Complete Works of Emile Zola (153 page)

“I am the dupe of life,” he would think bitterly. “I have been robbed of everything, body, heart, and reason. Events and men have tortured me unceasingly. I have loved two beings, James and Madeleine, and these two beings are turning against me at the present moment. Nothing remained for me but to undergo, this incredible grief, the grief of being robbed of my child — My kisses have brought James to life again: I have put Lucy, I have put this man between Madeleine and myself.”

Another event transpired to increase his woes. One evening, Lucy, who had been crouching before the fire as usual, fell asleep, with her head leaning against her mother’s knees. But her slumber was very much disturbed by sudden starts and rambling complaints, and when Madeleine took her in her arms to put her to bed, she noticed that her face was quite red. This alarmed her, for she thought that the child was threatened with some kind of fever, and she insisted on her little bed being removed and set up in her own room, and made up her mind to stay by her, telling William to lie down. But he did not sleep a wink the whole night, for he could not take his eyes from his wife who was watching with uneasy anxiety. The room, lit up by the pale light of a night-lamp, seemed to him indistinct and veiled as in a dream. He lost all consciousness of himself: thoroughly worn out, and with his eyes wide open, he seemed to be passing a night of ghastly dreams. Each time that Madeleine leaned over the cot of the little patient, he fancied he could see a phantom rise by the bed-side of his dead child. Then as Lucy tossed about in the delirium of the fever, he was astonished at hearing her still complaining, and fancied he was watching an endless death agony. This sight of his wife clad in a white dressing gown, anxious and silent, bending over the shivering child, whose red face he saw clearly among the bed clothes, had in the stilly silence of the night and the flickering flame of the lamp an air of painful desolation. He lay crushed and terrified till morning.

When the doctor came about nine o’clock he found Lucy in a very alarming state. The illness had declared itself, the child had the small-pox. From this moment her mother never left her: she, passed the whole, day by her bedside and had her meals, which she scarcely touched, brought up to her: at night, she snatched an hour or two’s rest on a long chair. For a whole week, William lived in a sort of stupor: he kept going and coming from the bed-room to the dining-room, and stopping in the passages to reflect, without being able to find a single thought in his empty brain. But it was the nights especially that were so terrible: in vain did he turn over in his bed, he only succeeded in falling off, towards morning, into a feverish sleep, out of which the least groan from Lucy awoke him. Every night as he lay down, he dreaded to see her die under his eyes. The air of the room, pervaded with the odour of drugs, stifled him, and the thought that a poor creature was suffering by his side caused him a continual anguish by exciting his nervous sensibilities. If he could have read clearly the cause of his trouble, he would have wept with shame and rage. Unknown to himself, he was feeling irritated at Madeleine who seemed to have quite forgotten his existence, and he was angry with her for becoming so entirely absorbed in the safety of this child whose face.

pained them. Perhaps she was simply watching over her because she was like James: she wished to keep constantly before her the living picture of her first lover. If the little thing had been like him, her father, his wife would not have been so distressed. He did not acknowledge to himself these frightful suppositions, but they revolved vaguely in his brain with a sensation of torture. One day, when he was alone in the dining-room, he asked himself all at once what would be his feelings if Madeleine were to come down and tell him the unexpected news of Lucy’s death. His whole being replied that this news would console him greatly. Then he was beside himself, and thought he had discovered in his nature the cruelty of an assassin. To-day he was wishing for his daughter’s death, to-morrow doubtless he would kill her. His stupor was thus subject to sudden crises of madness.

Geneviève, in her character of implacable judge, redoubled his anguish. From the very first commencement of Lucy’s illness, she had seized every opportunity of entering the room where the poor child lay suffering. When she was by her side, she never ceased to predict her death, and to mutter that heaven would take her away from her parents to punish them for their sins. She never assisted Madeleine to nurse her, she never gave the little patient her medicine or smoothed her pillow, without some ominous remark. Exasperated by these continual thoughts of death and punishment which forbade all hope, the young mother soon drove her from the room and gave her orders never to set foot in it again. Then the old protestant haunted William’s footsteps with her mournful remarks; whenever she could catch him in a passage or in the dining-room, she kept him for an hour listening to her vagaries, pointing to the hand of God in the illness of his daughter and to the certainty of punishment for himself in the near future. These interviews crushed what little hope the poor man had.

Not daring to remain in the bedroom and dreading to meet the fanatic if he left it, he knew not where to spend his days. In her delirium Lucy kept calling “Papa, papa,” in a strange tone which pierced his heart. “Is she really calling for me?” he would ask himself. Then he would go near and lean over the little patient’s bed. The burning eyes, enlarged and inflamed by the fever, would fasten on him with terrible earnestness. She hardly seemed to see him, and her gaze was lost in space. Then she suddenly turned her head, and stared at another point of the room, still shouting “Papa, papa,” in a more panting tone. And William would say, “She does not hold out her arms to me, she is not calling for me at all.” At other times, Lucy would smile in her fever; there was nothing irregular or fitful in her delirium, she rambled peacefully from one subject to another, chattering away with an occasional stifled murmur of complaint: she would lift her little wasted hands from beneath the bed clothes, and wave them feebly, as if she were asking for invisible toys. It was a heart-rending sight and Madeleine could not refrain from weeping as she tried to tuck her up again. But the child refused to lie down, and sat up in bed chattering all the time in disconnected words. William, thoroughly unnerved, made towards the door.

“Stay, I beg you,” Madeleine would say, “she often calls for you, and it would be better if you were always by.”

Then he would stay and listen with nervous shudders to Lucy’s sweet yet painful prattle. Since the very first day that the small-pox had declared itself, he had taken a strange interest in following the ravages of the disease on the child’s face. The pimples first attacked the forehead and the cheeks which they covered almost entirely with a mass of sores; then by a curious freak the spread of the pustules stopped leaving a space round the eyes and mouth. The face looked almost like a hideous mask, with holes in it through which appeared a delicate mouth and soft childish eyes. In spite of himself William kept trying to discover if the pimples would not efface the resemblance to James on these altered features. But invariably, through the holes of the mask, in the contraction of the lips and the play of the eyelids, he fancied he could detect still the portrait of Madeleine’s first lover. Yet, in the height of the fever, he saw with unconscious joy that the resemblance was disappearing, and this calmed him and permitted him to stay by Lucy’s side.

One morning the doctor announced that he could at last assure them of the child’s recovery. Madeleine could have kissed his hands, for she had felt thoroughly worn out for a week. Yet the improvement in the patient was very slow, and William was a prey again to a secret feeling of anxiety. He began once more to study his daughter’s face, feeling an oppression at heart as each pustule disappeared. Gradually the mouth and eyes which had been attacked in the later stages of the disease became clear of sores, and the young father told himself that he was going to see James brought to life again once more. One gleam of hope remained. One day as he was showing the doctor out, he asked him at the door:

“Do you think that any marks will remain on the child’s face?”

Madeleine overheard this question, although it had been put in a whisper. She rose up very pale, and went to the door.

“Set your mind at ease,” replied the doctor. “I think I can promise you that the pimples will leave no trace.”

William started with a movement so pronounced of regret and dejection that his wife looked him in the face with an expression of deep reproach. Her eyes seemed to say:

“Then you would have your child’s face disfigured in order to escape a little pain!” He hung his head and felt oppressed with one of those mute feelings of despair to which.

he was subject when he found himself giving way to cruel thoughts of selfishness. The longer he lived, the more cowardly he felt himself in presence of suffering.

The little patient’s cote stayed in her parents’ bedroom a fortnight longer. Lucy gradually regained her strength. The hopes of the doctor were realised; the pimples had entirely disappeared, and William now hardly dared to look at his child. For some time too, a new source of anguish had been springing up in his breast; for his restless disposition, exaggerating the smallest circumstances, seemed to take a cruel delight in self-torture. Having noticed one day a little gesture in Madeleine which reminded him of a movement of the hand which James made every minute when he was talking, he began to watch his wife and to study each of her attitudes and each of the inflections of her voice. He was not long in convincing himself that she had preserved something of the ways of her former lover. This discovery was a terrible blow to him.

It was no dream, for Madeleine had at times certain points of resemblance to James. In former days when she had been sharing the young man’s life, and living under his influence, she had almost unconsciously fallen in with his tastes and mode of life. During a whole year, she had received from him a sort of physical education which had fashioned her after his image; she repeated the words of his ordinary conversation, and reproduced, unknown to herself, his familiar gestures and even the intonations of his voice. This propensity to imitation, which gives to every woman, after a certain time, a sort of kinship of manners to the man in whose arms she is living, brought about the modification of certain of her features and changed the character of her face into James’s ordinary expression. This was a result that must necessarily follow from the physiological laws of their union; as her virginity was ripening under his influence, as he was making her his for life, he was transforming the virgin into a woman and stamping this woman with his imprint. At this period Madeleine was unfolding in the full bloom of puberty; her limbs, her face, even her look and smile were transformed and expanded by the action of the new blood which the young fellow was infusing into her veins; she became one of his family, and took his likeness. Afterwards when he went away, she forgot his gestures and inflexions of voice, though still remaining his wife, his submissive kinswoman. Then William’s kisses had almost obliterated James’s features from her face, and five years of forgetfulness and peace had made this man’s blood stagnant. But since his return, it had become brisk again, and Madeleine, by living continually in thought and dread of her first lover, was assuming again, under the influence of this one idea, her attitudes, accent and features of former days. All her former intimacy seemed to be coming to life again in her outward appearance. She began to walk, talk and live at La Noiraude, as she had formerly lived in the Rue Soufflot when she was James’s submissive mistress.

William trembled sometimes as he heard her pronounce a word. He would raise his head in alarm, and look before him, as if he had expected to behold his former friend. And he saw his wife who would remind him of the doctor by the freaks of the features of her face. She had a turn of the neck and a shrug of the shoulders that he recognised. Certain special words too which she repeated every moment, gave a painful shock to his nerves, for he remembered having heard them from James’s lips. Every time now that she opened her mouth or moved a limb, he could see that she was full of and quivering with her first love. He could guess how far she was under the influence of this passion. Had she wished to deny the possession of her whole being, her body itself and its smallest movement would have declared what a slave she was. She was not simply thinking Of James now, she was living with him in the flesh, in his embraces; she was confessing every instant that he possessed her still and that she would never lose the imprint of his kisses. Nothing could have induced William to clasp her in his arms, when he saw that she could not shake off the impression of his comrade and his brother; he always ended by looking on the two as inseparable, and he would have thought himself guilty of a monstrous desire, if he had taken her then to his breast. When he felt certain that Madeleine was becoming James’s submissive spouse, he grew absorbed in the study of this strange change, and in spite of himself, though such an inspection caused him terrible sufferings, he hardly took his eyes off his wife, and he stood by at the awakening of the old love, noting each fresh resemblance that revealed itself. His hourly observations nearly drove him out of his senses. Not only was his daughter the picture of this man, the thought of whom brought a burning sensation to his cheeks, but to complete his misery his wife must be continually speaking of him by her voice and by her gestures.

In the transformation of her being Madeleine went back too to some of the habits she had when a young woman. The gentle and thoughtful serenity which five years of esteem and affection had imparted to her nature departed at the reappearance of the emotions of her former life. She lost the soft pink tint of her complexion, her bashfulness, the modest grace of her carriage, and all that chaste appearance which marked her out as a woman of the better class. Now she would remain half-dressed for mornings together, as in the days when she lived in the Rue Soufflot; her red hair fell down her neck, and her dressing-gown would be open at the top, disclosing her plump white neck, inflated with voluptuousness. She put no restraint on her actions, mixing up in her conversation words that she had never heard uttered at La Noiraude, indulging in gestures that she had learnt from her old friends, and becoming almost vulgar unconsciously by virtue of her memories of the past. William looked on, with sorrowful dismay, at this debasement of Madeleine’s character; when he saw her walking with an ungainly waddle, as if her hips were too heavy for her limbs, he hardly recognised her for the strong healthy woman whom he had had as his wife for four years. He looked upon » himself now as married to a girl reeking with the filth of her past. The fatal concomitants of a life such as Madeleine had led had fallen upon her in his arms, as if to show him that his kisses were powerless to save her from the consequences of her former intimacy with James. It was vain for her to lull herself in a dream of peace, for she awoke at the first quickening of her blood, and fell back into the shame which she had formerly accepted, and which she was now to complete.