CHAPTER II

Our house in Dormans was situated on the town’s main artery, the Avenue de la Marne. Actually the Avenue de la Marne was nothing but a slice of the national highway that left Paris some one hundred and fifty kilometers before Dormans and resumed its course towards Nancy, Metz and Saarbrucken as soon as it passed the Dormans sign-post on the other side of town. But to the people of Dormans, the Avenue de la Marne was what Avenue Foch is to Parisians or Park Avenue to New Yorkers: the mere mention that one lived there gave one a definite standing over one’s interlocutor.

The Avenue de la Marne was also the functional heart of the town and the villages scattered about its countryside. I often thought in those days that I could live my entire life just moving up and down its length like the Marchands had done for generations without having or wanting to reach beyond its boundaries for the necessities, chores or even the joys of life. I went to school and Sunday mass on the Avenue de la Marne, borrowed wonderful books from the public library located in its Town Hall. Bébert worked and banked there, Nanette shopped, argued and gossiped along its strip. You could be sired, born and schooled, married and divorced on the Avenue de la Marne; you could practice a trade or adultery there, become a saint in its Gothic church or an alcoholic in its friendly cafes; you could find a doctor for your ailments or a vet for those of your livestock, have your wedding photographed for legitimacy or your will drawn up for posterity on the Avenue de la Marne. Indeed, the only thing you couldn’t do on the Avenue de la Marne was to be buried there because in Dormans people kept their grief to themselves. Once dead, the sons and daughters of Dormans were laid to rest in the cemetery on the road to the Château, an oasis of serenity delineated by a belt of indolent cypresses which wavered uniformly against the leaden sky whenever a summer storm lashed out at their conical tops.

The Marchands’ house on the Avenue de la Marne consisted of three stories, two-rooms wide, sandwiched between the café where Soldat Mueller and his friends drank their morning beers and after-dinner schnapps on its right, and the house of the widowed Madame Tardieux on its left. The late Monsieur Tardieux had worked for the state-run railway system all of his life and then died peacefully of a heart attack two months after his retirement a year before I came to Dormans. Nanette always insisted that the poor man had died of a “concert” rather than the heart attack diagnosed by Dr. Martin, the latter being a divine punishment meted out to people who burnt the candle at both ends which certainly was not true of