Pissevin’s Mayor, forty-year-old Jacqueline Housset, daughter of the village cooper and carpenter, is beginning her day’s work at the Mairie.

This morning Jacqueline found the door unlocked, for her clerk, Agamemnon Pliquot, had arrived before her. As usual he was busying himself with a matter of road repairs. A wizened man in his sixties with a light of ferocity in his eyes, he was busying himself with it over a spectacularly old typewriter.

Agamemnon wasn’t an easy man to understand. What could it mean, that he had never indicated by word or twitch of eyebrow that he was aware that the Council employing him had no authority to do so, having ceased to exist?

Jacqueline was a cautious woman. She was beginning to feel she could guess where his loyalties lay but, afraid that she could be wrong, she too kept quiet about it in his presence, just as she had as a guilty child in that terrible week when the empty biscuit jar seemed to grow emptier and emptier and her parents’ blindness to it more and more agonizing.

This timorous caution in the face of her clerk wasn’t the behaviour of a Mayor, Jacqueline told herself, or even of an average grown-up. But then, she doubted that the day would ever come when she would believe she was the Mayor. She was what they had for the time being instead of a Mayor. It surely couldn’t last much longer.

Most of the time Jacqueline bore her burden in solitude. Agamemnon came only one day a week, on Wednesdays. On Jaqueline’s first Wednesday he had arrived, nodded acknowledgement of her presence and sat straight down and started to type a letter about the proposed repair of a potholed section of the Chemin Neuf. The same happened on the second Wednesday, and on all subsequent Wednesdays.

The letters were directed at the Mayor and Council of Bionvers. That particular section of the Chemin Neuf was, in the view of Pissevin—as embodied in Agamemnon—the responsibility of Bionvers. This view was not well received in Bionvers. By way of refutation reference was made to maps. The relevance of maps was contested, and reference was made instead to precedence. The relevance of precedence was even more vigorously contested. When deadlock seemed complete, and the possibility of repair remote, the suggestion was made that as a cheaper alternative a warning ‘Chaussée Déformée’ sign should be erected. This suggestion, coming from Pissevin, was approved in principle by Bionvers, provided that Bionvers not be expected to bear the cost. Needless to say this was unacceptable to Pissevin, since the same considerations that bore upon repair bore equally upon signage. Concession of the principle, for however trivial an expense, would ever afterwards lay the conceding party open to unforeseeable expenditures. From Bionvers came a compromise suggestion: the cost of a roadside sign could be shared equally between the two communes. This proposal seemed to have a certain elegance, since in any case there would have to be two signs, one in each direction.

At this, however, Agamemnon drew himself up and composed a blistering reply in which he charged Bionvers with unscrupulous deviousness. This shifty and hypocritical compromise had only been mooted, he wrote, because it was understood full well in Bionvers that Pissevin, which stood upon principle, would never be able to accept it.

And indeed it was more than likely that Bionvers had been able to anticipate the response to its suggestion, since the Bionvers half of the correspondence was composed, on Fridays, by the nomadic Agamemnon himself.

‘What are you saying today?’ Jacqueline asked, hanging up her jacket.

Agamemnon sighed. ‘I fear we seem to be coming to the, ahem, end of the road. In the face of this obduracy what can we say?’

‘Yes,’ said Jacqueline. ‘That’s what I was wondering.’

He sighed again. ‘I am saying that we have nothing further to say on the matter, and we look to Bionvers to acknowledge in full its responsibilities or to make some proposal that violates no principle.’

‘And how do you think they will take that?’

‘We shall have to see,’ he said, and sighed again. ‘This whole business is costing us a fortune in stamps.’