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By Root 1456 0

of soup, and I forced her to gnaw a bit of bone,” Françoise explained to me, to reduce thus to nothing her daughter’s supper, as though its copiousness were a crime. Even at lunch or dinner, if I committed the sin of going into the kitchen, Françoise would pretend that they had finished, and would even excuse herself by saying: “I just felt like a scrap,” or “a mouthful.” But I was speedily reassured on seeing the multitude of dishes that covered the table, which Françoise, surprised by my sudden entry, like a thief in the night which she was not, had not had time to whisk out of sight. Then she added: “Go along to your bed now, you’ve done enough work today” (for she wished to make it appear that her daughter not only cost us nothing and lived frugally, but was actually working herself to death in our service). “You’re only cluttering up the kitchen and disturbing Monsieur, who is expecting a visitor. Go on, upstairs,” she repeated, as though she were obliged to use her authority to send her daughter to bed when in fact she was only there for appearances’s sake now that supper had been ruined, and if I had stayed five minutes longer would have withdrawn of her own accord. And turning to me, in that charming, popular and yet highly individual French that was hers, Françoise added: “Monsieur can see that her face is just cut in two with want of sleep.” I remained, delighted not to have to talk to Françoise’s daughter.

I have said that she came from a small village which was quite close to her mother’s, and yet differed from it in the nature of the soil and its cultivation, in dialect, and above all in certain characteristics of the inhabitants. Thus the “butcheress” and Françoise’s niece did not get on at all well together, but had this point in common, that when they went out on an errand, they would linger for hours at “the sister’s” or “the cousin’s,” being themselves incapable of finishing a conversation, in the course of which the purpose with which they had set out faded so completely from their minds that, if we said to them on their return: “Well! will M. le Marquis de Norpois be at home at a quarter past six?” they did not even slap their foreheads and say: “Oh, I forgot all about it,” but “Oh! I didn’t understand that Monsieur wanted to know that, I thought I had just to go and bid him good-day.” If they “lost their heads” in this way about something that had been said to them an hour earlier, it was on the other hand impossible to get out of their heads what they had once heard said by “the” sister or “the” cousin. Thus, if the butcheress had heard it said that the English made war on us in ’70 at the same time as the Prussians (and I explained to her until I was tired that this was not the case), every three weeks the butcheress would repeat to me in the course of conversation: “It’s all because of that war the English made on us in ’70 with the Prussians.” “But I’ve told you a hundred times that you’re wrong,” I would say, and she would then answer, implying that her conviction was in no way shaken: “In any case, that’s no reason for wishing them any harm. Plenty of water has flowed under the bridges since ’70,” and so forth. On another occasion, advocating a war with England which I opposed, she said: “To be sure, it’s always better not to go to war; but when you must, it’s best to do it at once. As the sister was explaining just now, ever since that war the English made on us in ’70, the commercial treaties have ruined us. After we’ve beaten them, we won’t allow one Englishman into France unless he pays three hundred francs admission, as we have to pay now to land in England.”

Such was, in addition to great decency and civility and, when they were talking, an obstinate refusal to allow any interruption, going back time and time again to the point they had reached if one did interrupt them, thus giving their talk the unshakeable solidity of a Bach fugue, the character of the inhabitants of this tiny village which did not boast five hundred, set among its chestnuts, its willows, and its fields of potatoes and