The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Read online

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ cried Mouret. ‘I should have been there; the furniture is my guarantee after all… I knew you wouldn’t budge from your chair. You don’t have much sense, my dear… Rose! Rose!’

  And when the cook had arrived:

  ‘Did anyone bring furniture for the people upstairs?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur. In a little cart. I recognized Bergasse’s cart, the dealer on the market. Well, none of it was very heavy. Madame Faujas was following it. As she came up the Rue Balande, she even lent the fellow who was pushing it a hand.’

  ‘But you saw the furniture at least. Did you count the pieces?’

  ‘Of course, Monsieur. I went and stood in the doorway. They all went by in front of me, and that didn’t seem to please Madame Faujas. Let me see… First they took up an iron bedstead, then a chest of drawers, two tables, four chairs… I think that was all… And the things weren’t new. I shouldn’t give a hundred and fifty francs for the whole lot.’

  ‘But you should have let Madame know; we can’t rent to them in such conditions… I’ll have to go and have it out with Bourrette straight away.’

  He was getting angry, and was about to leave the house when Marthe managed to stop him in his tracks:

  ‘Listen, I was forgetting… They paid six months’ rent in advance.’

  ‘Oh? So they’ve paid?’ he stammered in a voice that sounded almost annoyed.

  ‘Yes, the old lady came down and gave me this.’

  She rummaged around in her work table and gave her husband seventy-five francs in coins of a hundred centimes, carefully wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Mouret counted the money, muttering:

  ‘If they pay, they are free to… All the same they are a strange pair. It’s true, not everybody’s well off. But even if you don’t have a penny that’s no reason to behave so suspiciously.’

  ‘I meant to tell you as well,’ Marthe said when she saw he had calmed down, ‘the old lady asked if we would mind letting her have the truckle bed; I told her we weren’t using it and that she could keep it as long as she wanted.’

  ‘That was right, we must be obliging… I told you, what I don’t care for with these devilish priests is that you never know what they are thinking or doing. That aside, you often come across some very decent men amongst them.’

  The money seemed to have consoled him. He made jokes, pestered Serge to tell him about the Missions to China which he was reading at the moment. During dinner he pretended not to concern himself any more with the folk upstairs. But when Octave recounted that he had seen Abbé Faujas coming out of the bishop’s palace, Mouret could no longer contain himself. At dessert he went back to the conversation of the day before. Then he was somewhat ashamed, for beneath the thick skin of a retired businessman he possessed a fine soul. Above all he had a lot of common sense, a rightness of judgement which caused him more often than not to hit on the mot juste in the midst of all the provincial tittle-tattle.

  ‘After all,’ he said as he went to bed, ‘it’s not good to poke your nose into the affairs of other people… The priest can do as he pleases. It’s vexing to feel we have to talk about these people all the time; I wash my hands of them from now on.’

  A week went by. Mouret had gone back to his usual occupations; he prowled about the house, chatted to the children, spent his afternoons out concluding business deals as he liked, and never saying a word about them; ate and slept like a man for whom life is a gentle slope, without shocks or surprises of any kind. The house became deadly quiet once more. Marthe was at her accustomed place, on the terrace at her small work table. Désirée was playing at her side. The two boys came home boisterously, at the same times of the day. And Rose the cook got cross, grumbled at everybody, while the garden and the dining room remained in a calm and somnolent state.

  ‘Far be it from me to say so,’ Mouret said again to his wife, ‘but you can see that you were wrong thinking that if we rented out the second floor it would interfere with our lives. We are quieter than ever, the house is smaller but happier.’

  And he sometimes looked up to the windows on the second floor, which Madame Faujas had hung with thick cotton curtains the day after they moved in. Not a single fold in those curtains moved. There was something self-satisfied about them—they conveyed a smug feeling of cold, rigid holiness. Behind them a monastic silence, a stillness, seemed to be deepening. From time to time the windows were partly opened, so that you could see the shadow on the high ceilings between the white curtains. But in spite of Mouret’s watchfulness he never managed to see the hand that opened or shut them; he did not even hear the squeaking of the catch. No human sound came down from the apartment.

  At the end of the first week, Mouret still had not set eyes on Abbé Faujas again. This man living so close to him and whom he never caught even a glimpse of, drove him in the end into a state of nervous anxiety. In spite of his efforts to appear indifferent, he fell again to questioning everyone, he began to make enquiries.

  ‘So you haven’t seen anything of him?’ he asked his wife.

  ‘I thought I caught sight of him yesterday when he came back, but I’m not sure… His mother always wears a black dress, so perhaps it was her.’

  And, as he plied her with questions, she told him what she knew.

  ‘Rose says he definitely goes out every day. He even stays out quite a long time… As to the mother, she is regular as clockwork. She comes down at seven each morning to get her provisions. She has a large basket, which is always closed, in which she must carry everything—coal, bread, wine, food, for you never see a tradesman arrive with them… Anyway they are extremely polite. Rose says they say good day when they meet her. But more often than not she doesn’t even hear them come downstairs.’

  ‘They must prepare some odd meals up there,’ muttered Mouret, who had not gleaned a thing from this information.

  Another evening when Octave said he had seen Abbé Faujas go into Saint-Saturnin, his father asked about his demeanour and how passers-by reacted to him, and what he was going to do in the church.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so inquisitive!’ laughed the young man… ‘He didn’t look very good in the sun with that red soutane… that’s all I know. I even noticed that he was walking along by the houses in the narrow strip of shade, where his soutane looked blacker. He’s not vain you know, he puts his head down and walks quickly… Two girls began to laugh at him when he crossed the square. He raised his head and smiled very kindly at them, didn’t he, Serge?’

  Serge added that several times when they were coming home from school he had been following Abbé Faujas from a distance as he was coming back from Saint-Saturnin. He crossed the road without saying a word to anyone. He didn’t seem to know a soul, and was in some way ashamed of the half-concealed mockery he could feel around him.

  ‘So are they talking about him in town?’ asked Mouret, his interest at its height.

  ‘Nobody talked to me about the priest,’ replied Octave.

  ‘Yes,’ said Serge, ‘they are talking about him. Abbé Bourrette’s nephew told me that they didn’t think much of him in the church. They don’t like those priests who come from distant parts. And besides he looks so unhappy… When they get used to him they’ll leave him alone, poor fellow. But at first they have to make up their minds about him.’

  At that point Marthe suggested that the two boys shouldn’t answer people if anyone asked them about the priest.

  ‘Oh, they can answer,’ cried Mouret. ‘We don’t know anything that would compromise him, that’s certain.’

  From that moment quite innocently and without any malicious intent he made his children into spies and set them to follow the priest. Octave and Serge had to recount everything that people were saying about him in town, and were given orders to follow him whenever they happened to meet him. But that source of information soon ran dry. The muttered rumours occasioned by the arrival of a priest who was strange to the diocese had stopped. The town seemed to have forgive
n the ‘poor fellow’ in his worn-out soutane who scurried along its narrow shaded streets; but all they felt for him now was disdain. For his part, the priest walked straight to the cathedral and came back again, always taking the same route. Octave said jokingly that he even counted the paving stones.

  Inside the house Mouret wanted to make use of Désirée, who never went out. He took her to the bottom of the garden in the evening and listened to her prattle about what she had seen and done during the day; he tried to get her talking about the folk on the second floor.

  ‘Listen,’ he said to her one day, ‘tomorrow when the window is open you can throw your ball up into their room and go and ask them for it back.’

  The next day she threw her ball up; but she had only got as far as the steps when the ball, thrown by an invisible hand, came bouncing back on to the terrace. Her father, who had been relying on the kind little girl to repair relations that had been broken on the first day, despaired then of his attempts. He was evidently coming up against the priest’s very decided wish to keep himself barricaded in his own apartment. This struggle only made his curiosity burn more fiercely. He took to gossiping in corners with the cook, much to the disapproval of Marthe who chided him for his undignified behaviour. But he got angry and told lies. As he felt he was in the wrong, he took to chatting to Rose surreptitiously about the Faujas.

  One morning, Rose beckoned him to follow her into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, there you are, Monsieur,’ she said, shutting the door. ‘I’ve been watching for you to come down for a good hour.’

  ‘Have you found something out?’

  ‘You shall see… Yesterday I chatted to Madame Faujas for more than an hour.’

  Mouret was thrilled. He sat down on a kitchen chair which had lost its straw, in the midst of yesterday’s dishcloths and vegetable peelings.

  ‘Quick, tell me,’ he urged.

  ‘Well,’ said the cook, ‘I was at the front door saying hello to Monsieur Rastoil’s maid when Madame Faujas came down to empty a bucket of dirty water into the gutter. Instead of going upstairs again and not turning round, as usual, she stayed looking at me for a minute or two. I thought she wanted to have a chat. I said to her that it had been a fine day and the wine harvest would be good… She answered “Yes, it will” in an indifferent kind of way and wasn’t in any hurry to go, her being a woman who doesn’t own any land and so isn’t interested in that sort of thing at all. But she’d put down her bucket and didn’t go. She even leaned against the wall, beside me…’

  ‘So what did she tell you?’ asked Mouret, in a torment of impatience.

  ‘I wasn’t so silly as to ask her lots of questions, you understand; she would have run away… In a roundabout way I brought the conversation round to what she might be interested in. As the priest-in-charge of Saint-Saturnin, that nice Monsieur Compan, just went by, I told her that he had been very ill, and hadn’t long to live and that they would find it hard to find a replacement for him in the cathedral. She was all ears, I can tell you. She even asked me what was wrong with him. Then, bit by bit I talked to her about our bishop. Monsignor Rousselot is a very good gentleman. She didn’t know how old he was. I told her he is sixty, that he is rather soft as well, and sometimes lets people tread all over him. They often say that Monsieur Fenil, the assistant bishop, does whatever he wants at the bishopric… The old lady was really interested; she would have been there in the street till tomorrow morning.’

  Mouret made a gesture of despair.

  ‘After all that,’ he cried, ‘I can see that the chatting was done entirely by you… But what did she say?’

  ‘Wait, let me finish,’ Rose went on calmly. ‘I was coming to that… I ended up telling her about us so as to get her to talk. I told her you were Monsieur François Mouret, a former businessman from Marseilles and that in fifteen years you made your fortune in wine, oil, and almonds. And I told her that you chose to come and enjoy the fruits of your earnings in Plassans, a quiet town where your wife’s relatives live. I even found a way of telling her that Madame is your cousin, that you are forty years old and she is thirty-seven and that you are a very happy family. You weren’t to be seen on the Cours Sauvaire very often. Well, the whole story… She seemed very interested. She kept answering “Yes, yes”, and wasn’t in any hurry to go. When I stopped, she nodded, like this, as if to say that she was listening and I should go on… And we went on chatting like that till it was dark, like good friends, leaning against the wall.’

  Mouret had risen, in a rage.

  ‘What!’ he cried. ‘Is that all!… She made you natter away for an hour and told you nothing!’

  ‘When it got dark, she said: “It’s getting cooler.” And she took her bucket again and went upstairs.’

  ‘You are a complete fool! That old woman is worth ten of you! Oh, how they must be laughing now they know everything they wanted to know about us… Rose, you are a complete fool!’

  The old cook was not of a patient temperament. She began to stomp around, clattering the pans and saucepans, crumpling cloths and throwing them about.

  ‘You know, Monsieur,’ she brought out, ‘if you’ve only come into my kitchen to call me names you needn’t bother. You can get out… What I did was only to make you happy. If Madame found us here doing what we are doing she would tell me off, and she’d be right, because it’s not good… After all I couldn’t tear the words out of the lady’s mouth, could I?… I went about it the same as anybody would. I chatted, I told her your business. And it’s too bad for you if she didn’t talk about herself. Go and ask her if it means so much to you. Perhaps you won’t be so foolish as me, Monsieur…’

  She had raised her voice. Mouret thought it would be wise to make good his escape, shutting the kitchen door behind him, so that his wife wouldn’t hear. But Rose opened the door again behind his back, shouting to him in the hall:

  ‘I shan’t do anything else—you can get somebody else to do your dirty work if you want.’

  Mouret was beaten. He remained somewhat bitter about his defeat. Resentfully, he consoled himself by saying that the people on the top floor were of no importance. He gradually put about a view amongst all his acquaintances that became current in the town. Abbé Faujas was regarded as a priest without any means or ambition, completely detached from the goings-on in the diocese. It was thought he was ashamed of his poverty, accepting the chores in the cathedral that no one else wanted, and hiding as much as possible in the shadows, where he seemed to be happy. About one thing only they were curious—the reason why he had come to Plassans from Besançon. Certain tales were going round. But the suggestions seemed to be random. Even Mouret, who had enjoyed spying on his tenants to pass the time, in much the same way as he would have played at cards or bowls, was beginning to forget that a priest was lodging in his house. And then something new occurred to occupy him.

  One afternoon as he was coming home he noticed Abbé Faujas going up the Rue Balande ahead of him. He slowed down. He studied him in a leisurely fashion. It was the first time he had seen him in full daylight like that during the month that the priest had been lodging in the house. The priest was still wearing his old cassock; he was walking slowly with his three-cornered hat in his hand, his head bare, in spite of the chilly wind. Not a soul could be seen in the steep street, with its great bare house fronts, their shutters closed. Mouret, hastening, ended up walking on tiptoe in case the priest heard him and eluded him. But as they were both approaching Monsieur Rastoil’s house, a group of people came out of the Place de la Sous-Préfecture and entered it. Abbé Faujas made a slight detour to avoid these gentlemen. He watched the door close. Then, stopping abruptly, he turned round just in front of his proprietor who was directly behind him.

  ‘I am delighted to meet like this,’ he said with impeccable politeness. ‘I would have permitted myself to intrude on your privacy this evening… On the day we last had any rain, some wet came through the ceiling in my room that I should like to point out to you.’


  Mouret stood before him, and said in an embarrassed way that he was at his disposal. And as they went in together he asked him what time would be convenient for him to come up and see the ceiling.

  ‘At once, if you please,’ the priest replied. ‘If it’s not too inconvenient.’

  Mouret, stunned, followed him upstairs, while Rose watched them climb each step, as she stood in amazement at the kitchen door.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN Mouret got up to the top floor, he was more excited than a schoolboy about to enter a woman’s bedroom for the first time. The unexpected satisfying of a long pent-up desire, the hope of seeing something completely extraordinary, made him quite breathless. In the meantime Abbé Faujas, hiding the key in his large fingers, had inserted it into the keyhole, the iron making no sound at all. The door slid open as if on velvet hinges. The priest stood aside and ushered Mouret in without a word.

  The cotton curtains hanging at the two windows were so thick that the room was a pale chalky colour, like the half-light in a walled cell. This room was huge, with a high ceiling and clean, if faded, wallpaper of a washed-out yellow hue. Mouret ventured in, and, stepping gingerly over the tiles, as polished as ice, he seemed to feel the cold beneath the soles of his shoes. He risked a covert look at the iron curtainless bedstead, whose sheets were so tightly tucked in that you would have supposed it to be a white stone bench placed in a corner. A chest of drawers, which looked lost at the other side of the room, and a small table placed in the middle, with two chairs, one in front of each window, completed the furnishings. Not a piece of paper on the table, not an object on the chest of drawers, not a piece of clothing on the walls: bare wood, bare marble, bare walls. Above the chest, a large black wooden Christ cut through this grey bareness with his dark cross.

  ‘Come in, Monsieur,’ the priest said. ‘Come over here. It’s in this corner that a mark on the ceiling has appeared.’