The sad fact was that he did come from that very countryside. His assumed Paris manners and the veneer of society restrained him somewhat, but she was soon to see that terrible South appear in him after all, commonplace, brutal, illogical. The first time that she realized it was in regard to religion, about which, as about everything else, Numa was entirely in line with the traditions of his province.
Numa was the Provençal Roman Catholic who never goes to communion, never confesses himself except in cholera times, never goes to church except to bring his wife home after mass, and then stands in the vestibule near the holy-water basin with the superior air of a father who has taken his children to a show of Chinese shadows—yet a man who would let himself be drawn and quartered in defence of a faith he does not feel, which in no way controls his passions or his vices.
When he married he knew that his wife was of the same church as himself and that at the wedding in St. Paul’s the priest had eulogized them in due form as befitted all the candles and carpets and gorgeous flowers that go with a first-class wedding. He had never worried further about it. All the women whom he knew—his mother, his cousins, his aunt, the Duchesse de San Donnino, were devout Catholics; so he was much surprised after several months of marriage to observe that his wife never went to church. He spoke of it:
“Do you never go to confession?”
“No, my dear,” she answered quietly, “nor you either, so far as I can see.”
“Oh, I—that is quite different!”
“Why so?”
She looked at him with such a sincerely puzzled expression—she seemed so far from understanding her own inferiority as a woman, that he made no reply and waited for her to explain.
No, she was not a free-thinker, nor a strong-minded woman. Educated in Paris at a good school, she had had for confessor a priest of Saint-Laurent up to seventeen; when she left school, and even for some time after, she had fulfilled all her religious duties at the side of her mother, who was a bigoted Southerner. Then, one day, something within her seemed suddenly to give way, and she declared to her parents that she felt an insuperable repulsion for the confessional. Her pious mother would have tried to overcome what she looked upon as a whim, but her father had interfered:
“Let her alone; it took hold of me just as it has seized her and at the same age.”