A Good Bottle, a Good Book, and a Good Friend
Keep on searching till you find what’s worth looking for
When Moliere’s three sons arrived at the city gate the mayor himself came out to greet them. “Gentlemen, what a pleasure, what a nice surprise. The sons of the world’s greatest living playwright! If I may inquire, what do you expect from your stay in our humble town?”
“I’d love to taste some good wine,” said the oldest, a heavy drinker. “Vins de Bordeaux is my favorite, and Chateau Cantenac is on second place. As far as the rest of the list, to be entirely honest, I never had a vino in my life that I didn’t like.”
“I am always on the lookout for vintage books,” said the bibliophile. “Would be nice to find a first-edition Dante, preferably signed by the author himself.”
“I hope to make new friends,” said the youngest, the gregarious type.
“I suggest the three of you meet M. Dubois,” said the mayor. “He is an affable innkeeper who also owns an antiquarium. However, I have to warn you, the other townspeople here are teetotal bores, barely semi-literate and extremely suspicious of outsiders.”
The brothers concluded it still promised to be a better place than pretty much the entire world they’d visited, and set out to locate M. Dubois.
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A sketch of this article was published in Paragraph Planet on December 13, 2023.
