Chapter IV: Book I: I (3)

Thereupon he had to relate to her what the Brichets had said, what Bambousse had decided, and how they looked, and where they were at work. When he repeated to her the answer of Rosalie’s father, ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed, ‘if the child should die her mishap would go for nothing.’ And clasping her hands with a look of envious admiration she added, ‘How you must have chattered, your reverence! More than half the day spent to obtain such a fine result! You took it easy coming home? It must have been very hot on the road?’

The Abbé, who by this time had risen, made no answer. He had been on the point of speaking about the Paradou, and asking for some information concerning it. But a fear of being flooded with eager questions, and a kind of vague unavowed shame, made him keep silence respecting his visit to Jeanbernat. He cut all further questions short by asking:

‘Where is my sister? I don’t hear her.’

‘Come along, sir,’ said La Teuse, beginning to laugh, and raising her finger to her lips.

They went into the next room, a country drawing-room, hung with faded wall-paper showing large grey flowers, and furnished with four armchairs and a sofa, covered with horse-hair. On the sofa now slept Desirée, stretched out at full length, with her head resting on her clenched hands. The pronounced curve of her bosom was raised somewhat by her upstretched arms, bare to the elbows. She was breathing somewhat heavily, her red lips parted, and thus showing her teeth.

‘Lord! isn’t she sleeping sound!’ whispered La Teuse. ‘She didn’t even hear you pitching into me just now. Well, she must be precious tired. Just fancy, she was cleaning up her yard till nearly noon. And when she had eaten something, she came and dropped down there like a shot. She has not stirred since.’

For a moment the priest gazed lovingly at her. ‘We must let her have as much rest as she wants,’ he said.

‘Of course. Isn’t it a pity she’s such an innocent? Just look at those big arms! Whenever I dress her I always think what a fine woman she would have made. Ay, she would have brought you some splendid nephews, sir. Don’t you think she is like that stone lady in Plassans corn-market?’

She spoke thus of a Cybele stretched upon sheaves of wheat, the work of one of Puget’s pupils, which was carved on the frontal of the market building. Without replying, however, Abbé Mouret gently pushed her out of the room, and begged her to make as little noise as possible. Till evening, therefore, perfect silence settled on the parsonage. La Teuse finished her washing in the shed. The priest, seated at the bottom of the little garden, his breviary fallen on his lap, remained absorbed in pious thoughts, while all around him rosy petals rained from the blossoming peach-trees.

XI

About six o’clock there came a sudden wakening. A noise of doors opening and closing, accompanied by bursts of laughter, shook the whole house. Desirée appeared, her hair all down and her arms still half bare.

‘Serge! Serge!’ she called.

And catching sight of her brother in the garden, she ran up to him and sat down for a minute on the ground at his feet, begging him to follow her:

‘Do come and see the animals! You haven’t seen the animals yet, have you? If you only knew how beautiful they are now!’

She had to beg very hard, for the yard rather scared him. But when he saw tears in Desirée’s eyes, he yielded. She threw herself on his neck in a sudden puppy-like burst of glee, laughing more than ever, without attempting to dry her cheeks.

‘Oh! how nice you are!’ she stammered, as she dragged him off. ‘You shall see the hens, the rabbits, the pigeons, and my ducks which have got fresh water, and my goat, whose room is as clean as mine now. I have three geese and two turkeys, you know. Come quick. You shall see all.’

Desirée was then twenty-two years old. Reared in the country by her nurse, a peasant woman of Saint-Eutrope, she had grown up anyhow. Her brain void of all serious thoughts, she had thriven on the fat soil and open air of the country, developing physically but never mentally, growing into a lovely animal--white, with rosy blood and firm skin. She was not unlike a high-bred donkey endowed with the power of laughter. Although she dabbled about from morning till night, her delicate hands and feet, the supple outlines of her hips, the bourgeois refinement of her maiden form remained unimpaired; so that she was in truth a creature apart--neither lady nor peasant--but a girl nourished by the soil, with the broad shoulders and narrow brow of a youthful goddess.

Doubtless it was by reason of her weak intellect that she was drawn towards animals. She was never happy save with them; she understood their language far better than that of mankind, and looked after them with motherly affection. Her reasoning powers were deficient, but in lieu thereof she had an instinct which put her on a footing of intelligence with them. At their very first cry of pain she knew what ailed them; she would choose dainties upon which they would pounce greedily. A single gesture from her quelled their squabbles. She seemed to know their good or their evil character at a glance; and related such long tales about the tiniest chick, with such an abundance and minuteness of detail, as to astound those to whom one chicken was exactly like any other. Her farmyard had thus become a country, as it were, over which she reigned; a country complex in its organisation, disturbed by rebellions, peopled by the most diverse creatures whose records were known to her alone. So accurate was her instinct that she detected the unfertile eggs in a sitting, and foretold the number of a litter of rabbits.

When, at sixteen, Desirée became a young woman, she retained all her wonted health; and rapidly developed, with round, free-swaying bust, broad hips like those of an antique statue, the full growth indeed of a vigorous animal. One might have thought that she had sprung from the rich soil of her poultry-yard, that she absorbed the sap with her sturdy legs, which were as firm as young trees. And nought disturbed her amidst all this plenitude. She found continuous satisfaction in being surrounded by birds and animals which ever increased and multiplied, their fruitfulness filling her with delight. Nothing could have been healthier. She innocently feasted on the odour and warmth of life, knowing no depraved curiosity, but retaining all the tranquillity of a beautiful animal, simply happy at seeing her little world thus multiply, feeling as if she thereby became a mother, the common natural mother of one and all.

Since she had been living at Les Artaud, she had spent her days in complete beatitude. At last she was satisfying the dream of her life, the only desire which had worried her amidst her weak-minded puerility. She had a poultry-yard, a nook all to herself, where she could breed animals to her heart’s content. And she almost lived there, building rabbit-hutches with her own hands, digging out a pond for the ducks, knocking in nails, fetching straw, allowing no one to assist her. All that La Teuse had to do was to wash her afterwards. The poultry-yard was situated behind the cemetery; and Desirée often had to jump the wall, and run hither and thither among the graves after some fowl whom curiosity had led astray. Right at the end was a shed giving accommodation to the fowls and the rabbits; to the right was a little stable for the goat. Moreover, all the animals lived together; the rabbits ran about with the fowls, the nanny-goat would take a footbath in the midst of the ducks; the geese, the turkeys, the guinea-fowls, and the pigeons all fraternised in the company of three cats. Whenever Desirée appeared at the wooden fence which prevented her charges from making their way into the church, a deafening uproar greeted her.

‘Eh! can’t you hear them?’ she said to her brother, as they reached the dining-room door.

But, when she had admitted him and closed the gate behind them, she was assailed so violently that she almost disappeared. The ducks and the geese, opening and shutting their beaks, tugged at her skirts; the greedy hens sprang up and pecked her hands; the rabbits squatted on her feet and then bounded up to her knees; whilst the three cats leapt upon her shoulders, and the goat bleated in its stable at being unable to reach her.

‘Leave me alone, do! all you creatures!’ she cried with a hearty sonorous laugh, feeling tickled by all the feathers, claws, and beaks and paws rubbing against her.

However, she did not attempt to free herself. As she often said, she would have let herself be devoured; it seemed so sweet to feel all this life cling to her and encompass her with the warmth of eider-down. At last only one cat persisted in remaining on her back.

‘It’s Moumou,’ she said. ‘His paws are like velvet.’ Then, calling her brother’s attention to the yard, she proudly added: ‘See, how clean it is!’

The yard had indeed been swept out, washed, and raked over. But the disturbed water and the forked-up litter exhaled so fetid and powerful an odour that Abbé Mouret half choked. The dung was heaped against the graveyard wall in a huge smoking mound.

‘What a pile, eh?’ continued Desirée, leading her brother into the pungent vapour, ‘I put it all there myself, nobody helped me. Go on, it isn’t dirty. It cleans. Look at my arms.’

As she spoke she held out her arms, which she had merely dipped into a pail of water--regal arms they were, superbly rounded, blooming like full white roses amidst the manure.

‘Yes, yes,’ gently said the priest, ‘you have worked hard. It’s very nice now.’

Then he turned towards the wicket, but she stopped him.

‘Do wait a bit. You shall see them all. You have no idea--’ And so saying, she dragged him to the rabbit house under the shed.

‘There are young ones in all the hutches,’ she said, clapping her hands in glee.

Then at great length she proceeded to explain to him all about the litters. He had to crouch down and come close to the wire netting, whilst she gave him minute details. The mother does, with big restless ears, eyed him askance, panting and motionless with fear. Then, in one hutch, he saw a hairy cavity wherein crawled a living heap, an indistinct dusky mass heaving like a single body. Close by some young ones, with enormous heads, ventured to the edge of the hole. A little farther were yet stronger ones, who looked like young rats, ferreting and leaping about with their raised rumps showing their white scuts. Others, white ones with pale ruby eyes, and black ones with jet eyes, galloped round their hutches with playful grace. Now a scare would make them bolt off swiftly, revealing at every leap their slender reddened paws. Next they would squat down all in a heap, so closely packed that their heads could no longer be seen.

‘It is you they are frightened at,’ Desirée kept on saying. ‘They know me well.’

She called them and drew some bread-crust from her pocket. The little rabbits then became more confident, and, with puckered noses, kept sidling up, and rearing against the netting one by one. She kept them like that for a minute to show her brother the rosy down upon their bellies, and then gave her crust to the boldest one. Upon this the whole of them flocked up, sliding forward and squeezing one another, but never quarreling. At one moment three little ones were all nibbling the same piece of crust, but others darted away, turning to the wall so as to eat in peace, while their mothers in the rear remained snuffing distrustfully and refused the crusts.

‘Oh! the greedy little things!’ exclaimed Desirée. ‘They would eat like that till to-morrow morning! At night, even, you can bear them crunching the leaves they have overlooked in the day-time.’

The priest had risen as if to depart, but she never wearied of smiling on her dear little ones.

‘You see the big one there, that’s all white, with black ears--Well! he dotes on poppies. He is very clever at picking them out from the other weeds. The other day he got the colic. So I took him and kept him warm in my pocket. Since then he has been quite frisky.’

She poked her fingers through the wire netting and stroked the rabbits’ backs.

‘Wouldn’t you say it was satin?’ she continued. ‘They are dressed like princes. And ain’t they coquettish! Look, there’s one who is always cleaning himself. He wears the fur off his paws.... If only you knew how funny they are! I say nothing, but I see all their little games. That grey one looking at us, for instance, used to hate a little doe, which I had to put somewhere else. There were terrible scenes between them. It would take too long to tell you all, but the last time he gave her a drubbing, when I came up in a rage, what do you think I saw? Why that rascal huddled up at the back there as if he was just at his last gasp. He wanted to make me believe that it was he who had to complain of her.’

Then Desirée paused to apostrophise the rabbit. ‘Yes, you may listen to me; you’re a rogue!’ And turning towards her brother, ‘He understands all I say,’ she added softly, with a wink.

But Abbé Mouret could stand it no longer. He was perturbed by the heat that emanated from the litters, the life that crawled under the hair plucked from the does’ bellies, exhaling powerful emanations. On the other hand, Desirée, as if slowly intoxicated, was growing brighter and pinker.

‘But there’s nothing to take you away!’ she cried; ‘you always seem anxious to go off. You must see my little chicks! They were born last night.’

She took some rice and threw a handful before her. The hen gravely drew near, clucking to the little band of chickens that followed her chirping and scampering as if in bewilderment. When they were fairly in the middle of the scattered rice the hen eagerly pecked at it, and threw down the grains she cracked, while her little ones hastily began to feed. All the charm of infancy was theirs. Half-naked as it were, with round heads, eyes sparkling like steel needles, beaks so queerly set, and down so quaintly ruffled up, they looked like penny toys. Desirée laughed with enjoyment at sight of them.

‘What little loves they are!’ she stammered.

She took up two of them, one in each hand, and smothered them with eager kisses. And then the priest had to inspect them all over, while she coolly said to him:

‘It isn’t easy to tell the cocks. But I never make a mistake. This one is a hen, and this one is a hen too.’

Then she set them on the ground again. Other hens were now coming up to eat the rice. A large ruddy cock with flaming plumage followed them, lifting his large feet with majestic caution.

‘Alexander is getting splendid,’ said the Abbé, to please his sister.

Alexander was the cock’s name. He looked up at the young girl with his fiery eye, his head turned round, his tail outspread, and then installed himself close by her skirts.

‘He is very fond of me,’ she said. ‘Only I can touch him. He is a good bird. There are fourteen hens, and never do I find a bad egg in the nests. Do I, Alexander?’

She stooped; the bird did not fly from her caress. A rush of blood seemed to set his comb aflame; flapping his wings, and stretching out his neck, he burst into a long crow which rang out like a blast from a brazen throat. Four times did he repeat his crow while all the cocks of Les Artaud answered in the distance. Desirée was greatly amused by her brother’s startled looks.

‘He deafens one, eh?’ she said. ‘He has a splendid voice. But he’s not vicious, I assure you, though the hens are--You remember the big speckled one, that used to lay yellow eggs? Well, the day before yesterday she hurt her foot. When the others saw the blood they went quite mad. They all followed her, pecking at her and drinking her blood, so that by the evening they had eaten up her foot. I found her with her head behind a stone, like an idiot, saying nothing, and letting herself be devoured.’

The remembrance of the fowls’ voracity made her laugh. She calmly related other cruelties of theirs: young chickens devoured, of which she had only found the necks and wings, and a litter of kittens eaten up in the stable in a few hours.

‘You might give them a human being,’ she continued, ‘they’d finish him. And aren’t they tough livers! They get on with a broken limb even. They may have wounds, big holes in their bodies, and still they’ll gobble their victuals. That’s what I like them for; their flesh grows again in two days; they are always as warm as if they had a store of sunshine under their feathers. When I want to give them a treat, I cut them up some raw meat. And worms too! Wait, you’ll see how they love them.’

She ran to the dungheap, and unhesitatingly picked up a worm she found there. The fowls darted at her hands; but to amuse herself with the sight of their greediness she held the worm high above them. At last she opened her fingers, and forthwith the fowls hustled one another and pounced upon the worm. One of them fled with it in her beak, pursued by the others; it was thus taken, snatched away, and retaken many times until one hen, with a mighty gulp, swallowed it altogether. At that they all stopped short with heads thrown back, and eyes on the alert for another worm. Desirée called them by their names, and talked pettingly to them; while Abbé Mouret retreated a few steps from this display of voracious life.

‘No, I am not at all comfortable,’ he said to his sister, when she tried to make him feel the weight of a fowl she was fattening. ‘It always makes me uneasy to touch live animals.’

He tried to smile, but Desirée taxed him with cowardice.

‘Ah well, what about my ducks, and geese, and turkeys?’ said she. ‘What would you do if you had all those to look after? Ducks are dirty, if you like. Do you hear them shaking their bills in the water? And when they dive, you can only see their tails sticking straight up like ninepins. Geese and turkeys, too, are not easy to manage. Isn’t it fun to see them walking along with their long necks, some quite white and others quite black? They look like ladies and gentlemen. And I wouldn’t advise you to trust your finger to them. They would swallow it at a gulp. But my fingers, they only kiss--see!’

Her words were cut short by a joyous bleat from the goat, which had at last forced the door of the stable open. Two bounds and the animal was close to her, bending its forelegs, and affectionately rubbing its horns against her. To the priest, with its pointed beard and obliquely set eyes, it seemed to wear a diabolical grin. But Desirée caught it round the neck, kissed its head, played and ran with it, and talked about how she liked to drink its milk. She often did so, she said, when she was thirsty in the stable.

‘See, it has plenty of milk,’ she added, pointing to the animal’s udder.

The priest lowered his eyes. He could remember having once seen in the cloister of Saint-Saturnin at Plassans a horrible stone gargoyle, representing a goat and a monk; and ever since he had always looked on goats as dissolute creatures of hell. His sister had only been allowed to get one after weeks of begging. For his part, whenever he came to the yard, he shunned all contact with the animal’s long silky coat, and carefully guarded his cassock from the touch of its horns.

‘All right, I’ll let you go now,’ said Desirée, becoming aware of his growing discomfort. ‘But you must just let me show you something else first. Promise not to scold me, won’t you? I have not said anything to you about it, because you wouldn’t have allowed it.... But if you only knew how pleased I am!’

As she spoke she put on an entreating expression, clasped her hands, and laid her head upon her brother’s shoulder.

‘Another piece of folly, no doubt,’ he murmured, unable to refrain from smiling.

‘You won’t mind, will you?’ she continued, her eyes glistening with delight. ‘You won’t be angry?--He is so pretty!’

Thereupon she ran to open the low door under the shed, and forthwith a little pig bounded into the middle of the yard.

‘Oh! isn’t he a cherub?’ she exclaimed with a look of profound rapture as she saw him leap out.

The little pig was indeed charming, quite pink, his snout washed clean by the greasy slops placed before him, though incessant routing in his trough had left a ring of dirt about his eyes. He trotted about, hustled the fowls, rushing to gobble up whatever was thrown them, and upsetting the little yard with his sudden turns and twists. His ears flapped over his eyes, his snout went snorting over the ground, and with his slender feet he resembled a toy animal on wheels. From behind, his tail looked like a bit of string that served to hang him up by.

‘I won’t have this beast here!’ exclaimed the priest, terribly put out.

‘Oh, Serge, dear old Serge,’ begged Desirée again, ‘don’t be so unkind. See, what a harmless little thing he is! I’ll wash him, I’ll keep him very clean. La Teuse went and had him given her for me. We can’t send him back now. See, he is looking at you; he wants to smell you. Don’t be afraid, he won’t eat you.’

But she broke off, seized with irresistible laughter. The little pig had blundered in a dazed fashion between the goat’s legs, and tripped her up. And he was now madly careering round, squeaking, rolling, scaring all the denizens of the poultry-yard. To quiet him Desirée had to get him an earthen pan full of dish-water. In this he wallowed up to his ears, splashing and grunting, while quick quivers of delight coursed over his rosy skin. And now his uncurled tail hung limply down.

The stirring of this foul water put a crowning touch to Abbé Mouret’s disgust. Ever since he had been there, he had choked more and more; his hands and chest and face were afire, and he felt quite giddy. The odour of the fowls and rabbits, the goat, and the pig, all mingled in one pestilential stench. The atmosphere, laden with the ferments of life, was too heavy for his maiden shoulders. And it seemed to him that Desirée had grown taller, expanding at the hips, waving huge arms, sweeping the ground with her skirts, and stirring up all that powerful odour which overpowered him. He had only just time to open the wicket. His feet clung to the stone flags still dank with manure, in such wise that it seemed as if he were held there by some clasp of the soil. And suddenly, despite himself, there came back to him a memory of the Paradou, with its huge trees, its black shadows, its penetrating perfumes.

‘There, you are quite red now,’ Desirée said to him as she joined him outside the wicket. ‘Aren’t you pleased to have seen everything? Do you hear the noise they are making?’

On seeing her depart, the birds and animals had thrown themselves against the trellis work emitting piteous cries. The little pig, especially, gave vent to prolonged whines that suggested the sharpening of a saw. Desirée, however, curtsied to them and kissed her finger-tips to them, laughing at seeing them all huddled together there, like so many lovers of hers. Then, hugging her brother, as she accompanied him to the garden, she whispered into his ear with a blush: ‘I should so like a cow.’

He looked at her, with a ready gesture of disapproval.

‘No, no, not now,’ she hurriedly went on. ‘We’ll talk about it again later on---- But there would be room in the stable. A lovely white cow with red spots. You’d soon see what nice milk we should have. A goat becomes too little in the end. And when the cow has a calf!’

At the mere thought of this she skipped and clapped her hands with glee; and to the priest she seemed to have brought the poultry-yard away with her in her skirts. So he left her at the end of the garden, sitting in the sunlight on the ground before a hive, whence the bees buzzed like golden berries round her neck, along her bare arms and in her hair, without thought of stinging her.

XII

Brother Archangias dined at the parsonage every Thursday. As a rule he came early so as to talk over parish matters. It was he who, for the last three months, had kept the Abbé informed of all the affairs of the valley. That Thursday, while waiting till La Teuse should call them, they strolled about in front of the church. The priest, on relating his interview with Bambousse, was surprised to find that the Brother thought the peasant’s reply quite natural.

‘The man’s right,’ said the Ignorantin.* ‘You don’t give away chattels like that. Rosalie is no great bargain, but it’s always hard to see your own daughter throw herself away on a pauper.’

* A popular name in France for a Christian Brother.--ED.

‘Still,’ rejoined Abbé Mouret, ‘a marriage is the only way of stopping the scandal.’

The Brother shrugged his big shoulders and laughed aggravatingly. ‘Do you think you’ll cure the neighbourhood with that marriage?’ he exclaimed. ‘Before another two years Catherine will be following her sister’s example. They all go the same way, and as they end by marrying, they snap their fingers at every one. These Artauds flourish in it all, as on a congenial dungheap. There is only one possible remedy, as I have told you before: wring all the girls’ necks if you don’t want the country to be poisoned. No husbands, Monsieur le Curé, but a good thick stick!’

Then calming down a bit, he added: ‘Let every one do with their own as they think best.’

He went on to speak about fixing the hours for the catechism classes; but Abbé Mouret replied in an absent-minded way, his eyes dwelling on the village at his feet in the setting sun. The peasants were wending their way homewards, silently and slowly, with the dragging steps of wearied oxen returning to their sheds. Before the tumble-down houses stood women calling to one another, carrying on bawling conversations from door to door, while bands of children filled the roadway with the riot of their big clumsy shoes, grovelling and rolling and pushing each other about. A bestial odour ascended from that heap of tottering houses, and the priest once more fancied himself in Desirée’s poultry-yard, where life ever increased and multiplied. Here, too, was the same incessant travail, which so disturbed him. Since morning his mind had been running on that episode of Rosalie and Fortune, and now his thoughts returned to it, to the foul features of existence, the incessant, fated task of Nature, which sowed men broadcast like grains of wheat. The Artauds were a herd penned in between four ranges of hills, increasing, multiplying, spreading more and more thickly over the land with each successive generation.

‘See,’ cried Brother Archangias, interrupting his discourse to point to a tall girl who was letting her sweetheart snatch a kiss, ‘there is another hussy over there!’

He shook his long black arms at the couple and made them flee. In the distance, over the crimson fields and the peeling rocks, the sun was dying in one last flare. Night gradually came on. The warm fragrance of the lavender became cooler on the wings of the light evening breeze which now arose. From time to time a deep sigh fell on the ear as if that fearful land, consumed by ardent passions, had at length grown calm under the soft grey rain of twilight. Abbé Mouret, hat in hand, delighted with the coolness, once more felt quietude descend upon him.

‘Monsieur le Curé! Brother Archangias!’ cried La Teuse. ‘Come quick! The soup is on the table.’

It was cabbage soup, and its odoriferous steam filled the parsonage dining-room. The Brother seated himself and fell to, slowly emptying the huge plate that La Teuse had put down before him. He was a big eater, and clucked his tongue as each mouthful descended audibly into his stomach. Keeping his eyes on his spoon, he did not speak a word.

‘Isn’t my soup good, then, Monsieur le Curé?’ the old servant asked the priest. ‘You are only fiddling with your plate.’

‘I am not a bit hungry, my good Teuse,’ Serge replied, smiling.

‘Well! how can one wonder at it when you go on as you do! But you would have been hungry, if you hadn’t lunched at past two o’clock.’

Brother Archangias, tilting into his spoon the last few drops of soup remaining in his plate, said gravely: ‘You should be regular in your meals, Monsieur le Curé.’

At this moment Desirée, who also had finished her soup, sedately and in silence, rose and followed La Teuse to the kitchen. The Brother, then left alone with Abbé Mouret, cut himself some long strips of bread, which he ate while waiting for the next dish.

‘So you made a long round to-day?’ he asked the priest. But before the other could reply a noise of footsteps, exclamations, and ringing laughter, arose at the end of the passage, in the direction of the yard. A short altercation apparently took place. A flute-like voice which disturbed the Abbé rose in vexed and hurried accents, which finally died away in a burst of glee.

‘What can it be?’ said Serge, rising from his chair.

But Desirée bounded in again, carrying something hidden in her gathered-up skirt. And she burst out excitedly: ‘Isn’t she queer? She wouldn’t come in at all. I caught hold of her dress; but she is awfully strong; she soon got away from me.’

‘Whom on earth is she talking about?’ asked La Teuse, running in from the kitchen with a dish of potatoes, across which lay a piece of bacon.

The girl sat down, and with the greatest caution drew from her skirt a blackbird’s nest in which three wee fledglings were slumbering. She laid it on her plate. The moment the little birds felt the light, they stretched out their feeble necks and opened their crimson beaks to ask for food. Desirée clapped her hands, enchanted, seized with strange emotion at the sight of these hitherto unknown creatures.

‘It’s that Paradou girl!’ exclaimed the Abbé suddenly, remembering everything.

La Teuse had gone to the window. ‘So it is,’ she said. ‘I might have known that grasshopper’s voice---- Oh! the gipsy! Look, she’s stopped there to spy on us.’

Abbé Mouret drew near. He, too, thought that he could see Albine’s orange-coloured skirt behind a juniper bush. But Brother Archangias, in a towering passion, raised himself on tiptoe behind him, and, stretching out his fist and wagging his churlish head, thundered forth: ‘May the devil take you, you brigand’s daughter! I will drag you right round the church by your hair if ever I catch you coming and casting your evil spells here!’

A peal of laughter, fresh as the breath of night, rang out from the path, followed by light hasty footsteps and the swish of a dress rustling through the grass like an adder. Abbé Mouret, standing at the window, saw something golden glide through the pine trees like a moonbeam. The breeze, wafted in from the open country, was now laden with that penetrating perfume of verdure, that scent of wildflowers, which Albine had scattered from her bare arms, unfettered bosom, and streaming tresses at the Paradou.

‘An accursed soul! a child of perdition!’ growled Brother Archangias, as he reseated himself at the dinner table. He fell greedily upon his bacon, and swallowed his potatoes whole instead of bread. La Teuse, however, could not persuade Desirée to finish her dinner. That big baby was lost in ecstasy over the nestlings, asking questions, wanting to know what food they ate, if they laid eggs, and how the cockbirds could be known.

The old servant, however, was troubled by a suspicion, and taking her stand on her sound leg, she looked the young curé in the face.

‘So you know the Paradou people?’ she said.

Thereupon he simply told the truth, relating the visit he had paid to old Jeanbernat. La Teuse exchanged scandalised glances with Brother Archangias. At first she answered nothing, but went round and round the table, limping frantically and stamping hard enough with her heels to split the flooring.

‘You might have spoken to me of those people these three months past,’ said the priest at last. ‘I should have known at any rate what sort of people I was going to call upon.’

La Teuse stopped short as if her legs had just broken.

‘Don’t tell falsehoods, Monsieur le Curé,’ she stuttered, ‘don’t tell them; you will only make your sin still worse. How dare you say I haven’t spoken to you of the Philosopher, that heathen who is the scandal of the whole neighbourhood? The truth is, you never listen to me when I talk. It all goes in at one ear and out at the other. Ah, if you did listen to me, you’d spare yourself a good deal of trouble!’

‘I, too, have spoken to you about those abominations,’ affirmed the Brother.

Abbé Mouret lightly shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I didn’t remember it,’ he said. It was only when I found myself at the Paradou that I fancied I recollected certain tales. Besides, I should have gone to that unhappy man all the same as I thought him in danger of death.’

Brother Archangias, his mouth full, struck the table violently with his knife, and roared: ‘Jeanbernat is a dog; he ought to die like a dog.’ Then seeing the priest about to protest he cut him short: ‘No, no, for him there is no God, no penitence, no mercy. It would be better to throw the host to the pigs than carry it to that scoundrel.’

Then he helped himself to more potatoes, and with his elbows on the table, his chin in his plate, began chewing furiously. La Teuse, her lips pinched, quite white with anger, contented herself with saying dryly: ‘Let it be, his reverence will have his own way. He has secrets from us now.’

Silence reigned. For a moment one only heard the working of Brother Archangias’s jaws, and the extraordinary rumbling of his gullet. Desirée, with her bare arms round the nest in her plate, smiled to the little ones, talking to them slowly and softly in a chirruping of her own which they seemed to understand.

‘People say what they have done when they have nothing to hide,’ suddenly cried La Teuse.

And then silence reigned again. What exasperated the old servant was the mystery the priest seemed to make about his visit to the Paradou. She deemed herself a woman who had been shamefully deceived. Her curiosity smarted. She again walked round the table, not looking at the Abbé, not addressing anybody, but comforting herself with soliloquy.

‘That’s it; that’s why we have lunch so late! We go gadding about till two o’clock in the afternoon. We go into such disreputable houses that we don’t even dare to tell what we’ve done. And then we tell lies, we deceive everybody.’

‘But nobody,’ gently interrupted Abbé Mouret, who was forcing himself to eat a little more, so as to prevent La Teuse from getting crosser than ever, ‘nobody asked me if I had been to the Paradou. I have not had to tell any lies.’

La Teuse, however, went on as if she had never heard him.

‘Yes, we go ruining our cassock in the dust, we come home rigged up like a thief. And if some kind person takes an interest in us, and questions us for our own good, we push her about and treat her like a good-for-nothing woman, whom we can’t trust. We hide things like a slyboots, we’d rather die than breathe a word; we’re not even considerate enough to enliven our home by relating what we’ve seen.’

She turned to the priest, and looked him full in the face.

‘Yes, you take that to yourself. You are a close one, you’re a bad man!’

Thereupon she fell to crying and the Abbé had to soothe her.

‘Monsieur Caffin used to tell me everything,’ she moaned out.

However, she soon grew calmer. Brother Archangias was finishing a big piece of cheese, apparently quite unruffled by the scene. In his opinion Abbé Mouret really needed being kept straight, and La Teuse was right in making him feel the reins. Having drunk a last glassful of the weak wine, the Brother threw himself back in his chair to digest his meal.

‘Well now,’ finally asked the old servant, ‘what did you see at the Paradou? Tell us, at any rate.’

Abbé Mouret smiled and related in a few words how strangely Jeanbernat had received him. La Teuse, after overwhelming him with questions, broke out into indignant exclamations, while Brother Archangias clenched his fists and brandished them aloft.

‘May Heaven crush him!’ said he, ‘and burn both him and his witch!’

In his turn the Abbé then endeavoured to elicit some fresh particulars about the people at the Paradou, and listened intently to the Brother’s monstrous narrative.

‘Yes, that little she-devil came and sat down in the school. It’s a long time ago now, she might then have been about ten. Of course, I let her come; I thought her uncle was sending her to prepare for her first communion. But for two months she utterly revolutionised the whole class. She made herself worshipped, the minx! She knew all sorts of games, and invented all sorts of finery with leaves and shreds of rags. And how quick and clever she was, too, like all those children of hell! She was the top one at catechism. But one fine morning the old man burst in just in the middle of our lessons. He was going to smash everything, and shouted that the priests had taken his child from him. We had to get the rural policeman to turn him out. As to the little one, she bolted. I could see her through the window, in a field opposite, laughing at her uncle’s frenzy. She had been coming to school for the last two months without his even suspecting it. He had regularly scoured the country after her.’

‘She’s never taken her first communion,’ exclaimed La Teuse below her breath with a slight shudder.

‘No, never,’ rejoined Brother Archangias. ‘She must be sixteen now. She’s growing up like a brute beast. I have seen her running on all fours in a thicket near La Palud.’

‘On all fours,’ muttered the servant, turning towards the window with superstitious anxiety.

Abbé Mouret attempted to express some doubt, but the Brother burst out: ‘Yes, on all fours! And she jumped like a wild cat. If I had only had a gun I could have put a bullet in her. We kill creatures that are far more pleasing to God than she is. Besides, every one knows she comes caterwauling every night round Les Artaud. She howls like a beast. If ever a man should fall into her clutches, she wouldn’t leave him a scrap of skin on his bones, I know.’

The Brother’s hatred of womankind was boiling over. He banged the table with his fist, and poured forth all his wonted abuse.

‘The devil’s in them. They reek of the devil! And that’s what bewitches fools.’

The priest nodded approvingly. Brother Archangias’s outrageous violence and La Teuse’s loquacious tyranny were like castigation with thongs, which it often rejoiced him to find lashing his shoulders. He took a pious delight in sinking into abasement beneath their coarse speech. He seemed to see the peace of heaven behind contempt of the world and degradation of his whole being. It was delicious to inflict mortification upon his body, to drag his susceptible nature through a gutter.

‘There is nought but filth,’ he muttered as he folded up his napkin.

La Teuse began to clear the table and wished to remove the plate on which Desirée had laid the blackbird’s nest. You are not going to bed here, I suppose, mademoiselle,’ she said. ‘Do leave those nasty things.’

Desirée, however, defended her plate. She covered the nest with her bare arms, no longer gay, but cross at being disturbed.

‘I hope those birds are not going to be kept,’ exclaimed Brother Archangias. ‘It would bring bad luck. You must wring their necks.’

And he already stretched out his big hands; but the girl rose and stepped back quivering, hugging the nest to her bosom. She stared fixedly at the Brother, her lips curling upwards, like those of a wolf about to bite.

‘Don’t touch the little things,’ she stammered. ‘You are ugly.’

With such singular contempt did she emphasise that last word that Abbé Mouret started as if the Brother’s ugliness had just struck him for the first time. The latter contented himself with growling. He had always felt a covert hatred for Desirée, whose lusty physical development offended him. When she had left the room, still walking backwards, and never taking her eyes from him, he shrugged his shoulders and muttered between his teeth some coarse abuse which no one heard.

‘She had better go to bed,’ said La Teuse. ‘She would only bore us by-and-by in church.’

‘Has any one come yet?’ asked Abbé Mouret.

‘Oh, the girls have been outside a long time with armfuls of boughs. I am just going to light the lamps. We can begin whenever you like.’

A few seconds later she could be heard swearing in the sacristy because the matches were damp. Brother Archangias, who remained alone with the priest, sourly inquired: ‘For the month of Mary, eh?’

‘Yes,’ replied Abbé Mouret. ‘The last few days the girls about here were hard at work and couldn’t come as usual to decorate the Lady Chapel. So the ceremony was postponed till to-night.’

‘A nice custom,’ muttered the Brother. ‘When I see them all putting up their boughs I feel inclined to knock them down and make them confess their misdeeds before touching the altar. It’s a shame to allow women to rustle their dresses so near the holy relics.’

The Abbé made an apologetic gesture. He had only been at Les Artaud a little while, he must follow the customs.

‘Whenever you like, Monsieur le Curé, we’re ready!’ now called out La Teuse.

But Brother Archangias detained him a minute. ‘I am off,’ he said. ‘Religion isn’t a prostitute that it should be decorated with flowers and laces.’

He walked slowly to the door. Then once more he stopped, and lifting one of his hairy fingers added: ‘Beware of your devotion to the Virgin.’

XIII

On entering the church Abbé Mouret found nine or ten big girls awaiting him with boughs of ivy, laurel, and rosemary. Few garden flowers grew on the rocks of Les Artaud, so the custom was to decorate the Lady altar with a greenery which might last throughout the month of May. Thereto La Teuse would add a few wallflowers whose stems were thrust into old decanters.

‘Will you let me do it, Monsieur le Curé?’ she asked. ‘You are not used to it---- Come, stand there in front of the altar. You can tell me if the decorations please you.’

He consented, and it was she who really directed the arrangements. Having climbed upon a pair of steps she bullied the girls as they came up to her in turn with their leafy contributions.

‘Not so fast, now! You must give me time to fix the boughs. We can’t have all these bundles coming down on his reverence’s head---- Come on, Babet, it’s your turn. What’s the good of staring at me like that with your big eyes? Fine rosemary yours is, my word! as yellow as a thistle. You next, La Rousse. Ah, well, that is splendid laurel! You got that out of your field at Croix-Verte, I know.’

The big girls laid their branches on the altar, which they kissed; and there they lingered for a while, handing up the greenery to La Teuse. The sly look of devotion they had assumed on stepping on to the altar steps was quickly set aside, and soon they were laughing, digging each other with their knees, swaying their hips against the altar’s edge, and thrusting their bosoms against the tabernacle itself. Over them the tall Virgin in gilded plaster bent her tinted face, and smiled with her rosy lips upon the naked Jesus she bore upon her left arm.

‘That’s it, Lisa!’ cried La Teuse; ‘why don’t you sit on the altar while you’re about it? Just pull your petticoats straight, will you? Aren’t you ashamed of behaving like that?--If any one of you lolls about I’ll lay her boughs across her face.--Can’t you hand me the things quietly?’

Then turning round, she asked:

‘Do you like it, sir? Do you think it will do?’

She had converted the space behind the Virgin’s statue into a verdant niche, whence leafy sprays projected on either side, forming a bower, and drooping over in front like palm leaves. The priest expressed his approval, but ventured to remark: ‘I think there ought to be a cluster of more delicate foliage up above.’

‘No doubt,’ grumbled La Teuse. ‘But they only bring me laurel and rosemary--I should like to know who has brought an olive branch. Not one, you bet! They are afraid of losing a single olive, the heathens!’

At this, however, Catherine came up laden with an enormous olive bough which completely hid her.

‘Oh, you’ve got some, you minx!’ continued the old servant.

‘Of course,’ one of the other girls exclaimed, ‘she stole it. I saw Vincent breaking it off while she kept a look-out.’

But Catherine flew into a rage and swore it was not true. She turned, and thrusting her auburn head through the greenery, which she still tightly held, she started lying with marvellous assurance, inventing quite a long story to prove that the olive bough was really hers.

‘Besides,’ she added, ‘all the trees belong to the Blessed Virgin.’

Abbé Mouret was about to intervene, but La Teuse sharply inquired if they wanted to make game of her and keep her arms up there all night. At last she proceeded to fasten the olive bough firmly, while Catherine, holding on to the steps behind her, mimicked the clumsy manner in which she turned her huge person about with the help of her sound leg. Even the priest could not forbear to smile.

‘There,’ said La Teuse, as she came down and stood beside him to get a good view of her work, ‘there’s the top done. Now we will put some clumps between the candlesticks, unless you would prefer a garland all along the altar shelf.’

The priest decided in favour of some big clumps.

‘Very good; come on, then,’ continued the old servant, once more clambering up the steps. ‘We can’t go to bed here. Just kiss the altar, will you, Miette? Do you fancy you are in your stable? Monsieur le Curé, do just see what they are up to over there! I can hear them laughing like lunatics.’

On raising one of the two lamps the dark end of the church was lit up and three of the girls were discovered romping about under the gallery; one of them had stumbled and pitched head foremost into the holy water stoup, which mishap had so tickled the others that they were rolling on the ground to laugh at their ease. They all came back, however, looking at the priest sheepishly, with lowered eyelids, but with their hands swinging against their hips as if a scolding rather pleased them than otherwise.

However, the measure of La Teuse’s wrath was filled when she suddenly perceived Rosalie coming up to the altar like the others with a bundle of boughs in her arms.

‘Get down, will you?’ she cried to her. ‘You are a cool one, and no mistake, my lass!--Hurry up, off you go with your bundle.’

‘What for, I’d like to know?’ said Rosalie boldly. ‘You can’t say I have stolen it.’

The other girls drew closer, feigning innocence and exchanging sparkling glances.

‘Clear out,’ repeated La Teuse, ‘you have no business here, do you hear?’

Then, quite losing her scanty patience, she gave vent to a very coarse epithet, which provoked a titter of delight among the peasant girls.

‘Well, what next?’ said Rosalie. ‘Mind your own business. Is it any concern of yours?’

Then she burst into a fit of sobbing and threw down her boughs, but let the Abbé lead her aside and give her a severe lecture. He had already tried to silence La Teuse; for he was beginning to feel uneasy amidst the big shameless hussies who filled the church with their armfuls of foliage. They were pushing right up to the altar step, enclosing him with a belt of woodland, wafting in his face a rank perfume of aromatic shoots.

‘Let us make haste, be quick!’ he exclaimed, clapping his hands lightly.

‘Goodness knows I would rather be in my bed,’ grumbled La Teuse. ‘It’s not so easy as you think to fasten all these bits of stuff.’

Finally, however, she succeeded in setting some lofty plumes of foliage between the candlesticks. Next she folded the steps, which were laid behind the high altar by Catherine. And then she only had to arrange two clumps of greenery at the sides of the altar table. The last boughs sufficed for this, and indeed there were some left which the girls strewed over the sanctuary floor up to the wooden rails. The Lady altar now looked like a grove, a shrubbery with a verdant lawn before it.

At present La Teuse was willing to make way for Abbé Mouret, who ascended the altar steps, and, again lightly clapping his hands, exclaimed: ‘Young ladies, to-morrow we will continue the devotions of the month of Mary. Those who may be unable to come ought at least to say their Rosary at home.’

He knelt, and the peasant girls, with a mighty rustle of skirts, sank down and settled themselves on their heels. They followed his prayer with a confused muttering, through which burst here and there a giggle. One of them, on being pinched from behind, burst into a scream, which she attempted to stifle with a sudden fit of coughing; and this so diverted the others that for a moment after the Amen they remained writhing with merriment, their noses close to the stone flags.

La Teuse dismissed them; while the priest, after crossing himself, remained absorbed before the altar, no longer hearing what went on behind him.

‘Come, now, clear out,’ muttered the old woman. ‘You’re a pack of good-for-nothings, who can’t even respect God. It’s shameful, it’s unheard of, for girls to roll about on the floor in church like beasts in a meadow---- What are you doing there, La Rousse? If I see you pinching any one, you’ll have to deal with me! Oh, yes, you may put out your tongue at me; I’ll tell his reverence about it. Out you get; out you get, you minxes!’

She drove them slowly towards the door, while running and bobbling round them frantically. And she had succeeded, as she thought, in getting every one of them outside, when she caught sight of Catherine and Vincent calmly installed in the confessional, where they were eating something with an air of great enjoyment. She drove them away; and as she popped her head outside the church, before closing the door, she espied Rosalie throwing her arm over the shoulder of Fortune, who had been waiting for her. The pair of them vanished in the darkness amid a faint sound of kisses.