I found last year only twenty
rasières of cider apples. There were no more, but in order to make good cider these are the best. I made a barrelful and yesterday I tapped it. As for nectar, that is nectar; you will say so, too. I had Polyte here. We took a drink and then another drink without quenching our thirst, for one could drink it till tomorrow. I drank so much, one drink after another, that I felt a coolness in my stomach. I said to Polyte: ‘If we should take a glass of brandy, now, it would heat us up.’ He consented. But brandy, that put a fire in my body, so hot that it was necessary to return to the cider. So there it was! From coolness to heat and from heat to coolness, I perceived that I was in the nineties. Polyte was far beyond a hundred.”
The door opened. Mélie appeared, and immediately, before she said “Good day” to us, exclaimed: “Pigs! You were far beyond the hundred mark, both of you!”
Matthew was angry, but answered: “Say not so, Mélie, say not so; I have never been beyond a hundred.”
They gave us an exquisite breakfast, before the door under two lime-trees, at the side of the little chapel of Notre Dame du Gros-Ventre, with the beautiful landscape before us. And Matthew related to us, with raillery mingled with credulity, some unlikely stories of miracles.
We had drunk much of the adorable cider, pungent and sweet, cool and powerful, which he preferred to all liquids, and were smoking our pipes, sitting astride our chairs, when two good women presented themselves.
They were old, dried, and bent. After bowing, they asked for Saint Blanc. Matthew winked his eye toward us, and said:
“I will go and get him for you.” And he disappeared into his woodshed.
He remained there five minutes, then returned with face filled with consternation. Raising his arms, he declared:
“I don’t know at all where he is. I cannot find him. I am sure that I had him!” Then, making a horn of his hands, he called: “Mélie!”
From the foot of the garden his wife answered: “What is it?”
“Where is Saint Blanc? I can’t find him in the shed!”
Then Mélie threw back this explanation:
“Wasn’t it him you took to stop the hole in the rabbit hutch last week?”
Matthew started. “Good God. Maybe that’s so.”
Then he said to the two women: “Follow me.”
They followed. We almost suffocated with laughter. In fact, Saint Blanc, stuck in the earth like a common stake, stained with mud and filth, was being used to make one corner of the rabbit hutch.
When they perceived him, the two good women fell on their knees, crossed themselves, and began to murmur their oremus. Matthew hurried to them. “Wait,” said he, “you are kneeling in the dirt; I will bring you some straw.”
And he went to find some straw and made them a prayer cushion. Then, seeing that his saint was muddy, and believing, without doubt, that it would be bad for the trade, he added: “I am going to clean him up a bit.”
He took a pail of water and a brush and began to wash the wooden figure vigorously. Meantime the two old women continued to pray.
When he had finished, he said: “Now it is all right.” And then he brought us back for another drink.
As he raised the glass to his lips, he stopped and said, with an air of embarrassment: “Well, indeed, when I put Saint Blanc in the rabbit hutch, I was sure he would never earn me another penny. For two years there had been no demand for him. But the saints, you see, never die.”
He drank and continued:
“Come, let us have another. Amongst friends you must never go less than fifty, and we’re only at thirty-eight.”
The Pardon
She had been brought up in one of those families who live shut up in themselves, and seem to be remote from everything. They pay no attention to political events, although they chat about them at table, and changes in government seem so far, so very far away that they are spoken of only as a matter of history—like the death of Louis XVI, or the landing of Napoleon.
Customs change, fashions succeed each other, but this is hardly perceptible in the family where old traditions are always followed. And if some impossible story arises in the neighbourhood, the scandal of it dies at the threshold of this house.
The father and mother, alone in the evening, sometimes exchange a few words on such a subject, but in an undertone, as if the walls had ears.
With great discretion, the father says: “Do you know about this terrible affair in the Rivoil family?”
And the mother replies: “Who would have believed it? It is frightful!”
The children have no suspicion of anything, but come to the age of living, in their turn, with a bandage over their eyes and minds, without ever suspecting any other kind of existence, without knowing that one does not always think as one speaks, nor speak as one acts, without knowing that it is necessary to live at war with the world, or at least in armed peace, without surmising that the ingenuous are frequently deceived, the sincere trifled with, and the good wronged.
Some go on until death in this blindness of probity, loyalty, and honour; so upright that nothing can open their eyes. Others, undeceived, without realizing why, are weighed down with despair, and die believing that they are the puppets of exceptional fate, the miserable victims of unlucky circumstance or particularly bad men.
The Savignols married their daughter Berthe when she was eighteen. Her husband was a young man from Paris, Georges Baron, whose business was on the Stock Exchange. He was an attractive youth, with a smooth tongue, and he observed all the outward proprieties necessary. But at the bottom of his heart he sneered a little at his guileless parents-in-law, calling them, among
