Quartermaster Varajou had obtained a week's leave to go and visit his sister, Madame Padoie. Varajou, who was in garrison¹ 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, formerly² a horticulturist at Angers, but now retired³ from business, had closed his purse strings⁴ to his scapegrace son and had hardly seen him for two years. His daughter had married Padoie, a former treasury⁵ 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 spoke⁶ 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 eyebrows⁷. He wore a velvet⁸ skull

分享到：