Mr Fallacy - Land Parcels 87, 88, 89, 3 August

The windows of the neighbouring house are wide open. Cardboard boxes are strewn along the path. Noises and clattering inside. Mr Fallacy is busy house-cleaning on a large scale. No sooner has our car engine stopped than he also dashes out, face open like a door, sharp nose, pale cap, seventy years of horse-trading in his features, toothless smile, shining eyes behind well-cut glasses, and who absolutely wants to know or to recognize the new neighbours about whom well, yes, he has just heard. His gascon laughter traverses the valley as far as the facing languedocian village while throwing at you some ribald truths. He mentions cousin and parents relationships, weddings and funerals, his beginnings in life, his sacrifices and his misfortunes, the high positions he could have achieved in the administration if he hadn’t had to bring up his two sons, at his wife’s parting. One is now a poulterer, the other a dairyman in Hazelnut-Borough, a small textile centre with a working-class majority. He has always been involved with calves, with cows, with beef cattle to whom he claims he can speak. Even now, at more than eighty years of age, he watches over sixteen animals, which does not prevent him from thumping down the cards at manille, every evening, in the corner café. He doesn’t lack money, he doesn’t lack ease but he would love to be considered more and complains about the carelessness of the new generations and sighs about these young people who depilate and smoothen their legs, drunk with eff-ball and the music of swing. Thus his grandson, an excellent rugbyman, has been frequenting an auxiliary nurse for years and years and Mr Fallacy tells the love-birds in vain that he would like to see the wedding before laying down his arms, all no good. His sons, he says, after all he has done for them, are hardly any better ; neither are his neighbours by the way, among them the Mayor, for example, who had made known his intention of having his dung heap on the roadside removed with the excuse that, for twenty years, it had attracted the flies ! To which Mr Fallacy had replied by return of post and with a personal go-between (in this case Mr Roadman) that when the twenty-five chickens of the Mayor stop scratching the dung heap, one would find less refuse on the little tarred road. As for the Mayor’s wife, she is not more confidence-inspiring to him for, he insisted, he had noticed that she had made the most of him being at the Fair, to “lighten his barrel” ; not that the lady was given to drinking, but really out of economic considerations. As regards the Mayor’s children, whom he had crammed with the very best in him, would you believe that - once their brevet obtained - they didn’t look at him any more with the vile excuse that, according to their parents, he had taught them obscenities only : “I want crows and owls to empty themselves on my face, if this is so”, howls lugubriously Mr Fallacy.