Germinal (55 page)

On entering the bedroom, M. Hennebeau was taken aback: the room had not been attended to, presumably because Hippolyte had either forgotten or been too lazy to do so. The room seemed warm and clammy, stuffy from having been shut up all night, especially as the door of the stove had been left open; and his nostrils were assailed by a strong, suffocating smell of perfume that he thought must be coming from the wash-basin, which had not been emptied. The room was extremely untidy: clothes lay scattered about, wet towels had been tossed over the backs of chairs, the bed was unmade, and one sheet had been pulled half off on to the floor. But at first he barely took all this in, as he made for the table covered in papers and searched for the missing note. He went through them twice, examining each one, but it was plainly not there. What the devil had that scatterbrain Paul done with it?

As M. Hennebeau returned to the middle of the room, casting an eye over each piece of furniture, his attention was caught by a speck of brightness in the middle of the unmade bed, something glowing like a spark. Without thinking he went over, and his hand reached out. There, between two creases in the sheet, was a small gold scent-bottle. In an instant he had recognized it as
one of Mme Hennebeau's, the phial of ether which she always carried with her. But he could not explain how this object came to be here: what was it doing in Paul's bed? Suddenly he turned deathly pale. His wife had slept here.

‘Excuse me,' came Hippolyte's low voice through the doorway, ‘I saw Monsieur come up and…'

The servant had come in and was filled with consternation at the state of the room.

‘Heavens! Of course! The room's not been cleaned. It's that Rose going out and leaving me to do everything!'

M. Hennebeau had hidden the bottle in his hand, and he was clutching it so tightly that he might have broken it.

‘What do you want?'

‘Monsieur, there's another man downstairs…He's come from Crèvecœur, with a letter.'

‘Very well, you may go. Kindly tell him to wait.'

His wife had slept here! Once he had bolted the door, he unclenched his fist and looked at the bottle, which had left a red mark on his skin. Suddenly he understood, he saw it all, this abominable thing that had been going on under his roof for months past. He recalled his former suspicion, the sound of clothes brushing past the door, of bare feet padding through the silent house in the middle of the night. It had indeed been his wife, on her way to sleep up here.

Slumped on a chair and staring at the bed opposite, he remained for several minutes as though poleaxed. A noise roused him, somebody was knocking at the door and trying to open it. He recognized the servant's voice.

‘Monsieur…Ah, Monsieur has locked the door…'

‘What is it now?'

‘Apparently it's urgent, the workers are smashing everything. There are two more men downstairs. And some telegrams have arrived.'

‘Leave me be! I'll be down in a moment.'

The terrible thought had just occurred to him that Hippolyte would have found the bottle himself if he had cleaned the room that morning. In fact the servant probably knew already, there must have been dozens of times when he had found the bed still
warm from their adultery, with Madame's hairs on the pillow and unmentionable stains on the bed-linen. If he insisted on disturbing him like this, it was no doubt with malicious intent. Perhaps he had even listened at the door and been aroused by the sound of debauchery coming from his mistress and young master.

M. Hennebeau sat on. He continued to stare, his eyes never leaving the bed. The long years of unhappiness passed before him, his marriage to this woman, their instant incompatibility of body and heart, the lovers she had had without his knowing who they were, and the one he had tolerated for ten years the way one tolerates some unwholesome craving in a person who is ill. Then there had been the move to Montsou and his foolish hope that he might cure her, by the months spent languishing in this sleepy exile and by the advancing years that would finally bring her back to him. Then their nephew turns up, this Paul to whom she had started playing mother, and to whom she had spoken about her heart being dead to passion, a cinder beneath the ashes. And there was he, the idiot husband who failed to see it coming, adoring this woman who was rightfully his, whom other men had possessed and whom only he was not allowed to have! He adored her with a shameful passion, to the extent that he would have fallen on his knees before her if she had deigned to give him what was left over after all the others! But what was left over was now being given to this child.

At that moment the distant sound of a bell made him start. He recognized it as the signal he had ordered to be given when the postman arrived. He stood up and exclaimed aloud, as in his pain a stream of foul language poured unbidden from his lips:

‘They can go to hell! They can go to fucking hell with their telegrams and their letters!'

He was now filled with rage and felt as though he had need of a cesspit into which he could have trodden all this filth under the heel of his boot. The woman was a slut, and he searched for other crude words with which to defile her image. Suddenly remembering the marriage that she was seeking, so sweetly and calmly, to engineer between Cécile and Paul, he quite lost
patience. Wasn't there even any passion, any jealousy, in this perennial lust of hers? It had become no more than a depraved form of play, the mere habit of having a man, a pastime engaged in with the regularity of pudding at the end of a meal. He laid all the blame on her and in the process almost exonerated the young man to whom she had thus attached herself in this reawakening of her appetites, like someone reaching out to plunder the first unripe fruit encountered on a country walk. Whom would she consume next, how much lower would she stoop, when she could no longer call on obliging nephews sufficiently pragmatic to accept this household regime of free board, free lodging and a free wife?

There was a timid scratching at the door, and the sound of Hippolyte's voice could be heard as he ventured to whisper through the keyhole:

‘Monsieur, the post…And Monsieur Dansaert has come back, he says people are killing each other…'

‘I'm coming, God damn it!'

What was he going to do to them? Throw them out of the house the moment they returned from Marchiennes, as though they were smelly animals he no longer wanted under his roof? Grab a large stick and scream at them to take their filthy coupling elsewhere? It was their mingled breath and their pleasured sighs that had made the air so heavy in this warm, clammy room; the pungent odour that had taken his breath away was the scent of musk from his wife's skin, this bodily need for very strong perfume being yet another of her perverse tastes; and for him it was the warm smell of fornication, of real flesh-and-blood adultery, which rose from the scattered chamberpots and the unemptied basins, from the unmade bed and the untidy furniture, from every inch of this room that reeked of vice. In his impotent fury he threw himself on the bed and pounded it with his fists, savaging it, pummelling the places where he could identify the imprint of their bodies, and driven wilder still when the discarded blankets and the crumpled sheets remained soft and unresponsive beneath his fists, as though they too were exhausted after a night of passion.

But suddenly he thought he heard Hippolyte coming back
upstairs again. Ashamed of himself, he stopped. He remained motionless for a moment, panting and mopping his forehead as he waited for his pulse to slow. Having stood to look at himself in the mirror, he gazed at his face, its features so distorted that he no longer recognized it. He observed them slowly resume an air of calm and then, by a supreme act of will, he went downstairs.

Below, five messengers were standing waiting, in addition to M. Dansaert. Each brought increasingly worrying news about the strikers' march through the pits; and the overman gave him a long account of the events at Mirou, which had been saved by the stout action of old Quandieu. He listened, nodded, but took nothing in; his thoughts were still on the bedroom upstairs. Eventually he bid them good day, saying that he would take the appropriate measures. When he was alone again, seated at his desk, he seemed to doze off, with his head buried in his hands and his eyes covered. His post was lying there, and he roused himself to look for the expected letter of reply from the Board. But the words swam before his eyes. At length, however, he grasped that these gentlemen were hoping for violent incidents: not that they were instructing him to aggravate the situation, of course, but they did imply that disturbances would hasten the end of the strike by provoking firm action to contain them. With that he ceased to hesitate and sent telegrams off in all directions, to the Prefect in Lille, to the garrison at Douai, to the gendarmerie at Marchiennes. It was a great relief, and now all he had to do was lie low, indeed he let it be thought that he was suffering from an attack of gout. And throughout the afternoon he hid himself away in his study, refusing to see anyone and content merely to read the telegrams and letters that continued to arrive by the dozen. In this manner he followed the mob at a distance as they proceeded from Madeleine to Crèvecœur, from Crèvecœur to La Victoire, and from La Victoire to Gaston-Marie. At the same time he received news of the disarray of the gendarmes and the dragoons as they were misled by false information and kept finding themselves heading in the opposite direction from the pits that were being attacked. But they could all kill each other and destroy what they pleased, for he had put his head
back in his hands, his fingers over his eyes, and now lost himself in the great silence of the empty house, hearing only the occasional clatter of a saucepan as the cook busied herself mightily for the dinner party ahead.

It was five o'clock and dusk was already filling the room when a loud noise made M. Hennebeau jump, and he sat there dazed and motionless, his elbows on his papers. He thought that the wretched pair must have returned. But the commotion grew louder, and a terrible shout went up just as he approached the window:

‘We want bread! We want bread!'

It was the strikers invading Montsou, just as the gendarmes, thinking they were headed for Le Voreux, were racing off in the opposite direction to occupy it.

At that very moment, some two kilometres beyond the first houses in Montsou and just before the crossroads where the road to Vandame met the main highway, Mme Hennebeau and the two young ladies had been watching the mob file past. Their day out in Marchiennes had been a jolly one: they had had a pleasant lunch at the house of the manager of Les Forges, followed by an interesting tour of the workshops and a visit to a neighbouring glass factory, which had taken care of the afternoon; and then, as they were making their way home through the clear twilight of this bright winter's day, Cécile had noticed a small farmstead at the side of the road and taken a fancy to a cup of milk. The women had all stepped down from the carriage, and Négrel had gallantly dismounted to accompany them. Meanwhile the farmer's wife, flustered at being visited by gentry, rushed about and declared that she must put a cloth on the table before she could serve them. But Lucie and Jeanne wanted to see the cow being milked, and so they had all gone to the cowshed with their cups; it was almost like going on a picnic, and they laughed with delight as their feet sank into the straw.

Mme Hennebeau was rather warily sipping her milk with the air of an indulgent mother when she became alarmed by a strange roaring noise outside.

‘What's that?'

The barn stood right at the edge of the road and had large double doors, for it also served for storing hay. Already the girls had poked their heads out and, on looking left, were astonished to see a screaming horde of people pouring out of the Vandame road like a black river.

‘Oh God!' muttered Négrel, who had also gone out to look. ‘Don't say our troublesome miners are turning nasty.'

‘It must be the folk from the mines,' said the farmer's wife. ‘They've been past twice already. It seems things aren't too good at the minute, and they mean to show who's boss.'

She spoke each word cautiously, watching for the reaction on their faces; and when she saw how alarmed everyone was and how deeply anxious the encounter had made them, she hastily concluded:

‘Ruffians, the lot of them. Ruffians.'

Négrel, seeing that it was too late to get back to the carriage and drive into Montsou, ordered the coachman to hurry and bring it into the farmyard, where they hid it still harnessed behind a shed. He took his own horse, which a young lad had been holding, and tethered it inside the shed. When he returned, he found his aunt and the young ladies quite distraught and ready to accept the suggestion from the farmer's wife that they take refuge in her house. But Négrel thought that they would be safer where they were, since no one would ever think to come looking for them among the hay. The barn doors did not shut properly, however, and there were also such large gaps in its rotten wood that the road was perfectly visible.

‘Come now, we must have courage. We shall sell our lives dearly!'

This joke made everyone even more afraid. The noise was growing louder, but there was still nothing to be seen; and out on the empty road it was as though a great gust of wind was blowing, like the sudden squalls that precede great storms.

‘No, no, I don't want to look,' said Cécile, as she went to hide in the hay.

Mme Hennebeau, who now looked very pale, was angry that people should spoil her fun like this, and she stood well back, her gaze averted with an air of distaste; while Lucie and Jeanne,
though they were trembling, each had one eye glued to a chink in the door, anxious not to miss the show.

The rumble of thunder drew nearer, the ground shook, and Jeanlin appeared first, racing along in front and busily blowing his horn.

‘Scent-bottles at the ready, ladies. The sweaty masses are nigh!' whispered Négrel, who, despite his republican leanings, liked to mock the common man when he was in the company of the ladies.