“Who in the world is General Blanmont?”
“Oh—of course, you don’t know. It’s easy to see you don’t belong to Gisors! My dear old chap, I told you just now that the inhabitants of this town were nicknamed the ‘arrogant men of Gisors,’ and never was an epithet better applied. But let’s get on with lunch first, and I will tell you about the town while I show you around.”
He stopped talking now and then to sip a glass of wine which he looked at tenderly every time he put it down.
He was an amusing sight with his napkin tucked into his collar, his flushed cheeks and shining eyes, and whiskers spreading round his moving jaws.
He made me eat to repletion. Then, when I was thinking of getting back to the station, he seized my arm and led me into the street.
The town, which was quite a pleasant provincial city, was crowned by its fortress, the most curious monument of the military architecture of the twelfth century left in France; the fortress itself looked down over a long green valley where the clumsy Norman cows browsed and ruminated in the pastures.
The Doctor said to me:
“Gisors, a town of four thousand inhabitants on the borders of l’Eure, was first mentioned in the Commentaries of Julius Caesar: Caesaris ostium, then Caesartium, Caesortium, Gisortium, Gisors. I’ll now take you to see the place where the Roman army encamped. Their traces are still visible.”
I laughed and replied:
“It seems to me, old man, that you are suffering from a disease which you as a doctor ought to investigate. It is called parochial pride.”
He stopped short.
“Parochial pride, my friend, is only natural patriotism. I love my house and, by a natural extension of that love, my town and my province, because I find in them only the customs of my village; but, if I love my frontier, if I defend it, if I am angry when a neighbour sets foot on it, it is because I feel my house already threatened, because the frontier which I do not know is the road to my province. I myself am a Norman, a true Norman. Well, in spite of my bitterness against Germany and my desire for vengeance, I do not dislike her, I do not hate her by instinct as I hate the English, the real, hereditary and natural enemy of the Normans, because the English invaded the land occupied by my ancestors, they plundered and ravaged it twenty times, and the traditional hatred of this faithless race came to me with life itself, from my father—But here is the statue of the general.”
“What general?”
“General Blanmont! We had to have a statue. They don’t call us the arrogant men of Gisors for nothing. So we discovered General Blanmont. Look in the window of this bookshop.”
He dragged me in front of a bookshop in which about fifteen books bound in yellow, red and blue caught my eye.
When I read the titles I began to giggle idiotically. They were Gisors, Its Beginnings, Its Future, by M. X., a member of several learned societies.
History of Gisors, by the Abbé A. …
Gisors from the Time of Caesar to Our Day, by M. B., a landed proprietor.
Gisors and Its Neighbourhood, by Dr. C. D.
The Glories of Gisors, by an antiquarian.
“My dear man,” replied Marambot, “not a year passes, not one, mark you, but a new history of Gisors is brought out; we have twenty-three of them already!”
“What about the glories of Gisors?” I asked.
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you all of them, I can only speak of the outstanding ones. First we had General Blanmont, then the Baron Davillier, the celebrated ceramist who explored Spain and the Balearic Islands and revealed to collectors the wonderful Moorish pottery. In literature, we have a journalist of considerable merit, now dead, Charles Brainne, and, among well-known living men, the very eminent director of the Nouvelliste de Rouen, Charles Lapierre … oh, and many more—a great many more.”
We were going down the gentle slope of a long street: the June sun warmed it from end to end and had driven the inhabitants indoors.
Suddenly a man came into sight at the other end of the road—a drunken man, reeling as he came. Head thrust forward, with arms swinging and nerveless legs, he came on in jerks of three, six or ten quick steps followed by a pause. When a short, strenuous rush had landed him in the middle of the street, he stopped short and swayed as though hesitating between a fall and a further display of energy. Then he advanced abruptly in another direction. Next he cannoned violently into a house, to which he attached himself with every appearance of wanting to enter it through the wall. Then he turned round with a sharp effort and stared ahead, his mouth open and his eyes blinking in the sun. At last, with a jerk of his hind quarters, he removed his back from the wall and set off again.
A little yellow dog, a famished mongrel, followed him, barking, stopping when he stopped and going on again when he went on.
“Look,” said Marambot, “there is Madame Husson’s May King.”
I was most astonished and asked:
“Madame Husson’s May King—whatever do you mean by that?”
The Doctor began to laugh.
“Oh, it’s just a way we have here in speaking of drunken men. It arose from an old story which has now become a legend although it is absolutely true.”
“Is it an amusing story?”
“Oh, most amusing.”
“Go ahead then.”
“Right you are. At one time there lived in this town an old lady who, being very virtuous herself, encouraged virtue in others. Her name was Madame Husson. I’m telling you the story with the real names, you know,
