Abbé Mouret's Transgression by Émile Zola

‘Now my soup is too hot! ' grumbled La Teuse, as she returned from the kitchen with a basin, from which a wooden spoon was projecting.

She placed herself just in front of Abbé Mouret, and began to eat very cautiously from the edge of the spoon. She wanted to enliven the Abbé and to draw him out of his melancholy moodiness. Ever since he had returned from the Paradou, he had declared himself well again, and had never complained. Often, indeed, he smiled in so soft and sweet a fashion, that his fever seemed to have increased his saintliness, at least so thought the villagers. But, at intervals, he had fits of gloomy silence, and appeared to be suffering torture which he strove to bear uncomplainingly. It was a mute agony which bore down upon him, and, for hours at a time, left him stupefied, a prey to a frightful inward struggle, the violence of which could only be guessed by the sweat of anguish that streamed down his face.