Complete Works of Emile Zola (250 page)

At this thought a savage rage was once more kindled within her. And in a final access of desire, she dreamt of recapturing her prey, of swooning in Maxime’s arms and carrying him away with her. Louise could never marry him; Louise well knew that he did not belong to her, since she had seen them kissing each other on the lips. Then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders, so as not to pass quite naked through the hall. She went downstairs.

In the small drawing-room she came face to face with Mme. Sidonie. The latter, in order to enjoy the drama, had again stationed herself on the conservatory steps. But she no longer knew what to think when Saccard reappeared with Maxime, and abruptly replied to her whispered questions that there was “nothing whatever.” Then she guessed the truth. Her yellow face turned pale, she thought this was really too much. And she went softly and glued her ear to the door of the staircase, hoping to hear Renée cry, upstairs. When the latter opened the door, it almost struck her sister-in-law in the face.

“You are spying on me!” said Renée, angrily.

But Mme. Sidonie replied with fine disdain:

“Do you think I care about your filth!”

And catching up her sorceress’s dress, retreating with a majestic look:

“It’s not my fault, my dear, if you meet with mishaps…. But I bear no malice, do you hear? And understand that you would have found and could still find a second mother in me. I shall be glad to see you at my place, whenever you please.”

Renée did not listen to her. She entered the large drawing-room, she passed through a very complicated figure of the cotillon, without even remarking the surprise which her fur cloak occasioned. In the middle of the room were groups of ladies and their partners mingling together, waving streamers, and M. de Saffré’s fluted voice called out:

“Come, mesdames, the ‘Mexican War.’… The ladies who play the bushes must spread out their skirts and remain on the ground…. Now the gentlemen must dance round their bushes…. Then when I clap my hands each of them must waltz with his bush.”

He clapped his hands. The brass sang out, the waltz once more sent the couples spinning round the room. The figure was not very successful. Two ladies had been left behind on the carpet, entangled in their dresses. Madame Daste declared that the only thing that amused her in the “Mexican War” was making a “cheese” with her dress, as at school.

Renée, on reaching the hall, found Louise and her father, whom Saccard and Maxime were seeing off. The Baron Gouraud had left. Madame Sidonie went away with the Mignon and Charrier couple, while M. Hupel de la Noue escorted Madame Michelin, followed discreetly by her husband. The préfet had spent the latter part of the evening in making love to the pretty brunette. He had just succeeded in persuading her to spend a month of the fine season in his departmental town, “where she would see some really curious antiquities.”

Louise, who was covertly munching the nougat which she had put in her pocket, was seized with a fit of coughing just as she was leaving the house.

“Cover yourself up,” said her father.

And Maxime hastened to tighten the strings of the hood of her opera-cloak. She raised her chin, she allowed herself to be muffled up. But when Madame Saccard appeared, M. de Mareuil turned back, said good-bye. They all stayed talking there for a moment. Renée, to explain her paleness, her trembling, said that she had felt cold, that she had gone up to her room to throw this fur over her shoulders. And she watched for the moment when she could whisper to Louise, who was looking at her with tranquil curiosity. When the gentlemen shook hands once more, she leant forward, murmured:

“Tell me you’re not going to marry him? It’s not possible. You know quite well…”

But the child interrupted her, rising on tiptoe, speaking in her ear:

“Oh! make yourself easy. I shall take him away…. It makes no difference, since we are going to Italy.”

And she smiled with her vague, vicious, sphinx-like smile. Renée was left stuttering. She did not understand, she fancied that the hunchback was laughing at her. Then when the Mareuils had gone, after several times repeating, “Till Sunday!” she looked at her husband, she looked at Maxime with her terrified eyes. And seeing their tranquil and self-satisfied attitudes, she hid her face in her hands, fled, sought refuge in the depths of the conservatory.

The pathways were deserted. The great clumps of foliage were asleep, and on the heavy surface of the tank two budding water-lilies slowly unfolded. Renée would gladly have sought relief in tears; but this moist heat, this pungent odour which she recognized caught her at the throat, strangled her despair. She looked down at the spot in the yellow sand at her feet, on the margin of the tank, where last winter she used to spread out the bearskin rug. And when she raised her eyes, she saw yet one more figure of the cotillon right away in the background, through the two open doors.

The noise was deafening, there was a confused medley in which at first she distinguished nothing but flying skirts and black legs prancing and turning. M. de Saffré’s voice cried, “Change your ladies! change your ladies!” And the couples passed by amid a fine yellow dust; each gentleman, after three or four turns in the waltz, threw his partner into the arms of his neighbour, who in his turn threw him his. The Baronne de Meinhold, in her costume as the Emerald, fell from the hands of the Comte de Chibray into the hands of Mr. Simpson; he caught her as best he could by the shoulder, while the tips of his gloves glided under her bodice. The Comtesse Vanska, flushed, jingling her coral pendants, went with a bound from the chest of M. de Saffré to the chest of the Duc de Rozan, whom she entwined in her arms and compelled to hop round for five turns, when she hung herself on the hips of Mr. Simpson, who had just flung the Emerald to the leader of the cotillon. And Madame Teissière, Madame Daste, Madame de Lauwerens shone like large, live jewels, with the blonde pallor of the Topaz, the gentle blue of the Turquoise, the ardent blue of the Sapphire, had moments of abandonment, curved under a waltzer’s outstretched wrist, then started off again, fell back or forwards into a fresh embrace, visited one after the other the arms of every man in the room. However, Madame d’Espanet, standing in front of the band, had succeeded in catching hold of Madame Haffner as she sped by, and now waltzed with her, refusing to let her go. Gold and Silver danced amorously together.

Renée then understood this whirl of skirts, this prancing of legs. Standing lower down, she could see the eagerness of the feet, the whirling of glazed shoes and white ankles. At intervals it seemed to her as though a gust of wind were about to carry off the dresses. Those bare shoulders, those bare arms, those bare heads that flew and reeled past, caught up, thrown off and caught up again at the end of that gallery, where the waltz of the band grew madder, where the red hangings swooned amid the final fever of the ball, seemed to her as the tumultuous symbol of her own life, of her self-exposures, of her surrenders. And at the thought that Maxime, to take the hunchback in his arms, had abandoned her there, in the very spot where they had loved one another, she underwent a pang so great that she thought of plucking a stalk of the tanghin-plant that grazed her cheek, and of chewing it dry. But she was afraid, and she remained before the shrub, shivering under the fur which her hands drew over her with a tight clutch, with a great gesture of terrified shame.

CHAPTER VII

Three months later, on one of those dismal spring mornings which in Paris recall the dimness and murky humidity of winter, Aristide Saccard got out of a cab in the Place du Château-d’Eau and turned with four other gentlemen into the space in the middle of the demolitions upon the site of what was to become the Boulevard du Prince-Eugène. They formed a committee of inspection which had been sent by the compensations commission to value certain houses on the spot, their owners not having been able to come to terms with the Ville.

Saccard was repeating the stroke of fortune of the Rue de la Pépinière. So that his wife’s name might remain quite out of it, he began by a spurious sale of the building-plots and the music-hall. Larsonneau handed over the lot to an imaginary creditor. The deed of sale bore the colossal figure of three million francs. This figure was so outrageous that the committee at the Hotel de Ville, when the expropriation-agent, in the name of the non-existing landlord, claimed the amount of the purchase-money as an indemnity, refused for one moment to allow more two millions and a half, despite the mute efforts of M. Michelin and the speeches of M. Toutin-Laroche and the Baron Gouraud. Saccard had foreseen this repulse; he refused the offer, let the case go before the jury, of which he happened to be a member, together with M. de Mareuil, by an accident to which he had no doubt contributed. And it was thus that, with four of his colleagues, he found himself appointed to make an enquiry upon his own site.

M. de Mareuil accompanied him. The three other committeemen consisted of a doctor, who smoked a cigar without caring the least in the world for the heaps of lime-rubbish he stepped over, and two business men, of whom one, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly turned a grindstone in the streets.

The path which these gentlemen followed was abominable. It had been raining all night. The ground, soaked through and through, was turning into a river of mud, running between the demolished houses over a path cutting across the soft ground in which the dobbin-carts sank up to their axles. On either side, great pieces of wall, crenulated by the pickaxe, remained erect; tall, gutted buildings, displaying their pallid entrails, opened to mid-air their wells stripped of stairs, their gaping rooms suspended on high and resembling the broken drawers of a big, ugly piece of furniture. Nothing could be more woe-begone than the wall-papers of these rooms, blue or yellow squares falling in tatters, marking the positions, five or six stories high, close under the roofing, of wretched little garrets, cramped cabins to which perhaps a whole human existence had been limited. On the bare walls, ribbons of flues ascended side by side, lugubriously black and with abrupt bends. A forgotten weather-cock grated at the extremity of a roof, while gutters, half detached, depended like rags. And the gap yawned still wider in the midst of these ruins, like a breach opened by cannon; the roadway, as yet hardly set out, filled with rubbish, with mounds of earth and deep pools of water, stretched along under the leaden sky, amid the sinister pallor of the falling plaster-dust, edged with the black strips of chimneys as with a mourning border.

The gentlemen, with their well-blackened boots, their frock-coats and tall hats, struck a strange note in this muddy, dirty yellow landscape, across which there passed nothing but sallow workmen, horses splashed to their backs, carts whose sides were hidden beneath a coating of dust. They went in Indian file, hopping from stone to stone, avoiding the pools of liquid mire, sometimes sinking in up to their ankles and then cursing as they shook their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the Rue de Charonne, by which they would have avoided this tramp over broken ground; but unfortunately they had several plots of land to visit on the long line of the boulevard; curiosity impelled them, they had decided to go right through the works. And moreover it interested them greatly. Sometimes they stopped, balancing themselves on a piece of plaster that had fallen into a rut, lifted their noses, called out to point out to one another a yawning flooring, a flue pointing into the air, a joist that had fallen on to a neighbouring roof. This bit of razed city at the end of the Rue du Temple seemed to them quite droll.

“It’s really curious,” said M. de Mareuil. “See, Saccard, look at that kitchen, up there; an old frying-pan has remained hanging there over the stove…. I can see it quite plainly.”

But the doctor, his cigar between his teeth, had planted himself before a demolished house of which there remained only the ground-floor rooms, filled with the debris of the other stories. A solitary large piece of walling rose from the heap of brick-rubbish; and in order to overthrow it with one effort they had tied round it a rope at which some thirty workmen were tugging.

“They won’t do it,” muttered the doctor. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”

The four others retraced their steps to see the wall come down. And all five of them, with staring eyes, with bated breath waited for the fall with a thrill of rapture. The workmen, relaxing, and then suddenly stiffening themselves, cried, “Oh! heave oh!”

“They won’t do it,” repeated the doctor.

Then, after a few seconds of anxiety:

“It’s moving, it’s moving,” joyously said one of the businessmen.

And when the wall at last gave way and came down with a thundering crash, raising a cloud of plaster, the gentlemen looked at one another with smiles. They were enchanted. Their frock-coats were covered with a fine dust, which whitened their arms and shoulders.

They now talked of the workmen, while resuming their cautious progress across the puddles. There were not many good ones amongst them. They were all sluggards, spendthrifts, and obstinate into the bargain, having but one dream, the ruin of their employers. M. de Mareuil, who for the last minute had with a shudder been watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof hacking at a wall with their pickaxes, expressed the opinion that those fellows were very plucky all the same. The others stopped once more, raised their eyes to the labourers balancing themselves, leaning over, striking with all their might; they shoved down the stones with their feet and quietly watched them smashing beneath them: had their pickaxe gone wide of the mark, the mere momentum of their arms would have hurled them to the bottom.

“Bah! they’re used to it,” said the doctor, replacing his cigar between his lips. “They’re brutes.”

They now reached one of the houses they had to inspect. They hurried through their task in a quarter of an hour, and resumed their walk. They gradually lost their disgust for the mud; they walked straight across the pools, giving up all hope of keeping their boots clean. When they had passed the Rue Ménilmontant, one of the business-men, the ex-knife-grinder, became restless. He examined the ruins around him, failed to recognize the neighbourhood. He said he had lived thereabouts, more than thirty years ago, on his first arrival in Paris, and that he should much like to find the place again. He kept on searching with his eyes, when the sight of a house which the labourers’ picks had already cut into two made him stop short in the middle of the road. He studied the door, the windows. Then, pointing with his finger to a corner of the demolished building, right up above: