Complete Works of Emile Zola (1650 page)

“Doctor,” said she, after having explained the case to him, “I feel as though I were assisting at a resurrection. My heart is deeply touched by it, and it seems to me that I see therein a wonderful sign, which foretells extraordinary events.”

Novarre smiled at this instance of feminine nervousness. Then he wished to investigate for himself. But Monsieur Jérôme was not an accommodating patient. He had closed his doors to doctors, as well as to every one else; and as his condition required no treatment, the doctor had abstained from going to see him for some years. He was, therefore, obliged to content himself with waiting for him in the park, on one of his outings, when he greeted him and followed him along the road. But even as he approached he saw Monsieur Jérôme’s eyes light up, and his lips move in a confused stammering. The doctor was astonished and touched in his turn. “You are right, madame,” said he, upon his return to Suzanne; “the case is very unusual. There is clearly every evidence of a crisis of the whole system, which must proceed from a profound internal shock.”

She asked, anxiously:

“But what do you foresee, doctor, and what can we do?”

“Oh, we can do nothing; that, unfortunately, is certain. And as to foreseeing what such a state is likely to lead to in the near future, I would not even venture to predict. Still, I must admit that although such cases are rare, there are examples of them. For instance, I remember myself examining, at the Asylum of Saint-Cron, an old man who had been shut up there for nearly forty years without having ever been heard to utter a word, so far as the attendants could recall. All at once he seemed to awaken. He spoke confusedly at first, then very distinctly, and kept up for entire hours an interminable flow of uninterrupted prattle. But the extraordinary thing was that this old man, who had been considered idiotic, had seen everything, heard everything, and understood everything during his forty years of apparent stupor; and what he recounted, in his ceaseless flow of words, was precisely the interminable recital of his sensations and his recollections that had been locked up within him since he first came to the asylum.”

Suzanne shuddered, and tried to conceal the extreme emotion that this terrible example caused her.

“And what became of this unfortunate?” asked she again.

|Novarre hesitated for a moment.

“He died three days later. I must admit to you, madame, that these sorts of crises are almost always the symptom of an approaching end. It is the eternal simile of the lamp that emits a final burst of light before it goes out forever.”

A deep silence prevailed.  Suzanne had become very pale as she felt the shadow of death pass by. But it was not her unfortunate grandfather’s approaching end that touched her most deeply; she had another dread, another grief. Was it possible that her grandfather, like the old man at Saint-Cron, had seen, heard, and comprehended everything? She felt that she must venture to ask one more question.

“Do you believe, doctor,” she asked, “that intelligence has been abolished in our own dear invalid? Could he, in your opinion, understand and think?”

Novarre made a vague gesture, that of a scientific man who considers himself unable to vouch for anything outside of experimental certainty.

“
Oh, madame,” replied he, “you are asking too much of me. In the mysteries of the brain, into which we as yet penetrate with such difficulty, all things are possible. Intelligence may remain intact after the loss of speech, for the fact that a person does not speak does not imply that he is incapable of thought. Still, my diagnosis would have been that all the mental faculties of Monsieur Jérôme were enfeebled. I have believed him sunk completely into senile infancy.”

“
But it is possible, you say, that he may have kept his faculties intact?”

“It is very possible; I even begin to suspect that that has been the case, and the demonstration of it lies in the awakening of his whole being, with the power of speech that seems to be returning to him by degrees.”

The result of this conversation was to leave Suzanne in a kind of melancholy horror. She could no longer linger affectionately in her grandfather’s room, assisting thus at his resurrection, without feeling a secret terror. If he had really seen all, heard all, understood all, in the dumb rigidity by which the paralysis held him, then what a terrible tragedy had he passed through in the depths of his silence! For more than thirty years he had been the impassive witness of the rapid decay of his race; his wide-open eyes had beheld the defeat of his descendants gradually accomplished, and had seen their downfall accelerated by the vertigo of possession transmitted from father to son. He had seen his son Michel, after the death of his wife, ruin himself in the pursuit of other women, and blow out his brains with a pistol; his daughter Laure, mad with religious feeling, had entered a convent; and his son Philippe, married to a worthless wretch, had been killed in a duel, at the close of an imbecile existence. He had seen his grandson Gustave, the son of Michel, become the cause of his father’s suicide by robbing him of his mistress and of a hundred thousand francs from his business payments at the very time that his other grandson, André, the son of Philippe, sank into imbecility in the confinement of an asylum. He had seen Boisgelin, the husband of his granddaughter, Suzanne, buy in the endangered Pit, put it in the hands of his poor cousin, Delaveau, who, after giving it a brief prosperity, had just reduced it, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, to ashes, on the very night that he discovered the destroying poison, the treachery of his wife Fernande and the fine gentleman Boisgelin, who were the ruin of each other in a mad desire for luxury and pleasure, even to the point of destruction of everything that surrounded them. He had seen the Pit, his own beloved creation, those works that he had received in a very modest form from his father, and which he had enlarged by the work of his own hands until they had become gigantic — he had seen the Pit, which he hoped his own descendants would convert into an entire town, an empire of iron and steel, decline so rapidly that now, in the second generation, there was not a stone of it left standing. And, lastly, he had seen his race, in which had accumulated so slowly, from a long line of laborers, the creative force that displayed itself in his father and himself, all at once spoiled, degenerated, destroyed by the abuse of riches, so that no spark remained, among his grandchildren, of the heroism of labor belonging to the Qurignons. What a dreadful history was accumulated in the brain of this old man of eighty-eight years! — what a course of terrible events, covering an entire century of effort, lighting up the past, the present, and the future of a family! And what a frightful thing it was that the brain, where this history had apparently been sleeping, should slowly awake and threaten shortly to pour out the whole in a flood of unrestrained frankness, if the lips now only stammering should begin to enunciate intelligible words!

It was this terrible awakening that Suzanne now expected with increasing anxiety. She and her son were the last of the race. Paul was the only male descendant of the Qurignons left. His aunt Laure had just died in the convent of Carmelite nuns, where she had lived for forty years, and some years since the cousin André, secluded from his infancy, had died insane. When Paul now accompanied his mother to Monsieur Jérôme’s room, the latter looked at him for a long time with those eyes which now displayed intelligence. Paul was the single fragile twig of that oak, with its powerful trunk, which he had formerly hoped to see increase and divide into vigorous branches representing a numerous family. Would not this boy bring to the family tree new strength, health, and vigor drawn from his rough, laboring ancestors? Was not his posterity going, in the future, to spread and extend so as to conquer all the blessings and all the joys of earth? But such vigor was already exhausted among his grandsons; the life of wealth, ill spent, had exhausted the ancestral strength, accumulated so far back, in less than half a century. How sad was the spectacle of the grandfather, the last remaining witness upright amid so many ruins, seeing no one now to succeed him but the gentle Paul, so refined and so delicate, this precious offshoot, the last gift that life seemed to have been willing to leave to the Qurignons, in order that they might take fresh root and blossom once more in a new soil. How sad was the irony of this quiet, thoughtful child, being now alone in this enormous Guerdache, this royal habitation bought formerly at a great price by Monsieur Jérôme, in the hope and proud expectation of one day filling it with his numerous descendants. He had imagined these vast apartments occupied by ten establishments; he had heard there the laughter of a continually increasing troop of boys and girls; it was to be the hereditary domain, happy and luxurious, where the Qurignon dynasty, more and more numerous, should reign. But, behold, on the contrary, these apartments became each day more vacant. Intoxication, madness, and death had passed by, each doing its destructive work, until finally a temptress had appeared who had completed the ruin of the house; and now, since the last catastrophe, two-thirds of the apartments were closed, the whole of the second story was abandoned to dust, the reception-rooms themselves on the ground floor were opened only on Saturday to permit the sun to enter. Unless Paul could restore the race, it was going to become extinct, and the empire where it should have prospered was nothing more than a vast empty territory, too heavy for the shoulders of the disunited family, and destined to crumble little by little into decay, unless a new life was breathed into it.

Another week passed by. The servant could now distinguish words in the confused stammerings of Monsieur Jérôme. Then a distinct sentence was formed, and he came to repeat it to madame.

“Oh, it was not without difficulty, madame, but I can assure you positively that monsieur repeated again this morning, ‘It is necessary to give back, it is necessary to give back!’”

Suzanne remained incredulous. This did not convey to her any idea. “It is necessary to give back, what? Listen again, my friend,” said she; “try to catch the words better.”

The next day the servant was still more positive.

“I assure you, madame, that monsieur says distinctly,’ It is necessary to give back, it is necessary to give back,’ twenty or thirty times running, in a low, continuous voice, as if he were putting into the words all the strength that remains in him.”

From that evening Suzanne resolved to watch over her grandfather herself, in order to make her own observations. The next day he could not rise. His brain remained free, but his lower limbs, and soon his whole body, were attacked by the disease, as if already struck by death. She became frightened, and sent once more for Dr. Novarre, who could do nothing, and who warned her gently that the end was near. From that time forward she did not leave the room.

It was a vast apartment, covered with a thick carpet, and hung with very heavy tapestry. Its coloring was red, and the whole effect was of solid but slightly sombre luxury. The furniture was of sculptured mahogany. There was a large bed with posts, and a long mirror in which the whole park was reflected. When the windows were open, an immense expanse of horizon could be seen beyond the lawns, and through the tops of the trees, some of which were a hundred years old; the collection of roofs belonging to Beauclair were visible, then the Monts Bleuses in the distance, La Crêcherie with its blast-furnace, and the Pit, whose gigantic chimneys were still standing.

One morning Suzanne had seated herself near the bed, after having drawn back the curtains, in order that the winter sun might enter, when she was greatly moved by hearing Monsieur Jérôme speak. His face was turned towards the window, and for a moment he looked at the distant horizon with his large, clear eyes. At first he said only two words:

“Monsieur Luc—”

Suzanne, who had heard distinctly, remained for a moment filled with surprise. Why Monsieur Luc? Monsieur Jérôme had never had any relations with Luc; he must be in ignorance even of the latter’s existence, unless, indeed, he had been conscious of recent events, and had seen and understood everything, which was what she had suspected and feared for some time past. This “Monsieur Luc,” falling from lips so long sealed, was the first evidence that there had always been an active intelligence which perceived and understood behind his silence. She felt her own distress increase.

“Is it really Monsieur Luc that you said, grandfather?”

“
Yes, yes, Monsieur Luc.”

He displayed a clearness and an increasing energy, while his eyes were ardently fixed on her.

“Why do you speak to me of Monsieur Luc?” said she. “You know him, then; you have something to tell me about him?”

He hesitated, not finding words with certainty, and then he repeated Luc’s name, with the impatience of a child.

“He was formerly my great friend,” said she, “but he has not come here for many long years.”

Monsieur Jérôme shook his head violently, and then he collected himself, as if his tongue were becoming gradually loosened.

“I know, I know — I want him to come.”

“You want Monsieur Luc to come and see you? You wish to speak to him, grandfather?”

“Yes, yes, that is it Let him come at once; I will speak to him.”

Suzanne’s surprise increased, together with the secret dread that now took possession of her. What could Monsieur Jérôme wish to say to Luc? The idea seemed to her so full of painful possibilities that for a moment she tried to disbelieve in the desire, seeing in it only a delirious imagination. But he was in full possession of his senses, and entreated her with an emotion irresistibly full of power, in which he exhausted the last strength of his poor, infirm being. She ended by being greatly troubled, suspecting a case of conscience, and asking herself whether she would not be to blame in refusing a dying man such an interview, even though obscure and difficult complications might arise from it, concerning which she was already in dread.

“You cannot tell me, grandfather?”

“No, no — to Monsieur Luc. I will tell him immediately — oh! immediately.”