do it for my sake.’ He appeared quite exasperated and kept saying to me: ‘I have had enough of that pig Morin’s affair, do you hear?’
“Of course I was obliged to go also, and it was one of the hardest moments of my life. I could have gone on settling that business as long as I lived, and when we were in the railway carriage, after shaking hands with her in silence, I said to Rivet: ‘You are a mere brute!’ And he replied: ‘My dear fellow, you were beginning to get on my nerves confoundedly.’
“On getting to the Fanal office, I saw a crowd waiting for us, and as soon as they saw us, they all exclaimed: ‘Well, have you settled the affair of that pig, Morin?’ All La Rochelle was excited about it, and Rivet, who had got over his ill humour on the journey, had great difficulty in keeping himself from laughing as he said: ‘Yes, we have managed it, thanks to Labarbe.’ And we went to Morin’s.
“He was sitting in an armchair, with mustard plasters on his legs, and cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery. He was coughing incessantly with the short cough of a dying man, without anyone knowing how he had caught this cold, and his wife seemed like a tigress ready to eat him. As soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees shake, so I said to him immediately: ‘It is all settled, you dirty scamp, but don’t do such a thing again.’
“He got up, choking, took my hands and kissed them as if they had belonged to a prince, cried, nearly fainted, embraced Rivet, and even kissed Madame Morin, who gave him a push that sent him staggering back into his armchair. But he never got over the blow: his mind had been too upset. In all the country round, moreover, he was called nothing but ‘that pig, Morin,’ and the epithet went through him like a sword-thrust every time he heard it. When a street-boy called after him: ‘Pig!’ he turned his head instinctively. His friends also overwhelmed him with horrible jokes, and used to chaff him, whenever they were eating ham, by saying: ‘Is this a bit of you?’ He died two years later.
“As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in 1875, I called on the new notary at Tousserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome, richly-dressed woman received me. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ she said.
“I stammered out: ‘No … No … Madame.’
“ ‘Henriette Bonnel?’
“ ‘Ah!’ And I felt myself turning pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease, and looked at me with a smile.
“As soon as she had left me alone with her husband, he took both of my hands, and squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: ‘I have been intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has very often talked to me about you. I know under what painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact, and devotion you showed yourself in the affair—’ He hesitated, and then said in a lower tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse: ‘In the affair of that pig, Morin.’ ”
Madame Baptiste
When I went into the waiting-room at the station at Loubain, the first thing I did was to look at the clock, and I found that I had two hours and ten minutes to wait for the Paris express.
I felt suddenly tired, as if I had walked twenty miles. Then I looked about me, as if I could find some means of killing the time on the station walls. At last I went out again, and halted outside the gates of the station, racking my brains to find something to do. The street, which was a kind of boulevard planted with stunted laburnum-trees, between two rows of houses of unequal shape and different styles of architecture, houses such as one sees in only small towns, ascended a slight hill, and at the extreme end of it there were some trees, as if it ended in a park.
From time to time a cat crossed the street, and jumped over the gutters, carefully. A cur sniffed impatiently at every tree, and hunted for fragments from the kitchens, but I did not see a single human being. I felt listless and disheartened. What could I do with myself? I was already thinking of the inevitable and interminable visit to the small café at the railway station, where I should have to sit over a glass of undrinkable beer, and an unreadable local newspaper, when I saw a funeral procession coming out of a side street into the one in which I was, and the sight of the hearse was a relief to me. It would, at any rate, give me something to do for ten minutes.
Suddenly, however, my attention was redoubled. The corpse was followed by only eight gentlemen, one of whom was weeping, while the others were chatting together. But there was no priest, and I thought to myself: “This is a non-religious funeral,” but then I reflected that a town like Loubain must contain at least a hundred freethinkers, who would have made a point of making a manifestation. What could it be, then? The rapid pace of the procession clearly proved that the body was to be buried without ceremony, and, consequently, without the intervention of religion.
My idle curiosity played with the most complicated suppositions, and, as the hearse passed, a strange idea struck me, namely, to follow it with the eight gentlemen. That would take up my time for an hour, at least, and I, accordingly, walked with the others, with a sad look on my face, and on seeing this, the two last turned
