Twice a year, at Easter, and in the middle of September, we used to spend a couple of weeks in Auvergne with my father's mother. Twice a year, as soon as we arrived, my aunt would overwhelm us with six months of local gossip.

When she was a girl she had wanted to go on the stage. How I wish she had succeeded! Then the theater would have given her the outlet she had been looking for ever since in her own home.

Yet I must confess that I always enjoyed her half-yearly performance. I looked forward to the bravura bits -an accident at the mine, the latest town scandals, some celebrity's arrival, not to mention the endless wrangles about property lines, the origin of so many lawsuits.

Though she went through her routine, her technique better than ever, my aunt, that day for some reason or other, didn't seem up to her usual standard. I watched her with surprise and even a bit of embarrassment.

She never used to give thought to her grey hair and was frankly fiftyish, but now she had begun to use dye-a jet black. One could see only too clearly that she had put on the dye herself, as best she could; it had dried out her hair and was already making her features look harder. She had powdered her face lavishly with too pink a powder, which she had quickly wiped off just before we arrived: it brought out the faded look of her skin, formerly amber colored. Above all, the artificial high spirits with which she told her story betrayed a hidden fatigue. Only once in all those flashes of talent in which she excelled did she achieve exactly the effect she aimed

at.

And yet at the beginning, when she had begun on the chapter devoted to everyone (neighbors, tradesmen, or even friends) with whom

one

she had quarreled since our last visit, followed by the shorter list of the people with whom she had made up, I thought she was getting off to a good start. But no, it turned out to be a false one. A single subject obsessed her. She had been talking all around it, feeling sure, I guess, that we wouldn't notice.

"By the way, we've gone back to Vital's. Their meat is excellent."

My father lifted his eyebrows in twofold surprise: first, because Vital's meat had always been firstrate; secondly, because my aunt for a long time hadn't liked fresh meat.

"And I must say," she added, "their employees are quite decent."

Mme. Vital, a widow, obviously couldn't get along without help. Her business was very active and required the presence of two men and an apprentice.

"Poor Louise," my aunt continued, "at last she's found the boy she needs. A strong, competent fellow. And good-looking too, which never does any harm."

After a pause, she repeated. "Yes, a good looking boy. And that never does any harm.

Then she gave a short laugh and with a wave of her hand put things back into place. Of course she had to admit that the new butcher boy was good looking, but she didn't want us to think that his good looks meant anything to her.

"The War Memorial monument is finished at last. It wasn't ready by the fourteenth of July, so they inaugurated it on the fifteenth of August. The prefect was on vacation and the subprefect took his place. Everyone was there. Our representative, the county councilman, the whole Town Council, and all the school children they could round up.

"Poor Louise was there too, of course. Her name's the last on the list. Beginning with a V, you see. And the new butcher boy, in a dark-