Abbe Mouret's Transgression: Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The morning was becoming terribly hot. In that huge rocky amphitheatre
the sun kindled a furnace-like glare from the moment when the first fine
weather began. By the planet's height in the sky Abbe Mouret now
perceived that he had only just time to return home if he wished to get
there by eleven o'clock and escape a scolding from La Teuse. Having
finished reading his breviary and made his application to Bambousse, he
swiftly retraced his steps, gazing as he went at his church, now a grey
spot in the distance, and at the black rigid silhouette which the big
cypress-tree, the Solitaire, set against the blue sky. Amidst the
drowsiness fostered by the heat, he thought of how richly that evening
he might decorate the Lady chapel for the devotions of the month of
Mary. Before him the road offered a carpet of dust, soft to the tread
and of dazzling whiteness.

At the Croix-Verte, as the Abbe was about to cross the highway leading
from Plassans to La Palud, a gig coming down the hill compelled him to
step behind a heap of stones. Then, as he crossed the open space, a
voice called to him: 'Hallo, Serge, my boy!'

The gig had pulled up and from it a man leant over. The priest
recognised him--he was an uncle of his, Doctor Pascal Rougon, or
Monsieur Pascal, as the poor folk of Plassans, whom he attended for
nothing, briefly styled him. Although barely over fifty, he was already
snowy white, with a big beard and abundant hair, amidst which his
handsome regular features took an expression of shrewdness and
benevolence.*

* See M. Zola's novels, _Dr. Pascal_ and _The Fortune of the
Rougons_.--ED.

'So you potter about in the dust at this hour of the day?' he said
gaily, as he stooped to grasp the Abbe's hands. 'You're not afraid of
sunstroke?'

'No more than you are, uncle,' answered the priest, laughing.

'Oh, I have the hood of my trap to shield me. Besides, sick folks won't
wait. People die at all times, my boy.' And he went on to relate that he
was now on his way to old Jeanbernat, the steward of the Paradou, who
had had an apoplectic stroke the night before. A neighbour, a peasant on
his way to Plassans market, had summoned him.

'He must be dead by this time,' the doctor continued. 'However, we must
make sure. . . . Those old demons are jolly tough, you know.'

He was already raising his whip, when Abbe Mouret stopped him.

'Stay! what o'clock do you make it, uncle?'

'A quarter to eleven.'

The Abbe hesitated; he already seemed to hear La Teuse's terrible voice
bawling in his ears that his luncheon was getting cold. But he plucked
up courage and added swiftly: 'I'll go with you, uncle. The unhappy man
may wish to reconcile himself to God in his last hour.'

Doctor Pascal could not restrain a laugh.

'What, Jeanbernat!' he said; 'ah, well! if ever you convert him! Never
mind, come all the same. The sight of you is enough to cure him.'

The priest got in. The doctor, apparently regretting his jest, displayed
an affectionate warmth of manner, whilst from time to time clucking his
tongue by way of encouraging his horse. And out of the corner of his eye
he inquisitively observed his nephew with the keenness of a scientist
bent on taking notes. In short kindly sentences he inquired about his
life, his habits, and the peaceful happiness he enjoyed at Les Artaud.
And at each satisfactory reply he murmured, as if to himself in a tone
of reassurance: 'Come, so much the better; that's just as it should be!'

He displayed peculiar anxiety about the young priest's state of health.
And Serge, greatly surprised, assured him that he was in splendid trim,
and had neither fits of giddiness or of nausea, nor headaches
whatsoever.

'Capital, capital,' reiterated his uncle Pascal. 'In spring, you see,
the blood is active. But you are sound enough. By-the-bye, I saw your
brother Octave at Marseilles last month. He is off to Paris, where he
will get a fine berth in a high-class business. The young beggar, a nice
life he leads.'

'What life?' innocently inquired the priest.

To avoid replying the doctor chirruped to his horse, and then went on:
'Briefly, everybody is well--your aunt Felicite, your uncle Rougon, and
the others. Still, that does not hinder our needing your prayers. You
are the saint of the family, my lad; I rely upon you to save the whole
lot.'

He laughed, but in such a friendly, good-humoured way that Serge himself
began to indulge in jocularity.

'You see,' continued Pascal, 'there are some among the lot whom it won't
be easy to lead to Paradise. Some nice confessions you'd hear if all
came in turn. For my part, I can do without their confessions; I watch
them from a distance; I have got their records at home among my
botanical specimens and medical notes. Some day I shall be able to draw
up a wondrously interesting diagram. We shall see; we shall see!'

He was forgetting himself, carried away by his enthusiasm for science. A
glance at his nephew's cassock pulled him up short.

'As for you, you're a parson,' he muttered; 'you did well; a parson's a
very happy man. The calling absorbs you, eh? And so you've taken to the
good path. Well! you would never have been satisfied otherwise. Your
relatives, starting like you, have done a deal of evil, and still they
are unsatisfied. It's all logically perfect, my lad. A priest completes
the family. Besides, it was inevitable. Our blood was bound to run to
that. So much the better for you; you have had the most luck.'
Correcting himself, however, with a strange smile, he added: 'No, it's
your sister Desiree who has had the best luck of all.'

He whistled, whipped up his horse, and changed the conversation. The
gig, after climbing a somewhat steep slope, was threading its way
through desolate ravines; at last it reached a tableland, where the
hollow road skirted an interminable and lofty wall. Les Artaud had
disappeared; they found themselves in the heart of a desert.

'We are getting near, are we not?' asked the priest.

'This is the Paradou,' replied the doctor, pointing to the wall.
'Haven't you been this way before, then? We are not three miles from Les
Artaud. A splendid property it must have been, this Paradou. The park
wall this side alone is quite a mile and a half long. But for over a
hundred years it's all been running wild.'

'There are some fine trees,' observed the Abbe, as he looked up in
astonishment at the luxuriant mass of foliage which jutted over.

'Yes, that part is very fertile. In fact, the park is a regular forest
amidst the bare rocks which surround it. The Mascle, too, rises there; I
have heard four or five springs mentioned, I fancy.'

In short sentences, interspersed with irrelevant digressions, he then
related the story of the Paradou, according to the current legend of the
countryside. In the time of Louis XV., a great lord had erected a
magnificent palace there, with vast gardens, fountains, trickling
streams, and statues--a miniature Versailles hidden away among the
stones, under the full blaze of the southern sun. But he had there spent
but one season with a lady of bewitching beauty, who doubtless died
there, as none had ever seen her leave. Next year the mansion was
destroyed by fire, the park doors were nailed up, the very loopholes of
the walls were filled with mould; and thus, since that remote time, not
a glance had penetrated that vast enclosure which covered the whole of
one of the plateaux of the Garrigue hills.

'There can be no lack of nettles there,' laughingly said Abbe Mouret.
'Don't you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?'

A pause followed, and he asked:

'And whom does the Paradou belong to now?'

'Why, nobody knows,' the doctor answered. 'The owner did come here once,
some twenty years ago. But he was so scared by the sight of this adders'
nest that he has never turned up since. The real master is the
caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters
in a lodge where the stones still hang together. There it is, see--that
grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.'

The gig passed by a lordly iron gate, ruddy with rust, and lined inside
with a layer of boards. The wide dry thoats were black with brambles. A
hundred yards further on was the lodge inhabited by Jeanbernat. It stood
within the park, which it overlooked. But the old keeper had apparently
blocked up that side of his dwelling, and had cleared a little garden by
the road. And there he lived, facing southwards, with his back turned
upon the Paradou, as if unaware of the immensity of verdure that
stretched away behind him.

The young priest jumped down, looking inquisitively around him and
questioning the doctor, who was hurriedly fastening the horse to a ring
fixed in the wall.

'And the old man lives all alone in this out-of-the-way hole?' he asked.

'Yes, quite alone,' replied his uncle, adding, however, the next
minute: 'Well, he has with him a niece whom he had to take in, a queer
girl, a regular savage. But we must make haste. The whole place looks
death-like.'

Back to chapter list of: Abbe Mouret's Transgression