The Man Who Planted Trees Read Free Page A

the spirit of adventure. Along the lanes and paths you meet men and women who are well-fed, boys and girls who know how to laugh and have rediscovered the pleasures of old rural sports and pastimes. If you include both the former population, unrecognisable since their life became more agreeable, and the newcomers, more than ten thousand people must owe their happiness to Elzéard Bouffier.

    When I reflect on the fact that one man, with only his own simple physical and moral resources, was able to bring forth out of the desert this land of Canaan, I can’t help feeling the human condition in general is admirable, in spite of everything. And when I count up all the constancy, magnanimity, perseverance and generosity it took to achieve those results, I’m filled with enormous respect for the old, uneducated peasant who was able, unaided, to carry through to a successful conclusion an achievement worthy of God.
    Elzéard Bouffier died peacefully in 1947 in the hospice at Banon.

The Story of Elzeard Bouffier

Aline Giono

 
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    MY FATHER’S STORY, which you’ve just read, has had several titles:
    The Man who Planted Trees;
    The Story of Elzéard Bouffier;
    The Man who Planted Hope and Reaped Happiness.
    Also “The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met”; and perhaps others I know nothing about. Until now the story has appeared only in reviews, newspapers and magazines, usually abroad (it has been translated into twelve different languages) and in the most varied countries. As we have seen, its title has varied too. But what hasn’t changed is the welcome the story has met with, as is shown by a continual flood of enthusiastic letters. But it hasn’t always been so: the tale has had a curious history. I’ll start at the beginning.
    In 1953 the American magazine
Reader’s Digest
asked my father to write a few pages for its well-known feature, “The Most Extraordinary Character I Ever Met”.
    My father loved commissions. He was never happier than when someone asked him to write so many words on such and such a subject; if they actually specified the number of words he was in seventh heaven. If he’d been commissioned to produce 3,400 words on shoe-laces, he’d have set about the task with glee. (One illustration of this, among others, is “Stones”, a text he wrote on the subject of precious stones, a commission from a factory producing jewels for Swiss watches.)
    But he objected strongly to some kinds of commission. Long before the war he’d done some interviews with politicians. “Those people would ask you to write a novel about sewing machines!” he said angrily, going on to provide brilliant examples of how such a commission might be executed. He was indignant because it treated writing as something other than craftsmanship pure and simple.
    To return to
Reader’s Digest,
I can still see my father going cheerfully up to his study and starting work.
    A few days later the text, typed by my mother, was sent off, and the response wasn’t slow in coming. It expressed the warmest satisfaction: the piece was exactly what was wanted.
    A few more weeks went by, and one fine day my father, looking very astonished, hurried down from his study, through the dining room, and out to join my mother in the kitchen. He’d just had another letter from
Reader’s Digest
, very different in tone from the first. It called my father an impostor, and with a great show of virtuous indignation was returning his text: the
Digest
couldn’t publish it.
    This is what had happened.
Reader’s Digest
, being a serious magazine, subjected its contributors’ texts to thorough investigation. The public must not be misled: if the most remarkable mother was said to have had twenty-four children in twelve years, her claim had to be checked out. If the most remarkable missionary was supposed to have been cut up into seventy-four pieces before he was