“’The works of the flesh thou shalt not desire
   Except in marriage only.’

“Did you ever desire, or live with, any other woman than your wife?”

Sabot exclaimed with sincerity: 

“As to that, no; oh, as to that, no, m’sieu le Cure.  My poor wife, deceive her!  No, no!  Not so much as the tip of a finger, either in thought or in act.  That is the truth.”

They were silent a few seconds, then, in a lower tone, as though a doubt had arisen in his mind, he resumed: 

“When I go to town, to say that I never go into a house, you know, one of the licensed houses, just to laugh and talk and see something different, I could not say that.  But I always pay, monsieur le cure, I always pay.  From the moment you pay, without anyone seeing or knowing you, no one can get you into trouble.”

The cure did not insist, and gave him absolution.

Theodule Sabot did the work on the chancel, and goes to communion every month.

THE WRONG HOUSE

Quartermaster Varajou had obtained a week’s leave to go and visit his sister, Madame Padoie.  Varajou, who was in garrison at Rennes and was leading a pretty gay life, finding himself high and dry, wrote to his sister saying that he would devote a week to her.  It was not that he cared particularly for Mme. Padoie, a little moralist, a devotee, and always cross; but he needed money, needed it very badly, and he remembered that, of all his relations, the Padoies were the only ones whom he had never approached on the subject.

Pere Varajou, formerly a horticulturist at Angers, but now retired from business, had closed his purse strings to his scapegrace son and had hardly seen him for two years.  His daughter had married Padoie, a former treasury clerk, who had just been appointed tax collector at Vannes.

Varajou, on leaving the train, had some one direct him to the house of his brother-in-law, whom he found in his office arguing with the Breton peasants of the neighborhood.  Padoie rose from his seat, held out his hand across the table littered with papers, murmured, “Take a chair.  I will be at liberty in a moment,” sat down again and resumed his discussion.

The peasants did not understand his explanations, the collector did not understand their line of argument.  He spoke French, they spoke Breton, and the clerk who acted as interpreter appeared not to understand either.

It lasted a long time, a very long time.  Varajou looked at his brother-in-law and thought:  “What a fool!” Padoie must have been almost fifty.  He was tall, thin, bony, slow, hairy, with heavy arched eyebrows.  He wore a velvet skull cap with a gold cord vandyke design round it.  His look was gentle, like his actions.  His speech, his gestures, his thoughts, all were soft.  Varajou said to himself, “What a fool!”

He, himself, was one of those noisy roysterers for whom the greatest pleasures in life are the cafe and abandoned women.  He understood nothing outside of these conditions of existence.