The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Read online

  ‘Me a thief! Monsieur!’ she had cried. ‘Be very careful what you are saying!… Just because you saw me sell one of Madame’s rings. That ring belonged to me; Madame gave it to me, she’s not a brute like you… Aren’t you ashamed of leaving your poor wife without a penny! She hasn’t even got shoes to put on her feet. The other day I had to pay the milk lady… Well, yes I did, I sold her ring. What if I did? Is her ring not her own! She can do with the money because you don’t let her have a thing… I’d sell the house, the whole house, do you hear? It hurts me so much to see her go around with not a stitch to put on.’

  Thenceforth Mouret was on constant watch. He locked the cupboards and took the keys. When Rose went out he looked at her hands with a mistrustful air. He felt her pockets if he thought he could detect a suspicious bump under her skirts. He bought back from the second-hand dealer on the market certain items that he put in their place again, wiping them, ostentatiously looking after them in the presence of Marthe to remind her of what he called ‘Rose’s thieving’. He never accused her directly. He tormented her in particular over a cut glass jug sold for twenty sous by the cook. The latter, who pretended she had broken it, was made to bring it to him at the table for each meal. One morning at breakfast she let it fall in front of him in exasperation.

  ‘Now it’s broken good and proper, Monsieur, isn’t it?’ she said laughing in his face.

  But as he threatened to dismiss her, she said:

  ‘Just you try!… I’ve been looking after you for twenty-five years, Monsieur. Madame would leave with me.’

  Marthe, pushed to the limits, with Rose and Olympe counselling her, finally revolted. Olympe had been sobbing for a week, claiming that if she didn’t get five hundred francs by the end of the month, one of the bills guaranteed by Abbé Faujas ‘was going to be published in a Plassans newspaper’. This published bill, this dreadful threat which terrified her for some reason she could quite understand, made Marthe decide to risk everything. As she went to bed that night she asked Mouret for five hundred francs. Then, as he looked at her appalled, she talked about her fifteen years of deprivation, the fifteen years spent in Marseilles behind a counter with her pen tucked behind her ear like a shop assistant.

  ‘We earned the money together,’ she said. ‘It belongs to us both. I want five hundred francs.’

  Mouret broke his silence with extreme violence. His fury found words again.

  ‘Five hundred francs!’ he shouted. ‘For your priest, is it?… I keep my mouth shut these days, fool that I am, in case I say too much. But don’t imagine you can go on making a fool of me for ever. Five hundred francs! Why not the whole house! That’s right enough, the house belongs to him! And he wants the money does he? He told you to ask me for the money?… I may as well be living in a wood! I shall end up having my handkerchief stolen out of my pocket. I bet if I went up and searched his room I should find all the wretched things that belong to me at the back of his drawers. I am missing three pairs of linen, seven pairs of socks, four or five shirts; I counted yesterday. Nothing is mine any more, everything is disappearing, everything is going… No, not a penny, not a penny, do you understand?’

  ‘I want five hundred francs, half the money is mine,’ she repeated calmly.

  For an hour Mouret raged, working himself up, blaming her for the same things twenty times over until he wearied of it. She wasn’t like his wife any more; she had loved him before the priest arrived; she had listened to him; she had looked after the house properly. The people who were setting her against him must be really vicious people. Then his words got tangled up. He let himself sink into an armchair, a broken man, weak as a child.

  ‘Give me the key to the bureau,’ Marthe demanded.

  He stood up and with what remained of his strength he howled:

  ‘You want to take it all, don’t you? You want to leave your children without a bed to sleep on and not leave us a crumb to eat?… Well then, take the lot, tell Rose to fill her apron. Here you are, here’s the key.’

  And he threw her the key, which Marthe hid beneath her pillow. She was very drained after this row, the first violent row she had had with her husband. She went to bed. He spent the night in the armchair. Towards morning she heard him sobbing. She would have given him back the key if he had not gone out into the garden like a man deranged, although it was still blackest night.

  Peace seemed to have been re-established. The key of the bureau remained hanging on a nail, near the mirror. Marthe, unused to seeing large sums all at once, had a sort of fear of the money. She behaved very discreetly at first, ashamed, each time she opened the drawer, where Mouret always kept tens of thousand-franc notes in cash to buy his wine. She took only what she strictly needed. Olympe moreover gave her excellent advice: since she now had the key, she should prove that she could be economical. When she saw her trembling in front of the ‘loot’, she even stopped talking about the Besançon debts for a while.

  Mouret lapsed again into his bleak silence. He had received another blow, still more violent than the first, when Serge entered the seminary. His friends from the Cours Sauvaire, the little rentiers who regularly went for a walk along the promenade from four till six, were beginning to get very worried when they saw him coming along, his arms dangling at his side, a dull expression on his face, scarcely answering their greeting, as if eaten up by an incurable disease.

  ‘He’s going downhill,’ they muttered. ‘At forty-four, you wouldn’t believe it! He’s losing his mind.’

  He no longer seemed to hear the spiteful remarks they dared to make when he was there. If they asked him direct questions about Abbé Faujas he reddened slightly, answering that he was a good tenant, that he paid his rent when it was due. The rentiers laughed behind his back, as they sat on a bench on the Cours, in the sunshine.

  ‘He’s only got what he deserves, after all,’ said one former almond merchant. ‘Do you remember how keen he used to be on the priest? He was the one singing his praises to all and sundry in Plassans. Nowadays he looks a bit strange when you get him back on that subject.’

  And along the bench, from one end to the other, these gentlemen passed on scandalous stories, each leaning in turn to his neighbour’s ear.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said a retired master tanner, ‘Mouret’s not bold enough. If it were me I’d throw the priest out.’

  And they all declared that Mouret, the man who had made so much fun of husbands whose wives led them by the nose, wasn’t bold enough.

  In the town, despite some people’s apparent persistence in spreading them around, these calumnies never went beyond a certain group of idlers and gossips. If Abbé Faujas, who had refused to go and live in the priest’s lodgings, was still staying at the Mourets’, it could only be through love of their beautiful garden, where he read his breviary so quietly. His elevated sense of duty, his strict life, the scorn for his personal appearance that priests sometimes pride themselves on, placed him above all suspicion. The members of the Youth Club accused Abbé Fenil of trying to undermine him. In any case he had won over the whole of the new part of the town. The only section against him now was the Saint-Marc district, whose noble inhabitants kept their distance when they met him in the bishop’s lodgings. But he shook his head on the occasions when old Madame Rougon told him he could get away with anything.

  ‘Nothing’s definite yet,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I have no firm hold on anyone. It would only take a straw to make the whole edifice collapse.’

  Marthe had been causing him anxiety for some time. He felt unable to assuage the fever of devotion that was burning her up. She eluded him, disobeyed him, threw herself into everything much more intensely than he would have wanted. This woman who was so helpful, this respected patron lady might be the undoing of him. There was a flame burning inside her that was wrecking her body, darkening her skin, and giving her black rings round her eyes. It was like an affliction that was increasing all the time, driving her entire being mad, getting closer and closer t
o her brain and her heart. Her face was drowned in ecstasy, hands stretched out in a nervous trembling. A dry cough sometimes racked her from head to toe, without her appearing to be aware of it. And the priest became ever harsher with her, repelling this love she was offering, forbidding her to come to Saint-Saturnin.

  ‘The church is icy cold,’ he would say. ‘You are coughing too much. I don’t want you to make it worse.’

  She assured him that it was nothing, a mere irritation in her throat. Then she complied, she accepted this prohibition of going to church as if it were a punishment she deserved, that it closed the doors of heaven to her. She sobbed, believing she was damned, trailed around through days empty of meaning; and in spite of herself, like a woman who returns to a forbidden love, when Friday came, she stole humbly into the Saint-Michel chapel and came to press her burning forehead against the wooden confessional. She did not speak, but remained in that position, a broken woman; Abbé Faujas, annoyed with her, treated her cruelly like an unworthy girl. He sent her away, and she left, happy and comforted.

  The priest feared the darkness in the Saint-Michel chapel. He enlisted the help of Doctor Porquier, who persuaded Marthe to go to confession in the little oratory at the Work of the Virgin in the town. Abbé Faujas promised to wait there for her every other Saturday. This oratory was a cheerful place, set up in a large whitewashed room with four huge windows; he hoped it would calm the over-excited imagination of his penitent. There he would be master, make her into his submissive slave, without having to fear a possible scandal. Moreover, to give short shrift to any nasty rumours, he asked his mother to come along with Marthe. While he was confessing the latter, Madame Faujas stayed at the entrance. The old lady, not caring to waste time, brought with her a stocking she was knitting.

  ‘My dear child,’ she often said to Marthe, when they were going back to the Rue Balande together, ‘I heard Ovide talking to you very loudly again today. Can you not do as he asks? Do you not like him? Oh, how I wish I were in your shoes, I should kiss his feet… If all you can do is cause him grief, I shall end up hating you.’

  Marthe bowed her head. She was extremely embarrassed in the presence of Madame Faujas. She did not like her, she was jealous of her, found her always in the way between herself and the priest. And besides, she suffered from the black looks of the old lady, whom she kept meeting and who was full of strange and troubling pieces of advice.

  Marthe’s bad health was a satisfactory explanation for her meetings with Abbé Faujas in the oratory of the Work of the Virgin. Doctor Porquier assured everyone that she was simply following his prescription—which made the walkers on the Cours laugh heartily.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Madame Paloque said to her husband one day as they watched Marthe go down the Rue Balande with Madame Faujas, ‘I would love to be a fly on the wall to see what the priest does with his lovelorn penitent… All this talk about her “heavy cold” makes me laugh! As though a heavy cold could prevent her from taking confession in a church! I’ve had a cold myself, as a matter of fact, but that didn’t make me go and hide in a chapel with a priest.’

  ‘You are wrong to concern yourself with Abbé Faujas’s affairs,’ replied the justice. ‘I’ve been warned. He’s a man who needs careful management. You are too full of resentment. You will prevent us getting where we want to be.’

  ‘Well, they trampled all over me,’ she went on bitterly. ‘They’ll hear about this… Your priest Faujas is a big fool. Do you suppose Abbé Fenil wouldn’t be grateful if I came upon the curate and his lady love whispering sweet nothings to one another? He would give a lot for a scandal like that, you may depend upon it… Let me alone, you don’t understand that sort of thing.’

  Two weeks later on the Saturday, Madame Paloque was waiting for Marthe to come out of her house. Her monstrous features hidden behind her curtains, she was all dressed, spying on the street through a hole in the muslin. When the two women disappeared round the corner of the Rue Taravelle, she grinned from ear to ear. Without hurrying, she put on her gloves and went sedately through the Place de la Sous-Préfecture, taking a roundabout route and slowly picking her way over the sharp cobbles. As she passed Madame Condamin’s town house, for a moment she pondered whether to call for her. But perhaps the latter would have scruples about it? All said and done, it was best to do without a witness and carry out the mission boldly.

  ‘I’ve left time enough for them to have got on to the major sins, I think I can show my face now,’ she thought after walking round for a quarter of an hour.

  Then she made haste. She often came to the Work of the Virgin to go over the details of the accounts with Trouche. Today instead of going into the employee’s office, she went along the passage, and went down again straight to the oratory. Sitting on a chair in front of the door, Madame Faujas was calmly doing her knitting. The judge’s wife had foreseen this obstacle. She reached the door, with the brisk air of a very busy person. But even before she had stretched out her arm to turn the knob, the old lady had got up and, with extraordinary strength, pushed her out of the way.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in her coarse peasant voice.

  ‘I’m going where I need to go,’ Madame Paloque replied, her arm bruised, her face convulsed with anger. ‘You are a coarse and insolent woman. I am the treasurer of the Work of the Virgin, I have the right to go where I like here.’

  Madame Faujas stood leaning against the door. She had put her spectacles back on her nose. She resumed her knitting with the most admirable display of coolness you could see anywhere.

  ‘No,’ she said stolidly. ‘You can’t go in.’

  ‘Oh? And why not, pray?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  The justice’s wife felt that her trick had misfired. She was choking on bile. She grew fearsome, saying over and over:

  ‘I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you are doing here, I could shout for someone and have you arrested, because you hit me. There must be very nasty things going on behind this door if you are charged with stopping people who belong here. I belong here, do you hear?… Let me pass or I shall call everybody.’

  ‘Call who you like,’ the old lady replied, with a shrug. ‘I told you, you can’t go in. I say so and that’s that… How do I know if you are someone who belongs here? Anyway, even if you do, it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody can go in… It’s my business.’

  Then Madame Paloque lost all sense of proportion; she raised her voice and shouted:

  ‘I don’t need to go in. That’s enough for me. I’ve learned what I want to know. You are Abbé Faujas’s mother, aren’t you? Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you have got a nice job here!… No, of course I’m not going in; I don’t want to get mixed up in all this filth.’

  Madame Faujas, putting her knitting down on the chair, looked at her, eyes flashing behind her spectacles, a little bent over, her hands outstretched as if she were going to pounce on her to keep her quiet. She was about to throw herself at her when Abbé Faujas appeared at the door; he was in his surplice and looked very stern.

  ‘Why, whatever’s the matter, Mother?’ he asked.

  The old lady put her head down, and drew back like a bulldog hiding behind its master’s legs.

  ‘Is that you, my dear Madame Paloque?’ the priest went on. ‘Did you want a word with me?’

  The justice’s wife, through a supreme effort of will, managed to smile. She replied, in a terrifyingly pleasant tone of voice, cuttingly:

  ‘Oh, you were there, Monsieur le Curé? Oh, if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have insisted at all. I wanted to see our altar cloth, which must be in a rather bad state by now. As you know, I am a good housekeeper here; I look after the little details. But if you are busy I won’t disturb you any longer. Do what you have to do, it’s your house. Madame only had to say the word, and I would have left her, to make sure you had your peace and quiet.’

  Madame Faujas made a growling noise. A look from her son calmed her down.


  ‘Come in, I beg you,’ he continued. ‘You aren’t disturbing me in the slightest. I was giving confession to Madame Mouret who is not very well… Please come in. The altar cloth could do with changing, you are right.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll come back another time,’ she said again. ‘I am embarrassed that I interrupted you. Carry on, carry on, Monsieur le Curé.’

  But she did go in. While she was looking at the altar cloth with Marthe, the priest was quietly scolding his mother.

  ‘Why did you stop her, Mother? I didn’t tell you to guard the door.’

  She looked straight ahead with the air of an animal refusing to do what it’s told.

  ‘Over my dead body would she have got in,’ she muttered.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because… Listen, Ovide, don’t be cross; you know I can’t bear you to be cross with me… You told me to accompany the landlady here, didn’t you? Well, I thought you needed me because of inquisitive people. So I sat there. You were free to do whatever you wanted, I promise you; nobody would have poked their nose in.’

  He understood, caught hold of her hands, shaking her and said:

  ‘What, Mother, you presumed…?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t presume anything,’ she replied with sublime insouciance. ‘You are the master and you do what you want, and whatever you do is good, you see. You are my son… I would steal for you, you know very well.’

  But he was no longer listening. He had let go his mother’s hands; he looked at her as though he were lost in thoughts that made his face sterner, and more austere.

  ‘No, never, never,’ he said with bitter pride. ‘You are mistaken, Mother… Only chaste men are strong.’

  CHAPTER 16

  DÉSIRÉE at seventeen still laughed her simple laugh. She had grown into a tall, plump and comely girl with the arms and shoulders of a mature woman. She grew like a strong plant, happily, impervious to the ill fortune that was emptying and darkening the house.