Complete Works of Emile Zola (135 page)

“If any calamity ever overtakes us, we will come here and forget it; here we shall be proof against suffering.”

In this way the months glided by, in this way season succeeded season. The first year after their marriage, a joyful event had happened — Madeleine had given birth to a daughter. William welcomed with profound gratitude this child which his lawful wife, and not his mistress, as might have happened, had presented to him. He saw in this retardation of maternity a kind design on the part of Heaven. Little Lucy peopled their solitude herself. Her mother, strong as she was, could not suckle her herself, and she chose for her nurse a young woman who had been in her service before her marriage. This woman, whose father managed the farm by the little house, thus suckled the child quite close to La Noiraude. The parents used to go to inquire about her every day, and later on, when Lucy had grown, they would leave her for weeks at the farm, where she used to like to stay and lived a healthy life. There they would see her every afternoon, when they went to seclude themselves in their little house. They would take her with them, enjoying an exquisite pleasure in surrounding this little fair head with their happy memories. The dear girl gave a perfume of childhood to the little rooms where they had loved each other, and they would listen to her prattle with melting affection, in their meditation on the past. When they were all three together in their retreat, William would take Lucy with her laughing rosy lips and blue eyes on his knees and say gently:

“Madeleine, here we have the present and the future.” Then the fond mother would smile serenely on them both. Maternity had given the finishing touch to the equilibrium of Madeleine’s temperament. Up to that time, she had retained her girlish impulsiveness, and her young woman’s amorous gestures; her golden hair fell down her back in wanton freedom; her hips were too obtrusive in their movements, and in her grey eyes, or on her red lips would play bold expressions of desire. Now, her whole being had toned down, and marriage had imparted to her a sort of precocious maturity; there was a slight rotundity in her figure, her movements were more gentle and dignified; her golden-hair, carefully tied up, was now merely a charming token of strength, a vigorous setting for the picture of her now calm face. The girl was giving place to the mother, to the fruitful woman, settled in the plenitude of her beauty. What especially gave to Madeleine her dignified bearing, her noble expression of peace and health, her complexion clear and smooth as tranquil water, was the internal contentedness of her being. She felt herself free, she lived proud and satisfied with herself; her new existence was a suitable atmosphere in which her better part was rapidly developing. Before this, during the first few months that she had spent in the country, she had expanded in joy and strength; but then she had not been free from a something that seemed coarse, and this coarseness was now being transformed into serenity.

Madeleine’s smiling vigour was a great solace for William. When he pressed her to his heart, he felt invigorated with a share of her strength. He loved to lay his head on her bosom, to listen to the steady beat of her heart. It was this beat which regulated his life. A fiery and nervous woman would have put him into a state of keen anguish, for his body and mind shrank from the slightest shock. Madeleine’s regular and steady breathing on the contrary strengthened him. He was becoming a man. His timid weakness was now simply gentleness. His young wife had absorbed him: he was now a part of her. As happens in every union, the strong nature had taken undisputed possession of the weak one, and henceforth William was hers who ruled him. He was in her poorer in a strange way, in a way which affected his whole being. He was continually influenced by her, subject to her joys and sorrows, following her in each change of her nature. His own identity was disappearing, and he could no longer assert himself. He would have wished to revolt against thus being led captive by Madeleine’s will. But from henceforth his tranquillity depended on this woman, and her life was irrevocably destined to become his. If she was at peace, he too would live in peace; if she became agitated, his agitation would be as strong as hers. It was a complete fusion of body and mind.

Besides, a broad peaceful future was opening before them, and the husband and wife could look forward to it without tear. The four years of bliss were removing from their minds all apprehension of calamity. William was contented to abandon himself to Madeleine’s will, and to feel himself breathing freely, and growing stronger in this submission; he would say to her sometimes with a smile: “It is you Madeleine who are the man.” Then she would kiss him, half-abashed at this power which she was acquiring, in spite of herself, by the force of her character. Had you seen them going down to the park, with little Lucy between them, each holding one of her hands, you could not have failed to guess the happy serenity of their union. The child was like a bond which united them. When she was not with them, William seemed almost timid by Madeleine’s side; but there was so much affection in their lingering gait, that the thought of an event to mar the happiness of these two smiling beings would never have occurred to anyone.

During these first years of their married life, they received very few visitors. They knew scarcely anybody, and were slow to form connections, having no love for new faces. Their most frequent guests were two neighbours, Monsieur de Rieu and his wife, who lived in Paris during the winter, and came to spend the summer at Véteuil. Monsieur de Rieu had formerly been the most intimate friend of William’s father. He was a fine old gentleman, of aristocratic bearing, stiff and ironical; his pale lips were at times lit up by a faint smile, a smile that looked as sharp as a blade of steel. Almost completely deaf, all the keenness of the wanting sense had concentrated in his look. He saw the smallest things, even those that went on behind him. Yet, he seemed to see nothing, his proud bearing never relaxed; not a crease in his lips would show that he had seen or heard. On entering a house, he would sit down in an arm-chair, and stay there for hours together, as if absorbed in his eternal silence. He would throw his head back, never relaxing the rigidity of his features, and half close his eyes as if asleep: the truth was, he was carefully following the conversation, and studying the smallest play of features on the faces of the speakers. This amused him wonderfully; he took a savage delight in this pastime, noting the coarse and wicked thoughts that he fancied he could detect on the faces of these people who looked on him as a post, before which they could without fear confide to each other the most important secrets. For  him, smiles, and pretty delicate expressions did not exist; he had no eye for anything but grimaces. As he could hear no sounds, he thought every sudden contraction, every playful turn of the features grotesque. When two people were talking in his presence, he watched them curiously, as if they were two animals showing their teeth. “Which of the two will eat the other,” he would think. This continual study, this observation and this science of what he called the grimaces of features had given him a supreme contempt for mankind. Soured by his deafness, which he would not admit, he would tell himself sometimes that he was fortunate in being deaf and able to isolate himself in a corner. His pride of birth was turning into pitiless raillery; he appeared to think himself living in the midst of a race of wretched puppets, splashing in the dirt like stray dogs, crouching with a skulk at the sight of the whip, and worrying one another for a bone picked up on the dung-hill. His proud impassive face protested against the turbulence of other faces, and his keen-edged laughs were the bitter jeers of a man delighted with infamy, and disdaining to feel angry at brutes deprived of reason.

Yet he felt a little kindness towards the young couple; but this did not go so far as to disarm his derisive curiosity. When he came to La Noiraude, he looked at his young friend William, with a certain amount of pity; the latter’s attitude of adoration in Madeleine’s presence did not escape his notice, and this spectacle of a man at a woman’s knees had always seemed to him monstrous. Still, the young couple, who talked but little, and on whose faces sat an expression of relative placidity, seemed to him the most sensible beings he had yet met, and his visit to them was always one of pleasure. His victim, the eternal subject of his bitter observation and mockery, was his own wife.

Hélène de Rieu, who nearly always accompanied him to La Noiraude, was a woman above forty. She was a little dumpy person, with an insipid fair complexion, and, to her great despair, slightly inclined to stoutness. Picture a chubby-cheeked doll transformed into a woman. Affected, with a passionate love for puerility, she had a quiverful of pouts, glances, and smiles; she played with her face as on an exquisite instrument, whose celestial harmony was to seduce everybody; she never allowed her features to remain at rest, hanging her head down in a languishing fashion, raising it to the sky with sudden feints of passion and poetry, turning it, nodding it, according to the exigencies of attack or defence. She made a vigorous resistance to age, which was bringing flesh and wrinkles: smeared with unguents and pomades, laced up in stays that choked the breath out of her, she fancied herself growing young again. These were only her follies; but the dear woman had vices. She looked on her husband as a dummy whom she had married to give herself a position in the world, and she thought she ought to be easily excused for never having loved him. “What! talk about love to a man who can’t hear you!” she would say to her friends. And then she would put on the air of an unhappy and misunderstood woman. The truth was, she did not stint herself of consolation. Not wishing to forget the love phrases which she could not utter to Monsieur de Rieu, she rehearsed them to people who had good ears. She always selected lovers of a tender and delicate age, eighteen to twenty at the most. Her girlish tastes must have young fellows with rosy cheeks, who had not yet lost the odour of their nurses’ milk. Had she dared, she would have debauched the collegians that she met, for there was in her passion for children, an appetite of shameful pleasure, a wish to teach vice, and to taste strange delights in the soft embraces of arms still weak. She was fastidious; she liked timid kisses, which tickled her cheeks without bearing a deep imprint. Thus she was always to be seen in the company of five or six young sparks; she hid them under her bed, in the wardrobes, everywhere where she could put them. Her happiness consisted in having half-a-dozen tractable lovers fastened to her skirts. She soon tired them out, changing them every fortnight, and living in a perpetual renewal of followers. You would have thought her a boarding-school mistress, dragging her pupils about. She was never without admirers, she got them anywhere, from that crowd of young idiots whose dream is to have a middle-aged married woman for a mistress. Her forty years, her Billy girlish airs, her insipid white skin which repelled men of riper years, were an invincible attraction for the young rascals of sixteen.

In the eyes of her husband, Hélène was a singularly curious little machine. He had married her on a day that he felt bored, and he would have driven her away from his house the next, if he had thought her worth getting angry about. The laborious toil that this coquette made her physiognomy undergo, gave him the greatest pleasure, for he tried to find out the secret wheels that set the eyes and lips of this little machine in motion. This pale face, plastered with paint, which was never at rest, seemed to him a mournful comedy, with its winks, its contortions of the mouth, all its rapid and, to him, silent play. It was after a long contemplation of his wife, that he bad come to the conclusion that humanity was composed of wicked and stupid marionettes. When he pried into the wrinkles of this aged doll, he discovered, beneath her grimaces, thoughts of infamy and foolishness which made him look on her as a creature that he ought to have whipped. Yet, he preferred to amuse himself by studying and despising her. He treated her as a domestic animal; her vices left him as indifferent as the caterwauling of a tabby-cat after a tom; setting his honour high above the shame of such a creature, he sat still, with superb disdain and cold irony, at the procession of young sparks marching into his wife’s room. One might have thought that he took a pleasure in showing off his contempt for mankind, his denial of every virtue, by thus tolerating the vices that were taking place under his own roof, and by seeming to accept debauch and adultery as quite usual and natural things. His silence, his cruelly derisive smile said plainly: “The world is a vile hole of filth; I have fallen into it, and I have to live there.”

Hélène did not stand on ceremony with her husband. She spoke to her lovers in his presence, in the most off-hand, familiar way, convinced that he could not hear her. Monsieur de Rieu could read these familiar expressions on her lips, and he then displayed an exquisite politeness to the young men, amusing himself at their embarrassment, and obliging them to shout gracious answers into his ears. He never manifested the slightest astonishment at seeing his drawing-room filled with new faces every month; he welcomed Hélène’s boarders with a paternal good nature, which was a cloak to his terrible sarcasm. He asked them their ages, and made inquiries about their studies. “We are fond of children,” he would often say, in a tone of bantering kindness. When the drawing-room was empty, he would complain of the way in which young people forget their elders. One day even, as his wife’s court was not very well attended, he brought her a young fellow of seventeen, but ho was hump-backed, and Hélène speedily dismissed him. Sometimes Monsieur de Rieu would be even more cruel still; he would hurriedly enter his wife’s room, and keep her panting for an hour, talking to her about the fine weather or the rain, while some poor, simple creature was stifling under the bed-clothes, which had been hastily pulled over him at the unexpected entrance of the husband. The title, (title, by the “way, which is found in every little town) of cuckolded husband was bestowed on him at Véteuil; having caught his wife in the very act with a collegian who had slipped out of bounds, he had simply said to this young lover, in his cold, polite voice: “Ah, sir, so young, and without being forced to it! you must be very courageous.” But Monsieur de Rieu was not the man to thrust his nose into a place where he was likely to catch his wife at this sort of thing; he tried to appear blind as well as deaf; for this allowed him to preserve his haughty bearing, and his terribly calm attitude. What made his enjoyment more delicious, was the stupidity of his wife, who thought him simple enough not to suspect anything. He pretended to he a good-natured fellow, made scathing allusions with exquisite politeness, enjoying, like a connoisseur, the bitterness of the double-pointed words that he addressed to her, words the refined cruelty of which he alone understood. He played with this woman every hour, and would have been really annoyed if she had repented. At bottom, Monsieur de Rieu wished to know how far disdain can go.