The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Page 5

  ‘I’ll go and help her.’

  And she climbed the stairs after the servant. The priest did not even turn his head. He was smiling at the three children standing before him. His face could assume a most gentle expression when he wanted, in spite of the harshness of his brow and the hard lines around his mouth.

  ‘Is that your whole family, Madame?’ he asked Marthe, who had drawn near.

  ‘Yes, Monsieur,’ she replied, embarrassed by the uncompromising look he gave her.

  But he was looking at the children again and said:

  ‘These two great lads will be men before long… Have you finished your studies, young man?’

  He was speaking to Serge. Mouret butted in.

  ‘This one has finished, though he’s the younger. When I say he’s finished, I mean he’s passed his exams, but he’s gone back to school to do his year of philosophy. He’s the brains of the family… The other one, the eldest, this great lump here, isn’t up to much I’m afraid. He’s already failed his baccalaureate twice, and he’s a bit of a rogue as well—he couldn’t care less.’

  Octave listened to this criticism with a smile on his face, while Serge had bowed his head at the praise. Faujas appeared to consider them for another moment in silence. Then passing on to Désirée, he resumed his air of sympathy and asked:

  ‘Will you allow me to be your friend, Mademoiselle?’

  She made no answer. As though afraid of him, she went over and hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. The latter, instead of disengaging herself, put an arm round her waist and squeezed her tight.

  ‘Please forgive her,’ she apologized, somewhat sadly. ‘She is rather weak-minded and she has remained a child… She’s very unsophisticated… We don’t torment her with studying. She’s fourteen years old and so far all she likes is animals.’

  Désirée took heart at her mother’s comforting words. She looked up and smiled. Then, daringly:

  ‘I’d like you to be my friend… But… tell me you never hurt flies?’

  And as everybody found that funny, she went on gravely:

  ‘Octave squashes flies. It’s naughty.’

  Abbé Faujas had sat down. He seemed very tired. He gave himself up briefly to the peace of the terrace, letting his eyes range slowly over the garden and the neighbour’s trees. This great sense of calm, this deserted corner of a provincial town occasioned a sense of wonderment in him. The darkness fell in patches over his face.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ he said softly.

  Then he was silent, as though absorbed and lost in thought. He started slightly when Mouret said to him with a little laugh:

  ‘If you don’t mind, Monsieur, we shall have supper.’

  And when his wife gave him a look:

  ‘Please join us and let us offer you a bowl of soup. That way you will not need to go and have dinner in the hotel… Please do, you are welcome.’

  ‘Our sincere thanks, but we are not in need of anything,’ the abbé replied in tones of extreme politeness that did not encourage a second invitation.

  The Mourets then returned to the dining room and sat down at the table. Marthe served the soup. There was soon a joyful clatter of spoons. The children chattered. Désirée laughed out loud as she listened to a story told by her father, delighted that they were finally about to eat. In the meantime Abbé Faujas, whom they had forgotten, stayed seated motionless on the terrace facing the setting sun. He did not look round; he seemed not to be listening. As the sun was about to disappear he took off his hat, no doubt finding the heat stifling. Marthe, sitting in front of the window, could see his large bare head with short hair, greying at the temples. One last red gleam illumined this rough soldierly pate and made his tonsure look like a scar from a bludgeon. Then the glimmer of light vanished and the priest, coming into the shadows, was nothing but a black silhouette against the pale grey twilight.

  Unwilling to call Rose, Marthe went and got a lamp herself and served up the first dish. As she came back from the kitchen, she met a woman she did not at first recognize at the bottom of the stairs. It was Madame Faujas. She had donned a cotton bonnet and looked like a servant, with her cotton dress fastened under the bodice with a yellow sash and knotted behind her back. She had rolled up her sleeves and was puffing audibly from the chores she had just completed, her big laced-up shoes tapping along the paved floor.

  ‘So have you finished, Madame?’ asked Marthe, with a smile.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ she replied. ‘It was all done with in a trice.’

  She went down the steps and her voice modulated:

  ‘Ovide, my son, you can go up if you want to. It’s all ready up there.’

  She had to touch her son on the shoulder to draw him out of his reverie. The air was getting cooler. He shivered and followed her without a word. As he passed the door of the dining room which was all bright in the lamplight and buzzing with the children’s conversation, he put his head round the door and said in his suave voice:

  ‘Allow me to thank you again and forgive us for this intrusion… We do apologize…’

  ‘No no!’ Mouret cried. ‘It’s we who are sorry not to be able to offer you anything better tonight.’

  The priest raised his hand in acknowledgement and Marthe again met the clear eagle-like look which had thrown her into such confusion. It was as though from the depths of his eyes, ordinarily a bleak grey, a light had momentarily flashed on, like those you see moving behind the sleeping fronts of people’s houses.

  ‘Our priest has a gleam in his eye by the look of it,’ observed Mouret, laughing, when mother and son had gone.

  ‘I don’t think they are very happy,’ whispered Marthe.

  ‘Well, he certainly doesn’t carry a goldmine in his box… it’s light as a feather! I could have lifted it with the tip of my little finger.’

  But his chattering was interrupted by Rose, who had come running down the stairs to tell them about the surprising events she had just witnessed.

  ‘My goodness,’ she said, standing at the table where her employers were eating. ‘That woman is strong as a horse! She’s over sixty-five if she’s a day and you’d never know it! She bustles around and works like nobody’s business.’

  ‘Did she help you move the fruit?’ asked Mouret, intrigued.

  ‘She did, sure enough, Monsieur. She carried away the fruit like this, in her apron; it was loaded fit to burst. I said to myself “Her dress won’t stand it.” But nothing of the sort. It’s strong material like what I wear myself. We had to do more than ten trips. My arms were sore and aching. She was grumbling away and saying it wouldn’t do. I think I heard a bit of swearing, if you don’t mind my saying.’

  Mouret appeared to enjoy this greatly.

  ‘And what about the beds?’ he enquired.

  ‘She made up the beds… You should see her turn a mattress. She doesn’t find it heavy, I can tell you. She takes it by the end and throws it up in the air like a feather… And very careful she is and all. She tucked in the truckle bed as if it were a baby’s cot. If she’d had to put Baby Jesus to bed, she couldn’t have laid the sheets on it more lovingly… Of the four blankets she placed three on the truckle bed. Just like for the pillows—she didn’t want any for herself. Her son’s got both of them.’

  ‘So is she going to sleep on the floor?’

  ‘In the corner, like a dog. She threw a mattress down on the floor in the other bedroom, saying she would sleep there, sounder than in Paradise. I couldn’t persuade her to do anything else more decent. She claims she’s never cold and her head is too hard to mind the tiles… I gave them water and sugar like Madame said and that was that… All the same, they’re queer folk.’

  Rose finished serving dinner. The Mourets let the meal go on some time that evening. They chatted for a long while about the new tenants. The arrival of these two strangers was a big event in their usual well-ordered routine. They spoke of it as they might a disaster, adding the tiny details which invariably help t
o pass the long evenings in the country. Mouret in particular enjoyed small-town tittle-tattle. At dessert, elbows on the table, in the warmth of the dining room, he repeated for the tenth time, with the satisfied expression of a contented man:

  ‘Besançon’s not done Plassans any favours, sending him… Did you see the back of his soutane when he turned round?… It would greatly surprise me if he had the churchwomen running after him. He’s too badly turned out; penitents like their priests to look smart.’

  ‘He has a pleasant enough voice,’ said the indulgent Marthe.

  ‘Not when he’s angry,’ Mouret replied. ‘Didn’t you hear him get cross when he discovered the apartment wasn’t furnished? He’s a rough-mannered man. You can bet he won’t waste time in the confessionals. I am curious to know how he’s going to go about getting furniture tomorrow. As long as he pays up at least. Well anyway, I can always get hold of Abbé Bourrette—he’s the only contact I have.’

  The family was not very religious. The children also made fun of the priest and his mother. Octave imitated the old lady craning her neck to peer into every corner of the room, which made Désirée laugh.

  The more serious Serge stuck up for ‘those poor people’. As a rule, unless he was going to play piquet,* Mouret got his candlestick at exactly ten o’clock, and went to bed; but that evening at eleven he was still not ready to turn in. Désirée had finally fallen asleep with her head in Marthe’s lap. The two boys had gone up to their room. Mouret was still chatting away alone with his wife.

  ‘How old do you think he is?’ he enquired abruptly.

  ‘Who?’ said Marthe who was also beginning to feel sleepy.

  ‘The priest of course! What do you think? Between forty and forty-five? He’s a fine-looking fellow. What a shame he wears a soutane! He would have made a famous carabineer.’

  Then after a silence, talking to himself and continuing to voice the thoughts that were causing him such deliberations:

  ‘They arrived on the six forty-five train. So they only had time to call at the Abbé Bourrette’s before coming here… I bet they haven’t had anything to eat. That’s for sure. We should have seen them go out to the hotel… Oh yes, I should dearly like to know where they could have eaten.’

  Rose, who for a while had been moving back and forth to the dining room, waiting for her employers to go to bed before locking the doors and windows, said:

  ‘I know where they ate.’

  And when Mouret quickly turned round, she added:

  ‘Yes, I went back up to see if they needed anything. I didn’t hear any noise and didn’t dare knock; I spied through the keyhole.’

  ‘But that’s very wicked,’ Marthe interrupted severely. ‘You know perfectly well that I don’t like you doing that.’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ cried Mouret, who in other circumstances would have lost his temper with the inquisitive servant. ‘You looked through the keyhole?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur, it was for a good reason.’

  ‘Of course. So what were they doing?’

  ‘Well, Monsieur, they were eating… I saw them eating off one corner of the truckle bed. The old lady had spread out a napkin. Each time they poured out some wine they laid the litre bottle back down on the pillow.’

  ‘But what were they eating?’

  ‘I don’t exactly know, Monsieur. It seemed like the remains of some pâté out of a newspaper. They had some apples too, some small apples that didn’t look very nice.’

  ‘And were they chatting? Could you hear what they were saying?’

  ‘No, Monsieur, they weren’t chatting… I stayed up there a good quarter of an hour spying on them. They weren’t saying anything. They just ate and ate!’

  Marthe had got to her feet, waking Désirée, as though she were going upstairs. Her husband’s curiosity pained her. The latter finally decided to get up himself, while old Rose, who was religious, went on muttering:

  ‘That poor dear man must have been ravenous. His mother passed him the biggest morsels and took pleasure in watching him eat… Well anyway, he’s going to sleep in some lovely white sheets. I hope the smell of the fruit doesn’t bother him. It doesn’t smell very nice in the room, you know, with that sharp smell of apples and pears. And not a stick of furniture, nothing except the bed in the corner. If it were me I should be scared, I’d keep the light on all night.’

  Mouret had taken his candlestick. He remained a moment in front of Rose, summing up the evening with the words of a man disturbed in his usual thinking:

  ‘It’s extraordinary.’

  Then he joined his wife at the foot of the stairs. She was already in bed and asleep while he was listening to the faint noises coming from the floor above. The priest’s room was directly above theirs. He heard him open the window quietly and it much intrigued him. He raised his head from the pillow, desperately fighting sleep, dying to know how long the priest would remain at the window. But sleep got the better of him. Mouret was sleeping like a log before he could hear the muffled squeak of the catch again.

  On the floor above, Faujas, bareheaded, was staring out into the darkness. He remained there for a long time, happy to be finally alone, absorbed in the thoughts that caused such harshness across his brow. He could sense on the floor below the tranquil slumber of this house he had only been in for a few hours: the pure respiration of the children, the honest breathing of Marthe, and the sound of Mouret’s heavy, regular breath as he slept. And there was a touch of disdain as well as defiance in the way he lifted his head as though to see into the distance, to the furthest houses in the little sleeping town. The tall trees in the gardens of the sub-prefecture formed a dark mass, Monsieur Rastoil’s pear trees stretched out their thin, twisted branches; after that, there was a sea of darkness, a void, from which not a sound could be heard. The town was as innocent as a young girl rocking a cradle.

  Faujas stretched out his arms in an ironic challenge, as though he wanted to pull Plassans to his broad chest and suffocate it. He muttered:

  ‘So much for those fools smiling this evening as they saw me crossing their streets!’

  CHAPTER 3

  NEXT day, Mouret spent the morning spying on his new tenant. This occupation would fill the empty hours he spent at home fussing around, tidying things that had not been put away, picking quarrels with his wife and children. From now on he had something to keep him busy, a distraction, something to take him away from his daily routine. As he said, he didn’t care for priests and this first one that had entered his life interested him to an extraordinary degree. This priest brought with him a whiff of mystery; a stranger who made him rather anxious. Although he brazened it out, declaring himself to be a ‘Voltairean’ freethinker,* he felt an incredulity, a bourgeois frisson vis-à-vis the priest, in which there was more than a touch of lively curiosity.

  Not a sound came from the second floor. On the stairs, Mouret listened hard, and even risked going up to the attic. His step slowed as he went along the landing; he was greatly agitated by what sounded like a shuffling of slippers behind the door. Unable to discover anything definite, he went down to the garden and walked around under the arbour at the bottom, looking up and trying to see through the windows what was happening in the rooms. But not even the shadow of the priest could be seen. Madame Faujas, who, no doubt, did not have any curtains, had hung some sheets over the glass for the time being.

  At lunch Mouret seemed very put out.

  ‘Are they dead up there?’ he said as he cut the bread for the children. ‘Marthe, you haven’t heard them moving around?’

  ‘No, dear. I haven’t been listening.’

  Rose shouted from the kitchen:

  ‘They haven’t been up there for a while. If they are out and about still, they must have gone a long way.’

  Mouret called the cook and questioned her in detail.

  ‘They went out, Monsieur. The mother first and the priest afterwards. They step so quiet I shouldn’t have seen them, if their shadows hadn’t
passed in front of the kitchen window when they opened the door… I looked out into the street to see. But they had slipped off smartly, I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s very strange. Then—where was I?’

  ‘I believe Monsieur was at the bottom of the garden looking at the grapes in the arbour.’

  That had the effect of putting Mouret in a frightful mood. He heaped insults upon the priesthood: they were all sly; they were up to all kinds of tricks the devil himself was no match for them; they affected a ridiculous prudery, to such an extent that no one had ever seen a priest shaving. In the end, he was wishing he hadn’t rented rooms to this priest he’d never met.

  ‘You are to blame as well!’ he said to his wife, getting up from the table.

  Marthe was about to protest and remind him of their discussion the day before. But she raised her eyes, looked at him, and said nothing. He, however, could not bring himself to go out as he usually did. He went back and forth from dining room to garden, picking up this and that, pretending that everything was untidy, that the house was turned upside down. Then he got cross with Serge and Octave who, he said, had left half an hour early for school.

  ‘Isn’t Papa going out?’ Désirée asked in her mother’s ear. ‘He will get on our nerves if he stays here.’

  Marthe made her be quiet. Mouret spoke finally about some business he had to complete in the course of the day. He did not have a moment. He couldn’t even have a day’s rest at home, if he needed it. He left, in despair at not being there, and not to be on watch.

  In the evening when he got back he was in a fever of curiosity.

  ‘What news of the priest?’ he asked before he had even taken off his coat.

  Marthe was working in her usual place, on the terrace.

  ‘The priest?’ she repeated in some surprise. ‘Oh yes, the priest… I haven’t seen him. I think he has moved his things in. Rose told me someone had brought some furniture.’