The Man Who Planted Trees (3 page)

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 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.

 

 

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 eaten . . . And so on. In short, it had to be established that every extraordinary person had had a life that was ordinary, i.e. real.

The remarkable person my father had described was a shepherd. In 1953 this hadn't yet come back into fashion. What made him remarkable was that he'd spent his life — all his life — planting acorns wherever he went with his flock. So gradually, thanks to him, an almost deserted area was magnificently re-wooded and restored to life and abundance. It was a charming fable, and its hero was reminiscent of the Americans' Johnny Appleseed or the John Barleycorn of the English.

My father, giving him life, just as Elzéard Bouffier himself gave life back to the wilderness, was imprudent enough to plant in his narrative not acorns but a few easily verifiable geographical details, and then had his hero die (peacefully) in the hospice at Banon in 1947.

The idea that someone should seriously check whether someone called Elzéard Bouffier — what a beautiful name! — died in the hospice at Banon in 1947 would have struck my father as farcical. But that is what happened.

Of course the researcher drew a blank. There was no Elzéard at Banon, no enchanted forest at Vergons in the Var. In short, it was all an obvious fake. Hence the outrage.

My father found the situation comical, but, as I well remember, his chief reaction was surprise that there should be people stupid enough to ask a writer — a professional inventor — who was the most remarkable person he had ever met, and not realise that this person was bound to emerge from his imagination.

It was a family joke for a long time.

But after being buried a second time by
Reader's Digest,
Elzéard Bouffier has had a posthumous existence as remarkable as his imaginary real life.

He has gone and planted his acorns and grown his forests all over the world, from New Zealand to Kenya, from Finland to the United States. Wherever his story has been published, people have believed in it; though this simply proves it was well told. But why shouldn't people believe in it? Nature imitates art, and it wouldn't surprise me if someone actually found an elderly shepherd who'd spent his life reforesting whole landscapes. In fact, I'm sure he does exist. But maybe he hasn't got such a fine name.

I hope what I'm about to relate won't shock people with no sense of humour. I've come across a correspondence that took place in 1968 between my father and a German publishing house. I don't know by what mysterious chance this German publisher, who planned to bring out an anthology of illustrated biographies, decided to include the life of Elzéard Bouffier. But the fact is, the invented shepherd was going to appear among real people, historical personages, or at least characters who had actually existed — a list of their names was enclosed. And so a photograph was required, and my father was solemnly requested to send one.

I can still see my father laughing. It was hard to resist such an opportunity for a joke. The letter from Germany is annotated in his handwriting:

“I sent them a photograph of the
invented
character” (his italics). With the letter, in a plastic sleeve, scrupulously returned by the German publisher with many thanks, there's a little old faded photograph of a typical “handsome old man”, clear-eyed and with a calm expression, his bearing both proud and awkward, wearing what is clearly his Sunday best in honour of the occasion. Elzéard Bouffier, as large as life and twice as natural! The name is written on the back of the photograph in my father's hand. And so this unknown stranger will for ever be Elzéard Bouffier — unless someone recognises him, and we get a letter claiming compensation for wrongful exploitation of their grandfather.

The German publisher's last letter is dated 1969. The anthology of biographies was such a success it had gone into a third edition. And “many of our readers are so enthusiastic they would like to go to France to see the places where Elzéard Bouffier lived and planted the forest. We should be very grateful if you would be so kind as to send us the exact address of the village which is closest to the forest, and also the nearest railway station.”

What better tribute could one offer any writer?

I don't know whether my father went so far as to invent a railway station to please his German readers, for sadly all this happened in 1969, and the next year he was to stop inventing for ever.