Awakening [1879]

Another dozen paces, and his boot will slide upon a rock. It is going to change his life. The Facteur Cheval is about to chance upon his Stone of Escape.

Joseph Ferdinand Cheval delivers the mail in a thirty-kilometre round centred on his picturesque home village of Hauterives. He is, according to his own halting testimony, an unremarkable and poorly-educated man. His neighbours, if asked for an opinion, would snigger their assent, for most of them consider their postman to be a simpleton.

The Stone will change none of this. Nor will the hundred thousand stones that are yet to come. Nor will the oyster-shells, nor the shards of flint, tile and glass. Nor will the strands of wire, nor any of the other junk that will pass through the postman’s hands during the next thirty-three years.

The moment has come. With a little gasp, Cheval stumbles and pitches into the sedge. Rolling to his feet, he discerns the object that caused him to trip. The half-buried stone is a cluster of strange whorls, scarified by wind and water, brownish and gnarled. When dug from its bed, it turns out to be more than a foot across, but it is surprisingly light. Parts of its surface have a glassy sheen, while others are scaly and pocked with pin-holes. Its discoverer does not know it, but this material once rained hellfire-hot from the sky, in an ancient time when the volcanoes of the Chaine de Puys tore this land asunder. It is tufa, called molasse by the locals.

Facteur Cheval pores over the Stone for half an hour, before slipping it carefully into his sack. His heart is pounding. He has found the substance of his life-long dreams. He knows that this stuff is the fabric of palaces.

The Greeting of Monsieur Brouette [out of time]

Welcome, dear visitor, to the garden of a country postman. Its tale is a simple one. A diligent public servant chanced on pretty stones in the course of his work. He brought them home, and used them to create a little shrine. He augmented it over many years, and the outcome is before you. In the estimation of many, it is worthy of celebration.

That is one way of looking at it, indeed. Try to imagine, though, what really happened here.

In these days of enterprise, men confuse their calling with their employment. They equate normalcy with conformity. They measure their achievement in degrees of social acceptance. Sheep follow sheep, never noticing that the ring has closed up, and that their procession has become a grand cirque.

And yet a man could choose a different way. He could determine a personal philosophy during his youth, and dedicate his maturity to its enactment. Better yet, he could make a monument of it, something enduring and capable of being read by future generations.

Gardens are always special places, simply because they are imbued with self-expression of this very kind. What, then, raises an ordinary garden to become many-layered, intricate, inspirational and immortal?

Just three things. The first of these is Craftsmanship, and the second is Time. Both are given to the Children of Nature in abundance. The third is Obstinacy, a more unusual and undervalued gift. But the Master received it in the fullest measure.

Nascence [1847]

Three mornings a week, he comes here, to the schoolroom beside the church. Today is the eighteenth day of April, and tomorrow he will be eleven years old. But this birthday is filled with sadness. His mother is grown too ill to make him biscuits. Her little house in Charmes-sur-l’Herbasse is subdued; its occupants fearful of her departure.

The other children show no such deference. The Boy-whose-Name-is-Horse is habitually ridden for their amusement. The teachers compound his isolation, scolding him for his lapses into the patois of the Bas-Dauphine, the dialect of his parents. He hunches sullenly in the last place on the long oak bench, one eye on the window high above, making castles of the clouds.

Only the smelly old man who sweeps the nave of the village chapel teaches Ferdinand anything. Once a victualler to the Grand Armee, he tells tales of searing deserts and of the pillars of Barbary. The youngster listens, rapt. The images of towers and parapets bleached white against the azure sky are etched into unconscious corners of his mind.

The Visitor’s Notion [time of writing]

True homage here could scarcely be finished. It would have to grow through the years, ever more ornate, replete with secrets of the soul. It would need to be the work of a single hand. It should go on and on, oblivious to the spite and derision of deluded peers. Only then could it reflect the marvel that it venerates.

Heroism inherent in the ludicrous. Guile revealed through roughness. Significance deep within the trivial. Epic banality and heart-bursting idleness. Who could ever have the patience or the presumption to follow the postman, to echo his song of the spirit?

Better never to take such a risk, to fail in the ultimate project.

And yet…

Philomene and the Basket [early summer, 1879]

“I should be grateful if you keep language like that out of my house, Monsieur. Leave it at the door with your boots, if you please”.

Cheval sits hunched on the stool by the fireplace, and tries to avoid her eyes. He continues to wrestle with the bundle of wands that induced the curse.

“I swear that no-one could ever make a basket out of that”, she continues, “least of all a ham-fisted fool like you. Where did you get those switches from? They’re much too thick. You’re supposed to use osiers. Why didn’t you get Bonaud to make you a basket, anyway?”

“Because he wanted five francs for it”, snarls the postman. “And they have to be thick. This is for carrying rocks, remember? It’s no use having a dainty little thing like he hawks to the fruit-pickers”.

“It should still be made from osiers”, she insists. “Bonaud’s got a grove of them. He pollards them properly, and harvests the strikes every autumn. That’s why he’s the basket-maker, and that’s why anyone with any sense goes to him”. She chastises him with a knowing toss of her curls. “He knows what he’s doing”, she adds for good measure.

Cheval grunts, and draws out a pen-knife from his waistcoat pocket. Bracing the wand against his thumb, he splits it along its length, stopping a little short of the end. The weaving soon proceeds more easily, and he smiles inwardly at his wife’s evident disappointment.

“And how will you stop that fraying now?” she demands, indignantly.

“I’ll paint it with pitch, and line the whole thing with cow-hide”, he replies, improvising flagrantly.

“And you’ll smell like a tannery, and it’ll stick to your back the minute the sun comes out”.

The postman no longer cares to disguise his smile. He revels in familiar gratification as another artefact begins to take shape in his hands. From his earliest years, Cheval has been a spontaneous, if unconventional, craftsman.

Let down by the wickerwork, Philomene tries another line of attack. “Heaven only knows why you’re carrying on with this rock-gathering nonsense in the first place”.

But she already knows the reason. Her husband patiently sets his part-formed basket aside, and grins at her. “Do you want to see the drawing, now I’ve finished it?”

She is struggling to appear disapproving now. His child-like enthusiasm strips the years from them both. Determined not to reveal more than a glimmer of interest, she answers him with a taut nod.

Cheval unfurls the paper, and Philomene cannot help but give a little gasp. He draws so beautifully, and his visions enchant her. She does not doubt that he will render it just as he shows it.

“It will be taller than you are, dear”, he says affectionately. “I will build it over this ornamental pond, you see? You can have lilies”.

“The Source of Life”, she reads. “Does that mean it will lead to something else?”

“Perhaps”, he smiles. “Would you like that?”

The Fading of Roses [1847]

She is gone. The petals with which she shared her name are discoloured and ragged already. The little garden that she loved so well is shrivelling, withdrawing into the cold ground.

Ferdinand will not cry. He has resolved never to give anyone that satisfaction. There is only himself and his father now. Strong men both, but there is nothing beautiful any more.

Well and Waterfall[1879]

There is something fine and constant in the character of tools, as well you know. Sturdy and obedient, they reflect and reward their user’s care. They are patient and unquestioning. They are ready for any travail to which you commit yourself.

The prim row of allotment gardens is a model of uniformity. A casual impression suggests the mark of minds much like your own. Fastidious files of vegetables, tended and tilled with precision; all of this the pride of austere men who converse in blank nods.

They were satisfied at first, these dour neighbours. Their solemn gaze suggested taciturn approval, as you begin to redress the overgrown tangle of the Richaud plot. But now you are an alien. Your piles of stone and gravel are an incomprehensible anathema to harsh and bleak ekers of produce.

You are not like the others, Cheval. You may dress like them, toil like them, shun all show and self-importance like them, and yet you have a vision that they cannot share. You have seen towering spires. You have gazed on nectar-steeped jungles and diamond-strewn deserts. You sense the opulence of distant empires, and when you close your eyes your dreams are entwined with the vista of princes, far away and yet bathed in the light of these self-same stars.

This is a good plot. Large and level, with firm soil and even drainage. You have carefully placed your fountain at the midpoint of the long, eastern edge, so that expansion is unconstrained. And thus it is in your mind, good postman, that more wonders are to come, even as your spade slices into the earth for the first time. You have one hour of late summer daylight in which to delve the beginnings of your well.

Would you dare to start this, if you truly foresaw the hundred thousand hours to come?

Of course you would, Cheval, because you have foreseen them. You have already walked in the palace of your imagination. This is the revelation that has raised your life beyond the ordinary. All that remains is to declare it to the world.

The Sailor at the Plough[1849]

In the sombre and glorious procession of the Year, it is autumn. By the busy round of the Sun, mid-morning. The waters of the mist lately broken, and the hazy grey-green world is showered with jewels. Three hearts beat as one at the steady pace of glistening plough.

This is the precious moment that the party gains the crest of the scarp. Your companion kicks out the ploughshank, and the great Percheron stallion shudders as the drag of the share slips from its shoulders.

Your spirit leaps as you loose the buckles at the yoke, your sleeves drenched in dew and horse-spittle. You sense the warm and pungent rush as the beast declares his annual victory, his golden gift dripping from the traces.

There will be cheese and bread and wine atop this hill, just as always, once a year for a thousand years. The other man sweeps the grass with his boot, conjuring an arc of droplets. He unfurls the roll of sacking and proffers the fare inside with the merest shift of an eyebrow. You nod your thanks in wordless excitement.

He has seen distant lands, this hired hand of your father’s. He has trodden the Silk Road. You are bursting to join him there, but who dare break the solemnity of this awesome moment?

Yet the other man needs no encouragement to recount his travel-tales. A single farm-boy is a poor audience for a storyteller, but you are an audience nonetheless. So thinks the man who was once a sailor.

And he is wrong. The power of a story has nothing to do with the number of ears upon which it falls. Measure these things instead by the imagination fired, and in such terms there are Angels listening in adoration. The clearing of the mist reveals the minarets of Barbary, bursting into the Ardeche sky.

A Sizeable Undertaking

Alone

The Excavation of an Egyptian Tomb

Bread

A Temple to Nature

Rosie

Water

Butterflies

Giants

Yearning

Veda

Oath

Scorn

Tersanne

Alicius Villa

Winter

Sacrilege

Widow Richaud

Footings

Sterile Aristocrats

Fecund Peasants

Cyrille and the River

Make-Believe

St. Amedee

Primitives

Alice

A Model Village

Who’s Counting?

Before the Flood

Contrition

The Queen of Caves

Bestiary

Apotheosis

Sentiments

Finality

Monsieur Malraux’s Opinion

Silence and Eternal Rest

15th September, 2004