Complete Works of Emile Zola (1664 page)

All at once the three children, who had been astonished up to that time, burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh! a duck roasting on the spit! think of great-grandfather Morfain being roasted like a duck!”

“Well!” said Ludovic Boisgelin, “it must have been poor fun to work in those days.”

“Yes, indeed,” said his sister Aline. “I am glad I was not born at that time. It is so amusing to work now.”

But Maurice had grown serious. He seemed to be thinking and turning over in his little head the wonderful things that he had just heard. And he ended by saying: “No matter! Great-grandfather Morfain must have been splendidly strong, and if things go on better nowadays it is perhaps because he worked so hard.”

Luc, who up to that moment had contented himself with listening with a smile, was delighted at this wise remark. He lifted Maurice up and kissed him on both cheeks.

“You are right, my boy. And if you work with all your might now, your great-grandchildren may be still more fortunate. So you see even now that men are no longer roasted like ducks and that work has ceased to be painful.”

By Luc’s order they had set the battery of the electric furnaces to work again. Claudine and Céline, by merely a slight movement, turned on or turned off the current. The furnaces were charged, the fusion proceeded, and every five minutes the rolling platform received the ten blazing pigs of iron, which it carried away. Then the children wanted to set the mechanism at work themselves; and what a delight it was to find this work so easy after the story that they had listened to about the toil of Morfain, which seemed to them like the sad labors of a mighty giant in some former world which has now disappeared.

But then appeared an apparition, and the children at once took flight in consternation. Luc saw Boisgelin again, standing at the door of the shed, gazing at them, and watching the work going on with the half-angry, suspicious look of a master who is continually apprehensive of being robbed by his men. He might often be seen thus in all parts of the works, bewildered that he could not inspect at once the enormous extent of the halls and the machinery, and becoming more and more excited at the idea of the millions he was losing somehow, day after day, because he was prevented from controlling the works and overlooking his workmen. They were so many now that he could not supervise them all. He succumbed under the weight of the enormous fortune, too great for him to look after. It was as if the skies had fallen on his head.

He looked so haggard, and worn out, as he idly walked about the works and watched the workers, he who had never in his life made use of his own hands, that Luc felt great pity for him, and was going to join him, in order to calm him and lead him back to his own home; but Boisgelin was on the alert, and rapidly vanished down the side of the great halls.

Luc’s morning visit having been made, he went home.

He could no longer inspect everything. Now that his city had grown so large, he merely walked over it in all directions. He was a creator resting from his work, and was delighted to see what he had begun growing larger day by day, as the houses and gardens of his city stretched into the plain beyond.

On the afternoon of that day, after he had given another glance at the general stores, he went to pass a quiet evening hour in the twilight with Monsieur Jordan and his sister. In the little salon opening on the park he found Sœurette, in company with Hermeline the schoolmaster and Abbé Marie, while Jordan himself, stretched out upon a couch wrapped in a blanket, was, according to his wont, dreamily gazing at the darkening heavens. Kind Dr. Novarre had died not long before among the roses of his garden. His sole regret had been that he could not live long enough to see the completion of all the beautiful things in which he had been unable to believe at one time. So Soeurette’s little party was now reduced to the priest and the school-master, who came occasionally to resume the old habit of meeting each other at her breakfast-table. Hermeline, now seventy, had given up his position as school-master, and was passing his last years in bitter disappointment, much vexed by everything now going on before his eyes. He had even begun to think that Abbé Marie was lukewarm. The abbé, who was five years older than himself, maintained a sad and silent dignity. He was growing less and less willing to speak of what he felt, and he saw his church deserted and his God overthrown.

Just as Luc was seating himself, patient and silent, beside Sœurette, the school-master began to resume his old accusations as a factional republican against the clericals.

“Come, come, abbé; I want you to help me, since I am now supporting your own views. The end of the world has come; these children, whose education has cultivated, not repressed, their passions, those ill weeds that we, their teachers, were formerly at pains to root up and destroy, how are they to become good citizens, trained to serve the state, if their anarchic individuality has never felt curb or bridle?  All will be lost if we, who are orderly, sensible men, do not hasten to save the republic.”

Now that he had learned to speak of saving the republic against the attacks of those whom he called socialists and anarchists, he had gone over to the reactionary party, and had adopted the hatred that the priest felt for all who attempted any reforms that were not conducted by himself, opposing anything beyond his narrow Jacobin formula, to which he adhered with obstinacy.

He went on with more violence:

“And I tell you, abbé, that your church, too, will be swept away if you do not defend yourself. Your religion, as you know, has never been mine, but I have always recognized the fact that the mass of the people needs some religion, and Catholicism was undoubtedly an admirable factor in government. Set to work, then! We republicans are with you, and we will settle our differences when the work is done, when as allies we shall have reconquered men’s bodies and souls.

Abbé Marie slowly shook his head. He made no answer; he never now grew angry. At last he said:

“I do my duty. Every morning I am at my altar, even though no one else may be in my church, and I pray God to do a miracle. He will, I know, if He finds it necessary.”

This speech completed the exasperation of the schoolmaster.

“Come, come,” said he, “you must do what you can to aid your God. It is mere cowardice to do nothing, and it is more so now that I tell you we are ready to act with you! Devil take you! — we must all act!”

Sœurette here thought she had better interpose, and, full of sympathy for the combatant who was losing ground, she said, smiling:

“If our good doctor were still with us he would beg you not to agree on this subject, for an alliance would only aggravate your quarrel. You make me wretched, my friends. I should have been so glad, not to convert you to our ideas, but to see that you could at least recognize by its results a little of the good that they have here accomplished.”

Both had great respect for a woman so gentle and so holy, and their presence in her little parlor, in the very centre of the rising city, showed what an influence she could always exert over them. They even went so far as to bear with the presence of Luc, that victorious enemy, who, it must be said, never made any display of his triumph, letting nothing be seen but his great pity for what he felt to be the dying agonies of a worn-out world. This time again he did not intervene, and made no answer to the furious attacks of Hermeline on all that he had attempted, because all had turned out according to his wishes. What he now heard was a last protest of the principle of authority against man’s social, natural liberation, another form of tyranny, the State all-powerful against the even more powerful Church, each furiously wanting to claim the people, now willing to enter into an alliance, but ready to recommence the struggle as soon as by their united efforts the people should have thrown off civil servitude as well as their allegiance to religion.

“Ah!” cried Hermeline again, “if you own yourself conquered, abbé, all is lost; and all that I can do is to follow your example, and die silent in my own corner.”

The priest once more shook his head like a man who thinks it useless to attempt to answer. Yet for the last time he replied:

“God cannot be conquered. We must leave action to God.”

Night was falling slowly over the park, and the little room was becoming dark. Nobody spoke, and a chill seemed to have passed over them — a chill from the melancholy past. The school - master rose and took his leave. Then, as the priest was rising to do the same, Sœurette tried quietly to slip into his hand the money she always gave him when he came to see her, to be spent on his poor people. But though he had been accepting her charitable offering for forty years, he now declined it, saying, in a slow, deep voice:

“No, thank you, mademoiselle; keep this money. I should not know what to do with it. There are no more poor.”

Ah! how grateful were these words to Luc—” no more poor!” His heart leaped within him. “No more poor!” — no more poor creatures starving in that Beauclair he had known so hopeless and so miserable, with its cursed population of wage-earners dying of hunger! Were all the sores of the old system about to be healed? Were crime and shame to disappear with poverty? It had sufficed that labor should have been reorganized with justice to bring about a better division of wealth. And what might not be hoped when labor should be held in honor, and a community full of brotherly love and peace should people his happy city?

Jordan, lying on his couch wrapped in a warm coverlet, had not moved. He had doubtless been travelling in spirit over infinite space, for he lay looking into the heavens. When the abbé and Hermeline were gone he roused himself, and, still looking at the setting sun, whose slow disappearance he seemed to be watching with peculiar interest, said, as if speaking in a dream:

“Every time that I see a sunset I feel sad and anxious. Suppose the sun were never to come back to revisit a dark, frozen world, what a terrible death it would entail on all things living! The sun is the father, the fecundator, and the begetter, without whom seeds would dry up in the ground or rot away; and it is to him that we must trust for future relief and happiness, for if he did not help us all life would some day disappear.”

Luc began to smile. He knew that Jordan, in spite of his great age, for he was nearly seventy-five, had been for some years studying the difficult problem of how to store up solar heat, so as to accumulate it in great reservoirs whence he might distribute it as the great, eternal, only living force. He foresaw that a time would come when coal would be exhausted in our mines, and what would then produce the immense quantity of electricity that would have become indispensable to men in their daily life? Thanks to his first discoveries, he had succeeded in giving them electric power almost for nothing. But how glorious it would be if he could succeed in making the sun himself the universal motor, if he could draw directly from his rays that calorific power contained in coal, and use it as the only source of fecundity, the parent of an immortal existence. He had only this last discovery to make, and then his work would be accomplished. He would be ready to die.

“Be easy,” said Luc, cheerfully; “the sun will rise to-morrow, and you will end by getting him to give you his sacred fire, the divine rays which alone can create, without rest and beyond time.”

Sœurette, growing a little anxious lest the evening breeze which was coming in at the window should give her brother a cold, came near, and asked him:

“Sha’n’t I shut the window?”

But he made a gesture of refusal, and merely allowed her to wrap him more closely in his coverings. It seemed as if he lived only by a miracle, because he willed to live, and wanted to put off his death till the evening of the day when his work would be accomplished — that night when, his work finished, his task done, he would sink into his last sleep a satisfied and faithful workman. His sister redoubled her cares, and her precautions no doubt prolonged his life; and every day he could command two hours of physical and mental energy, every minute of which he utilized, thanks to his keen sense of method and order. Thus this poor frail being, so old, so near the close of life, to whom the least current of night air might put an end, was bent on conquering and ruling the earth by his discovery, laboring simply like an honest workman who will not leave his work till it is done.

“You will live to be a hundred, as far as I can see,” said Luc, with his kind laugh.

Jordan began to laugh, too.

“Of course I shall, if I need to live a hundred years.” Again there was silence in the little parlor among these three devoted friends. The warm twilight was delicious as it spread over the park, the long avenues of which grew black as the gloom increased. A little light still gleamed on the mown lawns, while in the blue horizon the great trees disappeared, or seemed merely trembling shadows. This was the lovers’ hour. The park of La Crêcherie was all open to them; they came there at the close of day, after their task was finished at the works, and their daily household occupations at home. Nobody interfered with these wandering couples, these phantoms with their arms round each other’s waists, and after being a few moments in sight from the windows of the house, they disappeared among the foliage. They were confided to the watchful care of the friendly old oaks, and the liberty given them to love was counted upon to keep them chaste and within proper bounds, as future wives and husbands whose union would become inseparable if it had been wisely and freely made. Those who are to love always should know why and how they love. If they have chosen each other by mutual consent and with thorough knowledge of each other, they will not grow apart; they never will separate; they will grow closer to each other more and more. And this night, on the lawns now darkened by the shades of evening, pairs of lovers were wandering like phantoms, peopling the mysterious darkness, while the earth was thrilling with delight in the fresh odors of spring.

More and more couples came into view, and Luc recognized some of them as boys and girls whom he had seen that morning in the workshops. Was not that Adolphe Laboque with Germaine Yvonnot, closely linked together, pressing the tall grasses with elastic tread? That other pair, both looking down till the hair on their bent heads touched, surely they were Hippolyte Mitaine and Laure Fauchard? Were not two others Alexandre Feuillat and Clémentine Bourron, with arms round each other’s waists, as if they were never to be unclasped again? And Luc felt even deeper emotion when he recognized two of his own sons. His son Charles, who was clasping to his breast Céline Lenfant, the brunette, and his other son Jules, his youngest born, who was walking in close company with Claudine Bonnaire, the fair. Ah! those handsome young people! they were the prophets of a new spring, couples born of love matches, by whom would again be lighted that torch of life which generations pass on to one another. As yet they were experiencing only the chaste thrill which came from whispered words of love, innocent caresses, a pressure of hands in which hearts sought a response, a furtive kiss whose sweetness seemed to open heaven. But before long the flame would grow intense, and when if at last united they should be the parents of children, other lovers would be born of them, others would some day walk in this park as they had done, in the happy time of young love and tenderness. There would thus always be more happiness, more true love creating more mutual sympathy. And more and more young couples kept arriving in the park, which soon seemed as if it must contain all the lovers in the happy city. Such an evening was beautiful after a day of toil, and delightful were the lawns and coppices, with their sweet odors and their mysterious shadows, from which proceeded little sounds of kisses and light laughter.