The young horse-chestnut trees budded and blossomed, the great cornfields lay round Charville like an emerald sea, everywhere there was the pleasant stir of spring, the smell of fresh-turned earth, the women hoeing and weeding in the fields, above them the larks singing jubilantly. The time of M. Moreau’s death came and passed away. There was no news of Fabien. Madame Roulleau began to feel as if all prospered.
Every one talked about the early season, the warmth of the spring, but the doctors, it was noticed, made no answer to these congratulations. Monseigneur at the Evêché, the Préfet, and a few of the leading men were aware of the cause of this silence. Certain of the number had it dinned persistently into their ears by M. Deshoulières whenever he had the chance, or could make it. What healthiness Charville possessed it owed to its situation, to the broad plains around, and the winds that rushed up and carried away the foul, bad exhalations. The town itself was shamefully mismanaged. The narrow streets, the old tumble-down, crowded, picturesque houses went on from year to year untouched, and the population increased and were crammed into the same space as their forefathers occupied with a quarter of their number. The old walls no longer existed, it is true, except in name, and the people had broken through, crossed the river, and spread out a straggling suburb. But all the houses in that part were miserably squalid, and lay low with water standing about them, so that they were, to say the least, no less unhealthy than the habitations in Charville proper.
There was always illness. But this year there was something about the illness which caused considerable anxiety to the doctors. Something, in the way in which a fever clung and lingered, and sprang up, and held its ground, even when it was winter, with snow and frost on the ground, and it was not, as Nannon said with indignation, fever weather. It was this impossibility of beating it out which made M. Deshoulières speak of it with gravity. People laughed at him for it. “Fever? But, monsieur, there is always fever at Charville. It is almost an institution.”
“Monsieur le Préfet, it is an institution with which we could well dispense.”
“Eh bien, we shall see. It seems to me you are disturbing yourself unnecessarily. Next winter, perhaps, there may be a possibility of accomplishing some of these improvements that you so much desire. My dear monsieur, you do not know how many important matters call for my devotion to them at this moment.”
M. Deshoulières had some idea. There was an old underground cave at Charville, where the Préfet proposed establishing his mushroom-beds. It was a scheme with which the wants of the town could not possibly be expected to interfere. He went home terribly disheartened.
The Bishop did his best for him, but, as he had said, he was an old man, and in his comfortable room, in the Evêché, he could not, perhaps, estimate the extent of the danger. After all, too, this danger depended in great measure upon certain conditions. There had been a warm, damp spring. If the summer were unusually hot the chances were very much in favour of the fever. Otherwise it might tide over again, carry off one here, one there, and not at all interfere with the Préfet’s mushroom-beds. M. Deshoulières was looked upon as an uncomfortable prophet. Why should he talk of evils before they arrived? He would not consent to hold his peace as they desired, but he was thrown very much upon his own resources. A little beyond the suburbs I have described, a hospital had been built, the Hospital St. Jean. M. Deshoulières busied himself with improving its working capabilities. He had a certain authority there of which he made good use. And it seemed to him as if there was little else he could do. The men in whose hands power rested met him with the never-failing “nous verrons,” which did not abate his indignation, and the poor clung to their poverty and their filth.
And meanwhile the fever gained a little ground. It was of a low typhoid character, and it kept entirely in the lower town. As yet not a single case had occurred elsewhere to frighten the mothers when they looked at their little ones sleeping, with, perhaps, a little flush upon the soft sweet cheek. The lower town was privileged, as it were, to possess a certain amount of unhealthiness, and no one troubled their heads much about the matter except the doctors, whose business it was supposed to be. It was a lovely summer. There was the promise of an abundant harvest, always an important question in Charville. The plains, flat and ugly as they were, could boast a certain beauty in their aspect of fertility. Little stone-coloured villages, with a church in the centre of each, were dotted here and there. Canals or small streams trickled slowly along, the course of the river was broken by water-mills, every thing seemed full of fat promise. The sun glowed down upon it all,—a peaceful, contented scene. What more was wanted? The Préfet looked at it one day from his window with a smile of satisfaction, and went away to his mushroom-beds. He saw Monsieur Deshoulières in the distance, and crossed over to avoid him. “That man has become a perfect pest,” he said severely. “I incline to think that after all there may be something in these stories that one hears now and then about him and the old man who died. It appears to me that he never knows when to be content, and discontent is the mother of all the vices, one with which, I am thankful to say, I have no sympathy.”
“It is the bane of our century,” said Monsieur de Blainville, with whom he was walking.
“Precisely. And in my opinion the Government should put it down with more determination than they do.”