THE MECHANICAL PIANO

By PETER BROOKE

HREE weeks ago I was in a French village called Les Bordes-les-Celles. You can get to it from Paris by jumping into a taxi and shouting " Cemay-la-Ville!" You reach Cernay-la-Ville in half an hour, and then you walk two or three miles.

But I found Bordes-les-Celles in a different way. I was bicycling through the forest of Rambouillet when I came to the top of a steep hill and found myself (these are the appropriate words) hurtling down it at a speed Sir Malcolm Campbell could have become interested in. When I reached the bottom I was told I had fallen off in the village of Celles-les-Bordes. Here, I thought to myself, is where I will stay. I made enquiries at the bakery-café-post-office- hotel, and found that everybody had lived in every house in Celles-les-Bordes for at least fifty years, and there were no vacancies. But the goodwife, very daringly, suggested that I try Les Bordes-les-Celles. It was roughly two miles away, they cautioned me, and they could not tell me very much about it. Perhaps they constantly resented the name of their own village turned back to front, and so feigned ignorance of its exact manners and customs.

To reach Les Bordes-les-Celles (which I may as well tell you is called Les Bordes for short, but knowledge of this fact is very difficult to attain) I had to climb an enormous hill, and at the top I found a plain After a mile's bicycling I entered Les Bordes. Les Bordes is just what a village should be, with a pump, a chateau, and a very old postmistress who has just passed her examinations in the Morse code. Moreover, it is impossible to believe oneself within two hundred miles of Paris, instead of the actual fifteen.

In the first place, everybody fetches their own water from the pump and milk from the farmyard. In the second place, it is fast asleep. When I arrived (carefully this time) in front of the village pond, where the frogs were tuning up their throats for a gala night performance, the villagers showed a shocked kind of curiosity, but faded away, like snarks. If I caught one of them, and questioned him, he was sympathetic, but utterly uninformative. " Je regrette, monsieur, mais . . ." I felt it was indecent to take up any more of their time. Luckily I found a Parisian, who told me there was an hOtel somewhere the other side of the pond.

I found this hotel, a very old washed-out building like something hastily painted on a backdrop. Signs of ancient luxury and joie-de-vivre lingered in corroded lettering.

HOTEL DE L'EUROPE. SES BOSQUETS. SES COGNACS. OUVERT JOUR ET NUIT. I knocked at the door. There was no answer. Through the glass panels I could see a sort of rustic parlour with a little bar counter and a row of bottles. I went around to the other entrance, which was barred and bolted. A sad dog barked at me, but without very much conviction, for after a very few minutes' home defence propaganda, it wagged its tail and assured me the house was empty. But I had so liked the look of this large, faded hotel that I determined to stay where I was and beard the proprietor.

Eventually two old men passed me, in earnest agricultural conversation. I stopped them. Where, I asked them, would the proprietor be " Je regrette, monsieur, mais . . ."

" Nous regrettons, monsieur, mais . . ."

The next time I accosted one of the younger generation, a child of six, also on a bicycle. He didn't regret. He was full of adventure. He even had certain facts at his fingertips. Madame la patronne, a very old lady, went regularly to pick grass for her rabbits.

" Where?" I asked. " Par la!" cried the child excitedly, pointing over a large stretch of territory with absolute certainty. We jumped on our bicycles and set out for the unknown. After six miles' reconnaissance, vividly conducted by my friend through fields and farmhouses, we came across an old lady knitting at her cottage window who clearly remembered, she said, that this was the one day in the year when Madame Le Notre went to Paris.

When we returned to the Hotel de l'Europe nothing had changed. The dog gave a defeatist bark, and the bottles on the bar counter glinted with ineffectual conviviality. The child suddenly disappeared, leaving me alone on the door- step of the hotel. Having waited so long, I thought, I will wait still longer. It was a beautiful evening, and far away, over the fields of pea and clover, where the bees sang plain- song, I could see the green gloom of the forest. Up the street the château pointed its grey bonnets to the sky. Suddenly, within the parlour, an enormously loud mechanical piano began to play " La vie cst belle." I started up, peering through the glass panels of the door, but could see no one. Could this be Madame Le Notre? I asked myself, hastily revising my opinion of Les Bordes. Wa:4 this the kind of grass she picked for her rabbits? I left, bicycling back to Rambouillet.

But curiosity is a very strong emotion. In four days I was back at the Hotel de l'Europe with a friend. We knocked on the parlour door.

" Entrez ! " shouted a voice.

We entered, passing a dilapidated billiard-table and a grandfather clock. In a corner stood the mechanical piano. In the kitchen sat an old woman peeling potatoes. When another woman entered, a younger one with that kind of imbecile face to be found in any village in the world, I imagined a Broeghel painting, or a Le Nain. The older woman turned out to be Madame Le Notre, a Bretonne, with the shrewd Breton sense of life. The other was the maid-of-all-work with no roof to her mouth.

I told Madame the story of the mechanical piano. She laughed and told me there was something wrong with the mechanism. We looked over the hotel and decided to stay there. Madame told me she had refused to take guests in her hotel, because she didn't want to do another stroke of work in her life. "On s'en f out du travail a quatre-vingts ans." Everything was left to Linette, the idiot girl. So we had to cook, and clean and fetch water and wood and milk. This was good fun, I might add, especially as we could always resort to a period in the bar-parlour, and dance to the eight tunes of the mechanical piano (ten centimes a dance).

Les Bordes went on its sleepy way. Occasionally farm labourers would come into the parlour to drink yin ordinaire and play belotte. Three nights a week Linette bought two bottles of red wine and went to bed in the poultry shed, but she was always punctual in the morning. Madame shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. What could she do without the girl, after ten years, and five of them in a lonely house? What did it matter, when all was said and done?

"Qu'est qu'on attendait de la vie? " One was happy in that village. Its ancient simplicity seemed all the more desirable when one realised that glittering Paris was only a stone's throw a .vay, that one need only walk two or three miles to Cernay-la-Ville, jump into a taxi, and shout " Place de l'Opera " or " Boulevard Raspail!"

In the third week we were there, at two o'clock in the morning, I was woken up by the mechanical piano playing " J'ai deux amours! " Later I heard sounds of loud bang- ing. When we went downstairs in the morning, men were putting the piano into a van We missed it very much.