Complete Works of Emile Zola (637 page)

“I can’t discover anything!” murmured Berthe, who was rummaging a cupboard.

The shelves had the melancholy emptiness and the false luxury of families where inferior meat is purchased, so as to be able to put flowers on the table. All that was lying about were some white and gold porcelain plates, perfectly empty, a crumb-brush, the silver-plated handle of which was all tarnished, and some cruets without a drain of oil or vinegar in them; there was not a forgotten crust, not a morsel of dessert, not a fruit, nor a sweet, nor a remnant of cheese. One could feel that Adèle’s hunger never satisfied, lapped up the rare dribblets of sauce which her betters left at the bottoms of the dishes, to the extent of rubbing the gilt off.

“But she has gone and eaten all the rabbit!” cried Madame Josserand.

“True,” said Hortense, “there was the tail piece. Ah! no, here it is. It would have surprised me if she had dared. I shall stick to it, you know. It is cold, but it is better than nothing!”

Berthe, on her side, was rummaging about, but without result. At length her hand encountered a bottle, in which her mother had diluted the contents of an old pot of jam, so as to manufacture some red currant syrup for her evening parties. She poured herself out half a glass, saying:

“Ah! an idea! I will soak some bread in this, as it is all there is!”

But Madame Josserand, all anxiety, looked at her sternly.

“Pray, don’t restrain yourself, fill your glass whilst you are about it! It will be quite sufficient if I offer water to the ladies and gentlemen tomorrow, will it not?
”

Fortunately, the discovery of another of Adèle’s evil doings interrupted her reprimand. She was still turning about, searching for crimes, when she caught sight of a volume on the table; and then occurred a supreme explosion.

“Oh! the beast! she has again brought my Lamartine into the kitchen!”

It was a copy of “Jocelyn.” She took it up and rubbed it hard, as though dusting it; and she kept repeating that she had twenty times forbidden her to leave it, lying about in that way, to write her accounts upon. Berthe and Hortense, meanwhile, had shared the little piece of bread which remained; then carrying their suppers away with them, they said that they would undress first. The mother gave the icy cold stove a last glance, and returned to the dining-room, tightly holding her Lamartine beneath the massive flesh of her arm.

Monsieur Josserand continued writing. He trusted that his wife would be satisfied with crushing him with a glance of contempt as she crossed the room to go to bed. But she again dropped on to a chair, facing him, and looked at him fixedly without speaking. He felt this look, and was seized with such uneasiness, that his pen kept sputtering on the flimsy wrapper paper.

“So it was you who prevented Adèle making a cream for tomorrow evening?” said she at length.

He raised his head in amazement.

“I, my dear!”

“Oh! you will again deny it, as you always do. Then, why has she not made the cream I ordered? You know very well that before our party tomorrow uncle Bachelard is coming to dinner, it is his saint’s-day, which is very awkward, happening as it does on my reception day. If there is no cream, we must have an ice, and that will be another five francs squandered!”

He did not attempt to exculpate himself. Not daring to resume his work, he began to play with his penholder. There was a brief pause.

“Tomorrow morning,” resumed Madame Josserand, “you will oblige me by calling on the Campardons and reminding them very politely, if you can, that we are expecting to see them in the evening. Their young man arrived this afternoon. Ask them to bring him with them. Do you understand? I wish him to come.”

“What young man?”

“A young man; it would take too long to explain everything to you. I have obtained all necessary information about him. I am obliged to try everything, as you leave your daughters entirely to me, like a bundle of rubbish, without occupying yourself about marrying them any more than about marrying the Grand Turk.”

The thought revived her anger.

“You see, I contain myself, but it is more, oh! it is more than I can stand! Say nothing, sir, say nothing, or really my anger will get the better of me.”

He said nothing, but she vented her wrath upon him all the same.

“It has become unbearable! I warn you, that one of these mornings I shall go off, and leave you here with your two idiotic daughters. Was I born to live such a skinflint life as this?
Always cutting farthings into four, never even having a decent pair of boots, and not being able to receive my friends decently! And all that through your fault! Ah! do not shake your head, do not exasperate me more than I am already! Yes, your fault! You deceived me, sir, basely deceived me. One should not marry a woman, when one is decided to let her want for everything. You played the boaster, you pretended you had a fine future before you, you were the friend of your employer’s sons, of those brothers Bernheim, who, since, have merely made a fool of you. What! You dare to pretend that they have not made a fool of you! But you ought to be their partner by now! It is you who made their business what it is, one of the first glass-houses in Paris, and you have remained their cashier, a subordinate, a hireling. Really! you have no spirit; hold your tongue.”

“I get eight thousand francs a year,” murmured the cashier. “It is a very good berth.”

“A good berth, after more than thirty years’ labour!” resumed Madame Josserand. “They grind you down, and you are delighted. Do you know what I would have done, had I been in your place? well! I would have put the business into my pocket twenty times over. It was so easy. I saw it when I married you, and since then I have never ceased advising you to do so. But it required some initiative and intelligence; it was a question of not going to sleep on your leather-covered stool, like a blockhead.”

“Come,” interrupted Monsieur Josserand, “are you going to reproach me now with being honest?”

She jumped up, and advanced towards him, flourishing her Lamartine.

“Honest! in what way do you mean? Begin by being honest towards me. Others do not count till afterwards, I hope! And I repeat, sir, it is not honest to take a young girl in, pretending to be ambitious to become rich some day, and then to end by losing what little wits you had in looking after somebody else’s cashbox. On my word, I was nicely swindled! Ah! if it were to happen over again, and if I had only known your family!”

She was walking violently about. He could not restrain a slight sign of impatience, in spite of his great desire for peace.

“You would do better to go to bed, Eléonore,” said he. “It is past one o’clock, and I assure you this work is pressing. My family has done you no harm, so do not speak of it.”

“Ah! and why, pray? Your family is no more sacred than another, I suppose. Every one at Clermont knows that your father, after selling his business of solicitor, let himself be ruined by a servant. You might have seen your daughters married long ago, had he not taken up with a strumpet when over seventy. There is another who has swindled me!”

Monsieur Josserand turned pale. He replied in a trembling voice, which rose higher as he went on:

“Listen, do not let us throw our relations at each other’s heads. Your father never paid me your dowry, the thirty thousand francs he promised.”

“Eh? what? thirty thousand francs!”

“Exactly; don’t pretend to be surprised. And if my father met with misfortunes, yours behaved in a most disgraceful way towards us. I was never able to find out clearly what he left. There were all sorts of underhand dealings, so that the school in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor should remain with your sister’s husband, that shabby usher who no longer recognises us now. We were robbed as though in a wood.”

Madame Josserand, now ghastly white, was choking with rage before her husband’s inconceivable revolt.

“Do not say a word against papa! For forty years he was a credit to instruction. Go and talk of the Bachelard Academy in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon? And as for my sister and my brother-in-law, they are what they are. They have robbed me, I know; but it is not for you to say so. I will not permit it, understand that! Do I speak to you of your sister, who eloped with an officer?
Oh! you have indeed some nice relations!”

“An officer who married her, madame. There is uncle Bachelard, too, your brother, a man totally destitute of all morality — “

“But you are becoming cracked, sir! He is rich, he earns what he pleases as a commission merchant, and he has promised to provide Berthe’s dowry. Do you then respect nothing?”

“Ah! yes, provide Berthe’s dowry! Will you bet that he will give a sou, and that we shall not have had to put up with his nasty habits for nothing? He makes me feel ashamed of him every time he comes here. A liar, a rake, a person who takes advantage of the situation, who for fifteen years past, seeing us all on our knees before his fortune, has been taking me every Saturday to spend two hours in his office, to go over his books! It saves him five francs. We have never yet been favoured with a single present from him.”

Madame Josserand, catching her breath, was wrapped for a moment in thought.

Then she uttered this last cry:

“And you have a nephew in the police, sir!”

A fresh pause ensued. The light from the little lamp was becoming dimmer, wrappers were flying about beneath Monsieur Josserand’s feverish gestures; and he looked his wife full in the face — his wife in her low neck dress — determined to say everything, and quivering with courage.

“With eight thousand francs a year one can do many things,” resumed he. “You are always complaining. But you should not have arranged your housekeeping on a footing superior to our means. It is your mania for receiving and for paying visits, of having your at homes, of giving tea and pastry — “

She did not let him finish.

“Now we have come to it! Shut me up in a box at once. Reproach me for not walking out as naked as my hand. And your daughters, sir, who will marry them if we never see any one? We don’t see many people as it is. It does well to sacrifice oneself, to be judged afterwards with such meanness of heart!”

“We have all of us, madame, sacrificed ourselves. Léon had to make way for his sisters; and he left the house to earn his own living without any assistance from us. As for Saturnin, poor child, he does not even know how to read. And I deny myself everything; I pass my nights — “

“Why did you have daughters then, sir? You are surely not going to reproach them with their education, I hope?
Any other man in your place would be proud of Hortense’s diploma and of Berthe’s talents. The dear child again delighted every one this evening with her waltz, the ‘Banks of the Oise,’ and her last painting will certainly enchant our guests tomorrow. But you, sir, you are not even a father; you would have sent your children to take cows to grass, instead of sending them to school.”

“Well! I took out an assurance for Berthe’s benefit. Was it not you, madame, who, when the fourth payment became due, made use of the money to cover the drawing-room furniture?
And, since then, you have even negotiated the premiums that had been paid.”

“Of course! as you leave us to die of hunger. Ah! you may indeed bite your fingers, if your daughters become old maids.”

“Bite my fingers! But, Jove’s thunder! it is you who frighten the likely men away, with your dresses and your ridiculous parties!”

Never before had Monsieur Josserand gone so far. Madame Josserand, suffocating, stammered forth the words: “I — I ridiculous!” when the door opened. Hortense and Berthe were returning, in their petticoats and little calico jackets, their hair let down, and their feet in old slippers.

“Ah, well! it is too cold in our room!” said Berthe shivering. “The food freezes in your mouth. Here, at least, there has been a fire this evening.”

And both dragging their chairs along the floor, seated themselves close to the stove, which still retained a little warmth. Hortense held her rabbit bone in the tips of her fingers, and was skilfully picking it. Berthe dipped pieces of bread in her glass of syrup. The parents, however, were so excited that they did not even appear to notice their arrival. They continued:

“Ridiculous — ridiculous, sir! I shall not be ridiculous again! Let my head be cut off if I wear out another pair of gloves in trying to get them husbands. It is your turn now! And try not to be more ridiculous than I have been!”

“I daresay, madame, now that you have exhibited them and compromised them everywhere! Whether you marry them or whether you don’t, I don’t care a button!”

“And I care less, Monsieur Josserand! I care so little that I will bundle them out into the street if you aggravate me much more. And if you have a mind to, you can follow them, the door is open. Ah, heavens! what a good riddance!”

The young ladies quietly listened, used to these lively recriminations. They were still eating, their little jackets dropping from their shoulders, and their bare skin gently rubbing against the lukewarm earthenware of the stove;
and they looked charming in this undress, with their youth and their hearty appetites and their eyes heavy with sleep.

“You are very foolish to quarrel,” at length observed Hortense, with her mouth full. “Mamma only spoils her temper, and papa will be ill again tomorrow at his office. It seems to me that we are old enough to be able to find husbands for ourselves.”

This created a diversion. The father, thoroughly exhausted, made a feint of returning to his wrappers; and he sat with his nose over the paper, unable to write, his hands trembling violently. The mother, who had been moving about the room like an escaped lioness, went and planted herself in front of Hortense.

“If you are speaking for yourself,” cried she, “you are a great ninny! Your Verdier will never marry you.”

“That is my business,” boldly replied the young girl.

After having contemptuously refused five or six suitors, a little clerk, the son of a tailor, and other young fellows whose prospects she did not consider good enough, she had ended by setting her cap at a barrister, whom she had met at the Dambrevilles’, and who was already turned forty. She considered him very clever, and destined to make a name in the world. But the misfortune was that for fifteen years past Verdier had been living with a mistress, who in the neighbourhood even passed for his wife. She knew of this, though, and by no means let it trouble her.