Free The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) by Émile Zola

always closed, in which she must carry everything—coal, bread, wine, food, for you never see a tradesman arrive with them… Anyway they are extremely polite. Rose says they say good day when they meet her. But more often than not she doesn’t even hear them come downstairs.’
    ‘They must prepare some odd meals up there,’ muttered Mouret, who had not gleaned a thing from this information.
    Another evening when Octave said he had seen Abbé Faujas go into Saint-Saturnin, his father asked about his demeanour and how passers-by reacted to him, and what he was going to do in the church.
    ‘Oh, don’t be so inquisitive!’ laughed the young man… ‘He didn’t look very good in the sun with that red soutane… that’s all I know. I even noticed that he was walking along by the houses in the narrow strip of shade, where his soutane looked blacker. He’s not vain you know, he puts his head down and walks quickly… Two girls began to laugh at him when he crossed the square. He raised his head and smiled very kindly at them, didn’t he, Serge?’
    Serge added that several times when they were coming home from school he had been following Abbé Faujas from a distance as he was coming back from Saint-Saturnin. He crossed the road without saying a word to anyone. He didn’t seem to know a soul, and was in some way ashamed of the half-concealed mockery he could feel around him.
    ‘So are they talking about him in town?’ asked Mouret, his interest at its height.
    ‘Nobody talked to me about the priest,’ replied Octave.
    ‘Yes,’ said Serge, ‘they are talking about him. Abbé Bourrette’s nephew told me that they didn’t think much of him in the church. They don’t like those priests who come from distant parts. And besides he looks so unhappy… When they get used to him they’ll leave him alone, poor fellow. But at first they have to make up their minds about him.’
    At that point Marthe suggested that the two boys shouldn’t answer people if anyone asked them about the priest.
    ‘Oh, they can answer,’ cried Mouret. ‘We don’t know anything that would compromise him, that’s certain.’
    From that moment quite innocently and without any malicious intent he made his children into spies and set them to follow the priest. Octave and Serge had to recount everything that people were saying about him in town, and were given orders to follow him whenever they happened to meet him. But that source of information soon ran dry. The muttered rumours occasioned by the arrival of a priest who was strange to the diocese had stopped. The town seemed to have forgiven the ‘poor fellow’ in his worn-out soutane who scurried along its narrow shaded streets; but all they felt for him now was disdain. For his part, the priest walked straight to the cathedral and came back again, always taking the same route. Octave said jokingly that he even counted the paving stones.
    Inside the house Mouret wanted to make use of Désirée, who never went out. He took her to the bottom of the garden in the evening and listened to her prattle about what she had seen and done during the day; he tried to get her talking about the folk on the second floor.
    ‘Listen,’ he said to her one day, ‘tomorrow when the window is open you can throw your ball up into their room and go and ask them for it back.’
    The next day she threw her ball up; but she had only got as far as the steps when the ball, thrown by an invisible hand, came bouncing back on to the terrace. Her father, who had been relying on the kind little girl to repair relations that had been broken on the first day, despaired then of his attempts. He was evidently coming up against the priest’s very decided wish to keep himself barricaded in his own apartment. This struggle only made his curiosity burn more fiercely. He took to gossiping in corners with the cook, much to the disapproval of Marthe who chided him for his undignified behaviour. But he got angry and told lies.