Complete Works of Emile Zola (347 page)

He bowed, parted from the Abbé, and made his way to Madame de Condamin, whose slightest headaches caused him endless trouble and anxiety. At dinner, the next day, Marthe spoke of the doctor in almost violent terms. She swore that she would never allow him to visit her again.

‘It is he who is making me ill,’ she exclaimed. ‘This very afternoon he has been advising me to go off on a journey.’

‘And I entirely agree with him in that,’ declared Abbé Faujas, folding his napkin.

She fixed her eyes upon him, and turned very pale as she murmured in a low voice:

‘What! Do you also want to send me away from Plassans? Oh! I should die in a strange land far away from all my old associations, and far away from those I love.’

The priest had risen from his seat, and was about to leave the dining-room. He stepped towards her, and said with a smile:

‘Your friends only think of what is good for your health. Why are you so rebellious?’

‘Oh! I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!’ she cried, stepping back from him.

There was a short contest between them. The blood rushed to the Abbé’s cheeks, and he crossed his arms, as though to withstand a temptation to strike Marthe. She was leaning against the wall, in despair at her weakness. Then, quite vanquished, she stretched out her hands, and stammered:

‘I beseech you to allow me to remain here. I will do whatever you tell me.’

Then, as she burst into sobs, the Abbé shrugged his shoulders and left the room, like a husband fearing an out­break of tears. Madame Faujas, who was tranquilly finishing her dinner, had witnessed the scene and continued eating. She let Marthe cry on undisturbed.

‘You are extremely unreasonable, my dear child,’ she said after a time, helping herself to some more sweetmeats. ‘You will end by making Ovide quite detest you. You don’t know how to treat him. Why do you refuse to go away from home, if it is necessary for your health? We should look after the house for you, and you would find everything all right and in its place when you came back.’

Marthe was still sobbing, and did not seem to hear what Madame Faujas said.

‘Ovide has so much to think about,’ the old lady continued. ‘Do you know that he often works till four o’clock in the morning? When you cough all through the night, it disturbs him very much, and distracts his thoughts. He can’t work any longer, and he suffers more than you do. Do this for Ovide’s sake, my dear child; go away, and come back to us in good health.’

Then Marthe raised her face, red with weeping, and throwing all her anguish into one cry, she wailed: ‘Oh! Heaven lies!’

During the next few days no further pressure was brought to bear upon Madame Mouret to induce her to make the journey to Nice. She grew terribly excited at the least reference to it. She refused to leave Plassans with such a show of determination that the priest himself recognised the danger of insisting upon the scheme. In the midst of his triumph she was beginning to cause him terrible anxiety and embarrassment. Trouche declared, with his snigger, that it was she who ought to have been sent the first to Les Tulettes. Ever since Mouret had been taken off, she had secluded herself in the most rigid religious practices, and refrained from ever mentioning her husband’s name, praying indeed that she might be rendered altogether oblivious of the past. But she still remained restless, and returned from Saint-Saturnin’s with even a keener longing for forgetfulness than she had had when she went thither.

‘Our landlady is going it finely,’ Olympe said to her husband when she came home one evening. ‘I went with her to church to-day, and I had to pick her up from the flag­stones. You would laugh if I told you all the things that she vomited out against Ovide. She is quite furious with him; she says that he has no heart, and that he has deceived her in promising her a heap of consolations. And you should hear her rail, too, against the Divinity. Ah! it’s only your pious people who talk so badly of religion! Anyone would think, to hear her, that God had cheated her of a large sum of money. Do you know, I really believe that her husband comes and haunts her at night.’

Trouche was much amused by this gossip.

‘Well, she has herself to blame for that,’ he said. ‘If that old joker Mouret was put away, it was her own doing. If I were Faujas, I should know how to arrange matters, and I would make her as gentle and content as a sheep. But Faujas is an ass, and you will see that he will make a mess of the business. Your brother, my dear, hasn’t shown himself sufficiently pleasant to us for me to help him out of the bother. I shall have a rare laugh the day our landlady makes him take the plunge.’

‘Ovide certainly looks down upon women too much,’ de­clared Olympe.

Then Trouche continued in a lower tone:

‘I say, you know, if our landlady were to throw herself down some well with your noodle of a brother, we should be the masters, and the house would be ours. We should be able to feather our nest nicely then. It would be a splendid ending to it all, that!’

Since Mouret’s departure, the Trouches also had invaded the ground-floor of the house. Olympe had begun by com­plaining that the chimneys upstairs smoked, and she had ended by persuading Marthe that the drawing-room, which had hitherto been unoccupied, was the healthiest room in the house. Rose was ordered to light a big fire there, and the two women spent their days in endless talk, before the huge blazing logs. It was one of Olympe’s dreams to be able to live like this, handsomely dressed and lolling on a couch in the midst of an elegantly furnished room. She even per­suaded Marthe to have the drawing-room re-papered, to buy some new furniture and a fresh carpet for it. Then she felt that she was a lady. She came downstairs in her slippers and dressing-gown, and talked as though she were the mistress of the house.

‘That poor Madame Mouret,’ she would say,’ has so much worry that she has asked me to help her, and so I devote a little of my time to assisting her. It is really a kindness to do so.’

She had, indeed, quite succeeded in winning the confidence of Marthe, who, from sheer lassitude, handed over to her the petty details of the household management. It was Olympe who kept the keys of the cellar and the cupboards, and paid the tradesmen’s bills as well. She had been deliberating for a long time as to how she should manage to make herself equally free in the dining-room. Trouche, however, dissuaded her from attempting to carry out that design. They would no longer be able to eat and drink as they liked, he said; they would not even dare to drink their wine unwatered, or to ask a friend to come and have coffee. Then Olympe declared that at any rate she would bring their share of the dessert upstairs. She crammed her pockets with sugar, and she even carried off candle-ends. For this purpose, she made some big canvas pockets, which she fastened under her skirt, and which it took her a good quarter of an hour to empty every evening.

‘There! there’s something for a rainy day,’ she said, as she bundled a stock of provisions into a box, which she then pushed under the bed. ‘If we happen to fall out with our landlady, we shall have something to keep us going for a time. I must bring up some pots of preserves and some salt pork.’

‘There is no need to make a secret of it,’ said Trouche. ‘If I were you, I should make Rose bring them up, as you are the mistress.’

Trouche had made himself master of the garden. For a long time past he had envied Mouret as he had watched him pruning his trees, gravelling his walks, and watering his lettuces; and he had indulged in a dream of one day having a plot of ground of his own, where he might dig and plant as he liked. So, now that Mouret was no longer there, he took possession of the garden, planning all kinds of alterations in it. He began by condemning the vegetables. He had a delicate soul, he said, and he loved flowers. But the labour of digging tired him out on the second day, and a gardener was called in, who dug up the beds under his directions, threw the vegetables on to the dung-heap, and prepared the soil for the reception of pæonies, roses and lilies, larkspurs and convolvuli, and cuttings of geraniums and carnations. Then an idea occurred to Trouche. It struck him that the tall sombre box plants, which bordered the beds, had a mournful appearance, and he meditated for a long time about pulling them up.

‘You are quite right,’ said Olympe, whom he consulted on the matter. ‘They make the place look like a cemetery. For my part, I should much prefer an edging of cast-iron made to resemble rough wood. I will persuade the landlady to have it done. Anyhow, pull up the box.’

The box was accordingly pulled up. A week later the gardener came and laid down the cast-iron edging. Trouche also removed several fruit-trees which interfered with the view, had the arbour painted afresh a bright green, and orna­mented the fountain with rock-work. Monsieur Rastoil’s cascade greatly excited his envy, but he contented himself for the time by choosing a place where he would construct a similar one, ‘if everything should go on all right.’

‘This will make our neighbours open their eyes,’ he said in the evening to his wife. ‘They will see that there is a man of taste here now. In the summer, when we sit at the window, we shall have a delightful view, and the garden will smell deliciously.’

Marthe let him have his own way and gave her consent to all the plans that were submitted to her, and in the end he gave over even consulting her. It was solely Madame Faujas that the Trouches had to contend against, and she continued to dispute possession of the house with them very obstinately. It was only after a battle royal with her mother that Olympe had been able to take possession of the drawing-room. Madame Faujas had all but won the day on that occasion. It was the priest’s fault if she had not proved victorious.

‘That hussy of a sister of yours says everything that is bad of us to the landlady,’ Madame Faujas perpetually complained. ‘I can see through her game. She wants to supplant us and to get everything for herself. She is trying to settle herself down in the drawing-room like a fine lady, the slut!’

The priest however paid no attention to what his mother said; he only broke out into sharp gestures of impatience at her complaints. One day he got quite angry and exclaimed:

‘I beg of you, mother, do leave me in peace. Don’t talk to me any more about Olympe or Trouche. Let them go and hang themselves, if they like.’

‘But they are seizing the whole house, Ovide. They are perfect rats. When you want your share, you will find that they have gnawed it all away. You are the only one who can keep them in check.’

He looked at his mother with a faint smile.

‘You love me very much, mother,’ said he, ‘and I forgive you. Make your mind easy; I want something very diffe­rent from the house. It isn’t mine, and I only keep what I gain. You will be very proud when you see my share. Trouche has been useful to me, and we must shut our eyes a little.’

Madame Faujas was then obliged to beat a retreat; but she did so with very bad grace. The absolute disinterested­ness of her son made her, with her material baser desires and careful economical nature, quite desperate. She would have liked to lock the house up so that Ovide might find it ready in perfect order for his occupation whenever he might want it. The Trouches, with their grasping ways, caused her all the torment and despair felt by a miser who is being preyed upon by strangers. It was exactly as though they were wasting her own substance, fattening upon her own flesh, and reducing herself and her beloved son to penury and wretchedness. When the Abbé forbade her to oppose the gradual invasion of the Trouches, she made up her mind that she would at any rate save all she could from the hands of the spoilers, and so she began pilfering from the cupboards, just as Olympe did. She also fastened big pockets underneath her skirts, and had a chest which she filled with all the things she collected together — provisions, linen, and miscellaneous articles.

‘What is that you are stowing away there, mother?’ the Abbé asked one evening as he went into her room, attracted by the noise which she made in moving the chest.

She began to stammer out a reply, but the priest under­stood it all at a glance, and flew into a violent rage.

‘It is too shameful!’ he said. ‘You have turned your­self into a thief, now! What would the consequences be if you were to be detected? I should be the talk of the whole town!’

‘It is all for your sake, Ovide,’ she murmured.

‘A thief! My mother a thief! Perhaps you think that I thieve, too, that I have come here to plunder, and that my only ambition is to lay my hands upon whatever I can! Good heavens! what sort of an opinion have you formed of me? We shall have to separate, mother, if we do not understand each other better than this.’

This speech quite crushed the old woman. She had re­mained on her knees in front of the chest, and she sank into a crouching position upon the floor, very pale and almost choking, and stretching out her hands beseechingly. When she was able to speak, she wailed out:

‘It is for your benefit, my child, for yours only, I swear. I have told you before that they are taking everything; your sister crams everything into her pockets. There will be no­thing left for you, not even a lump of sugar. But I won’t take anything more, since it makes you angry, and you will let me stay with you, won’t you? You will keep me with you, won’t you?’

Abbé Faujas refused to make any promises until she had restored everything she had taken to its place. For nearly a week he himself, superintended the secret restoration of the contents of the chest. He watched his mother fill her pockets, and waited till she came back upstairs again to take a fresh load. For prudential reasons he allowed her to make only two journeys backwards and forwards every evening. The old woman felt as though her heart was breaking as she restored each article to its former place. She did not dare to cry, but her eyelids were swollen with tears of regret, and her hands trembled even more than they had done when they were ransacking the cupboards. However, what afflicted her more than anything else was to see that as soon as she had re­stored each article to its rightful position, Olympe followed in her wake and took possession of it. The linen, the pro­visions, and the candle-ends, merely passed from one pocket to another.