Passage to Marseille Page #4

Will you come in, please?

Sit down.

Thank you.

Captain, Renault's told us what you said,

and we've been talking here together.

There's nothing to do. It's true.

We're convicts escaped from Cayenne.

We're Frenchmen.

Convicts or not, we can kill Germans.

- What is more important than that?

- Shut up. What do you know about it?

We're as good Frenchmen as a lot

who have never been sent to Cayenne.

We are not soft, us convicts.

We can kill Germans.

Keep out of this, Petit.

- Why have you told us this, Captain?

- To put you on your guard.

You're for us, then?

Yes. France needs men.

You see? I told you he would be for us.

- Even if we are convicts?

- What does that matter?

I guess it's time you heard our story.

Tell him, Renault.

Yes, but what shall I begin with?

With whom shall I begin?

Now there is Petit.

He is from Provence.

What caused him to become a convict?

- It was the love of a farmer for his land.

- You are right.

I farmed the land my father farmed

and his father before him.

My wife and I planted

as the seasons went by.

And then the government came,

and they built a dam.

They flooded all my land.

I guess I went kind of crazy.

He ran to the control station

and attempted to smash the machinery.

When the employees tried to seize him,

he maimed several and killed one.

The government let me off easy.

Instead of being guillotined,

I was transported for life to Guiana.

Do you know French Guiana?

It is the most corrupt

and neglected of all our colonies.

There in the steaming equatorial climate,

there're 5,000 or 6,000 men just like us,

struggling against the heavy undergrowth

in the very depths of the jungle.

Slaves half-naked in the forests,

tortured by heat and humidity,

mosquitoes, fever, rotten food.

Men die or else go insane.

Here you might have found Petit laboring

to build a road.

I will tell you about this road.

The convicts call it Route Zero,

because it will never exist.

Already it has been under construction

for more than half a century,

and for that,

there is exactly 16 miles to show.

And for those 16 miles,

there is one dead convict for every yard.

Not far from where Petit worked,

you might have run across Garou

working in a mahogany camp at Charven.

Formerly a mechanic

and a professional racer of motorcars,

he had killed his sweetheart

during a lover's quarrel.

In certain circles, it was considered crude

of him to accomplish this end with an axe.

Well, of course,

since then Garou has reformed.

He's learned discipline. Haven't you?

Cayenne is a very good school for that.

And now, as a pleasant diversion,

may I please introduce myself?

As you may already have discovered,

mon Capitaine, I'm a very clever man.

And sensitive.

Sensitive down to my fingertips.

In fact, these fingers made me

the best safecracker in Paris

and a virtuoso among the pickpockets.

Oh, they had such a delicate touch,

and from the purses of the rich

they brought forth brilliant symphonies

as from a piano.

Your story is a delightful diversion,

my friend.

But one doesn't tell a glib story

with a dry tongue.

You will find a bottle of cognac

in my cabin.

- Thank you. What else might I find?

- I'll take a chance.

Now tell me about yourself.

I'm a deserter of the Army of France.

In the last war, at the age of 16, I enlisted.

Three months later, I ran away.

I discovered a terrible thing about myself.

I was a coward.

Later I went to Morocco

to enlist in the Foreign Legion

in an effort to redeem myself,

but I got arrested.

You see, even a deserter

and convict can love his country, Captain.

Can you imagine, then, my feelings,

when during the long years

of my imprisonment,

I had to watch every morning

the tricolor being raised?

Soon I discovered that there was another

who every morning looked at the flag,

the sight of which seemed to him

like a benediction, like a sacrament.

I came to feel a strange kinship

with this man,

because every morning

we did the same thing at the same time.

The convicts, we called him Grandpre.

He was a librs, a free man.

That is, he had served his sentence,

but was not permitted to leave the colony.

Since Cayenne offers no employment

for free men,

the lot of these librs was hopeless.

But Grandpre was more resourceful

than most.

He became a catcher of butterflies,

for which the Guianas are famous.

The goods he made from these,

he sold to the tourists,

and the butterflies themselves

to collectors.

Thus, franc by franc and sou by sou,

Grandpre was able

to put together a little sum.

For Grandpre had a plan and a hope.

The same plan and hope of all of us.

Escape.

Hold it, you. This is a closed road.

We're not guarding butterflies.

I heard

there was a special big kind up here.

- I forgot it was a toll road.

- These are cheap cigarettes.

They won't be

when you sell them to the convicts.

Hi, Grandpre.

- How is it with you and your butterflies?

- How is with you and your mosquitoes?

I wish they were pigs of Germans.

- What did you say?

- Just what I said.

The old man asked you a simple question,

Petit.

I said I wish I was in France killing pigs

of Germans instead of mosquitoes.

You mean that you'd fight for our country

if you were free?

Sooner than most, I swear it.

Not sooner than me.

There is only one thing I hate

more than a guard, and that's a Nazi.

How about you?

What are you, a recruiting officer?

Or is this a cross-examination?

I'm just asking him. Well?

I'm a patriot, to answer your question.

And my friend over there, Marius,

he's a patriot, too.

You see over there by the guard?

He is very clever. Everything there is

to know about bribery, Marius knows.

He would be a very useful man

if one were planning an escape.

Maybe.

- There is no escape. Don't talk about it.

- We are silly to even listen.

Old man just play games with our mind,

that's all.

But I have heard he has money, lots of it.

Well, that's different.

That's something else again, eh, Marius?

Yeah, that would be different.

You there.

This fellow got lost in the swamp.

I told him

he could spend the night with you.

What's this, a hotel?

We're crowded already.

Thank you. Thank you, my friends.

What are you doing here?

I paid the Sergeant for your company.

And I brought you a present.

- What is all this talk about being lost?

- There had to be an excuse.

You said you would fight for France.

So she must mean something to you,

in spite of you being here.

I thought it would be nice

to drink together and talk about home.

- Oh, that's a crazy idea.

- I think about my home all the time.

- My farm and my old woman.

- Yes, a farm is good.

There is nothing better

than the good French soil.

No, I'll take Paris any day.

Montmartre and Moulin Rouge,

Bal Tabarin and the women. The women.

Paris isn't France. I like the open country.

Long white roads and green trees.

The most beautiful place in the world.

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