Armand Delsol

Armand Delsol is 58 and has run Salaisons Delsol since his father died, thirty years ago. Jovial and fatherly, he calls everyone by their first name and speaks of the factory the way others speak of a church. His father made sausage with his own hands, and he says he turned that into a factory that gives work to eighty families.

He lives in a family house adjoining the factory, of pale stone, with a low-ceilinged living room, a fireplace lit from October to April, a cracked leather armchair and, on the mantel, a portrait of his father in an apron, smiling. On Sundays he hangs sausages to cure on the back porch and receives the neighbors with an open bottle. He is the kind of man who remembers the name of everyone's child.

He has rosy skin, a broad clean-shaven face, gray hair combed back with gel and jowls that wobble when he laughs. He wears a light blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a gray wool waistcoat and a gold watch on his wrist, and his thick hands are still a butcher's. The smile is a salesman's, and it works.

About the company, his account has the tone of a speech: thirty years of a clean house, a small legal line of horse meat for the region's butchers, separate and with its own label, and none of it goes into lasagna. Whoever receives the frozen meat trucks, he says, is the head of the cold room, at four in the morning. A good man, he says, but one who signs for receipt without reading a line.

When the question suggests he sold horse as if it were beef, Armand recalls his thirty years of a clean house, asks if this is what a thief in his own factory is called and warns that he will speak only with the company's lawyer. The salesman's smile vanishes for a second and returns: an owner's hurt or the calculation of someone who knows how to sell?