Toumignon, on the other hand, had powerful inducements to make every effort in the contest, which enormously increased his fighting power, for the otherwise enviable possession of a woman like Judith was a constant source of uneasiness to him, and frequently exposed him to insults inspired by jealousy. He was fighting for the honor of the most beautiful creature in Clochemerle, and the one who in consequence was regarded with the most suspicion. It was this that gave him the genuine courage which he displayed in this affair, a courage, be it said, reinforced by frequent libations both matutinal and nocturnal. Easily frightened on most occasions on account of his poor physique, François Toumignon may be put down as one of those fiery little men who are capable of sheer heroism when they have a few drinks inside them.
There is another fact which should be recorded. An active search failed to discover six of the two-franc pieces deposited in the collection plate as a hint to the faithful of Clochemerle. This made a dead loss of twelve francs affecting the savings of the Curé Ponosse, a loss which he felt, for his income was small. The inhabitants of Clochemerle, the good Catholics especially, were inclined to be closefisted where money was concerned (the only generous ones were the spendthrifts who went constantly to Adèle’s and never to church). However, if this had been the only consideration, the disappearance of these coins would not have been a very serious matter. But a sad and disquieting feature of the occurrence was that it created a germ of suspicion in the midst of that edifying, and apparently very united, group of pious women. Some of their number accused each other in veiled terms of misappropriation, and a new impetus was given to these slanderous insinuations. Clémentine Chavaigne, Justine Putet’s rival in godliness (on this account they were enemies, adopting an oily hypocritical manner towards each other), took it upon herself to suggest to the Curé Ponosse that he should start a subscription towards the purchase of a new Saint Roch, putting her own name at the head of the list for a sum of eight francs. Beaten for once in the sphere of pious enterprise, Justine Putet sneered sarcastically in defiance of her rival. The relations between these two excellent ladies rapidly became so strained that Clémentine remarked:
“Well, Mademoiselle, I don’t get up on a prie-dieu in the middle of the church and make an exhibition of myself. I content myself with giving my money, and stint myself to do it, Mademoiselle.”
Justine Putet, whose reactions were sometimes of a formidable nature, made a venomous retort:
“Perhaps, Mademoiselle, all you had to do to obtain this money was just to stoop down and pick it up?”
“And pray what do you mean by that?”
“That you need a very clear conscience before you can presume to dictate to other people, Miss Thief.”
These ladies might then have been seen a few moments later, hastening to the presbytery to give vent to their rancor and bitterness, and unbosom themselves to the Curé Ponosse, a proceeding which greatly upset the Curé of Clochemerle, plagued as he already was both by the Church and the Republic, the Conservatives and the party of the Left (who, by the way, were also conservative in their outlook, all the inhabitants being more or less landowners, while those who were not landowners had no interest whatever in any form of institution). With his head splitting, the Curé Ponosse had no other means of reconciling the two enemies than a threat to deprive them of absolution. They drew nearer to each other with words thought out in advance, which belied their mutual insults; but their looks of fury only emphasized these the more. The day of the scandal had brought to full flower the seeds of hatred they already bore within them. Justine Putet declared that Clémentine Chavaigne smelled like a dead rat. And she speaks truth; her skin was actually affected by this highly unpleasant odor at the mere sight of a detested rival whose subscription had been a successful move on her part. Charitably informed of the reputation she had acquired, Clémentine Chavaigne declared, under the seal of secrecy, that she had overheard an interview of a highly equivocal nature in the vestry between the Sexton Coiffenave and Justine Putet. According to her account, Justine had taken advantage of Coiffenave’s extreme deafness to make a series of lewd remarks to him (gazing passionately at him the while), sufficient to make one’s hair stand on end, thereby giving free rein to those sadist instincts which she, Clémentine, had unmasked long ago. This perspicacious lady, having glanced heavenwards with a look of righteous horror, whispered to her confidante:
“If Putet had designs on Monsieur le Curé—well, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised. . . .”
“My dear lady, whatever are you saying to me?” the other answers, deliciously thrilled.
“Haven’t you noticed how she is always on the watch for him, and that look of hers when she speaks to him? She’s a tyrant, that Putet, and hell’s behind her. She’s a hypocrite who uses piety to cover up her loathsome behavior. I’m positively frightened of her.”
“Fortunately Monsieur le Curé is a saintly man. . . .”
“A very saintly man, as you may well say. But the fact is, he doesn’t see any harm in that Putet woman’s affected ways. Do you know how long she stayed shut up with him in the confessional the other day? Thirty-eight minutes, Mademoiselle! Has a respectable woman got enough sins to take up thirty-eight minutes? Then what can she be talking to him about? I’ll tell you, my dear. She’s stirring him up against us. Now listen to me. I much prefer creatures like that good-for-nothing Toumignon woman! She’s possessed by the devil, you’ll tell me, a nasty low creature who gets all the men in the town running after her. But at least you know where you are with women like that. They’re not double-faced. . . .”
The reader will now be able to judge how matters stand. No one had yet had time to form a definite opinion. True, there were partisans on either side who blindly took their stand with the Church or with the municipal authority. But the floating mass of the population made its decisions for reasons peculiar to each individual. In this instance personal bias was the outcome of motives which in many cases were by no means clear or were of a kind that it would be impossible to acknowledge. Jealous feelings were vigilantly awaiting their opportunities. Even among the group of pious women their disintegrating effects were working unseen.
Who won the fight, Nicolas or Toumignon? No one could say as yet. This cannot be decided until later—by the dimensions of the dressings of their wounds, by the length of time for which each man was disabled.
But there was one question which overtopped all others, a profoundly stirring question. Who was to pay for the breakage? Toumignon, without a shadow of doubt, said the Church party, which steadily maintained that Saint Roch received his deathblow at the hands of Judith’s husband. This imputation Toumignon resisted with the utmost violence. And suppose that were actually the case, what then? It was reserved for Tafardel to throw light on the controversy. He obtained a minutely detailed account of the whole incident, with special reference to the insults given and received.
“Cuckold, you say? Nicolas called Toumignon a cuckold?”
“Yes, he did, several times over!” Laroudelle, Torbayon, and others declared.
Tafardel was thereupon seen to remove his famous panama in great glee, make a deep bow to the empty church, and issue a challenge to the last surviving representatives of obscurantism:
“Ye faithful followers of Loyola, I warn you, we are going to have some fun!”
In the opinion of Clochemerle’s learned man, the term cuckold, thus bestowed in public, constituted a case of libel in which grave harm might be done to the recipient of the insult, both in the matter of his reputation and of his conjugal relations. Toumignon and his wife were consequently entitled to claim damages from Nicolas. If, therefore, the Church party showed any inclination to prosecute for the breakage of the saint, Toumignon had only to put in a counter-claim.
“You will find me ready for you, Monsieur Ponosse,” Tafardel said, by way of farewell.
Thereupon he climbed the hill to the town hall and immediately set to work again. This incident i
n the church will provide material for two sensational columns in the Vintners’ Gazette of Belleville-sur-Saone. The inhabitants of the surrounding districts will read this excellent paper only to learn with indignation how a couple of honest Clochemerle tradespeople were placed in a position where divorce, and possibly even murder, is inevitable, thanks entirely to the myrmidons of the Church. This is a new departure indeed!
While the whole of Clochemerle was in a state of agitation, there was one person only who remained completely invisible, Barthélemy Piéchut, the mayor. This crafty individual, this consummate schemer—who, with his urinal, was the origin of the whole catastrophe—was well aware of the value of silence, the value of absence. He left all the impulsive people, all the silly simple people, to go ahead and get themselves into a mess. He let the gossips have their say, waiting till he discovered on the ocean of empty words some useful flotsam and jetsam of truth. He himself remained silent, observed, meditated, weighed the pros and cons. But these were only preliminaries. Later he will handle the inhabitants like pawns on the chessboard of his ambition.
Barthélemy Piéchut was farsighted. He had a fixed aim in life, unknown to all save Noémie, his wife. But she was as secret as the tomb and a steel safe into the bargain, the most avaricious woman in Clochemerle and the most insincere in her conversation, which made her the most useful wife that destiny could possibly have allotted to the mayor of a town in which the people were turbulent and difficult to manage. Always wise in her advice was Noémie, an inveterate hoarder, tireless in acquisition, indeed overstepping the mark in that respect, so that it became necessary at times to restrain her; for her minute calculations were often so minute as to be actually wrong. She would never shrink from stirring up trouble between two families if a few francs were to be gained thereby; to spy upon a servant she would leave her bed at break of day. Relentless in the matter of giving trouble to others, she regarded it as her right that others should expend their last ounce of effort for her benefit. To snatch at every opportunity for gain was an obsession with her. It was her only defect—a defect, by the way, which would be a godsend to those unfortunates who have been ruined by spendthrift wives. Thus freed from the necessity of constant attention to his work in the town, if Barthélemy Piéchut had to leave home to deal with important business elsewhere, he could do so with entire confidence in Noémie’s management during his absence. This management was of such an uncompromising kind that people often complained to him of his wife’s hardheartedness. They invariably found the mayor, who was not afraid of losing by it, disposed to give way a little. These concessions earned him the reputation of being an obliging man, easy to approach, and not an ogre where humble people were concerned—an excellent reputation, due to his way of saying, with a shrug of his shoulders: “Oh, it’s only my wife! You know what women are. . . .” She was very useful to him in managing his affairs, exercising a shrewd control over public opinion.
Noémie had another good point: she was devoid of jealousy. She was a woman who was completely disinterested in the question of cohabitation, which is often such an important one for married couples. She had never really enjoyed herself in bed. In the early days of her marriage she naturally wished for enlightenment. This was at first a question of curiosity, then of vanity, and finally of avarice, as always in her case. A rich girl when she married Barthélemy Piéchut, whose only assets were his tall handsome appearance and his reputation as a man of good abilities, she did not wish unfair advantage to be taken of her wealth. But she had to admit that Barthélemy was punctilious in money matters. It was probable that he had married her for her money, but he made as much return for it as he could, especially in the earlier years; and this was to his credit, for Noémie, taking no pleasure in married love, conferred none herself. However, for a period of several years she felt herself under an obligation to draw every penny of the income derived from her dowry, until the day when her two children Gustave and Francine had been born, and she obtained an undertaking from Barthélemy to leave her henceforth in peace. She proclaimed to him that she had quite enough to do in running his house—with the children, the servants, the cooking, the washing, and the accounts—without being deprived of her sleep by silly nonsense which she already knew by heart. She gave Barthélemy Piéchut to understand that, if he came across creatures “who like that sort of thing,” she would not interfere. “It will be all the less work for me to do.” She made an end of her constant visits to the church, and her avarice increased still more. It was, indeed, her only source of thorough enjoyment.
This suited Barthélemy admirably. His wife had always been a gawky angular unattractive woman, whom he could have left to lie on the floor beside their bed with barely a twinge of conscience. Since the birth of the children, Noémie’s total lack of physical charm was a discouraging business; even a hard-working man like Barthélemy ended by jibbing at the task he was called upon to undertake.
He appreciated nights of complete idleness which left him reserves of energy. Women had always taken an interest in him. As he advanced in years, public distinctions afforded him compensation for advantages of which age was depriving him. If by chance, in a heedless moment, he made demands on Noémie, she would say to him: “Will you never learn decent manners!” with such coldness that it would have needed all the blind impetuosity of a young man to persist. At the period of which we are writing, moreover, he had long been inclined to beware of anything in the nature of an impromptu, bringing to bear even on his marital relations that same spirit of caution and foresight which was the secret of his power.
For a long time past Barthélemy Piéchut had regarded his wife as his manager, and in certain respects his partner. But Noémie continued to insist on their sharing a bed, this being a wife’s privilege, setting her apart from the women whom her husband might meet in casual encounters. Furthermore, she found it a convenient arrangement for discussing plans in the wintertime when the nights were long.
It is now time to disclose Barthélemy Piéchut’s grand project: no less than to become a Senator in three years’ time, in place of M. Prosper Louèche, at present in office but known in well-informed circles to be notably decrepit. This decay of his intellectual faculties would be no serious obstacle to his re-election, if he had not weakened his prospects by a renewed outbreak of a highly scandalous form of activity. The old man interested himself in little girls in a very benevolent way, but one which would hardly, for all that, come under the heading of philanthropy. Prosper Louèche had urfortunately made himself conspicuous in his youth by advanced ideas of a distinctly radical tinge.
Although he subsequently gave reassuring proofs of his conversion, first by aspiring to bourgeois honors, then by an ardent display of patriotism at Bordeaux in 1914, and finally by a speech in the Senate in which he appealed for a vigorous prosecution of the war to its bitter end, he still had numerous enemies. As his integrity could not be brought in question, or at least not sufficiently, it was determined to get him on the score of his morals. Thanks to M. de Vilepouille, a distinguished gentleman of the Right who was perfectly safe from retribution, and who spoke without any intention of harming his old friend, the party of the Right learned of his exploits. “It is a strange thing,” the Senator said, in his high-pitched aristocratic voice, “Louèche’s ideas and mine differ, but our tastes are the same: we like our fruit a little unripe, my dear fellow. At our age, it’s most enlivening! But I must tell you that Louèche has ideas of his own that are really curious. . . . Some amusing tricks, my boy! This colleague of ours has always been an innovator, he’s like that in everything!” In short, it was high time for M. Prosper Louèche to be shifted altogether if a scandal were to be avoided.
Barthélemy Piéchut knew all this. He was pulling strings. Already he had influence behind him, and was counting on Bourdillat and Focart, who were likely to be seen at Clochemerle again, this time separately.
Piéchut intended, when he became a Senator, to get his daughter Francine marri
ed. She was now sixteen, and was already a very good-looking girl, well educated, with manners which would go down in any drawing room (those manners had cost him a pretty penny!). As regards her marriage, he was thinking of Gonfalon de Bec, of Blacé, an ancient noble family whose finances were in an even worse condition than the frontage of their château, which nevertheless looked very impressive as it stood up on a small hill at the farther end of a splendid park in the French style, with its trees more than two hundred years old. . . . A proud family, the Gonfalon de Becs, but they needed re-gilding. Their son Gaétan, who was now twenty years old, was said to be just the right age for Francine in three or four years’ time. This Gaétan was reputed to be rather a fool and not likely to achieve much. This was an additional reason. Francine would keep him well in hand, for she showed signs of growing into a strong-willed, energetic woman like her mother, and very careful in money matters, with the additional advantage of a better education. Married to this Gaétan, with a title and a fortune at her disposal, Francine would be on the same footing as the Courtebiche and Saint-Choul families, and far superior to the Girodots. While so far as he himself was concerned, his political position would be strengthened by his connection with the noble families of the district.
With his hat on the back of his head and his elbows on the table, the Mayor of Clochemerle was thinking of all these things, eating slowly the while. The urinal and the battle in the church, he said to himself, must play their part in the realization of his schemes. Seated around him were the members of his family, controlling their curiosity, respecting his silence. However, when the meal was over, Noémie asked:
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