In the year of Judith’s marriage, Toumignon’s mother having died, she found herself in full possession of the Beaujolais Stores. Having a natural aptitude for commerce, she expanded the business of the shop. She had plenty of time to give to it, being but little concerned with François Toumignon, who had proved deplorably weak in every way. Judith acquired the habit of going once a week either to Villefranche or to Lyons—on business, so she said. The war put the finishing touch to Toumignon’s debility, and made him a drunkard as well.
At the end of the year 1919, Hippolyte Foncimagne appeared at Clochemerle, took up his abode at the inn, and immediately set about taking steps to supply himself with a number of household necessities which the suspicious watchfulness of Arthur Torbayon precluded him from obtaining from his hostess, as it would have been a simple matter for him to do. He visited the Beaujolais Stores to make trifling purchases, and did this so constantly that it became a kind of legend. Proceeding piecemeal, he provided himself with eighteen self-fixing buttons, articles which are very popular among bachelors who have nobody to look after these matters. The eyes of the handsome legal assistant had an Oriental languor about them. They made a lively impression on Judith, and gave her back all the impetuous ardor of her youth, now enriched and re-enforced by the experience that only maturity can bring.
It was soon observed that on Thursdays, the day on which Judith took the motor omnibus to Villefranche, Foncimagne invariably went off on his motor bicycle and was absent for the whole day. It was further noticed that the fair Judith began to make considerable use of her bicycle, for reasons of health according to her own account. But these same reasons always took her along the road which leads directly to Moss Wood, in which the loving couples of Clochemerle are wont to take shelter. It was Justine Putet who disclosed the fact that the young Clerk of the Court was in the habit of creeping into Monks’ Alley at nightfall and entering the little door which opens into the courtyard of the Beaujolais Stores, while Toumignon was still hanging about at the café. Lastly, people declared that they had met Foncimagne and Judith in a certain street in Lyons which is full of hotels. From that time onwards Toumignon’s dishonorable fate left no further room for doubt.
By the year 1922, when this intrigue had been proceeding with shameless openness for three years, all interest in it had come to an end. For a long time past, a scandal, perhaps even a tragedy, had been generally expected. Subsequently, when the guilty couple were seen to be firmly established in their irregular union, with no thought of concealment, they ceased to attract attention. The only person along the entire valley who was ignorant of the whole business was Toumignon himself. He had treated Foncimagne as his greatest friend, and was constantly bringing him to the house, proud to show off Judith to him. This he did to such an extent that she herself thought it necessary to intervene, saying that the young man was seen there too often and that it would end by making people gossip.
“Gossip about who? Gossip about what?” Toumignon asked.
“Me and this Foncimagne. Can’t you see what people will be saying?”
This idea struck Toumignon as being irresistibly funny, but he gave vent to his wrath against the mischievous gossips.
“If ever you catch anyone saying anything wrong, you just send him along to me. You understand? And won’t I give him an earful!”
As luck would have it, just at that moment Foncimagne came in. Toumignon gave him an enthusiastic welcome.
“Listen, Hippolyte, here’s a good yarn. You’re supposed to be carrying on with Judith!”
“I . . . I . . .” Foncimagne stammered out, conscious that he was beginning to blush.
“François, François, come now, don’t talk nonsense!” Judith cried out hastily, blushing too, as though her modesty were offended, and anxious also to correct the misunderstanding.
“Let me finish, for the Lord’s sake!” Toumignon answered. “It isn’t so often you hear a joke in these parts, where most of ’em are fools. Well, it seems people are saying that you play about with Judith. You don’t think that funny?”
“François, shut up!” the unfaithful wife repeated.
But there was no holding him back. He was completely unrestrained.
“Look here, Hippolyte, she’s a beautiful woman, Judith, don’t you think? Very well, then, I tell you she’s not a woman, she’s an icicle! And if ever you can get her to thaw, I’ll stand you any number of drinks! Make yourself at home. I’ve got to go along to Piéchut. Make hay while the sun shines, Hippolyte. Let’s see if you arc cleverer than me.”
After the following final injunction, he closed the shop door behind him.
“When you catch anyone talking, Judith, you send him along to me. Understand?”
Never before had the handsome Clerk of the Court been so ardently beloved by the beautiful daughter of commerce, and this carefree arrangement meant lasting happiness for three different people.
CHAPTER FOUR
More Notable Inhabitants
THIRTY YARDS BEYOND the Beaujolais stores one comes to the post office, which is under the direction of Mile. Voujon. Ten yards farther on you find the tobacconist’s shop kept by Mme. Fouache, of whom we shall have occasion to speak again.
Near the tobacconist’s shop, Dr. Mouraille’s house could easily be recognized by its large brass plate and by the metal sliding door of a garage on the ground floor, a contrivance which was still the only one of its kind in Clochemerle.
Dr. Mouraille himself was quite an average type of person. At the age of fifty-three he was a sturdy man, with a red face and a loud voice. He was also—so it was whispered by his patients—a bit of a brute. His practice of medicine was conducted with a fatalism which left all initiative and all responsibility for the final issue of an illness to nature. He had definitely adopted this method after fifteen years of experiments and statistics. As a young practitioner, Dr. Mouraille had been guilty of the same error in the care of the body as that into which Ponosse had fallen, when a young priest, in the care of souls: he had shown too much zeal. He attacked disease with diagnoses which were as audacious as they were fanciful, and with violently counteracting specifics. This system gave him twenty-three per cent of losses in serious cases, a proportion which was soon reduced to nine per cent. It was then that he decided to confine himself to diagnosis, as was the usual practice among his colleagues in the surrounding district.
Dr. Mouraille was a heavy drinker, with a taste, which was unusual at Clochemerle, for appetizers before meals, a habit acquired in his student days. That period had been very prolonged, and devoted impartially to racing, poker, drinking at cafés, visits to houses of pleasure, country excursions, and parties at the university. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Clochemerle treated their doctor with respect, saying to themselves that sooner or later they were pretty sure to be at his mercy, and that he might then revenge himself, for anything at which he had taken offense, by a dig of his scalpel into an abscess, or by some extraction ruthlessly carried out. The doctor’s activities among the jaws of Clochemerle were, in fact, of a most drastic kind; he made use of a primitive and terrifying implement, which he handled with a tenacious and irresistible grip. He regarded the scraping-out and filling of teeth as a pretty trick performed by impostors and quacks, and an anesthetic as a useless complication. In his opinion pain was its own antidote, and the element of surprise an excellent aid to the work. He had developed on these lines a technique of operation which was rapid and usually effective. If a patient’s face was swollen, without warning he would give it a formidable blow with his fist, which half-stunned the sufferer. The latter’s mouth having been opened wide by his cries of pain, he would plunge his forceps down to the jawbone, and tug away in jerks until it was broken. The victim would then rise from his chair in such a state of bewilderment that he paid his money on the spot, a procedure practically unknown at Clochemerle.
Methods so vigorous as these compelled respect. No one in the town would have dared to set hims
elf up against Dr. Mouraille. But he himself chose his own enemies, and one of these was the Curé Ponosse, though quite involuntarily as far as the latter was concerned. The quarrel arose on a certain occasion when the curé had failed to mind his own business in the matter of Sidonie Sauvy’s stomach. The story is worth repeating. But it should be heard in the version given by Babette Manapoux, one of the best storytellers in Clochemerle, who has made a speciality of some of these tales. Let us listen to her:
“Well, there was Sidonie Sauvy’s stomach got all big. Naturally at her age there was no chance of her having gone wrong. There was plenty of tittle-tattlers who said that Sidonie when she was young had the devil in her skirts. But those stories, you couldn’t tell if they was right or wrong, they went too far back. When a woman gets to that age, more than sixty, nobody can remember what she did when she was a girl. When all’s said and done, it doesn’t make no difference if she was a good girl or a bad one, once she’s past the age. Which makes you sorrier, to have done it or not to have done it?
“Well, as I said, there was Sidonie with her stomach getting bigger and bigger, like a pumpkin growing in the sunshine in summertime. That stomach of hers, it was all on account of her not being able to do her little duties. That gave her a swelling inside. . . .”
“Perhaps you mean a stoppage of the bowels, Madame Manapoux?”
“That’s quite right, sir, quite right. Just what the doctor said. Well, there was that stomach worrying the life out of Sidonie’s children, specially Alfred. Towards evening he thought he’d better ask her: ‘Don’t you feel well, Mother? Maybe you ain’t well, just a bit hot-like?’ That’s all he said to her, not a word more, and Sidonie didn’t say yes or no, because she couldn’t really make out what was happening in her stomach. But what does Sidonie do then but get a nasty fever so that she makes a regular noise in her bed. Her children waited on till about nine o’clock so as to be quite sure she was ill enough not to be able to get well alone, because they didn’t want to risk having to pay the doctor’s fee without it was necessary. Then at last Alfred he said they mustn’t think about expense and that it’d be more Christian to send for the doctor.
“D’you know Dr. Mouraille? A very clever man when limbs is broken, there’s no saying he isn’t. He’s the man who set Henry Brodequm’s leg that time he fell off a ladder beating nuts off the tree, and Anthony Patrigot’s arm that’d been damaged by a lorry. But he’s not so good for things that go wrong inside as for fractures, Dr. Mouraille isn’t. Well then, he comes along to the Sauvys’, and he lifts up Sidonie’s bedclothes.
“‘Has she had an action?’ he asks.
“‘No, nothing happens at all,’ Alfred answers.
“When the doctor finished feeling Sidonie’s stomach, which was as hard as a barrel and as big—well, very nearly—he said to the children: ‘Come on, let’s go outside.’ When they were all in the yard, Dr. Mouraille says to Alfred: ‘In the state she’s in now, she’s practically done for.’ ‘On account of her stomach?’ Alfred asks. ‘What’s she got inside it?’ ‘Gases,’ Dr. Mouraille answers. ‘Either she’ll burst, or it’ll choke her. One or the other’s bound to happen shortly.’
“Then off he goes, Dr. Mouraille, looking pretty sure of himself. And when you think that you’ve got to pay a doctor twenty francs for saying things like that just because he’s got a car to come and see you in—well, I call it a crime! Specially when it’s all lies, as it was that time I’m telling you of, as you’ll see soon.
“‘So I’m not coming along all right?’ Sidonie asks Alfred when he gets back from the yard.
“‘No, you’re not,’ he says.
“Now the way Alfred spoke, she knew quite well that there might soon be no more question of her coming along well or badly. I must tell you that Sidonie, once she was past an age to be pawed about, got pretty religious. Now that she saw she was nearing the time to say good-by to everybody, she asked to see the curé. Ponosse had come by then—you know him.
“When you get the curé to come to a house, it means that someone’s in a bad way. Well, then, so the Curé Ponosse turns up, speaking gentle and kind, and asking what the damage is. They tell him all about Sidonie’s stomach having stopped working, and how Dr. Mouraille didn’t think she had a dog’s chance of pulling through. And then the Curé Ponosse asks them to lift up Sidonie’s bedclothes and let him see her stomach, which gave Alfred no end of a surprise to start with. But Alfred didn’t think for a moment it was curiosity, seeing the state she was in, the poor old thing. Well, then, the Curé Ponosse starts feeling Sidonie’s stomach, just like Dr. Mouraille’d been doing. But ’twas a very different story, with the Curé Ponosse.
“‘I see,’ says he. ‘I’ll get her moving. You haven’t any salad oil?’ he asks Alfred.
“Alfred brings the bottle, full up. The Curé Ponosse pours out two large glasses and makes Sidonie drink them. Besides that, he asks her to tell her beads, as long as she can, so that God could have a hand in it too, the comfort she’d feel when her stomach was relieved. And then off goes the Curé Ponosse as calm as you like, telling them to wait and not to fret or worry.
“Well, that started her stomach going, like the curé had said it would, and she couldn’t stop herself, and went on and on to her heart’s content, and all the bad gases left her, and there was lots of noise and smell, as you may imagine. There was a smell in the street like on the days when the casks are emptied, it was really extraordinary; and everyone in the lower town was sayin’ ‘Why, that’s Sidonie’s stomach getting better!’ So thoroughly relieved she was, that a couple of days later she slipped on her jacket and out she went into the town as lively as a cricket, and told everyone that Dr. Mouraille had wanted to murder her, and that the Curé Ponosse had done a miracle in her stomach with holy salad oil.
“That business of Sidonie’s stomach being cured by a sort of miracle with oil and a rosary, it made a stir in Clochemerle, I can tell you, and it was a real score for the Church. It was after that that people started being friendly with the Curé Ponosse, even those who don’t go to church, and going to fetch him when anyone was ill, often rather than have Dr. Mouraille, who’d made a mess over that business, so everyone thought. Ever since then he’s always had a grudge against the Curé Ponosse and they’ve never got on together, though it wasn’t the curé’s fault, for he’s a real good sort in some ways, not a bit stuck-up, and a good judge of Beaujolais, so the vinegrowers say.”
Adjoining the chemist’s shop with its dusty windows, where specimens of the advertiser’s art showed sufferers from eczema scratching themselves furiously, a very different kind of shop attracted your attention, with its shining nickel plate and its photographs and sporting telegrams pasted on the plate glass. A machine which was the envy of all the male youth in Clochemerle occupied the place of honor in the window, a bicycle of the renowned Supéras make, and an exact counterpart, according to the catalogues, of the machines used by the most famous racing cyclists.
This shop belonged to the cycle dealer, Eugène Fadet, who was noted for the way in which he could take a flying leap on to the saddle of his bicycle, and for the supple activity of his riding which was considered to be the last word in elegance. Eugène had great influence among all the young lads in Clochemerle, who regarded his friendship as an honor. And this for several reasons. First, his very individual way of rumpling his cap and putting it on at a picturesque angle, of “giving himself a slant,” as he said. Then the cut of his hair at the nape of his neck, which was imitated but never successfully, the hairdresser at Clochemerle being able to bring it to such perfection only on Fadet’s head, the shape of which was specially adapted to that kind of gigolo smartness. Further, having formerly been a racing cyclist and an air mechanic, Fadet did not hesitate, in his fabulous stories which were continually being enhanced by repetition, to treat the celebrities of the racing track and of the air with a brotherly freedom of language. Chief among these stories was that of his great exploit, “the t
ime when I ran a close second to Ellegard, who was world champion at that time—I mean in 1911, at the ‘drome.” Then followed a description of the racing track, the wild enthusiasm of the gallery, and the remark made by the astonished Ellegard himself: “I had to go all out.” The youths of Clochemerle were never tired of listening to this story, which gave them visions of renown. They were always asking for it.
“Tell us, Eugène, that day you ran second to Ellegard . . . tell us about it!”
Once again he would supply thrilling details, invariably ending with some such sentence as this:
“Well, you boys, which of you is buying me a drink?”
There was always some seventeen-year-old anxious to stand well with Eugène, who managed to find the required amount somewhere in the depths of his pockets. Before closing the shop door, Fadet would shout:
“Tine, I’ve got a job to see to!”
Then he would hasten to get outside as fast as he could. Often, however, not fast enough to escape being caught by the voice of a quarrelsome peevish woman—his wife, Léontine Fadet, calling out crossly:
“Off again drinking with those boys? And what about your work?”
An old frequenter of racing tracks and airdromes, who was teaching a whole band of youth “how to keep the girls in order” (“women have got to crawl if you’re to call yourself a man!”), a personage of such distinction could not allow his prestige to be thus publicly endangered.
Clochemerle Page 6