Toujours Provence(23)

Never has a pickax been taken up with more enthusiasm, and it inevitably attracted Faustin’s attention. He stopped on his way to do battle with the mildew that he was convinced was about to attack the vines, and asked what I was doing. Planting roses, I said.

“Ah bon? They must be large roses to need such an important hole. Rose trees, perhaps? From England? It is difficult here for roses. Tache noire is everywhere.”

He shook his head, and I could tell he was going to give me the benefit of his pessimism. Faustin is on close terms with every kind of natural disaster, and he is happy to share this extensive knowledge with anyone foolish enough to hope for the best. To cheer him up, I told him about the gold napoléons.

He squatted at the side of the trench and pushed his cap, stained blue with antimildew spray, onto the back of his head so that he could give the news his full attention.

“Normalement,” he said, “Where there are one or two napoléons, it signifies that there are others. But this is not a good place to hide them.” He waved his large brown paw in the direction of the house. “The well would be more safe. Or behind a cheminée.”

I said that they might have been hidden in a hurry. Faustin shook his head again, and I realized that hurry was not an intellectual concept that he accepted, particularly when it came to hiding sacks of gold. “A peasant is never as pressé as that. Not with the napoléons. It is just bad luck that they dropped here.”

I said it was good luck for me, and with that depressing thought he went off to look for catastrophe in the vineyard.

The days passed. The blisters flourished. The trench grew longer and deeper. The tally of napoléons remained at two. And yet it didn’t make sense. No peasant would go out to work in the fields with gold coins in his pocket. A cache was there somewhere, I was sure of it, within feet of where I was standing.

I decided to ask for a second opinion from the self-appointed expert of the valley, the man from whom Provence held no secrets, the wise, venal, and congenitally crafty Massot. If anyone could guess, merely by sniffing the wind and spitting on the ground, where a sly old peasant had hidden his life savings, it was Massot.

I walked through the forest to his house and heard his dogs baying with frustrated blood lust as they picked up my scent. One day, I knew, they would break their chains and maul every living thing in the valley; I hoped that he would sell his house before they did.

Massot ambled across what he liked to call his front garden, an expanse of bare, trodden earth decorated with dog droppings and clumps of determined weeds. He looked up at me, squinting against the sun and the smoke from his fat yellow cigarette, and grunted.

“On se promène?”

No, I said. Today I had come to ask his advice. He grunted again and kicked his dogs into silence. We stood on either side of the rusty chain that separated his property from the forest path, close enough for me to catch his gamey smell of garlic and black tobacco. I told him about the two coins, and he unstuck the cigarette from his lower lip, inspecting the damp stub while his dogs padded back and forth on their chains, growling under their breath.

He found a home for his cigarette under one end of his stained moustache, and leaned toward me.

“Who have you told about this?” He looked over my shoulder, as if making sure that we were alone.

“My wife. And Faustin. That’s all.”

“Tell nobody else,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with a grimy finger. “It is possible that there are more coins. This must be kept entre nous.”

We walked back along the path so that Massot could see where the two coins had been found, and he gave me his explanation of the national passion for gold. Politicians, he said, were the cause of it, starting with the Revolution. After that, there were emperors, wars, countless presidents—most of them cretins, he said, and spat for emphasis—and devaluations that could turn a hundred francs into a hundred centimes overnight. No wonder the simple peasant didn’t trust scraps of paper printed by those salauds in Paris. But gold—Massot held his hands in front of him and wriggled his fingers in an imaginary pile of napoléons—gold was always good, and in times of trouble it was even better. And the best gold of all was dead man’s gold, because dead men don’t argue. How fortunate we are, you and I, said Massot, to come across such an uncomplicated opportunity. It seemed that I had a partner.

We stood in the trench, Massot tugging on his moustache while he looked around him. The ground was flat, some of it planted with lavender, some covered in grass. There was no obvious spot for a hiding place, which Massot took to be an encouraging sign; an obvious place would have been discovered fifty years ago, and “our” gold removed. He climbed out of the trench, and paced off the distance to the well, then perched on the stone wall.