As a result of certain remarks of Jean Azévédo, Thérèse paid a little more attention to the priest, who was still young, and not on good terms with his parishioners who found him stand-offish: “He’s not the kind we want here”: In the course of his rare visits to the La Traves, Thérèse noticed his white temples and high forehead. He had no friends. How did he spend his evenings? Why had he chosen this life? “He is very punctilious,” said Madame de la Trave: “He prays every evening: but he is wanting in unction. I don’t think he is genuinely devout. He doesn’t really do anything in the Parish.” She deplored the fact that he had given up the Church Lads’ Brigade: and the parents complained that he did not go with the children to the football-field. “It’s all very well for him to be buried in his books, but a Parish soon goes to pieces.” Thérèse used to go to church to hear him preach (“My dear, you’ve decided to go just when your condition would have excused you”). The Curé’s sermons, which dealt with dogma or morals, were impersonal. But Thérèse was struck by an intonation, a gesture, or a word that seemed specially significant.... Ah! perhaps he could have helped her to unravel the confusion of her soul: unlike the rest, his also had been a tragic rôle: to his own inner solitude was added the isolation that the cassock brings upon its wearer. What comfort did he draw from those daily rites? Thérèse would have liked to have been present at Mass during the week when, with no other witness but a choir-boy, he bent muttering over a piece of bread. But such a proceeding would have seemed odd to her family and the neighbours, who would have raised the cry of “Conversion.” * * * * * Much as Thérèse suffered at that time, it was just after the birth of the child that she began to find life really unendurable. There was no outward sign of this, no scene between Bernard and herself: and she behaved with more deference to her parents-in-law than her husband himself. There lay the tragedy: there had been no reason for a rupture: it was impossible to conceive an event that would have prevented things taking the course that led to death. Misunderstanding presupposes some common ground of conflict; but Thérèse never came into contact with Bernard and still less with her parents-in-law; their words barely reached her: she hardly conceived it necessary to answer them. Had they even a vocabulary in common? They attached a different meaning to the most unimportant words. If Thérèse was ever tempted into saying something she really meant, the family had agreed, once and for all, that the poor child could not resist a paradox. “I pretend not to hear,” Madame de la Trave used to say: “and if she persists, not to take any notice. She knows it’s no good trying it on us.”