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.
