Complete Works of Emile Zola (929 page)

A tall, strapping fellow came in, rejoicing in the brawny strength of his forty years; he had curly hair, and a pointed, long, unkempt beard, with the face of a saint laid waste, a saint sodden with strong drink, addicted to forcing girls, and to robbing folks on the highway. He had already got tipsy at Cloyes since the morning, and wore muddy trousers, a filthily-stained blouse, and a ragged cap stuck on the back of his neck. He was smoking a damp, black, pestilential halfpenny cigar. Yet, in the depths of his fine liquid eyes lurked a spirit of fun free from ill-feeling, the open-heartedness of good-natured blackguardism.

“So father and mother haven’t turned up yet?” he asked.

When the thin, jaundiced clerk responded testily by a shake of the head, he stared for an instant at the wall, while his cigar smouldered in his hand. He had not so much as glanced at his sister and his brother-in-law, who, themselves, did not appear to have seen him enter. Then, without a word, he left the room, and went to hang about on the pavement.

“Hyacinthe! Hyacinthe!” droned the little clerk, turning streetwards, and seeming to find infinite amusement in this name, which brought many a funny tale back to his memory.

Hardly five minutes had passed before the Fouans made their tardy appearance, two old folk of slow, prudential gait. The father, once very robust, now seventy years of age, had shrivelled and dwindled down under such hard work, such a keen land-hunger, that his form was bowed as if in a wild im­pulse to return to that earth which he had coveted and possessed. Nevertheless, in all save the legs, he was still hale and well-knit, with spruce little white mutton-chop whiskers, and the long family nose, which lent an air of keenness to his thin, leathery, deeply-wrinkled face. In his wake, following him as closely as his shadow, came his wife; shorter and stouter, swollen as if by an incipient dropsy, with a drab-coloured face perforated with round eyes, and a round mouth pursed up into an infinity of avaricious wrinkles. A household drudge, en­dowed with the docile, hard-working stupidity of a beast of burden, she had always stood in awe of the despotic authority of her husband,

“Ah, so it’s you!” cried Fanny, getting up. Delhomme, also, had risen from his chair. Behind the old people, Hyacinthe had just lounged in again without a word. Compressing the cigar end to put it out, he thrust the pestiferous stump into a pocket of his blouse.

“So we’re here,” said Fouan. “There’s only Buteau missing. Never in time, never like other people, the beast!”

“I saw him in the market,” asserted Hyacinthe in a husky voice due to drink. “He’s coming.”

Buteau, the younger son, owed his nickname to his pig-headedness, being always up in arms in obstinate defence of his own ideas, which were never those of anybody else. Even when an urchin, he had not been able to get on with his parents; and, later on, having drawn a lucky number in the conscrip­tion, he had run away from home to go into service, first at La Borderie, subsequently at La Chamade.

While his father was still grumbling, he skipped cheerfully into the room. In him, the large Fouan nose was flattened out, while the lower part of his face, the maxillaries, projected like the powerful jaws of a carnivorous beast. His temples retreated, all the upper part of his head was contracted, and, behind the boon-companion twinkle of his grey eyes, there lurked deceit and violence. He had inherited the brutish desires and tenacious grip of his father, aggravated by the narrow mean­ness of his mother. In every quarrel, whenever the two old people heaped reproaches upon his head, he replied: “You shouldn’t have made me so!”

“Look here, it’s five leagues from La Chamade to Cloyes,” replied he to their complaints; “and besides, hang it all, I’m here at the same time as you. Oh, at me again, are you?”

They all disputed, shouted in shrill, high-pitched voices, and argued over their private matters exactly as if they had been at home. The clerks, disturbed, looked at them askance, till the tumult brought in the notary, who re-opened the door of his private office.

“You are all assembled? Then come in!”

This private office looked on to the garden, a narrow strip of ground running down to the Loir, the leafless poplars along which were visible in the distance. On the mantelpiece, between some packets of papers, there was a black marble clock; the furniture simply comprised the mahogany writing-table, a set of pasteboard boxes, and some chairs. Monsieur Baillehache at once installed himself at his writing-table, like a judge on the bench, while the peasants who had entered in a file hesitated and squinted at the chairs, feeling embarrassed as to where and how they were to sit down.

“Come, seat yourselves!” said the notary.

Then Fouan and Rose were pushed forward by the rest on to the two front chairs; Fanny and Delhomme got behind, also side by side; Buteau established himself in an isolated corner against the wall; while Hyacinthe alone remained standing, in front of the window, blocking out the light with his broad shoulders. The notary, out of patience, addressed him familiarly.

“Sit down, do, Hyacinthe!”

He had to broach the subject himself.

“So, Fouan, you have made up your mind to divide your property before your death, between your two sons and your daughter?”

The old man made no reply. The rest were as if frozen to stone; there was deep silence.

On his part, the notary, accustomed to such sluggishness, did not hurry himself. His office had been in his family two hundred and fifty years. Baillehache, son, had succeeded Baillehache, father, at Cloyes, the line being of ancient Beauceron extraction, and they had contracted from their rustic connection that ponderous reflectiveness, that artful circumspection, which protract the most trivial debates with long pauses and irrelevant talk. Having taken up a penknife the notary began paring his nails.

“Haven’t you? It would appear that you have made up your mind,” he repeated at length, looking hard at the old man.

The latter turned, looked round at everybody, and then said, hesitatingly:

“Yes; that may be so, Monsieur Baillehache. I spoke to you about it at harvest-time. You told me to think it over; and I have thought it over, and I can see that it will have to come to that.”

He explained the why and wherefore, in faltering phrases, interspersed with constant digressions. But there was one thing which he said nothing about, but which was obvious from the repressed emotion which choked his utterance — and that was the infinite distress, the smothered rancour, the rending asunder, as it were, of his whole frame, which he felt in parting with the property so eagerly coveted before his father’s death, culti­vated later on with the violent avidity of lust, and then added to, bit by bit, at the cost of the most sordid avarice. Such-and-such a plot represented months of bread and cheese, fireless winters, summers of scorching toil, with no other sustenance than a few gulps of water. He had loved the soil as it were a woman who kills, and for whose sake men are slain. No spouse, nor child, nor any human being; but the soil! However, being now stricken in years, he must hand his mistress over to his sons, as his father, maddened by his own impotence, had handed her over to him.

“You see, Monsieur Baillehache, one has to look at things as they are. My legs are not what they used to be; my arms are hardly better; and, of course, the land suffers accordingly. Things might still have gone on if one could have come to an understanding with one’s children.”

He glanced at Buteau and Hyacinthe, who made no sign, however; their eyes were looking into vacancy, as though they were a hundred miles away from him and his words.

“Well, am I to be expected to take strange people under our roof, to pick and steal? No, servants now-a-days cost too much; they eat one out of house and home. As for me, I am used up. This year, look you, I have hardly had the strength to cultivate a quarter of the nineteen setiers* I possess; just enough to provide corn for ourselves and fodder for the two cows. So, you understand, it’s breaking my heart to see good land spoiled by lying idle. I had rather let everything go than look on at such sinful waste.”

His voice faltered; his gestures were those of resigned anguish. Near him listened his submissive wife, crushed by more than half a century of obedience and toil.

“The other day,” he continued, “Rose, while making her cheeses, fell into them head first. It wears me out only to jog to market. And then, we can’t take the land away with us when we go. It must be given up — given up. After all, we have done enough work, and we want to die in peace. Don’t we, Rose?”

“That’s true enough; true as we sit here,” said the old woman.

There fell a new and prolonged silence. The notary finished trimming his nails, and at last he put the knife back on his desk, saying:

“Yes, those are very good reasons; one is frequently forced to resolve on a deed of gift. I should add that it saves expense, for the legacy duties are heavier than those on the transference of property.”

Buteau, despite his affectation of indifference, could not help exclaiming:

“Then it’s true, Monsieur Baillehache?”

“Most certainly. You will save some hundreds of francs.”

There was a flutter among the others; even Delhomme’s countenance brightened, while the parents also shared in the general satisfaction. The moment they knew it was cheaper, the thing was as good as done.

“It remains for me to make the usual observations,” con­tinued the notary. “Many thoughtful persons condemn such transfers of property, and regard them as immoral, in that they tend to sever family ties. Deplorable instances might, in fact, be mentioned, children having sometimes behaved very badly, when their parents had stripped themselves of all.”

The two sons and the daughter listened to him, open-mouthed, with trembling eyelids and quivering cheeks.

“Let papa keep everything himself, if those are his ideas,” brusquely interrupted the very susceptible Fanny.

“We have always been dutiful,” said Buteau.

“And we’re not afraid of work,” added Hyacinthe.

With a wave of his hand Maître Baillehache restored calm.

“Pray, let me finish! I know you are good children, and honest workers; and, in your case, there is not the slightest danger of your parents ever repenting of their resolution.”

He spoke without a tinge of irony, repeating the conciliatory phrases which five-and-twenty years of professional practice had made smooth upon his tongue. However, the mother, although seeming not to understand, glanced with her small eyes from her daughter to her two sons. She had brought them up, without any show of fondness, amid the chill parsimony which reproaches the little ones with diminishing the household savings. She had a grudge against the younger son for having run away from home just when he was capable of earning wages; the daughter she had never been able to get on with, encountering in her a strain too like her own, a robust activity made haughty and unyielding by the intermingled intelligence of the father; and her gaze only softened as it rested upon the elder son, the ruffian who took neither after her nor after her husband — the ill weed sprung none knew whence, and, perhaps, excused and favoured on that account.

Fouan also had looked at his children, one after the other, with an uneasy mistrust of the uses they might make of his property. The laziness of the drunkard was not so keen an anguish to him as the covetous yearning of the two others for possession. However, he bent his trembling head. What was the good of kicking against the pricks?

“The partition being thus resolved upon,” resumed the notary, “the question becomes one of terms. Are you agreed upon the allowance which is to be paid?”

Everybody suddenly relapsed into mute rigidity. Their sun-burnt faces assumed a stony look, an air of impenetrable gravity, like that of diplomatists entering on the appraisement of an empire. Then they threw out tentative glances one to another, but nobody spoke. At last the father once more explained matters.

“No, Monsieur Baillehache, we have not entered on the subject; we were waiting till we met all together, here. But it’s quite simple, isn’t it? I have nineteen setiers, or, as people now say, nine hectares and a half (about twenty-three acres). So that, if I rented them out, it would come to nine hundred and fifty francs, at a hundred francs per hectare (two and a half acres).”

Buteau, the least patient, leapt from his chair.

“What! A hundred francs per hectare! Do you take us for fools, papa?”

And a preliminary discussion began on the question of figures. There was a setier of vineyard; that, certainly, would let for fifty francs. But would that price ever be got for the twelve setiers of plough-land, still less for the six setiers of natural meadow-land, the fields along the Aigre, the hay of which was worth nothing? The plough-land itself was hardly of good quality, especially at the end which edged the plateau, for the arable layer got thinner and thinner as it neared the valley.

“Come, come, papa.” said Fanny, reproachfully, “you mustn’t take an unfair advantage of us.”

“It’s worth a hundred francs a hectare,” repeated the old man stubbornly, slapping his thigh. “I could let it out to-morrow at a hundred francs if I wanted to. And what’s it worth to you, now? Just let’s hear what it’s worth to you?”

“It’s worth sixty francs,” said Buteau, but Fouan, greatly put out, sustained his price, and launched into fervent eulogy of his land — such fine land as it was, yielding wheat of itself — when Delhomme, silent till then, declared in his blunt, honest way: “It’s worth eighty francs, not a copper more, and not a copper less.”

The old man immediately calmed down.

“All right, say eighty. I don’t mind making a sacrifice for my children.”

Rose, twitching at a corner of his blouse, expressed in one word the outraged instincts of her mean nature—”No!”

Hyacinthe held himself aloof. Land had been no object to him since the five years he had spent in Algeria. He had but one aim: to get his share at once, whatever it might be, and to turn it into money. Accordingly, he went on swinging to and fro with an air of amused superiority.