Complete Works of Emile Zola (1760 page)

In September, then, the simple but cheerful house stood completed in its pleasant garden, which was faced by a railing on the side of the square. Its affectionately awaited owner might come to take possession of it when he pleased, for nothing was lacking. True, a drapery hung before the marble slab bearing an inscription over the doorway; but this inscription, so far as Simon was concerned, was to be the great surprise, and would only be uncovered at the last moment. Adrien repaired to the Pyrenees to plan the final arrangements with Simon and David, and it was then decided that the former’s wife, who was in a very weak state of health, should in the first instance install herself in the house, with the help of her children, Joseph and Sarah. Then, on the appointed day, Simon would arrive with his brother David. There would be an official reception at the railway station, and afterwards he would be conducted in triumph to his new home, the gift of his fellow-townsmen, where his wife and children would await him.

At last, on the Twentieth of September, a Sunday, the solemnity was enacted amid radiant sunshine and a warm and pure atmosphere. The streets of Maillebois were decorated with flags, the last flowers of the season were scattered along the procession’s line of route. And early in the morning — although the train would only arrive at three o’clock in the afternoon — the population assembled out of doors, gathering together in a happy, singing, laughing multitude, whose numbers were swollen by all the visitors who flocked in from neighbouring parishes. At noon one could no longer circulate outside the house on the large new square, whose recreation-ground was invaded by the working-class families of the neighbourhood. There were people, too, at all the windows, and the very roadways were blocked by waves of spectators eager to see and to testify their passion for justice. Nothing could have been grander or more inspiring.

Marc and Geneviève had arrived from Jonville, with Clément, Charlotte, and little Lucienne, early in the day. It was arranged that they should await Simon in the garden of the house, grouped around Madame Simon, her children, Joseph and Sarah, her grandchildren, François and Thérèse, and her great-granddaughter, little Rose. Louise, of course, was there, beside her husband Joseph, and Sébastien beside his wife Sarah. These constituted the three generations which had sprung from the blood of the innocent man mingled with that of his champions. Then, also, places had been reserved for the first defenders, the survivors of the heroic days — Salvan, Mademoiselle Mazeline, and Mignot — as well as for the fervent artisans of the work of reparation, the now conquered and enthusiastic members of the Bongard, Doloir, and Savin families. It was rumoured that Delbos, the exadvocate, the hero of the two trials, who for four years recently had held the office of Minister of the Interior, had gone to join Simon and David, in order to reach the town in their company. Only the mayor and a deputation of the Municipal Council were to meet the brothers at the railway station and conduct them to the house, decked with banners and garlands, where the ceremony of presentation would take place. And there, in accordance with this programme, Marc remained waiting with the rest of the family, in spite of all his joyous eagerness to embrace the triumpher.

Two o’clock struck; there was still an hour to be spent patiently. Meanwhile the crowd steadily increased. Marc, having left the garden to mingle with the groups and hear what was being said, found that the one subject of conversation was that extraordinary story emerging from the past, that condemnation of an innocent man, which had become both abominable and inexplicable in the eyes of the new generations. From the younger folk a long cry of indignant amazement arose; while the old people, those who had witnessed the iniquity, tried to defend themselves with vague gestures and shamefaced explanations. Now that the truth had become manifest in the full sunlight, endowed with all the force of invincible certainty, the children and the grandchildren could not understand how their parents and grandparents had carried blindness and egotism so far as to fail to fathom so simple an affair. And doubtless many of the older folk shared the astonishment of the younger ones, and were at a loss to account for the credulity into which they had fallen. That, indeed, was their best answer to the reproaches they heard; it was necessary to have lived in those times to understand the power of falsehood over ignorance. One old man penitently confessed his error; another related how he had hissed Simon on the day of his arrest, and how he had now been waiting two hours in order to acclaim him, anxious as he was not to die with his bad action upon his conscience. And a youth, his grandson, thereupon threw himself on the old man’s neck and kissed him, laughing, with tears in his eyes. Marc was delightfully touched by the scene, and continued to walk about, looking and listening.

But all at once he stopped short. He had just recognised Polydor Souquet, clad in rags, with a ravaged countenance, as if still under the effects of a night of intoxication. And Marc was thunderstruck when by the side of Polydor he perceived Brother Gorgias, clad as usual in black, without a sign of linen, his greasy old frock-coat clinging fast to his dark hide. He, Gorgias, was not drunk. Silent and fierce of aspect, erect in all his tragic leanness, he darted fiery glances at the crowd. And Marc could hear that Polydor, with a drunkard’s stupid obstinacy, was deriding him respecting the Affair, of which everybody was talking around them. Slabbering and stammering, the scamp went on:

‘I say, old man, the copy-slip — you remember, eh? The copy-slip! It was I who sneaked it. I had it in my pocket, and I was stupid enough to give it you back while you were seeing me home.... Ah, yes! that wretched copy-slip.’

A sudden flash of light illumined Marc’s mind. He now knew the whole truth. The one gap in the affair, which had still worried him occasionally, was now filled. Polydor had given the slip to Gorgias, and that explained how it had chanced to be in his pocket, and how it had become mingled with a copy of
Le Petit Beaumontais
when, terrified by his victim’s cries, he had hastily sought a handkerchief, a stopper of any kind, to use as a gag.

‘But you know, old man,’ stammered Polydor, ‘we liked each other very much, and we didn’t tell our business to other folk. And yet, if I
had
chattered, what a rumpus there would have been! Ah! what a face my Aunt Pélagie would have pulled.’

Half-fuddled, in an ignoble state, the rascal went on jeering, unconscious, it seemed, of the presence of the people around him. And Gorgias, who from time to time gave him a contemptuous glance, must suddenly have understood that Marc had heard the drunkard’s involuntary confession, for in a low voice he growled: ‘Be quiet, you wine-bag! Be quiet, you rotten cur! You stink of your sin and mine; you have damned me again by your ignominy! Be quiet, you filthy thing; it is I who will speak! Yes, I will confess my fault, in order that God may pardon me!’

Then, addressing himself to Marc, who was still lost in silent amazement, he went on: ‘You heard him, Monsieur Froment, didn’t you? Well, it’s necessary that all should hear. I have been consumed long enough by a desire to confess myself to men, even as I have confessed to God, in order that my salvation may be the more glorious. And, besides, all these people exasperate me! They know absolutely nothing; they keep on repeating my name with execration, as if I were the only culprit! But wait a moment; they will see it is not so, for I will tell them everything!’

Then, though he was over seventy years old, he contrived to spring upon the low wall supporting the garden railing of the house where Simon, the innocent man, was soon to be received in triumph. And clinging with one hand to that railing, he turned and faced his mighty audience. During the hour he had spent roaming through the groups he had heard his name fall from every tongue as a name of infamy. And he had gradually been fired by a sombre fever, the bravado of a fine bandit, who denies none of his actions, but is ready to cast them in the teeth of men, full of a mad pride that he should have dared to commit them. What caused him most Buffering, however, was that he alone should be named, that all the weight of the general execration should be cast upon his shoulders, for the others, his accomplices, seemed to be quite forgotten. Only the previous day, his resources again being exhausted, he had attempted to force himself upon Father Crabot, who was shut up at the estate of La Désirade, and he had been flung out with the alms of a twenty-franc piece, the very last that would be given him, so he had been told. And now, amid all the insulting words that were levelled at him, nobody shouted the name of Father Crabot..

Why, as he was ready to expiate his transgression, why should not Father Crabot expiate his also? No doubt he, Gorgias, would extract no more twenty-franc pieces from that coward if he were to reveal everything; but his hatred was now dearer to him than money, and it would be blissful to cast his enemy into the flames of hell, while he himself ascended to the delights of paradise by virtue of the penance of a public confession, the idea of which had long haunted him.

Thus, an unexpected, an extraordinary scene began. With a violent, sweeping gesture, Gorgias sought to gather the crowd together and attract its attention. And in a shrill but still powerful voice he called: ‘Listen to me! listen to me! I will tell you everything!’

But at first he was not heard, and he had to raise the same cry twice, thrice, a dozen times, with increasing, unwearying energy. By degrees he was noticed and people became attentive; and when some of the old folk had recognised him, when his name had flown from mouth to mouth amid a quiver of horror, a death-like silence at last fell from one to the other end of the great square.

‘Listen to me! listen to me! I will tell you everything!’

Raised above the heads of all the others, with the broad sunlight streaming on him, he clung with one hand to the iron railing, while with the other he went on making vehement gesticulations as if he were sabreing the air. His threadbare frock-coat hung closely to his withered, knotty frame, and with his dusky face, from which jutted the big beak of a bird of prey, he looked quite terrible, like some phantom of the past, whose eyes glowed with the flames of all the abominable passions of long ago. — .

‘You speak of truth and justice,’ he cried. ‘But you know nothing, and you are not just!... You all fall upon me, you treat me as if I were the only culprit, whereas others sinned more even than I did. I may have been a criminal, but others accepted my crime, hid it, and continued it.... Wait a little while; you will see by-and-by that I don’t lack the courage to confess my sin. But why am I the only one ready to confess? Why isn’t my master, my chief, the all-powerful Father Crabot, here also, ready to humiliate himself and tell everything? Let him come! Go and fetch him from his hiding-place, and let him confess his sins before you and do penitence beside me. Otherwise I shall speak out; I shall proclaim his crime with mine, for though I be the most humble, the most miserable of sinners, God is in me, and it is God who demands expiation of him as of me.’

Then, in the bitterest language, he declared that all his superiors, Father Crabot at the head of them, were but degenerate Catholics, poltroons, and enjoyers of life. The Church was dying by reason of their cowardice, their compromises with the weaknesses and the vanities of the world. It was, indeed, his favourite theory that all true religious spirit had departed from those monks, those priests, and those bishops, who ought to have ensured the reign of Jesus by fire and sword. Earth and mankind belonged to God alone, and God had given them to His Church, the sovereign delegate of His power. The Church therefore possessed everything, and held absolute dominion over everybody and everything. To her belonged the disposal of wealth; none could be wealthy save by her permission. To her belonged even the disposal of life, for every living man was her subject, whom she allowed to live or suppressed according to the interests of Heaven. Such was the doctrine from which the true saints had never departed. He, a mere humble Ignorantine, had always practised and exalted that doctrine, and his superiors, though they had wronged him in other respects, had always recognised in him the rare merit of possessing the true, absolute religious spirit; whereas they themselves — the Crabots, the Philibins, and the Fulgences — had ruined religion by their compromises, their trickery with the Freethinkers, the Jews, the Protestants, and the Freemasons. Like opportunists, anxious to please, they had gradually abandoned dogmas and concealed the asperity of doctrines, whereas they ought to have fought openly against impiety, and have slaughtered and burnt all heretics. He himself dreamt of seeing a huge sacrificial pyre set up in the midst of Paris, on which he would have cast the whole guilty nation, in order that the flames and the stench from all those millions of bodies might have ascended to the glowing skies to rejoice and appease the Deity.

And he next exclaimed: ‘As soon as a sinner confesses and does penance, he is no longer guilty, he again recovers the grace of his Sovereign Master. What man is there who never sins? All who are made of flesh are liable to err. Even like the layman, he who is in holy orders and whom the beast, which is in all men, precipitates into crime, has but one obligation cast upon him — that of confession; and if he receives absolution, if he expiates his sin with firm repentance, he redeems himself, he becomes again as white as snow, worthy to enter into heaven, among the roses and lilies of Mary.... I confessed my sin to Father Théodose, who absolved me, and I owed nothing more to anybody, since God, who ordains and knows all things, had pardoned me by the sacrament of one of His ministers. And in the same way, from that day forward, each time that I lied, each time that my superiors compelled me to lie, I went back to the confessional, and I washed my soul clean of all the impurities with which human fragility had soiled it. Alas! I have often and I have greatly sinned, for God, in order no doubt to try me, has allowed the devil to assail me with all the fires of hell. But I have battered my chest with my fists, I have made my knees bleed by dragging them over the flagstones of chapels — I have paid, and I repeat that I owe nothing whatever. A flight of archangels would bear me straight to paradise if I should die by-and-by, ere lapsing again into the original mire, whence in common with all men I have sprung. And in particular I owe nothing to men; I have never owed them anything; my crime lies between God and me, His servant. But He has forgiven me, and so, if I speak here to-day, it is because I choose to do so, because I desire to couple with the Divine mercy the martyrdom of a last humiliation, in order that I may enter paradise in triumph — a celestial joy which, whatever my abjection, I shall assuredly taste, thanks to my penitence; whereas you will never taste it — race of unbelievers and blasphemers that you are, destined, one and all, to the flames of hell!’