In the meantime Abbé Faujas, whom they had forgotten, stayed seated motionless on the terrace facing the setting sun. He did not look round; he seemed not to be listening. As the sun was about to disappear he took off his hat, no doubt finding the heat stifling. Marthe, sitting in front of the window, could see his large bare head with short hair, greying at the temples. One last red gleam illumined this rough soldierly pate and made his tonsure look like a scar from a bludgeon. Then the glimmer of light vanished and the priest, coming into the shadows, was nothing but a black silhouette against the pale grey twilight.

Unwilling to call Rose, Marthe went and got a lamp herself and served up the first dish. As she came back from the kitchen, she met a woman she did not at first recognize at the bottom of the stairs. It was Madame Faujas. She had donned a cotton bonnet and looked like a servant, with her cotton dress fastened under the bodice with a yellow sash and knotted behind her back. She had rolled up her sleeves and was puffing audibly from the chores she had just completed, her big laced-up shoes tapping along the paved floor.

‘So have you finished, Madame?’ asked Marthe, with a smile.

‘Oh, it was nothing,’ she replied. ‘It was all done with in a trice.’

She went down the steps and her voice modulated:

‘Ovide, my son, you can go up if you want to. It’s all ready up there.’

She had to touch her son on the shoulder to draw him out of his reverie. The air was getting cooler. He shivered and followed her without a word. As he passed the door of the dining room which was all bright in the lamplight and buzzing with the children’s conversation, he put his head round the door and said in his suave voice:

‘Allow me to thank you again and forgive us for this intrusion… We do apologize…’

‘No no!’ Mouret cried. ‘It’s we who are sorry not to be able to offer you anything better tonight.’

The priest raised his hand in acknowledgement and Marthe again met the clear eagle-like look which had thrown her into such confusion. It was as though from the depths of his eyes, ordinarily a bleak grey, a light had momentarily flashed on, like those you see moving behind the sleeping fronts of people’s houses.

‘Our priest has a gleam in his eye by the look of it,’ observed Mouret, laughing, when mother and son had gone.

‘I don’t think they are very happy,’ whispered Marthe.

‘Well, he certainly doesn’t carry a goldmine in his box… it’s light as a feather! I could have lifted it with the tip of my little finger.’

But his chattering was interrupted by Rose, who had come running down the stairs to tell them about the surprising events she had just witnessed.

‘My goodness,’ she said, standing at the table where her employers were eating. ‘That woman is strong as a horse! She’s over sixty-five if she’s a day and you’d never know it! She bustles around and works like nobody’s business.’

‘Did she help you move the fruit?’ asked Mouret, intrigued.

‘She did, sure enough, Monsieur. She carried away the fruit like this, in her apron; it was loaded fit to burst. I said to myself “Her dress won’t stand it.” But nothing of the sort. It’s strong material like what I wear myself. We had to do more than ten trips. My arms were sore and aching. She was grumbling away and saying it wouldn’t do. I think I heard a bit of swearing, if you don’t mind my saying.’

Mouret appeared to enjoy this greatly.

‘And what about the beds?’ he enquired.

‘She made up the beds… You should see her turn a mattress. She doesn’t find it heavy, I can tell you. She takes it by the end and throws it up in the air like a feather… And very careful she is and all. She tucked in the truckle bed as if it were a baby’s cot. If she’d had to put Baby Jesus to bed, she couldn’t have laid the sheets on it more lovingly… Of the four blankets she placed three on the truckle bed. Just like for the pillows—she didn’t want any for herself.