The Bark Tree Read Online Free PDF

satyr; they keep their little girls shut up when he’s about. He’s very respectable meussieu, but he mustn’t get giddy. So he exaggerates his pomposity in order to avoid this.
    “I can go and have some French fries tomorrow. When she asks me, ‘Well, you’re late, aren’t you?’ I’ll say: ‘Yes, I went to have some French fries at Blagny.’ If she looks at me in amazement I’ll say: ‘Yes, I just suddenly felt like it.’ It’s idiotic, this business. I shall go home tomorrow just as I always do. Hm, that young man was in the same compartment as I was last night.”
    They are nearing Paris. The hatter and the banker are discussing an important question: how much is the pension of the holders of the military medal? The train throws its load out onto the platform. The mass moves quickly towards an aperture, and there disintegrates. Some take the B train, others the V, others the CD, and others the metro. Others walk. Others take a time to gulp down a coffee with a croissant. The observer yawns, and goes home to bed.
     
     
    —oooooo—oooooo—
    Ever since she’d seen a man run over, at about 5 in the afternoon, outside the Gare du Nord, Mme. Cloche had been in ecstasy. Naturally, she said she’d never seen anything more horrible; and that must have been so, because poor Potice had been carefully laminated by a bus. By a series of carefully prepared chances, she happened to be sitting, at about the same time, opposite the same place, on the terrace of a café that a blessed coincidence had placed precisely there. She ordered camomile tea, and patiently waited for the same thing to happen again. That was it, so far as she was concerned; she’d be there every day. Waiting for an accident. Absurdly, the ideal line from pavement to pavement that Potice hadn’t been able to traverse to its extremity, absurdly, this line now seemed to her to be necessarily linked to fate, destiny or fatality. Something shocking had happened there: yellow brains on the asphault; so there, indefinitely and inexplicably, horrible accidents were bound to recur, and Mme. Cloche adored the shocking and the horrible. The camomile tea was tepid and the sugar inadequate; the waiter was informed of this extremely bluntly. She took off her fur wrapper, for it was very hot, and scrubbed her face with a gray - checked handkerchief; the customers avoided looking at her. As for her, she was waiting.
    There were two taxis whose fenders had come into collision, and another which had fallen foul of the law for some trifling reason. But that was all. For an hour, thousands of cars and thousands of pedestrians followed their respective paths without any serious disturbance. Waves of bipeds and a few rare quadrupeds flowed into the station; waves of bi-, tri-, and quadricycles went by. But nothing happened.
    The camomile tea had been drunk for a long time, and Ma Cloche was still frustrated; then she had an idea: to stop thinking of the accident, and that way, perhaps, another would occur. She started thinking about professional matters (she was a midwife) and abortional and gynecological difficulties went running through the old bag’s head, while the waiter was looking at her contemptuously, making her feel that she should either quit her observatory, or reorder. The insolence of this character became such that Ma Cloche finally realized that she would have to remove her undesirable self from these premises. So she put her fur wrapper back on, looked at the time on an enormous old turnip which she took out of a carpetbag, paid for her camomile tea, leaving a most ungratifying gratuity for the waiter, and left, in despair. She’d hardly gone three paces when she heard a loud scream behind her, a fairly excruciating scream, then a terrific hullabaloo, whistles, people calling out, cars hooting. Her heart stopped beating for a moment, then, with unparalleled velocity, she turned on her heel and ran to the scene of the accident.
    But this time,