Two months passed away in this manner. Abbé Faujas and his mother had become quite a part of the Mourets' family life. They all had their recognised places every evening at the table, just as the lamp had its place; and the same intervals of silence were broken night after night by the same remarks from the card-players and the same subdued converse of the priest and Marthe. When Madame Faujas had not given him too tremendous a beating Mouret found his lodgers 'extremely nice people.'
All that curiosity of his, born of idleness, waned before the interest and occupation that the nightly parties afforded him, and he no longer played the spy upon the Abbé, whom he declared to be a very good fellow, now that he knew him better.
'Oh, don't bother me with your stories!' he used to exclaim to those who attacked Abbé Faujas. 'You get hold of a pack of nonsense and put absurd interpretations upon facts that admit of the simplest explanation. I know all about him. He very kindly comes and spends his evenings with us; but he's not a man to make himself cheap, and I can quite understand that people don't like him for it and accuse him of pride.'
Mouret greatly enjoyed being the only person in Plassans who could boast of knowing Abbé Faujas, and he even somewhat abused this advantage. Every time he met Madame Rougon he put on an air of triumph and made her understand that he had stolen her guest from her, while the old lady contented herself with smiling quietly. With his intimate acquaintances Mouret extended his confidences further, and remarked that those blessed priests could do nothing like other people. Then he gave them a string of little details, and told them in what manner the Abbé drank, how he talked to women, and how he always kept his knees apart without ever crossing his legs, and other trifling matters which the vague alarm that his free-thinking mind experienced in the presence of his guest's long, mystic-looking cassock made him notice.
The evenings passed away one after another, and at last the first days of February came round. In all the conversations between himself and Marthe Abbé Faujas had to all appearance carefully avoided the subject of religion. She had once remarked to him, almost lightly:
'No, Monsieur l'Abbé, I am not a very religious woman, and I seldom go to church. At Marseilles I was always too busy, and now I am too indolent to go out. And then I must confess to you that I wasn't brought up with religious ideas. My mother used to tell me that God would come to us quite as well at home.'
The priest bowed his head without making any reply, and seemed to signify that he would rather not discuss religious matters under such circumstances. One evening, however, he drew a picture of the unexpected comfort which suffering souls find in religion. They were talking of a poor woman whom troubles of every sort had driven to suicide.
'She did wrong to despair,' said the priest in his deep voice. 'She was ignorant of the comfort and consolation to be found in prayer. I have often seen heart-broken, weeping women come to us, and they have gone away again filled with a resignation that they had vainly sought elsewhere, and glad to live; and this had come from their falling upon their knees and tasting the blessedness of humiliating themselves before God in some quiet corner of the church. They came back there, they forgot their troubles, and became God's entirely.'
Marthe listened with a thoughtful expression to these remarks of the priest, whose last words fell in a gradually softening voice that seemed to breathe of superhuman felicity.