“Mistress,” said my dear teacher, “is as a fact to be compared to the strong women of the scripture. She is a godly wife.”
“Thank God!” said my mother, “I have never been a traitor to the faithfulness I owe unto Léonard Ménétrier, my husband, and I reckon well, now that the most difficult part is passed, not to fail him till my last hour is come. I wish he would keep his faith to me as I keep mine to him.”
“Madam, when first I looked on you I could see you to be an honest woman,” replied the priest, “because I have experienced near you a quietude more connected with heaven than with this world.”
My mother, who was simple-minded, but not stupid, understood very well what he wanted to say, and replied that if he had known her twenty years ago, he would have found her to be quite another than she had become in this cookshop, where her good looks had vanished with the fire of the spit and the fumes of the dishes. And as she was touched she mentioned that the baker at Auneau had found her to be so much to his liking that he had offered her cakes every time she passed his shop. “Besides,” she added angrily, “there is neither girl nor woman ugly enough to be incapable of doing wrong if she had a fancy to do it.”
“This good woman is right,” said my father. “I remember when I was a prentice at the cookshop of the Royal Goose near the Gate of St Denis, my master, who was then the banner-bearer of the guild, as I myself am to-day, said to me: ‘I’ll never be a cuckold, my wife is too ugly.’ This saying gave me the idea to attempt what he thought to be impossible. I succeeded at my first attempt, one morning when he went to La Vallée. He spoke the truth, his wife was very ugly, but high spirited and grateful.”
At this anecdote my mother broke out and said that such things ought not to be told by a father to his wife and son, if he wanted to have their respect.
M. Jérôme Coignard, seeing her become red with anger, changed the conversation with kindly meant ability. He addressed himself abruptly to Friar Ange, who, hands in his sleeves, sat humbly at the corner of the fireside:
“Little friar, what kind of relics did you carry on the second vicar’s donkey’s back in company with Sister Catherine? Was it your small clothes you gave the devotees to kiss, in the manner of some grey friars, of whom Henry Estienne has narrated the adventures?”
“Ah! your reverence,” meekly said Friar Ange with the expression of a martyr suffering for truth, “it was not my small clothes, it was a foot of St Eustache.”
“I should have taken my oath on it, if it would not be a sin to do so,” exclaimed the priest, brandishing the drumstick of a fowl. “Those Capuchins turn out saints utterly ignored by good authors, who work on ecclesiastical history. Neither Tillemont nor Fleury speak of that St Eustache to whom a church is consecrated, very wrongly, at Paris, when so many saints recognised by writers well deserving to be believed, are still waiting for a similar honour. The ‘Life of St Eustache’ is a tissue of ridiculous fables; the same is the case of that of St Catherine, who has never existed except in the imagination of some wicked Byzantine monk. But I do not want to attack her too hardly, as he is the patroness of men of letters, and serves as a signboard to the bookshop of that good M. Blaizot, which is the most delectable abode in this world.”