The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (30 page)

She fell back, already stiffening in a nervous attack, when Abbé Faujas, who had finished his soup, took her hands, squeezed them hard and spoke in his kindest voice:

‘Be strong in the face of this ordeal sent by God. He will grant you His consolation if you do not struggle with Him. He can bring about the happiness you deserve.’

Beneath the pressure of the priest’s hands and because of the kindly tone of his words, Marthe straightened up again, as though brought back to life, her cheeks burning.

‘Oh yes,’ she said through her sobs, ‘I need so much happiness, promise me much happiness.’

CHAPTER 19

T
HE
general election was due in October.
*
Towards the middle of September, Monsignor Rousselot, having had a long conversation with Abbé Faujas, suddenly left for Paris. It was said one of his sisters who lived in Versailles was seriously ill. Five days later he was back. He was being read to by Abbé Surin in his study. Leaning back in an armchair, wrapped up against the cold in a snug dressing gown of purple silk, although the season was still very warm, he was listening to the feminine voice of the young priest who was lovingly scanning some verses of Anacreon.
*

‘Good, good,’ he murmured. ‘You capture the music of this beautiful language.’

Then, looking anxiously at the clock, he went on:

‘Did Abbé Faujas come this morning?… Oh, my dear boy, what a bother it all is! I still have the horrible noise of the railway in my ears… It rained the whole time in Paris! I had business all over town, and there was mud everywhere.’

Abbé Surin put his book down on the corner of a console.

‘Was Monsignor satisfied with the outcome of his journey?’ he asked with the familiarity of a spoilt child.

‘I know now what I wanted to know,’ the bishop replied, recovering his shrewd smile. ‘I should have taken you with me. You would have learnt some things that are useful to you at your age, given that you are destined for the episcopacy through birth and contacts.’

‘Tell me, Monsignor,’ begged the young priest.

But the prelate shook his head.

‘No, no. One mustn’t say these things… Be friendly towards Abbé Faujas, he could be very useful to you one of these days. I have had some very detailed information.’

Abbé Surin put his hands together in such a winning display of curiosity that Monsignor Rousselot continued:

‘He’d had problems in Besançon… He was in Paris in furnished rooms with no money. He went of his own accord to offer his services. The minister was at that time on the lookout for priests who were loyal to the government. I understand that Faujas frightened him at first with his serious expression and his worn-out soutane. It
was quite by chance that he sent him here… The minister was very friendly to me.’

The bishop finished his sentences with a small dismissive wave, searching for words, fearing to say too much. Then the affection he felt for his secretary got the better of him; he added quickly:

‘Anyway, trust what I am telling you and make yourself useful to the curé of Saint-Saturnin. He’s going to need anybody he can get. He strikes me as a man who won’t forget an insult or a helping hand. But don’t form an alliance with him. He will come to no good. That’s my personal impression.’

‘To no good?’ echoed the young priest in surprise.

‘Oh, at the moment he is full of his success… But it’s his face that worries me, my child; what a terrifying countenance! That man will not die in his bed… Now don’t go compromising me; all I want is a quiet life; I just need to be left in peace.’

Abbé Surin was preparing to take up the book again when Abbé Faujas was announced. Monsignor Rousselot, cheerful, hands outstretched, went to meet him, calling him ‘my dear curé’.

‘Leave us, my child,’ he said to his secretary, who withdrew.

He spoke about his journey. His sister was better. He had been able to see a few old friends.

‘And did you see the minister?’ asked Abbé Faujas, with a meaningful look.

‘Yes, I thought I ought to go and see him,’ answered the bishop, who could feel himself reddening. ‘He sang your praises.’

‘So you don’t doubt me any longer? You trust me?’

‘Absolutely, my dear curé. Anyway I don’t understand politics at all. I will let you deal with all that.’

They chatted the whole morning. Abbé Faujas persuaded him to take a trip round the diocese. He would accompany him and tell him exactly what to say. It would be necessary to send for all the deans as well, so that the curés of the smallest communes could receive their instructions. That posed no problem, the clergy would do as they were told. The most delicate task was in Plassans itself, in the Saint-Marc district. The nobility, shut away in their large houses, had not been exposed at all to the priest’s actions. He had only had some influence until now on the ambitious royalists, the Rastoils, the Maffres, the Bourdeus. The bishop promised to sound out certain salons he frequented in the Saint-Marc district. Anyway, even supposing the
nobility voted the wrong way, they would only amount to a risible few if the clerical bourgeoisie were to abandon them.

‘Now,’ said Monsignor Rousselot, getting up, ‘it would perhaps be a good idea for me to know the name of your candidate so that I can give him my blessing.’

Abbé Faujas smiled.

‘A name is dangerous,’ he replied. ‘If we named our candidate today, there’d be nothing left of him in a week’s time… The Marquis of Lagrifoul has become impossible. Monsieur de Bourdeu, who is hoping to put forward his name, is more impossible still. We will let them tear each other apart, and only intervene at the eleventh hour… Just say that a purely political election would be regrettable and that it will be necessary, in the interests of Plassans, to have a man chosen from outside the parties, someone with a thorough knowledge of the needs of the town and the department. You can even let it be known that we have found this man. But don’t do any more than that.’

It was the bishop’s turn to smile. He moved towards the priest as he was about to take his leave.

‘What about Abbé Fenil?’ he asked, lowering his voice. ‘Aren’t you afraid he will put a spoke in your plans?’

Abbé Faujas shrugged.

‘He hasn’t taken any further steps,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said the prelate. ‘That lack of action worries me. I know Fenil, he’s the most hateful priest in my diocese. He might have given up the idea of beating you on the political front as useless; but you may be sure he will take his personal revenge… He’s probably watching you from the back of his lair.’

‘Well,’ said Abbé Faujas, displaying his white teeth, ‘I don’t suppose he’ll eat me alive, will he?’

Abbé Surin had just come in. When the curé of Saint-Saturnin had left, he made Monsignor Rousselot laugh a lot by saying:

‘Supposing they ate each other up, like the two foxes who had nothing left but their tails?’

The electoral period was about to begin. In Plassans, absolutely untouched by political questions in the normal way of things, the temperature was beginning to rise a little. It was as though an invisible mouth were blowing the winds of war through its quiet streets. The Marquis of Lagrifoul, who lived in La Palud, a large village in the neighbourhood, had come into town two weeks before to visit one
of his relatives, the Count of Valqueyras, whose mansion occupied a corner position in the Saint-Marc district. He let himself be seen about town, took walks on the Cours Sauvaire, went to Saint-Saturnin and greeted influential people, always retaining the morose manner characteristic of the nobility. But these efforts at being pleasant, which had sufficed the first time round, did not appear to be having much success. Accusations, each day more exaggerated, were rife, and came from unknown sources: the marquis was lamentably weak. With anyone except the marquis, Plassans would have had a branch railway line long ago, joining the line to Nice. Moreover, when someone from the Plassans area had gone to see the marquis in Paris, he’d had to go three or four times before getting him to provide the least little service. However, although the candidacy of the outgoing deputy was extremely compromised by these accusations, no other candidate had yet definitely put himself forward. Monsieur de Bourdeu’s name was mentioned, but it was said in the same breath that it would be very difficult to reach a majority with him, a former prefect under Louis-Philippe,
*
with no solid backing anywhere. The truth was that an unknown influence had just turned the expectations of the different candidates in Plassans upside down by rupturing the alliance between the Legitimists and the Republicans. It left people generally perplexed, confused and with a sense of unease, a need to get through the elections as speedily as possible.

‘The majority has shifted,’ opined the shrewd politicians of the Cours Sauvaire. ‘The question is, what has it shifted to?’

With this fever of division affecting the town, the Republicans wanted to nominate their candidate. They chose a hatmaker, a man by the name of Maurin, much loved by the working population. Trouche, in the cafés at night, said he thought Maurin very nondescript. He proposed a man proscribed after the December
coup d’état
, a wheelwright from Les Tulettes, who had the good sense to refuse. It must be said that Trouche declared that he himself was one of the most ardent Republicans. He would have put himself forward, he said, if he had not had his wife’s brother in the church. To his great regret he felt he had to side with the
faux-dévots
,
*
which obliged him to stay out of the limelight. He was one of the first to spread nasty rumours about the Marquis de Lagrifoul; he also advocated the rupture with the Legitimists. The Republicans in Plassans, who were not very numerous, were certainly going to lose. But Trouche’s triumph
came when he accused the party from the prefecture and the Rastoils of having put away poor old Mouret, with the aim of depriving the democratic party of one of its most admirable leaders. The night he made this accusation at a liquor seller’s in the Rue Canquoin, the people who were there exchanged strange looks. The gossips in the old quarter, softening their attitude towards the ‘madman who beat his wife’, now that he was safely locked up, were saying that Abbé Faujas had wanted to get rid of a husband who was in his way. So Trouche repeated his tale every evening, bringing his fist down on the café tables with such conviction that he ended up creating a legend in which Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies played the strangest possible role. There was a complete turnaround in favour of Mouret. He became a political victim, a man whose influence had been feared so much that they had put him away in a room in Les Tulettes.

‘Let me sort it out,’ said Trouche with a confidential air. ‘I’ll show you what all those damn penitents are like, and I’ll tell you a thing or two about their Work of the Virgin… It’s a fine sort of establishment where the ladies make their assignations!’

In the meantime Abbé Faujas was here, there, and everywhere. For quite some time he had been seen continually out on the streets. He took more care of himself, and made an effort to keep a pleasant smile on his face. He lowered his eyelids now and then to hide the dark flame in his eyes. Often, at the end of his patience, and tired of these petty daily struggles, he went back into his bare room, clenching his fists, his shoulders swelling with unspent strength, wishing he had a colossus to strangle, to relieve his feelings. Old Madame Rougon, whom he carried on visiting in secret, was his good fairy. She admonished him soundly, kept his tall frame bent before her on a low chair, telling him again and again that he should try to be nice to everyone, that he would ruin everything if he was so silly as to roll up his sleeves for a fight. Later, when he had won the day, he could seize Plassans by the throat, could strangle the place if he pleased. Of course she had no love lost for Plassans; she resented her forty wretched years and since the
coup d’état
her spitefulness towards it had known no bounds.

‘I’m the one wearing the soutane,’ she told him sometimes with a smile. ‘You are more like a gendarme, my dear curé.’

The priest especially made regular visits to the reading room in the Youth Club. He listened indulgently to the young people discussing politics, nodding his head and saying that honesty was all that was
required. His popularity was increasing. He had consented one day to play billiards, and turned out to be remarkably good at it. When he was in a gathering of two or three he accepted a cigarette. So the club took his advice about everything. What crowned his reputation as being a tolerant man, was the good-natured way he pleaded for the admission of Guillaume Porquier, who had renewed his request.

‘I have seen this young man,’ he said. ‘He came to make his general confession and I did indeed grant him absolution. For every sin, mercy… He can’t be treated like a leper just for unhooking a few signs in Plassans or running up a few debts in Paris.’

When Guillaume had been admitted, he said with a chuckle to the Maffre sons:

‘Well now, you boys owe me two bottles of champagne… As you see, the curé does whatever I want. I’ve got a little way of tickling him in a sensitive place and then he laughs, my dears, he can’t refuse me anything.’

‘But he doesn’t seem very keen on you all the same,’ remarked Alphonse. ‘He gives you some queer looks.’

‘Huh, that’s because I tickled him a bit too much… You’ll see we shall soon be the best of friends.’

And in fact Abbé Faujas seemed to have grown fond of the doctor’s son. He said the poor boy needed a very gentle guiding hand. Guillaume became the life and soul of the club in a very short time; he invented games, told them his recipe for punch with kirsch, led astray the very young lads truanting from school. His attractive vices exercised an enormous influence on them. While the organ thundered away above the billiard room, he was drinking beer, surrounded by the sons of all the polite society of Plassans, telling them dirty stories which made them guffaw with laughter. The club thus went downhill as rascally plots were hatched in corners. But the priest wasn’t aware of them. Guillaume told everyone Faujas was a ‘brainbird’ who had grand ideas running through his head.

‘The priest could be bishop whenever he wants,’ he said. ‘He’s already refused a cure
*
in Paris. He wants to remain in Plassans, he has fallen in love with the town… I would propose him as deputy if it were up to me. He’s the one to represent us in the Chamber! But he wouldn’t have it, he’s too modest… When the elections come, we can ask his opinion. He won’t let us down.’

Lucien Delangre remained the serious member of the club. He
showed great deference towards Abbé Faujas, winning round the support of the group of studious young men for him. He often went to the club with him, chatting eagerly, and falling silent as soon as they went into the club room.