“Papa, this morning Tintin tried to touch me under my dress.”
Adelaide uttered a cry of horror. They all gathered round Clotilde, who said:
“Well, he did. He tried to touch me!”
“Is that true, Gustave?” roared Honore. “Speak up, can’t you?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know,” stammered Gustave, seeming disconcerted. “I didn’t really see… It could have been, but I didn’t exactly. .” Perceiving that this reply was disappointing his audience, he added hastily: “Well, anyway, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if it was true. It’s just what you’d expect of Tintin. He doesn’t care what he does with the girls. And that’s something I have seen!” The same might have been said of all the urchins on the plain, including Gustave himself; but his words evoked an appalled murmur. Adelaide snatched up her daughter and promised her that she should never again go down to the meadows. Clotilde, who had not foreseen this disaster, at once tried to take back what she had said, but Adelaide carried her hastily into the kitchen, drowning her voice with her own.
Honore stood motionless, clasping his horny hands together while he glared like a wild animal over the plain as it lay scorching beneath the sun. Juliette drew near to him and murmured:
“I told Marguerite I’d fetch her at one o’clock to-morrow, so she could be here at half-past.”
The families in Claquebue numbered ninety-five. There were the Durs, the Corenpots, the Rousseliers, the Hau-douins, the Malorets, the Messelons. . but I have no need to name them all. The feeling between different families, whether of hatred or of friendship, was ascribed to various reputable causes — material interests, political opinions, religious beliefs. But in fact these feelings reflected above all the emotional dispositions of the individual families and their attitude towards sex. The cure was well aware of this, and never failed to take it into account in his relentless battle for the salvation of their souls, dividing the families into three categories. There were first of all those who were un-Catholic in their approach to, and their indulgence in, the pleasures of the flesh: such families were lost to the Church, and even their more virtuous members, devout thought they might be, represented a threat to religion. Then there were those at the opposite pole who yielded to fleshly impulses only with that furtiveness which is inspired by the fear of God, tormented families kept with little effort upon the true path: their members, borne upon the good tide, might with little danger be guilty of the blackest sins, since these were no more than passing deviations. Finally there were those in between, the hesitant families, tending now in one direction now in the other, torn this way and that, sinning, repenting and sinning again: these, the majority, had need of all the cure’s care.
He was the only one to possess any clear perception of this sexual countenance worn by each separate family, which for his convenience he classified under these three heads. The families themselves were only subconsciously aware of it, and this was also true of individuals. Nevertheless, when Honore Haudouin said of the Alalorets that they were a filthy lot, he was not indulging in mere abuse: without precisely knowing it he was stigmatising habits of sensuality which differed from those prevailing in his own family, and which shocked him.
Although the members of a family — the word is to be interpreted here as meaning household — might differ among themselves in matters of detail, the father preferring fair hair and plumpness, for example, and the sons dark hair and willowiness, they shared as though they were one flesh certain attractions and aversions where other families were concerned. The case of the Haudouins and the Malorets was by no means exceptional. There were plenty of others, although generally of a less extreme kind, to bear witness to the cure's perspicacity. The Durs, for example, lived next door to the Berthiers in the middle of the village. They were ardent priest-lovers with a son and two daughters. The Dur boy had seduced one of the Berthier girls, and although he did not much like her he retained a happy memory of the occasion. The elder Dur girl genuinely detested all the Berthier males and would have nothing at all to do with them, but the younger one was on covertly friendly terms with them. From this one might infer that the individual Durs differed widely in their attitude to the Berthiers: but it did not alter the fact that when their father apostrophised the Berthiers as “revolutionary rabble,” he could count upon his children’s sympathy. All were conscious of what underlay his ful-minations, an ingrained family rancour and mistrust. All felt obscurely threatened in their sexual inheritance, their common stock of minor vices, their especial and private mode of coming to terms with their desires, while concealing them, as decency required, from the light of day. They felt themselves threatened by a certain cynicism implicit not merely in the words and looks of the Berthiers but in their very silences. They seemed always to carry their arms at the ready, so to speak, and one could never stop oneself remembering that their women were naked under their clothes' This rendered the Durs uncomfortable: thev had an acutely mortified feeling that the Berthiers suspected the existence of the shameful and grubby secrets which they forgave themselves.
“Revolutionary rabble!. said old Dur; but although it was all ostensibly a matter of politics and of going or not going to Church, the first Berthiers who had stopped attending Mass, like the first Messelons to espouse the cause of the Republic, had been really proclaiming an attitude to the pursuit and performance of sexual love. When old Berthier inveighed against the Durs and their creeping-jesus airs his remarks were certain to include a juicy reference to certain regions of the body, and the tone of voice in which he uttered the word “reactionary” denoted primarily his scorn for suspected amorous procedures which he held to be preposterous. Moreover all the Republicans (I am speaking of a time forty-five years ago, when political opinions in Claquebue were not yet deeply rooted)— all the Republicans suspected their adversaries, not precisely of being impotent, since they reproduced themselves, but of functioning on a diminished and miserly scale. The reactionaries, for their part, held the radicals to be the prey of monstrous appetites, addicts of licentiousness, disdainers of the hereafter: and with a secret element of jealousy in their attitude, like that of a virtuous woman for an unmarried girl who flaunts her laden belly.
“Revolutionary rabble!” said old Dur; and “Reactionary blackbeetles!” said old Bertheir. . Pure eyewash, all of it!. . Can anyone seriously suppose that two families living side by side for sixty years, seeing each other day after day, can continue to think of each other solely in terms of politics or the confessional? People such as the Berthiers and the Durs, the Corenpots and the Rousseliers, spending their sweat sixteen hours a day on the soil, expecting nothing more of life than their own aching bones can wrest from it, have little time for the narrow contemplation of foreign affairs or eternity. In Claquebue true faith, whether religious or political, was bom in the loins: beliefs originating in the mind were simply notions, opportunist stratagems wedded to neither hatred nor friendship and capable of being revised to suit the times, as old Hau-douin had known how to do. The people seized upon Radicalism, Clericalism, Royalism or General Boulanger as they seized upon the pretext of a boundary hedge, simply as a means of asserting that in their family sexual love was approached in a certain way. The jMesselons waxed ferocious over Alsace-Lorraine, and the downfall of tyrants and priests, because for them this was a way of making love: for old Philibert, indeed, it was the only way left, and he continued to practise it until the last breath left his body.