Complete Works of Emile Zola (1606 page)

It was three years since all this happened. And the premature ruin of the Qurignon family was still going on as if for an example of the severest fate. Shortly after the departure of Gustave, news was received of his death at Nice, in a carriage accident, where the runaway horses had thrown him over a precipice. The younger brother of Michel, Philippe, had also disappeared, having been killed in a duel in Paris, after a very discreditable career into which he had been drawn by his abandoned wife, who was said to be now in Russia with an opera-singer. Their only child, André Qurignon, the last of the name, was the victim of a rachitic affection, complicated by mania, and was forced to be put under restraint in an asylum. Besides this invalid and his aunt Laure, who, being always in the convent, was the same as dead, there remained only Suzanne, Michel’s daughter. Suzanne, when she was twenty, five years before the death of her father, had married Boisgelin, who bad been attracted by her on meeting her at the house of a neighbor. Although the Pit was already in jeopardy, Michel, with ostentatious pride, had found means to give his daughter a
dot
of a million francs. Boisgelin, on his side, was very rich, having inherited from his grandfather and father more than six million francs, acquired in a business of doubtful character, by people who had a bad name for usury and robbery, in which, however, he personally was wholly unconcerned. He was very much deferred to, envied, and sought after, having a superb
hôtel
in Paris, in the Parc Monceau, and leading a life of expensive folly. He achieved the distinction of being at the foot of his class at the Lycée Condorcet, which he had astonished by his elegance, and he never afterwards lifted a finger to work, believing himself to be one of the new species of aristocrats, who prove their nobility by squandering with magnificence the fortunes acquired by their progenitors, without lowering themselves to earn a sou. Unfortunately, the six millions proved I insufficient for the immense expenses of his establishment, and he allowed himself to be drawn into financial speculations which he did not in the least understand.  The Bourse was at that time much excited upon the subject of new gold-mines, and Boisgelin was persuaded that if he risked his fortune he would double it in two years. Then, all at once, occurred collapse and ruin; for a moment he believed that he was absolutely bankrupt, even to the point of not saving from the ruins a morsel of bread for the next day. He wept like a child, and looked down at his useless hands, asking himself what he could do under these circumstances, since they neither knew how to work nor were fit to do so. It was then that his wife, Suzanne, showed herself truly admirable and displayed a tenderness, a judgment, and a courage which put him on his feet again. Her own d
ot
of a million of francs was found to be untouched. She decided that in order to meet the situation their house in the Parc Monceau, where their living expenses were too great, must be sold; and another million was thus realized. But how to live, above all in Paris, upon two millions where six had not sufficed, and where all the temptations occasioned by the display of luxury in a large city would be renewed? Their future was decided in the end by a chance meeting. Boisgelin had a poor cousin, Delaveau, the son of his father’s sister, whose husband, an unfortunate inventor, had died in poverty. Delaveau was an engineer, a graduate of the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, and at the time of Michel Qurignon’s suicide he occupied a modest position in a coalmine at Brias. He understood clearly the situation at the Pit, and believed himself fully qualified to relieve it by means of a new scheme of organization; therefore, being very ambitious of success, and further stimulated by his wife, he came to Paris in search of a sleeping partner with capital, and there one evening he met his cousin Boisgelin face to face on the street. Like a flash the idea came to him — why had he not already thought of the latter, who was a capitalist, and, moreover, the husband of a Qurignon? As soon as he understood the condition of his cousin’s affairs, and learned of the two remaining millions which he and his wife were anxious to invest advantageously, he enlarged his scheme still further; he had several interviews with his cousin, in the course of which he displayed such strong convictions, and showed himself so full of intelligence and energy, that he ended by convincing the other man. His scheme certainly displayed genius; he proposed to utilize the recent catastrophe to buy the Pit for one million when it was worth two, and then to organize the manufacture of fine steel work, which would speedily result in considerable profit. Then, why should not the Boisgelins themselves buy Guerdache? In the forced liquidation which was about to be made of the Qurignon fortune, they could easily obtain it for five hundred thousand francs, although it had cost eight hundred thousand. Boisgelin would still have five hundred thousand francs out of his two millions, and these he might put into the management of the works; while he, Delaveau, pledged himself formally to increase the capital tenfold by paying a princely interest upon it. Boisgelin would move his establishment from Paris, and live mainly at Guerdache, where he could lead a pleasant existence until such time as the colossal fortune, which he and his wife would certainly some day regain, should enable them to resume their Parisian life with all the luxury of their dreams.

It was Suzanne who finally determined her husband in favor of this plan, for he himself was very uneasy at the idea of a provincial life, and was in dread of dying of ennui. She, on the contrary, was charmed to return to Guerdache, where all her youth had been passed. Affairs turned out exactly as Delaveau had foreseen; when the settlement of the business took place, the fifteen hundred thousand francs that the Boisgelins expended for the purchase of the works and of Guerdache just covered the Qurignons’ embarrassments, so that the Boisgelins became absolute owners of both properties, and were under no further necessity of accounting to the two surviving heirs — that is to say, to Aunt Laure, who was a nun, and to André, the poor idiotic creature who was shut up in an asylum. Moreover, Delaveau fulfilled his engagements; he reorganized the workshops, renewed the machinery, and achieved such success in the manufacture of fine steel that at the end of the first year the profits were splendid. In three years’ time the Pit had regained its position as one of the most prosperous steel-factories in the country, and the income which its twelve hundred workmen gained for Boisgelin enabled him to install himself at Guerdache in great luxury, with six horses in his stables, five carriages in his coach-house, and to give hunting-parties, fêtes, and dinners to which the dignitaries of the town quarrelled for invitations. Boisgelin, who had missed Paris very much during the first few months, and had found idleness hang heavy on his hands, now began to be habituated to country life, having found a little corner of the earth in which his vanity could reign triumphant, thus becoming once more successful in filling up the emptiness of a life which resembled the buzzing of a useless insect. The easy condescension that he was able to exercise at Beauclair filled him secretly with triumphant 8elf-complaisancy.

Delaveau was installed at the Pit, where he occupied Blaise Qurignon’s old house, with his wife, Fernande, and their little girl, Nise, who was only a few months old. He himself was then thirty-seven years of age, and his wife was twenty-seven. He had known her when she was a music-teacher, and he was living in her mother’s house on the same floor as herself, in the lower part of a dingy dwelling in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Her beauty was dazzling, but it was so refined and so dignified that for more than a year when he met her upon the stairs he drew back against the wall, ashamed, poor boy, of his homeliness and his poverty. Then they exchanged greetings, an intimacy sprang up, and the mother confided to him that she had lived twelve years
in
Russia, and that her daughter, with her queenly beauty, was all that she had brought back, after being seduced by a prince in whose château she was a governess. The prince, who adored her, would certainly have endowed her with a handsome fortune; but he was dead, having been killed by an accidental gunshot the evening after a hunting-party; and the unfortunate woman, returning to Paris with her little Fernande, and without a sou, had no resource but to resume her occupation of teaching, and was thus enabled to bring up her daughter by her own efforts, dreaming all the while of a magnificent destiny in store for her. Fernande, cradled amid adulation, and convinced that her beauty destined her to a throne, suffered cruelly from the dismal poverty which forced her to make and remake her own hats and dresses, and left her without means to replace her shoes when they were worn out. Rage against such an existence had taken possession of her, and so great a desire for conquest that from the age of ten she had not passed a single day without experiencing hatred, envy, and impatience of hardship, which created within her extraordinary impulses of perversion and destruction. The result of all this was that, under the belief that her beauty could carry everything before it by force of its own power, she was mad enough to give herself to a man of wealth and influence, who abandoned her shortly after. This adventure, which sank deep into the bitterness of her soul, developed in her falsehood, hypocrisy, and deceit — vices which up to that time she had not possessed. She vowed to herself that the same thing should not happen again, for she still retained too much ambition to fall into habitual vice. The failure of her beauty convinced her that to be beautiful was not in itself sufficient to secure success. She must seek an occasion to rise in the world; she must find a man whom she could bewitch, and then make him her obedient creature. Her mother was now dead, after having gone about giving lessons in the mud of Paris for a quarter of a century in order to gain a bare subsistence; and she felt that her opportunity had arisen in the appearance of Delaveau, who was not handsome nor rich, but who offered to marry her. She did not love him, but she felt that he was very much in love with her, and she made up her mind to make use of his protection to enter into the world of honest women into which he would be the means of entrance and her protector. He accepted her without even a trousseau, which he furnished himself, having the exalted faith of a devotee who desires nothing of his goddess but herself. From that moment destiny turned out exactly as Fernande willed. Within two months after her husband had introduced her at Guerdache she had seduced Boisgelin, and yielded suddenly to his solicitations one evening, after having studied the position carefully. He was consumed with a passion for her, and he would have expended his whole fortune upon her at the risk of breaking all his other ties. She, on her part, had found her cherished ideal in this handsome man of clubs and horse-races, a lover full of vanity, madness, and prodigality, capable of the very worst actions to retain be beautiful a mistress, if she became indispensable to his self-indulgence. And she was satisfying all kinds of accumulated grievances: her gloomy hatred of her husband, whose laborious life and blind tranquillity humiliated her; her increasing jealousy of the gentle Suzanne, whom she had detested from the first day she saw her; and, indeed, the desire to see her suffer was one of her reasons for accepting the attentions of Boisgelin. Guerdache was now one continuous fête; Fernande reigned there as an acknowledged beauty, having realized the dream of her ambitious life, assisting Boisgelin to squander the money which Delaveau had made by the hard work of twelve hundred workmen at the Pit, and even indulging the hope of one day returning to Paris, to live there in triumph upon the promised millions.

These were the stories Luc revolved in his thoughts while he walked on slowly to accept Suzanne’s invitation. If he was not then thoroughly informed of all, he suspected those which a near future was about to reveal to him in even their smallest details. And as he raised his eyes he saw that he was only about a hundred yards from the beautiful park, whose magnificent trees displayed such an infinite variety of green. He paused, a figure rose before him, dominating all the others in his thoughts; it was that of Monsieur Jérôme, the second of the Qurignons, whom he had seen the evening before in his wheeled chair, pushed by a servant, at the very door of the Pit. He saw him again, with his lifeless, withered limbs, dumb, but with clear eyes which for twenty-five years had looked on the disasters that overwhelmed his race. There had been his son Michel, thirsting for pleasure and luxury, ruining the manufactory, and finally destroying himself in a terrible family tragedy. There was his grandson Gustave, stealing his father’s mistress, and then having his brains dashed out at the bottom of an abyss, as though he were pursued by the avenging Furies. There was his daughter Laure in a convent, dead to the world; there was his other son, Philippe, married to an abandoned woman, dragged by her into the mire, and killed at last in a duel following upon a revolting scandal; there was his other grandson, André, the last of his name, wrecked in health and confined among the insane. And even now misfortune pursued his house. The plague-spot that was to complete the destruction of the family was that Fernande, who had laid her hold upon them, was, as if to complete their very ruin, gnawing at what remained to them with her little white teeth. In silence he had been witness of all these things. Had he understood them? Had he pronounced judgment on them? His intellect was said to be weakened, yet how clear and penetrating were his eyes! And if he did, indeed, reflect, with what thoughts must his long, motionless hours have then been filled! All his hopes had crumbled to ashes; that victorious strength accumulated by his long line of hard-working progenitors, that energy which he had expended to bequeath to a long line of descendants, and which would unceasingly increase his fortune, had burned out like a wisp of straw in a display of fireworks. The reserve of creative power which had been the result of so many centuries of poverty and effort had been completely exhausted in three generations. Nervous exhaustion, that destroyer which is the result of over-refinement, had suddenly developed in the warm air of a life of luxury. The race, too quickly surfeited, had grown giddy with possession; it had fallen into ruin in the madness of wealth; and that royal domain — that Guerdache which he had purchased, and which he had dreamed of seeing one day peopled by his numerous descendants — by happy couples who would increase the honor of his name, what sadness he must now feel at seeing the half of its apartments vacant, what anger he must surely experience at seeing it now delivered over to this strange woman who had brought with her the last drop of venom in the folds of her robe! He lived there absolutely alone; he kept up tender relations solely with his granddaughter Suzanne, who was the only person whom he received in the vast chamber that he occupied on the ground-floor of his mansion. Long before, when she was only ten years old, Suzanne, a loving little girl, touched by the sad condition of her unfortunate grandfather, had made him the object of her tender care. Then, when she returned after her marriage, upon the purchase of the Pit and of Guerdache, she had insisted that her grandfather should remain with them, although nothing of his fortune was left to him in consequence of the division of his wealth which he had made at the time of his paralytic attack. She had not been without scruples in coming to Guerdache; it seemed to her that she and her husband, by following Delaveau’s counsels, had despoiled the remaining members of her family, her aunt Laure, f and the afflicted André. Their subsistence, to be sure, was secured to them, and upon her grandfather Jérôme she bestowed great affection, watching over him like a good angel. But although a smile sometimes appeared in the
j
depths of his clear eyes, when he fixed them upon her, they had at other times no more expression in them than in two springs of water. From these unfathomable depths, he looked forth and saw the lawless life of Guerdache revolving recklessly around him. Did he observe, did he reflect, and, if so, with what despair must his thoughts be filled?