The Town of Tombarel

I A SPARTAN OF THE HILLSMy acquaintance with Monsieur Alcide Tombarel was formed in a very pleasant way; for Bacchus at his most innocent and most charming brought us together. No one who lives in any part of wine-growing France can despise the little wines of the country—the little wines, like the children of the soil, that pine away and die if transplanted far from their own district, that laugh out their butterfly life for a season or two, and then perish from premature old age. In the south especially they are part and parcel of the sunshine of the midday meal. Now, such a wine, pale gold, full, with a faint perfume of hyacinth and a touch of the flavour of flint to give it character, did I drink at the table of my friend, General Duhamel, who has a villa of the modern stucco world in the Mont Boron quarter of Nice, super-imposed on a cellar of Paradise. He was good enough to give me the address of the vine-grower; for thus do the wise buy their little wines of the country—not in commonplace bottles from pettifogging wine merchants, but in casks filled from generous tuns in the vineyards themselves. “If you go to Creille, a little town away back in the mountains”—he waved an indicating hand—“and ask for Monsieur Tombarel, and mention my name, no doubt he’ll let you have some.” You see, there is a certain amount of polite ceremonial in the matter. You don’t buy wine in the offhand way in which you buy ducks. The most grizzled and stringy-necked old peasant with an acre of vines offers, and demands at the same time, what for a better term one might call the courtesy of the grape. An old inhabitant of the Azure Coast, I was familiar with the observances. Wherefore I thanked my host gratefully—for one doesn’t give away one’s pet vineyard to all and sundry—and a few days afterwards I journeyed through many devious and precipitous paths through the mountains to the tiny little town of Creille which stood perched, or rather piled somewhat ridiculously, on the top of a hill set sentinel-wise in the wild sweep of a gorge. From declivitous desolation I found myself suddenly pulled up in a gay little cobble-stoned square. On the left was l’Hôtel du Commerce, with a rusty, moth-eaten, sun-eaten, time-eaten car standing before the closed doors. There were a few funny little shops with women sitting on the thresholds. Across the way, two or three vague, swarthy, shirt-sleeved men sat at little tables outside the Café Pogomas. To this apparently quivering centre of the life of Creille did I, leaving my car, address my inquiring footsteps. I approached the swarthy men who were drinking the greyest of grey wine from demi-setiers—tiny, squat tumblers holding about a gill—and raised my hat. “Pardon, Messieurs”—they responded courteously—“can you direct me to the house of Monsieur Tombarel?” One of them began, when another interrupted him: “Tiens. Here is Marius.” “The patron,” the first explained. And there issued from the interior of the café, the landlord, Marius Pogomas himself. He was a heavy-browed, powerfully built man, with an extraordinarily deep furrow running horizontally across his forehead. The closely cut hair on his bullet head seemed scarcely more of a crop than that on his two or three days’ unshaven fat cheeks. His glance was kind, yet singularly commanding. He wore a fairly clean white suit and espadrilles—rope-soled, canvas shoes—and a coarse blue shirt destitute of collar. “Monsieur . . . ?” he questioned. I repeated my inquiry. “Ah,” said he, “Monsieur le Maire.” Thus I learned that Monsieur Tombarel was Mayor of Creille. I explained that it was not in his official quality of Mayor, but as a private viticulteur that I desired to visit Monsieur Tombarel. “You wish to buy wine, Monsieur?” “Of course,” said I. He gave me to understand, with a flicker of fingers to lips, that I had come to the right market. But, he added, with a warning hand and a deepening of his furrow, Monsieur le Maire was very jealous of his wine, and wouldn’t sell it to the first comer. He seemed quite sorry for me, a foreigner, for though I speak French as well as most people, I can’t help looking an uncompromising Englishman. I explained that I had an appointment with him, arranged by telegram, and that I bore the introduction of General Duhamel. He threw out his arms. That was a different matter altogether. General Duhamel. He was of the country. An old Chasseur Alpin. “I who speak to you, Marius Pogomas, served under him when he was simple captain. I’ll have you shown the way at once,” said he. He turned towards the interior of the café and bawled out something in the unintelligible Franco-Italian Provençal patois of the mountains, and presently an indiscriminate sort of boy of thirteen or so appeared. The infant, said Pogomas, would guide me to the house of Monsieur Tombarel. He led me through the tortuous main street of an amazing mediæval town, smelling cold and sour. Once the rows of houses on each side with their narrow stone staircases yawning on the pavement were broken by an open space. On three sides of it ran fifteenth-century arcading, and a low building with an eighteenth-century façade, pediment and all—the Mairie—nearly filled up the fourth. In the middle was an agreeably carved well-head surmounted by wrought iron. The main occupation of the inhabitants here and in the streets seemed to be to sit about and think. Fifty yards farther on brought us to waste land by the mountain-side. My boy conductor bade me turn to the right, for a quarter of a kilometre off was the vineyard of Monsieur le Maire. But, curious as to the view, I walked straight on and found myself standing on a tongue of rock projecting far out into the wild semi-circular valley and commanding an unfathomable abyss. All around for miles were the rolling slopes either thick with pines or terraced out bleakly for vine and olive, with here and there a red roof showing, and, in the far distance, the crumbling yellow of another little craggy town. But, on the sheer sides of this monstrous wedge whereon I stood, no vegetation could grow. Compared with it the Tarpeian Rock was a gentle hillock. I seemed to stand poised in the centre of the world. The small boy drew a half-consumed cigarette from his breeches pocket and, lighting it, smoked in patient leisure during my foolish contemplation. In an untidy rustic garden in front of a long, two-storied, pink-washed dwelling, I met one of the surprises of my life. Instead of a kindly peasant proprietor, I saw a most courteous gentleman. It was obvious that he had attired himself in ceremonious raiment, in order to greet with dignity the friend of General Duhamel. But, no matter how he might have been dressed, the man of the world betrayed himself by his smile and by the manner of his outstretched hand. He wore a hat, a Provençal hat, a soft, black felt hat with a prodigiously high crown and a prodigious brim. Beneath it a mean little clean-shaven face would have been lost. To set it off a full beard was essential. And the full beard did Monsieur Tombarel wear—a white moustache with the ends curling upwards in a suggestion of truculence, and a white, stiff beard trimmed to a point. Below the back of the brim swept a majestic white mane. His black jacket was buttoned at the throat. Such was the poet Mistral of my imaginings. Necessity compelled a wide black silk cravat tied in a floppy bow. After preliminary courtesies he conducted me to a large shed behind the house, in whose vast coolness were ranged many formidable hogsheads of wine. A smiling, coarse-aproned man with rolled-up sleeves brought a tray with a myriad little tumblers. The hogsheads were tapped. For the next half-hour the glasses were filled with wines red and rosy and golden. The afternoon sun crept in and set them all aflame. “Monsieur Fontenay,” said my host—for what else could I call him?—when I had made my choice, “I am rejoiced to see you can discriminate between the lavish bounty of the gods and their more subtle gifts.” He whispered a word to the cellarer, bowed me out, and led me to the ragged garden where were set a table and chairs beneath a sprawling cedar. “I will now ask you to do me the pleasure of drinking with me a glass of wine, of which, alas, I have only a few bottles left.” Did I not say that Bacchus at his simplest and most delightful brought us together? Then of course, painter-wise, I fell in love with the picturesque old gentleman, and begged him to sit to me for his portrait. I explained, so that he should not think himself at the mercy of an amateur: “I am a member of the Royal Academy which, in England, you know, more or less corresponds with the Institut—the Académie des Beaux-Arts.” He smiled. “Of course. Your President, for the first time in your history, is a distinguished architect.” I gasped. How many well-fed Britons in any sumptuous dining-saloon could tell you off-hand the name of the President of the Royal Academy? And here, in this neglected corner of the world, was a fantastically attired, Mistral-looking old vine-grower who knew all about it. “It is very simple,” he said, with a smile. “I am interested in all those things. In my youth I went from here, where I was born, to Paris to study art. I tried painting, sculpture, architecture. I was good for nothing. I drifted into land-surveying which I detested. At last, after many years, I found that God had decreed it my vocation to come back here and plant my cabbages or my vines. You behold another Cincinnatus. But the unconquered country—the land of Art—is always the country of my dreams. . . . For my portrait, if my old Provençal head—ma tête de vieux Provençal—can interest you, I am at your entire disposition.” If what I set out to tell you had not essentially to do with Pogomas, the landlord of the café, I could talk about Monsieur Tombarel, the baffled artist, all day long. But all the foregoing is merely to explain, in a reasonable manner, how I gained admission to the innermost secrets of the God-and-man-forgotten little town of Creille. I painted Monsieur Tombarel’s portrait, and it was my privilege to win his friendship. Now we come to the point of the story. Creille, like every other town, wished to erect a war monument. It took a long time after the war was over for the necessary money to dribble in. The Mayor put his foot down on rubbish. Better nothing than a cheap monstrosity which would make the town ridiculous in the eyes of the world. And the inhabitants of Creille, realizing that the eyes of the world were upon them, submitted meekly to the Mayor. At last a patriotic sculptor of the Midi, whose aunt had come from Creille—so integral and potent is the Family in French psychology—undertook the work for a modest fee, and presented a design to the Conseil Municipal. My friend Tombarel was good enough to show me the maquette or model in clay, and ask my confidential advice. I walked round it as it stood on the long walnut table of the council room of the Mairie, and bestowed on it my enthusiastic admiration. It was new, strong, exciting. On the indication of a rock above the plinth stood, at the end of a leap, a Chasseur Alpin with his trumpet to his lips, sounding the charge, while at the foot of the rock sagged the dead body of a comrade, the trumpet drooping from his hand. But there was something diabolical in the nervous strength of the living man, the very dare-devil spirit of the diables bleus, the proud name of the Alpine regiments to which all the dead of Creille had belonged. “It is magnificent,” said I. “And where are you going to put it?” “We are divided,” said the Mayor, with a sigh. “There are politics even here. The Radicals choose the new Place Georges Clemenceau, and the Republicans, with whom I am in sympathy, the venerable old Place de la Mairie, outside these windows.”