The Eternal Flame by Michel Corday

Author:Michel Corday [Corday, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2013-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter III

(Tuesday)

The beautiful May dusk was falling over the main square in Briolle. Perhaps it would be the last evening of peace for the little town. The chestnut-trees on the esplanade, whose flowers were still impregnated with brightness, shone for a moment longer in the twilight, like giant candlesticks, Christmas trees strayed into spring. Then they went out.

Noblemain lingered on the threshold of his garage, under the lamp suspended from the lintel. The raw light fell in a flood over his luxuriant curly hair, his powerful shoulders and vast paunch. There was perhaps no one in Briolle more popular than that plump, eloquent, generous, helpful and plain-speaking man, with the honest face. He was also reputed to be highly skilled in his trade. In spite of his obesity, he knew how to roll briskly under a chassis. At the end of his muscular arms there were precise and delicate hands—the hands of a surgeon.

Noblemain was waiting for nightfall. All the shops clustered around the square had been shut for some time. Only the café of the Hôtel Moderne was still illuminated, but its last regulars were coming out. And while their footsteps echoed in the empty streets, the façade went dark. Then the garage-owner put out the lamp over his door and set off slowly beneath the chestnut trees, in the opaque shadows.

He was genuinely generous by nature; he was impulsively drawn toward misfortune and against injustice—but he suffered from a secret vice: envy. The happiness of others distressed him. If he learned of a stroke of good luck it dug into the fat man like a needle into a pincushion. Even when he thought he had forgotten it, he still suffered from it. He asked himself: “Why am I sad? What’s bothering me?” He searched—and remembered that the pharmacist had received an award, or that the bookseller’s son had passed his baccalaureate, or even that a postman a hundred leagues away had won a million in the lottery—for local gossip and reading the newspapers had the same effect on him.

He envied good luck even in the form of merit. To have merit is still a kind of luck. Every success brought him distress—even that of an actor in the cinema, a singer, a gymnast or a clown. He even envied the talents of which he was scornful.

But the most atrocious things about that unfortunate man was that he had to slake his rancor. He relieved it basely. By night, he wandered around town. Sometimes he went as far as the neighboring vineyards, where the citizens possessed little bottle-taps. Making sure that he was alone, he would slip a folded sheet of paper into a letter-box, or write three lines in pencil on a door. It was always some perfidious slander. Was it true? Was it false? It mattered little to the envious fat man. The essential thing, for him, was to pour his poison. He had, for a time, vented his spleen, purged his bile.

Noblemain advanced slowly through the trees.

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