Besides, Marc prevailed on Geneviève to undertake the management of the adjoining girls' school—that is after requesting Salvan to intervene with Le Barazer with a view to her appointment to the post. It will be remembered that immediately after her convent days she had obtained the necessary certificates, and that if she had not taken charge of the girls' school when her husband was first appointed to Jonville, it had been because Mademoiselle Mazeline had then held the post. But the advancement now given to Jauffre and his wife had left both posts vacant, and it seemed best that the two schools should be confided to Marc and Geneviève, the husband taking the boys and the wife the girls—this indeed being an arrangement which the authorities always preferred.
Marc, for his part, perceived all sorts of advantages in it: the teaching would proceed on the same lines in both schools; he would have a devoted collaborator who would help instead of trying to thwart him in his advance towards the future. And, again, though Geneviève had given him no cause for anxiety since her return, she would find occupation for her mind; she would be compelled to recover and exert her reason in acting as a teacher, a guardian of the little maids who would be the wives and mothers of to-morrow. Besides, would not their union be perfected? would they not be blended for ever, if, with all faith and all affection, they should share the same blessed work of teaching the poor and lowly, from whom the felicity of the future would spring? When a notification of the appointment arrived, fresh joy came to them; it was as if they now had but one heart and one brain.
But in what a ruinous and uneasy state did Marc now find that village of Jonville which he had loved so well! He remembered his first struggles with the terrible Abbé Cognasse, and how he had triumphed by securing the support of Mayor Martineau, that well-to-do, illiterate but sensible peasant, who retained all a peasant's racial antipathy for the priests—those lazy fellows, who lived well and did nothing. Between them, Marc and Martineau had begun to secularise the parish; the schoolmaster no longer sang in the choir, no longer rang the bell for Mass, no longer conducted his pupils to the Catechism classes; while the Mayor and the parish council escaped from routine and favoured the evolution which gave the school precedence over the Church. Thanks to the action Marc brought to bear on his boys and their parents, and the influence he exercised at the parish offices, where he held the post of secretary, he had seen great prosperity set in around him. But as soon as he had been transferred to Maillebois, Martineau, falling into the hands of Jauffre, the man of the Congregations, had speedily weakened. Indeed, he was incapable of action when he did not feel himself supported by a resolute will. Racial prudence deterred him from expressing an opinion of his own; he sided with the priest or with the schoolmaster according as one or the other proved to be the stronger. Thus, while Jauffre, thinking merely of his own advancement, chanted the litanies, rang the bell, and attended the Communion, Abbé Cognasse gradually became master of the parish, setting the Mayor and the council beneath his heel, to the secret delight of the beautiful Madame Martineau, who, though not piously inclined, was very fond of displaying new gowns at High Mass on days of festival. Never had there been a plainer demonstration of the axiom, 'According to the worth of the schoolmaster, such is the worth of the school; and according to the worth of the school, such is the worth of the parish.' In very few years, indeed, the prosperity which had declared itself in Jonville, the ground which had been gained, thanks to Marc, was lost. The village retrograded, its life died away in increasing torpor after Jauffre had delivered Martineau and his fellow-parishioners into the hands of the triumphant Cognasse.
In this way sixteen years elapsed, bringing disaster. All moral and intellectual decline leads inevitably to material misery. There is no country where the Roman Church has reigned as absolute sovereign that is not now a dead country. Ignorance, error, and base credulity render men powerless. And what can be the use of exercising one's will, acting and progressing, if one be a mere toy in the hands of a Deity who plays with one according to his fancy? That Deity suffices, supplies the place of everything. At the end of such a religion of terrestrial and human nothingness, there is but stupidity, inertia, surrender into the hands of Providence, mere routine in the avocations of life, idleness, and want. Jauffre let his boys gorge themselves with Bible history and Catechism, while in their peasant families all ideas of any improved system of cultivating the land were regarded with increasing suspicion. They knew nothing of those matters, they would not learn. Fields remained unproductive, crops were lost for want of intelligent care. Then effort seemed excessive and useless, and the countryside became impoverished, deserted, though above it there still shone the all-powerful and fructifying sun—that ignored, insulted god of life.
The decline of Jonville had become yet more marked after Abbé Cognasse had prevailed on the weak Martineau to allow the parish to be dedicated to the Sacred Heart in a pompous and well-remembered ceremony. The peasants were still waiting for that Sacred Heart to bring them the wondrous promised harvests by dispelling the hailstorms and granting rain and fine weather in due season. By way of result one only found more imbecility weighing on the parish, a sleepy waiting for divine intervention, the slow agony of fanatical believers, in whom all power of initiative has been destroyed, and who, if their Deity did not nourish them, would let themselves starve rather than raise an arm.
During the first days that followed his return, Marc, on taking a few country walks with Geneviève, felt quite distressed by all the incompetency and neglect he beheld. The fields were ill-kept, the roads scarcely passable. One morning they went as far as Le Moreux, where they found Mignot installing himself in his wretched school, and feeling as grieved as they were that the district should have fallen into such a deplorable state.
'You have no idea, my friends,' said he, 'of the ravages of that terrible Cognasse. He exercises some little restraint at Jonville; but here, in this lonely village, whose inhabitants are too miserly to pay for a priest of their own, he terrorises and sabres everybody. Of late years, he and his creature Chagnat, while reigning here, virtually suppressed the Mayor, Saleur, who felt flattered at being re-elected every time, but who turned all the worries of his office over to his secretary, Chagnat, and by way of exhibiting his person, let himself be taken to Mass, though at heart he scarcely cared for the priests.... Ah! how well I now understand the torments of poor Férou, his exasperation, and the fit of lunacy which led to his martyrdom.'
With a quivering gesture Marc indicated that he was haunted by the thought of that unhappy man, struck down by a revolver-shot yonder, under the burning sun. 'When I came in just now, he seemed to rise before me. Famished, having only his scanty pay to provide for himself, his wife, and his children, he endured untold agony at feeling that he was the only intelligent, the only educated, man among all those ignorant dolts living at their ease, who disdained him for his poverty and feared him for his attainments, which humiliated them.... That explains, too, the power acquired by Chagnat over the Mayor, the latter's one desire being to live in peace on his income, in the somnolent state of a man whose appetite is satisfied.'
'But the whole parish is like that,' Mignot replied. 'There are no poor, and each peasant remains content with what he harvests, not in a spirit of wisdom, but from a kind of egotism, ignorance, and laziness. If they are perpetually quarrelling with the priest, it is because they accuse him of slighting them, of not giving them the Masses and other ceremonies to which they consider themselves entitled. Thanks to Chagnat, in his time something like an understanding was arrived at, and, indeed, all that was said and done here in honour of St. Antony of Padua can hardly be pictured.... But the result of Chagnat's régime is deplorable; I found the school as dirty as a cowshed; one might have thought that the Chagnats had lodged all the cattle of the district in it, and I had to engage a woman to help me to scour and scrape everything.'