Marthe was still sobbing, and did not seem to hear what Madame Faujas said.
'Ovide has so much to think about,' the old lady continued. 'Do you know that he often works till four o'clock in the morning? When you cough all through the night, it disturbs him very much, and distracts his thoughts. He can't work any longer, and he suffers more than you do. Do this for Ovide's sake, my dear child; go away, and come back to us in good health.'
Then Marthe raised her face, red with weeping, and throwing all her anguish into one cry, she wailed: 'Oh! Heaven lies!'
During the next few days no further pressure was brought to bear upon Madame Mouret to induce her to make the journey to Nice. She grew terribly excited at the least reference to it. She refused to leave Plassans with such a show of determination that the priest himself recognised the danger of insisting upon the scheme. In the midst of his triumph she was beginning to cause him terrible anxiety and embarrassment. Trouche declared, with his snigger, that it was she who ought to have been sent the first to Les Tulettes. Ever since Mouret had been taken off, she had secluded herself in the practice of the most rigid religious practices, and refrained from ever mentioning her husband's name, praying indeed that she might be rendered altogether oblivious of the past. But she still remained restless, and returned from Saint-Saturnin's with even a keener longing for forgetfulness than she had had when she went thither.
'Our landlady is going it finely,' Olympe said to her husband when she came home one evening. 'I went with her to church to-day, and I had to pick her up from the flag-stones. You would laugh if I told you all the things that she vomited out against Ovide. She is quite furious with him; she says that he has no heart, and that he has deceived her in promising her a heap of consolations. And you should hear her rail, too, against the Divinity. Ah! it's only your pious people who talk so badly of religion! Anyone would think, to hear her, that God had cheated her of a large sum of money. Do you know, I really believe that her husband comes and haunts her at night.'
Trouche was much amused by this gossip.
'Well, she has herself to blame for that,' he said. 'If that old joker Mouret was put away, it was her own doing. If I were Faujas, I should know how to arrange matters, and I would make her as gentle and content as a sheep. But Faujas is an ass, and you will see that he will make a mess of the business. Your brother, my dear, hasn't shown himself sufficiently pleasant to us for me to help him out of the bother. I shall have a rare laugh the day our landlady makes him take the plunge.'
'Ovide certainly looks down upon women too much,' declared Olympe.
Then Trouche continued in a lower tone:
'I say, you know, if our landlady were to throw herself down some well with your noodle of a brother, we should be the masters, and the house would be ours. We should be able to feather our nest nicely then. It would be a splendid ending to it all, that!'