Free The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono Page A

men drive their vans into town with their charcoal, and then drive back again. Even the stoutest character goes to pieces under the continual contrast. The women stay at home and nurse grudges. Everything is a subject of unrelenting contention and rivalry, from the selling of charcoal to a pew in church, from separate and competing vices to the general mixture of vice and virtue. Never any rest. And on top of all that, the equally unrelenting wind frays everyone’s nerves. There are epidemics of suicide and many cases of madness, usually homicidal.
    The shepherd who didn’t smoke went and fetched a little bag and emptied a pile of acorns on to the table. Then he began to inspect them closely, separating the good from the bad. I smoked my pipe. I offered to help. He said he had to do it himself. And seeing how carefully he worked I didn’t insist. That was all the conversation we had. And when he’d collected a large enough heap of good acorns he divided them up into groups of ten. As he did so he discarded those that were too small or had a tiny split; he examined them minutely. Once he had sorted out one hundred perfect acorns, he stopped and we went to bed.
    It was peaceful to be in his company, and next morning I asked if I might stay all day and rest. He found this quite natural; or rather he gave me the impression that nothing disturbed him. I didn’t absolutely need to rest, but I was intrigued and wanted to know more. He let his flock out of the fold and led them to pasture. Before leaving home he took the little bag in which he’d put his carefully chosen and counted acorns, and dipped it in a bucket of water.
    I noticed that instead of a stick he carried a steel rod as thick as a man’s thumb and about a metre and a half long. I followed a path parallel to his, strolling along like someone taking it easy. He took his sheep to a hollow and left them there to graze, guarded by his dog. Then he came up to where I was standing. I was afraid he was going to object to my intrusion, but not at all. He had to come this way anyhow, and he invited me to go with him if I hadn’t anything better to do.

    When he reached the place he was aiming for, he began making holes in the ground with his rod, putting an acorn in each and then covering it up again. He was planting oak trees. I asked him if the land was his. He said it wasn’t. Did he know who the owner was? No, he didn’t. He thought it must be common land, or perhaps it belonged to people who weren’t interested in it. He wasn’t interested in who they were. And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns.
    After the midday meal he started sorting out more acorns to sow. I must have been very pressing with my questions, because he answered them. He’d been planting trees in this wilderness for three years. He’d planted a hundred thousand of them. Out of those, twenty thousand had come up. Of the twenty thousand he expected to lose half, because of rodents or the unpredictable ways of Providence. That still meant ten thousand oaks would grow where before there had been nothing.
    It was at this point that I wondered how old he was. He was obviously over fifty. Fifty-five, he said. His name was Elzéard Bouffier. He had once owned a farm on the plains. It was there he had lived his life.
    But he had lost first his only son, then his wife. After that he came here to be alone, enjoying an unhurried existence with his sheep and his dog. But it struck him that this part of the country was dying for lack of trees, and having nothing much else to do he decided to put things right.
    As I myself, despite my youth, was leading a solitary life at the time, I was able to sympathise with others like me and deal tactfully with their sensibilities. But I made one mistake with him. Because I was young I naturally thought of the future in terms of myself, and assumed everyone sought the same happiness. So I remarked how