by Emile Zola
‘I told you she would be unfaithful!’ cried Auguste with an air of indignant triumph.
‘And I told you you were doing your best to make her unfaithful!’ screamed Madame Josserand exultantly. ‘I’m not saying Berthe was right; in fact, she’s behaved like an idiot, and I’m going to tell her what I think, too; but since she’s not here, I repeat, you, and you alone, are to blame!’
‘What do you mean? I’m to blame?’
‘Of course you are! You don’t know how to treat women. For example, did you ever condescend to come to one of my Tuesday receptions? No; and if you did you only stayed half-an-hour at the most, and then you only came three times during the whole season. It’s all very well to say you’ve always got a headache. Manners are manners, that’s all. I’m not saying it’s a great crime; but you just don’t know how to behave!’
She hissed out the words with a venom that had gradually accumulated, for when her daughter had married she had especially counted on her son-in-law to fill her drawing-room with desirable guests. But he had brought no one, and never even came himself; thus another of her dreams had vanished as she saw that she could never hope to rival the Duveyrier choruses.
‘However,’ she added, with a touch of irony, ‘I don’t force anybody to come and enjoy themselves at my house.’
‘The fact is, nobody ever enjoys it,’ he retorted petulantly.
This threw her into an absolute rage.
‘That’s right, let’s hear your insults! I’d have you know, sir, that if I wanted I could get the best society in Paris to come to my parties, and I certainly never depended on you for my social position.’
It was no longer a question of Berthe’s misconduct; in this personal quarrel the adultery had disappeared. As though the victim of some hideous nightmare, Monsieur Josserand sat there listening to them. It was not possible; his daughter could never have caused him such grief as this. At last, rising with difficulty, he went out, without saying a word, to find Berthe. As soon as she came, he thought, she would fling her arms round Auguste’s neck; everything would be explained, everything would be forgotten. He found her arguing with Hortense, who kept urging her to ask forgiveness of her husband, for she was already tired of her and feared that she might have to share a room with her for some time to come. At first Berthe refused, but finally followed her father. As they came back to the dining-room where the dirty breakfast-cups still stood, Madame Josserand was shouting:
‘No, absolutely not, I don’t pity you in the least!’
Then, at the sight of Berthe, she fell silent, relapsing into her severely majestic mood, while Auguste, when his wife appeared, made a grand gesture of protest as if to sweep her from his path.
‘Now look here,’ said Monsieur Josserand, in his gentle, tremulous voice, ‘what’s the matter with all of you? You’re driving me mad with all this quarrelling; I don’t know where I am. Tell me, my child, your husband’s mistaken isn’t he? You explain it to him, please. You ought to have some consideration for your poor old parents. Now, kiss and make up, for my sake.’
Berthe, who was quite willing to kiss Auguste, stood there half-throttled in her dressing-gown, looking very awkward as she saw him recoil from her with an air of tragic repugnance.
‘What? You won’t kiss him my darling?’ continued the father. ‘You’re the one who should take the first step. And you, my dear fellow, you should encourage her, and be indulgent.’
Then, finally, Auguste burst out:
‘Encourage her! I like that! I caught her in her nightdress, sir, with that fellow! Do you take me for a fool to think that I’d kiss her? She was in her nightdress, do you hear sir?’
Monsieur Josserand was thunderstruck. Then, seizing Berthe’s arm, he exclaimed:
‘You’re not saying anything? So it’s true? Down on your knees, then!’
But Auguste had already reached the door.
‘That’s no good. Don’t give me that nonsense, or try to saddle me with her again. Once was enough. I’ve had enough, do you hear? I’d rather get a divorce. Give her to somebody else if you find her a nuisance. And anyway, you’re just as bad as she is.’
He waited until he had got into the hall before delivering himself of this final taunt:
‘Yes, when you’ve turned your daughter into a slut, you don’t force her down an honest man’s throat.’
The front door slammed, and profound silence reigned. Berthe mechanically sat down at the table, her eyes downcast, examining the dregs in her coffee-cup, while her mother strode up and down, swept away by the tempest of her emotions. Her father, white-faced and utterly worn out, sat aloof in the far corner of the room, leaning against the wall. The room reeked of rancid butter, of the cheap kind you could buy at the Halles.
‘Now that that insolent fellow has gone,’ said Madame Josserand, ‘we might be able to hear ourselves speak. All this, sir, is the result of your incapacity. Can you at last see how much at fault you’ve been? Do you think that quarrels like this would ever have occurred in the house of one of the Bernheim Brothers, the owners of the Saint-Joseph Glassworks? No, I think not! If you’d listened to me, if you’d got your employers on your side, that insolent person would now be grovelling at our feet, because obviously all he wants is money. If you’ve got money people will respect you, sir. It’s much better to be envied than pitied. If I only had twenty sous, I always pretended I had forty. But you sir, you don’t care if I go barefoot or not; you’ve deceived your wife and daughters in a most disgraceful fashion by letting them drag out their existence in this hand-to-mouth way. Oh, it’s no good denying it! All our misfortunes are due to that.’
Monsieur Josserand stared blankly into space, without moving. His wife stood in front of him, full of mad desire for a scene. Then, seeing that he would not react, she continued to pace up and down.
‘Yes, yes, play at being disdainful. It doesn’t affect me in the slightest, you know that. Just you dare say anything about my family after what’s happened in your own! Uncle Bachelard is a saint, and my sister too! Do you want to know what I think? Well, if my father hadn’t died you would have killed him. As for your father …’
Monsieur Josserand’s face became whiter still as he gasped:
‘Eléonore, I beg of you—say what you want about my father, about my whole family; but I beg of you, leave me in peace; I don’t feel well!’
Berthe, taking pity on him, looked up.
‘Mamma, do leave him alone,’ she said.
Then, turning on her daughter, Madame Josserand went on with even greater fury:
‘I was keeping you till last. I’ve been holding it in since yesterday. But I can’t any longer. With that counter-jumper, of all people! You must have lost all pride! I thought you were only making use of him, showing him just enough friendliness to keep him on his toes in the shop. And I helped you. I encouraged him! Now tell me, what did you hope to gain in all this?’
‘Nothing whatever!’ stammered Berthe.
‘Then why did you carry on with him? It’s even more mad than scandalous!’
‘How funny you are, mamma! One never thinks about that sort of thing in advance!’
Madame Josserand continued to pace up and down.
‘“One never thinks …”! Oh really. But yes, you have to think! Misbehaving like that! There’s absolutely no sense in it—that’s what annoys me! Did I ever tell you to deceive your husband? Did I ever deceive your father? He’s sitting there; ask him. He can tell you if he ever caught me with another man.’
Her pace slackened; her gait grew majestic and she lustily slapped the green bodice of her dress.
‘No, never; not a slip, not one indiscretion, not even the thought of one! My life has been quite chaste, yet God knows what I’ve had to put up with from your father! I had every excuse, and lots of women would have taken their revenge. But I was sensible; that’s what saved me. You see, he’s got nothing to say! He just sits there, unable to make a single complaint. I’ve got every r
ight to call myself a virtuous woman! Oh, you great ninny, you surely see what a fool you’ve made of yourself!’
Then she delivered a lecture on domestic morality with regard to adultery. Was not Auguste now entitled to lord it over her? She had given him a terrible weapon. Even if they made it up, she could never have the least argument with him without being told to shut up at once. A nice state of affairs, eh? How delightful it would be for her always to eat humble pie! It was all over, and she could never hope to enjoy any of the little privileges she might have obtained from a compliant husband, little kindnesses, attentions, and the like. No, it was better to live a virtuous life than not to have the upper hand in one’s own house!
‘I swear before God,’ she cried, ‘I would always keep myself decent, even if the Emperor himself had pestered me! The loss is too great!’
She strode on, silent for a while, as if lost in thought, and then added:
‘Besides, it’s the most shameful thing of all.’
Monsieur Josserand looked at her, and then at his daughter, moving his lips without speaking, his whole dejected frame protesting against such harrowing explanations. Berthe, however, daunted by violence, felt hurt at her mother’s moral lecture. And at last she rebelled, for, true to her old training as a marriageable daughter, she failed to recognize the gravity of her sin.
‘Well!’ she cried, planting both elbows on the table, ‘you shouldn’t have made me marry a man I didn’t care for. Now I hate him, and I’ve taken up with somebody else.’
So she went on. The whole story of her marriage was rehearsed in short phrases, pronounced in bursts: the three winters devoted to man-hunting, the various youths at whom she was thrown, the failure of this offer of her body in the market of bourgeois drawing-rooms. Then she spoke of everything that mothers taught their dowryless daughters. A complete series of lessons in polite prostitution: the touch of fingers in the dance, the relinquishing of hands behind a door, the indecency of innocence speculating on the prurient appetites of the foolish; then, one fine evening, the full-blown husband, landed just as a common prostitute lands a man; the husband trapped behind a curtain, falling for the bait in the fever of his desire.
‘Well, he bores me and I bore him!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s not my fault that we don’t understand each other. The very next day after our wedding he seemed to think we’d swindled him; yes, and he looked as glum and unpleasant as he does now when things go badly in the shop. I was never taken with him. If that’s all the fun you get out of marriage! That’s certainly how it all began! Never mind, it was bound to happen and it’s not all my fault.’
She stopped, and then, with an air of profound conviction, added:
‘Ah, mamma, how well I understand you now! You remember when you told us you’d had more than enough of it?’
Standing before her, Madame Josserand listened, indignant and aghast.
‘I said that?’ she screamed.
But Berthe was unstoppable.
‘Yes you did, lots of times. And I’d like to see how you’d have behaved in my place. Auguste isn’t easygoing like papa. You’d have had a fight about money before the week was out. Auguste is the sort of man who would’ve made you say that all men are good for is what you can get out of them!’
‘I said that?’ repeated her mother, beside herself with rage.
So threateningly did she advance towards her daughter that the father held out both hands, as if begging for mercy. The raised voices of the two women struck him to the core; each fresh outburst seemed to widen the wound. Tears filled his eyes as he stammered out:
‘Do stop; spare me all this!’
‘No, it’s dreadful!’ continued Madame Josserand, raising her voice. ‘The wretched girl is telling me I’m responsible for her shameful behaviour! The next thing she’ll say is that I was the onewho was unfaithful to her husband! So it’s my fault, is it? That’s what it seems to come down to. My fault, eh?’
Berthe continued to sit with her elbows on the table, pale but resolute.
‘It’s absolutely certain that if you’d brought me up differently …’
She never finished the sentence. Her mother gave her such a huge clout that it banged her head down on the oilcloth table-cover. Madame Josserand’s hand had been itching to do this since the night before; it had been making her fingers tingle, as in the far-off days when her little girl used to oversleep.
‘There, take that for your education!’ she cried. ‘Your husband should’ve killed you!’
Without lifting her head Berthe burst into tears, holding her cheek to her arm. She forgot that she was twenty-four; this slap reminded her of slaps received when she was younger, and of all the timorous hypocrisy of her girlhood. Her resolution, as an emancipated, grown-up person, was lost as she felt the sharp pain of a little girl.
Hearing her sobs, her father was nearly overcome with emotion. Stumbling forward, he pushed his wife aside, saying:
‘Listen, do you both want to be the death of me? Must I go down on my knees to you?’
Having relieved her feelings, and having nothing more to say, Madame Josserand withdrew in regal silence. Opening the door suddenly, she caught Hortense listening behind it. This caused a fresh outburst.
‘So you were listening to all this filth, were you? One of you does shocking things, and the other gloats over them! A pretty pair! Goodness gracious! Whoever could have brought you up?’
Hortense came calmly in, and said:
‘There was no need to listen; you can be heard from the far end of the kitchen. The maid’s in fits. Besides, I’m old enough to get married now so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t know.’
‘Verdier, I suppose!’ was the mother’s biting reply. ‘That’s the sort of satisfaction you give me. Now you’re waiting for that brat to die; but you’ll have to wait, because she’s big and fat, so they say. A good job, too!’
A rush of bile turned the girl’s gaunt face yellow, as she replied through clenched teeth:
‘If it’s a big, fat baby Verdier can get rid of it. And I’ll make him get rid of it quicker than you think, just to show you all. Yes, yes, I can find a husband without your help; the matches you make are too healthy!’
Then, as her mother advanced towards her, she said:
‘Don’t think you can slap me! Just look out!’
They glared at each other, and Madame Josserand was the first to yield, masking her retreat with an air of disdainful superiority. The father, however, thought that hostilities were about to recommence. Watching these three women, the mother and her daughters, beings he had loved and who now were ready to murder one another, he felt as if the whole world was giving way under his feet; and he, too, escaped to his room as if he had received his death-blow and wished to die alone. And in the midst of his sobs, he kept repeating:
‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it!’
Silence reigned once more in the dining-room. Berthe, heaving huge sighs, her cheek on her arm, had calmed down somewhat. Hortense sat at the other end of the table, buttering a piece of toast by way of recovering her equanimity. Then, with various gloomy remarks, she brought her sister to a pitch of desperation: life at home, she said, had become unbearable; if she were in her place she would prefer to be slapped by her husband rather than by her mother, as that was a far more natural thing. Moreover, once she had married Verdier she would simply send her mother packing, as she was not going to have rows of this sort in her home. Just then Adèle came in to clear away; but Hortense went on, saying that if there was any more of this she would give warning; and the maid was of this opinion too—she had been obliged to shut the kitchen-window because Lisa and Julie had both been peeping out to see what was going on. The whole thing, however, had amused her greatly, and she was still chuckling about it. What a smack Madame Berthe had got! She was the worst off, after all. And as she waddled about, Adèle uttered a phrase full of profound philosophy. After all, she said, what did the other people in the house care?
Life went on, and before the week was out nobody would even remember madam’s affair with the two gentlemen. Hortense, who nodded approval, broke in with a complaint about the butter; her mouth was tainted by the filth. Goodness Gracious! Butter at twenty-two sous! It must be poison! And since it left a nauseous deposit in the saucepans, the maid proceeded to explain that it was not even economical to buy the stuff. At this moment a dull thud, like something falling on the floor, set them all listening.
Berthe at last looked up in alarm. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps it’s madam and the other lady in the drawing-room,’ suggested Adèle.
On going through the drawing-room, Madame Josserand had started back in surprise. A lady sat there, all by herself.
‘What? Are you still here?’ she exclaimed, on recognizing Madame Dambreville, whose presence she had entirely forgotten.
The latter did not stir. The family quarrels, the raised voices, the banging of doors, all this had passed over her; she seemed oblivious of it all. There she sat, motionless, gazing into space, absorbed in passionate despair.
But something was at work within her; the advice of Léon’s mother had shaken her, persuading her to pay dearly for a few final fragments of happiness.
‘Come on,’ cried Madame Josserand brutally, ‘you can’t sleep here, you know. I had a note from my son, he’s not coming.’
Then, with a dry mouth, as if she were just waking up, Madame Dambreville spoke.