Complete Works of Emile Zola (1217 page)

The days wore on, monotonously, and that first week of the relapse was to Jean and Henriette the dreariest and saddest in all their long, unsought intimacy. Would their suffering never end? were they to hope for no surcease of misery, the danger always springing up afresh? At every moment their thoughts sped away to Maurice, from whom they had received no further word. They were told that others were getting letters, brief notes written on tissue paper and brought in by carrier-pigeons. Doubtless the bullet of some hated German had slain the messenger that, winging its way through the free air of heaven, was bringing them their missive of joy and love. Everything seemed to retire into dim obscurity, to die and be swallowed up in the depths of the premature winter. Intelligence of the war only reached them a long time after the occurrence of events, the few newspapers that Doctor Dalichamp still continued to supply them with were often a week old by the time they reached their hands. And their dejection was largely owing to their want of information, to what they did not know and yet instinctively felt to be the truth, to the prolonged death-wail that, spite of all, came to their ears across the frozen fields in the deep silence that lay upon the country.

One morning the doctor came to them in a condition of deepest discouragement. With a trembling hand he drew from his pocket a Belgian newspaper and threw it on the bed, exclaiming:

“Alas, my friends, poor France is murdered; Bazaine has played the traitor!”

Jean, who had been dozing, his back supported by a couple of pillows, suddenly became wide-awake.

“What, a traitor?”

“Yes, he has surrendered Metz and the army. It is the experience of Sedan over again, only this time they drain us of our last drop of life-blood.” Then taking up the paper and reading from it: “One hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, one hundred and fifty-three eagles and standards, one hundred and forty-one field guns, seventy-six machine guns, eight hundred casemate and barbette guns, three hundred thousand muskets, two thousand military train wagons, material for eighty-five batteries—”

And he went on giving further particulars: how Marshal Bazaine had been blockaded in Metz with the army, bound hand and foot, making no effort to break the wall of adamant that surrounded him; the doubtful relations that existed between him and Prince Frederick Charles, his indecision and fluctuating political combinations, his ambition to play a great role in history, but a role that he seemed not to have fixed upon himself; then all the dirty business of parleys and conferences, and the communications by means of lying, unsavory emissaries with Bismarck, King William and the Empress-regent, who in the end put her foot down and refused to negotiate with the enemy on the basis of a cession of territory; and, finally, the inevitable catastrophe, the completion of the web that destiny had been weaving, famine in Metz, a compulsory capitulation, officers and men, hope and courage gone, reduced to accept the bitter terms of the victor. France no longer had an army.

“In God’s name!” Jean ejaculated in a deep, low voice. He had not fully understood it all, but until then Bazaine had always been for him the great captain, the one man to whom they were to look for salvation. “What is left us to do now? What will become of them at Paris?”

The doctor was just coming to the news from Paris, which was of a disastrous character. He called their attention to the fact that the paper from which he was reading was dated November 5. The surrender of Metz had been consummated on the 27th of October, and the tidings were not known in Paris until the 30th. Coming, as it did, upon the heels of the reverses recently sustained at Chevilly, Bagneux and la Malmaison, after the conflict at Bourget and the loss of that position, the intelligence had burst like a thunderbolt over the desperate populace, angered and disgusted by the feebleness and impotency of the government of National Defense. And thus it was that on the following day, the 31st, the city was threatened with a general insurrection, an immense throng of angry men, a mob ripe for mischief, collecting on the Place de l’Hotel de Ville, whence they swarmed into the halls and public offices, making prisoners the members of the Government, whom the National Guard rescued later in the day only because they feared the triumph of those incendiaries who were clamoring for the commune. And the Belgian journal wound up with a few stinging comments on the great City of Paris, thus torn by civil war when the enemy was at its gates. Was it not the presage of approaching decomposition, the puddle of blood and mire that was to engulf a world?

“That’s true enough!” said Jean, whose face was very white. “They’ve no business to be squabbling when the Prussians are at hand!”

But Henriette, who had said nothing as yet, always making it her rule to hold her tongue when politics were under discussion, could not restrain a cry that rose from her heart. Her thoughts were ever with her brother.

“
Mon Dieu
, I hope that Maurice, with all the foolish ideas he has in his head, won’t let himself get mixed up in this business!”

They were all silent in their distress; and it was the doctor, who was ardently patriotic, who resumed the conversation.

“Never mind; if there are no more soldiers, others will grow. Metz has surrendered, Paris may surrender, even; but it don’t follow from that that France is wiped out. Yes, the strong-box is all right, as our peasants say, and we will live on in spite of all.”

It was clear, however, that he was hoping against hope. He spoke of the army that was collecting on the Loire, whose initial performances, in the neighborhood of Arthenay, had not been of the most promising; it would become seasoned and would march to the relief of Paris. His enthusiasm was aroused to boiling pitch by the proclamations of Gambetta, who had left Paris by balloon on the 7th of October and two days later established his headquarters at Tours, calling on every citizen to fly to arms, and instinct with a spirit at once so virile and so sagacious that the entire country gave its adhesion to the dictatorial powers assumed for the public safety. And was there not talk of forming another army in the North, and yet another in the East, of causing soldiers to spring from the ground by sheer force of faith? It was to be the awakening of the provinces, the creation of all that was wanting by exercise of indomitable will, the determination to continue the struggle until the last sou was spent, the last drop of blood shed.

“Bah!” said the doctor in conclusion as he arose to go, “I have many a time given up a patient, and a week later found him as lively as a cricket.”

Jean smiled. “Doctor, hurry up and make a well man of me, so I can go back to my post down yonder.”

But those evil tidings left Henriette and him in a terribly disheartened state. There came another cold wave, with snow, and when the next day Henriette came in shivering from the hospital she told her friend that Gutman was dead. The intense cold had proved fatal to many among the wounded; it was emptying the rows of beds. The miserable man whom the loss of his tongue had condemned to silence had lain two days in the throes of death. During his last hour she had remained seated at his bedside, unable to resist the supplication of his pleading gaze. He seemed to be speaking to her with his tearful eyes, trying to tell, it may be, his real name and the name of the village, so far away, where a wife and little ones were watching for his return. And he had gone from them a stranger, known of none, sending her a last kiss with his uncertain, stiffening fingers, as if to thank her once again for all her gentle care. She was the only one who accompanied the remains to the cemetery, where the frozen earth, the unfriendly soil of the stranger’s country, rattled with a dull, hollow sound on the pine coffin, mingled with flakes of snow.

The next day, again, Henriette said upon her return at evening:

“‘Poor boy’ is dead.” She could not keep back her tears at mention of his name. “If you could but have seen and heard him in his pitiful delirium! He kept calling me: ‘Mamma! mamma!’ and stretched his poor thin arms out to me so entreatingly that I had to take him on my lap. His suffering had so wasted him that he was no heavier than a boy of ten, poor fellow. And I held and soothed him, so that he might die in peace; yes, I held him in my arms, I whom he called his mother and who was but a few years older than himself. He wept, and I myself could not restrain my tears; you can see I am weeping still—” Her utterance was choked with sobs; she had to pause. “Before his death he murmured several times the name which he had given himself: ‘Poor boy, poor boy!’ Ah, how just the designation! poor boys they are indeed, some of them so young and all so brave, whom your hateful war maims and mangles and causes to suffer so before they are laid away at last in their narrow bed!”

Never a day passed now but Henriette came in at night in this anguished state, caused by some new death, and the suffering of others had the effect of bringing them together even more closely still during the sorrowful hours that they spent, secluded from all the world, in the silent, tranquil chamber. And yet those hours were full of sweetness, too, for affection, a feeling which they believed to be a brother’s and sister’s love, had sprung up in those two hearts which little by little had come to know each other’s worth. To him, with his observant, thoughtful nature, their long intimacy had proved an elevating influence, while she, noting his unfailing kindness of heart and evenness of temper, had ceased to remember that he was one of the lowly of the earth and had been a tiller of the soil before he became a soldier. Their understanding was perfect; they made a very good couple, as Silvine said with her grave smile. There was never the least embarrassment between them; when she dressed his leg the calm serenity that dwelt in the eyes of both was undisturbed. Always attired in black, in her widow’s garments, it seemed almost as if she had ceased to be a woman.

But during those long afternoons when Jean was left to himself he could not help giving way to speculation. The sentiment he experienced for his friend was one of boundless gratitude, a sort of religious reverence, which would have made him repel the idea of love as if it were a sort of sacrilege. And yet he told himself that had he had a wife like her, so gentle, so loving, so helpful, his life would have been an earthly paradise. His great misfortune, his unhappy marriage, the evil years he had spent at Rognes, his wife’s tragic end, all the sad past, arose before him with a softened feeling of regret, with an undefined hope for the future, but without distinct purpose to try another effort to master happiness. He closed his eyes and dropped off into a doze, and then he had a confused vision of being at Remilly, married again and owner of a bit of land, sufficient to support a family of honest folks whose wants were not extravagant. But it was all a dream, lighter than thistle-down; he knew it could never, never be. He believed his heart to be capable of no emotion stronger than friendship, he loved Henriette as he did solely because he was Maurice’s brother. And then that vague dream of marriage had come to be in some measure a comfort to him, one of those fancies of the imagination that we know is never to be realized and with which we fondle ourselves in our hours of melancholy.

For her part, such thoughts had never for a moment presented themselves to Henriette’s mind. Since the day of the horrible tragedy at Bazeilles her bruised heart had lain numb and lifeless in her bosom, and if consolation in the shape of a new affection had found its way thither, it could not be otherwise than without her knowledge; the latent movement of the seed deep-buried in the earth, which bursts its sheath and germinates, unseen of human eye. She failed even to perceive the pleasure it afforded her to remain for hours at a time by Jean’s bedside, reading to him those newspapers that never brought them tidings save of evil. Never had her pulses beat more rapidly at the touch of his hand, never had she dwelt in dreamy rapture on the vision of the future with a longing to be loved once more. And yet it was in that chamber alone that she found comfort and oblivion. When she was there, busying herself with noiseless diligence for her patient’s well-being, she was at peace; it seemed to her that soon her brother would return and all would be well, they would all lead a life of happiness together and never more be parted. And it appeared to her so natural that things should end thus that she talked of their relations without the slightest feeling of embarrassment, without once thinking to question her heart more closely, unaware that she had already made the chaste surrender of it.

But as she was on the point of leaving for the hospital one afternoon she looked into the kitchen as she passed and saw there a Prussian captain and two other officers, and the icy terror that filled her at the sight, then, for the first time, opened her eyes to the deep affection she had conceived for Jean. It was plain that the men had heard of the wounded man’s presence at the farm and were come to claim him; he was to be torn from them and led away captive to the dungeon of some dark fortress deep in Germany. She listened tremblingly, her heart beating tumultuously.

The captain, a big, stout man, who spoke French with scarce a trace of foreign accent, was rating old Fouchard soundly.

“Things can’t go on in this way; you are not dealing squarely by us. I came myself to give you warning, once for all, that if the thing happens again I shall take other steps to remedy it; and I promise you the consequences will not be agreeable.”

Though entirely master of all his faculties the old scamp assumed an air of consternation, pretending not to understand, his mouth agape, his arms describing frantic circles on the air.

“How is that, sir, how is that?”

“Oh, come, there’s no use attempting to pull the wool over my eyes; you know perfectly well that the three beeves you sold me on Sunday last were rotten — yes, diseased, and rotten through and through; they must have been where there was infection, for they poisoned my men; there are two of them in such a bad way that they may be dead by this time for all I know.”

Fouchard’s manner was expressive of virtuous indignation. “What, my cattle diseased! why, there’s no better meat in all the country; a sick woman might feed on it to build her up!” And he whined and sniveled, thumping himself on the chest and calling God to witness he was an honest man; he would cut off his right hand rather than sell bad meat. For more than thirty years he had been known throughout the neighborhood, and not a living soul could say he had ever been wronged in weight or quality. “They were as sound as a dollar, sir, and if your men had the belly-ache it was because they ate too much — unless some villain hocussed the pot—”