The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (18 page)

The president appeared flattered at the role destined for his son. So things were settled, in spite of the opposition of the judge, who had hoped to obtain some glory for himself in setting up the club. The very next day Séverin Rastoil and Lucien Delangre arranged to meet Abbé Faujas. Séverin was a tall young man of twenty-five, an obtuse numbskull of a fellow, who had just passed his law exams, thanks to his father’s influential position. The latter hoped against hope to make him a deputy prosecutor, since he did not see him attracting any clients of his own. Lucien, on the other hand, was small in stature, with a keen eye and had his head screwed on; though a year Séverin’s junior, he pleaded his cases with the aplomb of an experienced practitioner. The
Gazette de Plassans
proclaimed him a future luminary at the Bar. It was especially to the latter that the priest gave the most detailed instructions. The president’s son did the errands, bursting with importance. Within three weeks the Youth Club was up and running.

At that time under the church of Les Minimes at the end of the Cours Sauvaire there were some large offices and a former convent refectory which was no longer used. That was the site that Abbé Faujas had in mind. The parish clergy were very happy to make it over to them. One morning when the provisional committee of the Youth Club had assigned workmen to these cellar-like premises, the good people of Plassans were flabbergasted to see a café being installed under the church. After the fifth day, no one could doubt it any longer. It was a café right enough. Seating was brought in, marble tables, chairs, two billiard tables, three cases of crockery and glasses.
A door was knocked through at the end of the building, as far away as possible from the door of the church. Large red curtains, restaurant curtains, were hung behind the glass door, which you opened after going down five stone steps. There, in front of you, was a large room; this one opened out to a narrower room and a reading room on the right; finally in a square room at the back they had placed the two billiard tables. They were exactly underneath the main altar.

‘Oh, you poor things,’ said Guillaume Porquier to the Maffre boys, when he met them on the Cours, ‘next you’ll be taking Mass between two games of bezique.’

Ambroise and Alphonse begged him not to talk to them by day because their father had threatened to sign them up for the Navy if they kept company with him. The truth was, that after people’s initial astonishment, the Youth Club was enjoying great success. Monsignor Rousselot had accepted the honorary presidency. He even arrived one evening together with his secretary, Abbé Surin. They each drank a glass of blackcurrant syrup in the small reception room and the glass Monsignor had drunk from was kept on a dresser as a mark of respect. This tale is told with emotion in Plassans to this day. That decided all the youngsters in town to join. It was very bad form not to belong to the Youth Club.

However, Guillaume Porquier prowled around on the periphery of the club, teasing them like a young wolf who dreams of entering the sheepfold. The Maffre boys, in spite of living in mortal fear of their father, adored this great shameless lout who told them tales of life in Paris and organized exciting excursions into the surrounding countryside for them. So they ended up meeting him every Saturday at nine on a bench in the Mail. They slipped away from the club and chatted until eleven, hidden in the black shadows of the plane trees. Guillaume repeatedly brought up the subject of the evenings they were spending under the church of Les Minimes.

‘You lot are so gullible, letting yourselves be led by the nose like that…’ he said. ‘The beadle gives you glasses of sweetened water, doesn’t he? Just as if he were giving communion?’

‘No no, you are mistaken, I assure you,’ Ambroise stated. ‘You would think you are definitely in one of the cafés on the Cours, the Café de France or the Café des Voyageurs… You drink beer, punch, madeira, well whatever you like—anything you’d drink anywhere else.’

But Guillaume carried on jeering.

‘Nevertheless,’ he growled, ‘I shouldn’t want to drink their disgusting stuff. I should be too scared they’d spiked it with some drug to make me go to confession. I bet you play “I spy” or “Forfeits” to decide who pays?’

The Maffre boys laughed a lot at his jokes. But they put him right and told him that even cards were allowed. That it didn’t have anything churchy about it. And it was very comfortable, the sofas were good, and there were windows everywhere.

‘Come now,’ Guillaume persisted. ‘You don’t mean to say you don’t hear the organ when there’s something going on in the evening in the Minimes?… I should choke on my coffee knowing that there are baptisms, weddings, and funerals going on just above my little cup of weak coffee.’

‘You’re not completely wrong,’ said Alphonse. ‘The other day while I was playing billiards with Séverin, during the day, we could very clearly hear they were having a funeral for someone. It was the butcher’s little girl, the one at the end of the Rue de la Banne… That Séverin is as stupid as anything, he thought he would scare me by telling me the whole lot was going to fall on my head.’

‘So—what a place your club is!’ cried Guillaume. ‘I wouldn’t set foot in it for a fortune. You might as well drink your coffee in a sacristy.’

It hurt Guillaume deeply not to belong to the Youth Club. His father had forbidden him to apply, fearing he might not be admitted. But his annoyance became too much for him. He put in a request, without telling anyone. There was a terrible fuss. The committee charged with deciding on admissions counted the Maffre boys among its members at the time. Lucien Delangre was president, and Séverin Rastoil secretary. The embarrassment of these young men was dreadful. While not daring to support his application they did not wish to offend the worthy and respectable Doctor Porquier, who had the absolute confidence of the ladies in the town. Ambroise and Alphonse begged Guillaume not to go any further with it, giving him to understand he didn’t have a chance.

‘Forget it!’ he replied. ‘You are a couple of cowards. Do you suppose I really want to join your association? I’m having you on. I want to see if you’ve got the nerve to vote against me… I’ll laugh like anything the day those loathsome creatures close the door on me. As for
you, my friends, you can go and find your entertainment wherever you like; I shan’t speak to you again, ever.’

The Maffre boys were distressed and begged Lucien Delangre to manage things so as to avoid any fuss. Lucien consulted his usual counsellor, Abbé Faujas, about the problem, for he had become a devoted admirer of the latter. The priest came to the Youth Club every afternoon, from five to six. He crossed the hall with a kindly expression, greeting people, stopping from time to time, standing in front of a table, chatting for a few minutes with a group of youngsters. He never took anything to drink, not even a glass of pure water. Then he went into the reading room, sat at the large table covered with a green tablecloth, read all the newspapers the club took, the Legitimist papers from Paris and the neighbouring departments. Occasionally he would make a rapid note in a little notebook. After that he retired discreetly with another smile at the members, shaking hands with them. Some days, however, he stayed longer, became absorbed by a game of chess, spoke cheerfully about all manner of things. The young people, who were very fond of him, said of him:

‘You’d never think he was a priest, to hear him talk.’

When the mayor’s son told him about the embarrassment Guillaume’s request had caused the committee, Abbé Faujas promised to intervene. And keeping his word, the next day he went to see Doctor Porquier to give him the news. The doctor was appalled. Did his son then want to make him die of sorrow and bring shame and dishonour on his old head? And what could be done about it now? If his application was withdrawn, the shame would be just as great. The priest’s advice was to send him away for two or three months to a property the doctor owned a few miles off, and Faujas would take responsibility for what ensued. The story ended quite simply. As soon as Guillaume had gone, the committee put the request to one side, declaring that there was no hurry and that the decision could be deferred for the time being.

Doctor Porquier learned of this solution through Lucien Delangre one afternoon in the garden of the sub-prefecture. He hurried on to the terrace. It was Abbé Faujas’s time for reading his breviary. He was there under the Mourets’ arbour.

‘Oh, Monsieur le Curé, how grateful I am!’ said the doctor, leaning over the terrace. ‘May I shake your hand?’

‘It’s rather high,’ smiled the priest, looking at the wall.

But the effusive Doctor Porquier was undaunted by these obstacles.

‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘If you allow, Monsieur le Curé, I’ll come round.’

And he vanished. The priest, still smiling, made his way slowly to the little gate that opened on to the Impasse des Chevillottes. The doctor was there already, knocking timidly.

‘This gate’s been nailed up,’ murmured the priest, ‘and one of the nails has come out… If we had a tool of some sort it wouldn’t be too difficult to take out the other one.’

Looking about him he saw a spade. Then he drew back the bolts and with a slight heave, opened the gate. He went out into the Impasse des Chevillottes, where Doctor Porquier overwhelmed him with gratitude. As they were walking along the Impasse and chatting, Monsieur Maffre, who happened to be in the Rastoils’ garden, opened the little gate hidden behind the fountain on his side. And these gentlemen laughed mightily at finding themselves all three together in the deserted lane.

They remained there for a short while. When they took their leave of the priest, the judge and the doctor looked around in curiosity at the Mourets’ garden.

In the meantime Mouret, who was staking his tomatoes, looked up and saw them. He was dumbstruck.

‘Well, well,’ he muttered. ‘So they’re in! Now all we need is for the priest to bring the whole gang in here!’

CHAPTER 13

A
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that time Serge was nineteen. He had a little room on the second floor opposite the priest’s rooms, and there he led a monk-like existence, reading a lot.

‘I ought to chuck your books on the fire,’ said Mouret angrily. ‘You’ll end up bedridden.’

And it was true, the young man was of such a nervous disposition that if he wasn’t very careful, he fell prey to every minor illness, like a girl, and had to keep to his room for two or three days at a time. Then Rose would drown him in herbal tea and when Mouret went along to ‘liven him up a bit’, as he put it, if the cook was there she made her master leave the room, saying:

‘Let him alone, poor lamb! You’ll be the death of him with your brutal ways. He’s not in the least like you, he’s the spitting image of his mother. You’ll never understand either the one or the other.’

Serge smiled. When his father saw he was so delicate he hesitated to send him to Paris to read Law after he left school. He wouldn’t hear of a provincial university; in his view a young man who wanted to get anywhere really had to go to Paris. He had high ambitions for his son, saying that people who were not so clever as him—the Rougon cousins,
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for example—had carved out fine careers for themselves. Every time the boy seemed to be in better health again he fixed his departure for the beginning of the following month. Then the trunk was never packed, the young man coughed a little, and the departure was once again postponed.

Each time this happened, Marthe, unruffled and calm as ever, contented herself with saying quietly:

‘He’s not yet twenty. It’s not wise to send such a young boy to Paris… Anyway, he’s not wasting his time here. You yourself are always saying he works too hard.’

Serge went with his mother to Mass. He was religiously inclined, very gentle and serious. Doctor Porquier recommended lots of exercise, so he had become obsessed with botany, taking trips out, and spending his afternoons drying the flowers he had collected, sticking them in, classifying and labelling them. It was then that Abbé Faujas became his close friend. The priest had once been a botanizer; he
gave him some practical advice for which the young man was very grateful. They lent each other books, went together one day to look for a plant the priest said must grow in those parts. When Serge was poorly his neighbour visited him every morning, sat at his bedside, and chatted for a long time. On other days when he was better he was the one to knock on Abbé Faujas’s door as soon as he heard him moving about in his room. They were only separated by the narrow landing and ended up in each other’s rooms most of the time.

Mouret often still lost his temper in spite of Marthe’s impassive calm and the irritation in Rose’s eyes.

‘What on earth can that boy be doing up there?’ he grumbled. ‘I don’t set eyes on him for days at a time. He’s always in the priest’s rooms; they are always chatting in some corner… Well, for a start, he must leave for Paris. He’s as strong as an ox. All those little complaints are just an act, to make it easier for himself. Yes, you may well look at me like that, I don’t want the priest turning him into a little tartuffe.’

So he kept watch on his son. When he believed he was in the priest’s rooms he called out to him sharply.

‘I’d rather he went to visit women!’ he cried one day in exasperation.

‘Oh, Monsieur,’ said Rose, ‘such notions of yours are abominable!’

‘Yes, women, I mean it! I’ll take him to them myself, if you force me to, with all your preaching!’

Serge of course belonged to the Youth Club, but he seldom went; he preferred his own company, and would certainly never have set foot in the place if Abbé Faujas, whom he met there sometimes, had not been there. In the reading room the priest taught him to play chess. Mouret, who knew the boy was seeing the priest even in the café, swore he would drive him to the railway station the following Monday. The trunk was packed in earnest this time, when Serge, who had wanted to spend his last morning out in the fields, came back soaked to the skin by a sudden shower. He had to go to bed and his teeth chattered with cold. For three weeks his life was in the balance. His recovery took a good two months. Those first days especially he was so weak he lay there with his head raised on pillows and his hands stretched out over the sheets just like a waxwork.

‘It’s your fault, Monsieur,’ the cook shouted at Mouret. ‘If the child dies you’ll have that on your conscience.’

As long as his son was in danger Mouret remained depressed, his
eyes red from weeping, skulking silently round the house. He rarely went upstairs, pacing back and forth in the hall, waiting for the doctor to leave. When he knew that Serge was out of danger, he slipped into his room offering to help. But Rose shooed him away. They didn’t need him. The child was not yet strong enough to put up with his rough ways. He would do better to look after his own affairs than to take up so much space. So Mouret stayed downstairs on his own, more anxious and at a loss than ever. He didn’t feel like doing anything, he said. Often when he went through the hall he would hear on the floor above the voice of Abbé Faujas, who spent the whole afternoon at the bedside of the convalescent Serge.

‘How is he today, Monsieur le Curé?’ Mouret asked the priest timidly, when the latter went down into the garden.

‘Quite well; but it will be a long haul and require a lot of care.’

And he went on calmly reading his breviary, while the father, secateurs in hand, trailed after him down the paths, trying to renew the conversation, to have more detailed news of ‘the boy’. As the convalescence progressed he noticed that the priest never left Serge’s bedside. Having gone up at intervals when the women weren’t there, he always found him sitting beside the young man, chatting softly to him, performing little services like putting sugar in his tea, drawing the bedclothes over him, giving him the things he asked for. And throughout the house there was a gentle murmuring, as words were exchanged in hushed tones between Marthe and Rose, and a special quiet which transformed the second floor into the corner of a monastery. It seemed to Mouret he could smell incense in his house; and sometimes, from the sound of low voices, that they were saying Mass up there.

‘What on earth are they doing?’ he asked himself. ‘The boy is out of danger after all. They can’t be administering the last rites.’

Serge himself worried him. He looked like a girl in his white linen nightclothes. His eyes had got bigger, the smile on his lips was sweetly ecstatic, and it stayed there even in the throes of his worst suffering. Mouret did not dare broach the subject of Paris any more, his sick son seemed to him so chaste and feminine.

One afternoon he climbed very softly up the stairs. Through the half-open door he could see Serge sitting in an armchair in the sunshine. The young man was weeping, his eyes raised to heaven, while his mother was also sobbing in front of him. They both turned, at the
noise of the door opening, without drying their tears. And immediately in his weak, convalescent voice, Serge said:

‘Father, I want to ask a great favour. Mother claims you will be angry, that you will refuse to grant me something that would make me overwhelmingly happy… I’d like to enter the seminary.’

He had put his hands together in a sort of fever of devotion.

‘You… you!’ Mouret stammered.

And he looked at Marthe, who looked away. He said no more but went to the window, and came back instinctively to sit at the foot of the bed, as if stunned by this blow.

‘Father,’ Serge went on after a long silence, ‘when I was so close to death, I saw God, I swore I would belong to Him. I assure you that my joy resides nowhere but in Him. Believe me and do not be cast down.’

Mouret, with a despondent expression, looked at the floor and still did not speak. He made a gesture of utter despair as he said in a low voice:

‘If only I had the nerve, I would tie two shirts up in a kerchief and take to the road.’

Then he rose, went and tapped on the glass with his fingertips. And when Serge renewed his pleading, he replied simply:

‘No, no, it’s all right. You be a priest, my boy.’

And he went out of the room. He left for Marseilles the next day without a word to anyone, and spent a week with his son Octave. But he came back worried and looking older. Octave did not afford him much consolation. He had found him living the high life, crippled with debts, and hiding girls in cupboards. But he didn’t breathe a word about all this. He became quite sedentary, did not do any good deals, any of those transactions of standing crops which he had boasted about so much in the old days. Rose noticed that he affected an almost complete silence, even avoiding saying good day to Abbé Faujas.

‘Don’t you realize you are being rather rude?’ she said to him impudently one day. ‘Monsieur le Curé has just gone by and you turned your back on him… If you are doing that because of the boy, you are quite wrong. Monsieur le Curé didn’t want him to enter the seminary. He lectured him long enough about it. I heard him… Oh, it’s a jolly house we have now, right enough. You don’t chat any more, not even with Madame. When you sit down to eat it might as well be a funeral… Well, Monsieur, I’ve just about had enough of it.’

Mouret left the room, but the cook went after him into the garden.

‘Aren’t you pleased to see the child on his feet again? He ate a chop yesterday, the little angel, and with a good appetite as well… You don’t give a tinker’s cuss, do you? You wanted to make him into a pagan like yourself… Go on with you, you need prayers more than anyone. God wants salvation for us all. If I was you I’d weep with joy at the thought that the little darling is going to pray for us. But you are stony-hearted, Monsieur… How lovely that sweet boy will look in his soutane!’

At that Mouret went up to the first floor. There he locked himself in a bedroom that he called his office, a big, bare room, furnished with only a table and two chairs. This room was his bolt-hole whenever the cook hounded him. But he tired of it and returned to the garden that he was cultivating ever more assiduously. Marthe did not seem to be aware of her husband’s black moods; sometimes he didn’t utter a word for a week, and yet she did not get worried or cross. She became more detached from her surroundings every day. The house seemed so peaceful, she even supposed when she did not hear Mouret grumbling all the time that he had seen reason and found a little place he could be happy in, as she had. That allayed her worries and allowed her to sink ever deeper into her dream world. When he looked at her, his eyes misted over and he did not recognize her, yet she smiled at him and didn’t see the tears welling up behind his eyelids.

The day Serge, now completely restored to health, entered the seminary, Mouret remained alone in the house with Désirée. He often looked after her now. This overgrown child, who was nearly sixteen, could have fallen into the pond or set the house on fire by playing with matches, like a little girl of six. When Marthe came home she found the doors wide open and the rooms empty. The house seemed completely bare. She went out on to the terrace and saw her husband playing with the girl at the bottom of the path. He was sitting on the ground, on the sand; with the help of a small wooden spade he was gravely filling a cart which Désirée was holding on a string.

‘Giddy up!’ shouted the child.

‘Wait!’ said her father patiently. ‘It’s not full yet. If you want to play horses you must wait till it’s full up.’

Then she stamped around, pretending to be a horse impatient to go; but unable to wait, she set off, screaming with laughter. The cart
tipped over and all the sand fell out. When she had gone once round the garden she came back shouting:

‘Fill it up, fill it up again!’

And Mouret filled it once more, with little spadefuls. Marthe stayed on the terrace, unsettled, uneasy; these wide-open doors, this man playing with the child at the back of the empty house distressed her, though she didn’t know exactly why. She went up to get changed, hearing Rose, who had also just returned, say from the top of the steps:

‘My goodness, how stupid he is!’

According to his friends on the Cours Sauvaire, the little rentiers
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he went for a walk with every day, Mouret was ‘a bit touched’. He had gone grey within a few months, he was unsteady on his legs, he was no longer the man whose sharp-tongued mockery was feared by the whole town. For a while it was thought he had thrown himself into risky speculations and that he was weighed down with the loss of a huge sum of money.

Madame Paloque, leaning out of her dining-room window, which looked out on to the Rue Balande, even said he was ‘in a bad way’ each time she saw him go out. And if Abbé Faujas crossed the road, a few minutes later, she took pleasure in calling out, especially when she was entertaining people:

‘Look at Monsieur le Curé, he’s putting on weight… If he was eating from the same table as Monsieur Mouret, you’d say he only left him the bones.’

She laughed and so did they. Abbé Faujas in fact was becoming a fine figure of a man, with his habitual black gloves and shining soutane. When Madame de Condamin complimented him on the way he looked, his mouth creased into the ironic smile that he reserved for such occasions. These ladies liked to see him well turned out, in garments that were soft and rich. Doubtless a bare-knuckle fight, bare arms, in rags if need be, would have been more his style. But whenever he neglected himself, the slightest critical remark from old Madame Rougon would fetch him out of his carelessness; he smiled, went and bought silk stockings, a hat, a new belt. He got through any amount of them, his large frame wore them out rapidly.

Ever since the establishing of the Work of the Virgin, all the women were on his side; they defended him against the rumours about him that were still going round now and then, without anyone quite knowing where they came from. To be sure, they found his treatment of
them was rather harsh sometimes; but this was not unattractive to them, especially in the confessional, where they liked to feel his iron hand taking them by the scruff of the neck.