The Mother Superior’s Twenty-Five Francs
He really was comic, old Pavilly, with his great spider legs, his little body, his long arms, and his pointed beard, surmounted by a flame of red hair on the top of his skull.
He was a clown, a peasant clown, a born clown, born to play tricks, to raise laughter, to play parts, simple parts, since he was the son of a peasant, and a peasant himself, hardly able to read. Oh, yes, the good God had created him to amuse other people, the poor devils belonging to the countryside, who had no theatres and no feasts; and he amused them with all his might and main. In the café, they stood him drinks to keep him there, and he went on drinking without turning a hair, laughing and joking, playing tricks on everyone without annoying a single soul, while the onlookers rolled with laughter.
He was so comic that, ugly as he was, the girls themselves did not resist him, they were laughing so heartily. He carried them, with quips and jests, behind a wall, into a ditch, into a stable, then he tickled them and squeezed them, keeping up such an amusing patter, that they held their sides as they repulsed him. Then he leaped about, pretending he was going to hang himself, and they writhed, with tears in their eyes; he chose his moment, and tumbled them over so handily that they surrendered all, even those who had defied him, to amuse themselves.
Well, towards the end of June, he undertook to help with the harvest, at Le Hariveau’s, near Rouville. For three whole weeks he delighted the harvesters, men and women, by his pranks, from morning to night. In the daytime, he appeared in the fields, in the middle of the swaths of corn, he made his appearance in an old straw hat that hid his russet topknot, gathering up the yellow corn with his long skinny arms and binding it into sheaves; then stopping to sketch a comic gesture that evoked shouts of laughter down the length of the field from the workers, whose eyes never left him. At night, he glided like a crouching beast through the straw in the barns where the women slept, and his hands prowled about, rousing shouts and creating loud disturbances. They chased him off, using their sabots as weapons, and he fled on all fours, like a fantastic monkey, amid explosions of mirth from the entire room.
On the last day, as the wagon-load of harvesters, adorned with ribbons and bagpipes, shouting and singing and joyously drunk, were going down the wide white road, drawn at the slow pace of six dappled horses, led by a youngster in a smock, with a cockade in his cap, Pavilly, in the middle of sprawling women, was dancing the dance of a drunken satyr, that kept the young rascals of boys open-mouthed on the banksides of the farms, and the peasants lost in wonder at his incredible anatomy.
All at once, as they reached the fence of Le Hariveau’s farm, he made a bound with upflung arms, but as he fell back he unluckily struck against the side of the long cart, went headlong over, fell on to the wheel, and bounced off on to the road.
His comrades flung themselves out. He moved no more, one eye shut, the other open, ghastly with fright, his great limbs stretched out in the dust.
When they touched his right leg, he began to cry out, and when they tried to stand him up, he fell down.
“I’ll be bound he’s broken his leg,” cried a man.
He had indeed a broken leg.
Farmer Le Hariveau had him laid on a table; and a rider hurried to Rouville to find a doctor, who arrived an hour later.
The farmer was a very generous man, and he announced that he would pay for the man to be treated at the hospital.
So the doctor carried Pavilly off in his carriage, and deposited him in a whitewashed dormitory, where his fracture was set.
As soon as he realised that he would not die of it, and that he was going to be cared for, cured, pampered, and nourished, with nothing to do, lying on his back between two sheets, Pavilly was seized with an overwhelming merriment and he began to laugh a silent perpetual laughter that revealed his decaying teeth.
As soon as a sister approached the bed, he grimaced contentedly at her, winking his eye, twisting his mouth, and moving his nose, which was very long and which he could move as he pleased. His neighbours in the dormitory, very ill as they were, could not refrain from laughing, and the sister in charge often came to his bedside to enjoy a quarter of an hour’s amusement. He invented the most comic tricks for her, and quite new jests, and as he had in him the instinct for every sort of barnstorming, he turned devout to please her and spoke of the good God with the grave air of a man that knows that there are moments
