My old friend (one has friends occasionally who are much older than
oneself), my old friend Doctor Bonnet, had often invited me to spend
some time with him at Riom, and as I did not know Auvergne, I made up my
mind to go in the summer of 1876.
I got there by the morning train, and the first person I saw on the
platform was the doctor. He was dressed in a gray suit, and wore a soft,
black, wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hat, which was narrow at the top
like a chimney pot, a hat which hardly any one except an Auvergnat would
wear, and which smacked of the charcoal burner. Dressed like that, the
doctor had the appearance of an old young man, with his spare body under
his thin coat, and his large head covered with white hair.
He embraced me with that evident pleasure which country people feel when
they meet long-expected friends, and stretching out his arm, he said
proudly:
"This is Auvergne!" I saw nothing except a range of mountains before me,
whose summits, which resembled truncated cones, must have been extinct
volcanoes.
Then, pointing to the name of the station, he said:
"_Riom_, the fatherland of magistrates, the pride of the magistracy, and
which ought rather to be the fatherland of doctors."
"Why?" I asked.
"Why?" he replied with a laugh. "If you transpose the letters, you have
the Latin word _mori_, to die.... That is the reason why I settled here,
my young friend."
And delighted at his own joke, he carried me off, rubbing his hands.
As soon as I had swallowed a cup of coffee, he made me go and see the
town. I admired the chemist's house, and the other celebrated houses,
which were all black, but as pretty as knick-nacks, with façades of
sculptured stone. I admired the statue of the Virgin, the patroness of
butchers, and he told me an amusing story about this, which I will
relate some other time, and then Doctor Bonnet said to me:
"I must beg you to excuse me for a few minutes while I go and see a
patient, and then I will take you to Chatel-Guyon, so as to show you the
general aspect of the town, and all the mountain chain of the
Puy-de-Dôme, before lunch. You can wait for me outside; I shall only go
upstairs and come down immediately."
He left me outside one of those old, gloomy, silent, melancholy houses,
which one sees in the provinces, and this one appeared to look
particularly sinister, and I soon discovered the reason. All the large
windows on the first floor were half boarded up with wooden shutters.
The upper part of them alone could be opened, as if one had wished to
prevent the people who were locked up in that huge stone trunk from
looking into the street.
When the doctor came down again, I told him how it had struck me, and he
replied:
"You are quite right; the poor creature who is living there must never
see what is going on outside. She is a mad woman, or rather an idiot,
what you Normans would call a _Niente_[8]. It is a miserable story, but
a very singular pathological case at the same time. Shall I tell you?"
[Footnote 8: A _Nothing_.--TRANSLATOR.]