Complete Works of Emile Zola (1607 page)

Luc found himself before the iron gates which opened on the road to Formerie, at the spot where that to the little village of Combettes branched off. All he had to do was to push open the side gate and to walk up the royal avenue of elms. At the end of it the chateau could be seen — a vast building of the seventeenth century, with an air of grandeur in spite of its simplicity. It had a façade with twelve windows, two stories, and a raised
rez-de-chaussée
, the approach to which was by a double porch ornamented with beautiful vases. The park, which was very large, was laid out in lawns and forest trees; it was crossed by the Mionne, which fed a great lake where swans were moving to and fro.

Luc had already turned his steps to the porch, when a light laugh of welcome caused him to turn his head. There, under an oak, near a stone table surrounded by rustic seats, he perceived Suzanne, who was seated beside it, while her son Paul played at her feet.

“Ah, yes, my good friend, I came down here to await my guests, like a country person who is not afraid of the open air. How kind of you to have accepted my short invitation.”

And she held out her hand, smiling. She was not pretty, but she was, charming. Small, and very fair, with a round, well-turned head, curling hair, and soft blue eyes. Her husband had always considered her lamentably insignificant, never seeming to be aware of the exquisite kindness and solid good sense which were concealed under her air of extreme simplicity.

Luc took her hand, which he held for a moment in both his own.

“It is you who are kindness itself to have thought of me. I am happy — so happy in seeing you again.”

She was three years his senior; she had known him when he lived in a miserable house in the Rue de Bercy, near the factory where he had started in life as an assistant engineer. Being a woman of very kind feelings, she attended to her charities herself, and in this way she came to the house of a mason who was left a widower with six children; two of them were very little girls. Luc had found Madame Boisgelin in his miserable house, with both the little girls on her lap, one evening when she had come to bring them some linen and food. The acquaintance once made, he had had occasion to visit her
hôtel
in the Parc Monceau, in regard to their common charities. A deep sympathy had drawn them together; little by little he had become her helper, her messenger, in various matters known only to themselves. Thus it happened that he had ended by being frequently at the
hôtel,
that he was invited to her soirees during two winters, and that he had made the acquaintance of the Jordans.

“If you only knew how you are regretted, how you are mourned for!” he added, restricting his allusions to their old companionship in charity to this remark.

She made a gesture expressive of deep feeling, and murmured:

“When I think of you, I have been distressed that you were not here, where there is so much to be done.”

But Luc now just perceived Paul, who ran forward, his hands full of flowers, and whom he was surprised to find so much grown. The child was very fair, slender, and smiling; he had an air of extreme gentleness, and greatly resembled his mother.

“Ah,” said the latter, gayly, “he will soon be seven years old; then he will be a little man.”

 They were both seated, talking with great friendliness in the genial warmth of that radiant September day, and so lost in the interest of their kindly recollections that they did not see Boisgelin descend the porch steps and advance towards them. Boisgelin was a tall, foppish-looking man, with gray eyes, a large nose, and a waxed moustache; his brown hair was arranged in curls upon his narrow forehead, where some traces of baldness were already visible; he was very correctly dressed in country costume, and sported a single eye-glass.

“Good - morning, my dear Froment,” he cried, in a well-toned voice, but with a somewhat thick accent. “A thousand thanks for having consented to make one of us.”

And, after a hearty shake of the hand in the English manner, he turned without further speech to his wife.

“Tell me,
ma chère,”
he said, “has the order been given to send the victoria for the Delaveaus?”

There was no necessity for Suzanne to reply. The victoria, conveying the family just spoken of, emerged at that moment from the avenue of great elms, and they alighted opposite the stone table. Delaveau was short and strongly built; he had a head like a bull-dog, massive and low, with a projecting lower jaw, and this, together with his flat nose, large, protuberant eyes, and highly colored cheeks, half hidden by a thick fringe of black beard, imparted to his whole appearance something of soldierliness, authority, and rigidity. Fernande, standing beside him, presented a delicious contrast; she was a brunette with blue eyes, and she had a finely formed figure, with a graceful neck and shoulders. The purest and fairest of faces was shaded by magnificent jet-black hair, beneath which her large eyes of deep blue shone with an expression of ardent tenderness; her fresh, delicate mouth displayed tiny teeth, which gave the impression of unchanging brilliancy, and of strength sufficient to break stones. She herself took especial pride in her finely shaped feet, for she considered them an incontestable proof of her princely parentage.

She apologized to Suzanne at once for bringing her maid, who alighted from the victoria, holding in her arms Fernande’s little girl, a child three years old, as fair as her mother was dark, with loosely curling hair, eyes the color of the sky, and a rosy mouth which laughed incessantly, displaying dimples in her cheeks and chin.

“
Ma chère
, I took advantage of your kind permission to bring Nise.”

“You did quite right,” replied Suzanne. “I have told you that there will be a little table served.”

The two women appeared to be friends. The appearance, however, was not real, for Suzanne had a slight fluttering of the eyelids when she saw Boisgelin pressing his attentions on Fernande, and she also betrayed her annoyance by displaying satisfaction at the icy manner Fernande assumed on her admirer’s attempting to escape from one of her caprices. The atmosphere of uneasiness extended to both Luc and Delaveau, who had met before during the previous spring. They shook hands, but the unexpected presence of this young man at Beauclair seemed to cause the manager of the Pit a kind of shock.

“What! You have been here since yesterday? And you have not found Jordan, of course, because a sudden despatch obliged him to leave for Cannes.... Yes, yes, I know all that, but I did not know that you had been summoned.... His blast-furnace has occasioned him a great deal of annoyance.”

Luc was surprised to see that Delaveau was greatly disturbed by his appearance, so much so that he appeared inclined to inquire why Jordan had summoned him to La Crêcherie. He did not understand the reason of Delaveau’s sudden uneasiness, and he answered at haphazard:

“Oh, do you think he has been annoyed? Everything is going on very well.”

At this Delaveau discreetly began to talk about something else, and informed Boisgelin, whom he treated with the utmost familiarity, of the purchase for China of a stock of defective shells which were to be remelted. This caused a diversion, during which Luc, who adored children, amused himself by watching Paul give his flowers to Nise, she being a great friend of his. What a pretty little girl she was, so fair that she was like a little sunbeam! And how did she come to be born like this, when both her parents were so dark? Fernande, who upon greeting Luc had cast on him a piercing glance as if to discover whether he were a friend or an enemy, was delighted at his putting this question to her, for it gave her the opportunity of alluding in reply, with a magnificent air, to the child’s grandfather, the famous Russian prince.

“Oh, he was a splendid-looking man, fair, with a bright complexion. I am sure Nise will be the image of him.” Boisgelin considered that it was not the correct thing for him to await his guests under an oak-tree, such manners being in the style of a worthy
bourgeois
retired from business to lead a country life. He caused them all to return to the house, and as he conducted them to the salon they suddenly encountered Monsieur Jérôme, who appeared in his wheeled chair, pushed by his man. The old man had insisted that he should lead a life completely apart, as regarded his hours for meals, his exercise, his rising and retiring; and as he ate alone, and would not permit any one to show him any attention, it had become an established rule in the house that no one should address him. People contented themselves with bowing to him in silence; Suzanne alone smiled at him, and followed him tenderly with her eyes. Monsieur Jérôme was now setting out on one of his long promenades, in which he sometimes passed the whole afternoon out-of-doors; he gazed at them all fixedly, like a being from another world, who returns no salutations. But the icy clearness of his gaze again awoke in Luc a feeling of uneasiness, a painful doubt if all were well.

The salon was an immense and very handsome room, hung with red brocade, and furnished sumptuously in the style of Louis XIV. They had scarcely entered it when the other guests arrived, the sub-prefect Châtelard, followed by the mayor, Gourier, with his wife Leonore and their son Achille. Châtelard was a man of about forty, still handsome, but with a bald head, an aquiline nose, a firm mouth, and large, keen eyes obscured by spectacles; he was a waif from Paris, where he had lost his hair and his digestion, and had then secured the prefecture of Beauclair as a provision for life, through an intimate friend who was a much-reviled minister. He was entirely without ambition, his liver was out of order, and he felt the necessity of a quiet life; at this point he had the good luck to meet the beautiful Madame Gourier, who seemed to have taken permanent possession of him, in an undisturbed liaison. He was kindly regarded by his subordinates, and, it was said, was calmly tolerated by the lady’s husband, who had other fancies. Leonore, who at thirty-eight was still beautiful, with large, regular features and a fair complexion, manifested profound religious devotion, and had a cold and prudish manner, under which, so those who understood it whispered, was hidden a burning furnace of unrighteous desires. Gourier himself was a fat, vulgar, thick-necked man, with a red, moon face. He never seemed to have any suspicions of his wife, for he spoke of her with a smile of indulgence, and set her aside for the workwomen in his shoe-factory, an industry of some importance, which he had inherited from his father, and in which he himself had amassed a fortune. He had virtually separated from his wife fifteen years before; the only tie which existed between them was their son Achille, a boy of about eighteen, who had his mother’s regular features and fine eyes, but with dark coloring, and who already manifested intelligence and a spirit of independence which annoyed and at the same time perplexed his parents. The beautiful Leonore never set foot in her husband’s workshops; nevertheless the relations between them were perfect in the eyes of the world; above all, since Châtelard had entered the house such complete content had reigned there that it was everywhere quoted as a pattern. The sub-prefect and the mayor had become inseparable; the municipal government was greatly facilitated by this, and the whole town profited by the fortunate connection.

In addition to these there were other guests: Judge Gaume, who was accompanied by his daughter, Lucille, and followed by the
fiancé
of the latter, a retired captain named Jollivet. Gaume had a long face, a high forehead, and a double chin; he was barely forty-five, but apparently he desired to efface himself completely in the isolation of Beauclair, in consequence of a terrible family tragedy which had wrecked his life. His wife, on being deserted by her lover, had one evening killed herself in his presence after acknowledging her crime. In spite of his cold and severe manner, he had remained secretly inconsolable, and he now suffered through his daughter, whom he adored, and who displayed as she grew up a greater and greater resemblance to her mother. Small, graceful, loving, and refined, Lucille, with her soul-destroying eyes looking forth from her clear olive face, recalled to him her ‘mother’s fault, and he was filled with such a dread of seeing this fault renewed in her that he betrothed her at twenty to Captain Jollivet, in spite of the bitter loneliness which would be his lot after their separation. This Captain Jollivet had been obliged to retire from active service in consequence of a fever brought back from Madagascar. He looked old for his thirty - five years, but nevertheless he was still a fine-looking man, with an obstinate face and a splendid mustache. He had just inherited an income of twelve thousand francs, and he had then decided to settle at Beauclair, which was his native place, and to marry Lucille, whose languishing, dove-like manners had taken complete possession of him. Judge Gaume, who had no private fortune, and who lived with great economy on his official income, could not refuse such a match. His secret grief, however, seemed to increase, and he had never before manifested so close an attention to legal matters; his judgments were delivered with great severity, and he interpreted the code in the same spirit. Some people said that behind this attitude of an implacable judge he was really a brokenhearted man, a despairing pessimist, who believed in nothing good, not even in human justice. And what must be the suffering of a judge who condemns miserable criminals, and yet doubts whether he has the right to do so!

After these came the Mazelles, with their little girl Louise, who was three years old, and was another guest for the children’s table. They were a perfectly happy couple; they were two stout people, of about the same age, being hardly past forty, with a constantly increasing resemblance to each other, for they had each a rosy, smiling face, and the same gentle and paternal manner. They had spent a hundred thousand francs in establishing themselves, after the manner of the
bourgeoisie,
near the Sub-Prefecture, in a nice, comfortable house, surrounded by a very extensive garden; and they lived upon an income of fifteen thousand francs, drawn from government securities, that being the only investment sufficiently safe to satisfy them. Their happiness in looking forward to a life with nothing to do had passed into a proverb. People said: “Ah, to be like Monsieur Mazelle, who does nothing! He is a happy man!” But he always answered that he had worked hard for ten years, and that his fortune was due to his own exertions. The truth was that he had been a small coal-dealer, and having married a wife who brought him fifty thousand francs as her
dot,
he had had the wit, or perhaps only the opportunity, to foresee strikes, whose frequency during the last ten years had led to a frequent rise of price in the French coal-mines. His stroke of genius had been in securing for himself, as a stranger, enormous reserves of coal at the lowest possible prices, and then in selling them at enormous profits to manufacturers in France, when they were in danger of being forced to close their factories by reason of the sudden scarcity of fuel. But he had shown himself a truly wise man in retiring from business when he reached forty, and when he had amassed six hundred thousand francs, which, according to his calculations, ought to be sufficient to make his wife and himself perfectly happy. He had not even yielded to the temptation to reach a million, so much did he fear some cruel trick of fortune. There never was a higher triumph of happy egoism; there never was an optimism which had more reason to say that everything in this world turns out for the best than that displayed by these good people who adored each other, and adored their little girl, who had come to them late in life; they presented, in the full satisfaction of their desires, far from all ambition and all excitement, a perfect example of secure happiness, with no desire to look upon the misfortunes of others. The single thorn in their side was that Madame Mazelle, who was very stout and very florid, believed herself to be attacked by a disease without a name, and indefinable as to its nature; but this only gave occasion for greater sympathy, more attention on the part of the husband, who, smiling, spoke with a kind of tender vanity of “my wife’s complaint,” just as he might have said “my wife’s remarkable golden hair.” It did not occasion him either fear or distress, and he treated it just as he did people’s astonishment that their little girl, Louise, should be so different from themselves; for she was dark, thin, and excitable, with a sharp, odd little face, eyes obliquely set, and a delicate little nose. She was a continual amazement to her parents, as if she had fallen from heaven as a gift, in order to create an occasional ruffle in their easy-going home lives, where nothing else disturbed their digestion. The upper-class society of Beauclair was very ready to laugh at the Mazelles, and to call them fatted pullets, but, none the less, they were respected; they were kindly greeted, and invited to entertainments in quarters where their fortune gave them an advantage over hard workers, poorly paid officials, and even millionaire capitalists who were always in dread of what might happen.