The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Page 20

  ‘Let him alone, poor lamb! You’ll be the death of him with your brutal ways. He’s not in the least like you, he’s the spitting image of his mother. You’ll never understand either the one or the other.’

  Serge smiled. When his father saw he was so delicate he hesitated to send him to Paris to read Law after he left school. He wouldn’t hear of a provincial university; in his view a young man who wanted to get anywhere really had to go to Paris. He had high ambitions for his son, saying that people who were not so clever as him—the Rougon cousins,* for example—had carved out fine careers for themselves. Every time the boy seemed to be in better health again he fixed his departure for the beginning of the following month. Then the trunk was never packed, the young man coughed a little, and the departure was once again postponed.

  Each time this happened, Marthe, unruffled and calm as ever, contented herself with saying quietly:

  ‘He’s not yet twenty. It’s not wise to send such a young boy to Paris… Anyway, he’s not wasting his time here. You yourself are always saying he works too hard.’

  Serge went with his mother to Mass. He was religiously inclined, very gentle and serious. Doctor Porquier recommended lots of exercise, so he had become obsessed with botany, taking trips out, and spending his afternoons drying the flowers he had collected, sticking them in, classifying and labelling them. It was then that Abbé Faujas became his close friend. The priest had once been a botanizer; he gave him some practical advice for which the young man was very grateful. They lent each other books, went together one day to look for a plant the priest said must grow in those parts. When Serge was poorly his neighbour visited him every morning, sat at his bedside, and chatted for a long time. On other days when he was better he was the one to knock on Abbé Faujas’s door as soon as he heard him moving about in his room. They were only separated by the narrow landing and ended up in each other’s rooms most of the time.

  Mouret often still lost his temper in spite of Marthe’s impassive calm and the irritation in Rose’s eyes.

  ‘What on earth can that boy be doing up there?’ he grumbled. ‘I don’t set eyes on him for days at a time. He’s always in the priest’s rooms; they are always chatting in some corner… Well, for a start, he must leave for Paris. He’s as strong as an ox. All those little complaints are just an act, to make it easier for himself. Yes, you may well look at me like that, I don’t want the priest turning him into a little tartuffe.’

  So he kept watch on his son. When he believed he was in the priest’s rooms he called out to him sharply.

  ‘I’d rather he went to visit women!’ he cried one day in exasperation.

  ‘Oh, Monsieur,’ said Rose, ‘such notions of yours are abominable!’

  ‘Yes, women, I mean it! I’ll take him to them myself, if you force me to, with all your preaching!’

  Serge of course belonged to the Youth Club, but he seldom went; he preferred his own company, and would certainly never have set foot in the place if Abbé Faujas, whom he met there sometimes, had not been there. In the reading room the priest taught him to play chess. Mouret, who knew the boy was seeing the priest even in the café, swore he would drive him to the railway station the following Monday. The trunk was packed in earnest this time, when Serge, who had wanted to spend his last morning out in the fields, came back soaked to the skin by a sudden shower. He had to go to bed and his teeth chattered with cold. For three weeks his life was in the balance. His recovery took a good two months. Those first days especially he was so weak he lay there with his head raised on pillows and his hands stretched out over the sheets just like a waxwork.

  ‘It’s your fault, Monsieur,’ the cook shouted at Mouret. ‘If the child dies you’ll have that on your conscience.’

  As long as his son was in danger Mouret remained depressed, his eyes red from weeping, skulking silently round the house. He rarely went upstairs, pacing back and forth in the hall, waiting for the doctor to leave. When he knew that Serge was out of danger, he slipped into his room offering to help. But Rose shooed him away. They didn’t need him. The child was not yet strong enough to put up with his rough ways. He would do better to look after his own affairs than to take up so much space. So Mouret stayed downstairs on his own, more anxious and at a loss than ever. He didn’t feel like doing anything, he said. Often when he went through the hall he would hear on the floor above the voice of Abbé Faujas, who spent the whole afternoon at the bedside of the convalescent Serge.

  ‘How is he today, Monsieur le Curé?’ Mouret asked the priest timidly, when the latter went down into the garden.

  ‘Quite well; but it will be a long haul and require a lot of care.’

  And he went on calmly reading his breviary, while the father, secateurs in hand, trailed after him down the paths, trying to renew the conversation, to have more detailed news of ‘the boy’. As the convalescence progressed he noticed that the priest never left Serge’s bedside. Having gone up at intervals when the women weren’t there, he always found him sitting beside the young man, chatting softly to him, performing little services like putting sugar in his tea, drawing the bedclothes over him, giving him the things he asked for. And throughout the house there was a gentle murmuring, as words were exchanged in hushed tones between Marthe and Rose, and a special quiet which transformed the second floor into the corner of a monastery. It seemed to Mouret he could smell incense in his house; and sometimes, from the sound of low voices, that they were saying Mass up there.

  ‘What on earth are they doing?’ he asked himself. ‘The boy is out of danger after all. They can’t be administering the last rites.’

  Serge himself worried him. He looked like a girl in his white linen nightclothes. His eyes had got bigger, the smile on his lips was sweetly ecstatic, and it stayed there even in the throes of his worst suffering. Mouret did not dare broach the subject of Paris any more, his sick son seemed to him so chaste and feminine.

  One afternoon he climbed very softly up the stairs. Through the half-open door he could see Serge sitting in an armchair in the sunshine. The young man was weeping, his eyes raised to heaven, while his mother was also sobbing in front of him. They both turned, at the noise of the door opening, without drying their tears. And immediately in his weak, convalescent voice, Serge said:

  ‘Father, I want to ask a great favour. Mother claims you will be angry, that you will refuse to grant me something that would make me overwhelmingly happy… I’d like to enter the seminary.’

  He had put his hands together in a sort of fever of devotion.

  ‘You… you!’ Mouret stammered.

  And he looked at Marthe, who looked away. He said no more but went to the window, and came back instinctively to sit at the foot of the bed, as if stunned by this blow.

  ‘Father,’ Serge went on after a long silence, ‘when I was so close to death, I saw God, I swore I would belong to Him. I assure you that my joy resides nowhere but in Him. Believe me and do not be cast down.’

  Mouret, with a despondent expression, looked at the floor and still did not speak. He made a gesture of utter despair as he said in a low voice:

  ‘If only I had the nerve, I would tie two shirts up in a kerchief and take to the road.’

  Then he rose, went and tapped on the glass with his fingertips. And when Serge renewed his pleading, he replied simply:

  ‘No, no, it’s all right. You be a priest, my boy.’

  And he went out of the room. He left for Marseilles the next day without a word to anyone, and spent a week with his son Octave. But he came back worried and looking older. Octave did not afford him much consolation. He had found him living the high life, crippled with debts, and hiding girls in cupboards. But he didn’t breathe a word about all this. He became quite sedentary, did not do any good deals, any of those transactions of standing crops which he had boasted about so much in the old days. Rose noticed that he affected an almost complete silence, even avoiding saying good day to Abbé Faujas.

  ‘Don’t
you realize you are being rather rude?’ she said to him impudently one day. ‘Monsieur le Curé has just gone by and you turned your back on him… If you are doing that because of the boy, you are quite wrong. Monsieur le Curé didn’t want him to enter the seminary. He lectured him long enough about it. I heard him… Oh, it’s a jolly house we have now, right enough. You don’t chat any more, not even with Madame. When you sit down to eat it might as well be a funeral… Well, Monsieur, I’ve just about had enough of it.’

  Mouret left the room, but the cook went after him into the garden.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased to see the child on his feet again? He ate a chop yesterday, the little angel, and with a good appetite as well… You don’t give a tinker’s cuss, do you? You wanted to make him into a pagan like yourself… Go on with you, you need prayers more than anyone. God wants salvation for us all. If I was you I’d weep with joy at the thought that the little darling is going to pray for us. But you are stony-hearted, Monsieur… How lovely that sweet boy will look in his soutane!’

  At that Mouret went up to the first floor. There he locked himself in a bedroom that he called his office, a big, bare room, furnished with only a table and two chairs. This room was his bolt-hole whenever the cook hounded him. But he tired of it and returned to the garden that he was cultivating ever more assiduously. Marthe did not seem to be aware of her husband’s black moods; sometimes he didn’t utter a word for a week, and yet she did not get worried or cross. She became more detached from her surroundings every day. The house seemed so peaceful, she even supposed when she did not hear Mouret grumbling all the time that he had seen reason and found a little place he could be happy in, as she had. That allayed her worries and allowed her to sink ever deeper into her dream world. When he looked at her, his eyes misted over and he did not recognize her, yet she smiled at him and didn’t see the tears welling up behind his eyelids.

  The day Serge, now completely restored to health, entered the seminary, Mouret remained alone in the house with Désirée. He often looked after her now. This overgrown child, who was nearly sixteen, could have fallen into the pond or set the house on fire by playing with matches, like a little girl of six. When Marthe came home she found the doors wide open and the rooms empty. The house seemed completely bare. She went out on to the terrace and saw her husband playing with the girl at the bottom of the path. He was sitting on the ground, on the sand; with the help of a small wooden spade he was gravely filling a cart which Désirée was holding on a string.

  ‘Giddy up!’ shouted the child.

  ‘Wait!’ said her father patiently. ‘It’s not full yet. If you want to play horses you must wait till it’s full up.’

  Then she stamped around, pretending to be a horse impatient to go; but unable to wait, she set off, screaming with laughter. The cart tipped over and all the sand fell out. When she had gone once round the garden she came back shouting:

  ‘Fill it up, fill it up again!’

  And Mouret filled it once more, with little spadefuls. Marthe stayed on the terrace, unsettled, uneasy; these wide-open doors, this man playing with the child at the back of the empty house distressed her, though she didn’t know exactly why. She went up to get changed, hearing Rose, who had also just returned, say from the top of the steps:

  ‘My goodness, how stupid he is!’

  According to his friends on the Cours Sauvaire, the little rentiers* he went for a walk with every day, Mouret was ‘a bit touched’. He had gone grey within a few months, he was unsteady on his legs, he was no longer the man whose sharp-tongued mockery was feared by the whole town. For a while it was thought he had thrown himself into risky speculations and that he was weighed down with the loss of a huge sum of money.

  Madame Paloque, leaning out of her dining-room window, which looked out on to the Rue Balande, even said he was ‘in a bad way’ each time she saw him go out. And if Abbé Faujas crossed the road, a few minutes later, she took pleasure in calling out, especially when she was entertaining people:

  ‘Look at Monsieur le Curé, he’s putting on weight… If he was eating from the same table as Monsieur Mouret, you’d say he only left him the bones.’

  She laughed and so did they. Abbé Faujas in fact was becoming a fine figure of a man, with his habitual black gloves and shining soutane. When Madame de Condamin complimented him on the way he looked, his mouth creased into the ironic smile that he reserved for such occasions. These ladies liked to see him well turned out, in garments that were soft and rich. Doubtless a bare-knuckle fight, bare arms, in rags if need be, would have been more his style. But whenever he neglected himself, the slightest critical remark from old Madame Rougon would fetch him out of his carelessness; he smiled, went and bought silk stockings, a hat, a new belt. He got through any amount of them, his large frame wore them out rapidly.

  Ever since the establishing of the Work of the Virgin, all the women were on his side; they defended him against the rumours about him that were still going round now and then, without anyone quite knowing where they came from. To be sure, they found his treatment of them was rather harsh sometimes; but this was not unattractive to them, especially in the confessional, where they liked to feel his iron hand taking them by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘My dear,’ Madame de Condamin said to Marthe one day, ‘he told me off yesterday. I believe he would have slapped me if the wood hadn’t been there between us… Oh, he’s not always the easiest man to deal with!’

  And she giggled at the thought of this little row with her director of conscience. Madame de Condamin, it’s true, thought she saw Marthe turn pale at certain things she divulged about Abbé Faujas and his manner in the confessional. She guessed she was jealous, and took a wicked delight in torturing her, in providing more and more intimate details.

  When Abbé Faujas created the Youth Club, he became good-natured. It was like a new incarnation. Beneath the effort of will, his serious nature bent like molten wax. He allowed people to talk about his role in opening the club, and made friends with all the young men in the town, checking himself more, realizing that truanting schoolboys didn’t have the same taste as women for being treated roughly. He almost fell out with the Rastoils’ son, when he threatened to box his ears about an issue concerning the internal rules of the club; but with surprising self-control he held out his hand to him almost immediately, humbling himself, getting the people around him on his side by his grace in apologizing to ‘that great beast Saturnin’, as he was called.

  If the priest had conquered the women and children, he remained on terms of simple politeness with the fathers and the husbands. The serious characters continued to be suspicious of him, seeing that he distanced himself from every political faction. In the sub-prefecture Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies was highly critical of him, while Monsieur Delangre, without actually standing up for him, said with a shrewd smile that one must wait awhile before passing judgement. In Monsieur Rastoil’s house, he had created a rift. Séverin and his mother constantly belaboured the president with their praise for the priest.

  ‘All right, all right! He’s as good as you say,’ cried the poor man. ‘I agree. Let me alone. I invited him to dinner. He didn’t come. But I can’t go along and drag him here.’

  ‘But my dear,’ said Madame Rastoil, ‘when you see him, you scarcely bid him good day. That’s what must have annoyed him.’

  ‘It must have been that,’ added Séverin. ‘He can see that you are not on such good terms as you should be with him.’

  Monsieur Rastoil shrugged. When Monsieur de Bourdeu was there, both of them accused Abbé Faujas of leaning towards the sub-prefecture. Madame Rastoil remarked that he’d never even set foot there.

  ‘Of course,’ the president replied. ‘I am not accusing him of Bonapartism… I’m saying that he has leanings, that’s all. He has had dealings with Monsieur Delangre.’

  ‘Well, and so have you!’ cried Séverin. ‘You’ve had dealings with the mayor! You have to in certain situations… Just
say you can’t stand Abbé Faujas, that would be better.’

  And they all sulked in the Rastoil household for days at a time. Abbé Fenil only rarely crossed their threshold now, saying that he was stuck at home with the gout. Moreover, when put on the spot on two occasions as to what he thought of the priest-in-charge of Saint-Saturnin he had commended him in a few brief words. Abbé Surin and Abbé Bourrette, like Monsieur Maffre, were of the same opinion as the mistress of the house. The opposition came then only from the president, upheld by Monsieur de Bourdeu, both of them declaring gravely that they could not compromise their political situation by friendship with a man who was not open about his opinions.

  Séverin, just to tease, took it into his head to go and knock on the little gate in the Impasse des Chevillottes when he had something to say to the priest. Gradually the Impasse became neutral territory. Doctor Porquier who had been the first to make use of this path, the Delangre boy, the judge, all came at one time or another to chat with Abbé Faujas. Sometimes for the whole afternoon the little gates of the two gardens remained wide open, as did the porte cochère* of the sub-prefecture. The priest was there at the end of the cul-de-sac, leaning against the wall and smiling, shaking hands with the members of the two groups who felt like coming to greet him. But Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies pretended he did not care to set foot outside the garden of the sub-prefecture; while Monsieur Rastoil and Monsieur Bourdeu, insisting just as doggedly on not appearing in the Impasse, remained seated under the trees in front of the fountain. Rarely did the priest’s little court invade the Mourets’ arbour. But occasionally a head would poke up, glance round, and vanish again.

  At all events, Abbé Faujas was completely at ease. The only place he kept an anxious watch on was the Trouches’ window, where he could see Olympe’s eyes gleaming, no matter what time of day it was. The Trouches lay in ambush behind the red curtains, consumed with a raging desire to come down as well, and taste the fruit, and chat with the assembled company. They tapped at the shutters, leaned out a moment, and drew back in a rage at the repressive glares of the priest. Then they returned furtively to press their pale faces to one corner of the window, spying on his every movement, tormented at seeing him comfortably enjoying this paradise that he had forbidden them.