Ги де Мопассан
The works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 5
"But – but suppose he should not believe me?"
The curé knew too well the ins and outs of human nature not to have an answer for that.
"Tell everybody you are enceinte. When he sees that everyone else believes it, he will soon believe it himself. You will be doing no wrong," he added, to quiet his conscience for advising this deception; "the Church does not permit any connection between man and woman, except for the purpose of procreation."
Jeanne followed the priest's artful device, and, a fortnight later, told Julien she thought she was enceinte. He started up.
"It isn't possible! You can't be!"
She gave him her reasons for thinking so.
"Bah!" he answered. "You wait a little while."
Every morning he asked, "Well?" but she always replied: "No, not yet; I am very much mistaken if I am not enceinte."
He also began to think so, and his surprise was only equaled by his annoyance.
"Well, I can't understand it," was all he could say. "I'll be hanged if I know how it can have happened."
At the end of a month she began to tell people the news, but she said nothing about it to the Comtesse Gilberte, for she felt an old feeling of delicacy in mentioning it to her. At the very first suspicion of his wife's pregnancy, Julien had ceased to touch her, then, angrily thinking, "Well, at any rate, this brat wasn't wanted," he made up his mind to make the best of it, and recommenced his visits to his wife's room. Everything happened as the priest had predicted, and Jeanne found she would a second time become a mother. Then, in a transport of joy, she took a vow of eternal chastity as a token of her rapturous gratitude to the distant divinity she adored, and thenceforth closed her door to her husband.
She again felt almost happy. She could hardly believe that it was barely two months since her mother had died, and that only such a short time before she had thought herself inconsolable. Now her wounded heart was nearly healed, and her grief had disappeared, while in its place was merely a vague melancholy, like the shadow of a great sorrow resting over her life. It seemed impossible that any other catastrophe could happen now; her children would grow up and surround her old age with their affection, and her husband could go his way while she went hers.
Towards the end of September the Abbé Picot came to the château, in a new cassock which had only one week's stains upon it, to introduce his successor, the Abbé Tolbiac. The latter was small, thin, and very young, with hollow, black-encircled eyes which betokened the depth and violence of his feelings, and a decisive way of speaking as if there could be no appeal from his opinion. The Abbé Picot had been appointed doyen of Goderville. Jeanne felt very sad at the thought of his departure; he was connected, in her thoughts, with all the chief events of her life, for he had married her, christened Paul, and buried the baroness. She liked him because he was always good-tempered and unaffected, and she could not imagine Etouvent without the Abbé Picot's fat figure trotting past the farms. He himself did not seem very rejoiced at his advancement.
"I have been here eighteen years, Madame la Comtesse," he said, "and it grieves me to go to another place. Oh! this living is not worth much, I know, and as for the people – well, the men have no more religion than they ought to have, the women are not so moral as they might be, and the girls never dream of being married until it is too late for them to wear a wreath of orange blossoms; still, I love the place."
The new curé had been fidgeting impatiently during this speech, and his face had turned very red.
"I shall soon have all that changed," he said, abruptly, as soon as the other priest had finished speaking; and he looked like an angry child in his worn but spotless cassock, so thin and small was he.
The Abbé Picot looked at him sideways, as he always did when anything amused him.
"Listen, l'abbé," he said. "You will have to chain up your parishioners if you want to prevent that sort of thing; and I don't believe even that would be any good."
"We shall see," answered the little priest in a cutting tone.
The old curé smiled and slowly took a pinch of snuff.
"Age and experience will alter your views, l'abbé; if they don't you will only estrange the few good Churchmen you have. When I see a girl come to mass with a waist bigger than it ought to be, I say to myself – 'Well, she is going to give me another soul to look after;' – and I try to marry her. You can't prevent them going wrong, but you can find out the father of the child and prevent him forsaking the mother. Marry them, l'abbé, marry them, and don't trouble yourself about anything else."
"We will not argue on this point, for we should never agree," answered the new curé, a little roughly; and the Abbé Picot again began to express his regret at leaving the village, and the sea which he could see from the vicarage windows, and the little funnel-shaped valleys, where he went to read his breviary and where he could see the boats in the distance. Then the two priests rose to go, and the Abbé Picot kissed Jeanne, who nearly cried when she said good-bye.
A week afterwards, the Abbé Tolbiac called again. He spoke of the reforms he was bringing about as if he were a prince taking possession of his kingdom. He begged the vicomtesse to communicate on all the days appointed by the Church, and to attend mass regularly on Sundays.
"You and I are at the head of the parish," he said, "and we ought to rule it, and always set it a good example; but, if we wish to have any influence, we must be united. If the Church and the château support each other, the cottage will fear and obey us."
Jeanne's religion was simply a matter of sentiment; she had merely the dreamy faith that a woman never quite loses, and if she performed any religious duties at all it was only because she had been so used to them at the convent, for the baron's carping philosophy had long ago overthrown all her convictions. The Abbé Picot had always been contented with the little she did do, and never chid her for not confessing or attending mass oftener; but when the Abbé Tolbiac did not see her at church on the Sunday, he hastened to the château to question and reprimand her. She did not wish to quarrel with the curé, so she promised to be more attentive to the services, inwardly resolving to go regularly only for a few weeks, out of good nature.
Little by little, however, she fell into the habit of frequenting the church, and, in a short time, she was entirely under the influence of the delicate-looking, strong-willed priest. His zeal and enthusiasm appealed to her love of everything pertaining to mysticism, and he seemed to make the chord of religious poetry, which she possessed in common with every woman, vibrate within her. His austerity, his contempt for every luxury and sensuality, his disdain for the things that usually occupy the thoughts of men, his love of God, his youthful, intolerant inexperience, his scathing words, his inflexible will made Jeanne compare him, in her mind, to the early martyrs; and she, who had already suffered so much, whose eyes had been so rudely opened to the deceptions of life, let herself be completely ruled by the rigid fanaticism of this boy who was the minister of Heaven. He led her to the feet of Christ the Consoler, teaching her how the holy joys of religion could alleviate all her sorrows, and, as she knelt in the confessional she humbled herself and felt little and weak before this priest, who looked about fifteen years old.
Soon he was detested by the whole country-side. With no pity for his own weaknesses, he showed a violent intolerance for those of others. The thing above all others that roused his anger and indignation was – love. He denounced it from the pulpit in crude, ecclesiastical terms, thundering out terrible judgments against concupiscence over the heads of his rustic audience; and, as the pictures he portrayed in his fury persistently haunted his mind, he trembled with rage and stamped his foot in anger. The grown-up girls and the young fellows cast side-long glances at each other across the aisle; and the old peasants, who liked to joke about such matters, expressed their disapproval of the little curé's intolerance as they walked back to their farms after service with their wives and sons.
The whole country was in an uproar. The priest's severity and the harsh penances he inflicted at confession were rumored about, and, as he obstinately refused to grant absolution to the girls whose chastity was not immaculate, smiles accompanied the whispers. When, at the holy festivals, several of the youths and girls stayed in their seats instead of going to communicate with the others, most of the congregation laughed outright as they looked at them. He began to watch for lovers like a keeper on the look-out for poachers, and on moonlight nights he hunted up the couples along the ditches, behind the barns and among the long grass on the hill-sides. One night he came upon two who did not cease their love-making even before him; they were strolling along a ditch filled with stones, with their arms round one another, kissing each other as they walked.
"Will you stop that, you vagabonds?" cried the abbé.
"You mind yer own bus'ness, M'sieu l'curé," replied the lad, turning round. "This ain't nothin' to do with you."
The abbé picked up some stones and threw them at the couple as he might have done at stray dogs, and they both ran off, laughing. The next Sunday the priest mentioned them by name before the whole congregation. All the young fellows soon ceased to attend mass.
The curé dined at the château every Thursday, but he very often went there on other days to talk to his penitente. Jeanne became as ardent and as enthusiastic as he as she discussed the mysteries of a future existence, and grew familiar with all the old and complicated arguments employed in religious controversy. They would both walk along the baroness's avenue talking of Christ and the Apostles, of the Virgin Mary and of the Fathers of the Church as if they had really known them. Sometimes they stopped their walk to ask each other profound questions, and then Jeanne would wander off into sentimental arguments, and the curé would reason like a lawyer possessed with the mania of proving the possibility of squaring the circle.
Julien treated the new curé with great respect. "That's the sort of a priest I like," he was continually saying. "Half-measures don't do for him," and he zealously set a good example by frequently confessing and communicating. Hardly a day passed now without the vicomte going to the Fourvilles, either to shoot with the comte, who could not do without him, or to ride with the comtesse regardless of rain and bad weather.
"They are riding-mad," remarked the comte; "but the exercise does my wife good."
The baron returned to Les Peuples about the middle of November. He seemed a different man, he had aged so much and was so low-spirited; he was fonder than ever of his daughter, as if the last few months of melancholy solitude had caused in him an imperative need of affection and tenderness. Jeanne told him nothing about her new ideas, her intimacy with the Abbé Tolbiac, or her religious enthusiasm, but the first time he saw the priest, he felt an invincible dislike for him, and when his daughter asked him in the evening: "Well, what do you think of him?"
"He is like an inquisitor!" he answered. "He seems to me a very dangerous man."
When the peasants told him about the young priest's harshness and bigotry and the sort of war of persecution he waged against natural laws and instincts, his dislike changed to a violent hatred. He, the baron, belonged to the school of philosophers who worship nature; to him it seemed something touching, when he saw two animals unite, and he was always ready to fall on his knees before the sort of pantheistic God he worshiped; but he hated the catholic conception of a God, Who has petty schemes, and gives way to tyrannical anger and indulges in mean revenge; a God, in fact, Who seemed less to him than that boundless omnipotent nature, which is at once life, light, earth, thought, plant, rock, man, air, animal, planet, god and insect, that nature which produces all things in such bountiful profusion, fitting each atom to the place it is to occupy in space, be that position close to or far from the suns which heat the worlds. Nature contained the germ of everything, and she brought forth life and thought, as trees bear flowers and fruit.
To the baron, therefore, reproduction was a great law of Nature, and to be respected as the sacred and divine act which accomplished the constant, though unexpressed will of this Universal Being; and he at once began a campaign against this priest who opposed the laws of creation. It grieved Jeanne to the heart, and she prayed to the Lord, and implored her father not to run counter to the curé, but the baron always answered:
"It is everyone's right and duty to fight against such men, for they are not like human creatures. They are not human," he repeated, shaking his long white hair. "They understand nothing of life, and their conduct is entirely influenced by their harmful dreams, which are contrary to Nature." And he pronounced "contrary to Nature" as if he were uttering a curse.
The priest had at once recognized in him an enemy, and, as he wished to remain master of the château and its young mistress, he temporized, feeling sure of victory in the end. By chance he had discovered the liaison between Julien and Gilberte, and his one idea was to break it off by no matter what means. He came to see Jeanne one day towards the end of the wet, mild winter, and, after a long talk on the mystery of life, he asked her to unite with him in fighting against and destroying the wickedness which was in her own family, and so save two souls which were in danger. She asked him what he meant.
"The hour has not come for me to reveal all to you," he replied; "but I will see you again soon," and with that he abruptly left her.
He came again in a few days, and spoke in vague terms of a disgraceful connection between people whose conduct ought to be irreproachable. It was the duty, he said, of those who were aware of what was going on, to use every means to put an end to it. He used all sorts of lofty arguments, and then, taking Jeanne's hand, adjured her to open her eyes, to understand and to help him.
This time Jeanne saw what he meant, but terrified at the thought of all the trouble that might be brought to her home, which was now so peaceful, she pretended not to know to what he was alluding. Then he hesitated no longer, but spoke in terms there could be no misunderstanding.
"I am going to perform a very painful duty, Madame la comtesse, but I cannot leave it undone. The position I hold forbids me to leave you in ignorance of the sin you can prevent. Learn that your husband cherishes a criminal affection for Madame de Fourville."
Jeanne only bent her head in feeble resignation.
"What do you intend to do?" asked the priest.
"What do you wish me to do, Monsieur l'abbé?" she murmured.
"Throw yourself in the way as an obstacle to this guilty love," he answered, violently.
She began to cry, and said in a broken voice:
"But he has deceived me before with a servant; he wouldn't listen to me; he doesn't love me now; he ill-treats me if I manifest any desire that does not please him, so what can I do?"
The curé did not make any direct answer to this appeal.
"Then you bow before this sin! You submit to it!" he exclaimed. "You consent to and tolerate adultery under your own roof! The crime is being perpetrated before your eyes, and you refuse to see it! Are you a Christian woman? Are you a wife and a mother?"
"What would you have me do?" she sobbed.
"Anything rather than allow this sin to continue," he replied. "Anything, I tell you. Leave him. Flee from this house which has been defiled."
"But I have no money, Monsieur l'abbé," she replied. "And I am not brave now like I used to be. Besides, how can I leave without any proofs of what you are saying? I have not the right to do so."
The priest rose to his feet, quivering with indignation.
"You are listening to the dictates of your cowardice, madame. I thought you were a different woman, but you are unworthy of God's mercy."
She fell on her knees:
"Oh! Do not abandon me, I implore you. Advise me what to do."
"Open M. de Fourville's eyes," he said, shortly. "It is his duty to end this liaison."
She was seized with terror at this advice.
"But he would kill them, Monsieur l'abbé! And should I be the one to tell him? Oh, not that! Never, never!"
He raised his hand as if to curse her, his whole soul stirred with anger.
"Live on in your shame and in your wickedness, for you are more guilty than they are. You are the wife who condones her husband's sin! My place is no longer here."
He turned to go, trembling all over with wrath. She followed him distractedly, ready to give in, and beginning to promise; but he would not listen to her and strode rapidly along, furiously shaking his big blue umbrella which was nearly as high as himself. He saw Julien standing near the gate superintending the pruning of some trees, so he turned off to the left to reach the road by way of the Couillards' farm, and as he walked he kept saying to Jeanne:
"Leave me, madame. I have nothing further to say to you."
In the middle of the yard, and right in his path, some children were standing around the kennel of the dog Mirza, their attention concentrated on something which the baron was also carefully considering as he stood in their midst with his hands behind his back, looking like a schoolmaster.
"Do come and see me again, Monsieur l'abbé," pleaded Jeanne. "If you will return in a few days, I shall be able to tell you then what I think is the best course to take, and we can talk it over together."
By that time they had almost reached the group of children (which the baron had left, to avoid meeting and speaking to his enemy, the priest) and the curé went to see what it was that was interesting them so deeply. It was the dog whelping; five little pups were already crawling round the mother, who gently licked them as she lay on her side before the kennel, and just as the curé looked over the children's heads, a sixth appeared. When they saw it, all the boys and girls clapped their hands, crying:
"There's another! There's another!"
To them it was simply a perfectly pure and natural amusement, and they watched these pups being born as they might have watched the apples falling from a tree.
The Abbé Tolbiac stood still for a moment in horrified surprise, then, giving way to his passion, he raised his umbrella and began to rain down blows on the children's heads. The startled urchins ran off as fast as they could go, and the abbé found himself left alone with the dog, which was painfully trying to rise. Before she could stand up, he knocked her back again, and began to hit her with all his strength. The animal moaned pitifully as she writhed under these blows from which there was no escape (for she was chained up) and at last the priest's umbrella broke. Then, unable to beat the dog any longer, he jumped on her, and stamped and crushed her under-foot in a perfect frenzy of anger. Another pup was born beneath his feet before he dispatched the mother with a last furious kick, and then the mangled body lay quivering in the midst of the whining pups, which were awkwardly groping for their mother's teats. Jeanne had escaped, but the baron returned and, almost as enraged as the priest, suddenly seized the abbé by the throat, and giving him a blow which knocked his hat off, carried him to the fence and threw him out into the road.
When he turned round, M. le Perthuis saw his daughter kneeling in the midst of the pups, sobbing as she picked them up and put them in her skirt. He strode up to her gesticulating wildly.
"There!" he exclaimed. "What do you think of that surpliced wretch, now?"
The noise had brought the farmpeople to the spot, and they all stood round, gazing at the remains of the dog.
"Could one have believed that a man would be so cruel as that!" said Couillard's wife.
Jeanne picked up the pups, saying she would bring them up by hand; she tried to give them some milk, but three out of seven died the next day. Then old Simon went all over the neighborhood trying to find a foster-mother for the others; he could not get a dog, but he brought back a cat, asserting that she would do as well. Three more pups were killed, and the seventh was given to the cat, who took to it directly, and lay down on her side to suckle it. That it might not exhaust its foster-mother the pup was weaned a fortnight later, and Jeanne undertook to feed it herself with a feeding-bottle; she had named it Toto, but the baron rechristened it, and called it Massacre.
The priest did not go to see Jeanne again. The next Sunday he hurled curses and threats against the château, denouncing it as a plague-spot which ought to be removed, and going on to anathematize the baron (who laughed at him) and to make veiled, half-timid allusions to Julien's latest amour. The vicomte was very vexed at this, but he did not dare say anything for fear of giving rise to a scandal; and the priest continued to call down vengeance on their heads, and to foretell the downfall of God's enemies in every sermon. At last, Julien wrote a decided, though respectful, letter to the archbishop, and the Abbé Tolbiac, finding himself threatened with disgrace, ceased his denunciations. He began to take long solitary walks; often he was to be met striding along the roads with an ardent, excited look on his face. Gilberte and Julien were always seeing him when they were out riding, sometimes in the distance, on the other side of a common, or on the edge of the cliff, sometimes close at hand, reading his breviary in a narrow valley they were just about to pass through; they always turned another way to avoid passing him. Spring had come, enflaming their hearts with fresh desires, and urging them to seek each other's embraces in any secluded spot to which their rides might lead them; but the leaves were only budding, the grass was still damp from the rains of winter, and they could not, as in the height of summer, hide themselves amidst the undergrowth of the woods. Lately, they had generally sheltered their caresses within a movable shepherd's hut which had been left since autumn, on the very top of the Vaucotte hill. It stood all alone on the edge of the precipitous descent to the valley, five hundred yards above the cliff. There they felt quite secure, for they overlooked the whole of the surrounding country, and they fastened their horses to the shafts to wait until their masters were satiated with love.
One evening as they were leaving the hut, they saw the Abbé Tolbiac sitting on the hill-side, nearly hidden by the rushes.
"We must leave our horses in that ravine, another time," said Julien; "in case they should tell our whereabouts," and thenceforth they always tied their horses up in a kind of recess in the valley, which was hidden by bushes.
Another evening, they were both returning to La Vrillette where the comte was expecting Julien to dinner, when they met the curé coming out of the château. He bowed, without looking them in the face, and stood on one side to let them pass. For the moment his visit made them uneasy, but their anxiety was soon dispelled.
Jeanne was sitting by the fire reading, one windy afternoon at the beginning of May, when she suddenly saw the Comte de Fourville running towards the château at such a rate as to make her fear he was the bearer of bad news. She hastened downstairs to meet him, and when she saw him close, she thought he must have gone mad. He had on his shooting-jacket and a big fur cap, that he generally only wore on his own grounds, and he was so pale that his red moustaches (which, as a rule, hardly showed against his ruddy face) looked the color of flame. His eyes were haggard and stared vacantly or rolled from side to side.
"My wife is here, isn't she?" he gasped.
"No," answered Jeanne, too frightened to think of what she was saying; "I have not seen her at all to-day."
The comte dropped into a chair, as if his legs had no longer strength to support him, and, taking off his cap, he mechanically passed his handkerchief several times across his forehead; then he started to his feet, and went towards Jeanne with outstretched hands, and mouth opened to speak and tell her of his terrible grief. But suddenly he stopped short, and fixing his eyes on her, murmured, as if he were delirious: "But it is your husband – you also – " and breaking off abruptly, he rushed out towards the sea.
Jeanne ran after him, calling him and imploring him to stop. "He knows all!" she thought, in terror. "What will he do? Oh, pray heaven he may not find them."
He did not listen to her, and evidently knowing whither to direct his steps, ran straight on without any hesitation as to the path he should take. Already he had leapt across the ditch, and was rapidly striding across the reeds towards the cliff. Finding she could not catch him up, Jeanne stood on the slope beyond the wood, and watched him as long as he was in sight; then, when she could see him no longer, she went indoors again, tortured with fear and anxiety.
When he reached the edge of the cliff, the comte turned to the right, and again began to run. The sea was very rough, and one after the other the heavy clouds came up and poured their contents on the land. A whistling moaning wind swept over the grass, laying low the young barley, and carrying the great, white seagulls inland like sprays of foam. The rain, which came in gusts, beat in the comte's face and drenched his cheeks and moustaches, and the tumult of the elements seemed to fill his heart as well as his ears. There, straight before him in the distance, lay the Vaucotte valley, and between it and him stood a solitary shepherd's hut, with two horses tied to the shafts. (What fear could there be of anyone seeing them on such a day as this?)
As soon as he caught sight of the animals, the comte threw himself flat on the ground, and dragged himself along on his hands and knees, his hairy cap and mud-stained clothes making him look like some monstrous animal. He crawled to the lonely hut, and, in case its occupants should see him through the cracks in the planks he hid himself beneath it. The horses had seen him and were pawing the ground. He slowly cut the reins by which they were fastened with a knife that he held open in his hand, and, as a fresh gust of wind swept by, the two animals cantered off, their backs stung by the hail which lashed against the sloping roof of the shepherd's cot, and made the frail abode tremble on its wheels.
Then the comte rose to his knees, put his eye to the slit at the bottom of the door, and remained perfectly motionless while he watched and waited. Some time passed thus, and then he suddenly leapt to his feet, covered with mire from head to foot. Furiously he fastened the bolt, which secured the shelter on the outside, and seizing the shafts, he shook the hut as if he would have broken it to atoms. After a moment he began to drag it along – exerting the strength of a bull, and bending nearly double in his tremendous effort – and it was towards the almost perpendicular slope to the valley that he hurried the cottage and its human occupants who were desperately shouting and trying to burst open the door, in their ignorance of what had happened.
At the extreme edge of the slope, the comte let go of the hut, and it at once begun to run down towards the valley. At first it moved but slowly, but, its speed increasing as it went, it moved quicker and quicker, until soon it was rushing down the hill at a tremendous rate. Its shafts bumped along the ground and it leaped over and dashed against the obstacles in its path, as if it had been endowed with life; it bounded over the head of an old beggar who was crouching in a ditch, and, as it passed, the man heard frightful cries issuing from within it. All at once one of the wheels was torn off, and the hut turned over on its side. That however, did not stop it, and now it rolled over and over like a ball, or like some house uprooted from its foundations and hurled from the summit of a mountain. It rolled on and on until it reached the edge of the last ravine; there it took a final leap, and after describing a curve, fell to the earth, and smashed like an egg-shell.
Directly it had dashed upon the rocks at the bottom of the valley, the old beggar, who had seen it falling, began to make his way down through the brambles. He did not go straight to the shattered hut, but, like the cautious rustic that he was, went to announce the accident at the nearest farm-house. The farm people ran to the spot the beggar pointed out, and beneath the fragments of the hut, found two bruised and mangled corpses. The man's forehead was split open, and his face crushed; the woman's jaw was almost separated from her head, and their broken limbs were as soft as if there had not been a bone beneath the flesh. Still the farmers could recognize them, and they began to make all sorts of conjectures as to the cause of the accident.
"What could they have been doin' in the cabin?" said a woman.
The old beggar replied that apparently they had taken refuge from the weather, and that the high wind had overturned the hut, and blown it down the precipice. He added that he himself was going to take shelter in it when he saw the horses fastened to the shafts and concluded that the place was already occupied.
"If it hadn't been for that I should have been where they are now," he said with an air of self-congratulation.
"Perhaps it would have been all the better if you had been," said some one.
