We should be very sorry to interrupt your dinner.’

‘Well, all right!’ said Mouret, who was hungry. ‘Rose will take you up. Ask her if you need anything… Make yourselves comfortable.’

Abbé Faujas, having said goodnight, was on his way to the bottom of the stairs, when Marthe went over to her husband and said softly:

‘But you have forgotten, my dear…’

‘What?’ he asked, seeing her hesitate.

‘You know… the fruit?’

‘Oh, you’re right, there’s the wretched fruit!’ he exclaimed in consternation. And as Abbé Faujas came back with a questioning look: ‘I am really very annoyed, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Father Bourrette is surely a good man, but it is vexing that you entrusted him with this matter… His head is not worth two sous…* If we had known, we should have had everything ready. Instead of that, we have to move things around. We were using the rooms, you see. Our entire harvest of figs, apples, grapes is up there on the floor…’

The priest was listening with a surprise that his extreme politeness could not conceal.

‘Oh, it won’t take us long,’ Mouret went on. ‘In ten minutes if you won’t mind waiting, Rose will clear your rooms.’

The worried look on the abbé’s pale face became more marked.

‘The rooms are furnished, are they not?’ he asked.

‘Not at all. There’s not one stick of furniture. We’ve never lived in them.’

At that the priest became agitated. His grey eyes flashed. He exclaimed, barely suppressing his anger:

‘What! But I specifically asked him in my letter if we could rent furnished rooms. Obviously I couldn’t bring any furniture in my trunk.’

‘What did I tell you?’ Mouret’s voice grew louder. ‘That Bourrette is unbelievable… He came round here, Monsieur, and for certain he saw the apples, because he even picked one up, declaring that he had rarely seen such a beautiful apple. He said that everything seemed fine and that it was just right and that he would rent the rooms.’

But Abbé Faujas was no longer listening; his cheeks were flushed with anger. He turned, and in an anxious and stuttering voice he said:

‘Mother, do you hear that? There isn’t any furniture.’

The old lady, her thin black shawl wrapped tightly around her and not letting go of her basket, had just been creeping around inspecting the ground floor. She had got as far as the kitchen door and inspected its four corners; then, coming back to the steps, had slowly taken in the view of the garden. But it was the dining room that interested her most. There she stood as before opposite the laden table, her eyes on the steaming soup, when her son again said:

‘Do you hear that, Mother? We shall have to go to the hotel.’

Without answering, she looked up. Her whole face indicated a refusal to leave this house whose every nook and cranny she was already familiar with.

She gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug, her eyes wandering from the kitchen to the garden and from garden to dining room.

Mouret meanwhile was becoming impatient. Seeing that neither mother nor son seemed about to go away, he went on:

‘Unfortunately we don’t have any beds… Well, in the attic we have a sort of truckle bed which might be all right at a pinch for Madame, but I don’t know what Monsieur l’Abbé could sleep on.’

Then Madame Faujas finally opened her mouth. She said in a clipped, rather hoarse voice:

‘My son can have the truckle bed… I only need a mattress on the floor in a corner.’

The abbé gave an approving nod to this arrangement. Mouret started to protest, to try and think of some other arrangement. But confronted by the satisfied expression of his new tenants, said nothing, but made do with exchanging a look of astonishment with his wife.

‘Tomorrow is another day,’ he said with his bourgeois dryness. ‘You will be able to get what furniture you need. Rose will go up and take away the fruit and make the beds. Would you wait a moment on the terrace?… Come children, get two chairs.’

Ever since the priest and his mother had arrived, the children had been sitting quietly at the table. They studied the visitors curiously. The priest had seemed not to notice them; but Madame Faujas had stopped for a moment by each of them, as though she wished from the outset to get inside their young heads.