Falling Action
They said:
"Old rascal, get out!"
And he grew angry, becoming exasperated, hot and distressed at not
being believed, not knowing what to do and always repeating himself.
Night came. He must depart. He started on his way with three neighbors to whom
he pointed out the place where he had picked up the bit of string, and all along
the road he spoke of his adventure.
In the evening he took a turn in the village of Breaute in order to tell it to
everybody. He only met with incredulity.
It made him ill at night.
The next day about one o'clock in the afternoon Marius Paumelle, a hired man in
the employ of Maître Breton, husbandman at Ymanville, returned the pocketbook
and its contents to Maître Houlbreque of Manneville.
This man claimed to have found the object in the road, but not knowing how to
read, he had carried it to the house and given it to his employer.
The news spread through the neighborhood. Maître Hauchecome was informed of it.
He immediately went the circuit and began to recount his story completed by the
happy climax. He was in triumph.
"What grieved me so much was not the thing itself as the lying. There is nothing
so shameful as to be placed under a cloud on account of a lie."
He talked of his adventure all day long; he told it on the highway to people who
were passing by, in the wineshop to people who were drinking there and to
persons coming out of church the following Sunday. He stopped strangers to tell
them about it. He was calm now, and yet something disturbed him without his
knowing exactly what it was. People had the air of joking while they listened.
They did not seem convinced. He seemed to feel that remarks were being made
behind his back.
On Tuesday of the next week he went to the market at Goderville, urged solely by
the necessity he felt of discussing the case.
Malandain, standing at his door, began to laugh on seeing him pass. Why?
He approached a farmer from Crequetot who did not let him finish and, giving him
a thump in the stomach, said to his face:
"You big rascal."
Then he turned his back on him.
Maître Hauchecome was confused; why was he called a big rascal?
When he was seated at the table in Jourdain's tavern he commenced to explain
"the affair."
A horse dealer from Monvilliers called to him:
"Come, come, old sharper, that's an old trick; I know all about your piece of
string!"
Hauchecome stammered:
"But since the pocketbook was found."
But the other man replied:
"Shut up, papa, there is one that finds and there is one that reports. At any
rate you are mixed with it."
The peasant stood choking. He understood. They accused him of having had the
pocketbook returned by a confederate, by an accomplice.
He tried to protest. All the table began to laugh.
He could not finish his dinner and went away in the midst of jeers.
He went home ashamed and indignant, choking with anger and confusion, the more
dejected that he was capable, with his Norman cunning, of doing what they had
accused him of and ever boasting of it as of a good turn. His innocence to him,
in a confused way, was impossible to prove, as his sharpness was known. And he
was stricken to the heart by the injustice of the suspicion.
Then he began to recount the adventures again, prolonging his history every day,
adding each time new reasons, more energetic protestations, more solemn oaths
which he imagined and prepared in his hours of solitude, his whole mind given up
to the story of the string. He was believed so much the less as his defense was
more complicated and his arguing more subtile.
"Those are lying excuses," they said behind his back.
He felt it, consumed his heart over it and wore himself out with useless
efforts. He wasted away before their very eyes.
The wags now made him tell about the string to amuse them, as they make a
soldier who has been on a campaign tell about his battles. His mind, touched to
the depth, began to weaken.
In the falling action, Hauchecome was dealing with the results of the climax.