Complete Works of Emile Zola (1840 page)

Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

I

DURING the fruit season a brown-skinned little girl with bushy black hair used to come every month to the house of Monsieur Rostand, a lawyer of Aix, in Provence, bringing with her a huge basket of apricots or peaches, so heavy that she had hardly strength enough to carry it. She would wait in the large entrance-hall, whither all the family went to greet her.

‘So it’s you, Naïs,’ the lawyer would say. ‘You’ve brought us some fruit, eh? Come, you’re a good girl. And how is your father?’

‘Quite well, sir,’ replied the little girl, showing her white teeth.

Then Madame Rostand would take her into the kitchen and ask her about the olives, the almonds, and the vines. But the most important question was whether there had been any rain at L’Estaque, where the Rostands’ estate was situated, a place called La Blancarde, which was cultivated by the Micoulins. There were but a few dozen almond and olive trees, but the question of rain was none the less an important one in this province, where everything perishes from drought.

‘There have been a few drops,’ Naïs would say. ‘The vines want more.’

Then, having imparted her news, she ate a piece of bread and some scraps of meat, and set out again for L’Estaque in a butcher’s cart which came to Aix every fortnight. Frequently she brought some shell-fish, a lobster, a fine eel, for Micoulin fished more than he tilled the ground. When she came during the holidays, Frédéric, the lawyer’s son, used to rush into the kitchen to tell her that the family would soon take up their quarters at La Blancarde, and that she must get some nets and lines ready. He was almost like a brother to her, for they had played together as children. Since the age of twelve, however, she had called him ‘Monsieur Frédéric,’ out of respect. Every time old Micoulin heard her speak familiarly to the young man he boxed her ears, but in spite of this the two children were sworn allies.

‘Don’t forget to mend the nets,’ repeated the schoolboy.

‘No fear, Monsieur Frédéric,’ replied Naïs. ‘They’ll be ready for you.’

Monsieur Rostand was very wealthy. He had bought a splendid seignorial mansion in the Rue du Collège at a very low price. The Hôtel de Coiron, built during the latter part of the seventeenth century, had twelve windows in its frontage, and contained enough rooms to house a religious order. Amid those vast rooms the family, consisting of five persons, including the two old servants, seemed lost. The lawyer occupied merely the first floor. For ten years he had tried, without success, to let the ground and second floors, and finally he had decided to lock them up, thus abandoning two-thirds of the house to the spiders. Echoes like those of a cathedral resounded through the empty sonorous mansion at the least noise in the entrance-hall, an enormous hall with a staircase from which one could easily have obtained sufficient material to build a modern dwelling.

Immediately after his purchase, Monsieur Rostand had divided the grand drawing-room into two offices, by means of a partition. It was a room thirty-six feet long by twenty-four broad, lighted by six windows. Of one of the two parts he had formed his own private room, the other being allotted to his clerks. The first floor contained four other apartments, the smallest of which measured twenty feet by fifteen. Madame Rostand, Frédéric, and the two old servants had bedrooms as lofty as churches. The lawyer had been forced, for convenience’ sake, to convert an old boudoir into a kitchen; for at an earlier stage, when they had made use of the kitchen on the ground floor, the food, after passing through the chilly atmosphere of the entrance-hall and staircase, had come to table quite cold. To make matters worse, the gigantic apartments were furnished in the most sparing manner. In the lawyer’s private room an ancient suite of furniture, upholstered in green Utrecht velvet, and of the stiff and comfortless-looking Empire style, did its best to fill up the space, with its sofa and eight chairs; a little round table, belonging to the same period, looked like a toy in that immensity; on the chimney-piece there was nothing beyond a horrible modern marble clock between two vases, whilst the tiled floor, looking much the worse for age, showed a dirty red. The bedrooms were more empty still. The whole house brought home to one the tranquil disdain which Southern families — even the richest of them — display for comfort and luxury, in that happy land of the sun, where life is mainly spent out of doors. The Rostands were certainly not conscious of the sad, mortal chilliness which brooded over those huge rooms, mainly though the scantiness and poverty-stricken aspect of the furniture.

Yet the lawyer was a shrewd man. His father had left him one of the best practices in Aix, and he had managed to improve it considerably by displaying an amount of activity rare in that land of indolence. Small, brisk, weasel-faced, his sole thought was of his work. No other matters troubled his brain; he never even looked at a paper during the rare hours of idleness he spent at his club. His wife, on the contrary, had the reputation of being one of the cleverest and most accomplished women in the town. She was a De Villebonne, a fact which invested her with a certain amount of dignity, in spite of her
mésalliance.
But she was strait-laced to such a point, she practised her religious duties with such bigoted fortitude, that she had, as it were, become shrivelled up by the methodical life she led.

As for Frédéric, he grew up between his busy father and rigid mother. During his schoolboy days he was a dunce of the first water, trembling before his mother, but having such a distaste for work that he would often sit in the drawing-room during the evening poring for hours over his books without reading a single line, his mind wandering, whilst his parents imagined from the look of him that he was preparing his lessons. Irritated by his laziness, they put him to board at the college; but he then worked less than ever, being less looked after than at home, and delighted to feel that he was no longer under his parents’ stern eyes. Accordingly, alarmed by the airs of liberty which he put on, they took him away, in order to have him under their ferule again. So narrowly did they look after him that he was forced to work: his mother examined his exercises, made him repeat his lessons, and mounted guard over him unremittingly like a gendarme. Thanks to this supervision, Frédéric failed but twice in passing the examination for his degree.

Aix is celebrated for its law school, and young Rostand was naturally sent to it. In that ancient town the population is largely composed of barristers, notaries, and solicitors practising at the Appeal Court. A youth takes a law degree as a matter of course, following it up or not as he pleases. So Frédéric remained at the college, working as little as possible, but trying to make his parents believe that he was working a great deal. Madame Rostand, to her great sorrow, had been forced to give him more liberty. He now went out when he chose in the daytime, and was only expected to be at home to meals. He had, however, to be in by nine o’clock in the evening, except on those days when he was allowed to go to the theatre. Thus began that country student’s life, so full of vice when it is not entirely devoted to work.

A person must know Aix, be acquainted with the quiet grass-grown streets, the state of torpor which enwraps the whole town, in order to understand the purposeless life which the students lead there. Those who work can manage to kill time over their books; but those who refuse to exert themselves steadily have no other places where they can while away their leisure save the cafés and other resorts, where people gamble and drink, and call it ‘seeing life.’ Thus Frédéric soon became an inveterate gambler: he passed the greater part of his evenings at cards, and finished them elsewhere. When he found his evenings too short for him he managed, by stealing a key of the house door, to have all night as well. In this way his years of probation passed pleasantly enough.

Frédéric had sense enough to see that he must play the part of a tractable son. The hypocrisy of a child curbed by fear had little by little grown upon him. His mother now declared herself satisfied; he took her to church, behaved most properly with her, told her with the greatest calmness the most unheard-of lies, which she believed, thanks to his air of candour. And so clever did he become in this respect that he never allowed himself to be outwitted, being always ready with an excuse, always prepared in advance with the most extraordinary stories in support of his statements. He paid his gaming debts with money borrowed from his cousins, and his pecuniary transactions would have filled a book. Once, after an unhoped-for stroke of good luck, he was able to turn a dream he had of spending a week in Paris into reality, by getting himself invited thither by a friend who had a little estate near the Durance.

Frédéric was a fine young fellow, tall, with regular features, and a black beard. His vices made him good company, especially with ladies. He was quoted for his good manners. Those who knew his goings on smiled a little, but, as he had the sense to throw a veil over this side of his life, he came in for a certain amount of credit for not making an exhibition of his excesses, as did other students who were the scandal of the town.

Frédéric was nearly twenty-one, and was soon to pass his last examination. His father, who was still young and not inclined as yet to hand his practice over to him, talked of making him enter the magistrature to begin with. He had friends in Paris to whom he could apply to get him an appointment as public prosecutor’s assessor. The young man raised no objection; for he never openly opposed his parents; but a certain expressive smile on his face betokened his firm determination to prolong the pleasant existence which suited him so well. He knew that his father was rich, that he was his only son, so why should he trouble himself? In the meantime he smoked his cigar on the Promenade, gambled in the neighbouring cafés, and paid his attentions to a variety of damsels, though all this did not prevent him from holding himself at his mother’s orders, and loading her with attentions. At times when he felt out of sorts he stayed at home in the huge gloomy mansion in the Rue du Collège, and enjoyed delicious repose. The emptiness of the rooms, the sense of constraint perceptible on every side, seemed to him to possess a soothing influence. There he collected himself afresh, making his mother believe that he was stopping at home for her sake, until the day when, health and appetite having returned, he devised some fresh escapade. In one word, he was the best fellow in the world, so long as his pleasures were not interfered with.

Every year, however, Naïs came to the Rostands with her fish and fruit, and every year she grew. She was of the same age as Frédéric, or, to be correct, she was just three months older. Madame Rostand would often say to her:

‘What a big girl you are growing, Naïs!’

And Naïs would smile, showing her white teeth. As a rule, Frédéric was not there; but one day, during the last year of his probation, he was going out, when he found Naïs standing in the hall with her basket. He stopped short in astonishment. He did not recognise the girl, though he had seen her only the year before at La Blancarde. Naïs was looking superb, with her dark face beneath a swarthy covering of thick black hair, her broad shoulders, her supple waist, and her magnificent arms, of which the bare wrists were exposed. In a single year she had grown like a young tree.

‘You!’ said he, in a hesitating voice.

‘Yes, Monsieur Frédéric,’ replied Naïs, looking him in the face with her big eyes, in which a sombre fire smouldered. ‘I’ve brought some sea-urchins. When are you coming? Shall I get the nets ready?’

He was still looking at her, and muttering, as if he had not heard her speak: ‘How handsome you are, Naïs! What is there in you?’

The compliment made her smile. Then, as he took her hands playfully, as he had done in the days gone by, she became serious, and said in a hoarse whisper: ‘No, no; not here. Take care! here comes your mother.’

II

A FORTNIGHT later the Rostand family started for La Blancarde. The lawyer had to rest during the vacation, and September was a charming month at the seaside. The great heat was past, and the nights were deliciously cool.

La Blancarde was not actually in L’Estaque, a village situated on the extreme outskirts of Marseilles, and nestling among the rocks which bound the bay. The house was built on a cliff overlooking the village, and its yellow walls, glistening amongst the pines, could be seen from any part of the bay. It was one of those heavy square buildings, pierced with irregular windows, and called ‘châteaux’ in Provence. In front of the house a broad terrace extended, rising almost perpendicularly above the pebbly beach. Behind, there was a vast enclosure of poor land, upon which nothing but a few vines, almond or olive trees would grow. One of the inconveniences, indeed, one of the dangers, of La Blancarde was the fact that the sea was gradually eating away the cliff; infiltrations, proceeding from neighbouring springs, were constantly at work in that softening mountain of clay and rock; and every year enormous masses fell away, being precipitated with a deafening crash into the sea. The property was thus becoming smaller and smaller; the pines had already begun to fall.

The Micoulins had been settled at La Blancarde for forty years. According to the Provençal custom, they cultivated the land and shared the crops with the landlord. These crops were scanty, and they would have died of starvation if, during the summer, they had not turned their attention to the sea. Between tilling and sowing there came an interval of fishing. The family consisted of Micoulin, a stern old man, with a black and seamy face, before whom the others trembled; of his wife, a tall woman, whose intellect was dulled by hard toil in the blazing sun; of a son, who at that time was serving on board the
Arrogant,
man-of-war; and of Naïs, whom her father, in spite of her numerous tasks at home, sent to work at a tile manufactory. Rarely did the sound of a laugh or a song enliven the tenants’ dwelling, a hovel built against one of the sides of La Blancarde. Micoulin, buried in his reflections, preserved gloomy silence. The two women exhibited towards him that cringing respect which Southern wives and daughters always display for the head of the family. It was not often that silence was broken, except it were by the mother’s calls, as she stood with her hands on her hips, her throat ready to burst, shouting out the name of Naïs whenever her daughter disappeared. Naïs heard her a mile away, and returned home pale with stifled anger.