'Ah! where is the fowl?' he cried, just as she was getting into the carriage.
He went back for it, and placed it upon her knees.
'It is for Mouret, you understand,' he said, with a malicious expression; 'for Mouret, and for no one else. When I come to see you, I shall ask him how he liked it.'
He winked as he glanced at Olympe. Then, just as the coachman was going to whip his horse forward, he laid hold of the carriage again, and said:
'Go and see your father and talk to him about the cornfield. See, it's that field just in front of us. Rougon is making a mistake. We are too old friends to quarrel about the matter; besides, as he very well knows, it would be worse for him if we did. Let him understand that he is making a mistake.'
The carriage set off, and as Olympe turned round she saw Macquart grinning under his mulberry trees with Alexandre, and uncorking that second bottle of which he had spoken. Marthe gave the coachman strict orders that he was never to take her to Les Tulettes again. She was beginning to feel a little tired of these drives into the country, and she took them less frequently, and at last gave them up altogether, when she found that she could never prevail upon Abbé Faujas to accompany her.
Marthe was now undergoing a complete change; she was becoming quite another woman. She had grown much more refined, through the life of nervous excitement which she had been leading. The stolid heaviness and dull lifelessness which she had acquired from having spent fifteen years behind a counter at Marseilles seemed to melt away in the bright flame of her new-born piety. She dressed better than she had been used to do, and joined in the conversation when she now went to the Rougons' on Thursdays.
'Madame Mouret is becoming quite a young girl again,' exclaimed Madame de Condamin in amazement.
'Yes, indeed,' replied Doctor Porquier, nodding his head; 'she is going through life backwards.'
Marthe, who had now grown much slimmer, with rosy cheeks and magnificent black flashing eyes, burst for some months into singular beauty. Her face beamed with animation, extraordinary vitality seemed to flood her being and thrill her with warmth. Her forgotten and joyless youth appeared to blaze in her now, at forty years of age. At the same time she was overwhelmed by a perpetual craving for prayer and devotion, and no longer obeyed Abbé Faujas's injunctions. She wore out her knees upon the flag-stones at Saint-Saturnin's, lived in the midst of canticles and offerings of praise and worship, and took comfort in the presence of the gleaming monstrances and the brightly lit chapels, and priests and altars that glittered with starry sheen through the dark gloom of the cathedral nave. She had a sort of physical craving for those glories, a craving which tortured and racked her. She was compelled by her very suffering—she would have died if she had not yielded—to seek sustenance for her passion, to come and prostrate herself in confession, to bow in lowly awe amidst the thrilling peals of the organ, and to faint with melting joy in the ecstasy of communion. Then all consciousness of trouble left her, she was no longer tortured, she bowed herself to the ground in a painless trance, etherealised, as it were, becoming a pure, unsullied flame of self-consuming love.