Léon and Louise Read Online Free PDF Page B

one or two middle-class residences. There were also a covered market, the Brasserie des Artistes, the Café du Commerce, and a Romanesque church outside which, despite the priest’s fierce opposition, a public urinal had been built by order of the maliciously anticlerical mayor. In the central ring were the post office, two bakeries, a hairdressing salon and a grocer’s, as well as a butcher’s, an ironmonger’s and a clothes shop entitled Aux Galeries Place Vendôme from which the little town’s female citizens and the local farmers’ wives bought what they considered to be Parisian chic. Located among the humbler homes in the outermost ring were the smiths and joiners and the retail outlets of the agricultural association, also a saddlery, the memorial to the dead of 1870, the undertaker’s, a machine shop, and the fire station.
    So far, Saint-Luc-sur-Marne had survived the hostilities unscathed. The front had come unpleasantly close during the first year of the war and again in the third, and almost within eyeshot there were expanses of ruins that had once been thriving villages, but Saint-Luc itself had been spared the horrors of war. The worst the town had had to endure was the requisitioning of its fire engine by a battalion commander in transit, as well as occasional incursions by hordes of soldiers on leave from the front and doggedly determined to spend all their pay in a single night.
    Other than that, the people of Saint-Luc had grown accustomed to the curious fact that the war raged only where it was actually being waged, while only just around the corner buttercups bloomed, market women offered their wares for sale, and mothers plaited coloured ribbons into their daughters’ hair.
    As a new arrival Léon had assumed that the Café du Commerce was the tradesmen’s regular haunt, whereas the Brasserie des Artistes was the rendezvous of the local artists and intellectuals. Needless to say, it was the other way round. In Saint-Luc, as elsewhere in the world, the most successful lawyers, shopkeepers and craftsmen felt that their lives suffered from a certain lack of aesthetic and intellectual stimulation in the evenings, when they had counted their day’s takings and locked them up securely in the safe, so they liked to spend their meagre leisure hours in the Brasserie des Artistes, which they held to be an artists’ rendezvous because of the nicotine-stained Toulouse-Lautrec prints on its walls. It was in fact a long time since this supposed artists’ rendezvous had been frequented by any artists because, outnumbered by their culturally aspiring fellow citizens, they had fled across the square and into the Café du Commerce . There Saint-Luc’s bohemians now sat night after night at a safe distance from the bourgeoisie, just as bored as the latter and afflicted by the undeniable fact that an artist’s life, too, is nowhere near as amusing and eventful as it ought to be by rights.
    The bohemians of Saint-Luc consisted of two schoolmasters with literary pretensions, each of whom thought himself by far the other’s artistic superior, the church organist, who suffered from chronic melancholia, a bachelor watercolourist, the lisping stonemason, and a handful of old-established drunks, windbags and pensioners. Defiantly cheerful, they all sat together at their regular table near the cylindrical stove whose flue ran straight across the taproom and disappeared through the kitchen wall, drinking Pernod and exhaling garlic fumes, while barely a hundred kilometres away complete age-groups of young men were being shot, gassed and blown to pieces.
    To be fair to the windbags, it wasn’t their fault that they were doing so well out of the war. The streets were paved with gold now that the government was keeping soldiers and their families sweet with generous pay, allowances and pensions. It was true that money couldn’t always buy everything you had a