Lise wanted him to take her hand. They had never been alone like this before, never lived in this kind of environment and never been lost in nature, just the two of them. Even when they went to the desert three years ago, they had never left the group, and apart from one night in a tent, they had gone back to the hotel every evening. This time their isolation was much more tangible.
As they marvelled at their surroundings, they became aware of a faint smell of rotting coming from the warm scrub. Franck frowned and looked around him, searching for a dead animal. Just before the grove of trees, he saw a large patch of box. Leaving Lise to her own thoughts, he walked up to the wall of green, and the bad smell got stronger as he approached. The belt of two-metre-high box trees was indeed hiding something: a perfectly rectangular water tank, like a swimming pool more than six metres long, made of very old cement that had turned black with time. He went closer. The sides were barely a metre high, but the basin looked deep, full of stagnant, murky water with green spots floating on the surface. The water level was low, or perhaps the water really was very deep. Franck’s eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom. But when he looked closer, he could see the shadowy lake two metres below; thick, dark water covered in an array of tiny flora that had seized their opportunity. There was no dead animal though; the smell was perhaps coming from those rotting spots on the water.
Meanwhile, Lise was slowly turning her face to the sun, making the most of the panoramic scene. When she turned around again, awestruck, she could no longer see Franck and, for a moment, she had the terrible feeling that she had lost him and was utterly alone. She was overwhelmed by a horrible sensation of total distress and abandonment, coupled with infinite contentment. Alone.
August 1914
The lion tamer could make himself at home up there and stay as long as he wanted. The mayor had handed the area over to him. He was not even asked for rent or any other quid pro quo. Perhaps the mayor thought the village would benefit from the illusory protection of the wild animals. Ever since all the healthy men had left for the front the village had been fearful. Fernand had already hidden a flock of ewes in the hills, more than two hundred of them, so why not hide some lions and tigers as well? No one ever went up Mont d’Orcières any more. Certainly no one would have wanted to live in that house, because the land was cursed. Everyone left it well alone.
‘If the Hun wants to live up there, let him get on with it,’ people said, as you would say about an enemy advancing on a minefield. ‘Let him settle in that sorry place; it’s the devil’s land. He won’t last long and nor will his lions …’
Mont d’Orcières had once been covered in fertile, exuberant vineyards, but at the end of the nineteenth century they had been devastated by phylloxera, and carbon disulphide and coal tar had been poured over them. The people would have tried anything to eradicate the disease afflicting their glorious vines, and the chemicals had burnt deep into the layers of soil. But the yellow insects had still won. Here, as everywhere, phylloxera had wiped out the vines, proving that even tiny insects can change the face of the world. For the last thirty years the land on Mont d’Orcières had been considered cursed. Not only had it been poisoned with chemicals, but its shadow loomed over the village, contributing to the feeling that it was the harbinger of doom.
At the beginning, the phylloxera infestation had been like a war. A war many thought it would be easy to win. Even though the insects skipped across whole areas, jumping from one vine to another at the least breath of wind, people refused to view it as fatal. Yet even the most optimistic quickly understood that this was a war that had been lost at the outset, a war against a tiny little parasite a few millimetres long, which managed to destroy the vines across the whole of the country. The entire nation lost to the insects. Over the course of a few springs, all French vineyards were decimated by the greedy aphid, a minuscule creature that buried its eggs at the height of summer like mines that would explode the following spring in the form of docile nymphs, which in turn began to suck the sap from the vine stocks, drying them out and killing them from the bottom up.
There had been vines on Mont d’Orcières for two thousand years. The limestone plateau of Quercy was excellent wine country. In the Middle Ages, this was where black wine was produced for the tables of kings, and for export to England. Back then Bordeaux was merely where the wine from all along the Lot river ended up. But after the advent of the sap-sucking insects, and their treatment with naphthalene and carbon disulphide, the vines were reduced to rows of burnt stalks, aligned like fossilised soldiers or Pompeii gladiators.
Nothing would grow on Mont d’Orcières, not even new grafts, because the soil was too chalky. Around Bordeaux, on the other hand, the new grafts took quickly because the ground was soft and well irrigated by the Garonne river. The Orcières winegrower and his wife, exhausted by a succession of harvests ruined by chemicals, tore up what remained of the vines before setting fire to everything and hanging themselves from the big oak tree. They even threw the casks and the wine press into the flames, so that the conflagration took over the whole hillside, devouring the vegetation round about, including the juniper above the rocks. Everything was destroyed except for the house and the handful of trees which gave it shade. By making a human chain and passing buckets of water up from the reservoir, the villagers had at least been able to save these.
As the land was damned anyway, the German might as well move in there with his big cats. He might survive but no one could prosper up there. Not even lions and tigers and their master. The mayor lent him the house and land for as long as he wanted. At least his being there on the roof of the world with his cages and carriages would mean that they had one strong, able-bodied man in case of emergency. As for the lions and tigers, no one was sure if they should be frightened of them or not. Everyone knew about the Champawat Tiger, shot by an English hunter; the newspapers had reported her killings constantly. In areas where wolves still prowled, the image of that Bengal tiger that had killed four hundred people in India had awakened ancient fears. Other than in newspapers and illustrated books, creatures like that did not exist for the people of the causse. They might also have seen pictures of them on circus wagons and posters, but no one wanted to see them in real life. And knowing they were up there was unsettling.
Down in the village, Mayor Fernand had been wise enough to invent a story that would persuade people to accept the German’s presence. He told them that this saintly character’s conscience had prevented him from joining up because he loved the French and refused to fire on them. He made it known that he was a pacifist, a rebel who refused to follow orders and spill blood. Couderc, the schoolmaster, backed the mayor up in this. They both wanted to reassure the thirty or so remaining inhabitants of the village, especially the women. In any case, even were the Pope or God himself to settle up there, Mont d’Orcières would still be cursed. The great overhanging rock, with its brutal cliff edge rising above the village, was like a frontier between earth and sky. It loomed. And was hated even more in the winter months. From November to April it blocked the sun in the morning, casting the village into shadow until the afternoon.
If that man succeeded in living on the deadly mountain, if he managed to survive on those lands after all that had happened there, it must be because he was the devil incarnate. After he arrived, the lions’ roaring and deep terrifying growling carried down to the village on the evening winds, heart-stoppingly brutal, yet silken. The cattle and the few horses left in the village were unsettled by the sound. At each roar, the mayor’s old nag or the doctor’s unbroken horse whinnied as frantically as if the stables were on fire. The leonine cries frightened the dogs as well. They were so scared by the noise from on high that they did not even bark. The roaring rang out in the evening, but also in the morning, like a daily warning, sending shivers down the spines of the villagers.