But Faujas's severity increased, he tried to check her by roughness. He was amazed at this passionate awakening of Marthe's soul, this ardour for love and death. He frequently questioned her on the subject of her childhood; he even went to see Madame Rougon, and remained for a long time in great perplexity and dissatisfaction.
'Our landlady has been complaining of you,' his mother said to him. 'Why won't you allow her to go to church whenever she likes? It is very unkind of you to vex her; she is very kindly to us.'
'She is killing herself,' replied the priest.
Madame Faujas shrugged her shoulders after her usual fashion.
'That is her own business. We all have our ways of finding pleasure. It is better to die of praying than to give one's self indigestion like that hussy Olympe. Don't be so severe with Madame Mouret. You will end by making it impossible for us to live here.'
One day when she was advising him in this way, he exclaimed in a gloomy voice:
'Mother, this woman will be the obstacle!'
'She!' cried the old peasant woman, 'why, she worships you, Ovide! You may do anything you like with her, if you will only treat her a little more kindly. She would carry you to the cathedral if it rained, to prevent you wetting your feet, if you would only let her!'
Abbé Faujas himself at last came to understand the necessity of no longer treating Marthe so harshly. He began to fear an outburst. So he gradually allowed her greater liberty, permitted her to seclude herself, to tell her beads at length, to offer prayers at each of the Stations of the Cross, and even to come twice a week to his confessional at Saint-Saturnin's. Marthe, no longer hearing the terrible voice which had seemed to impute her piety to her as a vice, believed that God was pouring His grace upon her. Now at last, she thought, she was entering into all the joys of Paradise. She was overcome by trances of sweet emotion, inexhaustible floods of tears, which she shed without being conscious of their flow, and nervous ecstasies from which she emerged weak and faint as though all her life-blood had left her veins. At these times, Rose would take her and lay her upon her bed, where she would lie for hours with pinched lips and half-closed eyes like a dead woman.
One afternoon the cook, alarmed by her stillness, was really afraid that she might be dead. She did not think of knocking at the door of the room in which Mouret had shut himself, but she went straight to the second floor and besought Abbé Faujas to come down to her mistress. When he reached Marthe's room, Rose hastened to fetch some ether, leaving the priest alone with the swooning woman. He merely took her hands within his own. At last Marthe began to move about and talk incoherently. When she at last recognised him at her bedside her blood surged to her face.