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Our closest companion in the village was Mme. Boucher, whose memories extended back to a time before automobiles were seen in Castelnaud. From her kitchen window, Mme. Boucher could see the house where she had been born and where, from age twelve, she had kept house for her father and brother, who were farmers. In the heat of a July afternoon, she liked nothing better than to sit in the shade, looking up at her birthplace, telling tales of the past. Her fair cheeks would redden and lift into laughter as she told of running like a rabbit on the ramparts of the castle with the boys—her brother and the young Paul Meunier—when she was too small to know the difference between the sexes. Then her face would tighten and her voice crack as she told of the change in her life when her mother died. Suddenly she had to take the mantle of the matri7 m a d a m e b o u c h e r arch, wear a dark apron, and stay indoors keeping house for the men. Her eyes would fill with tears as she mourned her last days at school in the year before her mother became ill. The teacher had always said she had a prodigious memory. She could to this day recite the names of the old regions of France. And though outside of school she spoke patois, her formal French was impeccable , as was her handwriting. Mademoiselle l’institutrice had said she should be sent to Sarlat, to the sisters, for instruction in arts and letters, but at twelve those dreams were nullified by her mother’s death. For the eighty years thereafter, through housework, marriage , farm labor, childbirth, and the tragic deaths of child and husband, she kept up her reading, wrote letters regularly to practice her hand and her art of composition , and leaped at every chance to demonstrate her agility with numbers. She was proud of these skills and as delighted to exercise them as she must have been to learn them, in the girls’ schoolroom just up the hill. On her melancholy days, there would be no sign of Mme. Boucher all morning. In the afternoon, we would find her seated by her fireplace, with a navy blue coverall over her black-and-white nylon paisley dress. This was her grieving attire. No matter how we would start the conversation, it would lead to her life’s great sorrow —the loss of her son, Charles. We heard the story scores of times, it’s true. Yet through the gravity of her telling, the tale cut the heart each time. Her handsome son, the one real friend she had ever had in the world, had been taken from her at the height of his success. She had fought for his chances, protected him from family expectations that he would become a farmer like his father, insisted that he be well educated, and then had 1 5 2 D O R D O G N E D AY S swelled with joy as he succeeded in the tobacco business and was elected mayor of Castelnaud not once but four times in succession. Through the first two terms, he was unmarried, and she was his social partner. She accompanied him to mayoral receptions in the stately city hall of Sarlat and, on one memorable evening, she and her son received the great Josephine Baker in their very own salon. When, in his third term, her son married , her happiness was complete. Even if she no longer had first place at his side, she reveled in his continued success as mayor and his contentment as husband and father. But then one day, “la catastrophe.” He collapsed. There was nothing to be done. He suffered unspeakably. (At this point, Mme. Boucher would go silent. It was many years before we pieced together an understanding that it was a brain tumor that caused her son’s collapse and killed him after a lingering illness.) She still occupied the house that he had expanded to include a reception room for official occasions; it was filled with photographs, yellowing election placards, and even strips of old bunting. Listening to Mme. Boucher’s tale, we were at first at a loss, wanting to comfort her and reaching for consolations —how fortunate, for example, that her son had left a baby daughter, who was the grandmother’s chief joy in her old age. We soon...

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