There the wind rolled its ample currents over plateaux and hills, carrying a strong taste reminiscent of the sea. Sometimes, at the top of a shut-in road that climbed under the shady trees, an unexpected perspective disclosed enormous expanses, forests, cross-roads, the breadth of the river, a big village, oxen in a field, vine on a hill-side, in short, the whole unexpected complexity of the provincial countryside, far from Paris and its suburbs.
The master and Mme. Chambannes would leave about nine and not return until time for lunch. Some days, in order to prevent idle gossip, they took the abbé Touronde with them. M. Raindal and the priest occupied one seat and Zozé, who was driving, the other.
One Thursday, the three of them went as far as Mantes, where the master wished to purchase a pair of brown shoes; their arrival caused a sensation. The strange carriage, the piquant attractiveness of Mme. Chambannes, M. Rainda white hair and the black robe of the abbé impressed the curious with their cumulative effect. In front of the bootmake shop, urchins surrounded the carriage. Neighboring shopkeepers came out on their steps and passed jocular comments. This affair and the popular emotion it caused were summed up in a short anonymous paragraph in the Petit Impartial de Seine-et-Oise. Although names were not given no one could mistake the meaning of the allusions, from the heading, Suzanne, to the bitterness of the writer towards “certain ecclesiastics, friends of the orphans” who were paying for the abbé Tourond holidays.
As a result of this unlucky experience Mme. Chambannes henceforth avoided the towns.
These drives, moreover, were less of a pleasure than a mere pastime between the hours when she read Geral letters—when any came—and those when she wrote to him.
Every day, after lunch, she shut herself up, to write him long pages, cleverly composed so as to stimulate his inert tenderness and his somnolent jealousy. In the meantime, M. Raindal, who had gone up, seemingly to work, enjoyed a nap on the floor above or imitated his hostess by writing a few words to his family. It would have made a piquant comparison to put their two letters side by side. Zozé purposely blackened her own character, multiplied the questionable details, the recital of episodes where her coquetry won her admiration, the masculine homage, the fervent glances of M. Raindal, of the abbé, of a passer-by, of all the men. The master, on the contrary, exhausted all examples in order to whitewash her of everything suspicious, to establish her child-like candor, her virtue and undoubted purity.
They did not meet again until nearly four lock. Then, according to the temperature, they remained in the garden or made visits in the neighborhood, either to the abbé Touronde, whose little orphans M. Raindal inspected twice, the Herschsteins, or the Silberschmidts.
Never did the time lag for the master, unless it were when Zozé left him alone with her Aunt Panhias, having herself to call somewhere in the village, give orders, or change her dress. His only compensation was that he could talk about his little pupil. He confided to Mme. Panhias his own observations concerning the changing moods of Zozé. Some mornings she seemed a prey to utter weariness, without any notable event justifying these fits of sadness. To what could he attribute them? Mme. Panhias, who had secretly noted the coincidence of such crises with the non-arrival of letters bearing the Deauville post-mark, replied evasively:
“It is her natourre to be like this! How can it be helped?”
“It may be so!” M. Raindal approved. “Quite so!... A dreamy nature!... A nature essentially melancholy!”