By Theodore Darymple
Driving through France recently, we stopped for the night in the small town of Loudun.
It had that complete, and to me pleasing or even consolatory, deadness common to many small French towns, where there seems to be no activity at all, nothing ever happens except on the tiniest scale, and all dramas are strictly private.
There were a few desultory drinkers in the bar in Loudun, but that was all. Otherwise, the shutters were closed and nobody was about.
The quietness of a town at night has a special quality, which is more than the mere absence of sound, and it acts like a balm to the soul. During the Second World War, there was a British poster asking travelers whether the journey they were making was really necessary, nonessential travel supposedly detracting from the business of war; a French provincial town at night asks you, implicitly, whether what you are doing is really necessary. And the answer is almost invariably “No.”
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