Title : Sauveterre - Jean Lartéguy - Book
Summary :
In this novel, the places, the situations, the characters, even if they have well-known names, everything is imaginary. I chose the title Sauveterre for its meaning: safe land, land of asylum. There does exist in Lozère, between Sainte-Enimie and Mende, a Causse of this name. But there were never any Protestants or resistance fighters. They only passed through, like the Huguenots who inflicted a bloody defeat on the royalists at the tower of Mazel, like the resistance fighters returning from Mont Lozère who were massacred on parade on the Méjean, while they were trying to reach the Cévennes. I would like, however, to see what belongs to all the Causses there: the abandoned farms, whose roofs are collapsing, revealing their Romanesque vaults. Winter, the bitter winds and the snow that torment them; in summer, the sotchs, blue basins, green ponds of living grass in the middle of the burnt and dead plateaus and, all year round, the great flocks of sheep that wander, harassed by dogs. I dedicate this book to the memory of my great-grandmother, the Césarde de Peyrevioles and to all the old Césardes, proud and solitary of the country of Peyres, of the Margeride, of the Causses and of the Cévennes. Alone, they still remember the few groups of resistance fighters, equipped with hunting rifles, who preferred the encounter with wild boars to that of the Germans, the deserters from the Napoleonic wars who had chosen to live in the forest, rather than die in glory, the Camisards hunted by the dragoons of Villars, and the Knights Templar who disguised themselves as peasants to escape the guards of Philip the Fair. It was they who transmitted to me their cult of the damned, and their distrust of all the forms that power has taken over the centuries.
