La Blachette

André helped us load our meager belongings on his cart, pulled by two mangy cows, and we were off to "La Blachette," a subsistence farm set on a hillside of bramble, pine and chestnut trees. The place belonged to his mother, an illiterate peasant woman who welcomed the cash income we brought. It is probable that her priest, Father Riou, had suggested she take in these children, as they could help on the farm and around the house.

The house was divided into two sections, with two cows, a pig and goats occupying one half, keeping the house warm with their body-heat in winter while ensuring a variety of strange new smells and flies, in the warmer months.

André Aubert, a decent fellow, took us to the farm next door as a form of introduction. No one was home, or, as André put it in the old "langue d'Oc," "Ya dinjüe." This was the provençal language of these parts before the "langue d'Oïl" replaced it in the Middle Ages. After the Becherbach dialect of my childhood, I always listened attentively and applied myself to learning this lovely italianate tongue. It said something of the isolation of this remote mountainous area that modern linguistics had not yet penetrated into the backward Province of Vivarais, named after its former capital of Viviers.