Complete Works of Emile Zola (435 page)

Then he stopped; and, instead of finishing the sentence he had begun, he gave another turn to his answer: ‘Well, it isn’t your fault. Just now your hands are tied. We had better give them the million; believe me, we had.’

‘Never!’ cried Rougon energetically. ‘In a fortnight you shall have your grant; in a fortnight, do you hear me?’

The cab had just stopped in front of the little house in the Rue Marbeuf. Neither of them alighted, however. For some moments they continued talking inside the vehicle, as though comfortably ensconced in their own home. M. Bouchard and Colonel Jobelin were coming to dine that evening with Rougon, and he pressed M. Kahn to join them; but the other, to his great regret, he said, was obliged to decline the invitation, as he was engaged elsewhere. The great man was now enthusiastically determined upon obtain­ing the railway grant. When he at length alighted from the cab he closed the door in a friendly way and gave the ex-deputy a parting nod.

‘Till next Thursday, then?’ cried the latter, thrusting his head out of the window as the cab drove off.

Rougon was feeling slightly feverish on his return. He could not even read the evening papers. Although it was scarcely five o’clock, he went straight to the drawing-room and began to walk up and down while waiting for his guests. The first sunshine of the year, though it was only a pale January sunshine, had given him a touch of headache. His afternoon had left a very vivid impression upon him. All his friends rose before him: those whom he put up with, those of whom he felt afraid, and those for whom he had a genuine affection. They all seemed to be goading him on, forcing him to some decisive step. And this did not dis­please him; he felt that their impatience was reasonable, and he realised that an anger akin to their own was rising up within himself. It was as though the ground in front of him had gradually diminished, as if the time was near when he would be compelled to make a formidable leap.

Then he suddenly thought of Gilquin, whom he had entirely forgotten. He rang for his servant to ask if ‘the gentleman in the green overcoat’ had called again during his absence. But the servant had seen no one. Then Rougon told him that if Gilquin should call during the evening he was to be shown into his study. ‘And you will let me know immediately,’ he added, ‘even if we are at table.’

His curiosity was again roused, and he went to look for Gilquin’s card. He read the inscription, ‘Very urgent; a strange business,’ several times over, without managing to make anything of it. When M. Bouchard and the colonel arrived he slipped the card into his pocket, feeling disturbed, even irritated, by those words, which kept buzzing in his brain.

The dinner was a very plain one. M. Bouchard had been a bachelor for the last two days, his wife having had to go into the provinces on a visit to a sick aunt, of whom, strangely enough, she had never previously spoken. The colonel, for whom there was always a cover laid at Rougon’s table, had that evening brought his son, whose holidays were on just then. Madame Rougon did the honours in her kindly silent fashion. Under her ever-vigilant eyes the repast was served, slowly, but most carefully, and without the slightest noise. The conversation turned upon the subjects of study in the public schools. The chief clerk quoted some lines from Horace, and spoke of the prizes he had gained in the examinations, about 1813. The colonel said he would have liked a more military form of discipline among the pupils; and then he went on to explain why Auguste had failed in his examination for a bachelor’s degree in November. The youth had such a lively intelligence, he said, that he always went beyond the questions asked by the examiners, and this had annoyed them. While his father was thus explaining his failure, Auguste himself was eating some fowl, with a sly smile on his beaming dunce’s face.

They were at dessert, when the sound of a bell in the hall caused Rougon the greatest emotion, and quite distracted his attention from his guests. He felt sure that the ring was Gilquin’s, and sharply raised his eyes to the door, already mechanically folding up his napkin in the expectation of being summoned from the room. But when the door opened, it was Du Poizat who appeared. The ex-sub prefect dropped into a chair at a few feet from the table, as though he were quite at home. He often called like this early in the evening, imme­diately after his dinner, which he took at a little boarding-house in the Faubourg Saint Honoré.

‘I’m quite done up,’ he said, without giving any particulars of the intricate business which he had been transacting during the afternoon. ‘I should have gone straight to bed, but I felt an inclination to come and glance over the papers. They are in your room, I suppose, Rougon, aren’t they?’

He stayed where he was, however, and accepted a pear and half a glass of wine. The conversation then turned upon the high price of provisions, which had doubled, it was said, during the last twenty years; M. Bouchard mentioning that he could remember having seen pigeons sold at fifteen sous the couple when he was young. However, as soon as the liqueurs and coffee had been handed round, Madame Rougon quietly disappeared, and the men went into the drawing-room without her. They all seemed quite at home. The colonel and the chief-clerk carried the card-table in front of the fire, and began to shuffle the cards, already preparing some won­derful combinations. Auguste sat down at a side table and turned over some numbers of an illustrated newspaper. Du Poizat had disappeared.

‘Just look at the hand I hold,’ exclaimed the colonel abruptly. ‘Isn’t it a strange one?’

Rougon went up to the table and nodded. Then, when he had returned to his chair in silence, and was taking up the tongs to move some of the logs of the fire, the servant came in very quietly, and said in his ear: ‘The gentleman who called this morning is here.’

Rougon started. He had not heard the bell. When he went into his study, he found Gilquin standing there with a rattan cane under his arm, whilst, with a professional blinking of the eyes, he examined a somewhat poor engraving of Napoléon at Saint Helena. Gilquin’s long green overcoat was buttoned up to his chin, and he had not even doffed his black silk hat, which looked almost new, and was tilted very much on one side.

‘Well?’ asked Rougon hastily.

Gilquin, however, seemed in no hurry, but jogged his head while looking at the engraving, and saying: ‘It’s well expressed. How dreadfully bored he looks, doesn’t he?’

The room was lighted by a single lamp, which stood on a corner of the writing-table. As Rougon entered, a slight noise, a gentle rustling of paper, had come from behind a high-backed arm-chair which stood in front of the mantel­piece, but then such perfect silence had fallen that the previous sound might have been thought the mere cracking of some half-extinguished piece of firewood. Gilquin declined to take a seat; so he and Rougon remained standing near the door, in a patch of shadow cast by a book-case.

‘Well?’ Rougon asked again; and then he mentioned that he had called in the Rue Guisarde during the afternoon.

At this Gilquin began to speak of his doorkeeper, an ex­cellent woman, who was, unfortunately, dying of consumption, which she had contracted owing to the dampness of the ground floor of the house.

‘But this important piece of business of yours? What is it?’ asked the great man impatiently.

‘Oh, wait a moment,’ rejoined the other, ‘I have come about that. I’ll tell you about it directly. But did you go upstairs, and did you hear my cat? It’s a cat that came in by way of the roof. One night, when my window was open, I found her lying by my side. She was licking my beard. It seemed very droll, and so I kept her.’

Then, at last, he made up his mind to speak of the parti­cular business which had brought him there. It was a long story.
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He commenced by relating his amours with an ironing girl, with whom he had fallen in love one evening, as he was coming out of the Ambigu Theatre. Poor Eulalie, he said, had been distrained upon by her landlord, when only five instalments of her rent were due. For the last ten days, there­fore, she had been staying at a lodging-house in the Rue Montmartre, near her work, and it was there that he himself had been sleeping all the week, the room being on the second floor, a dark little place at the far end of a passage, which overlooked a yard.

All this did not interest Rougon, still he listened with patient resignation.

‘Well, three days ago,’ continued Gilquin, ‘I brought a cake and a bottle of wine with me in the evening. We ate the cake and drank the wine in bed. A little before midnight, Eulalie got up to shake out the crumbs; and then she went soundly to sleep. She sleeps like a log. I, myself, was lying awake. I had blown out the candle, and was staring up into the darkness, when I heard a dispute in the next room. I ought to tell you that between the two rooms there’s a door which has been fastened up. After a time the voices quieted down and peace seemed to have been made; but I still heard such singular sounds that at last I got out of bed and fixed my eye to a crack in the door. Well, you’ll never guess what I saw then!’

He stopped for a moment, and gazed at Rougon, revelling in the effect which he thought he was producing.

‘There were two men there: a young one of about five-and-twenty, who was fairly good looking; and another who must have turned fifty, short and thin, and of sickly appear­ance. Well, they were examining a collection of pistols and daggers and swords, all kinds of brand new weapons which glistened in the light. They were talking in a jargon I which did not recognise at first, but afterwards, by certain words I heard, I knew it was Italian. I’ve travelled in Italy, you know, in the macaroni trade. Well, I strained my ear to listen, and then I understood, my dear fellow. Those gentle­men have come to Paris to assassinate the Emperor! There, what do you think of that?’

Then he crossed his arms and pressed his cane to his breast as he kept on repeating: ‘It’s a funny business, isn’t it?’

So this was Gilquin’s strange affair! Rougon shrugged his shoulders. Twenty times before had various conspiracies been reported to him.

‘You told me to come and tell you all the gossip of the neighbourhood,’ resumed the ex-commercial traveller. ‘Well, I want to render you all the service I can, and so I tell you all I hear. It is wrong of you to shake your head like that. Do you think if I had gone to the prefecture that they would have sent me away without a nice little gratuity? But I prefer benefiting my friends. I tell you that the matter is really serious. So go and tell it to the Emperor, and just see how he embraces you.’

For the last three days, Gilquin had been keeping a watch over those fine gentlemen as he called them. During the daytime, two others made their appearance, a young man, and another of mature years, with a pale, handsome face and long black hair, who seemed to be the chief.
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They all looked tired out when they entered the room, and they talked together in brief, guarded phrases. However, on the previous night, Gilquin had seen them filling some little iron ‘machines’ which he believed were bombs. He had got Eulalie’s key, and had taken off his boots and kept a careful watch in the room, listening to every sound. In the evening he so man­aged matters that Eulalie began to snore at about nine o’clock, which, he had thought, would prevent the others from feeling any suspicion; besides, it was never prudent, he added, to let a woman have any share in political matters.

As Gilquin went on speaking, a grave expression came over Rougon’s face. He was beginning to believe the story. Beneath the ex-bagman’s vinous hilarity, amid the odd details mingled with the narrative, he felt that there was a basis of positive truth. And then all his irksome expectation during the day, all his anxious curiosity appeared to him in the light of a presentiment, and he again experienced that inward trembling which he had felt every now and then since the morning; the involuntary emotion, as it were, of a strong man when he realises that his fortune depends upon a single card. However, he affected utter indifference: ‘A set of imbeciles who must have the whole detective force watching them,’ he said.

Gilquin began to grin. ‘The police had better lose no time, then,’ he rejoined.

Then he became silent, but he still smiled and gently tapped his hat. The great man realised that he had not been told everything, and looked at Gilquin searchingly. However, the other opened the door to take his leave. ‘Well, at any rate, I have given you warning,’ he said. ‘I’m going to dine now, my good fellow. I’ve had no dinner yet; I’ve been playing the spy on my men all the afternoon, and I’m tremendously hungry.’

At this Rougon stopped him, saying that he could let him have some cold meat; and forthwith he ordered a cover to be laid for him in the dining-room. Gilquin seemed quite touched by this attention. He once more closed the study door, and, lowering his voice so that the servant should not hear him, said to Rougon: ‘You are a good fellow. Listen to me, now. I don’t want to tell you any lies. If you had received me badly, I should have gone straight to the prefec­ture. But, now, I’ll tell you everything. That’s honest, isn’t it? I’m sure you won’t forget the service I’m rendering you. Friends are friends, whatever people may say.’ Then he leant forward and continued in a whisper: ‘It is to come off to-morrow night. They are going to blow Badinguet
1
up in front of the Opera-house when he arrives there. The carriage and the aides-de-camp and the whole lot will be clean swept away.’

While Gilquin sat down to his meal in the dining-room, Rougon remained standing in the middle of his study, per­fectly still and with an ashy face. He was deep in thought, and seemed to be hesitating. At length he sat down at his writing-table and took up a sheet of paper, but he tossed it aside again almost immediately. For a moment it seemed as if he were going to rush to the door and give an order. Then he slowly came back and again became absorbed in thought, which cast a shrouding gloom over his face.

Just at that moment the high-backed arm-chair in front of the fire-place moved, and Du Poizat stood up, calmly folding a newspaper.

‘What! were you there?’ cried Rougon roughly.