by Emile Zola
Madame Deberle, calmer than her, kept saying they ought to leave them alone and they would get on perfectly well. At one end of the room, Hélène and a few ladies were laughing at the sight of the table. All those little pink mouths with their brilliant white teeth were champing away. And nothing was funnier than these well-brought-up children who from time to time forgot their manners to indulge in behaviour more typical of young savages. They clasped their glasses with both hands to drink up the dregs, got it all over their faces, stained their costumes. The din increased. They pillaged the last plates. Even Jeanne was dancing on her chair when she heard a quadrille in the salon; and as her mother came over, telling her off for eating too much, she said:
‘Oh, Maman, I feel so good today!’
But the music had caused other children to get off their chairs. Gradually they left the table and soon nobody remained but a plump baby right in the middle. He appeared not to care a jot about the piano. A napkin round his neck, his chin on the tablecloth, he was so small, he opened his big eyes and thrust his mouth forward each time his mother gave him a spoonful of chocolate. The cup was nearly empty, and he let them wipe his mouth, but he was still taking great gulps and opening his eyes wide.
‘You’re doing well, old chap!’ Malignon said contemplating him thoughtfully.
It was then that they had the distribution of ‘surprises’. When the children left the table they took with them one of the large gold packages and were in a hurry to tear open the wrapping. And they took out toys, wigs made out of tissue paper, birds and butterflies. But the greatest delight was the firecrackers. Each ‘surprise’ contained a cracker which the boys were brave enough to pull, delighted with the noise, while the girls closed their eyes, and had several goes. For a moment all you could hear was these dry pistol-cracks. And it was while this hubbub was going on that the children went back into the drawing room where the piano continued to play figures of a quadrille.
‘I could fancy a brioche,’ muttered Mademoiselle Aurélie, as she sat down.
Then, around the table which was now free, though still very cluttered after the enormous dessert, the ladies sat down. There were about ten who had prudently waited before starting to eat. As they couldn’t get hold of anyone to serve them, it was Malignon who offered. He emptied the jug of chocolate, held up the bottles to see what was left, and even managed to produce some ices. But, gallant as he was, he still kept referring to the bizarre idea they’d had of closing the blinds.
‘It’s exactly like being in a cellar!’ he repeated.
Hélène had stayed standing, talking to Madame Deberle. The latter was going back into the drawing room, and she was preparing to follow her when she felt a gentle touch. The doctor was there smiling behind her and it seemed he did not intend to leave.
‘Are you not having anything to eat?’ he enquired.
And behind this banal question lay such an intense plea that she felt very troubled. She understood his real meaning perfectly. She was gradually becoming more and more excited by all this gaiety round about her. All these children jumping and shouting gave her a headache. Her cheeks pink and her eyes bright, she at first refused.
‘No thank you. Nothing.’
Then, as he insisted, she was instantly anxious, and wanted to get rid of him:
‘Well, a cup of tea, then.’
He rushed to get her a cup. His hands were shaking as he gave it to her. And while she drank, he drew nearer, his lips swollen and trembling with the declaration which rose from the depths of his being. Then she withdrew, held out her empty cup and escaped while he put it on a dresser, leaving him alone in the dining room with Mademoiselle Aurélie, who was slowly chewing her food and inspecting the plates in a meticulous fashion.
The pianoforte was being played very loud at the back of the drawing room. And from one end to the other the excited dancers were funny and charming. A circle had formed around the quadrille in which Jeanne and Lucien were dancing. The little marquis was muddling up his steps somewhat. He only got it right when he had to take Jeanne by the waist; then he caught hold of her and whirled her round. Jeanne was poised in a ladylike manner, cross when he creased her dress; then, carried away with the pleasure of the dance, it was her turn to seize hold of him and lift him off the ground. And these two Meissen statues, the white brocade satin suit with flowers on and the dress embroidered with flowers and strange birds, took on the grace and strangeness of an ornament on a shelf. When the quadrille finished, Hélène called to Jeanne to tie her dress.
‘It’s his fault, Maman,’ the little girl complained. ‘He keeps brushing against me, I can’t bear it.’
Around the drawing room the parents were smiling. When the piano began again all the children leaped into action once more. But they were apprehensive when they saw people looking at them. They became solemn and took care not to gallop around, so as to seem well behaved. Some of them could dance; most, not knowing the movements, shuffled around where they were, their arms and legs getting in their way. But Pauline intervened.
‘I’d better dance with them. What chumps they are!’
She dived into the middle of the quadrille and took two by the hand, one on the left, one on the right, and whipped up the dancing so much that the floorboards cracked. All you could hear was the thundering of little feet with their heels thudding out of time, while the piano alone continued to play to the beat. A few more adults joined in. Seeing some little girls were shy and did not dare to dance, Madame Deberle and Hélène guided them into the thick of it. They led the figures, pushed their partners around, and formed the circles. And the mothers passed them their youngest offspring to be jumped about for a minute or two, holding them by both hands. Then the dance was at its best. The dancers gave themselves up to it joyfully, laughing and pushing, like a school boarding-house suddenly overcome by mad gaiety when the teacher is not there. And nothing was jollier than this carnival of children, these little men and women in their small world mingling the fashions of every race, fantasies of fiction and theatre. The costumes lent the freshness of childhood to their pink mouths, blue eyes and gentle faces. You would have thought it was the gala of some fairy tale, with cherubs dressed up for Prince Charming’s wedding feast.
‘It’s so stuffy,’ said Malignon. ‘I’m going to get some air.’
He went out, flinging wide the drawing-room door. The daylight of the street entered then in a pallid flash and cast a sort of sadness over the brilliance of the lamps and candles. And every quarter of an hour, Malignon slammed the door.
But the piano played on. The little Guiraud girl, with a black Alsatian butterfly on her blonde hair, was dancing on the arm of a Harlequin twice as big as her. A Scotsman was whirling Marguerite Tissot around so fast that she lost her milkmaid’s boot on the way. The two Berthiers, Blanche and Sophie, inseparable, were jumping up and down together, the Soubrette on the arm of Folly, whose bells were jangling. And your eyes could not avoid lighting on one or other of the Levasseur girls; there seemed to be scores of Little Red Riding Hoods. Everywhere there were hoods and red satin dresses edged in black velvet. Meanwhile, to have more space to dance in, the older boys and girls had taken refuge at the back of the other drawing room. Valentine de Chermette, enveloped in her Spanish mantilla, was showing great prowess with her young partner, who had come in a suit. Suddenly there was laughter, people called to one another to come and look. Behind a door in a corner the little Guiraud boy, the two-year-old Pierrot, and a little girl of the same age dressed as a peasant, had their arms round one another, holding on very tight in case they fell, and were moving round surreptitiously all by themselves, cheek to cheek.
‘I’m exhausted,’ said Hélène, coming to lean against the dining-room door.
She was fanning herself, red in the face from jumping about. Her breasts rose and fell beneath the transparent grenadine of her blouse. And she sensed again Henri breathing at her shoulder, always there. Then she realized he was about to say something, bu
t she no longer had the strength to avoid his declaration. He moved forward and said very softly into her hair:
‘I love you! Oh, I love you!’
It was as though a tongue of flame burned her from head to toe. Oh God! He had spoken. She would no longer be able to feign the sweet peace of ignorance. She hid her blushes behind her fan. The stamping of the children, carried away by the last quadrilles, had grown louder. Silvery laughter sounded, birdlike voices made little cries of pleasure. A freshness emanated from this circle of innocents, let loose to gallop around like so many little devils.
‘I love you, oh I love you!’ Henri said again.
She shivered, could not listen any more. Her head whirling, she took refuge in the dining room. But that room was empty. Monsieur Letellier was peacefully asleep on his own on a chair. Henri followed her. He went so far as to catch hold of her wrists, risking a scandal, with a face so ravaged by passion that she trembled. He kept on repeating:
‘I love you, I love you...’
‘Leave me,’ she murmured feebly, ‘leave me, you are mad...’
And the ball was going on next door, a wild scurrying of tiny feet! You could hear the little bells of Blanche Berthier accompanying the softer notes of the piano. Madame Deberle and Pauline were clapping in time. It was a polka. Hélène saw Jeanne and Lucien go by smiling, with their hands round each other’s waists.
Then, with a sudden movement she jerked away, and escaped into the next room, a pantry where there was broad daylight. This sudden clarity blinded her. She was panicky, she was not in a fit state to return to the salon with the passion that must surely be visible on her face. And, crossing the garden, with the noise of the dancers still in her ears as she left, she went back up to her own apartment to recover.
Chapter 5
Back up there in the gentle, cloistered atmosphere of her room, Hélène felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She was astonished to find it so calm, so shut away, so soporific beneath its blue velvet furnishings, when she was bringing to it the breathless fire of this passion that so agitated her. Was this really her room, this solitary, dead place that she found so stifling? She flung open a window and leaned out in the direction of Paris.
The rain had stopped, the clouds were dispersing like a monstrous flock of sheep, their unruly line disappearing out to the misty horizon. A gap of blue had opened up above the city, and was slowly widening. But Hélène, her elbows trembling on the sill, and still trying to catch her breath after rushing upstairs, saw nothing, heard only the pulsating of her heart in her breast, that rose and fell. She breathed in deeply, it seemed to her that the huge valley, with its river, its two million lives, its gigantic heart, its distant hills, would not have air enough to restore to her the regularity and peace of her breathing.
For a few minutes she remained there, distraught, utterly transfixed by this crisis. Confused thoughts and feelings coursed through her, their murmur preventing her from listening to herself and making sense of it all. Her ears were buzzing, her eyes saw large bright spots travelling slowly across her field of vision. She was surprised when she looked at her gloved hands and remembered she had forgotten to sew a button on to the left one again. Then she said aloud, repeating several times in a voice that grew ever softer:
‘I love you... I love you... Oh God, I love you.’
And instinctively she put her head in her clasped hands, pressing on her closed lids as though to increase the blackness into which she was sinking. She was seized by a wish to annihilate herself, to not see any more, to be alone in the shadowy depths. Her breathing grew quieter. Paris blew a strong breath of wind into her face. She felt the city’s presence, not wanting to look at it, and yet panic-stricken at the idea of leaving the window, and not having beneath her this place whose endlessness she found so reassuring.
Before long she forgot everything. She relived the scene of his declaration, despite herself. Against a black, inky background, Henri appeared particularly vividly, so alive that she could make out the small nervous trembling of his lips. He was coming closer, he was leaning over her. Then, she was pulling herself wildly away. And yet she was feeling her shoulders burn, hearing a voice that whispered: ‘I love you... I love you...’ Then, when in one supreme effort she banished this vision, it re-formed a little further off, and gradually grew bigger; and there was Henri again following her into the dining room with those same words: ‘I love you... I love you’, their repetition like the continuous pealing of a bell. All she could hear were those words vibrating through her limbs. They pierced her breasts. But she wanted to reflect, she attempted once more to escape from the image of Henri. He had declared himself, she would never be able to look him in the face again. With a man’s brutality he had just spoiled their love. And she remembered the days when he had been in love with her without being cruel enough to tell her so, those times spent at the bottom of the garden in the serenity of the coming spring. Oh God! Now he had spoken! This thought insisted, became so large, so heavy that a lightning bolt that destroyed Paris in front of her eyes would not have seemed of equal importance. In her heart she felt indignation, pride and anger, as well as a secret, undeniable desire that rose from her loins and intoxicated her. He had spoken, and was speaking still, again and again he appeared before her, saying ‘I love you... I love you...’, those ardent words which bore away with them the whole of her past life as a wife and mother.
And yet, in remembering this, she was nevertheless aware of the vast spaces stretching out below, beyond this darkness in which she was blinding herself. There was a loud voice, and the waves of life rose higher and engulfed her. The sounds, the smells, the light itself beat against her face despite her clenched, nervous hands. From time to time a sudden glow seemed to pass through her closed eyelids. And in this light she thought she could see monuments, spires, and domes rising up in the diffused light of her dream.
Then she spread out her hands, opened her eyes and was dazzled. The sky emptied, Henri had disappeared.
All you could see in the far distance was a bank of clouds which were heaping up a landslip of chalky boulders. Now in the pure, intense blue sky, puffs of cotton wool were sailing by at a leisurely pace, like flotillas of little boats billowing out in the wind. To the north, over Montmartre, a web of exquisite pale silk stretched over a section of the sky, like a fishing net on a calm sea. But as the sun went down over the hills of Meudon, invisible to Hélène, the last of the downpour must still have been obscuring the sun, for Paris, under the brightness, was still dark and damp, beneath the steam of the drying roofs. It was a city of unvarying tone, a bluish slate grey stained black by the trees, yet very distinct with its sharp edges and thousands of windows. The Seine had the dull sheen of an old silver ingot. On both sides the monuments looked as if they had been spattered with soot; the Tour Saint-Jacques stood like a piece of old junk from a museum eaten away by rust, while the silhouette of the Panthéon towered above its shrouded quartier like a gigantic catafalque. Only the gilded Dôme des Invalides retained its glowing flames; and you might have thought they were lamps lit up in the middle of the day, dreamy and melancholic among the crepuscular gloom draped over the city. Outlines were missing. Paris, veiled in a cloud, was a smudge on the horizon, like a colossal but delicate charcoal drawing in the limpid sky.
As she looked out at this bleak city Hélène reflected that she did not know Henri very well. She felt stronger now that his image no longer pursued her. Her rebelliousness drove her to reject this obsession which in the space of a few weeks had filled her life with this man. No, she did not know him. She was ignorant of everything, his actions, his thoughts; she would not even have been able to say whether or not he was very intelligent. Perhaps he was deficient in matters of the heart even more than in the head. And she exhausted all the suppositions, her heart swelling with the animosity she found at the bottom of them all, always coming up against her lack of knowledge, that wall that separated her from Henri, and which prevented her from knowin
g him. She knew nothing, she would never know anything. In her imagination he was always brutal, whispering passionate words which excited her, causing her the only trouble which, until then, had disturbed the happy equilibrium of her life. Where had he come from, that he had made her so sad? Suddenly she thought that six weeks ago she had not existed for him, and that idea was unbearable. Oh God! Not to mean anything to one another, to pass by without seeing one another, not meeting at all perhaps! She put her hands together in despair, her eyes wet with tears.
Hélène gazed at the towers of Notre-Dame, in the far distance. A ray of light, in the gap between two clouds, gilded them. Her head was heavy, as if it were too full of the tumult of conflicting ideas inside it. She was suffering, she would have liked her mind to be on Paris, to recover her serenity in her usual quiet contemplation of its sea of roofs. How many times at that hour had the secret nature of the city in the calm of a beautiful evening lulled her in a tender reverie! Meanwhile, before her eyes Paris was brightening in the bursts of sunshine. After the first ray of light had fallen on Notre-Dame, other rays followed and struck the city. As it went down, the sun caused breaks in the clouds. Then the quartiers spread out in variegations of shade and light. At one minute all the Left Bank was a leaden grey, while circles of light streaked along the Right Bank, unrolling next to the river like the pelt of some gigantic beast. Then the shapes shifted and moved at the whim of the wind that carried away the wisps of cloud. Against the gold hue of the roofs, blankets of darkness all travelling in the same direction, slid by softly and silently. There were enormous ones, sailing majestically across like an admiral’s ship, surrounded by smaller ones which moved in symmetry like a squadron in battle order. An immensely long shadow opening like the mouth of a reptile obscured Paris for a moment and seemed to be trying to devour it. And when that one had vanished, diminished now to the size of a worm on the distant horizon, a ray of light, whose shafts sprang out like rain from the fissure in the cloud, fell into the empty chasm that it left. You could see its golden dust trickle like fine sand, grow into a vast cone, and pour down in torrents on the Champs-Élysées, dancing and splashing with light. This sparkling shower lasted a long time, like the constant firing of a rocket.