Complete Works of Emile Zola (1755 page)

Pausing in his stormy perambulations, Brother Gorgias drew up his gaunt and tragic figure. His eyes were blazing, an evil laugh distorted his face once more. For a moment he remained silent. Then in a jeering way he said: ‘As you choose, Monsieur Froment! I came here in a friendly spirit to give you some particulars about the affair, which still interests you as you have not renounced the hope of getting Simon rehabilitated. You can make use of those particulars; I authorise you to make them known. And I ask you for no thanks, for I no longer expect any gratitude from men.’

Then he wrapped himself in his ragged cloak, and went off as he had come, opening the doors himself, and giving never a glance behind. Outside the icy rain was coming down in furious squalls, the wind filled the street with its howls. And Gorgias vanished like a ghost into the depths of the lugubrious darkness.

Geneviève had now opened the door behind which she had remained listening. Stupefied by all she had heard she let her arms drop, and for a moment remained gazing at Marc, who likewise stood there motionless, at a loss whether to laugh or to feel angry.

‘He is mad, my friend,’ said Geneviève. ‘If I had been in your place I should not have had the patience to listen to him so long; he lies as he has always lied!’ Then, as Marc seemed inclined to take things gaily, she continued: ‘No, no, it is not at all amusing. The revival of all those horrid things has made me feel quite ill, and anxious also, for I do not understand what can have been his purpose in coming here. Why did he make that pretended confession? Why did he select you to hear it?’

‘Oh!  I think I know, my dear,’ Marc answered. ‘In all probability Father Crabot and the others no longer give him a copper, that is, apart from some petty monthly allowance which they may have arranged to make him. And as the rascal has a huge appetite he tries to terrify them from time to time, in order to extract some big sum from them. I have had information; they have done their utmost to induce him to leave the region. Twice already, by filling his pockets, they have prevailed on him to do so; but as soon as his pockets were empty he came back. They dare not employ the police in the affair, otherwise the gendarmes would have rid them of him long ago. And so, once again, as they have refused to let him have more money, he wishes to give them a good fright by threatening to tell me everything. And he has told me just a little truth mixed with a great deal of falsehood, in the hope that I may speak of it, and that the others in their fright may pay him well to prevent him from telling me all the rest.’

This logical explanation restored the calmness of Geneviève, who merely added: ‘The rest — the full, plain truth — he will never tell it!’

‘Who knows?’ Marc replied. ‘His craving for money is great, but there is yet more hatred in his heart. And he is courageous; he would willingly risk his skin to revenge himself on those old accomplices who have cowardly forsaken him. Moreover, in spite of all his crimes, he really belongs to his Deity of extermination; he glows with a sombre, devouring faith, which would prompt him to martyrdom if he only thought that he might thereby win salvation and cast his enemies into the torments of hell.’

‘Shall you try to make any use of what he told you?’ Geneviève inquired.

‘No, I think not. I shall talk it over with Delbos; but he, I know, has resolved that he will only move when he has a certainty to act upon.... Ah! poor Simon, I despair of ever seeing him rehabilitated; I have become so old!’

All at once, however, the new fact, awaited for so many years, became manifest, and Marc then beheld the realisation of the most ardent desire of his life. Delbos, who placed no faith in any help from Brother Gorgias, had set all his hopes on the Rozan medical man, that Dr. Beauchamp, a juror at the second trial, to whom Judge Gragnon was said to have made his second illegal communication, and who was reported to be tortured by remorse. This scent Delbos followed with infinite patience, having a watch kept upon the doctor, who preserved silence in compliance with the entreaties of his wife, a very pious and also sickly woman, whose death would probably have been hastened by any scandal. All at once indeed she died, and Delbos then no longer doubted the success of his enterprise. It took him another six months to perfect his arrangements; he managed to enter into direct relations with Beauchamp, whom he found all anxiety and indecision, assailed by a variety of scruples. But at last the doctor made up his mind to hand the advocate a signed statement in which he related how one day a friend, acting on behalf of Gragnon, had shown him the pretended confession which a workman, dying at the Beaumont hospital, was said to have made to one of the sisters — a confession in which this man acknowledged that he had engraved a false stamp for Simon, the Maillebois schoolmaster. And Beauchamp added that this secret communication alone had convinced him of the guilt of Simon, whom previously he had been disposed to acquit for lack of all serious proof.

Having secured this decisive statement Delbos did not act precipitately. He waited a little longer. He gathered together other documents, which showed that Gragnon had communicated his extravagant forgery to other jurors, men of the most amazing credulity. Equally extraordinary was it to find that the ex-presiding judge had dared to repeat the trick of Beaumont, carrying a gross forgery in his pocket, circulating it secretly through Rozan, exploiting human imbecility with the most sovereign contempt. And twice had the trick succeeded, Gragnon on the second occasion saving himself from the galleys by sheer criminal audacity. He was now beyond the reach of punishment, for he had lately died, perishing miserably, quite withered away, his features furrowed, it seemed, by invisible claws. And it was certainly his death which had induced Dr. Beauchamp to speak out.

Marc and David had long thought that the Simon affair would be quite settled when the personages compromised in it should have disappeared. At present ex-investigating Magistrate Daix was also dead, while the former Procureur de la République, Raoul de la Bissonnière, had lately been retired with the grant of a Commandership of the Legion of Honour. Then Counsellor Guybaraud, who had presided at the Assizes at Rozan, having been stricken with hemiplegia, was passing away between his confessor and a servant-mistress; whereas Pacard, the ex-demagogue who in spite of a nasty story of cheating at cards had managed to become a public prosecutor, had quitted the magistracy to take up somewhat mysterious duties at Rome as legal adviser to some of the Congregations. Again, at Beaumont there were great changes in the political, administrative, clerical and teaching worlds. Other men had succeeded Lemarrois, Marcilly, Hennebise, Bergerot, Forbes and Mauraisin. Of the direct accomplices in the crime, Father Philibin had died far away, Brother Fulgence had disappeared, being also dead perhaps, in such wise that there only remained Father Crabot, the great chief. But even he had withdrawn from among the living, cloistered, it was alleged, in some lonely cell, where he was spending his last years in great penitence.

And thus there was quite a new social atmosphere; politics had altogether changed, men’s passions were no longer the same when Delbos, having at last collected the weapons he desired, brought the affair forward once more with masterly energy. Of recent years he had risen to a position of influence in the Chamber of Deputies, so he took his documents straight to the Minister of Justice, and speedily prevailed on him to lay the new fact before the Court of Cassation. It is true that a debate on the subject ensued the very next day, but the Minister contented himself with stating that the matter was purely and simply a legal one, and that the Government could not allow it to be turned once more into a political question. And then, amid the indifference with which this old Simon affair was now regarded, a vote of confidence in the Government was passed by a considerable majority. As for the Court of Cassation, which still smarted from the smack it had received at Rozan, it tried the case with extraordinary despatch, purely and simply annulling the Rozan verdict without sending Simon before any other tribunal. It was all, so to say, a mere formality; in three phrases everything was effaced, and justice was done at last.

Thus, then, in all simplicity, the innocence of Simon was recognised and proclaimed amid the pure glow of truth triumphant after so many years of falsehood and of crime.

CHAPTER III

On the morrow of the court’s judgment there came an extraordinary revival of emotion at Maillebois. There was no surprise, for those who now believed in Simon’s innocence were very numerous; but the material fact of that decisive legal rehabilitation upset everybody. And the same thought came to men of the most varied views. They approached one another, and they said:

‘What! can no possible reparation be offered to that unfortunate man who suffered so dreadfully? Doubtless neither money nor honours of any kind could indemnify him for his horrible martyrdom. But when a whole people has been guilty of such an abominable error, when it has turned a fellow-being into such a pitiable suffering creature, it would be good that it should acknowledge its fault, and confer some triumph on that man by a great act of frankness, in which truth and justice would find recognition.’

From that moment, indeed, the idea that reparation was necessary gained ground, spreading by degrees through the entire region. One circumstance touched every heart. While the Court of Cassation was examining the documents respecting the illegal communication made at Rozan, old Lehmann, the tailor, who had reached his ninetieth year, lay dying in that wretched house of the Rue du Trou which had been saddened by so many tears and so much mourning. His daughter Rachel had hastened from her Pyrenean retreat in order that she might be beside him at the last hour. But every morning, by some effort of will, the old man seemed to revive; being unwilling to die, said he, so long as justice should not have been done to the honour of his son-in-law and his grandchildren. And, indeed, it was only on the night of the day when the news of the acquittal reached him that he at last expired, radiant with supreme joy.

After the funeral Rachel immediately rejoined Simon and David in their solitude, where they intended to remain for another four or five years, when perhaps they might sell their marble quarry and liquidate their little fortune. And it so happened that the old house of the Rue du Trou was now demolished, a happy inspiration coming to the Municipal Council of Maillebois to purify that sordid district of the town by carrying a broad thoroughfare through it, and laying out a small recreation-ground for the working-class children. Sarah, whose husband Sébastien had now been appointed headmaster of one of the Beaumont schools, had sold the tailoring business to a Madame Savin, a relative of those Savins who in former times had pelted her brother Joseph and herself with stones; and thus no trace remained of the spot where the Simon family had wept so bitterly in the distant days, when each letter arriving from the innocent prisoner in the penal settlement yonder had brought them fresh torture. Trees now grew there in the sunshine, flowers shed their perfume beside the lawns, and it seemed as if it were from that health-bringing spot that spread the covert remorse of Maillebois, its desire to repair the frightful iniquity of the past.

Nevertheless, things slumbered for a long time yet. A period of four years went by, during which only individual suggestions were made, no general agreement being arrived at. But generation was following generation; after the children had come the grandchildren, and then the great-grandchildren of those who had persecuted Simon, in such wise that quite a new population ended by dwelling in Maillebois. Yet it was necessary for the great evolution towards other social conditions to be entirely accomplished, in order that the seed which had been sown should yield a harvest of citizens freed from error and falsehood, to whom one might look for a great manifestation of equity.

Meantime life continued, and the valiant workers whose task was completed made way for their children. Marc and Geneviève, now nearly seventy years old, retired, and the Jonville schools were entrusted to their son Clément and his wife Charlotte, Hortense Savin’s daughter, who, like himself, had adopted the teaching profession. Mignot, on his side, had quitted Le Moreux and retired to Jonville, in order to be near Marc and Geneviève, who dwelt in a small house near their old school. Thus the village held quite a little colony of the first participators in the great enterprise, for Salvan and Mademoiselle Mazeline were still alive, enjoying a smiling and kindly old age. Then, at Maillebois, the boys’ school was in the hands of Joseph, and the girls’ school in those of his wife Louise. He was now forty-four, she two years younger; and they had a big son, François, who, in his twenty-second year, had married his cousin Thérèse, the daughter of Sébastien and Sarah, by whom he had a beautiful baby-girl named Rose, now barely a twelvemonth old. Joseph and Louise were bent on never quitting Maillebois, and they gently chaffed Sébastien and Sarah respecting the honours which awaited them; for there was now a question of appointing Sébastien to the directorship of the Training College where Salvan had worked so well. As for François and Thérèse, who by hereditary vocation had also adopted the scholastic profession, they now dwelt at Dherbecourt, where both had become assistant teachers. And what a swarming of the sowers of truth there was on certain Sundays when the whole family assembled at Jonville round the grandparents, Marc and Geneviève! And what fine, bright health was brought from Beaumont by Sébastien and Sarah, from Maillebois by Joseph and Louise, from Dherbecourt by François and Thérèse, who came carrying their little Rose; while at Jonville they were met by Clément and Charlotte, who also had a daughter, Lucienne, now a big girl, nearly seven years of age! And, again, what a table had to be laid for that gathering of the four generations, particularly when their good friends Salvan, Mignot and Mademoiselle Mazeline were willing to join them to drink to the defeat of Ignorance, the parent of every evil and every form of servitude!