Manon laughed, kissed Marie, climbed up into her seat and took the dog in her lap. Marie Castener stood by the wheel; she was feeling important with all these neighbours listening while she helped to launch Manon on this great adventure.
“Etienne’s boy shall come over twice a week with eggs, vegetables, butter and bread. He can ride a bicycle, you know. If you want anything write it down on paper, for Pierre forgets everything, save the time for his meals.”
Manon leant over towards this stolid, ugly woman who had the heart of a saint.
“How good you have been to me.”
“Don’t be sentimental,” said Marie Castener; “haven’t I enjoyed it?”
The blue cart moved off, and the neighbours made the departure quite a public occasion, waving to Manon and shouting “Bonne chance.” It was an emotional moment, a dramatic moment—Manon sailing out into the wilderness with all her belongings loaded on the cart, to begin the new life, the life that was to be so bitter and so heart-breaking to many.
At the end of the village, just before the road turned up the hill under the poplars, stood the farm-house where Louis Blanc had been lodging. A meadow planted with a few apple trees separated the house from the road. Bibi, an unshaved and slovenly Bibi, was leaning over the farmyard gate when Manon and the cart went by. She did not see him, but Louis Blanc watched the brown horse and the blue cart go slowly up the hill.
His jaw seemed to lengthen; his lower lip protruded; his eyes looked mere slits. He rubbed his chin between finger and thumb, and spat over the gate. It appeared that Manon had a way of getting things done; she had a cart at her service when he, Bibi, had been unable to hire a cart, and she had a man to work for her. Now she was going to Beaucourt with all her goods and chattels to take up life in the Café de la Victoire. Bibi’s nostrils looked pinched, he sneered.
“A nice fix she would be in,” he thought, “if someone kicked that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt.”
That was the centre point of Bibi’s vision. The bottom had fallen out of his own enterprise, and he had been listening to panegyrics on the philanthropy of Anatole Durand: “Ah, if all wealthy men were like that, if there were no profiteers.” The whole business made Bibi savage. Manon and her man were flaunting their success, while old Durand was preparing to spoil the place as a fertile field for speculation. And the fools applauded him!