I recognized Bergasse’s cart, the dealer on the market. Well, none of it was very heavy. Madame Faujas was following it. As she came up the Rue Balande, she even lent the fellow who was pushing it a hand.’

‘But you saw the furniture at least. Did you count the pieces?’

‘Of course, Monsieur. I went and stood in the doorway. They all went by in front of me, and that didn’t seem to please Madame Faujas. Let me see… First they took up an iron bedstead, then a chest of drawers, two tables, four chairs… I think that was all… And the things weren’t new. I shouldn’t give a hundred and fifty francs for the whole lot.’

‘But you should have let Madame know; we can’t rent to them in such conditions… I’ll have to go and have it out with Bourrette straight away.’

He was getting angry, and was about to leave the house when Marthe managed to stop him in his tracks:

‘Listen, I was forgetting… They paid six months’ rent in advance.’

‘Oh? So they’ve paid?’ he stammered in a voice that sounded almost annoyed.

‘Yes, the old lady came down and gave me this.’

She rummaged around in her work table and gave her husband seventy-five francs in coins of a hundred centimes, carefully wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Mouret counted the money, muttering:

‘If they pay, they are free to… All the same they are a strange pair. It’s true, not everybody’s well off. But even if you don’t have a penny that’s no reason to behave so suspiciously.’

‘I meant to tell you as well,’ Marthe said when she saw he had calmed down, ‘the old lady asked if we would mind letting her have the truckle bed; I told her we weren’t using it and that she could keep it as long as she wanted.’

‘That was right, we must be obliging… I told you, what I don’t care for with these devilish priests is that you never know what they are thinking or doing. That aside, you often come across some very decent men amongst them.’

The money seemed to have consoled him. He made jokes, pestered Serge to tell him about the Missions to China which he was reading at the moment. During dinner he pretended not to concern himself any more with the folk upstairs. But when Octave recounted that he had seen Abbé Faujas coming out of the bishop’s palace, Mouret could no longer contain himself. At dessert he went back to the conversation of the day before. Then he was somewhat ashamed, for beneath the thick skin of a retired businessman he possessed a fine soul. Above all he had a lot of common sense, a rightness of judgement which caused him more often than not to hit on the mot juste in the midst of all the provincial tittle-tattle.

‘After all,’ he said as he went to bed, ‘it’s not good to poke your nose into the affairs of other people… The priest can do as he pleases. It’s vexing to feel we have to talk about these people all the time; I wash my hands of them from now on.’

A week went by. Mouret had gone back to his usual occupations; he prowled about the house, chatted to the children, spent his afternoons out concluding business deals as he liked, and never saying a word about them; ate and slept like a man for whom life is a gentle slope, without shocks or surprises of any kind. The house became deadly quiet once more. Marthe was at her accustomed place, on the terrace at her small work table. Désirée was playing at her side. The two boys came home boisterously, at the same times of the day. And Rose the cook got cross, grumbled at everybody, while the garden and the dining room remained in a calm and somnolent state.

‘Far be it from me to say so,’ Mouret said again to his wife, ‘but you can see that you were wrong thinking that if we rented out the second floor it would interfere with our lives. We are quieter than ever, the house is smaller but happier.’

And he sometimes looked up to the windows on the second floor, which Madame Faujas had hung with thick cotton curtains the day after they moved in. Not a single fold in those curtains moved. There was something self-satisfied about them—they conveyed a smug feeling of cold, rigid holiness. Behind them a monastic silence, a stillness, seemed to be deepening.