Complete Works of Emile Zola (1749 page)

Louise, quite upset, shuddering as if she had felt an icy breath from the grave sweeping across her cheek, had barely time to cry: ‘Grandmother, I will wait a little longer; I will come back in a month’s time!’ Then the judas was shut violently, and the dim, silent house became quite deathly in the darkness, which had now gathered all around.

During the previous five years Madame Duparque had gradually relinquished all intercourse with the world. At first, on the morrow of Madame Berthereau’s death and Geneviève’s departure, she had contented herself with ceasing to receive her relations, restricting herself to the society of a few pious friends of her own sex, and of the priests and other clerics whom she had made her familiars. Among these was Abbé Coquard, who had succeeded Abbé Quandieu at St. Martin’s. He was a rigid man, full of a sombre faith, and it delighted Madame Duparque to hear the threats which he addressed to the wicked — threats of hell with its consuming flames, its red forks, and its boiling oil. Thus, morning and evening she was seen repairing now to the parish church, now to the Capuchin chapel, in order to attend the various offices and ceremonies. But as time went by she went out less and less, and at last a day came when she ceased to cross her threshold. It was as if she were gradually sinking into gloom and silence, burying herself by slow degrees. One day even the shutters of her house, which had still been opened every morning and closed at night, remained closed, the façade becoming blind, as it were, the house dead, neither a glimmer nor a breath of life emanating from it any more. One might have thought that it was abandoned, uninhabited, if sundry frocks and gowns had not been seen slipping through the doorway at nightfall. They were the gowns of Abbé Coquard, Father Théodose, and at times — so people said — Father Crabot, who thus paid the old lady friendly visits. Her little fortune, now a matter of two or three thousand francs a year, which she had arranged to leave, one half to the College of Valmarie, the other to the Capuchin chapel, hardly sufficed to explain the fidelity of her clerical friends. Their visits must also have been due in part to her exacting and despotic nature, which overcame the most powerful, and in part to their apprehensions of some deed of mystical madness, of which they felt her to be capable. It was said, too, that she had obtained an authorisation to hear Mass and take the Communion at home; and this, no doubt, explained why she no longer set foot out of doors. By the force of her piety she had compelled even the Deity to come to her house, in order that she might be spared the affliction of going to His; for the idea of seeing the streets and the people in them, of again setting her eyes on that abominable age in which Holy Church was agonising, had become such torture to her, that she had caused her shutter to be nailed in position, and every chink in the woodwork to be stopped up, in order that no sound or gleam of the world might again reach her.

This was the supreme crisis. She spent her days in prayer. She was not content with having broken off all intercourse with her impious and accursed progeny, she asked herself if her own salvation were not in danger through having incurred, perhaps, some responsibility in the damnation of her kinsfolk. She was haunted by a recollection of Madame Berthereau’s sacrilegious revolt on her death-bed, and believed that unhappy woman to be not merely in purgatory but in hell. Then, too, came the thought of Geneviève, whom the demon had assailed so terribly, and who had gone back to her errors like a dog to his vomit. And, finally, there was Louise, the pagan, the godless creature, who had rejected even the gift of the Divine Body of Jesus. Those two — Geneviève and Louise — belonged, both in body and in spirit, to the devil; and if Madame Duparque caused Masses to be said and candles burnt for the repose of her dead daughter’s soul, she had abandoned those who still lived to the just wrath of her God of anger and punishment. But, at the same time, her anguish remained extreme; she wondered why heaven had thus stricken her in her posterity, and strove to interpret this visitation as a terrible trial, whence her own holiness would emerge dazzling and triumphant. The confined, claustral life she led, entirely devoted to religious practices, seemed to her to be necessary reparation, for which she would be rewarded by an eternity of delight. In this wise she expiated the monstrous sinfulness of her descendants, those women guilty of free thought, who, in three generations, had escaped from the Church and ended madly by putting their belief in a religion of human solidarity. Thus, wishing to redeem the apostasy of her grandchildren, Madame Duparque set all her pride in humbling herself, in living for God alone, in seeking to slay what little womanliness still lingered in her; for it was from that womanliness that her condemned descendants had sprung.

So stern and sombre was her ardour that she discouraged the few clerics who alone now linked her to the world. She was conscious of the decline of the Church; she could detect the collapse of Catholicism under the efforts of those diabolical times from which she had withdrawn by way of protest against Satan’s victory — as if, indeed, she denied that victory by not beholding it. And in her opinion her renunciation, her fancied martyrdom, might perhaps impart new vigour to the soldiers of religion. She would have liked to have seen them as ardent, as resolute, as fierce as she herself was, encasing themselves in the rigidity of dogmas, carrying fire and sword into the midst of the unbelievers, and aiding the great Exterminator to conquer his people by dint of thunderbolts. She never felt satisfied; she found Father Crabot, Father Théodose, even the sombre Abbé Coquard, altogether too lukewarm. She accused them of compounding with the hateful worldly spirit of the times, and of completing the ruin of the Church with their own hands by adapting religion to the tastes of the day. She dictated their duty to them, preached a campaign of outspokenness and violence, unhinged as she was, thrown into extreme exaltation by her lonely life, and ever athirst with some supreme longings in spite of all the penance heaped upon her.

Father Crabot was the first to grow tired of that strange penitent, who, at eighty-three years of age, treated herself so harshly, and bore herself like a despairing prophetess, whose uncompromising Catholicism was really a condemnation of the long efforts made by his own Order to humanise the terrible Deity of the stakes and the massacres. Thus the Jesuit allowed long intervals to elapse between his discreet visits, and, finally, he altogether ceased to call, being of opinion, no doubt, that the legacy he had hoped to receive for Valmarie would not be sufficient compensation for the dangers he might incur with a woman whose soul was ever in a tempest. A few months later Abbé Coquard likewise withdrew, not because he had any cowardly fears of being compromised, but because each of his discussions with the old lady degenerated into a horrible battle. Eager and despotic like herself, the Abbé was bent on retaining all his power and authority as a priest; and one day, when Madame Duparque began to thunder in the name of God, reproaching him with inaction, in such wise that he appeared to be a mere transgressing sinner, he became quite angry, for he declined to accept such a reversal of their respective positions. Then, for nearly another year, only Father Théodose’s frock was to be seen slipping into the silent, closed house of the Place des Capucins.

Father Théodose, no doubt, regarded Madame Duparque’s little fortune as worth taking, for the times were now hard for poor St. Antony of Padua. In vain did the Capuchin scatter prospectuses broadcast; money did not now flow into the collection boxes as it had done in the happy days when, by a stroke of genius, he had induced Monseigneur Bergerot to bless one of the saint’s bones. In those days the miracle lottery had put people into quite a fever; the sick, the idle, and the poor had all dreamt of winning happiness from heaven in return for an investment of twenty sous; whereas, now that a little sense and truth were spreading through the district, thanks to the secular schools, the base commerce of the Capuchin chapel stood revealed in all its shameful imbecility.

For a time, it is true, another stroke of genius on the part of Father Théodose, the creation of some wonderful mortgage bonds on heaven, had again stirred the souls of the humble and the suffering, who, as life below proved so cruel to them, hungered for felicity beyond the grave. Then, during several months, the money of dupes had flowed in; all the savings hidden in old stockings had been brought forth by believers anxious to secure the chance of a little peace in the Unknown. But finally, being confronted by growing incredulity, Father Théodose had found it difficult to place his remaining bonds, and had thereupon planned a third stroke of genius — this time the invention of some private, reserved gardens in the ever-flowery Fields of the Blessed. According to him there were to be some delightful little nooks in Eternity, garnished with roses and lilies of the very best varieties, under foliage set out to please the eyes, and near springs which would be particularly pure and fresh. And thanks once more to the decisive intervention of St. Antony of Padua, one might book those little nooks in advance, thereby insuring to oneself the eternal enjoyment of them. Naturally, the booking was very expensive if one desired something spacious and comfortable, though there were indeed gardens at all prices, which varied in accordance with site, charm, and proximity to the abodes of the angels. Two old ladies, it appeared, had already bequeathed their fortunes to the Capuchins in order that the miracle-working saint might reserve for them two of the best gardens that were still vacant, one being in the style of an old French park, whereas the other was more of the ‘romantic’ type, with a maze and a waterfall. And it was also said that Madame Duparque had in like way made her choice, this being a golden grotto on the slope of an azure mount, among clumps of myrtle bushes and oleanders.

Father Théodose, then, alone continued to visit the old lady, putting up with her fits of temper, and returning to the house even after she had driven him from it in her exasperation at finding him so lukewarm and resigned to the triumph of the Church’s enemies. And the Capuchin had actually ended by securing a latch-key in order that he might enter the house whenever he pleased, instead of having to ring the bell again and again, for poor Pélagie had become extremely deaf. It was also at this same moment that the two women, the two recluses as they may be called, cut the bell wire; for of what use was it to retain that connecting link with the outer world? The only living being whom they now received had a key to admit himself, and by cutting the wire they were spared the nervous starts that came upon them whenever they heard that jangling bell which they did not wish to answer. Pélagie, indeed, had become as fierce and as maniacal as her mistress. She had begun by curtailing her chats in the tradespeople’s shops, scarcely speaking to anybody when she went out, but gliding swiftly past the houses like a shadow. Next, she had decided to go shopping twice a week only, in this wise condemning her mistress and herself to live on stale bread and a few vegetables — such fare as might have suited a pair of hermits in the desert. And now the few tradespeople came themselves to the house at nightfall on Saturday evenings, and left their goods at the doorway in a basket, which they found waiting for them on the ensuing Saturday, with the money due to them wrapped in a scrap of newspaper.

At the same time Pélagie had one great worry — her nephew Polydor, who had entered a Beaumont monastery in a menial capacity, and who came and made frightful scenes with her whenever he wished to extort money. He alarmed the old woman to such a degree that she did not even dare to leave him at the door, for she felt sure that on some pretext or other he would collect a crowd and force his way in.

And when she had admitted him, she trembled still more; for she knew that he was a man to deal her a nasty blow should she refuse to give him a ten-franc piece. For many long years she had caressed the dream of employing all her savings — some ten thousand francs, scraped together copper by copper — to procure some happiness in the other world; and if the little treasure was still carefully hidden away inside her palliasse, this was because she hesitated as to the best, the most efficacious mode of investment. Should she found a perpetual Mass for the repose of her soul, or should she book one of Father Théodose’s reserved gardens, a modest little nook in heaven, by the side of her mistress’s lordly grotto? And she was still hesitating in this respect when misfortune fell upon her.

One night, when she had been obliged to admit Polydor, the rascal did not murder her, but rushed in turn upon every article of furniture in her garret, finally ripping up the palliasse and fleeing with the ten thousand francs, while Pélagie, whom he had thrust aside and who had fallen beside the bed, groaned with despair at seeing that bandit — who was of her own flesh and blood — make off with the blessed money which St. Antony of Padua was to have given her back in eternal delight. Would she be damned, then, as she no longer possessed the wherewithal to speculate in the miraculous lottery? Such was the shock the old woman experienced that two days later she died; and it was Father Théodose who discovered her, already stark and cold, in her bare and dirty garret, to which he climbed in his surprise and anxiety at finding her nowhere else. He was obliged to attend to everything — declare the death, make arrangements for the funeral, and busy himself as to how the last remaining inmate of the little house would live now that she had nobody left to serve her.

For several weeks past Madame Duparque, whose legs had become too feeble to support her weight, had taken to her bed, in which, however, she remained in a sitting posture, erect and tall, though withered. Little breath was left her, yet she still seemed to reign despotically over that silent, dark, and empty house, whence she had driven all her kith and kin, and where the only creature, the domestic animal, whom she had been willing to tolerate, had just died. When Father Théodose, on returning from Pélagie’s funeral, tried to ascertain Madame Duparque’s intentions with respect to her future mode of life, he could not even extract an answer from her. Greatly embarrassed, he insisted, and offered to send her a Sister, pointing out that it was impossible for her to attend to any household duties as she could not even leave her bed. But she at once flew into a temper, growled like some mighty animal stricken unto death and unwilling to be disturbed in its final hour. Vague charges gurgled in her throat; they were all cowards, all traitors to their God, all egotists who abandoned the Church in order that the vaults might not fall upon their heads! Thereupon Father Théodose, in his turn growing exasperated, left her, deciding that he would return the following morning to see if she had become more reasonable.