The month of April was very mild and warm, and in the evenings, after dinner, the young Mourets went to amuse themselves in the garden. Marthe and the priest, too, as they found the dining-room become very close, also went out on to the terrace. They sat a few steps from the open window, just outside the stream of light which the lamp cast upon the tall box hedges. Hid there in the deepening dusk, they discussed all the little details connected with the Home of the Virgin. This constant discussion of charitable matters seemed to give a tone of additional softness to their conversation. In front of them, between Monsieur Rastoil\'s huge pear-trees and the dusky chestnuts of the Sub-Prefecture, there was a large patch of open sky. The young people sported about under the arbours, while every now and then the voices of Mouret and Madame Faujas, who remained alone in the dining-room, deeply absorbed in their game, could be heard raised in passing altercations.

Sometimes Marthe, full of tender emotion, a gentle languor that made her words fall slowly from her lips, would check her speech as she caught sight of the golden train of some shooting star, and smile as she threw back her head a little and looked up at the heavens.

\'There\'s another soul leaving purgatory and entering paradise!\' she murmured, while, as the priest kept silent, she added: \'How pretty they are, those little beliefs! One ought to be able to remain a little girl, your reverence.\'

She no longer now mended the family linen in the evening. She would have had to light a lamp on the terrace to see to do it, and she preferred the gloom of the warm night, which seemed to thrill her with peaceful happiness. Besides, she now went out every day, which fatigued her, and when dinner was over she had not energy enough to take up her needle. Rose had been obliged to undertake the mending, as Mouret was beginning to complain that his socks were all in holes.

To tell the truth Marthe was really very much occupied. Besides the committee meetings over which she presided, she had numerous other things to attend to, visits to make, and[Pg 96] superintendence duties to exercise. She deputed much necessary writing and other little matters to Madame Paloque; but she was so eager to see the Home actually established, that she went off to the Faubourg, where the building stood, three times a week, to make sure that the workmen were not wasting their time. Whenever she thought that satisfactory progress was not being made, she hurried to Saint-Saturnin\'s to find the architect, and grumbled to him and begged him not to leave the men without his supervision, growing quite jealous, indeed, of the work which was being executed in the church, and saying that the chapel repairs were being much too quickly pushed forward. Monsieur Lieutaud smiled at all this, and assured her that everything would be completed within the stipulated time. But Abbé Faujas likewise protested that sufficient progress was not being made, and urged Marthe to give the architect no peace, so she ended by going to Saint-Saturnin\'s every day.

She went thither with her brain full of figures, or absorbed in thinking of walls that had to be pulled down and rebuilt. The chilliness of the church cooled her excitement a little. She dipped her fingers in the holy water and crossed herself, by way of doing as others did. The vergers grew to know her and bow to her, and she herself became quite familiar with the different chapels and the sacristy, whither she sometimes had to go in search of Abbé Faujas, and the wide corridor and low cloisters through which she had to pass. At the end of a month there was not a corner in Saint-Saturnin\'s which she did not know. Sometimes she had to wait for the architect, and then she would sit down in some retired chapel and rest after her hurried walk, recapitulating in her mind the host of things which she wanted to impress upon Monsieur Lieutaud. The deep, palpitating silence which surrounded her, and the dim religious light falling from the stained-glass windows, gradually plunged her into a vague, soft reverie. She began to love the lofty arches and the solemn bareness of the walls, the altars draped in protecting covers, and the chairs all arranged in order. As soon, indeed, as the padded doors swung to behind her, she began to experience a feeling of supreme restfulness, she forgot all the weary cares of the world, and perfect peace permeated her being.

\'Saint-Saturnin\'s is such a pleasant place,\' she said in an unguarded moment one evening before her husband, after a close, sultry day.

[Pg 97]

\'Would you like us to go and sleep there?\' Mouret asked, with a laugh.

Marthe felt hurt. The feeling of purely physical happiness which she experienced in the church began to distress her as being something wrong; and it was with a slight feeling of trouble that she thenceforward entered Saint-Saturnin\'s, trying to force herself to remain indifferent and uninfluenced by her surroundings, just as she would have been in the big rooms at the town hall. But in spite of herself she was deeply, distressfully affected. It was, however, a distress to which she willingly returned.

Abbé Faujas manifested no consciousness of the slow awakening which every day went on within her. He still retained with her the demeanour of a busy, obliging man, putting heaven on one side. He never showed anything of the priest. Sometimes, however, she would disturb him as he was going to read the burial office; and he would then speak to her for a moment between a couple of pillars in his surplice which exhaled a vague odour of incense and wax tapers. It was frequently a mere bricklayer\'s bill or some carpenter\'s claim that they spoke about, and the priest would just tell her the exact figures and then hurry away to attend to the funeral; she remaining there, lingering in the empty nave, while one of the vergers was extinguishing the candles. As Faujas, when he crossed the church with her, bowed before the high altar, she had acquired the habit of doing likewise, at first out of a feeling of mere propriety. But afterwards the action had become mechanical, and she now bowed when she was quite alone. Hitherto this act of reverence had been her only sign of devotion. Two or three times she had come to the church on days of high ceremonial of which she had not previously been aware: but when she saw the church was full of worshippers and heard the pealing of the organ, she hurried off, thrilled with sudden fear and not daring to cross the threshold.

\'Well!\' Mouret would frequently ask her with his sniggering laugh, \'when do you mean to take your first communion?\'

He was perpetually teasing her, but she never replied, simply fixing upon him the gaze of her eyes, in which a passing brightness glistened when he went too far. By degrees he became more bitter, he was tired of mocking at her; and at the end of a month he quite lost his temper.

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\'What sense is there in going and mixing yourself up with a lot of priests?\' he would growl at times when his dinner was not ready when he wanted it. \'You are always away from home now, there\'s no keeping you in the house for an hour at a time! I shouldn\'t mind it myself, if everything weren\'t going to pieces here. I never get any of my things mended, the table is not even laid by seven o\'clock, there\'s no making anything out of Rose, and the whole place is left to rack and ruin.\'

He picked up a house-cloth that was lying about, locked up a bottle of wine that had been left out, and began to wipe the dust off the furniture with his fingers, working himself up to a higher pitch of anger as he cried: \'There\'ll soon be nothing left for me to do but to take up a broom and put an apron on! You would see me do it without disturbing yourself, I know! I might do all the work of the house without your being any the wiser for it indeed! Do you know that I spent a couple of hours this morning in putting this cupboard in order? No, no, things can\'t go on any longer in this way!\'

At other times there was a disturbance about the children. Once when Mouret came home he found Désirée \'wallowing like a young pig\' in the garden, lying on her stomach before an ant-hole, and trying to find out what the ants might be doing in the ground.

\'We may be very thankful, I\'m sure, that you don\'t sleep away from the house as well!\' he cried as soon as he caught sight of his wife. \'Come and look at your daughter! I wouldn\'t let her change her dress because I wished that you might see what a pretty sight she is.\'

The girl cried bitterly while her father kept turning her round.

\'Look at her now! Isn\'t she a nice spectacle? This is the way children go on when they are left to themselves! It isn\'t her fault, poor little innocent! At one time you couldn\'t leave her alone for five minutes: she would be getting into the fire, you said! Well, I expect she will be getting into the fire now, and everything will be burnt up, and then there\'ll be an end of it all!\'

When Rose had taken Désirée away, he continued: \'You live now simply for other people\'s children. You don\'t give a moment to your own! What a goose you must be to go knocking yourself up for a parcel of hussies who only[Pg 99] laugh at you! Go and walk about the ramparts any evening and you will see something of the conduct of those impudent creatures whom you talk of putting under the protection of the Virgin!\'

He stopped to take breath and then went on again:

\'At all events see that Désirée is properly taken care of before you go picking up girls from the gutter! There are holes as big as my fist in her dress. One of these days we shall be finding her in the garden with a leg or an arm broken. I don\'t say anything about Octave or Serge, though I should much prefer your being at home when they come back from college. They are up to all kinds of diabolical tricks. Only yesterday they split a couple of flag-stones on the terrace by letting off crackers. I tell you that if you don\'t keep yourself at home we shall find the whole house blown to bits one of these days!\'

Marthe said a few words in self-defence. She had been obliged to go out, she urged. There was no doubt that Mouret, who possessed an ample fund of common sense, in spite of his proclivities for teasing and jeering, was right. The house was getting into a most unsatisfactory state. That once quiet spot indeed, where the sun had set so peacefully, was becoming uproarious, left to look after itself, suffering from the children\'s noisiness, the father\'s bursts of temper, and the mother\'s careless, indifferent lassitude. In the evening, at table, they dined badly and quarrelled amongst themselves. Rose did just what she liked, and she, by the way, was of opinion that her mistress was quite in the right.

Matters came to such a pass at last that Mouret, happening to meet his mother-in-law, complained to her bitterly of Marthe\'s conduct, although he was quite aware of the pleasure he afforded the old lady by revealing to her the troubles of his home.

\'You astonish me extremely!\' Félicité replied with a smile. \'Marthe always seemed to me to be afraid of you, and I considered her even too yielding and obedient. A woman ought not to tremble before her husband.\'

\'Ah, yes, indeed!\' cried Mouret, with a hopeless look, \'once upon a time she would have sunk into the ground to avoid a quarrel; a mere glance was sufficient to make her do everything I desired. But that\'s all quite altered now. I may remonstrate and shout as much as I like, she still goes her own way. She doesn\'t reply, she hasn\'t as yet got to[Pg 100] flying out at me, but that will come as well, I dare say, by-and-by.\'

Félicité then answered with some hypocrisy:

\'I will speak to Marthe if you like. But it might, perhaps, hurt her if I did. Matters of this kind are better kept between husband and wife. I don\'t feel very uneasy about them; I\'ve no doubt that you\'ll soon get back again all the quiet peacefulness which you used to be so proud of.\'

Mouret shook his head with downcast eyes.

\'No! no!\' he said; \'I know myself too well. I can make a noise, but it does no good. In reality I am as weak as a child. People are quite wrong in supposing that I gained my own way with my wife by force. She has generally done what I wanted her to do, because she was quite indifferent about everything, and would as soon do one thing as another. Mild as she looks, she is very obstinate, I can tell you. Well, I must try to make the best of it.\'

Then, raising his eyes, he added:

\'It would have been better if I had said nothing about all this to you; but you won\'t mention it to anyone, will you?\'

When Marthe went to see her mother the next day, the latter received her with some show of coldness, and exclaimed:

\'It is wrong of you, my dear, to show yourself so neglectful of your husband. I saw him yesterday and he is quite angry about it. I am well aware that he often behaves in a very ridiculous manner, but that does not justify you in neglecting your home.\'

Marthe fixed her eyes upon her mother.

\'Ah! he has been complaining about me!\' she said curtly. \'The least he could do would be to keep silent, for I never complain about him.\'

Then she began to talk of other matters, but Madame Rougon brought her back to the subject of her husband by inquiring after Abbé Faujas.

\'Perhaps Mouret isn\'t very fond of the Abbé, and finds fault with you in consequence. Is that the case, do you think?\'

Marthe showed great surprise.

\'What an idea!\' she exclaimed. \'What makes you think that my husband does not like Abbé Faujas? He has certainly never said anything to me which would lead me to imagine such a thing. He hasn\'t said anything to you, has[Pg 101] he? Oh no! you are quite mistaken. He would go up to their rooms to fetch them if the mother didn\'t come down to have her game of cards with him.\'

Mouret, indeed, never complained in any way about Abbé Faujas. He joked with him a little bluntly sometimes, and occasionally brought his name into the teasing banter with which he tormented his wife, but that was all.

One morning, as he was shaving, he said to Marthe:

\'I\'ll tell you what, my dear; if ever you go to confession, take the Abbé for your director, and then your sins will, at any rate, be kept amongst ourselves.\'

Abbé Faujas heard confessions on Tuesdays and Fridays, on which days Marthe used to avoid going to Saint-Saturnin\'s. She alleged that she did not want to disturb him; but she was really under the influence of that timid une............