There, beyond the mountains flaming red in this evening’s sunset. It’ll be windy tomorrow, Babette thought. In the two weeks she’d spent in this village in the Cévennes, Le Castellas, she’d climbed up onto the ridge at the end of every day. Along the same path where Bruno led his goats. The morning she’d arrived, she’d thought, Nothing changes here. Everything dies and is reborn. Even if there are more villages dying than being reborn. At some point, a man reinvents the old actions. And everything starts over. The overgrown paths again have a reason to exist. “It’s because the mountain remembers,” Bruno had said, serving her a big bowl of black coffee. She’d met Bruno in 1988. The first big assignment the newspaper had given her. Twenty years after May 1968, what had become of the militants? As a young philosopher and anarchist, Bruno had fought on the barricades in Paris.
