Free The Train by Georges Simenon

a common origin but they nonetheless formed two distinct clans.
    Was Madame Delmotte, as some people claimed, ashamed of her family’s hardness? Widowed at an early age, she had made a doctor of her son, and he had been killed at the front.
    Since then she had lived with two maidservants in a big stone house where she spent her afternoons on the veranda. From the street you could see her knitting for the old people in the almshouse, in a black dress with a narrow white lace collar. Dainty and pink, she gave off a sugary smell.
    It was on the veranda that she gave me chocolate to drink and biscuits to eat while asking me questions about school, my friends, what I wanted to do later on, etc. Making no mention of my mother and father, she asked me if I would like to serve at mass, with the result that I was a choirboy for two years.
    She invited me to her house nearly every Thursday and sometimes another little boy or girl shared our snack. Wewere invariably given homemade biscuits of two sorts, bright yellow ones with lemon flavoring and brown ones with spices and almonds.
    I can still remember the smell of the veranda and the warmth in winter, which wasn’t the same as anywhere else and struck me as subtler and more pervasive.
    Madame Delmotte came to see me when I had what was diagnosed at first as dry pleurisy, and it was she, in her car driven by Desire, who took me to see a specialist at Mézières.
    Three weeks later, thanks to her, I was admitted to a sanatorium where I wouldn’t have obtained a bed without her intervention.
    It was she too who, when I got married, gave us the silver bowl which stands on the kitchen sideboard. It would look better in a dining room, but we haven’t got one.
    I think that Madame Delmotte, indirectly, played an important part in my life and, more directly, in my departure from Fumay.
    As for her, she had no need to leave, for, having become an old lady, she was already in her flat at Nice, as she was every year at the same season.
    Why did I begin thinking about her? For I did think about her, sitting in my cattle car, where it was dark again, feeling Anna’s shoulder against mine and wondering whether I dared to take her hand.
    Madame Delmotte had made a choirboy of me and Anna had just left prison. I wasn’t interested in finding out why she had been sent to prison and for how long.
    I suddenly remembered that she had no luggage, no handbag, that when the gates had been opened the authorities hadn’t been able to give back their things to theprisoners. So in all probability she hadn’t any money on her. And yet, a little earlier, she had told me that she had just bought a bar of soap.
    Jeff and Julie, lying side by side, were kissing each other full on the lips and I could make out the scent of their saliva.
    “Don’t you feel sleepy?”
    “What about you?”
    “Perhaps we could lie down?”
    “Perhaps.”
    Both of us were forced to bump against our neighbors, and I would have sworn that there were legs and feet all over the place.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “You aren’t cold?”
    “No.”
    Behind me, the man I had taken for a horse dealer hoisted himself imperceptibly onto his neighbor, who, as she spread her legs, brushed against my back. We were so close to one another and my senses were so alert that I knew the exact moment of penetration.
    Anna too, I would swear to that. Her face touched my cheek, her hair, her parted lips, but she didn’t kiss me and I didn’t try to kiss her.
    Others besides ourselves were still awake and must have known. The movement of the train was shaking us all; after a while the noise of the wheels on the rails became a sort of music.
    I am possibly going to express myself crudely, out of clumsiness, precisely because I have always been a prudish man, even in my thoughts.
    I wasn’t discontented with my way of life. I had chosenit. I had patiently realized an ideal which, until the previous day—I repeat this in all