Nobody about! The noise has ceased…. From the midst of some wet wild vines, a couple of curlews fly off noisily…. A light breeze sings in the trees…. Towards the east, on the sharp ridge of the Alpilles, a golden dust amasses, from which the sun slowly appears…. The day's first sunbeam is already touching the roof of the windmill. Immediately, the drum-roll starts again, hidden, this time from in the fields….
The devil, I had forgotten about it. What sort of idiot, then, greets the day from the middle of the woods with a drum?… I try my best to get a look, but I can't see anyone…. Nothing except the tufts of lavender and the pine trees which go down right to the road…. Perhaps there is some goblin, hidden in the thicket, mocking me…. It must be Ariel or Puck. The rascal must have said to himself as he passed my windmill:
—That Parisian is much too tranquil in there, let's have a dawn serenade for him.
Whereupon, he took up his big drum and … more drum-rolls…. Will you shut that thing up, Puck, you will wake up the cicadas.
* * * * *
It wasn't Puck.
It was Gouget Francois, called Pistolet, drummer in the 31st Battalion, and right now on his biannual leave. Pistolet is bored stiff here and he has his memories, and he has his drum, and—when someone from the village wants to borrow the instrument—he goes out and bangs the damned drum in the woods, and dreams of the Prince-Eugène barracks, back in Paris.
Today, he is honouring a small, green hillock with his reveries. There he is, propping up a pine tree, his drum in his arms, having a field day…. Partridges, alarmed, take to the air from under his feet; but he doesn't notice them. Wild flowers bathe him in their scent; but he doesn't smell them.
He doesn't see the fine spiders' webs vibrating in the sun amongst the branches, nor the pine needles, which jump about on his drum. Completely given over to his reverie and his music, he looks lovingly at the blur of his whizzing drumsticks, and his large, dull face lights up with pleasure at every roll.
"How lovely the great barracks is, with its large flagged courtyard, its orderly, all in line windows, its men in military caps, and its low arcades full of clattering mess-tins!…