The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint)

by Emile Zola

  CHAPTER 15

  ONE Friday, Madame Paloque, going into Saint-Saturnin, was most surprised to see Marthe on her knees in front of the Saint-Michel chapel. Abbé Faujas was giving confession.

  ‘Well, well!’ she thought. ‘Has she finally managed to capture the priest’s heart? I must stay. If Madame de Condamin came in, it would be very amusing.’

  She took a chair, a little to the back, half-kneeling, her face in her hands, as though deep in fervent prayer. Then she opened her fingers and looked. The church was very dark. Marthe, her head bowed over her prayer book, seemed to be asleep; her dark shape stood out against the whiteness of the pillar. And of her whole body only her shoulders gave a sign of life, being shaken by deep sighs. So thoroughly overcome, she allowed her turn to be taken, every time Abbé Faujas sent away a new penitent. The priest waited a minute, became impatient, gave sharp little taps on the wood of the confessional. Then one of the women there, seeing that Marthe did not move, would decide to take her place. The chapel was emptying, Marthe remained motionless, half-swooning.

  ‘She has got it badly,’ Madame Paloque thought. ‘It’s indecent showing yourself off like that in a church… Aha, here’s Madame de Condamin!’

  And there indeed was Madame de Condamin. She paused for a moment before the font, taking off one glove and crossing herself prettily. Her silk dress swished as she made her way through the narrow space between the chairs. When she knelt, the high vault was filled with the rustle of her skirts. She looked benignly about her, smiling into the dark shadows of the church. Soon only Marthe and she were left. The priest was getting cross, tapping more urgently on the confessional.

  ‘Madame, it’s your turn, I am the last,’ Madame de Condamin whispered kindly, leaning towards Marthe, whom she had not recognized.

  Marthe turned round, showing her dreadfully thin, nervous face, pale with an extraordinary emotion. She seemed not to take it in. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as if she was emerging from an ecstatic slumber.

  ‘Come along then, ladies!’ said the priest, opening the door of the confessional a little.

  Madame de Condamin got to her feet with a smile, obeying the priest’s summons. But Marthe had recognized her and suddenly moved forward into the chapel; then fell to her knees once more and stayed there three paces away.

  Madame Paloque was enjoying herself hugely. She hoped the two women would come to blows. Marthe must have heard everything, for Madame de Condamin had a fluting voice. She babbled about all her sins, filling the confessional with her bubbly chatter. At one point she even gave a laugh, a little suppressed laugh which made Marthe lift her suffering face. But she finished promptly. She was just leaving, but came back again, still genuflecting, still chattering, but not kneeling.

  ‘That demon of a woman is having fun at Madame Mouret’s and the priest’s expense,’ thought the justice’s wife. ‘She’s so sly, nothing puts her out.’

  Finally Madame de Condamin left. Marthe watched her, seeming to wait until she had finally gone. Then she leaned on the confessional, and abandoned herself, pressing her knees hard against the wood. Madame Paloque had moved forward, and was craning her neck, but she could see only the edge of the penitent woman’s dark dress draped over the side. For nearly half an hour nothing moved. She thought for a moment she could hear stifled sobs in the quivering silence, sometimes punctuated by a little cracking sound from the confessional. In the end she became tired of spying. She only stayed there so that she could get a good look at Marthe when she emerged.

  Abbé Faujas was the first to leave the confessional, banging the door shut in irritation. Madame Mouret remained there for a long time still, motionless, bowed over in the narrow enclosure. When she withdrew, her veil drawn down, she looked like a broken woman. She forgot to make the sign of the cross.

  ‘There has been a quarrel, the priest hasn’t been kind to her,’ murmured Madame Paloque, and she followed her as far as the Place de l’Archevêché.

  She stopped a moment, then, after ascertaining that no one was looking, she sneaked into the lodging occupied by Abbé Fenil at one corner of the square.

  Marthe’s life now was lived at Saint-Saturnin. She fulfilled her religious duties with great fervour. Even Abbé Faujas frequently told her off for the passion she put into her devotions. He only allowed her to take communion once a month, regulating her hours of religious practices, demanding that she didn’t shut herself off in her piety. For a long time, until he allowed it, she had been entreating him to let her attend Low Mass each morning. One day when she told him that she had lain for an hour on the icy-cold tiles of her floor to punish herself for a sin, he got angry and told her that only her confessor had the right to impose penitences. He was very strict in his guidance of her, threatening to send her to Abbé Bourrette if she didn’t do as she was told.

  ‘I was wrong to take you on,’ he often repeated. ‘I only want souls that are obedient.’

  She was happy to receive these blows. The iron hand that ruled her, the hand which kept her on the brink of this continual adoration, in whose depths she wanted total annihilation, was whipping her with a desire that was constantly renewed. She was still a novice, she was descending into love one step at a time; she would be brought up short, guessing she might plunge deeper, ravished by this slow journey to other joys yet unknown. The great peace she had first experienced in the church, that forgetting of the outside world and of her own self, was transformed into an active pleasure, into a blessed state which she could bring about, which she could reach, herself. It was the happiness she had vaguely desired from girlhood, and which she was now finding as a woman of forty. It was a happiness which satisfied her, which gave back all the beautiful years which had passed her by and made her live for herself alone, attentive as she was to all the new sensations that wakened her innermost being like caresses.

  ‘Be kind to me,’ she whispered to Abbé Faujas, ‘be kind to me, I need your kindness.’

  And when he was kind to her, she would have gone down on her knees to thank him. He was more amenable then and talked to her in a paternal way, explaining that she had too lively an imagination. God, he said, did not like to be adored in that way, in sudden impulses. She smiled, she was young and blushing and beautiful again. She promised to be good. Then, in a dark corner, her devotions flung her down on the stone floor, not kneeling but sliding, almost sitting, stammering out ardent words. And when the words died away, she continued to pray with an upsurge of her whole being, pleading for that Divine Kiss which passed over her head but would never come to rest upon it.

  At home Marthe became argumentative. Until then she had drifted around, indifferent, listless, happy when her husband left her alone. But since he had been spending his days at home, no longer indulged in his jocular teasing, but was growing thinner and more sallow, he was getting on her nerves.

  ‘He’s always under our feet,’ she told the cook.

  ‘He does it deliberately,’ replied Rose. ‘He’s not a good man deep down. I’ve thought that for a long time. Look at the sly expression on his face, himself liking to be so chatty, don’t you think he’s playing for sympathy? He hates sulking but he carries on with it so that we’ll feel sorry for him and do what he wants. You’re quite right to pay no attention to his play-acting, Madame.’

  Mouret had a hold over the two women because of the money. He did not want to get into an argument in case it made his life even more difficult. Though he had stopped grumbling aloud as he fussed and stamped around, his depressed state was evidenced by his refusal to give a hundred sous to Marthe or Rose. He gave the latter a hundred francs a month for food. Wine, oil, and preserves were in the house. But the cook had to be prepared to put in some of her own money at the end of the month. As for Marthe, she had nothing. He left her literally without a penny. She was reduced to coming to an arrangement with Rose to try and save ten francs out of the hundred francs she got a month. Often she had no boots to put on and was obliged to go to her moth
er and borrow money for a dress or hat.

  ‘Mouret’s going mad!’ cried Madame Rougon. ‘You can’t go around naked. I’ll have a word with him.’

  ‘Please, Mother, don’t do that,’ she replied. ‘He hates you. He would treat me even worse if he knew I told you about these things.’

  She burst into tears and added:

  ‘I’ve stood up for him for a long time, but now I haven’t got the strength to keep quiet any longer… You remember when he did not want me to even set foot outside the door. He shut me in the house, he treated me like an object. Now if he’s behaving so cruelly, it’s because he can see I have escaped, and that I shall never more agree to be his servant. He’s a man without any religion, he’s selfish and heartless.’

  ‘He doesn’t beat you though, does he?’

  ‘No, not yet. He’s just at the stage of refusing me everything. I haven’t bought any chemises for five years. Yesterday I showed him the ones I have. They are worn and so full of darns that I am ashamed to wear them. He looked at them and felt them, saying they would definitely last till next year… I don’t have a penny to call my own; I have to burst into tears to get a twenty-sous coin out of him. The other day I had to borrow two sous from Rose to buy some cotton. I sewed up my gloves again, that were coming apart in various places.’

  And she told her about a dozen other little things: the stitching she did herself on her boots with resinated cotton, the ribbons she washed in tea to refurbish her hats; the ink she spread over the frayed folds in her one silk dress to hide the worn patches. Madame Rougon sympathized, encouraged her to revolt. Mouret was a monster. He was so mean, Rose said, that he counted the pears in the loft and the sugar lumps in the cupboards, inspected the preserves, ate yesterday’s crusts of bread.

  Marthe suffered especially from not being able to give to the collections at Saint-Saturnin; she hid ten sous in pieces of paper, and kept this treasure for High Mass on Sundays. Now, when the patron ladies of the Work of the Virgin made some gift to the cathedral, a ciborium, a silver cross, a banner, she felt ashamed. She would avoid them, and pretend not to know what they were doing. These ladies were very sorry for her. She would have stolen from her husband if she had been able to find the key to his desk, so racked was she by the need to decorate this church she loved. When Abbé Faujas used a chalice donated by Madame de Condamin she felt jealous to her very core, like a woman whose husband is unfaithful; whereas the days he said Mass on the altar cloth she had embroidered she felt a deep sense of joy, trembling with the violence of her prayer as if there was something of herself there beneath the opened hands of the priest. She would have liked to have a whole chapel just for her. She dreamed of placing a fortune in it, of shutting herself up and receiving the Almighty in it, for herself alone.

  Rose, who was party to all her secrets, did her best to get hold of some money for her. That year she performed a disappearing act on the best fruit from the garden, and sold it. She also got rid of a pile of old furniture from the attic, so that she managed to assemble the sum of three hundred francs which she placed triumphantly in Marthe’s hands. Marthe kissed the old cook.

  ‘Oh, you are so good!’ she said, familiarly. ‘Are you sure at least that he didn’t notice you?… I saw in the Rue des Orfèvres the other day some little cruets made of burnished silver, really pretty; they cost two hundred francs… Will you do something for me, Rose? I don’t want to buy them myself because I might be seen going into the shop. Tell your sister to go and buy them; she can bring them when it’s dark and give them to you through the kitchen window.’

  This purchasing of the cruets was, to her, a forbidden adventure, deeply thrilling. She kept them for three days at the back of a cupboard hidden behind parcels of linen. And when she gave them to Abbé Faujas in the sacristy of Saint-Saturnin, she was trembling and incoherent. He told her off in a kindly way. He did not care for presents; he talked about money with the disdain of a strong man for whom power and dominance are the only things that matter. During his first two years of poverty, even on the days when he and his mother lived off bread and water, it had never crossed his mind to borrow ten francs from the Mourets.

  Marthe found a safe place for the remaining hundred francs. She became miserly as well. She calculated what she would spend the money on and bought something new every morning. As she was still very hesitant, Rose told her that Madame Trouche wanted to speak to her specially. Olympe, who spent hours in the kitchen, had become close friends with Rose, from whom she often borrowed forty sous, so as not to have to climb up two flights of stairs on the days when she said she had forgotten her purse.

  ‘Go up and see her,’ the cook added. ‘It’s easier to talk up there… They are good people and very fond of Monsieur le Curé. They have had a lot of trouble, you know. It breaks my heart, all the things Madame Olympe has told me.’

  Marthe found Olympe in tears. They were too good and people had always taken advantage of them. And she began to explain about their business in Besançon when the dishonesty of an associate had left them with huge debts to cope with. The worst was that the creditors were getting annoyed. She had just received an insulting letter threatening to write to the mayor and the Bishop of Plassans.

  ‘I’m ready to put up with anything,’ she sobbed. ‘But I’d give my life not to have my brother compromised… He’s already done too much on our behalf. I don’t want to talk about it to him, for he is not well off. He would torment himself to no purpose… My word! What can I do to stop that fellow writing a letter? I should die of shame if a letter of that sort arrived at the town hall and the bishop’s house. Yes, I know my brother, he would die of shame.’

  Then tears welled up in Marthe’s eyes as well. She was very pale as she wrung Olympe’s hand. Then, without Olympe having to ask, she offered her a hundred francs.

  ‘I know it’s very little; but would that be sufficient to ward off the danger?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘A hundred francs, a hundred francs,’ Olympe repeated. ‘No no, he’ll never be happy with a hundred francs.’

  Marthe was in despair. She swore she didn’t have any more. She forgot herself so much as to talk about the cruets. If she hadn’t bought them she could have given her the three hundred francs. Madame Trouche’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Three hundred francs—that’s exactly what they are asking,’ she said. ‘Well, you would have done a greater service to my brother by not giving him this gift, which will remain in the church anyway. What beautiful things the ladies of Besançon have given him! And today he’s none the richer for them. Don’t make any more gifts like that, it’s daylight robbery. Take my advice. There is so much hidden misery in the world. No, a hundred francs would never be enough.’

  She spent a good half-hour bemoaning her lot, but when she saw that Marthe really did only have a hundred francs, she ended up accepting them all the same.

  ‘I’m going to send them to that fellow and make him wait,’ she muttered, ‘but he won’t leave us in peace for long… And above all I beg you not to talk about this to my brother. It would be the death of him… It’s better too if my husband doesn’t know anything about our little doings. He’s so proud, he would do silly things to make it up to you. We women understand each other.’

  Marthe was very happy with this loan. From then on she had a new concern: to keep Abbé Faujas, without him knowing, out of harm’s way. She often went upstairs to the Trouches and spent hours there working out with Olympe how they could pay the creditors. The latter had told her that the priest stood guarantor for numerous bills that were pending, and there would be a terrible scandal if they were ever sent to some bailiff in Plassans. The sum owed to the creditors was so huge, according to her, that for a long time she refused to say how much it was, crying even more loudly when Marthe pressed her. Finally one day she mentioned twenty thousand francs. Marthe froze. She would never be able to raise twenty thousand francs. With staring eyes, she realized she would have to wait for Mouret to die,
to get access to such a sum.

  ‘I’m talking about twenty thousand francs altogether,’ added Olympe quickly, worried by her serious expression. ‘But we should be happy to pay it back in ten years, in small instalments. The creditors would wait as long as we want if they knew they were getting regular payments… It’s very annoying that we can’t find anybody to trust us enough to advance us the necessary money.’

  That was their usual subject of conversation. Olympe often spoke of Abbé Faujas as well, whom she seemed to adore. She told Marthe intimate details about the priest. He hated being tickled. He couldn’t sleep on his left side. He had a strawberry mark on his right shoulder, which became red in May like a ripening fruit. Marthe smiled, and never tired of hearing these little things; she questioned the young woman about her childhood and her brother’s. Then, when the question of money came up again she was mad with frustration; she went so far as to complain bitterly about Mouret, and before long the emboldened Olympe never spoke of him in her presence except as ‘the old skinflint’. Sometimes when Trouche got back from his office the two women were still there talking. They fell silent, changed the subject. Trouche maintained his dignified attitude. The patron ladies of the Work of the Virgin were very happy with him. He was never seen in any cafés in the town.

  However, Marthe, in order to come to Olympe’s aid—some days she spoke of throwing herself out of the window—urged Rose to take all the useless old objects that had been thrown into corners to the second-hand dealer on the market. The two women were hesitant about this at first. When Mouret was out of the house they only took the damaged chairs and tables. Then they turned to more important objects, sold china, jewellery, anything that could be got rid of without causing too empty a space. They were on a slippery slope; they would have ended up taking away the big pieces of furniture and only leaving the four walls if Mouret had not one day called Rose a thief and threatened her with the police.