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Updated: June 9, 2025
"Yes, indeed!" exclaimed both the priests with one accord. "Meanwhile, till these fine things are accomplished, I will be content to dig in my little kitchen garden with an eye to the savoury stews in which you shall share," said Madame Bavoil. "There I am in my element; I do not lose my footing as I do in your imitation churches."
"I did not know of that property in the lily," said Durtal, laughing, "but I knew that Albertus Magnus assigned the same peculiarity to the mallow; only the patient need not swallow the plant; she has only to stoop over it." "What nonsense!" exclaimed the old priest. His housekeeper, quite scared, stood looking at the ground. "Do not listen to him, Madame Bavoil," cried Durtal.
He looked about him, surprised at seeing nobody, hearing nothing; but Madame Bavoil beckoned to him, made her way round the house, and led the way into a sort of vestibule along which clambered a vine wrapped in swathing, and she turned into a little chapel, where she knelt down on the flagstones. Durtal, amazed, seemed to breathe the melancholy that weighed on this naked sanctuary.
His reception was always the same; Madame Bavoil greeted him with the invariable formula: "Here is our friend," while the priest's eyes smiled as he grasped his hand. Whenever he saw Madame Bavoil she was praying: over her stove, when she sat mending, while she was dusting the furniture, as she opened the door, she was always telling her rosary, without pause.
At first Durtal thought Madame Bavoil slightly crazy, and while she poured out a passage by Jeanne de Matel on Saint Joseph, he looked at the priest who gave no sign. "Then Madame Bavoil is a saint?" he asked one morning when they were alone. "My dear Madame Bavoil is a pillar of prayer," replied the Abbé gravely. And one afternoon, when Gévresin was away in his turn, Durtal questioned the woman.
Little scope as the plan of the book offers for any variety or display of character, being mainly occupied with erudite monologue, put sometimes into the mouth of Durtal, sometimes into that of the Abbé Plomb, yet the personalities of these two, as well as those of Géversin, Madame Bavoil, and Madame Mesurat, stand out very vividly, and make us wish for that fuller acquaintance with them which a little more movement and incident would have afforded.
"Oh, our friend, must that gentle Jesus, as the Venerable Jeanne says, be for ever the poor man pining for admittance at the door of our heart? Come, just a little goodwill open yours to Him," cried Madame Bavoil. And Durtal, finally driven into his last intrenchments, by a nod signified acquiescence in the wish of all his friends.
"Ah, your soul wants locks and latches," said Madame Bavoil, laughing. "It is a public mart where every distraction meets to chatter. I am constantly driven out, and when I want to go home again they are in possession." "Oh, I quite understand that. You know the proverb, 'Who goes hunting loses his seat by the hearth." "That is all very well to say, but "
Another interpretation to the credit of the palm!" "But after all, you are absurd, our friend!" cried Madame Bavoil. "All this will not hold together. Your plants are the growth of different climates, and in any case they could not all be in bloom at the same time; consequently, by the time you have planted this, that will be dead. You can never grow them side by side."
This tale is as absurd as another, also dear to the old wives of the city, and which tells that if you spit on a certain square of stone, set with black cement into the pavement behind the choir, blood will exude. "Hah, it is you, Madame Bavoil." "Yes, our friend, I myself. I have just been on an errand for the Father, and am going home again to make the soup.
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