The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
to bingo there was a special attraction: the “Theatre of the Air” company was putting on a performance of La Buveuse de Larmes, and those who felt sentimentally inclined and were anxious to glut their appetite for passionate melodrama had turned out in considerable numbers to witness a piece which less emotional temperaments might find a little ridiculous. Denis had said that he was not interested in girls, but he had taken up a position at the edge of the sidewalk so that they could see him to full advantage — his greatest advantage being that they did not matter to him. Occasionally one of them would give him a wink, whereupon he would turn to his friends and say: “Did you see that?”
Then they all went upstairs for the parish hall was on the second floor, above the church. The edifice as a whole had the appearance of a warehouse to which a belfry had been added. The parish was a poor one, and they had not as yet been able to complete the building of this temple, which had nothing substantial about it except its foundations. At the door a group of urchins were waiting for a chance to slip in without paying. A little later, after the performance had started, they would be raining kicks upon the thin doors, which must have been made of special wood, since they had been withstanding this assault for some ten years now and still were capable of a vigorous resonance. These shameful carryings-on had given the Saint-Joseph parishioners a reputation for being badly brought up. The Soyeux, horrified by it all, blamed the Mulots. Finally, as a last resort, they had stationed a gendarme at the door; but he was a symbolic gendarme and an art lover. Passionately fond of the drama, he always sympathized with the villains and became so interested that he forgot his duties. At that point, Pritontin would come trotting out, and in winter time the small lads would throw snowballs at him.
Denis and the others now entered the hall. The ceilings were dirty and cobwebs hung from the corners of the room.
“Be quiet, you!” Pritontin warned them. He knew them well, for ever since they were children they had been misbehaving in the parish hall.
They gave him a haughty stare. “An usher!” The vendor of chandeliers opened his eyes at this. “Here are our tickets; look at them!”
“What’s back of all this?” muttered Pritontin, suspiciously. “Gonzague!” he called, “find them some seats.”
One of the Gonzagues came up, with a gesture of repugnance. There were a dozen of his kind there. They were known as “Gonzagues,” or “the curé’s pets,” and it was looked upon as a natural thing that they should have for their pastor a pious attachment that amounted to a kind of adoration. For the most part they were solemn-faced, serious-minded young men who no longer attended the seminary. People never said of them “They’ve finished the seminary,” but “They don’t go to the seminary anymore.” Denis insisted that they were too flabby to withstand the system of education. And Monsieur le Curé, who paid certain bills-rendered to cover their scholastic expenses, had made it plain to them that they were wasting his money, since they did not have it in them to become priests like Monsieur Bongrain nor colonizers like the famous curé Monsieur Labelle. This passion for the seminary, however, was soon extinguished in the young Soyeux. It was certain rumours going the rounds concerning the probable canonization of a young Saint-Joseph seminarist who had died under peculiar circumstances that had been responsible for the vogue.
The Gonzagues did not care for Boucher and his friends who, each in his own way, represented all that they had spoiled their lives by giving up. Denis and his kind were supremely clever at getting out of scrapes, whereas the spirit of submission, stigma of the schools, was spread all over the faces of these pious young men, like a rotten fruit.
When Jean indicated that they wished to be seated in the row behind the one reserved for the guests of honour where Lise sat, the usher glared at them but restrained himself. “Take those seats; they are just as good.”
“Come on! We’re sitting here,” announced Denis.
They made a great deal of noise as they sat down and the scandalized Soyeux began whispering among themselves. Flora Boucher was proud and Barloute Colin could see in the situation possibilities of getting herself talked about. The Gonzagues, who had decided that Lise was one of them, had gathered at the rear of the room and were talking matters over, nervously, as if they had discovered a plot. Hearing the commotion, Lise, like the little girls of the quarter, yielded to her curiosity and looked back to see what was going on. She had been well-reared; but her instruction in good manners had been purely theoretical, and so she instinctively followed the fashion of Saint-Sauveur before she had time to think what the manuals of etiquette had to say on the subject.
Then it was she caught sight of Denis. He did not take his seat at once but stood there arrogantly looking the crowd over. This, as Lise saw it, gave him an air of distinction; for she had acquired a false conception of what constituted greatness and expected it to be accompanied by a certain amount of disdain. From then on, she vainly sought an excuse for turning her head once more. Besides, there was that ribbon on her shoulder that would not stay in place and kept tickling her ear.
“Nervous?” her mother inquired fussily. Madame Lévesque was enjoying the jealousy of Eugénie Clichoteux, former queen of the young Soyeuses, for Lise —
Denis, who always became nervous when he felt a crowd behind him, was talking in a loud voice. “I don’t like your being so familiar with her,” he was saying.
“Sh-sh-sh! Not so loud!” Jean begged him. “She’s not going to give us away. You can see for yourself she’s not that kind.”
“We’re not so interesting when we have our faces washed,” observed Robert, who was a sensible lad.
Lise had recognized them, but it was Denis with his haughty air who fascinated her. The others, now that they were neat and well combed, lacked that originality she had at first discovered in them. To her romantic mind, heroes who felt the need of improving their appearance when they knew someone was watching them lost much of their worth. Jean may have believed that his handsome brown suit, the close-shaven down of his face, and his yellow tie with the green dots gave him an advantage, but for her all this merely stifled the true character she had found in his oil-streaked face; it conferred upon him a mediocre appearance, that of a vagabond in Sunday clothes. He was envious because she looked at Denis, but thought that she was trying to steal a glance at him out of the corner of her eye as women have a way of doing.
Upon the stage, the image of the future church, painted upon the wrinkled curtain, appeared about to fall in ruins before that edifice had been erected. There were a number of peepholes through which the actors’ noses could be seen protruding beneath the ravelled threads. The Deputy now arrived, followed by Gus Perrault, and the audience rose and applauded as Monsieur le Curé smilingly seated them at his side. The worthy priest then let his gaze wander over the room and bit his lip with satisfaction as he noted that it was filled to overflowing. In his eyes, it took on the aspect of a purse stuffed with money to the bursting point.
A few Soyeuses were still coming in. It was eight-thirty, and Jean-Paul Labrie, the stage manager, rapped three times with a hammer that belonged to his father, the carpenter. The sacristan’s eldest son, Jacques, being a privileged character, was in charge of the curtain. The noise died down with the lights and the Buveuse de Larmes made her appearance. In the first act, there were two dead and one wounded. Monsieur Pritontin, who was a great lover of dramatic art, deplored the fact that the blank cartridge, being too damp, had failed to go off. Those who prided themselves on being critics studied the moustaches to see how lifelike they were. Denis wished that he could have Messalina’s red mane, to set fire to. He liked to give the impression of being a violent lad, violence to him being a semblance of power.
“I’d wring her neck!” he said, in a voice that all could hear.
Madame Langevin, a big woman who sympathized with the “innocent” ones in the play, agreed with him and went him one better: “I’d do worse than that to her, so I would! I’d scratch her eyes out!”
By the time the first act drew to a close, all the terrifying words that had been spoken, the shrieks of vengeance, the scenes of sublime and tender affection, and the cry of “wicked adulteress!” had made as deep an impression upon the audience as a