Free A Life by Guy de Maupassant Page A

reminisced about her childhood. The young girl could see herself in these stories of former days, and was startled by the similarity of their thoughts, by the kinship of their desires; for every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth.
    Their slow progress matched the slow pace of the narrative, which was sometimes interrupted for a few moments by bouts of breathlessness; and then Jeanne's thoughts would race ahead of the stories newly begun, towards a future filled with joyful events, and she would revel in her happy expectations.
    One afternoon, as they were resting on the far bench, she suddenly caught sight of a fat priest coming towards them from the other end of the avenue.
    He greeted them from a distance, assumed a smiling expression, and then greeted them again when he was three paces away, enquiring loudly:
    'Well now, your ladyship,' and how are we today?'
    It was the local priest.
    Having been born in the days of the Enlightenment thinkers * and then brought up during the Revolutionary period by a father who was a non-believer, Mama seldom went to church, although some manner of female religious instinct made her fond of clerics.
    She had quite forgotten about the Abbé Picot, her priest, and blushed on seeing him. She apologized, for not having spared him the obligation of paying a call on them. But the fellow did not seem to have taken umbrage; he looked at Jeanne and complimented her on her healthy appearance, then sat down, placed his priest's three-cornered hat on his knees, and mopped his brow. He was extremely fat and extremely red in the face, and he was sweating profusely. He kept removing from his pocket an enormous check handkerchief which was drenched in perspiration, and wiping it across his face and neck; but hardly had this damp  piece of cloth been returned to the black depths of his clerical habit than new beads of sweat formed on his skin and dripped onto the bulge of his cassock-clad stomach, fixing the errant particles of road dust into little round stains.
    He was a cheerful sort, the typical country priest, tolerant, garrulous, and altogether a good fellow. He told them stories, talked about the local people, and seemed not to have noticed that his two female parishioners had not yet been to church, the Baroness having been as remiss in this respect as she was uncertain in her faith, and Jeanne having been only too happy to be released from the convent where she had tasted her fill of religious ceremonies.
    The Baron appeared. His pantheistic beliefs made him indifferent to all dogma. He was amiably civil towards the Abbé, whom he knew slightly, and invited him to stay for dinner.
    The priest knew how to make himself welcome thanks to that intuitive skill which the cure of souls gives to even the most ordinary of men who are called by the chance of events to exercise power over their fellows.
    The Baroness made a fuss of him, perhaps drawn to him by the kind of affinity which brings people of a similar nature together, since the ruddy face and breathlessness of this portly man appealed to her in her wheezing obesity.
    By the time they had reached dessert, his good spirits were quite those of the feasting curate, that relaxed familiarity which comes with the end of a convivial meal.
    And all at once, as though struck by a sudden, happy thought, he exclaimed:
    'But wait, I have a new parishioner I must introduce to you, Monsieur le Vicomte de Lamare!'
    The Baroness, who had the entire armorial of the province at her fingertips, enquired:
    'Is he one of the Lamares de l'Eure?'
    The priest bowed:
    'Yes, Madame, he is the son of the Vicomte Jean de Lamare, who died last year.'
    Then Madame Adélaïde, who treasured the nobility above all  else, asked a whole series of questions and learnt that the young man, having paid his father's