CHAPTER 22

It was perfectly dark in the cell at Les Tulettes. A draught of cold air awoke Mouret from the cataleptic stupor into which his violence earlier in the evening had thrown him. He remained lying against the wall in perfect stillness for a few moments, his eyes staring widely; then he began to roll his head gently on the cold stone, wailing like a child just awakened from sleep. But the current of chill damp air swept against his legs, and he rose and looked around him to see whence it came. In front of him he saw the door of his cell wide open.

'She has left the door open,' said he aloud; 'she will be expecting me. I must be off.'

He went out, and then came back and felt his clothes after the manner of a methodical man who is afraid of forgetting something, and finally he carefully closed the door behind him. He passed through the first court with an easy unconcerned gait as though he were merely taking a stroll. As he was entering the second one, he caught sight of a warder who seemed to be on the watch. He stopped and deliberated for a moment. But, the warder having disappeared, he crossed the court and reached another door, which led to the open country. He closed it behind him without any appearance of astonishment or haste.

'She is a good woman all the same,' he murmured. 'She must have heard me calling her. It must be getting late. I will go home at once for fear they should feel uneasy.'

He struck out along a path. It seemed quite natural to him to find himself among the open fields. When he had gone a hundred yards he had altogether forgotten that Les Tulettes was behind him, and imagined that he had just left a vine-grower from whom he had purchased fifty hogsheads of wine. When he reached a spot where five roads met, he recognised where he was, and began to laugh as he said to himself:

'What a goose I am! I was going up the hill towards Saint-Eutrope; it is to the left I must turn. I shall be at Plassans in a good hour and a half.'

Then he went merrily along the high-road, looking at each of the mile-stones as at an old acquaintance. He stopped for[Pg 306] a moment before certain fields and country-houses with an air of interest. The sky was of an ashy hue, streaked with broad rosy bands that lighted up the night like dying embers. Heavy drops of rain began to fall; the wind was blowing from the east and was full of moisture.

'Hallo!' said Mouret, looking up at the sky uneasily, 'I mustn't stop loitering. The wind is in the east, and there's going to be a pretty downpour. I shall never be able to reach Plassans before it begins; and I'm not well wrapped up either.'

He gathered round his breast the thick grey woollen waistcoat which he had torn at Les Tulettes. He had a bad bruise on his jaw, to which he raised his hand without heeding the sharp pain which it caused him. The high-road was quite deserted, and he only met a cart going down a hill at a leisurely pace. The driver was dozing, and made no response to his friendly good-night. The rain did not overtake him till he reached the bridge across the Viorne. It distressed him very much, and he went to take shelter under the bridge, grumbling that it was quite impossible to go on through such weather, that nothing ruined clothes so much as rain, and that if he had known what was coming he would have brought an umbrella. He waited patiently for a long half-hour, amusing himself by listening to the streaming of the downpour; then, when it was over, he returned to the high-road, and at last reached Plassans, ever taking the greatest care to keep himself from getting splashed with mud.

It was nearly midnight, though Mouret calculated that it could scarcely yet be eight o'clock. He passed through the deserted streets, feeling quite distressed that he had kept his wife waiting such a long time.

'She won't be able to understand it,' he thought. 'The dinner will be quite cold. Ah! I shall get a nice reception from Rose.'

At last he reached the Rue Balande and stood before his own door.

'Ah!' he said, 'I have not got my latchkey.'

He did not knock at the door, however. The kitchen window was quite dark, and the other windows in the front were equally void of all sign of life. A sense of deep suspicion then took possession of the madman; with an instinct that was quite animal-like, he scented danger. He stepped back into the shadow of the neighbouring houses, and again[Pg 307] examined the house-front; then he seemed to come to a decision, and went round into the Impasse des Chevillottes. But the little door that led into the garden was bolted. At this, impelled by sudden rage, he threw himself against it with tremendous force, and the door, rotted by damp, broke into two pieces. For a moment the violence of the shock almost stunned Mouret, and rendered him unconscious of why he had broken down the door, which he tried to mend again by joining the broken pieces.

'That's a nice thing to have done, when I might so easily have knocked,' he said with a sudden pang of regret. 'It will cost me at least thirty francs to get a new door.'

He was now in the garden. As he raised his head and saw the bedroom on the first floor brightly lighted, he came to the conclusion that his wife was going to bed. This caused him great astonishment, and he muttered that he must certainly have dropped off to sleep under the bridge while he was waiting for the rain to stop. It must be very late, he thought. The windows of the neighbouring houses, Monsieur Rastoil's as well as those of the Sub-Prefecture, were in darkness. Then he again fixed his eyes upon his own house as he caught sight of the glow of a lamp on the second floor behind Abbé Faujas's thick curtains. That glow was like a flaming eye, and seemed to scorch him. He pressed his brow with his burning hands, and his head grew dizzy, racked by some horrible recollection like a vague nightmare, in which nothing was clearly defined, but which seemed to apply to some long-standing danger to himself and his family—a danger which grew and increased in horror, and threatened to swallow up the house unless he could do something to save it.

'Marthe, Marthe, where are you?' he stammered in an undertone. 'Come and bring away the children.'

He looked about him for Marthe. He could no longer recognise the garden. It seemed to him to be larger; to be empty and grey and like a cemetery. The big box-plants had vanished, the lettuces were no longer there, the fruit-trees had disappeared. He turned round again, came back, and knelt down to see if the slugs had eaten everything up. The disappearance of the box-plants, the death of their lofty greenery, caused him an especial pang, as though some of the actual life of the house had departed. Who was it that had killed them? What villain had been there uprooting everything and tearing away even the tufts of violets which[Pg 308] he had planted at the foot of the terrace? Indignation arose in him as he contemplated all this ruin.

'Marthe, Marthe, where are you?' he called again.

He looked for her in the little conservatory to the right of the terrace. It was littered with the dead dry corpses of the box-plants. They were piled up in bundles amidst the stumps of the fruit-trees. In one corner was Désirée's bird-cage, hanging from a nail, with the door broken off and the wire-work sadly torn. The madman stepped back, overwhelmed with fear as though he had opened the door of a vault. Stammering, his throat on fire, he went back to the terrace and paced up and down before the door and the shuttered windows. His increasing rage gave his limbs the suppleness of a wild beast's. He braced himself up and stepped along noiselessly, trying to find some opening. An air-hole into the cellar was sufficient for him. He squeezed himself together and glided inside with the nimbleness of a cat, scraping the wall with his nails as he went. At last he was in the house.

The cellar door was only latched. He made his way through the darkness of the hall, groping past the walls with his hands, and pushing the kitchen door open. Some matches were on a shelf at the left. He went straight to this shelf, and struck a light to enable him to get a lamp which stood upon the mantelpiece without breaking anything. Then he looked about him. There appeared to have been a big meal there that evening. The kitchen was in a state of festive disorder. The table was strewn with dirty plates and dishes and glasses. There was a litter of pans, still warm, on the sink and the chairs and the very floor. A coffee-pot that had been forgotten was also boiling away beside the stove, slightly tilted like a tipsy man. Mouret put it straight and then tidily arranged the pans. He smelt them, sniffed at the drops of liquor that remained in the glasses, and counted the dishes and plates with growing irritation. This was no longer his quiet orderly kitchen; it seemed as if a hotelful of food had been wasted there. All this guzzling disorder reeked of indigestion.

'Marthe! Marthe!' he again repeated as he returned into the passage, carrying the lamp as he went; 'answer me, tell me where they have shut you up. We must be off, we must be off at once.'

He searched for her in the dining-room. The two cupboards to the right and left of the stove were open. From a[Pg 309] burst bag of grey paper on the edge of a shelf some lumps of sugar had fallen upon the floor. Higher up Mouret could see a bottle of brandy with the neck broken and plugged with a piece of rag. Then he got upon a chair to examine the cupboards. They were half empty. The jars of preserved fruits had been attacked, the jam-pots had been opened and the jam tasted, the fruit had been nibbled, the provisions of all kinds had been gnawed and fouled as though a whole army of rats had been there. Not being able to find Marthe in the closets, Mouret searched all over the room, looking behind the curtains and even underneath the furniture. Fragments of bone and pieces of broken bread lay about the floor; there were marks on the table that had been left by sticky glasses. Then he crossed the hall and went to look for Marthe in the drawing-room. But, as soon as he opened the door, he stopped short. This could not really be his own drawing-room. The bright mauve paper, the red-flowered carpet, the new easy-chairs covered with cerise damask, filled him with amazement. He was afraid to enter a room that did not belong to him, and he closed the door.

'Marthe! Marthe!' he stammered again in accents of despair.

He went back to the middle of the hall, unable to quiet the hoarse panting which was swelling in his throat. Where had he got to, that he could not recognise a single spot? Who had been transforming his house in such a way? His recollections were quite confused. He could only recall some shadows gliding along the hall; two shadows, at first poverty-stricken, soft-spoken, self-suppressing, then tipsy and disreputable-looking; two shadows that leered and sniggered. He raised his lamp, the wick of which was burning smokily, and thereupon the shadows grew bigger, lengthened upon the walls, mounted aloft beside the staircase and filled and preyed upon the whole house. Some horrid filth, some fermenting putrescence had found its way into the place and had rotted the woodwork, rusted the iron and split the walls. Then he seemed to hear the house crumbling like a ceiling from dampness, and to see it melting like a handful of salt thrown into a basin of hot water.

But up above there sounded peals of ringing laughter which made his hair stand on end. He put the lamp down and went upstairs to look for Marthe. He crept up noiselessly on his hands and knees with all the nimbleness and[Pg 310] stealth of a wolf. When he reached the landing of the first floor, he knelt down in front of the door of the bedroom. A ray of light streamed from underneath it. Marthe must be going to bed.

'What a jolly bed this is of theirs!' Olympe was just exclaiming; 'you can quite bury yourself in it, Honoré; I am right up to my eyes in feathers.'

She laughed and stretched herself and sprang about amidst the bed-clothes.

'Ever since I've been here,' she continued, 'I've been longing to sleep in this bed. It made me almost ill wishing for it. I could never see that lath of a landlady of ours get into it without feeling a furious desire to throw her on to the floor and put myself in her place. One gets quite warm directly. It's just as though I were wrapped in cotton-wool.'

Trouche, who had not yet gone to bed, was examining the bottles on the dressing-table.

'She has got all kinds of scents,' he said.

'Well, as she isn't here, we may just as well treat ourselves to the best room!' continued Olympe. 'There's no danger of her coming back and disturbing us. I have fastened the doors up. You will be getting cold, Honoré.'

But Trouche now opened the drawers and began groping about amongst the linen.

'Put this on, it's smothered with lace,' he said, tossing a night-dress to Olympe. 'I shall wear this red handkerchief myself.'

Then, as Trouche was at last getting into bed, Olympe said to him:

'Put the grog on the night-table. We need not get up and go to the other end of the room for it. There, my dear, we are like real householders now!'

They lay down side by side, with the eider-down quilt drawn up to their chins.

'I ate a deuced lot this evening,' said Trouche after a short pause.

'And drank a lot, too!' added Olympe with a laugh. 'I feel very cosy and snug. But the tiresome part is that my mother is always interfering with us. She has been quite awful to-day. I can't take a single step about the house without her being at me. There's really no advantage in our landlady going off if mother means to play the policeman. She has quite spoilt my day's enjoyment.'

[Pg 311]

'Hasn't the Abbé some idea of going away?' asked Trouche after another short interval of silence. 'If he is made a bishop, he will be obliged to leave the house to us.'

'One can't be sure of that,' Olympe petulantly replied. 'I dare say mother means to keep it. But how jolly we should be here, all by ourselves! I would make our landlady sleep upstairs in my brother's room; I'd persuade her that it was healthier than this. Pass me the glass, Honoré.'

They both took a drink and then covered themselves up afresh.

'Ah!' said Trouche, 'I'm afraid it won't be so easy to get rid of them, but we can try, at any rate. I believe the Abbé would have changed his quarters before if he had not been afraid that the landlady would have considered herself deserted and have made a rumpus. I think I'll try to talk the landlady over. I'll tell her a lot of tales to persuade her to turn them out.'

He took another drink.

'Oh! leave the matter to me,' replied Olympe; 'I'll get mother and Ovide turned out, as they've treated us so badly.'

'Well, if you don't succeed,' said Trouche, 'I can easily concoct some scandal about the Abbé and Madame Mouret; and then he will be absolutely obliged to shift his quarters.'

Olympe sat up in bed.

'That's a splendid idea,' she said, 'that is! We must set about it to-morrow. Before a month is over, this room will be ours. I must really give you a kiss for the idea.'

They then both grew very merry, and began to plan how they would arrange the room. They would change the place of the chest of drawers, they said; and they would bring up a couple of easy-chairs from the drawing-room. However, their speech was gradually growing huskier, and at last they became silent.

'There! you're off now!' murmured Olympe, after a time. 'You're snoring with your eyes open! Well, let me come to the other side, so that, at any rate, I can finish my novel. I'm not sleepy, if you are.'

She got up and rolled him like a mere lump towards the wall, and then began to read. But, before she had finished a page, she turned her head uneasily towards the door. She fancied she could hear a strange noise on the landing. At this she cried petulantly to her husband, giving him a dig in the ribs with her elbow:

[Pg 312]

'You know very well that I don't like that sort of joke. Don't play the wolf; anyone would fancy that there was somebody at the door. Well, go on if it pleases you; you are very irritating.'

Then she angrily absorbed herself in her book again, after sucking a slice of lemon left in her glass.

With the same stealthy movements as before, Mouret now quitted the door of the bedroom, where he had remained crouching. He climbed to the second floor and knelt before Abbé Faujas's door, squeezing himself close to the key-hole. He choked down Marthe's name, that again rose in his throat, and examined with glistening eye the corners of the priest's room, to satisfy himself that nobody was shut up there. The big bare room was in deep shadow; a small lamp which stood upon the table cast just a circular patch of light upon the floor, and the Abbé himself, who was writing, seemed like a big black stain in the midst of that yellow glare. After he had scrutinised the curtains and the chest of drawers, Mouret's gaze fell upon the iron bedstead, upon which lay the priest's hat, looking like the locks of a woman's hair. There was no doubt that Marthe was there, thought Mouret. Hadn't the Trouches said that she was to have that room? But as he continued gazing he saw that the bed was undisturbed, and looked, with its cold, white coverings, like a tombstone. His eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom. However, Abbé Faujas appeared to hear some sound, for he glanced at the door. When the maniac saw the priest's calm face his eyes reddened, a slight foam appeared at the corner of his lips, and it was with difficulty that he suppressed a shout. At last he went away on his hands and knees again, down the stairs and along the passages, still repeating in low tones:

'Marthe! Marthe!'

He searched for her through the whole house; in Rose's room, which he found empty; in the Trouches' apartments, which were filled with the spoils of the other rooms; in the children's old rooms, where he burst into tears as his hands came across a pair of worn-out boots which had belonged to Désirée. He went up and down the stairs, clinging on to the banisters, and gliding along the walls, stealthily exploring every apartment with the extraordinary dexterity of a scheming maniac. Soon there was not a single corner of the place from the cellar to the attic which he had not investigated.[Pg 313] Marthe was nowhere in the house; nor were the children there, nor Rose. The house was empty; the house might crumble to pieces.

Mouret sat down upon the stairs. He choked down the panting which, in spite of himself, continued to distend his throat. With his back against the banisters, and his eyes wide open in the darkness, he sat waiting, absorbed in a scheme which he was patiently thinking out. His senses became so acute that he could hear the slightest sounds that arose in the house. Down below him snored Trouche, while Olympe turned over the pages of her book with a slight rubbing of her fingers against the paper. On the second floor Abbé Faujas's pen made a scratching sound like the crawling of an insect, while, in the adjoining room, Madame Faujas's heavy breathing seemed like an accompaniment to that shrill music. Mouret sat for an hour with his ears sharply strained. Olympe was the first of the wakeful ones to succumb to sleep. He could hear her novel fall upon the floor. Then Abbé Faujas laid down his pen and undressed himself, quietly gliding about his room in his slippers. He slipped off his clothes in silence, and did not even make the bed creak as he got into it. Ah! the house had gone to rest at last. But the madman could tell from the sound of the Abbé's breathing that he was yet awake. Gradually that breathing grew fuller, and at last the whole house slept.

Mouret waited on for another half-hour. He still listened with strained ears, as though he could hear the four sleepers descending into deeper and deeper slumber. The house lay wrapped in darkness and unconsciousness. Then the maniac rose up and slowly made his way into the passage.

'Marthe isn't here any longer; the house isn't here; nothing is here,' he murmured.

He opened the door that led into the garden, and went down to the little conservatory. When he got there he methodically removed the big dry box-plants, and carried them upstairs in enormous armfuls, piling them in front of the doors of the Trouches and the Faujases. He felt, too, a craving for a bright light, and he went into the kitchen and lighted all the lamps, which he placed upon the tables in the various rooms and on the landings, and along the passages. Then he brought up the rest of the box-plants. They were soon piled higher than the doors. As he was making his last journey with them he raised his eyes and[Pg 314] noticed the windows. Next he went out into the garden again, took the trunks of the fruit-trees and stacked them up under the windows, skilfully arranging for little currents of air which should make them blaze freely. The stack seemed to him but a small one, however.

'There is nothing left,' he murmured: 'there must be nothing left.'

Then, as a thought struck him, he went down into the cellar, and recommenced his journeying backwards and forwards. He was now carrying up the supply of fuel for the winter, the coal, the vine-branches, and the wood. The pile under the windows gradually grew bigger. As he carefully arranged each bundle of vine-branches, he was thrilled with livelier satisfaction. He next proceeded to distribute the fuel through the rooms on the ground-floor, and left a heap of it in the entrance-hall, and another heap in the kitchen. Then he piled the furniture atop of the different heaps. An hour sufficed him to get his work finished. He had taken his boots off, and had glided about all over the house, with heavily laden arms, so dexterously that he had not let a single piece of wood fall roughly to the floor. He seemed endowed with new life, with extraordinary nimbleness of motion. As far as this one firmly fixed idea of his went, he was perfectly in possession of his senses.

When all was ready, he lingered for a moment to enjoy the sight of his work. He went from pile to pile, took pleasure in viewing the square-set pyres, and gently rubbed his hands together with an appearance of extreme satisfaction. As a few fragments of coal had fallen on the stairs, he ran off to get a brush, and carefully swept the black dust from the steps. Then he completed his inspection with the careful precision of a man who means to do things as they ought to be done. He gradually became quite excited with satisfaction, and dropped on to his hands and knees again, and began to hop about, panting more heavily in his savage joy.

At last he took a vine-branch and set fire to the heaps. First of all he lighted the pile on the terrace underneath the windows. Then he leapt back into the house and set fire to the heaps in the drawing-room and dining-room, and then to those in the kitchen and the hall. Next he sprang up the stairs and flung the remains of his blazing brand upon the piles that lay against the doors of the Trouches and Faujases. An ever-increasing rage was thrilling him, and the lurid[Pg 315] blaze of the fire brought his madness to a climax. He twice came down the stairs with terrific leaps, bounded about through the thick smoke, fanning the flames with his breath, and casting handfuls of coal upon them. At the sight of the flames, already mounting to the ceilings of the rooms, he sat down every now and then and laughed and clapped his hands with all his strength.

The house was now roaring like an over-crammed stove. The flames burst out at all points, at once, with a violence that split the floors. But the maniac made his way upstairs again through the sheets of fire, singeing his hair and blackening his clothes as he went. And he posted himself on the second-floor, crouching down on his hands and knees with his growling, beast-like head thrown forward. He was keeping guard over the landing, and his eyes never quitted the priest's door.

'Ovide! Ovide!' shrieked a panic-stricken voice.

Madame Faujas's door at the end of the landing was suddenly opened and the flames swept into her room with the roar of a tempest. The old woman appeared in the midst of the fire. Stretching out her arms, she hurled aside the blazing brands and sprang on to the landing, pulling and pushing away with her hands and feet the burning heap that blocked up her son's door, and calling all the while to the priest despairingly. The maniac crouched still lower down, his eyes gleaming while he continued to growl.

'Wait for me! Don't get out of the window!' cried Madame Faujas, striking at her son's door.

She threw her weight against it, and the charred door yielded easily. She reappeared holding her son in her arms. He had taken time to put on his cassock, and was choking, half suffocated by the smoke.

'I am going to carry you, Ovide,' she cried, with energetic determination; 'Hold well on to my shoulders, and clutch hold of my hair if you feel you are slipping. Don't trouble, I'll carry you through it all.'

She hoisted him upon her shoulders as though he were a child, and this sublime mother, this old peasant woman, carrying her devotion to death itself, did not so much as totter beneath the crushing weight of that big swooning, unresisting body. She extinguished the burning brands with her naked feet and made a free passage through the flames by brushing them aside with her open hand so that her son[Pg 316] might not even be touched by them. But just as she was about to go downstairs, the maniac, whom she had not observed, sprang upon the Abbé Faujas and tore him from off her shoulders. His muttered growl turned into a wild shriek, while he writhed in a fit at the head of the stairs. He belaboured the priest, tore him with his nails and strangled him.

'Marthe! Marthe!' he bellowed.

Then he rolled down the blazing stairs, still with the priest in his grasp; while Madame Faujas, who had driven her teeth into his throat, drained his blood. The Trouches perished in their drunken stupor without a groan; and the house, gutted and undermined, collapsed in the midst of a cloud of sparks.