SUMMARY
Upon telling some of Anouk’s friends about the origin of chocolates on Easter, Vianne had managed to catch their attention. In particular, a boy named Jeannot Drou had a magnificent idea that Vianne should organize a chocolate festival on Easter day.
After a day’s hard work of preparing sugary and chocolaty confections to decorate her shop for the chocolate festival, Vianne decides to take a break. Armande Voizin comes in to have a cup of chocolate, as she usually does. She is skeptical that her grandson Luc will come (they haven’t seen eye to eye in a very long time, and recently, Vianne invited him to come into this shop). Armande is astonished when Luc does come, and they share a couple of hours of priceless conversation. When Luc leaves, Armande thanks Vianne.
Later on, Roux comes to the chocolaterie as he had promised earlier. Through their conversation, Vianne had found out that Roux had been a builder once, but problems arisen that forced him to live a nomadic life with the gypsies.
Now the story transitions once again to Reynaud’s point of view and he expresses his contempt towards Vianne. After looking at the poster outside the shop, he accuses Vianne of purposely planning the chocolate festival the most holy of the church’s ceremonies, Easter Sunday. He comes into the shop to scold Vianne for this unacceptable date. However, Vianne does not find this to be a problem and says, “ I’m sure there’s room here for both of us”. With that, Reynaud leaves, defeated. There is no police department in a small town such as Lansquenet, but Reynaud says that he actually wants some violence to occur because it might give him an excuse to call the police from Agen.
Now as Viannne had promised, she and Anouk came at Saturday night to Les Marauds to Roux’s temporary home. A small celebration of sorts was happening, and Vianne and Anouk and Pantoufle (Anouk’s imaginary rabbit friend) joined in on the festivities.
The month of March had come, a month for change, according to Vianne. It was getting closer to Easter, which means that Reynaud is trying harder at Sunday service to preach about the evils of Vianne and her chocolate shop. Even Josephine Muscat, who previously had become much more confident in herself, had shrunk back to her old state of fear. However, Armande was never fazed. She knows that Reynaud can’t do anything to her because she knows some secrets of Reynaud from back in the day. Reynaud was actually a local, but he left Lansquenet when he was a boy. Apparently, he was involved in a really big scandal, and now he is back in the town. Guillaume had to finally put his dog Charly to sleep, because the dog was suffering too much.
Moving on to other events, because of a disastrous fire that occurred in Les Marauds, the gypsies were finally forced to leave the area, much to the happiness of Reynaud. Roux knows that the fire was not an accident, but he has no proof to back his case. Nevertheless, he is determined to finish his job repairing Armande’s house, so he is currently living at an abandoned house down the road.
Now to more happy events, Josephine arrived in the afternoon and said that she finally left her husband Paul. She was planning to use some of her housekeeping money
To run away, but Vianne convinced her otherwise. Instead, she offered her own home to Josephine. But later on, a drunken Paul Muscat came to demand his wife back. Luckily, there was a safety chain on the door so he couldn’t just barge right in. Paul begins yelling at Vianne for influencing his wife this way. This is when Josephine again musters up more courage and stands up to her husband face to face. From there, it was done, and although Paul was still shouting outside the shop, there was no going back.
The next day, Guillaume came into the shop very cheerful. He brought a stray dog that Roux found by Les Marauds. Although he says that he does not plan on keeping the dog, it seems that he already has won the affection of the dog. After that, people just began pouring into the shop, not for chocolate, but to see if the rumors about Josephine leaving her husband were true. Things were still cheerful until Reynaud came into the shop. He began trying to convince Josephine to return to her husband but thanks to the support of Vianne and Armande, Josephine was able to resist Reyanud’s influence.
This section ends on a bad note as we see Paul Muscat conversing with Reynaud. He asks Reynaud if he was able to convince Josephine, but Reyanud says no. Although Reynaud wants to save the marriage, he does not want to do it just so that Paul can go back to being lazy and beating his wife everyday. Nevertheless, when Paul comes up with a plan involving a fire that will get rid of Vianne, Reynaud is all ears.
QUOTE
“ All of us changing. Speeding up. Like an old clock being wound up after years of telling the same time.”( Harris 113).
REACTION
The reason why I picked this quote was because it is true. Everyone is beginning to change in this section, with Armande being the exception of course. Josephine is standing up to her abusive husband and Reynaud while Guillaume has learned to cope with the death of his dog Charly.
The character of Reynaud is a very interesting character in this book. He seems to be a hypocritical man who is trying his best to get rid of Vianne Rocher while trying to stay true to his Christian values. You see it happen all the time in history, with Christians causing wars, violence, and despair while justifying their actions by using the bible. With Reynaud though, it is very interesting to read his thoughts and see the hypocrisy occurring on a smaller scale. When the chapter is dedicated to Reynaud’s perspective, you always see him having internal conflicts, because he is always apologizing to his father whenever a terrible non-Christian thought pops into his head. The way I see it, he has the best of intentions at hand, wanting to preserve the stability of the town and protect it from radical change. It is pretty tough to do so when a stranger prances in, opens up a chocolate shop, and plans to have a chocolate festival on the most holy day of the Christian religion. However, doing so at the expense of the happiness of the townspeople is obviously not the way to go.
As an extension to this I find it very amusing how whenever Joanne writes in the perspective of Vianne, then I feel that Vianne is the good person, along with all of her friends. However, when she switches to the perspective of Reynaud, I then feel sorry for him. I feel bad that no one is listening to him when he is trying his best to guide them the right way. I feel bad that he is practically the only person in the town who is still fasting, while the others are feasting away at chocolate. But then sometimes he does have the occasional bad thought about inflicting harm upon Vianne, and then that just makes me vilify him again. But maybe the author is doing this on purpose, which might be the reason why she offers two points of view in this novel.
In terms of the authors writing style, I think that Joanne Harris does a very good job at invoking feelings of suspense. By reading the last page of section 2, I can tell that from now on, everything is going to start hitting the fan. Reading that conversation between Paul and Reynaud at the end really felt like a movie scene when two villains have a plan to get rid of the protagonist once and for all. But there was a twist though, because Reynaud forbids Paul to do anything to Vianne, because he was his responsibility, and anything bad that happened would be on the church. I also feel that Joanne Harris is good at not being too obvious. For example, on page 187, when Guillaume said that he would most likely not adopt the stray dog, instead of saying that the dog has already grown on Guillaume, she writes, “ When I looked back a moment later, the dog was sitting on Guilaume’s knees, eating the Florentines. Anouk looked at me and winked.”
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