"Then the captain has no family?"
"No family?" she cries, scandalized. "Well, my little one, you are not on. Oh! yes, there is a family, and a nice one, indeed! Heaps of nieces and cousins,—loafers, penniless people, hangers-on, all of whom were plundering him and robbing him. You should have seen that. It was an abomination. So you can imagine whether I set that right,—-whether I cleared the house of all this vermin. Why, my dear young woman, but for me, the captain now would be on his uppers. Ah! the poor man! He is well satisfied with the way things are now."
I insist with an ironical intention, which, however, she does not understand:
"And, undoubtedly, Mademoiselle Rose, he will remember you in his will?"
Prudently, she replies:
"Monsieur will do as he likes. He is free. Surely I do not influence him. I ask nothing of him. I do not ask him even to pay me wages. I stay with him out of devotion. But he knows life. He knows those who love him, who care for him with disinterestedness, who coddle him. No one need think that he is stupid as certain persons pretend,—Madame Lanlaire at the head, who says things about us. It is she, on the contrary, who is evil-minded, Mademoiselle Célestine, and who has a will of her own. Depend upon it!"
Upon this eloquent apology for the captain, we arrive at the church.
The fat Rose does not leave me. She obliges me to take a chair near hers, and begins to mumble prayers, to make genuflections and signs of the cross. Oh! this church! With its rough timbers that cross it and sustain the staggering vault, it resembles a barn; with the people in it, coughing, hawking, running against benches, and dragging chairs around, it seems also like a village wine-shop. I see nothing but faces stupefied by ignorance, bitter mouths contracted by hatred. There are none here but wretched creatures who come to ask God to do something against somebody. It is impossible for me to concentrate my thoughts, and I feel a sort of cold penetrating me and surrounding me. Perhaps it is because there is not even an organ in this church. Queer, isn't it? but I cannot pray without an organ. An anthem on the organ fills my chest, and then my stomach; it completely restores me, like love. If I could always hear the strains of an organ, I really believe that I should never sin. Here, instead of an organ, there is an old woman, in the choir, with blue spectacles, and a poor little black shawl over her shoulders, who painfully drums on a sort of piano, wheezy and out of tune. And the people are always coughing and hawking, the droning of the priest and the responses of the choristers being drowned by a sound of catarrh. And how bad it all smells,—mingled odors of the muck-heap, of the stable, of the soil, of sour straw, of wet leather, of damaged incense. Really, they are very ill-bred in the country.
The mass drags along, and I grow weary. I am especially vexed at finding myself among people so ordinary and so ugly, and who pay so little attention to me. Not a pretty spectacle, not a pretty costume with which to rest my thought or cheer my eyes. Never did I better understand that I am made for the joy of elegance and style. Instead of being lifted up, as at mass in Paris, all my senses take offence, and rebel at once. For distraction, I follow attentively the movements of the officiating priest. Oh! thank you! he is a sort of tall, jovial fellow, very young, with an ordinary face, and a brick-red complexion. With his dishevelled hair, his greedy jaw, his gluttonous lips, his obscene little eyes, and his eyelids circled with black, I have sized him up at once. How he must enjoy himself at the table! And at the confessional, too,—the dirty things that he must say! Rose, perceiving that I am watching him, bends toward me, and says, in a very low voice:
"That is the new vicar. I recommend him to you. There is no one like him to confess the women. The curate is a holy man, certainly, but he is looked upon as too strict. Whereas the new vicar...."