Repository path: workshop/translations/moulin-installation/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-moulin-installation-R06-v1 — the miller takes possession, single pass

Source. Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (1869; text of Charpentier 1895), «Installation», ¶1–4, 380 French words, read in French. Copy-text fr.wikisource.org (Charpentier 1895, p. 7–13), fetched 2026-08-06; the working span is workshop/experiments/E-20260806f-persona-crossing/materials/sources.json (daudet, sha256 6a67187c6868…).

Regime. R06 — the R04 draft, stopped before self-revision and frozen as its own artifact (R04 §Procedure 2a). Cost $0 — lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: none — measured on the R04 revision of this draft (7-token longest run, 0 shared 12-grams, against Keith Adams, PG #30442). Figures on the R04 page; no comparator was read before this draft was written (R04 §Procedure 1).

It was the rabbits who were astonished!… For so long they had been seeing the mill door shut, the walls and the platform overrun with weeds, that they had ended by believing the race of millers extinct, and, finding the place a good one, had made of it something like a general headquarters, a centre of strategic operations: the rabbits' mill of Jemmapes… The night I arrived there were a good twenty of them, and I am not lying, sitting in a ring on the platform warming their paws at a ray of moonlight… No sooner had I got a skylight open a crack — frrt! there goes the bivouac in rout, and all those little white backsides scampering off, tails in the air, into the thicket. I do hope they will come back.

Somebody else greatly astonished at the sight of me is the tenant on the first floor, a sinister old owl with the head of a thinker, who has lived in the mill for more than twenty years. I found him in the upper room, motionless and upright on the shaft, in the middle of the fallen plaster and tiles. He looked at me a moment with his round eye; then, quite dismayed at not recognising me, he set about going "Hoo! hoo!" and shaking, with difficulty, his wings grey with dust — these devils of thinkers! they never brush themselves… Never mind! such as he is, with his blinking eyes and his sullen face, this silent tenant suits me better than another would, and I have lost no time in renewing his lease. He keeps, as in the past, the whole top of the mill with an entrance by the roof; I reserve the room below for myself, a little room whitewashed with lime, low and vaulted like a convent refectory.

It is from there that I write to you, my door wide open, in the good sunshine.

A pretty pinewood, all glittering with light, comes tumbling down in front of me to the bottom of the slope. On the horizon the Alpilles cut out their fine crests… Not a sound… Barely, at long intervals, a note of a fife, a curlew in the lavender, a mule-bell on the road… All this beautiful Provençal country lives only by the light.