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Toine

I

He was known ten leagues around, Father Toine, Big Toine, Toine-my-Fine, Antoine Mâcheblé, called Brûlot, the innkeeper of Tournevent.

He had made famous the hamlet nestled in a fold of the valley that descended to the sea, a poor peasant hamlet composed of ten Norman houses surrounded by ditches and trees.

There they were, those houses, huddled in that ravine covered with grass and gorse, behind the curve that had given the place its name, Tournevent. They seemed to have sought shelter in this hollow like birds hiding in the furrows during hurricanes, a shelter against the great sea wind, the offshore wind, the hard, salty wind that gnaws and burns like fire, dries and destroys like winter frosts.

But the entire hamlet seemed to be the property of Antoine Mâcheblé, called Brûlot, who was also often called Toine and Toine-my-Fine, due to a phrase he constantly used:

"My Fine is the best in France."

His Fine, of course, was his cognac.

For twenty years, he had supplied the countryside with his Fine and his Brûlots, because whenever someone asked him:

"What shall we drink, Father Toine?"

He invariably replied:

"A brûlot, my son-in-law, it warms the gut and clears the head; there's nothing better for the body."

He also had a habit of calling everyone "my son-in-law," although he had never had a married daughter or one to marry.

Ah, yes, Toine Brûlot was well known, the biggest man in the canton, and even in the district. His small house seemed ridiculously too narrow and too low to contain him, and when one saw him standing in his doorway, where he spent his entire days, one wondered how he could possibly enter his dwelling. He entered it every time a customer presented themselves, for Toine-my-Fine was entitled to take his little glass from everything drunk at his establishment.

His café's sign read: "At the Friends' Rendezvous," and he was indeed, Father Toine, the friend of the whole region. People came from Fécamp and Montivilliers to see him and have a laugh listening to him, for he could make a tombstone laugh, that big man. He had a way of joking with people without offending them, of winking to express what he didn't say, of slapping his thigh in his fits of mirth that would make you laugh from the belly despite yourself, every time. And then, he was a curiosity just to watch him drink. He drank as much as was offered to him, and everything, with a joy in his mischievous eye, a joy that came from his double pleasure, the pleasure of enjoying himself first, and then of amassing money, for his enjoyment.

The local jokers would ask him:

"Why don't you drink the sea, Father Toine?"

He would reply:

"Two things prevent me, firstly that it's salty, and secondly that it would have to be bottled, since my stomach isn't flexible enough to drink from such a large vessel!"

And then you had to hear him argue with his wife! It was such a comedy that one would gladly have paid to see it. For thirty years they had been married, they bickered every day. Only Toine laughed, while his wife got angry. She was a tall peasant woman, walking with long, stilt-like strides, and carrying on a thin, flat body a head like an angry owl. She spent her time raising chickens in a small yard behind the inn, and she was renowned for the way she knew how to fatten poultry.

When a dinner party was held in Fécamp among the gentry, it was essential, for the meal to be appreciated, to serve a fowl raised by Mother Toine.

But she had been born in a bad mood and had continued to be dissatisfied with everything. Angry with the whole world, she primarily resented her husband. She resented him for his cheerfulness, his reputation, his health, and his plumpness. She called him a good-for-nothing because he earned money without doing anything, a glutton, because he ate and drank like ten ordinary men, and not a day went by without her declaring with an exasperated air:

"Wouldn't he be better off in the pigsty, naked like that? It's enough to make one's heart ache with all that fat."

And she would shout in his face:

"Wait and see, just wait a bit; we'll see what happens, we'll see! He'll burst like a grain sack, that big flabby fellow!"

Toine would laugh with all his heart, slapping his belly, and reply:

"Eh! Mother Hen, my plank, try to fatten poultry like that. Try it and see."

And rolling up his sleeve over his enormous arm:

"Here's a wing, Mother, here's one."

And the drinkers would bang their fists on the tables, twisting with laughter, stomp their feet on the floor, and spit on the ground in a frenzy of gaiety.

The furious old woman would retort:

"Wait a bit... wait a bit... we'll see what happens... he'll burst like a grain sack..."

And she would leave in a fury, amidst the laughter of the drinkers.

Toine, in fact, was astonishing to behold, so thick and large had he become.

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