Heloise Pajadou’s Calvary

Heloise Pajadou’s Calvary (Le Calvaire de Heloise Pajadou originally), by Lucien Descaves, and published for the first time in 1883, is a Naturalist novel set in mid-18th century France, during the French Second Empire or possibly later.

This is a tale of marital infidelity on the part of a vulgar, but wily, inveterate skirt-chaser, Pajadou, and the toll his extra-marital affairs, ever more audacious, take on his good, good-hearted, faithful wife Heloise, who runs a laundry business with him and her mother, in a small country village outside Paris.

Just when Pajadou’s behavior seemed like it could not get any worse, the family-owned business apprentices Reine, a girl not yet fourteen years old; she looked twelve, if that. She was small in stature, very slender, with an immensely sweet prettiness. Her very blond and very fine hair were tucked up under a little white bonnet pulled down over her ears. But what was particularly pretty about her was her complexion. Her white skin, a transparent, delicately pink white skin, which her eyelashes cast a shadow on, gave her a luminous face: it was like a spray of flowers…