Jean, however, answered merely with an angry gesture. His town-breeding prevented him from believing such stories. The two women then went on gossipping together for a long time, telling each other of various quaint remedies, such as placing parsley beneath one's bed to cure lumbago, or keeping three acorns in one's pocket in the case of inflammation, or drinking a glass of water which had been exposed to the moon in view of getting rid of wind.
"Well, if you're not going to send for Sourdeau," La Frimat abruptly exclaimed, "at any rate you'd better send for his reverence the priest."
Jean again replied by an angry gesture, and La Grande compressed her lips tightly.
"What good would his reverence do?"
"What good would he do? Why, he would bring the blessed sacrament, and there's some comfort in that, sometimes."
La Grande shrugged her shoulders, as though to express that now-a-days no one believed in such old-fashioned ideas.
"Besides," she added, after a pause, "the priest wouldn't come. He is ill. Madame Bécu told me just now that he is going away in a carriage on Wednesday, as the doctor says that he will certainly die if he remains in Rognes."
As a matter of fact, the Abbé Madeline's health had gradually been getting worse during the two years and a-half that he had been stationed at Rognes. A feeling of home-sickness, a broken-hearted longing for his native mountains of Auvergne had been preying upon him with increasing severity every day he had spent in that flat land of La Beauce, where the sight of the far-spreading boundless plain filled his heart with despondent melancholy. Not a tree nor a rock was to be seen; and instead of rushing cascades of foaming water, there were only stagnant pools. The priest's eyes lost their brightness, and he grew more fleshless than ever, till people said that he was going off in a consumption. Yet he might still have been reconciled to remaining there if he could have derived any consolation from the women of his parish. But it was just the other way. Coming, as he did, from a pious and faithful flock, his timid soul was overwhelmed with grief and consternation at finding himself in so irreligious a parish, where only the merest outward forms of the faith were complied with. The women deafened and dazed him with their screaming and quarrelling, and so abused his yielding nature that they practically took the religious direction of the place into their own hands: while he, a man full of scrupulous sensitiveness, and constantly afraid of involuntarily falling into sin, stood by in silent consternation. But there was a final blow in store for him. On Christmas day, one of the hand-maidens of the Virgin had been seized with the pangs of labour while in church. Since then the priest had been getting worse and worse, and now he was going to be carried back, in a dying condition, to Auvergne.
"So, then, we're without a priest again?" exclaimed La Frimat. "I wonder if the Abbé Godard would come back to us."
"Ah, the surly fellow!" cried La Grande; "he would burst with spite if he had to come!"