Complete Works of Emile Zola (336 page)

‘Listen to me,’ said Abbé Faujas, livid with rage; ‘you will pack up your things in the morning and take yourselves off!’

‘Why? What for?’ asked Olympe, quite calmly; ‘we are very comfortable here.’

The priest sternly interrupted her.

‘Hold your tongue! You are a wretched woman! You have never tried to do anything but injure me. Our mother was right; I ought never to have rescued you from your state of wretchedness. I’ve just had to pick your husband up on the stairs. It is disgraceful. Think of the scandal there would be if he were to be seen in this state. You will go away in the morning.’

Olympe sat up to sip her grog.

‘No, no, indeed!’ she said.

Trouche laughed. He was drunkenly merry, and fell back into an arm-chair in a state of happy self-satisfaction.

‘Don’t let us quarrel,’ he stammered. ‘It is a mere nothing; only a little giddiness. The air, which is very cold, made me dizzy, that’s all. And your streets in this con­founded town are so very confusing. I say, Faujas, there are some very nice young fellows about here. There’s Doctor Porquier’s son. You know Doctor Porquier, don’t you? Well, I meet the son at a café behind the gaol. It is kept by a woman from Aries, a fine handsome woman with a dark complexion.’

The priest crossed his arms and looked at him with a terrible expression.

‘No, really, Faujas, I assure you that it is quite wrong of you to be angry with me. You know that I have been well brought up, and that I know how to behave myself. Why, in the daytime I wouldn’t touch a drop of syrup for fear of compromising you. Since I have been here I have gone to my office just like a boy going to school, with slices of bread and jam in a little basket. It’s a very stupid sort of life, I can assure you, and I only do it to be of service to you. But at night, I’m not likely to be seen, and I can go about a little. It does me good, and, in fact, I should die if I always kept myself locked up here. There is no one in the streets, you know. What funny streets they are, eh?’

‘Sot!’ growled the priest between his clenched teeth.

‘You won’t be friends, then? Well, that’s very wrong of you, old chap. I’m a jolly fellow myself, and I don’t like sour looks, and if what I do doesn’t please you, I’ll leave you to get on with your pious ladies by yourself. That little Con­damin is the only decent one amongst them, and even she doesn’t come up to the café-keeper from Aries. Oh, yes! you may roll your eyes about as much as you like. I can get on quite well without you. See! would you like me to lend you a hundred francs?’

He drew out a bundle of bank-notes and spread them on his knees, laughing loudly as he did so. Then he swept them under the Abbé’s nose and threw them up in the air. Olympe sprang out of bed, half naked, picked up the notes and placed them under the bolster with an expression of vexation. Abbé Faujas glanced around him with great surprise. He saw bottles of liqueurs ranged all along the top of the chest of drawers, a scarcely touched patty was on the mantelpiece, and there were some sweetmeats in an old box. The room was, indeed, full of recent purchases; dresses thrown over the chairs, an open parcel of lace, a magnificent new overcoat hanging from the window-catch, and a bearskin rug spread out in front of the bed. By the side of Olympe’s glass of grog on the little table there also lay a small gold lady’s watch glittering in a porcelain tray.

‘Whom have they been plundering, I wonder?’ thought the priest.

Then he recollected having seen Olympe kissing Marthe’s hands.

‘You wretched people!’ he cried; ‘you have been thieving!’

Trouche sprang up, but his wife pushed him down upon the sofa. ‘Keep quiet!’ she said to him, ‘go to sleep, you need it.’

Then, turning to her brother, she continued:

‘It is one o’clock, and you might let us go to sleep if you have only disagreeable things to say. It is certainly wrong of my husband to intoxicate himself, but that’s no reason why you should abuse him. We have already had several explanations; this one must be the last, do you understand, Ovide? We are brother and sister, are we not? Well, then, as I have told you before, we must go halves. You gorge yourself downstairs, you have all kinds of dainty dishes pro­vided for you, and you live a fat life between the landlady and the cook. Well, you please yourself about that. We don’t go and look into your plate or try to pull the dainty morsels out of your mouth. We let you manage your affairs as you like. Very well then, just you leave us alone and allow us the same liberty. I don’t think I am asking any­thing unreasonable.’

The priest made a gesture of impatience.

‘Oh yes, I understand,’ she continued; ‘you are afraid lest we should compromise you in your schemes. The best way to ensure our not doing so is to leave us in peace and cease from worrying us. Ah! in spite of all your grand airs, you are not so very clever. We have the same interests as you have, we are all of the same family, and we might very well hunt together. It would be much the best plan, if you would only see it. But there, go to bed, now! I’ll scold Trouche in the morning, and I’ll send him to you and you can give him your instructions.’

For a moment the priest, who was a little pale, remained thinking; then, without another word, he left the room, and Olympe resumed the perusal of her novel, while Trouche lay snoring on the sofa.

The next morning, Trouche, who had recovered his wits, had a long interview with Abbé Faujas. When he returned to his wife, he informed her of the conditions upon which peace had again been patched up.

‘Listen to me, my dear,’ Olympe replied. ‘Give way to him and do what he asks. Above all try to be useful to him, since he gives you the chance of being so. I put a bold face on the matter when he is here, but in my own heart I know very well that he would turn us out into the street like dogs if we pushed him too far, and I don’t want to have to go away. Are you sure that he will let us stay?’

‘Oh yes; don’t be afraid,’ replied the secretary. ‘He has need of me, and he will leave us to feather our nest.’

From this time forward Trouche used to go out every evening about nine o’clock, when the streets were quiet. He told his wife that he went into the old quarter of the town to further the Abbé’s cause. Olympe was not at all jealous of his nightly absences, and laughed heartily whenever he brought her back some broad story. She preferred being left quietly to herself, to sip her glass and nibble her cakes in privacy, or to spend her long evenings snugly in bed, devouring the old novels of a circulating-library which she had discovered in the Rue Canquoin. Trouche used to come back slightly under the influence of liquor, but he took off his boots in the hall so as to make no noise as he went upstairs. When he had drunk too much, and reeked of tobacco and brandy, his wife would not let him get into bed, but made him sleep on the sofa. If he became annoying, she caught hold of him, looked him sternly in the face, and said:

‘Ovide will hear you. Ovide is coming.’

At this he was as frightened as a child that is threatened with a wolf, and went off to sleep, muttering excuses. In the morning he dressed himself in serious, sedate fashion, wiped from his face all the marks of the previous night’s dissipation, and put on a certain cravat, which gave him, he said, quite the air of a parson. As he passed the cafés he bent his head to the ground. At the Home of the Virgin he was held in great respect. Now and then, when the girls were playing in the courtyard, he raised a corner of his curtain and glanced at them with an affectation of fatherliness, though his eyes glistened beneath their lowered lids.

The Trouches were still kept in check by Madame Faujas. The mother and the daughter were perpetually quarrelling, Olympe complaining that she was sacrificed to her brother, and Madame Faujas treating her like a viper whom she ought to have crushed to death in her cradle. Both grasping after the same prey, they kept a close watch on one another, anxious to know which would secure the larger share. Madame Faujas wanted to obtain everything in the house, and she tried to keep the very sweepings from Olympe’s clutching fingers. On seeing what large sums her daughter drew from Marthe, she quite burst with anger. When her son shrugged his shoulders at it like a man who despises such matters, and is forced to close his eyes to them, she, on her side, had a stormy explanation with her daughter, whom she branded as a thief, as though the money had been taken from her own pocket.

‘There, mother, that will do!’ cried Olympe impatiently. ‘It isn’t your purse, you know, that I have been lightening. Besides, I have only been borrowing a little money; I don’t make other people keep me.’

‘What do you mean, you wicked hussy?’ gasped Madame Faujas with indignation. ‘Do you suppose that we don’t pay for our food? Ask the cook, and she will show you our account book.’

Olympe broke out into a loud laugh.

‘Oh, yes, that’s very nice!’ she cried; ‘I know that account book of yours! You pay for the radishes and butter, don’t you? Stay downstairs by all means, mother; stay downstairs on the ground floor. I don’t want to interfere with your arrangements. But don’t come up here and worry me any more, or I shall make a row, and you know that Ovide has forbidden any noise up here.’

At this Madame Faujas went downstairs muttering and growling. The threat of making a disturbance always com­pelled her to beat a retreat. Olympe began to sing jeeringly as soon as her mother’s back was turned. But whenever she went down into the garden the other took her revenge, keeping everlastingly at her heels, watching her hands, never ceasing to play the spy upon her. She would not allow her in the kitchen or dining-room for a moment. She embroiled her
with Rose about a saucepan that had been borrowed and never returned; but she did not dare to attempt to under­mine Marthe’s friendship for her for fear of causing some scandal which might prove prejudicial to the priest.

‘Since you are so regardless of your own interests,’ she said to her son one day, ‘I must look after them for you. Make yourself easy. I shan’t do anything foolish; but if I were not here, your sister would snatch the very bread out of your hands.’

Marthe had no notion of the drama that was being played around her. To her the house simply seemed more lively and cheerful, now that all these people thronged the hall and the stairs and the passages. The place was as noisy as an hotel, what with all the echoes of quarrelling, the banging of doors, the free and independent life of each of the tenants, and the flaming fire in the kitchen, where Rose seemed to have a whole table d’hote to provide for. There was a con­tinual procession of tradesmen to the house. Olympe, who became very particular about her hands and refused to risk spoiling them by washing plates and dishes, had every­thing sent from a confectioner’s in the Rue de la Banne, who catered for the townspeople. Marthe smiled and said she enjoyed the present bustle of the house. She now greatly disliked being left alone, and felt the necessity of occupation of some sort to allay the fever that was consuming her.

Mouret, however, to escape from all the racket, used to shut himself up in a room on the first floor, which he called his office. He had overcome his distaste for solitude; he now scarcely ever went down into the garden, but kept himself locked up from morning till night.

‘I should very much like to know what he finds to do in there,’ said Rose to Madame Faujas. ‘One can’t hear him move, and you might almost fancy he was dead. If he wants to hide himself in that way, it must be because he is doing something that’s neither right nor proper; don’t you think so, eh?’

When the summer came round once more, the house grew still livelier. Abbé Faujas received the guests of both the sub-prefect and the presiding judge beneath the arbour at the bottom of the garden. Rose, by Marthe’s orders, purchased a dozen rustic chairs, so that the visitors might enjoy the fresh air without it being necessary to carry the dining-room chairs hither and thither. It was now the regular thing for the doors communicating with the little lane to remain open every Tuesday afternoon, and the ladies and gentlemen came to salute Abbé Faujas like friendly neighbours, the men often in their slippers and with their coats carelessly unbuttoned, and the ladies in straw hats and with skirts looped up with pins. The visitors arrived one by one, and gradually the two sets of guests found themselves mixing together, gossiping and amusing themselves with perfect familiarity.

‘Aren’t you afraid,’ said Monsieur Bourdeu to Monsieur Rastoil one day, ‘that these meetings with the sub-prefect’s friends may be ill advised? The general elections are getting near.’

‘Why should they be ill advised?’ asked Monsieur Rastoil. ‘We don’t go to the Sub-Prefecture; we keep on neutral ground. Besides, my good friend, there is no ceremony about the matter. I keep my linen jacket on, and it’s a mere private friendly visit. No one has any right to pass judgment upon what I do at the back of my house. In the front it’s another matter. In the front we belong to the public. When Monsieur Péqueur and I meet each other in the streets we merely bow.’

‘Monsieur Péqueur de Saulaies improves much on acquaint­ance,’ the ex-prefect ventured to remark after a short pause.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ replied the presiding judge; ‘I am delighted to have made his acquaintance. And what a worthy man Abbé Faujas is! No, no; I have no fear of any slander arising from our going to pay our respects to our excellent neighbour.’

Since the general election had begun to be the subject of conversation, Monsieur de Bourdeu had felt very uneasy. He declared that it was the increasing warmth of the weather that affected him; but he was frequently assailed with doubts and scruples, which he confided to Monsieur Rastoil in order that the latter might reassure him. However, politics were never mentioned in the Mourets’ garden. One afternoon, Monsieur de Bourdeu, after vainly trying to devise some means of bringing political matters forward, exclaimed abruptly, addressing himself to Doctor Porquier:

‘I say, doctor, have you seen the “Moniteur” this morn­ing? I see that the marquis has at last spoken! He uttered just thirteen words; I counted them. Poor Lagrifoul! He has made himself very ridiculous!’