Unnamed Patronne

The patronne in "Ad Astra" is the manager and owner of the Cloche-Clos. An old woman who wears steel spectacles and knits, she thoroughly understands the threat posed to her business by the Allied aviators and their German prisoner. She loudly expresses her outrage that this German - whom she calls a "Boche!" (422) - has been brought into her bistro: "Eight months since the obus I have kept them in a box against this day: plates, cups, saucers, glasses, all that I have had since thirty years, all gone, broken at one time! And it costing me fifty centimes the glass for such that I shame myself to have my patrons - " (422). (Obus is French for artillery shell; it seems she uses the term to refer to the time, eight months earlier, when the Germans began bombarding Amiens, and a shell destroyed the tools of her trade.)