Complete Works of Emile Zola (1807 page)

The paling surrounds seven or eight tents, which form a kind of street. Behind the tents small, raw-boned, sinewy horses nibble the scorched grass. Low wheels of vehicles are visible beneath shreds of old awning.

Within is an unbearable stench of filth and misery. The ground is already trodden down, dusty and purulent. The bedding is being aired on the pointed palings. There are straw pallets, faded rugs, square mattresses, on which two families must sleep at ease, all the output of some leper hospital, drying in the sun. In the tents, set up in Arab fashion, very high, and opening like curtains hanging from the canopy of a bedstead, are heaps of rags, saddles, harness, a lot of bric-a-brac without a name, objects that have ceased to have either colour or form, lying there in a layer of superb filth, which is warm in tone and likely to send a painter into ecstasies.

I think, however, I found the kitchen at the extremity of the encampment, in a tent that was smaller than the others. There were some iron stewpans and three-legged cooking-pots; I even recognised a plate. But there was no appearance of cooking. The stewpans serve, perhaps, to make the Sabbath broth.

The men are tall and strong, with round faces and very long, curly black hair, which is glossy and greasy. They are attired in all the cast-off garments picked up on the road. One of them was walking about, dressed in a chintz curtain with great yellow flowers. Another had a jacket which must originally have been a dress coat from which the tails had been torn. Several have women’s petticoats. They smile in their long, thin, glossy beards. Their favourite head-covering seems to be the crowns of old felt hats, out of which they have made skull-caps by cutting off the brims.

The women also are tall and strong. The shrivelled-up old ones are hideous in their half-naked emaciation and dishevelled hair, and resemble witches who have been burnt in hell fire. Among the young ones, there are some who are very beautiful beneath their coating of filth, with their bronzed skin and great soft black eyes. They give themselves a coquettish appearance; their hair is plaited in two thick tresses, which are looped up and fastened behind the ears, and tied tight at distances by pieces of red ribbon. In their coloured petticoats, with their shoulders covered by a shawl fastened like a sash, their heads decked with a neckerchief tightened across their foreheads, they had the grand air of barbarian queens fallen to the depths of vermin.

And the children, a whole flock of them on the move. I saw one in a shirt, with a man’s huge waistcoat flapping against his calves; he had a beautiful blue stag-beetle in his hand. Another, a very small child, two years old at the most, was running about naked, absolutely naked, amidst the noisy laughter of the prying girls of the neighbourhood. And he was so dirty, the dear little fellow, so green and red, that you might have mistaken him for a Florentine bronze, one of those charming little figures of the Renaissance period.

The whole band is impassive in presence of the noisy curiosity of the crowd. Men and women are sleeping in the tents. A mother is suckling a little yellow-coloured mite, who looks as if he were made of brass, at a bare black breast that looks like a gourd become brown by use. Other women who are squatting down, gaze seriously at these strange Parisians who are ferreting among the filth. I inquired of one of them what she thought of us; she feebly smiled, without answering.

A handsome girl of some twenty summers strolls about among the idlers, and tempts ladies in hats and silk gowns to have their fortunes told. I saw her go through the performance. She took a young woman’s hand, retained it in hers in a fondling way, until the hand in the end remained there. Then she gave the person to understand that she must put a piece of money in it; a ten-sou piece was not sufficient, she must have a couple, and she even talked about five francs. At the expiration of a few seconds, after having promised long life, children, and much happiness, she took the two ten-sou pieces and used them to make signs of the cross at the edge of the young woman’s hat, and at the word
Amen,
slipped them into her pocket, an immense pocket, in which I caught a glimpse of handfuls of silver.

She certainly sells a talisman. She breaks a little bit of reddish stuff, which looks like dried orange peel, between her teeth; she ties it up in the corner of the pocket-handkerchief of the person whose fortune she has been telling; then, she impresses upon her that she must be sure and add bread, salt, and sugar to it. This will prevent all illness and keep away the devil.

And the hussy goes through her work with an astounding air of gravity. If one of the pieces of money that have been put in her hand is taken back, she vows that her good predictions will turn into frightful evils. The system is simple, but the gesture and tone are capital.

Gipsies are tolerated in the little town in Provence where I was brought up; but they do not excite extraordinary curiosity. They are accused of eating the lost dogs and cats, and that makes persons of the bourgeois class look askance at them. Respectable people turn aside their heads when they have to go into their vicinity.

They arrive with their habitations on wheels, and take up their quarters on a bit of waste land in the outskirts. Some spots are inhabited from year to year by tribes of children in rags, and men and women stretched in the sun. I have seen creatures of superb beauty there. We youngsters, who did not feel the same disgust as respectable persons, used to go and peer into the carts where these people sleep in winter.

And, I remember that one day, when my heart was swollen with some boyish sorrow, I had an idea of getting up into one of those carts that was leaving, and going off with those tall, beautiful girls, whose black eyes frightened me, of going a long way off, to the end of the world, rolling for ever on the roads.

X

A young chemist who was a friend of mine said to me one morning:

“I know a learned old man who has shut himself up in a little house on the Boulevard d’Enfer, to study the crystallisation of the diamond, in quiet He has already made remarkable progress. Shall I take you to see him?”

I accepted with secret terror. A sorcerer would have frightened me less, for I have but little fear of the devil; but I am afraid of money, and I confess that the man who one of these days happens to find the philosopher’s stone, will strike me with respectful horror.

On the way, my friend gave me some details concerning the manufacture of precious stones. Our chemists have been inquiring into the subject for a long time. But the crystals they have hitherto produced are so small, and the cost of manufacture is so high, that the experiments have, till now, been limited to the simple curiosity of men of science. That is how the matter stands. It is merely a question of discovering more powerful agents and a less expensive process, to turn the articles out at a low figure.

In the meanwhile we had reached our destination. My friend, before ringing, warned me that the old man of learning disliked inquisitive persons, and would no doubt give me a sorry welcome. I would be the first of the profane to penetrate within the sanctuary.

The chemist opened to us, and I confess that he first of all struck me as looking stupid, and of having the emaciated and down-trodden air of a cobbler. He greeted my friend affectionately, accepting my presence with a surly growl, as if I had been a dog belonging to his young disciple. We crossed a neglected garden. At the bottom of it was the house — a hovel in ruins. The tenant had pulled down all the partitions, so as to leave but one large, lofty room. Within was the complete apparatus of a laboratory, and amongst it strange-looking vessels, of which I did not attempt to understand the use. All the luxury and furniture consisted of a form and table stained black.

It was in this wretched hole that I was more blindly dazzled than I have ever been in my life. Set on the ground along the wall were the remains of worn-out baskets, the osier of which was bursting, filled to the brim with precious stones. Each heap consisted of one sort. The rubies, amethysts, emeralds, sapphires, opals, turquoises, thrown into the corners like shovelfuls of stones beside the road, shone with brilliant flashes, lighting up the room with their sparkling fire. They were like beacons, live coal, red, violet, green, blue, pink. And one would have said there were millions of fairies’ eyes laughing in the dark, on a level with the ground. Never has such a treasure existed, even in an Arab story; never has woman dreamt of such a paradise.

I could not restrain a burst of admiration.

“What wealth!” I exclaimed. “There are milliards there.” The learned old man shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to be gazing at me with an air of profound pity.

“Each of those heaps costs a few francs,” he said to me in his slow, hollow tone of voice. “I shall sprinkle them to-morrow over the walks of my garden in the place of gravel.” Then, turning towards my friend, and taking up the stones in handfuls, he continued:

“Look at these rubies; they are the finest I have yet produced. I am not satisfied with these emeralds; they are too pure; all natural ones are flaky, and I do not want to beat nature. What puts me to despair is my not having been able to produce the white diamond. I recommenced my experiments yesterday. As soon as I have succeeded, the labour of my life will be crowned, I shall die happy.”

The man had become greater. He no longer appeared to me stupid; I began to tremble before this pallid old man who had it in his power to pour a miraculous shower over Paris.

“
But you must be afraid of thieves?” I inquired of him. “I see solid iron bars at your doors and windows. That is a precaution.”

“Yes, I am afraid at times,” he murmured, “afraid that idiots may kill me before I have discovered the white diamond. Those stones which will be worthless in a short time may tempt my heirs now. It is of my heirs that I am in terror; they know that by causing me to disappear they will bury the secret of my invention with me, and that they will thus maintain the value of this pretended treasure.”

He became thoughtful and sad. We had seated ourselves on the heap of diamonds, and I watched him, his left hand buried in the basket of rubies, whilst he made handfuls of emeralds run through his right. Children make sand pass through their fingers in the same way.

After a silence I exclaimed:

“You must lead an intolerable existence t You live here in the hatred of mankind Have you no amusement?”

He gazed at me in surprise.

“I work,” he answered simply; “I never feel dull. When I am gay, on my days of folly, I put some of these stones in my pocket, and I go and sit down at the end of my garden, behind a loophole which looks on to the boulevard. There I from time to time throw a diamond into the middle of the road.”

He still laughed at the thought of this capital joke.

“You could never imagine the grimaces the people who find my stones make. They shake, look behind them, then run away as pale as death. Ah! the poor people, what capital comedies they have performed to me. I have passed many merry hours there.”

His dry voice gave me inexpressible discomfort. He was evidently making fun of me.

“Hey! young man,” he resumed, “I have enough there to purchase many women; but I am an old devil. You can understand that if I felt the least ambition, I should long ago have been king somewhere. Bah! I would not kill a fly; I am good, and that is why I allow men to live.”

He could not have told me more politely that if the fancy took him, he would send me to the scaffold.

Strange thoughts rose within me and rang in my ears until I was giddy. The eyes of fairies of precious stones gazed at me with their piercing glances, red, violet, green, blue, pink. I had clenched my fists without knowing it; in the left I had a handful of rubies, in the right a handful of emeralds. And, if I must say all, I was urged by an almost irresistible desire to slip them into my pockets.

I let the accursed stones go, and went off with a sound of galloping gendarmes in my ears.

XI

I — had gone to Versailles, and was ascending the spacious Cour des Maréchaux, a stony solitude that has often reminded me of the barren land of La Crau, where an ocean of pebbles is turning green in the bright sun.

Last winter, I saw the château with its bluish roof, in snowy weather, looking majestic and gloomy against the grey sky, like the royal palace of cold. It still looks sad in the summer, more melancholy, more abandoned, in the warmth of the air, amidst the luxuriant growth of the trees in the park. Each time the fine weather comes, the old trunks make themselves young again with their leaves. The old château is in the pangs of death; the sap of life no longer rises in its stones which are crumbling to. dust; implacable ruin is at hand, gnawing off the corners, disjoining the flagstones, pursuing hourly its deadly task.

Habitations, whether they be hovels or palaces, have their complaints from which they suffer and from which they die. They are great living bodies, persons who have a childhood and old age; some are robust until the moment of their death, others are weary and shaky before the time. I remember houses standing by the roadside that I have caught a glimpse of from a railway carriage window: newly erected buildings, unpretentious pavilions, deserted country-houses, ruined keeps. And all these stone beings spoke to me, told me what sort of health they enjoyed, and what illness was killing them. When a man closes his doors and windows and leaves his abode, it is the blood of the house flowing away. The residence stands for years in the sun wearing the furrowed features of the dying; then some winter night, it is blown down by a gust of wind.

The Château of Versailles is dying from this desertion. Its size was too great for man to put life into it. It would require quite a nation of tenants to make vitality circulate in those endless corridors, in that long succession of immense rooms. It was the colossal error of the pride of a monarch, who destined it to ruin from its birth, by making it too large. The glory of Louis XIV. no longer overspreads even the room in which he slept, a frigid chamber to which his regal ashes convey naught but a little more dust