Complete Works of Emile Zola (936 page)

Fanny left off knitting.

“I won’t have Nénesse go,” she declared. “Monsieur Baillehache explained a sort of lottery dodge to us. Several people club together, each of them lodging in his hands a sum of money, and those who have unlucky numbers are bought off.”

“People must be well off to do that,” said La Grande, drily.

Bécu had caught a stray word or so between two tricks.

“War! Heart alive!” said he. “There’s nothing like it for making men! When you’ve not been in it, you can’t know. There’s nothing like taking shot and steel as they come! How about yonder, among the blackamoors?”

He winked his left eye, while Hyacinthe simpered know­ingly. They had both served in Algeria, the rural constable in the early days of the conquest, the other more recently, at the time of the late revolts. Accordingly, in spite of the difference in period, they had some reminiscences in common; of Bedouins’ ears cut off and strung into chaplets; of oily-skinned Bedouin women seized behind hedges and corked up in every orifice. Hyacinthe, in particular, had a tale, which set the bellies of the peasants shaking with tempestuous laughter, a tale of a big lemon-coloured cow of a woman whom they had set a-running quite naked, with a pipe stuck in her.

“Zounds!” resumed Bécu, addressing Fanny: “You want Nénesse to grow up a girl, then? However, Delphin shall wear regimentals in no time, I promise you!”

The children had left off playing, and Delphin raised his hard bullet-like head, already even redolent of the soil.

“Sha’n’t!” he said, bluntly and stubbornly.

“Hallo!” rejoined his father, “what’s that? I shall have to teach you what bravery is, my traitor Frenchman.”

“I won’t go away; I’ll stop at home.”

The rural constable raised his hand, but was checked by Buteau.

“Let the child alone! He’s right. Is he wanted? There are others. Why on earth should we be supposed to come into this world just to leave home and go and get our heads broken, on account of a lot of nonsense we don’t care a copper about? I’ve never left the neighbourhood, and I’m none the worse for it.”

He had, in fact, drawn a lucky number, and was a regular stay-at-home, attached to the land, and only acquainted with Orléans and Chartres, never having seen an inch beyond the flat horizon of La Beauce. He seemed to plume himself on having thus grown in his own soil, with the limited, lush energy of a tree. He had risen to his feet and the women were gazing at him.

“When they come back from serving their term, they’re all so thin!” ventured Lise, in an undertone.

“And you, did you go far, corporal?” asked old Rose.

Jean was smoking in silence, like a contemplative young man who preferred listening. He slowly took his pipe out of his mouth.

“Yes, pretty far, one might say. But not to the Crimea. I was about to start when Sebastopol was taken. Later on, though, I was in Italy.”

“And what’s Italy like?”

The question seemed to perplex him. He hesitated, and ransacked his memory.

“Why, Italy’s like home. There’s farming there, and woods with rivers. It’s the same everywhere.”

“Then you fought?”

“Fought? Rather.”

He had again begun to pull at his pipe, and did not hurry himself. Françoise, who had looked up, remained with her mouth half open, expecting a story. And, indeed, all of them were interested; La Grande herself thumped the table afresh to silence Hilarion, who was grunting, La Trouille having devised a little diversion by slyly sticking a pin into his arm.

“At Solferino ‘twas warm work; yet, gracious! how it rained! I hadn’t a dry thread on me; the water was running down my back and trickling into my shoes. Wet through we were, and no mistake!”

Everybody still waited, but he said no more about the battle. That was all he had seen of it. After a minute’s silence, however, he resumed in his matter-of-course way:

“Goodness me! War isn’t so bad as people think. The lot falls upon one, doesn’t it? and one must do one’s duty. I left the service because I liked other things better. But it may have its advantages for those who are sick of their trade, and who feel furious when the foe comes and tramples on us in France.”

“It’s a beastly thing, all the same,” wound up old Fouan. “Each man ought to defend his own homestead, and nothing more.”

A fresh silence fell. It was very warm, with a damp animal warmth, accentuated by the strong smell of the litter. One of the two cows got up and relieved herself, and the dung splashed down softly and rhythmically. From the gloom of the rafters came the melancholy chirp of a cricket, and along the walls the lissom fingers of the women, plying their knitting-needles, played in shadow to and fro, looking amid the darkness like gigantic spiders.

Palmyre, taking the snuffers to trim the candle with, snuffed it so low as to extinguish it. A tumult followed. The girls laughed, the children stuck their pin into poor Hilarion’s buttocks; and the meeting would have been quite upset if the candle brought by Hyacinthe and Bécu, who were nodding over their cards, had not served to re-kindle the other one, despite its long wick, which had swollen at the top into a kind of red mushroom. Conscience-stricken at her awkwardness, Palmyre quaked like a naughty child in terror of the lash.

“Come,” said Fouan, “who will read us a bit of this, to finish the evening? Corporal, you ought to read print very well, now!”

He had been to fetch a greasy little book, one of the books of Bonapartist propaganda with which the Empire had flooded the country-side. It had come out of a pedlar’s pack, and was a violent onslaught upon the old monarchy: a dramatised history of the peasant before and since the Revolution, with the lament-like title of “The Misfortune and Triumph of Jacques Bonhomme.”

Jean had taken the book, and instantly, without waiting to be pressed, he began to read in a colourless, stumbling, school­boy tone, heedless of punctuation. They listened to him devoutly.

He started with the free Gaul reduced to slavery by the Romans, and then vanquished by the Franks, who transformed slaves into serfs, by establishing the feudal system. Then began the protracted martyrdom of Jacques Bonhomme, tiller of the soil, slave-driven and worked to death, century after century. Many towns-people revolted, founding corporations and acquiring the right of citizenship, but the enthralled peasantry, isolated and dispossessed of everything, only managed to free themselves at a later period, buying their manhood and their liberty for money. And what a delusive liberty it was! They were overwhelmed by exorbitant and ruinous taxes; their rights of ownership were ceaselessly called into question, and the soil was burdened with so many charges as to leave one merely flints to feed upon! Next began the terrible enumeration of the impositions that lay so heavy on the poor peasant. No one could draw up a full and accurate list, the taxes poured in so abundantly from king, bishop, and baron all at once. Three beasts of prey tore at the same carcase. The king had the poll-tax and tallage, the bishop the tithes, the baron laid a tax on everything, and turned everything into gold. The peasant had nothing left him to call his own — neither earth, water, fire, nor even the air he breathed. He paid for this, and he paid for that; paid to live, paid to die; paid for his contracts, flocks, business, and pleasure. Paid for having the rain-water from the ditches diverted on to his grounds; paid for the highway dust kicked up by his sheep in the drought of summer. “Who ever could not pay was obliged to give his body and his time, tax­able and taskable without limit; forced to till the soil, to garner and reap, to trim the vines, clean out the château moat, make and repair the roads. Then there were the dues in kind; and the manor mill, oven, and wine-press, where he was forced to leave a quarter of his crop; and the imposition of watch and ward, which survived in money even after the demolition of the feudal keeps; and the imposition of shelter and purveyance, which, whenever the king or baron passed by, sacked the cot­tages, dragged mattresses and coverlets from beds, and drove the owner out of his house — lucky not to have his doors and windows torn from their fastenings if he were at all dilatory in turning out. But the most execrated imposition, the re­membrance of which still rankled in the hamlets, was the salt-tax; with public store-houses for salt, and every family rated at a certain quantity, which they were, willy-nilly, com­pelled to purchase of the king; and the system of collec­tion was so iniquitous and despotic that it roused France to rebellion and drowned her in blood.

“My father,” interrupted Fouan, “saw the time when salt was ninepence a pound. Truly, times were hard.”

Hyacinthe sniggered in his sleeve, and endeavoured to lay stress upon those indelicate rights to which the little book merely made a modest allusion.

“And how about the bridal rights, eh? My word! The baron popped his legs into the bride’s bed on the wedding night; and—”

They silenced him. The girls, even Lise, notwithstanding her rotundity of form, had reddened deeply; while La Trouille and the two brats, with their eyes turned downwards, were stuff­ing their fists into their mouths to restrain their laughter. Hilarion drank in every word open-mouthed, as if he under­stood it all.

Jean went on. He had now got to the administration of justice, the three-fold justice of king, bishop, and lord, which racked the poor folk toiling on the glebe. There was common law, there was statute law, and, above all, there was the arbitrary right of might. No safeguard, no appeal against the all-powerful sword. Even in the ages which followed, when equity put in a protest, judgeships were bought, and justice was sold. Worse still was the recruiting system: a blood-tax which, for a long time, was only levied upon the inferior rural classes. They fled into the woods, but were driven thence in chains, with musket-stocks, and enrolled like galley-slaves. Promotion was denied them. A younger son, nobly born, dealt in regiments as in goods he had paid for, sold the smaller posts to the highest bidder, and drove the rest of his human cattle to the shambles. Lastly came the hunting rights, rights of dove-cot and warren, which even now, although abolished, have left a fierce resentment in the peasant’s heart. The chase was an hereditary madness: an old feudal prerogative authorising the lord to hunt here and everywhere, and punishing with death the vassal audacious enough to hunt over his own ground. It was the caging under the open sky of the free beast and bird for the pleasure of one man. It was the grouping of fields into hunting-captaincies ravaged by game, without it being lawful for the peasant to bring down so much as a sparrow.

“That’s intelligible,” muttered Bécu, who would have fired at a poacher as soon as at a rabbit.

Hyacinthe had pricked up his ears, now that the hunting question was dealt with, and he slily whistled, as if to say that game belonged to those who knew how to kill it.

“Ah! dear me!” said Rose, simply, fetching a deep sigh.

They all felt the need of similar relief. The reading was gradually bearing heavy upon them, with the oppressive weight of a ghost story. Nor did they always understand, which doubled their uneasiness. Things having gone on like that in olden times, might easily become the same again.

“Go on, poor Jacques Bonhomme,” read Jean in his drawling, schoolboy way: “shedding your sweat and blood; you are not yet through your troubles.”

And the peasant’s Calvary was set forth. Everything was a source of suffering to him: mankind, the elements, his own self. Under the feudal system, when the nobles sallied forth to seek their prey, it was he who was hunted, tracked down, and made booty of. Every private war between lord and lord ruined if it did not slay him; his hut was burnt, his field laid waste. Later on came the “great companies,” — the worst of all the scourges that ever made our country districts desolate, — bands of adventurers at the beck and call of any one who would pay them; now for France, now against her, marking their passage with fire and sword, and leaving only bare earth behind them. The towns, thanks to their walls, might hold out, but the villages were swept away in that murderous madness which pervaded the centuries from end to end. There were centuries steeped in blood — centuries during which our unfortified districts never ceased to moan with pain: women were violated, children crushed to death, men hanged. Then, when war gave over, the king’s tax collectors made provision for the continued torture of the poor; for the number and the magnitude of the taxes were nothing in comparison to the wonderful and fearful method of their collection. Villain-tax and salt-tax were farmed out; injustice presided over the dis­tribution of all the impositions; armed troops extorted payment of treasury-dues in the same way as one might raise a contri­bution of war. Insomuch that scarcely any of the money ever reached the State coffers, being appropriated on its way, and dwindling more and more at every fresh pair of pilfering hands it passed through. Then famine interposed. The tyrannical folly of the law, causing the stagnation of com­merce and preventing the free sale of grain, produced terrible dearths every ten years or so, whenever the season was too hot or the rains were too prolonged, — dearths which seemed chastisements of Heaven. A storm flushing the rivers, a dry spring, the smallest cloud, the slightest sunbeam that marred the crops laid thousands of human beings low, involving agonies of starvation, a sudden and general rise of prices, and periods of awful anguish, during which men browsed like brute beasts on the grass of the ditches. After war and famine, fatal epidemics set in, and killed those whom the sword and hunger had spared. Corruption ever sprang forth anew from ignorance and uncleanliness: there was the great Black Death, whose gigantic spectre looms above the old time, mowing down with its sickle the wan, melancholy dwellers in the country districts. Then his burden being greater than he could bear, Jacques Bonhomme revolted. Behind him lay centuries of terrified submission, his shoulders inured to the last, his spirit so crushed that he felt not his own degradation. It was possible to beat and beat him; to famish him, and rob him of all he had, without rousing him from the timid stupor into which he had sunk, pondering confused thoughts that signified nothing even to himself. But some last injustice, some last anguish, made him suddenly spring at his master’s throat like a maddened, over-beaten domestic animal. So for ever, from century to century, the same exasperation bursts forth, and the Jacquerie arms the tillers of the soil with pitchfork and bill-hook, as soon as they have nothing left them but to die. There were the Chris­tian “Bagandes” of Gaul, the “Pastoureaux” of the Crusades, and in later times the “Croquants” and “Nu-pieds” who fell upon the nobles and royal soldiers. After four hundred years the cry of the Jacques, in their pain and wrath, was again to sweep over the desolate fields, and make the masters quake in their castle strongholds. What if they once more became angry, they who had numbers on their side? What if they claimed their share of worldly joy? And the vision of old sweeps by: Sturdy, half-clad, tattered hordes, mad with brutality and lust, spreading ruin and destruction, as they too had been ruined and destroyed, and violating in their turn the wives of others. “Calm thyself, dweller in the fields,” pursued Jean, in his placid, sedulous style, “for thy hour of triumph will soon strike from the clock of history.”