Among the Roots of the Divine
In this passage from A King Alone by Jean Giono, the arrival of Fall is transformed into a sacred rite, where trees take on the grandeur of gods or ancient kings. Clothed in regal armor—cassocks, stoles, berets—they seem to give birth to radiant offspring, each leaf a soul bursting forth in color. These souls, like newly winged birds, rise and scatter into the sky in plumes of pink, gray, rust, and gold. The autumn foliage becomes a celestial procession, a ritual unveiling of the soul’s hues, as if the forest itself were shedding spirit-children into the world, each one alight with mystery and motion. Yet as the beauty unfolds, so too does a pattern: with the turn of the season, people begin showing up dead. The novel, part murder mystery and part metaphysical fable, evokes the feeling of the Eleusinian Mysteries—an ancient cycle where death and divinity intertwine. The small mountain town is baffled by what’s happening, caught in the midst of some ancient procession of gods, kings, and birds. To join in the ecstasy is, it seems, to die beautifully:
Frédéric owns the sawmill on the road to Avers. He took it over from his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather—from all the Frédérics.
A King Alone by Jean Giono.
It’s on the side of the road, exactly at the hairpin bend. There’s a beech tree there; I’m sure there’s none more magnificent anywhere. It’s the Apollo Citharoedus of beech trees. There cannot possibly be another beech, anywhere at all, with skin so smooth and so beautiful a color, a more flawless build, more perfect proportions, with such nobility, grace, and eternal youth. Definitely “Apollo” is what you say the instant you catch sight of it, and you say it again and again for as long as you look at it. What is most extraordinary is that it’s both beautiful and so simple. No question about it: it knows itself and judges itself. How can such perfection not have a consciousness, when all it takes is a puff of north wind, an unfortunate shift of evening light, an odd tilt to its leaves for its beauty, defeated, to lose all its power to awe?
—
Afterwards we had beautiful weather. I say “we”; naturally I wasn’t there because all that happened in 1843, but I had to put my heart and soul into the whole thing and ask so many questions to get to the bottom of it that I ended up being part of it; and besides, I imagine it was one of those sumptuous falls you and I know.
—
It’s instantaneous. Was there some watchword uttered last night while you had your back to the sky as you stirred your soup? This morning, you open your eyes and see my ash tree with a plume of golden parrot feathers on its skull. By the time you’ve made your coffee and gathered up everything you scatter around you when you coffee outside, it’s not just a single plume but a whole helmet fashioned out of the rarest feathers: pink, gray, rust. Then it’s slings, belts, and straps, lanyards, epaulettes, aprons, and breastplates that the tree hangs from himself and sticks everywhere on him; and all this is made out of the most gleaming ruby red that the world has to offer. Well, there he is decked out in his armor, done up in all the trimmings of a warrior priest, rattling his little noisemakers of dry wood.
Not to be outdone, the M 312 ash dons amices, honey-colored cassocks, bishops’ albs, blazon-covered stoles, and playing-card kings. The larch trees cover themselves in capuchins and shepherd’s cloaks of marmot fur; the maples put on red gaiters, slip on Zouave pantaloons, envelop themselves in executioners’ capes, and cover their heads with Borgia berets. And by the time all that’s done, the mountain-goat meadows are already blue with autumn crocuses. On the way back, when you reach the top of the La Croix pass, you find yourself face-to-face with the first sunset of the season, a kaleidoscope of crazy colors streaking the sky walls; next you see, down below, a grassy hollow that was nothing but hay when you went by two or three days ago, and now it has become a bronze crater guarded by Indians, Aztecs, blood kneaders, gold beaters, ocher miners, popes, cardinals, bishops, knights of the forest; mixed in are tiaras, bonnets, helmets, skirts, painted flesh, embroidered cloths, fall foliage, ash trees, beech trees, maples, shadberries, elms, larch trees, sycamores, oaks, and the black-green of the fir trees that ennobles all the other colors.
From then on the great walls of the sky will be painted evening after evening with colors that facilitate our acceptance of cruelty and free the ritual sacrifices from any and all remorse. Daubed in purple, the west bleeds on the rocks; they are incontestably more gorgeous when washed in blood than when a summer evening coats them a satiny pink or a pretty azure at the hour when Venus looks as delicate as a grain of barley. Pale green, violet, stains of sulfur, and even sometimes, where the light is brightest, a handful of plaster, while the three other walls of the sky cram together to form compact blocks of a night that is no longer smooth and shiny but suspect, condensed into enigmatic structures: such are the subjects of meditation that the monastery frescoes of the mountains offer us to contemplate. While in the shadow, the trees are tireless as they shake their tiny rattles of dry wood.
—
The sawmill beech had not yet reached, of course, the magnitude it has today. But in its youth (well, at least in relation to today), or more accurately its adolescence, it was already of a stature and fabric that placed it head and shoulders above the other trees, even all the other trees combined. Its foliage was thick and bushy, dense as stone; its trunk (which could not be seen, covered as it was with small impenetrable branches) must have been of a rare strength and beauty to bear so much accumulated weight with such grace. And it was (at the time) filled to the brim with birds and flies; it had as many birds and flies as leaves. Crows, rooks, swarming things plowed into it and shook it continually; at every moment it released splashes of nightingales and titmouses and vapors of wagtails and bees; it breathed out falcons and gadflies; it juggled multihued balls of finches, goldcrests, robins, plovers, and wasps. All around it was an endless dance of birds, butterflies, and bugs; and the sun seemed to break up into rainbows through bursts of sea spray. And in fall, with its long crimson strands, its thousand arms entwined with green serpents, its hundred thousand hands of golden foliage playing with feathered pom-poms, strings of birds, and crystal dust, it was no longer really a tree. It crackled like an inferno; it danced as only supernatural beings know how to dance, its body proliferating around its immobility; it swayed in a twisting of scarves, so quivering, so bronze, so indefatigably remolded by the euphoria of its body that you could no longer tell if it was anchored by the clinging of its prodigious roots or by the miraculous speed of the tip of the spinning top on which the gods take their rest. The forests, sitting on the bleachers of the mountain amphitheater in their grand priestly vestments, no longer dared to move. That masterful beauty was as hypnotizing as the eye of a snake or the blood of wild geese on snow. And all along the roads that went up to or came down from that beauty, a procession of maples stained with blood like butchers fell in line.
