The Little House

When I see a housing development poster, I am tempted to cry. I think: "Here is a beautiful park, a beautiful forest that will be cleared; splendid trees will be cut down to replace them with poor lines of apple trees, around rabbit huts. Here are paths that trucks and dumpers will transform into quagmires.
Where today we pick lily of the valley and wild strawberries, tomorrow there will be cabbage fields and priests' gardens. Ineffable electricity pylons will stretch their wires into the sky; wooden stakes will enclose paltry properties. The bare suburbs will eat up a corner of the countryside. Paris, like a great stain, will spread its smudges; instead of listening to the birds, we will hear the phonograph chopping up "blues". Poor France! »
But....
But a fellow soldier, a diligent and hard-working worker, invited me to come and have lunch at his house, in this awful suburb. He proudly showed me the little plaster-tiled house he had built himself, he fed me his green peas and his salads, he treated me to eggs from his hens and the stew from one of his rabbits; when I left, he gave me a bouquet of his roses. He told me:
Since I've been here, I haven't gone to the bistro anymore, because I've had too much work: my garden, you understand... and my hovel that I enlarge as soon as I have four sous left...

My comrade was happy; his wife, hands on her hips, watched her laundry dry on ropes; the kids were golden and healthy. You can't imagine how useful and pleasant all the little houses covered with zinc or corrugated iron, all the shacks that populated an old estate surrounded by rough walls, seemed to me.

D.