Ah, the fraud, and he talking of all his fine schemes,
and of all he would spend, as though he had millions!
And he ruining Jouse Benedit and bringing about
that incurable illness; Jouse Benedit who had been
born in Saint Loup, who belonged to Saint Loup,
who was a part of the town, a tradition as his father
had been before him; what an outrage that wass
when one came to think, one's own neighbour rolled
in the dust by a stranger. There were even some folk
who remarked that Kahn's name was, to say the
least of it, Mghly suspicious, who declared that he
might very well be a spy, this in spite of the fact that
the gentle old mayor insisted that such a suspicion
was foolish: cYou do not believe it yourselves,5 said
the mayor, which was true enough, no one really
believed it. The fact was that nerves were badly on
edge; it had been an appalling spring and summer
with the enemy pressing on every side and causing
an indescribable slaughter. The fate of the Allies
had hung in the balance, and now there had come
the French counter-offensive with its long lists of
missing, wounded and dead; small wonder that
nerves were badly on edge as death swept like a
whirlwind over France, devastating the peaceful
homes of Provence. And then there were those who
could honestly say that Anatole Kahn's advice had
misled them; Mere Melanie, for instance, who had
run into debt through making extravagant alterations,
and Hermitte who now never ceased to wail that
restoring his attic had cost him a fortune, and Madame
Roustan who had done up two rooms in the hope of
obtaining a substantial profit. No denying that
Anatole Kahn was to blame; no denying, either,
that most people blamed him.
But strangely enough his worst enemy was a gentle
and very innocuous person. It was Guillaume Simon
who harmed Kahn the most and this, as it happened,