La Teuse had laid out the breakfast beneath two big mulberry trees, whose spreading branches formed a sheltering roof at the bottom of the little garden. The sun, which had at last succeeded in dissipating the stormy-looking vapours of early morning, was warming the beds of vegetables, while the mulberry-trees cast a broad shadow over the rickety table, on which were laid two cups of milk and some thick slices of bread.
‘You see how nice it looks,’ said Desirée, delighted at breakfasting in the fresh air.
She was already cutting some of the bread into strips, which she ate with eager appetite. And as she saw La Teuse still standing in front of them, she said, ‘Why don’t you eat something?’
‘I shall, presently,’ the old servant answered. ‘My soup is warming.’
Then, after a moment’s silence, looking with admiration at the girl’s big bites, she said to the priest: ‘It is quite a pleasure to see her. Doesn’t she make you feel hungry, Monsieur le Curé? You should force yourself.’
Abbé Mouret smiled as he glanced at his sister. ‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured; ‘she gets on famously, she grows fatter every day.’
‘That’s because I eat,’ said Desirée. ‘If you would eat you would get fat, too. Are you ill again? You look very melancholy. I don’t want to have it all over again, you know. I was so very lonely when they took you away to cure you.’
‘She is right,’ said La Teuse. ‘You don’t behave reasonably, Monsieur le Curé. You can’t expect to be strong, living, as you do, on two or three crumbs a day, as though you were a bird. You don’t make blood; and that’s why you are so pale. Don’t you feel ashamed of keeping as thin as a lath when we are so fat; we who are only women? People will begin to think that we gobble up everything and leave you nothing but the empty plates.’
Then both La Teuse and Desirée, brimful of health and strength, scolded him affectionately. His eyes seemed very large and bright, but empty, expressionless. He was still gently smiling.
‘I am not ill,’ he said; ‘I have nearly finished my milk.’ He had swallowed two mouthfuls of it, but had not touched the bread.