The bar at the far end of the square is called the Cheval and it is the bad one, and the woman who runs it is called Sylvie Anquetil and she is one and fifty and she does not like anybody.
That is why Nadine Roux chose it, and it took about four minutes of the first morning to find out that she had chosen better than she knew.
The other three bars on that square would have been an event.
She would have walked into the Commerce at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday and there would have been nine people in it who had been on that square in the April of 2027, and one of them would have said something kind, and the whole thing would have been over before it started.
The Cheval had four men in it at eleven o'clock and three of them were asleep.
Sylvie Anquetil looked at her for about two seconds when she came in.
"Café."
"Un café."
And that was the entire conversation of the first day, and of the second, and of about the first three weeks.
Here is what Sylvie Anquetil did over those three weeks, and Nadine Roux did not understand any of it until about the June.
She did not ask her name.
She did not tell anybody her name, although she had it by the second day, because a woman who has run a bar in a town of eleven hundred for nineteen years has everybody's name.
She put her at the corner table without being asked, which is the table you can see the whole square from and where the light is behind you.
And on the fourth day, when a man of about sixty came in at half past eleven and stood in the middle of that room and looked at the corner table for slightly too long, Sylvie Anquetil said, "Marcel. Tu bois quelque chose ou tu regardes?"
And Marcel had a beer and did not look again.
"Why are you being decent to me?" said Nadine Roux, in about the fourth week.
"I am not being decent to you. You are paying for coffee."
"Sylvie."
Sylvie Anquetil wiped a bit of the counter that did not need it.
"My brother was in a thing in 2011," she said. "Not the same. Nothing like the same, and I am not going to tell you about it, and he is at Dunkerque now and he is fine.
"And for about a year in this town everybody was extremely kind to me and nobody said one useful word, and I have never forgotten which of the two I would have taken."
She put the cloth down.
"So you can sit at that table," said Sylvie Anquetil, "and I am not going to ask you a single question, and if any of them start, I will put them out."
Nobody in Ardres has ever known any of that.
What the town knows is that Roux's girl sat in the Cheval for three hours on the first day, which everybody agrees was a message, and which about eleven people have explained to each other over eleven years as a deliberate insult to the three good bars.
Nadine Roux has never corrected it.
It was a deliberate insult to the three good bars. That is entirely true, and it is not the reason she went back the next day, or on the four hundred days after that.