Not far from there, a friendly and filthy cafe offered to the poor in the neighborhood, to the hungry rapines, to the tramps, to the four girls under the shelter of an intimacy full of human warmth.
The patron, Father Jules, an Auvergnat who was as good as the good bread, with his olive-wood face cut like a snake, could not refuse a bowl of soup, a glass of wine, a dish simmered with "his artisses" greatly annoyed by his grumpy and rather stingy wife, who treated the artists of pretenders, but reserved his tenderness to the lost girls, to the trails of which she softened the distress.
Father Jules and Solange exploited this flow of drinks, wood and coal "since the post-war period of 14 / 18. The goodwill had belonged to Jules' father, who had come to St Flour at the end of the 19th century, work in Paris.
It was the happy time of solid natures, of robust constitutions, of strong wills.
It was thanks to his obstinacy and hard work that Mathieu, Jules' father, was able to set up a cafe-maker, after he had carried for fifteen years on his back tons of wood and coal in buildings without a lift, buckets of hot water to the petty bourgeois of the neighborhood.
Jules, son of Mathieu, had the passion of "artisses". He would also have liked to paint from nature, to draw "pretty girls," to chew the picaresque scenes he watched from his bar.
At Jules, the rapines ate either "croume'' (A credit or against a drawing or a table). He was their providence.
In his wood and coal reserve, even in his cellar, the countless canvases of his subjects were crowded together, without discrimination.
By the end of the forties he had hundreds of them.