The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume 2 (of 8) eBook

He was sitting in an easy chair, with mustard plasters on his legs, and cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery.  He was coughing with the short cough of a dying man, without any one knowing how he had caught it, and his wife looked at him like a tigress ready to eat him, and as soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees shake, so I said to him immediately:  “It is all settled, you dirty scamp, but don’t do such a thing again.”

He got up, choking, took my hands and kissed them as if they had belonged to a prince, cried, nearly fainted, embraced Rivet and even kissed Madame Morin, who gave him such a push as to send him staggering back into his chair, but he never got over the blow:  his mind had been too much upset.  In all the country round, moreover, he was called nothing but, “that pig of a Morin,” and that epithet went through him like a sword thrust every time he heard it.  When a street boy called after him:  “Pig!” he turned his head instinctively.  His friends also overwhelmed him with horrible jokes, and used to ask him, whenever they were eating ham:  “It’s a bit of you?” He died two years later.

As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in 1875, I called on the new notary at Fouserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome and evidently wealthy lady received me.  “You do not know me again?” she said.  And I stammered out:  “But ... no Madame.”  “Henriette Bonnel.”  “Ah!” And I felt myself turning pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease, and looked at me with a smile.

As soon as she had left me alone with her husband, he took both my hands, and squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said:  “I have been intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has very often talked to me about you.  I know ... yes, I know under what painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you showed yourself in the affair....”  He hesitated, and then said in a lower tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse....  “In the affair of that pig of a Morin.”

THE WOODEN SHOES

The old priest was sputtering out the last words of his sermon over the white caps of the peasant women, and the rough or pomatumed heads of the men.  The large baskets of the farmer’s wives who had come from a distance to attend mass, were on the ground beside them, and the heavy heat of a July day caused them all to exhale a smell like that of cattle, or of a flock of sheep, and the cocks could be heard crowing through the large west door, which was wide open, as well as the lowing of the cows in a neighboring field....  “As God wishes.  Amen!” the priest said.  Then he ceased, opened a book, and, as he did every week, he began to give notice of all the small parish events for the following week.  He was an old man with white hair who had been in the parish for over forty years, and from the pulpit he was in the habit of discoursing familiarly to them all, and so he went on:  “I recommend Desire Vallin, who is very ill, to your prayers, and also la Paumelle, who is not recovering from her confinement satisfactorily.”