The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (25 page)

‘Because you are so unconcerned about your interests,’ she told her son one day, ‘I shall look after them properly on your behalf. Don’t be afraid, I shall be careful… If I weren’t there, you know, your sister would take the bread out of your mouth.’

Marthe didn’t realize what drama was going on around her. The house simply struck her as being more alive, since the hall, the stairs, and the passages were full of people. You would have said it was a guest house, with the sound of suppressed quarrels, doors opening and closing, the casual, personal life of everyone who lived there, the hot and busy kitchen where Rose seemed to be catering for large numbers of people. And then there was the constant stream of suppliers. Olympe, who looked after her hands and did not want to do any more washing-up, ordered everything to be delivered, from a patissier in the Rue de la Banne, who prepared meals for the town. And Marthe smiled and declared herself happy with this transformation throughout the house. She no longer liked to be on her own; she needed occupations for the fever that blazed within her.

Mouret, meanwhile, as if to escape all the commotion, shut himself away in the room upstairs that he called his study. He had got over his
dislike of solitude, and hardly ever went down into the garden now, disappearing from morning till night.

‘I’d love to know what he does in there,’ said Rose to Madame Faujas. ‘You don’t hear a sound. You’d think he was dead. If he hides away like that, it’s because he’s up to no good.’

When summer arrived, the house became still more lively. Abbé Faujas entertained guests from both the sub-prefect’s and the president’s clan, in the arbour. On Marthe’s orders Rose had bought a dozen garden chairs so that they could sit in the fresh air without moving the seats from the dining room. The habit became established. Each Tuesday afternoon the gates of the Impasse remained open; the ladies and gentlemen came to greet Monsieur le Curé in neighbourly fashion wearing straw hats and summer shoes on feet, their coats unbuttoned and their skirts pinned up. The visitors arrived one by one, eventually mingling, talking and laughing together, chatting most intimately to one another.

‘Aren’t you afraid’, Monsieur de Bourdeu asked Monsieur Rastoil one day, ‘that these meetings with the clique from the sub-prefecture might be rather unwise?… The general elections take place soon.’

‘Why unwise?’ replied Monsieur Rastoil. ‘We are not going to the sub-prefecture. We are on neutral territory… And then, my friend, there is nothing official about it. I keep on my linen jacket. It’s a private occasion. No one has the right to judge what I do at the back of my house… In front, that’s another matter, we belong to the public… Monsieur Péqueur and I don’t even greet each other when we meet out in the street.’

‘Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies is a man worth getting to know,’ the former prefect risked after a silence.

‘I’ve no doubt,’ the president replied. ‘I’m delighted to have made his acquaintance… And what an excellent fellow Abbé Faujas is! No, I don’t fear people’s critical comments when I say hello to our good neighbour.’

After that mention of the general elections, Monsieur de Bourdeu became anxious. He said he found the first warmth of the summer extremely tiring. Often he had scruples, made known his reservations to Monsieur Rastoil, in order that the latter might reassure him. Anyway, they never touched on politics when in the Mourets’ garden. One afternoon, Monsieur de Bourdeu, vainly casting around for something to say, cried to Doctor Porquier:

‘Tell me, Doctor, have you seen this morning’s
Moniteur
?
^*
The marquis has finally spoken. He has uttered thirteen words, I’ve counted… Poor Lagrifoul! What a laughing stock that man is.’

Abbé Faujas wagged a friendly finger at him.

‘No politics, gentlemen, no politics!’ he murmured.

Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies was chatting to Monsieur Rastoil; they both pretended they hadn’t heard. Madame de Condamin smiled. She went on, addressing Abbé Surin:

‘Is it not the case, Monsieur l’Abbé, that your surplices are stiffened with a weak solution of glue and water?’

‘Indeed so, Madame, with glue and water,’ answered the young priest. ‘Some laundresses use starch, but it is not good because it tears the cloth.’

‘Well,’ went on the young woman, ‘I can’t get my laundress to use glue solution for my petticoats.’

So then Abbé Surin kindly gave her the name and address of his laundress on the back of one of his visiting cards. They talked in this manner about clothes, the weather, the harvest, the doings of the week. An hour went by very agreeably. Games of shuttlecock in the Impasse interrupted the conversations. Abbé Bourrette turned up very frequently, and in his delighted fashion, recounted stories from church that Monsieur Maffre heard right through to the end. Madame Delangre met Madame Rastoil only once, and both of them were very polite, very formal, their dull eyes suddenly gleaming with their former rivalry. Monsieur Delangre did not put himself out much. As for the Paloques, though they still frequented the sub-prefecture, they avoided being there when Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies was about to pay a neighbourly call on Abbé Faujas. The justice’s wife didn’t know what to think since her unfortunate visit to the oratory of the Work of the Virgin. But the person who showed himself to be the most assiduous was certainly Monsieur de Condamin, still wearing the smartest gloves, who came in order to make fun of everybody, telling lies, risking obscenities with extraordinary aplomb, and savouring for a good week afterwards the intrigues he had sniffed. This tall man, getting on in years and so dapper in his tight coat caught in at the waist, was very keen on the young. He made fun of the old, got the young girls in the company on one side, and laughed aloud in a corner with them.

‘Come over here, girls!’ he would say with a smile. ‘Let’s leave the oldies together.’

One day he very nearly beat Abbé Surin in a remarkable game of shuttlecock. The truth was that he made mock of all this provincial society. He had picked on the Rastoils’ son as his particular victim, an innocent boy to whom he said the most atrocious things. He went so far as to accuse him of making up to his wife, and he rolled his eyes fearsomely, which made poor Séverin sweat with anxiety. The worst thing was that the latter believed he really was in love with Madame de Condamin, and kept gazing at her in a shy, lovelorn way, which her husband found extremely amusing.

The Rastoil girls, towards whom the forestry commissioner was as gallant as a young widower, were also the butt of his most cruel jokes. Although they were nearing thirty, he encouraged them to play children’s games, and talked to them as if they were schoolgirls. It amused him greatly to study them when the mayor’s son, Lucien Delangre, was present. He would take Doctor Porquier to one side, a man used to hearing all sorts, and allude sotto voce to Monsieur Delangre’s former affair with Madame Rastoil:

‘Tell me, Porquier, this old boy has a problem… Is it Angéline or Aurélie who is Delangre’s daughter…?

‘Divine if you can, but decide if you dare!’

Meanwhile, Abbé Faujas was pleasant to all the visitors, even to the terrible Condamin, disquieting though he was. He kept in the background as much as he could, spoke rarely and left the two clans to mingle; he appeared simply to be enjoying the role of the tactful host, happy to be a means of bringing together two distinguished groups of people who were just made to understand one another. Marthe had twice thought she should put the visitors at their ease by appearing herself. But she could not bear to see the priest surrounded by all these people. She waited until he was on his own; she had rather see him when he was his usual serious self, walking slowly under their peaceful arbour. The Trouches for their part on Tuesdays took up their jealous spying activities again behind their curtains; while Madame Faujas and Rose, at the back of the hall, craned their necks, and were loud in their admiration of the graceful way Monsieur le Curé received the most respected people in Plassans.

‘Why, Madame,’ said Rose, ‘you can see straight away that he is a distinguished gentleman… Now he’s shaking hands with the sub-prefect. Well, I prefer Monsieur le Curé, although the sub-prefect is a fine-looking man… Why don’t you go out in the garden? In your
place I should get dressed up in my silk dress and go out. After all, you are his mother.’

But the old countrywoman shrugged.

‘He’s not ashamed of me,’ she replied; ‘but I should be worried I’d cramp his style… I’d rather watch him from in here. That gives me more pleasure.’

‘Oh, I understand. You must be so proud of him!… Not like Monsieur Mouret who nailed up the door so nobody could get in. Never one visitor, never a dinner to cook, the garden empty at night—it was scary. We lived like wild animals. It’s true Monsieur Mouret wouldn’t have made a good host. The face he used to make up when someone happened to call!… Don’t you think he should follow Monsieur le Curé’s example? Instead of shutting myself up like that, I should go out in the garden and enjoy myself with the rest of them, I should want to keep my place in society… But no, he’s upstairs, shut away as if he was afraid of catching scabies… By the way, shall we go and see what he’s doing up there?’

One Tuesday they went upstairs. That day the two clans were making a great deal of noise. The laughter rose from the garden through the open windows, while a supplier who was bringing a basket of wine to the Trouches upstairs was making a noise like breaking glass as he took back the empty bottles. Mouret was firmly locked up in his study.

‘I can’t see—the key is in the way,’ said Rose, having put her eye to the keyhole.

‘Wait,’ whispered Madame Faujas.

Very gently she turned the key which was sticking out a little. Mouret was sitting in the middle of the room, at the big empty table covered in a thick coating of dust, without books or papers; he was leaning back against his chair, dangling his arms, his face white and staring, lost to the world. He was not moving.

The two women took turns to peer at him in silence.

‘He makes my flesh creep,’ said Rose, as they went downstairs. ‘Did you notice his eyes? And the dirt! It’s a good two months since he laid a pen down on that desk. There was I imagining him writing in there!… When you think how jolly the house is, and yet he’s in there all by himself, acting as if he were dead!’

CHAPTER 17

M
ARTHE
’
S
health was worrying Doctor Porquier. He still wore his affable smile, treating her in the way a doctor does the aristocracy, who are never ill, and gave a consultation just as a dressmaker might arrange a fitting for a dress. But you might have surmised by a certain tightness of his lips that ‘the dear lady’ did not just have ‘a slight spotting of blood’, as he had managed to convince her. During the fine weather he advised her to enjoy herself, to go for excursions in her carriage, but not to tire herself. So Marthe, possessed ever more by a vague anxiety and with the need to keep her nervous disposition occupied, organized trips to neighbouring villages. Twice a week after lunch she left in an old repainted barouche rented from a coach maker in Plassans. She went eight or ten miles, so as to be back for six o’clock. She cherished the idea of getting Abbé Faujas to accompany her, and that was in fact the only reason she had obeyed the doctor’s orders; but the abbé, without exactly saying no, always claimed he was too busy, so she had to be satisfied with the company of Olympe or Madame Faujas.

One afternoon as she was passing through the village of Les Tulettes with Olympe, driving alongside the small property belonging to Uncle Macquart, he caught sight of her from up on his terrace where he had planted two mulberry trees:

‘Where’s Mouret? Why hasn’t Mouret come?’

She had to stop a while at her uncle’s and explain at length that she was not very well and couldn’t stay for dinner. He was insisting on killing a chicken.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, finally. ‘I’ll kill it anyway and you shall take it home with you.’

And he went and killed it forthwith. When he brought the chicken back, he laid it on the stone table in front of the house and muttered delightedly:

‘Good and plump, that one.’

Her uncle was halfway through a bottle of wine under his mulberry trees, in the company of a tall, thin lad in grey. He persuaded the two women to sit down, bringing chairs, doing the honours of the house with a satisfied smirk on his face.

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?… My mulberries are doing wonderfully well. In the summer I smoke my pipe in the fresh air. In the winter I sit over there against the wall in the sunshine… Do you see my vegetables? The henhouse is behind. I’ve got another plot of land at the back with potatoes and alfalfa… Oh, my word, I’m sounding old, high time I got around more.’

He rubbed his hands, moving his head gently from side to side, gazing lovingly at his land. But one thought seemed to darken his mood.

‘Is it a long time since you’ve seen your father?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Rougon’s not behaving well… The cornfield over there on the left is for sale. If he’d wanted, we could have bought it. A man who sleeps on hundred-sou coins, what odds is it to him? A miserable three thousand francs, I’m told… But he refused. Last time he even got your mother to say he wasn’t at home… No good will come of that, you’ll see.’

And he repeated several times, shaking his head, laughing his wicked laugh again:

‘No, no good will come of that.’

Then he went to get the glasses, insisting the two women taste his wine. It was a little wine from Saint-Eutrope, a wine he had discovered himself; he drank it with reverence. Marthe scarcely moistened her lips. Olympe managed to empty the bottle. Afterwards she accepted a glass of fruit cordial. The wine was very strong, she said.

‘And what are you up to with your priest?’ the uncle suddenly asked his niece.

Marthe, shocked and taken unawares, looked at him, but said nothing.

‘They say you are very close,’ her uncle continued in a loud voice. ‘Those men of the cloth are often a lot of topers. When they told me about it I said it served Mouret right. I’d warned him… Oh, I’d get rid of the priest for you, all right. Mouret can come and ask my advice, and I’ll even give him a hand if he wants. I’ve never been able to stand those creatures… I know one, Abbé Fenil, who’s got a house on the other side of the road. He’s as bad as the rest of ’em. But he’s as cunning as a monkey, he makes me laugh. I don’t think he gets on very well with your priest, does he?’

Marthe had gone very white.

‘Madame is Monsieur the Abbé Faujas’s sister,’ she said, indicating Olympe, who was all ears.

‘What I said has nothing to do with Madame,’ replied her uncle,
not in the least put out. ‘Madame isn’t cross with me. She’s going to have some more to drink.’

Olympe allowed him to pour her a little more cordial. Marthe had got up and was trying to leave but her uncle made her visit his property. At the bottom of the garden she stopped to look at a large white house built on the slope a few hundred yards from Les Tulettes. The courtyards inside resembled the exercise yards in a prison. The narrow, regular windows which marked out the façade with black bars gave the whole central building the bare, grey look of an asylum.

‘It’s the madhouse,’ murmured her uncle, who had followed the direction of Marthe’s gaze. ‘That lad is one of the wardens. We get on very well. He comes and cracks a bottle with me every now and then.’

And, turning to the man in grey who was finishing his glass of wine under the mulberry trees:

‘Hey Alexandre, come over here and tell my niece which window belongs to the poor old dear.’

Alexandre obliged.

‘You see those three trees?’ he said, pointing with his finger as if he was tracing a map in the air. ‘Well, slightly above the one on the left you should be able to see a fountain in the corner of a courtyard… Follow the windows on the ground floor to the right: it’s the fifth one along.’

Marthe remained silent, her lips white, her eyes fixed, despite herself, on the window he was pointing to. Uncle Macquart was looking in the same direction, eyes half-closed in approval.

‘Sometimes I see her in the mornings when the sun is on the other side. She is keeping very well, isn’t she, Alexandre? That’s what I always tell them when I go to Plassans… I’m in a good position here to keep an eye on her. I couldn’t be better placed.’

He gave a satisfied laugh.

‘As you see, my dear, the heads on the Rougon side are no better than on the Macquarts’. When I sit down here opposite that great hulk of a building, I often say to myself that since the mother is there the whole lot of them will be in there some day… I’m not afraid for myself, thank the Lord. I’ve got my head screwed on all right. But I can think of some whose brains have had a shaking-up… Well, I shall be there to welcome them in, I’ll be able to see them from my little place, I’ll put in a good word for them to Alexandre although the family haven’t always been very nice to me.’

And he added with his chilling smile, like a well-behaved wolf:

‘It’s really lucky for you all that I live in Les Tulettes.’

Marthe began to shake. Although she knew her uncle’s taste for unpleasant jokes and the pleasure he took in tormenting the people he supplied with rabbits, it seemed to her that he was telling the truth and that the whole family would eventually be accommodated there in those long grey lines of huts. She would not stay a minute longer, in spite of all Macquart’s urging and protests that he was going to uncork another bottle.

‘Hey, the chicken!’ he shouted just as she was getting into her carriage.

He hurried back to get it and put it on her lap.

‘It’s for Mouret, do you hear?’ he repeated very pointedly. ‘For Mouret and nobody else. And moreover when I come over I shall ask him if he enjoyed it.’

He winked at Olympe. The coachman was just about to crack his whip when he leaned on the carriage again and said:

‘Go and see your father and talk to him about the cornfield… That’s the field over there in front… Rougon’s in the wrong. We are too old to quarrel. He would come off badly, he knows very well… Make him realize he’s wrong.’

The barouche set off. Olympe, turning, saw Macquart under his mulberry trees enjoying a joke with Alexandre, uncorking that second bottle he had mentioned. Marthe gave express orders to the coachman not to go to Les Tulettes again. In any case she found these excursions tiring. They became gradually rarer, and then she abandoned them altogether when she realized that Abbé Faujas would never agree to come with her.

Marthe was developing into a completely different woman. She was becoming more refined because of the nervous life she led. Her bourgeois solidity, the heavy quietude acquired in those fifteen sleepy years behind a counter seemed to melt away in the burning flame of her devotion. She dressed more smartly now, and chatted away at the Rougons’ soirées on Thursdays.

‘Madame Mouret looks like a young girl again,’ said Madame de Condamin admiringly.

‘Yes,’ murmured Doctor Porquier, nodding. ‘She’s living her life in reverse.’

Marthe, slimmer, with her rosy cheeks and superb, blazing black
eyes, was especially beautiful during those few months. Her face glowed. Her whole being exuded an extraordinary liveliness, enfolding her in a thrilling warmth. It seemed that at forty her forgotten youth burned within her, like a splendid conflagration. Now, no longer holding back her prayers, which were an hourly need in her, she disobeyed Abbé Faujas’s orders. Her knees were worn out on the slabs in Saint-Saturnin; she lived for the psalms, the adorations, and assuaged her desire in the contemplation of the shining monstrances, the glittering chapels, the altars and the priests who gleamed like stars against the dark background of the nave. She had a kind of physical appetite for these glories, an appetite which tortured her and left her with a hollow feeling in her breast and an emptiness in her brain when it was not satisfied. Her suffering was too great, she was pining away and needed nourishment for her passion; she sought the annihilation of herself in the soft murmurs of the confessional; she needed to be crushed beneath the powerful vibrations of the organ, to lose consciousness in the spasm of the communion. That numbed her, and she felt no more pain. She was ravished from the earth, agonizing without suffering, becoming a pure flame consuming itself in love.

Abbé Faujas became even stricter with her, still keeping her in check by his rough treatment. He was surprised by the awakening of such passion, by this eagerness for love and death. He often questioned her about her childhood. He visited Madame Rougon, and for some time remained puzzled and discontented in himself.

‘The mistress of the house is not pleased with you,’ his mother told him. ‘Why don’t you let her go to church when she likes?… You are wrong to go against her will. She’s on our side.’

‘She’s killing herself,’ muttered the priest.

Madame Faujas shrugged in her usual manner.

‘It’s up to her. People take their pleasure where they find it. It’s better to kill yourself praying than give yourself indigestion like that slut of an Olympe… Don’t be so severe with Madame Mouret. You’ll end up making things impossible in the house.’

One day when she was giving him some advice he said in sombre tones:

‘Mother, that woman will get in our way.’

‘What!’ cried his elderly mother. ‘But she worships you, Ovide!… You could do anything you wanted with her, if you only stopped
scolding her. On rainy days she would carry you from here to the cathedral so that you didn’t get your feet wet.’

Abbé Faujas himself understood the need not to treat her so roughly now. He was afraid of things coming to a head. Gradually he allowed Marthe more freedom to go on retreats, to tell her lengthy rosaries, to say a prayer at each station of the cross. He even permitted her to come to his confessional in Saint-Saturnin twice a week. When Marthe no longer had to listen to that fearful voice accusing her of piety as though she had been indulging in some shameful vice, she thought that God had vouchsafed her His grace. She entered at last into the bliss of Paradise. She broke down, she burst into uncontrollable tears without being aware of weeping. Her nerves collapsed and she emerged from these crises in a weakened state, fainting, as though her whole life had flowed down her cheeks. Rose carried her to bed, where she stayed for hours, her lips tight shut, and her eyes half-open, like a corpse.

One afternoon the cook, terrified when she saw her lying there motionless, thought she was dying. It didn’t cross her mind to knock on the door of Mouret’s room, which was locked; she climbed up to the second floor and begged Abbé Faujas to come down to her mistress’s bedside. When he was in her bedroom she ran to fetch the ether, leaving him alone with this unconscious woman lying across the bed. All he did was take her hands and place them between his own. At that she stirred, repeating words at random. Then when she recognized him standing there near her bedside, the blood rose to her cheeks, she buried her head into the pillow and made a move as if to pull the covers over her.

‘Are you feeling better, my child?’ he asked. ‘You worry me a great deal.’

Her throat constricted, and unable to answer, she burst out sobbing, and allowed her head to rest on the priest’s arms.

‘I am not suffering, I am so happy!’ she breathed, in a voice that was no more than a whisper. ‘Let me weep. Tears are my joy! Oh, how good you are to come! I have been waiting for you, calling for you, so long.’

Her voice got fainter and became no more than an ardent prayer.

‘Who will give me the wings to fly to you? Distant from you, my soul longs to be filled with you, pines for you, desires you ardently, sighs for you, O my God, O my only joy, my consolation, my sweetness, my treasure, my happiness and my life, my God and my whole being…’

She smiled as she uttered this incoherent declaration of longing. She clasped her hands, imagining Abbé Faujas had a halo round his head. He had always succeeded in preventing such an avowal from Marthe’s lips; for a moment he was apprehensive, and drew back from her grasp. And then, standing up straight, he said in a tone of authority:

‘I want you to be reasonable. God will refuse your homage if you do not offer it up in the calm light of reason… From now on you must take care of yourself.’

Rose came back in despair at not finding the ether. He made her sit down next to him, repeating in a more gentle voice to Marthe: