But the entire hamlet seemed to be the property of Antoine Mâcheblé, nicknamed Brulot, also very often called ’Toine, and ’Toine-Ma-Fine, because of a certain phrase that was forever in his mouth:
“My fine is the best in all France.”
His fine was his cognac, let it be understood.
For twenty years he had been slaking the thirst of the country with his fine and his brûlots; for whenever anybody would ask him:
“What had I better take, Father Antoine?”
He invariably responded:
“A burnt brandy, son-in-law;—it warms up the tripes and clears up the head;—nothing better for the inside!”
He also had the habit of calling everyone “son-in-law”—although he never had a married daughter, nor even a daughter to marry.
Yes, indeed! everybody knew ’Toine Brulot, the biggest man in the canton, and even in the whole arrondissement. His little house seemed ridiculously too narrow and too low to contain him; and when you saw him standing at his door, as he would do for a whole day at a time, you could not have helped wondering how he would ever manage to get inside again. But inside he would get—somehow or other—every time a customer came; for it was ’Toine’s acknowledged right to levy a treat upon everyone who drank in his house.
The name of his tavern, painted upon the sign was “Au Rendezvous des Anis”; and a good name it was, seeing that Father ’Toine was the friend, sure enough, of everybody in the whole country. Folks came from Fécamp and from Montivillers to see him and to joke with him and to listen to his talk; for that big fat old fellow could have made a tombstone laugh. He had a way of his own of joking at folks without making them mad—a way of winking his eye to express what he never said—a way of slapping his own thigh when he got to laughing, so funny that at every slap he was bound to make you also laugh with him, whether you wanted to or not. And then it was good fun only just to see him drink. He would drink every time anybody asked him, and drink everything offered him—with a look of joy in his mischievous eye—a joy of twofold origin, inspired first by the pleasure of being treated, and secondly by the delight of piling away so many big coppers paid down as the price of the fun.
The jokers of the neighbourhood used to say to him:
“Why don’t you drink up the sea, Pap ’Toine?”
He would answer:
“There’s two things prevent me—first thing is that it’s salty, and then besides it would have to be bottled, because my abdomen isn’t elastic enough for me to trust myself to drink out of such a cup as that.”
And then you ought to have heard him quarrelling with his wife! It was better than a play! Every single day during the whole thirty years they had been married they used to fight regularly. Only ’Toine would just joke, while his wife would get really mad. She was a tall peasant woman, who walked with great long steps like a crane—and whose slabsided, skinny body supported a head that looked like the head of a mad owl. She spent her whole time in raising chickens in a little backyard behind the tavern; and she was renowned for her skill in fattening fowl.
Whenever they gave a big dinner at Fécamp, up the coast, it was always considered essential to eat one of Mother ’Toine’s boarders—otherwise it would be no dinner at all.
But she had been born in a bad humour, and she had remained all her life cross with everything and everybody. And while she was ill-humoured with the world in general, she was particularly ill-humoured with her husband. She was mad at him for his good humour, for his renown, for his good health, and for his fatness. She called him a good-for-nothing, because he was able to make money without doing anything;—she called him a hog, because he ate and drank as much as ten ordinary men;—and she never passed a day of her life without declaring:
“Wouldn’t he look better in the pigpen, a beggar like that!—Makes my stomach sick to see the fat of him!”
And she would go and scream in his face:
“Wait!—you wait a bit! We’ll see what’ll happen to you!—we’ll see soon enough! You’ll bust like a grain-sack, you big, puffed-up good-for-nothing!”
Then ’Toine would slap his fat stomach, and laugh with all his might, and answer:
“Eh! Mother ’Toine, my old plank—you just try to fatten up your chickens like that—you just try it on for the fun of the thing!”
And, pulling up his shirtsleeve to show his enormous arm, he would cry:
“Now there’s a wing for you, mother!—that’s what you can call a wing.”
And the customers would yell with delight, and thump the table with their fists, and stamp the earthen floor with their feet, and spit on the ground in the craziness of their merriment.
The furious old woman would yell again:
“Wait a bit!—you just wait a bit. … I know what’s going to happen to you;—you’ll bust like a grain sack!”
And off she would go, pursued by the laughter of the customers.
’Toine was indeed wonderful to behold—so heavy and thick and red and puffy he had become. He was one of those enormous beings whom Death seems to select to amuse himself with—to practise all his tricks and jokes and treacherous buffooneries upon, so that his slow work of destruction may be rendered for once irresistibly funny. Instead of showing himself in his ordinary aspect to such a one,
