A Love Story

by Emile Zola

  ‘Leave her alone! We are all family here! Poor Jeanne! We have missed her so.’

  She rang to ask if Mademoiselle Smithson and Lucien had returned from their daily walk. They had not. In any case Lucien was getting out of hand, he had made the five Levasseur girls cry the day before.

  ‘Shall we play “I Spy”?’ asked Pauline, light-headed at the idea of her approaching marriage. ‘It’s not too tiring.’

  But Jeanne shook her head. Slowly, from under her lashes she observed the people around her. The doctor had just informed Monsieur Rambaud that his protégée had at long last been taken into the hospice and the latter, very touched, took hold of his hands as though he had received from him a personal kindness. Everyone relaxed in an armchair and the conversation became charmingly informal. The talking tailed off and there were occasional silences. Since Madame Deberle and her sister were chatting together, Hélène said to the two men:

  ‘Doctor Bodin has recommended a trip to Italy.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s why Jeanne was asking me!’ cried Monsieur Rambaud. ‘Would you like to go there?’

  The child did not answer but put her two little hands on her chest, and her grey face lit up. Her eyes had slid fearfully over to the doctor, for she realized that her mother was consulting him. There was a slight tremor but he remained very cool. Then suddenly Juliette intervened, wanting, as usual, to be in on every conversation.

  ‘What? Were you talking about Italy? Were you saying you are going to Italy? What a coincidence! This very morning I was pestering Henri to take me to Naples... Just think, I’ve been wanting to go to Naples for the last ten years. Every spring he promises me and then doesn’t keep his word.’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to,’ murmured the doctor.

  ‘What? You didn’t say that? You refused point-blank, you said you couldn’t leave your patients.’

  Jeanne was listening. A long line creased her innocent face, and she fidgeted with her fingers, mechanically, one after the other.

  ‘Oh, as far my patients are concerned,’ went on the doctor, ‘I could entrust them to a colleague... If I thought you would enjoy it so much...’

  ‘Doctor,’ Hélène interrupted, ‘are you also of the opinion that such a trip would be all right for Jeanne?’

  ‘It would be excellent, it would get her completely back on her feet. A trip always does a child good.’

  ‘So let’s take Lucien,’ cried Juliette, ‘and we’ll all go together. Would you like that?’

  ‘Of course, whatever you like,’ he replied with a smile.

  Jeanne hung her head and wiped away two large tears of anger and despondency that stung her eyes. And she slumped down into the armchair, as if she did not wish to hear or see any more, while there was a rush of loud exclamations from Madame Deberle, delighted by this unexpected offer of entertainment. Oh, it was so kind of her husband! She kissed him for taking the trouble. She immediately started talking about preparations. They would go next week. Oh my goodness, she would never have time to get everything ready! Then she wanted to work out an itinerary; they had to go via such and such a town; they would stay a week in Rome, then stop in a charming little place that Madame Guiraud had told her about. And she ended up quarrelling with Pauline who asked if they could put off the trip so that her husband could come as well.

  ‘Oh, good gracious no!’ she said. ‘We’ll have the wedding when we get back.’

  Jeanne was quite forgotten. She was studying her mother and the doctor closely. Hélène was definitely in favour of this trip now, which would surely bring Henri and her closer. It would be a great delight to go away together to sunny climes, live side by side all day, take advantage of any hours that might be free. A relieved smile spread across her lips; she had been so afraid of losing him, she was so happy to be able to go away, with all her love intact! And while Juliette was listing all the places they would go through, both of them were already imagining walking into an ideal springtime, saying with a look that they would love one other in this or that place, everywhere they visited together.

  Meanwhile Monsieur Rambaud, who had grown somewhat quiet and gloomy, noticed Jeanne’s distress.

  ‘Are you not feeling well, darling?’ he whispered to her.

  ‘No, I am really poorly... Take me back up, please.’

  ‘But we have to tell your mother.’

  ‘No, no, Maman is busy, she hasn’t time. Take me back up, take me back up.’

  He picked her up in his arms, saying to Hélène that the little girl was rather tired. Then she asked him to wait for her upstairs, she would follow. Although Jeanne did not weigh much, she slipped out of his hands and he had to rest on the second floor. She had leaned her head against his shoulder and the two of them looked mournfully at one another. Not a sound came to disturb the icy silence of the staircase. He whispered:

  ‘You are pleased about going to Italy, aren’t you?’

  But she burst out sobbing, stammering that she didn’t want to any more, she’d rather die in her bedroom. Oh, she would not go, she would be ill, she could sense it. Nowhere, she wouldn’t be going anywhere. They could give her little shoes to the poor. Then through her tears she whispered to him.

  ‘Do you remember what you asked me one evening?’

  ‘What was that, darling?’

  ‘If you should live with Maman for good. Well, if you still want to, I’d like that too.’

  Monsieur Rambaud’s eyes filled with tears again. He kissed her gently, while she added, still more quietly:

  ‘Perhaps you are cross because I got angry. I didn’t know then, you see. But you are the one I want. Oh, tell me right now, now... I love you more than the other one.’

  Downstairs in the conservatory Hélène was forgetting herself again. They were still talking about the trip. She felt an overwhelming desire to open her bursting heart and spill out to Henri all the feelings of happiness which were suffocating her. So while Juliette and Pauline were discussing which dresses to take with them she leaned towards him and agreed to the rendezvous she had refused an hour earlier.

  ‘Come tonight, I’ll expect you.’

  But when she finally came up, she met a distraught Rosalie, who was running down the stairs. As soon as she saw her mistress, the maidservant cried out:

  ‘Madame, Madame! Hurry! Mademoiselle is unwell. She is spitting blood.’

  CHAPTER 3

  When they left the table the doctor told his wife there was a lady about to give birth, whom he would doubtless have to spend the night attending. He left at nine, went down to the waterside and walked along the deserted banks, in the black night. A little damp breeze was blowing, the swollen Seine was flowing in ink-black waves. When it struck eleven he went back up the slope by the Trocadéro and started prowling around the house, whose dark square shape just looked like a darker shadow in the night. But there was still light from the windows of the dining room. He walked once round the house, there was also a bright light from the kitchen window. Then he waited in surprise, growing more and more anxious. Shadows passed behind the curtains, people seemed to be moving around the apartment. Perhaps Monsieur Rambaud had stayed for dinner? And yet this good man never allowed himself to stay beyond ten o’clock. And he did not dare go up. What would he say if Rosalie opened the door to him? Finally, towards midnight, mad with frustration, casting all precautions aside, he rang the bell, and passed Madame Bergeret’s lodge without a word. At the top of the stairs it was Rosalie who greeted him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Doctor. Come in. You’ve arrived. Madame must be expecting you, I’ll tell her.’

  She showed no surprise at seeing him there at that time of night. While he entered the dining room without a word, she went on, very upset:

  ‘Oh, Mademoiselle is very poorly, sir, very poorly. What a night! And my legs are killing me.’

  She left. The doctor instinctively sat down. He had forgotten he was a doctor. Along the banks he’d been dreaming of that room where Hé
lène would receive him, finger to her lips, that he shouldn’t wake Jeanne asleep in the adjoining room. The night light would be burning, the room shrouded in darkness, they would kiss silently. And here he was apparently making a formal call, waiting, with his hat on his knees. Behind the door nothing broke the silence but a hacking cough.

  Rosalie reappeared, crossed the dining room rapidly, a bowl in her hand, and said curtly:

  ‘Madame says not to come in.’

  He remained there, unable to leave. So was the rendezvous then to be another day? It stopped him in his tracks like an impossibility. Then he thought: poor Jeanne was really not a healthy child. Children gave you nothing but trouble and strife. But the door opened again and Doctor Bodin came out, apologizing the while. He strung together a few brief words: they had come to get him, but he would always be very happy to consult his illustrious colleague.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Doctor Deberle repeated, his ears buzzing.

  Reassured, the old doctor said he was perplexed, couldn’t make up his mind about a diagnosis. Lowering his voice, he discussed the symptoms, using technical words in sentences that were interspersed and concluded with a blink of his eyes. There was a cough without expectoration, total exhaustion, and a high temperature. Could it be typhoid fever? However, he could not reach a conclusion, the chloranaemic neurosis which the patient had been treated for over such a long period, made him fear unforeseen complications.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked after each phrase.

  Doctor Deberle replied with evasive gestures. While his colleague was speaking he became more and more ashamed of being there. Why had he come up?

  ‘I’ve placed two vesicants on her,’ the old doctor continued. ‘We shall see how she is, shan’t we? But you go and look at her. Then you’ll be able to make up your own mind.’

  He took him into the room. Henri trembled as he went in. The room was dimly lit by a lamp. He remembered other nights like that, the same warm smell, the same close, peaceful atmosphere and deep shadows of the furniture and curtains which seemed to be asleep. But no one came over to him as they had before, with hands held out. Monsieur Rambaud, collapsed in an armchair, seemed to be dozing. Hélène in a white dressing gown was standing by the bed and did not turn her head. And her white face seemed very large. So for a minute he examined Jeanne. She was so weak and she could not open her eyes without it fatiguing her. She was heavy and bathed in sweat, her cheeks flushed red in her pale face.

  ‘It’s acute consumption,’ he muttered finally, speaking out loud without meaning to, and not showing any surprise, as though he had seen it coming for a long time.

  Hélène heard and looked at him. She was completely cold, dry-eyed, and terribly calm.

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Doctor Bodin nodding, in the approving manner of a man who would not have wanted to be the first to pronounce.

  He listened to the child’s breathing again. Jeanne, limbs inert, lent herself to the examination without appearing to understand why they were torturing her like that. A few words were exchanged between the two doctors. The old doctor muttered something about amphoric respiration and the ‘cracked pot sound’, yet he still seemed to waver, talking now of a capillary bronchitis. Doctor Deberle explained that there must have been an accidental reason for the illness, catching cold probably, but that he had already several times observed the chloro-anaemia that gave rise to chest infections. Hélène was standing behind them, waiting.

  ‘You listen to her now,’ said Doctor Bodin, making way for Henri.

  Henri leaned over to lift Jeanne up. She had not opened her eyes, but abandoned herself to the fever that was burning her. Her nightdress was undone and you could see her childish chest, and the scarcely visible naissant swelling of her breasts. And nothing was more chaste or heartbreaking than this puberty already touched by Death. She had not resisted the hands of the old doctor at all. But as soon as Henri’s fingers touched her, a sort of jolt went through her body. A fierce modesty roused her from the unconscious state into which she had sunk. She made a movement like a woman taken by surprise, violated, she clutched at her breast with her two poor thin little arms, and stammered in a trembling voice:

  ‘Maman... Maman...’

  And she opened her eyes. When she recognized the man standing over her, she was terrified. She saw her nakedness, she sobbed in shame, rapidly drawing the sheet up round her. In her agony she seemed to have aged by ten years all at once, and, near to death, her twelve years were enough to understand that this man should not touch either her, or her mother through her. She cried again, in a desperate call for help:

  ‘Maman, Maman, please...’

  Silently, Hélène came and stood by Henri. She stared at him, stony-faced. Touching him, she uttered just one word in a strangled voice:

  ‘Go!’

  Doctor Bodin tried to quieten Jeanne, who was shaken by a fit of coughing in the bed. He swore they would not disturb her any more and that everyone would go away and leave her in peace.

  ‘Go!’ repeated Hélène, in her low, deep voice, in her lover’s ear. ‘You can see we’ve killed her.’

  Speechless, Henri left. He stayed a moment in the dining room, waiting for something to happen, he knew not what. Then seeing that Doctor Bodin did not come out of the room, he groped his way downstairs without Rosalie even lighting his way. He was thinking of the alarming rate at which acute consumption advanced. He had studied cases in depth. The miliary tubercles would multiply, there would be an increase in fits of choking, Jeanne would not live more than three weeks.

  A week went by. The sun rose and set in the great Paris sky which stretched away outside the window, without Hélène being exactly aware of the rhythm of the days inexorably passing. She knew her daughter was going to die, she was like a woman stunned, horrified by the laceration within her. She waited without hope, only certain that death would not bring any forgiveness. She could not shed tears, she walked softly around the room, was always on her feet tending to the sick girl with slow, measured movements. Sometimes, overcome with tiredness, she collapsed into a chair and looked at her for hours on end. Jeanne was getting weaker. She was assailed and exhausted by bouts of vomiting and the fever did not abate. When Doctor Bodin arrived, he examined her briefly and left a prescription. And as he withdrew, his bent back conveyed such impotence that her mother did not even bother to go out and question him. The very next day after the crisis, Abbé Jouve had hurried along. He and his brother called every evening and exchanged a silent handshake with Hélène, not daring to ask for news. They had offered to take it in turns to sit with her, but she sent them away before ten, not wanting anyone in the room during the night. One day the abbé, who had seemed very preoccupied for a couple of days, took her to one side.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said quietly. ‘The dear child has been held back on account of her poor health. She could make her First Communion here.’

  At first Hélène seemed not to understand. The thought that, in spite of his open-mindedness, the priest in him, with his concerns about heaven, had wholly resurfaced, surprised her and even offended her a little. She shrugged and said:

  ‘No, no, I don’t want her disturbed. If there is a paradise, she will go straight there.’

  But that evening Jeanne had one of those illusory revivals that deceive the dying. Her hearing, made more acute by her illness, had picked up the abbé’s words.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, my dear friend,’ she said. ‘You said something about communion. We can do it soon, can’t we?’

  ‘Of course, darling,’ he replied.

  Then she wanted him to come closer to have a talk. Her mother had raised her on her pillow, she was sitting up, and looked very small. Her chapped lips were smiling, while in her bright eyes, death was already passing.

  ‘Oh, I’m very well,’ she said. ‘I’d get up if I wanted to. Tell me, would I have a white dress with a bouquet? Will the church be as beautiful as it is for the Month of Mary?�
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  ‘More beautiful, sweetheart.’

  ‘Truly? Will there be that many flowers? And will they sing such lovely hymns?’

  She was suffused with joy. She looked at the curtains around her bed, in a sort of ecstasy saying that she loved God and had seen Him when they were singing the canticles. She could hear the organ music, and see moving lights, while the flowers in the great vases floated down like butterflies. She was racked by a violent fit of coughing and was thrown back on to the bed. But she went on smiling, not apparently realizing she was coughing, but saying over and over:

  ‘I’m getting up tomorrow, I’ll learn my catechism by heart and we shall all be very happy.’

  At the foot of the bed Hélène uttered a sob. She, who could not weep, felt floods of tears rising in her throat as she listened to Jeanne’s laughter. She was choking, she escaped into the dining room to hide her despair. The priest followed her. Monsieur Rambaud had quickly got up to distract the little girl.

  ‘Oh, Maman cried out, has she hurt herself?’ she asked.

  ‘Your Maman?’ he replied. ‘She didn’t shout, no, no, she was laughing because you are well.’

  In the dining room, Hélène, at the table with her head in her hands, was making an effort to suppress her sobs. The priest bent down, begging her to stop. But lifting up her streaming face, she blamed herself, saying she had killed her daughter. And an entire confession in broken phrases issued from her mouth. She would never have given in to that man if Jeanne had been with her. She had been obliged to go and meet him in that secret room. Oh God, why didn’t Heaven take her at the same time as her daughter? She could not go on living. The priest in alarm calmed her down and promised her forgiveness.