time I saw M. Minicot I took him for a witch. He wore a castoff tulle hat with faded roses in the brim, and a soiled lace fichu which reached almost to his waist, and an apron drawn tightly round the lower part of him like a skirt. At a distance his appearance was rather terrifying. The beard one might have passed it was a common appendage among the Nurienaises,-and the pipe in his mouth. What frightened me was the moustache, thick and white as lamb's wool, surmounting the fichu, and serving as a foil to the roses in the hat. But the sinister impression vanished on nearer approach when one perceived that he was a man, and that it was a whim of his to masquerade like this. M. Minicot had the trustful and engaging smile of the honoured indigent. And he wore his strange plumage as if it were natural. This alone gave him a certain dignity. He would come to the window like a bird while we were having déjeuner, and bow to us in turn, Irene first. Crumbs, I supposed, were the attraction. And nearer home there was Louise. It was Louise with her honest, brown, horse face and slow smile-if you can imagine a horse with a smile who decided us to go to Madame Brun's, or Sam Suffy, as the house was called. Our choice of apartments was limited at Nurien. Madame Gerontiat's windows looked out on the Route Nationale, and offered a fine view of the drinking fountain and the plane trees and the statue of M. Boudin, but they were hot and stuffy, and there there were noises late and early in the street, and in the summer a hubbub of char-a-bancs carrying tourists to the Cirque at the spectacular end of the valley. Madame Leblanc's house was more secluded. Her windows looked on to the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville, but Angela didn't like the smell. Madame Brun's windows at first didn't open at all, but when they did open it was on the quiet Rue Saint Béat, a feeder of the market - place. The street had no particular shape. It was broad here and narrow there, with kinks in it and projecting angles, and alleys leading into culs-de-sac. The houses displayed a great variety of roof, some with the mansard slope, others pure Béarnais with bellying curves like sails, the most sightly roofs I know; but in colour they were all of the same satisfying pigeon - grey, house and church; and this gave the town an individual, cosy, self-contained look, which did not belie its nature. Sam Suffy and Louise between them captured us at once. Angela was determined that those windows should open, and the brawny Louise accomplished the feat, as she accomplished most things. The verandah of the first and second floors at the back looked over the houses beneath on to the valley-as generous a view as you will find in France-and admitted as many courants d'air quickly, without translating it Angela used to laugh at my accent, and my ear was so bad that I had not the patience to listen to voluble French for more than two minutes at a time. When M. Bruneteau or as we chose. Our abode was well named. Sam Suffy, we discovered, was a corruption of Ça me suffit, gallice, the Abode of Bliss. We did not know that we lived in a house whose name was a joke until Louise explained why so many people grinned as they passed our windows. Nor did we understand why Madame Brun's house dog, a brown Pyrenean wolfhound, who frequented the hall or doorstep, was sometimes called Vichy Mademoiselle Lory came to and sometimes Nero. Angela's theory was that it had been born at Vichy, and that its real name was Nero. Irene worried it out of Louise. You called it Vichy at a distance when you had a bone to give it. Vichy, in fact, was vocative, Nurien for Viens ici. Thus the children learned French. It was not the French of Paris, still it was good enough. It We wanted them to become bilingual. This has always seemed to me the ideal education for an English boy or girl up to the age of twelve. "Better than a private school," I used to say to Angela. was my business to preserve the illusions. We lived in the present. We probably both wondered a dozen times a day what we were going to do about their education, but we left it out of our discussions. Still my boast of the advantages of Nurien over a private school was not all make-believe. What would I not have given to be able to talk French, or to follow it when spoken see us I used to become half hypnotised with ennui, and the effort of pretending to follow what they said. They talked and talked, and would never go. It was like listening to the rumble of an interminable train which one had to be polite to, although one was feeling train-sick. It was all my wretched ear. I loved the people and the country, and the language, so long as I had not got to listen to it or talk it, but could read it in peace. When it was a case of a difficulty in a book, Angela had to come to me. The children had her ear. They very soon learnt to use verbs reflexively, roll a sufficient "r," and put in an occasional subjunctiveand quite naturally. Irene acted as interpreter for the Brebis when she visited us, and afterwards for Uncle Bliss, and sometimes for me. She learnt to talk patois too without serious damage to her French of Nurien. They had regular lessons, of course. Mademoiselle Lariot used to come every day. But or SO What for the first month This some distant village, generally one woman to a pig, sometimes driving it, or more often leading, walking backwards with a deceitfully extended palm, and repeating, "Viens, viens, m'petit." Best of all were the Pyrenean bullocks in their light, clean, white or grey blankets, and coiffure of sheepskin, yoked in pairs to the carts, gentle-eyed, buff-coloured, and moving in perfect step. The master of the team walked solemnly in front, the guiding rod of hazel on his shoulder, or balanced erect in his hand, the docile bullocks following. The carts they drew carried pigs or calves. There was the little charrette, balanced on two low wheels, occupied by a single oscillating sow; and four-wheeled boarded waggons with a dozen calves in them, standing in rows, rump to rump, and looking out gravely at the street. The peasants, gaunt, clean-shaven, hawk-like Béarnais, came in on foot, or in small carts drawn by donkeys, or mules with enormous ears. I have described the Rue Saint Béat as quiet. This was true of six days in the week, but on the seventh, Tuesday, it became the debouchement for all the traffic from the west of the valley into the market - place. disturbance of tranquillity added to the attractions of the street. We enjoyed the din, the bêlement, mugisement, beuglement, grognement-here was another exercise in French-of lambs, calves, and pigs. Market at Nurien was as different from Homerton as the Café Dodet from Homersfield Bell. From early in the morning until midday the procession filed through the Rue Saint Béat-lambs carried on asses' backs, two of them in a sack on each side of the saddle, bleached faces looking out as if they were going to be sea-sick; peasant women bringing in their tall, lean, chestnut-fed pigs from they would chaffer. There were no flocks. The sheep had gone up to the high pastures, and the cattle which were not in carts were mostly led. The boucherie Mallet was round a bend of the street, mercifully hidden from window; but M. Mallet would descend to a point within observation and accost the farmers as they brought in their stock. An old man would come along leading a single calf, its neck in the noose of a rope. M. Mallet would stop him, and "Eight hundred francs for that!" M. opening of her bodice, extended Mallet would laugh at the demand as he pinched and pulled the calf, but after a little palaver he would bend quickly and brand his initials on its coat. Then he would take the still expostulating peasant into the buvette and stand him a byrrh, leaving the calf tied to the rail beugling piteously. Irene would run across the road and stroke it. Calves' lips and noses are dewy, and fragrant, and inviting; calves' eyes large and black and full of expression, but happily neither accusatory nor apprehensive. Val would offer it a lump of sugar, which, of course, it declined. The boucherie Mallet was to become a familiar interior. Louise was too occupied to do the marketing, so we had to go to the butcher's and grocer's ourselves. Angela at the butcher's was unthinkable. I offered to go instead. But no, she insisted that it was the housewife's work. She was learning faire les économies, an art in which I was unteachable. So we went together. Never before had her eyes rested for more than a moment on the suspended carcases. The ribs of the beast, we discovered, were chops. Détails horribles. Madame Mallet at the counter received us with becks and smiles. A strong and beefy woman with a damp pink complexion like meat. Such at any rate were her arms and neck and cheeks, and one could imagine that the raw pink tints, most apparent at the to her boots. A necessarily carnivorous woman, I argued in her defence. She worked like a harpy, springing from carcase to carcase, cutting, chopping, pounding, patting, and sawing, yet with a courtesy and an air of obliging which made her occupation appear almost human. Madame Mallet was the busiest woman in Nurien; the boucherie was always crowded. And how expert an anatomist ! I watched her fascinated, and tried to recognise in the disjected members dishes familiar at restaurants. I noticed that even the head and feet were sold, and some of the customers were served with 'inners." These were generally soft and splashy, and could be distinguished from the "outers" by their iridescent tints of glazed lead or putty. Angela insisted that her two kilos should be solid. When Madame Mallet plumped them down on the marble counter-triply enfolded, it is true, in sheets of La Petite Gironde she dropped them into her exquisite bag, the one the Brebis had chosen for her at Homerton the day we explored the burrow and the treasuries of Uncle Bliss. day as we were leaving the different one for each pair, and shop we saw a calf lying at the her nighty-case to keep her bottom of a gig outside with nighty in during the day. All its neck and four feet tied up this ritual of specklessness into a ball, and its nose poked seemed to me right and proper into a basket of quivering in Angela, who at Homersfield raw veal. The contact of the used to accuse me of leaving quick and the dead was too my pyjamas on the bathroom much. After that we passed floor. Unhappily we had no the boucherie Mallet with bathroom at Sam Suffy, but averted eyes. Madame Mallet had to learn the art of washing regarded us reproachfully at in sections, as was the mode first, and then not at all, and in the country of our adoption. to avoid either unpleasantness, we used to make furtive detours to the market-place by the Allée du Panier Fleuri. The vegetarian epoch continued for a few weeks until the Brebis came, and Louise was relieved by a femme de ménage. During this period we had no meat in the house except ham. Not from the charcuterie; there the risks there the risks were equal, or worse, a literal casting of swine before pearls. The pig makes a horrid corpse. We bought our ham at the grocer's in clean slices, which carried pig. no reminiscence of At Homersfield Angela's vulnerability to the lesser plagues earned her from me the title of "The Knight in Chain Armour." 'Why is mummy like a knight in chain armour? Irene and Val gave it up. "Because she will stand up to a dragon and succumb to a mosquito." But at Sam Suffy there were worse than mosquitoes. During the summer verminicide became a necessary item in the "bazar." However, Angela grew philosophic in adversity, and though she didn't like having her chair or bed kicked, or having her meals served on coarse crockery, or being waited on by clumsy servants, she became very fond of the heavy-handed, heavy-footed Louise, and suffered her gaucheries patiently. For myself there were compensations in the simple life. It was a relief to have only two suits, or one like Uncle Bliss, and never have to put on evening clothes or a starched shirt. I had long suspected that one's comfort depended on having few possessions. Angela was never separated from her daintinesses, not even at Sam Suffy. She never had to drink out of a thick cup, but carried about with her the two Spode cups and saucers, with sugar-basin and milk-jug to match, in the osier teabasket, the one which used to do duty at the Witch Pool; and she took her own bedspread and pillow and quilt with her everywhere, and the dress cover to protect her garments from the least speck of dust, and the shoe-bags, a I Angela thought this a pose. |