In the Wood
The Mayor was sitting down to breakfast when he was told that his village constable was waiting for him at the Town Hall with two prisoners. He went there immediately and found indeed old Hochedur, the village constable, standing guard with an air of great severity over a couple of stout villagers. The man, a fat paterfamilias, red-nosed and white-haired, seemed overwhelmed, while the woman, a nice little soul dressed in her Sunday clothes, very plump, her cheeks flushed, was looking defiantly at the instrument of authority who had captured them.
The Mayor asked: “What is all this, Hochedur?”
The constable made his statement.
He had set out that morning at his usual time to go on his beat from Champioux Woods to the boundaries of Argenteuil. He hadn’t found anything to remark on in the countryside except that it was beautiful weather and the corn was doing well, when young Bredel, who was pruning his vine, had called out:
“Hullo, Hochedur, go and look at the edge of the wood, in the first copse, and you’ll find there a couple of doves who have at least a hundred and thirty years between them.”
He set off in the direction indicated, had crept into the undergrowth and had heard words and sighs which had led him to suspect an outrage on public morals.
Then, crawling on hands and knees, as if he were trying to surprise a poacher, he had caught the couple here present at the moment when they were abandoning themselves to a natural instinct.
The Mayor stared at the prisoners in stupefaction. The man must have been at least sixty, and the woman not less than fifty-five.
He began to question them, first the man, who replied in so faint a voice that it was hardly audible.
“Your name?”
“Nicholas Beaurain.”
“What is your profession?”
“I am a draper in the Rue des Martyrs, Paris.”
“What were you doing in the wood?”
The draper made no answer, his glance fixed on his large stomach, his hands pressed against his thighs.
The Mayor asked again:
“Do you deny the accusation?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you admit it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What have you to say in your defence?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Where did you meet your accomplice?”
“She is my wife, sir.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then—then, you don’t live together in Paris?”
“Pardon, sir, we do live together.”
“But—in that case, you must be mad, absolutely mad, my good man, to come and get yourself caught in the open country, at ten o’clock in the morning.”
The draper seemed ready to weep with shame. He muttered:
“It was she who wanted it. I told her it was a silly thing to do. But when a woman gets an idea into her head—you know, sir—she has no room for anything else.”
The Mayor, whose sense of humour was not puritanical, smiled and replied:
“In your case, then, the contrary ought to have happened. You wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t had room for something else!”
Then rage seized M. Beaurain, and turning towards his wife, he said: “Look what you’ve brought us to now, with your romantic notions! Think of it. We shall have to go into court at our age for immorality. We shall have to shut up shop and sell out and move into another district! Think of it!”
Mme. Beaurain got up, without looking at her husband, and explained the situation without any trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness, and almost without hesitation.
“My goodness, Mr. Mayor, I know quite well that we look foolish. Will you let me plead this cause like a lawyer—or, better still, like a poor woman?—and I hope you will be willing to send us home and spare us the shame of a summons.
“A long time ago, when I was young, I made the acquaintance of M. Beaurain in this district, on a Sunday. He was employed in a draper’s shop. I was a shop girl in a ready-made clothes shop. I remember all that as though it were yesterday. I used to spend my Sundays here, now and again, with a girl friend, Rose Levêque, with whom I lived in the Rue Pigalle. Rose had a sweetheart—I hadn’t. He it was who brought us out here. One Saturday he told me, laughing, that the next day
