Complete Works of Emile Zola (935 page)

“Two!” cried he, evidently finding something exceedingly humorous in the figure, for he choked with laughter.

“Your turn, Fanny,” now called Grosbois.

When Fanny had got her hand to the bottom, she did not hurry. She fumbled about, stirred the papers round, and seemed to weigh them one after the other.

“Picking and choosing’s not allowed,” said Buteau, savagely. He was suffocating with passion, and had turned pale on ascertaining the number drawn by his brother.

“Eh? Why not?” replied Fanny. “I’m not looking; surely I may feel.”

“Get on,” murmured the father; “there’s nothing to choose between ‘em; one’s as heavy as the other.”

At last she made up her mind, and ran to the window.

“One!”

“Well, then, Buteau has number three,” resumed Fouan. “Draw it, my boy.”

In the growing darkness they had not seen how the face of the young man changed. He burst out in wrath:

“Never, never!”

“What?”

“If you think I’m going to assent to this, you’re wrong! The third lot, eh? The bad one! I told you over and over again that I wanted a different division. But you pooh-pooh’d me! Besides, can’t I see through your trickery? Oughtn’t the youngest to have drawn first? No, I won’t draw, since there’s been cheating!”

The parents gazed at his wild movements as he gesticulated and stamped about.

“My poor boy, you’re going crazy,” said Rose.

“Oh, yes, mamma, I know well enough you never liked me. You’d strip the skin off my back to give it to my brother. You’d all of you eat me alive.”

Fouan sternly interrupted him. “Enough of this folly! Will you draw?”

“It’ll have to be done all over again.”

At this there was a general protest. Hyacinthe and Fanny clutched their papers as if a forcible attempt were being made upon them. Delhomme declared that the drawing had been fair, and Grosbois, much aggrieved, threatened to leave if his honesty were called in question.

“Then papa shall add a thousand francs to my share out of his hoard,” said Buteau.

The old man, taken aback for an instant, stammered. Then he drew himself up and advanced threateningly.

“What’s that you say? So you’re anxious to get me assassinated, you brute? Raze the house to the ground and you won’t find a copper. Take that paper, or, by God, you shall have nothing at all!”

Buteau, with a hardened and obstinate brow, did not quail before his father’s raised fist.

“No!”

An awkward silence again fell. The huge hat was now an encumbrance and obstruction, with this solitary scrap of paper, which nobody would touch, inside it. The surveyor, to cut things short, advised the old man to draw it out himself. He did so, gravely, and went to the light to read it, as if the number were still unknown.

“Three! You’ve the third lot, d’ye hear? The deed is ready, and it’s quite certain that Monsieur Baillehache won’t alter it, for once done can’t be undone. As you’re sleeping here, I give you the night to think it over in. So that’s done with. Let’s say no more about it.”

Buteau, wrapped in shadow, made no reply. The others noisily assented, while the mother at last made up her mind to light a candle so as to lay the cloth.

At that moment Jean, who was coming to meet his com­rade, espied two intertwined shadows watching, from the dark deserted road, the progress of events at the Fouans. Feathery snow-flakes were beginning to flutter across the slate-grey sky.

“Oh, Monsieur Jean,” said a soft voice, “how you frightened us!”

Then he recognised Françoise’s long face and thick lips. She was nestling against her sister Lise, and had one arm round her waist, while she leant her head on her shoulder. The two sisters adored each other, and were always seen about like this, hanging on each other’s neck. Lise taller, and of pleasant aspect, despite her large features and the incipient development of her whole plump person, bore her misfortune with equanimity.

“You were spying, eh?” Jean inquired gaily.

“Why, what’s going on in there has an interest for me,” replied Lise, freely and openly. “It’s a point whether it will make Buteau come to a decision.”

Françoise, with her other arm, had now caressingly encircled her sister’s swollen figure.

“What a shame, the brute! When he’s got some land, p’raps he’ll be looking out for some one better off.”

But Jean gave them hope. The drawing of the lots must have come to an end, and the rest was matter of arrangement. When he told them he was to sup at the old folks’ house, Françoise added, as she turned away: “Well, we shall see you presently; we’re going to the evening meeting.”

He watched them disappear in the darkness. The snow was thickening and embroidering their mingled dresses with fine white down.

CHAPTER V

At seven o’clock, after dinner, the Fouans, Buteau, and Jean went to share the cow-house with the two cows which Rose had decided to sell. The animals, fastened up at the farther end, near the trough, kept the closed shed warm with the power­ful exhalation from their bodies and their litter; whereas the kitchen, containing only three meagre, smouldering logs, left there after the cooking, was already chilled by the early November frost. So, in the winter, the evening meeting was held in the cow-house, on the trampled earth, snugly and warmly, with no other preparation than carrying in a small round table and a dozen old chairs. Each neighbour brought a candle in rotation. Tall shadows flickered over the bare, dust-begrimed walls, reaching up to the cobwebs on the beams; and from the rear came the warm breath of the cattle, that lay and chewed the cud.

La Grande was the first to arrive, with a piece of knitting. She never brought a candle, presuming on her great age, and she was held in such awe that her brother dared not remind her of the custom. She forthwith took the best place, drew the candlestick towards her, and kept it to herself, on the score of her failing eyes. She had rested the stick, which never left her, against her chair. Glittering flakes of snow were melting on the bristles which stuck up over her fleshless, bird-like head.

“It’s coming down?” asked Rose.

“It is,” she replied in her curt tones. And setting straight­way to work with her knitting, she compressed her thin lips, never prodigal of speech, and cast a searching glance at Jean and Buteau.

The others made their appearance behind her. First Fanny, her son, Nénesse — Delhomme never came to the meetings — then, almost immediately, Lise and Françoise, who’ laughingly shook off the snow which covered them. The sight of Buteau made the former faintly blush. He looked at her un­moved.

“Been all right, Lise, since we last met?”

“Pretty well, thanks.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Palmyre, meanwhile, had stolen in through the half-open door, and she was shrinkingly placing herself as far as possible from her grandmother, the redoubtable La Grande, when a tumult outside made her start up. Furious stammerings, tears, laughter, and yells were heard.

“Those rascally children are at him again!” cried she.

She had made a spring forward, and opened the door again. “With a bold rush, and growling like a lioness, she rescued her brother Hilarion from the mischievous clutches of La Trouille, Delphin, and Nénesse. The last-named had just joined the other two, who were hanging round the cripple and yelling. Hilarion, breathless and scared, shambled in on his twisted legs. His hare’s lip made him dribble at the mouth. He stuttered unintelligibly, was decrepit-looking for his age, and brutishly hideous like the cretin that he was.

He was in a very spiteful mood, quite furious at not being able to catch and clout the urchins who were teasing him. Once more he complained that he had been pelted with a volley of snow-balls.

“Oh! what a story!” said La Trouille, with an air of sur­passing innocence. “He’s bitten my thumb; look!”

At this Hilarion all but choked in his struggle to get his words out; while Palmyre soothed him, and, wiping his face with her handkerchief, called him her darling boy.

“There, that’ll do,” said Fouan at length. “You ought to be pretty well able to prevent his catching you. Sit him down, anyhow, and let him keep quiet. Silence, you brute, or you’ll be sent back home with a flea in your ear.”

As the cripple continued to stutter, with the intention of putting himself in the right, La Grande, with her eyes flashing fire, seized her stick and brought it down on the table so sharply as to make every one jump. Palmyre and Hilarion collapsed in affright and stirred no more.

Then the evening began. The women, gathered round the single candle, knitted, spun, or did needlework, that they never so much as looked at. The men, stolid and taciturn, smoked in the rear, while the children pushed and pinched each other in a corner, amid suppressed giggling.

Sometimes they told stories: that of the Black Pig which guarded a treasure with a red key in its mouth; or that of the Orléans beast, which had a man’s face and bat’s wings, with hair down to the ground, two horns, and two tails (one to lay hold with and the other to kill with), which monster had devoured a Rouen traveller, of whom nothing remained but his hat and boots.

At other times they told tales about the wolves which, for centuries, had devastated La Beauce. In days of old, when La Beauce, now stripped and bare, had a few clumps of trees left out of its primeval forests, countless packs of wolves, urged by hunger, issued forth in winter time to prey upon the flocks. “Women and children were devoured, and the old country-folk remembered how, in heavy falls of snow, the wolves would enter the towns. At Cloyes, they would be heard howling in the Place Saint-Georges; at Rognes, they would sniff round the imperfectly closed doors of the cow-houses and sheep-pens. Then came a succession of hackneyed anecdotes: of the miller surprised by five large wolves, and putting them to flight by lighting a match; of the little girl chased for two leagues by a she-wolf, and eaten up just at her own door, where she tripped and fell; legends upon legends of wer­wolves, men changed to animals, who leaped upon the necks of belated travellers, and ran them to death.

But what froze the blood of the girls gathered round the slim candle, what made them take wildly to flight and scan the dark­ness apprehensively as they left the house, was the villany of the Chauffeurs,* the notorious Orgères band of sixty years ago, at the thought of which the whole country-side still trembled.

There were hundreds of them, tramps, beggars, deserters, spurious pedlars — men, women, and children, all living by robbery, murder, and debauchery. They were the descendants of the old armed and disciplined troops of brigands, and, taking advantage of the revolutionary disturbances, they laid formal siege to lonely houses, into which they burst like bombshells, breaking the doors in with battering-rams. When night came on, they issued forth like wolves from the forest of Dourdan and the copses of La Conie, the wooded lairs wherein they lurked; and, with the darkening shadows, terror fell upon the farmers of La Beauce, from Etampes to Châteaudun, and from Chartres to Orléans.

Of their many legendary atrocities, the one which was most popular at Rognes, was the pillage of the Millouard farm, only a few leagues distant, in the Canton of Orgères. Beau-François, their noted chief, the successor of Fleur d’Epine, had with him that night his lieutenant, Rouge d’Auneau, Grand-Dragon, Breton-le-cul-sec, Lonjumeau, Sans-Pouce, and fifty others, all with blackened faces. First, they bayonetted into the cellar the farm people, the servants, the waggoners, and the shepherd. Then they “warmed” old Fousset, the farmer, whom they had kept by himself. Having stretched his feet over the glowing coals of the fireplace, they set his beard and all the hair on his body on fire with burning straw. Then they reverted to his feet, which they notched with the point of a knife for the flames to penetrate the better. At length the old man, having decided to reveal where his money was, they let him go and carried off considerable booty. Fousset, who had strength enough to drag himself to a neighbouring house, did not die till later on. The tale invariably concluded with the trial and execution of the Chauffeurs at Chartres, after they had been betrayed by Borgne-le-Jouy. Eighteen long months were devoted to preparing the case against the prisoners, and in the meanwhile sixty-four of the latter died in prison of a plague brought on by their filthy habits. Still the trial before the Assize Court dealt with a hundred and fifteen accused, thirty-three of whom were contumacious; seven thousand eight hundred questions were submitted to the jury, and finally there were twenty-three condemnations to death. On the night after the execution, the headsmen of Chartres and Dreux had a fight over the criminals’ clothes, beneath the scaffold still red with blood.

Fouan, in alluding to a murder Janville way, thus once more recounted the abominations done at the Millouard farm; and he had got as far as the song of complaint composed in prison by Rouge d’Auneau, when the women were alarmed by strange noises in the road — footsteps, struggles, and oaths. They grew pale, and listened in terrified expectation of seeing a gang of blackened men come in like bomb-shells. Buteau, however, bravely went and opened the door.

“Who goes there?”

He at last perceived Bécu and Hyacinthe, who, at the conclusion of a quarrel with Macqueron, had just left the tavern, carrying with them the cards and a candle to finish their game elsewhere. They were so tipsy, and the company had been so frightened, that every one began to laugh.

“Come in, anyhow, and mind you behave yourself,” said Rose, smiling at her tall vagabond son. “Your children are here, you can take them back with you.”

Hyacinthe and Bécu sat down on the ground near the cows, placed the candle between them, and went on with their game. “Trump, trump, and trump!” The conversation had changed; the others were now talking of the youths in the neighbourhood who had to draw in February for the con­scription — Victor Lengaigne and two others. The women had grown grave, and spoke slowly and sadly.

“It’s no joke,” resumed Rose: “no joke for any one.”

“War, war!” murmured Fouan. “Oh, the harm it does! It’s simply destruction to culture. When the youths leave us, our best hands go, as is easily seen when work-time comes. And when they come back, why, they’re altered, and their heart is no longer with the plough. Cholera even is better than war!”