Complete Works of Emile Zola (642 page)

Then, Madame Josserand’s rage burst all bounds.

“Ah! I swear to you that it sha’n’t come to nothing next time, even if I have to tie him to you myself! There is one who shall pay for all the others. Yes, yes, Monsieur Josserand, you may stare at me, as though you did not understand: the wedding shall take place, and without you, if it does not please you.You hear, Berthe?
you have only to pick that one up!”

Saturnin appeared not to hear. He was looking under the table. The young girl pointed to him; but Madame Josserand made a gesture which seemed to imply that he would be got out of the way. And Berthe murmured:

“So then it is decidedly to be Monsieur Vabre? Oh! it is all the same to me. To think though that not a single sandwich has been saved for me!”

CHAPTER IV

As
early as the morrow, Octave commenced to occupy himself about Valérie. He studied her habits, and ascertained the hour when he would have a chance of meeting her on the stairs; and he arranged matters so that he could frequently go up to his room, taking advantage of his coming home to lunch at the Campardons’, and leaving “The Ladies’ Paradise” for a few minutes under some pretext or other. He soon noticed that, every day towards two o’clock, the young woman, who took her child to the Tuileries gardens, passed along the Rue Gaillon. Then he would stand at the door, wait till she came, and greet her with one of his handsome shopman’s smiles. At each of their meetings, Valérie politely inclined her head and passed on; but he perceived her dark glance to be full of passionate fire; he found encouragement in her ravaged complexion and in the supple swing of her gait.

His plan was already formed, the bold plan of a seducer used to cavalierly overcoming the virtue of shop-girls. It was simply a question of luring Valérie inside his room on the fourth floor; the staircase was always silent and deserted, no one would discover them up there; and he laughed at the thought of the architect’s moral admonitions; for taking a woman belonging to the house was not the same as bringing one into it.

One thing, however, made Octave uneasy. The passage separated the Pichons’ kitchen from their dining-room, and this obliged them to constantly have their door open. At nine o’clock in the morning, the husband started off for his office, and did not return home until about five in the evening; and, on alternate days of the week, he went out again after his dinner to do some bookkeeping, from eight to midnight. Besides this, though, the young woman, who was very reserved — almost wildly timid — would push her door to, directly she heard Octave’s footsteps. He never caught sight of more than her back, which always seemed to be flying away, with her light hair done up into a scanty chignon. Through that door kept discreetly ajar, he had, up till then, only beheld a small portion of the room: sad and clean looking furniture, linen of a dull whiteness in the grey light admitted through a window which he could not see, and the corner of a child’s crib inside an inner room; all the monotonous solitude of a wife occupied from morning to night with the recurring cares of a clerk’s home. Moreover, there was never a sound; the child seemed dumb and worn-out like the mother; one scarcely distinguished at times the soft murmur of some ballad which the latter would hum for hours together in an expiring voice. But Octave was none the less furious with the disdainful creature as he called her. She was playing the spy upon him perhaps. In any case, Valérie could never come up to him if the Pichons’ door was thus being continually opened.

He was just beginning to think that things were taking the right course. One Sunday when the husband was absent, he had manœuvred in such a way as to be on the first-floor landing at the moment the young woman, wrapped in her dressing-gown, was leaving her sister-in-law’s to return to her own apartments; and she being obliged to speak to him, they had stood some minutes exchanging polite remarks. So he was hoping that next time she would ask him in. With a woman with such a temperament the rest would follow as a matter of course. That evening during dinner, there was some talk about Valérie at the Campardons’. Octave tried to draw the others out. But as Angèle was listening and casting sly glances at Lisa, who was handing round some leg of mutton and looking very serious, the parents at first did nothing but sing the young woman’s praises. Moreover, the architect always stood up for the respectability of the house, with the vain conviction of a tenant who seemed to obtain from it a regular certificate of his own gentility.

“Oh! my dear fellow, most respectable people. You saw them at the Josserands’. The husband is no fool; he is full of ideas, he will end by discovering something very grand. As for the wife, she has some style about her, as we artists say.”

Madame Campardon, who had been rather worse since the day before, and who was half reclining, though her illness did not prevent her eating thick underdone slices of meat, languidly murmured in her turn:

“That poor Monsieur Théophile, he is like me, he drags along. Ah! great praise is due to Valérie, for it is not lively always having by one a man trembling with fever, and whose infirmity usually makes him quarrelsome and unjust.”

During dessert, Octave, seated between the architect and his wife; learnt more than he asked. They forgot Angèle, they spoke in hints, with glances which underlined the double meanings of the words; and, when they were at a loss for an expression, they bent towards him one after the other, and coarsely whispered the rest of the disclosure in his ear. In short, that Théophile was a stupid and impotent person, who deserved to be what his wife made him. As for Valérie, she was not worth much, she would have behaved just as badly even if her husband had been different, for with her, nature had so much the mastery. Moreover, no one was ignorant of the fact that, two months after her marriage, in despair at recognising that she would never have a child by her husband, and fearing she would lose her share of old Vabre’s fortune if Théophile happened to die, she had her little Camille got for her by a butcher’s man of the Rue Sainte-Anne.

Campardon bent down and whispered a last time in Octave’s ear:

“Well! you know, my dear fellow, a hysterical woman!”

And he put into the word all the middle-class wantonness of an indelicacy combined with the blobber-lipped smile of a father of a family whose imagination, abruptly let loose, revels in licentiousness. The conversation then took a different turn, they were speaking of the Pichons, and words of praise were not stinted.

“Oh! they are indeed worthy people!” repeated Madame Campardon. “Sometimes, when Marie takes her little Lilitte out, I also let her take Angèle. And I assure you, Monsieur Mouret, I do not trust my daughter to everyone; I must be absolutely certain of the person’s morality. You love Marie very much, do you not, Angèle?”

“Yes, mamma,” answered the child.

The details continued. It was impossible to find a woman better brought up, or according to severer principles. And it was a pleasure to see how happy the husband was! Such a nice little home, and so clean, and a couple that adored each other, who never said one word louder than another!

“Besides, they would not be allowed to remain in the house, if they did not behave themselves properly,” said the architect gravely, forgetting his disclosures about Valérie. “We will only have respectable people here. On my word of honour! I would give notice, the day that my daughter ran the risk of meeting disreputable women on the stairs.”

That evening, he had secretly arranged to take cousin Gasparine to the Opéra-Comique. He therefore went and fetched his hat at once, talking of a business matter which would keep him out till very late. Rose though probably knew of the arrangement, for Octave heard her murmur, in her resigned and maternal voice, when her husband came to kiss her with his habitual effusive tenderness:

“Amuse yourself well, and do not catch cold on coming out.”

On the morrow, Octave had an idea: it was to become acquainted with Madame Pichon, by rendering her a few neighbourly services; in this way, if she ever caught Valérie, she would keep her eyes shut. And an opportunity occurred that very day. Madame Pichon was in the habit of taking Lilitte, then eighteen months old, out in a little basket-work perambulator, which raised Monsieur Gourd’s ire; the doorkeeper would never permit it to be carried up the principal staircase, so that she had to take it up the servants’; and as the door of her apartment was too narrow, she had to remove the wheels every time, which was quite a job. It so happened that that day Octave was returning home, just as his neighbour, incommoded by her gloves, was giving herself a great deal of trouble to get the nuts off. When she felt him standing up behind her, waiting till the passage was clear, she quite lost her head, and her hands trembled.

“But, madame, why do you take all that trouble?” asked he at length. “It would be far simpler to put the perambulator at the end of the passage, behind my door.”

She did not reply, her excessive timidity kept her squatting there, without strength to rise; and, beneath the curtain of her bonnet, he beheld a hot blush invade the nape of her neck and her ears. Then he insisted:

“I assure you, madame, it will not inconvenience me in the least.”

Without waiting, he lifted up the perambulator and carried it in his easy way. She was obliged to follow him; but she remained so confused, so frightened by this important adventure in her uneventful every-day life, that she looked on, only able to stutter fragments of sentences.

“Dear me! sir, it is too much trouble — I feel quite ashamed — you will find it very awkward. My husband will be very pleased — “

And she entered her room and locked herself in, this time hermetically, with a sort of shame. Octave thought that she was stupid. The perambulator was a great deal in his way for it prevented him opening his door wide, and he had to slip into his room sideways. But his neighbour seemed to be won over, more especially as Monsieur Gourd consented to authorize the obstruction at that end of the passage, thanks to Campardon’s influence.

Every Sunday, Marie’s parents, Monsieur and Madame Vuillaume, came to spend the day. On the Sunday following, as Octave was going out, he beheld all the family seated taking their coffee, and he was discreetly hastening by, when the young woman, whispering quickly in her husband’s ear, the latter jumped up, saying:

“Excuse me, sir, I am always out, I have not yet had an opportunity of thanking you. But I wish to tell you how pleased I was — “

Octave protested. At length he was obliged to give in. Though he had already had his coffee, they made him accept another cup. They gave him the place of honour, between Monsieur and Madame Vuillaume. Opposite to him, on the other side of the round table, Marie was again thrown into one of those confused conditions which at any minute, without apparent cause, brought all the blood from her heart to her face. He watched her, never having seen her at his ease. But, as Trublot said, she was not his fancy: she seemed to him wretched and washed out, with her flat face and her thin hair, though her features were refined and pretty. When she recovered herself a little, she laughed lightly as she again talked of the perambulator, about which she found a great deal to say.

“Jules, if you had only seen Monsieur Mouret carry it in his arms. Ah well! it did not take long!”

Pichon again uttered his thanks. He was tall and thin, with a doleful look about him, already subdued to the routine of office life, his dull eyes full of the apathetic resignation displayed by circus horses.

“Pray say no more about it!” Octave ended by observing, “it is really not worth while. Madame, your coffee is exquisite. I have never drunk any like it.”

She blushed again, and so much that her hands even became quite rosy.

“Do not spoil her, sir,” said Monsieur Vuillaume gravely. “Her coffee is good, but there is better. And you see how proud she has become at once!”

“Pride is worth nothing,” declared Madame Vuillaume. “We have always taught her to be modest.”

They were both of them little and dried up, very old, and with dark-looking countenances; the wife wore a tight black dress, and the husband a thin frock-coat, on which only the mark of a big red ribbon was to be seen.

“Sir,” resumed the latter, “I was decorated at the age of sixty, on the day I was pensioned off, after having been for thirty-nine years employed at the Ministry of Public Instruction. Well! sir, on that day I dined the same as on other days, and did not let pride interfere with any of my habits. The Cross was due to me, I knew it. I was simply filled with gratitude.”

His life was perfectly clear, he wished every one to know it. After twenty-five years’ service, he had been promoted to four thousand francs. His pension, therefore, was two thousand. But he had had to re-engage himself in a subordinate position at fifteen hundred francs, as they had had their little Marie late in life when Madame Vuillaume was no longer expecting either son or daughter. Now that the child was established in life, they were living on the pension, by pinching themselves, in the Rue Durantin at Montmartre, where things were cheaper.

“I am sixty-three,” said he, in conclusion, “and that is all about it, and that is all about it, son-in-law!”

Pichon looked at him in a silent and weary way, his eyes fixed on his red ribbon. Yes, it would be his own story if luck favoured him. He was the last born of a greengrocer who had spent the entire worth of her shop in her anxiety to make her son take a degree, just because all the neighbourhood said he was very intelligent; and she had died bankrupt eight days before his triumph at the Sorbonne. After three years of hardships at his uncle’s, he had had the unexpected luck of getting a berth at the Ministry, which was to lead him to everything, and on the strength of which he had already married.

“When one does one’s duty, the government does the same,” murmured he, mechanically reckoning that he still had thirty-six years to wait before obtaining the right to wear a piece of red ribbon and to enjoy a pension of two thousand francs.

Then he turned towards Octave.