The Caning at the Cafe du Concorde.

The Caning at the Cafe du Concorde.

On the face of it, to any casual or uninformed observer, the Cafe du Concorde may have appeared an unlikely location to act as a setting for the public disgrace and punishment of Yvette Marie-Louise Renard. The cafe in its snug location on the eponymous main square of the idyllic little village of Pont du Rochelles showed nothing at first glance to suggest that it was anything else other than the sort of pleasant and friendly little rural establishment whose twin could be found in any village in France. The drivers whose navigational facilities had so seriously let them down as to find themselves, by chance, happening upon this rustic backwater of the Provence would have noted the charming little whitewashed building on the corner of the Place du Concorde with its flower boxes on its upstairs windows and the vine interwoven trellis that served as awnings over the front door and large window front which, in daylight at least, concealed the interior of the cafe behind an obfuscating barrier of the kind of smoky brown glass which seems characteristic of the fenestration of rural French cafes, stained brown by generations of customers who considered it their birthright to fill the cafe with clouds of foul smelling tobacco fumes as the price of their patronage. The visitor on a hot day might well have been tempted to linger awhile in the shade of the umbrellas covering the handful of little iron round tables on the flagstones in front of the cafe and perhaps enjoyed a carafe of chilled Rose wine, made from the grape variety Mourvedre for which the region was renowned, whilst taking in the peaceful scenery of the little square with its stone fountain, wooden benches and fig trees and observing the unhurried, bucolic life of the local community as they went about their daily business. There was nothing in that halcyon image to suggest that this was anything other than the sort of place where nothing very much ever happened at all. But appearances can be deceptive. Had our theoretical observer been possessed of keen perception he might have noticed a few factors that didn’t quite match this sleepy rural image.
Had he been warm blooded and possessed an eye for a shapely turn of leg or bewitching smile he would have needed little of his perceptive abilities to remark upon the young waitress who delivered his carafe to his table. The four young ladies who served in that capacity at the Cafe du Concorde were all personable and attractive. That in itself was not unusual. Pretty girls were as common as the bees among the honeysuckle in the tiny gardens of the village in France; as ubiquitous as the little Wall Lizards on the dry stone walls around the vineyards and, if the young ladies at the Cafe du Concorde were apt to be flirtatious with any customer obviously possessed of XY chromosomes and not yet entirely geriatric, then they were French after all and only doing that which came naturally to them. What might have raised our observer’s eyebrows was the uniform that all four girls affected and which was presumably the obligatory costume to be worn whilst on duty. They all wore the traditional black French maids’ dresses trimmed with white and matched with white pinafores that the tourist to France inevitably fantasises about encountering but, much to his chagrin, rarely does. The skirts were ridiculously short and there was the frill of lacy petticoat peeping beyond the hem. If one of the young ladies obligingly bent over to wipe and clear a table our observer might well have been treated to a sublime vision of endless, becoming thigh, clad in dark stockings held in place by silly flirtatious garters, and perhaps even a glimpse of lacy white knickers clinging to an admirably shaped derriere. Were he able to regard the vision dispassionately he might well have concluded that, whoever the proprietor of this cafe was, then they were a person of acute business sense and well aware that the fine vintages of Chateau de l’Escarelle were not the only lure to draw custom within the walls of their establishment.
If our hypothetical observer might now have perchance to wipe his brow and tear his eyes away from the delightful young serving girls and cast his eye over the other occupants of the cafe and square he might have observed some other anomalies. It is certainly true that sitting at the tables in front of the cafe were the obligatory contingent of grizzled veterans and elderly farmers nursing glasses of watered down Pernod. But that was not the whole story. There was a slightly Bohemian feel to the village of Pont du Rochelles; a feeling in large part that could be attributed to the small but colourful community of struggling artists who were more or less permanent residents in the building on the far side of the square which gloried under the name of Hotel du Ville; a somewhat grandiose title which betrayed the building’s aspirations above its station as a rather dilapidated rural guest house. This bright and generally young sector of the community could normally be found scouring the surrounding countryside by day with brush and canvas and, by evening, forming small excited groups around the tables in the Cafe du Concorde, squandering their dwindling funds and despairing to their colleagues of ever being quite able to capture the luminosity of the Provence sunshine among the olive groves.
Standing out in even more startling contrast than this fringe community of artists was another group it was possible to see around the village on occasion. This was a group liable to excite scandalised whispers among gossiping women, knowing winks between their men folk and the occasional wolf whistle from young farm lads. These were the young, rather exotic ladies whose numbers varied from time to time who worked at the Cabaret Chat Noir a little way outside of the village. These young ladies called themselves “dancers” or, even more pretentiously, “artistes” as if the doubtless considerable skills involved in shedding their clothing on a stage in front of an exclusive clientele of leering males could be described as an art form. It was quite rare to see these eye catching young ladies abroad in broad daylight. They were creatures of the night who worked long hours at the cabaret. When not divesting themselves of their clothing on stage they would be employed in divesting gullible men of their disposable income by luring them into sharing bottles of cheap champagne at astronomically inflated prices as the price of their company or perhaps even tempting them into greater intimacy in one of the alcoves of the cabaret, partitioned from the rest by heavy curtains, known as the separee. The Chat Noir “girls”, as they were rather euphemistically called locally, tended to keep themselves to themselves and slept most of the hours of daylight in any case. Seeing them about the village in the daytime hours was as incongruous as sighting a night moth under the daylight sun only much more colourful. When they did appear in the village most men avoided their eye in fear of eliciting any recognition from them. There were few married men in the village who wanted their patronage of the Cabaret Chat Noir to become common knowledge.
There was also an older somewhat more well to do segment of the local populace. In spite of its admittedly agrarian nature the region around Pont du Rochelles was a prosperous one or at least it boasted a sizable group of wealthy patriarchs and matriarchs who held the real economic clout and political influence around the village. This upper echelon of local society owned most of the village along with a large proportion of the local business. These were the people of influence and importance in the village; the people who kept the wheels of local commerce turning; the people who were the shakers and movers; the people whose wealth and connections gave them a disproportionate voice in the running of local affairs; the very people, in fact, who it was politic to stay firmly on the right side of. To be numbered among this class, albeit in a roundabout fashion and slightly scandalous manner, was the formidable matriarch and proprietress of the Cafe du Concorde.
Madame Courvelle had been a great beauty in her youth and was still, at age fifty, a strikingly handsome lady. She had married well to a gentleman of considerable wealth and, upon her early widowhood, had inherited her late husband’s fortune. The Cafe du Concorde was but one of her business interests albeit a favourite one. She owned a considerable amount of property including a small mansion on the outskirts of the village, several vineyards and, in addition to her ownership of the Cafe du Concorde, she was also the proprietress of the Cabaret Chat Noir. This fact alone was enough to ensure Madame Courvelle a highly influential position since it meant that she was party to many a secret that influential men of the village were desirous of avoiding becoming part of the public domain. She was not a woman to cross lightly! Generally though she was discreet and, if there was a whiff of scandal to her business dealings, then she was rich enough to dismiss them as the idle gossip of envy. She was a busy lady and, although she would spend much of her nights at the helm in the cabaret, especially on the weekends, the centre of her little empire was the Cafe Du Concorde where she could most often be found holding court. The cafe was the hub of social life within the village and, standing firmly at the epicentre of this, was Madame Courvelle herself. She ruled over her empire with grace and charm but also with a rod of iron. She was the very last person in Pont du Rochelles that Yvette Marie-Louise Renard would have wished to fall on the wrong side of.
If the Cafe du Concorde might have struck the casual observer as an unlikely setting for a severe and humiliating punishment then they would have been even more surprised to learn that the central figure on the receiving end of this misfortune was Yvette Renard. There was certainly nothing about Yvette to suggest that she was the kind of girl to attract trouble. She was not wilful or malicious. She was young and attractive but by no means flighty or loose. Most people in the village would have told you that she was conscientious, intelligent, hard working and invariably courteous and respectful to her elders. She was, in fact, a thoroughly nice girl. She was petite with long brown hair and a serious demeanour to her pretty face. Other than her charming looks she was not the kind of girl to attract attention. She was rather shy if anything and not given to the type of behaviour that would elicit disapproval from the older members of the community. She lived quietly with an elderly aunt, her divorced mother having died tragically young some years previously, and generally troubled nobody. She didn’t even have a boyfriend for she was hopelessly timid around members of the opposite sex.
In spite of her timidity Yvette was a girl of ambition and, in Pont du Rochelles, ambition was a necessary attribute for any young girl to possess should she want to make anything of her life. There was little meaningful employment for young women in the village other than service either in the domestic sense or in the cafes and shops. The best prospect that most young women could expect locally was a good marriage but even prospective suitors with the wherewithal to support a wife comfortably were in short supply and liable to fall to girls with far more predatory aggression than the shy little Yvette could muster. But Yvette had one priceless advantage. She had been clever at school and diligent in her studies and the combination had reaped her a rich reward for now, just into her twenties, she was a student teacher at a primary school in the nearest town, some twenty kilometres away. She hoped in the near future to become a fully qualified teacher and to obtain some independence in her life. For the moment however she could not afford to live in town and was reliant upon her aunt’s generosity, in allowing her virtually free accommodation, even if it meant her having to drive her old and battered little Renault each day to town to work.
All in all therefore Yvette was a thoroughly admirable young lady and it might seem difficult to understand what brought her to that terrible day when she found herself bending over a chair in the Cafe du Concorde with her skirt above her waist and her knickers about her knees awaiting the stroke of the cane. There was certainly no serious flaw in her character that led her to such an impasse. If flaw there was it was a flaw endemic to all young girls of her age; the flaw of her very youth. She was very young and, in common with most young people, on occasion apt to act foolishly; to not consider the consequences of her actions; in short to do something silly and thoughtless that an older and wiser head would have instantly recognised the folly of. It was this impulsive rashness that brought her to her regrettable demise in the Cafe du Concorde and could indeed have led her to even greater disaster.
It was perhaps the spring air during the Easter break from school that was the root cause behind Yvette’s serious lack of judgement, for the warm weather and liberty from work had induced in her a somewhat frivolous and enervated mood. Still there was nothing sinister in her decision to drive that evening to attend a reunion party with some old school friends at a restaurant in a neighbouring village. The food was excellent and the company delightful and Yvette found herself enjoying herself enormously. The wine flowed freely; too freely in fact and it was that which started the downward spiral toward catastrophe. Yvette had a poor head for alcohol and her first, and possibly most fundamental, error of the night was to foolishly decide to drive home with far too much of the fruits of the grape fizzing merrily in her veins. She justified this misguided decision to herself on the grounds that she had little other alternative. Nobody else of sobriety was driving home her way and there was no taxi service in the neighbourhood. Walking was out of the question for it was nearly eight kilometres back to Pont du Rochelles and that along pitch black, country lanes to boot. Of course she should have refused to drink at all but by the time she found herself fumbling for her car keys in the car park of the restaurant, in the early hours of the morning, it was too late to consider that option. Almost certainly among Yvette’s calculations, such as they were, was the thought that she was very unlikely to be caught driving home while intoxicated. The village of Pont du Rochelles did not possess much in the way of local constabulary and what it did boast in this regard was more than likely to be firmly in their beds by this hour. It was only eight kilometres after all and it was improbable that she would even encounter another car. She would risk it.
Even after a couple of kilometres Yvette’s folly should have been evident to her. She was not a very good driver at the best of times but tonight she was particularly erratic. Twice she found herself off the road and onto the grass verges as she peered myopically through the windscreen at the dark lane ahead, poorly illuminated by her feeble headlamps. It was a wonder that she managed to navigate her way over the ancient and much beloved, but exceedingly narrow bridge over the river at Pont du Rochelles without mishap. It was not until she entered the centre of the village and turned onto the square however that calamity struck. Eager to get home by now she took the corner far too fast and made a complete hash of the turn, veering wildly and coming into sickening contact with a parked automobile just outside the Cafe du Concorde and careering along its flank in a squeal of tortured metal.
In shock Yvette recognised the car she had struck immediately. It was a large and expensive Mercedes, virtually brand new and the property, no less, of Madame Courvelle, the daunting matriarch of the Cafe du Concorde, parked in her usual place when she decided to sleep the night in her rooms above the cafe instead of driving home to her mansion. Panic and terror overcame Yvette and they led her to her second major blunder of the night. To have had an accident whilst under the influence of alcohol would mean the automatic loss of her driving licence, sullied as it was already by a sorry list of minor misdemeanours. The loss of her licence meant that she would be without transport to get to work and stood to lose her job and, with it, the very aspirations of her ambition and career. Whatever Yvette was thinking at this moment, it was hardly rational. Gripped in panic she drove straight home, hid her damaged car in the garage and rushed upstairs to fling herself on her bed sobbing in fear. It was not the proudest night in Yvette’s life.
Nor was it the most congenial awakening for Madame Courvelle the next morning. Stepping out of the cafe into the bright morning sunshine on the square she saw immediately the devastation wreaked upon her proud possession. The paint work along the whole right side of the car was a wretched shambles, the right front wing was badly staved in and the side mirror on that flank was lying in the road half way across the square. In understandable high dudgeon Madame Courvelle stormed back into the cafe to summon the local police officer on the telephone.
Chief Constable Morel, the senior officer of the district arrived within half an hour accompanied by one of his subalterns to inspect the scene of the incident and to interview the furious Madame Courvelle. He took a statement from Madame Courvelle, which shed little light on the matter other than Madame’s outraged indignation and an imperious demand that the culprit responsible for the outrage be apprehended forthwith. In the meantime his subordinate made enquiries among the delightedly fascinated crowd now gathering on the square around the ruins of Madame Courvelle’s automobile. Not much happened as a rule in Pont du Rochelles and the scandalous immolation of Madame’s car was the most exciting thing that had happened in months. People were all too willing to come forward to the police but sadly few of them had anything constructive to contribute to the inquiries. Some claimed to have heard a crash in the middle of the night though seldom did their estimated times of this event coincide with each other. Conspicuously lacking was any eye witness evidence regarding the incident. Nobody had seen anything.
By mid morning Chief Constable Morel and Madame Courvelle had been joined by Monsieur Cordeaux, the leading local magistrate, who had arrived to assure Madame Courvelle, over a glass of excellent Baux de Provence, that he regarded the matter with the utmost gravity and should the police succeed in bringing the culprit before his court then they could expect the full majesty of the law to fall upon their sorrowful head. The head of the local prefecture also put in an appearance for no other reason than to lend support and the fact that the scandal on the square was a welcome diversion on what would otherwise have been a typically uninteresting day.
The subject whose identity and ultimate fate was being so gravely discussed by this collection of worthy dignitaries was, at that time, sat miserably on her bed, nursing a monumental hangover and reflecting ruefully that she had made the worst mistake of her life. Impulsive actions that had seemed logical the night before were now revealed in the sober light of day to be folly bordering on lunacy. If having an accident whilst under the influence of alcohol was severely remissible it paled into insignificance against the added offence of leaving the scene of an accident for which she was responsible without reporting it. That was a serious crime in France and liable to be severely dealt with at the hands of the law. Nor could Yvette see the remotest possible chance of evading exposure as the perpetrator of the deed. A little earlier she had crept into the garage to inspect the damage to her own car. Oddly, considering the havoc it had wreaked upon Madame Courvelle’s Mercedes, the little Renault had escaped relatively unscathed. Nevertheless there was sufficient damage to the car’s bodywork to indicate its involvement in a recent collision and even the most simple police officer would be hard put not to link the damage to that on the afore-mentioned automobile of Madame Courvelle. Nom de Dieu! There were even plainly discernible streaks of the Mercedes’ silver paint work clearly visible on the Renault! She couldn’t hide her own car indefinitely in the garage and, once revealed to the public, it wasn’t going to take the detective intuition of a Hercules Poirot to point the accusing finger in her direction.
For most of the morning Yvette sat in her room and mused despairingly over her dwindling list of options. By lunchtime she had come to the inevitable and sorry conclusion that she had only one feasible option albeit an unthinkable one. She would have to make a clean breast of it. She would have to walk humbly into the Cafe du Concorde and confess her crime to Madame Courvelle in person, offer to pay for the damage she had caused and throw herself on the mercy of that redoubtable lady. Her only salvation lay in the hope that Madame Courvelle might take pity on her and be persuaded not to press charges on the understanding that Yvette would naturally recompense her for the damage caused. It was a fool’s hope but the only one she had left. Shortly after lunch therefore Yvette donned her best dress, pulled on a pair of pretty sandals and walked down to the village square with all the air of the condemned on their final walk to the guillotine.
A little later, in the backroom of the cafe where Yvette had requested a private conversation with Madame Courvelle, she poured out a full confession being careful to omit no detail of her culpability and expressing the most humble contrition for her malfeasance. She insisted that she would reimburse Madame Courvelle for every cent of the costs to repair the car. She did however point out that a criminal case against her would mean the end of her career before it had barely started and she pleaded with Madame Courvelle to spare her from the full weight of the judicial authorities.
Madame Courvelle listened carefully to Yvette’s long monologue and, when she had finally run out of steam and fallen into a pathetically hopeful silence, she took the time to light a cigarette and to ponder her response before replying. She had been astonished by the intelligence that it was Yvette who was responsible for the damage to her car. She had been privately nursing a conviction that the culprits were one of a gang of young lads who had been a thorn in her side for some time now. Yvette was the last person she would have thought of. The sorry series of events Yvette described seemed so out of character for the serious and shy young girl Madame Courvelle knew well.
It placed Madame Courvelle in somewhat of a quandary however. The truth was that she liked Yvette. She had long harboured an admiration for the young girl’s ethos of hard work and careful study and her initiative in trying to better herself through her own efforts. She had long lamented the fact that more young people in the village had not demonstrated such considered thought for their futures. She was under no illusion that Yvette was anything other than completely correct in her analysis of the effects of a criminal record on her career however. If anything Yvette had understated it. It would be fatal. She could forget forever her ambitions to teach. That was a pity for Yvette was probably the brightest young girl in the village and it was criminal that she should so squander her prospects and bright potential in a moment of uncharacteristic madness. Yet what should she do about it?
She pondered her options thoughtfully before finally addressing the miserably penitent girl shuffling her feet in front of her. “Well Yvette,” she began, “I have to thank you at least for coming here and making a full confession. It doesn’t excuse your criminal stupidity but it is nevertheless to your credit that you have been honest enough to own up to your foolishness.” Madame Courvelle shook her head in exasperation. “Whatever were you thinking of girl? I’m surprised at you! Whatever possessed you to take your car out drinking in the name of heaven?”
Yvette lowered her head contritely, her lower lip trembling in sorrow. “I… I don’t know Madame.”
Madame Courvelle clicked her tongue in irritation. “I can’t think what came over you Yvette. This is most unlike you. Mon Dieu, what am I to do with you?”
“I…I’m sorry Madame.” Yvette dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief she was clutching in her hand.
Madame Courvelle waved a finger at her. “Not as sorry as you’re going to be Yvette! I have to inform you that it is too late to keep this matter from the authorities for the police have already been informed. Even as we speak Chief Constable Morel is making inquiries and searching for the culprit responsible. Now you might be the last person that comes to his mind on his list of suspects but, in a place as small as Pont du Rochelles, I don’t think it will take him long to narrow the list down to you.