Guilloux, Louis. Bitter Victory (New York: Robert M. McBride, c1936) 574 p. Originally published as Le Sang Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1935) Translated from the French by Samuel Putnam.

M. Babinot supplements his income as a teacher by working at the local town library.

A filthy, rotting place, this library. To begin with, it was not a library, but an ordinary reading room.... There would be two or three old Goya hags, with high-necked whalebone collars and hatchet faces, reading the Revue des Deux Mondes through their lorgnettes, and here and there a few invalid gentlemen who for their part were content with a chat over the items in the local newspaper. At the far end of the room, in a glass cage, would be M. Babinot himself, in cutaway and toque, deeply immersed in reading a learned work, some recent acquisition, a treatise on the Yellow Peril or something of the sort. (p. 148-9).

Babinot is extremely patriotic. He once got it a fight with a man who did not salute the flag on Bastille Day.