Complete Works of Emile Zola (849 page)

A great cry arose, dominating the
Marseillaise:

“Bread! bread! bread!”

Lucie and Jeanne pressed themselves against Madame Hennebeau, who was almost fainting; while Négrel placed himself before them as though to protect them by his body. Was the old social order cracking this very evening? And what they saw immediately after completed their stupefaction. The band had nearly passed by, there were only a few stragglers left, when Mouquette came up. She was delaying, watching the bourgeois at their garden gates or the windows of their houses; and whenever she saw them, as she was not able to spit in their faces, she showed them what for her was the climax of contempt. Doubtless she perceived someone now, for suddenly she raised her skirts, bent her back, and showed her enormous buttocks, naked beneath the last rays of the sun. There was nothing obscene in those fierce buttocks, and nobody laughed.

Everything disappeared: the flood rolled on to Montsou along the turns of the road, between the low houses streaked with bright colours. The carriage was drawn out of the yard, but the coachman would not take it upon him to convey back madame and the young ladies without delay; the strikers occupied the street. And the worst was, there was no other road.

“We must go back, however, for dinner will be ready,” said Madame Hennebeau, exasperated by annoyance and fear. “These dirty workpeople have again chosen a day when I have visitors. How can you do good to such creatures?”

Lucie and Jeanne were occupied in pulling Cécile out of the hay. She was struggling, believing that those savages were still passing by, and repeating that she did not want to see them. At last they all took their places in the carriage again. It then occurred to Négrel, who had remounted, that they might go through the Réquillart lanes.

“Go gently,” he said to the coachman, “for the road is atrocious. If any groups prevent you from returning to the road over there, you can stop behind the old pit, and we will return on foot through the little garden door, while you can put up the carriage and horses anywhere, in some inn outhouse.”

They set out. The band, far away, was streaming into Montsou. As they had twice seen police and military, the inhabitants were agitated and seized by panic. Abominable stories were circulating; it was said that written placards had been set up threatening to rip open the bellies of the bourgeois. Nobody had read them, but all the same they were able to quote the exact words. At the lawyer’s especially the terror was at its height, for he had just received by post an anonymous letter warning him that a barrel of powder was buried in his cellar, and that it would be blown up if he did not declare himself on the side of the people. Just then the Grégoires, prolonging their visit on the arrival of this letter, were discussing it, and decided that it must be the work of a joker, when the invasion of the mob completed the terror of the house. They, however, smiled, drawing back a corner of the curtain to look out, and refused to admit that there was any danger, certain, they said, that all would finish up well. Five o’clock struck, and they had time to wait until the street was free for them to cross the road to dine with the Hennebeaus, where Cécile, who had surely returned, must be waiting for them. But no one in Montsou seemed to share their confidence. People were wildly running about; doors and windows were banged to. They saw Maigrat, on the other side of the road, barricading his shop with a large supply of iron bars, and looking so pale and trembling that his feeble little wife was obliged to fasten the screws. The band had come to a halt before the manager’s villa, and the cry echoed:

“Bread! bread! bread!”

M. Hennebeau was standing at the window when Hippolyte came in to close the shutters, for fear the windows should be broken by stones. He closed all on the ground floor, and then went up to the first floor; the creak of the window-fasteners was heard and the clack of the shutters one by one. Unfortunately, it was not possible to shut the kitchen window in the area in the same way, a window made disquietingly ruddy by the gleams from the saucepans and the spit.

Mechanically, M. Hennebeau, who wished to look out, went up to Paul’s room on the second floor: it was on the left, the best situated, for it commanded the road as far as the Company’s Yards. And he stood behind the blinds overlooking the crowd. But this room had again overcome him, the toilet table sponged and in order, the cold bed with neat and well-drawn sheets. All his rage of the afternoon, that furious battle in the depths of his silent solitude, had now turned to an immense fatigue. His whole being was now like this room, grown cold, swept of the filth of the morning, returned to its habitual correctness. What was the good of a scandal? had anything really changed in his house? His wife had simply taken another lover; that she had chosen him in the family scarcely aggravated the fact; perhaps even it was an advantage, for she thus preserved appearances. He pitied himself when he thought of his mad jealousy. How ridiculous to have struck that bed with his fists! Since he had tolerated another man, he could certainly tolerate this one. It was only a matter of a little more contempt. A terrible bitterness was poisoning his mouth, the uselessness of everything, the eternal pain of existence, shame for himself who always adored and desired this woman in the dirt in which he had abandoned her.

Beneath the window the yells broke out with increased violence:

“Bread! bread! bread!”

“Idiots!” said M. Hennebeau between his clenched teeth.

He heard them abusing him for his large salary, calling him a bloated idler, a bloody beast who stuffed himself to indigestion with good things, while the worker was dying of hunger. The women had noticed the kitchen, and there was a tempest of imprecations against the pheasant roasting there, against the sauces that with fat odours irritated their empty stomachs. Ah! the stinking bourgeois, they should be stuffed with champagne and truffles till their guts burst.

“Bread! bread! bread!”

“Idiots!” repeated M. Hennebeau; “am I happy?”

Anger arose in him against these people who could not understand. He would willingly have made them a present of his large salary to possess their hard skin and their facility of coupling without regret. Why could he not seat them at his table and stuff them with his pheasant, while he went to fornicate behind the hedges, to tumble the girls over, making fun of those who had tumbled them over before him! He would have given everything his education, his comfort, his luxury, his power as manager, if he could be for one day the vilest of the wretches who obeyed him, free of his flesh, enough of a blackguard to beat his wife and to take his pleasure with his neighbours’ wives. And he longed also to be dying of hunger, to have an empty belly, a stomach twisted by cramps that would make his head turn with giddiness: perhaps that would have killed the eternal pain. Ah! to live like a brute, to possess nothing, to scour the fields with the ugliest and dirtiest putter, and to be able to be happy!

“Bread! bread! bread!”

Then he grew angry and shouted furiously in the tumult:

“Bread! is that enough, idiots!”

He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment. His desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat like a death agony. Things were not all for the best because one had bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition of wealth? These revolutionary dreamers might demolish society and rebuilt another society; they would not add one joy to humanity, they would not take away one pain, by cutting bread-and-butter for everybody. They would even enlarge the unhappiness of the earth; they would one day make the very dogs howl with despair when they had taken them out of the tranquil satisfaction of instinct, to raise them to the unappeasable suffering of passion. No, the one good thing was not to exist, and if one existed, to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain of sand, which cannot bleed beneath the heels of the passer-by.

And in this exasperation of his torment, tears swelled in M. Hennebeau’s eyes, and broke in burning drops on his cheeks. The twilight was drowning the road when stones began to riddle the front of the villa. With no anger now against these starving people, only enraged by the burning wound at his heart he continued to stammer in the midst of his tears:

“Idiots! idiots!”

But the cry of the belly dominated, and a roar blew like a tempest, sweeping everything before it:

“Bread! bread! bread!”

CHAPTER 6

SOBERED by Catherine’s blows, Étienne had remained at the head of his mates. But while he was hoarsely urging them on to Montsou, he heard another voice within him, the voice of reason, asking, in astonishment, the meaning of all this. He had not intended any of these things; how had it happened that, having set out for Jean-Bart with the object of acting calmly and preventing disaster, he had finished this day of increasing violence by besieging the manager’s villa?

He it certainly was, however, who had just cried, “Halt!” Only at first his sole idea had been to protect the Company’s Yards, which there had been talk of sacking. And now that stones were already grazing the facade of the villa, he sought in vain for some lawful prey on which to throw the band, so as to avoid greater misfortunes. As he thus stood alone, powerless, in the middle of the road, he was called by a man standing on the threshold of the Estaminet Tison, where the landlady had just put up the shutters in haste, leaving only the door free.

“Yes, it’s me. Will you listen?”

It was Rasseneur. Some thirty men and women, nearly all belonging to the settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante, who had remained at home in the morning and had come in the evening for news, had invaded this estaminet on the approach of the strikers. Zacharie occupied a table with his wife, Philoméne. Farther on, Pierron and Pierronne, with their backs turned, were hiding their faces. No one was drinking, they had simply taken shelter.

Étienne recognized Rasseneur and was turning away, when the latter added:

“You don’t want to see me, eh? I warned you, things are getting awkward. Now you may ask for bread, they’ll give you lead.”

Then Étienne came back and replied:

“What troubles me is, the cowards who fold their arms and watch us risking our skins.”

“Your notion, then, is to pillage over there?” asked Rasseneur.

“My notion is to remain to the last with our friends, quit by dying together.”

In despair, Étienne went back into the crowd, ready to die. On the road, three children were throwing stones, and he gave them a good kick, shouting out to his comrades that it was no good breaking windows.

Bébert and Lydie, who had rejoined Jeanlin, were learning from him how to work the sling. They each sent a flint, playing at who could do the most damage. Lydie had awkwardly cracked the head of a woman in the crowd, and the two boys were loudly laughing. Bonnemort and Mouque, seated on a bench, were gazing at them behind. Bonnemort’s swollen legs bore him so badly, that he had great difficulty in dragging himself so far; no one knew what curiosity impelled him, for his face had the earthy look of those days when he never spoke a word.

Nobody, however, any longer obeyed Étienne. The stones, in spite of his orders, went on hailing, and he was astonished and terrified by these brutes he had unmuzzled, who were so slow to move and then so terrible, so ferociously tenacious in their rage. All the old Flemish blood was there, heavy and placid, taking months to get heated, and then giving itself up to abominable savagery, listening to nothing until the beast was glutted by atrocities. In his southern land crowds flamed up more quickly, but they did not effect so much. He had to struggle with Levaque to obtain possession of his axe, and he knew not how to keep back the Maheus, who were throwing flints with both hands. The women, especially, terrified him — the Levaque, Mouquette, and the others — who were agitated by murderous fury, with teeth and nails out, barking like bitches, and driven on by Mother Brulé, whose lean figure dominated them.

But there was a sudden stop; a moment’s surprise brought a little of that calmness which Étienne’s supplications could not obtain. It was simply the Grégoires, who had decided to bid farewell to the lawyer, and to cross the road to the manager’s house; and they seemed so peaceful, they so clearly had the air of believing that the whole thing was a joke on the part of their worthy miners, whose resignation had nourished them for a century, that the latter, in fact, left off throwing stones, for fear of hitting this old gentleman and old lady who had fallen from the sky. They allowed them to enter the garden, mount the steps, and ring at the barricaded door, which was by no means opened in a hurry. Just then, Rose, the housemaid, was returning, laughing at the furious workmen, all of whom she knew, for she belonged to Montsou. And it was she who, by striking her fists against the door, at last forced Hippolyte to set it ajar. It was time, for as the Grégoires disappeared, the hail of stones began again. Recovering from its astonishment, the crowd was shouting louder than ever:

“Death to the bourgeois! Hurrah for the people!”

Rose went on laughing, in the hall of the villa, as though amused by the adventure, and repeated to the terrified man-servant:

“They’re not bad-hearted; I know them.”

M. Grégoire methodically hung up his hat. Then, when he had assisted Madame Grégoire to draw off her thick cloth mantle, he said, in his turn:

“Certainly, they have no malice at bottom. When they have shouted well they will go home to supper with more appetite.”

At this moment M. Hennebeau came down from the second floor. He had seen the scene, and came to receive his guests in his usual cold and polite manner. The pallor of his face alone revealed the grief which had shaken him. The man was tamed; there only remained in him the correct administrator resolved to do his duty.

“You know,” he said, “the ladies have not yet come back.”

For the first time some anxiety disturbed the Grégoires. Cécile not come back! How could she come back now if the miners were to prolong their joking?