Read Complete Works of Emile Zola Online
Authors: Émile Zola
Complete Works of Emile Zola (1235 page)
With a slow and painful effort Jean rose from his knees.
“Farewell!”
Henriette stood motionless in her place.
“Farewell!”
But Jean could not tear himself away thus. Advancing to the bedside he sorrowfully scanned the dead man’s face, with its lofty forehead that seemed loftier still in death, its wasted features, its dull eyes, whence the wild look that had occasionally been seen there in life had vanished. He longed to give a parting kiss to his little one, as he had called him so many times, but dared not. It seemed to him that his hands were stained with his friend’s blood; he shrank from the horror of the ordeal. Ah, what a death to die, amid the crashing ruins of a sinking world! On the last day, among the shattered fragments of the dying Commune, might not this last victim have been spared? He had gone from life, hungering for justice, possessed by the dream that haunted him, the sublime and unattainable conception of the destruction of the old society, of Paris chastened by fire, of the field dug up anew, that from the soil thus renewed and purified might spring the idyl of another golden age.
His heart overflowing with bitter anguish, Jean turned and looked out on Paris. The setting sun lay on the edge of the horizon, and its level rays bathed the city in a flood of vividly red light. The windows in thousands of houses flamed as if lighted by fierce fires within; the roofs glowed like beds of live coals; bits of gray wall and tall, sober-hued monuments flashed in the evening air with the sparkle of a brisk fire of brushwood. It was like the show-piece that is reserved for the conclusion of a
fete
, the huge bouquet of gold and crimson, as if Paris were burning like a forest of old oaks and soaring heavenward in a rutilant cloud of sparks and flame. The fires were burning still; volumes of reddish smoke continued to rise into the air; a confused murmur in the distance sounded on the ear, perhaps the last groans of the dying Communists at the Lobau barracks, or it may have been the happy laughter of women and children, ending their pleasant afternoon by dining in the open air at the doors of the wine-shops. And in the midst of all the splendor of that royal sunset, while a large part of Paris was crumbling away in ashes, from plundered houses and gutted palaces, from the torn-up streets, from the depths of all that ruin and suffering, came sounds of life.
Then Jean had a strange experience. It seemed to him that in the slowly fading daylight, above the roofs of that flaming city, he beheld the dawning of another day. And yet the situation might well be considered irretrievable. Destiny appeared to have pursued them with her utmost fury; the successive disasters they had sustained were such as no nation in history had ever known before; defeat treading on the heels of defeat, their provinces torn from them, an indemnity of milliards to be raised, a most horrible civil war that had been quenched in blood, their streets cumbered with ruins and unburied corpses, without money, their honor gone, and order to be re-established out of chaos! His share of the universal ruin was a heart lacerated by the loss of Maurice and Henriette, the prospect of a happy future swept away in the furious storm! And still, beyond the flames of that furnace whose fiery glow had not subsided yet, Hope, the eternal, sat enthroned in the limpid serenity of the tranquil heavens. It was the certain assurance of the resurrection of perennial nature, of imperishable humanity; the harvest that is promised to him who sows and waits; the tree throwing out a new and vigorous shoot to replace the rotten limb that has been lopped away, which was blighting the young leaves with its vitiated sap.
“Farewell!” Jean repeated with a sob.
“Farewell!” murmured Henriette, her bowed face hidden in her hands.
The neglected field was overgrown with brambles, the roof-tree of the ruined house lay on the ground; and Jean, bearing his heavy burden of affliction with humble resignation, went his way, his face set resolutely toward the future, toward the glorious and arduous task that lay before him and his countrymen, to create a new France.
THE END
DOCTOR PASCAL
Translated by Mary J. Serrano
Le Docteur Pascal
is the concluding novel of the
Rougon-Macquart
series, first published in June 1893 by Charpentier. The novel opens in 1872, after the fall of the Second Empire and the end of the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. The novel’s protagonist is Pascal Rougon, the son of Pierre and Félicité Rougon, whose rise to power in the fictional town of Plassans was detailed in the first novel of the series.
In the narrative, Pascal has been a physician in Plassans for over thirty years, whilst having spent his time observing and chronicling the lives of his family based on his theories of heredity. Pascal believes that everyone’s physical and mental health and development can be classified by the interplay between their ‘innateness’ (characteristics based on difference) and their ‘heredity’ (similarity). Using his own family as a case study, Pascal classifies the thirty descendants of his grandmother Adelaïde Fouque,
Tante Dide
, based on this model, revealing by extension Zola’s own theory of how heredity and environment affect the nature of all human beings.
In the novel Pascal has developed a serum that he hopes will cure hereditary and nervous diseases, improving and perhaps prolonging life. His niece Clotilde fears that Pascal’s work questions the power of God, foolishly attempting to comprehend the unknowable. She encourages her uncle to destroy his work, but he refuses, revealing his own heredity quality of obsessive passion. Pascal explains his goal as a scientist as laying the groundwork for happiness and peace by seeking and uncovering the truth, which he believes can be found in the science of heredity. After he shows her the Rougon-Macquart family tree and demonstrates his beliefs, Clotilde begins to agree with the purpose of his lifelong work.
As the culminating novel of the series,
Le Docteur Pascal
also resolves the fates of the remaining family members’ lives that have been charted in the nineteen previous novels. Being the only novel in the series to feature all five generations of the family, Zola effectively concludes his monumental objective: the study how heredity affects the lives of descendants.
The Rougon-Macquart family tree
CONTENTS
XIV.
I.
In the heat of the glowing July afternoon, the room, with blinds carefully closed, was full of a great calm. From the three windows, through the cracks of the old wooden shutters, came only a few scattered sunbeams which, in the midst of the obscurity, made a soft brightness that bathed surrounding objects in a diffused and tender light. It was cool here in comparison with the overpowering heat that was felt outside, under the fierce rays of the sun that blazed upon the front of the house.
Standing before the press which faced the windows, Dr. Pascal was looking for a paper that he had come in search of. With doors wide open, this immense press of carved oak, adorned with strong and handsome mountings of metal, dating from the last century, displayed within its capacious depths an extraordinary collection of papers and manuscripts of all sorts, piled up in confusion and filling every shelf to overflowing. For more than thirty years the doctor had thrown into it every page he wrote, from brief notes to the complete texts of his great works on heredity. Thus it was that his searches here were not always easy. He rummaged patiently among the papers, and when he at last found the one he was looking for, he smiled.
For an instant longer he remained near the bookcase, reading the note by a golden sunbeam that came to him from the middle window. He himself, in this dawnlike light, appeared, with his snow-white hair and beard, strong and vigorous; although he was near sixty, his color was so fresh, his features were so finely cut, his eyes were still so clear, and he had so youthful an air that one might have taken him, in his close-fitting, maroon velvet jacket, for a young man with powdered hair.
“Here, Clotilde,” he said at last, “you will copy this note. Ramond would never be able to decipher my diabolical writing.”
And he crossed the room and laid the paper beside the young girl, who stood working at a high desk in the embrasure of the window to the right.
“Very well, master,” she answered.
She did not even turn round, so engrossed was her attention with the pastel which she was at the moment rapidly sketching in with broad strokes of the crayon. Near her in a vase bloomed a stalk of hollyhocks of a singular shade of violet, striped with yellow. But the profile of her small round head, with its short, fair hair, was clearly distinguishable; an exquisite and serious profile, the straight forehead contracted in a frown of attention, the eyes of an azure blue, the nose delicately molded, the chin firm. Her bent neck, especially, of a milky whiteness, looked adorably youthful under the gold of the clustering curls. In her long black blouse she seemed very tall, with her slight figure, slender throat, and flexible form, the flexible slenderness of the divine figures of the Renaissance. In spite of her twenty-five years, she still retained a childlike air and looked hardly eighteen.
“And,” resumed the doctor, “you will arrange the press a little. Nothing can be found there any longer.”
“Very well, master,” she repeated, without raising her head; “presently.”
Pascal had turned round to seat himself at his desk, at the other end of the room, before the window to the left. It was a plain black wooden table, and was littered also with papers and pamphlets of all sorts. And silence again reigned in the peaceful semi-obscurity, contrasting with the overpowering glare outside. The vast apartment, a dozen meters long and six wide, had, in addition to the press, only two bookcases, filled with books. Antique chairs of various kinds stood around in disorder, while for sole adornment, along the walls, hung with an old
salon
Empire paper of a rose pattern, were nailed pastels of flowers of strange coloring dimly visible. The woodwork of three folding-doors, the door opening on the hall and two others at opposite ends of the apartment, the one leading to the doctor’s room, the other to that of the young girl, as well as the cornice of the smoke-darkened ceiling, dated from the time of Louis XV.
An hour passed without a sound, without a breath. Then Pascal, who, as a diversion from his work, had opened a newspaper —
Le Temps
— which had lain forgotten on the table, uttered a slight exclamation:
“Why! your father has been appointed editor of the
Epoque
, the prosperous republican journal which has the publishing of the papers of the Tuileries.”
This news must have been unexpected by him, for he laughed frankly, at once pleased and saddened, and in an undertone he continued:
“My word! If things had been invented, they could not have been finer. Life is a strange thing. This is a very interesting article.”
Clotilde made no answer, as if her thoughts were a hundred leagues away from what her uncle was saying. And he did not speak again, but taking his scissors after he had read the article, he cut it out and pasted it on a sheet of paper, on which he made some marginal notes in his large, irregular handwriting. Then he went back to the press to classify this new document in it. But he was obliged to take a chair, the shelf being so high that he could not reach it notwithstanding his tall stature.
On this high shelf a whole series of enormous bundles of papers were arranged in order, methodically classified. Here were papers of all sorts: sheets of manuscript, documents on stamped paper, articles cut out of newspapers, arranged in envelopes of strong blue paper, each of which bore on the outside a name written in large characters. One felt that these documents were tenderly kept in view, taken out continually, and carefully replaced; for of the whole press, this corner was the only one kept in order.