The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (6 page)

Mouret appeared to enjoy this greatly.

‘And what about the beds?’ he enquired.

‘She made up the beds… You should see her turn a mattress. She doesn’t find it heavy, I can tell you. She takes it by the end and throws it up in the air like a feather… And very careful she is and all. She tucked in the truckle bed as if it were a baby’s cot. If she’d had to put Baby Jesus to bed, she couldn’t have laid the sheets on it more lovingly… Of the four blankets she placed three on the truckle bed. Just like for the pillows—she didn’t want any for herself. Her son’s got both of them.’

‘So is she going to sleep on the floor?’

‘In the corner, like a dog. She threw a mattress down on the floor in the other bedroom, saying she would sleep there, sounder than in Paradise. I couldn’t persuade her to do anything else more decent. She claims she’s never cold and her head is too hard to mind the tiles… I gave them water and sugar like Madame said and that was that… All the same, they’re queer folk.’

Rose finished serving dinner. The Mourets let the meal go on some time that evening. They chatted for a long while about the new tenants. The arrival of these two strangers was a big event in their usual well-ordered routine. They spoke of it as they might a disaster, adding the tiny details which invariably help to pass the long evenings in the country. Mouret in particular enjoyed small-town tittle-tattle. At dessert, elbows on the table, in the warmth of the dining room, he
repeated for the tenth time, with the satisfied expression of a contented man:

‘Besançon’s not done Plassans any favours, sending him… Did you see the back of his soutane when he turned round?… It would greatly surprise me if he had the churchwomen running after him. He’s too badly turned out; penitents like their priests to look smart.’

‘He has a pleasant enough voice,’ said the indulgent Marthe.

‘Not when he’s angry,’ Mouret replied. ‘Didn’t you hear him get cross when he discovered the apartment wasn’t furnished? He’s a rough-mannered man. You can bet he won’t waste time in the confessionals. I am curious to know how he’s going to go about getting furniture tomorrow. As long as he pays up at least. Well anyway, I can always get hold of Abbé Bourrette—he’s the only contact I have.’

The family was not very religious. The children also made fun of the priest and his mother. Octave imitated the old lady craning her neck to peer into every corner of the room, which made Désirée laugh.

The more serious Serge stuck up for ‘those poor people’. As a rule, unless he was going to play piquet,
*
Mouret got his candlestick at exactly ten o’clock, and went to bed; but that evening at eleven he was still not ready to turn in. Désirée had finally fallen asleep with her head in Marthe’s lap. The two boys had gone up to their room. Mouret was still chatting away alone with his wife.

‘How old do you think he is?’ he enquired abruptly.

‘Who?’ said Marthe who was also beginning to feel sleepy.

‘The priest of course! What do you think? Between forty and forty-five? He’s a fine-looking fellow. What a shame he wears a soutane! He would have made a famous carabineer.’

Then after a silence, talking to himself and continuing to voice the thoughts that were causing him such deliberations:

‘They arrived on the six forty-five train. So they only had time to call at the Abbé Bourrette’s before coming here… I bet they haven’t had anything to eat. That’s for sure. We should have seen them go out to the hotel… Oh yes, I should dearly like to know where they could have eaten.’

Rose, who for a while had been moving back and forth to the dining room, waiting for her employers to go to bed before locking the doors and windows, said:

‘I know where they ate.’

And when Mouret quickly turned round, she added:

‘Yes, I went back up to see if they needed anything. I didn’t hear any noise and didn’t dare knock; I spied through the keyhole.’

‘But that’s very wicked,’ Marthe interrupted severely. ‘You know perfectly well that I don’t like you doing that.’

‘Leave her alone!’ cried Mouret, who in other circumstances would have lost his temper with the inquisitive servant. ‘You looked through the keyhole?’

‘Yes, Monsieur, it was for a good reason.’

‘Of course. So what were they doing?’

‘Well, Monsieur, they were eating… I saw them eating off one corner of the truckle bed. The old lady had spread out a napkin. Each time they poured out some wine they laid the litre bottle back down on the pillow.’

‘But what were they eating?’

‘I don’t exactly know, Monsieur. It seemed like the remains of some pâté out of a newspaper. They had some apples too, some small apples that didn’t look very nice.’

‘And were they chatting? Could you hear what they were saying?’

‘No, Monsieur, they weren’t chatting… I stayed up there a good quarter of an hour spying on them. They weren’t saying anything. They just ate and ate!’

Marthe had got to her feet, waking Désirée, as though she were going upstairs. Her husband’s curiosity pained her. The latter finally decided to get up himself, while old Rose, who was religious, went on muttering:

‘That poor dear man must have been ravenous. His mother passed him the biggest morsels and took pleasure in watching him eat… Well anyway, he’s going to sleep in some lovely white sheets. I hope the smell of the fruit doesn’t bother him. It doesn’t smell very nice in the room, you know, with that sharp smell of apples and pears. And not a stick of furniture, nothing except the bed in the corner. If it were me I should be scared, I’d keep the light on all night.’

Mouret had taken his candlestick. He remained a moment in front of Rose, summing up the evening with the words of a man disturbed in his usual thinking:

‘It’s extraordinary.’

Then he joined his wife at the foot of the stairs. She was already in bed and asleep while he was listening to the faint noises coming from
the floor above. The priest’s room was directly above theirs. He heard him open the window quietly and it much intrigued him. He raised his head from the pillow, desperately fighting sleep, dying to know how long the priest would remain at the window. But sleep got the better of him. Mouret was sleeping like a log before he could hear the muffled squeak of the catch again.

On the floor above, Faujas, bareheaded, was staring out into the darkness. He remained there for a long time, happy to be finally alone, absorbed in the thoughts that caused such harshness across his brow. He could sense on the floor below the tranquil slumber of this house he had only been in for a few hours: the pure respiration of the children, the honest breathing of Marthe, and the sound of Mouret’s heavy, regular breath as he slept. And there was a touch of disdain as well as defiance in the way he lifted his head as though to see into the distance, to the furthest houses in the little sleeping town. The tall trees in the gardens of the sub-prefecture formed a dark mass, Monsieur Rastoil’s pear trees stretched out their thin, twisted branches; after that, there was a sea of darkness, a void, from which not a sound could be heard. The town was as innocent as a young girl rocking a cradle.

Faujas stretched out his arms in an ironic challenge, as though he wanted to pull Plassans to his broad chest and suffocate it. He muttered:

‘So much for those fools smiling this evening as they saw me crossing their streets!’

CHAPTER 3

N
EXT
day, Mouret spent the morning spying on his new tenant. This occupation would fill the empty hours he spent at home fussing around, tidying things that had not been put away, picking quarrels with his wife and children. From now on he had something to keep him busy, a distraction, something to take him away from his daily routine. As he said, he didn’t care for priests and this first one that had entered his life interested him to an extraordinary degree. This priest brought with him a whiff of mystery; a stranger who made him rather anxious. Although he brazened it out, declaring himself to be a ‘Voltairean’ freethinker,
*
he felt an incredulity, a bourgeois frisson vis-à-vis the priest, in which there was more than a touch of lively curiosity.

Not a sound came from the second floor. On the stairs, Mouret listened hard, and even risked going up to the attic. His step slowed as he went along the landing; he was greatly agitated by what sounded like a shuffling of slippers behind the door. Unable to discover anything definite, he went down to the garden and walked around under the arbour at the bottom, looking up and trying to see through the windows what was happening in the rooms. But not even the shadow of the priest could be seen. Madame Faujas, who, no doubt, did not have any curtains, had hung some sheets over the glass for the time being.

At lunch Mouret seemed very put out.

‘Are they dead up there?’ he said as he cut the bread for the children. ‘Marthe, you haven’t heard them moving around?’

‘No, dear. I haven’t been listening.’

Rose shouted from the kitchen:

‘They haven’t been up there for a while. If they are out and about still, they must have gone a long way.’

Mouret called the cook and questioned her in detail.

‘They went out, Monsieur. The mother first and the priest afterwards. They step so quiet I shouldn’t have seen them, if their shadows hadn’t passed in front of the kitchen window when they opened the door… I looked out into the street to see. But they had slipped off smartly, I can tell you.’

‘That’s very strange. Then—where was I?’

‘I believe Monsieur was at the bottom of the garden looking at the grapes in the arbour.’

That had the effect of putting Mouret in a frightful mood. He heaped insults upon the priesthood: they were all sly; they were up to all kinds of tricks the devil himself was no match for them; they affected a ridiculous prudery, to such an extent that no one had ever seen a priest shaving. In the end, he was wishing he hadn’t rented rooms to this priest he’d never met.

‘You are to blame as well!’ he said to his wife, getting up from the table.

Marthe was about to protest and remind him of their discussion the day before. But she raised her eyes, looked at him, and said nothing. He, however, could not bring himself to go out as he usually did. He went back and forth from dining room to garden, picking up this and that, pretending that everything was untidy, that the house was turned upside down. Then he got cross with Serge and Octave who, he said, had left half an hour early for school.

‘Isn’t Papa going out?’ Désirée asked in her mother’s ear. ‘He
will
get on our nerves if he stays here.’

Marthe made her be quiet. Mouret spoke finally about some business he had to complete in the course of the day. He did not have a moment. He couldn’t even have a day’s rest at home, if he needed it. He left, in despair at not being there, and not to be on watch.

In the evening when he got back he was in a fever of curiosity.

‘What news of the priest?’ he asked before he had even taken off his coat.

Marthe was working in her usual place, on the terrace.

‘The priest?’ she repeated in some surprise. ‘Oh yes, the priest… I haven’t seen him. I think he has moved his things in. Rose told me someone had brought some furniture.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ cried Mouret. ‘I should have been there; the furniture is my guarantee after all… I knew you wouldn’t budge from your chair. You don’t have much sense, my dear… Rose! Rose!’

And when the cook had arrived:

‘Did anyone bring furniture for the people upstairs?’

‘Yes, Monsieur. In a little cart. I recognized Bergasse’s cart, the dealer on the market. Well, none of it was very heavy. Madame Faujas
was following it. As she came up the Rue Balande, she even lent the fellow who was pushing it a hand.’

‘But you saw the furniture at least. Did you count the pieces?’

‘Of course, Monsieur. I went and stood in the doorway. They all went by in front of me, and that didn’t seem to please Madame Faujas. Let me see… First they took up an iron bedstead, then a chest of drawers, two tables, four chairs… I think that was all… And the things weren’t new. I shouldn’t give a hundred and fifty francs for the whole lot.’

‘But you should have let Madame know; we can’t rent to them in such conditions… I’ll have to go and have it out with Bourrette straight away.’

He was getting angry, and was about to leave the house when Marthe managed to stop him in his tracks:

‘Listen, I was forgetting… They paid six months’ rent in advance.’

‘Oh? So they’ve paid?’ he stammered in a voice that sounded almost annoyed.

‘Yes, the old lady came down and gave me this.’

She rummaged around in her work table and gave her husband seventy-five francs in coins of a hundred centimes, carefully wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Mouret counted the money, muttering:

‘If they pay, they are free to… All the same they are a strange pair. It’s true, not everybody’s well off. But even if you don’t have a penny that’s no reason to behave so suspiciously.’

‘I meant to tell you as well,’ Marthe said when she saw he had calmed down, ‘the old lady asked if we would mind letting her have the truckle bed; I told her we weren’t using it and that she could keep it as long as she wanted.’

‘That was right, we must be obliging… I told you, what I don’t care for with these devilish priests is that you never know what they are thinking or doing. That aside, you often come across some very decent men amongst them.’

The money seemed to have consoled him. He made jokes, pestered Serge to tell him about the
Missions to China
which he was reading at the moment. During dinner he pretended not to concern himself any more with the folk upstairs. But when Octave recounted that he had seen Abbé Faujas coming out of the bishop’s palace, Mouret could no longer contain himself. At dessert he went back to the conversation of the day before. Then he was somewhat ashamed, for beneath the
thick skin of a retired businessman he possessed a fine soul. Above all he had a lot of common sense, a rightness of judgement which caused him more often than not to hit on the
mot juste
in the midst of all the provincial tittle-tattle.

‘After all,’ he said as he went to bed, ‘it’s not good to poke your nose into the affairs of other people… The priest can do as he pleases. It’s vexing to feel we have to talk about these people all the time; I wash my hands of them from now on.’

A week went by. Mouret had gone back to his usual occupations; he prowled about the house, chatted to the children, spent his afternoons out concluding business deals as he liked, and never saying a word about them; ate and slept like a man for whom life is a gentle slope, without shocks or surprises of any kind. The house became deadly quiet once more. Marthe was at her accustomed place, on the terrace at her small work table. Désirée was playing at her side. The two boys came home boisterously, at the same times of the day. And Rose the cook got cross, grumbled at everybody, while the garden and the dining room remained in a calm and somnolent state.

‘Far be it from me to say so,’ Mouret said again to his wife, ‘but you can see that you were wrong thinking that if we rented out the second floor it would interfere with our lives. We are quieter than ever, the house is smaller but happier.’

And he sometimes looked up to the windows on the second floor, which Madame Faujas had hung with thick cotton curtains the day after they moved in. Not a single fold in those curtains moved. There was something self-satisfied about them—they conveyed a smug feeling of cold, rigid holiness. Behind them a monastic silence, a stillness, seemed to be deepening. From time to time the windows were partly opened, so that you could see the shadow on the high ceilings between the white curtains. But in spite of Mouret’s watchfulness he never managed to see the hand that opened or shut them; he did not even hear the squeaking of the catch. No human sound came down from the apartment.

At the end of the first week, Mouret still had not set eyes on Abbé Faujas again. This man living so close to him and whom he never caught even a glimpse of, drove him in the end into a state of nervous anxiety. In spite of his efforts to appear indifferent, he fell again to questioning everyone, he began to make enquiries.

‘So you haven’t seen anything of him?’ he asked his wife.

‘I thought I caught sight of him yesterday when he came back, but I’m not sure… His mother always wears a black dress, so perhaps it was her.’

And, as he plied her with questions, she told him what she knew.

‘Rose says he definitely goes out every day. He even stays out quite a long time… As to the mother, she is regular as clockwork. She comes down at seven each morning to get her provisions. She has a large basket, which is always closed, in which she must carry everything—coal, bread, wine, food, for you never see a tradesman arrive with them… Anyway they are extremely polite. Rose says they say good day when they meet her. But more often than not she doesn’t even hear them come downstairs.’

‘They must prepare some odd meals up there,’ muttered Mouret, who had not gleaned a thing from this information.

Another evening when Octave said he had seen Abbé Faujas go into Saint-Saturnin, his father asked about his demeanour and how passers-by reacted to him, and what he was going to do in the church.

‘Oh, don’t be so inquisitive!’ laughed the young man… ‘He didn’t look very good in the sun with that red soutane… that’s all I know. I even noticed that he was walking along by the houses in the narrow strip of shade, where his soutane looked blacker. He’s not vain you know, he puts his head down and walks quickly… Two girls began to laugh at him when he crossed the square. He raised his head and smiled very kindly at them, didn’t he, Serge?’

Serge added that several times when they were coming home from school he had been following Abbé Faujas from a distance as he was coming back from Saint-Saturnin. He crossed the road without saying a word to anyone. He didn’t seem to know a soul, and was in some way ashamed of the half-concealed mockery he could feel around him.

‘So are they talking about him in town?’ asked Mouret, his interest at its height.

‘Nobody talked to me about the priest,’ replied Octave.

‘Yes,’ said Serge, ‘they are talking about him. Abbé Bourrette’s nephew told me that they didn’t think much of him in the church. They don’t like those priests who come from distant parts. And besides he looks so unhappy… When they get used to him they’ll leave him alone, poor fellow. But at first they have to make up their minds about him.’

At that point Marthe suggested that the two boys shouldn’t answer people if anyone asked them about the priest.

‘Oh, they can answer,’ cried Mouret. ‘We don’t know anything that would compromise him, that’s certain.’

From that moment quite innocently and without any malicious intent he made his children into spies and set them to follow the priest. Octave and Serge had to recount everything that people were saying about him in town, and were given orders to follow him whenever they happened to meet him. But that source of information soon ran dry. The muttered rumours occasioned by the arrival of a priest who was strange to the diocese had stopped. The town seemed to have forgiven the ‘poor fellow’ in his worn-out soutane who scurried along its narrow shaded streets; but all they felt for him now was disdain. For his part, the priest walked straight to the cathedral and came back again, always taking the same route. Octave said jokingly that he even counted the paving stones.

Inside the house Mouret wanted to make use of Désirée, who never went out. He took her to the bottom of the garden in the evening and listened to her prattle about what she had seen and done during the day; he tried to get her talking about the folk on the second floor.

‘Listen,’ he said to her one day, ‘tomorrow when the window is open you can throw your ball up into their room and go and ask them for it back.’

The next day she threw her ball up; but she had only got as far as the steps when the ball, thrown by an invisible hand, came bouncing back on to the terrace. Her father, who had been relying on the kind little girl to repair relations that had been broken on the first day, despaired then of his attempts. He was evidently coming up against the priest’s very decided wish to keep himself barricaded in his own apartment. This struggle only made his curiosity burn more fiercely. He took to gossiping in corners with the cook, much to the disapproval of Marthe who chided him for his undignified behaviour. But he got angry and told lies. As he felt he was in the wrong, he took to chatting to Rose surreptitiously about the Faujas.

One morning, Rose beckoned him to follow her into the kitchen.

‘Oh, there you are, Monsieur,’ she said, shutting the door. ‘I’ve been watching for you to come down for a good hour.’

‘Have you found something out?’

‘You shall see… Yesterday I chatted to Madame Faujas for more than an hour.’

Mouret was thrilled. He sat down on a kitchen chair which had lost its straw, in the midst of yesterday’s dishcloths and vegetable peelings.

‘Quick, tell me,’ he urged.

‘Well,’ said the cook, ‘I was at the front door saying hello to Monsieur Rastoil’s maid when Madame Faujas came down to empty a bucket of dirty water into the gutter. Instead of going upstairs again and not turning round, as usual, she stayed looking at me for a minute or two. I thought she wanted to have a chat. I said to her that it had been a fine day and the wine harvest would be good… She answered “Yes, it will” in an indifferent kind of way and wasn’t in any hurry to go, her being a woman who doesn’t own any land and so isn’t interested in that sort of thing at all. But she’d put down her bucket and didn’t go. She even leaned against the wall, beside me…’