Scandal over Yana and the Voyt found drunk in the woods turns a compromising encounter into a public affair with political consequences. Jagna Borynowa and the Voyt are discovered lying together beneath junipers after drinking; Jagna flees when they are roused, and the Voyt is too drunk to leave without help. The women who find them choose to make the scene known rather than quietly conceal it. Their account spreads through Lipce, where the encounter becomes evidence in a struggle over the Voyt’s authority as well as a spectacle of sexual disgrace.

Discovery in the woodland

The scandal reaches the villagers as a story told beside the pond. Groups remain there at sunset when hired hands return with heavy loads of firewood on their backs. Kozłowa, bent beneath her burden, props it against a tree and announces that the village official has deceived them: no one was dead in the forest, but what they had found might be worse. Her weary arrival lends the tale the immediacy of a report brought directly from the woodland lane.

Kozłowa recounts that she and the other women were walking back toward the cross when Gulbas came running, frightened, saying that someone dead lay beneath the junipers. At a distance, the figures appeared lifeless, with only their legs showing. Filipka wanted to flee; Grzelowa had begun praying. Kozłowa crossed herself and approached. The supposed bodies were the Voyt, without his capote, and Jagna Borynowa beside him, asleep. The contrast between the alarm of a possible death and the discovery of the village’s chief official in this exposed, intimate setting gives the episode its startling turn.

Kozłowa says the pair had been drinking heavily and had gone to rest in the cool shade. She insists that the women did not wake them at once: they wanted witnesses to see what was happening. Filipka, out of pity, covered Jagna with her apron. When the Voyt was finally roused, Jagna ran into the field; he was so drunk that the others could barely hoist him onto a cart. The physical details—the discarded capote, the apron, Jagna’s sudden flight and the Voyt’s helplessness—make the report difficult to contain as private rumor.

From witnessed scene to public shame

The account prompts immediate expressions of disbelief and disgust. One villager groans that nothing like it has happened in Lipce; another distinguishes a farmhand with a young woman from a farmer who is a father and the Voyt besides. That comparison exposes the village’s uneven moral measure: the Voyt’s public office and family status intensify the condemnation, while the remark treats a farmhand’s conduct as a lesser matter. Jagna is also made conspicuous in the story, but the evidence does not show the same political scrutiny being directed at her as at the man who holds office.

Kozłowa’s telling is not neutral observation. She describes the scene as depraved and says that she and the others deliberately let the villagers become witnesses. Her account therefore does two things at once: it reports what the women saw and frames what they saw for communal judgment. The crowd does not receive a private explanation from either Jagna or the Voyt; it receives a vivid version carried by witnesses, with the Voyt’s drunken condition and Jagna’s flight at its center.

Płoszka turns scandal into a campaign

At the inn, Płoszka uses the discovery to rally opposition to the Voyt. When Sikora hints that he knows things but will not speak, Płoszka answers that nobody is forcing him to reveal them and redirects the talk toward the official’s bad example and the disgrace brought upon the village. He calls for the Voyt to be thrown out of office, arguing that the villagers put him in the position and can remove him. Płoszka also stands the others another quart as he makes his case, a concrete sign that his effort to shape opinion unfolds through the ordinary social setting of the inn.

Płoszka’s case goes well beyond the woodland encounter. He accuses the Voyt of siding with the squire against the community, supporting a school in Lipce, recommending the Germans in Podlesie to the squire, and spending community money on his own comfort. These are Płoszka’s charges, not findings established by the discovery itself. The scandal supplies a public disgrace around which he can gather them, joining sexual conduct to disputes over village loyalty, education, settlement, and public funds. Sikora counters that Płoszka also wants his snout in the trough, making clear that the campaign is contested and that its challenger’s motives are questioned too.

Political meaning and limits of the episode

The encounter becomes consequential because the Voyt’s private behavior is exposed in a community already alert to questions of collective rights and leadership. In the forest dispute, villagers had gathered in large numbers to oppose the manor’s felling and to act together under Boryna’s leadership. The later campaign against the Voyt uses a different instrument: not a march to defend woodland, but public talk and a proposal to unseat an official. The contrast shows how village action can move from direct resistance to a political challenge within its own community, although the evidence here records Płoszka’s effort to build that challenge rather than its final outcome.

The scandal does not, by itself, prove Płoszka’s claims of misuse of public money or establish the full nature of Jagna and the Voyt’s relationship. It does establish the circumstances of their discovery and the sequence that made the scene politically usable: the women find them, Kozłowa tells the villagers, Jagna escapes the witnesses, and the Voyt must be carried away. What began as a startling woodland sight thus becomes a test of the Voyt’s standing, with gossip functioning as both communal judgment and a weapon in a broader contest over authority.