Honoré Gauthier

Honoré Gauthier is 52 and a scrap dealer in Marseille. Broad and pot-bellied, with a sun-burned face and red cheeks, a thick gray mustache and thin hair combed back with brilliantine, he is talkative and expansive and wants to look big before the Parisians, who treat him as a carter. He came to Paris on business, he says, and seven thousand tons of iron do not turn up twice in a scrap dealer's life.

He lives in a tall pink town house near the Vieux-Port, with a wrought-iron balcony over a narrow street, clotheslines crossing the neighbors' windows and the smell of fish soup rising from the ground floor. Inside there is a wall clock that runs slow, an oilcloth-covered table and an iron pot always on the fire. He takes his coffee on the balcony in the morning, with yesterday's newspaper, and comments on other people's lives aloud to whoever passes.

He wears a beige linen suit, rumpled and tight, a crooked bow tie and a straw hat he carries in his hands, turning it by the brim. He has a laborer's thick hands, with a worn gold ring on his finger, and a laugh that fills the corridor. He greets everyone as if they were an old acquaintance, and demands the same familiarity back.

About the week in Paris, his account is that of a man who wasted time chasing another man: he negotiated, strolled, shook hands, and believes he was the last to notice that something was wrong. He remembers the deputy director as an elegant fellow with a deep voice, who made him feel important for a moment. He takes not a cent from this story, he repeats, and asks the detective to lower his voice.

When the question suggests he was a partner of the false deputy director, Honoré answers that he lost the whole week chasing the man and that no one insults him like that without paying. The laugh that filled the corridor falls apart, and he squeezes the straw hat: the outrage of a deceived merchant or the bluster of someone who needs to look big?