For the remainder of the season, he didn’t find a single truffle. The new owner was en colère. He brought Napoléon to the café and demanded his money back. The old owner told him to go away and learn how to hunt properly. Such an imbécile didn’t deserve a dog like Napoléon. Other unpleasant words were exchanged, but there was no question of the money being refunded.
The new owner went into Avignon to find a lawyer. The lawyer said, as lawyers often do, that it was a grey area. There was no precedent to refer to, no case in the long and meticulously documented history of French law that touched on the matter of a dog being derelict in his duty. It was without doubt a dispute that would have to be decided by a learned judge.
Months and many consultations later, the two men were instructed to appear in court. The judge, being a thorough and conscientious man, wanted to be sure that all the principals in the case were present. A gendarme was sent to arrest the dog and bring him to court as a material witness.
Whether or not the dog’s presence in the witness box helped the judge in his deliberations is not known, but he handed down the following verdict: Napoléon was to be returned to his old owner, who would repay half the purchase price, being allowed to keep the other half as compensation for the loss of the dog’s services.
Now reunited, Napoléon and his old owner moved from St. Didier to a village north of Carpentras. Two years later, an identical case was reported, although due to inflation the amount of money had increased. Napoléon and his owner had done it again.
But there was something I didn’t understand. If the dog was such a virtuoso truffle hunter, surely his owner would make more money by working him than selling him, even though he ended up keeping the dog and half the money each time he went to court.
Ah, said Alain, you have assumed, like everyone else, that the truffles in the satchel were found by Napoléon on the days they were brought into the café.
Non?
Non. They were kept in the congélateur and brought out once or twice a week. That dog couldn’t find a pork chop in a charcuterie. He had a nose of wood.
Alain finished his wine. “You must never buy a dog in a café. Only when you have seen him work.” He looked at his watch. “I have time for another glass. And you?”
Always, I said. Did he have another story?
“This you will like, being a writer,” he said. “It happened many years ago, but I am told it is true.”
A peasant owned a patch of land some distance from his house. It was not a big patch, less than two hectares, but it was crowded with ancient oaks, and each winter there were many truffles, enough to allow the peasant to live in comfortable idleness for the rest of the year. His pig barely needed to search. Year after year, truffles grew more or less where they had grown before. It was like finding money under the trees. God was good, and a prosperous old age was assured.
One can imagine the peasant’s irritation the first morning he noticed freshly displaced earth under the trees. Something had been on his land during the night, possibly a dog or even a stray pig. A little further on, he noticed a cigarette end crushed into the earth—a modern, filter-tipped cigarette, not of the kind he smoked. And certainly not dropped by a stray pig. This was extremely alarming.
As he went from tree to tree, so his alarm increased. More earth had been disturbed, and he saw fresh grazes on some rocks that could only have been made by a truffle pick.
It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been, one of his neighbors. He had known them all since childhood. It must have been a foreigner, someone who didn’t know that this precious patch was his.
Since he was a reasonable man, he had to admit that there was no way a foreigner could tell if the land was privately owned or not. Fences and signs were expensive, and he had never seen the need for them. His land was his land; everyone knew that. Clearly, times had changed and strangers were finding their way into the hills. He drove to the nearest town that afternoon and bought an armful of signs: PROPRIETE PRIVEE, DEFENSE D’ENTRER, and, for good measure, three or four that read CHIEN MÉCHANT. He and his wife worked until dark nailing them up around the perimeter of the land.
A few days went by without any further signs of the trespasser with the truffle pick, and the peasant allowed himself to relax. It had been an innocent mistake, although he did wonder why an innocent man would hunt truffles at night.
And then it happened again. The signs had been ignored, the land violated, and who knows how many fat black nuggets taken from the earth under cover of darkness. It could no longer be excused as the mistake of an ignorant enthusiast. This was a braconnier, a poacher, a thief in the night who hoped to profit from an old man’s only source of income.