When the decree to use the translation into the native tongue had been issued, Père Patou had dutifully attempted to memorize the authorized French translation of the liturgy. It had sounded strange, downright unholy, to his ear. Yet he had persisted. Until he would have felt secure saying the Mass in the vernacular, however, he considered himself justified in delaying such a radical innovation in his parish. Therefore he continued to use the Latin he’d known from the time of his catechesis as a boy. Never had he succeeded in reaching the point of confidence in proceeding in French. And even if he had, he told himself, his flock would have been unable to give any responses in any language but the Latin they too had memorized as children. Without much understanding of what they were repeating, still they were spiritually fortfied by uttering it.
Père Patou had thought of asking M. du Praz, the schoolmaster, to help him teach the villagers and farm families in the parish the liturgy in their own tongue. But considering that he himself had been unable to gain the assurance needed to lead his parishioners in the vernacular, he concluded it would be preferable to the ear of God that the Mass be said in Latin, with the participation of the people and the security of the priest. If the bishop had been informed of his curé’s failure to comply with the papal edict, he’d taken no measures to enforce it. Père Patou, even though in his heart he believed he was justified in violating these new ordinances of Mother Church, regularly confessed his pastoral dereliction to Père Girard in the neighboring village of Champagne.
When he would be staying close to home, as ordinarily he did after breakfast, Père Patou would pour himself a second cup of coffee from the pot that Esther would leave on the fender of the stove. This morning he particularly wanted that second cup. But having no idea how long the meeting would go on, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to make it through without feeling the need to relieve himself. Not wishing to contend with the discomfort of trying to hold out nor with the embarrassment of having to excuse himself, perhaps at a critical juncture, after refolding the letter and tucking it back in his cassock, he carried his dish, utensils and mug to the kitchen sink. He was disappointed in his hope that Esther would have gone out to her jardin potager to fetch herbs, so that he might scrape the uneaten omelet into the garbage pail and bury it under the slops. After staring first at the incriminating evidence, then at him, Esther didn’t make a sound. Was it, he wondered, that, able to read the state of his mind, the woman realized he was deeply troubled and so decided to spare him from her tongue?
He was to be at the meeting, M. Burnier, the council clerk, had informed him, at nine fifteen. As Père Patuou was about to wriggle his old railroad watch out of the pocket of his cassock, the bells rang three quarters past the hour of eight. So unaware consciously was he of the punctuation of time every quarter hour that he hadn’t noticed the striking of fifteen and thirty past while he was having breakfast. In order to relieve himself before setting off for the Hotel de ville, he went into the toilet. Though he waited and strained, nothing would come.
“Ah, yes, that’s old age,” Père Patou mumbled. “Not being able when you want to. And then it will be having to when I don’t want to.”
Immediately reprimanding himself for muttering what God’s ear might hear as a murmur against His way for His children and His will for one of His servants, he prevented himself from wording a thought he couldn’t keep from darting into his head—likewise, never again to hear the beautiful songs of the shy warblers and larks in the woodlands belonging to M. Constans, while having to hear the squawking of the crows that haunted the graveyard beside the church, like the restless souls of sinners. But then, he went on with himself, doesn’t God, Who made the crows, also love them?
Giving up at the toilet, Père Patou saw through the casement window that Esther was now in her garden, bent over, snipping. Tiptoe he hurried back into the kitchen and ran a finger of water into a tumbler. Then he scurried into the pantry and poured three fingers of Pernod in with the water. After shaking the tumbler, he drained it in two gulps and smacked his lips over the taste of anise and licorice. He felt a warmth in his belly, even though the water, drawn from what he liked to think of as one of the deep wells of salvation the prophet Isaiah told of, was cool. Before leaving the rectory, he stole into the kitchen again, rinsed the tumbler, dried it and replaced it on its shelf in the cupboard.
After scattering the bread crumbs, which he’d saved from his breakfast, in the presbytery garden, Père Patou headed up the high street of the village. Seven years ago the surface had been macadamized. The smell of fresh cut hay told him that M. Grenier, who still wore sabots in the fields, had been mowing the meadow nearest to the churchyard since shortly after the angelus had rung. When the noon angelus would chime, M. Grenier would be washing down his baguette and cheese with M. Giardi’s wine, as he sat leaning his back against the wheel of his cart. And when the angelus would ring at six in the evening, M. Grenier would head home.
Directly across the street from the rectory stood a higgledy-piggledy cluster of buildings. In the farmhouse on the corner, where the street became a dirt road and turned sharply south, M. Grenier lived with his wife and a dull-witted daughter. His two sons had left the region some years ago, breaking their mother’s heart, successful though they’d become in business together in Aix-en-Provence. Like the church, the rectory, the old relais, and the other couple of dozen houses that made up the village, M. Grenier’s home was constructed of local stone, covered with white-washed stucco. Beyond its red tile roof, on this sparkling clear morning, Père Patou could see the gray-blue mass of Mont Blanc, some sixty kilometers to the east.
Adjoining M. Grenier’s farmhouse were a bakehouse, barn, and cart shed, with a louvered dovecot on top, all of whose surfaces were undressed quarry stone. In the loft of the barn, which M. Grenier had converted to a pied-à-terre, Esther lived, with half a dozen cats. Carved into the lintel above the oak door that opened onto a flight of rickety steps was that date 1590. This was the extent of Père Patou’s acquaintance with the lodging he’d found for Esther when she’d suddenly appeared in the village during the early days of the war.
Lichen and moss grew along the foundation stones of the bakehouse. Against the wall of the barn leaned a manure spreader. Through the doors of the cart shed, which stood open to the street outside and to the courtyard inside, Père Patou caught a glimpse of Mme. Grenier, a stumpy woman in her late sixties, sawing wood on a sawhorse. Hanging on the back of one door was a harness, on the other a yoke and a seine. At the end of M. Grenier’s property, running along the back wall of the cart shed, grew tangles of bramble, nettle and blackberry.
Lying in the shade of the gnarled plane tree at the corner of the shed was M. Grenier’s big mongrel. Her shaggy brown-white coat and long nose suggested she was predominately shepherd. The contentment the dog’s posture bespoke served as a passing reproach to the priest for the grumbling and anxiety he’d allowed to take possession of him this morning. “Considerate lilia agri quomodo crescunt; non laborant, neque nent,” he recited aloud to himself. And, ah yes, he reminded himself, before uttering these words Christ had asked, “Et de vestimento quid solliciti estis?—a question Père Patou would like to put to Esther but didn’t dare. Recognizing the curè as an old friend, the shepherd gave the earth a slap with her thick tail.
Père Patou was approaching the first of the tall green lampposts situated between the cruelly pollarded lime trees standing in a rank in front of the Hotel Le Tourneau. With their squares of panes, these streetlights—the only ones in the village—were designed in imitation of the nineteenth-century gas lamps Père Patou remembered from his childhood in Chambéry. Here came Mme. Renard’s fluffy poodle, lifting his feet like a trotting show pony, as he pranced down the middle of the street from the far end of the village. He passed Père Patou, who stopped and turned to watch him, without paying him the least heed. A couple of meters from M. Grenier’s shepherd, who
m for years he’d been treating as an enemy, he pulled up short, eyed her, then let go a volley of yips directly at her, sharply piercing the silence enfolding the village. Stretched on the ground, the shepherd still was taller than the poodle. And she weighed many times as much.
So intensely was the small dog yelping that Père Patou could catch glimpses of his needlelike teeth. The big dog never stirred, except to turn her muzzle away from the yapper in what Père Patou construed as a gesture of disdain. As abruptly as he’d interrupted his prance through the village to reprobate the shepherd, the poodle reversed direction and paraded off the way he’d come. The laugh that escaped Père Patou left him feeling less discontented and fretful. Whatever would happen God was permitting.
Before walking on, he glanced up at the bell tower of the church. The weathervane goat on top was pointing his tail toward Dijon, his horns toward Mont Blanc. Since time was measured in the village by the striking of bells, what did it matter that there was no clock dial, as there was in the steeples of churches in Crusseilles and Frangy? How dear the village bells were to the priest—just as were the surrounding mountains, Jura to the north and the great Mont Blanc to the east—not merely delighting his senses but also nurturing his spirit. In the same way that the mountains took his eye close to the feet of Heaven, the bells let him hear God’s voice speaking to his legions of angels. And while the ringing of time reminded him of the temporality of his body, it also assured him of the immortality of his soul.
In harmony with his willed acceptance of the inevitable was Père Patou’s gratitude that, although at eighty-three of course he wasn’t the big powerful fellow he’d been when at twenty-seven he’d come to the village, God had kept him essentially sound. True, like his hearing, his eyesight had diminished a bit, though not so much as to inhibit his reading the Scriptures. And he still had a keen enough nose to relish the odor of manure as well as the sweetness of new-mown hay and the heady perfume of honeysuckle. Half a dozen of his teeth were gone, but declining to have the dentist in Cruseilles replace them with false ones on a plate, he was perfectly able to bite off bread and munch his food. His tongue savored coffee and Pernod and M. Giardi’s good wine as much as ever, maybe more. Although his hair, which had frosted when he was in his mid-fifties and turned luminous silver before he was sixty, had thinned, still it covered most of his high-domed head.
As for bone aches—arthritis the doctor in Dijon had told him—they were tolerable. He did, though, catch himself wincing when he kneeled, then rose, when he shifted positions after sitting or lying for a spell, when he roused himself to use the commode, as he had to two or three times a night, and when he pushed himself up and out of bed for good at five fifteen each morning. But once he was up and going, the aching diminished. He still rode his bicycle to visit the shut-ins and sick in the outlying farms of his long narrow parish.
Yes, most of all, the bells proved that God had preserved the strength and vigor His servant, Père Patou, needed to carry on as priest and shepherd. To keep the bells ringing was one of the functions of Jacques Tricquet, the fifty-some year-old sexton, a thick-set muscular man with a bull neck, a slightly hunched back, and a left leg that was shorter than the right. Even wearing a specially made shoe, whose platform sole was an inch or so high, he listed and bobbed, like a sailboat in choppy water on a windy day, as he made his way, cigarette rolled in brown paper pasted on his turned-down lower lip.
Without fail, at six in the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening Jacques Tricquet would limp to the rear of the nave and ring the angelus by pulling the rope attached to the campane. Sunday mornings he would ring the call to church. Every other day it was his function to hoist the great deadweights up to their pulleys in the belfry by tugging hand over hand on the ropes that hung from the tower. The slow descent of these iron pigs, controlled by a mechanism of wheels, barrels and trip pins, caused the bells to be struck by a hammer the proper number of times every quarter of an hour. The working of the ancient contraption was a wonderment to Père Patou.
Every once in a while the dupla, the machinery that kept clock time, would become impish. Either the hammer would refuse to strike or it would perform such devilments as ring every nine minutes or sound seven times at three in the morning. Then the sacristan would have to clamber up to where the rooks roosted in with the bells and set things to rights.
Although Jacques Triquet was generally healthy enough to slam the door in the doctor’s face, there were those occasions when he was too ill for hard work. Then the priest would have to assume the office of sexton. Just last winter Jacques Tricquet had been down with painful lumbago. For the month of February Père Patou had done God’s work by hoisting the iron weights. While pulling, he often thought of how many hands had grasped and yanked on the frayed hemp, wondered how old the rope was, wondered how many ropes had served before it.
At first the muscles in his arms and shoulders, and most severely in his calves, though scarcely in his back, God be thanked, had ached to the point of pain. But after two weeks of pulling he felt almost no discomfort. Even when at first he had hurt, that had been easier to put up with than the scoldings Esther had flung at him, with warnings of apoplexy and prophecies of invalidism and death, while clicking her tongue and shaking her head.
Père Patou was making his way along the two-story addition M. Le Tourneau had had built onto the old relais two years ago. Originally a large farmhouse had been converted into the relais. When the railway replaced the stage coaches that had fed the posting houses, tracks had never brought a train into the village. After the road that passed through as the high street had finally been macadamized, it had brought the automobiles.
Père Patou looked for signs of life in the hotel. Above the green window boxes, planted with geraniums and variegated petunias, the wooden shutters over most of the windows were closed. This suggested that the Hotel Le Tourneau had at least a dozen guests who were sleeping, despite the striking of the clock bells through the night and the ringing of the angelus at six a. m. And, Père Patou surmized, guests must also be in some rooms whose shutters were open and others in the eight or ten rooms in the old relais. He’d make this observation to the village council, citing it as evidence that contradicted M. Le Tourneau’s contention that the ringing of the bells was keeping his guests from sleep and thus hurting his trade.
To find so many of the red shutters—the shutters on all the dwellings in the village, including the rectory, were painted green—closed when half the morning was gone, confirmed Père Patou’s conviction that the clientele attracted to the Hotel Le Tourneau lived by a different sense of time from that which governed the life of the village. How different were the businessmen, in suits and ties, and the women, in fashionable dresses, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, from the farmers, in freshly laundered work clothes and the shopkeepers in brown corduroy, who made up the former clientele! Those men never had women with them. The women who now frequented the hotel would stroll through the village in broad daylight wearing shorts and culottes, as if on holiday in a German spa or an Italian resort. When Père Patou would drop into the bistro of the old relais to sip a glass of wine in late afternoon before the addition had been constructed, the patrons would be smoking clay pipes while chatting about rain, the size of crops, the prices of grain and fruit and wine, of supplies and commodities.
Although he never ventured near that place since it had become the Hotel Le Tourneau, word of its transformation had reached Père Patou’s ear. The bistro now was a cocktail lounge where women, smoking not only cigarettes but also cigars, and men stayed up half the night drinking whiskey and gin. Was there any wonder the shutters on the windows of the rooms they finally went to bed in were still closed at nine o’clock in the morning?
In what had been an English garden, a swimming pool and a tennis court now stood. The clientele attracted to the modern Hotel Le Tourneau arrived from the airport at Genève in rented Cit
roëns, Mercedes Benzes and BMW’s. No doubt at that very moment a dozen or so were standing on the tarmac parking lot, which was not visible from the road. To make place for parking, the henhouse behind the old relais had been torn down. Just as the addition was constructed of a brick façade over cinder block, rather than stucco over stone, so a parking lot had replaced a farm building and macadam had displaced soil and grass.
The clientele of the Hotel Le Tourneau consisted of many foreigners, almost as many Swiss, Germans, English, and even Americans, as French. M. Le Tourneau had informed Père Patou that these were important international businessmen, who chose his establishment because it lay conveniently close to a major international airport, less than an hour’s driving time away, yet far enough from the busy city of Genève to be restful. Thanks to the mountains and prevailing winds, the peace and quiet of the village were rarely disturbed by the roar of low-flying planes. According to the hotelier, all that was preventing his hotel from becoming a world renowned establishment was the striking of church bells during the hours of sleep.
M. Le Tourneau asserted that his clientele came to hold meetings and transact business while also being able to make use of the recreational facilities his hotel offered. For his part, Père Patou had no doubt there was a darker reason for the desirability of the Hotel Le Tourneau, one which its proprietor was perfectly aware of but would never acknowledge. At once accessible and remote, it was situated to serve as a rendezvous for those engaged in affaires de coeur clandestine. Many of those who stayed at the Hotel Le Tourneau did not go to sleep with M. Constans’ lambs and get up with M. Gernier’s cocks. To think of what the shutters on those bedrooms, still closed when the sun was halfway up the sky above Mont Blanc, were concealing made Père Patou cross himself as he walked by.