Complete Works of Emile Zola (803 page)

Pauline became very grave, and her saddened eyes sought the ground. Lazare was right. She could clearly foresee a long series of days like this in store for them, the same in­cessant quarrels, which she would have to smooth away. And she was no longer quite sure that she was altogether cured herself, and might not again give way to her old outbursts of jealousy. Ah! were these daily troubles never to have an end? But she had already raised her eyes again; she remem­bered how many times she had won the victory over herself; and as for those other two, she would see whether they would not grow tired of quarrelling before she did of reconciling them. This thought brightened her, and she laughingly repeated it to Lazare. What would be left for her to do, if the house became perfectly happy? She would fall a victim to
ennui
herself, if she hadn’t some little worries to smooth away.

‘Where are the priest and the Doctor?’ she asked, sur­prised to see them no longer there.

‘They must have gone into the kitchen garden,’ said Chanteau. ‘The Abbé wanted to show our pears to the Doctor.’

Pauline was going to look from the corner of the terrace, when she stopped short before little Paul.

‘Ah! He has woke up again!’ she cried. ‘Just look at him! He’s already trying to be off on the loose!’

Paul had just pulled himself up on to his little knees in the midst of the rug, and was beginning to creep off slyly upon all fours. Before he reached the gravel, however, he tripped over a fold in the rug, and rolled upon his back, with his frock thrown back and his little legs and arms in the air. He lay kicking about and wriggling amidst the poppy-like brilliance of the rug.

‘Well! he’s kicking in a fine way!’ cried Pauline merrily. ‘Look, and you shall see how he has improved in his walking since yesterday.’

She knelt down beside the child and tried to set him on his feet. He had developed so slowly that he was very back­ward for his age, and they had for a time feared that he would always be weak on his legs. So it was a great joy to the family to see him make his first attempts at walking, clutch­ing at the air with his hands, and tumbling down over the smallest bit of gravel.

‘Come now! give over playing,’ Pauline called to him. ‘Come and show them that you are a man. There now, keep steady, and go and kiss papa, and then you shall go and kiss grandfather.’

Chanteau, whose face was twitching with sharp shooting pains, turned his head to watch the scene. Lazare, notwith­standing his despondency, was willing to lend himself to the fun.

‘Come along!’ he cried to the child.

‘Oh! you must hold out your arms to him,’ Pauline ex­plained. ‘He won’t venture if you don’t. He likes to see something that he can fall against. Come, my treasure, pluck up a little courage!’

There were three steps for him to take. There were loving exclamations and unbounded enthusiasm when Paul made up his mind to go that little distance, with all the swaying of a tight-rope walker who feels uncertain of his legs. He fell into the arms of his father, who kissed him on his still scanty hair, while he smiled with an infant’s vague delighted smile, widely opening his moist and rosy little mouth. Then his godmother wanted to make him talk, but his tongue was still more backward than his legs, and he only uttered guttural sounds in which his relatives alone could distinguish the words ‘papa’ and ‘mamma.’

‘Oh! but there’s something else yet,’ Pauline resumed. ‘He promised to go and kiss his grandfather. Go along with you! Ah! it’s a fine walk you’ve got before you this time!’

There were at least eight steps between Lazare’s chair and Chanteau’s. Paul had never ventured so far out into the world before, and so there was considerable excitement about the matter. Pauline took up a position half-way in order to prevent accidents, and two long minutes were spent in persuad­ing the child to make a start. At last he set off, swaying about, with his hands clutching the air. For an instant Pauline thought that she would have to catch him in her arms, but he pushed bravely forward and fell upon Chanteau’s knees. Bursts of applause greeted him.

Then they made him repeat the journey half a score of times. He no longer showed any signs of fear; he started off at the first call, went from his grandfather to his father, and then back again to his grandfather, laughing loudly all the time, and quite enjoying the fun, though he always seemed on the point of tumbling over, as if the ground were shaking beneath him.

‘Just once again to father!’ Pauline cried.

Lazare was beginning to get a little tired. Children, even his own, quickly bored him. As he looked at his boy, so merry and now out of danger, the thought flashed through his mind that this little creature would outlive him and would doubtless close his eyes for the last time, an idea which made him shudder with agony. Since he had come to the determination to continue vegetating at Bonneville, he was constantly occupied with the thought that he would die in the room where his mother had died; and he never went up the stairs without telling himself that one day his coffin would pass that way. The entrance to the passage was very narrow, and there was an awkward turning, which was a perpetual source of disquietude to him, and he worried himself with wondering how the bearers would be able to carry him out without jolting him. As increasing age day by day shortened his span of life, that constant dwelling upon the thought of death hastened his breaking-up, annihilated his last shreds of manliness. He was ‘quite done for,’ as he often told himself; he was of no further use at all, and he would ask himself what was the good of bestirring himself, as he fell deeper and deeper into the slough of boredom.

‘Just once more to grandfather!’ cried Pauline.

Chanteau was not able to stretch out his arms to receive and support his grandson, and, though he set his knees apart, the clutching of the child’s puny fingers at his trousers drew sighs of pain from him. The little one was already used to the old man’s ceaseless moaning, and probably imagined, in his scarcely awakened mind, that all grandfathers suffered in the same way. That day, however, in the bright sunshine, as he came and fell against him, he raised his little face, checked his laugh, and gazed at the old man with his vacillating eyes. The grandfather’s deformed hands looked like hideous blocks of mingled flesh and chalk; his face, dented with red wrinkles, disfigured by suffering, seemed to have been violently twisted towards his right shoulder; while his whole body was covered with bumps and crevices, as if it were that of some old stone saint, damaged and badly pieced together. Paul appeared quite surprised to see him looking so ill and so old in the sunshine.

‘Just once more! Just once more!’ cried Pauline again.

She, full of health and cheerfulness, kept sending the little lad to and fro between the two men, from the grand­father, who obstinately lived on in hopeless suffering, to the father, who was already undermined by terror of the hereafter.

‘Perhaps his generation will be a less foolish one than this,’ she suddenly exclaimed. ‘He won’t accuse chemistry of spoiling his life; he will believe that it is still possible to live, even with the certainty of having some day to die.’

Lazare smiled in an embarrassed way.

‘Bah!’ he muttered, ‘he will have the gout like my father, and his nerves will be worse strung than mine. Just see how weak he is! It is the law of degeneration.’

‘Be quiet!’ cried Pauline. ‘I will bring him up, and you’ll see if I don’t make a man of him!’

There was a moment’s silence, while she clasped the child to her in a motherly embrace.

‘Why don’t you get married, as you’re so fond of children?’ Lazare asked.

She looked at him in amazement.

‘But I have a child! Haven’t you given me one? I get married! Never! What an idea!’

She dandled little Paul in her arms, and laughed yet more loudly as she declared that Lazare had quite converted her to the doctrines of the great Saint Schopenhauer, and that she would remain unmarried in order to be able to work for the universal deliverance. And she was, indeed, the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity.

The sun was sinking to rest in the boundless waters, perfect serenity fell from the paling sky, the immensity of air and sea alike lay wrapped in all the mellow softness of the close of a lovely day. Par away over the water one single little white sail gleamed like a spark, but it vanished as the sun sank beneath the long line of the horizon; then there was nothing to be seen save the gradual deepening of the twilight over the motionless sea. And Pauline was still dandling the child, and laughing with brave gaiety as she stood between her despairing cousin and her moaning uncle, in the middle of the terrace, which was now growing bluish in the shadowy dusk. She had stripped herself of every­thing, but happiness rang out in her clear laugh.

‘Aren’t we going to dine this evening?’ asked Louise, making her appearance in a coquettish dress of grey silk.

‘I’m quite ready,’ Pauline replied. ‘I can’t think what they can be doing in the garden.’

At that moment Abbé Horteur came back, looking very much distressed. In reply to their anxious questions, after seeking for some phrase which would soften the shock, he ended by bluntly saying:

‘We have just discovered poor Véronique hanging from one of your pear-trees.’

They all raised a cry of surprise and horror, and their faces paled beneath the passing quiver of death.

‘But what could make her do such a thing?’ cried Pau­line. ‘She could have had no reason, and she had even to prepare the dinner. It can scarcely be because I told her that they had made her pay ten sous too much for her duck!’

In his turn Doctor Cazenove now came up. For the last quarter of an hour he had been vainly trying to restore animation to the poor woman’s body in the coach-house, whither Martin had helped him to carry it. One could never tell, he said, what such whimsical old servants would do. She had never really got over her mistress’s death.

‘It didn’t take her long,’ he added. ‘She just strung herself up by the strings of one of her kitchen aprons.’

Lazare and Louise, frozen with terror, said not a word. Chanteau, after listening in silence, felt a pang of disgust as he thought of the compromised dinner. And that wretched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation:

‘What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!’

THE END

GERMINAL

Translated by Havelock Ellis

Often considered to be Zola’s masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French language,
Germinal
(1885) is an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic portrayal of a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s.  The novel’s title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month, with ‘germen’ being Latin for ‘seed’, suggesting the hope for a better future for the miners. The novel was initially serialised between November 1884 and February 1885 in
Gil Blas
, being published the same year as a book.

The novel involves Étienne Lantier, who previously appeared in
L’Assommoir
. The young migrant worker arrives in the dreary coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France, hoping to earn a living as a miner. Having lost his previous position on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay, as well as employment pushing carts down the pit. 

Étienne is a hard-working idealist, though he possesses the Macquart ancestors’ traits of hot-headed recklessness, capable of exploding into rage under the influence of drink or strong passions. Experiencing the severe poverty and oppression suffered by the miners, whose working and living conditions continue to worsen, Étienne embraces socialist principles, reading large amounts of working class movement literature.  Meanwhile, Étienne falls in love with Maheu’s daughter Catherine, also employed pushing carts in the mines, and he is drawn into the relationship between her and her brutish lover Chaval, later to appear in
La Terre
.

Once pushed to the breaking point of their abject working conditions, the miners decide to strike and Étienne, now a respected member of the community who is recognised as a political idealist, becomes the leader of the movement. Their poverty becoming ever more disastrous, the miners are eventually sparked into a ferocious riot, the description of this violence providing some of Zola’s most stirring and evocative scenes. The rioters are eventually confronted by the army that represses the revolt in a violent and unforgettable episode.

Zola was very proud of
Germinal
and was always keen to defend any conservative criticism of its ‘exaggeration’. As with all of his works, the author’s research had been thorough, with the author travelling around many locations in northern France, witnessing the after-effects of a crippling miners’ strike first-hand at Anzin, as well as actually going down a working coal pit at Denain. Due to this level of commitment to his art, the mine scenes are especially charged with realistic power.