“At la Tuilière,” said M. de Terremondre, “in my cousin Jacques’ house, there is a billiard-table with pockets, which dates from Louis XV.’s time, in a very low vaulted hall, of soft, whitewashed stone, where this inscription is still to be read:— ‘Gentlemen are requested not to rub their cues on the walls.’ It is a request to which no one has paid any attention, for the vaulting is pitted with a number of little round holes, whose origin is accurately explained by this inscription.”
M. le président Peloux was asked in several directions at once for details as to the affair in Queen Marguerite’s house. The murder of Madame Houssieu, which had excited all the district, was still arousing interest. Every one knew that a crushing weight of evidence hung over a butcher’s boy of nineteen, named Lecœur, whom folks used to see twice a week entering the old lady’s house with his basket on his head. It was also known that the prosecution was detaining two upholsterer’s apprentices of fourteen and sixteen years of age as accomplices, and it was said that the crime had been committed in circumstances which made the story of it a particularly delicate one.
Being questioned on this point, M. le président Peloux lifted his round ruddy head from the billiard-table and winked.
“The case is being tried in camera. The scene of the murder has been reconstructed in its entirety. I don’t believe that there is a doubt left as to the acts of debauchery which preceded the crime and facilitated the perpetration of it.”
He took up his liqueur glass, swallowed a mouthful of armagnac, smacked his lips, and said: “Heavens! what velvet!”
And, when a circle of inquirers crowded round him asking for details, the magistrate, in a low voice, disclosed certain circumstances which provoked murmurs of surprise and grunts of disgust.
“Is it possible?” was the comment. “A woman of eighty!”
“The case,” answered M. le président Peloux, “is not unique. You may take my word for it after my experience as a magistrate. And the young scamps of the faubourgs know much more on this subject than we do. The crime in Queen Marguerite’s house is of a well-known, classified sort; I might call it a classic type. I immediately scented it out as senile debauchery, and I saw quite clearly that Roquincourt, the prosecuting counsel, was following a wrong track. He had naturally ordered the arrest of all the vagabonds and tramps found wandering within a wide circumference. Every one of them aroused suspicions; and what put the crowning touch to his mistake was that one of them, Sieurin, nicknamed Pied-d’Alouette, a regular gaolbird, made a confession.”
“How was that?”
“He was bored with solitary confinement. He had been promised a pipe of canteen tobacco if he confessed. He did confess. He told them all they wanted. This Sieurin, who has been sentenced thirty-seven times for vagabondage, is incapable of killing a fly. He has never committed robbery. He is a simpleton, an inoffensive creature. At the time of the crime, the gendarmes saw him on Duroc hill making straw fountains and cork boats for the school children.”
M. le président resumed his game.
“Ninety — forty.... During this time, Lecœur was telling all the girls in the Quartier des Carreaux that he had done the deed, and the keepers of disorderly houses were bringing to the police-inspector Madame Houssieu’s earrings, chain, and rings that the butcher-boy had distributed among their inmates. This Lecœur, like so many other murderers, gave himself up. But Roquincourt, in a rage, left Sieurin, or Pied-d’Alouette in solitary confinement. He is still there. Ninety-nine... and one hundred.”
“Splendid!” said M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin.
“So,” murmured M. Delion, “this woman of eighty-three had still... It is incredible!”
But Dr. Fornerol, agreeing with President Peloux’s opinion, declared that the case was not as unusual as they fancied, and he supplied the physiological explanation, which was listened to with interest. Then he went on to quote different cases of sexual aberrations and wound up in these words:
“If the devil on two sticks, lifting us up in the air, were to raise the roofs of the town before our eyes, we should see appalling sights, and we should be staggered at the discovery among our fellow-citizens of so many maniacs, degenerates, mad men and mad women.”
“Bah!” said M. Worms-Clavelin, the préfet, “one must not look too closely into that. All these people, taken one by one, are perhaps what you say; but together they form a superb mass of constituents and a splendid county-town population for the department.”
Now, on the raised divan which overlooked the billiard-table, Senator Laprat-Teulet sat caressing his long white beard. He had the majesty of a river.
“For my part,” said he, “I can only believe in goodness. Wherever I cast my eyes, I see virtue and honesty. I have been able to prove by numerous instances that the morals of the French women since the Revolution leave nothing to be desired, especially in the middle classes.”
“I am not so optimistic,” replied M. de Terremondre, “but I certainly did not suspect that Queen Marguerite’s house hid such shameful mysteries behind its walls of crumbling woodwork and beneath the cobweb-curtains of its mullioned windows. I went to see Madame Houssieu several times; she seemed a miserly and mistrustful old woman, a little mad, yet like so many others. But, as they used to say in the time of Queen Marguerite;
“She is under the sod.
Her soul be with God!
(“Elle est sous lame.
Dieu ait son âme!”)
She will no longer, by her lewdness, blot the scutcheon of good Philippe Tricouillard.”
At that name a shout of merry laughter burst from their knowing faces. It was the secret joy and inward pride of the town, that emblematic shield, with its witness to the triple virtue and power that put this bourgeois ancestor of theirs on a level with the great condottiere of Bergamo. The people of... loved him, their lusty forebear, the contemporary of the king in the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, their ancient alderman Philippe Tricouillard, about whom, to tell the truth, they knew nothing save the gift of nature to which he owed his illustrious surname.
The turn taken by the conversation led Dr. Fornerol to say that several instances had been cited of a similar anomaly, and that certain writers declare that at times this honourable monstrosity is transmitted hereditarily and becomes persistent in a family. Unluckily the line of the worthy Philippe had been extinct for more than two hundred years.
After this remark, M. de Terremondre, who was president of the Archaeological Society, related a true anecdote.
“Our departmental archivist,” said he, “the learned M. Mazure, has recently discovered in the garrets of the prefecture some documents relating to a charge of adultery, brought, at the very period when Philippe Tricouillard was flourishing, towards the end of the fifteenth century, by Jehan Tabouret against Sidoine Cloche, his wife, for the reason that the aforesaid Sidoine, having had three children at a birth, Sieur Jehan Tabouret only acknowledged two of them as his, and maintained that the third was by another man, for he averred that he was constitutionally incapable of begetting more than two at a time. And he gave a reason for this, founded on an error then common among matrons, barber-surgeons, and apothecaries, who each as eagerly as the others professed to believe that the normal frame of a man was physiologically incapable of begetting more than twins, and that all over the number of pledges which the father can produce should be disowned. For this reason, poor Sidoine was convicted by the judge of having played the harlot, and for this put naked on an ass with her head towards the tail, and thus led through the town to the pond at Les Evés, where she was ducked three times. She would scarcely have suffered thus if her wicked husband had been as generously gifted by Dame Nature as good Philippe Tricouillard.”
XVII
IN front of Rodonneau’s house-door, the préfet glanced to right and left to see that he was not being spied upon. He had heard that it was said in the town that he went to the jeweller’s house for assignations and that Madame Lacarelle had been seen fol
lowing him into this house, called the House of the Two Satyrs. He felt very bad-tempered over this. He had another cause of annoyance. Le Libéral, which had treated him respectfully for a long time, had attacked him vigorously over the departmental budget. He was censured by the Conservative organ for having made a transfer to conceal the expenses of the electoral propaganda. M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin was perfectly honest. Money inspired him with respect as well as love. He felt before “Property” that feeling of religious terror that the moon inspires in dogs. With him wealth had become a cult.
His budget was very honestly put together. And, apart from the irregularities that had now become regular as the result of a faulty administration common to the whole Republic, nothing worthy of blame could be discovered in it.
M. Worms-Clavelin knew this. He felt himself strong in his integrity. But the polemics of the press put him out of patience. His heart was saddened by the animosity of his opponents and the rancour of the parties that he believed he had disarmed. After so many sacrifices he was pained at not having won the esteem of the Conservatives, which he secretly valued far more highly than the friendship of the Republicans. He would have to inspire le Phare with pointed and forceful replies, to conduct a lively, and, perhaps protracted war. This thought was harassing to the deep slothfulness of his mind and alarming to his prudence, which feared every action as a source of peril.
Thus he was in a very bad temper. And it was in a sharp voice that, throwing himself into the old leather arm-chair, he inquired of Rodonneau junior whether M. Guitrel had arrived. M. Guitrel had not yet come. So M. Worms-Clavelin, roughly snatching a paper from the jeweller’s desk, tried to read while smoking his cigar. But neither political ideas nor tobacco-smoke served to dispel the gloomy pictures that crowded into his mind. He read with his eyes, but thought of the attacks of le Libéral: “Transfer! There are not fifty people in the county town who know what a transfer is. And here I can see all the idiots in the department shaking their heads and solemnly repeating the phrase in their newspaper:— ‘We regret to see that M. le préfet has not abandoned the detestable and exploded practice of making transfers.’” He fell into thought. The ash from his cigar lavishly bestrewed his waistcoat. He went on thinking: “Why does le Libéral attack me? I got its candidate returned. My department shows the greatest number of new adherents at election-times.” He turned over the page of the paper. He thought on again:— “I have not covered up a deficit. The sums voted on the presentation of the estimates have not been spent in a different way from what was proposed. These people don’t know how to read a budget. And they are disingenuous.” He shrugged his shoulders; and gloomy, indifferent to the cigar ash which covered his chest and thighs, he plunged into the reading of his paper.
His eyes fell on these lines:
“We learn that a fire having broken out in a faubourg of Tobolsk, sixty wooden houses have fallen a prey to the flames. In consequence of the disaster more than a hundred families are homeless and starving.”
As he read this, M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin emitted a deep shout, something like a triumphal growl, and, aiming a kick at the jeweller’s desk:
“I say, Rondonneau, Tobolsk is a Russian town, isn’t it?”
Rondonneau, raising his innocent, bald head towards the préfet, replied that Tobolsk was, indeed, a town in Asiatic Russia.
“Well,” cried M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin, “we are going to give an entertainment for the benefit of the sufferers by the fire at Tobolsk.”
And he added between his teeth:
“I’ll make... a Russian entertainment for ‘em. I shall have six weeks’ peace, and they won’t talk any more about transfers.”
At that moment Abbé Guitrel, with anxious eyes, his hat under his arm, entered the jeweller’s shop.
“Do you know, monsieur l’abbé,” said the préfet to him, “that, by general request, I am authorising entertainments for the benefit of the sufferers from the fire at Tobolsk — concerts, special performances, bazaars, &c.? I hope that the Church will join in these benevolent entertainments.”
“The Church, Monsieur le préfet,” replied Abbé Guitrel, “has her hands full of comfort for the afflicted who come to her. And doubtless her prayers...”
“ propos, my dear abbé, your affairs are not getting on at all. I come from Paris. I saw the friends whom I have at the Department of Religion. And I bring back bad news. To start with, there are eighteen of you.”
“Eighteen?”
“Eighteen candidates for the bishopric of Tourcoing. In the first rank is Abbé Olivet, curé of one of the richest parishes in Paris, and the president’s candidate. Next there is Abbé Lavardin, vicar-general at Grenoble. Ostensibly, he is supported by the nuncio.”
“I have not the honour of knowing M. Lavardin, but I do not think he can be the candidate of the nunciature. It is possible that the nuncio has his favourite. But assuredly that favourite remains unknown. The nunciature does not solicit on behalf of its protégés. It insists on their appointment.”
“Ah! ah! monsieur l’abbé, they are cute at the nunciature.”
“Monsieur le préfet, the members of it are not all eminent in themselves; but they have on their side unbroken tradition, and their action is guided by secular rules. It is a force, monsieur le préfet, a great force.”
“By Jove, yes! But we were saying that there is the president’s candidate and the nuncio’s candidate. There is also your own Archbishop’s candidate. When they first mentioned him, I thought to myself that it was you.... We were wrong, my poor friend. Monseigneur Chariot’s protégé — I’ll wager you won’t guess who it is.”
“Don’t make a wager, monsieur le préfet, don’t make a wager. I would bet that the candidate of Monseigneur the Cardinal-Archbishop is his vicar-general, M. de Goulet.”
“How do you know that? I did not know it myself.”
“Monsieur le préfet, you are not unaware that Monseigneur Chariot dreads that he may find himself saddled with a coadjutor, and that his old age, otherwise so august and serene, is darkened by this fear. He is afraid lest M. de Goulet should, so to say, attract this nomination to himself, as much by his personal merits as by the knowledge that he has acquired of the affairs of the diocese. And His Eminence is still more desirous, and even impatient, to separate himself from his vicar-general, since M. de Goulet belongs by birth to the nobility of the district, and through that fact shines with a brilliancy which is far too dazzling for Monseigneur Chariot. Since, on the contrary, Monseigneur does not rejoice in being the son of an honest artisan who, like Saint Paul, worked at the trade of weaver!”
“You know, Monsieur Guitrel, that they also talk of M. Lantaigne. He is the protégé of Madame Cartier de Chalmot. And General Cartier de Chalmot, although clerical and reactionary, is much respected in Paris. He is recognised as one of the ablest and most intelligent of our generals. Even his opinions, at this moment, are advantageous rather than harmful to him. With a ministry disposed to reunion, reactionaries get all that they want. They are needed; they give the turn to the scale. And then the Russian alliance and the Czar’s friendship have contributed to restore to the aristocracy and the army of our nation a part of their ancient prestige. We are shunting the Republic on to a certain distinction of mind and manners. Moreover, a general tendency towards authority and stability is declaring itself. I do not, however, believe that M. Lantaigne has great chances. In the first place, I have reported most unfavourably with regard to him. I have represented him in high places as a militant monarchist. I have described his uncompromising ways, his cross-grained temperament. And I have painted a sympathetic portrait of you, my dear Guitrel. I have shown off your moderation, your pliancy, your politic mind, your respect for republican institutions.”
“I am very grateful to you for your kindness, monsieur le préfet. And what did they reply?”
“You want to know that. Well! they replied: ‘We know such candidates as your M. Guitrel. Once nominated, they are wo
rse than the others. They show more zeal against us. That is easily accounted for. They have more to beg pardon for of their own party.’”
“Is it possible, monsieur le préfet, that they talked like this in high places?”
“Ha! yes. And my interlocutor added this: ‘I do not like candidates for the episcopacy who show too much zeal for our institutions. If I could get a hearing, the choice would be made from among the others. In the civil and political ranks they prefer officials who are most devoted, most attached to the government. Nothing can be better. But there are no priests devoted to the Republic. In this case, the wise thing is always to take the most honest men.’”
And the préfet, throwing the chewed end of his cigar into the middle of the floor, finished with these words:
“You see, my poor Guitrel, that your affairs are not making headway.”
M. Guitrel stammered:
“I do not see, Monsieur le prefect, I do not perceive anything, in such speeches, that is calculated to produce in you this impression of... discouragement. On the contrary, I should rather derive from it a sentiment of... confidence....”
M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin lit a cigar and said with a laugh:
“Who knows whether they are not right, at the bureaux?... But reassure yourself, my dear abbé, I do not abandon you. Let’s see, whom have we on our side?”
He opened his left hand, in order to count on his fingers.
They both considered.
They found a senator of the department who was beginning to emerge from the difficulties into which the recent scandals had plunged him, a retired general, politician, publicist and financier, the bishop of Ecbatana, well known in the artistic world, and Théophile Mayer, the friend of the ministers.
“But, my dear Guitrel,” cried the préfet, “you have only the rag-tag and bobtail on your side.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 127