Complete Works of Emile Zola (786 page)

‘A pack of grinning idiots, who jeered at me when that wolfish sea swept everything away! No! no! they may do things for themselves now! I won’t give them another chance of laughing at my “bits of sticks,” as they called them.’

Pauline tried to soothe him. The poor folk were in a terrible state of wretchedness. Since the sea had carried off the Houtelards’ house, the most solidly built of all the village, together with three others, cottages of the poorer fishermen, their misery had increased. Houtelard, who had once been the rich man of the district, had now taken up his quarters in an old barn, some twenty yards behind his former dwel­ling; but the others, who had no such refuge, were housing them­selves in clumsy huts made out of the shells of old boats. They were living in a miserable state of nudity and promiscuousness; the women and children were wallowing in vice and vermin. All that was bestowed upon them in charity went in drink. The wretched creatures sold all the food that was given them, with their clothes, pots, and pans, and what little furniture they had left, in order to buy drams of the terrible ‘calvados,’ which stretched them on the ground across their doorways like so many corpses. Pauline was the only one who still continued to say a word for them. Abbé Horteur had given them up, and Chanteau talked of sending in his resignation, being unwilling to remain any longer the Mayor of such a drove of swine. Lazare, too, when his cousin tried to excite his pity on behalf of that little colony of drunkards, beaten down by the fierceness of the elements, only repeated his father’s eternal refrain:

‘No one compels them to remain here. All that they have to do is to go elsewhere. Only a pack of idiots would come and stick themselves right under the waves.’

This was the general feeling of the neighbourhood, and everyone looked upon the Bonneville folk as obstinate fools. The villagers, on the other hand, were mistrustfully un­willing to go elsewhere. They had been born there, they said, and why should they have to leave the place? The same sort of thing had been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there was nothing for them to do anywhere else. Prouane, when he was exceptionally tipsy, always concluded by saying that wherever they might go they would always be devoured by something or other.

Pauline used to smile at this and nod her head in approval, for happiness, in her opinion, depended neither upon people nor circumstances, but on the more or less reasonable way in which people conformed themselves to their circumstances. She redoubled her care and attention, and distributed still larger doles and alms than before. At last she was able to induce Lazare to associate himself with her in her charities; she hoped that she might thereby rouse him from his gloomy broodings, and lead him to forget his own troubles by awaking in him pity for those of others. Every Saturday afternoon he remained at home with her, and from four o’clock till six they received the young folk from the village, the ragged draggle-tail urchins whom their parents sent up to get what they could out of Mademoiselle Pauline. It was an invasion of snivelling little lads and dirty little girls.

One Saturday it was raining, and Pauline could not dis­tribute her alms on the terrace, as was her custom. Lazare had to fetch a bench and place it in the kitchen.

‘Good gracious, sir!’ Véronique exclaimed. ‘Surely Mademoiselle Pauline isn’t going to bring all that dirty lot in here? It’s a nice idea, indeed; if they do come, I won’t answer for the state of the soup.’

At that moment the girl entered the kitchen with her bag of silver and her medicine-chest. She merrily replied to Véronique’s indignant outburst:

‘Oh! a turn of your broom will make things all right again; and, besides, it’s raining so heavily that they will have had a good washing before they come in, poor little things!’

And, indeed, the cheeks of the first to enter were quite bright and rosy from the downpour. They were so soaked that pools of water trickled from their ragged clothes on to the tiles of the kitchen-floor, thereby increasing the servant’s wrath, which was by no means diminished when Pauline told her to light a faggot of wood to dry them a little. The bench was carried near the fire, and was soon occupied by a shivering row of impudent, leering brats, who cast greedy eyes at what was lying about — some half-emptied wine-bottles, the remains of a joint, and a bunch of carrots lying on a block.

‘Children indeed!’ Véronique went on growling. ‘Child­ren that are grown up and ought to be earning their own living. They’ll go on pretending to be children till they’re five-and-twenty, if only you’ll let them!’

But Pauline bade her be silent.

‘There! have you done now? Talking like that won’t fill their mouths or help them to grow up.’

The girl sat down at the table, with her money and the other articles she intended to distribute in front of her; and she was just about to call the children to her in turn, when Lazare, who had remained standing, caught sight of Houtelard’s boy amongst the other youngsters, and shouted out:

‘Didn’t I forbid you to come here again, you young vulture? Your parents ought to be ashamed of themselves for sending you here, for they are quite able to feed you, whereas there are so many others who are dying of hunger.’

Houtelard’s son, an overgrown lad of fifteen, with a timid and sad expression, began to cry.

‘They beat me if I don’t come,’ he said. ‘The missis got hold of the rope and father drove me out.’

He turned up his sleeve to show a big violet bruise on his arm which had been caused by a blow from a piece of knotted rope. The ‘missis’ was the old servant whom the lad’s father had married, and who was gradually killing the boy by her ill-treatment. Since the loss of their house, their harsh­ness and miserly filthiness had increased, and now their home was a perfect pigsty, where they tortured the lad, as if to revenge themselves for their misfortunes on him.

‘Put an arnica compress on his arm,’ said Pauline softly to Lazare.

Then she herself gave the lad a five-franc piece. ‘Here! give them this so that they shan’t beat you any more, and tell them that if they strike you again, and if there are any bruises on your body next Saturday, they will never get another sou out of me.’

All along the bench the other children, cheered by the warming blaze, were now tittering and digging each other in the ribs with their elbows. One tiny little thing had stolen a carrot and was munching it furtively.

‘Come here, Cuche!’ said Pauline. ‘Have you told your mother that I hope to get her admitted very soon into the Hospital for Incurables at Bayeux?’

Cuche’s wife, a miserable abandoned woman, had broken her leg in July, and had remained infirm ever since.

‘Yes, I told her,’ the lad replied in a hoarse voice; ‘but she says she won’t go.’

He had grown into a strong young fellow, and was now nearly seventeen years old. With his hands hanging at his sides, he swayed about in an awkward manner.

‘What! She won’t go!’ cried Lazare. ‘And you won’t come, either; for I told you to come up this week and help a little in the garden, and I’m still waiting for you.’

The lad still swayed himself about. ‘I haven’t had any time,’ he replied.

At this Pauline, seeing her cousin about to lose his temper, interposed and said to the lad:

‘Sit down again now, and we will speak about it presently. Just reflect a little or you will make me angry too.’

It was next the turn of the Gonins’ little girl. She was thirteen years old, and still had a pretty rosy face beneath a mop of fair hair. Without waiting to be questioned, she poured out a flood of prattle, telling them how her father’s paralysis was ascending to his arms and even his tongue, and that he could now only grunt like an animal. Cousin Cuche, the sailor who had deserted his wife and installed himself in Gonin’s house, had made a violent attack upon the old man that very morning, in the hope of finishing him off.

‘Mother sets on him too. She gets up at night and empties bowls of cold water over father, because he snores so loud and disturbs her. If you could only see what a state they have left him in, Mademoiselle Pauline! He is quite naked, and he wants some sheets very badly, for all his skin is getting grazed and peeling off!’

‘There! That will do; hold your tongue!’ said Lazare, interrupting her chatter; while Pauline, moved to pity, sent Véronique off to look out a pair of sheets.

Lazare considered the girl much too wide-awake for her age, and he believed that, although she did perhaps sometimes ward off a blow meant for her father, she treated him in the long run no better than the others did. Moreover, he felt quite sure that whatever was given to her, whether it was money, or meat, or bed-linen, instead of being of any service to the infirm old man, would only serve for the gratification of his wife and cousin Cuche.

He began to question her sternly, for he had seen her gadding about with several lads of the neighbourhood. However, Pauline laid her hand upon his arm, for the other children, even the youngest amongst them, were sniggering and smiling with all the impudence of precocious vice. How was it possible to arrest that spreading rottenness when the men and women set so bad an example? When Pauline had given the girl a pair of sheets and a bottle of wine, she whispered to her for a moment or two, trying to frighten her as to the consequences which might result from misbehaviour. Warnings of this kind were the only ones that might hold her in check.

Meantime Lazare, wishing to hasten the distribution, the length of which was beginning to disgust and irritate him, called up Prouane’s daughter.

‘Your father and mother were tipsy again last night,’ he said, ‘and I hear that you were worse than either of them.’

‘Oh! no, sir! I had a very bad headache.’

He placed before her a plate in which were a few pieces of raw meat.

‘Eat that!’

She was devoured with scrofula again, and her nervous dis­orders had reappeared. Drunkenness increased her precocious infirmities, for she had acquired the habit of drinking with her parents. When she had swallowed three lumps of the meat, she stopped and made a grimace of disgust.

‘I’ve had enough; I can’t eat any more.’

But Pauline had taken up a bottle.

‘Very well,’ she said!’ if you don’t eat the meat, you shan’t have your glass of quinine wine.’

On hearing this, the girl fixed her glistening eyes on the glass, which Pauline filled, and overcame her repugnance against the meat. Then she seized the glass and tossed its contents down her throat with all a drunkard’s knowing readi­ness. But she did not then retire; she begged Pauline to let her take the bottle away with her, saying that it interfered too much with what she had to do to come up to the house every day; and she promised to take the bottle to bed with her, and to keep it so securely hidden that her father and mother would never be able to find it and drink the wine. Pauline, however, refused to let her have it.

‘You’d swallow every drop of it before you got to the bottom of the hill,’ said Lazare. ‘It’s yourself that we suspect now, you little wine-cask!’

One by one the children left the bench to receive money, or bread, or meat. Some of them, after receiving their share of the distribution, seemed inclined to linger before the blaz­ing fire, but Véronique, who had just noticed that half her carrots had been devoured, drove them off pitilessly into the rain. ‘Had anyone ever seen anything like it before?’ she cried. ‘Carrots, too, that still had all the earth sticking to them!’

Soon there was no one left but young Cuche, who looked very depressed in the expectation of receiving a severe lecture from Pauline. She called him to her, spoke to him for a long time in low tones, and finished by giving him his loaf and the hundred sous which he received from her every Saturday. Then he went off, with his clumsy swaying, having duly promised to work, but having no intention whatever of doing anything of the kind.

The servant was just giving a sigh of relief when she suddenly exclaimed:

‘Hallo! they haven’t all gone yet, then! There’s one of them over there in the corner still!’

It was the Tourmals’ little girl, the little abortion of the high roads, who, notwithstanding her ten years, was still quite a dwarf. It was only in shamelessness and effrontery that she seemed to grow, and she groaned more miserably and seemed more wretched than ever, trained for the profes­sion of begging from her cradle, just as some infants have their bones manipulated in order that they may become acrobats. She crouched between the dresser and the fire­place, as though she had stowed herself in that corner for fear of being surprised in some wrong-doing.

‘What are you up to there?’ Pauline asked her.

‘I am warming myself.’

Véronique cast an anxious glance round her kitchen. On previous Saturdays, even when the children had assembled on the terrace, various little articles had disappeared. That day, however, everything seemed in its place, and the little girl, who had hurriedly risen to her feet, began to deafen them with her shrill voice:

‘Father is in the hospital, and grandfather has hurt him­self at his work, and mother hasn’t a gown to go out in. Please have pity upon us, kind young lady—’

‘Do you want to split our ears, you little liar?’ Lazare cried angrily. ‘Your father is in gaol for smuggling, and when your grandfather sprained his wrist he was robbing the oyster-beds at Roqueboise, and, if your mother hasn’t got a dress, she must manage to go out stealing in her chemise, for she is charged with having strangled five fowls belonging to the innkeeper at Verchemont. Do you think you can befool us with your lies about matters that we know more of than you do yourself?’

The child did not even appear to have heard him. She went on immediately with all her impudent coolness:

‘Have pity upon us, kind young lady! My father and grandfather are both ill, and my mother dare not leave them. God Almighty will bless you for it.’

‘There! that will do! Now go away and don’t tell any more lies!’ Pauline said to her, giving her a piece of money to get rid of her.

She did not want telling twice, but hurried from the kitchen and through the yard as quickly as her little legs would carry her. Just at that moment the servant uttered a cry: