Complete Works of Emile Zola (769 page)

‘And to think I took so much trouble to make it for you!’ said Pauline. ‘Well, for the future, I shall keep the bottle here, and you will have to come up every afternoon at five o’clock. And I will give you a little minced raw meat. The doctor has ordered it for you.’

It was next the turn of a big twelve-year-old boy, Cuche’s son, a lean and scraggy stripling. Pauline gave him a loaf, some stewed meat, and also a five-franc piece. His was another wretched story. After the destruction of their house Cuche had deserted his wife, and gone to live with a female cousin, and the wife was now taking refuge in an old dila­pidated Coastguard watch-house, where she led an immoral life. The lad, who kept with her and shared the little she had, was almost starving, but whenever any suggestion was made of rescuing him from that wretched den he bolted off like a wild goat. Louise turned her head away with an air of disgust when Pauline, without the slightest embarrass­ment, told her the boy’s story. She, Pauline, had grown up in a free unrestrained way, and looked with charity’s unflinch­ing eye upon the vices of humanity. Louise, on the other hand, initiated into knowledge of life by ten years spent at boarding-schools, blushed at the ideas which Pauline’s words suggested. In her estimation these were matters which people thought of, but should not mention.

‘The other little girl there,’ Pauline went on, ‘that fair-haired little child, who is so rosy and bonny, is the daughter of the Gonins, with whom that rascal Cuche has taken up his quarters. She is nine years old. The Gonins were once very comfortably off, and had a smack of their own, but the father was attacked with paralysis in the legs, a very common com­plaint in our villages about here, and Cuche, who was only a common seaman to begin with, soon made himself the master. Now the whole house belongs to him, and he bullies the poor old man, who passes his days and nights inside an old coal-chest, while Cuche and the wife lord it over him. I look after the child myself, but I am sorry to say she comes in for a good many cuffings at home, and is unfortunately much too shrewd and noticing.’

Here Pauline stopped and turned to the child to question her.

‘How are they all getting on at home?’ she asked.

The child had watched Pauline while the latter was explaining matters in an undertone. Her pretty but vicious face smiled slyly at what she guessed was being said.

‘Oh, they’ve beaten him again,’ she said, still continuing to smile. ‘Last night mother got up and caught hold of a log of wood. Ah! Mademoiselle, it would be very good of you to give father a little wine, for they have put an empty jug by the chest, telling him that he may drink till he bursts.’

Louise made a gesture of disgust. What horrible people! How could Pauline take any interest in such dreadful things? Was it really possible that near a big town like Caen there existed such hideous places, where people lived in that utterly barbarous fashion?
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For, surely, they could be nothing less than savages, to thus trample under foot all law, both divine and human.

‘There! there! I have had quite enough of your young friends,’ she said, in a low tone, as she went to sit down near Chanteau. ‘I should not mourn for them very much if the sea were to sweep them all away.’

The Abbé had just crowned a king.

‘Sodom and Gomorrah!’ he cried. ‘I have been warn­ing them for the last twenty years. Well, it will be so much the worse for them.’

‘I have asked to have a school built here,’ said Chanteau, feeling a little distressed, as he saw the game going against him; ‘but there aren’t people enough. The children ought to go to Verchemont, but they don’t like school, and only play about on the roads when they are sent there.’

Pauline looked up in surprise. If the poor things were clean, she was thinking, there would be no necessity to attempt to make them so. Wickedness and wretchedness went together, and she felt in no way repelled by suffering, even when it seemed to be the consequence of vice. But she confined herself to asserting her charitable tolerance with a gesture of protest. Then she went on to promise little Gonin that she would go to see her father; and while she was doing so Véronique appeared upon the scene, pushing another little girl in front of her.

‘Here’s another, Mademoiselle.’

The new-comer, who was very young, certainly not more than five years old, was completely in rags, with black face and matted hair. With all the readiness of one already accustomed to begging on the high-roads she at once began to whine and groan:

‘Please take pity upon me. My poor father has broken his leg—’

‘It’s Tourmal’s girl, isn’t it?’ asked Pauline of Véro­nique.

But before the servant could reply the priest broke out angrily:

‘The little hussy! Don’t take any notice of her. Her father has been pretending to break his leg for the last five-and-twenty years. They are a family of swindlers, who only live by thieving. The father helps the smugglers. The mother pilfers in all the fields about Verchemont, and the grandfather prowls about at night, stealing oysters from the Government beds at Roqueboise. You can see for yourselves what they are making of their daughter — a little thief and a beggar, whom they send to people’s houses to lay her hands upon anything that may happen to be lying about. Just look how she is glancing at my snuff-box!’

The child’s eyes, indeed, after inquisitively examining every corner of the terrace, had flashed brightly on catching sight of the priest’s old snuff-box. She was not in the slightest degree abashed by the Abbé’s account of her family history, but repeated her petition as calmly as though he had not spoken a word.

‘He has broken his leg. Please, kind young lady, help us with a trifle.’

This time Louise broke out into a laugh. That little five-year-old impostor, who was already as scampish as her parents, quite amused her. Pauline, however, remained perfectly grave and serious, and took a new five-franc piece from her purse.

‘Now, listen to me,’ she said; ‘I will give you as much every Saturday if I hear a good account of you during the week.’

‘Look after the spoons, then,’ Abbé Horteur cried, ‘or she will walk off with some of them.’

Pauline made no reply to this remark, but dismissed the children, who slouched off with exclamations of ‘Thank you kindly ‘and ‘May God reward you!’

While this scene had been taking place Madame Chanteau, who had just come back from the house, whither she had gone to give a glance at Louise’s room, was muttering with vexation at Véronique. It was quite intolerable that the servant should take upon herself to introduce those wretched beggars. Mademoiselle herself brought quite sufficient of them to the house. A lot of scum, who robbed her of her money and then laughed at her! Of course the money was her own, and she could play ducks and drakes with it if she were so disposed, but it was really becoming quite immoral to encourage vice in this way. She had heard Pauline promise a hundred sous a week to the little Tourmal girl. Another twenty francs a month! The fortune of an emperor would not suffice for such perpetual extravagance!

‘You know very well,’ she said to Pauline, ‘that I hate to see that little thief here. Though you are now the mistress of your fortune, I cannot allow you to ruin yourself so fool­ishly. I am morally responsible. Yes, my dear, I repeat that you are ruining yourself, and more quickly than you have any notion of.’

Véronique, who had gone back to her kitchen, fuming with anger at Madame Chanteau’s reprimand, now reappeared.

‘The butcher’s here!’ she cried roughly. ‘He wants his bill settled; forty-six francs ten centimes.’

A pang of vexation curtailed Madame Chanteau’s remarks. She fumbled in her pocket, and then, assuming an expression of surprise, she whispered to Pauline:

‘Have you got as much about you, my dear? I have no change here, and I shall have to go upstairs. I will give it you back very shortly.’

Pauline went off with the servant to pay the butcher. Since she had begun to keep her money in her chest of drawers the same old comedy had been enacted each time a bill was presented for payment. It was a systematic levy of small amounts which had grown to be quite a matter of course. Her aunt no longer troubled to go and withdraw the money herself, but asked Pauline for it, and thus made the girl rob herself with her own hands. At first there had been a pretence of settling accounts, and sums of ten and fifteen francs had been repaid to her, but afterwards matters got so complicated that a settlement was deferred till later on, when the marriage should take place. Yet, in spite of all this, they took care that she should pay for her board with the greatest punctuality on the first day of every month, the sum due in this respect being now raised to ninety francs.

‘There’s some more of your money making itself scarce!’ growled Véronique in the passage. ‘If I had been you, I would have told her to go and find her change. It is abominable that you should be plundered in this way!’

When Pauline came back with the receipted account, which she handed to her aunt, the priest was radiant with triumph. Chanteau was vanquished; he had not a piece which he could move. The sun was setting, and the sea was crimsoned by its oblique rays, while the tide lazily rose. Louise, with a far-off look in her eyes, smiled at the bright and wide-stretching horizon.

‘There’s our little Louise up in the clouds,’ said Madame Chanteau. ‘I have had your trunk taken upstairs, Louisette. We are next-door neighbours again.’

Lazare did not return home till the following day. After his visit to the Sub-Prefect at Bayeux he had taken it into his head to go on to Caen and see the Prefect. And, though he was not bringing an actual subvention back in his pocket, he was convinced, he said, that the General Council
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would vote at the least a sum of twelve thousand francs. The Prefect had accompanied him to the door and had bound himself by formal promises, saying that it was impossible Bonneville should be left to its fate, and that the authorities were quite prepared to back up the efforts of the inhabitants. Lazare, however, could not help feeling despondent, for he foresaw all sorts of delays, and the least delay in the carrying-out of one of his schemes proved agony to him.

‘Upon my word of honour,’ he cried, ‘if I had the twelve thousand francs myself, I should be delighted to advance them! For the first experimental proceedings, indeed, so much would not be necessary. When we do get the money voted, you will see what a heap of worries and delays we shall have to go through. We shall have all the engineers in the department down here on our backs. But if we could make a start without them, they would be obliged to acquiesce in what had actually been done. The Prefect, to whom I briefly explained our plans, was quite struck with their advantage and simplicity.’

The hope of overpowering the sea now thrilled him feverishly. He had felt bitter rancour against it ever since he had considered it responsible for his failure with the sea­weed scheme; and, though he did not venture to openly revile it, he harboured the thought of coming vengeance. And what revenge could be better than to stay it in its course of blind destruction, and call out to it, like its master, ‘Thus far and no farther’?

There was, also, in this enterprise an element of phil­anthropy which, joined to the grandeur of the contemplated struggle, brought his excitement to a climax. When his mother saw him spending his days cutting out pieces of wood and burying his nose in treatises on mechanics, she thought, with trembling, of his grandfather, the enterprising but blundering carpenter, whose useless masterpiece lay slumber­ing in its glass ease on the mantelshelf. Was the old man going to live over again in his grandson to consummate the ruin of the family? Then she gradually allowed herself to be convinced and won over by the son whom she worshipped. If he were successful, and, of course, he would be successful, this would be the first step to fame, glorious and disinterested work which would make him celebrated. With this as a starting-point he might easily soar as high as ambition might prompt him. Henceforth the whole family dreamt of nothing but conquering the sea and of chaining it to the foot of the terrace, submissive like a whipped dog.

Lazare’s scheme was, as he had said, one of great simpli­city. He proposed to drive big piles into the sand, and to cover them with planks. Behind these the shingle, swept up by the tide, would form a sort of impregnable wall against which the waves would break powerlessly, and, by this means, the sea itself would build the barrier which was to keep it back. A number of groynes, built of long beams carried upon strong rafters forming a breakwater in front of the wall of shingle, would complete the works. Afterwards, if they had the necessary funds, they might construct two or three big stockades, whose solid mass would restrain the very highest tides. Lazare had found the first idea of his scheme in a ‘Carpenter’s Complete Handbook,’ a little volume with quaint engravings, which had probably been bought long ago by his grandfather. He elaborated and perfected the idea, and went into the matter pretty deeply, studying the theory of forces and the resistance of which the different materials were capable, and manifesting considerable pride in a certain disposition and inclination of the beams, which, said he, could not fail to insure absolute success.

Pauline once more showed great interest in her cousin’s studies. Like the young man’s, her curiosity was always aroused by experiments in strange things. But, with her more calculating nature, she did not deceive herself as to the possibility of failure. When she saw the tide mount up, her eyes wandered with an expression of doubt to the models which Lazare had made, the miniature piles and groynes and stockades. The big room was now quite full of them.

One night the girl lingered till very late at her window. For the last two days her cousin had been talking of burning all his models; and one evening, as they all sat round the table, he had exclaimed in a sudden outburst that he was going off to Australia, as there was no room for him in France. Pauline was meditating over all this by her window, while the flood-tide dashed against Bonneville in the dark­ness. Each shock of the waves made her quiver, and she seemed to hear, at regular intervals, the cries of poor creatures whom the sea was swallowing up. Then the struggle which was still waging within her between love of money and natural kindliness became unendurable, and she closed the window, that she might no longer hear. But the distant blows still seemed to shake her as she lay in bed. Why not try to attempt even what seemed impossible? What would it matter, throwing all this money into the sea, if there were yet a single chance of saving the village? And she fell asleep at daybreak dreaming of the joy her cousin would feel when he should find himself released from all his brooding melancholy, set at last perhaps on the right path, happy through her, indebted to her for everything.