The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (12 page)

At the other end, one each side of the stove, Abbé Faujas and Marthe sat, as if they were quite on their own. The abbé had a man’s and a priest’s disdainful attitude to women. He kept her at a distance, like some shameful obstacle, unworthy of a strong man. And Marthe, full of a peculiar anxiety, would raise her eyes with one of those sudden fears which cause you to look over your shoulder to see if some hidden enemy might be preparing to strike. At other times she would halt abruptly in the midst of laughter when she caught sight of his priest’s robe. She would stop in embarrassment, astonished to find herself talking to a man who was not like other men. It was a long time before any intimacy became established between them.

Abbé Faujas never questioned Marthe directly about her husband, children, or household. Nonetheless he managed to discover the tiniest details of their history and present life. Every evening while Mouret and Madame Faujas were energetically battling it out, he learned some new fact. Once he remarked that husband and wife were physically very alike.

‘Yes,’ said Marthe with a smile. ‘When we were twenty we used to be taken for brother and sister. That’s partly what made us decide to get married. People used to joke about it, line us up side by side, and say we should make a pretty pair. The resemblance was so striking that Monsieur Compan, even though he knew us, wasn’t sure he should marry us.’

‘But are you cousins?’ asked the priest.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘My husband is a Macquart and I’m a Rougon.’
*

She stopped a moment in embarrassment, guessing that the priest was familiar with the history of her family, which was very well known in Plassans. The Macquarts were an illegitimate branch of the Rougons.

‘The oddest thing’, she said, to hide her embarrassment, ‘is that we both resemble our grandmother. My husband’s mother has passed on this likeness to him, whereas in me it has recurred again, but more distantly. One would think it has jumped my father’s generation.’

Then the priest cited a similar example in his own family. He had a sister who was, apparently, the image of his mother’s grandfather. The likeness in this case had jumped two generations. And his sister reminded everyone of this man in character, ways, and even his gestures and the sound of his voice.

‘It’s the same for me,’ Marthe observed. ‘When I was a child I used to hear them say: “She’s the spitting image of Tante Dide.” The poor woman is in the Tulettes now; she never was very right in the head… Now I am older I have calmed down a lot, I have got stronger. But I remember that at twenty I wasn’t in good health; I used to feel giddy, and I had wild ideas. Well, when I think what a strange child I was, it makes me smile.’

‘And your husband?’

‘Oh, he’s like his father—he was a hatmaker with a sensible, methodical nature… We were alike to look at, but as to what was inside, it was quite different… In the end we had grown very similar to one another. We had such a quiet life in our shops in Marseilles! I spent fifteen years there in which I learned to be happy in the bosom of my family.’

Every time Abbé Faujas got her on this subject he sensed a trace of bitterness in her. She was undoubtedly contented, as she claimed; but he thought he could detect the former nervous disorders in her, which had settled down as she approached forty. And he imagined the drama played out between this woman and this man, in their looks so similar, whom all their friends judged to be made for one another; while underneath, the fermentation of illegitimacy, the constant mingling of rebellious bloods, aggravated two differing and antagonistic temperaments.
*
Then he explained to his own satisfaction the fatally debilitating effect of a regular life, the wearing down of character in the daily worries of shopkeeping, the gradual dulling of two natures by the fortune earned over fifteen years, which they had passed in
a modest fashion, buried in a sleepy corner of this small town. Today, although they were both still young, they seemed to be finished, burnt out. The priest shrewdly tried to ascertain if Marthe had resigned herself to this life. He found her very realistic about it.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am happy in my home. My children are enough for me. I’ve never been one for living the high life. I have been a bit bored sometimes, that’s all. I should have found some intellectual occupation but didn’t… But what would have been the point? My head probably wouldn’t have stood it. I wasn’t even able to read a novel without getting terrible headaches… For three nights the characters would be dancing around in my head… The only thing that I have never found tiring is sewing. I stay at home to avoid all the rumours going round the town; I find the gossip and foolishness so wearing.’

She stopped from time to time and looked at Désirée asleep at the table, smiling innocently as she slumbered.

‘Poor child!’ she murmured. ‘She can’t even sew, her head goes funny straight away… The only thing she likes is animals. When she goes to spend a month with her nurse, she lives out in the farmyard and comes back with rosy cheeks and looking very healthy.’

And she often returned to the subject of Les Tulettes with an unspoken fear of madness. So Abbé Faujas sensed a strange anxiety beneath this superficially calm and peaceful abode. Marthe was no doubt very fond of her husband; but mingled with her affection was a certain unease at Mouret’s jokes, at his incessant irony. She was also wounded by his egotism, and the way he left her to her own devices. She was vaguely resentful of the quiet life he had created around her, of this happiness she claimed to enjoy. When she spoke of her husband she always said:

‘He is very good to us… You might hear him shouting sometimes; but it’s because he likes everything to be tidy, you see, often unreasonably so. He gets cross if there is a flower pot out of place in the garden, or a toy left on the floor… Well, he must do as he sees fit. I know people have it in for him because he has amassed a certain amount of money, and he still concludes good deals from time to time; but he doesn’t care what people say about him… They tease him about me as well. They say he is miserly, keeps me at home, and doesn’t even let me buy my own shoes. It’s not true. I am absolutely free. No doubt he would rather find me at home when he comes in, instead of thinking
that I am always going out or paying people visits. Anyway he knows what I like doing. Why should I look elsewhere?’

When she defended Mouret against the Plassans gossip her voice became suddenly animated, as if she needed to protect him also from her own secret criticism. And she returned to the subject of that life outside with a nervous anxiety. Fearing the unknown, she seemed to be taking refuge in the narrow room, in the old garden with the tall box trees, doubting her own strength, afraid of some catastrophe. Then she would smile about this childish fear. She would shrug and slowly go back to knitting her stockings or mending an old shirt. And then Abbé Faujas saw only an aloof housewife with pale eyes before him, with a complexion that had returned to normal, and who had scented the house with fresh linen and a bunch of flowers she had picked in the shade of the evening.

Two months went by in this fashion. Faujas and his mother had fallen into the Mourets’ habits. In the evenings everyone had their own designated place around the table. The lamp was in the same position, the same words fell from the players’ lips into the same silences, and into the same softly spoken words exchanged by the priest and Marthe. When Madame Faujas had not beaten Mouret too convincingly, he found his lodgers ‘very nice people’.

All his curiosity, that of a bourgeois with too little to do, had diminished in his concern about the evening’s game; he no longer spied on the priest, saying that now he knew him well, he considered he was a good fellow.

‘Oh, leave it be!’ he would say loudly to those who attacked Faujas in his hearing. ‘You are imagining things, you are complicating things when there’s a quite simple explanation… I know it for an absolute certainty. He is good enough to spend every evening with us… Oh, he’s not a man to put himself around, I realize that people bear him a grudge for that and accuse him of being stand-offish.’

Mouret enjoyed being the only man in Plassans who could boast of knowing Abbé Faujas. He even played on this advantage. Every time he ran into Madame Rougon he crowed about it, he gave her to understand he had stolen her guest from her. She contented herself with a subtle smile. With his friends, Mouret pushed the confidences even further. He muttered that these damn priests couldn’t do anything the same as other men. He then recounted tiny details, the way the priest drank, the way he spoke to women, the way he kept his
knees apart and never crossed his legs; little anecdotes of no importance in which he pitted the anxious terror of a freethinker against the mysterious soutane reaching down to his guest’s ankles.

Evening succeeded evening, and they had reached the first days of February. In their conversations Abbé Faujas carefully avoided talking about religion with Marthe. Once she had told him almost cheerily:

‘No, Monsieur l’Abbé, I am not a religious person. I don’t go to church very often… Well, what can you expect. In Marseilles I was very busy all the time; now I can’t be bothered to go out very much. And I must tell you, I wasn’t brought up in a religious family. My mother used to say that God came to us.’

The priest had bowed, without saying anything, wishing to make it known by so doing that he preferred not to talk about such matters in these circumstances. However, one evening he drew a picture of the unhoped-for help which suffering souls can find in religion. It was to do with a poor woman who had been led to commit suicide by all sorts of reversals of fortune.

‘She was wrong to despair,’ said the priest in his deep voice. ‘No doubt she was unaware of the consolations of prayer. I have often seen women come to us weeping, broken, and go away again with a resignation they sought vainly elsewhere, and with a renewed zest for life. It’s because they had got down on their knees, had tasted the joy of humbling themselves in some private corner of the church. They came back, they forgot everything—they belonged to God.’

Marthe had listened to this speech with a thoughtful expression; these last words trailed away into a tone of superhuman happiness.

‘Yes, it must be a joyful experience,’ she murmured, as if talking to herself. ‘I have thought about it sometimes but I’ve always been afraid.’

The priest broached these subjects only on very rare occasions; on the other hand he spoke of charity often. Marthe was a very good-natured woman. Tears came into her eyes at the slightest tale of woe. He seemed to take pleasure in seeing her trembling with pity like that. Each evening he had some new and touching story that made her break down in compassion and caused her to drop everything. She would put her sewing aside and join her hands together with a pained expression, looking at him while he went into the desolating details of people dying of hunger, and the poor unfortunates forced into
crime by poverty. At that moment she belonged to him; he could have done whatever he wanted with her. And often at the other end of the room a quarrel broke out between Mouret and Madame Faujas about a
quatorze de rois
*
that had been declared wrongly or about a card that had been taken out of the hand that was put aside.

It was some time in the middle of February that a lamentable episode took place, much to the consternation of Plassans. It was found that a group of young girls, not much more than children, had been running wild in the town and had lapsed into debauchery.
*
And the affair didn’t just concern young people of the same age; it was said that people in respectable positions in society had been compromised. For a week Marthe had been very struck by this story, which caused a great scandal. She knew one of this group of unfortunates, a little blonde girl she had often kissed on the cheek and who was the niece of her cook, Rose. She couldn’t think of this poor girl, she said, without shuddering.

‘It’s a pity’, said Abbé Faujas one evening, ‘that there isn’t a religious centre on the model of the one in Besançon.’

And when pressed with questions by Marthe, he told her what sort of centre this was. It was a kind of crèche for the daughters of working people, for those between eight and fifteen, whose parents were obliged to leave them on their own at home while they go to work. During the day they were given sewing to do, and then in the evening they were returned to their parents when they came home. That way the poor children could grow up removed from vice, surrounded by the best of models. Marthe considered this a noble idea. Gradually she became obsessed by it to the point where all she spoke of was the need for creating a similar house in Plassans.

‘We could place it under the patronage of the Virgin,’ suggested Abbé Faujas. ‘But what a lot of obstacles to overcome! You don’t realize the problems there are in doing the smallest good work. It would require, for such a work to succeed, a motherly, warm, devoted person.’

Marthe lowered her head, looked at Désirée asleep beside her, felt the unshed tears behind her eyelids. She found out about the procedures to follow, the costs of setting it up, the annual expenditure.

‘Will you help me?’ she asked the priest one evening out of the blue.

Abbé Faujas gravely took her hand and kept it a moment in his,
murmuring that she had one of the most beautiful souls he had ever encountered. He would help her, but he was counting absolutely on her. He could do very little. She was the one who would have to raise subscriptions in the town and the one who would take responsibility, in brief, for ladies to form a committee, and who would organize the fine details, which was such a labour, of appealing for charity from the public. And he made a rendezvous with her the very next day at Saint-Saturnin, to put her in touch with the architect from the diocese, who might be able to give her information about the cost much better than he could.

That evening when he went to bed Mouret was very jolly. He had not allowed Madame Faujas to win one game.

‘You look very happy, my dear,’ he said to his wife. ‘Ha, did you see how I had that run of five? The old dear was quite shaken!’