Complete Works of Emile Zola (433 page)

Du Poizat, however, would exclaim: ‘I tell you he’s drawing us all out. He listens to all we say. Just look at his ears in the evening; you can see that they are on the strain.’

This was frequently the subject of their conversation when they went away together at half-past ten. It really was impossible, they said, that the great man should be unaware of their devotion. The ex-sub-prefect repeated that he was playing the part of a Hindoo idol, squatting in a state of self-satisfaction with his hands across his abdomen, and smiling unctuously amidst a crowd of believers who cut themselves to pieces in his worship. And the others allowed that this comparison seemed a very true one.

‘But I will keep my eye on him, you may depend upon that,’ Du Poizat said in conclusion.

However, it was useless to study Rougon’s face. It remained blank and unruffled, almost child-like. Perhaps, after all, there was no deception about his appearance. Clorinde, for her part, much preferred that he should remain inactive. She was afraid that if they compelled him to open his eyes he might thwart their plans. They were working for his advancement, in spite of himself, as it were. By some means or other, forcibly if necessary, they meant to thrust him into a position of high authority. Then they would have a settlement.

Still matters seemed to advance very slowly, and the band began to grow impatient. Du Poizat’s views gained the mastery. They did not openly reproach Rougon with all that they were doing for him, but they assailed him with allusions and hints. The colonel would sometimes come to the evening receptions with his boots white with dust. He had not had time to go home and change them, he said. He was quite knocked up with running about on foolish errands for which he should probably never get any thanks. On other evenings M. Kahn, with heavy eyes, complained of the late hours he had been compelled to keep for a month past. He was going a great deal into society, he said, not for plea­sure, indeed, but because it enabled him to meet certain people upon certain business. Then Madame Correur would relate affecting stories; telling them, for instance, of some poor young woman, a widow of the highest character, whom she visited, but was now unable to assist. If she were the government, she said, she would take good care to prevent injustice. Then the whole coterie would vent its own sorrows; each would lament his or her present situation, and compare it with what it would have been had they not behaved in the foolish, soft-hearted way they had done. And all these endless complaints were accentuated by meaning glances at Rougon. To rouse him they even went so far as to praise M. de Marsy. At first Rougon preserved unruffled tranquillity. He still showed no signs of understanding. But after a few evenings, when the talk was of this kind, slight twitchings would pass over his face at certain remarks made in his presence. He expressed no annoyance, but pressed his lips together as though he were pricked by some invisible needle. And at last he became so restless and uneasy that he gave up his card-tricks. He could no longer accomplish them successfully, and preferred to pace about the room, talking, and suddenly hastening away when his friends began to launch veiled reproaches at him. Every now and then he would turn white with anger, and seem to be forcibly holding his hands behind his back to restrain himself from turning the whole crew out of doors.

‘My children,’ said the colonel one evening, ‘I sha’n’t come here again for a fortnight. It will be good for us to sulk for a while and see how he can manage to amuse him­self without us.’

Then Rougon, who had been thinking of closing his doors, felt very much hurt at the way in which he was abandoned. The colonel kept his word, and some of the others followed his example. The drawing-room looked very empty; there were always five or six of the circle absent. When one of them reappeared after a prolonged absence, and the great man asked him if he had been unwell, the other merely answered in the negative with an air of surprise, and gave no explanation. One Thursday not a single person came. Rougon spent the whole evening alone, pacing up and down the big room with his hands behind him and his head bent. For the first time he felt the strength of the chain which linked him to his band. He shrugged his shoulders to express his contempt for the stupidity of the Charbonnels, the envious rage of Du Poizat, and the suspicious affection of Madame Correur. Nevertheless, he felt a craving, the jealous craving of a master secretly pained by their slightest infideli­ties, to see and rule these friends of his, whom he held in such light esteem. Indeed at the bottom of his heart he was touched by their foolish behaviour and loved their faults. They seemed to be part of his being, so that he felt diminished and incomplete when they held aloof from him. As they continued to absent themselves he ended by writing to them, and even called at their residences to make peace with them after serious tiffs. Life at the house in the Rue Marbeuf was now so much chronic quarrelling — a series of constantly recurring ruptures and reconciliations.

Towards the end of December there was a particularly serious defection. One evening, without anyone quite know­ing why, one bitter remark led to another, and it all ended by a very angry scene. For nearly three weeks after­wards the meetings ceased. The truth is that the band was beginning to lose hope. Their most earnest efforts seemed to have no appreciable result. It was unlikely that the general situation would change for a long time, and a sudden catastrophe, such as might render Rougon necessary, could hardly be anticipated. They had anxiously awaited the opening of the Corps Législatif, but this had gone off without any other incident than the refusal of two republican deputies to take the oath of allegiance. M. Kahn, who was the shrewd man of the group, no longer hoped for any advantage from the course of general politics.

Rougon, in his weary irritation, was occupying himself more energetically than ever with his Landes scheme, as though to conceal the feverish twitchings of his face, which he could no longer keep placid and sleepy as formerly. ‘I don’t feel very well,’ he sometimes said. ‘My hands tremble. My doctor has ordered me to take exercise. I am out-of-doors all day.’ He did, indeed, go out a great deal now, and was to be met in the streets with his hands swinging and his head in the air, absorbed in thought. When anyone stopped and questioned him he said he had been tramping about all day.

One morning when he returned home to
déjeuner,
after a walk in the direction of Chaillot, he found a gilt-edged visit­ing-card awaiting him, on which was written Gilquin’s name. The card was very dirty, and bore the marks of greasy fingers. Rougon rang for his servant. ‘Did the person who gave you this card leave any message?’ he asked.

The servant, who was new to the house, smiled. ‘It was a gentleman in a green overcoat,’ he replied. ‘He was very pleasant and offered me a cigar. He only said that he was a friend of yours.’ However, just as the servant was leaving the room he turned and added: ‘I think there’s something written on the back of the card.’ Rougon turned it over and read these words written in pencil: ‘Can’t wait. Will call again this evening. Very urgent; a strange business.’ Then he threw down the card with a careless air. After
déjeuner,
however, the expression ‘Very urgent; a strange business,’ recurred to his mind and haunted him, till it at last rendered him quite impatient. What could this ‘strange business’ of Gilquin’s be? Since Rougon had charged the ex-commercial traveller with sundry obscure and intricate commissions he had seen him regularly once a week in the evening. Never before had Gilquin called in the morning, so that the matter in hand must surely be something out of the common. Rougon, quite at a loss to guess its nature, found himself all aglow with impatience, and although he could not help feeling that it was ridiculous, he resolved to go out and try to discover Gilquin before the evening.

‘Some tipsy story, I dare say,’ he reflected as he went through the Champs Elysées. ‘Well, at any rate I shall satisfy myself.’

He was on foot, as he wished to carry out the directions of his doctor. It was a lovely day; a bright, sunny January noontide. Gilquin appeared to have removed from the Passage Guttin, for his card bore the address Rue Guisarde, Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Rougon had an immense amount of trouble to find this filthy street, which is situated near Saint-Sulpice’s. At the end of a dark passage he discovered a woman lying in bed, who called out to him in a voice which quavered with fever: ‘Monsieur Gilquin! I don’t know whether he’s in. It’s the door on the left on the fourth floor, right up at the top.’

When Rougon reached the fourth floor he saw Gilquin’s name inscribed on the door amidst some arabesques repre­senting flaming hearts transpierced by arrows. However, he knocked to no purpose; he could hear nothing but the tick-tack of a cuckoo-clock and the mewing of a cat. He had expected that he was coming on a vain errand, still he was glad that he had come. His walk had relieved him. So he went downstairs again, feeling more composed, and reflecting that he could very well wait till the evening. When he got outside he slackened his steps, crossed the Saint-Germain market, and then went down the Rue de Seine, with no definite goal in view, but thinking that he would walk home, although he already felt a little tired. Then, as he reached the Rue Jacob, he remembered the Charbonnels, who lived there. He had not seen them for ten days. They were sulking with him. However, he resolved to call on them for a few minutes and offer them his hand. The afternoon was so warm that he felt quite tender-hearted.

The Charbonnels’ room at the Hôtel du Périgord over­looked the yard, a gloomy well of a place which smelt like a dirty sink. It was a large, dark room, with rickety mahogany furniture and curtains of faded red damask. When Rougon entered it Madame Charbonnel was folding up her dresses and laying them in a big trunk, while her husband perspired and strained his arms in cording another trunk, a smaller one.

‘Halloa! are you off?’ Rougon asked, with a smile.

‘Yes, indeed,’ answered Madame Charbonnel, drawing a deep sigh. ‘This time we’ve quite made up our minds.’

However, they gave him a hearty welcome, apparently quite flattered at seeing him in their room. All the chairs were littered with clothes, bundles of linen, and baskets with splitting sides. So Rougon sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Oh, don’t trouble yourselves!’ he said, good-naturedly; ‘I’m very comfortable here. Go on with what you’re doing; I don’t want to disturb you. Are you going by the eight o’clock train?’

‘Yes, by the eight o’clock tram,’ M. Charbonnel replied. ‘That gives us just six more hours to spend in this beastly Paris. Ah! we sha’n’t forget it in a hurry, Monsieur Rougon!’

Then he, who generally spoke so little, launched into a flow of bitter invective, and even shook his fist at the window while declaiming against the horrid city, where one actually couldn’t see clearly in one’s room at two o’clock in the after­noon. That dirty light which filtered in through that narrow well of a yard was Paris! But, thank Heaven, he was going to see the sun again in his garden at Plassans! Then he looked round to make sure that he was forgetting nothing. He had bought a railway time-table in the morning, and he pointed to a cold roast fowl wrapt in some greasy paper, which they meant to take with them to eat on their journey.

‘Have you emptied everything out of the drawers, my dear?’ he asked. ‘My slippers were in the night-table. I think, too, that some papers fell behind the chest of drawers.’

Rougon felt pained as he watched the preparations of these disconsolate old folks, whose hands trembled as they made up their packages. Their emotion seemed to him like a silent reproach. It was he who had kept them in Paris, and their sojourn there was ending in complete failure, a veritable flight.

‘You are making a mistake,’ he said at last.

But Madame Charbonnel answered with a gesture of entreaty as if to beseech him to be silent. ‘Don’t make us any promises, Monsieur Rougon,’ she said sharply. ‘They could only bring all our unhappiness over again. When I think that we’ve been here for two years and a half! Two years and a half, good heavens, in this hole of a place! My left leg will never be free from pain again as long as I live. I have slept on the far side of the bed, and that wall behind you fairly streams with water at night. Oh, I couldn’t tell you all we’ve gone through! It would be too long a story. And we’ve spent a ruinous amount of money! Only yester­day I was obliged to buy this big trunk to carry away the things we have worn out while we have been in Paris; the wretchedly sewn clothes, which the shopkeepers charged us most extortionately for, and the linen which came back from the laundress’s in rags. Ah! I sha’n’t be sorry to have seen the last of your laundresses! They ruin everything with their acids.’

Then she threw a bundle of things into the trunk, and exclaimed: ‘No, this time we are certainly going, I think it would kill me to stay here an hour longer.’

Rougon, however, insisted upon talking about their law­suit. Had they had any bad news? he asked. Then the Charbonnels told him, almost crying as they did so, that the property of their cousin Chevassu was certainly lost to them. The Council of State was on the point of authorising the Sisters of the Holy Family to receive the legacy of five hundred thousand francs. Their last remaining hope had expired on hearing of the arrival of Monseigneur Rochart in Paris, whither he had come, for the second time, to hurry the matter forward.

And all at once M. Charbonnel ceased to struggle with the cords of the smaller trunk and raised his arms convulsively, while crying in a broken voice: ‘Five hundred thousand francs! Five hundred thousand francs!’

They both seemed overwhelmed. They sat down, the husband on the trunk and the wife on a bundle of linen, amidst all the litter of the room. And they began to pity themselves in a mournful strain; as soon as one stopped the other began. They recalled their affection for their cousin Chevassu. How fond they had been of him! As a matter of fact, they had not seen him for more than seventeen years before his death. But, just now, they wept over him in all good faith, and really believed that they had shown him every kind attention during his illness. Then they began to accuse the Sisters of the Holy Family of disgraceful scheming. They had brought undue influence to bear on cousin Chevassu, they had kept him from his friends, and had exerted constant pressure on his mind, which illness had weakened. Madame Charbonnel, though she was really a very devout woman, went so far as to relate a dreadful story, according to which cousin Chevassu had died of fright after signing his will at the dictation of a priest, who had shown him the devil stand­ing at the foot of his bed. And as for the Bishop of Fave­rolles, she said, it was a dirty part that he was playing, in despoiling a couple of honest people, who were esteemed throughout Plassans for the integrity they had shown in getting a little competency together in the oil trade.