Guy Maupassant - Original Short Stories – Volume 09

He was known for thirty miles round was father Toine – fat Toine, Toine-my-extra, Antoine Macheble, nicknamed Burnt-Brandy – the innkeeper of Tournevent.

It was he who had made famous this hamlet buried in a niche in the valley that led down to the sea, a poor little peasants’ hamlet consisting of ten Norman cottages surrounded by ditches and trees.

The houses were hidden behind a curve which had given the place the name of Tournevent. It seemed to have sought shelter in this ravine overgrown with grass and rushes, from the keen, salt sea wind – the ocean wind that devours and burns like fire, that drys up and withers like the sharpest frost of winter, just as birds seek shelter in the furrows of the fields in time of storm.

But the whole hamlet seemed to be the property of Antoine Macheble, nicknamed Burnt-Brandy, who was called also Toine, or Toine-My-Extra-Special, the latter in consequence of a phrase current in his mouth:

“My Extra-Special is the best in France:”

His “Extra-Special” was, of course, his cognac.

For the last twenty years he had served the whole countryside with his Extra-Special and his “Burnt-Brandy,” for whenever he was asked: “What shall I drink, Toine?” he invariably answered: “A burnt-brandy, my son-in-law; that warms the inside and clears the head – there’s nothing better for your body.”

He called everyone his son-in-law, though he had no daughter, either married or to be married.

Well known indeed was Toine Burnt-Brandy, the stoutest man in all Normandy. His little house seemed ridiculously small, far too small and too low to hold him; and when people saw him standing at his door, as he did all day long, they asked one another how he could possibly get through the door. But he went in whenever a customer appeared, for it was only right that Toine should be invited to take his thimbleful of whatever was drunk in his wine shop.

His inn bore the sign: “The Friends’ Meeting-Place” – and old Toine was, indeed, the friend of all. His customers came from Fecamp and Montvilliers, just for the fun of seeing him and hearing him talk; for fat Toine would have made a tombstone laugh. He had a way of chaffing people without offending them, or of winking to express what he didn’t say, of slapping his thighs when he was merry in such a way as to make you hold your sides, laughing. And then, merely to see him drink was a curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him, his roguish eyes twinkling, both with the enjoyment of drinking and at the thought of the money he was taking in. His was a double pleasure: first, that of drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash.

You should have heard him quarrelling with his wife! It was worth paying for to see them together. They had wrangled all the thirty years they had been married; but Toine was good-humored, while his better-half grew angry. She was a tall peasant woman, who walked with long steps like a stork, and had a head resembling that of an angry screech-owl. She spent her time rearing chickens in a little poultry-yard behind the inn, and she was noted for her success in fattening them for the table.

Whenever the gentry of Fecamp gave a dinner they always had at least one of Madame Toine’s chickens to be in the fashion.

But she was born ill-tempered, and she went through life in a mood of perpetual discontent. Annoyed at everyone, she seemed to be particularly annoyed at her husband. She disliked his gaiety, his reputation, his rude health, his embonpoint. She treated him as a good-for-nothing creature because he earned his money without working, and as a glutton because he ate and drank as much as ten ordinary men; and not a day went by without her declaring spitefully:

“You’d be better in the stye along with the pigs! You’re so fat it makes me sick to look at you!”

And she would shout in his face:

“Wait! Wait a bit! We’ll see! You’ll burst one of these fine days like a sack of corn-you old bloat, you!”

Toine would laugh heartily, patting his corpulent person, and replying:

“Well, well, old hen, why don’t you fatten up your chickens like that? just try!”

And, rolling his sleeves back from his enormous arm, he said:

“That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?”

And the customers, doubled up with laughter, would thump the table with their fists and stamp their feet on the floor.

The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat:

“Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You’ll see what’ll happen. He’ll burst like a sack of grain!”

And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers.

Toine was, in fact, an astonishing sight, he was so fat, so heavy, so red. He was one of those enormous beings with whom Death seems to be amusing himself – playing perfidious tricks and pranks, investing with an irresistibly comic air his slow work of destruction. Instead of manifesting his approach, as with others, in white hairs, in emaciation, in wrinkles, in the gradual collapse which makes the onlookers say: “Gad! how he has changed!” he took a malicious pleasure in fattening Toine, in making him monstrous and absurd, in tingeing his face with a deep crimson, in giving him the appearance of superhuman health, and the changes he inflicts on all were in the case of Toine laughable, comic, amusing, instead of being painful and distressing to witness.

“Wait a bit! Wait a bit!” said his wife. “You’ll see.”

At last Toine had an apoplectic fit, and was paralyzed in consequence. The giant was put to bed in the little room behind the partition of the drinking-room that he might hear what was said and talk to his friends, for his head was quite clear although his enormous body was helplessly inert. It was hoped at first that his immense legs would regain some degree of power; but this hope soon disappeared, and Toine spent his days and nights in the bed, which was only made up once a week, with the help of four neighbors who lifted the innkeeper, each holding a limb, while his mattress was turned.

He kept his spirits, nevertheless; but his gaiety was of a different kind – more timid, more humble; and he lived in a constant, childlike fear of his wife, who grumbled from morning till night:

“Look at him there – the great glutton! the good-for-nothing creature, the old boozer! Serve him right, serve him right!”

He no longer answered her. He contented himself with winking behind the old woman’s back, and turning over on his other side – the only movement of which he was now capable. He called this exercise a “tack to the north” or a “tack to the south.”

His great distraction nowadays was to listen to the conversations in the bar, and to shout through the wall when he recognized a friend’s voice:

“Hallo, my son-in-law! Is that you, Celestin?”

And Celestin Maloisel answered:

“Yes, it’s me, Toine. Are you getting about again yet, old fellow?”

“Not exactly getting about,” answered Toine. “But I haven’t grown thin; my carcass is still good.”

Soon he got into the way of asking his intimates into his room to keep him company, although it grieved him to see that they had to drink without him. It pained him to the quick that his customers should be drinking without him.

“That’s what hurts worst of all,” he would say: “that I cannot drink my Extra-Special any more. I can put up with everything else, but going without drink is the very deuce.”

Then his wife’s screech-owl face would appear at the window, and she would break in with the words:

“Look at him! Look at him now, the good-for-nothing wretch! I’ve got to feed him and wash him just as if he were a pig!”