Jaulin

Jaulin is a tradesman and gasoline seller in Ponteilles whose everyday dealings reveal both the village’s economic isolation and its capacity for organized resentment. He can offer an old man a meal with easy warmth, yet he also helps inflame hostility toward the narrator when the narrator takes his custom elsewhere. His character is shaped by this tension between hospitality and self-interest: he is at once a familiar neighbor, a local intermediary, and a representative of the community’s claims on its own people.

Identity and Place

When the narrator visits Jaulin shortly after settling in the village, Jaulin’s forge is also a point of sale for automobile gasoline. His work extends beyond that trade: the narrator refers to various other occupations already listed, though this scene does not specify them. The range of Jaulin’s activities places him at the center of local commerce, while the gasoline business makes the limits of that commerce unusually visible. Two old, rusty cans outside the forge advertise a supply that is usually unavailable.

Jaulin lives close to the narrator, who can call on him and later receive him at home. This proximity makes their disagreement more than an abstract dispute between buyer and seller. They are neighbors whose relationship is repeatedly tested by practical exchanges and public village loyalties. Jaulin is also a hunter, and he speaks on behalf of the commune’s hunters’ association when it delegates him to approach the narrator.

The Gasoline Trade and Rural Isolation

The narrator offers to buy all his gasoline from Jaulin. Jaulin agrees in principle, but the price he calculates is fifty-two centimes for the narrator, compared with fifty-two and a half for everyone else. The narrator points out that gasoline costs thirty-eight centimes elsewhere. Jaulin acknowledges that he has heard this figure, then explains why his own supply cannot match it: he buys from Théodore in Montbiron, who buys from Émile in Cortoise, who buys from Fouillard in Maisons-Laffitte, who buys from Tricot in Neuilly, who in turn gets it from the factory.

The chain is not simply a sequence of avoidable commercial markups. Jaulin says that Théodore is his brother-in-law, that Émile is Fouillard’s cousin, that Fouillard married Léon Papit’s daughter, and that Tricot is a local man. In Jaulin’s account, these relationships help determine how the trade is arranged; each intermediary must be allowed to earn. He also invokes transport costs and the absence of a railway in the area, insisting that an order must be placed a full month in advance. His explanation makes the high price and unreliable supply concrete, while showing how kinship and local economic loyalties reinforce the very chain that makes the product dear.

The narrator’s wider account of village life gives the exchange a sharper context: goods in small communities arrive burdened by several intermediaries, can cost substantially more than in Paris, and may be both poorer in quality and difficult to find. Jaulin’s gasoline cans are a compact image of that condition—an advertised commodity that is generally absent, and a local price justified by a network the buyer cannot easily bypass. When the narrator later brings his gasoline in from outside, Jaulin takes the decision personally. The purchase becomes a test of whether the narrator will participate in the village’s economic arrangements, not merely a choice between prices.

Hospitality and Domestic Life

Jaulin’s response to an elderly man known as père Michel shows another side of his manner. When the old man complains, Jaulin cheerfully tells him that there is beef salad, prepared with garlic and pickles, and urges him to come in. The offer is specific and practical, delivered in a welcoming tone that the narrator notices. It is a small act of care rather than a grand gesture, and it briefly makes Jaulin appear generous and approachable.

That scene is shadowed by the narrator’s recollection of the attic door from which Jaulin’s mother fell. He connects the door and the beef salad as belonging to the same order of family facts and feelings, even while Jaulin’s face is hospitable and smiling. The contrast complicates the apparent simplicity of the meal: domestic warmth and remembered family harm occupy the same setting. The passage does not resolve that tension; instead, it lets the narrator’s association disturb the easy impression created by Jaulin’s welcome.

Local Politics and Conflict

Jaulin’s public influence emerges when the mayor leaves the narrator’s house and goes by a circuitous route to Jaulin’s, where several important figures of the commune are waiting. The mayor reports that he has decided to have the deputy issue an order requiring dogs to wear muzzles, with exceptions for sheepdogs, farm dogs, and guard dogs, and a fine for violations. Jaulin is not the mayor, but his house serves as a meeting point for the local figures gathered around the decision.

The narrator later describes Jaulin as outwardly pleasant when they meet but privately persistent in speaking against him and stirring other people’s grudges and hatred. The narrator identifies the source of Jaulin’s grievance: he has not forgiven him for buying gasoline from outside rather than from Jaulin. This account exposes the personal stake beneath Jaulin’s participation in communal politics. His apparent friendliness and his behind-the-scenes hostility coexist, just as the welcoming meal coexists with the narrator’s troubling family association.

On a Sunday morning, Jaulin comes formally dressed and unusually grave. He tells the narrator that he is a hunter and that the hunters’ association has delegated him to say that the situation cannot continue. The clipped, hesitant delivery marks a shift from private neighborly business to collective demand: Jaulin arrives not only as the seller whose trade has been bypassed, but as an emissary authorized to speak for an organized group. His character therefore links intimate transactions to public pressure. Through him, the village’s economic interdependence becomes a claim on individual behavior, and a disagreement over gasoline feeds a wider conflict between the narrator and the community.