“Well, Césaire, what is it you want?”
“I want to talk to you, Father.”
The man stood there, daunted, his cap in one hand and his whip in the other.
“Talk, then.”
Césaire looked at the servant, an old woman dragging one foot after the other as she laid a place for her master on a corner of the table before the window.
“It’s—it’s, as you might say, a confession,” he stammered.
At that, Father Raffin looked closely at his peasant; he noticed his confused face, uneasy bearing and wandering eye, and ordered:
“Marie, go to your room for five minutes while I talk to Césaire.”
The servant flung an angry look at the man, and went off muttering.
“Now,” the priest added, “let’s hear all about it.”
The lad still hesitated, staring at his sabots, twisting his cap; he made up his mind abruptly:
“It’s like this. I want to marry Céleste Lévesque.”
“Well, my lad, what’s to prevent you?”
“It’s dad won’t have it.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, my dad.”
“What did your father say to you?”
“He said she’s had a babby.”
“She’s not the first since our mother Eve to have that happen to her.”
“A babby by Victor, Victor Lecoq, the servant at Anthime Loisel.”
“Ah, ah … so he won’t have it?”
“He won’t have it.”
“Not at any price?”
“No more’n an ass that won’t budge, saving your honour.”
“What did you say to him, to persuade him?”
“I said to him she was a good girl, and decent, and a good manager.”
“And that didn’t persuade him. So you want me to speak to him?”
“That’s just it. You talk to him.”
“And how shall I talk to your father?”
“Well … as if you were preaching to make us give our pennies.”
To the peasant mind the sole end of religion was to unloosen purses and empty men’s pockets to fill the coffers of heaven. It was a sort of vast trading house where the priests were the salesmen, as cunning, shifty and sharp as anyone, carrying on business for the good God at the expense of the country folk.
He knew quite well that the priests were of service, of great service to the poorest, the sick and the dying, helping, consoling, advising, sustaining, but all as a matter of money, in exchange for white coins, lovely shining silver paid out for sacraments and masses, advice and protection, pardon for sins and indulgences, purgatory and paradise depending on the income and the generosity of the sinner.
Father Raffin, who knew his man and was by no means disturbed, began to laugh:
“Very well, I’ll go and tell my little tale to your father, but as for you, my lad, you’ll have to come to church.”
Houlbrèque stretched out his hand and swore he would:
“If you fix this for me, I promise I will, on a poor man’s word.”
“That’s a good lad. When do you want me to come and see your father?”
“The sooner the better, tonight if you can.”
“In half an hour, then, after supper.”
“In half an hour.”
“That’s settled, then. Goodbye, my lad.”
“Goodbye, Father; thank you.”
“None at all, my lad.”
And Césaire Houlbrèque returned home, his heart eased of a great load.
He leased a small, a very small farm, for his father and he were not well off. They kept one servant, a fifteen-year-old girl who made their soup, looked after the poultry, milked the cows and churned the butter, and they lived sparsely, although Césaire was a good husbandman. But they did not own enough land or enough stock to do more than make both ends meet.
The old man had given up working. Melancholy, as the deaf are, riddled with aches and pains, bent, twisted, he wandered through the fields, leaning on his stick, regarding man and beast with a harsh scornful stare. Sometimes he sat down on the edge of a ditch and remained there for hours, motionless, his thoughts drifting among the things that had been his whole life, the price of eggs and corn, the sun and the rain that spoiled or brought on the crops. And, racked with rheumatism, his old limbs still sucked up the dampness of the soil, as for seventy years they had sucked up the moisture exhaled from the walls of his low thatched cottage, roofed, too, with damp straw.
He returned home at dusk, took his place at the end of the table, in the kitchen, and when he had in front of him the earthenware bowl that held his soup, he grasped it in bent fingers that seemed to have taken on the curved shape of the bowl, and winter and summer he warmed his hands on it before beginning to eat, so as to lose nothing, not one particle of warmth that came from the fire which cost so much money, nor a drop of the soup that took fat and salt to make, nor a morsel of the bread that was made from the corn.
Then he climbed up a ladder to the attic where he had his mattress, while his son slept downstairs, in the depths of a sort of niche near the chimney-place, and the servant shut herself in a kind of cell, a black hole which had once been used for storing potatoes.
Césaire and his father rarely spoke to each other. Only from time to time, when it was a question of selling a crop or buying a calf, the young man consulted the old one, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands and shouting his reasons into his father’s ear; and father Amable approved or disapproved in a slow hollow voice issuing from the pit of his stomach.
Césaire approached him after this fashion one evening as if it were a question of acquiring a horse or a young cow and conveyed to him, shouting in his ear at the top of his voice, his intention of marrying Céleste Lévesque.
At that, the old man was angry. Why? On moral grounds? Probably not. A girl’s virtue is lightly enough esteemed in the country. But his avarice, his deep-rooted savage instinct to thrift, revolted at the idea of his son bringing up
