Part 6

Suddenly through his tears he caught sight of the wicker-work woman on which Madame Bergeret draped her dresses and which she always kept in her husband’s study in front of the book-case, disregarding the professor’s resentment when he complained that every time he wanted to put his books on the shelves, he had to embrace the wicker-work woman and carry her off. At the best of times M. Bergeret’s teeth were set on edge by this contrivance which reminded him of the hen-coops of the cottagers, or of the idol of woven cane which he had seen as a child in one of the prints of his ancient history, and in which, it was said, the Phœnicians burnt their slaves. Above all, the thing reminded him of Madame Bergeret, and although it was headless, he always expected to hear it burst out screaming, moaning, or scolding. This time the headless thing seemed to be none other than Madame Bergeret herself, Madame Bergeret, the hateful, the grotesque. Flinging himself upon it, he clasped the thing in his arms and made its wicker breast crack under his fingers, as though it were the gristles of ribs that broke. Overturning it, he stamped on it with his feet and carrying it off, threw it creaking and mutilated, out of window into the yard belonging to Lenfant, the cooper, where it fell among buckets and tubs. In doing this, he felt as though he were performing an act that symbolised a true fact, yet was at the same time ridiculous and absurd. On the whole, however, he felt somewhat relieved, and when Euphémie came to tell him that déjeuner was getting cold, he shrugged his shoulders, and walking resolutely across the still deserted dining-room, took up his hat in the hall and went downstairs.

In the gateway he remembered that he knew neither where to go nor what to do and that he had come to no decision at all. Once outside, he noticed that it was raining and that he had no umbrella. He was rather annoyed at the fact, though the sense of annoyance came quite as a relief. As he stood hesitating as to whether he should go out into the shower or not, he caught sight of a pencil drawing on the plaster of the wall, just below the bell and just at the height which a child’s arm would reach. It represented an old man; two dots and two lines within a circle made the face, and the body was depicted by an oval; the arms and legs were shown by single lines which radiated outwards like wheel-spokes and imparted a certain air of jollity to this scrawl, which was executed in the classic style of mural ribaldry. It must have been drawn some time ago, for it showed signs of friction and in places was already half rubbed out. But this was the first time that M. Bergeret had noticed it, doubtless because his powers of observation were just now in a peculiarly wide-awake condition.

“A _graffito_,” said the professor to himself.

He noticed next that two horns stuck out from the old man’s head and that the word _Bergeret_ was written by the side, so that no mistake might be made.

“It is a matter of common talk, then,” said he, when he saw this name. “Little rascals on their way to school proclaim it on the walls and I am the talk of the town. This woman has probably been deceiving me for a long time, and with all sorts of men. This mere scrawl tells me more of the truth than I could have gained by a prolonged and searching investigation.”

And standing in the rain, with his feet in the mud, he made a closer examination of the _graffito_; he noticed that the letters of the inscription were badly written and that the lines of the drawing corresponded with the slope of the writing.

As he went away in the falling rain, he remembered the _graffiti_ once traced by clumsy hands on the walls of Pompeii and now uncovered, collected and expounded by philologists. He recalled the clumsy furtive character of the Palatine _graffito_ scratched by an idle soldier on the wall of the guard-house.

“It is now eighteen hundred years since that Roman soldier drew a caricature of his comrade Alexandros in the act of worshipping an ass’s head stuck on a cross. No monument of antiquity has been more carefully studied than this Palatine _graffito_: it is reproduced in numberless collections. Now, following the example of Alexandros, I, too, have a _graffito_ of my own. If to-morrow an earthquake were to swallow up this dismal, accursed town, and preserve it intact for the scientists of the thirtieth century, and if in that far distant future my _graffito_ were to be discovered, I wonder what these learned men would say about it. Would they understand its vulgar symbolism? Or would they even be able to spell out my name written in the letters of a lost alphabet?”

With a fine rain falling through the dreary dimness, M. Bergeret finally reached the Place Saint-Exupère. Between the two buttresses of the church he could see the stall which bore a red boot as a sign. At the sight, he suddenly remembered that his shoes, being worn out by long service, were soaked with water; now, too, he remembered that henceforth he must look after his own clothes, although hitherto he had always left them to Madame Bergeret. With this thought in his mind, he went straight into the cobbler’s booth. He found the man hammering nails into the sole of a shoe.

“Good-day, Piedagnel!”

“Good-day, Monsieur Bergeret! What can I do for you, Monsieur Bergeret?”

So saying, the fellow, turning his angular face towards his customer, showed his toothless gums in a smile. His thin face, which ended in a projecting chin and was furrowed by the dark chasm of his eyes, shared the stern, poverty-stricken air, the yellow tint, the wretched aspect of the stone figures carved over the door of the ancient church under whose shadow he had been born, had lived, and would die.

“All right, Monsieur Bergeret, I have your size and I know that you like your shoes an easy fit. You are quite in the right, Monsieur Bergeret, not to try to pinch your feet.”

“But I have a rather high instep and the sole of my foot is arched,” protested M. Bergeret. “Be sure you remember that.”

M. Bergeret was by no means vain of his foot, but it had so happened one day that in his reading he came upon a passage describing how M. de Lamartine once showed his bare foot with pride, that its high curve, which rested on the ground like the arch of a bridge, might be admired. This story made M. Bergeret feel that he was quite justified in deriving pleasure from the fact that he was not flat-footed. Now, sinking into a wicker chair decorated with an old square of Aubusson carpet, he looked at the cobbler and his booth. On the wall, which was whitewashed and covered with deep cracks, a sprig of box had been placed behind the arms of a black, wooden cross. A little copper figure of Christ nailed to this cross inclined its head over the cobbler, who sat glued to his stool behind the counter, which was heaped with pieces of cut leather and with the wooden models which all bore leather shields to mark the places where the feet that the models represented were afflicted with painful excrescences. A small cast-iron stove was heated white-hot and a strong smell of leather and cookery combined was perceptible.

“I am glad,” said M. Bergeret, “to see that you have as much work as you can wish for.”

In answer to this remark, the man began to give vent to a string of vague, rambling complaints which yet had an element of truth in them. Things were not as they used to be in days gone by. Nowadays, nobody could stand out against factory competition. Customers just bought ready-made shoes, in stores exactly like the Paris ones.

“My customers die, too,” added he. “I have just lost the curé, M. Rieu. There is nothing left but the re-soling business and there isn’t much profit in that.”

The sight of this ancient cobbler groaning under his own little crucifix filled M. Bergeret with sadness. He asked, rather hesitatingly:

“Your son must be quite twenty by now. What has become of him?”

“Firmin? I expect you know,” said the man, “that he left the seminary because he had no vocation. But the gentlemen there were kind enough to interest themselves in him, after they had expelled him. Abbé Lantaigne found a place for him as tutor at a Marquis’s house in Poitou. But Firmin refused it just out of spite. He is in Paris now, teaching at an institution in the Rue Saint-Jacques, but he doesn’t earn much.” And the cobbler added sadly:

“What I want....”

He stopped and then began again.

“I have been a widower for twelve years. What I want is a wife, because it needs a woman to manage a house.”

Relapsing into silence, he drove three nails into the leather of the sole and added:

“Only I must have a steady woman.”

He returned to his task. Then suddenly raising his worn and sorrowful face towards the foggy sky, he muttered:

“And besides, it is so sad to be alone!”

M. Bergeret felt pleased, for he had just caught sight of Paillot standing on the threshold of his shop. He got up to leave:

“Good-day, Piedagnel!” said he. “Mind and keep the instep high enough!”

But the cobbler would not let him go, asking with an imploring glance whether he did not know of any woman who would suit him. She must be middle-aged, a good worker, and a widow who would be willing to marry a widower with a small business.

M. Bergeret stood looking in astonishment at this man who actually wanted to get married; Piedagnel went on meditating aloud:

“Of course,” said he, “there’s the woman who delivers bread on the Tintelleries. But she likes a drop. Then there’s the late curé of Sainte-Agnès’s servant, but she is too haughty, because she has saved a little.”

“Piedagnel,” said M. Bergeret, “go on re-soling the townsfolks’ shoes, remain as you are, alone and contented in the seclusion of your shop. Don’t marry again, for that would be a mistake.”

Closing the glazed door behind him, he crossed the Place Saint-Exupère and entered Paillot’s shop.

The shop was deserted, save for the bookseller himself. Paillot’s mind was a barren and illiterate one; he spoke but little and thought of nothing but his business and his country-house on Duroc Hill. Notwithstanding these facts, M. Bergeret had an inexplicable fondness both for the bookseller and for his shop. At Paillot’s he felt quite at ease and there ideas came on him in a flood.

Paillot was rich, and never had any complaints to make. Yet he invariably told M. Bergeret that one no longer made the profit on educational books that was once customary, for the practice of allowing discount left but little margin. Besides, the supplying of schools had become a veritable puzzle on account of the changes that were always being made in the curricula.

“Once,” said he, “they were much more conservative.”

“I don’t believe it,” replied M. Bergeret. “The fabric of our classical instruction is constantly in course of repair. It is an old monument which embodies in its structure the characteristics of every period. One sees in it a pediment in the Empire style on a Jesuit portico; it has rusticated galleries, colonnades like those of the Louvre, Renaissance staircases, Gothic halls, and a Roman crypt. If one were to expose the foundations, one would come upon _opus spicatum_[7] and Roman cement. On each of these parts one might place an inscription commemorating its origin: ‘The Imperial University of 1808—Rollin—The Oratorians—Port-Royal—The Jesuits—The Humanists of the Renaissance—The Schoolmen—The Latin Rhetoricians of Autun and Bordeaux.’ Every generation has made some change in this palace of wisdom, or has added something to it.”

[7] Brickwork laid in the shape of ears of corn.

M. Paillot rubbed the red beard that hung from his huge chin and looked stupidly at M. Bergeret. Finally he fled panic-stricken and took refuge behind his counter. But M. Bergeret followed up his argument to its logical conclusion:

“It is thanks to these successive additions that the house is still standing. It would soon crumble to pieces if nothing were ever changed in it. It is only right to repair the parts that threaten to fall in ruin and to add some halls in the new style. But I can hear some ominous cracking in the structure.”

As honest Paillot carefully refrained from making any answer to this occult and terrifying talk, M. Bergeret plunged silently into the corner where the old books stood.

To-day, as always, he took up the thirty-eighth volume of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_. To-day, as always, the book opened of its own accord at page 212. Now on this page he saw the picture of M. Roux and Madame Bergeret embracing.... Now he re-read the passage he knew so well, without paying any heed to what he read, but merely continuing to think the thoughts that were suggested by the present state of his affairs:

“‘a passage to the North. It is to this check,’ said he (I know that this affair is by no means an unprecedented one, and that it ought not to astonish the mind of a philosopher), ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Islands again’ (It is a domestic event that turns my house upside down. I have no longer a home), ‘and to enrich our voyage with a discovery (I have no home, no home any more) which, although the last (I am morally free though, and that is a great point), seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean....’”

M. Bergeret closed the book. He had caught a glimpse of liberty, deliverance, and a new life. It was only a glimmer in the darkness, but bright and steady before him. How was he to escape from this dark tunnel? That he could not tell, but at any rate he perceived at the end of it a tiny white point of light. And if he still carried about with him a vision of Madame Bergeret embraced by M. Roux, it was to him but an indecorous sight which aroused in him neither anger nor disgust—just a vignette, the Belgian frontispiece of some lewd book. He drew out his watch and saw that it was now two o’clock. It had taken him exactly ninety minutes to arrive at this wise conclusion.

VII

After M. Bergeret had taken the _University Bulletin_ from the table and gone out of the room without saying a word, M. Roux and Madame Bergeret together emitted a long sigh of relief.

“He saw nothing,” whispered M. Roux, trying to make light of the affair.

But Madame Bergeret shook her head with an expression of anxious doubt. For her part, what she wanted was to throw on her partner’s shoulders the whole responsibility for any consequences that might ensue. She felt uneasy and, above all, thwarted. She was also a prey to a certain feeling of shame at having allowed herself, like a fool, to be surprised by a creature who was so easily hoodwinked as M. Bergeret, whom she despised for his credulity. Finally, she was in that state of anxiety into which a new and unprecedented situation always throws one.

M. Roux repeated the comforting assurance which he had first made to himself:

“I am sure he did not see us. He only looked at the table.”

And when Madame Bergeret still remained doubtful, he declared that anyone sitting on the couch could not be seen from the doorway. Of this Madame Bergeret tried to make sure. She went and stood in the doorway, while M. Roux stretched himself on the sofa, to represent the surprised lovers.

The test did not seem conclusive, and it fell next to M. Roux’s turn to go to the door, while Madame Bergeret reconstructed their love scene.

Solemnly, coldly, and even with some show of sulkiness to each other, they repeated this process several times. But M. Roux did not succeed in soothing Madame Bergeret’s doubts.

At last he lost his temper and exclaimed:

“Well! if he did see us, anyway he’s a precious——.”

Here he used a word which was unfamiliar to Madame Bergeret’s ears, but which sounded to her coarse, unseemly and abominably offensive. She was disgusted with M. Roux for having permitted himself to use such a term.

Thinking that he would only injure Madame Bergeret more by remaining longer in her company, M. Roux whispered a few consoling phrases in her ear and then began to tiptoe towards the door. His natural sense of decorum made him unwilling to risk a meeting with the kindly master whom he had wronged. Left alone in this way, Madame Bergeret went to her own room to think.

It did not seem to her that what had just taken place was important in itself. In the first place, if this was the first time that she had permitted herself to be compromised by M. Roux, it was not the first time that she had been indiscreet with others, few in number as they might be. Besides, an act like this may be horrible in thought, while in actual performance it merely appears commonplace, dependent upon circumstances and naturally innocent. In face of reality, prejudice dies away. Madame Bergeret was not a woman carried away from her homely, middle-class destiny by invincible forces hidden in the secret depths of her nature. Although she possessed a certain temperament, she was still rational and very careful of her reputation. She never sought for adventures, and at the age of thirty-six she had only deceived M. Bergeret three times. But these three occasions were enough to prevent her from exaggerating her fault. She was still less disposed to do so, since this third adventure was in essentials only a repetition of the first two, and these had been neither painful nor pleasurable enough to play a large part in her memory. No phantoms of remorse started up before the matron’s large, fishy eyes. She regarded herself as an honourable woman in the main, and only felt irritated and ashamed at having allowed herself to be caught by a husband for whom she had the most profound scorn. She felt this misfortune the more, because it had come upon her in maturity, when she had arrived at the period of calm reflection. On the two former occasions the intrigue had begun in the same way. Usually Madame Bergeret felt much flattered whenever she made a favourable impression on any man of position. She watched carefully for any signs of interest they might show in her, and she never considered them exaggerated in any way, for she believed herself to be very alluring. Twice before the affair with M. Roux, she had allowed things to go on up to the point where, for a woman, there is henceforth neither physical power to put a stop to them, nor moral advantage to be gained by so doing. The first time the intrigue had been with an elderly man who was very experienced, by no means egotistic, and very anxious to please her. But her pleasure in him was spoilt by the worry which always accompanies a first lapse. The second time she took more interest in the affair, but unfortunately her accomplice was lacking in experience, and now M. Roux had caused her so much annoyance that she was unable even to remember what had happened before they were surprised. If she attempted to recall to herself their posture on the sofa, it was only in order to guess at what M. Bergeret had been able to deduce from it, so that she might make sure up to what point she could still lie to him and deceive him.

She was humiliated and annoyed, and whenever she thought of her big girls, she felt ashamed: she knew that she had made herself ridiculous. But fear was the last feeling in her mind, for either by craft or audacity, she felt sure she could manage this gentle, timid man, so ignorant of the ways of the world, so far inferior to herself.

She had never lost the idea that she was immeasurably superior to M. Bergeret. This notion inspired all her words and acts, nay, even her silence. She suffered from the pride of race, for she was a Pouilly, the daughter of Pouilly, the University Inspector, the niece of Pouilly of the Dictionary, the great-granddaughter of a Pouilly who, in 1811, composed _la Mythologie des Demoiselles_ and _l’Abeille des Dames_. She had been encouraged by her father in this sentiment of family pride.

What was a Bergeret by the side of a Pouilly? She had, therefore, no misgivings as to the result of the struggle which she foresaw, and she awaited her husband’s return with an attitude of boldness dashed with cunning. But when, at lunch time, she heard him going downstairs, a shade of anxiety crept over her mind. When he was out of her sight, this husband of hers disquieted her: he became mysterious, almost formidable. She wore out her nerves in imagining what he would say to her and in preparing different deceitful or defiant answers, according to the circumstances. She strained and stiffened her courage, in order to repel attack. She pictured to herself pitiable attitudes and threats of suicide followed by a scene of reconciliation. By the time evening came, she was thoroughly unnerved. She cried and bit her handkerchief. Now she wanted, she longed for explanations, abuse, violent speeches. She waited for M. Bergeret with burning impatience, and at nine o’clock she at last recognised his step on the landing. But he did not come into her room; the little maid came instead:

“Monsieur says,” she announced, with a sly, pert grin, “that I’m to put up the iron bedstead for him in the study.”

Madame Bergeret said not a word, for she was thunderstruck.

Although she slept as soundly as usual that night, yet her audacious spirit was quelled.

VIII

The curé of Saint-Exupère, the arch-priest Laprune, had been invited to déjeuner by Abbé Guitrel. They were now both seated at the little round table on which Joséphine had just set a flaming rum omelette.

M. Guitrel’s maid had reached the canonical age some years ago; she wore a moustache; and assuredly bore no resemblance to the imaginary portrait of her which set the town guffawing in the ribald tales of the old Gallic type that were bandied about. Her face gave the lie to the jovial slanders which circulated from the Café du Commerce to Paillot’s shop, and from the pharmacy of the radical M. Mandar, to the jansenist salon of M. Lerond, the retired judge. Even if it were true that the professor of rhetoric used to allow his servant to sit at table with him when he was dining alone, if he was in the habit of sharing with her the little cakes that he chose with such anxious care at Dame Magloire’s, it was only because of his pure and innocent regard for a poor old woman, who was, in truth, both illiterate and rough, but at the same time full of crafty wisdom and devoted to her master. She was, in fact, filled with ambition for him and ready in her loyalty to betray the whole world for his sake.

Unfortunately Abbé Lantaigne, the principal of the high seminary, paid too much heed to these prurient tales about Guitrel and his domestic, which everyone repeated and which no one believed, not even M. Mandar, the chemist of the Rue Culture, the most rabid of the town councillors. He had, in fact, added too much out of his own stock-in-trade to these merry tales not to suspect in his own mind the authenticity of the whole collection. For quite a voluminous cycle of romance had grown up round these two prosaic people. Had he only known the _Decameron_, the _Heptameron_ and the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ better, M. Lantaigne would frequently have discovered the source of this droll adventure, or of that weird anecdote, which the county town generously added to the legend of M. Guitrel and his servant Joséphine. M. Mazure, the keeper of the municipal archives, never failed for his part, whenever he had found some lewd story of a Churchman in an old book, to assign it to M. Guitrel. Only M. Lantaigne actually swallowed what everyone else said without believing.

“Patience, Monsieur l’abbé!” said Joséphine; “I will go and fetch a spoon to baste it with.”