Case Study: The Life Of Vieux 'Colombier'

From the top of her counter, Mrs Champagne loved the sound of her own voice. She was asthmatic and obese, white, and swollen, overdone. In her relaxed tissue, wrinkles crossed in all directions, streaking the forehead, basking eyes, lacerating the cheeks; these wrinkles were dug on her face, in black, as if the dust of age had penetrated under the skin and impregnated with indelible lines, the dermis.

She was loquacious and gallivanted about, convinced of her importance, revered by the district who considered her as influential and fair. She was in fact the providence of the poor, writing some petitions that she addressed to the great names of France who often received them, without anyone knowing why.

In contrast, her personal affairs were less successful; she operated in the street of Vieux-Colombier, near the Red Cross, a poorly stocked store of stationery and newspapers, earning enough not to go into bankruptcy; but she considered herself nonetheless successful, for the most intimate of her wishes were fulfilled, her proclivities to malicious gossip at last satisfied in this store which simulated a real reporting agency, a kind of small-scale police prefecture where, on judicial base spoken, were recounted, in the absence of convictions and crimes, the cuckoldry and quarrels, the loans to render and the unabated debts of households.
She took after the old affected by leeches, but even more so by these beggars who seek the charity under the churches’ porches, and she attended them, in fact, at best with the priests of Saint-Sulpice, living from a devotion equally retort over Mrs Champagne and the