“Promise me to do what I’m going to ask you....Promise first, and I’ll tell you afterwards....”
She reminded me that you were singing at eleven o’clock Mass next day, and told me that it would be nice if I came and listened to you.
“You’ve promised! You’ve promised!” she kept on saying as she kissed me. “You’ve given your word!”
She took the kiss which I gave her in return for acquiescence. The whole household was told about it. I felt myself under observation. Monsieur was going to Mass tomorrow—he who never set foot in a church! It was an event of immense significance.
I sat down to table, that evening, in a state of irritation which I could not hide for long. Hubert asked you some question or other about the Dreyfus affair. I remember that I protested furiously against what you told him in reply. I left the table and did not return. I packed a bag, and, at dawn on August 15, I caught the six o’clock train and spent a frightful day in a stifling, deserted Bordeaux.
It was strange that after that you should ever have seen me at Calèse again. Why did I always spend my holidays with all of you instead of travelling? I might invent all sorts of fine reasons. To tell the truth, it was a question for me of avoiding doubled expense. It never occurred to me that it was possible to go away and spend a lot of money without, as a preliminary, draining the stock-pot and shutting up the house.
I could have taken no pleasure in travelling about, knowing all the time that I was leaving the usual household routine behind me. So long as my share was served at Calèse, why should I go and eat elsewhere? Such was the spirit of economy that my mother had bequeathed to me, and out of which I made a virtue.
So I went back, but in a state of resentment against which even Marie herself was powerless. I started new tactics against you. Far from attacking your beliefs directly, I set myself, on the smallest possible occasion, to put you in contradiction with your faith.
My poor Isa, good Christian though you may be, confess that I had an easy game of it. That charity is synonymous with love was something that you had forgotten, if you ever knew it. Under this name you comprised a certain number of duties towards the poor, which you performed conscientiously, in the interests of your eternal life. I admit that you have changed a great deal in this respect: nowadays you visit cancer cases, I grant you.
But at that time, once the poor—your poor—were relieved, you found yourself only the more at your ease to demand your due from the people who lived dependent upon you. You never compromised about the duty of a housewife, which is to obtain the utmost possible work for the least possible money. That poor old woman who came in the morning with her vegetable cart, and to whom you would have dispensed charity freely if she had been a beggar, never sold you a single head of salad without your making it a point of honour to beat her down a halfpenny or so on her modest profits.
The most timid requests of the servants and the labourers for any increase in wages aroused in you at first stunned surprise, and then an indignation whose vehemence gave you the upper hand and always assured you the last word. You had a kind of genius for showing these people that they lacked for nothing. In your mouth an endless enumeration multiplied the advantages which they enjoyed. “You have lodging, a cask of wine, half a pig which you feed on my potatoes, a garden in which to grow vegetables.” The poor devils had no idea how well off they were.
You declared that your housemaid could put the whole of the forty francs a month you paid her in the Savings Bank. “She has all my old dresses, all my petticoats, all my shoes. What does she want money for? She would only give it away to her family....”
It is true that you looked after them devotedly when they were ill; you never neglected them; and I recognise that in general you were always esteemed, and often even loved, by these people, who despise weak masters. About all these questions you professed the ideas of your environment and your time.
But you would never admit to yourself that the Gospel condemned these ideas. “By the way,” I used to say, “I believe that Christ said...” You stopped short, disconcerted, furious because of the children. You always ended by falling into the trap. “One must not take things literally...” you would stammer. Whereupon I triumphed with ease, and overwhelmed you with examples to prove to you that saintliness consisted precisely in following the Gospel literally. If you had the misfortune to protest that you were not a saint, I quoted you the precept: “Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”
Confess, my poor Isa, that I did you good in my own way, and that, if you visit the cancerous today, they owe it partly to me! At that time your love for the children monopolised you altogether; they ate up your reserves of kindness and self-sacrifice. They prevented you from seeing other people. It was not only from me that they had turned you away, but from the rest of the world as well.
To God Himself you could speak only about their health and their future. That was where I had my chance. I used to ask you whether, from the Christian point of view, one should not rather desire all kinds of crosses for them, poverty, sickness. You cut me short. “I won’t answer you; you are talking about things you don’t understand.”
But, unfortunately for you, the children’s tutor was there too, a seminarist of twenty-three, Abbé Ardouin, whose testimony I mercilessly invoked and whom I embarrassed very much; for I never made him intervene except when I was sure that I was right, and he was incapable, in debates of that kind, of saying anything but just what he thought. In proportion as the Dreyfus affair developed, I found opportunities by the thousand of setting the poor abbé against you.
“To disorganise the army for the sake of a wretched Jew...” you would say. The mere word was enough to arouse my pretended indignation, and I kept on until I drove Abbé Ardouin to admit that a Christian could not subscribe to the condemnation of an innocent man, even if the safety of the country were at stake.
I did not really try to convince you, you and the children, who knew nothing about “the Affair” except through the caricatures of “right-thinking” newspapers. You formed an untouchable whole. Even when I appeared to be right, you were quite sure that it was only by some trickery or other.
You reached the point of saying nothing in my presence. At my approach, as happened again today, discussion came to a dead stop. But sometimes you did not know that I was hiding behind a clump of bushes, and suddenly I intervened before you could beat a retreat, and you were compelled to accept battle.
“He is a saint of a boy,” you used to say about Abbé Ardouin, “but a regular child who never thinks evil. My husband plays with him like a cat with a mouse. That’s the only reason he tolerates him, in spite of his horror of cassocks.”
As a matter of fact, I had agreed to the presence of an ecclesiastical tutor in the first place because no lay tutor would have accepted a hundred and fifty francs for the whole period of the holidays. At the outset I took this tall, dark, short-sighted young man, crippled by shyness, for a person of no importance, and paid no more attention to him than if he were a piece of furniture.
He made the children work, took them for walks, ate very little, and never said a word. He went up to his room as soon as he had swallowed his last mouthful. Sometimes, when there was nobody in the house, he sat down at the piano. I know nothing about music, but, as you used to say, “he gave me pleasure.”
No doubt you have not forgotten an incident which, without your ever suspecting it, created a hidden current of attraction between Abbé Ardouin and myself. One day the children announced that the priest was coming. Immediately, as was my custom, I took flight in the direction of the vineyard. But you sent Hubert after me: the priest had an urgent communication to make to me. I went back to the house cursing and swearing; for I was very much in awe of that little old man.
He had come, he told me, to unburden his conscience. He had recommended Abbé Ardouin to us as an excellent seminarist, whose subdiaconate had been postponed for reasons of health. He had just learne
d, however, in the course of an ecclesiastical retreat, that this delay was rather to be attributed to a disciplinary measure. Abbé Ardouin, although very pious, was mad about music, and he had been tempted by one of his comrades to slip out one night and attend a charity concert at the Grand Theatre. Although they were in lay clothes, they were recognised and reported.
What crowned the scandal was that the interpreter of Thais, Mme Georgette Lebrun, figured on the programme. At her appearance bare-legged, in her Greek tunic, held up under the arms by a silver girdle—“and that was all, so they said, not even the smallest shoulder-strap”—there was an “Oh!” of indignation. From the Union box an old gentleman cried out: “This is a bit too strong....Where are we supposed to be?”
Such was what Abbé Ardouin and his comrade had witnessed! One of the delinquents was expelled on the spot. The other was forgiven; he was a first-rate student; but his superiors had delayed his ordination by two years.
We were agreed in protesting that we had every confidence in the abbé all the same. Henceforth, nevertheless, the priest showed considerable coldness towards the seminarist, who, he said, had deceived him. You may remember this incident; but what you have never known is that that evening, while I was smoking on the terrace, I saw the thin figure of the culprit coming towards me in the moonlight.
He approached me awkwardly, and begged my pardon for having introduced himself into my house without having told me about his scrape. When I assured him that I really liked him all the better for his escapade, he protested with sudden firmness and pleaded against himself.
I could not properly estimate the enormity of his fault, he said; he had sinned at one and the same time against obedience, against his vocation, and against morality. He had committed the sin of scandal. His life would not be long enough to repair what he had done....I can still see that long bent back, with its shadow in the moonlight cut in two by the parapet of the terrace.
Prejudiced though I was against men of his profession, in the presence of such shame and sorrow I could not suspect the least hypocrisy. He excused himself for his silence to us on the ground that he would otherwise have had to go and live for two months at the expense of his mother, a very poor widow who was a daily worker at Libourne. When I answered him that, so far as I could see, he was under no obligation to tell us about an incident which concerned the discipline of the seminary, he took me by the hand and said these extraordinary words, which I heard for the first time in my life, and which gave me a kind of stupor:
“You are very good.”
You know that laugh of mine, that laugh which, even at the beginning of our life together, got on your nerves—so little infectious that, in my mouth, it had the power of chilling all gaiety around me. It shook me, that evening, before that tall seminarist, who was taken aback. Finally I was able to speak.
“You have no idea, Monsieur l’Abbé, how funny what you say is. Ask the people who know me whether I am good. Question my family, my colleagues: badness is my life force.”
He replied, in an embarrassed kind of way, that a really bad man did not talk about his badness.
“I challenge you,” I added, “to find in my life what you would call a good action.”
Then, referring to my profession, he quoted me the words of Christ: “I was a prisoner, and you visited me....”
“I find it to my advantage, Monsieur l’Abbé. I act from professional interest. There was a time when I paid warders to slip my name into the ears of accused persons at a suitable moment....So you see!”
I have forgotten his reply. We walked about under the lime-trees. How astonished you would have been if I had told you that I found some comfort in the presence of that man in a cassock! It was true, though.
I used to get up with the sun and go outside to breathe the cool air of dawn. I watched the abbé on his way to Mass, walking fast, so absorbed that he sometimes passed me a few yards away without seeing me. That was the time when I overwhelmed you with my mockeries, when I devoted myself to putting you in contradiction with your principles....It did not prevent me from having a bad conscience.
Every time I caught you red-handed in avarice or harshness, I pretended to believe that no trace of the spirit of Christ still survived among any of you; and I was well aware that, under my own roof, a man was living according to that spirit, unknown to all the rest of you.
Chapter VIII
BUT there was one occasion when I had no difficulty in feeling a horror of you. In ‘96 or ‘97—you may remember the exact date—our brother-in-law, Baron Philipot, died. Your sister Marinette awakened one morning and spoke to him, and he did not answer. She opened the shutters, saw the turned-up eyes of the old man, his dropped lower jaw, and did not realise all at once that for some hours she had been sleeping side by side with a corpse.
I doubt whether any of you appreciated the horribleness of that wretched man’s will. He left his wife an enormous fortune on condition that she did not marry again. If she did, the bulk of it was to go to his nephews.
“We shall have to take the greatest care of her,” your mother kept on saying. “Fortunately we are a family that sticks together. We must not leave the little one alone.”
Marinette was about thirty at that time; but remember what a girl she looked. She had obediently let herself be married to an old man, and had put up with him without rebelling. You assumed that she could easily accept the obligation to remain a widow. You took no account of the shock of deliverance, that sudden escape from the tunnel into the light of day.
No, Isa, don’t be afraid that I am going to abuse the advantage which is given me here. It was natural to desire that those millions should remain in the family and that your children should profit by them. You thought that Marinette ought not to lose the benefit of those ten years of servitude to an old husband. You acted as good relations. Nothing seemed to you more natural than celibacy.
Did you remember yourself that you had once been a young woman? No, that chapter was finished; you were a mother, and nothing else existed, either for you, or for anybody else. Your family never shone in the way of imagination. You could not put yourselves in the place either of animals or of people.
It was arranged that Marinette should spend the first summer of her widowhood at Calèse. She accepted with delight—not that there was very much intimacy between you; but she loved our children, above all little Marie. As for me, who hardly knew her, what struck me first was her gracefulness. A year older than you, she looked much younger. You let yourself run to seed with the children you bore; she had emerged from that old man’s bed apparently intact.
Her face was childlike. She wore her back hair piled high, according to the fashion of that time, and that darkish fair hair of hers strayed over the nape of her neck. (That is a marvel forgotten today: a nape with hair on it.) Her rather too round eyes gave her the air of being perpetually surprised. For a joke I joined my two hands round her “wasp’s waist”; but the development of her bosom and hips would seem almost monstrous today. The women of that time resembled hot-house flowers.
I was surprised that Marinette was so light-hearted. She gave the children plenty of amusement, organised hide-and-seek parties in the loft, played living pictures in the evening. “She is a little too flighty,” you said; “she does not realise her position in life.”
It was bad enough that you should have to put up with her wearing white dresses during the week; but you struck at her going to Mass without her veil and not wearing a coat trimmed with crape. The heat did not seem to you to be any excuse.
The only amusement which she had enjoyed with her husband had been riding. Until the last day of his life Baron Philipot, a champion horseman, rarely missed his morning ride. Marinette had her mare brought to Calèse, and, as nobody could escort her, she went riding alone, which struck you as doubly scandalous. A widow of three months ought not to take any exercise in any case; but that she should go riding without a bodyguard passed all bounds.
“I shall tell her what we think of it in the family,” you kept on saying. You told her, but she went on having her own way. Finally, tired of fighting, she asked me to escort her. She undertook to get a very quiet mount for me. (All the expenses, of course, were to fall on her.)
We used to start at dawn, because of the flies, and because we had to go for two kilometres at a walk before reaching the nearest pine-woods. The horses awaited us at the steps. Marinette put out her tongue at the closed shutters of your room as she pinned on to her habit a rose drenched with dew—“Not at all the thing for a widow,” she said. The bell of the first Mass rang in short strokes. Abbé Ardouin greeted us shyly, and disappeared in the mist that floated over the vineyards.
Until we reached the woods, we used to talk. I realised that I had some prestige in the eyes of my sister-in-law—less on account of my standing as a barrister than for the subversive ideas of which I made myself the champion in the family. Your principles resembled those of her husband too much. To a woman, religion, ideas, are always somebody; everything takes a shape in her eyes: a shape adorable or hateful.
I had only to press my advantage with this little rebel. But lo and behold!—so long as she confined her irritation to you, I had no difficulty in reaching her pitch; but it was impossible for me to follow her in the contempt she showed in the matter of the millions which she would lose if she married again. It was entirely to my interest to talk as she did and play the noble-hearted part; but it was impossible for me to make a pretence of it. I could not even look as though I approved when she reckoned the loss of that inheritance as nothing.
Must I confess it?—I did not even succeed in driving away the thought of her death, which would make us her heirs. (I was not thinking about the children, but about myself.)
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