There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly, robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings—and his mornings began very early—read as steadily for three or four hours in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight, and more customarily closed at ten.
Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive, observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes, in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared—no one wished—to interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying things.
And there was Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, who had been wounded in the 1870 fight and limped about on a wooden peg, with a stout cane in one hand. He was an amiable old mustachio, with pleasant eyes, under frowning eyebrows, a white whisp of hair on the top of his high brow, and a hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. But ah, he was most lovable! In the afternoon his little yard—he lived down the street on the opposite side from us in a small red and yellow brick house, hidden in climbing roses—was filled with children, for the old sabreur told stories well, and the boys and girls loved to hear him, and then in the spring he played marbles with them, so like a big chuckling boy, that it made us laugh to watch him get down on his good knee, and then get helped up again by the biggest boys, after he had taken his shot. It was tres jolie! Gabrielle and I thought so, and we played with him and the rest, when we too were, as the Americans say, kiddies. In later years when the aches—la sciatique abominable, as he said—settled in his bones, he gave up marbles, and turned to knitting, and it kept him quite happy. He would come in the evenings and enjoy our library, and very often fall asleep and snore ferociously. Father and mother, I think, loved him, but there was a good deal of veneration in their affection; Capitaine Jean Sebastien Bleu-Pistache always wore his medal of honor, won at Gravelotte.
The captain had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and never was there a daughter more sweet and affectionate. Blanchette, he said, was so like her mother—pauvre Blanche—dead now and resting among the big weeping willows in the crooked church yard, that ran down the hill at the other end of the village, with the grave-stones like a huddle of white or gray lambs chasing each other down the same slope, to the beech grove, and the purring brooklet, washing the long iris-bloom in summer. Blanchette said very little, but she always watched her father softly out of the corners of her eyes, and clapped her hands together softly too at his old, old stories, just as if she had never heard them before. Well Blanchette was our third friend.
And then the school-master—maître d'école—was a good friend, who smoked profusely, drank our red wine profusely too, and munched the sugary cookies mother made, as if he had never tasted anything so nice before. Indeed perhaps he had not, for he lived poorly some miles away, and came to school on a funny old mule that he never hitched up anywhere, but just jumped off its back, and let it wander as it would. Only it wouldn't. It went to sleep on the shady side of the school-house, and when the sun woke it up then it ambled slowly to the other side, for you see Emile Chouteau fed his dear friend so very well, that she was never hungry—whatever along the roadside, coming to school, she fancied, she ate—and always seemed growing fatter and fatter, so that it looked as if Emile would have to walk to school at last, when Sarah—he called her that—grew too fat to move.
How funny—O! tres drôle—the two were so different in size and way; the fat, sleepy, moody mule, lounging along, and stopping as if to yawn, while Emile read his book on its back, his head buried in its pages. And the school-master was so meagre, and long, and nervously restless and even excitable, and that perplexed stare with his glasses shoved up on the very top of his bald head! Ah, I see him always when I pass the school-house now. He dressed in tight fitting clothes, and they were just a little too small even for his thin body. Where he got his clothes was a matter of wonder to us. They were a little faded looking when new, and when they were old they became glossy, and then old Emile had the tatters mended by his boarding-house mistress. He looked neat and scrupulous too, in a way, and indeed we liked him greatly, although he lectured somewhat, and was apt to talk overmuch when our red wine lashed his spirits into a fervor of enthusiasm about Virgil, for the whole of reading and literature was summed up in Virgil to Emile Chouteau.
He loved to tell us:
"Virgil est un homme du Mond entier. Il presente le principe du cosmopolitanisme. Il est immortel parce qu'il n'appartient pas à aucun pays. Il devient la propriété de tous. La Renaissance était fondue sur Virgil: les meilleurs sont ses disciples."
Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something after Emile's funeral—the country side followed Emile's body with candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic—and not long afterwards she was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was ploughing a field in Briois.