Jean Coste or The Village Schoolmaster

Antonin Lavergne

Jean Coste or The Village Schoolmaster

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Preface

I was the delegate for publications in a cooperative society with variable capital and membership when the manuscript of the novel you are about to read reached me. I did not know the author. A mutual friend had given him the name of the Librairie Georges Bellais. Ill-treated by bourgeois publishers, he turned to us in good faith. He sent us his book without having secured any recommendation whatsoever.

I took the manuscript home with me. I read it attentively. I have never been one of those great dispatchers who polish off five octavos in a single morning. It took me my entire Sunday to read the two hundred sixty-odd handwritten pages.

A faithful employee, I reported to the board of directors that the book seemed good to me. The board delegated one of its members to examine the manuscript.

The delegated director did not hesitate: “I have looked at this novel,” he said. “It is very long, it is tedious, and besides, it is far too dark — there are no people as wretched as all that.”

I was obliged to bow before this verdict. The literary judgment of an employee does not prevail against the literary judgment of a proprietor.

But from that moment I hoped that someday a poor publisher would freely welcome the manuscript of a poor author.

I kept the manuscript at home. I am glad that the cahiers are publishing it at last.

There are no people as wretched as all that. — I bear no grudge against the wealthy director who, with that single proposition, gently strangled both a work and a man. I pity him. Unless he possesses genius, a rich man cannot imagine what poverty is. From this deficiency springs that weakness of mind we observe in most of the rich. With this constitutional weakness, they fail to recognize the bitterness of events and the harshness of men. Such they are, and most of them remain simpletons, children, insipid souls. One cannot blame them for it. But it is regrettable that more and more it is such rich men who, under the now-official title of socialists, make a profession of representing the immense multitude of the poor. The most talented man in the world, if he has never wanted for bread, is ignorant of circles we know well.

And besides, it is far too dark. — If our subscribers will read with an unprejudiced mind, they will see that the author has very honestly taken care not to exaggerate. His work is as sober as it is upright.

Those who insist that a work of art be socialist, those who, before casting their eyes upon the novel sent to them, first ask whether it fits the formulas of the doctrinaires and the motions of the congresses — they will be disappointed here. We warn them that they will always be disappointed by the institution of our cahiers. Precisely because we respect our convictions, we will scrupulously refrain from demanding of the authors who do us the kindness of accepting the hospitality of our cahiers anything resembling negotiations.

I would say the author is a realist, if the name of realist had not been usurped by certain false lyricists of the imagination. We shall say instead that the author is a historian — historian of his time, his region, his country, his surroundings, his trade. A product of the primary schools, a former schoolmaster, of primary-school culture, now a professor at a primary normal school, he knows the life of primary education through that personal experience which nothing can replace.

The men and institutions whose events he presents to us here are of the greatest importance for the moral health of the citizenry. We shall address the great question of primary education elsewhere than in this preface. But already all honest people are assured that a solid restoration of the schoolmasters would do more for the ends we commonly hold dear than the vain proliferation of formulas, programs, and phrases.

Charles Péguy

As manager of the cahiers, I beg that we be forgiven if this issue appears rather late. I trust I may be excused on the grounds that it is very substantial. We have also had a great deal of administrative and publishing work. At this end of the school year, we are rather fatigued. Finally, the author, wholly occupied with his university work, left me the task of correcting the proofs. He even gave me full authority to make those slight corrections of style which are definitive and which can only be made on the typeset composition. If, therefore, anyone is dissatisfied with certain passages, let him hold me solely responsible. But before condemning a word, a turn of phrase, a gesture, I ask that one consider whether that word, that turn, that syntax is not properly, technically, of the primary schools.

As manager of the cahiers, I also thank Lavergne for having insisted that we include, after the end of his novel, a detailed announcement of our institution. We have thus assembled at the end of this issue a great deal of information.

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I

The clock in the first classroom marks ten o’clock. The headmaster, Monsieur Largue, makes a sign. At once, a pupil leaves his desk, goes out, and sets to ringing the cracked bell hung near a corridor — a sort of narrow, lightless passage through which the boys’ school, situated behind the town hall of Peyras, communicates with the outside world.

To the cracked voice of the bell responds a joyful uproar. The buzzing of a wakened hive runs through the lower reaches of the decrepit, rickety building whose ground floor, sunk below street level by the height of a single step, comprises four classrooms in a row, airless, their walls leprous and flaking with damp — a wretched school indeed for a small city of seven or eight thousand inhabitants, in these times of fine school buildings.

From each room, after a sharp command from the master, comes first a noise of tables and benches being shifted, then a confused shuffling of feet which soon, at the clapping of the teachers’ hands, falls into cadence. And to the rhythm of the march then in fashion, The Flag of France, sung by a hundred clear, piping voices, the children emerge into the narrow, mulberry-bordered passage that stretches before the school and is closed off, on the far side, by the high wall enclosing the outbuildings of the town hall. There the ranks reform, tightly packed, set off again at the signal, and still singing, their feet hammering the gravel underfoot, they file past the headmaster’s garden, climb toward the upper courtyard — shaded by a few tall pines and reached by a staircase of several steps. A final signal: the little troop breaks apart, scatters in a clamor of joy, and soon the break is in full swing.

As was his custom, Monsieur Largue — an old schoolmaster with an angular face and a military bearing, owing to his salt-and-pepper goatee and his tall, stiff frame, well fitted into a frock coat of old-fashioned cut, though with a hesitant and sly gaze behind his pince-nez — went back down to his garden. Secateurs in hand, he began pulling up the weeds that poked up here and there and trimming the dry twigs and suckers from his shrubs, neglected over a month and a half of holidays.

The three assistants had stayed together in the courtyard. Although only one of them was on duty, they went on talking as they walked back and forth, keeping a sidelong eye on the noisy games of their pupils.

Before long, a boy who had been sent out reappeared and, red-faced from running, held out a regional newspaper. They stopped, and with the freshly printed sheet opened to the third page, they scanned the columns of the local news.

“Still nothing,” said the eldest, Jean Coste — a tall, thin, very dark young man who squinted slightly but had an open and likeable face. “What the devil is going on? How late the transfers are this year… It’s enough to drive mad anyone who hopes for or dreads a change…”

“The fact is we’ve been back from holidays for several days now, and they’re hardly rushing… It’s high time we knew where we stand…”

“Bah!” cried the third assistant in a rebellious tone. “I know what’s going on. I received a letter this morning from one of my friends, a colleague at the departmental capital. Well! It seems there’s a real tug-of-war this time. The headmaster at Meilhan is retiring and the post is hotly contested because of the advantages attached to it. Naturally, every politician in the region has his protégé and insists at all costs that he be preferred. The deputy for the arrondissement and the general councillor for the canton each have their man and are falling over themselves… Errands, lobbying, recommendations — there’s no end to it… And it’s the academy inspector who finds himself devilishly embarrassed to make his proposals to the prefect! Pleasing all those people is no easy matter! No one knows who will win out, unless some third party… Hence the delay.”

“Oh, that hardly surprises me!” cried Coste. “It’s no longer merit that counts — it’s connections you need nowadays. And what a lot of schemers we have, with such practices! It’s disgusting. But why do they persist in having us appointed by the prefect, in keeping us at the mercy of certain tin-pot politicians through him? It’s a regular steeplechase for the good posts. I know well enough it isn’t always our superiors’ fault, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes sometimes.”

“Bah! As if our superiors really care, deep down! They think of themselves first and foremost, and try to please… I didn’t think you harbored such illusions… But enough. My friend added that in these circumstances the academy inspector, worn out by all these rather imperious solicitations, was quite resolved to ask the current holder to keep his post a while longer. That would be a year gained, and by then — the king, the donkey, or I, we shall be dead, as the charlatan in La Fontaine says… But speaking of which, Coste, you don’t exactly get along with old Largue. Are you still hoping for a transfer?”

“I know nothing whatsoever… but the old boy has been meek as a lamb with me since the start of term. That doesn’t bode well for me… You know the old ape is false as a counterfeit coin and hasn’t liked me since I refused to go every evening and play his game of piquet or backgammon… I think he knows something… On reflection, if I do get my transfer, it’s all the same to me. It’s time, at my age, to start as head of a village school. Only my wife worries me in that regard. I haven’t told her anything, but I know it will grieve her terribly to leave her native town. Still, if I receive an appointment, she’ll come round to it, and as for her parents, they’ll resign themselves as well.”

“Myself,” said the second assistant, “I don’t want a taste of village life just yet — one rots away there!”

“Nor I,” echoed the third. “The pay is meager and the boredom fierce.”

“You are still young, the both of you,” said Coste. “But what can you do — one can’t remain an assistant one’s whole life. I’m nearly thirty. You know the academy inspector has his hobbyhorse. To be appointed head of an important school, you must, in his view, have spent several years in a village school. He’s not wrong, either, in my humble opinion… So I hope, for my future’s sake, that an appointment comes through.”

At that moment, the bell at the front door tinkled.

“The postman!” said Coste, looking over the courtyard parapet.

Already Monsieur Largue, secateurs in hand, was meeting the postman. Gravely, he set his pince-nez upon his great hooked nose and examined the addresses on the letters. Then, with a false and malicious smile, he made his way toward the courtyard, all the while savoring a pinch of snuff with an air of satisfaction.

“Here, Monsieur Coste,” he said, having stuffed the snuffbox into his waistcoat pocket. “Here — a letter from the academy inspectorate for you.”

The assistant seized it and tore off the bands, a little feverishly.

“There it is,” he said. “They’re sending me to Maleval. Well, so much the better.”

“Oh!” Monsieur Largue hastened to add. “You will be very well placed for a beginning… Maleval is not very far from here and, what’s more, it’s a stone’s throw from the departmental capital — barely three or four leagues — especially as they’re about to build a local railway that will pass through and carry you to Montclapiers in half an hour.”

“What’s the population?” asked the second assistant.

“About three hundred,” replied the headmaster, “perhaps more, perhaps less. I’m not very familiar with the post and am scarcely informed about its advantages… But Monsieur Coste will certainly have the town-hall secretaryship.”

“Well,” exclaimed Coste, “there or elsewhere, it makes no difference to me — one has to start somewhere!”

“Then may we congratulate you?” said his colleagues.

“If you like.”

“Would you not like to go and tell Madame Coste at once?” murmured the headmaster with a kindly and obliging air that clashed with the false gleam of his eye, sparkling with satisfied joy.

He had feared at first that the assistant would show displeasure at his transfer, and Coste’s equanimity made him full of attentions, contrary to his usual manner. Monsieur Largue was delighted to be rid of him without recriminations or quarrels.

“These gentlemen and I,” he went on, “will look after your pupils in your absence.”

Then, having taken a few steps to move away, he turned back and, amiable and solicitous:

“But better yet, Monsieur Coste,” he said. “Call on the primary inspector” — he pronounced these words with a deferential bow, rolling his r’s — “and ask him to let you prepare your move. Your pupils are still few in number. Until your replacement arrives, each of us will have to take on a portion of them. Now, whether that starts today or tomorrow makes little difference. You may therefore tell the Inspector that the service is assured and that I see no objection to your attending to your departure without having to return to the classroom.”

Coste thanked him.

“Isn’t the old ape charming today!” he said in a low voice to his colleagues as he shook their hands, while the headmaster walked away. “You can tell I’m clearing out. Sure enough, he knew already — did you notice his airs and his mocking attentions?… Ah, the creature! If he’s in a hurry to see the back of me, I shall hardly miss old Largue… I wish you his good graces.”

The assistants smiled.

“Yes, on condition we play piquet with him every evening,” said one. “No thank you — we couldn’t care less about the old boy and his honeyed, pedantic speeches… He can wait for us.”

Coste withdrew.

Several of his pupils stopped him. One asked:

“Is it true, sir, that you’re leaving?”

“Yes, my friends.”

In an instant the news spread through the groups of children. But with the indifference of their age and their curiosity once satisfied, they quickly returned to their games, without even allowing a fleeting glance to cross their rosy faces, animated by play, for this teacher who was leaving and who, after all, for more than six years, had had nearly all of them in his class and had spared neither care nor effort to instruct them.

“How ungrateful they are, all the same! Not a farewell nor a thank-you — only curiosity,” murmured the assistant, not without a slight pang.

Coste took from his classroom a few books and small belongings, stuffed them into his satchel, and headed down the corridor. With a quick step he crossed the town-hall courtyard. But once in the street, his eagerness subsided. Certainly, for his own part, he was happy to be leaving. Was he not thus escaping the near-servitude in which the pettifogging authority of Monsieur Largue had held him — the man with whom he had never gotten along? Yes, but his wife — what sort of welcome would she give to the announcement of an immediate departure? At the same time, the faint, almost unconscious regret at leaving this city he loved, where he had so many connections and good friends, rose within him as he strode through these streets he had so often traversed in every direction, whose smallest corners were familiar to him.

Already he could picture Louise in tears at the thought of abandoning this dear city where she had been born, this little homeland to which her shopgirl’s soul, her working-class habits, her childhood friendships bound her by a thousand imperceptible yet strongly resistant threads. At this thought, a slight sadness creased Coste’s brow. Absently, he returned the greetings of the good folk he met in the streets — sunny but nearly deserted at this hour. Lost in thought, he slowed his pace and pictured, with the clarity one has of things when on the point of leaving them, the peaceful years, though somewhat difficult, he had lived in Peyras, before and since his marriage.

Seven years earlier, he had arrived, on a mild autumn day just like this one, in this quiet, fallen city which still retains a certain grandeur from its historical past and from the time when the provincial Estates sat there and a prince of the blood resided within its walls.

Then a little café he was passing reminded him of the friendships, swiftly formed, that he had struck up the very day after his arrival with a band of young men, friends of the owner’s son, who gathered there every evening before setting off on rowdy nocturnal rambles through the peacefully sleeping quarters of the little town. It was in the company of Marcel, the café owner’s son — a young man then twenty years old who had died the previous year — that he had met Louise, his wife today. He had been in Peyras a fortnight. One Sunday afternoon, he was accompanying his new friend on a walk along the riverbanks. There — a meeting foreseen and perhaps arranged by Marcel — they had found two young women: Rosette, already Marcel’s sweetheart, and Louise. Almost at once, Rosette and Marcel linked arms and disappeared among the singing reeds and golden willows of the riverbank, leaving Louise and him alone together. Awkward at first and not knowing what to say, they had quickly overcome their mutual shyness and cheerfully made the best of the situation. Five minutes later, sitting on the parched grass of an embankment, in the shade of an ash tree clothed in pale gold, they were chatting like old friends. He noticed that Louise was very pretty, despite her slight frame. Her pale, anemic face, her fine skin traced with blue veins around the temples and across the forehead, her straight nose with its pink, quivering nostrils, her superb teeth, and above all her dark eyes, half-closed and so full of smiles, made her a charming little creature. She, for her part, did not find him too disagreeable — for she was watching him from the corner of her laughing eyes with an adorable awkwardness. Louise was then seventeen, and no one knew of any sweetheart she might have. She was therefore flattered by the attentions and polite courtesies of this tall young man, a gentleman with white hands, a “professor” — the sort so desired as a beau by all the shopgirls of Peyras, who had been enticed ever since his arrival, for a few years earlier they had seen one of their own become a lady by marrying a schoolmaster.

She very proud to please and to believe herself already singled out, he very gallant beside this beautiful child — they had chattered sweetly together and had ended by gazing at one another tenderly. So much so that, upon the return of the two lovers, Marcel and Rosette, lost among the willows, they found themselves in accord and were even beginning to flirt. Seeing him so quickly smitten with her prettiness, Louise forgot that he was a little cross-eyed. When they parted at the entrance to the town, they pressed each other’s hands firmly, exchanged a long, knowing look, and promised to meet again the following Sunday on the riverbanks — the customary rendezvous for the lovers of Peyras.

These distant memories, swiftly summoned, were very sweet to Coste’s heart and moved him still. Smiling at that dear past, the schoolmaster raised his eyes. He was, at that moment, standing before the haberdashery where Louise had once worked. And once again the trembling images of the past grew sharper before his eyes.

He relived then the winter evenings that followed the golden autumn afternoons in which Louise and he had come, little by little, to love each other so deeply, under the yellowing, hushed canopies of the plain or among the rustling reeds of the river. How many joys piously gathered and laid away, like flowers between the pages of a book, in the secret folds of the soul where they still gave off their fragrance, full of an ancient charm, yet ever stirring! Every evening, Marcel and he, now inseparable friends, came at nightfall to wait by the door of the haberdashery for Rosette and Louise to emerge. Arm in arm, rich in life and love, they took the longest way round to walk their sweethearts home, despite the biting cold or the darkness of certain alleyways; lightheartedly, the young women risked their mothers’ scoldings in order to spend together an extra half hour, an extra hour. And in the dark corners, in the lonely lanes, there were wild bursts of laughter, childish confidences, kisses stolen or madly returned, lip against lip, then long and passionate embraces before parting.

At last, after some months of these sweet maneuvers, Coste resolved — for he now adored Louise — to ask for her hand. The parents, who knew of their daughter’s love affair and were even flattered by it, had not waited for the young schoolmaster’s first overtures before opening their home to him two or three times a week — sniffing a good match — as is the custom in the working class of Peyras. Besides, Louise’s father, a simple carpenter, had immediately taken a liking to Coste as soon as he saw his daughter courted by this gentleman, a state functionary whose station was so far above his own; on Sundays he followed him to the café that the schoolmaster and his friends frequented. After prolonged libations, always paid for by Coste, the carpenter, his fatherly pride tickled, did not scruple — though no formal words had yet been exchanged — to publicly address the schoolmaster as his son-in-law, freely and loudly, which Coste took in good humor, for he already loved Louise too much to think of ever abandoning her.

The proposal, made between a bock and an apéritif, was accepted with enthusiasm. The carpenter, somewhat tipsy, wept for joy and pride. But difficulties arose from the young schoolmaster’s own parents, who, learning that their future daughter-in-law had for her dowry nothing but her fine teeth and her charm, found their son’s choice utterly ridiculous and flatly refused their consent to such folly. This opposition, bluntly conveyed by letter, neither surprised nor greatly troubled Coste, for he had expected a certain resistance and knew its reasons. Had he not dared, during the previous holidays — reckless and uncalculating — to spurn the bride they had found for him? A superb match, to be sure: a stout peasant girl, half-demoiselle after two years in a convent, whose dowry consisted of six thousand francs in fine hard coin, nearly as much again in land, and expectations besides! They could not forgive their son for not having meekly listened to them. A marriage they had so carefully contrived, coddled, nursed along for ages, and so fondly cherished in their dreams! For they had hoped that their child, for whom they had toiled hard, spending — so they said — extravagant sums, even mortgaging their vineyards already threatened by phylloxera, would repay them once he was well married. And so, disillusioned, they opposed the folly outright.

Coste, however, let the days pass and continued to visit Louise, his fiancée — since he had given his word — until the moment he succeeded in wresting his parents’ consent by threatening to leave for the colonies if they persisted any longer in preventing the fulfillment of his dearest wishes.

The old couple relented, but they refused to attend a wedding they deplored and that ruined their hopes. They even informed their son that they would never receive his wife in their home, and they held their grudge for more than two years. The birth of Paul — now five years old — shook them: their grandparents’ hearts softened in time, and all seemed forgotten.

Meanwhile Jean and Louise were happy and without ambition. He earning close to 1,700 francs — including the allowances and supplements paid by the city — she continuing to go to her shop, they enjoyed a certain ease. What celebrations when they found each other again in the evening, the day’s work done, in the little apartment they had rented at the far end of the suburb, its windows looking out upon the countryside where they had met and fallen in love! Jean adored more and more this exquisite, dark-haired child, frail as a doll, who was now his wife and who delighted him with her birdlike movements. What a sweet and inexperienced little housekeeper his Louisette was! How many roasts burned, how many sauces curdled, how many stews botched and barely edible! But was it really her fault, since they spent all their time kissing and clowning about the moment they were together? And their love grew in this life for two, so deliciously selfish and so full.

After the birth of Paul, who was put out to nurse in a neighboring village, there were, every Sunday, joyful outings to go and kiss the dear little one. Then Rose came into the world, and Louise, deeply anemic, remained ill for a long time. Coste then obliged her to give up her position as a shop assistant. For a long while he had dreamed of having his wife at home and all to himself. So he cheerfully made this decision, dictated by the need to let Louise recover in peace, but also, in part, by his jealous love. He knew well how shopgirls, at closing time, whether married or not, are pursued by dandies in fresh gloves, young bucks reeking of musk, and, what is worse, the libidinous old gentlemen of Peyras. Now, despite the fatigue of her pregnancies and her chlorotic pallor, Louise was still one of the most alluring and had many times been subjected to shameful propositions, though each was promptly and sharply rebuffed.

So frail and so dainty, she would henceforth have cares enough merely tending the household and the little ones. Moreover, in his lover’s selfishness, Jean wanted to find, on coming home, his wife fresh, rested, breathing calm and joy, ready to make him a warm and gentle home, untouched by any trouble from outside. All this was well worth the few hundred crowns that Louise earned so painfully each year at her haberdashery, standing from morning to night behind a counter. That money, besides, would scarcely have sufficed to pay the wages and the inevitable waste of a prodigal, surly maidservant, now made necessary by the small attentions required by the children. Blessed with an easy-going nature, preferring his complete tranquility to any extra income, Coste gave little thought to the burdens of the future and believed himself rich enough on his seventeen hundred francs.

From that point on, reduced to Jean’s salary as their sole resource, they lived rather modestly, just barely making ends meet, for the children cost a great deal, though it hardly showed. Yet Louise, who retained a touch of coquetry, found a way to be nicely curled and smartly turned out on Sundays, so that she could parade, dapper and triumphant, on the arm of her husband in his frock coat and top hat, before her former shopmates, paired off with artisans, who were very jealous of her.

As he walked along, Coste, increasingly moved, was thus remembering — or rather, thanks to the powers of his imagination, was seeing — the whole of that dear past unfolding within him in scenes incoherent but luminous. He grew sad, almost suffering now at the thought of leaving behind a part — perhaps the best part — of his life, in quitting so abruptly and for the unknown this peaceful and beloved city. At every step, at every turning of the street, did it not recall to him so many sweet memories sown there by his love, memories with which it seemed to adorn and perfume itself, more smiling, more familiar, more eloquent that morning, as though the better to make itself missed?

And Jean felt very sad all at once. It is true that his sadness evaporated as he spoke with the primary inspector, whom he had just gone up to see and who made no difficulty in granting him complete freedom.

From there, he crossed the Place Gambetta diagonally — so vast and so bare under the blazing sun; he walked for a while along the promenade with its four high, deep rows of plane trees, where he remembered the rendezvous he used to give Louise, on those moonless, mysterious autumn evenings. He crossed the bridge over the nearly dry stream that bathes Peyras and arrived at last before the house whose second floor he rented for two hundred francs.

Before climbing the worn steps two at a time, he hesitated a moment. He resolved to break the news of his transfer gently. Louise needed careful handling, for she was once more seven months pregnant and very fatigued by a difficult pregnancy.

At the sound of that well-known step, Paul and his little sister Rose — a tot of three and a half — appeared on the landing. They poked their tousled, impish heads between the banisters and cried out joyfully:

“Here’s Papa! Hello, hello, Daddy dear!”

Jean planted a big kiss on the cheeks held out to him. He found his wife slumped in a low chair, complaining of nausea. He kissed her and looked at her tenderly. Despite the deeper pallor of her drawn cheeks, despite the circles under her eyes, despite her colorless lips, she still seemed to him the dear and adorable creature of old.

Under that warm gaze of love that enveloped her whole, Louise’s suffering face brightened: she smiled, and her gums appeared nearly as white as her teeth.

“But,” she remarked, “it must already be noon for you to be here. I didn’t think it was so late.”

“Barely eleven, darling. It’s a surprise — I’ve just come from the inspector’s and, passing by, I wanted to give you a kiss.”

“My dear Jean,” she murmured, smiling.

“You know,” he said, “there’s news. Guess.”

“What? I have no idea.”

“Yes, news — guess,” he repeated, uneasy.

“A pay raise?”

“No, unfortunately. I expect I’ll have to wait some more.”

“Well then? Well then?”

Louise thought a moment, then, like a spoiled child:

“Will it make me happy?”

“Oh! Oh! I’m not so sure… so-so… No, probably not, because you love your Peyras too much.”

She did not dare to understand.

“Do speak!” she cried, impatient.

“Well then! Well then, my darling — we shall have to pack all this up and… leave for Maleval, where I’ve been appointed.”

He drew the letter of appointment from his pocket, unfolded it, and held it out.

Louise read it through. Her eyes filled with tears and a deep sigh escaped her aching breast.

“Oh, dear God! Dear God!… Leave Peyras, and my parents!… No, no — I won’t, I won’t — you must refuse at once.”

She was sobbing.

The children, seeing their mother cry, had pressed themselves against her, their eyes brimming with tears as well.

Jean made himself tender and coaxing with all of them.

“Come now, my Louison, my darling, courage — be reasonable! Haven’t I told you, many times, that I can’t remain an assistant all my life? The best thing is to accept this village post; besides, I have no choice — it’s impossible to refuse; they wouldn’t listen to me. And isn’t it the surest, the only way of coming back later… in a few years, as headmaster at Peyras?”

Louise wept silently.

Paul and Rose climbed onto her knees, stroking her with their little hands and saying:

“Don’t cry, little Mama, don’t cry, dear Mummy.”

“Boo! Boo! Naughty Papa!” Paul suddenly cried, stamping his foot and making such a funny face that Louise and Jean smiled in spite of themselves.

“My angels!” said Louise, pressing them against her passionately.

“Is Maleval far away?” she asked, calmer now.

“No, three leagues from Montclapiers. If you pine too much, you can go back to Peyras now and then.”

“Is it big?”

“Three hundred people, I think. You’ll see how peacefully we’ll live there. And besides,” he hastened to add with volubility, seeing Louise about to cry again, “besides, you know, I’ll finally be rid of the aggravation I’ve had with old Largue, since our falling out. He was becoming far too insufferable, the creature — always breathing down my neck. If you’d seen him just now, and how amiable and sweet the old boy was! No regrets between us; so we’ll part with glad hearts and, for once, like the best of friends.”

Louise remained sad; yet since her husband, whom she loved, was satisfied, she forced herself to smile. But despite herself, her tears burst forth again.

Jean, somewhat flustered, no longer knew what to do or say. He grew awkward; a look of irritation crossed his face and he fidgeted nervously on his chair.

Louise noticed.

“Oh, my dear, I should like to be glad; but it breaks my heart to have to leave Peyras. I was so happy here. Oh!” she added, with that disdain which the artisans of small towns have for the village and its inhabitants, “what shall I do among those mistrustful, unknown peasants with whom we are going to live?”

“Don’t fret. On the contrary, you’ll be more respected there than here. You who are vain,” he said, teasing her, “you’ll be Madame in the grandest style. And besides, it’s only a starting post. We’ll stay two or three years at most, and then, I tell you again, we’ll try to get back closer to Peyras. Monsieur Largue retires in six years — between now and then, why shouldn’t I come and replace him as headmaster?”

Louise seemed somewhat heartened by her husband’s assurances; she was touched by Jean’s words — she was a woman, and her vanity, once engaged, already found something to glean.

“But,” she asked, still anxious, “will you earn as much there as here?”

“More or less — yes, it will come to the same. I’ll have my fixed salary of a thousand francs. I hope, with my ten years’ service, they’ll soon give me my fourth class, which would mean two hundred francs more.” He said this to reassure his wife, though he hardly counted on it, so stingy are they with promotions nowadays. “On top of that, the town-hall secretaryship will bring me a good three or four hundred francs. With that, one can live in a village. Everything is cheap there. And then, you know, there are the perquisites: the gifts pour in, from those folk, when they slaughter their pig, bring in their harvests, and so on. Come, Louison, we’ll be just as well off, if not better, than here where everything is frightfully dear.”

Louise appeared reassured. She was smiling now at her husband’s words.

“But,” she objected, “the move will cost us a great deal, and you know we haven’t much left this month!”

“Bah!” he declared, full of unconcern, “no more than sixty francs or so. My colleagues are bachelors — I’ll borrow fifty francs from one of them. Once we’re at Maleval, I’ll apply for a relocation allowance and we’ll pay it back. You see — you were wrong to despair, since everything can be arranged beautifully.”

Never having been transferred since his marriage, and heedless besides, Coste truly did not know that the schoolmaster, however modest his purse, receives no relocation allowance — which is unjust and causes no end of trouble for most of them. His ignorance, moreover, was all the more understandable in that the Departmental Council had, in preceding years, voted a sum for this purpose — a credit suppressed precisely that year, for reasons of economy, since it is always on the money of the humble that economies are first made.

Although the regret of leaving still lingered within her, Louise, reassured, silenced her grief.

“The best thing is to get ready quickly,” said Jean. “That way you won’t have time to eat your heart out, as you say. Once we’re there, you’ll acclimatize fast enough and you’ll be happy. I’ll run and tell your parents and ask them to help us pack — tonight, at least, by lamplight. Our furniture is slight — it’ll be done in no time. The railway doesn’t go to Maleval — it would cost us an arm and a leg to ship our things to Montclapiers and then have them carted from there to Maleval. So I’ll hire a moving wagon. Well then, my darlings — goodbye, and give your father a smile. Courage, my dear.”

And he went back down, whistling. Louise smiled at the cheerful good nature of her “little man” and the volatility of his moods.

Jean returned an hour later.

“It’s all settled; your mother is on her way and your father will be here too, once his day’s work is done.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing much — they understood perfectly. Your father is even pleased; he’s already looking forward to coming to see us often, on his way to the Montclapiers market.”

“Oh, my father!” said Louise. “I know him. He’s been talking about going to the Montclapiers market for at least ten years… but money, if he knows well enough how to earn it, doesn’t stay long in his pocket, and then…”

Jean set to work after lunch. A few neighbors and friends came to help.

Two days later, they alighted at the Montclapiers station.

Stepping off the train, they made inquiries. They were directed to the office of the stagecoach that runs from Montclapiers to Lansac and which, in passing, was to set them down at Maleval. For a few sous, a ragged urchin offered to guide them there. Looking pitiful and mud-splattered, baskets and bundles under their arms — he towing Paul, she dragging Rose — they followed the boulevards, struggling to keep the umbrella balanced as it provided them scant protection.

From the low sky fell one of those fine, icy autumn rains that gusts of wind scatter into your face and that creep into the collar and the cuffs. Along the slippery sidewalks they went, following their guide, a sorry sight, jostled by hurrying passersby who walked bent forward, half-blinded by the dripping ribs of umbrellas.

Louise, on edge from the move and her pregnancy, was in a foul humor; her belly weighed on her like a ball and chain.

The children, blinded by the rain, their hands numb, trailed through the liquid mud, whimpering; they complained of their little legs, stiff from sitting for several hours in the cramped compartment of a third-class carriage packed with passengers.

Her expression dark, Louise grumbled without cease.

“My God! Is it possible!… You should have listened to me and stayed back there, at home,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Especially in the fine state I’m in… Enough to catch your death in this filthy mud… Oh, we were too happy at Peyras… Poor little things — they’re exhausted…”

But despite these words of pity, so great were her agitation and impatience that she could not help immediately yanking at Rose, who was dragging her feet more and more, and who at once burst into bitter tears and refused to go on.

“Oh, yes — isn’t this fine!… Will you hush, you silly girl!… And to think we could still be back there, so peaceful… yes, so peaceful, Lord Jesus!”

At this fussing, Jean shrugged his shoulders, irritated in turn; but he bit his thin lips and said nothing. At last — here they are at the stagecoach office. But they cannot find room in the coach about to depart. The driver, surly and streaming with rain, greets Coste’s polite request with brusqueness.

“Sort yourselves out as best you can. I don’t care… How was I to know you were taking the coach? At least one books a seat during the day…”

But catching himself at once, for fear these unknown travelers might go to the competitor across the street:

“Where are you headed, sir?” he said, more amiably.

“To Maleval. I’m the new schoolmaster.”

The driver’s face grew more pleasant.

“Ah! I knew the one before you — the cream of men. He always took my coach when he came to Montclapiers… One good customer fewer… but no, for you’ll take his place, I hope,” he insinuated, most obligingly. “Well then, climb in, my good sir, with your little lady… I’ll sort something out.”

He checked his watch.

“God damn me! Half past three… we should have been on the road… Come now, the rest of you, a bit of room, if you please!”

In the already packed coach, no one stirs. At last, at the driver’s insistence — swearing and cursing — Jean and Louise manage to squeeze in among all those resistant legs; but, perched at best on the very edge of the seat, they are forced to wedge the children between their knees, while the passengers they have disturbed eye them like intruders and mutter.

“Lord! Did you ever see such a thing!” grumbles a stout woman who had disappeared behind a scaffolding of baskets and bundles heaped on her broad lap. “There’s room for eight and here we are twelve, counting the brats. We’re packed in like herrings…”

“Oh yes,” sighed an old gentleman, “what purgatory! It’s high time we had our railway… Oh, this government!… It’s a sorry state…”

All assented, with voice and gesture.

The stagecoach lurched into motion, jolted roughly over the cobblestones. Silence fell.

Jean and Louise, mortified, had said nothing. Badly seated, they were in agony, the children pressed against them.

They left the town. The coach rolled gently along a fine road bordered with plane trees.

Conversation resumed; the eyes around them softened. Jean and Louise felt the hostility of those gazes melt away. As strangers, they were examined with curiosity. They were questioned. Jean replied politely. The children were admired — truly lovely with their curly hair. Louise smiled then, flattered by these praises.

Dusk came; they were racing through a plain of vineyards where a last remnant of dirty light lingered and died. The rain redoubled. It pattered against the glass of the small windows, streaking the shrunken, already blurred countryside.

Night fell suddenly inside the coach, where there gradually rose a smell of stale breath, damp cloth, and wet leather. Louise felt her stomach heave; they had to open a window for a moment to give her fresh air. The voices fell silent; soon a snore came from one corner, drowning out the rattling din of the stagecoach.

Cramped in their movements, at the end of their strength, Paul and Rose could scarcely keep themselves upright on their aching little legs. They began to complain again in the darkness. At a sharp command from their mother, they fell to whimpering once more.

Jean heard Louise grumbling again. He grew vexed in turn. With a brusque gesture he shook Paul and ordered him, in a low voice, to be quiet. The child sobbed softly, then fell asleep against his father’s shoulder. Rose must have been sleeping too. In the silence and darkness, soon nothing could be heard but the creaking of the coach’s axles, the rain dashing in heavy drops against the windows, and the bells of the horses jingling in fits and starts above the muffled rumble of the stagecoach on the sodden road.

It was nearly six o’clock when they alighted at Maleval. It was pitch dark; fortunately there came a break in the sky; through a gap in the clouds, as at the bottom of a blue pond rimmed with silver, the moon shone forth. It lit up a wide village street pocked with gleaming puddles and flanked by low, dark houses.

Jean asked the proprietress of the café where the stagecoach stopped to change horses to direct him to a hotel. At that word, the good woman opened wide eyes and said nothing.

“I am the new schoolmaster,” said Coste, repeating his request.

“Oh, my dear sir, an inn?… You must go to the far end of the village. Look — over there.”

She extended her finger toward the dark hole of the street, for the moon had just hidden itself.

“Wait,” she went on, “the boy will take you there.”

She called:

“Pierrou! Pierrou!”

A little fellow of eight, his hair in a thicket, appeared in the red glow of the lanterns, sucking his fingers for all he was worth.

Coste gave him a friendly pat on the cheek. A few steps farther on, he questioned the child in vain. Once more, in the silence of the street, Louise and he dragged the children along — half-awake, sleeping on their feet, stumbling in the dark; they splashed through puddles, spattering one another.

“Oh, God! Dear God!” Louise repeated, in an exhausted voice, worn out.

At last the moon reappeared and the road was lit.

“Is it much farther, my friend?” asked Jean.

The boy shook his head and went on sucking his fingers with renewed vigor. After a few steps, he stopped before the door of a shed; on a sign, one could read, in crooked letters:

Lodging for man and horse

For a room, they were given a sort of sordid garret with two beds. Exhausted, stomachs empty, they sat down. Jean tried to joke. Louise sulked. In silence they devoured the provisions they had brought in a basket. Rose and Paul were then put to bed and at once fell into a heavy sleep.

No sooner in bed himself, Jean tried to kiss Louise. She looked at him with a dull eye, full of reproach, and did not return his kiss. The candle blown out, she abruptly turned her back to him, her face toward the wall. Soon, from her shaking body, he understood she was weeping. He tried to console her. She pushed him away.

Jean felt wretched: it was the first time Louise had sulked for so long; the first time she had not returned his goodnight kiss.

That is why, despite his aching limbs, he could not fall asleep until, from the calm breathing of his wife, he was assured she was sleeping at last. But before closing his eyes, he gently kissed the hair of the dear, frail creature.

The next morning, Coste was awake early. Beneath the bedroom window, the cocks crowed, the hens clucked, the ducks quacked, and all these barnyard noises cradled for a moment Jean’s laziness and drifting thoughts. He then rose carefully, so as not to disturb Louise’s rest. But her sleep was so light that she half-opened her eyes the moment she lost the vague sensation of her husband’s body lying beside her. She stretched and raised her head. Her beautiful dark hair streamed over her shoulders and framed her pale face.

A band of sunlight, its atoms dancing, brightened the room and cut across it at an angle.

Louise looked at her husband and smiled. At once Jean forgot the ill humor of the night before. He felt cheerful, restored, his habitual carefree nature taking hold again.

“What time is it?” said Louise, yawning.

“Nearly seven.”

He approached the bed and gave his wife the morning kiss. She returned it affectionately and clasped her arms around his neck, as if to ask forgiveness for her sulking.

“Look — it’s stopped raining?”

“Thankfully. Look — it’s a magnificent day.”

He drew aside the frayed, yellowish-white curtains that veiled the panes. Opposite the window, a wall freshly whitewashed with limewash blazed with sunlight.

Louise smiled again. Jean, a brightness in his soul, began to hum.

“Oh, do be quiet, scatterbrain — you’ll wake the children.”

“You’re right — how silly of me!”

He stopped washing his face to gaze at Rose and Paul, sleeping nearly entwined.

“Aren’t they darling!” he murmured. “They look like two angels.”

“Are you going to the school?” said Louise. “I’m getting up — wait for me.”

“No, no, rest — you’re too tired. I’ll come back for you and the little ones shortly.”

“No, I’m eager to see our new quarters. You’re not going to hold class today, are you?”

“Oh, the school is closed; nobody knows I’ve arrived — no one will come. Tomorrow is Sunday, which gives us two full days to settle in. That’s why you’d do better to stay in bed.”

“No, I’m coming. We’ll need to open up, give the place a sweep, clean everything, get it all ready. The children would be in the way. We’ll leave them with the maid, who seems a kind girl. You saw how she offered, last night, to undress them.”

She wrapped the sleeping children in a gaze of tenderness.

“They’re so sweet, so beautiful!” she went on, with a flash of pride in her eyes. “How they were admired yesterday, in the coach! Darlings — they’ll surely sleep till noon.”

Downstairs, they found the maid at work.

“Don’t worry, madame,” she told them. “I’ll look after your little angels. I’ll get them up and they can play in the yard in this lovely sunshine.”

They asked for directions to the school. Outside, the sky was light, the air clear and mild, the street all brightness, in the rosy, childlike purity of this sunlit morning after a night of rain. The rooftops, the puddles of mud, the glass of the dormer windows and casements sparkled, splashed with glancing light, in the radiance of the triumphant day.

“You’d think the sky was celebrating our arrival,” Coste remarked. “Everything is cheerful for our welcome.”

And he added in a grave tone, with sudden feeling:

“May we have happy days here!”

They followed the main road along which the grey, old houses of Maleval are strung — some of them flanked on the outside by a covered staircase — a few here and there. Now and then lanes opened perpendicular to the road — climbing to the left, descending to the right, with no more than two or three houses on each side — and revealed the stony mountains, dotted with holm oaks, between which stretches the waterless valley where the village is built.

They took one of these lanes, followed it round to the bottom, and arrived before the town-hall-school, which faces the mountains and is separated from them by a small square and a few small gardens, fields, and vineyards. The church and presbytery are to the left, very close. A path leads off toward the mountain and passes above the promenade, enclosed by low walls, where people gather on Sundays to chat or drink absinthe around the basin fed by a cool spring, beneath a canopy of sturdy plane trees.

A front step, adorned with an iron balustrade, precedes the town hall. At the knock, an old lady came to open.

“Pardon me, madame,” said Coste with a bow. “I am the new schoolmaster, and I have come to—”

“But do come in, my dear colleague!” the old lady exclaimed graciously. “I have the keys to your quarters and I’ll hand them over.”

Small, thin, and sprightly, she stepped aside in the vestibule. On each side, a spiral staircase led to the first floor.

“That is your staircase, and this is mine.”

She took a ring of keys from a hook on the wall and, very obligingly, invited them to come upstairs.

On the landing, she opened a door.

“The town-hall room,” she said, “which is a little bit yours… This is where your predecessor worked as town-hall secretary.”

A large round table, straw-bottomed chairs, a bookcase containing the archives and a few books, two or three framed prints, and the bust of the Republic composed the entire furnishing of the room.

“How much shall I earn for this work?” Coste inquired.

“Two hundred and fifty francs. Oh, it’s not very demanding…”

Louise and her husband exchanged a glance, somewhat disappointed by the figure. They had been counting on four hundred, or at least three hundred francs.

“And the parents?” asked Jean.

“You’ll hardly be troubled by them,” the schoolmistress replied. “They’re at their work all day long, in the woods or the vineyards, until nightfall. On Sundays they’d sooner rest than come bother us. Indeed, I find they take too little interest in what their children do at school.”

“Certainly,” said Coste, “it’s preferable that they don’t plague us too much with absurd complaints or grievances; but it would be good, on the other hand, to be able to count on them and, in certain cases, to see their authority and oversight support our efforts.”

“And,” Louise ventured timidly, “are they kind and grateful?”

The schoolmistress understood, and smiled.

“Not especially. I have lived in Maleval for more than twenty years, and the ministerial circular forbidding schoolmasters to accept gifts — as if they were too well paid, alas! — that circular has changed nothing for us. However, from time to time, during the grape harvest for instance, there is always someone to supply us with our provision of grapes.”

Louise gave a little pout of disappointment.

“Look at the fine view,” said the schoolmistress. She had just opened the window, which gives directly onto a broad stone balcony.

The sight was, indeed, picturesque. On every side, rocky, limestone mountains rose against the blue sky, their only vegetation scattered tufts of holm oaks and rock plants. One of them, nearly bald, seemed, so clear was the air, to be scarcely a rifle-shot away. It blazed under the raw brilliance of the sun; its tormented flanks stood out sharply, as if carved by the play of shadow and light in the crevices of the rock. Between these mountains and the school lay a flat stretch comprising the still-green garden of the presbytery, fields with reddish furrows, vineyards with leaves yellow or crimson. In the distance, the plane trees of the promenade, their crowns bronzed by the onset of autumn, resembled a bouquet of brown gold encircled by a green ruff of lower branches. This little corner, contrasting with the barrenness of the surrounding mountains, offered a peaceful and smiling aspect and rested the eye.

For lodging: a kitchen, a dining room, and a bedroom; below, the woodshed, an oblong little garden, and near the staircase, the narrow, bare classroom.

“Are there many pupils?”

“About twenty-five, in the good seasons; but most are absent during harvest time, or they follow their parents into the woods to cut box and heather during the fine weather.”

The half-hour struck. The schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Bonniol, excused herself, for her little girls would not be long in arriving. She offered her services and, briskly, disappeared, having lent them a broom and a few utensils. Coste and Louise began the cleaning.

All in all, they were fairly satisfied, and cheerfully they arranged their new life.

“I like the lodgings,” said Louise, “but we’d need one more room. We’ll be cramped after my lying-in.”

“Bah! The dining room is useless — we haven’t the furniture for it. We’ll make it the children’s room, and we’ll eat in the kitchen.”

Louise soon leaned against the wall, breathless but still smiling. Jean begged her to rest and, cheerfully, a tune on his lips, continued the work alone.

A few children’s shouts from the square in front of the school reached Coste’s ears. He paid them little mind. But at the second stroke of eight, he heard a knock at the front door; he went down.

On the front steps stood, in single file, about ten children. The parents, having learned the evening before of the new schoolmaster’s arrival, had lost no time — eager to be rid of them — in sending them to school.

The boldest, a boy of twelve, asked:

“Are we having school today, sir?”

Coste hesitated at first and did not know what to say. From the top of the stairs, Louise’s voice, eavesdropping, called down:

“No — send them away.”

He could not bring himself to do it, so deeply rooted in his heart was the idea of duty at all costs.

“Wait a few minutes… I’ll be right back,” he said, and went back upstairs. The children scattered like a flock of twittering goldfinches.

“You sent them away, didn’t you?” said Louise.

“Can I really? If I send them away, they’ll roam the streets all day or go pilfering.”

Louise turned sulky and, flaring up abruptly:

“That’s it,” she grumbled. “I’m going to be in a fine state… Do you think I can move in all by myself? I feel so little courage… I’m already broken… No, you’re too foolish to keep those children — if they go pilfering, what is it to you!”

Tears flooded her cheeks. Jean made himself very gentle and, coaxing her, murmured:

“No, my dear Louise, I cannot… It would make a bad impression, and we must try to make the parents’ first impression of us favorable. These youngsters have already been without a teacher for several days. I understand that the parents, busy from morning to night, are impatient to know their children are at school and not roaming the village or the fields. Be reasonable, darling spoiled child.”

“Yes,” she replied selfishly, “so as not to inconvenience others, let us inconvenience ourselves… We’ll never get settled… and I’m so eager to rest.”

“But we will… There are about ten of them. I’ll give them work to do under the eldest one’s supervision and I’ll come right back up, going down from time to time to make sure they’re working.”

Louise calmed down. Jean dried her tears with a kiss; he flew down the stairs, was gone a quarter of an hour, and came back to resume his cleaning.

He was in the middle of wiping the windows when, at ten o’clock, he was told his furniture had arrived. Until noon he helped the driver unload and arrange his belongings. He then dismissed his pupils and ran to the inn to fetch Rose and Paul.

He found them playing in the yard, chasing the cocks and hens, shrieking with laughter at the frightened quacking of the ducks in an uproar.

The irritation he had felt, from the fatigue of the morning, vanished at once. The soothing caresses of the little ones restored his calm, and his heart expanded at their innocent questions.

“Papa, say — ducks are chickens with big beaks, right?” declared Paul.

“Mmm, yummy, the duck, the little hens,” babbled Rose, already greedy and tempted.

They chattered away, each trying to outdo the other, all the way to the school. Louise smothered her children in kisses, gripped again by the agitation of the day before, surrounded by all those pieces of furniture in disarray, fighting back a strong urge to cry.

They lunched on the last of their provisions and tallied their accounts. All expenses paid, they had twelve francs left and a little small change. And it was only the 13th of October.

Louise was dismayed. How would they manage until the end of the month?

“Why, simple!” replied Jean, full of unconcern. “They’ll give us credit this month. First thing tomorrow I’ll apply for a relocation allowance and we’ll pay off what we owe.”

Jean, poorly helped by Louise — who was incapable of any exertion — struggled through the afternoon to set up the beds. That evening, once his pupils had gone, he tidied himself up, pulled on his gloves, and called on the mayor, who — so he had been told — did not return from his farmstead until nightfall.

Monsieur Rastel, senior clerk in the excise office, having retired five years earlier, had since been living in his native village and had become its mayor. He spent his time hunting.

He was a grizzled man, heavy and squat. He wore a pince-nez; but as his nose was snub and tiny, the cursed lorgnette kept sliding down onto the ruddy, gleaming chin of its owner. Thus Monsieur Rastel’s habitual gesture was to push the unruly pince-nez back into place with two outstretched fingers, the thing obstinately refusing to stay put for a single minute.

The mayor received the schoolmaster in his kitchen. He welcomed him with protestations of friendship and an exuberance of gestures that made the descents of the slippery, capricious pince-nez more frequent and disordered than ever.

“Forgive me,” said Monsieur Rastel, “if I do not invite you to dinner, potluck as it would be; my wife is away for a few days. But that will come later. You know, I am a former civil servant myself, and thus one of your own. You may count on me entirely.”

And as the schoolmaster thanked him:

“Ah!” the mayor added, “we were sorry to lose your predecessor. A fine teacher and entirely devoted to our institutions. He well deserves the promotion we helped him obtain. For among our schoolmasters, there are still some, you know, who at heart are wavering, if not clerical. It’s absurd, it’s madness, certainly, but that’s how it is. We are counting on you, my dear Monsieur Coste. The district is deeply divided: the reactionaries want at all costs to drive us from the town hall. They are rabid, those fellows, and they give us a hard fight, I assure you. The elections are a few months away and we need every ally — yours above all.”

Coste protested his entire devotion; but privately he resolved not to get himself entangled in that hornets’ nest.

He was about to take his leave when Monsieur Rastel gave him a familiar clap on the shoulder.

“Do you hunt, Monsieur Coste?” he asked.

“No, Monsieur le Maire.”

“A pity… too bad. I would have invited you to my farm. Just now there’s a superb flight of thrushes; they come to feast on the gleanings from my vine and on my early-ripened olives, and I blast away at them! I bagged a dozen and a half today — and fat ones, round as balls of lard!… You won’t have much entertainment here, then. Look, a word of advice: get your permit and we’ll hunt together — red-legged partridge, hare, and rabbit abound in our woods. Come, you’ll make up your mind.”

“My permit!” Coste said to himself as he walked home. “Not on the twelve francs I have left, in any case.”

But far from feeling downcast, he smiled at his own reflection.

Yet, the very next day, his unconcern vanished when he had to face the suppliers with no money in hand. Coste wanted to speak to them himself; in any case, he could hardly think of sending his wife, who was very low that morning. Besides, since her pregnancy, Louise, worn out, took no interest in the household. Jean, very good to her, filled in as best he could, and of late he had taken the habit of going himself, every day before leaving for his classroom, to fetch certain provisions at the market or from the tradesmen.

Now, to present himself for the first time at a shop and ask for credit seemed to him an unusual and somewhat shameful thing. He needed all his courage to bring himself to it, and it was not without hesitation that, driven by necessity, he crossed the thresholds of the shops. What he dreaded — and not without reason — to the point of getting gooseflesh in advance, was being ill-judged, from the very first, by people who envy the civil servant too keenly not to seize every occasion to humiliate him. The village shopkeeper and the peasant in his smock have scarcely any regard for the man in a jacket, for the hard-pressed gentleman who comes to buy the bare necessities without a five-franc piece at his fingertips. And so they do not hesitate to gossip about it when the occasion arises. For what is common practice in the city is, for these covetous and suspicious country folk, a sign of disgrace. The peasant, if he has property under the sun and a few coins in his woolen stocking, does not buy on credit, despises the destitute, and above all the poor civil servants.

Coste, who had been born and raised in a village, knew all this. Hence the embarrassment he felt at the butcher’s, at the grocer’s, at the wood merchant’s — a tradesman who in the country is ordinarily paid cash on the nail. Inclined to exaggerate things, he suffered in thinking he detected the surprised looks of these small tradespeople — hucksters, rather — who, without competitors, went every morning at daybreak in their carts to buy for themselves, in Montclapiers, for cash and as needed, the goods they then retailed to the peasants of Maleval.

“To be sure,” Coste told himself, “they didn’t expect to hear the only civil servant in Maleval speak of credit on his very first visit.”

This thought made him seem awkward, ill at ease. “I’ll pay you at the end of the month” — these words seemed hard to pronounce and scraped his throat like the bristles of a brush.

Upon entering, he would hasten to declare his position as schoolmaster; at once, the shopkeeper would become obsequious and attentive toward “the schoolmaster, sir.” But in the immediately strained smile of the thin lips, in the beaming face of the retailer, there appeared surprise and sometimes even a flash of distrust in the eyes, when Coste — red in the face, dry-mouthed — uttered the word credit, so poorly understood and so poorly received, as a rule, by the hostile peasant. It is true that this lasted but a moment, and that the tradesmen, their astonishment past and on reflection, hastened to add, in an amiable voice, though with a touch of condescension and mockery for this poor customer who had become their debtor:

“At your service, sir — as you please.”

Coste was more at ease at the baker’s, who at once, of his own accord, handed him a tally stick. Yet, going thus from one supplier to the next, his timidity increased and his humble, embarrassed manner served to give a poor impression of him. So that, his rounds finished, he returned to the school with his heart full of a vague sadness, feeling his dignity wounded, with a presentiment of dark days ahead in this village and a fleeting dread of the future — sentiments that creased his gloomy brow.

Until now, he reflected, this shame and this humiliation had been spared him. At Peyras, his salary had sufficed for his family’s needs. Louise had the excellent habit of paying the daily suppliers in cash. If, since the children came, she and her husband had not saved a sou, at least they had never owed anything but the running debts of the tailor and the cobbler. Louise was not extravagant and managed her meager budget well. Her coquetry was content with little: a bit of ribbon, a flower, a trifle adorned her; she cut her own inexpensive dresses with fairy fingers and trimmed her hats with the art and taste of an expert milliner.

Certainly, like the small fry among civil servants, they knew those dreadful ends of the month when in the purse — limp or swollen with air like a bellows — a few small silver coins clink, spent parsimoniously on potatoes and cheap vegetables, until, the lean times past, one takes one’s revenge and feasts merrily upon returning from the tax collector’s. But it was the first time they had found themselves in such destitution.

Grey reflections assailed Coste: he caught himself regretting his departure from Peyras and the money spent on the move. He was haunted by the thought of the fifty francs borrowed from his colleague and a bill of one hundred and twenty-five francs left outstanding at his tailor’s in Peyras, which he had promised before leaving to pay off in installments.

Yet this fit of discouragement soon passed. On the threshold of his home, the sight of the mountainous landscape, resplendent with sun, a few tips of the hat from passing villagers in their Sunday best, gathered on the square, the joyful cries of Rose and Paul frolicking in the little garden — all of it chased away his melancholy. Coste recovered his good spirits. Besides, why despair? The allowance he was about to request would set him afloat again, and they would live as before in Peyras.

“Listen,” he said at once to Louise, “I was forgetting… Before I do anything else, I’m going to write my application for the allowance… but first let me kiss you, darling.”

Louise, busy arranging the kitchen utensils, held out her lips. Jean noticed then that her eyes were red.

“You’ve been crying, naughty girl? What’s the matter, little wife?” he cried in a caressing voice, rushing to her side. “What! You’re crying again! Whatever for, my darling?”

“I miss Peyras. All morning, while you were away, I did nothing but think of my parents… of back there… You see,” she added, as tears slid down her wax-pale cheeks, “you see, I cannot get used to the idea that it’s over — living there, strolling about on Sundays — that we’ll only go back once a year, for the holidays, like strangers, that our whole life will be spent here, in this hole or some other just like it, God knows where, among unknown faces… Oh, you’re lucky, you, to feel at home everywhere and to console yourself so quickly!”

She made a gesture of anguish, clasped her hands, and sighed heavily.

“Always your dark thoughts, my darling little fool!… You envy me, you say, but that’s because I’m a philosopher. The civil servant is a bird on a branch — he goes wherever the wind blows; he has no country anymore, that’s all!”

He broke off, for Louise was sobbing. He realized how much his clumsy words had hurt her. He drew her onto his lap and, almost rocking her, murmured:

“Come now, my Louise, don’t cry anymore. I’ve hurt you, without meaning to. Forgive me — it’s my nature. But if I am thoughtless, I love you dearly, you know. Why despair? Haven’t you your children with you, our beautiful children, and your husband? Isn’t that worth more than your hometown?”

“Oh yes, yes, my Jean, but I feel so sad, so sad…”

“Bah! We’ll come back to Peyras one day, and as headmaster, I promise—”

Rose, followed by Paul — who was sniggering slyly — burst in like a gust of wind, the door slamming behind her, and created a diversion.

“Papa! Papa!” cried the little girl with a lisp. “Paulou says those mountains are made of sugar. Is it true there’s candy, lots and lots, and that we’ll go and get some?”

Jean and Louise’s faces cleared, and through the open window they gazed at the mountain streaming with light under the noonday sun. Certain slabs of limestone, dazzling white, had crystalline appearances that explained Rose’s words. Paul was now laughing uproariously. Little Rose, not understanding the laughter, opened her big blue eyes wide, her finger still pointed toward the mountain, white as an enormous sugar loaf with silver-flecked fractures. She was pretty enough to eat, with her tangled hair, the innocent astonishment of her rosy little face, and her very serious, slightly offended expression. Louise swept her wildly into her arms. Smiling at the little girl’s repeated questions, she forgot her sorrow. Her calm persisted through the day.

In the afternoon, hearing Jean hum a song they used to sing together in the days of their courtship, she felt happy and joined her thin, wavering voice to the deep voice of her husband.

But despite herself, in the days that followed she was again seized by languor, tormented by homesickness. It came to her especially in the morning, in bed, where — their settling-in complete — she lingered, weary from her difficult pregnancy, while Jean tended to his pupils and watched over Rose and Paul as they played in the garden.

Her ailing condition predisposed her to these bouts of nostalgia. If she tried to get up, to shake off the melancholy that gripped her by keeping busy, she found her legs weak, incapable of any effort, less resilient by the day; she was seized by fits of breathlessness; she had palpitations and dizzy spells caused by the anemia of her exhausted body. And so great was her lassitude before long that she would throw herself back on the bed, half-dressed. Then, eyes on the ceiling, she would daydream for hours on end. Her imagination conjured the sweet native land, the friends and acquaintances she had left behind there, amid memories of peaceful and happy hours. She longed for those Sunday promenades where she would pass among the groups, on her husband’s arm, under the cool shade of the plane trees, followed by envious glances from her former shopmates. And suddenly, in a dreadful distress of soul, deepened by the solitude and silence of the room, she would bury her face in the hollow of the pillow and, shaken by great sobs, weep bitterly for the past.

Jean often surprised her in the midst of these crying spells, when he came between lessons to check on her. He scolded her with caresses but, clumsy as he was, did not always succeed in calming or consoling her. Tenderly, he urged her to go out, to take the children for walks around Maleval, to make the most of this fine autumn weather for distraction.

She agreed. One afternoon, feeling better, she took Rose and Paul, who were delighted by this unexpected outing. But when, crossing the village, she found herself the focus of every gaze, unable to fix her own on familiar sights, to rest it upon a known or friendly face, she could not bear it. Her eyes brimming with tears, pulling her bewildered children back toward home in a sudden about-face, she returned in haste to dream of her native land, exasperated by her husband’s consoling words.

Jean persisted, however, alarmed. At all costs he wanted to wrest her from these dismal reveries punctuated by childish complaints. On Sundays and Thursdays — the days off — he managed to draw her out of the house where she was consumed by nostalgic longing. At first they kept away from the village, far from the curious gazes that were a torment to Louise. The autumnal peace of the fields — which, under the rosy splendors of the sunsets, seemed already plunged in the deep dream so close at hand of winter — the stillness of the hollows, whose sleeping echoes were awakened by the children’s amused cries, the solitude of the white roads bordered by russet plane trees, the halts in the thickets of holm oaks from which, at their approach, the blackbirds fled with startled cries — all of it drew them closer together and slowly brought a measure of calm and forgetfulness to Louise’s trembling, aching soul. The boisterous high spirits of Rose and Paul, their gambols and their babble, captured her interest. Before the sights and novelties of this country, so new to them, born as they were on the plains, the children’s surprise frequently expressed itself in funny questions, unexpected comparisons, and reflections so bizarre that Louise, distracted and amused, forgot her pain and grew accustomed to her new life.

Often, sitting in the shade to rest, she found her smile again watching her husband become a boy once more, romping around her with Rose and Paul. Their bursts of laughter were contagious, as when Jean pretended to chase Rose as she fled before him like a fledgling with uncertain movements, her arms outstretched and flapping like frail wings, uttering little cries, or when he swiftly hid behind a tree, a bush, a rock, only to spring out suddenly crying: “Peekaboo! Peekaboo!” — to the wild delight of the little ones.

Jean, noticing that Louise was more cheerful, less dreamy, after these outings, claimed that his professional duties consumed him, and now that she knew the area and the people a little, urged her to visit the tradesmen herself.

There Louise met some women with whom she stopped to chat. The attentions, the flattery shown her, a certain respect she noticed in these peasant women — charmed to strike up a conversation with such a pretty little “lady” and to gossip about other people’s affairs — were so many distractions that made her stay in Maleval less odious. Her daily spells of dejection, without vanishing entirely, became rarer and less profound. She took pleasure in reporting to Jean, in minute detail, the conversations she had had with this or that woman. Acquaintanceships even formed; she visited neighbors who, in turn, came to sew beside her in the town-hall room, which was little used and in practice belonged to the schoolmaster.

“There — she’s settling in,” Jean told himself. He observed with satisfaction the change taking place.

Louise, however, had wanted to become friends with the schoolmistress; but Mademoiselle Bonniol, very discreet, kept her distance. The old spinster was always amiable and smiling when they met. But something of a creature of habit, adoring her own home, she rarely went out. Once her teaching was done, she shut herself up in her quarters, where she could be heard all the time chattering childishly with her beautiful white angora cat or with her caged canaries. Devout, but without a sour look about her, she went every evening to pray at the church or to knit with the curate’s sister, her friend — an old maid of her own age. Yet from time to time she would slip shyly into the Costes’ home, bringing sweets for Rose and Paul and taking them back to her own place — which delighted Rose especially, who so loved “the white pussycat and the yellow birdies” of mademoiselle.

If Louise spoke less and less of Peyras, she gave Jean other worries. As the time of her confinement approached, her fatigue increased. Because of her growing weakness, she was no longer of any use in the house. The whole last month she spent without stirring from her low chair. Fortunately, the gossip of the neighbors, attentive around her, was a distraction. Jean, outside of school hours, no longer left her side, kissing her eyes, lavishing on her his inexhaustible tenderness. Attentive to her every gesture, submissive to her every whim, he corrected pupils’ homework beside her, or engrossed the mayor’s decrees or secretarial papers.

To be sure, the poor fellow could have done with some rest himself, some calm. He felt it only too often. For want of time to prepare his lessons, he sometimes found himself embarrassed, hesitant before his pupils. But while reproaching himself for it, he acknowledged the impossibility of doing otherwise.

Money was scarce; they hired a woman only rarely, for the washing, and grudgingly at that! So, in addition to his professional labors, the schoolmaster used his free moments to put everything in order about the house; he cleaned, swept, cooked after a fashion; it was he who washed, put to bed, and tended the children; he who, in the evenings, once his little household was abed, might have been seen — had the shutters not been closed — with a kitchen apron tied around his waist, soaking linen or washing dishes. After which he would go to bed, exhausted; but despite his thinness, he had inherited from his peasant forebears a sturdy constitution and slept like a log until dawn, unless Louise needed some small attention in the night. In the morning he woke refreshed, full of courage, and at once harnessed himself to his hard labor without complaint, keeping — so long as his Louise smiled at him and his children too — his unshakable good humor and his precious insouciance.

Yet the situation scarcely improved. Life was as dear at Maleval as at Peyras. The five hundred francs less that he earned would have been sorely needed. Could one feed Louise, so frail, on potatoes or dried beans? Already, in the first days of November, he had paid off the arrears; but, as before, he had found himself with no advance for the coming month, since, true to his commitments, he had sent twenty francs — nearly all that remained after paying the suppliers — to his tailor in Peyras.

“Will you be getting any money soon?” asked Louise, anxiously.

And Jean would answer, full of confidence — if only to reassure her:

“Oh, you know, they’re never in much of a hurry, as a rule… Those offices — they take months and months… but they’ll make up their minds eventually. Look — something tells me that within a fortnight we’ll be fingering a few fine gold louis.”

Nothing came, however. Yes — an envelope stamped by the academy inspectorate, which set Coste’s heart pounding. Seized with dread at the thought of a mere refusal of aid, he hid in his classroom before tearing open the bands. A veil — perhaps a tear — passed before his eyes: the paper contained only these words:

No credit having been entered in the departmental budget for the past two years for relocation expenses, it was impossible either to grant or even to account for the request for assistance submitted by the schoolmaster of Maleval.

Jean turned pale, thinking of the future.

“What will Louise say?”

Given the state his wife was in, he resolved to conceal his setback from her; he would evade any questions or answer vaguely.

Nevertheless, he refused to believe the future was compromised; he gave himself over to calculations, to schemes that his excellent heart conceived and approved but which were only the uncertain fruit of his ineradicable illusions, of his ignorance of material life. So much so that he promised himself he would economize, pare down his meager expenses, unearth remunerative but chimerical work, spend his evenings — his nights, if need be — doing clerical work, productive copying, all of this without realizing how few resources Maleval offered and what refusals would greet his overtures to the bailiffs, solicitors, or notaries of the departmental capital and its surroundings.

Coste thought, in truth, of only one thing: that he would need more money now; his burdens were about to increase; Louise would be incapable of nursing the child to come; therefore it was his duty to manage, to work double; and he deluded himself, still hoping that with courage and perseverance he would find his way out of this difficulty.

To crown his misfortune, and at the cost of what suffering — which left her half dead — Louise gave birth in December to twin girls. She recovered slowly; despite her extreme weakness, she clung tenaciously to life; but how pale and frail she was!

The doctor prescribed a restorative diet — consequently a very costly one — and complete rest. And so, at the end of the month, Jean discovered that his salary of one hundred francs would not be enough to clear his accounts. A heap of bills had piled up at home. So as not to be left entirely without a sou, he paid the most pressing debts and was forced to let the others wait. His good heart kept him from railing against fate. He set about loving and rocking the two twins, casting about for a way out of his predicament.

He wrote to friends, soliciting a loan. All alleged various pretexts for refusing to help. Fresh disillusionment! But his devotion and his stubborn hopes gave him the courage to press one of them who had been dear to him since childhood and whom he knew to be comfortable. This friend nearly took offense and replied, not without irritation, with a second refusal, curtly justified. Resentment was gathering in Coste’s heart.

In these circumstances, however, he had nothing but praise for his neighbors and for the parents of his pupils. They rendered him many services and sent treats to Louise. Mademoiselle Bonniol especially proved most helpful. Often she came to sit at Louise’s bedside. She could be seen appearing every late afternoon, her face smiling, with her knitting and her white angora cat. Rose would immediately seize the “pussycat” and play with it like a doll. The very tame cat willingly let itself be stroked, purring, by the child’s plump little hands, and closed its beautiful blue-green eyes to the lisping words of the little darling who rocked and kissed it ceaselessly.

Yet, through indiscretions and complaints that escaped Louise in front of the neighbors and were promptly carried abroad by them, the schoolmaster’s growing straits were guessed at and gossiped about — which produced a detestable effect among most of the peasants, who are little inclined to pity in such matters. Had he been less preoccupied, Coste might have noticed certain less-than-charitable smiles when he crossed paths with certain people in the village streets.

On New Year’s Day, he had a happy surprise. An aunt of his wife’s sent a gold louis of twenty francs for the children, which was duly celebrated.

“There,” he said cheerfully. “That will be for the christening.”

This christening, fixed for the second Sunday in January, was a source of great anxiety for Coste. He had been dreading, ever since Louise’s confinement, that his in-laws might come and install themselves in his house for several days. Louise expressed the wish to have her mother near her. He dared not oppose her, nor quite confess the ever-worsening money troubles in which he was floundering.

He had therefore written and was impatiently awaiting a reply. His mother-in-law — that he could still endure. She might even be a precious help. But he knew his father-in-law and dreaded his arrival. Once at Maleval, the man would not easily be dislodged. It was almost with terror that Jean — who for his dear Louise’s sake nevertheless loved his in-laws — reckoned up the fresh expenses the carpenter’s visit would entail. The man, proud of his son-in-law the schoolmaster, would be delighted to play the gentleman and shed his work smock among peasants dazzled by his swagger and his gift of gab. He would happily settle in at Maleval, eating and drinking without counting, standing rounds of beer for this one and that in lordly fashion, and thus running up debts at the café in his son-in-law’s name — debts he would assuredly leave Jean to settle, along with his other costly whims and binges. A real torment for Coste, who nevertheless breathed not a word of it to his wife, too blind where her parents were concerned — they who had spoiled her and whom she adored. If they came, he would receive them, whatever his vexation, with a good welcome and a good face, as a son should. Never would Jean have confessed his difficulties to his father-in-law and mother-in-law. They would have resented him for it and bitterly reproached him for a destitution that, inexplicable to them, would have seemed an odious deception.

And he felt his heart tighten until it hurt.

A letter postmarked Peyras reached him at last. Jean breathed a sigh of relief after reading it. On the pretext that work was pressing, his father-in-law informed him that they found it impossible to be away even a single day. They were happy, he added, to know Louise was delivered and out of danger. They should not, then, be counted on for the twins’ christening; but when the fine weather came, they hoped Louise and the children would spend a few days with them at Peyras.

If Jean breathed easy, he was not deceived as to the real worth of his father-in-law’s excuse. He knew the spendthrift habits of the carpenter — an excellent worker, but a rabid gambler.

“Lucky for me they didn’t have the money for the journey,” he murmured. “No doubt the queen of spades has cleaned out the old man’s pockets.”

Louise wept on learning of her parents’ decision. She too, without saying so, understood the true cause of it, and she deeply regretted being unable to send them the necessary funds. But she did not insist: Jean lulled her sorrow with the promise of sending her and the little ones to spend a fortnight at Peyras the following spring.

“You see,” he told her, in answer to the eternal objection of lack of money, “it will be a way to save. Once the fare is paid, you’ll have nothing to spend over there. And I’ll manage on my own here to live on very little. So you’ll go, for certain.”

The christening was celebrated simply. Monsieur and Madame Rastel agreed to stand as godfather and godmother to one twin. The other had to make do with an obliging neighbor and Mademoiselle Bonniol.

A bottle of white wine and a few dry biscuits met the expense. The mayor and his wife gave their goddaughter an ivory rattle with silver bells — a useless trifle. Mademoiselle Bonniol gave a woolen vest she had made herself; the neighbor, a peasant, considered it quite enough to have paid for the baptismal candle and dispensed with any gift at all.

In the village it was declared, after the ceremony, that the schoolmaster, for a gentleman, “hardly did things properly”: no party, no dinner, a mere bite to eat, and a meager one at that! And among themselves they mocked the straits of this civil servant in his frock coat, this outsider.

A fortnight later, Coste received a second letter. It was from his mother, widowed two years and living alone in her village. By the hand of an obliging neighbor, she informed him that, having gone suddenly blind, she had henceforth no one to rely upon but the son for whom she and her husband had “eaten through everything they had.” Since the death of her husband — killed by the grief of seeing his four corners of vineyard ruined by phylloxera, then sold to pay their debts — she had toiled as long as she could and, come what may, earned her poor living; now, if her son did not take her in, she had no recourse but public charity, unless she was “to go and die like a beggar in a hospital.”

Jean was devastated by this news — a blow fit to finish him off. Too good a son, he did not hesitate a moment; but he felt a surge of rebellion against the cruel fate that was crushing him. Louise, to whom he at once showed the letter, dissolved in tears.

“And I thought,” she blurted out, “that your mother had money.”

These words gave Coste a glimmer of hope; his mother — who knows? — might perhaps help.

“I think so too,” he replied, “but it isn’t certain. She has always denied it since the seizure… but she is so thrifty…”

“Didn’t she still have a piece of land, as you used to say?… Well then, we’ll tell her to sell it, if she has no money.”

“Sell it! She would never consent. It’s all she has left, and what she received as her dowry. I know my mother: she has the peasant’s pride. She already suffered to see my father’s property put up at auction and scattered to the highest bidder. You could sooner tear her heart out than persuade her to part with the field she has from her family. Still, who knows? She may have a hundred francs or so put aside, and she’ll give them to us when she sees our destitution.”

The following Thursday, Jean set out. He brought back his mother, whom everyone called Caussette, a diminutive of Causse, her family name. The travel expenses further lightened the schoolmaster’s meager purse. Great as was his desire, he dared not, upon first seeing her again, question his mother about whatever resources she might possess.

There would be time later, in a few days, when the old woman, transplanted from her village, had grown acquainted with her new home and had warmed herself, in the affection of her family, from the cold of her two years of solitude. Yes, he would speak to her next month, and he clung desperately to this hope, relieved — out of fear of being disappointed — at the thought of having a few more weeks’ reprieve before questioning his mother. He foresaw, indeed, that she would resist, that she would not easily let go of her few sous, but he hoped to soften her heart. And, trusting, he waited, working from morning to night, without a second’s rest, without pausing for breath, for not only had a place been added to the family table, but the blind woman’s presence was an added burden of labor and worry for the brave young man.

Caussette could not console herself for having lost her sight. What is most precious to a man, is it not lou sens et la bista? (reason and sight), she would often repeat, as so many ancestors before her had repeated it, grown old and blind.

She was a tiny old woman, scrawny, all weathered and parchmented by fieldwork, who had once been very active and restless. The pains in her legs and close to half a century of toil — in the wind, the sun, the frost, and the rain — had shriveled and bent her like one of those gnarled vine stocks she had worked so long with her own hands. All day long she shuffled from chair to chair, unable, because of the cold, to go and bask in the sun, or else she turned and turned endlessly about the kitchen and her room. Sometimes she would sit by the fire and there, pitying herself, mumble prayers to the Virgin, to all the saints — words in which wept the longing for bright sunshine, for sweet light. Little by little her voice would rise and, distinctly, pour forth in endless lamentations.

“My God! Blessed Virgin!” she would moan. “Is it possible that I should be like this!… My poor husband, you are the lucky one, pushing up the mallows… Oh, this darkness! And it will always be like this, dear Jesus!… To think I shall never see you again, never, never, my darlings.”

And she would pass her dry hands — their earthy tan flaking to white with time — over the curly hair of Paul and Rose, who gazed at her in wonder and a little fear at those whitish, fixed eyes that, wide open, saw nothing.

The blind woman’s continual, monotonous lamentations grated on Louise, very nervous and irritable since her confinement. The young woman was beginning to get up, after having been bedridden for a month. But, a pale convalescent, she suffered excruciating breathlessness and violent palpitations at the slightest effort. The presence of her mother-in-law pleased her only indifferently. She had never loved her husband’s parents, the old woman especially. They had always regarded her as an intruder, never quite forgiving her for having usurped, in their son’s home, the place of another — richer — bride, whose money would have saved them from ruin. In the past, during the few days of holiday that she and her husband, after the reconciliation, spent with them, they had made a show of treating her cordially to deceive Jean; but given the occasion, a smoldering resentment would appear, rising to their hard, almost hateful faces, and, insincere as they were, they scarcely spared her their wounding allusions. And Louise still recalled them bitterly, those hours spent beside those two old people who had no affection for her.

That is why this daily tête-à-tête by the fire with Caussette, to which winter obliged her, vexed and even embittered her. For, privately, she blamed the blind woman for not having spontaneously offered them her savings. Since they were feeding her, what need had she to hold on to her money — that money which would have brought such relief to Jean and chased from his brow the cares that darkened it? For want of mutual affection and trust, long silences reigned between the two women. And many a time Louise bit her tongue to hold back the impatient words that the old woman’s whimpering drew to her lips. She was careful not to provoke her, so that the old woman might show herself merciful when the decisive confrontation came — the one Jean put off from day to day.

“How do we know she has anything?” he would murmur sometimes, to excuse his growing hesitations.

But Louise refused to believe that Caussette had no money and was not jealously guarding it, out of an old person’s avarice. She had noticed that whenever she entered the children’s room, where the blind woman also slept, the old woman would follow her, suspicious, ears pricked, dogging her every step.

“She’s got her nest egg in that trunk, for sure,” Louise thought. “She’s afraid I’ll rummage through her things and find her coins. The proof is, she never opens that trunk in front of us. And to think we’re suffering, that we barely have bread to eat… Oh, the miserly old thing!”

In those dark hours when all the evil instincts lurking in the folds of the soul come creeping out, Louise sometimes went so far as to wish for Caussette’s death. At least, if no money were found, they could sell the land and free themselves of the arrears so heavy to drag along, which weighed on Jean’s existence.

Louise urged her husband daily to appeal to Caussette’s purse. But Jean hesitated, uneasy, wondering how his mother would respond to his approach. Since she fell silent every time anyone alluded to the subject of expenses, it was either because she possessed nothing or because she intended to keep her money. And he procrastinated, although Louise pressed him ardently to make up his mind.

Yet he was the most wretched of them all, for he bore all the cares and all the fatigue. After his already grueling day’s work, he continued to tend the household, Louise being just barely able to bottle-feed the two twins and watch over them. And so Jean’s stooped shoulders, his chapped hands, told of his harsh labors, and his eyes were ringed from his vigils and his sleepless nights.

Every morning, before the pupils arrived, he made his rounds of the suppliers who, irregularly or badly paid, had scarcely any regard left for so poor a wretch and did not spare him their surly looks or their rebuffs. How often he came home beaten down, his former fine insouciance gone, endlessly chewing over the same dark, anguished thoughts. And no sooner was he in his house than, instead of calm, instead of the peaceful home he dreamed of, he found the histrionics of his blind mother and the great, sad eyes of his sickly, pale wife. He recovered a little peace only in his classroom, where, once his pupils had gone, he sometimes retreated to weep in solitude.

Louise could sense her husband’s torments and, forgetting for a moment her own physical suffering, was touched by Jean’s silent devotion. Then she in turn became loving and tender, pitied him for his life so full of struggles and pains, and accused herself of being an invalid, “a good-for-nothing.” Their kisses and caresses were only the sweeter for it and poured into their hearts a few minutes of oblivion. Then, united in their painful tenderness, they would look together at the future, so black, and try to find a way out of the impasse. For every month it was the same: Coste’s salary vanished like smoke, leaving no trace in their fingers, and the debts, extinguished on one side, grew by as much on the other.

“But why don’t you speak to your mother?” Louise would gently insist. “I’m sure she has money. Why wouldn’t she sell her land? It would let us clear our debts, even get a little ahead, and once the arrears are paid and the bad luck broken, we’d live modestly but manage to make ends meet.”

“No, I don’t dare… it would be wasted effort… for the more I think about it, the more I believe we’re hoping in vain. I know my mother. Would she even believe me? Wouldn’t she heap bitter reproaches on me? She’s so unhappy, the poor woman, at having lost her sight on top of everything, that it’s turned her sour. And then?”

“All the more reason… since she’s unhappy, she’ll take pity more easily. Besides, she can feel how well you look after her, and she’ll understand that with all our burdens, we simply can’t do otherwise.”

“You’re right; but in the state she’s in…”

“Oh, in the state she’s in,” Louise could not help saying, “it would be better if—”

She did not finish, before her husband’s horrified, grief-stricken look.

“Oh, my Louise,” he murmured painfully, “must you suffer too?… Oh, it’s dreadful, this poverty!… Yes” — and his voice was choked with sobs — “we are very wretched, but she is my mother and I remember how she loved me when I was a child.”

“Forgive me, Jean, forgive me. You see, my mind wanders… I feel myself turning wicked. I’m so weak, and then so sad to know you’re so unhappy.”

She threw herself at him, weeping. He consoled her.

“Still,” she went on, “we must put an end to it; our troubles are growing. Nothing prevents you from trying. She loves you, and who knows — when she learns what you’re suffering, you and our children, her mother’s heart will soften and give her the strength to make a sacrifice.”

“May you be right, my Louise!” And he promised to act the very next day.

---

Several days passed and still Jean hesitated.

“I’m waiting for the right moment,” he told his wife. “I’ll do it, you’ll see.”

But in the blind woman’s presence, his indecision paralyzed him and he felt as weak as a child.

One evening, however, as he returned from an errand where he had had to endure, from the butcher, a brutal reminder of an outstanding bill and the threat to cut off all credit, he told himself, nearly in tears, that he could no longer bear such humiliations, so painful to his self-respect and so damaging to his profession.

Toward the end of dinner, he made a sign to Louise, who withdrew to her room. He himself put Rose and Paul to bed, his heart tight, pale but resolved.

“Mother, I need to speak with you,” he said to the blind woman, who was preparing to retire.

Caussette started at her son’s curt tone and muttered.

She and Jean remained alone together in the kitchen. The fire in the stove, fed with wood, was dying. A yellow tallow candle was guttering to its end. Outside, the wind roared among the mountain rocks, whistled over the shuddering rooftops, and, slipping beneath the front door, filled the vestibule with shrill, tearing sounds like the cries of tormented souls wandering in the darkness.

Jean did not know where to begin. His mind adrift, he rose, poked the fire, threw on a log, and drew his chair closer, his back frozen, his heart pounding heavily.

A painful silence hung in the air, while the howling gusts shrieked through the valley and the neighboring hollows, like the approach of a marching crowd of giants. Everything trembled.

“Well!” exclaimed Caussette. “What is it you want to tell me? We’d be better off in bed than freezing our backs in your kitchen.”

“Mother,” said Jean with effort, “there are seven of us eating now. I earn barely a hundred francs a month. Louise is ill, and her confinement—”

Without reflecting on the enormous disproportion of situation and habits, on the vast difference between peasant life and her son’s, the old woman selfishly interrupted him and cried out, dazzled by a figure that represented a large sum to her:

“Goodness! Why do you complain? I hear you, you and your wife, complaining all the time since I’ve been here. A hundred francs — we never had as much with your poor father, barely half. And still, we’d have lived comfortably if you hadn’t cost us so much, making a gentleman out of you. A hundred francs!” she added, using a vivid local expression which, among the peasants, serves to paint the very height of wealth. “With a hundred francs, we’d have had golden pegs to hang our hats on!”

Jean bowed his head under the torrent of these words, which foretold a certain defeat; but the memory of the shames he had endured stiffened his courage.

“Listen to me, Mother,” he begged, “and be kind, as you were when I was little. A hundred francs — it’s a great deal, true, for you. But consider that we harvest neither wheat, nor oil, nor wine, as you did — that we must buy everything, except water… and then I’ve had such setbacks. Just as you once did for me, I’ve had to go into debt so that my children and my sick wife would not suffer — to come to Maleval—”

Caussette started and opened her mouth to interrupt.

“Don’t protest,” Jean cried in a firm voice, seeing how little his words were moving his mother. “I know what you’re going to say. I should have stayed over there, in Peyras? But what’s done is done, and the schoolmaster is obliged to go where his superiors send him — they don’t consult his tastes. In any case, it’s neither the café nor bad conduct that caused my debts. Besides, everything can still be put right. Let me pay off my arrears and we can live in peace.”

“Well, then what?” retorted the old woman, suspicious and a touch mocking.

“Well, I’m counting on you, Mother. You have some money, and—”

“It’s all lies!” the blind woman burst out. “It’s all a scheme to swindle me out of my money! It’s not true you have debts — no, no!”

And, malicious, with hatred on her deeply wrinkled face:

“It’s that wife of yours putting you up to this again, so she can preen herself and drape her shoulders and her pretty little face in fine fripperies! Besides, it’s not true I have money. It all went, into the hands of the bailiffs. Your schooling, your books ruined us. We fed you till you were twenty without your ever lifting a finger; you never earned us a single sou. Do you hear me — if your poor father is dead, it’s from the grief of having slaved, of having worn himself to the bone, only to see our land sold off like deadbeats’—”

She was weeping. Jean would have liked to end this painful scene; but despite everything, a faint hope of softening his mother remained.

“No, Mother, I’m not lying to you. You can ask the suppliers and they’ll tell you what I owe them.”

“Yes, after you’ve come to an arrangement with them to fleece me, you scoundrel.”

“Mother, I beg you,” he pleaded, with tears in his voice. “I am so wretched, and if you could see—”

“If I could see! I wouldn’t bother you for long, believe me! I’d go back home and earn my living, you ingrate. Oh, I know your wife doesn’t love me. I can feel well enough that I’ve been a burden since I got here. So long as she can primp and pamper herself and play the fine lady, she cares little for your poor mother, who is wretched enough at not being able to see without being tormented like this—”

This venomous hostility toward his wife nearly made Jean lose both patience and respect; he contained himself and, very humbly:

“Mother, you’re being unjust. Louise is ill and spends nothing on her clothes. I have four children. Misfortune has it in for us, and if we’re hard up—”

“If you’re hard up, is that my fault?” the blind woman cut in harshly. “You have four children? Since you made them, feed them now; they didn’t ask to come. And then, and then — you’re trying to hoodwink me. If what you say is true, so much the worse for you — you asked for it. You should have listened to us, your poor father and me. Instead of your penniless girl, you’d have married Léocadie — a fine, strapping girl who’d have brought you real money and hard coin. That would’ve let you ease our burden and stop them selling our vineyards like we were crooks. Yes, too bad for you. I tell you I have no money.”

Jean listened without anger, as though dazed. An immense weariness crushed him. This persistent rancor he had thought gone for years, these hateful reproaches aimed at Louise, this selfish avarice that showed hideously on his mother’s face — all of it wounded him to the depths of his filial love.

But suddenly a glimmer of hope. Caussette, as if frightened by this silence made more sinister by the terrifying noises outside, has just spoken, and it seems to Jean that an emotion trembles in the old woman’s voice.

“Ah, if I had money,” she concedes shrewdly, and as though seized by pity, “I wouldn’t say no… one could see whether what you say is true.”

Jean has fallen to his knees before the blind woman.

“Mother,” he sobs, “you have always loved me. Believe me and be kind to your unhappy son, to your Jean. Since you have no money, then…”

“Then what?” says Caussette, turning toward him her brown mask, furrowed with deep wrinkles, pierced by white eyes in which a gleam lights up like a gaze.

At that moment, a gust of wind shakes the door and the candle goes out abruptly. Darkness invades the room; a band of red light streams from the stove and strikes full on the peasant woman’s face, whose lips seem to contract in a grimace. Jean has risen to light another candle; his gaze falls on his mother’s face and, seeing it so hard, so closed to all pity, almost hideous in that red glow, he turns away, feeling himself defeated once more, and a sob tears through his chest. Groping, he searches for a match on the ledge of the shadowy mantelpiece.

“You’ve gone quiet!” cries Caussette, unaware of the darkness reigning in the kitchen. “You’re pretending to cry!… What are you moving?… Why are you walking about?… Answer me, Jean.”

These words come from a constricted throat. Her son’s silence fills Caussette with dread. She remembers those children who murder their aged parents to inherit. Instinctively, she pushes her chair back, hands outstretched, to ward off and defend herself.

“I’m lighting another candle — the other’s just gone out,” Jean finally answers, and fortunately he has his back turned to his mother and does not notice the panic or the dreadful gesture by which the blind woman’s horrible thought betrays itself.

“Ah!” sighs Caussette, relieved.

Jean has sat down again. Suspicious, the blind woman fixes upon him her white, unmoving gaze that seems to see. The hardness of her features, lit once more, appears to deepen. A sharp pain digs, like an acrid point, into Coste’s heart. And, in the rout of his hopes, his mind blank, he takes his head in his hands and dissolves in tears. Then broken, halting words, words of burning supplication, burst from his defeated being like a prayer, like the wild, despairing cry of a child:

“Mother, Mother… I beg you… be kind… help me… pull me out of this… if you knew all I have suffered… all I am suffering… Mother, you can… have pity…”

And he clasps his hands toward her as if she could see him.

“But I have no money, do you hear?… Not a sou. What can I do?… Alas, nothing.”

It seems she is relenting at last, that the sincere and desperate appeal of her son is reaching her.

“But,” murmurs Jean, trembling with hope, “if you were to sell your land…”

Caussette cuts him off. Like a fury she rises; her hands on her head, she invokes every saint and, in a hissing voice, as though pronouncing a curse, she cries:

“Sell my land!… All that’s left of the Causses, of my people!… Isn’t it enough that your father’s vineyards belong to Tom, Dick, and Harry — you’d have me do the same with my land!… Oh, ungrateful son! That wicked wife of yours has certainly changed you… Sell my land! Strip me bare!… Wait at least till I’m dead and gone. After that, you can squander it all with your pauper wife, if you like… Ah, your poor children! You won’t leave them so much as a shirt to cover themselves… yes, you’ll eat them out of house and home, spendthrifts, wastrels… I have nothing and I will sell nothing… No, no, no!”

In haste, at the risk of crashing into the furniture, she retreats to her room and, the door shut, can be heard still crying:

“My God! Blessed Virgin! They’ll be the death of me by inches… Sell my land! Yes, so they can send me to the hospital afterward… That vile woman, how she’s changed my boy! Jean, who used to be so gentle and good… Ah, he met her to the ruin of us all!”

Jean had remained by the fire, head bowed, dry-eyed. At last he rose.

“She refused, didn’t she?” said Louise, seeing him enter.

“You heard us?” asked Jean, anxious and very pale.

“I heard shouting, but with this wind… What did she say?”

“Oh, Louise, she doesn’t believe me,” he answered in deep despair.

“And yet she does have money; she hovers around me enough whenever I go into her room. If I can get my hands on it, she’ll scream, but never mind—”

“No, Louise, you will not do that. Don’t speak like that — it pains me too much. Besides, she can’t have a large sum. Only the sale of the land would set us right, and she won’t do it — she never will.”

“Then what shall we do?” sobbed Louise. Jean made a vague gesture of hopelessness and blew out the light.

In the next room, the blind woman, lying in bed, went on wailing; but her voice was drowned out by the thousand giant voices of the wind — plunging into the cavities of the rocks that roared and whistled, shaking the rooftops that groaned, driving the weathervanes wild so that they screeched, honing itself on the cracks of doors and windows that heaved and cracked — a concert of terror, dismal sounds, strange resonances, howlings of invisible, unmuzzled beasts.

---

Time passed. Always the same troubles, always the same cares.

On the first Thursday of every month, Coste — to save the thirty sous the stagecoach cost — now walked to the cantonal tax collector’s, a round trip of twelve kilometers each way. He set out early in the morning and, avoiding the main road, took roundabout paths through the woods, which lengthened his journey. He hoped thus to conceal a departure he considered humiliating, and to avoid unpleasant encounters. If he saw someone appear in the distance, he would promptly hide in a ditch, behind a thicket of oaks, for fear of being recognized, questioned, of having to blush while inventing a pretext for his early-morning walks. This dread did not leave him even after his arrival at the cantonal capital. As it was market day, he always feared coming face to face with a peasant from Maleval, who would have expressed a certain surprise at seeing the schoolmaster so dusty, and arrived at market “in Monsieur Soulier’s carriage,” as they say in those parts. And so he would follow the deserted lanes to the tax collector’s house, situated in a suburb of the little town.

No sooner had he drawn his monthly salary than he would run to the pharmacist’s to buy Louise’s medicines and break into the single “blue bill” he clutched in his hand. He would then set off in haste, skirting the cafés and the market, glad to get away before the arrival of the stagecoach and the peasants from Maleval, to plunge into the woods, out of sight, along stony paths rarely frequented except by goats, shepherds, and woodcutters.

For he had about his poverty a kind of morbid modesty, acutely sensitive, which made him take a thousand precautions, shroud the most natural acts in mystery, dissimulating everything for fear of attracting attention, of being noticed and criticized, of feeling shame.

Then, at Maleval, there were endless calculations to manage to satisfy his creditors. He racked his brains over it, consulted his notebooks, added, subtracted, blackening scraps of paper only to arrive always at the same despairing conclusion: that his resources would not suffice. Then he would resolve to pay off a bill too long overdue here, to make a partial payment there, after which he was left, as before, empty-handed and obliged to go into debt again, to reopen the “holes” he had just filled.

For, lacking any reserve, he went back to buying everything on credit, paid higher prices, did not dare to haggle or refuse merchandise that was too expensive, adulterated, or even of questionable quality — at the mercy of certain unscrupulous shopkeepers who exploited his destitution to humiliate and cheat him. And while the month ticked by, he spent his time dreaming of impossible economies, reproaching himself for the few cigarettes he still smoked, vainly seeking a way to increase his insufficient resources. But whatever his goodwill, despite his relentless work in the house, his burdens were too many, too heavy, and his expenses, alas, did not diminish.

Because of Louise, eternally ailing, because of his blind, encumbering mother, and because of the two twins above all, he was forced to resort at least two or three times a week to the services of a charwoman, who, on those days, took half of the three francs he earned himself.

Rose and Paul wore torn clothes and worn-out shoes; his own trousers and jackets were threadbare, holding together by a miracle, coming apart at the slightest snag. And so, in the evening, when everyone was in bed, yawning with fatigue, his eyes stinging and blurred with sleep, he would settle in to sit up in the kitchen. There, by the smoky light of a tallow candle, after having fussed over everything, washed everything, swept everything, he would mechanically thread a needle, darning and patching all the rags heaped on a chair, clumsily mending the shapeless shoes. Often midnight struck in the nocturnal silence and still he was there, busy at his mending, his gaze flickering, no longer thinking, without a tear to moisten his reddened eyelid. And the days flowed by, all alike.

He went out now only rarely, always after dark, hugging the walls, on account of his wretched clothes and also to avoid meeting certain suppliers, to whom he now sent the charwoman — who, one may well imagine, did not scruple to gossip at the schoolmaster’s expense.

To crown it all, Louise, shaken in her frail constitution by her successive pregnancies, was not recovering, as the interminable days flowed on. Still weak and anemic, she seemed to live only by the abnormal brilliance of her gaze, so bright with fever in the spectral dullness of her thin face — no bigger than a fist — beneath the mass of disordered hair. Following several spells and fainting fits, Coste had to send for the doctor from a neighboring village. The doctor diagnosed a state of great weakness, presenting no immediate danger but requiring much care and a carefully chosen diet, so depleted were the young woman’s forces from her confinement. On one visit, as Louise complained of frequent spells of breathlessness, he even advised taking the patient to a celebrated doctor in Montclapiers to consult him about these very painful heart palpitations.

Jean was in despair; too anxious to conceal from his wife his constant worries, he made a point of never speaking to her about them; he had no one to confide in and lived alone with his mortal money cares. Besides, Louise, ill and therefore selfish, scarcely questioned him anymore and retreated into her solitude to pine once more for Peyras and her parents.

For her part, Caussette, while continuing to lament the loss of her eyes, sulked with her son and still more with her daughter-in-law, whom she stubbornly refused to believe was ill. Since the scene that night, she imagined that Jean and Louise were in league to rob her and only spoke of their poverty the better to deceive her. To herself, she grumbled against Louise, whom she pictured as the sole cause of her past ruin and her present fears.

“The lazy thing!” she would growl, still full of hatred. “To have the nerve to let her husband wash her dishes! What a dainty creature… yes, good for nothing but lounging in bed, having nice thick slices served to her, cutlets, fillet, brains, while we eat beans or chickpeas… She didn’t have a penny to her name and wants to play the lady… Poor Jean — he’s done himself in good and proper. That’s what happens — children don’t respect their parents anymore, don’t listen to them anymore. Too bad for him if, instead of a sturdy, hardworking wife, money in his cupboard, and vineyards in the sun, all he’s got is that doll and her fleas… The good Lord is punishing him!”

Her aversion for Louise, her conviction that she alone had put her son up to asking for her money and her land, made her more suspicious by the day. She dreaded being robbed, especially by her daughter-in-law — “capable,” she thought, “of any villainy.” If Louise took a few steps in the kitchen, Caussette would rise at once, draw near to her room, and shut herself in, ear pressed to the door, starting at the slightest creak of the floor or the furniture. She always carried the keys to her trunk in a pocket hidden beneath her skirt, often feeling with an involuntary gesture to make sure they were there, with the persistent dread of losing them. At night she placed them, wrapped in handkerchiefs, under her bolster, buried them in a corner of the mattress, her mind forever at work imagining unfindable hiding places.

It happened that Louise had good days and, to relieve Jean, attended to the household. Caussette was then alarmed by her daughter-in-law’s comings and goings about the house. Despite the cold, she barricaded herself in her room and obstinately refused to leave it. As soon as Louise sat down, the blind woman would approach the stove and hold her dry, shriveled hands to the flame, in a silence thick with mutual hatred, in which one could hear below the monotone of Jean teaching his class or the children’s voices stumbling through a reading lesson. But before Louise could rise again, Caussette would hurry back to her room, groping her way, in order to stand guard over her pitiful savings. And while the young woman, exasperated by such behavior and by her mother-in-law’s hostile manner, would mutter angrily, “Oh, the filthy miser, the hateful woman!” — Caussette, seated on her trunk, the door shut, would mumble on her side, stubbornly fixed on her obsession: “She wants to rob me — that hussy will rob me!”

And so, however brightly the sun might shine in a blue sky, however it might follow rainy or freezing days with mild, luminous ones bearing the promise of spring — as the winters of the Midi so often do — Caussette took care not to descend the stairs, not to go and sit in one of those sheltered nooks, out of the wind, where the old folk of the South love to bask, eyes closed, hands clasped, deliciously soaking up the gentle, life-giving warmth.

Sometimes Jean, appearing suddenly, would say to her with the humble tone of a guilty child:

“Mother, it’s so lovely in the sun; why don’t you come down? You’d be so comfortable, sitting on the front step.”

Caussette would answer in a deliberately coaxing voice, forcing a smile:

“No, my child; my legs ache from my pains… I’d rather stay by the fire.”

Jean would go back downstairs. Then the blind woman would resume her dark, malicious expression:

“Yes,” she would think, “so that glutton of a wife of yours can take the chance to rob me.”

Rose and Paul, by extension, bore the brunt of Caussette’s ill humor. She caressed them less than before, mistrusting even them, imagining that her daughter-in-law was using her grandchildren to spy on her. So much so that when she was in her room, up to who knows what, she would shout at them and shove them roughly away the moment they, curious, cracked the door open. The poor darlings, bewildered, seemed stunned by their grandmother’s harshness.

“Granny is mean,” Rose philosophized, “ever since she got white eyes, isn’t that right, Papa?”

“Oh yes!” Paul confirmed. “She’s always shouting.”

Jean, his eyes full of tears — for he guessed only too well his mother’s thoughts — kissed his little girl and sadly replied:

“Hush, Rosette… it’s not nice to say that. Granny is always kind… but she has great sorrows and it hurts her, since she can’t see anymore.”

“And who put that white in her eyes?” asked Paul.

“It’s because she’s old, very old, and she has worked so very hard.”

“So when you and Mummy get old, you’ll have white in your eyes too? You’ll be mean?”

“Well, yes, Paulou… Hush now, you mustn’t say that… it’s not kind.”

Pensively, the children would contemplate the grandmother’s hard, earthy mask whenever she reappeared, and in their sudden silences one could sense a passing dread of things evil and undefined.

Another heartbreak for Jean was to hear Paul say to him, at other times:

“Papa, why don’t you buy me nice boots anymore? Look — my shoes and sister’s are ugly and full of holes, like the poor children’s; my chilblains are itching.”

Jean, choking back a sob, would turn away.

“Next month,” he would answer evasively, “soon, if you’re very good, my darlings.”

Alas! He knew only too well that the next month would come and that the money would melt away in his fingers once more; once again, Paul’s question would be met with the same evasive words, and the children’s aching little feet, instead of the fur-lined slippers he longed to cover them with, would still be dragging the old shoes he had painstakingly mended during his late-night vigils.

Around this time, two letters reached Coste. One was from his tailor in Peyras, to whom some sixty francs were still owed and who, having received no money order the previous month, begged Jean “not to forget him at the end of the current month, on account of a large payment coming due.” The second letter also came from Peyras, written by the assistant who had lent Coste fifty francs at the time of the move. He too was asking to be repaid. Then, as Jean — much embarrassed — was slow to respond, his former colleague sent a second missive couched in dry, hard terms, in which he was nearly angry that the sum, lent for a few weeks, had been kept for close to six months, and went so far as to speak of bad faith.

Coste answered at once. Very humbly, in simple, pained phrases, he asked for time, apologizing for his broken word — wholly involuntary, since his wife’s illness and the arrival of the twins had caused unforeseen expenses. But deep down, all he was enduring was beginning to embitter him; he could see no way out of his destitution. Resentments rose within him; rebellions fermented in his being, and evil thoughts — foul creatures — swarmed in the depths of his soul. Ah, if only his mother had been willing — if only she still would! And he caught himself loathing that miserly selfishness. Like a flash of lightning, the thought of a possible death — soon, almost desirable — crossed his mind; but he was immediately horrified by it and, in an immense dejection, wept with shame.

And while, seated in his empty classroom, he gasped with anguish at this hopeless situation and felt the hammer-blows of madness pounding at his temples, up above, over his head, in the kitchen, Caussette, suspicious, prowled with heavy tread, uttering her eternal complaints; Louise, for her part, suffered from a heart that sometimes leapt in her chest as though it would burst, and was driven to distraction by her mother-in-law’s ceaseless moaning. Jean would then rush back upstairs; he feared that in his absence Louise might have one of those fainting spells that for some time now left her cold and as though dead after bouts of suffocation — spells that, for the blind woman grumbling in her corner, were merely “the vapors of a little woman who wants to be pitied.”

Thus his life flowed on, without rest, without happiness, between these two women who detested each other, whom only his presence calmed, for — each a burden to the other — they were gradually coming, if not to outright quarreling, at least to exchanging in a low but audible voice more than one disagreeable remark, the prelude to an impending explosion. Jean foresaw and dreaded some painful scene between his mother and his wife — one that grew, day by day, more unavoidable, more imminent.

In the first days of March, Jean, worried about Louise, took her to a doctor in Montclapiers. To meet the expense, he had set aside thirty francs from his monthly salary before paying the suppliers. The doctor declared that Louise had a heart condition. He too prescribed great care, complete rest, a carefully chosen diet — in short, an entire costly course of treatment.

Coste left ten francs for the consultation and as much again at the pharmacist’s for the prescribed medicines.

While Louise waited for him at the stagecoach office, Jean went to make a few small purchases in town. As he was walking back preoccupied, reckoning up the money spent that day and giving himself over to his eternal calculations, he was accosted by a young man coming down the boulevard.

“Pardon me — am I right?… Monsieur Coste?”

“Well, it’s you, Darbel!”

Jean had just recognized one of his former pupils from Peyras. The young man’s neat, almost elegant dress instantly reminded him of his own frayed trouser-cuffs, his frock coat shiny at the elbows and shoulder blades. His cheekbones flushed with a blush of shame.

“And Madame Coste and the children?… They’re well, I hope?”

“The children, yes — but not my wife. We’ve just come from the doctor.”

“Ah! I’m sorry to hear it.”

Coste changed the subject.

“And you, Darbel — what are you doing here? I thought you were still at Peyras.”

“No, I’ve had a promotion. I’ve been a clerk at the telegraph office here for a few months now.”

“Congratulations. And are you well paid?”

“So-so — fifteen hundred francs at present; and every three years I’ll get a three-hundred-franc raise, up to twenty-seven hundred.”

When they parted, Coste reflected melancholically on this former pupil — by no means one of the brightest — who, at twenty-five, would be earning eighteen hundred francs, while he, a schoolmaster for ten years, had a fixed salary of a thousand. For the first time, Coste gave way to a surge of revolt. Bitterly, and not without hatred, he began to envy the lot of those more fortunate than himself — those rich people who, in the mildness of this afternoon, harbinger of spring, were parading in their carriages, their splendor brushing against his misery — those rich, indifferent to the poverty of so many thousands of beings, their fellow men — those favored ones, a single extravagance of whose would have sufficed to restore the peace of mind he had lost.

Following this trip to Montclapiers, Coste had to endure afresh the pointed remarks of certain suppliers, dissatisfied with the small sum he had sent them through the charwoman at the beginning of the month.

Very often the thought of some kind of loan — enough to silence these people — haunted him. Quick to delude himself despite his setbacks, he imagined that if he could only rid himself of the arrears — his ball and chain, as he called it — it would be possible, in spite of his crushing burdens, to live humbly but without going into debt. Louise would not always be ill; proper treatment, attentive care would restore her quickly; from the day she was well enough to manage the household, he, Coste, would bestir himself, would find other work to fill his free hours — copying, for instance, for notaries and bailiffs. Earning a little more thus, he and his family would scrape by quietly while waiting for a better-paying post or a promotion.

“Yes, these cursed debts alone cause all the trouble,” he would often sigh. “Let me find an advance for a few years, and once the past is settled, everything will work out.”

Once more he reviewed the list of friends and acquaintances he might approach. He wrote to one of his old school companions, recently married to a woman with a handsome dowry. Another refusal to swallow. Then he opened his eyes and understood the futility of his attempts; possessing nothing to stand surety for his debt, he was politely turned away with lying excuses and regrets. And Coste grew more embittered by the hour, brooding thus: his mother’s avarice, the callousness of his friends, the covert hostility or the disdain he sensed around him at Maleval — all of it was slowly killing his better instincts. Everyone in this world thinks only of himself, he thought; and his bitterness turned to revolt against fate and against men.

Now, one day, as he idly glanced at the advertisements in a newspaper, he gave a start, hypnotized by these words in small capitals:

MONEY LOANS

followed by this explanation:

Discretion, legal interest. Long-term: several years granted, or repayment by monthly installments, at your choice. Write to: M. A***, number ***, rue ***, Paris. Enclose stamp for reply. Preference given to officers and civil servants.

Coste had more than once heard it said, by hard-up colleagues, that bankers and men of business are glad to advance funds to civil servants, whose salary is for them a sure guarantee. He therefore imagined he had only to write in order to receive at once the sum of money he needed. This plan was communicated to Louise, who approved it.

That very evening, a letter left for Paris. Coste asked for a loan of five hundred francs for two years, citing his position as schoolmaster.

The lessons of life had not yet withered in his heart that flower of hope-in-spite-of-all. And so, as he went to post his letter, he breathed more freely, full of buoyancy, believing he could see the future smoothed at last. He was saved.

Two days pass. His heart swelling with hope, he waits patiently for a reply. Seated beside Louise, whom his confidence infects, they confer, make plans, allocate the sum in advance. Four hundred francs will be more than enough to pay off all the debts and renew clothing and shoes. The remainder will constitute a precious reserve of one hundred francs for the purchase of quinine wine, iron supplements, and a host of treats and nourishing foods that will put Louise back on her feet. After that, they would see — and, the dreaded cape rounded, onward sails the ship, surely toward blue seas, eternally calm!

These conferences, held in whispers in a corner of the kitchen, were not without alarming old Caussette. What on earth were they plotting, hiding from her like that? She vowed to keep watch — at night especially. Her dry, clenched hand gripped more tightly the keys buried in her pocket, and behind her white pupils, turned toward her son and obstinately fixed, one could sense something like the straining of a sharp, anxious, inward gaze, one that wanted to see and was vainly struggling to pierce the opaque veil over the eyes. Jean did not notice; humming now, he smiled at Louise, who smiled back.

The reply arrived after three days. In order not to be duped by unscrupulous persons, the lender explained, his firm made it a practice to secure guarantees before dispatching the requested sum. Hence the necessity of an investigation, conducted with the utmost discretion, to ascertain that the applicant was indeed a schoolmaster and enjoyed his full salary. To cover these obligatory costs, which the firm could not absorb, a remittance of ten francs was required. If the references were satisfactory, the loan would be gladly granted, in which case, furthermore, the ten francs advanced by the borrower would be refunded.

Jean leapt for joy and ran to tell Louise. That very morning, he handed the postman ten francs for a postal money order. That sum was virtually all he possessed at that moment.

“You see,” he told Louise, “there’s nothing surprising about it. The banker needs to verify my identity. I think these precautions are excellent. Without them, swindlers, under assumed names, would have a field day with such firms.”

Jean, certain of the future, changed his manner. He went out more often, his head high, pride in his eyes. His creditors’ glances no longer troubled him.

“Just wait, my good fellows, a few more days,” he would murmur joyfully, “and you’ll be paid on the dot from now on… and we’ll know how to put you in your place.”

So great, even, was his confidence that he promised one of the suppliers, in so many words, to settle his account shortly, and accordingly ordered him to send the bill at once.

“I’m expecting money!” he concluded proudly, with a touch of disdain for the man.

At that, the shopkeeper became very obsequious. Jean then had a moment of enormous joy: in the street he stopped to chat with one person after another, finding everyone charming, life adorable, the sky of a sweetness gentle on the eye, the greening trees full of a touching grace. Entering the house, he kissed Louise, he kissed Rose and Paul, he kissed the twins, he kissed his old mother on both cheeks — at which she showed surprise at this sudden embrace and Jean’s extraordinary gaiety. As for him, now descending to his empty classroom at that hour, he sang there at the top of his voice, like a hymn of deliverance.

A week passed, then two. Nothing. Yet Jean’s rapture and fine confidence persisted.

“Bah!” he would say. “It will come. A discreet investigation takes time.”

And, revived by this hope, they fed on it, jealously guarded it. He who has the dream has happiness. Jean had never been so happy as in those days.

Another week. A vague fear was not slow to arise. Jean feverishly awaited the postman’s rounds. Would he bring the blessed letter with its five red seals, the message bearing peace of mind? And with each disappointment, the fear grew, sharpened, and in the schoolmaster’s heart there was a painful jolt after the constriction of waiting.

At last he grows impatient. He writes. No answer. The idea that he has been duped occurs to him; he pushes it away; it haunts him; but he dares not complain, and before Louise he affects a gaiety he no longer feels.

Then, one day, he finds in the same newspaper a notice that confirms his suspicions and destroys his hopes. Following numerous complaints, Monsieur X***, a swindler, had just been arrested. The newspaper, of its own volition, warned its readers to beware of certain advertisements and, to clear its own responsibility, quoted the celebrated words: “The fourth page is a wall — whoever wishes may post upon it.” It proved the point unabashedly by running other advertisements of the same kind on that very fourth page — a veritable trap in which so many poor souls are caught.

At the certainty that his last hope had collapsed, Jean’s despair was immense. Yet he felt no surge of revolt, knowing himself guilty of blindness, calling his foolish trust an imbecility. Yes, an imbecile — to persist in hoping for the impossible! To take for a banker the swindler who had so neatly fleeced him! As if anyone had ever seen bankers rolling in gold making advances, offering money to poor wretches like him! Truly, poverty makes one stupid, and his heedlessness seemed to him culpable. With those ten francs — the good shoes he could have bought for Rose and Paul! And this thought was so cruel to him that he began to shed silent, heavy tears.

Coste would have liked to keep Louise in her illusions; but could he do so much longer? So he preferred to tell her everything. It was another heartrending scene; but his penitent heart, full of love and pity for the frail creature, must have found such gentle words, such tender consolations and caresses, that Louise, weeping on her husband’s shoulder, at last smiled at him and murmured, nestling deeper in his arms, by way of her only reproach:

“Oh, my dear, how good you are… oh, my Jean, how unhappy we are!”

These simple words did Coste good. Once more he bowed his head beneath the heavy yoke, happy in his unhappiness to love ardently and to be loved. And yet, more than ever, money was lacking in the house where the blind woman wandered, suspicious still, for she was vainly trying to account for her son’s and daughter-in-law’s silences after the bursts of gaiety and the effusions of the preceding weeks.

To make her medicines last until the end of the month without having to renew them, Louise rationed the drugs that cost so dear and that represented her health. Jean was consumed with regret.

“It’s my fault,” he thought. “I should not have been so stupid.”

Yes — not a thing in the house, and yet he was going to need money. Was he not summoned to a pedagogical conference that was to bring together, at the cantonal capital, all the schoolmasters of the canton on the 28th of March — that is, the following Monday? Certainly, he planned to go on foot and to spend as little as possible. But decently he could not set off without a sou in his pocket; one never knows what may arise.

Money was needed. To obtain some, Jean took the stagecoach and went to pawn his watch and a few of his wife’s jewels at the municipal pawnshop. It cost Louise dearly, to be sure, to part with her rings and her silver bracelet — Jean’s humble gifts from the time of their engagement, precious trifles and the sole visible relics of a dear past of love.

Upon his arrival in Montclapiers, Coste made straight for a neighborhood far from the suburb where the stagecoach stopped, and there discreetly made inquiries. Once he had the address, he crept furtively toward the pawnshop, choosing little-frequented streets for fear of suddenly finding himself face to face with someone he knew. It seemed to him that all these people he met divined his errand, looked at him with contempt, and the red of shame would then flush his face. Several times he walked back and forth past the pawnshop door, not daring to enter, his heart as tight with anguish and shame as if he were about to attempt something infamous. How he envied the resigned indifference of a wretched woman bringing the bundle of linen that would let her give her family a crust of bread, or the carefree, mocking manner of two students down on their luck who, with a laugh on their lips, were about to pawn the watch for which “auntie” would give them the gold coin indispensable for a night out with girls. At last, after long hesitation, Jean seized a moment when the place seemed deserted, cast a wild-eyed look around him, and slipped into the corridor, not knowing where to go or what to say.

In the office, the clerk raised his eyes to the newcomer with complete indifference. Nevertheless, Jean thought he detected mockery in that cold gaze and quickly, stammering, spread out his jewels. With a trembling hand he seized the few coins given him in exchange and fled precipitately from that wretched place where he felt he had spent a century. Crushed with shame, his cheeks on fire, staggering like a drunken man, he quickened his pace to get out of that dreadful, compromising street. His clouded gaze could no longer make out a thing.

Suddenly, at the turning of the street, an old gentleman planted himself before him and hailed him:

“Well, it’s you, Monsieur Coste! How are things at Maleval?”

Jean felt the blood rush to his head, then turned ghastly pale. As through a veil he recognized old Largue, his former headmaster at Peyras. Horribly embarrassed, he was terrified of being found out.

“But — where are you coming from? You look unwell.”

Jean found the strength to lie.

“I stumbled on a stone,” he said, “and my foot hurts badly… yes, very badly.”

“Some painful corn, eh! heh, heh!”

Monsieur Largue chuckled. This attitude, it seemed to Jean, was hateful and malicious. Certain the headmaster had understood, Jean would have liked to sink into the ground. Monsieur Largue inquired about Madame Coste and the children.

“Oh, thank you, thank you — they’re all very well,” Coste murmured, distraught, no longer knowing what he was saying.

“Well then, may I offer you a bock?”

Jean made his excuses, quick to escape. So that Monsieur Largue, watching him hurry off, grumbled:

“But what’s got into the foolish fellow? You’d think I frighten him. And yet I believed we’d parted on good terms!”

Jean was almost running through the streets, aimlessly, directionlessly — to flee. Frantic, his temples throbbing, he repeated painfully:

“Oh yes, he understood — he saw me come out. He was sneering at my worn trousers, my broken shoes. He’ll tell everyone back at Peyras that he saw me going to the pawnshop. He’ll tell the inspector. All my superiors will know I’m destitute… my God, my God! What shame!… What shame!”

With his narrow ideas, his petty functionary’s pride, he believed his dignity lost forever and exaggerated the consequences, should Monsieur Largue — who in fact had no idea the pawnshop was on that street — speak of his former assistant’s destitution. His superiors informed, Coste imagined his career compromised, the future barred, bad marks raining thick as hail on his poor back.

His eyes stung; he stopped, on the verge of tears. A fierce hatred rose in him against this man who had appeared in his path, to his ruin. He told himself that without Monsieur Largue he would never have been transferred, that he would still be back at Peyras, as peaceful as before — poor, but owing nothing to anyone and ignorant of the bitterness of all the shames he had swallowed.

But at the memory of his family, his rage subsided. A great prostration followed. Melancholy, Jean wandered for several hours through the lonely lanes of a suburb that opened onto the flat countryside, all green in the sun, where he had arrived without knowing how.

A clock face reading two o’clock reminded him that departure time was near. He returned to the center of town and hurried to make his purchases. On the boulevards, where a lively crowd circulated, he bought for his lunch — for he had not eaten all day — a two-sou croissant and a bar of chocolate. He was breaking his bread and chocolate in his pocket, into small pieces that he swallowed almost without chewing, his hand over his mouth.

A bright spring sun played among the delicate green of the chestnuts, the acacias, and the plane trees. Carriages streaked down the boulevard. The same envy he had felt on his last visit seized Coste’s heart, more keenly still. The insolent triumph of the parvenus parading before his eyes, savoring life and light, was a slap in the face of his misery.

---

Out of discretion and preference, the schoolmistress, Mademoiselle Bonniol, continued to live apart and seldom visited the Costes. They, for their part, lest she suspect their utter destitution, scarcely made advances to her either.

The rare times the old lady had ventured into their lodgings, the embarrassed manner, the visible discomfort, the hesitant welcome of Coste and Louise — neither of whom were adept at dissembling — had struck Mademoiselle Bonniol. She took it to mean that they wished to remain on good neighborly terms, but nothing more. In her old maid’s selfishness — gentle and a little timid — she was too fond of her solitude and her privacy to take offense at the infrequency of these formal relations, and, in truth, she was quite pleased by it. Once she was back in her quarters, whether chattering in a thin, mincing voice to her beloved pets — whom she addressed as one speaks to small children — or, in the evening, when the Angelus rang, praying at length in memory of her parents, dead these many years, Mademoiselle Bonniol desired nothing better than this monotonous, self-effacing life, without great joys but also without shocks or sorrows.

Sometimes, as a good colleague and out of kindness, if she met Rose and Paul playing in the vestibule, she would take them home with her and then caress them and stuff them with jams, biscuits, and sweets, of which she and her pets were very fond. These were red-letter days for Rose and Paul, little accustomed to such treats. Yet the two children’s boisterousness pleased her only halfheartedly — not that their presence was ever unwelcome or unbearable, but because she prized above all her selfish peace. After spending an entire day among her pupils — chattering, fidgety little girls — the schoolmistress thirsted for calm, and she found a childlike, ever-renewed delight in returning to her cramped quarters.

That is why, while both sides took care to remain on good terms, neither Coste nor Mademoiselle Bonniol did anything to strengthen their relations, still less to increase or deepen them. If the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress crossed paths in the vestibule, they would usually exchange a few amiable or commonplace words, sometimes stopping to talk about their pupils or the affairs of their trade. This happened often enough in the evening, at the end of the school day. But for several months now, they had for the most part contented themselves with a friendly greeting, and that was all.

Still, the two colleagues held each other in high esteem: he, on account of the manners and the pleasant face of this old lady, so discreet and so trim; she, out of pity for this tall, very gentle young man, burdened with family, ceaselessly toiling after school at the household tasks, taking his sick wife’s place without ever a complaint.

Mademoiselle Bonniol had no idea of the dire poverty in which Coste was struggling. She thought him merely strapped, which did not much surprise her, for although her salary was ample for her alone, she understood what miracles of economy were needed when one had Coste’s responsibilities.

However, a few days before the pedagogical conference, she thought she was doing well in proposing that they travel together by stagecoach and stay at the same inn in the cantonal capital.

“It’s the Cheval Blanc where we used to go, your predecessor and I,” she hastened to add, noticing a slight frown of annoyance crease Coste’s brow.

To which he replied, stammering:

“The thing is, I’d planned to walk… We lead such sedentary lives… I do so love walking…”

But he caught himself quickly, for he thought he detected a certain surprise in the schoolmistress’s gaze. More at ease, he would certainly have held to his plan and followed through without worrying about anyone else; but being very poor — that is to say, very touchy — he took fright at the merest trifle, terrified to the last degree of letting the extent of his misery show. That is why his prickly pride made him add at once, with eagerness:

“But no — on reflection, it’s too far. Better to take the stagecoach with you after all. So, agreed, mademoiselle — Monday we’ll do as you used to do with my predecessor.”

Alone, he suffered for it. His plans for economy were going up in smoke. Like it or not, out of a foolish concern for appearances, he would have to spend what remained of the money the pawnshop had lent him. And to think his Louise had shed so many tears in handing over her humble, precious jewels! That to get this money he had endured such humiliating torments in the streets of Montclapiers! Only the day before, he had been congratulating himself on avoiding all hotel expenses, for he had planned to carry in his pockets a few scraps of provisions that he would go and eat in hiding on the outskirts of the little town; he had told himself he would easily find a pretext for slipping away from his colleagues at mealtime without their being surprised. And now, caught off guard, he would have to do as the others after the conference — treat himself to a costly dinner while his family wanted for everything.

“To the devil with their conferences!” he grumbled. “We village schoolmasters are so rich that they must saddle us with such expenses! Shouldn’t they give us an allowance for it, at least? All I’d need now is to be called on to give the lesson. I’d better have a look at it, though. Cursed conferences — for all the good they do.”

---

The pedagogical conference varies in the details of its organization from department to department. But it usually lasts a day and comprises two sessions. One is devoted to the reading of papers prepared by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses on some question of method or discipline chosen well in advance by the academy inspector and communicated to those concerned through the departmental bulletin. These papers are in principle optional, but they tend, almost everywhere, to become compulsory. They give rise to discussions that are at the very least interesting, and to exchanges of ideas that are always fruitful.

The other session is taken up by a practical lesson given before one’s colleagues by the schoolmaster or schoolmistress designated by lot — a lesson whose subject, also known in advance, has been prepared by all. Here, too, there is occasion for mutual observation, for valuable comparisons benefiting everyone, and for courteous critiques from which beginners especially profit. Moreover, the primary inspector, who directs and summarizes the proceedings, gives, in the course of the meeting, general advice to his subordinates, furnishes them with information on the progress and results of studies, shares the comparisons he has been able to make and the observations he has gathered during his inspections at the various schools in his district — all excellent in themselves. But that is not all. These schoolmasters, who live in isolation at the back of their villages, finding themselves in contact two or three times a year, form good relations among themselves. Knowing one another better, they esteem and appreciate one another more and feel their solidarity. Finally, one can see how much these conferences, well run, can stir and set ideas in motion; they spur the schoolmasters to work, prevent certain teachers from lapsing into the routine and indifference in which they would end by sinking irremediably, were they not kept on their mettle and wrenched, from time to time, from the pernicious, depressing isolation of the village, where their sole society consists of ignorant and rough peasants. That is why these conferences, now firmly established in the schoolmaster’s way of life, would provoke no objection if the teachers could attend them without second thoughts or money worries.

On Sunday evening, Jean brushed his poor clothes himself, rubbed ink along the whitened brim of his hat and over the elbows of his frock coat. An unlucky stroke of the brush split the seam of the trousers, whose seat — worn thin by rubbing against the chairs and benches of the classroom — had, in the candlelight, the thickness of a cobweb. Louise, who had had a bad day, was asleep. Jean dared not wake her. Clumsily he mended the tear — a difficult and delicate task. It took an eternity and made him sweat profusely. He managed the repair, but one can imagine its appearance and its durability.

“Bah,” he said, “it won’t show — the tails of the frock coat will hide it.”

Eleven o’clock struck from the church steeple.

“That took some time — I didn’t think it was so late. Still, I really must go over tomorrow’s lesson a bit.”

Shattered with fatigue, his eyes heavy with sleep, he skimmed rapidly through a textbook, without reflecting, without taking notes. Surely fate would be kind to him; he fully expected it would be someone else who would give the practical lesson before his colleagues and the inspector.

The next morning, at nine o’clock, the stagecoach pulled up at the cantonal capital, to the cracking of the postilion’s whip as he, cheeks puffed, blew furiously on a battered, verdigrised bugle. Coste and Mademoiselle Bonniol alighted and made their way to the communal school. Some twenty schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were already gathered there, chatting in groups in the playground.

All eyes converged on the newcomers. Coste was discomfited. Thanks to his mending of the night before, he had hoped to pass unnoticed. But seeing certain of his colleagues looking so prosperous, their eyes fixed on him with curiosity, he lost his composure.

Mademoiselle Bonniol introduced him; he was received cordially; yet his unease increased. They were bound to notice his shabby clothes. He stood with his feet together, trying to hide the bottom of his trousers, which were fraying at the ankles. Then he noticed that several of his colleagues’ attire likewise betrayed no affluence. True, even these seemed to him less wretched in appearance than he. He took a certain pleasure, once attention had turned from him, in seeking out the visible marks of their poverty, in noting the traces of wear, the defects of outdated garments and long-worn shoes, and in examining them thus he felt a vague satisfaction, a little of his assurance returning. He wished he could know them all to be as destitute as himself. In the course of his scrutiny, his eyes rested on the worn-down boots of a probationary teacher. The young man, for his part, seemed not to care. Short, pale, rather good-looking, with the manner and voice of a street urchin, he was holding forth in the groups. He was an assistant at the cantonal school and answered to the name of Bertrand.

Naturally, they spoke of the paltry salaries. All of them, men and women alike, complained bitterly.

“A fine gift, their law of 1889!” said one schoolmaster, among the best dressed, however. “They did us in. It takes an eternity to get a promotion of two hundred francs. They no longer retire the older ones, or rarely, and the young ones are stuck in place. I’ll soon have twelve years’ service and I earn a thousand francs. For a while they threw money around by the handful, it’s true, for fine school buildings. Some of our elders profited a little. I know some whose salary was guaranteed in 1881, including all the supplements and allowances they were receiving from the communes. Some of them, in the towns, earn handsomely that way. Then everything changed; hard times came; all one hears now is economy, after the squandering, after they promised us the golden river. No funds — the budget is in deficit; no more retirements, and consequently few promotions. The Chambers won’t vote anything, for lack of sufficient revenue — that’s what they din into our ears when we protest. Yes, too much inequality. The administration hasn’t a sou left and doles out promotions to us with a miser’s hand. Complain? A fat lot of good that does! Fine words, there’s no shortage of those. Twelve years’ service and here I am still in the fifth class. Fortunately my wife had a bit of money. Without that, black misery — 79 francs 16 a month, or 2 francs 63 a day, a little less than a day laborer earns around here. Doesn’t it make you pity? And what if you had a family to support!”

“And what about us, the probationers!” cried Bertrand impetuously. “Isn’t it worse for us? I started here as an assistant; the indebted commune refuses us any supplement. So I have 900 francs a year, plus 25 francs as a residence allowance! My headmaster is a bachelor who eats at the hotel and can’t board his assistants cheaply, as some do. On one hand, I don’t complain too much — I’m freer. But I have to pay, in a none-too-appetizing ‘digs,’ 60 francs — yes, 60 francs, gentlemen — for my keep. And I assure you they don’t shove sautéed chicken or quail into our mouths. With incidental expenses, that’s 62 or 63 francs a month out of pocket the moment you leave the tax collector’s. Now, after deductions, I draw 73 francs 23 — not a radish more. That leaves 10 francs 23 for all my other expenses. There — there’s the triumph, there’s the eloquence of figures!… 10 francs 23!… So just feast your eyes on me — I’m dressed like a prince. I go to the tailor when one of my eyes drops out. We’re not the ones who’ll make the café owners rich! Next year I’m a soldier — yes, pack on back — and I assure you, were it not for the normal-school fees they’d make me repay, I’d re-enlist without a moment’s hesitation, with gusto, and send the profession and my snotty brats to the four winds!”

There was laughter. Bertrand was a working-class lad from Montclapiers and, like a true son of a fair-sized city, he had a ready tongue.

“The town-hall secretaryship?” another teacher was saying meanwhile. “Not always. Nowadays there are fellows in the villages — sons, brothers, cousins of the mayor — who snatch it from us and pocket the two or three hundred francs that would have helped fill our pots. That’s my case: the mayor has his uncle for secretary — an old duffer who never learned his spelling. Besides, it’s not a secure income, because if you displease the mayor, he cuts your wages. And the gifts — another fine joke! Yes, count on those and you’ll see later, you young ones. Grand promises, certainly; then, once in a while, a bit of rancid bacon, some rinds, a dozen sometimes-brooded eggs someone wants to be rid of, or a basket of almonds or grapes. And the ministerial circular!”

“Oh, the circulars!” Bertrand retorted with a street-urchin’s gesture. “If ever I’m stuck in a village, so long as they bring something, I’ll accept with both hands, and a big thank-you to boot: never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“And yet, to listen to all the makers of fine speeches,” another schoolmaster resumed, “we’ve nothing left to wish for — so much has been done for us!”

“Oh, enough!” cried Bertrand. “What a fine position ours is! Yes, I know there are still a few good posts, with communal supplements. But those are for the ones with connections and a supple spine. My parents — workers — bled themselves dry to keep me at the Montclapiers upper school until I was sixteen, then to pay my trousseau, my books, and my pocket money at the normal school. I came out with my advanced certificate and fine phrases about the schoolmaster’s admirable role! I’d rather have a bit more bread. They sent me here, where I earn nine hundred francs. Note that I have four younger brothers and sisters. With that brood, no more counting on the old folks — they barely have enough for themselves. What do you expect me to do? At thirty I’ll have a thousand francs as a fifth-class teacher. And to reach that magnificent situation, I have ahead of me five or six years as a probationer at forty-nine sous a day — yes, 2 francs 44, no more!… Oh, for pity’s sake! They’d deserve it if we taught our classes in slippers and a jacket with holes at the elbows!”

This sally raised a long burst of laughter. Coste, for his part, listened with interest, though he dared not say a word lest he attract his colleagues’ attention; but deep down, in Bertrand’s working-class banter and in the dispirited words of the others, he recognized most of his own constant preoccupations, he nodded in agreement, and, thinking of his destitution, he told himself that of all those who were complaining, he — the silent one — was the most miserable.

Bertrand was at it again, mocking more heartily than ever. His sharp little voice seemed to crackle; he was intoxicating himself with words and gestures, his verve whipped up by the laughter his easy, comic reflections provoked, rippling from group to group.

“Bah!” he exclaimed, with the cynicism of youth, making no attempt to disguise it, flaunting it, exaggerating it rather. “I don’t really care. Maybe things will change. In the meantime, I cheerfully run up debts.”

“Yes, but you’ll have to pay those debts — or beware the garnishment order. And then, the bad marks, the gloomy reprimands from the bosses…”

“Bah! Bad marks — a plaster on a wooden leg. As for debts — ha! They’ll be paid, eventually. What the devil — one will know how to go hunting when the time comes, beat the bushes, and flush out some good game from among the village maidens. Why not unearth some peasant girl who, to become madame — for I, mark you, am a gentleman — will bring me her fine coins and her vineyards? That should stop up the holes.”

And as everyone around him was doubled over with laughter, he grew more excited, jesting louder and louder. Now, in the tone of a fairground quack reeling off his pitch, with the grimaces of a sideshow clown parading at the entrance to his booth for the wonderment of gawkers, he continued:

“If anyone among you knows this phoenix, this rare bird, send her my way. I’m not fussy. Let the bride be lame, one-eyed, twisted, hunchbacked, old enough to have lost her teeth, even a wobbly head — I don’t care. The nest egg is what counts.”

The laughter redoubled. Bertrand was triumphant, tossing his handsome, reckless head. However, the schoolmistresses were beginning to find the young man’s cynicism odious on so serious a subject; a few moved away, displeased with this endless prattle.

But beneath these deliberate exaggerations, through this working-class bluster from a young man trying to impress, the other young men recognized — too crudely expressed, it is true — one of their most cherished desires: to make a good marriage. They too, for the most part, were infected by the plague of our times: the exclusive love and pursuit of money. Several had entered the primary normal school straight from their village for the first time, physically and intellectually rough-hewn, but already with imaginations at work and dreams of a splendid future, assured them as educated, elegant gentlemen. Their studies finished, they found themselves disillusioned from their very first steps in life, whose material demands tormented them at once; hard-pressed, they had quickly lost their illusions, especially those — and they were the majority — whose parents, workers or peasants, could not sustain their beginnings. This money, meted out to them so parsimoniously, became, in the bankruptcy of their hopes, the goal to attain. Moreover, they observed that childhood companions who had entered other branches of the civil service enjoyed, by the age of twenty-five, after a shorter probation than their own, a salary they would not reach until forty or beyond. What was to be done? What offered them compensation was the knowledge, the assurance, that the schoolmaster — esteemed and envied by the peasants — often makes a good marriage. A legend true in former times, but fading now, for the well-to-do country folk no longer want the schoolmaster, that penniless fellow, for a son-in-law. But they still believed in it, and for them everything tended toward this: to find the wife whose dowry would give them material security. With this obsession, they became very utilitarian and warded off the divine, disinterested passion of loving for love’s sake — which belongs to their age.

A few married schoolmistresses, and their double salary was then ample. But that was the exception. Many hesitated before the risks: illness, the arrival of children sometimes necessitating the wife’s resignation or unpaid leave. This, too, was why many schoolmistresses remained spinsters. It is true that their existence was less precarious than that of the schoolmasters, and that, despite the meagerness of their salary, they managed easily enough to live, for they did their own cooking and could better govern their budget. Their dress, at any rate, did not betray hardship; by miracles of economy possible only to a single woman, one could see even simple probationers at eight hundred francs in neat attire — smart, even, among those with taste. They scarcely complained, content to listen and to approve with a smile the gentlemen’s grievances.

They were still laughing at Bertrand’s quips when the headmaster of the school appeared on the threshold.

“The inspector is here,” he said.

They hastened to enter the classroom where the conferences are held. The schoolmasters sat at the pupils’ desks, the schoolmistresses on chairs ranged along the walls on either side.

Coste slipped into the back rows with the assistants. He made himself small, very small, relieved now to feel sheltered from indiscreet eyes. Silence fell in the room, for the inspector was feared and was considered, rightly or wrongly, not the most easygoing of men. For the moment, rigid on the platform, he was leafing through papers spread on the lectern. He was a handsome man of thirty-five to forty, his beard very black and trimmed to a point, his complexion dark, his brow wide and bare, his gaze direct but a little hard. Abruptly he raised his head and, with a sweeping glance — the gaze of the chief — he made sure no one was missing. Very elegant, he arched his well-proportioned figure in a frock coat with silk lapels, a discreet violet ribbon in his buttonhole. Wholly absorbed in the importance of his functions, his expression stern, he stood stiffly in a quasi-official, imperious pose — pontificating and quite the poseur, in the opinion of his subordinates. Absently, his fine hand, adorned with a ring, drew a comb of light tortoiseshell through his mustache and beard.

At last, with a satisfied air, he let fall from his very red mouth, well furnished with white teeth, these simple words:

“Gentlemen, I declare the session open.”

A vice-president and a secretary were elected by a show of hands. After the customary preliminaries, the inspector, having consulted his watch, added:

“Because of their distance and the difficulty of communications, several of you were unable to arrive early enough for the conference to begin at an earlier hour. The morning is already well advanced. We shall therefore postpone to this evening’s session the reading and discussion of the papers treating the assigned subject. To make use of the time remaining before noon, we shall begin with the practical lesson.”

The drawing of lots took place at once. A brief tremor of emotion caused the schoolmistresses to pale slightly — most of them dreading the prospect of speaking before their bearded colleagues and exposing themselves to their criticism and the inspector’s.

Over in his corner, Coste was no less nervous. As if to ward off fate, he lowered his head still further. All at once he shuddered from his feet to the nape of his neck, then turned ghastly white, feeling a dull blow to his heart and his blood stop. His name has just been called. Around him, the most apprehensive heave something like a sigh of relief. Reassured and delighted, the schoolmistresses whisper among themselves.

“I am pleased,” said the inspector, “that the lot has fallen on a newcomer among us. I invite Monsieur Coste to come forward.”

All eyes are turned toward the schoolmaster of Maleval. He is trembling in every limb; his ears are buzzing, his heart is leaping in his chest; he can no longer hear and, looking dazed, remains rooted to the spot, unable to comprehend. His colleagues take it for nerves; they speak to him, encourage him. He thinks of only one thing: that he truly has no luck, that he is caught unprepared and is going to be pitiful and ridiculous. No, it was too much bad fortune! He, who was trying to pass unnoticed, is forced to face the crossfire of these gazes that pain him — gazes that will examine him from head to foot, contemplate and scrutinize at leisure his pitiful face and his wretched appearance. For an excruciating half hour, he must speak in that exposed space, before that blackboard that terrifies him, under the eyes of his superior who will judge him harshly!

“Come, Monsieur Coste, please come forward,” says the inspector, who smiles but is flattered and moved by the violent distress of his subordinate.

At this fresh invitation, Coste rises to his feet; his head empties, his legs buckle and give way beneath him; he feels on the verge of fainting. At last he advances, staggering. His face, thinned by privation and exhaustion, is of an earthy pallor.

With a stern glance, the inspector — before whom he now stands — takes his measure. The chief’s brow furrows: is it impatience, or displeasure? The poor man blanches further; he is on the point of fleeing in terror, too wretched to go on.

“Come, Monsieur Coste, please begin. You are to give a moral lesson to the intermediate class on our duties of justice and charity. We are listening.”

Mockery of fate! To speak of justice and charity, when one is oneself so miserable! His throat tightens, his mouth is dry. As in a flash he thinks of his family, and then, in a prodigious effort, tries to gather the few ideas that whirl, ungrasped, in his brain like leaves in a hurricane.

He speaks at last — or rather he stammers, while the inspector, grown impatient at length and knowing nothing of this good man’s life, bends over his notebook and rapidly scribbles something — a severe assessment, no doubt.

Coste has noticed, and his confusion deepens. He speaks at random, his voice quavering, stopping, repeating himself, without coherence, without plan, in the grip of an uncontrollable terror. He is thinking of his dilapidation, of the pitiful look of his clothes. To conceal it as much as possible, he stands with feet together, stiff, not daring to raise his arms or make a movement, for fear of letting the badly mended tear of his trousers show. This fear obsesses him, and what he delivers are sentences from a textbook, rattled off in haste — cold sentences, without precision, without order. And yet, without being a brilliant schoolmaster, he ordinarily manages well enough in his classroom and can hold his pupils’ interest. But here, under all these converging gazes — some perhaps mocking, or rather glad at having dodged an always disagreeable chore — he sweats blood, stuttering, sometimes unable to find the right word; his anguished eyes do not leave the blackboard, for he dares not turn toward his colleagues or the inspector, in the anxious dread of reading his shame in their eyes. Were he less feeble, he might have drawn, from the very bitterness of his past and present sufferings, the material to speak eloquently of both justice and charity, to pour his aching heart into this simple primary-school lesson; but he cannot, he does not know how, and it is to his memory, to what he has read in school manuals, that he endlessly appeals, with gaps and abrupt halts.

Seeing him so wretched, the inspector finds words of pity and encouragement.

“Come now, my friend,” he says with kindness. “You lack confidence, and you forget that we are not judges here, but colleagues gathered to pool our observations, our experience, and the results of our work. Collect yourself, and continue without fear.”

These kind words might have done another man good. But Coste hears nothing and continues, in fits and starts, to recite words upon words that he no longer understands himself; for what alone obsesses him is the thought of his torn trousers, which a gesture too lively, parting the tails of his frock coat, might expose to all eyes; his feet still joined, he concentrates on hiding the lamentable state of his shoes. Suddenly, in the midst of this anguish, a wave of weakness seizes him. He wants to fall to his knees and cry out, giving free rein to the pent-up sobs that oppress him:

“I have four small children, a blind mother, a sick wife… I work like a slave after school, without an hour of leisure or quiet study… I am dying of shame! What more do you want of me?”

He struggles on, however, for it is better to swallow his suffering. His spirit broken, he tries to cite examples of justice and charity, muddles everything, confounds everything, grows more and more entangled. In a word, a most pitiful lesson, most uninteresting, without any value whatsoever; yet no one smiled. The majority of the schoolmasters, the schoolmistresses especially, suffered for their colleague’s mortification. They had certainly seen others fail in such circumstances, paralyzed by emotion, unable to utter a single word from dry mouths; but they sensed, this time, more than mere embarrassment, more than ordinary shyness, and without knowing why, nearly all of them felt their hearts constrict.

Everyone breathed freely, as though relieved, when the poor wretch, having completed his lesson after a fashion in a quarter of an hour, returned to his place, where he collapsed, burying his head in his hands, crushed by his inadequacy and by the public humiliation that reflected upon him and further darkened his already somber future. His finger wiped away a rebellious tear; in a dreadful despondency, he felt nothing but the need to be far away, very far away — the need to weep, to weep without cease, to unburden his heart heavy with grief, to salve with the balm of tears the bleeding wound dealt his self-respect.

Not without some compassion, the inspector summed up the general opinion by saying:

“Monsieur Coste was too overcome at finding himself among us for the first time. He therefore has a right to our full indulgence. I must nonetheless tell you that the schoolmaster must strive to overcome these weaknesses — understandable and sometimes excusable, to be sure, but which, if repeated, may do him harm.”

Not one schoolmaster had the heart to offer the all-too-easy critique of such a lesson. Seeing Coste so humble, so self-effacing, so crushed, all were still moved, and perhaps they understood. At the inspector’s invitation, a few confined themselves to presenting general observations on how a moral lesson should be given to children. They said it was the form of teaching that demanded the most care, preparation, and conviction on the part of each teacher. The inspector concurred, but with great tact.

“You are very right,” he said. “You must put your whole selves into these lessons. Let them be animated, living, founded on examples drawn from ordinary life or from the lives of your pupils, so that they feel rather than merely understand. Of course, these examples must not be chosen at random, and you should avoid wounding or humiliating the child whose misbehavior may serve as the starting point for a practical moral lesson. But do not forget: here it is not the memory that should retain a few more or less significant precepts; it is the heart you must reach and strike. You will have done nothing if the child’s heart has not stirred, if he has not been moved.”

There followed other counsels, grown commonplace from being repeated by pedagogues, and which are truly worth anything only when they are put into practice, before the schoolmaster’s eyes, not by vain words but by a gifted educator in action. A task difficult and delicate above all others, for it asks of the teacher a piece of his soul.

“The session is adjourned, gentlemen,” said the inspector. “As it is barely eleven o’clock, I ask you to be here at one o’clock sharp. You will thus be able to leave earlier or devote the end of the afternoon to your own affairs.”

They filed out. Before the pitiful, grief-stricken air of the wretched Coste, who was leaving last, the inspector held him back and had a few more kind words for him.

“Yes, Monsieur l’Inspecteur,” he half-confessed, “the emotion cut me off at the knees. I no longer knew what I was saying.”

His pride prevented him from offering any further excuse.

“You will try to do better next time. Come now, courage. Before long I shall come to see you in your classroom,” the inspector concluded.

However, after Coste had gone, the inspector thought it his duty to note in his book the impression produced:

Appears to be a most mediocre schoolmaster. To be seen soon. Slovenly appearance.

And as the headmaster of the cantonal school walked with him, he asked for information about Coste.

“This is the first time,” replied the headmaster, “that I have met Monsieur Coste. He has been at Maleval for six months and has never once presented himself here.”

Outside, the inspector did not dare call over Mademoiselle Bonniol, who was talking with Coste and seemed to be consoling him. He feared arousing the susceptibility of the schoolmaster of Maleval, who would surely have guessed what it was about and would only have suffered the more for it.

Coste and Mademoiselle Bonniol caught up with the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who, in groups, were heading toward the inn. All of them, vying with one another, then tried fraternally to encourage their colleague, whose humiliated manner touched them.

“Come now, you’re not going to torment yourself over that?” they said. “Although he puts on airs, the inspector is at bottom an excellent fellow, as you could see. Your case is not hopeless. Besides, it happens to everyone, and more often than you’d think.”

Obligingly, they cited the names of other shy colleagues who, in circumstances like his, had been unable to force a single word from their dry mouths. He, Coste, had at least spoken. But Jean barely heard them; a deep, secret humility was softening his being, already so battered by the swells of life. At that hour, he suffered less in his pride than in his heart. What worse things might still come of that ill-fated morning? Would every hope fail him in the future? And he saw himself marked down, confined for life to petty posts, without advancement, and — because of his clamoring debts and his insufficient salary — forever in the grip of this eternal poverty from which his family suffered. A poor human rag, he chewed over these disheartening thoughts and followed his colleagues mechanically, no longer thinking of his threadbare trousers or his shapeless shoes.

The evening session was very brief. Few schoolmasters had treated the assigned subject, which nearly angered the inspector, who threatened to make this hitherto optional work compulsory for all. After which, before adjourning, he addressed to them this final recommendation:

“You are aware, gentlemen, that complaints are heard everywhere about the increasingly difficult recruitment at the normal schools. Each year the number of candidates declines.”

And so the academy inspector, who deplores this state of affairs and fears it may soon harm the good name and interests of the teaching corps, has charged me to make a pressing appeal to your unquestionable devotion. You can, in your schools and around you, seek out vocations — even awaken them — and in any case carry on an active campaign. You have a stake in it, besides; for those among you who direct or are called upon to direct schools with several classes will be glad, when the time comes, to find in their assistants intelligent collaborators equal to their mission. Now, this is possible only if the number of candidates for the normal school is large enough to permit a selection — which is essential if we are to have good schoolmasters in the future. We are counting on you, gentlemen.

The conference ended on these words, which were received without enthusiasm — coldly, indeed. It was at most three o’clock in the afternoon. In the streets a warm spring sun was shining. The sky was of an exquisite serenity, as gentle as a child’s gaze.

Most of the schoolmistresses dispersed along the promenades and the outskirts of the little town. The trees, arrayed in the tender silk of young foliage, were beginning to cast a light shade embroidered with pearls and slips of gold by the rays filtering through the branches as through the openwork of green lace. And in this delicate tangle of budding greenery, sweetly fragrant of spring, the old houses of the town — all festive and wreathed in a crown of plane trees whose tops swayed above the dark rooftops — sheltered and, seen from a distance, disappeared.

The schoolmasters made for a café. Jean followed in their wake, no longer thinking and with no thought for the expense he was about to incur. In a great need of affection, he wished he were back at Maleval, so he could embrace his family and weep with them to ease his distress.

On the café threshold, Bertrand, escorted by other probationers, stopped and shook hands with his colleagues.

“Goodbye,” he said. “We’re off for a stroll to soak up the sun like old codgers.”

And when invited to come in:

“Oh, sure! The surplus cleared out ages ago. We’re at the end of the month, aren’t we, old girl? So our only refreshment now is a glass of fresh air. Better for the health. Cheerio, all — we’re off to stretch our pins, over that way.”

He walked off to the sound of laughter.

At the café, as earlier during lunch, the same talk and the same grievances began again, so general was the discontent. The inspector’s announcement about the shortage of normal-school candidates served as the theme.

“If the normal schools are being deserted,” said one, “too bad — or rather, so much the better. Why raise so many hopes only to dash them? They promised us the moon and deliver nothing. And to think that in high places they pretend to rack their brains over the causes of the disdain shown for the teaching profession. There is only one cause: the scandalous inadequacy of salaries. In the old days there was a glut: lured by promises and fanfare, young men all wanted to go into teaching. Ten years ago, when I sat the normal-school entrance examination, there were a hundred and forty candidates for thirteen scholarships. But people have since realized that ours is a starvation trade. And so — good night! Nobody left. Except in a few poor departments, the normal schools are recruited with the greatest difficulty. The inspector may preach all he likes; let him find candidates himself, if he wants them. As for me, I wash my hands of it.”

“Of course,” a second chimed in. “To say ‘candidate for the normal school’ is to say ‘candidate for poverty.’ It’s a heavy responsibility to assume — urging a father, a peasant who’s never rich, to make a schoolmaster of his son. Three years at the normal school, six years at least as a probationer at nine hundred francs, fifteen to twenty years at least before earning fifteen hundred — what do you expect of a man whose family is hard up? If there are no candidates, it’s because there can’t be any!”

“Yes, the stream has well and truly dried up or changed course! I was told by one of my old professors that the normal schools, apart from a few elite students who grow rarer all the time, now get only the dregs — the failures from other examinations. Every washout looking for a berth is sure to get in nowadays. It’s pitiful. In some normal schools the candidates are fewer than the scholarships on offer. But how can you expect an intelligent young man to accept a position paying a thousand francs — and not until he’s thirty — when he’d earn double elsewhere? It would be too stupid. No, better to go and break stones on the roads! And what servility is required of us! Oh, if only I’d known!”

“True enough, but the wine is poured and must be drunk. Who knows — things may change. In any case, bear this in mind: the fewer candidates the normal schools have, the better it will be for us. The day they’re almost entirely deserted, they’ll be forced to think of us, to improve our salaries.”

“In the meantime, too bad for those of us already in the trade. They pay us in fine words and ask us to be patient. No, we’ve gained nothing, say what they will, from all these so-called improvements.”

“But,” one of them objected, “at least we’re state civil servants now, and that counts for something.”

“A fat lot of good that does us! How can you fall for that line? Are you any less subject than before to the mayor, the municipal councillors, the cantonal delegates, and all the rest? Besides, on the pretext that we’re paid by the state, most communes today give their schoolmasters no supplement at all. How many of us haven’t lost by that! Or do you know what they tell you in certain towns: Very well, we’ll vote you supplements, but you’ll do double duty.”

“And then it’s endless supervisions, crushing tasks with just enough time to eat your meals. In one sub-prefecture they’ll go so far as to ask schoolmasters to do three, four extra hours a day — not counting Thursday and Sunday mornings given over to supervision. So not a single full day of rest. And the homework to correct, the lessons to prepare after school! A convict’s life, that’s what it is! Small wonder that those with weak chests go to push up the cypress roots well before retirement age.”

All came round to this view, and soon everyone had his say. They took a grim pleasure in laying bare, in exaggerating, with profound discouragement and mounting bitterness, the secret wounds, the moral and material misery of the schoolmaster. Yes, one had to wonder whether they were not being deliberately hoodwinked, whether all the delays used to make them wait were not pure farce. And the discontent of these humble men grew with the recital of the sufferings each had endured in silence, expressed itself in common complaints through which one could hear something like a muffled rumble of revolt. All that they barely dared whisper to themselves in the isolation of village life was now exasperated, rumbling in this café where they found themselves gathered.

This fever of common revolt roused Coste from his torpor, and his soul was troubled by the surge of the anxieties and resentments accumulated during his time at Maleval. He spoke in his turn, and the reflections that had come to him many times unbidden set his brain seething. His eye now alight, his gestures emphatic, his voice clear, he too was complaining, letting burst the storm of distresses and shames long brooded over. And whether a great bitterness lent his words a deep accent of sincerity, or whether his colleagues — who had seen him that morning at the conference, so clumsy and so tongue-tied — were astonished to hear him express himself with such warmth and ease, there came a moment when, in the cool, welcoming silence of the room that opened onto a little garden full of the babbling of a fountain and the rustling of acacias with their nascent fragrance, Coste’s voice rang out alone, vibrant and impassioned:

“Yes,” he cried, “the schoolmaster has reason to complain in the face of the bankruptcy of the hopes he was lulled with. To be sure, he waited long — patient, trusting, devoted, a modest and obedient servant. But is it his fault if he grows weary at last of being forever paid in empty words, in hollow phrases, if, on the pretext of budgetary necessities, the improvements to which he has a right are pushed back year after year? For want of satisfying legitimate desires and hopes, a muffled unrest is spreading, day by day, through the dense ranks of the schoolmasters. For it is not the thirst for pleasure, the love of money for money’s sake, that drives them: no, they ask only for enough to meet their needs and safeguard a dignity that is compromised by the insecurity of their moral and above all their material situation. Times are hard, and one cannot demand of the schoolmaster a selflessness whose worst consequences fall upon him among the peasants, so contemptuous of the needy teacher.”

“That is the plain truth,” they exclaimed around Coste. “We are less and less respected in the villages; it’s worse than before.”

“Yes, worse than before — you’ve said it,” Coste continued. “At every turn they dangle before our eyes, in fine phrases, the supposed advantages we have gained. It’s all humbug. In the old days the schoolmaster had several strings to his bow and was at least as happy as we are, if not more. Less watched, less pestered than today, freer in his life and in his classroom, he lived almost as a peasant. Bell-ringer, church cantor, even gravedigger, going from door to door soliciting gifts — a kind of voluntary tithe — what dignity could he have? they object. Granted; but at least all that supplemented his meager salary, kept his pot boiling, and he was free of worry about tomorrow — a peasant, I say again, living among peasants and like them. Is that our case? They claim so much has been done for us, and they think they’ve said it all when they show us the schoolmaster of the past earning three or four hundred francs at most. In reality, do we have more? Let them compare. In those days everything cost less, life was easier, and when the balance is struck, we are poorer today with our thousand francs — not counting a heap of additional vexations — than the schoolmaster of fifty years ago was with his three hundred francs, his petty perquisites, and the gifts that fed him a good part of the year.

“They tell us further: Compare the present budget for public education with the old one. — So what? There weren’t a hundred thousand schoolmasters then. You have increased the number of schools, spread instruction, built monuments — but, honestly, do you pay schoolmasters as they should be paid, as the needs of their families and the position they must maintain require? In the old days, the schoolmaster dressed as he pleased and no one took exception to his smock and wooden clogs. Was he not a peasant like the rest? Today, no. He must live differently; he is expected to keep up appearances; he has become a kind of petty bourgeois in outward show, with nothing but a fixed salary that grows ever more insufficient — for everything is dearer even in the most remote villages — since, apart from the town-hall secretaryship sometimes, he has no other resources than his thousand francs, since he may not, officially, accept any gift. If he has no means from his parents, if his wife brought no dowry, if family responsibilities crush him, what is he to do? And yet he was twenty once; he loved a girl, poor like himself, and, heedless of the future, he said to himself simply: Why should I not marry the one I love? Why should I not have fine children? Is it just that he should suffer for not having known how to calculate, for having followed his heart and scorned the money that later takes its terrible revenge?”

Coste stopped. His voice, in pronouncing these last words, trembled painfully, as though cracked by the sob that the bitter thought of his present bleeding sufferings brought rising within him. Around him, his colleagues were still silent, more and more won over by this sincere lament; a surge of fraternal sympathy carried them toward this tall, thin young man, a few words from Mademoiselle Bonniol having revealed to them his hard, difficult, and deeply meritorious life. This was no longer the timid fellow whose awkwardness had so painfully affected them that morning, but a man crying out his suffering, expressing his bitterness, and finding the words into which the overflow of his wretched heart poured forth.

Without gesture, in a slow, low voice, Coste began again:

“The schoolmaster is a half-bourgeois, but if the peasant still envies him on that account, he is also indifferent to him — to say nothing worse. On the pretext of maintaining dignity, of producing a moral effect, the schoolmaster lives almost apart, solitary and a stranger, mingling less and less with the peasant’s life, or only when — at election time, for example — he has nothing to reap but antipathies in the clash of hostile passions. Hence the mistrust, the enmities that scarcely relent, and, if the schoolmaster is hard up, the mockery and contempt that erode whatever regard still remains to him. Dominated by thoughts of advancement, of a better post, he no longer puts down roots in a village. Few are those who, after three or four years at most, for one reason or another — whether they request it or have given offense — do not undergo a costly transfer. And so the schoolmaster becomes, for the peasant, the stranger passing through, the one they do not love, whose origins they do not know, of whom they say only: He needn’t fear the frost or the hail, that one — every month he goes to collect his harvest at the tax office, and, on top of that, holidays for strolling about at the government’s expense.”

“Count ourselves lucky,” concluded one of Coste’s colleagues, “when they don’t call us white-handed loafers.”

An immense discouragement could be read in Coste’s bearing; it muffled the voice that had rung so vibrant a moment ago and which now arrived as from a distance. He fell silent, and a painful hush descended. All were pensive now; no gleam of revolt shone in their eyes, and their bowed backs seemed to bend beneath the weight.

The hour of departure was approaching for most of them. They rose, dejected, and in the streets empurpled by the setting sun they parted with melancholy farewells. The handshake each gave Coste in turn proved to him that his complaints had found an echo, that he had friends among them.

---

Spring, which had begun so well and — despite a few days of northwesterly wind — had enlivened with glorious mornings and warm, sunlit afternoons the month of March and hastened the confident green into leaf, suddenly turned sullen. Great black clouds fled across the sky and burst over the village and the fields in cold squalls. The weather turned sharp all at once; it was like a return to winter. Backs, already clad in lighter fabrics, hunched shivering beneath the lashing showers, and the young leaves trembled under the gusts of the tarral.

Caussette began to cough in the first days of April. She shivered even by the fireside whenever she could be persuaded to leave her icy room. Her lamentations went on without end; more cantankerous by the day, she grumbled ceaselessly against the weather and the children. Louise, very irritable on her side, lost patience at length; the ill-feeling between the two women deepened and declared itself openly. Scene after violent scene broke out between them. They hurled the coarsest insults at each other’s heads, very nearly coming to threats in voice and gesture. At their cries Jean, abandoning his pupils, would rush upstairs in a panic to place himself between them, striving in vain to calm them, accused by each of outrageous partiality, the reproaches of both raining down on him at once.

Those dreary days, and the drearier hours he spent after school between these creatures who were both dear to him, but whose cold, hateful faces never softened! He no longer had even the consolation of being able to give himself over, alone, to his dark thoughts in his classroom after the pupils had left. No — he had to be there at all times: when he was in their midst, at least they held their tongues.

But his work kept him downstairs six hours a day. In the morning he was less anxious, for Louise stayed in bed until eleven — another pretext for Caussette to grumble to herself, in her room, about the laziness of her daughter-in-law. During the afternoon he was always on the alert. Even as he explained a lesson or corrected an exercise, he kept one ear cocked to what was happening above him, in the kitchen where the two women were together. Apart from the patter of little feet and the laughter of Rose and Paul, a great silence often reigned, for Louise and Caussette, except to quarrel, scarcely spoke to each other anymore. Then sometimes, abruptly, there would come a murmur of harsh voices swelling in volume, and he would hastily abandon everything to go and pacify the two combatants.

“My God, my God!” he would sigh. “Let us pray my pupils don’t end up understanding and telling their parents all about it.”

And, deeply wretched, he would forget his money worries and throw himself at the feet of his wife and his mother, begging them to be reconciled, to love each other for his sake, to spare him these painful quarrels that could harm his standing in Maleval.

One Thursday afternoon, Jean had gone out with the children for a walk in the vicinity. He had wanted to take advantage of a break in the clouds that had pushed the drifting masses back to the edges of the horizon. Rose and Paul walked beside him and he pushed the two twins in a baby carriage. He was almost at peace, for in the past several days Caussette and Louise had not quarreled, and he had left them apparently calm in the kitchen. Caussette had even — badgered by his entreaties and for the sake of a quiet life — promised to come down for a while to the front step, warmed by the bright rays of the sun.

Half an hour passed after Jean and the children had gone. Louise was darning stockings by the window, in the sun. Caussette sat motionless not far from the nearly dead fire, near the door to her room, standing sentinel.

Silence reigned; nothing could be heard but the ticking of the alarm clock set on a corner of the mantelpiece, and outside the chirping of sparrows and the deep voice of a peasant plowing his field, who from time to time scolded the two mules of his team.

Through the glass, Louise watches him at his work; the plowman’s going and coming interests her. The gleaming plow sinks into the rich, damp earth, opening a wide reddish furrow that steams in the sun. In the distance, against the blue sky, the mountains rise, punctuated by a cluster of green where the plane trees of the promenade stand. Two or three old men, leaning against a dry-stone wall opposite the school, are chatting together, their eyes half-closed, as though about to doze, their heads resting on their walking sticks. This simple, peaceful scene charms Louise’s gaze. She regrets not having gone out with Jean: it must be so lovely outside. She feels better. The silence weighs on her. Without anger — merciful, even, under the influence of this radiant weather — she looks at the blind woman. Caussette, still motionless, her eyelids lowered, appears to sleep. But at a movement from Louise, her white pupils gleam in the depths of the hollow eye sockets; yet her features are relaxed, less harsh than usual.

“What a beautiful day!” murmured Louise, as though to open a conversation.

Caussette does not reply. Louise tries again in a calm, conciliatory voice, addressing her mother-in-law:

“Hadn’t you told Jean you’d come down to the front step? It must be so lovely out there.”

The same silence from the blind woman, who shuts her eyelids, disdainful of these overtures.

Louise persists. Abruptly, with her surly air, Caussette retorts:

“No, I don’t feel like going down. I don’t want to.”

“As you wish; it’s all the same to me,” replies Louise, stung at seeing her kindness so received.

In her corner, the blind woman grumbles. Louise understands why her mother-in-law insists on remaining there; she grows impatient and, her own expression turning sour, she mutters.

Once more, a deep silence falls.

A fit of coughing suddenly shakes Caussette’s frame.

“Would you like some herbal tea?” says Louise, calmed again. “There’s some made.”

“No, thank you. I don’t need any.”

“As you please.”

Caussette coughs again, then complains and shivers.

“Ah!” she moans. “What misery, to be old and blind. Jesus, my God!… My poor throat!” she adds in a gasping voice, seized once more by a dry cough.

“Is it possible, carrying on like that over a simple cold,” mutters Louise, vexed, shifting on her chair, which creaks.

“Of course!” the blind woman retorts, having heard. “A cold is nothing. At any rate, I know some who are more delicate than I am, and who love being cosseted like fine ladies.”

“You’re a wicked woman!” cries Louise, stung and full of her resentments. “You’ve never been able to say or do anything but hateful things.”

“If I say them, others think them. Ah! it’s only a simple cold! Of course — you’d rather nail me between four planks, I know very well. But I’m not ready to go yet. There are those who’d be only too happy to see me drop dead here.”

“That’s too much, that is too much!” cries Louise, beside herself. “You’re nothing but a vile woman, and — and — too bad, if you die, we certainly won’t be draping the donkey in crepe. One less famous miser.”

Caussette has risen and, her arm outstretched as though for a curse, she cries out, panting:

“A miser, me!… Ah! I know well enough you want my son to rob me for you. It’s you, you who put him up to it. You have the children spy on me. It’s not true I have money.”

“Then why do you keep such a watch? You’re always shut up in your room, and no wonder you’ve taken ill. Is it decent to be so suspicious, so miserly, and to leave your own son in poverty rather than touch your hoard? Bad mother! Bad mother!”

“No, no… Oh, the vile woman who has ruined my son.”

“Liar — it’s not true!”

“Yes, yes — you want to rob me… you want him to send me to the hospital… Glutton, pauper!… No, I will not sell my land… Ah! you need money to pamper your pretty face… Then work, you lazy thing; don’t play the invalid so you can treat yourself to nice thick slices of leg of mutton. You’ve ruined us, you’re eating us alive — lazy, lazy creature! Good-for-nothing!”

“Oh, my God!” exclaims Louise, quivering with rage. “To be treated like this!… Mother! Mother! I want to leave, I want to leave!”

“That would be the best thing you could do. What a relief for my poor boy, who’s killing himself for you!”

These words drive Louise to fury; she advances on the blind woman, who seems to defy her. Pale as death, her voice hissing, she cries in broken words:

“No, I will not leave… this is my home… Ah! You accuse me of wanting to rob you… Well then, yes — I will! I’ll break open your trunk… I’ll take everything, everything… and I’ll throw it into the street, you wicked mother!”

Caussette is frightened; she recoils, arms outstretched in defense; then suddenly, groping, overturning her chair, she flees into her room, locks herself in with a turn of the key, terrified by the furious, unhinged voice of her daughter-in-law, who still threatens her:

“Yes, you old witch, you hateful miser… I’ll rob you, I’ll rob you!”

Louise can take no more; her frenzy collapses and she sinks all at once onto a chair, sobbing frantically, her heart pounding fit to burst, nearly fainting. In her room, Caussette does not stir; seated on her trunk, her teeth chattering with fear and cold, she dreads that her daughter-in-law will carry out her threat.

“Lord Jesus!” she sighs. “She’s capable of it — she’ll rob me, she’ll rob me!”

She listens; she hears Louise weeping. Her fear vanishes at once and, her face full of hatred, she adds:

“Let her try, and we’ll see.”

But now, into the silence that has fallen over the house, children’s voices ring out:

“Little mother! Little mother! Pretty flowers for you!”

Jean comes in, happy from the good walk, happy at the children’s gaiety and at finding the house as calm as he had left it.

But on entering the kitchen he sees the overturned chair, Louise all alone and in tears, her features drawn, so pale, so pale.

“Oh, my God!” he groans.

His heart tightens. He who had arrived with such joy! He goes to his wife. Louise pushes him away at first, then, deeply wretched, bursts into sobs and at last tells him what has taken place.

Jean feels an atrocious pain pierce his heart.

“It’s too much — it’s too much!” he says through a sob.

Rose and Paul, their bouquets of fresh wildflowers in hand, bewildered by this sudden change, stare in fright, on the verge of tears themselves. In their cradle, where Jean has set them down, the twins coo, comically waving their little arms.

Caussette’s room remains silent.

The dinner hour approaches.

“Paul,” says Jean, “go and ask Grandmother to come to the table.”

The door is shut. The little boy knocks with his small fist.

“Grandmother, come to dinner, please!”

“I don’t want dinner… I’m not hungry… go away!” cries Caussette, opening her door a crack.

Jean decides to go and fetch his mother himself. He finds her seated once more on her trunk, in a hostile posture. In vain he pleads; she refuses, stubbornly repeating:

“No, no — I’m not hungry.”

And as Jean gently insists, she tells him through clenched teeth:

“Leave me in peace, once and for all. I won’t come. Your wife — you ought to whip her, for she doesn’t respect your mother. Go away, go away, you ingrate — you’re in league with her.”

Then it is Louise’s turn:

“Bah!” she says. “If she won’t come, too bad — it won’t kill her.”

“Oh, Louise, Louise! Be kind!” says Jean in a tone of reproach.

“I can see perfectly well that you’re taking her side, that you don’t love me!” she replies, in a burst of tears. “Oh, Mother, Mother!”

And after the silent dinner, when all are at last in bed, Jean remains alone in the kitchen. In vain he tries to turn to his customary tasks. Slumped on a chair, his head in his hands, he broods over his life of misery and pain. And while the hours chime one by one from the steeple of the church wrapped in night, while sudden showers patter, every quarter of an hour, on the roof tiles and the windowpanes with a sound like pebbles stirred by the rising sea, he feels a dreadful despair submerge his heart. And he lingers there.

---

The next morning, life resumed as usual. It was only at lunchtime, however, that Caussette left her room. She seemed very weary, dragging her feet in their heavy wooden clogs more than usual. As she sat down at the table, a spasm of pain crossed her wrinkled face and she could not stifle a slight cry. Jean, who was watching her, questioned her gently. She complained of a severe ache in all her limbs and an extreme fatigue throughout her body.

“If you’re suffering badly,” said Jean, “we’ll send for the doctor.”

“No, no — it will pass. Doctors are best left where they are. They cure nobody and are only good at eating poor folks’ money.”

During the afternoon she began to moan again and, although near the fire, claimed she was bitterly cold. All at once a violent chill seized her; her body began to tremble; one could hear her teeth chattering. Then, a moment later, the fever kindled and, pushing back her chair, Caussette declared herself greatly troubled by the heat, which, she said, was rising to her throat in waves. Jean, who happened to be there, hurried to her side; he took her hand — it was burning; alarmed, he found her pulse beating very hard. At her son’s insistence, Caussette consented — not without difficulty — to take to her bed. Jean, very attentive, tucked her in, propped her head with pillows, brought her herbal tea. From nursing Louise and the children, he had gradually acquired the touch of a sickroom attendant. And so Caussette, touched at last by the care he lavished on her, yielded to a kind impulse and said, in a rush of tenderness:

“Thank you, my brave boy!”

These words did Coste good; they seemed as soothing to him as the balm spread on a raw wound. Yet Jean could not persuade his mother to receive a visit from the doctor. Like most peasants, Caussette dreaded the doctor’s coming; in their view, the physician has every interest in not curing his patients too quickly, so as to increase his fees; and so one calls him only when all is desperate — with the result that the doctor’s arrival, coinciding too often with the fatal outcome of the illness, causes people to doubt his skill and to regard him as a sort of precursor, a herald of death.

The following day, the fever persisted; Caussette was already beginning to feel a stabbing pain in her side and shortness of breath. When Jean saw his mother breathing with such difficulty, he overrode the sick woman’s will and ran for the doctor. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia. Her temperature had risen to forty degrees, and a dry cough racked, at intervals, the old woman’s chest. To Coste’s questions, the doctor shook his head gravely:

“It is very serious,” he said, “especially at her age; but who knows? Despite her thinness, your mother is still very robust, and she may pull through.”

In her bed, Caussette seemed once again deeply anxious. All these comings and goings around her were unwelcome. The moment the charwoman, her son, or her daughter-in-law entered her room, the blind woman would raise herself on her elbow and in a brusque, hoarse voice demand to know what they wanted. Panting, she maintained this suspicious posture, her white eyes staring wide as though straining to see, her ears pricked to catch the slightest movement. Then a fit of coughing would flatten her on her pillow, and in her laboring chest could be heard the crackling of an ominous rattle.

So much suspicion and so much harshness saddened Jean and cut him to the quick. He felt powerless to reassure his mother, haunted as she was by the dreadful thought of a theft of which he was certainly incapable but which she would stubbornly persist in believing possible. Sometimes the dark idea — long since entertained by Louise — that Caussette’s death would immediately put an end to their money troubles would suddenly and treacherously insinuate itself into his mind. He would hasten to thrust it away in horror, believing himself guilty for having so much as entertained it, if only for a second. And in this cruel disarray of all his feelings of affection and decency, he would withdraw into a corner to hide tears of shame.

“Oh, this money, this cursed money, that makes my mother so hard toward me and that, through its haunting, comes to soil my true love for her!”

Alas! What would Coste have said, what would he have thought, had he suspected that Caussette’s illness had no other cause than this very thing? Ever since the evening when her son had turned to her, had begged her to deliver him from his misery, the old woman had lost all rest and all trust. How many times, waking with a start in the middle of the night, had she thrown herself from her bed and, feeling along the walls, barefoot on the freezing floor, gone to make sure the chest remained untouched? It was thus that, during the cold, damp night following her quarrel with Louise, Caussette — under the shock of her daughter-in-law’s threats — had not closed her eyes until morning, rising at every moment though already badly chilled, and had contracted the pneumonia that now nailed her to her bed.

That is why, during the days that followed, as the illness worsened, the blind woman became unable to endure her daughter-in-law’s presence in her room. She had nothing but harsh words for the young woman, crying out — in Jean’s absence, while he was busy with his class — that she wanted to be left alone.

“The hussy!” Caussette would say to herself. “If my son doesn’t do it himself, she’s capable of taking advantage of my illness. She loves nothing better than idling about and preening herself. Didn’t she threaten me, my God!”

She forgot her sufferings, started at the sound of a door, the creak of a piece of furniture, bolt upright in bed, ready at the first alarm to spring up.

That day, Caussette appeared more prostrate. Her white eyes glistened like shards of mirror. Her tongue dry, she articulated with difficulty her monotonous plaints, accompanied by the sibilant rattle that sang without cease in her chest and produced a frequent reddish expectoration. The shortness of breath was increasing; with each inhalation her nostrils dilated; one could hear something like the gurgling of air escaping through liquid. The patient’s cheekbones were red and burning; the flushed face revealed a deep, dark red tint beneath the skin weathered by the suns and winds of so many years of labor. The doctor, who came in the afternoon, found the pulse small and irregular; the temperature of the body — drenched in profuse sweat — remained above forty degrees: all very bad signs, he declared. He even asked whether the patient had begun to be delirious, and to Jean’s negative reply he added:

“It won’t be long now. It’s serious — very serious.”

That evening, Jean was alone keeping watch in the kitchen. Ten o’clock had just struck from the church steeple, and the vibrations of the metal were scarcely dying away in the depths of the great nocturnal silence.

Suddenly, Coste hears the crash of a bowl on the floor of the next room. Startled, he rises and gently, with caution, enters the bedroom. The door, barely pushed, opens without a sound.

By the light of the candle he holds in his hand, he sees a terrible sight. The blind woman has left her bed. In her shift, exposing the withered nakedness of her breast and her thin legs, she is all but stretched out upon her trunk, her arms spread as though to protect it. Her teeth chatter with cold and fever; her face is completely ravaged by illness and by a hideous terror.

“But you’re mad!” Jean cries at the sight. “Oh, Mother! Mother!”

“Ah! Scoundrel, thief!” the old woman hisses in a hiccupping voice. “I wasn’t wrong… you listen to that trollop wife of yours… You were there, to take my money… I heard you creeping in… Glutton, wretch — can’t you even wait until I’m dead?… But you’ll kill me before you get it… curse you, curse you, curse you!”

Rose and Paul, sleeping in the next room, are woken by their grandmother’s cries and in turn let out piercing shrieks. Louise, pale, comes running, scarcely dressed. She asks in a voice of anguish:

“What is it, what is it? Oh, my God!”

“Ah! Her too!” the blind woman roars, now delirious, clinging more tightly to the wood of the trunk, her nails screeching against it. “Her too, the hussy! Both of them were there… They want to steal my last coins… Get out, get out! Go away! Go away! Wicked, wicked, wicked!”

Caussette is foaming; mercifully her voice weakens, chokes, and cannot be heard from the schoolmistress’s lodging. Gasping for breath, the old woman falls silent at last and collapses full length in a faint. Quickly Jean puts her back to bed: she is ice-cold and a convulsive tremor shakes her from head to foot.

All night Caussette was delirious. She insulted her son, her daughter-in-law, her grandchildren, cursing them all; or else, in a weak, plaintive voice, she begged them to leave her her money — those dear coins she had earned with such pain ever since, before her husband’s death, she had been stripped of her property.

The next day, she died. She had not regained consciousness. To her last breath, still delirious, she spewed blasphemies and curses upon all her family, pursued even in her death agony by the torturing vision of her son tearing her money from her. At last the movement of her convulsed lips, fringed with bloody foam, ceased, and the silence of death enveloped — and the rigidity of death seized — that body twisted with suffering.

Jean, who on account of his mother’s dreadful delirium had refused all help from the neighbors, hastened to close the dead woman’s stubborn eyelids and to throw a corner of the sheet over that earthy mask, still so contorted with terror and hatred that he could not look upon it one last time without bursting into sobs.

The following night, after the departure of the neighbor women, Louise and Jean remained alone in the room of death. The terrible end of Caussette had left them overcome with shame and dread. They dared not speak, nor turn their eyes toward the corpse, rigid beneath the whiteness of the shroud that covered it entirely. Two candles burned on the chest of drawers, beside a saucer of holy water in which an olive branch was steeping.

At length, however, Jean started and tore himself from his painful reverie; he looked at his wife and murmured:

“What’s the use of staying here, Louise? You’re tiring yourself for nothing. Go to bed — I’ll keep the vigil alone and sleep in this chair.”

Louise obeyed; but before withdrawing she kissed her husband nervously; then, after a hesitation, said to him in a toneless voice:

“Tell me — why not look in the trunk now?”

Jean gave a start and sprang to his feet. He went deathly white.

“No, no — not yet,” he said. “Wait until they’ve taken her away. Tomorrow, tomorrow.”

He shuddered, as though he feared the dead woman might rise at the first step taken toward the trunk, which rested, black, at the foot of the funeral bed.

Yet when Louise had gone, he could not help saying to himself, deep down, that his situation was about to change at last, to improve; but he would have suffered, in his filial piety, to rejoice at it, especially in the terror that his mother’s death had left him. And so, to chase away these wicked thoughts of money, he gazed at the sheet, mottled with shadows, where the spare forms of the corpse showed through. He cast himself back to the distant time of his childhood and recalled his mother’s care when, not yet embittered by misfortune, she was the gentle, good woman who bends smiling over the cradle. Overwhelmed with grief and regret, he felt a surge of revolt against this money that alone, in the final days, had driven them apart. Given over entirely to his sorrow, he spent the night sobbing and dreaming of the past, in the solitude and silence of that funeral vigil, his heart full of gratitude and forgiveness.

On the day of the burial, Jean wept sincerely for his old mother. At the cemetery as at the church, he willed himself to remember only the wretched life of the brave woman she had once been. At the moment the coffin disappeared into the grave, he sent from the depths of his heart a last farewell to his mother. It was with a great sadness that, after receiving the conventional handshakes and the awkward condolences of the peasants, he set off home.

But no sooner had he entered the vestibule and closed the door behind him than Jean felt himself suddenly rid of an enormous weight. A joy — vague at first — flooded all his griefs. Imperious, the thought of the money his mother had left him seized his mind. Then he was ashamed of it, for the vivid image of Caussette in her death agony, crouching on her trunk, flashed before him. Climbing the stairs, he decided he would wait a while longer, to punish himself for the impatient desire he had felt to rush to his mother’s room. The few steps he had already bounded up he now descended again and went back into the classroom. He sat down at his desk on his platform, reached for a pupil’s notebook, and tried to correct an exercise. But despite his efforts he read without understanding, unable to sit still. In his mind he was calculating the sum he would find in the trunk — which would undoubtedly be enough to lift him from his shameful poverty. Suddenly he caught himself reckoning, on a scrap of paper, the total of his debts.

“Why hesitate?” he said then, aloud. “Isn’t that what life is? This preoccupation that obsesses me — isn’t it natural? No, it can no longer have anything blameworthy about it.”

He rose, bounded up the stairs, and entered — not without emotion — the room where, only a short time before, Caussette’s coffin had stood.

Louise was already there. Despite her fatigue, she had rummaged everywhere, and her face wore a look of anxious impatience.

“Jean,” she said, seeing her husband come in, “the trunk is locked. I’ve searched everywhere and I can’t find where the keys are hidden.”

His hands feverish, he joined his wife’s search. He turned and overturned every object, examined every piece of furniture, even moved them aside, tapping the walls and the floor. At length impatience overtook him, as it had Louise.

“Where the devil did she put them?” he said brusquely, searching once more the pockets of the last dress the dead woman had worn.

“Force the lock,” cried Louise nervously. “We don’t need keys, after all.”

“And yet she didn’t take them with her!” he replied, prowling about the room.

It repelled him to follow Louise’s advice. To force the lock, to pry off the lid of the trunk — the thought produced in him, in advance, the effect of a profanation. Would it not be the enactment — or rather the posthumous realization — of the theft his mother had attributed to him and which she had so dreaded throughout her life?

Jean shook his head.

“No, not that,” he murmured with a little shiver. “It would be a wicked act… I couldn’t do it — I feel that.”

“How foolish you are! I’ll do it myself, then. Go fetch me a hammer instead of standing there with your arms dangling and a stupid look on your face.”

“No, Louise, please — be patient. I’d be too grieved by it. We have time enough. Let’s keep looking.”

They persisted in their fruitless search.

“It’s so simple, though. Aren’t you a fool!” Louise kept repeating.

Jean had gone into the kitchen now and was turning everything upside down in the cupboards beside the chimney.

“No, no!” Louise called to him, exasperated. “What are you rummaging around in there for? You know perfectly well she hardly ever left her room. They can only be in here, in some hole or other.”

Jean came back. His eyes fell at once on the bed, which, hollowed in the middle, still bore the imprint of the corpse. He did not even think of it.

“What fools we are!” he exclaimed, almost joyfully. “I’ll wager they’re in the mattress.”

He rushed to the bed; with a swift motion he flung back the sheets, shoved aside the mattress, and uncovered the straw pallet, which had gone quite flat and collapsed during Caussette’s illness. Avidly he plunged his hands into it, running them in all directions through the corn-husk stuffing, which rustled as he pulled it out by the fistful and scattered it on the floor.

Rose and Paul, who had just come in, watched with great interest, uncomprehending.

Paul said:

“Papa, why are you making Granny’s bed, since they carried her away in the big box?”

And little Rose added, like an echo:

“Night-night, Granny… gone away in the big box.”

“There now!” said Jean all at once, with a smile of satisfaction. “I was sure of it — here they are.”

His hand held up a small packet, which he shook with a laugh, producing a very faint metallic clink. The packet was made of a handkerchief tied in several knots, knotted so tight that one needed fingers as thin and hooked as pincers — like Caussette’s — to undo them. In his eagerness, Jean broke a nail.

“Good Lord!” he cried, sucking his aching finger. “What precautions!”

At last Louise, more deft, succeeded and undid the final knot. Wrapped in scraps of cloth, two small keys — gleaming like iron objects in daily use — fell to the floor.

Under Coste’s fevered fingers, the old, rusted lock resisted for a moment.

“Damn it!” Jean cried harshly, losing patience. “Will we never get there? Her precious coins weren’t easy to steal, I’ll say that!”

The trunk open, Louise and he sent Caussette’s old rags flying about the room. Rose and Paul seized on these pitiful cast-offs and made a game of them.

At last, in one corner, beneath a pile of handkerchiefs striped yellow and blue, a second packet, fairly bulky, appeared. It contained a small sack of gray canvas — of the kind used for shotgun pellets — tied with a string. Its clear jingling rang in their ears like exquisite music.

Jean and Louise hefted and shook it in turn, naively relishing the silvery chime. Now they scarcely dared to verify the amount it contained, preferring to estimate the number roughly.

“There must be at least five hundred francs,” said Jean, full of joy.

His eyes shone with covetousness and he laughed softly; Louise too — both delighted. They breathed deeply, blissfully, as though happiness were flowing through their veins.

Abruptly, Coste untied the string, bent down, and overturned the contents of the sack onto a handkerchief spread on the floor. Gold coins of five, ten, and twenty francs, mixed with silver écus, small silver coins, and a good many large and small copper sous — a peasant’s savings — came streaming, rolling, gleaming about the room.

Rose and Paul had crouched around the heap of coins and were clapping their little hands and crying out, eyes wide:

“So many pennies, Papa! So many pennies, Mummy!”

All of them plunged their hands in with rapture, believing they had a fortune before them. After scattering the heap across the handkerchief and feasting their eyes to their satisfaction, Jean began to count it all, sorting it into piles.

“The devil! It can’t be!” he said at last, his brow creased with disappointment. “I’d have thought there was more. Only two hundred and fifty-two francs and a few miserable sous.”

“Didn’t you make a mistake?”

“Let’s see…”

No — it was the exact total. Their faces fell with disappointment.

But at once Jean was ashamed of his greed. He thought of all the privations that money represented, of all the economies his mother must have made, sou by sou, after old Coste’s death, from the meager wages of her painful fieldwork.

“The poor dear old thing!” he murmured, saddened and moved. “How she must have toiled to scrape all that together, on the little she earned. It’s no wonder she clung to it so. It was the fruit of many hardships, the savings from many a meal of nothing but a crust of brown bread and a few dried figs or almonds. Poor Mother — how little joy she had in her miserable life. And she died believing we wanted to rob her, that we were lying to her!”

Two large tears rolled from his eyes. His deep emotion reached Louise. They embraced, weeping.

They put the money back in the sack.

“Two hundred and fifty-two francs!” said Jean. “It’s a very handsome sum for us. With what I’ll get from selling the land, we’ll be back on our feet. If we’re not rich, at least we’ll owe nothing and we’ll have peace of mind from now on.” And he declaimed:

Who lives content with little possesses all things!

Once more, in handling this money he had so bitterly cursed only the day before, he was forgetting, in spite of himself, his emotion of a moment ago. Joy in his eyes, his chest expanded, he breathed freely — and even had to make an effort not to hum a tune, as was his habit when he was happy.

While Louise tied up the sack, Coste took his notebook and, consulting the bills spread out on the chest of drawers, drew up a tally of all his debts. So much to the Peyras tailor, so much to the butcher, so much to this one, so much to those — he kept on aligning figures. As he added them up, he found that these sums, sometimes so small, gradually made a very large total.

”… and 3,” he said at last, “makes 42. More than four hundred francs to pay, naturally including the doctor’s and the funeral expenses, which I’ve estimated roughly. It’s enormous!”

His brow darkened. For fear of error, he started the addition again.

“Well!” he added. “I’d have thought we owed much less. Bah! The land is worth a good five or six hundred francs at the very least; once everything is settled, we’ll have a tidy sum left over.”

He scribbled further calculations.

“That’s it… I was wrong to complain. We’ll have enough to see us through, at last.” And he heaved a sigh of relief. Then he kissed his Louise, who was smiling at him, happy, and caressed Rose and Paul, who, at their play, were still draping themselves in Caussette’s old clothes, then piling them higgledy-piggledy into the trunk — wide open now, and without its secret.

---

The following Thursday, Coste set off for his native village. The day before, with part of his mother’s savings, he had paid his Maleval suppliers to the last centime. And so, that day, he went out to the road to wait for the stagecoach — proud and glorying for the first time, walking in the broad sunlight and, head high, looking people in the face without shame as he met them and cheerfully returning their greetings in a clear voice. He was beside himself with joy at being able to tell himself he no longer owed a sou in Maleval.

As soon as he reached his village, he called upon the notary. The man told him that times were bad and landed property was fetching low prices; and so, although the field in question was certainly worth the six hundred francs at which Jean estimated it and which he was asking, three hundred and fifty to four hundred francs was the very most one could hope for, selling it at once and left uncultivated for a year as it had been.

“Unless you’d care to wait? In that case, with patience, one might get a better price.”

“No, I’d rather be rid of it as soon as possible,” replied Coste, impatient to owe nothing to anyone and to have a little money of his own.

The notary promised that within a fortnight he would have found a buyer.

Back at Maleval, Jean went to see the curé to inform him that he would be unable to pay for his mother’s funeral for some weeks.

The Abbé Clozel was one of those old country priests, full of devotion and rich in virtue. Of medium height but broad of shoulder, and sturdy as an oak despite his white hair, he had a stern face, tempered by the evangelical sweetness of his smile and the indulgent, guileless kindness of his blue eyes, pure as a child’s. Parish priest at Maleval for more than twenty years, he was much loved by his parishioners for his shrewd good nature and his discreet charity, which went so far as the complete forgetting of self. He could readily be seen chatting and laughing with the peasants. If the occasion arose — at harvest time, for instance — he was known to lend a hand in passing to people in difficulty: here putting his shoulder to a wheel, there helping to unload bales of hay or baskets of grapes. Hence his solid popularity among the villagers, whatever party they belonged to.

Until now the Abbé Clozel had had almost no dealings with the schoolmaster, despite the proximity of the rectory and the school. Not that Coste kept systematically aloof or obeyed those political preoccupations that, most of the time, in every village, make of the schoolmaster and the curé — representatives of hostile ideas — two antagonists who avoid each other, if not two irreconcilable enemies (though the contest is unequal on the side of the weaker schoolmaster). Coste certainly had no religious convictions; but if he was profoundly indifferent in matters of belief, neither did he harbor any prejudice. The priest, for his part — a man of peace and goodwill — scarcely took sides in the quarrels that divided his parishioners and concerned himself only with his church, which explained the respect and affection in which he was held. The cause of the reserve the schoolmaster had maintained toward the curé lay not in any of this but in the fact that, overburdened with work and too wretched, he seldom left his home and, out of pride, wished to form no regular acquaintance with anyone at all. He confined himself, like everyone else without exception, to greeting the Abbé Clozel politely when chance placed them in each other’s path. For his part, the old priest respected Coste’s reserve and voluntary isolation; through Mademoiselle Bonniol, who was on familiar terms at the rectory, he knew of the schoolmaster’s silent devotion, his humble and difficult life — all merits that were not calculated to forfeit the secret sympathy of the simple and charitable priest.

That is why the meeting of the two men was, from the outset, very cordial. Upon entering, Coste explained the purpose of his visit.

His hand outstretched, and with a kindly smile that softened the blunt frankness of his words, the abbé replied:

“Oh, there’s no hurry at all, my friend. Please take a seat. You will pay me whenever you like — I am a patient man. Schoolmasters, like country priests, must be content with little and seldom have large sums at their disposal. Rest easy — I’m not exactly rich myself, and that is why I understand the difficulties of my flock and feel the more for their sufferings. Between poor folk, one understands one another. I’m well aware that you have heavy family responsibilities, and—”

Coste interrupted him, not without a certain pride:

“But it’s not, Monsieur le Curé, that I am exactly hard up at the moment. I’m expecting the proceeds from a piece of land my poor mother left me, and I only need a few weeks’ credit.”

“Then I have no merit in obliging you,” said the priest good-naturedly. “Even the most comfortable of my parishioners don’t spoil me in that regard, and they know very well that I never resort to the services of the bailiff.”

Coste smiled. As they talked, he was surreptitiously examining the humble room where they sat, furnished with a few straw-bottomed chairs, with devotional pictures hanging on the walls and, on the mantelpiece, beside a tarnished mirror, two brass candlesticks and a statuette of the Virgin in white plaster. Everything breathed the simplicity — or rather the worthy poverty — of the good shepherd, ever ready to give the shirt off his back for the suffering sheep of his little flock.

The schoolmaster felt at ease in this setting, which reminded him of his own home, and in the company of this good man. The curé had his sister — who was his housekeeper — bring a bottle of beer. She, after exchanging a few welcoming words with Coste, withdrew discreetly.

“She is very close to your colleague, Mademoiselle Bonniol,” said the Abbé Clozel when his sister had gone.

“Indeed — so Mademoiselle Bonniol has often told me. An excellent person and a fine colleague.”

“Certainly — a saintly woman. She has her little eccentricities, to be sure, and likes to live alone with her animals — but, as you say, she has a heart of gold. She has often spoken to us of you… and of your merits. And so, we shared the esteem she has for you and for Madame Coste.”

Jean blushed and changed the subject. They talked then of their situations, their meager resources, their humble and difficult lives, and of Maleval and its inhabitants. Little by little they grew more trusting, more friendly, and took pleasure in the intimacy their conversation had assumed.

Coste stayed more than an hour. When he left, priest and schoolmaster — without having touched upon a single one of the questions liable to divide them, even momentarily — united their common poverty and humility in a warm handshake.

As he showed him out, the Abbé Clozel said with a mischievous smile:

“Although we are very near neighbors, I won’t ask you to come and see me often at the rectory. What is of no consequence for Mademoiselle Bonniol — a woman, and one who has been at Maleval a long time — could do you harm, a newcomer and an influential voter. We have here a few intransigent and captious spirits. They are few, but the wisest course is for you to keep your distance. As it has been said: the priest to the church, the schoolmaster to the school. But one is a man for all that, and it doesn’t prevent one from holding the other in esteem. At any rate, when we happen to meet, I don’t believe anyone will see any harm in our chatting as good friends.”

“But of course, Monsieur le Curé,” replied Coste, laughing at the amiable bluntness the priest brought to his remarks.

From then on, the two men did indeed stop to chat from time to time, especially in the afternoon, when Coste was overseeing his pupils’ departure and the curé was returning to his rectory after his customary stroll. And no one seemed to disapprove of these encounters or to hold it against Coste that he lived on excellent neighborly terms with the worthy priest.

A week later, a letter from the notary informed Coste that his field had found a buyer at a price of three hundred and ninety-five francs. He did not pause to reckon the loss he was taking on this hasty sale. Never had such sums been at his disposal, and in the joy of his recovered dignity, he was not far from imagining himself now almost wealthy and all future troubles well and truly averted. Once more he allowed himself to hope for a tranquil fate.

Yet when all the expenses and old debts had been paid, the jewels redeemed from the pawnshop, and clothing and shoes renewed, he had barely a little over a hundred francs left. It is true that Jean had seized an advantageous opportunity to buy a goat, easy to feed since Paul was big enough to lead it each day to browse the grassy ditches by the road, near the school. On Thursdays they would all go into the woods, where the goat would find abundant, fragrant pasture. The twins would delight in drinking her warm, creamy milk. In a word, as Jean put it, the money she had cost was really a sound investment.

But as it happened, in his preoccupation, Coste had forgotten to repay the fifty francs owed since the move to his colleague at Peyras. It so fell out that the man sent a reminder in a letter bordering on insolence, in which, among other pleasantries, he wrote “that he would have expected a colleague to show greater respect for his given word, etc., etc.”

The morning this letter was delivered, Jean was visibly vexed. His brow darkened; he had a mind, while sending the money, to reply very curtly; but he did nothing of the sort, afraid that his colleague, stung to the quick, might talk of his debt at Peyras. Out of pride, he contented himself with sending a postal money order along with a word of apology.

Louise could not get over how quickly the money was vanishing — money she had thought inexhaustible. When Jean, full of confidence and insouciance, maintained that what little remained should be kept as a reserve, she asked him:

“But then, are you going to buy on credit from the suppliers again?”

“Why, why not?” Jean retorted. “We don’t owe them a thing now — not them nor anyone. I’ve no intention of being left without any money in the house. It’s prudent. One never knows what may happen! This reserve will be for you, to look after yourself properly. Besides, what does it matter to the shopkeepers — don’t all civil servants do the same? And now that we’ve no arrears, but rather savings in the cupboard, the bills will be paid on the dot every month.”

Louise seemed convinced. Jean insisted nonetheless:

“After all,” he added proudly, “the suppliers know now that we’re good for it. They even think we’re rich and imagine I inherited more than three thousand francs. One of them told me so yesterday. Besides, since I’ve cleared my account with them, they’re so pleasant, so obliging: they offer me their entire shop and have even asked me not to stand on ceremony — to send the children or the charwoman every day and settle up at the end of the month. So we’ll keep this reserve. You’re going to take care of yourself, you’ll get well, and then we can dismiss the charwoman. After that, my salary will be enough — don’t you worry.”

What could she say to that? Besides, Louise had gradually lost interest in the household: owing to her precarious health, she let Jean see to everything and run everything. She raised no further objection.

Around this time, Coste received a visit from his inspector. With more confidence, and addressing pupils he knew well, he made a much better impression on his superior, who left expressing his satisfaction — not without alluding to the schoolmaster’s failure at the pedagogical conference.

Jean, without telling the whole truth, replied:

“You see, Monsieur l’Inspecteur, I am very shy in the presence of my colleagues. Besides being extremely nervous, I had my poor mother and my wife both ill, and I was too busy and too anxious to think of preparing my lesson the night before. So I was caught completely off guard.”

“I understand, I understand,” said the inspector with a smile. “But rid yourself of this timidity, which could have been held against you. Come now — courage, and goodbye.”

He shook Coste’s hand. He had, in fact, made inquiries, and knowing now the burdens this brave young man bore, he esteemed him all the more for it and quite understood the cause of the poor showing he had noted on the day of the conference.

Coste, having seen the inspector off at the stagecoach stop, came home whistling. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction and said to Louise:

“There goes a man who leaves content. Come, my Louise — everything will work out, everything will work out just as we wish.”

And in the exuberance of his joy, he scooped up the two twins cooing in their cradle, kissed each in turn, then, one on each knee, amused himself by bouncing them and saying in a childish voice:

“Come, my little darlings — a smile for your papa.”

But all at once he stopped, grown grave. The memory of his mother, gone forever, had just stirred within him, summoned by the dogwood walking stick propped against the door frame — the stick by which Caussette had guided herself. He reflected that, when all was said, it was to her, to her painfully amassed and jealously guarded savings, that he owed his peace of mind. Since everything in this world, good and evil alike, has its price, was his mother’s death not, as it were, the ransom of his present happiness? Then he felt toward the woman who slept over there, in the little cemetery visible through the open window, a keen rush of tenderness and gratitude that filled his heart and brought to his lips something like a prayer. At the same time a gentle melancholy, a fleeting regret, moistened his eyes in a softening of his whole being.

“What are you dreaming about?” asked Louise.

Jean had no time to answer.

Rose and Paul, who had been arguing on the landing for a moment, had just come in. The little girl, whom her brother delighted in mystifying, approached Jean and in a lisping voice asked, raising her beautiful candid eyes to her father:

“Paulou says that if I ate grass, then I’d have lovely milk like the goat. Is it true, Papa?”

Coste and his wife smiled at the adorable innocence of the little darling.

All in all — with a satisfied inspector, a few coins in the cupboard, no debts, a home where lovely children chattered, and peace of body and mind — life was becoming fine and good.

---

On a white afternoon in the waning days of April, Coste, who was standing on the doorstep overseeing the departure of his pupils, was surprised to see the mayor appear at the turning of the lane and then slowly mount the steps of the town hall–schoolhouse. What could account for this unusual visit? Since the fine weather had arrived, Monsieur Rastel spent the entire day at his farmstead and no longer “came down” to Maleval, since the schoolmaster took care to send him by a pupil the few documents requiring a signature.

“Well! What good wind brings you here, Monsieur le Maire?”

Monsieur Rastel, puffing like a walrus, inquired after the health of his goddaughter, good-natured as always, but with another preoccupation on his broad face, from which the sweat was streaming.

In the council chamber, the stout man — out of breath from climbing the stairs — collapsed heavily onto a chair, whose rungs cracked under him. Then, with a capacious checkered red handkerchief, he mopped his temples and brow.

“You know,” he said at last, “things are going badly.”

“Oh? What’s the matter?” asked Coste, taken aback.

“Why, the elections! Our opponents are scheming in the shadows. Come what may, they mean to get back into the town hall — to sweep us out, that’s what!”

“But since the district is republican?”

“Hmm! Hmm! It’s plain you take little interest in what’s going on. Too little, even. Yet you really must bestir yourself, confound it, and act! You have as much at stake as we do. One month more and we vote — so, no time to lose.”

And as Jean stared at him, dumbfounded:

“You know,” the mayor went on, continuing to mop his brow, “the reactionaries don’t care for you much. They say that although you make less commotion than your predecessor — that communard — you’re no better than he was. Some of them even claim you’re afraid.”

“Afraid! Of what?” exclaimed the schoolmaster, at a loss.

“Of them! And because you’re courting the curé.”

Coste was already opening his mouth to protest. Monsieur Rastel resumed at once:

“Oh, I attach no importance to it myself. I know very well you’re one of us. I’m no priest-eater, though I’m a good republican. And after all, the Abbé Clozel is a worthy man whom I esteem greatly and who knows how to keep his place. God grant that all curés were like him! But I’m only telling you this in your own interest. You’re not well off, are you? Well then —”

“Well then?” repeated Jean, annoyed by this question, which he found too familiar and even a little wounding to his pride.

“Well then — if they’re elected against us, the reactionaries have decided to take the town-hall secretaryship away from you.”

Coste paled.

“It can’t be!” he cried. “But who would they give it to?”

“Why, to Gustou — the first cousin of Piochou. You know — of Monsieur Pioch, the one who has his eye on my sash, the leader of the conservatives, the reactionaries, you know perfectly well. Gustou — lanky Gustou — is a greenhorn, practically an oaf, but he learned at the Brothers’ school in town to make fine flourishes and print letters. He claims to write a better hand than you, in roundhand and bastard script! And although he has some means, he’s got a keen appetite, like a good reactionary, and he finds that two hundred and fifty francs a year — especially for so little work — is worth taking. And that’s what’s hanging over your head, you see!”

Coste was struck dumb. This was serious. Twenty francs less a month — no way to balance his meager budget; once again it would be poverty, without hope this time. Despite his fine confidence, he suddenly recalled that the reserve in the cupboard was being chipped away every day, melting into unforeseen small expenses and costly medicines for Louise.

Hoping, however, that Monsieur Rastel was toying with him — trying to frighten him into zeal — he objected:

“But I thought we had nearly twenty votes in hand.”

“We had them, it’s true — but we helped ourselves along a bit, confound it! I’ll own it — enough said! So, you see, it’s time to watch our step, to shake ourselves up — in short!”

Coste knew little of the always somewhat unsavory cookery of elections. He breathed easier. All was not lost, then. Since it was a matter of defending his family’s bread, he would not stint his devotion. And so he promised, without hesitation, his active support in campaigning among those parents of his pupils who were considered lukewarm or indifferent.

Monsieur Rastel gave him some pointers; tempers had been running high for several days; the conservatives were ready for anything, claiming they had been “robbed” until now.

Coste did not linger over this word — though the mayor had underscored it — and saw in it only one of those exaggerations dictated by the hostile spirit of the parties.

From that day, he plunged headlong into the nascent struggle. He who, after finishing his class, had never gone out except to take his family on country walks, now left his house every evening. He talked with this one and that, preferably with the fathers of his pupils, and strove to steer the conversation onto the ground of the coming elections. Not without clumsiness and blunders, for he knew neither the people nor the temper of the district. He fastened above all on those the mayor had pointed out as undecided, exerting himself to convince them, never resting until he believed he had won them to his views. He did so much that he drew upon himself, more than ever, the hatred of the conservatives, who began to eye him with a very ill look.

“Just you wait, my fine fellow,” they said. “We’ll make your two hundred and fifty francs fly, we will! You’ll stick your tongue out all the further afterward. That’ll teach you to meddle in what’s no concern of yours.”

These threats, faithfully reported to Coste, served only to make him more ardent, and he threw himself body and soul into the battle that was beginning — one that was to be decisive for his future peace.

Every evening, the peasants gathered before the two cafés situated on the main road, in front of which the stagecoaches stopped to change horses.

This passing of the public coaches — which the construction of a railway was about to eliminate at any moment — was then, several times a day but especially in the evening, the only stir, the noisy animation that, for a few minutes, broke the monotonous solitude and silence of the sort of valley in which Maleval is built. Toward six o’clock, a muffled, distant rumble would come from the white road which, like a silver ribbon shot with sun, unfurls in a straight line for four kilometers before Maleval and then enters the village after rounding a hillock between whose high embankments it is enclosed for a stretch. Soon the cracking of whips rang out, mingled with the bright jingling of harness bells and the shrill, discordant fanfare of the trumpet or bugle that each postilion blew frantically, at the top of his lungs, to announce his triumphal arrival. Then, at the bend of the road, a stagecoach painted yellow and trimmed in garish red — the whole toned down by the dirty gray of mud or the whitish gray of dust — would appear all at once in the haze of sunlight; then another, and another, as many as five or six sometimes, at short intervals. Dragged by exhausted horses, so thin that their ribs showed through the taut skin like the hoops of a barrel, they rolled heavily along the fine road, raising whirlwinds of dust, with a rattling of ironwork and hollow timber, lurching along like frightened ducks. The village, drowsing between its mountains, seemed to wake at all this uproar, which the echoes sent back. In the blink of an eye, the deserted street came alive. While each driver went to fetch fresh horses from the stable to replace those that were being unhitched and led in, heads hanging and limping, the travelers crammed inside the coach would leap to the ground. They shook themselves at once, stretched yawning, walked about or stamped their feet to work the pins and needles from their legs, or with their handkerchiefs wiped the fine dust that covered their clothes and powdered their hair, along with their mustaches and eyebrows. A few women also alighted, looking weary, drawn, their dresses all crumpled; but the older ones remained patiently in the coach, content merely to shift about more freely. Then there were comings and goings from the café to the stagecoach and back again. Voices were raised, gestures were many and impatient, for everyone wanted a drink at once. The café owner and his wife were everywhere, most obliging, for the passage of the coaches — which four times a day plied between Montclapiers and the rich cantons of the plain — provided these publicans of so small a village with the better part of their income.

At last, the horses hitched, everyone packed into the stagecoaches again, which lurched off and, making the ground tremble and the windowpanes rattle in their wake, sped away toward the hill where they disappeared.

And until the following morning, the village sank back into its dreary apathy.

Drawn by this spectacle, groups of peasants formed there every evening, then — their curiosity satisfied from watching the new faces of the travelers — lingered until dinnertime. They would resume their conversations or their arguments in the open air, fragrant with the scents of the mountains, or else sit down around the café tables. In this election season, they gathered there in greater numbers.

Coste never failed to be on hand. He went from group to group and spent himself freely in talk. But since he had never concerned himself with active politics at Peyras, where the struggle between parties no longer existed, he showed little cunning and committed plenty of blunders. He very nearly got into arguments with certain conservatives, exasperated by the schoolmaster’s naive and somewhat muddled zeal.

Many a time, returning from these open-air gatherings, Coste encountered the Abbé Clozel reading his breviary before the church in the last glow of the setting sun. Quite indifferent to what was happening — for republicans and conservatives alike attended services every Sunday — the curé made a point of speaking to Coste about things unrelated to the coming elections.

One evening, however, he thought it well to say:

“My friend, you are being imprudent. You should, like me, stand aside. You see, all these struggles do no good for people like us. We lose our standing in them, and the esteem of many.”

Coste excused himself, citing the threats that had been made against him.

“You understand, Monsieur le Curé, that I have every interest in Monsieur Rastel’s remaining mayor of Maleval.”

“Yes, yes — I understand, and I pity you for it. But take my word from experience: be less fiery, more measured. After all, there is no question of principle at stake in Maleval — rather a question of personalities, as indeed in many places. Each side uses different words, drapes itself in the name republican or conservative — that’s all. And that is why there is more bitterness, more passion in all these contests, founded as they are on self-interest, on the need to be master. If you show your hand too much, you’ll make irreconcilable enemies who, should they one day hold the town hall, will not spare you, my poor boy.”

These last words had been spoken in a voice at once moved and paternal. Coste was touched. The curé continued:

“You see, one must have lived in order to regard these things with complete detachment. Alas! Our young priests, I know, do as you are doing now. They forget their mission, which is all peace and love. And so their intemperate zeal only makes them hated and, by consequence, poisons the quarrel, increases and perpetuates the misunderstandings, and drives people toward hatred of our holy religion. For my own part, I tell myself that royalty or republic matters little, that there will always be souls to console, to calm, and to sustain, and that no one will prevent me from fulfilling my sacred ministry of gentleness and forgiveness.”

This calm political skepticism, born of love and the total forgetting of human pettiness, struck the schoolmaster. Full of respect for the priest, he murmured:

“Oh, you — you are a saintly man, and everyone here reveres you.”

“No flattery, my friend. I’m only a poor man like you. Come now — be careful, and goodbye.”

They parted — the curé with his kind smile and the unalterable gentleness of his blue eyes, Coste saluting with respectful sympathy this man of goodness, but saying to himself:

“No, I cannot do otherwise. My children’s bread is at stake, and I must have nothing to reproach myself for.”

---

The closer election day drew, the more Monsieur Rastel exerted himself on his side. Notwithstanding the disdainful detachment he sometimes affected toward duties that, he professed, prevented him from fully enjoying the sweetness of retirement, the fact was that he clung to his sash as to the apple of his eye. Was it not for him a kind of revenge on his past life? A former minor civil servant, he had throughout his career known every servility, bowing his head beneath the arrogance, the whims, and the fancies of his hierarchical superiors. That is why he was not displeased, in his turn, to be at last the master and to compensate for his past subordination by the exercise of an authority almost without check — but which, on account of his genuine goodness, he did not know how to make heavy on others, content with the few satisfactions of vanity it afforded him.

Monsieur Rastel had abandoned his farmstead. At every moment he came hurrying to the town hall, lavishing advice and encouragement on Coste. Before long there were secret conclaves between the mayor, the schoolmaster, and the party grandees, which lasted far into the night and were held in the council chamber, with the windows hermetically sealed despite the mildness of the blue May evenings. These frequent meetings greatly intrigued the conservatives: “Fat Rastel is cooking up some dirty trick of his own,” they said. They themselves, moreover, met assiduously at the home of Piochou, their leader; and it sometimes happened that between eleven o’clock and midnight, emerging from their respective parleys, the two opposing groups — talking in low voices among themselves, stopping now and then to exchange a thought in mysterious fashion, like conspirators — would cross one another in the main street of the village, plunged in deep sleep and bathed in the soft light of the pink moon. They eyed one another warily; then the groups dispersed after a final word of advice and a handshake, and each went off to bed saying proudly to himself: “All sleep, but we — we keep watch!”

In the course of these meetings, Coste had at last come to understand many things of which he had had little inkling. But he feigned ignorance, for Monsieur Rastel did not dare openly broach the burning subject that was frequently discussed with innuendos easy enough, however, to penetrate. The mayor was vexed to see that the schoolmaster, while bravely putting himself forward when it came to active campaigning, could not take a hint about what was being discussed and, gazing vaguely into space, said nothing, proposed nothing whenever certain allusions were made by one or another of those present.

Coste’s ingenuousness, however, was only apparent. He was firmly resolved to lend himself to no underhanded means, to no fraud. His deep honesty recoiled from any tampering, any blameworthy act whatsoever and whatever the advantages to himself. He had, rooted within him, a respect for universal suffrage whose beauties he extolled to his pupils, with great conviction, in his civics lessons. He could not accept that anyone should deliberately falsify the vote. Persuade — yes, as much as you like; resort to illegal maneuvers — never. Besides, Coste had faith in success. He trusted the promises made to him by the peasants he catechized, who readily promised the schoolmaster what they promised just as readily to others, reserving the right to please themselves and vote as they saw fit when the time came. Coste was even surprised at the readiness with which those described to him as doubtful or lukewarm came round to his view, and he ingenuously credited himself with their conversion. Never having been involved in all these electoral machinations, he firmly believed in the sanctity of the given word, and what are called “the surprises of the ballot box” had no meaning for him.

In time, Monsieur Rastel grew impatient with the schoolmaster’s reserve — or rather, as he put it, his stupidity. One evening, he spoke deliberately of certain neighboring villages whose reactionary councils kept themselves adroitly in the town hall despite the indisputable gains of the republicans, who had once been in the minority but now held a majority of several votes, as an impartial tally and the subsequent legislative elections had shown.

In a tone that brooked no argument, the mayor said to Coste:

“So you see how our opponents go about it.”

“They’re wrong to do so,” the schoolmaster replied — having been directly addressed.

“But, you know, it’s fair game. One would have to be a fool to go easy on the reactionaries. Besides, think of the Empire and the Sixteenth of May — did they hold back then? Since you teach history to our youngsters, you won’t say that’s a fairy tale, will you?”

“Agreed — but the republic is strong enough not to model itself on the Empire and the Sixteenth of May. As for me, I believe our success is certain.”

“Perhaps — but that remains to be seen. As far as I can tell, you cling to your illusions, by God. It’s always been done, and we’ll never do as much as the reactionaries have done to us, are still doing, and will go on doing wherever they’re in charge. Ah, they’ve got more than a few tricks in their bag, those beggars. Better than us they know how to make the pea disappear. Come now — ask these gentlemen and they’ll tell you how our opponents used to carry on here, when they were in power.”

“It’s the honest truth!” put in a fellow with nearly white hair. “Today, when they want to take our places, their mouths are full of grand words. In the old days they fiddled right and left. Because the vote was nearly even, and a certain number couldn’t make up their minds — neither fish nor fowl — we had a hard time dislodging them from here. Yes, Monsieur le Maître, we caught them red-handed six years ago, and that’s why we’re sitting here today.”

“And if they get back in,” Monsieur Rastel pressed, “they won’t leave easily. So we’ll only be paying them back in their own coin. What say you?”

“I say, I say,” Coste replied, wavering, “that you’re surely right; but the republic must be a government of honesty, liberty, and fair dealing.”

“Fine phrases!” retorted the mayor, displeased by the schoolmaster’s resistance and shrugging his shoulders. “Well, let’s say no more about it. In any case, see that you keep quiet about what’s just been said. Go on — you’ll always be one of those who get fleeced.”

“What can I do? So long as my conscience —”

“Yes, yes — one can see you’re a complete novice in these matters. You act and speak like a child. If one squeezed your nose, milk would still come out. Well — too bad for you. In case of defeat, you’ll suffer more than I will.”

To this dressing-down Coste made no reply, for Monsieur Rastel had delivered it with such good humor that one could hardly take offense. After all, the schoolmaster’s participation was not needed; they therefore spoke of other things and parted early that evening.

From then on, the meetings were held at the mayor’s residence, and the schoolmaster was only rarely summoned. This did not displease him; he wanted no part in any complicity. But deep down, he was so keenly aware of the gravity that this election — whose outcome might once more plunge him into poverty — held for him, that he redoubled his efforts, and so effectively that Monsieur Rastel’s rather sharp displeasure was short-lived. But although the mayor did not bear a long grudge, once his coolness had passed he never breathed a word about what had happened, still less about what was being hatched at that very hour. And so, as the elections drew nearer, Coste — no longer kept abreast of events and decisions taken in closed committee — began to feel uneasy before the mayor’s mysterious manner and the evasive answers he received by way of information. So much so that, without regretting his earlier resolve in the slightest, he came round to telling himself selfishly that — provided he himself was not mixed up in any dirty business — Monsieur Rastel would, after all, be right to guard against every possible contingency, and that the threatening, clamorous hostility of the reactionaries ruled out courtesy and excused a great deal. This thought did not fail to reassure him about the final outcome of the struggle, and he faced the future with confidence.

Monsieur Rastel was not idle. All day long he could be seen striding along the main road, climbing up to one or another of his supporters like a general before the battle, pausing only to catch his breath and mop his sweating brow with the checkered red handkerchief he brandished constantly in his hand. He no longer went even for a morning — not a single hour — to his farmstead, where it would have been so pleasant to lounge about with a pipe instead of tramping through the blazing sun that lit the streets of Maleval with a harsh glare.

The heat was beginning, in fact. It was mid-May. The delicate greenery of April had filled out and was spreading in luxuriant growth. The sparse foliage of the trees had rounded into dense, cool, green masses and threw a compact shade upon the ground, through which a few sunbeams barely trembled in broad discs of gold. The amorous frenzy of the birds, fluttering around the freshly hatched nests, burst into wild song among the branches. Beneath the grasses and the moss, one could feel a multitude of tiny lives quivering and coupling, whose thousand confused voices filled the calm of the night with a deafening murmur. Morning and evening, breezes blew, carrying from the luminous distances and fields the heady scents of a world of blossoms swooning in the sun. In the valley, the verdant vines were already weaving their vigorous tendrils, whose flowering clusters exhaled an indefinable aroma. The mountains, under streaming rays, seemed also to quicken with an intense life, and the somber mantle of the great holm oaks was embroidered with the strange, tender-green designs of new shoots. And in this overflow of life, of sun, and of love, man lapsed back into the languors of reverie.

On the eve of the election, the village — ordinarily so calm — is in a ferment. Everyone takes his measures; they watch one another, so as to forestall any surprise.

The great day has come.

The pearly, trembling dawn has barely whitened the peaks when already determined young men are queuing on the steps of the town hall. The ballot is not to open until eight o’clock. But the conservatives mean to be among the first, so that at least some of them may sit on the committee and watch over the ballot box.

The disappointment is great when, at eight o’clock sharp, the doors open and, entering the chamber, they find the committee already formed, composed solely of their mocking adversaries. Monsieur Rastel has had the foresight, in fact, to have the youngest and the eldest of his supporters sleep in the town hall overnight. Mattresses are still heaped in a corner by the entrance, barely rolled up. A murmur of anger runs through the ranks of the outwitted conservatives, and already one can feel fists clenching.

During the afternoon the discontent grows, for two gendarmes — summoned from the cantonal capital by the mayor in anticipation of trouble — appear in the square at about three o’clock.

“They mean to rob us!” comes the roar from the groups. “But we won’t stand for it!”

The voting goes on; each party mobilizes its people, invalids included. Ailing, infirm old men, some of them in their dotage, mouths dribbling, are carried into the town-hall chamber where, sash across his chest, Monsieur Rastel presides, drenched, sweating from every pore, casting a protective eye over the ballot box set before him.

Outside, the sun beats down; the afternoon turns stormy; great white clouds are banking on the horizon. Under the electric charges in the air, the crowd surges before the town hall, gestures quicken, words fly, sometimes threatening. From group to group they shout at one another, they wrangle; altercations break out; several young men have already come to blows. More scenes of fisticuffs are in the making; fists clench and rise here and there, ready to strike. Rumors circulate that the mayor and his friends have palmed ballots, substituted others. Some cite the deed, assert without cause that they witnessed it; a reactionary voter swears the mayor took his ballot with fingers deliberately stained with ink, so as to have it annulled at the count. In trying to convince their friends they end by believing it themselves, and at the least sign of doubt become more emphatic, specify the circumstances, go so far as solemn oaths punctuated by threats and crude insults. Their opponents contradict them, provoke them. Tempers seethe. Protests rise, spreading from group to group amid mutual abuse, rumbling even into the voting chamber despite the mayor’s vigorous calls for silence.

Six o’clock strikes. No sooner does the roll of the drum announce the close of the ballot than arguments and disputes break out around the box. Insults are hurled at the mayor. Without hesitation, Monsieur Rastel orders the gendarmes to clear the room. The tellers remain alone around the table where the ballots are being counted. Among them, a single conservative — the only one — is gesticulating, furious. It is Gustou, thin and long as a day without bread, the man who aspires to replace Coste as secretary of the town hall.

The rest are massed at the back, on the landing, where they have just been pushed — not without difficulty and not without indignant protests. The doors stand wide open; a gendarme on either side, saber in hand. One can hear teeth grinding with rage. The heat is suffocating; at intervals a muffled roll of thunder mingles with the hubbub from outside, where they seem to be brawling hard.

In the chamber, every stained, poorly crossed, or doubtful ballot is fiercely disputed.

Gustou’s voice rings out suddenly:

“This is outrageous — only our ballots are stained or voided!”

And while his fist pounds the table, he turns toward the door and bellows:

“They’re robbing us, comrades!”

A clamor answers him; a surging movement on the landing; arms are stretched out, fists threaten. The woodwork of the door cracks under the pressure. The gendarmes can barely hold back the invasion of the room. Then a retreat, but the shouts redouble on the staircase, where women’s voices can be heard shrilling and men’s voices cursing.

Monsieur Rastel, crimson, mops himself more vigorously than ever, but with dignity does not cease repeating:

“Silence and calm, gentlemen! Respect for the law and for authority!”

Suddenly he is accosted by Gustou, who shouts:

“Monsieur le Maire, our ballots have been juggled — it’s scandalous!”

“Chuck the box out the window! Go on, Gustou!” shouts a voice from the landing.

Coste, who is standing by the far window, thinks it his duty to step forward and say:

“You are giving your friend very bad advice. He risks prison.”

“You — shut your beak!” comes the retort. “You’re part of the gang and as much a thief as they are!”

Stung by these words, he opens his mouth to answer the insulter sharply. But a noise rises in the room behind him. At the same time, men are clattering down the staircase, some furious, others shouting:

“Bravo, Gustou! Bravo!”

Coste has wheeled around; he just has time to see Gustou hurl himself upon the open ballot box — still containing half the ballots — seize it before anyone can intervene, dash to the balcony, and fling the whole lot outside.

Stupefaction. Monsieur Rastel rubs his eyes as though he were dreaming. The gendarmes have seized Gustou by the collar; he struggles and tries to flee.

Below, clamor erupts. In the glow of the red sun — already being overtaken by the storm clouds mounting and invading the sky — the ballot box passes from hand to hand, falls and bounces on the ground, smashed to pieces underfoot. The ballots scatter this way and that, trampled, torn to shreds in no time. The women are the most ferocious. People jostle, fists are exchanged.

In the town-hall chamber, Monsieur Rastel, arms aloft, laments:

“Oh, the villains! The scoundrels! An election that was going so well!”

But he is abandoned as everyone rushes outside to the aid of their friends. Left alone with Coste, he advances to the balcony and cries to the howling, threatening crowd below:

“Wretches — you’ve made your case plain! It’s prison for you — yes, prison, you rascals!”

“Come down here, you fat windbag, and we’ll give you the same!” bawl a few furious conservatives.

Divided into two maddened camps of roughly equal strength, men, women, even children challenge one another in the square, seeming at every moment on the point of tearing into one another in a general melee. The gendarmes have their hands full to keep order. Apart from a few isolated fistfights, the violence is mostly verbal — but beware the general battle to come, for the women are pushing the men on, urging them with their voices.

But now a flash of lightning blazes and seems to split the low sky. Then a violent clap of thunder shakes the valley and the discharge rolls from cloud to cloud and echo to echo. A brief silence, and the storm breaks, falling in a deluge upon the village. In an instant, the savage crowd scatters and flees from all directions into the shelter of the houses. For more than an hour, thunder and rain rage; night has fallen abruptly, but broad flashes of lightning tear open the thick darkness, illuminating for a second the things that seem to shudder; then the glare dies, while the great voice of the angry sky resounds and swells anew.

At last the storm retreats; every human cry has ceased in the village and the surrounding country; yet from the less dark sky the rain still falls. But toward ten o’clock the clouds part; fragments of blue gleam in the depths of the white openings; little by little the sky clears and grows serene, and a calm, luminous night begins. Up above, in the deep splendor of the blue abysses, the silent moon rises over the sleeping village, whose rooftops and foliage glisten, frosted with silver — and balances amid a retinue of bright stars that pale one by one at her approach. And from the mountains, silvered too, where the oaks dapple them with gray, from the valley caressed by cool breezes that set the leaves of vine and tree softly singing, from everywhere at last, come by the thousands the shrill, sustained cries of insects, while over there, at the black mouth of a gorge, in a ruin, two owl-calls answer one another.

---

The night blew out all those voters’ rages — rages as fleeting as marsh fires. When the radiant day set the rain-washed valley sparkling and the droplets on the bushes and still-wet trees glittering, the passion had well and truly subsided, and more than one man woke uneasy, thinking of the previous evening’s escapades.

Those who thought themselves in the least compromised were not swaggering now; some even hid themselves away for several days.

Gustou, whom the gendarmes had released after drawing up a formal report — Gustou was making somber reflections. No, he would not escape, not he! And with his face a foot long, he feared at every moment that he would be arrested and led off to prison, wrists in irons, like a rogue.

The inquiry and prosecution followed their usual course; Gustou got off lightly, however. He was sentenced to a heavy fine and a few days in prison. Coste appeared as a witness at the trial; the poor man was so frightened of the future that he was paler and more wretched, while giving his testimony, than the accused themselves.

In the meantime, new elections were held under the presidency of a prefectural councillor delegated to prevent further disturbances.

Discouraged, Monsieur Rastel washed his hands of the whole affair. It is true that several hotheads had threatened him with blows, and the good man, fearful for his skin, had decided on reflection to prefer his peace of mind to the satisfactions of vanity his sash afforded him. He foresaw, moreover, that his opponents’ show of force would have rallied the timid and the wavering to their side, and he had little stomach for resuming the fight. And so he came to vote as soon as the polls opened and hurried to withdraw and shut himself up at his farmstead, believing the game lost and vowing to taste henceforth the charms of retirement and the coolness of the shady woods. Was that not, after all, beyond price?

This unforeseen desertion delighted the conservatives; they exulted. For them, there was no longer any doubt that, but for Gustou’s rash act, they would have been robbed at the first election. They were therefore expecting a resounding triumph. They were obliged, however, to temper their jubilation somewhat. The result was not as brilliant as they had hoped, and proved that Monsieur Rastel had retired to his tent too soon and might have fought with every chance of success had he supported the efforts of his partisans, who for their part had contested the ground foot by foot to the very end. Indeed, the reactionaries elected by a majority won by only five or six votes. Even Monsieur Rastel and two other candidates on the republican list were among the ten councillors elected — at the bottom of the list, it is true — and would represent the opposition in the new council.

And so, when they came to tell him the result, the ex-mayor felt an immense and rather tragic regret.

“Yes, it’s my fault — my very great fault!” he cried, in answer to the bitter reproaches of his friends. “I left them too easy a game. I deserted the field of battle like a coward. But devil take me if I’d have believed success was possible, in such conditions!”

In his vexation he took to detesting his farmstead, painfully regretting the sash he had not known how to keep. And, in the grip of a great despondency:

“Ah!” he sighed. “It’s too late. Regrets are useless! Now that they’re in, the scoundrels, they’ll see to it that they never leave!”

That was indeed precisely what the victors were promising themselves. Their astonishment at the narrowness of their victory having passed, they gave themselves over — as soon as the results were proclaimed — to explosions of delirious joy, to comical transports. To celebrate more noisily and with greater éclat, they paraded through the village streets an effigy of Monsieur Rastel, fitted with large spectacles and a pork-butcher’s cape, beating a drum and shouting: “What a drubbing! Oh, what a drubbing!” Then they burned it in front of the town hall with songs and dances, while one firebrand, holding forth on the front steps, carried away by the excess of his joy, went so far as to declare cynically:

“And now that we’re in — let the reds come! I’ll stake my life they won’t sweep us out so easily. Hey there, republicans, communards — you’re neither clever enough nor man enough to fight us! Conjuring tricks aren’t your line — you’re only apprentices!”

And all laughed in the pride of triumph.

Meanwhile, what was becoming of Coste may be imagined. To the very last hour, despite Monsieur Rastel’s abandonment, he had clung to that stubborn hope one keeps even in the face of terrible danger. When the result was known, he was devastated. The wretched fellow could not recover from it; he thought he was dreaming and made no effort to hide his bewilderment. In the room where he stood, threats and brutal allusions were already raining thickly upon him. Without pity, the victors laughed at his crestfallen face. A certain somebody came and planted himself under his nose, eyed him with a mocking air, and said to him, coarsely and point-blank:

“You can pack your bags. Your two hundred and fifty francs from the secretaryship have taken the plunge. That way you’ll eat fewer chops!”

Coste was too wretched and too much the civil servant; he did not dare answer this malicious jeer with a well-aimed blow of the fist. He fled to his lodging to hide his anguish.

During this recent time he had been relatively so happy and so tranquil. To be sure, despite all his forecasts, the money set aside in the cupboard had gone quickly — on those small expenses one scarcely thinks of and that so often cripple the petty civil servant’s budget. Nevertheless, they were just managing to make ends meet; a few coins still remained in reserve and at least there was no anxiety. Coste, having no debts, breathed freely and had recovered all his former confidence and unconcern.

Louise, better cared for, better fed, had gradually regained more health. She could take long walks, and with this salutary exercise her pale complexion was brightened by the delicate flush of less impoverished blood. The same was true of her heart palpitations, which had grown increasingly rare as her general health improved. Her nights were calm, her bouts of insomnia less frequent; she too was being reborn to hope, felt full of courage, and — though still aided by Jean — was beginning to see to the housework.

The charwoman came only to wash the heavy laundry and do the most arduous chores. They even spoke of dismissing her before long. Since the arrival of the fine months, the expense of wood and candles had been almost nil. And so they lived fairly well, if from hand to mouth.

The twins, fed on the goat’s milk — which cost nothing to produce — were thriving. Jean had recovered his carefree gaiety. Dreams and plans flew from chattering lips, and the apartment, open to the joy from outside, filled with singing and kisses. They still had a few coins in the cupboard, and Jean, who was a smoker, allowed himself as an extra, two or three times a week, a ten-centime cigar. He would draw on it voluptuously, either during his walks, lying in the shade on the new grass, or in his little flower garden, reading his newspaper in shirtsleeves. He flattered himself at last that he had overcome his bad luck and declared himself happy.

Almost every evening, after school, he would set out with his whole household once the worst of the heat had passed. Paul, flanked by Rose, proudly led Même — as they called the goat. Jean pushed the carriage in which the two twins lay head to foot. Louise walked alongside, pretty and coquettish again; she chatted with her husband or laughed with him at the combined efforts of Paul and Rose, tugging on the rope to master the goat’s willful swerves and bring her back to the straight path. They would make for the gorges fragrant with lavender and wild thyme, to graze Même among the savory, aromatic grasses that sprout from the cracks and the crumbled edges of rocks or that spring vigorously from the hollows filled with the blackish humus of decomposed leaves. These were joyful outings and a tonic for the little ones and for Louise. To avoid too great a fatigue, they would halt in many places. Jean would sit down to read in the shade of an oak or would clamber among the rocks gathering plants for his herbarium. Louise knitted, keeping an eye on the twins. As for Rose and Paul, they did not leave the goat’s side for a minute and delighted in gamboling around her or after her. Même had quickly grown familiar with them. Capricious and whimsical, she would sometimes bolt and escape the little hands powerless to hold her. She would leap, bounding from rock to rock, pausing to browse a tuft of grass or the tender shoots of honeysuckle, and, having gained the summit of a high rock, would plant herself there a moment. Then, as though to taunt them, she would bleat softly, her golden eyes half-closed, down at the children who were afraid for her.

“Papa, Papa!” Rose would cry. “Même is going to go boom!”

And on her frightened little face could be read the emotion she felt at watching the goat’s perilous antics. At last, with graceful leaps, snatching a bite at every rock-clinging plant she met, Même would scramble down the slope, to the great delight of the reassured children. Then they would call to her tenderly, waggling their little fingers in a gesture that said: “Come!” The goat would advance toward them, then stand motionless watching them run up. Already their small hands would reach out to seize the halter or the horns; but she, who had seemed to wait for them, would dodge with a sidelong spring, scamper off nimbly, stop a few paces further on, and bleat again. The game would begin anew, for Rose and Paul vied with each other in persistence. So many mad dashes, full of surprise and peals of laughter; so many whimsical chases that gave the two children a healthy tiredness, a good appetite, and deep sleep each evening.

When the sun had set and the silky blue of the sky was reddening in the west, Jean would rise and give a call that put an end to the frolics of goat and children. At the cry, Même would come running to him at once and with a greedy tongue lick from Coste’s palm the few grains of salt he never failed to bring. They would make their way quietly back to Maleval, breathing the balmy freshness that steeped the evening air. Then all would eat with an appetite that made Jean say with relish:

“Better to pay the baker than the doctor and the pharmacist.”

Before the meal was over, Rose and Paul, sated, would be fighting sleep. Jean would say:

“The sandman, Rose — he’s right behind you.”

“Where is he?”

“Ah! The moment you opened your eyes, he flew out the window.”

“Tell me, what does the sandman look like?” Paul would ask in his turn. “Does he have fine clothes?”

“Of course. His cloak is all black. He has glowworms on his hat, moonbeams on his clothes, and a star on each of his shoes. Look — there he is, over there. Ah! You didn’t turn round fast enough — whoosh! He’s gone again!”

Louise, a pale pink flower on each cheek, would serve them with a smile, happy to be active, though she too was longing for sleep. Soon, amid this chatter — always the same and always delightful — the little ones’ eyes would close and they would fall fast asleep at the table. Jean would put them to bed himself, scarcely waking them, so accustomed had even his fingers become, with a mother’s touch, to this dear task. And this quiet life, this nightly ritual, were unspeakably sweet to his affectionate heart, from which all anxiety was absent. How could his unconcern not have returned? He imagined no other happiness and scarcely thought any longer of the future, content to enjoy the present.

And now Jean Coste asked himself anxiously, with anguish in his heart, whether this calm happiness — made of normal, dependable joys — was about to crumble all at once, and the dreadful, terrible privation from which he had once suffered so cruelly was going to creep back and install itself in his household. Alas, he could not deceive himself. The very next day, the newly elected councillors took noisy possession of the town hall, abandoned by Monsieur Rastel — who had sworn to confine himself henceforth to his farmstead — and established themselves forthwith as though in conquered territory. Their offensive manner, their scowling faces, the curt orders they gave, all said plainly enough how much hostility they bore toward the schoolmaster-secretary. He multiplied his efforts, would have liked to soften them by his humility, and strove in vain to demonstrate submission, almost servility. And they, triumphant, sneered without pity and said among themselves:

“He’s dying of fright — but it’s no use, it’s too late. Ah, my fine fellow — your two hundred and fifty francs are going to take a hit.”

Coste dreaded the future too much to rebel before these hostile looks and these whispers he guessed to be full of menace.

“It’s for my family,” he would murmur.

And this thought sustained him and gave him the strength to endure everything. Yet he understood that by himself alone he would not disarm the hostility shown him. That is why, one evening, he entered the rectory — desolate, bursting with fear at the thought of falling back into the misery of former days, and having no resource left but the hope of the step he was about to ask the curé to take on his behalf.

Seeing him, the Abbé Clozel said:

“Well, my friend — what brings you to my door? It’s true that now, with the new council, you’ll have a freer hand. You’ll be able to come to the rectory more often.”

But he noticed Coste’s distress and asked:

“What is the matter, my friend? You’re so pale and so downcast.”

“Ah, Monsieur le Curé, I am too wretched. What grieves me is precisely the new council. As soon as the mayor is elected, it seems, I am to be dismissed from my post as secretary.”

“Idle threats to frighten you. I don’t believe it. Come now — is it possible? Whom would they put in your place?”

“Why, Gustou — the cousin of Monsieur Pioch, the future mayor.”

“What business has he meddling in that? Hasn’t he work enough with his land?”

“Yet that is what they’re going to do — I’m certain of it. And for me it’s a terrible blow — poverty.”

Coste had spoken this last word in a low voice, through a sob. Then the memory of all he had suffered in the past surged back to his heart; humbly, without shame, he told the priest — who was moved — the story of his past life. Since his mother’s death, thanks to his inheritance, he had at last found peace, almost happiness, in the quiet modesty of his existence. Must he lose it once more?

“For,” he added, “if they take those two hundred and fifty francs from me, it’s back to the beginning. Already I was barely making ends meet. I have so many responsibilities, as you know, and no other resources than my meager salary. Twenty francs less a month — and at once it’s privation. For what am I to do on seventy-nine francs — fifty-two sous a day? I shall be forced into debt, for my wife’s health still requires great care — and debts grow like mushrooms. Besides, I no longer have a sou to hope for from anyone. How shall I pay, if I fall behind? I am counting on you — intercede for me. Say that if I involved myself in the elections, I was guided only by the thought of keeping those two hundred and fifty francs, which are essential to me. I bear no grudge against anyone. Only let them leave me to live — oh yes, let them not take from me this crust of bread that I need for my family.”

Coste was pleading, hands clasped, weeping freely. The curé could barely contain his emotion. He looked at the poor man and shared in his anguish and his distress.

“My friend,” he said, “count on me. The little influence I may have, I shall use for you. I fervently hope they will listen. I shall plead your cause with my heart, and I trust God will grant me the grace to persuade your opponents. Your lot is worthy of pity. One would need a heart of stone not to be moved.”

And as Coste, sunk in his grief and his humility, made another gesture of supplication, the Abbé Clozel added:

“Tomorrow I shall go to see Monsieur Pioch. It would be an iniquity! They will listen to me. Come now — courage, my friend!”

The schoolmaster went away somewhat heartened. The curé kept his word. But his effort was in vain. He was told that the post was promised and that to go back on a decision taken in closed council would displease all the conservatives. The Abbé Clozel appealed in vain to the sentiments of humanity that pleaded in favor of his protégé, preaching the forgetting of wrongs — that first duty of a sincere Christian. Piochou, with a sly peasant’s stubbornness, dug in his heels. He was sorry, certainly, but it was impossible; thus it had been decided and he could change nothing.

The curé lost a little patience before this lack of pity and this determination to hate:

“But it means poverty,” he cried, “for this poor man. Consider — he has four small children and a sick wife. No — you will not be so cruel!”

The peasant was stung by these last words, which were, however, only the cry of a heart that felt for another’s misery. Besides, he and his friends were delighted to be able at last to take revenge on one of those who had helped to secure Gustou’s conviction. Gustou wished to be secretary, and that compensation was surely owed to him. And so, drawing up his short frame and knitting his brows, the mayor declared flatly, in a sharp, thin voice:

“I’m sorry, but it’s impossible. Don’t insist.”

Then, wishing to teach a lesson to this curé whom they had not forgiven for his total abstention during the recent elections, he added, a little mockingly:

“Allow me even, Monsieur le Curé, a small respectful observation. I’m surprised that you should plead the cause of a firebrand like Coste, who did everything in his power to injure those who are the most devoted of your parishioners. Really, you don’t draw enough distinction between republicans and conservatives, between the enemies and the friends of religion. In wanting to be too good, one is often made a fool of. Many priests don’t behave as you do, and —”

The Abbé Clozel interrupted the crafty peasant and replied simply:

“Monsieur Pioch, I act according to my conscience and my duty. I am a man of peace. The quarrels that divide you matter little to me, and I understand them poorly. One and all, you are my dear flock, and as a good shepherd I owe my care to the faithful sheep as much as to those that stray from the fold and risk losing themselves entirely. Your cousin can do perfectly well without the town-hall secretaryship. It would, on the contrary, be a wicked act to take the bread from a man with a family to support. Come now — a generous impulse, and little children will bless you. Our best actions are always those that cost us the most. Have pity.”

“I repeat, Monsieur le Curé: to my keen regret, I can do nothing. What is decided is decided. Too bad for Monsieur Coste — he brought it on himself.”

Some days later, Monsieur Auguste Pioch — otherwise known as Gustou, or Piochounet — very proud and wearing on his brow the halo of confessor and martyr of the conservative faith, was installed by his cousin Monsieur Roch Pioch, or Piochou, mayor of Maleval, as secretary of the town hall, at — if you please — three hundred francs per annum. Well now! A fine vineyard often yields no more!

---

In the humble dwelling of the schoolmaster, the struggle — alas, a futile one — against poverty began anew, more terrible even than before. Thanks to prodigies of economy, the first months were bearable. But what privations were endured! And what coarse fare appeared on the table! In order not to go too deeply into debt, they even skimped on bread; at times they barely ate their fill. In vain — for all those hungry little mouths soon devoured the seventy-nine francs received at the end of each month.

Coste fought every inch. He sought out and begged for copying work around him, in the neighboring villages, and as far as Montclapiers. It was scarcely practical, on account both of Maleval’s insignificance and its remoteness from any center. Besides, on the spot, notaries, bailiffs, tradesmen, and the like could find enough starving wretches to call upon without having recourse to an outsider.

Turned away everywhere, Coste racked his brains. He must devise a means. At last he thought he had found one. This is what he did:

Each day he taught the regulation six hours of class — mornings from eight to eleven, afternoons from one to four. Following the example of many of his colleagues, he resolved to establish supervised study periods, one from eleven to noon and the other from four to six, and to ask the parents for a small fee. He was surprised not to have thought of it sooner. Salvation surely lay in this small innovation. Moreover, it would not even mean extra work for him, since while supervising his pupils in the classroom or the yard he could correct homework and prepare the next day’s lessons — all things he usually did before going to bed. The days being very long, the walks could still continue, even if dinner came a little later. A good idea, Jean told himself.

And, quick to hope, he flattered himself that every father, rather than let his son roam the streets or the outskirts of Maleval, would willingly make a small sacrifice. So as to put no one off, he decided he would require only five centimes per day per pupil. By his calculations, this should bring in twenty to twenty-five francs a month — that is, what the town-hall secretaryship used to pay him.

When consulted, a dozen families accepted the arrangement. This first result was encouraging enough for the schoolmaster, who indulged in hopeful speculation. But contrary to his expectations, the number of pupils staying for study remained stationary, then quickly dwindled. It turned out that certain fathers were annoyed at paying a sou a day — which amounted, over the year, to nearly fifteen francs. Under various pretexts, they kept their children at home. Besides, at that time of year the school is thinly attended and almost idle, on account of the fieldwork. Even among the most faithful, many gradually contrived not to pay the schoolmaster. Furthermore, they claimed that the schoolmaster was taking very little trouble and that instead of putting the children to work — which had not been agreed at all — he left them almost always at play and occupied himself meanwhile with his own affairs.

The upshot was that Coste, all things considered, had less leisure, new worries on top of the old, and precious little profit.

He despaired of his own helplessness. Moreover, this life of toil and privation was taking its toll on Louise’s delicate health; she began once more to weaken and to complain. Again she was forced to take to her bed on certain days, or dragged herself from chair to chair, without strength. Instead of dismissing the charwoman, as they had hoped, her help became all the more necessary — just when the salary had been cut. While his duties kept him in the classroom, Coste could not leave his children to themselves, especially when their mother was in bed, suffering from heart trouble or burning with fever. Moreover, since the recent elections he was regarded with suspicion, and he had no wish to expose himself to criticism. His absences during class would have been reported outside by his pupils, some of whom were the sons of the new councillors, and — from a sense of honor as much as of duty — he was determined that no one should be able to accuse him of negligence in his work.

And so they lived miserably, saving on everything, so that Louise might have now and then the slice of meat or the cutlet that her weakness would have required at every meal and that was so costly and so hard to pay for afterward. Only the twins, still nursed by the goat, lacked for nothing and thrived from day to day.

The burning month of July had passed, swelling the green grapes on the vine. The first fortnight of August was very hot as well. Soon, beneath the thick leaves of the vine stocks, the grapes in contact with the scorching soil took on a pink hue; then every cluster darkened as it ripened, and in the village preparations began for the approaching harvest. Frequent thunderstorms rumbled through the gorges, and the thirsty earth drank with delight the heaven-sent water. The hail — so dreaded, which in a few minutes can devastate the crops and even compromise those of the following years — did not fall, to the great joy of the peasants. Standing on their doorsteps, they watched with satisfaction the showers streaming down, further swelling the grapes and hastening the ripening of the very abundant harvest.

“It’s gold coins falling from the sky,” they would say.

And, beaming with pleasure, they rubbed their hands vigorously and thought of the fine coins that, after the sale of the new wine, would drop into their woolen stockings.

Amid the general satisfaction, Coste was the only one with nothing left to hope for. The holidays, which had begun on the twelfth of August, were to last until the first of October. Before the elections, Louise and Jean had promised themselves a week’s stay at Peyras. Now this cheerful plan had to be abandoned; there was no money. And since his wife’s parents lived very modestly themselves, Coste could not decently — and did not dare — go and establish himself in their home with his large family for a month, which was the only way to recoup his travel expenses and even save a little. Of necessity, then, they stayed at Maleval. They were able, however, to dismiss the charwoman, which was that much gained. Jean, free from morning to night, took her place and busied himself keeping the house clean and looking after the babies.

With Louise’s weakness — compounded by the grief of the precarious life into which they had relapsed — her painful heart palpitations had returned to plague her frequently. The slightest walk tired her, left her breathless and without spirit. On those stormy nights she slept badly, a prey to insomnia and fever.

She would then have attacks of suffocation and, full of anxiety, her eyes wild, almost rolled back, she would beg for the air that seemed to fail her. In vain Jean threw the windows wide; the oppression persisted, and, sitting bolt upright, Louise would gasp, a lump in her throat preventing her from breathing. Everything swam and distorted around her in the room; her ears rang atrociously; she heard the clamor of enormous waves crashing with a great roar. The veins in her neck and temples throbbed feverishly with dull blows, and the very audible sound of these violent, irregular beats distressed the sick woman painfully, and she would cry out, beside herself, her voice choked with anguish and sobs:

“Jean — air — I’m suffocating — my God, I’m going to — die — air — Jean — air.”

Then suddenly she would no longer feel her heart, which had stopped, and, fainting, she would collapse upon the bed, in a total prostration that left her face marble-pale, her hands bloodless, her eyes white, her extremities cold, her limbs bathed in icy sweat — in a swoon that resembled death itself, so faintly did her chest rise and fall.

Louise emerged from these episodes like an idiot, without strength. Brief, to be sure, was the duration of these attacks, always followed by a faint; but they recurred with such frequency that Jean was again obliged to call the doctor.

“All of this,” the doctor said, “is merely a consequence of anemia. Madame Coste has no organic lesion of the heart. Her nervous crises must therefore be treated with antispasmodics. But to put an end to them entirely, it is better to attack the anemia itself. Therefore: exercise, a fortifying diet, and iron supplements.”

Yes — but for that, money was needed. A great deal of money. Terrible refrain of a terrible situation! Louise was in despair all day long. The thought that for a long time yet — perhaps never — she would be able to see her parents and friends at Peyras weighed on her with sadness, and her morbid condition was only aggravated. In the midst of her sufferings, the stubborn longing for home seized her again and, her face drawn with pain, she pined for her dear Peyras, left a year ago, where she had once been so happy.

Her incessant complaints and tears — in which there were sometimes so many mute reproaches — wounded Jean’s heart. In time he lost his composure, seeing Louise without courage, unjust toward him, sometimes roughly pushing away both his consolations and his kisses. He had bursts of impatience that he did not always manage to suppress at once. Day by day, both grew embittered. They exchanged those irreparable words at whose impact the heart cries out in anguish.

“But tell me — what could I have done?”

“A great deal. At election time, you wanted to be honest. The best honesty was not to risk our peace, our bread. Go on — you’ll never be anything but a fool!”

“My fault — always my fault, is it? Did I imagine you’d always be ill, incapable of lifting a finger?”

“That’s right — reproach me for my sufferings now, as though I weren’t wretched enough. All you have left to do is insult me the way your mother used to. My God, my God! Has it come to this? And besides, if I’m ill, that’s your fault too. When you can’t feed your children, you don’t have them — you don’t ruin your wife’s health.”

At other times they reproached each other with their poverty, their families, their marriage:

“Ah!” Louise would murmur. “I should have married a workman. I wouldn’t be the fine lady that I am, but I’d have the necessities. My mother and father aren’t rich, yet they don’t know what real poverty is.”

“Ha!” Jean would retort. “Let’s talk about your parents, then. Selfish people who don’t even trouble themselves about what becomes of us — so long as their bellies are full, so long as your father can go and gamble and get drunk at the café.”

Alas, they quarreled often in this way. Hatred is the sister of poverty; the finest feelings are poisoned by it.

Full of bitterness and revolt, Louise and Jean were becoming cruel to each other — and, as they say in that country, irritable enough to fight with their own shadow. Then, abruptly, in the midst of these scenes, Louise, defeated and exhausted, would dissolve in tears and, in her worsening weakness, press her hand to her heart, which was on the point of breaking. At this gesture of unspeakable suffering, Jean would be ashamed of his harshness. All his pity, all his affection would flood into his soul, sweeping away his resentments. He would throw himself at his wife’s feet and, sobbing with her, beg her forgiveness. They would embrace, and for a long time, gently, they would weep together; but the damage was done. These dark, painful quarrels left them with an aftertaste of hatred. In the solitude of their hearts, they could not help returning to them, brooding over them, accusing each other of injustice. Gloomy silences fell between them; they would forget their kisses, their promises of the day before, wake side by side with hostile, distrustful looks, greet each other with sulks during which new grievances ripened. And over nothing — a tisane poorly heated, a plate or a cup broken — it would all begin again. Thus trust and peace of heart took flight.

From his outings in the village, Coste often came home with a sore heart. He could tell from people’s looks that they were gossiping, as before, about his difficulties and his troubles. He felt around him, like a net, a growing hostility — especially from the conservatives, who treated him as their victim, without pity, as an enemy. His pride bled from the scant regard shown him, from the allusions that sting like a slap, the words whispered behind his back, the smiles that insult. The suppliers, poorly paid, became once more hard, arrogant, savage, now that they no longer believed in the inheritance of three thousand francs. In their spite, they cast aside all a tradesman’s civility and laid bare their brutality toward this gentleman, who was nothing, when all was said, but a wretched pauper to whom they were practically giving charity. Jean, despite his revolts, endured it all; but sometimes he panicked before the hopeless situation.

The walks with Rose and Paul to graze Même no longer tore him from his preoccupations; on the contrary, they only reminded him more bitterly of the few months when he had been happy, trusting in a future now so dark.

Often, seated beneath an oak in the silence of the gorge, he would muse vaguely, moved to tenderness and self-pity — pity for himself and for his own. As though for pleasure, he summoned other painful thoughts. If he were to die, he thought, what would become — in this destitution — of Louise, ill and nearly helpless, and the four children? For them, begging; and once the mother had soon died in the hospital, the babies raised without affection in some poorhouse or orphanage, then cast out later, alone, into a harsh and thankless world.

The songs of a few grape-pickers, the shrill noise of carts whose dusty axles screamed and groaned beneath the weight of the vats brimming with pressed grapes being taken to the treading trough, would pierce the silence and rouse Coste from his dejection. Then he would raise himself and, before the activity of the whole village — busy with the grape harvest at its height — rebel against the demands of his “noble” profession. He was young, he was strong, and during these long holiday days he was obliged to sit idle, arms folded. His dignity required it. He was in the direst need of money, and he had not the right to earn any — he, a peasant’s son, raised amid the labors of the soil — by hiring himself out as a grape-picker for a wage of three or four francs a day! No, it was forbidden; he must content himself with the fifty-two sous he was paid for doing nothing during these five or six weeks. These peasants, whom he envied, would themselves have found it strange, laughable, that he should work with his hands like them.

Bitterly he brooded on this under the glorious skies of September, on those splendid days that, from dawn to dusk, invite one to the labors of the fields and hum with the cheerful bustle of the vintage. Every morning he tidied the house — and even this work was permitted him only because he did it behind closed doors, within four walls; then, in the afternoon, he wasted away in idleness and strolled, he — a pauper, a wretch — through the fields, through the woods, like a rich man, holding in his hand a book he read without understanding.

And sometimes on his way he would meet an old peasant bent beneath his bundle of heather, or an old woman carrying a basket of freshly picked grapes, from which she would offer a cluster to the children. One or the other would stop to talk with Jean, and it was not rare that in the course of the conversation they would make — sincerely, meaning no harm — this observation:

“A fine trade, yours, Monsieur Coste. Holidays whenever you like! Ah, you don’t have calluses on your hands like these.”

---

On the first day of the new term, the father of one of his pupils came to see him and said:

“The boy’s going on fifteen now. He means to enter the normal school at Montclapiers, if he passes the examination. That’s what I’ve come to see you about.”

“Well,” replied Coste, “would you like some good advice?”

“I won’t say no to that.”

“Then don’t go through with it.”

“Why ever not?” cried the peasant, dumbfounded.

Coste then painted for him — in rather exaggerated colors — the lot of a schoolmaster in his early years.

“Yes,” he concluded, “I say it to you frankly. Make your son whatever you like — a workman, rather — but not a schoolmaster, if you want him to be happy.”

It was no use; the peasant was firmly decided. He saw nothing but bad reasons and exaggerations in Coste’s words. His son would be a schoolmaster, would draw his pay as a civil servant — that was his dream.

Coste understood he was wasting his time; with an air of indifference he added:

“Very well — it shall be as you wish. I’ll prepare your son for the normal-school examinations.”

Then, knowing the man’s meager resources — a simple day-laborer, owner of a plot or two of land — he murmured, when the man had gone:

“Oh, the foolish, blind vanity of parents! Alas — my father did the same, long ago. My father and my mother too went one day to see a schoolmaster, for me.”

And, conscientiously, out of duty, that very day he devoted special care to the preparation of the candidate, whose success, he thought, might do him credit in the village and with his superiors.

---

Weeks passed, and winter came — very harsh that year. The privation deepened. The charwoman, whose wages were not always punctually paid, complained, and turning from bitter to insolent, she threatened to broadcast everything that went on in the schoolmaster’s wretched home. Coste did all he could to calm her. From then on, she often refused her services unless paid in advance. For a few other pressing debts, Coste took the road to the pawnshop once more. But, always mindful of his pride, he could not bring himself to go in broad daylight. Each time he dreaded humiliating encounters, and it was an hour of shame and trembling for him.

The villagers gossiped more than ever. A few of them, however, were beginning in their hearts to pity him, and at pig-killing time Coste had the pleasure of receiving as a gift two or three pounds of bacon and some rounds of sausage.

Monsieur Rastel, driven from his farmstead by the cold, avoided the schoolmaster. If he’s miserable, he thought, too bad for him! The regret for his sash — lost forever — had grown to such a pitch, in the isolation in which he had lived until November, that he could not forgive Coste, “that bungler,” and stubbornly persisted — quite wrongly — in regarding him as the sole cause of his defeat.

“If I could have counted on him better,” he thought, “I’d never have abandoned the fight, and I’d still be master.”

A few sympathies, but very few, remained to the unhappy man. The schoolmistress and the curé, among others, would have wished to help Coste. But he maintained, with them, the pride of his poverty. Although deeply touched by the treats and little gifts that Mademoiselle Bonniol and the Abbé Clozel sent to the children, he refused all offers of money. Since he knew he could not repay it, a loan seemed to him nothing but charity in disguise.

The suppliers, however, grew more pressing, more hostile. At the end of every month, despite his best efforts, Coste could not satisfy them all. The seventy-nine francs slipped through his fingers, especially once he had set aside a small sum for unforeseen expenses, the charwoman’s wages, and Louise’s medicines. He was floundering in an inextricable situation, haunted by the thought that it would never end.

His pupils were less docile; they no longer had any respect for a master they heard spoken of at home as a pauper riddled with debts.

Jean had been unable to replace his old winter clothes from the previous year. Dressed for summer despite the cold, he soon saw his cheap suit splitting with wear on all sides. He put on his shabby but warmer cast-offs from the year before. Thus attired, he no longer went out except at night, and even then reluctantly. But in his classroom he was exposed to the winks of his pupils; one afternoon they played the dirty trick of placing pellets of cobbler’s wax on his chair, and they laughed behind their hands when the schoolmaster, rising, left the worn-out seat of his trousers stuck to the straw. In the old days Coste had been very gentle with his pupils. But, embittered and very irritable, he had for some time been punishing them right and left. That evening he could hold back no longer. In his anger he slapped one of the laughing boys so unfortunately that he slightly injured his eye. Great scandal in the village. Nowadays, parents — even and especially those who brutalize their own children — will not allow the schoolmaster a moment’s impatience or forgetfulness, will not tolerate his giving a smack to an insufferable brat. The cuffed child’s father came storming to the school, threatening to smash everything and, by way of reprisal, to box the brutal schoolmaster’s ears himself. As for Monsieur le Maire Piochou, he seized on the windfall; he went to find Coste and informed him that if he did it again he would be hauled before the magistrates.

And upstairs, in his lodging, Jean would find again, at noon and in the evening, the eternally pale, wasted face of his wife.

Even Paul and Rose were being snapped at on every pretext and without cause. Their large, pensive eyes fixed themselves on the hard, care-ravaged face of this father once so kind, whose change of temper they could not understand. Sad and silent, they would shrink into their corner and watch the quarrels, weeping softly. Though they always had bread to eat, they suffered dimly from this wretched life. In their little brains they remembered the fine days when their papa, his handsome smile on his lips, had taken them to the fields in the company of Même. For the goat herself was no longer there to amuse them. With winter, she would have needed hay and fodder in the house; for this reason, and above all to have the means to settle a bill, the goat had been sold and the twins weaned.

And so the little boy and the little girl wandered through the cold house, heavy-hearted, their hands and feet swollen with chilblains. Timidly they warmed themselves at the thin kitchen fire, scolded for nothing, no longer daring to laugh or play or chatter as before — surprised when their mother or father, seeing them so sad, forgot their resentments and, full of regret, gathered them into their arms, suddenly covering them with caresses, as in days gone by.

Several times Jean walked to Montclapiers in the biting wind and despite the fallen snow. Fortunately the road is much traveled at all times: carts, carriages, and pedestrians had beaten a path. He pawned in this way everything that had any value and could be easily carried. Nothing remained to pledge except the furniture, which he could not decently contemplate having carted off and sold at Montclapiers, in full view of all Maleval.

As broken, as spiritless as a foundered horse, Jean no longer tried to fight back, sunk in a painful inertia and passivity of body and soul. What could he have done? He even wished he could stop thinking altogether, stop reflecting, be as childish and as indifferent as his babies, who, despite their fingers cracked by the cold, took delight in a straw, a white pebble, a ray of sunshine.

On Christmas Eve he went to bed, morose, without noticing that Rose and Paul had secretly placed their little shoes in the fireplace of their room. The next morning he rose just as forgetful and set about the household chores mechanically. Suddenly he heard Louise’s voice calling him.

“Jean,” she was saying, “go and see what’s the matter with the children — I can hear them crying.”

He went into the room. Rose and Paul, in their nightshirts, their feet and little hands red with cold, were crouching before their empty shoes, set in the ashes of the hearth, and big tears were streaming down their bluish cheeks.

The moment they had woken, they had ventured a glance toward the fireplace, surprised not to see a white parcel or toys spilling from their shoes.

“Maybe it’s hidden at the bottom,” Paul had said.

Followed by Rose, he had slid out of bed, and their disappointment had been such that the two little ones, bursting into tears, had stayed there, squatting, unable to tear their eyes from their empty shoes.

The pitiful sight broke Jean’s heart.

“Ah, my poor darlings!” he sobbed, embracing them.

Quickly he tucked them back in. The silence, the questioning look in the children’s eyes, pained him. He hastened to say, feigning surprise:

“It can’t be that Father Christmas forgot such good children. Ah — I know! Of course! It’s because it was so cold and snow fell in the night that he didn’t come. Stay in bed and I’ll go and see if I can find him.”

Rose’s and Paul’s faces relaxed at once into a smile.

“Yes, yes — go quickly, Papa!” cried the little boy, impatient. “Quick, before he leaves — Father Christmas!”

“Tell him to give me a doll!” added the little girl, clapping her hands.

Jean took a few sous and ran to buy, at a stall set up that day on the main road, some sweets and a few poor toys.

When he returned, the children’s joy knew no bounds — especially after the disappointment of waking.

“Did you see him, Papa?”

“Yes — over there, on the road, and he gave me these for you.”

Rose, radiant, was pressing frantically to her breast a tiny doll of painted cardboard. Paul, holding in his fingers a horse crudely cut from a piece of wood and painted a brilliant red, was shouting, clicking his tongue and making the gesture of cracking an imaginary whip:

“Giddy-up, horse! Trot! Gallop!”

And before the enormous joy of these dear little creatures, Jean fled the room, choking back a sob.

---

Louise’s health still required costly care and a special diet. With his derisory resources and his many expenses, Coste watched, month after month, the figure of his debt to the butcher swell in particular.

Now, in order that his children should not go barefoot and in rags, in order to replace his own clothes — which were falling to shreds and taking on the look of tatters — it came about that for several months Jean could give only the smallest sums to his suppliers. They lost patience. The butcher showed his teeth and threatened to garnish his wages. The charwoman, to whom this threat was made, lost no time in warning Coste — and then in carrying the news around the village.

The schoolmaster went at once to the butcher to ask him to be patient. He was eloquent; he spoke of the immense harm such a measure would do him. In short, the butcher — a big, ruddy fellow, not bad at heart but weak and changeable of character — appeared to soften and promised all the credit and all the time needed. But since he belonged to the present mayor’s party, nothing was more pressing than to recount, that evening at the conservative café, Coste’s visit and his pleas. His friends gave free rein to their hatred:

“You’re wrong — in your place we’d set the bailiff on his heels. Besides, it’s a good way of getting rid of that sorry character once and for all.”

Thus advised throughout the evening, the butcher forgot his morning promise and, in the days that followed, carried out his threat.

Coste was struck dumb with stupor at first; then, with an oriental resignation, bowing his head before evil and unknown forces, he sighed with melancholy:

“Well — it had to happen sooner or later.”

But at the end of the month, when he went to the tax collector and the man withheld twenty percent of his salary, the flush of shame rose to his face. He walked out like a drunken man, carrying away the wretched sixty-three francs and thirty-three centimes that he would henceforth receive. Tears rolled down his hollow cheeks; cries of anguish and revolt escaped his throat. Seated on the embankment of the road to Maleval, warmed by the bright sun of a fine winter’s day, he brooded, half-stupefied, on his bitter destiny. Sixty-three francs! It was on that he must live for thirty long days, pay a charwoman, clothe the babies, care for his poor Louise!

He rose at last. All along the road he walked — now frantic, as though mad with pain, now head bowed, back bent, like one of those tramps who drag their misery from village to village. He roused himself from his stupor only to abandon himself to wild or morbid dreams. If he found there, on his path, a purse, a wallet stuffed with banknotes — well, he would keep it; he would not be such a fool as to return it. Then he would murmur bitterly:

“Ah, if these trees, if this land belonged to me!”

And he would appraise the value of everything he passed. Little by little he felt envy growing in him like tares, choking his former good feelings, and all manner of desires filling his honest heart. In a mounting hallucination, he cast a gaze of hatred over those fields and vineyards stretching on either side of the road, those wooded hills rising toward the pale blue sky, those villas and châteaux crowning the heights and gleaming in the sun — all those possessions, in short, that belonged to the fortunate of this world.

And the dark days, the days without hope and without happiness, went on.

Until now, Coste had not entirely deprived himself of tobacco. To be sure, he husbanded parsimoniously the ten-sou packet he bought from time to time, rolling a cigarette at long intervals — for, he said, he would rather go without food than without a smoke. One day Louise reproached him with this needless expense, and he tried to abstain. The deprivation was hard. Then, one day, he remembered that he had been in the habit of tossing his cigarette ends behind the screen of a fireplace in which no fire was ever lit. He gathered them carefully, and these scraps of tobacco seemed exquisite to him, despite their acrid, dusty taste. One evening, even, in a deserted spot near the promenade, he caught sight of a cigar butt on the ground — three-quarters smoked and discarded by a passerby. The craving was so strong that he stooped furtively, snatched it up, and, in secret, once back in his house, lit it and at first savored the first puffs with relish; then, filled with shame and disgust, he flung it away and began to weep.

He was turning bad.

When one of the twins fell ill, he — who adored his children — said aloud:

“If she dies, too bad. For the dog’s life that awaits her.”

He stopped. Then, seized with remorse, in a need for tenderness, he cuddled the child, fussed over her as though to ask her forgiveness.

His teaching he now did without heart, mechanically. Given over entirely to his dark preoccupations, he let his pupils laugh and chatter. He delivered his lessons as in a dream, reading them from whatever book came to hand. His soul drowned in bitterness, he would shrug his shoulders at the passages where, in connection with the serfs, the textbook extolled the blessings of the Revolution. Were they more wretched than I? he thought. It was always the same: to some, everything; to the greater number, nothing — and this without cause, without reason; for he was a brave man, not lazy, of irreproachable conduct, and he was floundering in dreadful hardship, suffering in his own flesh and in the flesh of his family. Every man has the right to live by his work, modestly, he kept repeating. And in the disarray of his ideas — those of a civil servant raised in respect for authority and steeped in that very respect — he came round to hoping, as so many others did, for those new times when the sun of universal justice would rise upon the humble and the disinherited.

---

And around him he still felt as little pity as ever — nothing but disdainful or hostile looks. The suppliers, treating him from on high, sometimes refused him their goods with contempt: “Pay us,” they said arrogantly. “We’ve given you credit too long.” He submitted to these affronts, went home with head bowed — a human rag shaken now by only brief, dying spasms of revolt.

Nothing was forgiven him.

In those harsh winter days, to save on wood and coal, Coste — after his pupils had left — would bring his family down into the heated classroom. Too honest to divert a single shovelful of coal, to take a single log from the communal pile, he believed he had the right, in the pupils’ absence, to let his family enjoy the lingering warmth of a room in which there had been a fire for three quarters of the day.

It became known. Gossip in the village, and a formal accusation of warming himself at the commune’s expense. Monsieur le Maire Piochou at once brought the matter to Coste’s attention and, little given to euphemism, called him — almost brutally — a thief.

A flame of anger lit the schoolmaster’s eyes. He nearly threw himself, fists clenched, upon the mayor. But his arms fell. He was afraid. Perhaps, indeed, in the event of a complaint, he would be found guilty. When you are poor, you are a pariah; compassionate souls grow scarce around you. And besides — what was the use?

---

Jean had one last hope.

After his mother’s death he had subscribed to a pedagogical journal, which he received each week. An independent contributor regularly fought in its pages on behalf of schoolmasters, exposed abuses of every kind, and served as the mouthpiece of complaints and hardships, to which he called the attention of the higher administration.

Jean perhaps believed that his sad lot would move the world and raise a cry of outrage; perhaps, too, he obeyed a bitter impulse of revolt and wished to proclaim his distress. He wrote a simple, heartrending letter in which he set forth all that was pitiful and frightening in his situation, should he receive no relief from the ministry. The letter was published and even commented upon in a few lines vibrant with compassion.

Jean hoped. Who knows? In that ministry, where so much money was handled, there was surely a special fund for relief. They would pity him; they would send him some amount. Then he said to himself: what’s the use, after all? Even if they send me fifty, a hundred, two hundred francs — won’t it all begin again at once? He reflected further that, had he made his name and address known, many of his colleagues, less wretched than he, would surely have sent him the widow’s mite, the penny of the poor. And Jean murmured once more: what’s the use? No, no — I will not eat the bread of charity.

Another day, he proposed to go to Montclapiers, to throw himself at the feet of his superiors and beg them, as a favor, for a better-paying post. Then he realized how odd such a step would be — absurd, even — and how painful to his pride as a subordinate. Was he the only needy schoolmaster with a family? No, one did not do such things. Besides, would they even listen?

“Suppose this extraordinary step even had a chance of success,” he said to himself, “where would I find the money to pay my debts, the travel expenses of my family, the cost of moving my furniture?”

Resign, do something else? Impossible too — it would be even worse, at his age especially, and without a sou in hand.

He sank back into his painful passivity. And the days flowed on without hope and without happiness in his cold and cheerless home. Nothing sustained him. His sick wife went on lamenting, forever whimpering or weeping. His children — he avoided them, for everything about them reminded him of his dreadful poverty. The future? He dared not look at it without terror. His wretched position at Maleval, the garnishment of his salary, had perhaps prejudiced his superiors against him. Instead of a better post, might not some disgrace befall him one of these mornings? That would be terrifying, God help him, he would sigh. What, then, was he to do?

---

What then? he repeated to himself often, at the end of his strength now.

And since, that year, suicides among the poor were multiplying in Paris, caused by cold and hunger, he read one day, on a scrap of newspaper picked up in the street, a news item recounting the death by charcoal fumes of an entire family — father, mother, and five children.

The reading left him pensive.

He shook himself. Weary of everything, craving rest and oblivion, he murmured under his breath, in a distant, dreamlike voice:

“Always struggling!… I have nothing left to fight with! Life is cruel — life is a harsh stepmother to the small. Those who buy charcoal with their last coins show us the way, sooner or later.”

But at once, with the intense awareness of his responsibility, the ultimate pride of the civil servant recoiling before all noise, all scandal, he stiffened, incapable of one frank, final revolt. He added:

“Have I the right to dispose thus of my family’s lives? And of my own? What would they do without me?”

He drove the dreadful thought away. But would it not return? And then?

October 1894 – June 1895 Évreux