A Life (28 page)

But gradually she became accustomed to going to church and fell under the influence of this frail Abbé and his righteous, domineering ways. Being of a mystical bent, he pleased her with his moments of exaltation and religious ardour. He struck the chord of religiosity which all women carry in their soul. His unbending austerity, his disdain for the things of this world and for the sensual, his disgust at normal human preoccupations, his love of God, his crude, youthful inexperience, his stern language, and his inflexible will all gave Jeanne an idea of what martyrs must have been like; and she allowed herself to be charmedshe who had suffered and was already so disillusionedby the rigid fanaticism of this child, God's minister on earth.

He led her towards Christ the comforter, showing her how the pious joys of religion would assuage her suffering; and she knelt in the confessional, humbling herself, feeling small and weak before this priest who seemed to be no more than fifteen.

But he was soon hated by the whole district.

Unflinchingly severe on himself, he displayed implacable intolerance towards others. One thing in particular moved him to anger and indignation: love. He spoke of it in his sermons with vehemence and, in the usual ecclesiastical manner, always in black-and-white terms, raining down sonorous periods against concupiscence upon this audience of country-folk; and he would shake with fury, stamping his feet, his mind a prey to the images which he was wont to call forth in the course of his ranting.

The strapping lads and the country wenches swapped knowing glances across the aisle; and the old peasants, who like to joke about these matters, voiced their disapproval of the little priest's intolerance on the way back to their farms after the service, as they walked beside their sons in their blue smocks and the farming-women in their black cloaks. And the whole region was in an uproar.

People muttered to each other about how strict he was in the confessional, and about the harsh penances he imposed; and when he obstinately refused to grant absolution to girls whose chastity was no longer quite intact, the whole thing became a source of merriment. At High Mass on feast days people laughed to see some of the youngsters remain behind in their pews instead of going up to take communion with the others.

Soon he started spying, on courting couples in an effort to prevent their trysts, like a gamekeeper pursuing poachers. On moonlit nights he would chase after them along the ditches, behind the barns, and between the mounds of gorse that grew on the low hillsides.

One time he caught a pair who refused to let go of each other; they were holding one another round the waist and went on kissing as they walked along a ravine strewn with rocks.

The Abbé shouted:

'That's enough of that, you filthy country swine.'

And the lad turned round and retorted:

'Mind yer own business, Father, for this ain't none of yours.'

Then the Abbé picked up, some stones and started pelting them, as though they were dogs. The pair ran off laughing; and  next Sunday he denounced them by name in front of the whole congregation.

All the lads in the district stopped going to church.

The priest came to dine at the chateau every Thursday, and often visited at other times during the week to talk with his penitent parishioner. She would enthuse as he did, and talk over matters of the spirit, and deploy the whole, complicated, centuries-old arsenal of religious controversies.

They would walk together in the Baroness's long avenue, talking of Christ and the Apostles, the Virgin and the early Fathers, as if they had known them personally. Sometimes they would stop and consider profound questions that propelled them into mystical surmise, with Jeanne losing herself in fanciful arguments that soared into the heavens like rockets, while he, being of a more precise turn of mind, argued away like some self-confessed crackpot trying to give a mathematical proof of the squaring of the circle.

Julien treated the new priest with great respect, and kept saying: 'I do like this new man, he doesn't fudge the issues.'

And he was forever going to confession and taking communion, setting an example most liberally.

By this time he was visiting the Fourvilles almost every day, out shooting with the husband who now found his company indispensable, and going riding with the Comtesse in all weathers.

'They're completely mad about their horses,' the Comte would observe, 'but it does my wife good.'

The Baron returned towards the middle of November. He was a changed man, older and much more subdued, filled with a dark melancholy that had taken over his mind. And it was immediately apparent that the love which bound him to his daughter had grown stronger, as if the few months of loneliness and gloom had increased his need for affection, for intimacy and loving tenderness.

Jeanne did not tell him of her new outlook on things, about her close bond with the Abbé Tolbiac and her religious fervour; but the first time he saw the priest he took an ardent dislike to him.

And when Jeanne enquired that evening: 'How do you find him?', he replied: 'That man's an inquisitor! I should say he's very dangerous.'

Subsequently, when he heard from the peasants with whom he was friendly about the young priest's strict ways, about his violent behaviour and what amounted to his campaign of persecution against the laws and instincts of nature, dislike turned to hatred in his heart.

For his own part he belonged with those thinkers of old who worshipped nature, and he was readily affected by the sight of two animals mating. The God to whom he prayed was of a more or less pantheist type, and he was fiercely hostile to the Catholic conception of a God characterized by bourgeois motives, jesuitical wrath, and despotic vengeance, a God who diminished the spectacle of Creation as he himself dimly perceived it, that is, of Creation as a fateful, limitless, all-powerful force; Creation as simultaneously life, light, earth, thought, plant, rock, man, air, beast, star, God, insect; which created precisely because it
was
Creation, stronger than any individual will, vaster than any capacity to reason, and productive for no purpose, without cause or temporal limit, in all directions and in all shapes and dimensions, across the infinite reaches of space, as chance and the proximity of world-warming suns dictated.

Creation contained all the seeds of existence, and thought and life developed within it like flowers and fruits upon the trees.

For him, therefore, reproduction was the great, general law, a sacred, divine act to be respected, which accomplishes the obscure and constant will of Universal Being. And so, from farm to farm, he embarked upon a fervent campaign against their intolerant priest, the persecutor of life.

Distressed by this, Jeanne prayed to the Lord, and begged her father to refrain; but he kept saying:

'Such people must be resisted, it is our right and duty to do so. They're inhuman.'

'They're inhuman,' he insisted, shaking his long white hair, 'they're inhuman, they understand nothing, nothing, nothing. They're labouring under a fatal illusion. They hate the physical!'

And he would shout 'They hate the physical!' as though he were uttering a curse. The priest was well aware of his enemy, but as he was keen to remain master of the chateau and its young mistress, he temporized, sure of the final victory.

Then a new obsession came to haunt him. He had discovered by chance what was going on between Julien and Gilberte, and he wanted at all costs to put a stop to it.

One day he came to see Jeanne, and after a long discussion over mystical matters, he asked her to join with him in combating, in extirpating, the evil within her own family, to save two souls in mortal danger.

She did not understand and asked him to explain.

'The hour is not yet come,' he replied. 'I shall return before long.'

And he departed abruptly.

Winter was now nearing its end, a rotting winter, as men of the soil put it, both damp and mild.

The Abbé returned some days later and spoke in oblique terms about one of those unworthy relationships between people who should be above reproach. It behoved those who had knowledge of the facts, he said, to put an end to the business by whatever means. Having first broached the subject of there being higher considerations, he then took Jeanne by the hand and beseeched her to open her eyes, to understand, to help him.

This time she had understood, but she remained silent, horri fied at the thought of all the unpleasant consequences which might ensue in her now peaceful home; and she pretended not to understand what the Abbé meant. So he hesitated no further and spoke plainly:

'It is a painful duty which I have to perform, Madame la Comtesse, but there is no other way. My ministry obliges me not to allow you to remain in ignorance of that which you are in a position to prevent. Know then that your husband is engaged in a criminal friendship with Madame de Fourville.'

She lowered her eyes, in powerless resignation. The priest went on:

'What do you intend to do about it now that you know?'

Then she stammered:

'What do you
want
me to do about it, Father?'

He answered fiercely:

'Come between them and prevent this sinful passion.'

She began to cry and said, in an unhappy voice:

'But he's been unfaithful before, with a maid. And he doesn't listen to me. He has ceased to love me any more, and he mistreats me as soon as I show the slightest intention that doesn't suit him. What can I do?'

The priest did not anwer her but exclaimed:

'So you give in to it! You've resigned yourself to it! You consent in it! Adultery is here beneath your roof, and you tolerate it! The crime is taking place before your very eyes, and you look the other way? And you call yourself a wife? A Christian? A mother?'

She was sobbing:

'What do you want me to do?'

He replied:

'Anything rather than allow this infamous situation to con tinue. Anything, I tell you. Leave him. Leave this home that has been defiled!'

'But I have no money, Father,' she said, 'and indeed I haven't the courage, not in the present situation. And in any case, how can I leave him without there being proof? I do not even have the right to do so.'

The priest rose to his feet, quivering:

'Cowardice is your counsel, Madame, I had thought you were different than this. You are unworthy of God's mercy!'

She fell to her knees:

'Oh, I beg you, do not abandon me, tell me what to do!'

'Open Monsieur de Fourville's eyes to the truth,' he declared sharply. 'It is up to him to break this attachment.'

At this suggestion a horrible thought struck her:

'But he would kill them, Father! And I should be the accuser! Oh, no, not that, never!'

Then he raised his hand as though to curse her, beside himself with anger:

'Continue then in your shame and your crime, for your guilt is  greater than theirs. You are the complaisant wife! There is noth ing more I can do here!'

And he left, in such a fury that his whole body was trembling.

She went after him, distraught, ready to concede, beginning to promise him. But, still shaking with indignation, he walked briskly ahead, all the while furiously brandishing his large blue umbrella, which was almost as big as himself.

He caught sight of Julien standing by the gate overseeing the removal of some branches from the trees, and he turned left to walk through the Couillards' farm, continually repeating:

'Leave me, Madame, I have nothing further to say to you.'

In the middle of the farmyard, directly in his path, a bunch of children from the farm itself and from others nearby were gath ered round the kennel that belonged to Mirza, the bitch, and they were staring intently at something or other, rapt in silent concen tration. Standing in the midst of them, with his hands behind his back, was the Baron, who was also watching with interest. He looked like a schoolmaster. But when he saw the priest coming, he walked off so as to avoid meeting him and having to greet him and exchange words.

Jeanne said beseechingly:

'Give me a few days, Father, and then come back to the house. I shall tell you how far I have got and what I intend to do; and then we can decide.'

At that moment they were just reaching the group of children, and the priest went up to see what they were so interested in. The bitch was whelping a litter. In front of her kennel five pups were already squirming round their mother, who was licking them fondly, lying on her side and evidently in pain. Just as the priest leaned over, the animal tensed her body, stretched, and a sixth little puppy appeared. Then the young scamps, thrilled with joy, began to clap their hands and chant: 'And there's another one! And there's another one!' It was only a game to them, a perfectly natural, innocent game. They were watching the birth as they would have watched apples falling from a tree.

At first the Abbé Tolbiac stood in frozen astonishment; then, seized with uncontrollable fury, he lifted his large umbrella and  began to lay about, the bunch of children, hitting them on the head as hard as he could. Terrified, the little mites ran away as fast as their legs would carry them, so that all at once he found himself standing in front of the whelping bitch, who was making an effort to stand up. But he did not even let her get to her feet; rather, having now completely lost his temper, he began to beat her with his umbrella, holding it first in one hand and then in the other. Being chained up she could not escape, and she groaned wretchedly as she endeavoured to resist the blows. He broke his umbrella. Then, empty-handed, he stood on her, trampling on her in a frenzy, pounding her and crushing her into the ground. He caused her to give birth to one last pup, squeezed out under the pressure; and then, with, a wild stamp of his heel he dis patched the blood-smeared body, which continued to quiver where it lay, surrounded by the other squealing, newborn pups, themselves blind and heavy-limbed and already searching for a teat to suck.

Jeanne had made her escape; but the priest suddenly felt some one grab him by the collar, and a slap across the face sent his hat flying. Furious, the Baron carried him over to the gate and threw him out onto the road.