Free Imaginary LIves by Marcel Schwob Page A

women who haunt the outskirts of French towns, waiting by cemetery walls for any man who passes. These women know no names but those which suit their faces, and they called Katherine “The Snout”. She tramped the fields, where her white face was often seen peeping between the mulberry trees or over the hedges. In the evenings, she sat by the roadside, and she learned to control her fear of the dark in the midst of the dead, while her feet shivered against the stone-marked graves. No more white money, no more silver testons, no golden ecus; Katherine lived thinly now on bread, cheese and a jug of water. She had vagabond friends who cried, “Snout! Snout!” at her from afar and she loved them.
    The chapel bells were her greatest loss, for The Snout would remember June nights when she had spread her green jacket out on the church steps.
    Those were the days when she had so envied young ladies in their bright dresses. But now there remained to her neither cape nor jacket.
    Bareheaded, she crouched on the stones waiting for her bread. In the thick shadows of the cemeteries she missed those red candles at the house with the square room, and the green rushes underfoot, instead of black mud sticking to her boots.
    One night a tramp came along dressed up like a soldier. He cut The Snout’s throat to get her purse, but he found no money in it.
     
     

ALAIN THE GENTLE
    Soldier
     
     
    From the age of twelve he served Charles VII as an archer, for he was brought up by men-at-arms in the flat country of Normandy and the circumstance of his adoption was the following. When the armies came through that region, burning barns, skinning the legs of peasants with their sheath knives and flinging young girls down broken on their beds, Alain was hidden in an empty cask at the door of a wine press, and when the soldiers tumbled the cask upside-down they found him. They carried him away just as he was, in his shirt and his perky petticoat, to the captain of the troop, who gave him a little leather jacket and a cape that had been through the battle of Saint-Jacques. Perrin Godin taught him how to draw a bow and how to gamble at cards. In this company he passed through Bordeau., Angoulême and Poitou to Bourges; saw Saint-Pourcain where the king sat beyond the marches of Lorrain; visited Toul; returned to Picardy; entered Flanders; crossed Saint-Quentin and turned again toward Normandy. During his twenty-three years of military travel he met the Englishman, Jehan Poule-Cras, from whom he learned British curses; Chiquerello the Lombard, who instructed him in the cure of Saint-Anthony’s fire; and young Ydre de Laon, who taught him how to pull down breastworks.
    At Ponteau de Mer his comrade, Bernard d’Anglades, persuaded him to quit the royal courtage. Together, declared Bernard, he and Alain could make a fat living cheating with loaded dice, which they called “gourds”. They deserted their command forthwith, not even pausing to discard their uniforms, and set up their game on the head of a stolen drum behind a cemetery wall. After watching them a while, a rascally sergeant of the guard named Pierre Empongart told them they were sure to be caught and caught soon unless they became priests in order to escape the king’s men and claim the protection of the Church. They must clip their pates, he explained, and throw away their slashed doublets and colored sleeves if cornered.
    After shearing themselves then and there, he made them repeat a Dominus pars . They strutted away, one on each side of the road, Bernard with Bietrix la Clavière and Alain with Lorenette la Chandelière.
    Lorenette wanted a green cloth jacket, so Alain went back to the White Horse tavern at Lisieux where they had recently bought a jug of wine. That night he crept into the garden, made a hole in the wall with his pike, and so gained the hall of the inn where he found seven brass ecus, a red hat and a gold ring. Jaquet le Grand, pawnbroker of Lisieux, changed this