The Catalans: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian Read Free Book Online Page A

tall man, and here he towered over the little dark Catalans: and there was enough of his father—the old Camairerrou with a proved and shocking reputation—in his face to make it clear that you could not play with him.
    As a son-in-law he had improved in his connections, by no effort of his own. Camairerrou had distinguished himself during the Occupation by drowning one of the occupying German soldiers and by taking to the mountains when the evacuation of Saint-Féliu was ordered: there, continuing his trade of smuggling over the border, he had fallen in with an organization that passed refugees down into Spain, and knowing every path and cave in that wild neighborhood, knowing them even in the dark, he had been able to pass over several Allied airmen, secret agents, and Frenchmen bound for Algiers. Whenever it had been possible he had exacted a thumping great fee for his services, but when it had been clear that no money was to be had he had taken the men over for nothing. This, and the fact that when he had been paid he had invariably performed his bargain, redounded very much to his credit after the Liberation: so did the knowledge that somewhere in his house he had all the fees surrendered by his paying customers. He was still a lamentable father-in-law for Madeleine, but no longer an unmitigated disaster.
    So they were married. They were married cheerfully, but with a background of gloomy muttering. They were married in the mairie with the tricolor, and in the temple with orange blossom, legally and sacramentally, and they were married in the Café de Gênes with dried sausage and anchovies, cakes and sweet wine, popularly.
    Throughout the day, with the increasing effect of the wine and jollity, the forebodings of the elders had died down; but in the morning, with the wine quite gone and a general deflated sense of anticlimax abroad, they began again. They were ill-timed forebodings, intrusive and sometimes ill-natured; they were founded less on logic than on emotion, but they soon began to prove themselves to be true.
    In the circumstances it would have been strange if they had not been true. The young couple lived in the upper part of a house belonging to the Fajals at the back of the town: it was a dank, narrow house stuffed into an interior angle of the fortifications, and the sun could not reach it at any time. The lower part of the house was a store, and the upper part had been arranged with the idea of letting it to summer visitors: but the scheme had been quite unsuccessful and for years the stiff, bright-yellow varnished wood furniture had stood rigidly on the shining linoleum, cold even in the flood of August. It was an unhappy arrangement: in the first generous flush the intention had been to give it unconditionally to Madeleine and Francisco as a home; but very soon the flush receded and as there had been no exact terms—nothing specified on either side—the elders began to withdraw the implied gift, until by the end of the year the place was little more than a set of furnished rooms where the young people were allowed to live.
    It had begun simply enough: the women of the family had been naturally fascinated at running in and out of “Madeleine’s apartment” as it was called at first, and naturally they came without invitation. They came to help her clean, sweep, and cook: her mother (an excellent cook) had taught her none of these things, but they were all very much surprised that she did not know how to do them by intuition. And they came, with the liveliest curiosity, to stare: there was little enough to see or know, but what little there was they wanted to see and know and talk about.
    Then, when the disapproval of Francisco began to revive, they began to come into the house even more as by right; and her father, who surprised Madeleine by showing a greater jealousy of Francisco than the others, silently rearranged the furniture to his liking—replaced it in the positions it had occupied before