Léon and Louise Read Online Free PDF

undisturbed there and could do as he pleased. Most of the time he didn’t do much, just lay on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head and stared at the grain of the beams above him.
    The stationmaster’s wife, whom he was privileged to call Madame Josianne, brought him his meals at midday and in the evening. She showered him with maternal solicitude and verbal endearments, called him her sweetheart, cherub, duckling and treasure, enquired after the state of his digestion, the quality of his sleep and his mental welfare, offered to cut his hair, knit him some woollen socks, hear his confession and wash his underclothes.
    Apart from that no one troubled him, and this he much appreciated. When a train went by he would go to the window, count the carriages, goods wagons and cattle wagons, and try to guess what they were carrying. On one occasion he went back to his room with a newspaper a passenger had left behind on a bench, but after a few minutes he tired of the reports about Clemenceau’s latest cabinet reshuffle, butter rationing, troop movements on the Chemin des Dames and the Banque de France’s bullion sales. He couldn’t muster any real interest in the national war economy either, now that Cherbourg beach was so far away, and he gradually admitted to himself that, strictly speaking, the only thing in the world that really interested him was the girl in the red and white polka-dot blouse.
    Although he hadn’t seen her again since the day he arrived, he couldn’t help thinking of her the whole time. What might her name be? Jeanne? Marianne? Dominique? Françoise? Sophie? He softly and experimentally said each name aloud and wrote it with his finger on the floral rug beside his bed.
    Léon felt happy in his new abode. He didn’t miss his old life. Why should he have felt homesick? He could get on his bike and pedal back to Cherbourg any time he wanted. His parents would always, to the end of their days, welcome him with open arms in their eternally unchanging little house in the Rue des Fossées, and Cherbourg beach would still be there when he got back, exactly the same as when he left it, and he would put to sea in the sailing dinghy with Patrice and Joël as if no time had intervened, and after three days everyone in Cherbourg would have forgotten that he’d been away at all. And so, although he sometimes felt lonely, he was in no rush to go home. For the moment, he might just as well remain in Saint-Luc and try out his new, self-determined existence.
    The only unpleasant feature of his room was the way the goods shed’s beams and timber walls creaked and groaned. It was enough to give one the creeps. They whimpered by day when the sun warmed them up; they moaned at night when they cooled down again; they snapped and crackled at dawn when the air was at its coldest; and they creaked at sunrise when they warmed up again. At times it sounded as if someone were climbing the stairs to Léon’s room; at others as if someone were creeping across the roof space or scratching the wall of the adjoining room with a screwdriver. Although he knew perfectly well that there was no one there, he couldn’t help listening and never got to sleep before midnight.
    So he took to going for long bicycle rides through the surrounding countryside after supper and not returning until long after nightfall, when he was good and tired. But because the sea was far away and there was nothing to see for kilometres around but pancake-flat wheat and potato fields threaded with impenetrable hazel hedges and brackish drainage channels, his excursions became steadily shorter and ended ever sooner in the little town.
    In the early summer of 1918, Saint-Luc-sur-Marne comprised a couple of hundred buildings arranged in concentric rings around the Place de la République. In the innermost ring stood a pretentiously classicistic town hall, a primary school in the same architectural style, and