It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of an occupation must be in want of a life.

For an occupation narrows one's activities, thoughts, conversations, and ambitions. If one were, for instance, to be a baker, then the hour one awakens is set by the task. Well before dawn, though well past midnight, so that by the time others in the village awaken the baker is not only awake, but has bread on his tray. As always.

The constancy of this task meant that smoke rose from at least two chimneys in this quiet village as Belle crested the hill overlooking it. Long trails of thin grey smoke rose from thatched roofs atop brick walls. It appeared, save for the most minute of differences, the same as it had the day before, or any other day one could find on the calendar. The only variance in the scene came from the time of the year affecting how much daylight shone on the village, and the wind affecting the length of the trails the smoke made in the air.

To a habitual observer, it might even appear as if the seasons and weather was the variable, and the village was the constant.

"Perhaps watching my village is where Newton conceived of the clockwork universe," Belle said to herself, as was her habit. Belle was long resigned to conversing alone, as the idea of having an idea had not yet occurred to most of the denizens of that quiet little village. The thought was very nearly enough to turn her around and send her back to home.

But resolutely, she made the contemptibly familiar journey down the hill and via the old Roman road a budget conscious lord had first built the village around. It was, of course, near universally called the old Roman road, as if there were some new roads the Romans had built since their collapse. Calling the road old was an exercise in insulting tautology, much as pointing out to your elders that they were advanced in years, and long faded past the presentation of their prime.

The last laugh belonged to the elderly in that regard, Belle felt. After all, they built the new village around an old Roman road, rather than one of their own commission. Like not trusting a baker's apprentice because the young lad just wasn't as competent.

And with that thought Belle reached the village just in time for the baker's wife to throw open the shutters of her bedroom window, lean out, and say "bonjour!"

To which came the reply of a half-dozen villagers, doing the same. The baker followed the copied cry by stepping out with the same tray of bread and rolls he stepped out with every morning to sell. "Morning Belle," said the baker.

"Morning monsieur Jean," Belle replied.

"Where are you of to?" The baker, Jean, asked. The man looked confused, and slightly put out. As if Belle were somehow a wrench in the gears of the town's perfect clockwork synchrony.

"Finding myself agreeing with the church about book burning. I just read Emile, by Rousseau," Belle said, and she dared to try and say more. "The way he feels it unnecessary to educate women, as if he hoped his home life wouldn't involve a single thought."

"Sounds boring," Jean replied.

Belle wondered at that response. She couldn't tell if the man had just espoused his sex's preference by dismissing her thesis, or agreed with her and expressing his support for her dim opinion of Rousseau and the cad's writing. But before she could dissect the truth, and possibly revise her opinion about this little town, Jean was halfway down the street with his baking.

Only as she watched him depart, did it occur to Belle that she would have liked one of his bread rolls.

But she and her hunger carried on in a resolute and largely uncomplaining manner. She passed the blacksmith, where he and his apprentice glanced at her as if her presence in the street were strange. "Dazed and distracted, can't you tell?" the blacksmith asked. And though he was pointing down at the anvil, toward's his apprentice's work, Belle rather suspected that she was the subject of his criticism.

"Bonjour," said the town crier, as he passed on his way to the town square.

"Good day," a woman responded, her reply somewhat muffled by the tower of laundry she carried in her arms.

"How is your family?" Someone asked at the market.

"Bonjour," a young man, a butcher's apprentice, asked one of the passing daughters of the local inkeeper.

"Good day," the young woman replied, with a smile any fool should be able to recognize as a mischievous one. The smile was meant in two halves, half for the man pining over the young woman, and half for the man's wife. Who stood directly behind him with a rolling pin. "How is your wife?"

"I need six eggs!" Came a cry from further down the road.

"That's too expensive," was the predictable reply. Very few farmers nearby had more than a dozen chickens, and those that do were notoriously miserly.

"There must be more than this provincial life," Belle muttered to herself, as she finally reached the library.

Stepping past the wooden doorway, and out of the clockwork cacophony of the village, Belle was rather convinced the Library was actually another world. For here, unlike on the street or the stalls or the fountain or even the news out of the crier boy's mouth, things changed. New books appeared on the shelves, even if it was with agonizing irregularity. Titles moved about, and the table at the front titled 'new acquisitions' was so breathtakingly changeable that looking down at it was a highlight of Belle's day.

Though not today. The only new addition to the week was Emile, but Rousseau. Which happened to be the thing Belle carried in her hand as if were covered in mud.

"Ah, morning Belle," the librarian said.

"Morning Monsieur, anything new?"

"The one you're returning. I'm afraid you've read through my entire little library, unless you're finally willing to try your hand at Issac Newton."

"Heaven forbid," Belle said.

"Funny you should say that. The church has been collecting that book in your hand, all around France. Rousseau's opinions about spiritual life has left the bishops apoplectic. They say the bonfires in Paris have kept the poor warm for days."

"Funny. That's about the only part of the book I liked. Will the church have me burned at the stake?"

"We'd have to have a church in town."

Belle had wondered about that quite a bit, of late. What sort of town in rural France had a library, but no church?

"But if they burnt Rousseau at the stake, I might volunteer to be the one with the torch. The man has the abject gall to suggest there's no real need to educate a woman."

"Well, is there?"

There were days Belle was able to appreciate having her thoughts challenged. Today was not one of them. "I dare say it would let you call this place an antiquarian shoppe, rather than a library. Purveyor of fine, untouched tomes."

"Fair. Hardly anyone else in town has the free time to read more than a recipe."

Belle set her book down, and traced a row of books with her finger until she came to what she was looking for. "I'll take that one."

"Machiavelli? The Prince? But you read it twice."

"I should be grateful you aren't making light of me reading a book about a prince."

"It will be an enlightened age indeed when I make fun of women for reading nothing but romance, rather than reading nothing at all," the librarian replied. "But that is less a book about a prince, and more a recipe book about being one. And my dear, if you like it that much, it's yours."

"Monsiour? I can't..."

More proof that the inside of the Library was a world entirely separate from the one outside the door. Nothing else in the village had surprised her as much as this.

"I insist," the librarian said, in one of those 'I will be offended if you keep objecting' tones that older men always seem to master without effort. Belle's father was quite good at it.

"Well thank you, thank you very much," Belle managed to blubber as she stepped out of the library. In part to escape the ire that could come from inadequate gratitude.

And so, Machiavelli in hand, Belle marched on towards the village aqueduct.

The water system in the village always impressed her father. Impressed and bothered him. He said, every time they passed it, that it was far too new to be Roman, but no one in the French nobility would have built the thing. Far too sophisticated, and far too expensive, for a poor provincial town.

But having grown up with it, Belle lacked her father's interest, and viewed the thing, especially with the town's women doing their wash in the old Roman bath, as an affront to both her intelligence and everything she dreamed of for her life.

And so, disdainfully, she sat down by a fountain, determined to enjoy her book a little before she had to hike home. But she was hardly a paragraph in before someone interrupted her.

"Look at that, Belle by the well, and watch her bosom swell, she's about to tell me off," a woman said.

Lafey, the local goat herder. Not that the woman ever seemed to do much herding, milking, rearing, or really anything except saunter around the village and lord over the fawning admiration of the local men.

Admittedl Lafey was, by any objective measure, beautiful. Nearly enchantingly so. And widely regarded as the second most beautiful woman in the village. A fact she seemed to despise Belle for.

Lafey was also tediously fond of rhyming. Which didn't help Belle's already dim view of the woman, since Lafey seemed to possess no real talent for it, nor the inclination to improve by effort what nature had not endowed her with.

"Your prose flows like crows trapped in a pie. Stick your head in the water, stop being a bother, and keep it under until you-" Belle's rejoinder was interrupted when a goat jumped up on her lap, and tried to eat the Machiavelli's table of contents.

"Ah, there's Belle with her familiar look, her nose stuck in a book. And a book about a prince, how very droll." Lafey said, leaning on her shepherd's crook and peering down from her admittedly impressive height. Like a noblewoman embittered about the coarseness of her cotton.

Lafey had lived on the fringes of the village for perhaps a decade, and the only thing Belle could see had changed about her in all those years was how deeply the woman seemed to hate her. "And your face looks like the un-trousered buttocks of a troll. You forgot to rhyme 'droll'. Now find a randy goat to play, make yourself scarce, go away. You have wits duller than a baton, you'd do as well arm-wrestling Gaston."

"Mm, yes, Gaston," the woman said, and quite like a wolf spying a deer in the field, or a merchant spying a moneyed noble in a market, she spotted the man Belle hated most in the village.

It wasn't Gaston's fault Belle hated him so. Not entirely, since apart from being a bellicose and boisterous braggart he was no more ignorant than any of his countrymen. But he man possessed the distinctly offensive honour of having achieved exactly the things Belle wished. He had left the village. He had journeyed off and had adventures. Captain Gaston had fought wars, been brave, had been honoured by lords and even sung of by a bard or two. And against all the sense God must have endowed even that man with, Gaston had returned to the village.

How could Belle hate a man more, when he had rejected everything she dreamed of?