Status Updates From La terre

As for me, it's my business, isn't it? The day he decides to strangle me in one of these fits of rage he's been having recently, then I'll see if the good Lord will forgive me.

'We'll be in the money now that God's doing the work for us. Yes, damn it, this sort of day, when you just sit doing nothing, is worth all those days working like a black and getting nothing for it.'

She was slipping down and leaning against his shoulder. And so The stayed for another hour, with all kinds of ideas running vaguely through his head. Lustful thoughts came into his mind but not for long. She was too young and it seemed to him that, if he waited, she alone would grow older and come closer to him.

But he livened up when she told him how, for fun, she had once gone to have a look at the brothel at the junction of the Rue Davignes and the Rue Loiseau in Châteaudun, a ramshackle little house with closed, rotting shutters.

And as there were not enough people for dancing, the men preferred to go on drinking spirits and smoking, tapping out the dottles of their pipes onto the tablecloth.

...their sides with laughter.
'You'd better drink a lot,' Fanny said to Delhomme, with a loud laugh, forgetting her usual reserve.

When it was quite dark, they lit six tallow candles. They had been eating since three and they finally launched onto the dessert at about ten o'clock. From then on they drank coffee, not one or two cups but big bowlfuls of it all the time. The jokes became more pointed: coffee gives you energy, just the thing to liven men up who sleep too soundly; and each time one of the married guests took a gulp, everyone held...

The men, Buteau, Jean who had been best man, old Fouan and Delhomme, together with his son Nénesse, all in tail-coats and black trousers with tall silk hats, which never once left their heads, were playing cork penny in the courtyard. Monsieur Charles arrived alone, having taken Élodie back to her school in Châteaudun the day before; and without joining in, he watched the game and made some judicious comments.

'Can you imagine? Have you ever seen such abominable conduct... I was tidying up my rose-tree and I climbed up to the top rung and without thinking looked over the top and what do I see?... Honorine, yes, my maid Honorine, with a man on top of her and her legs in the air, up to their disgusting tricks... The dirty pigs, right under my wall!'

...Rue de la Planche-aux-Carpes, white-fronted with its green shutters always closed. They were two wretched little streets and for thirty years she had looked on miserable hovels and their squalid occupants, with the gutter in the middle of the street full of murky water.

Shutting her eyes, she could see the old quarter of Chartres tumbling down from the cathedral square to the banks of the Eure. When she arrived, she would go down the Rue de la Pie and the Rue Porte-Cendreuse, then, after the Rues des Ecuyers, to take the shortest route, she would go down the steps of the Tertre du Pied-Plat; and on the bottom step you could see No. 19 at the corner of the Rue aux Juifs and the...

Then suddenly Jesus Christ sat down again in his chair opposite the other man and quietened down:
'I tell you what, I know a game. You have to bet, right? Will you take me on?'
He had pulled a handful of five-franc pieces, fifteen or twenty of them, out of his pocket and piled them all up in a heap in front of him:
'This is what it is... You do the same as me.'

But the leisurely progress of the Mouche girls and their companions was speeded up by a glimpse of a very drunk Jesus Christ, reeling across the whole breadth of the street. They had heard that he'd been borrowing money that morning by mortgag ing his last piece of land. He was laughing to himself and you could hear the five-franc pieces jingling in his big pockets.

She handed him the money, thinking that he would not accept it. But he did and promptly pocketed it. Slowly they all made their way back to the Jolly Ploughman.

On this side of the square, overlooking some gardens, grass was growing like a meadow, whereas on the opposite side, alongside two roads lined with inns, the Saint George, the Good Harvesters and the Oak, it was hard and trodden down, full of whirling dust.

Ladies were bargaining and there was a throng of people round a big arrival of eggs outside the inn, the Poulterers' Arms.

As they entered Cloyes, he put on the safety ratchet and set the horse up the steep slope by the cemetery; and as they came up to the crossing formed by the Rue Grande and the Rue Grouaise, intending to leave the cart at the Jolly Ploughman, Jean suddenly pointed towards a man's back disappearing down the latter street.

A farmer who starts borrowing is sunk, he'll not even be left with his shirt. Even the other week one of my neighbours was expelled, the father, mother and four children all thrown onto the street, after the lawyers had gobbled up his cattle, his land and his house. And yet we've been promised an agricultural credit scheme at reasonable rates for years!

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