went due north from the house. For a long time I heard behind me high screams of the old man, They were torturing him in the courtyard, using meat hooks and ropes; I hoped he had a secret to give away.
In the course of that morning I entered the woods. It wasn’t a gradual change: at the edge of a glary field the trees suddenly began, shadow, and thick undergrowth. Soon I came upon a path which seemed to go more or less in my direction, north; it was neglected but not difficult. I left behind me the wide moat of desolation surrounding the city.
I had come to Paris as a small boy with my mother, from Hainaut in the north, after my father had died in the great plague. That was ten years ago. I had lived in Paris ever since, and everything and everyone I knew were bound up with that city where my first friends were, my first books, the first girl who let me make love to her.
But I felt no regret now, just the opposite: leaving it all behind was like a liberation.
We in the city knew that the world was dying around us. Armies and gangs of bandits roamed and fought each other and everyone else. The king was a prisoner in England but no one bothered about him except his own clique who tried to raise his ransom from the peasants. The peasants paid and paid and yet they went on growing food. Nothing since the beginning of the world has ever stopped them from doing that. At least not until this very year; this year, unbelievably almost, it truly seemed as if they wouldn’t any more.
There had been fighting and burning and plundering before, but what was happening in France now was different: there was no mercy, no ending to it, no idea behind it. Men were like birds with iron beaks; hammering and hammering away at the almost hopeless land. More than half the students were in theology colleges, but there was no Christianity left either. The few who really believed didn’t sit in schoolrooms but went into monasteries and vanished from our sight.
Yet it wasn’t at all a mood of misery which hung in the streets of the Latin Quarter. The older people, the priests and the professors, ignored what was happening, I think, except where it touched their private interests; when they talked about the outer world, which was rare enough, it sounded as it they were discussing the war between Caesar and Pompey.
And the students just didn’t care. We did a lot of drinking and fighting, we argued and read too because through scholasticism we felt superior to the dirt and hunger around us, and we tried to make love to every girl. I don’t know what the other students did about confession; I and my friends always went to the same old priest, Father Morel, a great scholar and also as deaf as a post. He peeked hard at you when you stopped talking and if you then smiled in the proper open way he immediately gave absolution.
But I remember a morning at the end of winter shortly before I was expelled. We were all sitting in the room of a friend of mine because he had a splendid fire going; some of us were playing cards, others were talking.
There was a lot of shouting and laughter. Wolves came to the Paris cemeteries every night and dug up corpses; now it was suggested that we should stage a wolf hunt. It was the time of the full moon. We’d set out just before nightfall; each of us was to bring a dog, and a sword or lance or even just a stick. There’d be wine too, to keep warm; and whoever came would later be entitled to wear a hat made of wolf fur. We all became very excited about the plan.
Just then someone who sat near the window shifted his seat and said: “Boys, the snow has turned into rain.”
He didn’t speak loudly; no one paid attention to his remark. I don’t know why his words sounded like thunder to me. They went through me in a shiver; I thought, I have heard them before, I have lived through this before. And: this is what people mean when they say they’ve heard the voice of God.
I stood up. “I have to leave,” I said.
They looked at me; “But you’re coming tonight?” someone asked.
I shook my head and left the house.
I came outside and walked to the middle of the street, slipping over the gleaming cobblestones. I looked up at the whitish sky; the rain was coming down hard now and hit my face. I won’t die with the world, I thought; as a matter of fact, neither the world nor I will die; there is something else to be found but not at this dead university and not by hunting wolves in a cemetery. I’ll have my hour yet, I’m not going to have it stolen from me; I’ll go find it, in spring. I will escape.
I don’t know really what came over me that morning; but as I went home in the streaming rain I felt reborn. That was the first time in my life I was consciously happy to be young. I made a song for myself from those words “the snow has turned into rain” and sang it as hard as I could, over the swishing of the rain and the gurgling sound of the bells of the Sorbonne which were ringing in the wet air. The people taking shelter under the gutters of the houses stood staring at me. The water dripped from my hair into my mouth.
And now it was spring, my hour had come, and I was going north through the woods away from Paris and toward the sea.
I came out onto a glade and here a woman was charring young green wood. I asked her about the way and as she said she’d be going presently to take charcoal to a house up north, I waited and went with her. A big house, she told me, at two hours’ distance. It was called Dammartin and the building intendant of Valois lived there; he was a strange man.
She was very articulate, but when I asked her had she always been charcoal burner, she answered only: “No.”
She said that beyond Dammartin the wood ended and the plain began once more, yet between Dammartin and a castle on the hill of Montmélian were no houses. I had told her I was on my way north without adding anything about England, for that might have sounded odd to her and made her suspicious about my company. She was enormous; I had a hard time keeping up with her although she was carrying her load. She didn’t even get out of breath: she walked to the tune of some chant she sang hoarsely but quite well.
It was already getting dark on the path, and I was stumbling over roots and stones, when we came to the gate of the house. It was smaller than I had imagined from her words, a low stone structure with outbuildings, barely fortified, with a beautiful lawn all around it.
There was no one in sight and no sound but the barking dogs.
I looked at her with some surprise; she shrugged with the same indifference as when I had asked her earlier if she wasn’t afraid of wolves. “He lives as if it was peacetime,” she said. “I leave you here, sir, good-bye.” She opened the gate and vanished behind the house with her charcoal, shouting at the dogs, which fell silent.
I crossed the lawn and looked around me in the dusk. Then I knocked on the front door.
From behind it an old voice called, “Who is it?”
I said I was a student asking lodging for the night. First a peephole, then the door itself opened. It was so dark in the house that I could barely make out the man holding the door.
I thought he’d question me but he said only, “This way if you please.”
I followed him blindly through a long corridor and down some steps, and through a courtyard where the evening light still hung, caught between the white walls, into an almost bare room.
