Complete Works of Emile Zola (183 page)

In a short time he became an excellent workman. He cherished, however, much higher ambitions. Having once seen, at a coachbuilder’s at Plassans, a fine new carriage, shining with varnish, he vowed that he would one day build carriages himself. He remembered this carriage as a rare and unique work of art, an ideal towards which his aspirations should tend. The tilted carts at which he worked in Vian’s shop, those carts which he had lovingly cherished, now seemed unworthy of his affections. He began to attend the local drawing-school, where he formed a connection with a youngster who had left college, and who lent him an old treatise on geometry. He plunged into this study without a guide, racking his brains for weeks together in order to grasp the simplest problem in the world. In this matter he gradually became one of those learned workmen who can hardly sign their name and yet talk about algebra as though it were an intimate friend.

Nothing unsettles the mind so much as this desultory kind of education, which reposes on no firm basis. Most frequently such scraps of knowledge convey an absolutely false idea of the highest truths, and render persons of limited intellect insufferably stupid. In Silvere’s case, however, his scraps of stolen knowledge only augmented his liberal aspirations. He was conscious of horizons which at present remained closed to him. He formed for himself divine conceptions of things beyond his reach, and lived on, regarding in a deep, innocent, religious way the noble thoughts and grand conceptions towards which he was raising himself, but which he could not as yet comprehend. He was one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a distance he took for stars.

The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre consisted, in the first place, of a large room into which the street door opened. The only pieces of furniture in this room, which had a stone floor, and served both as a kitchen and a dining-room, were some straw-seated chairs, a table on trestles, and an old coffer which Adelaide had converted into a sofa, by spreading a piece of woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this yard there was a well. Aunt Dide’s bedroom was on the left side of the passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one chair; Silvere slept in a still smaller room on the right hand side, just large enough for a trestle bedstead; and he had been obliged to plan a set of shelves, reaching up to the ceiling, to keep by him all those dear odd volumes which he saved his sous to purchase from a neighbouring general dealer. When he read at night-time, he would hang his lamp on a nail at the head of the bed. If his grandmother had an attack, he merely had to leap out at the first gasp to be at her side in a moment.

The young man led the life of a child. He passed his existence in this lonely spot. Like his father, he felt a dislike for taverns and Sunday strolling. His mates wounded his delicate susceptibilities by their coarse jokes. He preferred to read, to rack his rain over some simple geometrical problem. Since aunt Dide had entrusted him with the little household commissions she did not go out at all, but ceased all intercourse even with her family. The young man sometimes thought of her forlornness; he reflected that the poor old woman lived but a few steps from the children who strove to forget her, as though she were dead; and this made him love her all the more, for himself and for the others. When he at times entertained a vague idea that aunt Dide might be expiating some former transgressions, he would say to himself: “I was born to pardon her.”

A nature such as Silvere’s, ardent yet self-restrained, naturally cherished the most exalted republican ideas. At night, in his little hovel, Silvere would again and again read a work of Rousseau’s which he had picked up at the neighbouring dealer’s among a number of old locks. The reading of this book kept him awake till daylight. Amidst his dream of universal happiness so dear to the poor, the words liberty, equality, fraternity, rang in his ears like those sonorous sacred calls of the bells, at the sound of which the faithful fall upon their knees. When, therefore, he learnt that the Republic had just been proclaimed in France he fancied that the whole world would enjoy a life of celestial beatitude. His knowledge, though imperfect, made him see farther than other workmen; his aspirations did not stop at daily bread; but his extreme ingenuousness, his complete ignorance of mankind, kept him in the dreamland of theory, a Garden of Eden where universal justice reigned. His paradise was for a long time a delightful spot in which he forgot himself.

When he came to perceive that things did not go on quite satisfactorily in the best of republics he was sorely grieved, and indulged in another dream, that of compelling men to be happy even by force. Every act which seemed to him prejudicial to the interest of the people roused him to revengeful indignation. Though he was as gentle as a child, he cherished the fiercest political animosity. He would not have killed a fly, and yet he was for ever talking of a call to arms. Liberty was his passion, an unreasoning, absolute passion, to which he gave all the feverish ardour of his blood. Blinded by enthusiasm, he was both too ignorant and too learned to be tolerant, and would not allow for men’s weaknesses; he required an ideal government of perfect justice and perfect liberty. It was at this period that Antoine Macquart thought of setting him against the Rougons. He fancied that this young enthusiast would work terrible havoc if he were only exasperated to the proper pitch. This calculation was not altogether devoid of shrewdness.

Such being Antoine’s scheme, he tried to induce Silvere to visit him, by professing inordinate admiration for the young man’s ideas. But he very nearly compromised the whole matter at the outset. He had a way of regarding the triumph of the Republic as a question of personal interest, as an era of happy idleness and endless junketing, which chilled his nephew’s purely moral aspirations. However, he perceived that he was on the wrong track, and plunged into strange bathos, a string of empty but high-sounding words, which Silvere accepted as a satisfactory proof of his civism. Before long the uncle and the nephew saw each other two or three times a week. During their long discussions, in which the fate of the country was flatly settled, Antoine endeavoured to persuade the young man that the Rougons’ drawing-room was the chief obstacle to the welfare of France. But he again made a false move by calling his mother “old jade” in Silvere’s presence. He even repeated to him the early scandals about the poor woman. The young man blushed for shame, but listened without interruption. He had not asked his uncle for this information; he felt heart-broken by such confidences, which wounded his feeling of respectful affection for aunt Dide. From that time forward he lavished yet more attention upon his grandmother, greeting her always with pleasant smiles and looks of forgiveness. However, Macquart felt that he had acted foolishly, and strove to take advantage of Silvere’s affection for Adelaide by charging the Rougons with her forlornness and poverty. According to him, he had always been the best of sons, whereas his brother had behaved disgracefully; Pierre had robbed his mother, and now, when she was penniless, he was ashamed of her. He never ceased descanting on this subject. Silvere thereupon became indignant with his uncle Pierre, much to the satisfaction of his uncle Antoine.

The scene was much the same every time the young man called. He used to come in the evening, while the Macquarts were at dinner. The father would be swallowing some potato stew with a growl, picking out the pieces of bacon, and watching the dish when it passed into the hands of Jean and Gervaise.

“You see, Silvere,” he would say with a sullen rage which was ill-concealed beneath his air of cynical indifference, “more potatoes, always potatoes! We never eat anything else now. Meat is only for rich people. It’s getting quite impossible to make both ends meet with children who have the devil’s appetite and their own too.”

Gervaise and Jean bent over their plates, no longer even daring to cut some bread. Silvere, who in his dream lived in heaven, did not grasp the situation. In a calm voice he pronounced these storm-laden words:

“But you should work, uncle.”

“Ah! yes,” sneered Macquart, stung to the quick. “You want me to work, eh! To let those beggars, the rich folk, continue to prey upon me. I should earn probably twenty sous a day, and ruin my constitution. It’s worth while, isn’t it?”

“Everyone earns what he can,” the young man replied. “Twenty sous are twenty sous; and it all helps in a home. Besides, you’re an old soldier, why don’t you seek some employment?”

Fine would then interpose, with a thoughtlessness of which she soon repented.

“That’s what I’m always telling him,” said she. “The market inspector wants an assistant; I mentioned my husband to him, and he seems well disposed towards us.”

But Macquart interrupted her with a fulminating glance. “Eh! hold your tongue,” he growled with suppressed anger. “Women never know what they’re talking about! Nobody would have me; my opinions are too well-known.”

Every time he was offered employment he displayed similar irritation. He did not cease, however, to ask for situations, though he always refused such as were found for him, assigning the most extraordinary reasons. When pressed upon the point he became terrible.

If Jean were to take up a newspaper after dinner he would at once exclaim: “You’d better go to bed. You’ll be getting up late to-morrow, and that’ll be another day lost. To think of that young rascal coming home with eight francs short last week! However, I’ve requested his master not give him his money in future; I’ll call for it myself.”

Jean would go to bed to avoid his father’s recriminations. He had but little sympathy with Silvere; politics bored him, and he thought his cousin “cracked.” When only the women remained, if they unfortunately started some whispered converse after clearing the table, Macquart would cry: “Now, you idlers! Is there nothing that requires mending? we’re all in rags. Look here, Gervaise, I was at your mistress’s to-day, and I learnt some fine things. You’re a good-for-nothing, a gad-about.”

Gervaise, now a grown girl of more than twenty, coloured up at thus being scolded in the presence of Silvere, who himself felt uncomfortable. One evening, having come rather late, when his uncle was not at home, he had found the mother and daughter intoxicated before an empty bottle. From that time he could never see his cousin without recalling the disgraceful spectacle she had presented, with the maudlin grin and large red patches on her poor, pale, puny face. He was not less shocked by the nasty stories that circulated with regard to her. He sometimes looked at her stealthily, with the timid surprise of a schoolboy in the presence of a disreputable character.

When the two women had taken up their needles, and were ruining their eyesight in order to mend his old shirts, Macquart, taking the best seat, would throw himself back with an air of delicious comfort, and sip and smoke like a man who relishes his laziness. This was the time when the old rogue generally railed against the wealthy for living on the sweat of the poor man’s brow. He was superbly indignant with the gentlemen of the new town, who lived so idly, and compelled the poor to keep them in luxury. The fragments of communistic notions which he culled from the newspapers in the morning became grotesque and monstrous on falling from his lips. He would talk of a time near at hand when no one would be obliged to work. He always, however, kept his fiercest animosity for the Rougons. He never could digest the potatoes he had eaten.

“I saw that vile creature Felicite buying a chicken in the market this morning,” he would say. “Those robbers of inheritances must eat chicken, forsooth!”

“Aunt Dide,” interposed Silvere, “says that uncle Pierre was very kind to you when you left the army. Didn’t he spend a large sum of money in lodging and clothing you?”

“A large sum of money!” roared Macquart in exasperation; “your grandmother is mad. It was those thieves who spread those reports themselves, so as to close my mouth. I never had anything.”

Fine again foolishly interfered, reminding him that he had received two hundred francs, besides a suit of clothes and a year’s rent. Antoine thereupon shouted to her to hold her tongue, and continued, with increasing fury: “Two hundred francs! A fine thing! I want my due, ten thousand francs. Ah! yes, talk of the hole they shoved me into like a dog, and the old frock-coat which Pierre gave me because he was ashamed to wear it any longer himself, it was so dirty and ragged!”

He was not speaking the truth; but, seeing the rage that he was in, nobody ventured to protest any further. Then, turning towards Silvere: “It’s very stupid of you to defend them!” he added. “They robbed your mother, who, good woman, would be alive now if she had had the means of taking care of herself.”

“Oh! you’re not just, uncle,” the young man said; “my mother did not die for want of attention, and I’m certain my father would never have accepted a sou from his wife’s family!”

“Pooh! don’t talk to me! your father would have taken the money just like anybody else. We were disgracefully plundered, and it’s high time we had our rights.”

Then Macquart, for the hundredth time, began to recount the story of the fifty thousand francs. His nephew, who knew it by heart, and all the variations with which he embellished it, listened to him rather impatiently.

“If you were a man,” Antoine would say in conclusion, “you would come some day with me, and we would kick up a nice row at the Rougons. We would not leave without having some money given us.”

Silvere, however, grew serious, and frankly replied: “If those wretches robbed us, so much the worse for them. I don’t want their money. You see, uncle, it’s not for us to fall on our relatives. If they’ve done wrong, well, one of these days they’ll be severely punished for it.”