When the Mountain Fell by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
"When the Mountain Fell" by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz is a novel set in the picturesque yet perilous landscape of Switzerland during the eighteenth century. The story revolves around two shepherds, Séraphin Carrupt and Antoine Pont, who are tending their cattle in the idyllic valley of Derborence when a catastrophic landslide occurs, burying them and their livestock under tons of rock. Following this disaster, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of the villagers, particularly focusing on Antoine's wife, Thérèse, who grapples with the fear of losing her husband and the uncertainty of impending motherhood.
As the plot progresses, the novel explores themes of endurance, survival, and the deep connection between humanity and nature. Antoine's remarkable struggle for survival beneath the rubble becomes a poignant testament to the resilience of the human spirit. The tale is enriched by Ramuz’s poetic prose, which beautifully captures the raw beauty and formidable power of the natural world, while illustrating the intimate relationship between the characters and their environment.
Through the experiences of ordinary peasants, Ramuz examines fundamental questions about love, existence, and the divine, revealing universal truths that resonate beyond the Swiss setting. The characters, particularly Antoine and Thérèse, embody archetypal qualities of perseverance and devotion, making their story both timeless and relatable to readers across cultures.
When the Mountain Fell by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
- FIRST PUBLISHED: Derborence, 1934 (English translation, 1947)
- TYPE OF WORK: Novel
- TYPE OF PLOT: Regional romance
- TIME OF WORK: Eighteenth century
- LOCALE: Switzerland
The Story:
It was the evening of the twenty-second of June, about nine o’clock, and Séraphin Carrupt and Antoine Pont were sitting in their little shepherd’s cabin at some pasture fields called Derborence. They were pasturing their cattle there for the summer, as was the custom of those people in the towns lower down in the mountains. In the summer the towns were left with women, children, and older men in them, while the able men went up to tend the cattle and goats. In those days Derborence was a lovely valley pasture, but that was before the twenty-second of June.
Antoine had been married only two months before he left Aire to come up to Derborence with Séraphin. He was already becoming bored with the daily milking and cheese-making and was anxious to return to his wife, Thérèse. That night, as they sat together, Séraphin suggested that Antoine go home for a weekend to see that Thérèse was all right. It was a beautifully moonlit night, and the air was crackling, so much so that Séraphin said the Devil, who was up there on the peak called The Devil’s Tower, must have told his children to get out the ninepins. They tried to hit a spot that hung directly over the cabin, and when they missed, you could see, particularly on such a bright moonlit night, the balls skidding over into space and falling down. When the two men went to sleep, the crackling had stopped, but they dreamed of strange noises in the night.
The men of nearby Anzeindaz said it all started like a salvo of cannon; then came a blast of wind and finally a great pale cloud of dust. The noise was terrific. The wind pinned men in their beds, and the cloud obscured everything for a long time. When men dared to go near Derborence and could see through the cloud, the fine pastureland was gone; everywhere, rocks, large at the bottom, smaller at the top, covered the land where the cabins and the cattle had been.
One man, old Barthélémy, crept out of the cloud. Friends carried him down the mountain on an improvised stretcher, but there was a second beard of pink froth over his own black one before he got down. His chest had been crushed, and he died before he reached the town.
All the people in Aire, except Maurice Nendaz, a lame man who walked with a cane, thought a storm had struck, though there was no lightning. Nendaz went up the mountain to investigate and sent back a boy to tell the mayor that the men and cattle from Aire were buried under the rocks.
Thérèse had told her mother the night of the twenty-second that she thought she was going to have a baby. Philomène, therefore, tried to keep the news of the disaster from her daughter. How can one do that in a small town with the houses close to one another? And how can a girl believe that a mountain has fallen on her husband?
Men figured 150,000,000 cubic feet of rock had fallen when The Devil’s Tower slipped into Derborence. Scientists of all sorts came to measure, to investigate, to survey. Two months passed.
Only Old Plon, the shepherd, went near Derborence, where his sheep could find grass around the edges if they kept moving. He knew the Devil had been at work, and he said that at night, he had heard those poor fellows imprisoned there lamenting because they had not been put to rest.
One day, a head appeared, though only an eagle would have been able to see it, amid that huge pile of rocks. A body followed the head, squirming through cracks in the rocks. The man who appeared, looking like death itself after two months underground, remembered only that he was Antoine. He fought with his memory to find the way down to the village, only to be shot at as an evil spirit when he arrived.
He saw Thérèse in the fields and called to her, but his voice was strange. She was afraid and ran home. When the priest came with a cross, and the townspeople could persuade Antoine to come out of hiding, Thérèse, at least, believed he was really her husband and not a spirit.
The mayor and the priest asked him questions. People came from all over the district to hear, over and over, the story of how he had lived up there with just enough space under a fallen slab, with his mattress, with the new cheeses on the shelf by his bed, and finally the dribble of water that seeped through the rocks; how he had found spaces between the rocks that he investigated day after day, week after week, until, more than seven weeks after he was imprisoned, he had found an opening that finally led to the light overhead.
When Antoine got away from the townspeople and came home, he wanted to go back up the mountain because he was sure Séraphin was waiting to be let out. He slipped out early in the morning before anyone else was up. Thérèse wanted to follow, but she could get only the lame Nendaz to go with her. Even he stayed back when Old Plon warned them not to go on among the spirits. Nevertheless, Thérèse went up higher and higher on the mountain. Then Nendaz and others who had gathered with him to watch saw two tiny dots start down. Thérèse had defied the mountain to bring Antoine safely home.
Critical Evaluation:
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, after an early attempt to learn the writer’s craft in Paris, returned to his native Swiss village in the canton of Vaud, near Lausanne. He spent the rest of his life among his own people, developing a provincial style that set him apart as one of the very Swiss writers with an international reputation.
While still a student, Ramuz had visions of being a painter. His work has a preponderance of visual appeal, emanating from a deep-seated love of nature and the artistic ability to represent it in words. His many novels and stories are all about the harsh life of the peasants. He is constantly concerned with the most elementary problems that confront man: What is man? What are his essential needs? Where is there room for love in the modern world? Where is there room for God? Inherently religious, he subscribed to no faith. His work often makes use of legendary material and sometimes assumes the proportions of myth.
When the Mountain Fell displays all of these qualities. It is a dramatic, essentially poetic story that is a classic of man’s endurance and courage. Ramuz is able to make the reader participate in the delight of a man reborn to life, able once again to see, smell, breathe, and feel himself alive. Antoine and his devoted wife, Thérèse, are, in Ramuz’s mythology, archetypal peasants living in harmony with nature. Despite the apparent harshness of nature, Ramuz’s peasants triumph by learning to survive within the limits of the life that nature offers them. In this respect, they attain qualities of permanence and universality that permit them to transcend the geographical confines of the story. They could be any peasants, anywhere, any time.
Nature is accurately observed, providing the material from which Ramuz’s characteristic effects are achieved. The atmosphere, however, counts most: the infusion of feeling, the symbolic weight. Nature provides a setting of lyric beauty and homely charm. It is a sinister, brooding force and a backdrop for the human action, but nature is, at the same time, more than a backdrop. There is an interrelation between man and nature similar to the Wordsworthian communion.
Principal Characters:
- Séraphin Carruptan old man
- Antoine Ponta young newlywed
- Thérèsehis wife
- Philomène MayeThérèse’s mother
- Old Plona shepherd
- Maurice Nendaza lame villager
Bibliography
"After the Landslide." TIME Magazine, vol. 50, no. 15, Oct. 1947, p. 112. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=54776331&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.
"When the Mountain Fell." Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, 4th Edition, May 2015, pp. 2657–58. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=102944616&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.
"Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz." Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition, Jan. 2003, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=164521909&site=ehost-live. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.