When Marthe came that evening her mother stepped forward to welcome her, and kissed her affectionately with some ostentation before the company. She herself had made her peace with God on the morrow of the Coup d'État. She was of opinion that Abbé Faujas might now venture to return to the green drawing-room; but he excused himself, making a pretext of his work and his love of privacy. Madame Rougon then fancied that he was planning a triumphal return for the following winter. The Abbé's success was certainly on the increase. For the first few months his only penitents had come from the vegetable-market held behind the cathedral, poor hawkers, to whose dialect he had quietly listened without always being able to understand it; but now, especially since all the talk there had been in connection with the Home of the Virgin, he had a crowd of well-to-do citizens' wives and daughters dressed in silk kneeling before his confessional-box. When Marthe quietly mentioned that he would not receive her amongst his penitents, Madame de Condamin was seized with a sudden whim, and deserted her director, the senior curate of Saint-Saturnin's, who was greatly distressed thereby, to transfer the guardianship of her soul to Abbé Faujas. Such a distinction as this gave the latter a firm position in Plassans society.
When Mouret learned that his wife now went to confession, he merely said to her:
'You have been doing something wrong lately, I suppose, since you find it necessary to go and tell all your affairs to a parson?'
In the midst of all this pious excitement he seemed to isolate himself and shut himself up in his own narrow and monotonous life still further. When his wife reproached him for complaining to her mother, he answered:
'Yes, you are right; it was wrong of me. It is foolish to give people any pleasure by telling them of one's troubles. However, I promise you that I won't give your mother this satisfaction a second time. I have been thinking matters over, and the house may topple down on our heads before I'll go whimpering to anyone again.'
From that time he never made any disparaging remarks about the management of the house or scolded his wife in the presence of strangers, but professed himself, as formerly, the happiest of men. This effort of sound sense cost him little, for he saw that it would tend to his comfort, which was the object of his constant thoughts. He even exaggerated his assumption of the part of a contented methodical citizen who took pleasure in living. Marthe only became aware of his impatience by his restless pacing up and down. For whole weeks he refrained from teasing or fault-finding as far as she was concerned, while upon Rose and his children he constantly poured forth his jeers, scolding them too from morning till night for the slightest shortcomings.
Previously he had only been economical, now he became miserly.
'There is no sense in spending money in the way we are doing,' he grumbled to Marthe. 'I'll be bound you are giving it all to those young hussies of yours. But it's quite sufficient for you to waste your time over them. Listen to me, my dear. I will give you a hundred francs a month for housekeeping, and if you will persist in giving money to girls who don't deserve it, you must save it out of your dress allowance.'
He kept firmly to his word, and the very next month he refused to let Marthe buy a pair of boots on the pretext that it would disarrange his accounts, and that he had given her full notice and warning. One evening his wife found him weeping bitterly in their bedroom. All her kindness of heart was aroused, and she clasped him in her arms and besought him to tell her what distressed him. But he roughly tore himself away from her and told her that he was not crying at all, but simply had a bad headache. It was that, said he, which made his eyes red.