The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) by Émile Zola

open as if on velvet hinges. The priest stood aside and ushered Mouret in without a word.
    The cotton curtains hanging at the two windows were so thick that the room was a pale chalky colour, like the half-light in a walled cell. This room was huge, with a high ceiling and clean, if faded, wallpaper of a washed-out yellow hue. Mouret ventured in, and, stepping gingerly over the tiles, as polished as ice, he seemed to feel the cold beneath the soles of his shoes. He risked a covert look at the iron curtainless bedstead, whose sheets were so tightly tucked in that you would have supposed it to be a white stone bench placed in a corner. A chest of drawers, which looked lost at the other side of the room, and a small table placed in the middle, with two chairs, one in front of each window, completed the furnishings. Not a piece of paper on the table, not an object on the chest of drawers, not a piece of clothing on the walls: bare wood, bare marble, bare walls. Above the chest, a large black wooden Christ cut through this grey bareness with his dark cross.
    ‘Come in, Monsieur,’ the priest said. ‘Come over here. It’s in this corner that a mark on the ceiling has appeared.’
    But Mouret was in no hurry; he was enjoying himself. Although he didn’t see the strange objects that he had vaguely anticipated, the room held a particular smell for this man of reason. To him it smelled of the priesthood, of a man who was not as other men are, a man who blows out the candle before he changes his shirt, a man who doesn’t leave his underclothes or his razor lying around. What he found irritating was that he couldn’t see anything left on the furniture or in the corners which might possibly give him some hypothesis to work on. The room resembled the fellow himself—silent, cold, polished, and impenetrable. To his great surprise hedid not, as he had expected, get the impression of poverty. On the contrary, it made him feel as he had felt once before, one day when he had gone into the very richly furnished drawing-room of a prefect in Marseilles. The large Christ seemed to occupy it entirely with its black arms.
    But he had to attend to Abbé Faujas, who was summoning him to the recess.
    ‘Can you see the stain?’ the abbé asked. ‘It’s not quite as clear as it was yesterday.’
    Mouret stood on tiptoe and screwed up his eyes but could not see anything. When the priest drew back the curtains, he could just about make out a slight rusty discolouration.
    ‘Nothing very serious,’ he murmured.
    ‘Of course. But I thought I should let you know… It must have come in through the roof.’
    ‘Yes, that’s right. Through the roof.’
    Mouret made no further remark. He was looking at the room illuminated in the harsh light of day. It looked less solemn, but it still revealed nothing. In fact, not one speck of dust betrayed anything of the abbé’s life.
    ‘In any case,’ the latter continued, ‘we might perhaps have a look out of the window… Wait a moment.’
    And he opened the window. But Mouret cried that he would not hear of disturbing him any more, that it was a trivial matter and that the workmen would soon be able to find the hole.
    ‘You are not disturbing me in the least, I assure you,’ insisted the abbé kindly. ‘I know owners like to see for themselves… Look at it all carefully, I do beg you… It is your house.’
    As he uttered this last sentence, he actually smiled, which was a rare occurrence; then when he and Mouret had leaned over the rail and looked up at the guttering, he started to hold forth like an architect about how the stain could have got there.
    ‘I think there is a slight sinking of the tiles, you know, perhaps there is even a broken one among them; unless it is that crack you can see along the cornice up there, which goes right through into the retaining wall.’
    ‘Quite possibly,’ Mouret answered. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Monsieur, that I don’t know anything about that. The