I'll Drink to That by Rudolph Chelminski Read Free Book Online Page A

invented.
    The book’s convoluted plot is kicked off by the political ambitions of Clochemerle’s mayor, Barthélémy Piechut, who conceives of a way to increase his popularity among the town’s voters and guarantee his re-election while at the same time infuriating his political opponents. His stroke of genius is to erect what he calls un édifice on a town square next to the church, under the windows of a censorious old maid who is, naturally, a religious fanatic. The édifice is a public urinoir , a convenience known in polite society as a Vespasienne (for the Roman emperor who invented pay toilets), but more commonly known in vulgar parlance as a pissotière , or pissoir. The series of events kicked off by Piechut’s inspiration follows the ripening of the grapes on the slopes around the village as they head toward what promises to be an exceptional year for wine. In the baroque turmoil that ensues, money is made and lost, social climbers rise and fall, husbands are famously cuckolded and political fortunes hang in the balance. Overseeing the village’s spiritual well-being is the Abbé Augustin Ponosse, who was sent by his bishop to Clochemerle as a young man, and rapidly adapted himself to the local mores. As village priest, he assuaged his weakness of the flesh with the help of his enthusiastically devoted housekeeper, Honorine, and his temporal thirst with at least two liters of Beaujolais a day, “anything less than which would cause him to suffer.”
    “This system brought no soul back to God,” Chevallier wrote, “but Ponosse acquired a real competence in matters of wine, and by that he gained the esteem of the vignerons of Clochemerle, who said he was not haughty, not a sermonizer and was always disposed to empty his pot like an honest man. Over fifteen years Ponosse’s nose flowered magnificently, became a Beaujolais nose, enormous, with a color that hesitated between the violet of the canon and the purple of the cardinal. This nose inspired confidence in the region.”
    The real village of Vaux-en-Beaujolais (population 850), where Chevallier used to vacation in the curiously named Hôtel des Eaux (a Hotel of the Waters smack in the middle of pure wine country is a flagrant contradiction in terms, but the people of the Beaujolais have never been afraid of jokes, and least of all in Vaux) served as the model for Clochemerle, and the present-day town council is so proud of the connection that it has based its entire tourism strategy around the book. A splendid Gabriel Chevallier Museum, complete with an interactive multilingual presentation and figurines of the principal characters of Clochemerle, stands next door to the village’s caveau , where the barmaid is cheery and Beaujolais by the glass is excellent and cheap; one level lower on the hillside, on a terrace shaded by enormous plane trees, old men scheme fiendishly to destroy one another in vicious games of pétanque at the boulodrome. But Vaux’s pride and joy, largely financed by the state, like everything else in this most centralized of European nations, and indicated by arrow-pointing signs lest tourists miss it, is the town’s cultural attraction, the municipal pissotière. It is entirely male-configured, as these things were in Piechut’s day, painted the regulation forest green, and further adorned with Clochemerlesque frescoes by Allain Renoux, Vaux’s artist in residence.
    “We’re not the center of France,” the present-day mayor, Raymond Philibert, admitted over a glass of the local Beaujolais-Villages (2005 vintage) in the municipal caveau , “but this edifice is important to all French citizens and to those foreigners who have read the book. We owe it to them to give it the prestigious position it warrants.”
    Tongue in cheek or not, Philibert’s heavy emphasis on tourism—the Chevallier Museum alone cost more than $1 million, a serious investment to put into a little burg like Vaux—is a reflection of some hard realities