Eat Him If You Like by Jean Teulé Read Free Book Online Page B

leave his head exposed. Alain had paid for his daughter’s headstone. He tried to remind Devras of this as he hit him full in the face.
    The crowd pushed and shoved in their attempts to strike him and leave their mark on the enemy. One man hit him and then stepped back, leaving his place to another, who, once he had struck Alain, stood aside to be quickly replaced by someone else. The instinctive, collective nature of the massacre diluted responsibility. The bloodshed gave youngsters at the fair the opportunity to prove themselves and join the men. Thibassou was back again. The fourteen-year-old swaggered up and down the streets of Hautefaye, showing off his bloodstained baton. He vaunted his ferocity.
    ‘Hey, you, have you hit him? No? You’re a coward!’ he said, as he and Pierre Brut’s son questioned a boy of their own age.
    ‘Go and give him what for, ’Poleon,’ a mother commanded her five-year-old.
    The child hit Alain. He withdrew his hand and it was spattered with blood. Old Moureau urged people to throw stones at Alain’s head.
    ‘Three goes, one sou. If you kill the Prussian, you take him home.’ He handed out stones, turning the killinginto a sideshow. People trod on Alain with their left foot, superstitiously believing it would bring them luck. They thrashed him as if they were threshing wheat.
    ‘We haven’t threshed much wheat thanks to you, scum! Lébérou!’
    Alain was being likened to the mythical monster from Périgord, condemned to roam the country by night. Legend has it that the lébérou , his body swathed in an animal skin, would eat dogs, impregnate village women and jump on the backs of nocturnal walkers, forcing them to carry him. The following morning he would take on the form of a caring neighbour.
    ‘Lébérou, lébérou!’ the cry was immediately taken up by other villagers. Men made the sign of the cross with their forefingers as if warding off a vampire. ‘Prussian, it’s your fault we found the Lac Rouge farmer dead at the bottom of his well, with a dog paw in his mouth!’
    ‘Prussian, it’s your fault that my brother hanged himself with the halter of his last cow when he came back from burying it!’
    ‘Prussian, it’s your fault that I don’t know where to get fodder this winter. There’s no maize, no beans, nuts or turnips. Scoundrel! Here, take that!’
    It’s your fault! It’s your fault! They blamed Alain for all their woes. The drought, his fault! The problems with Prussia, his fault! His heart, bones, blood, feet and eyelids became a mush, barely held together by pieces of flesh. They were smashing his entire body. The earth of the main street, arid for so long, was joyfully soaking up his blood. Alain was jostled and kicked by clogged feet. He was no longerpresent; his dilated pupils were vacant. Murguet dragged a fork across Alain’s stomach as though he were turning clods of earth. Enough is enough!
    There was a crossroads in the town centre. On the left, on the corner of the road leading to Nontron, sprawled the long inn belonging to Élie Mondout, grocer and tobacconist. In painted lettering on the pink-brick façade were the words:
    Chas Mondout
    lu po ei boun,
    lu vei ei dou,
    la gent benaisé.
    (At Mondout’s,
    the bread is good,
    the wine is sweet,
    the people happy.)
    The tables were set with pewter dishes and iron forks, and Élie Mondout’s customers sat gawping at Alain. By now he was nothing more than pig or poultry feed.
    ‘Filthy Prussian, take that for my son who you sent to Reichshoffen!’
    Piarrouty bashed him once more in the head with his weighing hook and made for the inn, shouting, ‘I saw his brains!’ He drew vast amounts of water and went to wash his hook, much to Élie Mondout’s astonishment.
    The innkeeper had been busy rushing to and fro, making soup from leftover meat, slicing ham and bread, cooking up last year’s chestnuts, and bringing up demijohns of winefrom the cellar. No doubt he hadn’t even realised what was