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 The parcel of God, one distinguishes it very clearly from the threshold of the house of Mr Fallacy. One sees its proud bell-tower of grey stones and the roof with the anti-slide tiles such as recently remade by the builder of Ninive for the Mirages/Mystères, patrolling above the border-crests, have the annoying habit of causing these tiles to slide. The presbytery is couched a little lower, nearly facing the house of the blacksmith, and looks at the former tavern which was for a long time kept by a solid mustachioed of the Party who is supposed to - the story goes - have sheltered one of the mutineers of the Black Sea. The tavern does not shelter anybody any more. The presbytery was sold to vacationists. On a Saturday afternoon, the priest of a neighbouring parish comes, to say mass which the grandmothers of old sadly listen to while recalling to their memories the gestures of the abbé C. and his courteous way of dismissing them by a “ite missa est” and also the pranks of the abbé D. throwing his soutane into the nettles and with long betrousered strides embarking on the hunt for small birds... No necessity to conclude that the servants of God are scheming lovers of food and that they adore a booze when, isolated in their presbytery, they experience the need to see each other, to confide their disappointments and their pains, and when, four or five times a year, they receive with good fraternal hospitality the visit of confrères or when they participate in an ecclesiastic conference or when they uncork a bottle of white wine Gaillac doux, levied from the stock of a mass-wine not recalling, certainly no way, the old rough wines of the Vatican , alone capable of quenching the thirst of boozers, of libertins and of roguish cronies, and of all these pillars of the taverns, these “ibrouïgnos damnats” (damned boozers), so well denounced and condemned by Father Amilha, canon of Pamios, in his good old pulpit of Notre-Dame du Camp : “Aprep la bouno chero e’ les bounis boucis, succedo la misero, les plours et les soucis, sourtin del cabaret deja mori de set...” (Good food and good mouthfuls are succeeded by the misery, tears and sorrows ; coming out of the tavern, already I am dying of thirst ...)
The evening angelus rings its brassen soprano ; in the distance the chimneys are smoking and the shadows which are falling from the mountains become larger. The son of the blacksmith, in order to round off his budget, has accepted the position of a bell-ringer plus that of a grave-digger which he occupied already, while perhaps waiting to leave one day the anvil in favour of a School for zither, an instrument whose strings he artistically masters. The parcel of God lies next to the small acre of the Good God who only comes back to life at the call of the Last Services tintinnabulated by this Vulcan junior : croak, croak, croag, croag, croa, croa, chant the crows while fleeing with wings spread out “far from the gallows where was suspended by his flesh the author of the flesh”, under the suspicious glance of Jasotte *, the girl with the blue apron, who can identify all the graves and whose miller’s son - and his Priapus * of a companion whose belly is dressed by nothing - weighs her breasts, (so she herself feels the globes of the beautiful blond german under the shower), in the expectation of this “pestle between the grains, which, laughing, she not disdains”.
*Jasotte. Cf : D’un Moulin l’autre |
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