The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (22 page)

‘I know it’s very little; but would that be sufficient to ward off the danger?’ she asked anxiously.

‘A hundred francs, a hundred francs,’ Olympe repeated. ‘No no, he’ll never be happy with a hundred francs.’

Marthe was in despair. She swore she didn’t have any more. She forgot herself so much as to talk about the cruets. If she hadn’t bought them she could have given her the three hundred francs. Madame Trouche’s eyes lit up.

‘Three hundred francs—that’s exactly what they are asking,’ she said. ‘Well, you would have done a greater service to my brother by not giving him this gift, which will remain in the church anyway. What beautiful things the ladies of Besançon have given him! And today he’s none the richer for them. Don’t make any more gifts like that, it’s daylight robbery. Take my advice. There is so much hidden misery in the world. No, a hundred francs would never be enough.’

She spent a good half-hour bemoaning her lot, but when she saw that Marthe really did only have a hundred francs, she ended up accepting them all the same.

‘I’m going to send them to that fellow and make him wait,’ she muttered, ‘but he won’t leave us in peace for long… And above all I beg you not to talk about this to my brother. It would be the death of him… It’s better too if my husband doesn’t know anything about our little doings. He’s so proud, he would do silly things to make it up to you. We women understand each other.’

Marthe was very happy with this loan. From then on she had a new concern: to keep Abbé Faujas, without him knowing, out of harm’s way. She often went upstairs to the Trouches and spent hours there working out with Olympe how they could pay the creditors. The latter had told her that the priest stood guarantor for numerous bills that were pending, and there would be a terrible scandal if they were ever sent to some bailiff in Plassans. The sum owed to the creditors was so huge, according to her, that for a long time she refused to say how much it was, crying even more loudly when Marthe pressed her. Finally one day she mentioned twenty thousand francs. Marthe
froze. She would never be able to raise twenty thousand francs. With staring eyes, she realized she would have to wait for Mouret to die, to get access to such a sum.

‘I’m talking about twenty thousand francs altogether,’ added Olympe quickly, worried by her serious expression. ‘But we should be happy to pay it back in ten years, in small instalments. The creditors would wait as long as we want if they knew they were getting regular payments… It’s very annoying that we can’t find anybody to trust us enough to advance us the necessary money.’

That was their usual subject of conversation. Olympe often spoke of Abbé Faujas as well, whom she seemed to adore. She told Marthe intimate details about the priest. He hated being tickled. He couldn’t sleep on his left side. He had a strawberry mark on his right shoulder, which became red in May like a ripening fruit. Marthe smiled, and never tired of hearing these little things; she questioned the young woman about her childhood and her brother’s. Then, when the question of money came up again she was mad with frustration; she went so far as to complain bitterly about Mouret, and before long the emboldened Olympe never spoke of him in her presence except as ‘the old skinflint’. Sometimes when Trouche got back from his office the two women were still there talking. They fell silent, changed the subject. Trouche maintained his dignified attitude. The patron ladies of the Work of the Virgin were very happy with him. He was never seen in any cafés in the town.

However, Marthe, in order to come to Olympe’s aid—some days she spoke of throwing herself out of the window—urged Rose to take all the useless old objects that had been thrown into corners to the second-hand dealer on the market. The two women were hesitant about this at first. When Mouret was out of the house they only took the damaged chairs and tables. Then they turned to more important objects, sold china, jewellery, anything that could be got rid of without causing too empty a space. They were on a slippery slope; they would have ended up taking away the big pieces of furniture and only leaving the four walls if Mouret had not one day called Rose a thief and threatened her with the police.

‘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 to 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.