Fouan pushed; but Gideon was happy to stay where he was and he refused to budge, albeit with cheerful good humour, like a good-natured drunk, with a twinkle in his bleary eye and drooling as he curled up his lip. He stayed put, bracing himself on his wobbly legs and straightening up at each push, as though enjoying the joke. But when Buteau started pushing as well, it did not take long for him to tip over sideways, with his hooves in the air; and then he rolled over onto his back and started braying loudly as if to show his complete contempt for all the spectators.
‘Ah, you dirty beast, you idle good-for-nothing, I'll teach you to drink yourself sick,’ yelled Buteau, laying into him with his heels.
Jesus Christ compassionately intervened.
‘Come along. You can't expect him to be reasonable when he's drunk. Of course he doesn't understand, you'd do better to try and get him back into his stable.’
The Charles had moved away, completely shocked by such a crazy, ill-behaved animal; while Élodie had gone very red and was averting her eyes as if she were witnessing some indecent spectacle. At the entrance to the yard, the priest, Suzanne and Berthe were showing disapproval by their attitude. Some neighbours appeared and started making loud jocular comments. Lise and Françoise were ready to weep with shame.
Meanwhile, hiding his rage, Buteau was attempting to lift Gideon back onto his feet, aided by Fouan and Jesus Christ. It was no easy task, because with all the contents of the tub swilling around inside him, the fellow was a tidy weight, and no sooner had they got him onto his four feet and even succeeded in persuading him to move two or three yards forward then he suddenly buckled at the back and fell over again. And they would have to take him right across the yard to reach the stable. They would never manage it. What was to be done?
‘Bloody hell! Bloody hell!’ the three men kept swearing as they looked at the donkey from all angles, at a loss how to set about it.
Jesus Christ suggested leaning him up against the shed and from there working round the wall of the house up to the stable. At first it succeeded, although the donkey was scratching himself against the plaster. Unfortunately, this scratching must probably have become too painful, for suddenly shaking himself free from the hands which were holding him against the wall, he kicked up his heels and started prancing about.
Fouan nearly fell flat on his face and the two brothers were shouting:
‘Hold him! Hold him!’
Then, in the bright moonlight, Gideon was seen lashing out, bucking wildly all round the yard with his long ears flopping madly. His belly had been too much shaken up and he was feeling sick. He suddenly halted and retched, with his head reeling. He tried to gallop off again but his legs failed him and he stood motionless with his neck stuck out, his ribs shaking with dreadful convulsions. And then, reeling like a drunkard relieving himself and jerking his head forward with every effort, he vomited like a man.
The villagers gathered in the gateway were roaring with laughter while the squeamish Father Madeline, standing between Suzanne and Berthe, went pale and they led him away, full of indignation. But it was particularly the offended attitude of the Charles which showed how such an exhibition by a donkey was contrary to decent behaviour and even to the ordinary civility owed to any passer-by. Weeping heartbroken tears, Élodie had flung herself round her grandmother's neck, asking if the donkey was going to die. And despite Monsieur Charles's imperious injunctions to stop, delivered in the magisterial tones which had always been obeyed in the past in No. 19, the donkey went on and on, flooding the whole yard in a lake of red vomit, which flowed away into the pond. And then he slipped and fell sprawling into it, his legs spread out; and no drunk lying flat out in a street could have looked more disgusting. The wretched beast seemed to be doing it deliberately to bring disgrace on his masters. It was too much, Lise and Françoise ran off, hiding their eyes, and took shelter in the house.
‘That's enough! Cart him away!’
And indeed, there was nothing else to be done because Gideon, now drowsy and as limp as a wet rag, was going to sleep. Buteau hastily fetched a litter and half a dozen men helped him to lift the donkey onto it. And they took him away, with his legs dangling, snoring so heartily already that he still seemed to be braying and showing his low opinion of mankind.
This incident naturally spoilt the meal at first; but soon everyone had recovered and in the end the new wine was celebrated so heartily that by eleven o'clock everybody was like the donkey. Every minute someone had to go out into the yard to relieve himself.
Old Fouan was very merry. Perhaps he might do well to go back to his younger son after all, because the wine would be good, that year. He had had to go out like the others and he was turning all this over in his head, in the dark, when he heard Lise and Buteau, who had gone out behind him, crouching down side by side under the hedge squabbling because the husband was blaming his wife for not showing enough affection towards his father. She was a stupid little goose! They'd got to butter the old man up so that he'd come back and then they could wheedle his nest-egg out of him. Suddenly stone-cold sober, Fouan felt to make sure that no one had stolen his bonds from his pocket; and when they had all kissed and said goodnight, and he was back at the Castle, he was determined not to move out from there. But that very night, he saw a sight which made his blood run cold: La Trouille prowling round his bedroom in her shift, going through his trousers and smock and even looking in his shoes. Jesus Christ had evidently noticed that the nest-egg had disappeared from the saucepan of lentils and had sent his daughter in search of it, so that they could wheedle it out of him, to use Buteau's expression.
What he had seen went churning round in Fouan's head and gave him no rest. He got up and opened the window. Rognes was bathed in white moonlight and from the village the smell of wine was rising up, mingling with it the smell of those other things they had been gingerly stepping over along the walls for the last week, the whole powerful odour of the grape harvest. What was he to do? Where should he go? Now, he was determined never to let his miserable money out of his sight for a second, he'd sew it into his very skin! And then, as the breeze blew the smell into his face, his mind turned to Gideon; tough beasts, those donkeys; they could take ten times as much pleasure as any man and still not be any the worse for it. Never mind, if he was going to be robbed by his elder son and by the younger one, he hadn't any choice. The best thing to do was to stay on at the Castle, keep his eyes skinned and wait and see! His old frame was trembling at the thought.
Chapter 5
MONTHS went by, winter came and went, followed by spring, and life in Rognes continued much as before; it needed years for anything to seem to happen, in this dreary life of never-ending toil. In July, in the sweltering heat of the doldrums, the coming elections did however cause a great stir in the village. This time, beneath the surface, there were important issues at stake. People were discussing them and waiting for the candidates to make their electioneering visits.
And it so happened that on the Sunday for which the visit of Monsieur Rochetontaine, the factory-owner from Châteaudun, had been announced, a terrible row took place at the Buteaus between Lise and Françoise. The result showed that, even when things do not seem to be changing, they none the less are, for the last link between the two sisters, always near breaking-point yet continually repaired, had worn so thin in their daily squabbles that this time it broke once and for all, with no chance of repair, and for the most trivial of causes.
That morning, when Françoise was bringing her cows home, she had stopped to chat for a moment with Jean in front of the church. It must be admitted that she was being deliberately provocative in doing so, right in front of the house, intending to exasperate the Buteaus. So when she reached home, Lise shouted at her:
‘Look, when you meet your men, you might choose somewhere else than under our window!’
Buteau was listening, sharpening a bill-hook.
‘My men indeed! I see too much of them here,’ retorted Françoise. ‘And
there's one of them that, if I'd wanted, I wouldn't be seeing under our window but in your bed, the dirty beast!’
This reference to Buteau put Lise beside herself with rage. She had long had only one thought in mind, throwing her sister out so as to have a quiet life at home, even if it meant splitting up her property. This was why she put up with Buteau's thrashings, for he thought differently and was determined to pursue his schemes to the bitter end, still nursing hopes of going to bed with his young sister-in-law, as long as they both had the wherewithal to do it. Lise was irritated at not being mistress in her own house and tortured by a strange kind of jealousy, so that while quite ready to let her husband tumble her younger sister and to settle the question once and for all, she was furious at seeing him rutting after the little bitch, whom she had come to loathe because of her youth, her hard little breasts and her white skin, which you could see when she rolled up her sleeves. And, although willing to give him free rein, she would have liked him to destroy all this youth and beauty, and even have helped him to do so, not because she had qualms about sharing him but because she suffered from the growing rivalry between her sister and herself and it was making her life miserable to see that Françoise was better looking and would give him greater pleasure.
‘You slut!’ she screamed. ‘It's you who's leading him on! If you weren't always hanging around him, he wouldn't keep sniffing round your dirty bum, which you're too young to wipe properly anyway.’
Disgusted by this lying insinuation, Françoise went very pale. With cold fury she replied calmly:
‘Good, that's all I wanted to hear. Only a fortnight longer, and I'll not be troubling you any more, if that's what you want. In a fortnight's time I'm twenty-one, and I'll be off like a shot.’
‘Oh, so you're keen to come of age, are you, you've worked it all out so as to cause us trouble! Well, you little bitch, you're not going to leave in a fortnight's time, you're going to leave now, straight away. Fuck off!’
‘Well, I must say… Macqueron needs someone, he'll be glad of me. Goodbye!’
And Françoise left as simply as that, nothing else took place between them. Buteau dropped the bill-hook he was sharpening and rushed over to restore peace between them again, with a couple of clouts as usual. But he was too late; the only thing he succeeded in doing was punching his wife's nose, which started bleeding. Damned women! Just what he'd been so afraid of and trying to prevent for so long! The girl clearing out and starting a lot of real trouble. And he could see everything slipping out of his grasp and getting away, the girl as well as the land.
‘I'll go along to the Macquerons later on,’ he shouted. ‘She's got to come back, even if I have to bring her back with my boot up her arse!’
That Sunday, the Macquerons were in a turmoil because they were expecting one of the candidates, Monsieur Rochefontaine, the owner of the workshops at Châteaudum. During the last parliament, Monsieur de Chédeville had caused dissatisfaction, some said because he had too openly sympathized with the Orléanist faction, others because he had scandalized the imperial court by his affair with the young wife of one of the parliamentary ushers, who had become infatuated with him despite his age. Whatever the reason, the préfet had withdrawn his support and transferred it to the former opposition candidate, Monsieur Rochefontaine, whose factory had recently been visited by a minister and who had written a pamphlet on free trade which had attracted the favourable notice of the Emperor. Irritated at being left in the lurch, Monsieur de Chédeville had decided to stand, for he needed his post of deputy to further certain business transactions, being no longer able to manage on the rents he drew from La Chamade, which was mortgaged and in a bad way. Thus, by a strange quirk of fate, the situation had been reversed, with the large landowner now standing as the unofficial candidate.
Although he was mayor, Hourdequin had remained faithful to Monsieur de Chédeville; he was determined to ignore any official instructions and ready to fight to the bitter end if forced. In the first place, he thought it the decent thing not to turn like a weathercock at the slightest breeze from the préfet; and furthermore, as between the protectionist and the free trader, he had finally come to think that, in the catastrophic agricultural crisis, his interests were best served by the former. For some time now, the worries caused by Jacqueline and the problems of his farm had been preventing him from devoting proper attention to his duties as mayor, so that his deputy Macqueron had been left to look after the routine matters on the council. He was therefore surprised, when his interest in the election prompted him to play a more active part as chairman of the town council, to find them resentful and hostile.
It was Macqueron's doing: his crafty and underhand machinations were at last bearing fruit. This slovenly, grubby peasant, who had become rich and idle and was now bored stiff by his useless, idle existence, had gradually hit upon one final ambition to occupy his leisure: to become mayor. So he had undermined Hourdequin by exploiting the perennial hatred, innate in all the inhabitants of Rognes, against the former lords of the manor and against the sons of rich townsfolk who now owned their land. He'd got that land for nothing, that's for sure! Nothing but daylight robbery at the time of the Revolution! There was no danger that some poor wretch might be able to pick up a bargain, scum like that always came along when they were tired of making their pile in other ways! Quite apart from the fact that there were some pretty nasty things taking place up at La Borderie. There was that disgusting Cognet girl; and her master positively enjoyed picking her out of the dirty straw where she'd been sleeping with all his farm-hands! All this aroused feeling and in the crudest possible terms went the rounds of the whole district, exciting the indignation even of people who would have tumbled their own daughter or sold her, had it been worth the trouble. So that the municipal councillors had reached the stage of saying that rich bourgeois ought to stay at home and swindle and fornicate amongst themselves; but for a farming village, you needed a peasant as mayor. It was, in fact, on the subject of the elections that Hourdequin first met the resistance which took him by surprise. When he mentioned Monsieur de Chédeville, he saw stony faces all around him. When Macqueron had seen that Hourdequin was continuing to support the candidate who had lost favour, he had said to himself that here was the right place to do battle and an excellent opportunity to do Hourdequin down. He therefore supported the préfet's choice, Monsieur Rochefontaine, loudly proclaiming that all men of goodwill should support the government. This statement alone sufficed, without any need to indoctrinate the council members, because fearful of being swept out of office they were always for the winning side and determined to support the powers that be to ensure that nothing should ever change and wheat should continue to fetch a good price. The decent, fair-minded Delhomme, who was of this opinion, carried Clou and the others with him: and Hourdequin's position was finally compromised by the fact that his only supporter was Lengaigne, who was exasperated by Macqueron's growing importance. Slanderous accusations were made; Hourdequin was a ‘Red’, one of that riff-raff who wanted a republic and to do away with the peasantry; so that even Father Madeline became alarmed and, imagining that the deputy had been the moving spirit in establishing his parish, he too supported Monsieur Rochefontaine, despite the fact that the bishop secretly favoured Monsieur de Chédeville. But there was one final blow for the mayor: there was a rumour that at the time of opening up the famous direct route between Rognes and Châteaudun, he had pocketed half the subsidy. How had he done it? No one elucidated that point, it was just a mysterious and odious business. When asked about it, Macqueron put on a scared look, both pained and discreet, like a man who thinks that it is improper to talk about certain things: in fact, he had simply made it up. In a word, the commune was in a turmoil and the municipal council split in two, with the deputy and all the councillors except Lengaigne on one side and the mayor on the other. Only then did he realize the gravity of the situation.
A fortnight earlier Macqueron had already made a special trip to Chât
eaudun and grovelled to Monsieur Rochefontaine. He had begged him not to call on anyone else but himself should he condescend to come to Rognes. And this was why on this Sunday the innkeeper kept constantly coming out into the street after lunch on the look-out for his candidate. He had warned Delhomme, Clou and certain other municipal councillors who were possessing their souls in patience, over a bottle of wine. Old Fouan and Bécu were also there, playing cards, as well as Lequeu, busily occupied in reading a paper he had brought along, for he made a point of never being seen to drink. But there were two customers who gave the deputy mayor cause for concern, Jesus Christ and his rolling stone of a crony, the worker Canon, sitting opposite each other and hilariously imbibing a bottle of spirits. He kept casting furtive glances at them and trying to throw them out, unsuccessfully because, contrary to their normal habits, they were not being rowdy: they merely seemed not to be giving a damn for anyone. It struck three and still Monsieur Rochefontaine had not arrived although he had promised to be there at two o'clock.
‘Coelina,’ Macqueron called anxiously to his wife, ‘have you brought up the claret to offer a drink later on?’
Coelina, who was serving, made an anguished gesture; she had forgotten and her husband hurriedly made his way down to the cellar himself. In the room next door, the door of which was always open, was the haberdashery, and Berthe, looking like a fashionable shop-assistant, was showing three peasant women some pink ribbon; whilst Françoise, already at work, was dusting out shelf-compartments, although it was Sunday. Puffed up with self-importance, the deputy had immediately taken her on, flattered by her putting herself under his protection. His wife was, in fact, looking for an assistant. He would offer her board and lodging until he succeeded in reconciling her with the Buteaus, though she was threatening to kill herself if she was forced to go back there.