The Battle of Brittany

Closed when Open

The museum was the territory of Madame Boufleur and she ruled it much as any petty magnate would rule their inheritance.

"My father started the museum in 1911" she told Max proudly. She sat behind a built-in desk with a glass grid above and a scooped out hollow for tickets and change. Max felt in his pockets. "There's no charge, young man."

"Thank you," Max replied, reflecting that age was relative.

Madame Boufleur was ancient, with towers of dyed red hair above and beside a wrinkled, almost whitewashed, face; like a movie addict, waiting impatiently for twilight and the next screening.

Max, after listening for twenty minutes, concluded that her heyday would have been the silent movie era. She certainly didn't want competition as she spun through a dialogue in which she played both parts, answering herself with echoes like improvising the blues. Max imagined the producer scribbling frantically on cards to express the words coming from her.

She stopped from time to time to gather in great lungfuls of air before restarting at different places in the long but witty story she was delivering.

"Well young man, what brings you here today? Speak up, cat got your tongue, has it?" It seemed the clockwork had finally run down.

"I'm here for a few days and wanted to find out about Bremarché." His reply sounded unconvincing, even to him. It was clear by the third day of his visit, that nobody just came to Bremarché. You had a mundane reason, a delivery of ordered goods perhaps, or you stayed away. Holiday makers came, of course, but Max Hamilton-Stays wore a light sports jacket with a tie from his father's collection, hardly dressed for vacation.

"Piffle!" she replied, looking him directly in the eye; clearly, she had the measure of him. He looked away at the visitors' book to hide his embarrassment. The last entry was 23rd July 1981, almost three years ago.

How did she manage with three years between visits? Where did all that vocal energy go to in between? Did it build and build to barrage the next visitor who crossed her doorway? Was he enduring now the effects of a three-year stretch?

"What made you come here?"

"My father."

"Why?"

"I really do not know" he replied, giving equal stress to each word, thinking if he could find that out, he might fit into the world again. "No, he died two weeks ago," he added in response to her snort to get on the telephone and ask him.

"I'm sorry to hear that. When my father died...you know he set up this museum in 1911? It was first housed in a tiny office on the first..." Madame Boufleur slipped into automatic-tourist-guide mode, allowing Max's mind to wander.

He could see a good portion of the museum from where he stood at the entrance, invited, as yet, no further; a big chunk of the main room, but only a snippet of the smaller room to the right. The large room started with a prehistoric display, as if History had to start at the beginning. He saw stone tools and pictures of humanoids gradually standing more upright as they loped along the wall. One early human boasted a pasted-on grin and a child's party hat in faded biro. He glanced again at the visitors' book, wondering which errant child had committed the crime.

Perhaps Madame Boufleur had done it herself, anything to reduce the tedium of the yawning gap between visits.

"I said, young man, what would you like to see today?"

"I'm sorry, Madame. Do you have anything about the war?"

"I have nothing about the war, nothing significant whatsoever. It passed this backwater by. Now, I can tell you about the walls..." Her denial had been too quick, sentences rushed to fill the space between them, issued before the old lady had properly formed the words and lined them up. Her glossing over the war was remarkably similar to young Jean Claude's reaction; both were saying there was nothing of note; two ends of the age spectrum colluding to keep outsiders out.