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with its gleaming iron-and-brass bread racks, which antique dealers were always trying to buy. He knew they wouldn’t succeed as long as Barbier was the baker—a proper baker, possessed of a baker’s stoop, a permanent flour pallor, and a stubborn attachment to the old ways of doing things. The thought pleased Bennett, and he stopped to take in the smell of fresh loaves and almond cakes.
    “Jeune homme!”
    Madame Joux beckoned to him from the open door of the
épicerie
next door. He obeyed the insistent finger, preparing himself for the worst. His account, a dispensation that he had been able to establish only after Georgette had bullied Madame Joux into accepting such a modern notion, was overdue. Credit facilities, always regarded with distrust in any self-respecting French village, were about to be withdrawn. He could sense it coming.
    He took the sturdy hand of Madame Joux and bent over it politely, inhaling the aromatic traces of Roquefort and smoked sausage that clung to her fingers. “Madame,” he said. “As always, you add to the beauty of the morning.” He was encouraged to see the beginnings of a simper cross her face, and decided it was safe to broach the subject of his account. “I am desolated. I’ve run out of checks. You have no idea how inefficient these banks are nowadays. I myself …”
    Madame Joux stopped him with a playful backhand to the chest. “A detail,” she said. “I trust you like a son.
Écoute
—my little Solange is coming this weekend from Avignon. You must join us for dinner
en famille.
”
    Bennett’s smile slipped fractionally. Madame Joux had been trying to engineer a romance between him and little Solange for several months. He had nothing against the girl—she was quite sweet, in fact, and there had been a moment at the village fete last summer when he had almost been carried away during a
paso doble
under the trees—but the thought of being an appendage to the Joux dynasty had saved him.
    “Madame,” he said, “nothing would give me more pleasure. If it wasn’t for my old aunt …”
    “What aunt is this?”
    “The one in Menton, with the varicose veins. I must be at her side this weekend. There is talk of an operation.”
    Madame Joux was a connoisseur of other people’s operations, ever hopeful that some fascinating complications might develop. She pursed her lips and nodded. Patting her on the shoulder, Bennett took his leave before Madame Joux could suggest that the fictitious aunt should be brought to Saint-Martin to convalesce. He’d have to lie low during the weekend, and be prepared for many questions of a surgical nature during the following week. As he continued down the street, he reflected on the complexities of village life, realizing how much he enjoyed them.
    He ducked through the narrow door of the post office. Saint-Martin—or rather the mayor—had declined a delivery service as being elitist and unnecessary, so villagers were obliged to collect their mail from the mayor’s brother-in-law, Monsieur Papin, who took a close interest in all incoming communications; he was widely believed to steam open letters that looked in any way personal. He greeted Bennett with small clucking sounds and shook his head.
    “No love letters today, monsieur. No
billets-doux
. Just two bills.” He slid the drab envelopes across the stained plastic counter. “Oh, and your newspaper.”
    Bennett slipped the bills into his pocket, nodded to Papin, and took his
International Herald Tribune
next doorto the Café Crillon, center of Saint-Martin’s social life, headquarters of the village
boules
club, and the setting, every day at noon, for a fifty-franc lunch. The room was long and dark, with a pockmarked zinc bar to one side, tables and chairs scattered at random across the bare tiled floor, and a video-game machine, which had lost an argument with an overenthusiastic player two years earlier and had been out of order ever since.
    What ambiance there was came