Stories from a French Village: A Romance

“Madame Houdusse had a lover,” said Madame Sauveboeuf, a rather vicious local gossip. “He was the gendarme from Vaiges. He’d arrive by bicycle (eight kilometres) and if she could get away from her husband, she’d go to the empty house that’s right next door to Madame Boule’s, light a candle, and put it in the window to let him know she was there and waiting. They carried on like that for years. It was terrible.” By the time I arrived in this village of four hundred and fifty souls, Madame Houdusse was an elderly lady, stocky, slow and impertinent. But so was Madame Sauveboeuf. The two women had been rivals back in the 1950s when Madame Houdusse had run the restaurant and café on the far side of the bridge, and Madame Sauveboeuf’s mother had run the café and restaurant on the village square. Had there been a secret lover? Perhaps Madame Sauveboeuf only wanted to blacken Madame Houdusse’s reputation, although that passionate romance might have taken place half-a-century before. There’s no way of discovering the truth now. Both ladies are gone, so are the other old folks. The lovely old stone house with wooden shutters where the lovers met has also vanished. What happened to it? “I bought it and had it pulled down twenty-five years ago,” Madame Boule told me. “Even though I’d promised the former owner I’d take care of it, I didn’t want to spend money on the place.” Only the trace of a chimney remains, the hint of a red brick entry, and this story. https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner https://www.j-arleneculiner.com