Abbé Faujas had gently let his head turn so that he might peep at what was going on in the drawing-room. There he observed Madame Rougon standing in all her majesty in the centre of a group of guests. She seemed to have increased in stature, and every back around bent before her glance, which was like that of some victorious queen.
'Ah! here's your father!' said the person with the unctuous voice; 'the good doctor is just arriving. I'm quite surprised that he has never told you of all these matters. He knows far more about them than I do.'
'Oh! my father is always afraid lest I should compromise him,' replied the other gaily. 'You know how he rails at me and swears that I shall make him lose all his patients. Ah! excuse me, please; I see the young Maffres over there, I must go and shake hands with them.'
There was a sound of chairs being moved, and Abbé Faujas saw a tall young man, whose face already bore signs of physical weariness, cross the small room. The other person, the one who had given such a lively account of the Rougons, also rose from his seat. A lady who happened to pass near him allowed him to pay her some pretty compliments; and she smiled at him and called him 'dear Monsieur de Condamin.' Thereupon the priest recognised him as the fine man of sixty whom Mouret had pointed out to him in the garden of the Sub-Prefecture. Monsieur de Condamin came and sat down on the other side of the fireplace. He was startled to see Abbé Faujas, who had been quite concealed by the back of his chair, but he appeared in no way disconcerted. He smiled and, with amicable self-possession, exclaimed:
'I think, Monsieur l'Abbé, that we have just been unintentionally confessing ourselves. It's a great sin, isn't it, to backbite one's neighbour? Fortunately you were there to give us absolution.'
The Abbé, in spite of the control which he usually had over his features, could not restrain a slight blush. He perfectly understood that Monsieur de Condamin was reproaching him for having kept so quiet in order to listen to what was being said. Monsieur de Condamin, however, was not a man to preserve a grudge against anyone for their curiosity, but quite the contrary. He was delighted at the complicity which the matter seemed to have established between himself and the Abbé. It put him at liberty to talk freely and to while away the evening in relating scandalous stories about the persons present. There was nothing that he enjoyed so much, and this Abbé, who had only recently arrived at Plassans, seemed likely to prove a good listener, the more especially as he had an ugly face, the face of a man who would listen to anything, and wore such a shabby cassock that it would be preposterous to think that any confidence to which he might be treated would lead to unpleasantness.
By the end of a quarter of an hour Monsieur de Condamin became quite at his ease, and gave Abbé Faujas a detailed account of Plassans with all the suave politeness of a man of the world.
'You are a stranger amongst us, Monsieur l'Abbé,' said he, 'and I shall be delighted if I can be of any assistance to you. Plassans is a little hole of a place, but one gets reconciled to it in time. I myself come from the neighbourhood of Dijon, and when I was appointed conservator of woods and rivers in this district, I found the place detestable, and thought I should be bored to death here. That was just before the Empire. After '51, the provinces were by no means cheerful places to live in, I assure you. In this department the folks were alarmed if they heard a dog bark, and they were ready to sink into the ground at the sight of a gendarme. But they calmed down by degrees, and resumed their old, monotonous, uneventful existences, and in the end I grew quite resigned to my life here. I live chiefly in the open air, I take long rides on horseback, and I have made a few pleasant friendships.'
He lowered his voice, and continued confidentially: