by Émile Zola
‘So what is he doing now?’ asked Claude, who had gradually begun to listen to Sandoz’s story.
‘I don’t know; very likely nothing,’ Sandoz replied. ‘He said he had been very worried about his children’s health and that they take up a good deal of his time.’
Pale, scraggy Madame Margaillan had died of consumption; it ran in the family. Since her marriage her daughter Régine had developed a significant cough, and at the moment was taking the waters at Le Mont-Dore. She had not dared to take the children with her, however, for the previous year they had been seriously ill after a season in air that was too strong for their frail constitutions. That explained why the family was so broken up: the mother in Auvergne with just a lady’s maid; the grandfather in Paris, back on his big building schemes, keeping his four hundred workmen well in hand and proclaiming his contempt for laziness and incompetence; the father in exile, looking after his boy and girl at ‘La Richaudière’, interned like an invalid incapacitated in his first engagement in the battle of life. In a burst of confidence, Dubuche had even given Sandoz to understand that, as his wife had nearly died in giving birth to their second child and now fainted at the slightest physical shock, he had decided it was his duty to refrain from all conjugal relations. So even that consolation was denied him.
‘A happy marriage,’ was Sandoz’s quiet summing-up.
It was ten o’clock when the two friends rang the bell at the gate of ‘La Richaudière’. They were amazed, when they got inside, for this was their first visit, to see how the grounds were laid out; first, beautifully wooded parkland, then a formal terraced garden worthy of a royal palace, three enormous greenhouses and, most striking of all, a tremendous waterfall, a weird combination of rockery, cement, and water-pipes rigged up at the cost of a small fortune to flatter the pride of the ex-mason’s labourer whose property it was. They were even more amazed at the deserted, melancholy aspect of the place, the freshly raked but untrodden paths, the lawns and avenues unfrequented, except by an occasional gardener, the house itself apparently dead, with shutters closed at every window but two and barely open even there.
A footman did condescend to come to the door, however, and ask them their business, but when he discovered they were calling on the master he told them insolently that Monsieur was round the back of the house, at the gymnasium, and then withdrew.
They followed the path indicated and when they came out at one end of a lawn the sight they encountered made them suddenly stop dead. There was Dubuche standing in front of a trapeze holding up his son Gaston, a puny child whose limbs, at ten years old, were still those of a young baby. Near them, in a push-chair waiting her turn, was the little girl, Alice. Alice had been born prematurely, and nature had made such an incomplete job of her that at six she was still unable to walk. Completely absorbed, the father was engaged in exercising the boy’s spindly limbs; he swung him to and fro for a moment, then tried to make him pull himself up by his wrists, but in vain. The effort, faint though it was, made the child perspire so much that his father took him away and rolled him in a blanket. The whole scene was enacted in solitary silence beneath a huge sky, a pitiful, heartrending spectacle in such a magnificent setting. Looking up from his task, Dubuche discovered his two friends.
‘You here!’ he cried, and added, with a disconsolate gesture:
‘On a Sunday, and you never let me know!’
He hastened to explain that on Sundays the housemaid always went to Paris, and as she was the only person to whose care he dared entrust his children, Alice and Gaston, it was impossible for him to leave them for a minute.
‘I’ll bet you were coming to lunch!’ he said.
At a beseeching look from Claude, Sandoz quietly answered:
‘Oh no! We’re just on a flying visit. … Claude had to come out this way on business. He used to live at Bennecourt, you remember. As I was with him, we thought we’d include you in our round. Somebody’s expecting us, so don’t let us put you out.’
After that, much relieved, Dubuche made a show of not hurrying them away. … Surely they could spare him an hour or so, for goodness sake! … So the three of them stood about and talked. Claude looked at him again and again, surprised to see how he had aged. His round, chubby face had wrinkled and turned a bilious yellow broken by tiny red veins. His hair and moustache were going grey. His whole body seemed to have grown sluggish, and there was bitter weariness in his every gesture. … So financial failures were as hard to bear as artistic ones? … Voice, eyes, everything about him in his defeat gave away the humiliating state of dependence in which he was having to live: his ruined future perpetually flung in his face; the endless accusations of having contracted for a genius that had never been his and consequently of swindling his wife’s family; food, clothing, pocket-money, everything doled out to him as though he were a poor relation they could not decently shake off.
‘Don’t go yet,’ said Dubuche. ‘Let me just have another five minutes or so with one of my poor darlings here, then we’ll be finished.’
With infinite precaution and as gently as any mother, he took little Alice out of her chair and held her up to the trapeze, laughing and talking baby-talk to give her confidence. For two minutes or so he let her hang on to the bar, to exercise her muscles, but he followed every movement she made with open arms in order to save her from hurting herself if her frail waxen fingers lost their grip and she fell. She had big, pale eyes, and never spoke, but always did as she was told, though the exercise obviously terrified her; she was so pitifully light that she did not even tighten the ropes, like those poor, half-starved little birds that drop off their twigs without even bending them.
When he turned for a second to look at Gaston, Dubuche was horrified to see that the blanket had slipped, leaving the child’s legs uncovered.
‘Good heavens!’ he cried, distractedly. ‘He’ll catch cold on the grass! What can I do? I can’t leave Alice. … Gaston, my little one! He always does the same thing, waits till I’m busy with his sister, then … Sandoz, please cover him up. … That’s it! Thanks! Thanks very much! And don’t be afraid of folding the blanket well over!’
This was what his fine marriage had done with the flesh of his flesh: produced a pair of helpless half-finished creatures ready to perish like flies at the least puff of wind. He had married a fortune, but all he had got out of it was this: the everlasting grief of seeing his own flesh and blood, embodied in his two pitiable children, fall into decay, and his hopes for the future of his race decline, wither away and rot in the last stages of scrofula and consumption. From a self-centred young man he had become an admirable father, with one great passion burning in his heart, with only one desire: to make his children’s life worth living; and for that he struggled every hour of every day, rescuing them every morning, living in fear and dread of losing them by evening. Now that his own life, through the bitter taunts and insults of his father-in-law and the cheerless days and still more cheerless nights he shared with his unhappy wife, had lost its meaning, his children alone counted, and he was determined, by a miracle of untiring affection, to nurse them into life.
‘There, darling, that’s enough, isn’t it? Oh, you’ll be a fine strong girl one day, if we keep it up!’ he said to Alice as he carried her back to her chair. Then, refusing all offers of assistance from his friends, he picked up Gaston, still wrapped in his blanket, with one hand, and pushed Alice’s chair with the other.
‘Thanks,’ he said to Claude and Sandoz, ‘but I’m quite used to it. Poor little things, they’re not very heavy. … And you can never really trust servants.’
At the house, Claude and Sandoz saw the insolent footman again and noticed that Dubuche himself trembled in his presence, which made it clear that the servants’ hall reflected the contempt shown by the father-in-law who paid their wages for the man who married his daughter and whom he treated as a beggar to be tolerated out of charity only. Every time they laid out a clean shirt for him or offered him, when he dared
to ask for it, more bread, the servants went out of their way to make him feel they were doing him a favour.
Sandoz found the atmosphere unbearable.
‘We must be going,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Dubuche.’
‘Oh, don’t go yet … The children are just going to have lunch, then we’ll all three come along the road with you. … They’ve got to have their little walk, you see.’
Every day was mapped out, hour by hour, beginning with the morning bath, then physical exercises, followed by lunch, which was quite a complicated affair, as they had to have special food, all carefully chosen and scrupulously weighed. Even the water with a faint dash of wine which they drank with their meal was slightly warmed, lest they should catch a chill if it happened to be too cold. On this particular day they had yolk of eggs beaten up in beef-tea and the eye of a chop cut up by their father into tiny pieces. Lunch was followed by a walk, the walk by afternoon rest.
When the children were ready Dubuche started out with his friends down the broad avenues leading back to the gate; Alice was in her chair again, but Gaston was allowed to walk. It seemed natural, as they walked along, to talk about the grounds, but all the time Dubuche looked as worried and scared as if he were trespassing. He appeared to know nothing about the property or to take any active interest in it. His mind seemed to have become so warped and atrophied through his enforced leisure that he actually had forgotten what he was accused of never having learned: his job as an architect.
‘How are your parents keeping?’ Sandoz asked, and immediately the light came back into Dubuche’s eyes.
‘Oh, they’re very well and happy,’ he answered. ‘I bought them a little house, and they’re living on the income from some money I settled on them. … After all, mother had laid out a lot on my education, so I’d got to pay her back as I’d promised I would. … So far as that’s concerned, at least, I’ve given my parents no grounds for complaint.’
At the gate they stood and talked a few moments longer, before Dubuche, looking thoroughly dispirited, took leave of his two visitors. When he shook hands with Claude he said, without any trace of resentment, as if he were stating a simple fact:
‘Goodbye. Try to make a go of it. … I’ve made a mess of my life.’
And they watched him trudging back towards the house, pushing Alice’s chair, supporting Gaston who was already showing signs of fatigue, and looking himself like a weary, round-shouldered old man.
It struck one as Claude and Sandoz, depressed and hungry, hurried down into Bennecourt. There, too, a melancholy reception awaited them, for death had passed that way since their last visit. The Faucheurs, husband and wife, were both in their graves, so was old Poirette, and the inn had fallen into the hands of the feather-brained Mélie. Everything in it was disgustingly filthy and the lunch they were served was practically inedible; there were hairs in the omelette, the chops were greasy, while the dining-room itself, which opened straight on to the dunghill, was so full of flies that the tables were black with them. The smell, on that blazing August afternoon, was more than they could bear. They did not have it in them to wait for coffee and beat a hasty retreat.
‘To think you used to sing the praises of Mother Faucheur’s omelettes!’ said Sandoz. ‘They’re a thing of the past now, and no mistake! … How about a walk round?’
Claude nearly said no. Ever since they had arrived his one desire had been to get the whole thing over by walking as quickly as possible, as if every step were one step nearer Paris, where he had left his mind and his heart and his soul. He looked neither to right nor left, but forged straight ahead, ignoring the beauty of the trees and the fields, with one idea fixed so firmly in his head that at times he would have sworn he saw the Ile de la Cité rise up and beckon to him across the cornfields. Still, Sandoz’s proposal did not fail to arouse certain other memories, so in a moment of weakness he answered:
‘Good idea! Let’s take a look round.’
But as they walked along beside the Seine he realized, to his sorrow, that he ought to have refused. The place had been altered almost beyond recognition. A bridge had been built to link Bonnières with Bennecourt … a bridge, if you please, instead of the old ferry-boat creaking on its chain that used to put just that necessary touch of black on the surface of the stream! To make things worse, there was now a barrage downstream at Port-Villez; the water-level was now so high that most of the islands were submerged and the little backwaters flooded. All the beauty-spots, all the shady retreats swept clean away! It was enough to make one want to murder every engineer on the face of the earth!
‘That clump of willows sticking up there on the left, see it? That used to be Le Barreux, the island where we used to go and lie out on the grass and talk, remember? … Oh, the vandals!’ Claude cried.
Sandoz, too, who could not bear to see a tree cut down without shaking his fist at the woodcutter, was just as livid with fury at the thought of anyone being allowed to treat nature in so ruthless a fashion.
As they drew near his old cottage Claude clenched his teeth and relapsed into silence. It had been sold to some townspeople, who had put up railings and a gate against which he now pressed his face. The rosebushes were dead, so were the apricot trees, but the garden was very neatly and tidily laid out, with little paths and little flower and vegetable beds bordered with box, all reflected in a huge ball of silvered glass set up in their midst on a pedestal. The cottage itself had been freshly distempered, and the corners and the door and window surrounds painted to imitate stonework, giving it a blatant, ostentatious, over-dressed look which irritated Claude beyond words. Everything about it that could have reminded him of Christine, their great love, and their happy early years had gone. To make absolutely sure, he went up behind the cottage to look for the little oak wood and the shady spot that had known the thrill of their first embrace. Like the rest, the little wood was dead, cut down, sold, burnt as firewood. When Claude saw this, restraint gave way to emotion. Cursing the whole world with a gesture, he poured out his sorrow to the lovely countryside he had found so changed, swept clear of every vestige of their former happiness. So a few years were enough to blot out the places where a man had worked and loved and suffered! Why, then, all this fuss about life if, as a man goes through it, the wind behind him sweeps away all traces of his footsteps? He knew that he should never have gone back. The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.
‘Let’s get away from here!’ he cried. ‘Come on! Let’s get away! It’s enough to break anybody’s heart, and it isn’t worth it!’
When they came to the new bridge Sandoz tried to calm him down by drawing his attention to a motif which had not been there in the old days: the stately sweep of the Seine, now that it was broader and filled its bed to the brim. But Claude refused to be interested. For him the only appeal it had lay in the fact that it was the same water which had streamed past the old wharves of the Cité, and as he leaned over the bridge to look at it he imagined he saw the reflections of the towers of Notre-Dame and the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle in all their glory being carried down the river to the sea.
The two friends missed the three o’clock train and found the two hours’ wait a painful burden to bear. They had, fortunately, warned their families that they might return by an evening train if Dubuche kept them after lunch; therefore, as they were not expected at home they decided to dine together at a restaurant in the Place du Havre, hoping to put themselves in a better frame of mind by lingering over their dessert, chatting as they used to do in their bachelor days. It was nearly eight o’clock when they sat down to their meal.
No sooner was Claude outside the station, with his feet on the Paris pavements again, than his nervous agitation disappeared; he felt he was back on his own ground. But he remained cold and aloof in his now customary manner, in spite of Sandoz’s attempts to cheer him up by treating him to a flow of lively conversation, rich, savoury food, and heady wines worthy of a lover try
ing to win round a mistress. Cheerfulness, however, refused to be coaxed, and in the end Sandoz’s own gaiety abated. That thankless countryside, the Bennecourt they remembered but which had forgotten them, where they had not found so much as a stone to recall the days they had spent there! It shattered all the hopes of immortality he had ever held. If things, which are everlasting, forget so quickly, how can men be expected to remember even for an hour?
‘That’s the sort of thing that brings me out in a cold sweat,’ he went on. ‘Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is? We console ourselves for being spurned and rejected by relying on getting a fair deal from the future, just as the faithful put up with abomination on this earth because they firmly believe in another life where everyone shall have his deserts. Suppose the artist’s paradise turned out to be as non-existent as the Catholic’s, and future generations proved just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty-pretty dabbling better than honest-to-goodness painting! … What a cheat for us all, to have lived like slaves, noses to the grindstone all to no purpose! … And it isn’t impossible, after all. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn’t give a twopenny damn. Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than just competent, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to the initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcefully impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves. … Perhaps that’s the sort of thing that’s best left unsaid. It’s certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders! How could I possibly have the courage to carry on and stand up to all the mud-slinging if I couldn’t console myself with the illusion that one day I shall be accepted and understood?’