A Surprise
My brother and I were brought up by our uncle, the abbé Loisel—the curé Loisel, as we called him. Our parents died when we were small, and he had taken us into his rectory and raised us.
For eighteen years he had had the parish of Join-le-Sault, not far from Yvetot. It was a small village, set in the very middle of the Norman plateau known as the pays de Caux, dotted with farms whose orchards rose up here and there amidst the fields.
The village, apart from the farm cottages scattered over the plain, consisted of a mere six houses fronting on both sides of the main road, with the church at one end and the new town hall at the other.
My brother and I passed our childhood playing in the cemetery. The place was sheltered from the wind, and there my uncle gave us our lessons, the three of us sitting side by side on the one stone tomb, that of my uncle’s predecessor, whose wealthy family had seen to it that he was buried sumptuously.
To train our memories, my uncle made us learn by heart the names of the deceased that were painted on the black wooden crosses; and to train us in observation as well he made us begin our odd recitation now from one end of the graveyard, now from the other, or sometimes from the middle. He would point abruptly to a grave, and say, “The one in the third row, with the cross leaning to the left: whose is that?” When a burial took place, we made haste to learn what was to be painted on the wooden symbol, and we often went to the carpenter’s shop, to see the epitaph before it was placed on the tomb. My uncle would ask, “Do you know the new one?” And we would reply in unison, “Yes, uncle,” and immediately begin to recite: “Here lies Joséphine Rosalie Gertrude Malandain, widow of Theodore Magloire Césaire, deceased at the age of seventy-two years, mourned by her family: a faithful daughter, faithful wife and faithful mother. Her soul is in heaven.”
My uncle was a tall, big-boned priest, square-built in his ideas as in his frame. His soul itself seemed hard and definite, like an answer in a catechism. He often spoke to us of God in thundering voice, always uttering the word as violently as though he were firing a pistol. His God was not God the good and just, but simply God. He seemed to think of Him as a burglar thinks of a policeman, or a prisoner of the judge.
He brought us up harshly, teaching us to tremble rather than to love.
When one of us was fourteen and the other fifteen, he sent us to board, at a special reduced rate, at the seminary in Yvetot. This was a large, dreary building, full of curés, whose pupils were almost without exception destined for the priesthood. I can never think of the place even now without a shudder. It smelled of prayers the way a fish-market smells of fish. Oh! That dreary school, with its eternal religious ceremonies, its freezing Mass every morning, its periods of meditation, its gospel-recitations, and the reading from pious books during meals! Oh! Those dreary days passed within those cloistering walls, where nothing was spoken of but God—the explosive God of my uncle.
We lived there in narrow, contemplative, unnatural piety—and also in a truly meritorious state of filth, for I well remember that the boys were made to wash their feet but three times a year, the night before each vacation. As for baths, they were as unknown as the name of Victor Hugo. Our masters apparently held them in the greatest contempt.
My brother and I graduated the same year, and with a few sous in our pockets we woke up one morning to find ourselves in Paris, working at eighteen hundred francs a year in a government office, thanks to the influence, exercised on our behalf, of the Archbishop of Rouen.
For a while we continued to be very good boys, my brother and I, living together in the little lodging we had rented, like two night-birds torn from their nest and cast out into the dazzling sunlight, blinded and bewildered.
But little by little the Paris air, new comrades, and the theaters took away a little of our numbness. Certain new desires, different from heavenly joys, began to awaken within us, and, on a certain evening—the same evening—after long hesitation and uneasiness and the fears of a soldier before his first battle, we allowed ourselves to—how shall I put it—allowed ourselves to be seduced by two little neighbors, two shopgirls, who worked and lived together.
Soon an exchange took place between our two establishments, a division. My brother took the girls’ flat and kept one of them to live with him. The other came to live with me. Mine was named Louise. She was twenty-two, perhaps. A good girl, fresh, gay and round—especially round in a certain place. She moved in with me like a little wife taking possession of a man and of everything connected with that man. She organized the household, made everything neat, cooked, kept careful account of expenses, and in addition introduced me to many pleasant things with which I was unfamiliar.
My brother was also very happy. The four of us always had dinner together, one day in his rooms, the next day in mine, and there was never a cloud or a care.
For time to time I received a letter from my uncle, who continued to think that I was living with my brother, and who gave me news of the village, of his maid, of recent deaths, of the crops and harvests—all mixed in with bits of advice
