Nobody talks in rural France anymore. We just shuffle silently to our cars, or around Intermarché, where the check-out staff, as well as wearing latex gloves and masks, stand behind the sort of glass screens you get in banks. Should you encounter, by chance, a neighbour, you wave from a distance along the aisle. Assuming, that is, they do not flee. Assuming, too, that you recognise them behind their home-made mask.
Paranoia regarding la peste is palpable. Life here becomes a little less normal each and every day. Yesterday — or was it the day before? I have lost track of time — M. Jacques, who runs the tabac in the local town, installed a one-way system, improvised from the tables no-one is allowed to sit at anymore. His grey-faced coughing, though, I believe is the consequence of Camels not Covid-19.
I don’t smoke, or at least I didn’t, but I’ve taken to puffing at cigars in desperation at the ennui of house arrest since Macron addressed the nation to announce, “Nous somme en guerre!” Channelling Napoleon (complete with widow’s-peak hair), he then shut down the entire country with four hours notice to the strains of La Marseillaise. Was that the 17th March? I have lost track of time.
Anyway, until Napoleon Macron’s declaration we in France profonde had been blissfully blasé about coronavirus. After his orotundity on TV there was panic buying at our local Inter. The French plundered the demi-sel butter. The bit of shelf reserved for ‘Nos Amis, Les Anglais’ was stripped of Heinz baked beans.
Going shopping, for the essentials of food, newspapers, tobacco — for one hour only — is one of the few reasons you are allowed out of the house under Macron’s confinement measures, and then you have to carry an ‘Attestation‘ document on your person, signed and timed. Infringement is punishable by a rising scale of fines. After that, clink. Mais, quelle difference? We are imprisoned anyway.
In the local town, Le Neuf bistro is closed; also the new bar, the post office, Credit Mutuel bank — everything. Even the hairdressers. French women spend a lot of time at the coiffeuse. One index of our deteriorating standard of life is the abundance of self-dyed hair. You start to notice the little things. There is not much else to do.
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