Pas d’histoires !

Pas d’histoires ! is Théophile Lagniaud’s stated motto as mayor of Ponteilles: a preference for quiet that shapes how he approaches civic change. The phrase becomes especially revealing when he considers a railway. He moves from indecision to an emphatic rejection, not because he weighs the railway’s benefits against its costs, but because he dreads the complications it might bring.

A motto of avoidance

The expression is identified as Lagniaud’s devise. In the railway debate, its meaning is made concrete: he wants to remain undisturbed and to avoid the responsibility of intervening in disputes. The repeated appeal to peace is less a settled policy than a way to withdraw from choices that could make him answerable for what follows.

The railway question

Looking across the prosperous plain, Lagniaud admires the strong wheat and the promising beet crop, then imagines a small railway for the village. He immediately pulls back. The people of Ponteilles do not want one, and he says that he wants what the majority wants, while also admitting that he has not yet decided whether he wants the railway himself. His position shifts from uncertainty to resistance as he lists the changes he fears: outsiders, Parisians, factories, strikes, gendarmes, troops, and collisions. A railway would, in his imagination, turn a quiet local question into a chain of conflicts requiring him to arbitrate, conciliate, resist, and intervene.

From hesitation to refusal

The passing train makes the contrast tangible: the railway is already moving through the countryside he calls beautiful, while Lagniaud imagines its arrival in Ponteilles as a threat to familiar order. He adds the prospect of accidents, including collisions and injured level-crossing keepers, and concludes with a firm refusal of the railway. Once reassured by that decision, he walks back toward the village whistling cheerful tunes. The motto thus frames both the substance and the rhythm of his response: anxiety proliferates into imagined consequences, then a blunt refusal restores his composure.