Letters from my mill, to which are added Letters to an absent one etc
Alphonse Daudet
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 12, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt: ...At the keeper's house all were shivering, each had the fever; and it was really piteous to see those drawn, yellow faces, the black-circled eyes of those poor unfortunates, compelled to drag themselves about for three months under an inexorable sun which burned the sufferers but did not warm them. Dreary and painful life is that of a gamekeeper in Camargue! This one at least had his wife and children with him; but two leagues farther on, in a marsh, lives a horse-keeper, absolutely alone from one end of the year to the other--a Robinson-Crusoe existence. In his hut of reeds, which he built himself, there is not a utensil he did not make, from the braided osier hammock, the fireplace of three stones, the roots of tamarisk cut into stools, to even the lock and key of white wood which close this singular habitation. The man is as strange as his dwelling. He is a species of philosopher, silent as a hermit, sheltering his peasant distrust of every one behind his bushy eyebrows. When he is not in the pastures you will find him seated before his door, deciphering slowly, with childish and touching application, one of those little pink, blue, or yellow pamphlets which wrap the pharmaceutical phials he procures for his horses. Though the huts are near together, our keeper and he never visit each other. They even avoid meeting. One day I asked the roudeiroii the reason of this antipathy. He answered gravely: "On account of opinions: he is red; I am white." So in this desert, where solitude might have brought them together, these two savages, both ignorant, both naTve, these two herdsmen of Theocritus, who go to the city scarcely once a year, and to whom the little cafes of Arles, with their mirrors and their gilding, are as dazzling as the palace of the Pto...