Country Courts
The courthouse of the Gorgeville justice of the peace is full of country folk, seated impassively round the walls, awaiting the opening of the court.
Among them are large and small, ruddy fat fellows and thin ones looking as though they were carved out of a block of apple wood. They have placed their baskets on the ground, and there they sit placidly, silent, absorbed in their own affairs. They have brought with them the smells of the stable, of sweat, of sour milk and manure. Flies are buzzing about under the white ceiling. Through the open door you can hear the cocks crowing.
On a kind of platform stands a long table, covered with a green cloth. Seated at the very end on the left, a wrinkled old man is writing. At the end on the right, a policeman, stiffly erect in his chair, is gazing vacantly into space. On the bare wall, a large wooden Christ, writhing in an anguished attitude, seems still to offer up his eternal agony on behalf of these louts who smell of beasts.
His Honour the Justice of the Peace at length enters the court. Corpulent, and ruddy-complexioned, with every quick step of his fat hurried body he jerks his large black magistrate’s robe: he sits down, places his cap on the table, and looks round the assembled company with an air of deep disgust.
He is a provincial scholar, a local wit, one of those who translate Horace, relish the minor verse of Voltaire, and know Vert-Vert by heart as well as the obscene poems of Parny.
He opens proceedings.
“Now then, Monsieur Potel, call the cases.”
Then, with a smile, he murmurs:
“Quidquid tentabam dicere versus erat.”
The clerk of the court, raising his bald head, stammers out in an unintelligible voice: “Madame Victorie Bascule versus Isidore Paturon.”
A huge woman comes forward, a country woman, a woman from the county town, wearing a beribboned hat, a watch-chain festooned across her stomach, rings on her fingers, and earrings shining like lighted candles.
The justice of the peace greets her with a glance of recognition not without a gleam of mockery, and says:
“Madame Bascule, enumerate your complaints.”
The party of the other part stands on the opposite side. It is represented by three people. In the middle a young peasant, twenty-five years of age, chubby as an apple and red as a poppy in the corn. On his right, his wife, quite young, puny, slight, very like a bantam hen, with a flat narrow head, crowned as with a crest by a rose-coloured bonnet. She has a round eye, apprehensive and choleric, which looks out sideways like a bird’s. On the boy’s left stands his father, an old bent man, whose twisted body is lost in his starched smock, as if it were under a bell-glass.
Madame Bascule holds forth:
“Your Honour, for fifteen years I have looked after this boy here. I have brought him up and loved him like a mother, I have done everything for him, I have made a man of him. He had promised me, he had sworn never to leave me, he even drew up a deed to say so, in return for which I have given him a small property, my bit of land in Bec-de-Mortin, which is valued in the six thousands. And now that baggage, that low-down good-for-nothing, that dirty hussy …”
The Justice of the Peace: “Restrain yourself, Madame Bascule.”
Madame Bascule: “A miserable … a miserable … I know quite well she has
