The Man Who Planted Trees Read Free

for about an hour, he added: “He’s the wisest man in the world! He’s discovered a perfect recipe for happiness!”
    Because of my friend, not only the forest but also our hero’s happiness was protected: three subordinates were appointed, and bullied to such good purpose that they remained unmoved by any bribes the woodcutters might tempt them with.
    The tree-planter’s work wasn’t really threatened until the 1939 war. In those days cars were run on machines that turned wood into gas, and there was never enough wood. People started cutting down the oaks that had been planted in 1910, but the trees were so far from main roads that the business didn’t pay and was abandoned. The shepherd didn’t even know about it. He was thirty kilometres away, going peacefully on with his task, ignoring the 1939 war just as he’d ignored the war of 1914.
    I saw Elzéard Bouffier for the last time in June 1945. He was then eighty-seven. I took the same route into the wilds as before, but now, although everything had been allowed to run down during the war, there was a bus service linking the valley of the Durance and the mountains. I assumed it was because I was driving through the country relatively fast that I didn’t recognise scenery I’d seen for the first time on foot. Some of the settlements we went through also seemed quite new. It was only when I found out the names of the villages that I knew I really was back in a region that had once been ruined and desolate. The bus set me down in Vergons.

    In 1913 this hamlet, with its ten or eleven houses, had had three inhabitants. They were rough, unsociable people who hated one another and lived by trapping animals, in a state that morally and physically was almost prehistoric. The empty houses around them were overrun by nettles. They lived with nothing to hope for; all they had to look forward to was death. Not a situation propitious to virtue.
    But now all was changed, even the air. Instead of the rough and arid gusts that I had met with before, there was a soft and scented breeze. A sound like water drifted down from the heights: it was the wind in the forests. But the most astonishing thing of all was the sound of water actually flowing into a basin. I saw that the people in the village had built a fountain: it was gushing forth in abundance, and — this was what moved me most — beside it they had planted a lime tree which must have been about four years old. It was already quite sturdy — an indisputable symbol of resurrection.
    Vergons showed others signs of work that’s not undertaken without hope. So hope had returned.
    The ruins had been tidied up, crumbling walls knocked down, and five old houses rebuilt. The hamlet now had twenty-eight inhabitants, including four young couples. The new houses were freshly roughcast and surrounded by kitchen gardens where rows of both vegetables and flowers grew: cabbages mingled with rose bushes, leeks with snapdragons, celery with anemones. It had become a place where one would wish to live.
    I continued on foot. The war was only just over and life was still restricted, but Lazarus had risen from the grave. On the lower slopes of the mountains I could see small fields of young barley and rye, and, deep in the narrow valleys, a green haze of meadows.
    In the eight years between then and now the whole region has grown healthy and prosperous. On the sites where I saw only ruins in 1913 there are now neat, well-plastered farmhouses that speak of a happy and comfortable existence. Ancient springs, fed by the rains and snows retained by the forests, have started flowing again, and the water from them has been carefully channelled. Near every farm, amid groves of maple, the basins of fountains overflow on to carpets of cool mint. Villages have been gradually rebuilt. People from the plains, where land is expensive, have come and settled here, bringing with them youth and movement and