THERE IS NOTHING in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.
As regards the events which are now about to take place, the historian could give an independent account of them, using his own judgment. He would not hesitate to do so if he saw no better means of enlightening the reader. But there happens to be a man who had a profound knowledge of these events, having been brought into close contact with them through his employment under the town council. This man is the rural constable Cyprien Beausoleil, a citizen of Clochemerle, where he carried out duties tending to the preservation of peace, always with good humor, and frequently with happy results to himself. It seems to us preferable to borrow his account, which is certainly superior to any that we could ourselves draw up, seeing that we have here a genuine witness, and one who has, of course, the local touch and manner. This latter is very necessary in the present case. Here, then, is Cyprien Beausoleil’s account. Let us listen to him as he speaks of the past with the dispassionate outlook induced by lapse of time, which restores events to their true proportions, and relegates the participants to their erstwhile obscurity.
“So there was Adèle Torbayon, suddenly losing all shame, and going about everywhere sighing, with her eyes all puffed up as though some one had biffed her in the face, and looking as if she was thinking of things you could easily guess at, like they all do, women, when love sends ’em a bit queer. Yes, she’d kept quiet for a long time, that woman, just running her business, but now she went clean mad over Hippolyte Foncimagne. A man like Arthur might quite well see nothing in it, but you couldn’t take a man like me in, who knows all the women in the town and the country around here. A country policeman, what with his uniform and being able to make police reports, and pretty ready with his tongue and his hands too if necessary, and always loitering about without seeming to notice anything but watching all the time, it doesn’t take him long to know lots about all the women, and to have a hold over ’em too, only if it’s the price of keeping his mouth shut, seeing there’d be a hell of a row if a man who wasn’t taken in by appearances took it into his head one fine day to give the whole show away!
“I’ve had a good time, I can tell you I have, seeing I was always watching them, and I knew just the right moment to turn up. The right moment, I say, because that’s everything with those silly donkeys (but nice, though). For a man who has a taste for ’em and knows their ways, it’s easy enough to spot the moment when to come along by chance.
“Well, then, there was Adèle as though she’d suddenly gone clean off her nut, always stargazing, so she couldn’t hardly do her figures and you might almost leave the inn without paying. A woman who goes forgetting everything like that—so different from what you’re accustomed to see in this part of the country, where they’re always scraping and piling up the cash—well, you needn’t scratch your head over it any more: she’s fair caught, she’s got it badly, and no mistake about it. I’m speaking of course for women like Adèle and Judith, for example, women who mean business, hot stuff and no half measures about them, and not those simpering humbugs, those sort of icicles that you don’t want to have anything to do with, like some I know. Women aren’t made to work with their heads, that’s my opinion, and when they do, they’re no use for anything else. They’re always wanting in one thing, and that cleverness of theirs is out of place, that’s what I say! As for women, sir, I’ve talked to ’em, I’ve listened to ’em, I’ve held ’em, I’ve done what I liked with ’em—by the dozen. It’s bound to happen with all the opportunities a country policeman gets, when there’s that awful stormy weather that we get here in Beaujolais and they’re all alone at home. It seems to push ’em into your arms, in a manner of speaking. Now you take a tip from me, sir: if you like peace and quiet in your home, you choose a nice soft woman a bit heavy in her build, one of those plump ones who’re ready to faint when you touch them, and sometimes even when you only look as if you were going to. As far as noise and fuss goes, it’s better for ’em to give tongue at night than in the day, and better they should do it because they’re feeling happy than because they’re just spiteful and nasty. Take this as a general rule: you can tell a good woman by what she’s like in bed. You seldom find a woman who behaves well there who hasn’t got some good points about her. If her nerves get the better of her, just do your best with her: that chases all the devils away, better than Ponosse’s holy-water sprinkler does. She’s like a lamb after that, and agrees with you every time. Isn’t that right?
“Adèle, at the time I’m speaking of, was in fine form, up to her tricks with more than one, I can tell you. She’d only to let herself be seen around a little for all the men in Clochemerle to come along to the inn for drinks. In fact it was that, strictly speaking, that made Arthur a rich man. He’d only to let his wife be ogled by other men and he’d always have the place full, and that meant a fine lot of cash in the till every evening. He pretended not to see that Adèle got pawed about a little. It didn’t make him jealous, because he didn’t let her go out much, so it was impossible for her to get up to any real mischief. And what’s more, Arthur was a tall, strong fellow; he could hoist a full cask onto a cart without a grunt. And a little undersized fellow he could have held up at arm’s length. People kept the right side of him, I can tell you.
“Seeing Adèle all changed like that, so that she’d stopped all her joking with the customers, and made mistakes in giving them their change—giving them too much—that put me on her tracks. I’d always thought she was a lively customer, that woman, for all those quiet ways of hers. But no one ever said she’d been a bad wife for Arthur. It doesn’t take long, you know, to go off the rails, that sort of thing doesn’t, for the clever girls, when it takes ’em that way, they always find the best way of tackling it, if it’s only five minutes here and five minutes there. Well, when I saw all that change that’d come over Adèle, I said to myself, ‘That Arthur,’ I said, ‘he’s for it now!’ And in some ways I was rather pleased about it, thinking of what was only fair. It isn’t fair now—is it?—when there are two or three real fine women in a town, for the same men to have ’em all to themselves, while the other fellows are only having a thin time with scraggy women with no juice about ’em at all! So there was me starting to look around for the lucky man who’d managed to get hold of Adèle. Well, it didn’t take me long to see what was up. I’d only to watch how Adèle gloated over Foncimagne with melting looks, and the way she had of smiling at him slowly and never noticing anyone else, and hanging over him when she served him and almost touching his head with her bosom, and forgetting everyone so she shouldn’t lose a crumb of that young rascal so long as he was there. Women in that sort of state give the whole show away without saying a word, twenty times a day: love comes oozing out of their bodies like sweat under their arms. And there’s no denying this either, all the men near them, it stirs ’em up properly as soon as ever they notice it. ‘Well,’ I said to myself when I saw that sort of funny business, ‘there’s going to be a bust-up one of those fine days!’ Not so much on account of Arthur, I thought, as Judith on the other side of the road, seeing that she’d never give away the tiniest crumb of any cake she had, and as for Hippolyte, he was her own pet sugarplum.
“Well, it happened just as I knew it would, and it didn’t take long either. That Judith, she tumbled to what was happening at once, and there she was, stuck in front of her door all day long, with black looks on her face, and shooting nasty glances over towards the inn, so that you were expecting her every minute to come over and tear the other woman’s eyes out. Then at last, what does she do but send over that Toumignon of hers to ask if anyone had seen her beloved Foncimagne. After that she starts shouting about in her shop that Adèle was this and Adèle was that, and that she’d go over one morning and tell her what a shameless woman she was. And she kicked up such a devil of a row that the whole town got to hear of it, and it came to Adèle’s ears and pretty near to Arthur’s too; and then he got suspicious and started saying that when people tried to steer clear of him he never let ’em escape, and that that was the end of them, and he brought up the old story of the man he’d done in with a blow of his fist when the fellow was coming back one night on foot from Villefranche. And so the end of it was that Hippolyte, who was being threatened by Judith and Arthur, both of ’em, got scared and went and took a room in the lower town, leaving Adèle all upset like as if she was a widow. And there was Judith opposite, crowing over her, and going off into Lyons twice a week instead of once, and doing more bicycling than ever. But Hippolyte, he sang a bit small. And Adèle couldn’t hide her red eyes. And the whole town was watching the affair and keeping an eye on every little dodge those three were up to.
“The whole truth came out later, just as I’d guessed it would, and it was Hippolyte’s fault. One day when he’d had a bit too much, he couldn’t help shouting around the place that he’d got off with Adèle. But it hardly ever happens that men don’t go giving details about those sort of things sooner or later. Once it’s over and done with, they’ve still got the pleasure of being able to go bragging about and making other men envious, that is, when the lady’s worth it, as Adèle certainly was.
“All that happened three weeks before the troops arrived at Clochemerle. During those weeks Adèle’d got over it a bit, but her pride had had a nasty knock. Then she got into bad habits again with Foncimagne, and she’d no difficulty in carrying on with them, seeing that she’d got him handy, in a room upstairs. With the back entrance through the yard he could slip in there at any time. As for bad habits, take it all in all, p’raps they’re what makes life more pleasant than anything else. And there’s this too—when it’s late in life that you get to want someone, you want ’em terrible. When you look at Adèle you can see pretty well what I mean. And Arthur, I don’t doubt, had slowed up the pace a lot, as always happens with married couples, seeing it’s always the same dish. If you’re forever eating turkey and truffles, you get to think no more of it than if it was only boiled beef. As soon as a woman settles down into the ordinary humdrum, it’s harder to get going with her. Just the mere notion of finding something new, even if it sometimes doesn’t amount to much, seeing that that sort of thing’s always pretty much the same, it sends us all of a dither—I’m speaking for us men—because for women it’s different. So long as you give ’em all they want, they aren’t curious about other men. But it very seldom happens that they do get all they want, in the long run, and they can’t stop worrying about it, because when all’s said and done they’ve nothing more important to think about. It was like that for Adèle, not a doubt of it. She was like a lovely mare that’s neyer had oats and then gorges herself with them, and then gets left without ’em. She was too starved, that woman was, day in day out. And then this happening when she was about thirty-five, think of the jolt it must have given her. It sent her queer, and you can’t be surprised.
“Then after that, as I was saying, the troops came along to Clochemerle, about a hundred lusty young fellers, like a match and tinder they were, seeing that all those strapping young devils were thinking of nothing but skirts and what was underneath ’em. All the women felt themselves being stared at and started thinking of all that vim and go that was lying idle and wasted in the cantonments. Now I’m going to tell you something about the way I look at certain things. When soldiers come along, it sends the women crazy. People say it’s the sight of the uniform that has that effect on ’em. But what I think is, it’s more seeing a big crowd of men as hale and hearty and active as you could wish, and looking at the women so as to stir them up properly—then there’s the ideas they’ve got about soldiers. Always eager for a little love, they think soldiers are, and quick in taking every advantage they can, without so much as by y’r leave. Yes, rape any minute, that’s what gets their blood up. I reckon it’s their great-great-grandmothers are responsible: they had some rough handling when the marauding armies passed through the countryside. So it’s easy to see how this idea of soldiers stirs up a whole crowd of feelings that are usually lying deep down inside ’em. There’s lots of women who’d be only too glad not to be asked any questions, so as to be saved regrets and heartburnings afterwards, and to be able to say, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ That’s what always makes ’em dreamylike when they catch sight of soldiers, thinking how one of those daredevils might chuck himself at them suddenly, and only just imagining it makes ’em hot all over. When men and women start having a good look at each other, as happens when a regiment’s passing through, that means a lot of husbands given the go-by in those women’s heads! If everything that went on in their minds actually happened, there’d be a devil of a dirty mix-up all around—a regular merry-go-round it’d be, ain’t I right, sir?
“Well, as soon as I saw those hundred or so gay young dogs had settled themselves down at Clochemerle, it won’t be long before there are ructions, said I. There was everyone ogling each other, brazen or otherwise, men and women together, the women without saying exactly what they were thinking and the men saying it too plain, and much too loud to please the husbands, who don’t care two straws about their wives as a rule, but get to like them again as soon as anyone pays ’em a bit of attention—that’s a well-known fact. The women were feeling all set up already, merely knowing that the men were after them: some of the gloomy ones even started singing.
“All this meeting and mixing couldn’t go on and nothing further come of it. People began to talk and talk—saying much more than what had really happened, that’s quite certain. If some fine, strapping wench got made up to more than the others or had more compliments than they did, the jealous creatures soon started calling her names and accusing her of dreadful behavior in dark corners in coach sheds and cellars. But all the same, there were some pretty lively goings-on everywhere, and sometimes it was the women who’d had nothing said about them. It isn’t always those who do the most talking that behave the worst, not by any means: with them it’s all words, while the ones who play fast and loose don’t need ’em. The women who got most talked about were the ones who were putting up N.C.O.’s, because it’s generally supposed that the stripe makes things more elegant and nice. That just shows how you find vanity poking in everywhere. People were saying all over Clochemerle that Marcel le Barodet wasn’t losing any opportunities with the young lieutenant she had there always shut up in her house. But you couldn’t blame her, really, seeing she was a war widow, and if you look at it one way it was a sort of compensation she’d well earned, and didn’t do nobody any harm and gave pleasure to two people. Judith’s shop was crammed full of men, and she’s always been one for stirring them up. But so far as she was concerned there was nothing doing: her Hippolyte would always be the handsomest man that ever was.
“The woman who really interested me most was Adèle, who’d got Captain Tardivaux staying in her house, and he was the most important person in the town when you think of the authority he’d got, and the novelty of him. After the shame of having been given the chuck by Foncimagne in a way that the whole town knew about it, Adèle wasn’t her usual self at all, and a captain arriving at the inn was the very thing to buck her up. A captain—well, that was rather fine, and decidedly better than Foncimagne, who was only just a lawyer’s clerk, not much to boast of. As for the captain, I saw right away what he was up to. He’d started by making for the Beaujolais Stores, like everyone does when they first come to the town. When he found it wasn’t that side of the street he came back again along the other, and then planted himself near the window as though he was a sort of Government department all to himself, but it was really to have a good stare at Adèle, and get busy with the matter in hand—no need to say what that was. He kept his eyes on her all the time, that dirty foreigner did. It shamed all the rest of us, because Adèle belongs to the town. If one of our women goes wrong with a man in the town, there’s nothing amiss in that: it only means another pair of men, one of ’em made happy and the other left in the lurch, and if fellows started being too severe when these things happen, how could they ever get opportunities for themselves in these small towns where everyone knows everybody else? But when you see one of our own women being unfaithful to her husband with a stranger—well, that’s hard to stomach. It makes us Clochemerle people look as if we was a lot of real milksops, just standing by while the hussy has a hell of a good time on her own.
“Anyway, even when we saw what was going on, we didn’t dare to make too much fuss about it on account of Arthur, who isn’t much liked seeing he thinks himself the sharpest man that ever was, looking as though he thought we were all a lot of fools, and taking our money all the same. He’s a kind of feller people don’t care about. And I must tell you that Arthur’d made a bet one day last year when the bar was full of men. ‘I don’t care who else’s wife gets off with somebody,’ was what he said. ‘I’ll see mine doesn’t, and she never will.’ ‘What do you bet?’ Laroudelle asked. ‘What do I bet?’ Arthur answered. ‘Well, the day it’s proved, I’ll put up a barrel with a bung hole in it, slap in the middle of this room, and anyone who wants can have drinks for a whole week without paying!’ Now that’s a sort of bet that only an idiot too damned pleased with himself could have made, isn’t it, now? Everyone knew he’d lost his bet since the Foncimagne business, but no one was willing to take on the job of telling him so. What with the temptation of the free drinks on one side, and the fear of getting Adèle into trouble on the other, the end of it was that everyone preferred holding their tongues.
“As no one was taking advantage of the bet, we amused ourselves by watching to see if Arthur’d be given the go-by for the second time. Six months before, no one would have thought that wretched Tardivaux man would have had a dog’s chance, but Foncimagne being now off the map altered everything. So two or three of us started watching out to see how things were shaping. It wasn’t easy to get a line on it, because Adèle wasn’t going to ring the church bells to give us warning. So we weren’t any of us ready to say whether Arthur was being fooled over again or not.
“One day when I went off alone to get a drink, I noticed a great change. Tardivaux, who usually never took his eyes off Adèle, had stopped looking at her. I said to myself: ‘If you’ve stopped looking at her, that means there’s no need to!’ And Adèle, who hardly looked at him before, was looking at him now. Then I said once more to myself: ‘Oho, my girl, so he’s got you!’ That’s all I said, just in a whisper, but I’d made up my mind about it. Now you’ve noticed this, I expect: men look at women beforehand, and women look at men afterwards. Then, two days later, there was Adèle complaining of a headache, and taking a bicycle to get a bit of fresh air, so she said, exactly like Judith. And the next day she did the same thing. And then you might have seen Tardivaux spending less time in the bar and getting his horse saddled, to have a look at the country around, he said. And I said to myself, ‘Arthur,’ I said, ‘you’re a cuckold all over again!’ And to make more sure of it, I made my round in the direction Adèle’d taken, keeping out of sight as I always do. Being a country policeman, I know all the byroads and the bushy corners in the country around here, where the women and girls like to come for their love affairs, away from prying eyes. When I saw the shining nickel-plate of a bike in a thicket, and further on Tardivaux’s horse tied up all by himself, I knew all right, by that token, that Arthur might very well soon be having to stand drinks all the year around, if his bet was still on. But I can tell you I was surprised when I caught sight of that jaundice-faced Putet woman prowling about there. That seemed a funny thing to me. Likely enough, I said to myself, that old lump of carrion spotted the bike and the horse with no one on him, like I had.
“Well, then!—all these things you know about already, Putet’s nasty imaginings, Toumignon’s scrap with Nicolas before a whole church full of people and Saint Roch knocked down onto the ground and seeming as if he was done for, and Coiffenave ringing the bell as though there was a revolution, and Rose Bivaque losing her blue ribbon of the Holy Virgin because she’d been having too much of a good time with Claudius Brodequin, and the Montéjour people besmearing the war memorial, and Courtebiche getting on her high horse, and Saint-Choul escaping from a volley of tomatoes, and Foncimagne unable to satisfy those two greedy women of his, and Hortense Girodot eloping with her sweetheart, and Tafardel sputtering with rage, and old Mother Fouache belching out a lot of claptrap from morning till night, and Babette Manapoux going even harder at it with her tongue than she did with her clothes beater—all that, as I needn’t tell you, made Clochemerle a funny kind of place, and different from anything the oldest man in the town could recall, not even racking his memory.
“So there was Clochemerle turned topsy-turvy, and the men all talking nothing but politics and shouting so you couldn’t hear yourself speak, and every woman about the way the others were carrying on and who they’d been with, and bawling as loud as the men but more severe and bitter over it, as they always are. And then, on top of all this, there were those hundred soldiers, hot stuff all of ’em, and ready to go off like their own rifles, and thinking of nothing but indulging themselves, you know how. And all our women were in such a state from letting their minds keep dwelling on them that they got a sort of epidemic of being unable to restrain themselves, and our men began to lose weight from having too much of it, like young married couples. And then, to cap it all, there was a boiling hot sun. Clochemerle was becoming like a regular steam boiler, and no means of stopping the pressure. It simply had to bust, one way or another. Yes, I said to myself it’ll have to bust—or else the grape harvest’ll have to come along double-quick. The harvesting was due in a fortnight, and if it came quick that’d settle everything, because of keeping everybody busy from early morning, and the sweating and toiling, and the concern about the wine being good, which is what they always think of most. It’d have sobered them down and put ’em in the way of being serious again, that harvesting would. When the wine’s fermented, the whole of Clochemerle’s like a big happy family, with one thought, and that is, to get high prices for their stuff from the people coming from Lyons and Villefranche and Belleville. But they weren’t given the fortnight. That boiler bust before it was over.
“And now I’m going to tell you about that confounded business—stupid, it was—that happened all of a sudden like those claps of thunder that we get sometimes here in Beaujolais about the middle of June, with a hailstorm immediately following. Sometimes in one hour the whole crop’s done for. It’s a sad time for the whole countryside, those years.
“Well, now I’m coming to the great event. First of all, you must imagine Clochemerle with the troops in occupation, in a state of siege. At the Torbayon Inn, where Tardivaux had put his guardroom, there was the guard, a complete section billeted in the barns where they used to keep hay, in the days when horses were wanted for the public conveyances. There was a sentry posted in front of the inn, and another one exactly opposite, by Monks’ Alley, at the side of the urinal. There were other sentries elsewhere, of course, but it’s only those two who are important in what happened. Besides these, in the courtyard of the inn, and in the main street by the doors of the houses, there were soldiers hanging about everywhere. You see now what it was like?
“Very well, then. It was September 19th, 1923, a month after Saint Roch’s Day, which had started all those commotions I’ve told you about. Yes, it was September 19th, and a day with a sun that made you sweat, one of those days when you can’t stop drinking, with a hint of a storm somewhere or other in the sky though you couldn’t see it, but which might come down on you any moment—the sort that puts you all on edge. Before going on my round, just a short one to keep me occupied, and to give an eye to things because I like to do my job well, and also, I don’t mind telling you, on account of Louise (I give you her name, it won’t hurt her), a woman you could have quite a good time with if you took her the right way, and was good to me on occasions, when I felt like going to see her, and it was always at times like those that I did feel I’d like to—well, before starting off to work, seeing it was the sort of weather that made you thirstier than usual, I went along for a drink at Torbayon’s. When you’re a country policeman you can always get one easy enough: first one man and then another’s wanting to stand you one, seeing they’ve all got an interest in keeping on good terms with you.
“Well, so I went in there. It wasn’t two o’clock yet, that meant not much after midday, with the ordinary time. The heat was blazing, I can tell you! So in I went. There was the same old crowd of slackers that’s always hanging around at Adèle’s, Ploquin, Poipanel, Machavoine, Laroudelle, and the rest of ’em. ‘Hullo, Beausoleil,’ they called out, ‘is your gullet feeling like the road to Montéjour?’ (That’s the road here that goes so steep downhill.) ‘Well, I don’t mind lending a hand to help on with the good work,’ I answered. They had a good laugh at that. ‘Bring a glass, then, Adèle,’ they said, ‘and a couple of jugfuls.’ Then we clinked glasses, and stayed there without saying anything, twisting our hats about on our heads, except that I’d got my cap as I always have, but we were feeling pleased enough to be drinking good stuff and seeing all that sun shining in at the doorway while we were well in the shade, and I felt like staying there.
“After that, I had a look at Adèle. I’d no hopes in that direction, but watching her coming and going, and bending forward in attitudes that made you see her at her best, that gave me pleasant things to think about. She kept turning away accidental-like and going over and standing near Tardivaux’s table, and there she’d talk to him in whispers, with now and then a joke, loud so that everyone could hear, but what mattered most she said softly, and she spoke soft more often than loud, and everyone could see she was doing it the way two people have when they know each other in and out and are settling up their arrangements together. And then she worked it so she could touch Tardivaux now and then, and she looked at the clock, and next she gave the captain a smile which wasn’t the same as the one for the customers. It hurt us to think that all of us there, who’d spent so much at the inn, never got a smile like that from Adèle. And there they were, those two, gazing at each other and saying I don’t know what, as though we hadn’t been there at all, and for Adèle, who wasn’t much of a talker, to go on like that was a most surprising thing altogether.
“Well, there were moments when it was quite plain that they were as intimate as they ever could be, with nothing more to hide from each other. We felt a bit awkward at last, and started talking about this and that so as to pretend we didn’t notice how they were carrying on. But there was Arthur. ‘It’s his pride—and his stupidity—that’s making him blind, . . .’ I was saying to myself. Thinking like that made me turn around and look towards the door of the passage leading into the courtyard. I saw it a little way open, and I could have sworn there was someone stuck there behind it so that he could see into the bar. But I’d no time to think what to do, because just at that moment Tardivaux was getting up to go. He was standing up by Adèle’s side, and she was looking at him quite close, and he, thinking no one had noticed their goings-on, passed his hand gently over Adèle, not at all in the manner of a customer who’s afraid of being blackguarded for it, and Adèle never stepped away from him as she would have from an ordinary customer. Having the peak of my cap down over my eyes, I saw the whole thing without their knowing it. After that, Tardivaux went out, and Adèle stayed in the doorway, watching him go.
“At that very moment the door of the passage opened, and there was Arthur as white as a sheet and looking strange and funnylike, as though he couldn’t hold himself in any longer, and he strode across the bar and went out too, pushing Adèle aside. We were all of us wondering, ‘Where’s he rushing off to, then?’ Before we had time to think where, all of a sudden we heard the noise of high words and a fight going on, and Tardivaux’s voice shouting out: ‘Come here, men!’ ‘Come along, let’s have a look!’ we said. Every man of us was getting up to go, when bang, there was a rifleshot quite close to us, and there was Adèle falling to the ground before our very eyes, saying ‘Ooo—ooo—ooo,’ with only her breast and her stomach moving, and more quick than at ordinary times. It was a shocking thing, it really was. There was Adèle wounded by a shot that some damned addlepated idiot of a soldier had let off without knowing how or why, in the scurry. But I’ll explain. . . .
“While the others were attending to Adèle, I dashed outside, where my duty lay. And, my god, it was a pretty sight, I can tell you! There was civilians and soldiers all higgledy-piggledy in the middle of the street, and all of ’em seeing red, and hammering away hard at each other, and bawling and yelling, and all the time other people were arriving from every direction with thick sticks and iron bars and bayonets. And stones began flying, and everything else our people could get hold of. Good lord, it was a sight! Then I sprang into the middle of it all and yelled out at the top of my voice: ‘In the name of the law!’ Damned little they cared about the law—and nor did I, really, and I let out right and left with the best of ’em. At moments like that you might be somebody else—you don’t recognize yourself. A real riot, it was, and everyone lost his head completely, that’s certain. People ask how a riot starts—well, it’s like that, without a word of warning, and no one knows what it’s all about, though they’re right in the thick of it themselves.
“And then what did those fools of soldiers do but let off some more shots! Still, it did stop the scuffling because it raised a panic. Things were getting too serious altogether. And folks hadn’t any breath left—that was another reason—they’d used up too much strength and hadn’t kept any in reserve.
“How long this fight lasted, I’ve no idea, and no one in Clochemerle could tell you. Four or five minutes, possibly. But quite enough to do some damage, the mad state we were all in. Damage—yes, you’d hardly believe it. Adèle wounded in the chest. Arthur, with a bayonet thrust in the shoulder. Then Tardivaux with his face smashed to a jelly by Arthur’s fist. And Tafardel with a blow from the butt end of a rifle on his head which made it swell up like a pumpkin. And Maniguant’s boy with a broken arm, and a soldier who’d got a nasty wound from a pickax, and two others who’d been hit in the stomach. And several others, Clochemerle people and soldiers, rubbing themselves and limping. And lastly, worst of all—a terrible thing—there was someone killed, fallen stone-dead from a stray bullet, a good sixty yards and more away; it was Tatave Saumat, who’s known as Tatave the Bleater, the Clochemerle idiot, a poor irresponsible chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly. It’s always the innocent ones that get it!
“A shameful business altogether, by god it was! Everyone feeling bewildered, in a state of helpless amazement, and wondering how all these idiotic, disgraceful things had happened so quickly when no one had been wanting anything of the kind. Well, things do happen in a stupid way. And those I’m telling you of—well, they’d happened and they couldn’t be righted now, not with all the groaning and wailing of those who’d come along to see and were quite overcome with grief and pity, saying that they simply couldn’t ever have believed such things could take place in a town where the people are good sorts, take them on the whole—and it’s true, too, and being their policeman I ought to know. No, there’s nothing wrong with our people, indeed there isn’t! But it was too late, too late. You couldn’t get away from what you saw with your own eyes, and the pity of it all, looking at those poor sufferers, and specially Tatave, who was already white in the face, seeming as though he was surprised at being really dead, like the poor idiot he’d been during his lifetime, and not understanding any better now than he did then. As shy and cringing at finding himself in Heaven as he’d been here on earth, I expect!
“It’s easy enough to picture what happened after that. There was the bar at the Torbayon Inn looking like a hospital, and full of people come to see the wounded, and Mouraille and Basèphe going from one to the other with drugs and dressings, sweating all the time. And Arthur was inside there too, groaning and howling because he was wounded and a cuckold into the bargain, and because his wife had got damaged—and been had first, if you’ll excuse me. And Tardivaux making no less of a hullabaloo, and furious at the insult to his dignity as an officer, seeing that he’d had a good poke in the face from Torbayon’s fist, which had split his lip and smashed a couple of teeth, and that doesn’t look well on a captain, it certainly doesn’t. But the most pitiful sight was Adèle, lying there stretched out on the billiard table and making you sad to hear the little gentle whimpering sounds coming out of her mouth, and all our good women crowding around her, saying ‘Could you ever have believed it?’ and looking more doleful than if they were at confession. Somewhere in the front row you could have seen Judith, who’d come straight over from opposite when she heard what had happened, which just shows that Judith was kind enough so long as she didn’t have her men stolen from her. She’d opened Adèle’s bodice and chemise, taking the greatest care over it, and she was so upset at seeing the other woman bleeding that she kept saying over and over again: ‘I forgive Adèle everything, everything!’ That just shows how people feel more kindly disposed towards their fellow creatures directly they’re in trouble. Bending over her poor wounded neighbor, who might perhaps be going to die, made her feel like crying all the time, and sort of helpless and jumbled up in that sorrowing crowd she’d lost all physical feeling and hardly knew where she was. One man who was making a frightful fuss and noise in his own particular way was Tafardel, with a huge bump on his head and his left eye turned all purple. But it was giving him a wonderful flow of ideas, that blow he’d got on his head. He couldn’t stop writing and used up the whole of his notebook at one go, and all the time he was arguing against the curés and the aristocrats, who’d wanted to have him done in so as to hush up the truth, so he said. That made a touch of the comic in all this sad business. He’s a man with plenty of learning, Tafardel, there’s no denying it, but still, I’ve always thought him a little cracked, and that butt end of a rifle over his head wasn’t exactly the thing to put his brains in order.
“Well, you can picture to yourself the sort of scenes there were, right in the middle of the town. Folks were all horrified now and wanted to be all friendly again—now that it was too late. It’s when the mischief’s done that people get to thinking it’d be better to be on good terms with the other side. You can imagine old Mother Fouache, Babette Manapoux, Caroline Laliche, Clémentine Chavaigne, the curé’s Honorine, Tine Fadet, Toinette Nunant, Adrienne Brodequin, old Mother Bivaque, and the rest—the washhouse women mainly, and those living in the lower town, talking nineteen to the dozen and making worse noise than if they were singing psalms or bargaining on market day, and it was nothing but ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ and ‘I told you so!’ and ‘It was bound to happen with the shocking things—shameful things that were going on all around, Madame!’ But I must tell you that most of the women who went on like that were a lot of vulgar, gossiping creatures who rarely got a look in themselves, and then only by downright asking for it, seeing the men would hardly look at them except at times when there was a famine, as you might say. Those women who never got any satisfaction themselves were the last people to go offering opinions about other greedy ones who always found all they wanted and took more than their share. But all that’s nothing but fuss and tattle about women, and if you want to understand it you’ve got to know what sort of lives the others who dish it out are leading themselves. Anyway, they pitched it hot and strong, right in the middle of the street. And they said it all just like they do their knitting—no more effort than that—and with no more sense in their words than there’d be in one of their stitches. They were just like a lot of hens after they’ve laid an egg.
“After that Ponosse comes along, very worried at seeing the people distressed and suffering. ‘My good friends,’ was all he could say, ‘you should come to Mass a little more often. God would be better pleased with Clochemerle.’ And then there was Piéchut asking: ‘How did it all happen, tell us about it?’ shrewd and artful as he always is. And Cudoine, silly as ever, making violent protests when it was too late to be of any use. And Lamolire, Maniguant, Poipanel, Machavoine, Bivaque, Brodequin, Toumignon, Foncimagne, Blazot—everybody in fact, ending up with that dirty dog, Girodot, off they started arguing about the best way of settling the business, though there was precious little they could do, first of all for Tatave, who was gone for good, or for Adèle, or Arthur, or the rest of ’em, who could only get over their hurts by treatment and staying in bed. The end of it was that, acting on Mouraille’s advice who’d told them it was the best thing to do, because of complications or maybe some operations, they decided to send all the wounded to Villefranche, telephoning first to the hospital to warn them, and to take them all by car so as to get them there quickly without too much jolting. And Mouraille himself took Adèle in his own car because her case was worse than the others and he had to keep an eye on her in case she lost blood, so he said. And at about four o’clock in the afternoon all the wounded had left, except Tafardel, whose bump was getting black, but who was still writing and writing in his notebook, so as to send articles breathing vengeance to the newspapers. It was like putting a match to gunpowder and nearly blew up the Government, I can tell you, seeing that he’d declared that Tatave had been killed, Adèle wounded, and the Clochemerle schoolmaster bashed on the head, by orders from priests, and this made a stir all over France, and got as far as Parliament, and the Members got scared and were afraid there’d be an upheaval. That only shows you how a bit of learning, even when it’s only a darned fool that’s got it, can have a big effect.
“Once all the wounded had left, the people of this town keep wondering how these things could have happened—things you could only account for by the stupidity of us human beings, which is the worst ailment we have when you come to think it out. To kill Tatave and wound ten people because Arthur was a cuckold—well, you can’t connect up an affair like that with ordinary intelligence, not even when a man’s honor comes into it. There’s no sense in placing honor as high as all that. If every time a man’s wife went wrong it ended up with a lot of bloodshed, there’d be nothing left but to put up the shutters and close down altogether. And that’d make life hardly bearable. The pleasure you get with women is probably the greatest you have on this earth, and God could easily have arranged so that the biggest pleasure of all shouldn’t be got that way, couldn’t He? That’s how I look at it.
“Before I stop, I ought to tell you how the whole of the affair of September 19th was set going. It was through an anonymous letter he got that morning that Arthur came to know that Adèle was being unfaithful with Tardivaux. It’s enough to be told only one detail in affairs of this kind, and you’re very quickly reminded of others. That was just what happened in Arthur’s case, when he started thinking over Adèle’s strange way of going on ever since the troops had arrived. His jealousy made him see the whole thing clear in a flash, without those two knowing it, so they went on not caring about anybody, while Arthur, to make more sure, watched them in silence from behind the door of the passage at the back. After the way he saw Adèle making up to Tardivaux and talking to him in whispers, he had no further doubts. It was then that he sprang at Tardivaux in the street and began hitting him in the face. And it was then that the sentry opposite, in the terrific excitement, fired the shot that wounded Adèle. And the other sentry, not being able to tackle Arthur, who was as strong as a horse, gave him a thrust with his bayonet. And all our people standing around, furious at seeing Adèle wounded, and Arthur too, besides his being made a cuckold by a swine of a stranger, felt like murdering the soldiers and began to knock them about. And that’s how the fight started. The whole story came out afterwards.
“They also found out where the anonymous letter came from, because the person who’d sent it had left here the day before and gone to Villefranche, and the name of the town was on the postmark. And d’you know, it was Putet, that I’d seen spying in Moss Wood. It was she who’d caused the whole disaster, just as she’d worked up all the stories about the urinal. She couldn’t be happy unless she was doing some harm, that woman couldn’t. That only shows that when religion gets into the hands of dirty trollops, they get dirtier. She was a lump of nasty carrion, that Putet woman, a damned blight on the whole town.”