Sunday by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

not in the handwriting of Madame Harnaud's sister. On the back, moreover, he managed to read a printed letterhead: Gerard Palud.
    The name was familiar to him, as it used to be mentioned by his parents, who had had recourse on several occasions to this lawyer. For so he was called, although his profession was an ill-defined one. Not far from the Three Bells at Luçon he kept a grocery store with green-tinted windows where country people used to queue on market-days.
    Palud had worked a number of years as a notary's clerk, then had started a business on his own, advising clients about their transactions, whether buying or selling goods, about wills, investments, or inheritances. In a semi-official capacity he also took care of their lawsuits, and he stood roughly in the same relation to real lawyers, real solicitors or notaries, as a bone-setter or healer does to doctors.
    'I presume,' Madame Harnaud went on after a silence, 'that the two of you intend to draw up a marriage contract?'
    It was then that Berthe had raised her head and looked at Emile with a look he was never to forget, before saying quietly, with a faint tremor of her lips:
    'No.'
    The mother was taken in, imagined it to be generosity on the part of her daughter, or the blindness of love. The proof is that she had countered, not without a touch of irritation:
    'I know what one feels when one is young. All the same, one must look a little further, for none of us can foresee the future.'
    Berthe had repeated firmly:
    'We do not need a contract.'
    He could not have said by exactly what mechanism these words constituted a sort of act of possession of his person. Had not Berthe bought him, much more safely and surely than by any contract duly signed and sealed?
    If she disdained any contract, it was because she was sure of herself and she relied only on herself to keep her husband.
    'I don't want to insist. It's your affair between the two of you. If your poor father was alive though, I think . . .'
    'Did you have a marriage contract, you and he?'
    'The case was not quite the same.'
    It was worse, since Madame Harnaud, born in a shack on the marshes, had been a maid at the Three Bells Hotel before her marriage, and Big Louis had waited till she was four months pregnant before marrying her. Emile knew the facts very well since he now had the papers in his keeping.
    'As far as La Bastide goes and my share in it. . .'
    She was withdrawing reluctantly from the positions prepared by herself and Palud, with whom, they discovered, she had exchanged a considerable number of letters over the past few weeks.
    'I suppose you would like to take possession right away of your share of your father's inheritance?'
    A closed, attentive expression on her face, Berthe listened, taking care not to answer too quickly.
    'As far as La Bastide is concerned, I trust the two of you. Emile is intelligent, hard-working, and I have seen the way he manages things. So there is no reason why I should take my money out of it. . .'
    She had some idea in the back of her mind, which had perhaps been instilled there by Palud.
    'As I am going to live in Luçon and as, now that my poor husband is dead, I shall not last so very long . . .'
    The way was tortuous, but she got there in the end.
    'For you two it is a nuisance to have to render accounts to me each year. As for me, at my age . . .'
    She was not saying that she had only a relative confidence in her son-in-law.
    'The simplest thing, to avoid all discussion, is for you to pay me a remittance during my lifetime. In this way you are masters in your own house and I shall have no more to do with the business side . . .'
    It was not in fact true. Among the papers folded into four in front of her she picked out a draft agreement in Palud's handwriting. If the deed provided for an annual remittance amounting to well over half the present income from La Bastide it also reserved for Madame Harnaud, in the guise of a guarantee, a mortgage on the house, the