Germinal (69 page)

But at the Maheus' he was greeted by a scene which shocked
him even more. Old Bonnemort was sitting near the empty fireplace, rooted to his chair ever since the day of the slaughter, when two neighbours had found him slumped on the ground beside his broken stick, felled like an old tree that has been struck by lightning. Lénore and Henri, by way of cheating their hunger, were making a deafening racket scraping an old saucepan in which cabbage had been boiled the night before; and La Maheude, having set Estelle down on the table, was standing there brandishing her fist at Catherine:

‘You what? In God's name, what did you just say?'

Catherine had declared her intention of returning to work at Le Voreux. The thought of not earning her living, of being tolerated like this at her mother's as though she were some useless animal that was only in the way, was becoming more and more unbearable with each day that passed; and if she hadn't been afraid of further trouble from Chaval, she would already have gone back on Tuesday. She continued haltingly:

‘What else is there? We can't just do nothing and expect to live. At least we'll have something to eat.'

La Maheude broke in:

‘You just listen to me. I'll strangle the first one of you that goes back to work. No, really, it's too much. So they can kill the father and then go on exploiting the children just like before? I'm not having it, I tell you. I'd rather see you all carried out in a box, same as him that's already gone.'

And her long silence was rent by a furious torrent of words. Some improvement that would be, the paltry sum that Catherine would bring in! Thirty sous at most, plus a further twenty if the bosses would be so kind as to find a job for that little thief Jeanlin. Fifty sous, and seven mouths to feed! And of course all the little ones ever did was eat. And as for Grandpa, he must have damaged his brain when he fell, for he seemed to have lost his wits; or else it was the shock of seeing the soldiers firing on the comrades.

‘Isn't that right, Grandpa? They've finished you off, eh? You might still have strength in your arms, but you're done for.'

Bonnemort gazed uncomprehendingly at her from expressionless eyes. He would sit for hours like this just staring
ahead of him, capable only of spitting into a dish filled with ash which they placed beside him, for cleanliness' sake.

‘They still haven't sorted out his pension yet,' she went on, ‘and I know they're going to refuse it, because of our views…No, it's too much. I've had it with the whole bloody lot of them!'

‘But,' ventured Catherine, ‘on the notice they promise – '

‘To hell with the notice!…Just more tricks to trap us and eat us for breakfast. They can afford to be all sweetness and light now they've put their bullets through us.'

‘But then where shall we go, Mum? They won't let us stay in the village, that's for sure.'

La Maheude gestured in a wild, indeterminate way. Where would they go? She had no idea and tried not to think about it, for it made her head spin. They would go somewhere else, anywhere. And as the noise of the saucepan finally became unbearable, she rounded on Lénore and Henri and smacked them. Estelle, who had been crawling around on the table, fell off and added to the din. By way of comforting her, La Maheude gave her a good whack and told her she'd have done better to have killed herself outright. She started talking about Alzire and about how she wished the rest of them might be as fortunate. Then suddenly she began to sob and pressed her head against the wall.

Still standing there, Étienne had not dared to intervene. He counted for nothing in the household now, even the children backed away from him in distrust. But the tears of this unhappy woman were breaking his heart, and he said softly:

‘Come now, steady. We'll pull through somehow.'

She appeared not to hear him and poured out her sorrow in a low, continuous lament.

‘Heaven help us, how is it possible? We used to manage all right, before these terrible things. The bread was stale, but at least we were all together…But how did it happen, for God's sake? What did we do to deserve this grief, with some of us in our graves and the rest of us dearly wishing that we were too?…And yet it's true, they used to treat us like workhorses, and it just wasn't right that we should be whipped for our pains while we were busy swelling the coffers of the rich, and with no
chance of ever tasting the good things in life for ourselves. The pleasure goes out of living when there's nothing to hope for any more. No indeed, things couldn't go on like that any longer, we deserved some respite…But if only we'd known! How is it possible to have made ourselves so wretched when all we wanted was justice!'

Her chest rose with each sigh, and her voice was strangulated by an immense sadness.

‘And then there are always the people who know better, promising you that everything can be sorted out if you'll just make that little bit of effort…And you get carried away, you're suffering so much because of what does exist that you start wanting what doesn't. And there was I dreaming away like a fool, imagining a life where everyone was friends with everyone else. Floating on air I was, no question about it, with my head in the clouds. And then you fall flat on your face again, and you hurt all over…It wasn't true, all those things you thought you could see were just not there. What was really there was simply more misery, oh yes, as much misery as you could possibly want, and then getting shot into the bargain!'

As Étienne listened to this lamentation, he felt a pang of remorse with each tear that fell. He didn't know what to say to comfort La Maheude, who was utterly bruised by her terrible fall from the summit of the ideal. She had returned into the middle of the room, where she now stood looking at him; and in a final surge of rage she addressed him without ceremony:

‘And what about you? Are you planning to go back to the pit, now that you've landed us all in the shit?…Not that I blame you, of course. Only if it was me, I'd have died of shame long ago for having brought so much harm on my friends.'

He was going to reply, but instead he just shrugged in despair: why bother to offer explanations which in her grief she would not understand? It was all too much to bear, and so he departed once more on one of his sorry walks.

Again it was as though the village was waiting for him, the men on their doorsteps, the women at their windows. As soon as he appeared, the muttering started and a crowd began to gather. A storm of whispering had been brewing for the past
four days, and now it broke in universal condemnation. Fists were raised in his direction, mothers pointed him out to their sons with gestures of reproach, and old men spat when they saw him. Here was the sudden reversal in sentiment that follows on the heels of a defeat, the inevitable other side of popularity, a hatred fuelled by all the suffering endured to no purpose. He was being made to pay for the hunger and the deaths.

Zacharie, arriving with Philomène, bumped into Étienne as he was leaving and sneered:

‘Blimey, he's getting fatter! Must be cos he feeds off the rest of us.'

Already La Levaque had stepped out on to her doorstep, with Bouteloup. Mindful of Bébert, her boy who had been killed by a bullet, she shouted:

‘Yeah, there are some cowards about the place who like to get the children slaughtered instead. If he wants to give me mine back, he'd better go and dig him out of the ground.'

She had forgotten all about her imprisoned husband, and her household was no longer on strike since Bouteloup was working. Nevertheless the thought of Levaque did now suddenly occur to her, and she continued in a shrill voice:

‘Shame on you! It's only the villains that walk about as they like when the good men are locked up inside!'

In trying to avoid her Étienne had run into La Pierronne, who was arriving in a hurry across the gardens. She had welcomed her mother's death as a blessed relief, for her violent behaviour had threatened to get them all hanged. Nor did she grieve over the loss of Pierron's daughter, that little minx Lydie. Good riddance! But she now sided with her neighbours, hoping to patch things up with them:

‘And what about my mother? And the little girl? Everybody saw you hiding behind them when they stopped all those bullets that were meant for you!'

What should he do? Throttle La Pierronne and the other women, take on the whole village? For a moment Étienne felt like doing just that. The blood was throbbing in his head, and he now considered the comrades little better than dumb animals. He was irritated by their primitiveness and the lack of intelligence
that had led them to blame him for the logic of events. How stupid could you get! In his inability to influence them any more he felt disgust for them; and he simply quickened his step, as if deaf to their abuse. But soon he was in headlong flight, with each household booing him as he passed, and people chasing after him, a whole crowd cursing him in a thunderous crescendo as their hatred spilled over. He was the one, the one who had exploited them, the one who had murdered them, the unique cause of all their wretchedness. Pale and frightened, Étienne ran from the village with the screaming horde at his heels. Eventually, once they were out on the open road, many stopped chasing; but a few were still after him when, at the bottom of the hill, outside the Advantage, he met another group coming out of Le Voreux.

Old Mouque and Chaval were among them. Since the death of La Mouquette, his daughter, and of his son, Mouquet, the old man had continued to work on as a stableman without a word of regret or complaint. But suddenly, on catching sight of Étienne, he was seized with fury; tears streamed from his eyes, and a torrent of bad language came pouring out of his mouth, which was black and bleeding from chewing tobacco:

‘You bastard! You shit! You sodding, fucking bastard!…Just you wait! You're damn well going to pay me back for my poor bloody children! It's your turn now.'

He picked up a brick, broke it in two, and threw both pieces at Étienne.

‘Yeah, come on, let's get rid of the scum!' sneered Chaval loudly, overjoyed at this opportunity for revenge and in a lather of excitement. ‘We'll take it in turns…There, how does that feel to have your back to the wall, you filthy piece of shit!'

And he too attacked Étienne, with stones. A wild clamour broke out, and everybody picked up bricks and started breaking them and throwing them. They wanted to slaughter him, as though it was the soldiers themselves they were slaughtering. Dazed and bewildered, Étienne ceased his attempts at escape and turned to face them, trying to placate them with his words. His old speeches, which had previously been so warmly acclaimed, sprang once more to his lips. He repeated the phrases
with which he had turned the heads of his loyal followers in the days when they had listened to him with rapt attention; but his power had gone, and the only response was brickbats. He had just been hit on the left arm and was backing away, in some considerable danger, when he found himself pinned against the front wall of the Advantage.

Rasseneur had recently appeared on his doorstep.

‘Come in,' he said simply.

Étienne hesitated. It galled him to take refuge there.

‘Come in, for goodness' sake. I'll speak to them.'

Étienne accepted reluctantly and hid at the far end of the saloon while Rasseneur blocked the doorway with his broad shoulders.

‘Now then, my friends, easy does it…You know that I at least have never let you down. I've always been one for the softly softly approach, and if you'd listened to me, there is no doubt that you would not be in the position you're all in now.'

Shoulders back and belly out, he spoke at length, letting his undemanding eloquence pour forth with the soothing gentleness of warm water. And once more he succeeded as of old, effortlessly regaining his former popularity, quite naturally, as though only one month ago the comrades had never booed him or called him a coward. Voices shouted their approval. Hear, hear! You can count on us! That's the stuff! There was a thunderous burst of applause.

Standing in the background, Étienne felt sickened, and his heart was filled with bitterness. He remembered Rasseneur's prediction in the forest when he had warned him about the ingratitude of the crowd. What mindless brutality! How appalling it was, the way they had forgotten everything he had done for them! They were like a blind force constantly feeding on itself. But beneath his anger at seeing these brutes wrecking their own cause there lay despair at his own collapse, at the tragic end of his own ambitions. So that was it? It was all over? He remembered the occasion, under the beech trees, when he had listened to three thousand hearts beating in time with his own. That day he had been in control of his popularity, these people had belonged to him, he had felt himself to be their master.
Then he had been drunk on wild dreams: Montsou at his feet, Paris beckoning, perhaps election to the Chamber of Deputies, lambasting the bourgeois with his oratory, the first parliamentary speech ever made by a working man. And now it was all over! Now he had awoken from the dream, wretched and hated, and his people had just thrown bricks at him and banished him from their midst.

Rasseneur's voice grew louder.

‘Violence has never succeeded. You can't remake the world in a single day. Those who promised you they could change things at a stroke were either fools or rogues.'

‘Hear, hear!' cried the crowd.

So who
was
to blame? For Étienne this question, which he had never ceased to ask himself, was the last straw. Was it really his fault, all this suffering – which affected him too after all –this poverty, the shooting, these emaciated women and children who had no bread to eat? He had once had a dire vision of this kind, one evening before everything began to go wrong. But at that stage he had already felt buoyed up by some external force, which had carried him away with the rest of the comrades. Besides, it had never been a case of his telling them what to do; rather it was they who had led him, forcing him to do things that he would never have done on his own without the pressure of the mob urging him on from behind. With each new act of violence he had been left stunned by the outcome, which he had neither sought nor foreseen. How could he have ever predicted, for example, that one day his loyal flock from the village would actually stone him? These madmen were lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of leisure and plenty to eat. Yet behind his attempts at self-justification, behind all the arguments with which he tried to combat his remorse, lay the unspoken fear that he had not been equal to his task and the niggling doubt of the semi-educated man who realizes that he doesn't know the half of it. But he had run out of courage, and he no longer felt the same bond with the comrades, indeed he was afraid of them, of the huge, blind, irresistible mass that is the people, passing like a force of nature and sweeping away everything in its path, beyond the compass of rule or theory. He
had begun to view them with distaste and had gradually grown apart from them, as his more refined tastes made him feel ill at ease in their company, and as his whole nature slowly began to aspire towards membership of a higher class.