chapter xxiv: Guillaume Voiture du Marchandises part iii: making lemonade  

Guillaume Voiture du Marchandises continued to fued with the Siderealists for the better part of a decade. Although the attacks had quickly become extremely personal and insulting, he nonetheless couldn't help but to feel sorry for them during the War, when the catastrophic blow that destroyed the Siderealist movement arrived in the form of a seemingly ordinary army recruitment poster.

Like moths to a flame, the Siderealists enlisted en masse, all on the same day. Du Marchandises, busy as a bee in his studio, hadn't heard a word about it until a breathless messenger delivered a note from a mutual friend, informing him that his good friend, Siderealist playwright Sac De Viande, had been seen wearing a uniform and entering the home of Gaspille Argent, one of the richest men in Paris, the most enthusiastic patron of the Siderealists and a real art lover. Running the whole way, a panting du Marchandises burst in upon the two startled men.

 

"I felt as though I were intruding on a private moment." he would later write. Embarassed, he muttered a hasty apology and ran back home. He would never see Sac De Viande again. Such was the draw of that recruitment poster that an entire regiment was formed of Siderealist artists, poets and actors -- pansies even by the more liberal standards of the French armed forces -- and they were wiped out to a man by a hostile force of primary school children on holiday.

 

Stunned, Guillaume Voiture du Marchandises stopped painting, sold his Parisian house and moved to the south of France. There, he purchased a citrus grove and spent the last years of his life happily growing fruit.