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Updated: June 22, 2025
The smithy hearth befires a workshop which bristles with black objects. In the middle of the dark bodies of implements hanging from walls and ceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apron rainbowed with file-dust, dirty on principle, because of his ideas, this being Sunday.
We recognize Brisbille, swaying tipsily in the twilight. There is an eddy and a muttering in the flow. "D'you want to know where all that's leading you?" he roars, and nothing more can be heard but his voice. "It's leading you to hell! It's the old rotten society, with the profiteering of all them that can, and the stupidity of the rest! To hell, I tell you! To-morrow look out for yourselves!
Little more was lacking before I should be as much a reprobate as Brisbille, who, in this very place, before the war, stood up alone before the multitude and tried to tell them to their faces that they were going into the gulf. I move away with Marie. We go down into the valley, and then climb Chestnut Hill.
Brisbille, seeing one of the orators passing near him, throws him a ferocious look, and shouts, "Land-shark!" and other virulent insults. But because of the brass instruments let loose, people only see him open his mouth, and Monsieur Mielvaque dances with delight. Monsieur Mielvaque, declared unfit for service, has been called up again.
All at once Crillon cries, "There's Pétrarque!" and darts outside on the track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair of compasses and escapes obliquely. "And to think," says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillon has disappeared, "that the scamp is a town councilor! Ah, by God!"
Mame goes and sits apart. She detests Brisbille, who is the personification of envy, malice and coarseness. And everybody hates this marionette, too, for his drunkenness and his forward notions. All the same, when there is something you want him to do, you choose Sunday morning to call, and you linger there, knowing that you will meet others. This has become a tradition.
At the time of the great military maneuvers of September, 1913, Viviers was an important center of the operations. All the district was brightened with a swarming of red and blue and with martial ardor. Alone and systematically, Brisbille was the reviler. From the top of Chestnut Hill, where we were watching a strategical display, he pointed at the military mass. "Maneuvers, do they call them?
I could die of laughing! The red caps have dug trenches and the white-band caps have bunged 'em up again. Take away the War Office, and you've only kids' games left." "It's war!" explained an influential military correspondent, who was standing by. Then the journalist talked with a colleague about the Russians. "The Russians!" Brisbille broke in; "when they've formed a republic "
Leaving Marie's arm instinctively I sprang forward and planted myself before the sinister person. After the horrified murmur which followed the insult, a great silence had fallen on the scene. Astounded, and his face suddenly filling with fear, Brisbille stumbles and beats a retreat.
"And meanwhile," said Brisbille, viciously, "she's snuffing it." And he chews, once more, his customary saying pompous and foolish as the catchword of a public meeting "She's a victim of society!" Monsieur Joseph Bonéas has come into Brisbille's, and he does it complacently, for he is not above mixing with the people of the neighborhood.
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