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Bernard Marie Collet

René Barde, Writer
1901 - 1963

     

soupe a la chaussette

  René Barde - Date de parution : 15/09/2008 - Editions L'Arganier - Collection : La Belle Ouvrage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are the first pages of his autobiography....

rené barde 1930

 

 

           "We were carrying the hay the morning I was born.
                      That day a disturbance occurred that could be enigmatic, but surely due to my arrival at the parents' farm: we ate soup with socks! One of them, along with others, was drying above the stove, losing her balance and falling into the pot. It was only noticed when it was served on a plate after two hours of thick broth with bacon and vegetables.
                     Perhaps we will have to talk again about this wool sock that made fun of a peaceful workers' meal. I think the hair never came out of their teeth, because mine will say of me all their lives:
                     "This one, nothing good. He's going backwards. He is devout, he smokes, does not want to work and prefers to do without eating rather than swallowing a piece of bacon. A wooden head.... As he grew older and lazier, he started writing books and didn't want to earn money. And when everyone shaves, he alone grows his whole beard. A wooden head, a wooden head."
                     So it was said about the sixth and last born that I am. And if the chickens when they saw me did not crow the cock, it was interpreted as an announcement of a misfortune, which had to be averted by twisting their necks.
                     When I was very young, very young, I hated poverty. Seeing the barn full of wheat, the stables full of cattle, reassured me. I thought to myself with my hands stuck in my pockets, "how lucky I was to be born into the hands of farmers who are not poor." The miners' families - there were mines in the country - have no cows, horses or wheat." I considered myself a favorite of life. For example, in the Billet family, they were six children for a small carpenter's salary. They picked up and ate the dead chickens that had been thrown into the hedges for eight days. They were cheerful and lively like all young people, but they were not strong. Nor was I born like the children of Séraphine, the widow, if they wanted pears or apples they had to, at any risk for them, go and poach them from others. But soon what I called my luck was going to turn against me, because I realized that the sons of miners drank whole milk, while mine was skimmed; that they ate more butter than I did, and had as many sandwiches as they needed, that they were not disgusted with bacon, but ate the steak from the butcher shop.
                      Everyone at home loved bacon, except me. I couldn't swallow it. In the long run, this would have a sad and decisive influence on my future; because the bacon, which I could not put in my body, being the product of the farm, we did not replace it with anything, because we were neither rich nor easy and we had to live as much as possible from its products. My sister, who was the eldest, sometimes smeared the face of the slice that had been put on my plate. So without looking like it, without anyone suspecting it, - they still don't know it after 50 years: "We ate well at home", they say - I was going to become a young undernourished person - which is one of the worst forms of it - and with all the disadvantages that this has in the long run.The buckets of milk, the clods of butter, the bags of wheat, all this was not for me, but to sell and face a whole world of owners, a world of tax collectors, blacksmiths, weavers, cartwrights that had to be paid.
          As for the others, they were able to do all kinds of things, and first at the table. When a pig was killed, my mother ate a kilo and a half of chops for her supper. She could substitute one kilo of cheese for that when the opportunity arose. My father, he carried a frying pan and a coffee pot on it by the end of the handle clenched between his teeth... With his family, my brother Honoré lifted and carried more than ninety-five kilos. I had an aunt who at sixteen put a hundred kilos on her back from the courtyard to the attic.            In addition to his own weight, my brother Honoré lifted and carried more than ninety-five kilos. He could eat a pâté terrine that my head wouldn't have filled. When we made pancakes we had to chase it away, and to avoid this embarrassment we never made them. It was about the size of one of our cousins who, after dinner, could still eat two kilos of pâté and fourteen sandwiches.
                      Marc held the fork well too, but above all the kind god Eros had provided him with quality, which is perhaps why everyone loved him. And all these people including Ovid the fourth were able to repeat the night after the day's work.
                     Later, no one would ever want to work with Ovid: neither his son, nor his son-in-law, nor his companions, and it was with such a colleague that I was to be harnessed as a subverge. Our parents had wanted cattle, fields, meadows, children to work there. At seven and nine years old, my elders had to drive the cows to the meadow in the morning, three kilometres from school, where they would get crumbled to their knees. And in the evening they had to take them back. If they wanted to play like all children, they had to turn their work into games. This made them in the long run temperaments of young wolves. "Leups, leups, leups," my mother used to say in patois.
                      One day one of our aunts strongly reproached them that one of the cows had ripped a beet from her field. The boy, Mark, did not answer closely, but from a distance he shouted at the aunt:
                     "Fuck you... old cow yourself."
                      Tell that to their aunt! Our father recommended that we fight with those outside, never cry and drink a lot of beer, but not call his sisters by the name of the brave beasts they had to keep. Also when he learned these things, in the evening the guilty people would go on their knees in the corner after being hit with a cap. "They're leups" supported my mother.
          
                       At home we didn't express feelings. We never kissed the parents except on New Year's Eve. Just once, I think my mother's lips touched my hair. Father never kissed our mother, at least not in front of us. Sometimes, when a softer word or sentence was nuanced, a vague tenderness could be detected. But this can also be seen by the eyes of draught animals, although we do not hear what they say.
                      I didn't have a rough childhood like my elders. I followed the boys eight, five and three years apart. While our parents hardly ever hit us, my brothers never missed an opportunity to brutalize me, to make faces at me or to "tell" about me. My sister herself was happy to slap me. At eighteen years old they still rejected me with all kinds of bad words. It was only in their manhood that they acted a little better. Marc, the one everyone loved, was perhaps the worst. For no reason, he would sometimes leave me half faint for beating me too hard. He had, I'm sure, a carnal pleasure in doing harm.
                     I admit that I was still poorly dressed, my skinny calves in badly mended stockings, my blond hair, my two large teeth called "bran shovels", all this was not too much done to please and perhaps constitutes a vague excuse for them...