All Honore's family felt this Sundav oppression, even Honore himself, who went onlv twice a vear to Mass, at Christmas and on All Saints' Dav. He prided himself on believing in neither God nor the Devil and held the cure to be a man of ill-wilclass="underline" nevertheless he felt accountable to him for his moments of rapture and secretly suffered from not going to Church. He had an obscure feeling that the cure committed him to Heaven in his absence, and in doing so robbed him in some measure of his virility. When he was alone in the house on a Sundav morning he sometimes amused himself by carving phallic images in an apple or a potato: shaping them unconsciously to meet the threat, and without admitting to himself that he was indulging in magical practices as common in the town as in the countrv. His sense of danger in any case quite lacked the coarse explicitness which comes onlv too readily to my pen: it was kept purposelv vague to orfer no loophole for rational examination. Honore felt that he had expressed it well enough when he said that he was bored. But he rarelv risked anv overt defiance of that Sunday threat nor did the atmosphere of the house encourage him to do so.
On week-davs Adelaide had no strong religious feeling, and Honore’s jokes about priests and their vows of chastity did not trouble her. But on Sundays she was assailed with terror at the thought of all the calamities by which a familv mav be overtaken. Attendance at Mass, encircled bv her five children, left her imbued for the day with the sense of her importance in the eyes of God. and her vulnerabilitv: and the Devil would be banished from her thoughts until the morrow.
To Alexis, Gustave and Clotilde, Sunday was a day of merely negative interest, the one on which one did not go to school. Otherwise it was a day of emptiness and perfection, a bad copy of the other days, as dreary as those first days in the Bible when men were not yet sheltered from the gaze of le bon Dieu, who kept a sharp eye on them round the corner of a cloud or perhaps watched from Heaven through a telescope. They contrived to enjoy themselves notwithstanding, but with a sense of doing so beneath the eye of a supervisor who missed nothing. There could be no question of indulging in forbidden games.
Ferdinand’s children, arriving at Claquebue, were most especially conscious of escaping from the paternal privy. The empty spaces of the countryside conveyed to them no feeling of life held in suspense: they saw on the contrary a great expanse of freedom, and felt a mild intoxication by which their cousins were somewhat shocked. The very sight of the woods and the river was enough to make Frederic and Antoine believe a little in nymphs and dryads. The thought that, flitting among the trees, there might be divinities eager to rob schoolboys of their innocence, was a pleasant change from the blowsy mysteries of the pink corset, and in Uncle Honore’s house they thought of the policeman’s wife only with distaste. They were never to find any nymphs. They never seriously expected to do so. Yet when they went out into the woods in the afternoon in search of mushrooms or violets, blackberries, wild strawberries or lilies of the valley, it was in something the state of hopefulness of a soldier leaving barracks with a midnight pass. Alexis found this absurd, and teased them indulgently; he was a great deal more put out by the interest they displayed in the girls of Claquebue. In church or leaving church they could scarcely take their eyes off them. Alexis was embarrassed because he thought it wholly improbable that any girl could take a fancy to boys so uncouth, who were, moreover, not dressed like the country boys, and who answered in correct French when addressed in the local dialect. The things they said were almost meaningless and merely showed how little these college-boys understood of the atmosphere of a Sunday. Alexis was in no way unfriendly to them, nor did he despise them for their inexperience; but they had a way of talking about the girls and asking to be introduced to them (introduced!) which caused him acute discomfort. Accordingly, overlooking the fact that the day before he had rumpled a girl in the long grass down bv the river, he would assume the pious airs of a curate straved into dissolute company.
To Lucienne the days at Claquebue brought a happy sense of release. At home, or beneath the roof of the Demoiselles Hermeline, the exploration of the forbidden mysteries was a difficult undertaking. Every least sign of curiosity had to be concealed from her parents and her teachers. It was a matter of patiently garnering hints and observations, choosing between hypotheses, rejecting preconceived notions, interpreting scraps of conversation: and all this without laying herself open to the charge of perseverance in sin. But in Claquebue it seemed to her that the book mysteries lay open for everyone to read; she heard the flutter of its pages in the breeze blowing over the plain, and seemed at every instant to be on the threshold of discovery. In fact, however, she never discovered anything.
Ferdinand, who passed most of the day in the company of Honore, which afforded him so many grounds for outrage, had no notion of his nephews’ extreme restraint in their dealings with their cousins, and being accustomed to think the worst conjured up abominations which made him go hot and cold all over. He was confirmed in his misgivings by certain covert smiles which he surprised between Juliette and Frederic. But here, too, things were not nearly as bad as he imagined. Frederic, always far-sighted, had formed the habit at a tender age of putting his hand on Juliette’s breast. Since she was then perfectly flat the gesture had given rise to no apprehension. But when she reached the age of fourteen he began to reap the reward of his persistence, and a few years later she began to enjoy it herself. Her cousin had a pretty boy’s face which she liked kissing, but she never made any large concessions. Apart from a few familiarities the gulf between them was as wide as that which separated their families as a whole.
Twelve
Ferdinand pulled up the landau outside Honore’s house and said in a voice of grief:
“Philibert Messelon’s dead. We heard the news on our way here.”
Honore did not say a word, but in his fury that the old man should have died a week sooner than he promised he leapt onto the driver’s seat beside his brother, grabbed the reins and the whip, turned the carriage round on two wheels and beat the black horse with the whip-handle. Juliette, who had jumped onto the step to greet her Aunt Helene, was carried off at a gallop, unable either to jump down or to clamber inside.
“The old devil!” stormed Honore. “I’d like to know what he thinks he’s up to!”
“Well, after all, the man was ill.”
“We’ll see about that!”
The sounds of mourning poured out of every door and window of Philibert’s house, where the twelve Messelons and a concourse of sympathising neighbours were proclaiming that the best man in Claquebue had died, the best of husbands, the best of fathers, the best of neighbours, the best when it came to ploughing, sowing, reaping, managing cattle and looking after the Comviune. As Philibert’s widow distributed handkerchiefs to her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren the wails rose till they had the poignancy of sounding brass. In the yard there was tumult of another sort where the more ardent members of the Clerical Party, attracted by the news, were vigor-
ously discussing its political sequel. The Malorets, the Durs, the Rossigneux, the Bonbols and the Rousseliers, after giving the body a glance and a splash of holy water, were talking with a growing excitement of the Municipal Council, the Alairie, General Boulanger and the gratifying changes that must now ensue. Zephe made the startling announcement that the beard of the stone statue of St. Joseph, in front of the church, had grown five centimetres during the night, which he held to be an augury that the Alairie would now pass into the hands of the party of decency and order.