In the spring of that year, 1358, the peasants of northern France did not sow their fields any more.
I had succeeded in getting out of Paris just before sunset and walked to Saint-Denis in the twilight; I had found a room there to sleep and now was on the road again.
The sun was rising almost opposite me; a harsh light skimmed the empty fields. The war was in its twentieth year, but I was happy.
Not a soul was to be seen. Birds had been singing at dawn; now there was silence, and not the silence of nature but of a walled-in room in a castle.
After an hour I came to a well near the roadside. It was surrounded by ruins, but they were old and friendly with grass growing over them. The water stood high in the well and was easy to reach. I installed myself in the sun on the corner of a crumbling wall and pulled out my bread.
Then suddenly a shabby man on a horse was standing beside me. Around me the plain lay black and bare and yet I had not seen him approach. I went on eating my bread.
“Are you going to Paris?” he asked.
“No, north.”
“On foot?”
I didn’t answer.
“You will need a horse,” he said, “for there aren’t many places left in Ile de France where you can find a room or a meal.”
I shrugged and he gave me a smile and went on, “I have no use for this horse in Paris. I’ll sell it to you, you can have it for two francs.”
Two francs was unbelievably cheap even for his skinny horse, and I had twenty francs in the lining of my jacket.
“If you wonder why I would do such a thing,” he added, “it’s that I can see you’re a student. I admire learning; I would want to be a scholar myself.”
It was the bread that saved me. Before reaching for my jacket to bring out the two francs I put the last piece in my mouth, and while I did so I saw that he brought his right hand across his body to the handle of an old sword hanging on his left side, away from me. And without looking up at his face I realized that he would kill me the moment I showed my money.
I went on chewing slowly and then I turned toward him again and said, “You are very generous, but the sad truth is that I haven’t got a sou, let alone two francs. For the love of learning, why don’t you make a gift of your horse to me?”
His hand came back. “Perhaps walking is good for young men,” he said and rode off so sharply that lumps of earth flew into my lap.
After that I went on my way again. It was getting warmer and a light haze was rising from the puddles in the road and in the fields. The landscape was empty once more.
Around noon I came upon the body of a dog lying in the road. Big winter flies rose silently as I walked by it. I had been wondering what that black spot, shifting slightly, could be; and for some reason the discovery that it was a dead dog covered with flies unnerved me completely. What the man on the horse had failed to do, the dog achieved: it made me realize that I had left the protective ring of the city but without entering nature, that I was moving in a deadly no man’s land.
I stood still. The road ahead of me suddenly seemed implacable, the lightheartedness with which I had set out on my journey now was beyond my understanding. I had a feeling of being lost and alone on earth, a feeling such as I’d had before only at night in the hour that precedes dawn—not under a spring sun.
This is the road of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, I said to myself.
And I felt better. For that thought took me back to the university and to the house in Paris where I had lived and where the Revelation of Saint John was nothing more than a splinter of all things men believed; and with that the world brightened again.
But I jumped the muddy ditch and left that road; I set out at a right angle to it and went across the fields, going northeast.
Still nothing but weeds grew on the black land, and there was still no sign of human life; but after a while I came upon a cluster of trees. I found a sheltered hollow, and covered myself with my jacket and rested some time.
After that the going was harder, for the ground became hilly. Now I saw the first peasant’s hut and while I hesitated whether to look for shelter there, I saw another farther on, and then another; and I decided I could try to make a bit more headway. No smoke came from the huts and when I passed one close by I saw that it was uninhabited.
I walked along the foot of a rather steep hillside which faced south, and here the slope was planted with vines. They looked sickly but they were growing in rows. Someone was establishing order, some human being was near. From the corner of my eye I saw a shadow move and I turned: an old man was crouching between the vines. In his left hand he held a bunch of weeds he must have been pulling out, his right hand rested on a stone. He ducked low and peered at me with a frown.
“I’m alone,” I shouted at him, “unarmed!” I held my hands out and he scrambled to his feet and came toward me.
“Have you money?” he murmured.
“What have you got for sale?”
“I’ve wine, I’ve wine,” he said.
“No food?”
“No.”
“Is there a house anywhere near?”
He pointed east, where the ground fell away slightly from his hill. Far away in the plain a row of beeches was just barely visible, catching the sunrays.
“Is it empty?” I asked.
He grinned.
“Well?”
He didn’t answer, but shuffled away. I sat down on a bench, and he came back with a dirty jug which he handed to me.
I wiped the edge and drank; it was without doubt the foulest wine I’d ever tasted. But I drank it all. I gave him back the jug and a coin.
“A captain lives in the house,” he then said quite loudly.
“What kind of captain?”
He shrugged.
“Is it safe?”
“You must pay,” he said. “But you’ll pay on every road—” he moved his