Complete Works of Emile Zola (968 page)

La Trouille used to laugh till she fell down on her buttocks, almost choked. It was a continual fresh and ever increasing merriment. Used as she was to the sport, the final explosion, with its comical eruptive noisiness, never failed to shake her with laughter. Oh, what a funny fellow he was, this father of hers! Sometimes he would talk of a lodger who had fallen into arrears with his rent, and whom he was obliged to eject; at other times he would turn round with an air of surprise, and bow gravely, as though the table had wished him good-morn­ing; and at others he would trumpet out a series of salutes for his reverence the priest, his worship the mayor, and the ladies. It seemed almost, as though the fellow’s belly was a sort of musical-box, from which he could extract any sound he chose; and one day, when the company at The Jolly Ploughman at Cloyes wagered a glass that he could not let off six discharges one after another, he victoriously won the bet. This accom­plishment of his had become a source of honour and glory. La Trouille was quite proud of him; and, as soon as ever he raised his leg, she began to wriggle. She was constantly admiring him, and his prowess inspired her with mingled con­sternation and affection.

On the very evening of the day when old Fouan took up his quarters at the Château, as the old burrow in which the poacher buried himself was called, at the very first meal which the girl served to her father and grandfather, standing behind them in the respectful attitude of a servant, there were loud and merry explosions. The old man had given his son five francs, and a pleasant odour spread about — that of the kidney-beans and veal and onions, which the girl knew so well how to cook. As she was bringing in the beans she almost broke the dish in her excitement. For, before sitting down to table, Hyacinthe let off three sharp, regular reports.

“The salute for the feast!” he exclaimed. “Now we can begin!”

Then, bracing himself up, he gave vent to a fourth single discharge, very loud and odoriferous.

“That’s for those brutes, the Buteaus!” he cried. “Let them stuff it down their throats!”

Fouan, who had maintained a gloomy demeanour ever since his arrival, now suddenly broke out into a snigger, and signified his approbation by nodding his head. This seemed to have put him at his ease. He, too, in his time, had been noted as a joker, and his children had grown up quietly at home in the midst of the paternal bombardments. He rested his elbows on the table, and gave himself up to a pleasant feeling of enjoy­able comfort as he sat opposite that hulking rascal Hyacinthe, who gazed at him in return with his damp eyes and his air of jovial scampishness.

“Ah! God Almighty, dad. We’ll enjoy ourselves. You shall see my dodge. I’ll undertake to make you merry. Will you be any better off when you’re underground with the moles, for having denied yourself a tit-bit up here?”

Though he had been a sober man all his life, Fouan, who now felt a craving to drown his worries, replied in the same strain:

“Well, yes, indeed, it’s better to eat up everything rather than leave any for the others. Here’s your good health, my lad!”

La Trouille now served the veal and onions. There was a momentary silence, and Hyacinthe, to prevent the conversa­tion dropping, let fly a prolonged flourish, which passed through the straw seat of his chair with all the varied modulations of a human cry. Then he immediately turned to his daughter with a gravely interrogative air.

“What did you say?” he asked her. She could make no reply, but was obliged to sit down and hold her sides. She was still more upset, however, by some final facetiousness between the father and son, after the veal and the cheese had been cleared away, and they began to smoke and help themselves to the bottle of brandy which had been placed on the table. They sat silently for some time, boozy with drink.

Presently, Hyacinthe slowly raised his leg, and let off a loud explosion. Then looking towards the door: “Come in!” he cried.

Fouan, who felt himself challenged, and who had for a long time past been regretting his loss of form, now once more regained the accomplishment of his youthful days, and, raising his leg, he also broke out into a noisy explosion. “Here I come!” he exclaimed.

Then they both clapped their hands, slobbering and laugh­ing. They enjoyed it immensely. But it was too much for La Trouille, who had fallen down on the floor, and was so shaken with wild spasms of laughter that she, too, gave vent to a slight explosion, but soft and musical, like a note from a fife in comparison with the sonorous, organ-like sounds of the two men.

Hyacinthe sprang up with an air of indignant protest, and stretched out his arm with a tragical gesture of authority:

“Out of the room with you, you dirty sow. Out of the room at once, you stink-pot! I’ll teach you to show proper respect to your father and grandfather!”

He had never tolerated this familiarity on her part. It was only for people of a certain age. He cleared the air as it were with his outstretched hand, and pretended to be nearly choked by the little flute-like sound. His own, and his father’s, he said, only smelt of gunpowder. Then, as the culprit, who had turned very red, and was quite upset by her forgetfulness of etiquette, hung back and showed a disinclination to leave, he, himself, cast her out of the room with an energetic shove.

“Go and shake your petticoats, you filthy sow, and don’t venture in here again for another hour, till you’ve got yourself well ventilated!” said he.

That day was the commencement of a careless life full of jovial merriment. The girl’s bed-room was given up to the grand­father. It was one of the divisions of the old cellar, cut off by a wooden partition. La Trouille herself, relinquishing her room with the greatest willingness, now took up her quarters at the far end of the cellar, in an excavation in the rock, which led, so the local legends said, into some immense subterranean caverns which had been blocked up by land-slips. Unfortun­ately this fox-hole of a Château was getting more deeply buried every winter by the action of the heavy rains, which flowed down the steep slope of the hill and swept the earth and pebbles along with them. The old ruin, with its ancient foundations and rough repairs, would have disappeared alto­gether if the aged lime-trees that had been planted over it had not kept the stones together by their thick, spreading roots. However, when the spring-time came round it was a charmingly fresh little spot, a kind of grotto lying hid beneath a tangle of briars and hawthorns. The sweet-briar that grew in front of the window was starred over with pink blossoms, and the door was wreathed with a drapery of wild honey­suckle, which had to be lifted like a curtain before one could enter the place.

It was by no means every evening that La Trouille was called upon to cook kidney beans and veal and onions. This only happened when the old man had been induced to part with a five-franc piece. Hyacinthe never attempted to obtain the money by any show of force or harshness; he worked upon his father’s love of good living and his paternal feelings to despoil him of his money. There was always a good deal of feasting at the commencement of each month, when Fouan received his sixteen francs’ allowance from the Delhommes; and every quarter, when the notary paid him his dividend of thirty-seven francs and a-half, there was the most uproarious junketting. At first the old man, clinging to his ingrained habits of parsimony, would only hand out half a franc at a time, expecting that amount to last for a long while; but, by-and-bye, he gradually surrendered himself to his scamp of a son, who flattered him and wheedled him, and sometimes so worked upon his feelings by his extraordinary stories that he was dissolved in tears, and easily prevailed upon to part with two and three francs. He, too, then took to stuffing himself with food, saying that it was best to enjoy one’s-self while one could.

In justice to Hyacinthe, however, it must be said that he fairly divided everything with the old man; and, if he robbed him, he also kept him amused. The lazy fellow, with his knavishness, was, at all events, a better sort than Buteau, and indeed he often boasted to that effect. At first, when his belly was delighted with fat living, he dropped all thought even about his father’s supposed hoard, and did not make the least attempt to discover anything concerning it. Old Fouan was quite free to do as he pleased so long as he cheerfully provided the means for their festive junkettings. It was only during the second fortnight of the month, when the old man’s pockets were quite empty, that his son indulged in speculations as to where the money of which he had caught a glimpse could be hidden away. He could not get hold of a copper of it. He grumbled at La Trouille who served him dish after dish of potatoes without butter; and, as he felt a painful void in his belly, he reflected that it was really most idiotic for them to remain on such short commons simply for the sake of hoarding up some money. It would certainly be necessary to unearth that hoard some day and have a fling with it.

Still, even on the evenings when he had fared most wretchedly, and when he felt utterly weary and tired out, he bravely struggled against circumstances, and was as genial and hilarious as if he had just made an excellent dinner: restoring the general gaiety by a cannonade of heavy guns.

“There, that’s for the turnips, La Trouille, and that’s for the butter!” he cried.

Fouan, too, kept brisk and cheerful even during those pain­ful times — the last days of the month — for the daughter and the father then scoured the country for the means of keeping the pot boiling, and the old man, who was gradually induced to join them, ended by employing his time in the same way. He had become angry when he first saw La Trouille come home with a fowl which she had fished up from over a wall with a piece of looped string; but on a second occasion she made him shake with laughter by attaching a hook baited with some meat to the end of a string, which she concealed among the branches of a tree, allowing the baited hook to dangle down in front of a troop of ducks who were taking a walk. One of them suddenly rushed forward, and swallowed meat, hook, and string at a bolt. Then it immediately rose in the air, being sharply pulled up by the girl, before it was able to utter a single quack. This was not a very honest proceeding certainly; but they argued that animals which lived out-of-doors belonged to those who could catch them, and that so long as one did not steal money, one’s honesty could not be impeached. From that time the old man took some interest in the adventures of the young marauder, who performed some scarcely credible feats, such as stealing a sack of potatoes and then getting the owner of them to help her to carry them home; milking cows out at pasture into a bottle; and sinking the laundresses’ linen to the bottom of the Aigre by loading it with stones, and then going and fishing it up again during the night.

She was continually to be met on the roads, her geese affording her a pretext for her perpetual wanderings, and she would sit for hours on the slope of a ditch on the look-out for an opportunity, with a sleepy, innocent air, as though she had not a thought in the world beyond attending to her geese. She often even made use of these latter as watch-dogs, the gander giving her notice, by his hissing, of the inopportune approach of any one who might surprise her at work. She was now eighteen years old, but she was scarcely any taller than she had been at twelve; being still as slight and supple as a hazel-branch, with her kid-like head, her green eyes, and her large mouth, twisted towards the left. Her little, childish bosom had grown hard beneath her father’s old blouses, without in any way developing. She was more like a boy than a girl, and seemed to care about nothing save her geese. However, although she scoffed contemptuously at men, this did not prevent her, when she got larking with some lad of her own age, from ending with a little amatory amusement, almost as a matter of course, for it seemed to her quite natural, and no conse­quences ever followed. She was lucky enough to keep clear of the tramps and vagrants that passed along the roads, for grown-up men, finding nothing tempting about her, left her alone. As her grandfather said, amused and won over by her quaint ways, apart from the fact that she was given to thieving and didn’t care much about decency, she was a rum sort of girl, more decorous and less disreputable than might have been expected.

Fouan found especial amusement in accompanying Hyacinthe in his prowling rambles about the fields. Every peasant, even the most honest, is at heart a poacher, and the old man took a deep interest in the setting of snares, and the laying of lines, and in all the various other ingenious devices of this campaign of ruses, this continual warfare carried on against gamekeepers and gendarmes. As soon as the laced hats and yellow shoulder belts of the latter were seen emerging from a lane and making their way through a corn field, the father and son, lying on some sloping bank, pretended to be asleep. Presently, however, the son would creep on his hands and knees along the ditch, and take up his traps; while the father, with his honest elderly countenance, would keep a careful watch on the receding hats and shoulder belts.

There were some splendid trout in the Aigre, which they sold for forty and fifty sous apiece to a dealer at Châteaudun, but the fish were so artful that it was necessary for the men to lie flat on their stomachs on the grass watching them for hours. They often, too, sallied out as far as the Loir, from whose slimy bed some very fine eels were to be obtained. When his lines brought him nothing, Hyacinthe had a very simple plan for securing a haul. During the night he plundered the fish-preserves of the river-side residents. Fishing, however, he only indulged in as an occasional amusement; the pursuit of game was his absorbing passion. He ravaged the neigh­bourhood for miles around, and no prey was too humble for him. He would snare quails as well as partridges, and even starlings as well as larks. He seldom fired a gun, for the report of firearms carried too far over a level expanse. There was not a single covey of partridges that ever rose from the clover and lucern without his recognising it, and he knew per­fectly well when and where he could easily lay his hands upon the young birds, drowsy with sleep and soaked with the night-dew. He was extremely clever in liming twigs for the capture of larks and quails, and he hurled stones with a deadly aim at the dense flocks of starlings which the high winds of autumn brought into the district. For twenty years past he had been exterminating the game of the neighbourhood, and there was now scarcely a rabbit to be seen amongst the brushwood about the Aigre, a fact which extremely angered the local sportsmen. It was only the hares that escaped him. There were very few of them, however, and what there were scampered safe from his pursuit over the open country, where it was too risky to follow them. He smacked his lips at the thought of the few hares which were to be found on the La Borderie land, and every now and then he risked being sent to gaol, by sending one rolling over with a shot from his gun. When Fouan saw him going out with his gun, he always refused to accompany him. It was too hazardous and foolish, he said; he would cer­tainly get caught one day or other.