Complete Works of Emile Zola (343 page)

‘I saw your father this evening. He is a very good fellow. I wanted a paper from him. He was very kind, very kind indeed. He gave it to me. I have it here in my pocket. He didn’t want to give it me at first, though. He said it was only the family’s business. But I told him, “I am the family; I have got the wife’s orders.” You know her, don’t you? a dear little woman. She seemed quite pleased when I went to talk the matter over with her beforehand. Then he gave me the paper. You can feel it here in my pocket.’

Guillaume looked at him, concealing his extreme curiosity with an incredulous laugh.

‘I’m telling you the truth,’ continued the drunkard. ‘The paper’s here in my pocket. Can’t you feel it?’

‘Oh, it’s only a newspaper!’ said Guillaume.

At this, Trouche sniggered, and drew a large envelope from the pocket of his overcoat, and laid it on the table amidst the cups and glasses. For a moment, though Guillaume had reached out his hand, he prevented him from taking it, but then he allowed him to have it, laughing loudly the while. The paper proved to be a most detailed statement by Doctor Porquier with respect to the mental condition of François Mouret, householder, of Plassans.

‘Are they going to shut him up, then?’ asked Guillaume, handing back the paper.

‘That’s no business of yours, my boy,’ replied Trouche, who had now become distrustful again. ‘This paper here is for his wife. I am merely a friend who is glad to do a service. She will act as she pleases. However, she can’t go on letting herself be half murdered, poor lady!’

By the time they were turned out of the café he was so drunk that Guillaume had to accompany him to the Rue Balande. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep on every seat on the Cours Sauvaire. When they reached the Place of the Sub-Prefecture, he began to shed tears and stutter:

‘I’ve no friends now; everyone despises me just because I’m poor. But you are a good-hearted young fellow, and you shall come and have coffee with us when we get into posses­sion. If the Abbé interferes with us, well send him to keep the other one company. He isn’t very sharp, the Abbé, in spite of all his grand airs. I can persuade him into believing anything. But you are a real friend, aren’t you? Mouret is done for, old chap; we’ll drink his wine together.’

When Guillaume had seen Trouche to his door, he walked back through the sleeping town and went and whistled softly before Monsieur Maffre’s house. It was a signal he was making. The young Maffres, whom their father locked up in their bedroom, opened a window on the first floor and de­scended to the ground by the help of the bars with which the ground-floor windows were protected. Every night they thus went off to the haunts of vice in the company of Guillaume Porquier.

‘Well,’ he said to them, when they had reached the dark paths near the ramparts, ‘we needn’t trouble ourselves now. If my father talks any more about sending me off anywhere, I shall have something serious to say to him. I’ll bet you that I can get elected into the Young Men’s Club whenever I like now.’

The following night Marthe had a dreadful attack. She had been present in the morning at a long religious ceremony, the whole of which Olympe had insisted upon seeing. When Rose and the lodgers ran into the room upon hearing her piercing screams, they found her lying at the foot of the bed with her forehead gashed open. Mouret was kneeling in the midst of the bed-clothes, trembling all over.

‘He has killed her this time!’ cried the cook.

She seized Mouret in her arms, although he was in his night-dress, pushed him out of the room and into his office — the door of which was on the other side of the landing — then she went back to get a mattress and some blankets, which she threw to him. Trouche had set off at a run for Doctor Porquier. When the doctor arrived he dressed Marthe’s wound. If the cut had been a trifle lower down, he said, it would have been fatal. Downstairs in the hall, he declared in the presence of them all that it was necessary to take some active steps, and that Madame Mouret’s life could no longer be left at the mercy of a violent madman.

The next morning Marthe was obliged to keep her bed. She was still slightly delirious, and fancied that she saw an iron hand driving a flaming sword into her skull. Rose abso­lutely declined to allow Mou­ret to enter the room. She served him his lunch on a dusty table in his own office. He was still gazing at his plate with a look of stupefaction when Rose ushered into the room three men dressed in black.

‘Are you the doctors?’ he asked. ‘How is she getting on?’

‘She is better than she was,’ replied one of the men.

Mouret began to cut his bread mechanically as though he were going to eat it.

‘I wish the children were here,’ he said. ‘They would look after her, and we should be more lively. It is since the children went away that she has been ill. I am no longer good for anything.’

He raised a piece of bread to his mouth, and heavy tears trickled down his face. The man who had already spoken to him now said, casting at the same time a glance at his companions:

‘Shall we go and fetch your children?’

‘I should like it very much?’ replied Mouret, rising from his seat. ‘Let us start at once.’

As he went downstairs he saw no one except Trouche and his wife, who were leaning over the balustrade on the second floor, following each step he took with gleaming eyes. Olympe hurried down behind him and rushed into the kitchen, where Rose, in a state of great emotion, was watching out of the window. When a carriage, which was waiting at the door, had driven off with Mouret, she sprang up the staircase again, four steps at a time, and seizing Trouche by his shoulders, made him dance round the landing in a paroxysm of delight.

‘He’s packed off!’ she cried.

Marthe kept her bed for a week. Her mother came to see her every afternoon and manifested the greatest affection. The Faujases and the Trouches succeeded each other in attendance at her bedside; and even Madame de Condamin called to see her several times. Nothing was said about Mouret, and Rose told her mistress that she thought he had gone to Marseilles. When Marthe, however, was able to come downstairs again, and took her place at table in the dining-room, she began to manifest some astonishment, and inquired uneasily where her husband was.

‘Now, my dear lady, don’t distress yourself,’ said Madame Faujas, ‘or you will make yourself ill again. It was abso­lutely necessary that something should be done, and your friends felt bound to consult together and take steps for your protection.’

‘You’ve no reason to regret him, I’m sure,’ cried Rose harshly. ‘The whole neighbourhood breathes more freely now that he’s no longer here. One was always afraid of him setting the place on fire or rushing out into the street with a knife. I used to hide all the knives in my kitchen and Monsieur Rastoil’s cook did the same. And your poor mother nearly died of fright. Everybody who has been here while you have been ill, those ladies and gentlemen, they all said to me as I let them out, “It is a good riddance for Plassans.” A place is always on the alert when a man like that is free to go about as he likes.’

Marthe listened to this stream of words with dilated eyes and pale face. She had let her spoon fall from her hand, and she gazed out of the window in front of her as though some dreadful vision rising from behind the fruit-trees in the garden was filling her with terror.

‘Les Tulettes! Les Tulettes!’ she gasped, as she buried her face in her trembling hands.

She fell backwards and was fainting away, when Abbé Faujas, who had finished his soup, grasped her hands, pressing them tightly, and saying in his softest tone:

‘Show yourself strong before this trial which God is sending you. He will afford you consolation if you do not prove rebellious — He will grant you the happiness you deserve.’

At the pressure of the priest’s hands and the tender tone of his voice, Marthe revived and sat up again with flushing cheeks.

‘Oh, yes!’ she cried, as she burst into sobs, ‘I have great need of happiness; promise me great happiness, I beg you.’

CHAPTER XIX

The general elections were to take place in October. About the middle of September, Monseigneur Rousselot suddenly set off to Paris, after having a long interview with Abbé Faujas. It was said that one of his sisters, who lived at Versailles, was seriously ill. Five days later he was back in Plassans again, and he called Abbé Surin into his study to read to him. Lying back in his easy chair, closely enveloped in a padded robe of violet silk, although the weather was still quite warm, he smilingly listened to the young Abbé’s womanish voice as he softly lisped the strophes of Anacreon.

‘Good, very good,’ he said; ‘you express the music of that beautiful tongue excellently.’

Then, glancing at the timepiece with an expression of uneasiness, he added:

‘Has Abbé Faujas been here yet this morning? Ah, my child, what a dreadful time I’ve had! My ears are still buzzing with the abominable uproar of the railway. It was raining the whole time I was in Paris. I had to rush all over the place, and saw nothing but mud everywhere.’

Abbé Surin laid his book on the corner of a small table.

‘Is your lordship satisfied with the results of your journey?’ he asked, with the familiarity of a petted favourite.

‘I have learnt what I wanted to know,’ the Bishop replied with his subtle smile. ‘I ought to have taken you with me. You would have learnt a good many things that it would be useful for you to know at your age, destined as you are by your birth and connections for the episcopate.’

‘I am listening, my lord,’ said the young priest with a beseeching expression.

But the prelate shook his head.

‘No, no; these matters are not to be spoken of. Make a friend of Abbé Faujas. He may be able to do much for you some day. I have received full information about him.’

Abbé Surin, however, clasped his hands with such a wheedling look of curiosity that Monseigneur Rousselot went on to say:

‘He had some bother or other at Besançon. Afterwards he was living in great poverty in furnished apartments in Paris. He went and offered himself. Just at that time the minister was on the look-out for some priests devoted to the government. I was told that Faujas at first quite frightened him with his fierce looks and his old cassock. It was quite by chance that he was sent here. The minister was most pleasant and courteous to me.’

The Bishop finished his sentences with a slight wave of his hand, as he sought for fitting words, fearing, as it were, to say too much. But at last the affection which he felt for his secretary got the better of his caution, and he continued with more animation:

‘Take my advice and try to be useful to the vicar of Saint-Saturnin’s. He will want all the assistance he can get, and he seems to me to be a man who never forgets either an injury or a kindness. But don’t ally yourself with him. He will end badly. That is my impression.’

‘End badly?’ exclaimed the young priest in surprise.

‘Oh! just now he is in the full swing of triumph. But his face disquiets me, my child. He has a terrible face. That man will never die in
his bed. Don’t you do anything to compromise me. All I ask is to be allowed to live tranquilly — quietness is all I want.’

Abbé Surin was just taking up his book again, when Abbé Faujas was announced. Monseigneur Rousselot advanced to meet him with outstretched hands and a smiling face, address­ing him as his ‘dear Curé.’

‘Leave us, my child,’ he said to his secretary, who there­upon retired.

He spoke of his journey. His sister was better than she had been, he said, and he had been able to shake hands with some old friends.

‘And did you see the minister?’ asked Abbé Faujas, fixing his eves upon him.

‘Yes; I thought it my duty to call upon him,’ replied the Bishop, who felt that he was blushing. ‘He spoke to me very favourably indeed of you.’

‘Then you no longer have any doubts — you trust me abso­lutely?’

‘Absolutely, my dear Curé. Besides, I know nothing about politics myself, and I leave everything in your hands.’

They remained talking together the whole morning. Abbé Faujas persuaded the Bishop to undertake a visitation of his diocese, and said he would go with him and prompt him as to what he should say. It would be necessary to summon all the rural deans so that the priests of the smallest villages might receive their instructions. There would be no difficulty in all this, for the clergy would act as they were told. The most delicate task would be in Plassans itself, in the district of Saint-Marc. The aristocrats there, shutting themselves up in the privacy of their houses, were entirely beyond the reach of Abbé Faujas’s influence, and he had so far only been able to work upon certain ambitious royalists, such men as Rastoil and Maffre and Bourdeu. The Bishop, however, undertook to sound the feelings of various drawing-rooms in the district of Saint-Marc where he visited. But even allowing that the aristocracy should vote adversely, they would be in a ridiculous minority if they were deserted by those electors of the middle classes who were amenable to clerical influence.

‘Now,’ said Monseigneur Rousselot as he rose from his seat, ‘it would perhaps be as well if you told me the name of your candidate, so that I may recommend him in my letters.’

Abbé Faujas smiled.

‘It is dangerous to mention names,’ he said. ‘There wouldn’t be a scrap of our candidate left in a week’s time if we made his name known now. The Marquis de Lagrifoul has become quite out of the question. Monsieur de Bourdeu, who reckons upon being a candidate, is still more so. We shall leave them to destroy each other, and then, at the last moment, we shall come forward. Just say that an election on purely political grounds would be very regrettable, and that what is needed for the interests of Plassans is somebody who is not a party man, but has an intimate knowledge of the re­quirements of the town and the department. And you may let it be understood that such a man has been found; but don’t go any further.’

The Bishop now in his turn smiled. He detained the priest for a moment as he was about to take leave.

‘And Abbé Fenil?’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Are you not afraid that he will do all he can to thwart your plans?’