Vincent Péqueux

Vincent Péqueux, known as La Queue, runs the coach and carries the mail between Ponteilles and the station at Cortoise. His work is both essential and habitually unreliable: he loses correspondence, delays parcels, and often misses the train. The village nevertheless protects the arrangement, even opposing a railway that might make transport more efficient, because the existing service sustains Vincent and preserves familiar habits. Through him, the narrator presents local solidarity not as a simple virtue but as a force entangled with inconvenience, economic waste, and resistance to change.

Identity and Work

Twice a day, Vincent makes the ten-kilometre journey between Ponteilles and Cortoise in an ancient yellow-painted diligence, serving both passengers and messageries. He carries the mail and takes commissions from travelers along the way. The route links the village to the railway station, but the connection depends on Vincent’s carriage, his horses, and his ability to deliver what he collects.

His clothing makes his adherence to routine visible. In every season, even in the hottest summer weather, he wears a Russian leather cap and a short leather jacket lined with sheepskin. He complains of being too hot, yet has not thought to exchange the cap or put on a lighter blouse. The detail is characteristic of the account of him: discomfort is acknowledged, but habitual practice remains unchanged.

Delays, Lost Mail, and Parcels

Vincent’s stops at roadside drinking places and cafés, where he accepts drinks from passengers and takes on other people’s errands, regularly put the timetable at risk. He often misses the train. When he has drunk too much, he mislays correspondence sacks and postal parcels. The village treats these failures with familiar exasperation, but their recurrence is presented as part of ordinary local life rather than as a problem the community resolves.

When the mayor, Théophile Lagniaud, asks about the mail, Vincent says he does not know what he has done with it. He adds, with some importance, that it is the third time that week. The exchange turns a practical failure into a comic routine: the missing post is acknowledged, but Vincent’s confident announcement that it will eventually be found does not make the service more dependable. Sometimes he is discovered in a drinking place; sometimes he is picked up from a roadside ditch. More often, the account says, nothing is found.

Oversized parcels can wait at the station for eight or ten days while Vincent waits for his old carriage to return to Cortoise empty. Alternatively, he entrusts them, in exchange for a small drink, to the miller at Boissy-sur-Venette or to some carter, who may lose them in turn. On average, four parcels in ten go missing. Mrs. Tourteau, the grocer, asks after one of hers and is told that it remains at the station; her resigned response captures how delay and uncertainty have become familiar features of the service.

Encounters Along the Route

Vincent’s work brings him into the village’s everyday exchanges as well as its transport system. On one return from the station at Cortoise, his carriage stops outside the inn. He tells Jaulin that he has brought him a parcel, then reveals that the delivery is Jaulin’s father-in-law, whom he has found sitting on a milestone at the Beuzemond crossroads. The elderly man seemed exhausted, Vincent explains, so he invited him into the carriage. Jaulin appears put out by the arrival, while Vincent treats the rescue as an occasion worth a drink.

The episode shows the flexible, personal character of Vincent’s service: the carriage carries not only passengers, mail, and packages but also whatever—or whoever—enters the route’s improvised chain of favors. The same sociability that can interrupt his schedule enables him to take in a tired old man. His role is therefore not reducible to incompetence; it depends on informal dealings that serve as a substitute for a more reliable transport system, even as they contribute to its delays.

The Railway Dispute and Narrative Role

When a new railway line from Amiens is proposed to pass through Ponteilles, the municipality and the population protest energetically. Their stated concern is Vincent: if the village had a railway, they ask, what would become of him, his carriages, and his horses? The proposed improvement is rejected not because the existing service is shown to work well, but because changing it would threaten a familiar livelihood and disturb established arrangements.

The narrator connects this defense of Vincent to the villagers’ solidarity, inherited laziness, fear of breaking old habits, and instinctive hostility to what is new. He also sets out the material costs of that choice: the earnings of four intermediaries, the price of the messageries, lost time, forgetfulness, and Vincent’s repeated errors. The village’s decision thus preserves an individual’s place in its economy while multiplying expense and inconvenience for the community. Vincent is at once the beneficiary of its loyalty and the most conspicuous sign of what that loyalty costs. His comic misadventures give the narrator a concrete way to expose Ponteilles’s economic isolation and its preference for familiar inefficiency over change.