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It was in fat Madame Fontaine's little café at Bar la Rose, that Norman village by the sea, that I announced my decision. It being market-day the café was noisy with peasants, and the crooked street without jammed with carts. Monsieur Torin, the butcher, opposite me, leaned back heavily from his glass of applejack and roared.
"Pont du Sable Bon Dieu!" "Cristi!" thundered Torin. "You say you are going to live in Pont du Sable? Hélas! It is not possible, my friend, you are in earnest!" "That lost hole of a village of sacré vagabonds," echoed Pompanet. "Why, the mud when the tide is out smells like the devil. It is unhealthy." "Père Bordier and I went there for ducks twenty years ago," added the mayor.
Monsieur Pompanet, the blacksmith, at my elbow, put down his cup of black coffee delicately in its clean saucer and opened his honest gray eyes wide in amazement. Simultaneously Monsieur Jaclin, the mayor, in his freshly ironed blouse, who for want of room was squeezed next to Torin, choked out a wheezy "Bon Dieu!" and blew his nose in derision. "Pont du Sable Bon Dieu!" exclaimed all three.
"I know the place you mean," interrupted the mayor. "It was a post-tavern in the old days before the railroad ran there." "And later belonged to the estate of the Marquis de Lys," I added proudly. "Now it belongs to me." "What! You've bought it!" exclaimed Torin, half closing his veal-like eyes. "Yes," I confessed, "signed, sealed, and paid for."
"We were glad enough to get away before dark. B-r-r! It was lonely enough, that marsh, and that dirty little fishing-village no longer than your arm. Bah! It's a hole, just as Pompanet says." Torin leaned across the table and laid a heavy hand humanely on my shoulder. "Take my advice," said he, "don't give up that snug farm of yours here for a lost hole like Pont du Sable."
Hot is his desire to meet with them; and he calls his comrades one after the other by their names: first Cornix, whom he greatly loved, then the stout Licorides, then Nabunal of Mycenae, and Acoriondes of Athens, and Ferolin of Salonica, and Calcedor from towards Africa, Parmenides and Francagel, Torin the Strong, and Pinabel, Nerius, and Neriolis.
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