turned his head, has done I don’t know what to him, no, I really don’t know what … and he is going to marry her, the fool, the great blockhead, and he will bring her my property as a dowry, my bit of land in Bec-de-Mortin. … But not if I know it, not if I know it … I have a paper, there it is. … Let him give me back my property, then. We made a lawyer’s deed for safety’s sake, and a private agreement on paper for friendship’s sake. One is as good as the other. Each has his rights, isn’t that true?” (She holds out to the justice of the peace a stamped paper opened out wide.)
Isidore Paturon: “It’s not true.”
The Justice: “Silence! You shall speak in due course.” (He reads.)
“I, the undersigned, Isidore Paturon, promise by these presents my benefactress, Madame Bascule, never to leave her during my life, and to serve her with devotion.
“Gorgeville, .”
The Justice: “There is a cross for signature: you don’t know how to write, then?”
Isidore: “No. Can’t write a bit.”
The Justice: “It was you who made it—this cross?”
Isidore: “No. Not me.”
The Justice: “Who did make it, then?”
Isidore: “She did.”
The Justice: “You are prepared to take your oath that you did not make this cross?”
Isidore (in an outburst): “By my dad’s head, my ma’s, my grandfer’s, my gran’ma’s, and the good God’s, who hears me, I swear it isn’t me.” (He raises his hands and spits aside to emphasize his oath.)
The Justice (smiling): “What then were your relations with Madame Bascule, here present?”
Isidore: “She served me for a whore.” (Laughter in court.)
The Justice: “Restrain your language. You mean that your relations were not so innocent as she claims.”
Paturon, Senior (breaking in): “He wasn’t fifteen, not fifteen, your Honour, when she debouched him …”
The Justice: “You mean ‘debauched’?”
The Father: “How do I know? He wasn’t fifteen years old. And she’d fed him out of her own hand for four years then, stuffed him like a fatted fowl, crammed him with food fit to burst, saving your Honour. And then when the time came that he seemed to her ready, she disrupted him. …”
The Justice: “Corrupted. … And you let it happen?”
The Father: “It was her or some other woman, it was bound to happen! …”
The Justice: “Very well, then, what do you complain of?”
The Father: “Nothing! Oh, I’ve nothing to complain of myself, nothing, only that he doesn’t want any more of it himself, and he is quit of her. I demand protection according to the law.”
Madame Bascule: “These people are heaping lies on me, your Honour. I made a man of him.”
The Justice: “Quite!”
Madame Bascule: “And he is going back on me, deserting me, stealing my property. …”
Isidore: “It isn’t true, your Honour. I wanted to leave her five years ago, because she had fattened beyond all bounds, and that didn’t suit me a bit. That displeased me, and why not? Didn’t I say to her then I was going to leave her? And then she wept like a gutter-spout and promised me her property at Bec-de-Mortin to stay a few more years, only four or five. Of course I said ‘Yes,’ for sure. What would you have done yourself?
“So I stayed five years, every day and every hour of it. I had kept my promise. Give the devil his due! That was full value, that was!”
Isidore’s wife, silent till then, cries out with the piercing scream of a parrot:
“Just look at her, look at her, your Honour, the old haystack, and say if that wasn’t full value!”
The father nodded his head as one convinced, and repeated:
“Gosh, yes, full value that!” (Madame Bascule subsides on the bench behind her, and begins to weep.)
The Justice (in a fatherly tone): “What did you expect, my good woman? I can do nothing. You have given him your bit of land at Bec-de-Mortin by deed in a perfectly legal way. It is his, absolutely his. He has an indisputable right to do what he has done, and to bring it to his wife as dowry. I am not going to embark on questions of … of … delicacy. I can only regard the facts from the point of view of the law. I can do absolutely nothing in the matter.”
Father Paturon (proudly): “It’ll be all right to get back home, then?”
The Justice: “Certainly.” (They go out, followed by the sympathetic looks of the country folk, with the air of people who have won their case. Madame Bascule sobs on her bench.)
The Justice (smiling): “Compose yourself, my good woman. Come now, come now, compose yourself … and … and if I have any advice to give you, it is, look for another … another pupil …”
Madame Bascule (in the midst of her tears): “I shall never find one … never …”
The Justice: “I am sorry I cannot put you in the way of one.” (She throws a look of despair towards the Christ, suffering and writhing on the cross, then she rises and goes out, with mincing steps, hiccuping her discomfiture, hiding her face in her handkerchief.)
The Justice turns towards his clerk, and in a bantering voice: “Calypso could not console herself for the departure of Ulysses.” Then, in solemn tones:
“What! You do not know why President Amandon was transferred?”
“No, not at all.”
“As far as that is concerned, neither did he ever know it. But it is a story of the strangest sort.”
“Tell it to me.”
“I am sure you remember Madame Amandon, that pretty brunette, thin, and so distinguished and pretty that she was called Madame Marguerite in all Perthuis-le-Long?”
“Yes, perfectly.”
“Very well, then. You recall also how much she was respected and considered, and better loved than anyone in the town; she knew how to receive, how to organize a fête or a charity fair, how to find money for the poor, and how to please the young people in a thousand ways.
