I rose at length, bade the two old salts good morning, and with a blessing of good luck, recovered my gun from the kitchen cupboard, where I had reverently left it during mass, and went on my way to shoot. I, too, was anxious to make the most of the northeast wind.
There being no street in the lost village save the main thoroughfare, one finds only alleys flanked by rambling walls. One of these runs up to Tanrade's house; another finds its zigzag way to the back gate of the marquis, who, being a royalist, insists upon telling you so, for the keystone of his gate is emblazoned with a bas-relief of two carved eagles guarding the family crest. Still another leads unexpectedly to the silent garden of Monsieur le Curé. It is a protecting little by-way whose walls tell no tales. How many a suffering heart seeking human sympathy and advice has the strong figure in the soutane sent home with fresh courage by way of this back lane. Indeed it would be a lost village without him. He is barely over forty years old, and yet no curé was ever given a poorer parish, for Pont du Sable has been bankrupt for generations. Since a fortnight—so I am told—Monsieur le Curé has had no bonne. The reason is that no good Suzette can be found to replace the one whom he married to a young farmer from Bonville. The result is the good curé dines many times a week with the marquis, where he is so entertaining and so altogether delightful and welcome a guest that the marquise tells me she feels ten years younger after he has gone.
"Poor man," she confided to me the other day, "what will you have? He has no bonne, and he detests cooking. Yesterday he lunched at the château with Alice de Bréville; to-morrow he will be cheering up two old maiden aunts who live a league from Bar la Rose. Is it not sad?" And she laughed merrily.
"Monsieur le Curé has no bonne!" Parbleu! It has become a household phrase in Pont du Sable. It is so difficult to get a servant here; the girls are all fishing. As for Tanrade's maid-of-all-work, like the noiseless butler of the marquis and the femme de chambre of Alice de Bréville, they are all from Paris; and yet I'll wager that no larder in the village is better stocked than Monsieur le Curé's, for every housewife vies with her neighbour in ready-cooked donations since the young man from Bonville was accepted.
But these good people do not forget. They remember the day when the farm of Père Marin burned; they recall the figure in the black soutane stumbling on through flame and smoke carrying an unconscious little girl in his strong arms to safety. Four times he went back where no man dared go—and each time came out with a life.
Again, but for his indomitable grit, a half-drowned father and daughter, clinging to a capsized fishing-smack in a winter sea, would not be alive—there are even fisherfolk who cannot swim. Monsieur le Curé saw this at a glance, alone he fought his way in the freezing surf out to the girl and the man. He brought them in and they lived.
But there is a short cut to the marsh if you do but know it—one that has served me before. You can easily find it, for you have but to follow your nose along the wall of Madame Vinet's café, creep past the modest rose-garden of the mayor, zigzag for a hundred paces or more among crumbling walls, and before you know it you are out on the marsh.