“’The works of the flesh
thou shalt not desire
Except in marriage only.’
“Did you ever desire, or live with, any other
woman than your wife?”
Sabot exclaimed with sincerity:
“As to that, no; oh, as to that, no, m’sieu
le Cure. My poor wife, deceive her! No,
no! Not so much as the tip of a finger, either
in thought or in act. That is the truth.”
They were silent a few seconds, then, in a lower tone,
as though a doubt had arisen in his mind, he resumed:
“When I go to town, to say that I never go into
a house, you know, one of the licensed houses, just
to laugh and talk and see something different, I could
not say that. But I always pay, monsieur le cure,
I always pay. From the moment you pay, without
anyone seeing or knowing you, no one can get you into
trouble.”
The cure did not insist, and gave him absolution.
Theodule Sabot did the work on the chancel, and goes
to communion every month.
Quartermaster Varajou had obtained a week’s
leave to go and visit his sister, Madame Padoie.
Varajou, who was in garrison at Rennes and was leading
a pretty gay life, finding himself high and dry, wrote
to his sister saying that he would devote a week to
her. It was not that he cared particularly for
Mme. Padoie, a little moralist, a devotee, and
always cross; but he needed money, needed it very badly,
and he remembered that, of all his relations, the
Padoies were the only ones whom he had never approached
on the subject.
Pere Varajou, formerly a horticulturist at Angers,
but now retired from business, had closed his purse
strings to his scapegrace son and had hardly seen
him for two years. His daughter had married Padoie,
a former treasury clerk, who had just been appointed
tax collector at Vannes.
Varajou, on leaving the train, had some one direct
him to the house of his brother-in-law, whom he found
in his office arguing with the Breton peasants of
the neighborhood. Padoie rose from his seat, held
out his hand across the table littered with papers,
murmured, “Take a chair. I will be at liberty
in a moment,” sat down again and resumed his
discussion.
The peasants did not understand his explanations,
the collector did not understand their line of argument.
He spoke French, they spoke Breton, and the clerk
who acted as interpreter appeared not to understand
either.
It lasted a long time, a very long time. Varajou
looked at his brother-in-law and thought: “What
a fool!” Padoie must have been almost fifty.
He was tall, thin, bony, slow, hairy, with heavy arched
eyebrows. He wore a velvet skull cap with a gold
cord vandyke design round it. His look was gentle,
like his actions. His speech, his gestures, his
thoughts, all were soft. Varajou said to himself,
“What a fool!”
He, himself, was one of those noisy roysterers for
whom the greatest pleasures in life are the cafe and
abandoned women. He understood nothing outside
of these conditions of existence.
