The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (5 page)

CHAPTER 2

M
OURET
made a gesture of annoyance. He really wasn’t expecting his tenant for another two days at the earliest. He got up quickly as Abbé Faujas appeared in the doorway to the passage. He was a tall, strong man with a wide, square face, and a sallow complexion. Behind him, in his shadow, was an elderly woman who bore a surprising resemblance to him, but she was smaller and her appearance was more uncouth. Seeing the table set for supper, they both hesitated: they took a discreet step back, but did not retire completely. The tall black figure of the priest made a sombre mark on the bright whitewashed wall.

‘Forgive us for intruding,’ he said to Mouret. ‘We have just come from Abbé Bourrette’s; he must have told you…’

‘No, he didn’t!’ Mouret exclaimed. ‘That’s typical of him! He always seems to have descended from another planet. This very morning he told me categorically that you wouldn’t be here for another two days… Well, we’ll have to move you in all the same.’

Abbé Faujas apologized. He had a deep voice and its cadences were very melodious. He was truly sorry they had arrived at such an inopportune moment. Having conveyed his apologies in a few well-chosen words, he turned to pay the porter who had brought his trunk. With large, muscular hands he pulled from a pocket in his cassock a purse with just the steel rings visible. Head bent, he rummaged round in it tentatively for a minute or two, feeling the coins with the tips of his fingers. Then, without anyone seeing the coin, the porter went away. Faujas said again, politely:

‘Do carry on with your meal, Monsieur, I beg you… Your servant will show us the rooms. She will help me carry this upstairs.’

He was already bending down to take one of the handles of the trunk. It was a small wooden box reinforced with strips of tin round the middle and at the corners. It looked to have been repaired on one of its sides with a pine cross-piece. Mouret was surprised. He glanced around for the rest of the priest’s luggage, but could see nothing except a large basket which the old lady, tired though she was, held on to with both hands placed in front of her skirts, doggedly unwilling to put it down. Amongst the packets of linen, the corner of
a comb wrapped in paper and the neck of a badly corked litre bottle protruded from under the raised cover.

‘No, no, leave it,’ Mouret said, tapping the trunk lightly with his foot. ‘It can’t be very heavy. Rose will manage on her own.’

He was no doubt unaware of the covert scorn in his words. The old lady fixed her beady black eyes on him. Then she went back into the dining room, which she had been studying ever since she arrived, with its table laid for supper; tight-lipped, she surveyed one thing after another. Abbé Faujas meanwhile had agreed to leave the trunk there. In the yellow dusty sunlight coming in through the garden door, his shabby cassock looked all red; the edges were adorned with patches; it was extremely clean, but so pathetically worn that Marthe, who had thus far remained in her chair with a kind of worried reserve, also rose. The abbé, who, after only a cursory glance at her, had immediately glanced away, saw her get up, while not appearing to look at her at all.

‘I beg you,’ he repeated, ‘do not disturb yourselves. We should be very sorry to interrupt your dinner.’

‘Well, all right!’ said Mouret, who was hungry. ‘Rose will take you up. Ask her if you need anything… Make yourselves comfortable.’

Abbé Faujas, having said goodnight, was on his way to the bottom of the stairs, when Marthe went over to her husband and said softly:

‘But you have forgotten, my dear…’

‘What?’ he asked, seeing her hesitate.

‘You know… the fruit?’

‘Oh, you’re right, there’s the wretched fruit!’ he exclaimed in consternation. And as Abbé Faujas came back with a questioning look: ‘I am really very annoyed, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Father Bourrette is surely a good man, but it is vexing that you entrusted him with this matter… His head is not worth two sous…
*
If we had known, we should have had everything ready. Instead of that, we have to move things around. We were using the rooms, you see. Our entire harvest of figs, apples, grapes is up there on the floor…’

The priest was listening with a surprise that his extreme politeness could not conceal.

‘Oh, it won’t take us long,’ Mouret went on. ‘In ten minutes if you won’t mind waiting, Rose will clear your rooms.’

The worried look on the abbé’s pale face became more marked.

‘The rooms are furnished, are they not?’ he asked.

‘Not at all. There’s not one stick of furniture. We’ve never lived in them.’

At that the priest became agitated. His grey eyes flashed. He exclaimed, barely suppressing his anger:

‘What! But I specifically asked him in my letter if we could rent furnished rooms. Obviously I couldn’t bring any furniture in my trunk.’

‘What did I tell you?’ Mouret’s voice grew louder. ‘That Bourrette is unbelievable… He came round here, Monsieur, and for certain he saw the apples, because he even picked one up, declaring that he had rarely seen such a beautiful apple. He said that everything seemed fine and that it was just right and that he would rent the rooms.’

But Abbé Faujas was no longer listening; his cheeks were flushed with anger. He turned, and in an anxious and stuttering voice he said:

‘Mother, do you hear that? There isn’t any furniture.’

The old lady, her thin black shawl wrapped tightly around her and not letting go of her basket, had just been creeping around inspecting the ground floor. She had got as far as the kitchen door and inspected its four corners; then, coming back to the steps, had slowly taken in the view of the garden. But it was the dining room that interested her most. There she stood as before opposite the laden table, her eyes on the steaming soup, when her son again said:

‘Do you hear that, Mother? We shall have to go to the hotel.’

Without answering, she looked up. Her whole face indicated a refusal to leave this house whose every nook and cranny she was already familiar with.

She gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug, her eyes wandering from the kitchen to the garden and from garden to dining room.

Mouret meanwhile was becoming impatient. Seeing that neither mother nor son seemed about to go away, he went on:

‘Unfortunately we don’t have any beds… Well, in the attic we have a sort of truckle bed which might be all right at a pinch for Madame, but I don’t know what Monsieur l’Abbé could sleep on.’

Then Madame Faujas finally opened her mouth. She said in a clipped, rather hoarse voice:

‘My son can have the truckle bed… I only need a mattress on the floor in a corner.’

The abbé gave an approving nod to this arrangement. Mouret started to protest, to try and think of some other arrangement. But
confronted by the satisfied expression of his new tenants, said nothing, but made do with exchanging a look of astonishment with his wife.

‘Tomorrow is another day,’ he said with his bourgeois dryness. ‘You will be able to get what furniture you need. Rose will go up and take away the fruit and make the beds. Would you wait a moment on the terrace?… Come children, get two chairs.’

Ever since the priest and his mother had arrived, the children had been sitting quietly at the table. They studied the visitors curiously. The priest had seemed not to notice them; but Madame Faujas had stopped for a moment by each of them, as though she wished from the outset to get inside their young heads. At their father’s words all three jumped up from their chairs.

The old lady did not sit down. As Mouret was turning round to see where she was, he saw her standing in front of one of the half-open windows in the sitting room. She was craning her neck, quietly finishing her inspection, like someone visiting a property for sale. The moment Rose lifted the small trunk she came back into the hall, saying simply:

‘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.’