Complete Works of Emile Zola (338 page)

He again gave a snigger of satisfaction. ‘The Rougons, you know, my dear, haven’t got any stronger heads than the Macquarts have, and I often think, as I sit out here in front of that big house, that the whole lot will, perhaps, join the mother there some day. Thank Heaven, I’ve no fear about myself. My noddle is firmly fixed on. But I know some of them who are a little shaky. Well, I shall be here to receive them, and I shall see them from my den, and recommend them to Alexandre’s kind attention, though they haven’t all of them always been particularly kind to me.’

Then with that hideous smile of his that was like a captive wolf’s, he added:

‘It’s very lucky for you all that I am here on the spot at Les Tulettes.’

Marthe could not help trembling. Though she was well aware of her uncle’s taste for savage pleasantries, and the pleasure he took in torturing the people to whom he presented his rabbits, she could not help fancying that he was perhaps speaking the truth, and that the rest of the family would indeed be quartered eventually in those gloomy cells. She insisted upon taking her immediate departure in spite of the pressing entreaties of Macquart, who wanted to open another bottle of wine.

‘Ah! where is the fowl?’ he cried, just as she was getting into the carriage.

He went back for it, and placed it upon her knees.

‘It is for Mouret, you understand,’ he said, with a malicious expression; ‘for Mouret, and for no one else. When I come to see you, I shall ask him how he liked it.’

He winked as he glanced at Olympe. Then, just as the coachman was going to whip his horse forward, he laid hold of the carriage again, and said:

‘Go and see your father and talk to him about the corn­field. See, it’s that field just in front of us. Rougon is making a mistake. We are too old friends to quarrel about the matter; besides, as he very well knows, it would be worse for him if we did. Let him understand that he is making a mistake.’

The carriage set off, and as Olympe turned round she saw Macquart grinning under his mulberry trees with Alexandre, and uncorking that second bottle of which he had spoken. Marthe gave the coachman strict orders that he was never to take her to Les Tulettes again. She was beginning to feel a little tired of these drives into the country, and she took them less frequently, and at last gave them up altogether, when she found that she could never prevail upon Abbé Faujas to accompany her.

Marthe was now undergoing a complete change; she was becoming quite another woman. She had grown much more refined, through the life of nervous excitement which she had been leading. The stolid heaviness and dull lifelessness which she had acquired from having spent fifteen years be­hind a counter at Marseilles seemed to melt away in the bright flame of her new-born piety. She dressed better than she had been used to do, and joined in the conversation when she now went to the Rougons’ on Thursdays.

‘Madame Mouret is becoming quite a young girl again,’ exclaimed Madame de Condamin in amazement.

‘Yes, indeed,’ replied Doctor Porquier, nodding his head; ‘she is going through life backwards.’

Marthe, who had now grown much slimmer, with rosy cheeks and magnificent black flashing eyes, burst for some months into singular beauty. Her face beamed with animation, extraordinary vitality seemed to flood her being and thrill her with warmth. Her forgotten and joyless youth appeared to blaze in her now, at forty years of age. At the same time she was overwhelmed by a perpetual craving for prayer and devotion, and no longer obeyed Abbé Faujas’s in­junctions. She wore out her knees upon the flag-stones at Saint-Saturnin’s, lived in the midst of canticles and offerings of praise and worship, and took comfort in the presence of the gleaming monstrances and the brightly lit chapels, and priests and altars that glittered with starry sheen through the dark gloom of the cathedral nave. She had a sort of physical craving for those glories, a craving which tortured and racked her. She was compelled by her very suffering — she would have died if she had not yielded — to seek sustenance for her passion, to come and prostrate herself in confession, to bow in lowly awe amidst the thrilling peals of the organ, and to faint with melting joy in the ecstasy of communion. Then all consciousness of trouble left her, she was no longer tortured, she bowed herself to the ground in a painless trance, etherealised, as it were, becoming a pure, unsullied flame of self-consuming love.

But Faujas’s severity increased, he tried to check her by roughness. He was amazed at this passionate awakening of Marthe’s soul, this ardour for love and death. He frequently questioned her on the subject of her childhood; he even went to see Madame Rougon, and remained for a long time in great perplexity and dissatisfaction.

‘Our landlady has been complaining of you,’ his mother said to him. ‘Why won’t you allow her to go to church whenever she likes? It is very unkind of you to vex her; she is very kindly to us.’

‘She is killing herself,’ replied the priest.

Madame Faujas shrugged her shoulders after her usual fashion.

‘That is her own business. We all have our ways of finding pleasure. It is better to die of praying than to give one’s self indigestion like that hussy Olympe. Don’t be so severe with Madame Mouret. You will end by making it impossible for us to live here.’

One day when she was advising him in this way, he exclaimed in a gloomy voice:

‘Mother, this woman will be the obstacle!’

‘She!’ cried the old peasant woman, ‘why, she worships you, Ovide! You may do anything you like with her, if you will only treat her a little more kindly. She would carry you to the cathedral if it rained, to prevent you wetting your feet, if you would only let her!’

Abbé Faujas himself at last came to understand the necessity of no longer treating Marthe so harshly. He began to fear an outburst. So he gradually allowed her greater liberty, permitted her to seclude herself, to tell her beads at length, to offer prayers at each of the Stations of the Cross, and even to come twice a week to his confessional at Saint-Saturnin’s. Marthe, no longer hearing the terrible voice which had seemed to impute her piety to her as a vice, be­lieved that God was pouring His grace upon her. Now at last, she thought, she was entering into all the joys of Para­dise. She was overcome by trances of sweet emotion, inex­haustible floods of tears, which she shed without being conscious of their flow, and nervous ecstasies from which she emerged weak and faint as though all her life-blood had left her veins. At these times, Rose would take her and lay her upon her bed, where she would lie for hours with pinched lips and half-closed eyes like a dead woman.

One afternoon the cook, alarmed by her stillness, was really afraid that she might be dead. She did not think of knocking at the door of the room in which Mouret had shut himself, but she went straight to the second floor and besought Abbé Faujas to come down to her mistress. When he reached Marthe’s room, Rose hastened to fetch some ether, leaving the priest alone with the swooning woman. He merely took her hands within his own. At last Marthe began to move about and talk incoherently. When she at last recognised him at her bedside her blood surged to her face.

‘Are you better, my dear child?’ he asked her. ‘You make me feel very uneasy.’

She felt too much oppressed at first to be able to reply to him, and burst into tears, as she let her head slip between his arms.

‘I am not ill,’ she murmured at last, in so feeble a voice that it was scarcely more than a breath; ‘I am too happy. Let me cry; I feel delight in my tears. How kind of you to have come! I had been expecting you and calling you for a long time.’

Then her voice grew weaker and weaker till it was nothing more than a mere murmur of ardent prayer.

‘Oh! who will give me wings to fly towards thee?
My soul languishes without thee, it longs for thee passionately and sighs for thee, O my God, my only good thing, my consolation, my sweet joy, my treasure, my happiness, my life, my God, my all — ‘

Her face broke into a smile as she breathed these passionate words, and she clasped her hands fancying that she saw Abbé Faujas’s grave face circled by an aureole. The priest, who had hitherto always succeeded in checking anything of this sort, felt alarmed for a moment and hastily withdrew his arms. Then he exclaimed authoritatively:

‘Be calm and reasonable; I desire you to be so. God will refuse your homage if you do not offer it to Him in calm reason. What is most urgent now is to restore your strength.’

Rose returned to the room, quite distracted at not having been able to find any ether. The priest told her to remain by the bedside, while he said to Marthe in a more gentle tone:

‘Don’t distress yourself. God will be touched by your love. When the proper time comes, He will come down to you and fill you with everlasting felicity.’

Then he quitted the room, leaving the ailing woman quite radiant, like one raised from the dead. From that day forward he was able to mould her like soft wax beneath his touch. She became extremely useful to him in certain delicate missions to Madame de Condamin, and she also fre­quently visited Madame Rastoil when he expressed a desire that she should do so. She rendered him absolute obedience, never seeking the reason of anything he told her to do, but saying just what he instructed her to say and no more. He no longer observed any precautions with her, but bluntly taught her her lessons and made use of her as though she were a machine. She would have begged in the streets if he had ordered her to do so. When she became restless and stretched out her hands to him, with bursting heart and passion-swollen lips, he crushed her with a single word be­neath the will of Heaven. She never dared to make any reply. Between her and the priest there was a wall of anger and scorn. When Abbé Faujas left her after one of the short struggles which he occasionally had with her, he shrugged his shoulders with the disdain of a strong wrestler who has been opposed by a child.

Though Marthe was so pliant in the hands of the priest, she grew more querulous and sour every day amidst all the little cares of household life. Rose said that she had never before known her to be so fractious. It was towards her husband that she specially manifested increasing bitterness and dislike. The old leaven of the Rougons’ rancour was reviving in presence of this son of a Macquart, this man whom she accused of being the torture of her life. When Madame Faujas or Olympe came downstairs to sit with her in the dining-room she no longer observed any reticence, but gave full vent to her feelings against Mouret.

‘For twenty years he kept me shut up like a mere clerk, with a pen behind my ear, between his jars of oil and bags of almonds! He never allowed me a pleasure or gave me a present. He has robbed me of my children; and he is quite capable of taking himself off any day to make people believe that I have made his life unendurable. It is very fortunate that you are here and can tell the truth.’

She fell foul of Mouret in this way without any provoca­tion from him. Everything that he did, his looks, his ges­tures, the few words he spoke, all seemed to infuriate her. She could not even see him without being carried away by an unreasoning anger. It was at the close of their meals, when Mouret, without waiting for dessert, folded his napkin and silently rose from table, that quarrels more especially occurred.

‘You might leave the table at the same time as other people,’ Marthe would bitterly remark; ‘it is not very polite of you to behave in that way.’

‘I have finished, and I am going away,’ Mouret replied in his drawling voice.

Marthe began to imagine that her husband’s daily retreat from table was an intentional slight to Abbé Faujas, and thereupon she lost all control over herself.

‘You are a perfect boor, you make me feel quite ashamed!’ she cried. ‘I should have a nice time of it with you if I had not been fortunate enough to make some friends who console me for your boorish ways! You don’t even know how to behave yourself at table, you prevent me from enjoying a single meal. Stay where you are, do you hear? If you don’t want to eat any more, you can look at us.’

He finished folding his napkin as calmly as though he had not heard a word of what his wife had said, and then, with slow and deliberate steps, he left the room. They could hear him go upstairs and lock himself in his office. Thereupon Marthe, choking with anger, burst out:

‘Oh, the monster! He is killing me; he is killing me!’

Madame Faujas was obliged to console and soothe her. Rose ran to the foot of the stairs and called out at the top of her voice, so that Mouret might hear her through the closed door:

‘You are a monster, sir! Madame is quite right to call you a monster!’

Some of their quarrels were particularly violent. Marthe, whose reason was on the verge of giving way, had got it into her head that her husband wished to beat her. It was a fixed idea of hers. She asserted that he was only waiting and watching for an opportunity. He had not dared to do it yet, she said, because he had never found her alone, and in the night-time he was afraid lest she should cry out for assistance. Rose on her side swore that she had seen her master hiding a thick stick in his office. Madame Faujas and Olympe showed no hesitation in believing these stories, expressed the greatest pity for their landlady, and constituted themselves her pro­tectors. ‘That brute,’ as they now called Mouret, would not venture, they said, to ill-treat her in their presence; and they told her to come for them at night if he should show the least sign of violence. The house was now in a constant state of alarm.

‘He is capable of any wickedness,’ exclaimed the cook.

That year Marthe observed all the religious ceremonies of Passion Week with the greatest fervour. On Good Friday she knelt in agony in the black-draped church, while the candles were extinguished, one by one, midst the mournful swell of voices rising through the gloomy nave. It seemed to her as though her own breath were dying away with the light of the candles. When the last one went out, and the darkness in front of her seemed implacable and repelling, she fainted away, remaining for an hour bent in an attitude of prayer without the women around her being aware of her condition. When she came to herself, the church was de­serted. She imagined that she was being scourged with rods and that blood was streaming from her limbs; she experienced too such excruciating pains in her head that she raised her hands to it, as if to pull out thorns whose points she seemed to feel piercing her skull. She was in a strange condition at dinner that evening. She was still suffering from nervous shock; when she closed her eyes, she saw the souls of the expiring candles flitting away through the darkness, and she mechanically examined her hands for the wounds whence her blood had streamed. All the Passion bled within her.