with average ideas who has kept his parents’ values and neither retained nor acquired any others, and who has, since 1920, known no other worry or inspiration than those of an automobile and country inns. He is measured in his speech, firm even. And not without courage. It is he who helps French soldiers cross the Loire, aware of the risk of being denounced or the sudden arrival of the Germans.
His wife had refinement and charm and, as what comes later in the story will show, a heart. They had arrived the day before with their daughter, a very young woman, and granddaughter, a two-year-old.
They had not left Paris bound for Les Douciers, but Aufresne remembered, while in the worst of a traffic jam and a failing piston rod, that he was acquainted with Monsieur Soutreux and knew thelocation of Les Douciers, having spent a Sunday there. They sleep in the shed.
Madame Lerouchon, wife of a garage owner, has been staying at Les Douciers for quite some time. But she is living with her mother in a trailer parked in the field adjoining the courtyard. She is from Metz and speaks German as fluently as French. Madame Lerouchon resembles a fairground wrestler; she has the bulk and jowly muzzle of one. She doesn’t know how to speak without shouting nor how to shout without the accompaniment of a furious pantomime, a pantomime that is not only gesticulation but a simultaneous forward propulsion of her entire body, her head and the simultaneous and separate forward propulsion of her lips. She speaks the way farm dogs bark, for whom barking is not a sign of anger but of excitement, and who wag their tails at the same time as they make themselves heard. I have no reason to say this woman was disagreeable. Worse than that, or something else entirely.
Her niece resembles those “Gretchens” represented in French imagery around 1891: eyes like porcelain and blond plaits.
In the yard, in the house, a busy old man walks about always wearing a soft black hat and an off-white duster. His gaunt face resembles a skull, but a skull shorn of everything macabre, with neither death nor life, a moronic skull. His Midi accent, authentic though it may be, is so exaggerated that it seems put on. Everyone calls him “ le vieux monsieur ,” and no one knows him by any other name.
He speaks often of his son, a mechanic who is on the highway charitably repairing cars that break down.
The slow war of the first few months, as I experienced it in Paris, sometimes seemed to me like a war distant in time for the Parisians, a war refrigerated by a history textbook. During the very first days I heard a grocer from Combs-la-Ville, who the next day had to get back to his warehouse, declaring as he taped paper to his windows that he very much hoped to chop Adolf’s block off. I’m no longer hearing anything of the kind; I’m seeing only the calm of a self-possessed people. Germans no longer cut off children’s hands. The French no longer possess the slice of toast with magic jam that was going to trap the Germans like flies on glue so absolutely effectivelythat all tactics and strategy were superfluous. The passions of a people aren’t easily summed up, but it seemed as if the French had clearly concluded that at this moment in history Germany was the enemy. At Madame Soutreux’s I first understood that this could be otherwise.
Head, mouth and lips forward, Madame Lerouchon shouted at the volume of a domestic argument.
“You believe everything you’re told about Hitler. But you’re told nothing about Chamberlain.” Then, in a higher register, her final words screamed like a tenor heaving himself toward the high C, she repeated, “You were told … you were told … you were told … you were told … you were told that Hitler was malicious … But what do you know about it?… What harm do you expect him to do you?…”
Madame Lerouchon was seemingly in a frenzy. But it wasn’t a towering frenzy. It was a sort of good-girl’s
His wife had refinement and charm and, as what comes later in the story will show, a heart. They had arrived the day before with their daughter, a very young woman, and granddaughter, a two-year-old.
They had not left Paris bound for Les Douciers, but Aufresne remembered, while in the worst of a traffic jam and a failing piston rod, that he was acquainted with Monsieur Soutreux and knew thelocation of Les Douciers, having spent a Sunday there. They sleep in the shed.
Madame Lerouchon, wife of a garage owner, has been staying at Les Douciers for quite some time. But she is living with her mother in a trailer parked in the field adjoining the courtyard. She is from Metz and speaks German as fluently as French. Madame Lerouchon resembles a fairground wrestler; she has the bulk and jowly muzzle of one. She doesn’t know how to speak without shouting nor how to shout without the accompaniment of a furious pantomime, a pantomime that is not only gesticulation but a simultaneous forward propulsion of her entire body, her head and the simultaneous and separate forward propulsion of her lips. She speaks the way farm dogs bark, for whom barking is not a sign of anger but of excitement, and who wag their tails at the same time as they make themselves heard. I have no reason to say this woman was disagreeable. Worse than that, or something else entirely.
Her niece resembles those “Gretchens” represented in French imagery around 1891: eyes like porcelain and blond plaits.
In the yard, in the house, a busy old man walks about always wearing a soft black hat and an off-white duster. His gaunt face resembles a skull, but a skull shorn of everything macabre, with neither death nor life, a moronic skull. His Midi accent, authentic though it may be, is so exaggerated that it seems put on. Everyone calls him “ le vieux monsieur ,” and no one knows him by any other name.
He speaks often of his son, a mechanic who is on the highway charitably repairing cars that break down.
The slow war of the first few months, as I experienced it in Paris, sometimes seemed to me like a war distant in time for the Parisians, a war refrigerated by a history textbook. During the very first days I heard a grocer from Combs-la-Ville, who the next day had to get back to his warehouse, declaring as he taped paper to his windows that he very much hoped to chop Adolf’s block off. I’m no longer hearing anything of the kind; I’m seeing only the calm of a self-possessed people. Germans no longer cut off children’s hands. The French no longer possess the slice of toast with magic jam that was going to trap the Germans like flies on glue so absolutely effectivelythat all tactics and strategy were superfluous. The passions of a people aren’t easily summed up, but it seemed as if the French had clearly concluded that at this moment in history Germany was the enemy. At Madame Soutreux’s I first understood that this could be otherwise.
Head, mouth and lips forward, Madame Lerouchon shouted at the volume of a domestic argument.
“You believe everything you’re told about Hitler. But you’re told nothing about Chamberlain.” Then, in a higher register, her final words screamed like a tenor heaving himself toward the high C, she repeated, “You were told … you were told … you were told … you were told … you were told that Hitler was malicious … But what do you know about it?… What harm do you expect him to do you?…”
Madame Lerouchon was seemingly in a frenzy. But it wasn’t a towering frenzy. It was a sort of good-girl’s
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