Complete Works of Emile Zola (334 page)

‘Well, all the same,’ remarked Madame Paloque to her husband one day, as she watched Marthe going down to the Rue Balande, accompanied by Madame Faujas, ‘I should like to be in some corner and watch the vicar and his sweet­heart. It is very amusing to hear her talk of her bad cold! As though a bad cold was any reason why one shouldn’t make one’s confession in church! I have had colds, but I never made them an excuse for shutting myself up in a little chapel with a priest.’

‘It is very wrong of you to interfere in Abbé Faujas’s affairs,’ the judge replied to his wife. ‘I have been spoken to about him. He is a man with whom we must keep on good terms, and you will prevent us from doing so; you are too spiteful.’

‘Stuff!’ she retorted angrily; ‘they have trampled me under foot and I will let them know who I am! Your Abbé Faujas is a big imbecile! Don’t you suppose that Abbé Fenil would be very grateful to me if I
could catch the vicar and his sweetheart? Ah! he would give a great deal to have a scandal like that! Just you leave me alone; you don’t understand anything about such matters.’

A fortnight later, Madame Paloque watched Marthe go out on the Saturday. She was standing ready dressed, hiding her hideous face behind her curtains, but keeping watch over the street through a hole in the muslin. When the two women disappeared round the corner of the Rue Taravelle, she sniggered, and leisurely drawing on her gloves went quietly on to the Place of the Sub-Prefecture, and walked slowly round it. As she passed in front of Madame de Condamin’s little house, she thought for a moment of going in and taking her with her, but she reflected that the other might, perhaps, have some scruples. And, all considered, it was better she should be without witnesses, and manage the business by herself.

‘I have given them time,’ she thought, after a quarter of an hour’s promenade. ‘I think I may present myself now.’

Thereupon she quickened her pace. She frequently went to the Home of the Virgin to discuss the accounts with Trouche, but that day, instead of repairing to the secretary’s office, she went straight along the corridor towards the oratory. Madame Faujas was quietly knitting on a chair in front of the door.

The judge’s wife had foreseen that obstacle, and went straight on to the door with the hasty manner of a person who has important business on hand. But before she could reach out her hand to turn the handle the old lady had risen from her chair and pushed her aside with extraordinary energy.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked in her blunt peasant-woman’s tones.

‘I am going where I have business,’ Madame Paloque replied, her arm smarting and her face convulsed with anger. ‘You are an insolent, brutish woman! Let me pass! I am the treasurer of the Home of the Virgin, and I have a right to go anywhere here I want.’

Madame Faujas, who stood leaning against the door, straightened her spectacles upon her nose, and with unruffled tranquillity resumed her knitting.

‘Well,’ she said bluntly, ‘you can’t go in there.
’

‘Can’t, indeed! And may I ask why?’

‘Because I don’t wish that you should.’

The judge’s wife felt that her plan was frustrated, and she almost choked with spleen and anger. She was positively frightful to look at as she gasped and stammered:

‘I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what you are doing here. If I were to call out, I could have you arrested, for you have struck me. There must be some great wicked­ness going on at the other side of that door for you to have been put there to keep people from entering. I belong to the house, I tell you! Let me pass, or I shall call for help.’

‘Call for anyone you like,’ replied the old lady, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I have told you that you shall not go in, that I won’t let you. How am I to know that you belong to the house? But it makes no difference whether you do or you don’t. No one can go in. I won’t let them.’

Thereupon Madame Paloque lost all control of herself, raised her voice, and shrieked out:

‘I have no occasion to go in now! I have learnt quite sufficient! You are Abbé Faujas’s mother, are you not? This is a very decent and pretty part for you to be playing! I wouldn’t enter the room now; I wouldn’t mix myself up with all this wickedness!’

Madame Faujas laid her knitting upon the chair, and, bending slightly forward, gazed with glistening eyes through her spectacles at Madame Paloque, holding her hands the while a little in front of her, as though she were about to spring upon the angry woman and silence her. She was, indeed, going to throw herself forward, when the door sud­denly opened and Abbé Faujas appeared on the threshold. He was in his surplice and looked very stern.

‘Well, mother,’ he asked, ‘what is going on here?’

The old lady bent her head, and stepped back like a dog that is taking its place at its master’s heels.

‘Ah! is it you, dear Madame Paloque?’ the Curé con­tinued; ‘do you want to speak to me?’

By a supreme effort of will, the judge’s wife forced her face into a smile. She answered the priest in a tone that was terrible in its amiability and mingled irony.

‘Ah! you were inside were you, your reverence? If I had known that, I would not have insisted upon entering. But I want to see the altar-cloth, which must, I think, be getting into a bad condition. I am a careful superintendent here, you know, and I keep an eye upon all these little details. But, of course, if you are engaged in the oratory, I wouldn’t think of disturbing you. Pray go on with what you are doing; the house is yours. If madame had only just dropped me a word, I would have left her quietly to continue guarding you from being disturbed.’

Madame Faujas allowed a growl to escape her, but a glance from her son reduced her to silence.

‘Come in, I beg you,’ he said; ‘you won’t disturb me in the least. I was confessing Madame Mouret, who is not very well. Come in, by all means. The altar-cloth might very well be changed, I think.’

‘Oh, no! I will come some other time,’ Madame Paloque replied. ‘I am quite distressed to have interrupted you. Pray go on, your reverence, pray go on!’

Notwithstanding her protestations, however, she entered the room. While she was examining the altar-cloth with Marthe, the priest began to chide his mother in a low voice:

‘Why did you prevent her coming in, mother? I never told you to allow no one to enter.’

She gazed straight in front of her with her obstinate determined glance. ‘She would have had to walk over my body before she got inside,’ she muttered.

‘But why?’

‘Because — . Listen to me, Ovide; don’t be angry; you know that it pains me to see you angry. You told me to accompany our landlady here, didn’t you? Well, I thought you wanted me to stop inquisitive people’s curiosity. So I took my seat out here, and no one should have entered, be sure of that.’

But the priest caught hold of his mother’s hands and shook her, exclaiming:

‘Why, mother, you couldn’t have supposed — ‘

‘I suppose nothing,’ she replied, with sublime indifference. ‘You are free to do whatever pleases you. You are my child; I would steal for you, I would.’’

The priest was no longer listening to her. He had let her hands drop, and, as he gazed at her, he seemed to be lost in reflections, which made his face look sterner and more austere than ever.

‘No, never!’ he exclaimed with lofty pride. ‘You are greatly mistaken, mother. It is only the chaste who are powerful.’

CHAPTER XVI

At seventeen years of age, Désirée still retained the child­like laugh of an ‘innocent.’ She was now a fine, tall girl, plump and well-developed, with the arms and shoulders of a full-grown woman. She grew like a healthy plant, happy in her growth, and quite untouched by the unhappiness which was wrecking and saddening the house.

‘Why do you never laugh?’ she cried to her father one day. ‘Come and have a game at skipping! It’s such fun!’

She had taken possession of one of the garden-beds, which she dug, planted with vegetables, and carefully watered. The hard work delighted her. Then she desired to have some fowls, which devoured her vegetables and which she scolded with motherly tenderness. With these occupations of hers, gardening and fowl-keeping, she made herself dreadfully dirty.

‘She’s perfectly filthy!’ cried Rose. ‘I won’t have her coming into my kitchen any more; she dirties everything! It is no use your trying to keep her neatly dressed, madame. If I were you I should just let her mess about as she likes.’

Marthe, now ever preoccupied, no longer took care even that Désirée should change her under-linen regularly. The girl sometimes wore the same chemise for three weeks together; her stockings fell over her shoes, which were sadly worn down at the heels, and her tattered skirts hung about her like a beggar’s rags. Mouret was one day obliged to take up a needle himself, for the girl’s dress was torn behind from top to bottom. She, however, laughed gleefully at her nakedness, at her hair that fell over her shoulders, and at her black hands and dirty face.

Marthe came to feel a sort of disgust of her. When she returned home from mass, still retaining in her hair the vague perfume of the church, she quite shuddered at the strong scent of earth which exhaled from her daughter. She sent her into the garden again immediately lunch was over. She could not bear to have her near her, distressed, disquieted as she was by the girl’s robust vigour and clear laugh, which seemed to find amusement in everything.

‘Oh, dear! how wearisome the child is!’ she murmured sometimes, with an air of nerveless lassitude.

As Mouret heard her complain, he exclaimed in an impulse of anger:

‘If she’s in your way, we will turn her out of the house, as we have done the other two.’

‘Indeed, I should be very glad if she were to go away,’ Marthe answered unhesitatingly.

One afternoon, about the end of the summer, Mouret was alarmed at no longer being able to hear Désirée, who, a few minutes previously, had been making a tremendous noise at the bottom of the garden. He ran to see what had happened to her, and found her lying on the ground. She had fallen from a ladder on to which she had climbed to gather some figs: fortunately the box-plants had broken the force of her fall. Mouret, in a great fright, lifted her up in his arms and called for assistance. He thought she was dead; but she quickly came to herself, declared that she was none the worse for the accident, and wanted to climb the ladder again.

Marthe, however, had meantime come into the garden. When she heard Désirée laugh she seemed quite annoyed.

‘That child will kill me one of these days,’ she exclaimed. ‘She doesn’t know what to invent to alarm me. I’m sure that she threw herself down on purpose. I can’t endure it any longer. I shall shut myself up in my own room, or go out in the morning and not return till evening. Yes, you may laugh, you great goose! To think that I am the mother of such a ninny! You are making me pay for it very dearly!’

‘Yes, that she is!’ cried Rose, who had run down from the kitchen; ‘she’s a great burden, and, unfortunately, there’s no chance of our ever being able to get her married.’

Mouret looked at them and listened with a pang at the heart. He said nothing, but stayed with the girl at the bottom of the garden, and there they remained chatting affectionately till nightfall. The next day, Marthe and Rose were away from the house the whole morning. They went to hear mass at a chapel, a league from Plassans, dedicated to Saint-Januarius, whither all the pious folks of the town made a pilgrimage on that particular day. When they returned, the cook hastily served up a cold lunch. Marthe went on eating for a few minutes before she noticed that her daughter was not at table.

‘Isn’t Désirée hungry?’ she asked. ‘Why hasn’t she come to lunch?’

‘Désirée is no longer here,’ answered Mouret, who left his food almost untouched upon his plate; ‘I took her this morning to her nurse at Saint-Eutrope.’

Marthe laid down her fork, and turned a little pale, seeming both surprised and hurt.

‘You might have consulted me,’ she said.

Her husband, without making any direct reply, con­tinued:

‘She is all right with her nurse. The good woman is very fond of her, and will look well after her, and the child will no longer be in your way, and everyone will be happy.’

Then, as his wife said nothing, he added:

‘If the house is not yet sufficiently quiet for you, just tell me, and I will go away myself.’

She half rose from her seat, and a light glistened in her eyes. Mouret had wounded her so cruelly that she stretched out her hand as though she were going to throw the water-bottle at his head. In her long submissive nature angry promptings were now being fanned into life, and she was growing to hate this man who was ever prowling round her. She made a show of eating again, but she said nothing further about her daughter. Mouret had folded his napkin, and remained sitting in front of her, listening to the sound of her fork, and casting lingering glances round the dining-room, which had once been so merry with the chatter of the children, but was now so empty and mournful. The room seemed to him to be quite chilly, and tears were mounting to his eyes when Marthe called to Rose to bring in the dessert.

‘You must be very hungry, I should think, madame,’ said the cook, as she put a plateful of fruit upon the table. ‘We had quite a long walk; and if the master, instead of playing the pagan, had come with us, he would not have left you to eat the mutton all by yourself.’

Then she changed the plates, without pausing in her chatter.

‘It is very pretty is that chapel of Saint-Januarius, but it is too small. Did you see that the ladies who came late were obliged to kneel down outside on the grass, in the open air? I can’t understand why Madame de Condamin came in a carriage. There’s no merit in making the pilgrimage if you come like that. We spent a delightful morning, didn’t we, madame?’

‘Yes, a very delightful morning,’ Marthe replied. ‘Abbé Mousseau, who preached, was very affecting.’

When Rose in her turn noticed Désirée’s absence and learnt of the girl’s departure, she exclaimed:

‘Well, really, it was a very good idea of the master’s! She was always walking off with my saucepans to water her plants. We shall be able to have a little peace now.’