Part 7

So saying she took a long-handled pewter spoon from the sideboard drawer and handed it to M. Guitrel. Whilst the priest poured the flaming spirit over the frizzling sugar, which gave out a smell of caramel, the servant leant against the sideboard with her arms crossed and stared at the musical clock which hung on the wall in a gilt frame; a Swiss landscape, with a train coming out of a tunnel, a balloon in the air, and the enamelled dial affixed to a little church tower. The observant woman was really watching her master, for his short arm was beginning to ache with wielding the hot spoon. She began to spur him on:

“Look sharp, Monsieur l’abbé! Don’t let it go out.”

“This dish,” said the arch-priest, “really gives out a most delicious odour. The last time I had one like it made for me, the dish split on account of the heat and the rum ran over the table-cloth. I was much vexed, and what annoyed me still more was to see the consternation on M. Tabarit’s face, for it happened when he was dining with me.”

“That’s just it!” exclaimed the servant. “M. _l’archiprêtre_ had it served on a dish of fine porcelain. Of course, nothing could be too fine for Monsieur. But the finer the china is, the worse it stands fire. This dish here is of earthenware, and heat or cold makes no odds to it. When my master is a bishop he’ll have his omelettes soufflées served on a silver dish.”

All of a sudden the flame flickered out in the pewter spoon and M. Guitrel stopped basting the omelette. Then he turned towards the woman and said with a stern glance:

“Joséphine, you must never, in future, let me hear you talk in that fashion.”

“But, my dear Guitrel,” said the curé of Saint-Exupère, “it is only you yourself who can take exception to such words, for to others it would seem only natural. You have been endowed with the precious gift of intelligence. Your knowledge is profound and, were you raised to a bishopric, it would only seem a fitting thing. Who knows whether this simple woman has not uttered a true prophecy? Has not your name been mentioned among those of the priests considered eligible for the episcopal chair of Tourcoing?”

M. Guitrel pricked up his ears and gave a side-long glance, with one eye full on the other’s profile.

He was, indeed, feeling very anxious, for his affairs were by no means in a promising state. At the nunciature he had been obliged to content himself with vague promises and he was beginning to be afraid of their Roman caution. It seemed to him that M. Lantaigne was in good odour at the Department of Religion, and, in short, his visit to Paris had only filled him with disquieting fancies. And now, if he was giving a lunch to the curé of Saint-Exupère, it was merely because the latter had the key to all the wire-pulling in M. Lantaigne’s party. M. Guitrel hoped, therefore, to worm out of the worthy curé all his opponent’s secrets.

“And why,” continued the arch-priest, “should you not be a bishop one of these days, like M. Lantaigne?”

In the silence that followed the utterance of this name, the musical clock struck out a shrill little tune of the olden days. It was the hour of noon.

The hand with which Abbé Guitrel passed the earthenware dish to the arch-priest trembled a little.

“There is,” said the latter, “a mellowness about this dish, a mellowness that is not insipid. Your servant is a first-rate cook.”

“You were speaking of M. Lantaigne?” queried Abbé Guitrel.

“I was,” replied the arch-priest. “I don’t mean to say that at this precise moment M. Lantaigne is the bishop-designate of Tourcoing, for to say that would be to anticipate the course of events. But I heard this very morning from someone who is very intimate with the Vicar-General that the nunciature and the ministry are practically in agreement as to the appointment of M. Lantaigne. But this, of course, still lacks confirmation and it is quite possible that M. de Goulet may have taken his hopes for accomplished facts, for, as you know, he ardently desires M. Lantaigne’s success. But that the principal will be successful seems quite probable. It is true that some time ago a certain uncompromising attitude, which it was believed might be justly attributed to M. Lantaigne’s opinions, may perchance have given offence to the powers that be, inspired as they were with a harassing distrust of the clergy. But times are changed. These heavy clouds of mistrust have rolled away. Certain influences, too, that were formerly considered outside the sphere of politics are beginning to work now, even in governmental circles. They tell me, in fact, that General Cartier de Chalmot’s support of M. Lantaigne’s candidature has been all-powerful. This is the gossip, the still unauthenticated report, that I have heard.”

The servant Joséphine had left the room, but her anxious shadow still flashed from moment to moment through the half-open door.

M. Guitrel neither spoke nor ate.

“This omelette,” said the arch-priest, “has a curious mixture of flavours which tickles the palate without allowing one to distinguish just what it is that is so delightful. Will you permit me to ask your servant for the recipe?”

An hour later M. Guitrel bade farewell to his guest, and set out, with shoulders bent low, for the seminary. Buried in thought, he descended the winding, slanting street of the Chantres, crossing his great-coat over his chest against the icy wind which was buffeting the gable of the cathedral. It was the coldest, darkest corner of the town. He hastened his pace as far as the Rue du Marché, and there he stopped before the butcher’s shop kept by Lafolie.

It was barred like a lion’s cage. Under the quarters of mutton hung up by hooks, the butcher lay asleep on the ground, close against the board used for cutting up the meat. His brawny limbs were now relaxed in utter weariness, for his day’s work had begun at daybreak. With his bare arms crossed, he lay slowly nodding his head. His steel was still hanging at his side and his legs were stretched out under a blood-stained white apron. His red face was shining, and under the turned-down collar of his pink shirt the veins of his neck swelled up. From the recumbent figure breathed a sense of quiet power. M. Bergeret, indeed, always used to say of Lafolie that from him one could gather some idea of the Homeric heroes, because his manner of life resembled theirs since, like them, he shed the blood of victims.

Butcher Lafolie slept. Near him slept his son, tall and strong like his father, and with ruddy cheeks. The butcher’s boy, with his head in his hands, was asleep on the marble slab, with his hair dangling among the spread-out joints of meat. Behind her glazed partition at the entrance of the shop sat Madame Lafolie, bolt upright, but with heavy eyes weighed down by sleep. She was a fat woman, with a huge bosom, her flesh saturated with the blood of beasts. The whole family had a look of brutal, yet masterly, power, an air of barbaric royalty.

With his quick glance shifting from one to the other, M. Guitrel stood watching them for a long while. Again and again he turned with special interest towards the master, the colossus whose purpled cheeks were barred by a long reddish moustache, and who, now that his eyes were shut, showed on his temples the little wrinkles that speak of cunning. Then, surfeited of the sight of this violent, crafty brute, and gripping his old umbrella under his arm, he crossed his great-coat over his chest once more, and continued his way. He was quite in good spirits once more, as he thought to himself:

“Eight thousand, three hundred and twenty-five francs last year. One thousand, nine hundred and six this year. Abbé Lantaigne, principal of the high seminary, owes ten thousand, two hundred and thirty-one francs to Lafolie the butcher, who is by no means an easy-going creditor. Abbé Lantaigne will not be a bishop.”

For a long while he had been aware that M. Lantaigne was in financial straits, and that the college was heavily in debt. To-day his servant Joséphine had just informed him that Lafolie was showing his teeth and talking of suing the seminary and the archbishopric for debt. Trotting along with his mincing step, M. Guitrel murmured:

“M. Lantaigne will never be a bishop. He is honest enough, but he is a bad manager. Now a bishopric is just an administration. Bossuet said so in express terms when he was delivering the funeral oration of the Prince de Condé.”

And in mentally recalling the horrible face of Lafolie the butcher, M. Guitrel felt no repugnance whatever.

IX

Meanwhile M. Bergeret was re-reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He had a fellow-feeling for Faustina’s husband, yet he found it impossible really to appreciate all the fine thought contained in this little book, so false to nature seemed its sentiments, so harsh its philosophy, so scornful of the softer side of life its whole tone. Next he read the tales of Sieur d’Ouville, and those of Eutrapel, the _Cymbalum_ of Despériers, the _Matinées_ of Cholière and the _Serées_ of Guillaume Bouchet. He took more pleasure in this course of reading, for he perceived that it was suitable to one in his position and therefore edifying, that it tended to diffuse serene peace and heavenly gentleness in his soul. He returned grateful thanks to the whole band of romance-writers who all, from the dweller in old Miletus, where was told the Tale of the Wash-tub, to the wielders of the spicy wit of Burgundy, the charm of Touraine, and the broad humour of Normandy, have helped to turn the sorrow of harassed hearts into the ways of pleasant mirth by teaching men the art of indulgent laughter.[8]

[8] In his study of mediæval romances, M. Bergeret devotes himself to the _Conte badin_, or jesting tale of ludicrous adventure by which so much of Chaucer’s work was inspired. This school of short stories starts with the tales of Aristeides of Miletus, a writer of the second century B.C. His _Milésiaques_, as they are called, were followed by the fabliaux of the Middle Ages, and in the fifteenth century and onwards by the _Cent Nouvelles nouvelles_ of Louis XI’s time, by the _Heptaméron_ of the Queen of Navarre, the _Decameron_ of Boccaccio and the _Contes_ of Despériers, of Guillaume Bouchet, of Noël du Fail and others. La Fontaine retold many of the older tales in verse and Balzac tried to revive the Gallic wit and even the language of the fabliaux in his _Contes drôlatiques_.

“These romancers,” thought he, “who make austere moralists knit their brows, are themselves excellent moralists, who should be loved and praised for having gracefully suggested the simplest, the most natural, the most humane solutions of domestic difficulties, difficulties which the pride and hatred of the savage heart of man would fain solve by murder and bloodshed. O Milesian romancers! O shrewd Petronius! O Noël du Fail,” cried he, “O forerunners of Jean de La Fontaine! what apostle was wiser or better than you, who are commonly called good-for-nothing rascals? O benefactors of humanity! you have taught us the true science of life, a kindly scorn of the human race!”

Thus did M. Bergeret fortify himself with the thought that our pride is the original source of all our misery, that we are, in fact, but monkeys in clothes, and that we have solemnly applied conceptions of honour and virtue to matters where these are ridiculous. Pope Boniface VIII, in fact, was wise in thinking that, in his own case, a mountain was being made out of a mole-hill, and Madame Bergeret and M. Roux were just about as worthy of praise or blame as a pair of chimpanzees. Yet, he was too clear-sighted to pretend to deny the close bond that united him to these two principal actors in his drama. But he only regarded himself as a meditative chimpanzee, and he derived from the idea a sensation of gratified vanity. For wisdom invariably goes astray somewhere.

M. Bergeret’s, indeed, failed in another point: he did not really adapt his conduct to his maxims, and although he showed no violence, he never gave the least hint of forbearance. Thus he by no means proved himself the follower of those Milesian, Latin, Florentine, or Gallic romance-writers whose smiling philosophy he admired as being well suited to the absurdity of human nature. He never reproached Madame Bergeret, it is true, but neither did he speak a word, or throw a glance in her direction. Even when seated opposite her at table, he seemed to have the power of never seeing her. And if by chance he met her in one of the rooms of the flat, he gave the poor woman the impression that she was invisible.

He ignored her, he treated her not only as a stranger, but as non-existent. He ousted her both from visual and mental consciousness. He annihilated her. In the house, among the numberless preoccupations of their life together, he neither saw her, heard her, nor formed any perception of her. Madame Bergeret was a coarse-grained, troublesome woman, but she was a homely, moral creature after all; she was human and living, and she suffered keenly at not being allowed to burst out into vulgar chatter, into threatening gestures and shrill cries. She suffered at no longer feeling herself the mistress of the house, the presiding genius of the kitchen, the mother of the family, the matron. Worst of all, she suffered at feeling herself done away with, at feeling that she no longer counted as a person, or even as a thing. During meals she at last reached the point of longing to be a chair or a plate, so that her presence might at least be recognised. If M. Bergeret had suddenly drawn the carving-knife on her, she would have cried for joy, although she was by nature timid of a blow. But not to count, not to matter, not to be seen, was insupportable to her dull, heavy temperament. The monotonous and incessant punishment that M. Bergeret inflicted on her was so cruel that she was obliged to stuff her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her sobs. And M. Bergeret, shut up in his study, used to hear her noisily blowing her nose in the dining-room while he himself was placidly sorting the slips for his _Virgilius nauticus_, unmoved by either love or hate.

Every evening Madame Bergeret was sorely tempted to follow her husband into the study that had now become his bedroom as well, and the impregnable fastness of his impregnable will. She longed either to ask his forgiveness, or to overwhelm him with the lowest abuse, to prick his face with the point of a kitchen-knife or to slash herself in the breast—one or the other, indifferently, for all she wanted was to attract his notice to herself, just to exist for him. And this thing which was denied her, she needed with the same overpowering need with which one craves bread, water, air, salt.

She still despised M. Bergeret, for this feeling was hereditary and filial in her nature. It came to her from her father and flowed in her blood. She would no longer have been a Pouilly, the niece of Pouilly of the Dictionary, if she had acknowledged any kind of equality between herself and her husband. She despised him because she was a Pouilly and he was a Bergeret, and not because she had deceived him. She had the good sense not to plume herself too much on this superiority, but it is more than probable that she despised him for not having killed M. Roux. Her scorn was a fixed quantity, capable neither of increase nor decrease. Nevertheless, she felt no hatred for him, although until lately, she had rather enjoyed tormenting and annoying him in the ordinary affairs of every day, by scolding him for the untidiness of his clothes and the tactlessness of his behaviour, or by telling him interminable anecdotes about the neighbours, trivial and silly stories in which even the malice and ill-nature were but commonplace. For this windbag of a mind produced neither bitter venom nor strange poison and was but puffed up by the breath of vanity.

Madame Bergeret was admirably calculated to live on good terms with a mate whom she could betray and brow-beat in the calm assurance of her power and by the natural working of her vigorous physique. Having no inner life of her own and being exuberantly healthy of body, she was a gregarious creature, and when M. Bergeret was suddenly withdrawn from her life, she missed him as a good wife misses an absent husband. Moreover, this meagre little man, whom she had always considered insignificant and unimportant, but not troublesome, now filled her with dread. By treating her as an absolute nonentity, M. Bergeret made her really feel that she no longer existed. She seemed to herself enveloped in nothingness. At this new, unknown, nameless state, akin to solitude and death, she sank into melancholy and terror. At night, her anguish became cruel, for she was sensitive to nature and subject to the influence of time and space. Alone in her bed, she used to gaze in horror at the wicker-work woman on which she had draped her dresses for so many years and which, in the days of her pride and light-heartedness, used to stand in M. Bergeret’s study, proudly upright, all body and no head. Now, bandy-legged and mutilated, it leant wearily against the glass-fronted wardrobe, in the shadow of the curtain of purple rep. Lenfant the cooper had found it in his yard amongst the tubs of water with their floating corks, and when he brought it to Madame Bergeret, she dared not set it up again in the study, but had carried it instead into the conjugal chamber where, wounded, drooping, and struck by emblematic wrath, it now stood like a symbol that represented notions of black magic to her mind.

She suffered cruelly. When she awoke one morning a melancholy ray of pale sunlight was shining between the folds of the curtain on the mutilated wicker dummy and, as she lay watching it, she melted with self-pity at the thought of her own innocence and M. Bergeret’s cruelty. She felt instinct with rebellion. It was intolerable, she thought, that Amélie Pouilly should suffer by the act of a Bergeret. She mentally communed with the soul of her father and so strengthened herself in the idea that M. Bergeret was too paltry a man to make her unhappy. This sense of pride gave her relief and supplied her with confidence to bedeck herself, buoying her mind with the assurance that she had not been humiliated and that everything was as it always had been.

It was Madame Leterrier’s At Home day, and Madame Bergeret set out, therefore, to call on the rector’s highly respected wife. In the blue drawing-room she found her hostess sitting with Madame Compagnon, the wife of the mathematical professor, and after the first greetings were over, she heaved a deep sigh. It was a provocative sigh, rather than a down-trodden one, and while the two university ladies were still giving ear to it, Madame Bergeret added:

“There are many reasons for sadness in this life, especially for anyone who is not naturally inclined to put up with everything.... You are a happy woman, Madame Leterrier, and so are you, Madame Compagnon!...”

And Madame Bergeret, becoming humble, discreet and self-controlled, said nothing more, though fully conscious of the inquiring glances directed towards her. But this was quite enough to give people to understand that she was ill-used and humiliated in her home. Before, there had been whispers in the town about M. Roux’s attentions to her, but from that day forth Madame Leterrier set herself to put an end to the scandal, declaring that M. Roux was a well-bred, honourable young man. Speaking of Madame Bergeret, she added, with moist lips and tear-filled eyes:

“That poor woman is very unhappy and very sensitive.”

Within six weeks the drawing-rooms of the county town had made up their minds and come over to Madame Bergeret’s side. They declared that M. Bergeret, who never paid calls, was a worthless fellow. They suspected him of secret debauchery and hidden vice, and his friend, M. Mazure, his comrade at the academy of old books, his colleague at Paillot’s, was quite sure that he had seen him one evening going into the restaurant in the Rue des Hebdomadiers, a place of questionable repute.

Whilst M. Bergeret was thus being tried by the tribunal of society and found wanting, the popular voice was crowning him with quite a different reputation. Of the vulgar symbol that had lately appeared on the front of his own house only very indistinct traces remained. But phantoms of the same design began to increase and multiply in the town, and now M. Bergeret could not go to the college, nor on the Mall, nor to Paillot’s shop, without seeing his own portrait on some wall, drawn in the primitive style of all such ribaldries, surrounded by obscene, suggestive, or idiotic scrawls, and either pencilled or chalked or traced with the point of a stone and accompanied by an explanatory legend.

M. Bergeret was neither angered nor vexed at the sight of these _graffiti_; he was only annoyed at the increasing number of them. There was one on the white wall of Goubeau’s cow-house on the Tintelleries; another on the yellow frontage of Deniseau’s agency in the Place Saint-Exupère; another on the grand theatre under the list of admission rates at the second pay-box; another at the corner of the Rue de la Pomme and the Place du Vieux-Marché; another on the outbuildings of the Nivert mansion, next to the Gromances’ residence; another on the porter’s lodge at the University; and yet another on the wall of the gardens of the prefecture. And every morning M. Bergeret found yet newer ones. He noted, too, that these _graffiti_ were not all from the same hand. In some, the man’s figure was drawn in quite primitive style; others were better drawn, without showing, however, upon examination, any approach to individual likeness or the difficult art of portraiture. But in every case the bad drawing was supplemented by a written explanation, and in all these popular caricatures M. Bergeret wore horns. He noticed that sometimes these horns projected from a bare skull, sometimes from a tall hat.

“Two schools of art!” thought he.

But his refined nature suffered.

X

M. Worms-Clavelin had insisted on his old friend, Georges Frémont, staying to déjeuner. Frémont, an inspector of fine art, was going on circuit through the department. When they had first met in the painters’ studios at Montmartre, Frémont was young and Worms-Clavelin very young. They had not a single idea in common, and they had no points of agreement at all. Frémont loved to contradict, and Worms-Clavelin put up with it; Frémont was fluent and violent in speech, Worms-Clavelin always yielded to his vehemence and spoke but little. For a time they were comrades, and then life separated them. But every time that they happened to meet, they once more became intimate and quarrelled zestfully. For Georges Frémont, middle-aged, portly, beribboned, well-to-do, still retained something of his youthful fire. This morning, sitting between Madame Worms-Clavelin in a morning gown and M. Worms-Clavelin in a breakfast jacket, he was telling his hostess how he had discovered in the garrets at the museum, where it had been buried in dust and rubbish, a little wooden figure in the purest style of French art. It was a Saint Catherine habited in the garb of a townswoman of the fifteenth century, a tiny figure with wonderful delicacy of expression and with such a thoughtful, honest look that he felt the tears rise to his eyes as he dusted her. M. Worms-Clavelin inquired if it were a statue or a picture, and Georges Frémont, glancing at him with a look of kindly scorn, said gently:

“Worms, don’t try to understand what I am saying to your wife! You are utterly incapable of conceiving the Beautiful in any form whatever. Harmonious lines and noble thoughts will always be written in an unknown tongue as far as you are concerned.”