The Haudouin family possessed a good many traditions of this sort which they shared with all the peasants of Claquebue, some of a mystical nature and others based on economic considerations. Thus, Jules Haudouin had a superstitious aversion for feminine nudity. His hand was bolder than his gaze, and he passed his entire life without knowing that his wife had a large beauty-spot high up on one thigh. The greater freedom which darkness conferred upon him was in no sense due to any regard for his wife’s modesty. He was far removed from such refinements of feeling, and whether in pleasure or in toil did not put his wife upon the same plane as himself. Moreover, he found the nakedness of other women equally insufferable. One evening when the maidservant was putting away the dishes in the dining-room by the light of a candle, Haudouin, chancing to enter the room, was overtaken by a master’s whim. As he made himself ready the girl dutifully raised her skirts, uncovering the requisite amount of bare skin. At the sight he blushed red, and overcome by weak-
ness averted his eyes to contemplate the portrait of the President of the Republic. The austere countenance of Jules Grew, his fixed, suspicious gaze, completed Hau-douin's undoing. Filled with a sense of religious awe at the presence of this illustrious spectator, he blew out the candle. For a moment he remained motionless and silent, as though recoiling in the face of peril, but then the darkness restored his equanimity: I heard his heavy breathing mingled with the gratified murmurs of the girl. This mystical aversion from the satisfaction of the eves, the obscurely tangled belief that the sight of sin was a greater abomination than sin itself, was sufficiently common in Claquebue, where the cure encouraged his flock in the view that the wrath of God resided in the bodies of women more than anywhere else, so that it became an article of faith that it was safer to approach them with eves closed. The cure knew that one mystery leads to another and protects both. Among the most recent of the Haudouins I know a voung man who professes to be a Marxist, a nudist and an enlightened Freudian: it is not without a smile that I hear him claim to be an atheist as well, since I know that he never takes his pleasure without first putting out the light or drawing the curtain, and that except in nudist camps, where it is miraculously veiled with innocence, feminine nakedness inspires in him the same spiritual recoiling as in his great-grandfather. The bodies of prostitutes alone do not trouble him, no doubt because these represent something outside reality: nevertheless, he never asks one to take off her chemise.
For somewhat similar reasons Mme. Haudouin was less thorough in her toilet than she might have been. Nothing less than the occasion of a lving-in was needed to bring her to soap herself above the knees. This lack of hygiene, which was common to all the women of Claquebue, in no way arose from anv dislike of soap and water, for Mme. Haudouin quite frequently washed her feet, and always with satisfaction; it was simplv the outcome of a Christian modestv. fostered bv influences which set up pertinent restrictions in that domain. Needless to say, the cure did not expressly forbid women to wash themselves wherever they pleased, but he adroitly skirted the question with con-
stant praises of feminine pudicity, and he was careful to avoid commenting upon any passage in the Scriptures which might seem to approve of washing. He did this as much in the interest of his parishioners as in the cause of religion. Wholly devoted to his flock, the cure of Claque-bue was an honest and a forthright man, indiscreet at times to the point of being insufferable. Careless of pleasing, capable of injustice and even of acting with malice where he considered this was called for in order to bring some recalcitrant spirit back upon the narrow path, he performed his ministrations with the rigour and prudence of a peasant who sows where he may reap and does not waste his seed on barren soil. Knowing that modern methods of hygiene may in their effect upon morality be even more subversive than an anticlerical dinner held on a Good Friday, he did his utmost to protect his sheep against them.
There was, however, one part of his wife’s anatomy which afforded Haudouin untroubled pleasure and hilarity. This was her rump. For him it had no especial femininity, and he regarded it rather as a neutral zone. It was the only part of the feminine anatomy which he found both amusing and agreeable. But then, the cure himself did not object to jokes on the subject, and was even known to smile at them. He saw no serious peril in this, and in general shared the view of the Church, which has always conceded to French humour that in those fleshy hillocks the Devil has no dwelling-place.
The sports of love had but a small place in the preoccupations of the Haudouins. Husband and wife never spoke of them. If, by some extraordinary lapse, Haudouin chanced to caress his wife during the day, they were both somewhat put out by the event, as though they had been guilty of a misdemeanour. Not only did they reproach themselves with the waste of time, but they had a feeling that what they had done was as lacking in sense as to go to church on a week-day. They took far more interest in the love-concerns of other people than in their own, and they talked readily of these, with the utmost freedom of language. This lack of restraint arose out of the fact that in doing so they saw themselves in the role of censors. The conscious pillar of morality, Haudouin denounced sin with vigour, calling things by their proper names.
Their embraces were infrequent and quickly over, all initiative being denied to the wife, at least in practice. A man of regular habits in all other matters, Haudouin had never thought of precisely regulating their occurrence. He would sometimes indulge himself every night for a week and then abstain for several weeks on end. He was not, however, actuated solely by caprice. He adjusted his pleasure according to the work he had on hand. When he was engaged in difficult and arduous tasks he abstained, or was less assiduous. It was not fatigue or mental strain which caused this falling off, but rather the conviction that in business matters continence is one of the secrets of success. That is why he was never so much given to caressing the maidservant as during his latter years when, with his wordly situation solidly established, he might permit himself diversions which, considering their trifling importance, could yield no other grounds for self-reproach. But even at this stage of tardy roistering he did not forget the value of moderation, and I often heard him say to his son Ferdinand, “Until you’ve got all your certificates and a solid connection, don’t go overdoing you-know-what.” The veterinary surgeon took heed of this advice, and if he lacked his father’s flexibility and judgment in economising his energies, he did at least know how to preserve them by keeping to strict rules. His sons were a good deal more lax, and as for the latest of the Haudouins, one may say that they expend themselves solely upon impulse, deliberately separating their pleasure from their work. Thus I have observed the dissipation of that capital of continence which their forebears bequeathed to them as an essential ingredient of worldly prosperity. It is a long time now since any of the later generations bought Government bonds. Instead of saving their money, they foolishly squander it on women. This is what happens when impulse is no longer curbed to fit the necessities of daily toil.
For an observer condemned to immobility and inaction, nothing is more consoling than to witness the contradictions which human nature affords. I was able to watch Jules Haudouin at the end of his life, a Radical and an anti-Clerical, instruct his son in a secret which, perhaps unwittingly, he had derived from the cure of Claquebue. For scarcely a Sunday went by on which that worthy man did not proclaim from the pulpit the direct relationship between incontinence and poverty, letting it be inferred that God favoured the material fortunes of all men who were niggardly in caressing their wives.