by Emile Zola
The young man had lost his mother and father very early on in life. The Michons had, in days gone by, been saddlers at Les Alluets, near Mantes. On their death, an uncle had sent the child off to boarding school. Then the uncle himself had passed away, and for five years Julien had had a little job as a copying clerk in the P*** post office. He earned fifteen hundred francs, without a hope of ever earning more. In any case, he saved his money, and couldn’t imagine a more comfortable or a happier condition than his own.
Tall, strong, and bony, Julien had big hands that got in his way. He felt he was ugly, with a square head that looked as if it had been left unfinished after some rough handling by a sculptor all fingers and thumbs; and this made him shy, especially in the presence of young ladies. When a laundress had told him with a laugh that he wasn’t so bad looking, it had left him feeling deeply disturbed. When he ventured out, his arms dangling, his shoulders hunched, his head hanging low, he would take long loping strides to return more quickly into his shadow. His clumsiness left him prey to a continual sense of fright, a pathological longing for ordinariness and obscurity. He seemed to have resigned himself to growing old in this way, without friendship, without love affairs, with the tastes of a cloistered monk.
And this life did not weigh heavily on his broad shoulders. Julien, at heart, was very happy. He had a calm and transparent soul. His daily life, dominated by fixed rules, was imbued with serenity. In the morning he would go to his office, and placidly take up his work where he had left off the night before; then, he would have a bread roll for lunch, and continue his writing; then he had dinner, went to bed, slept. The next day, the sun would rise on the same schedule, week by week, month by month. This slow procession came to be accompanied by a soft and gentle music, rocking him in the daydream of those oxen that pull the cart along and then spend the evening ruminating among fresh straw. He drank in all the charm of monotony. Sometimes, after dinner, he would enjoy going down the rue Beau-Soleil, and sitting on the bridge, waiting for nine o’clock. He let his legs dangle over the water, watching the Chanteclair flowing along beneath him, with the pure murmur of its silver waves. Willows, along both river-banks, trailed their pale heads in their own reflections. From the sky drifted down the fine ashen hues of dusk. And there he would remain, in the midst of this great calm, held in its charm and reflecting vaguely that the Chanteclair must be as happy as he was, gliding continually over the same waterweeds, in such a pleasant silence. When the stars came out, he would go home to bed, his lungs filled with freshness.
These weren’t by any means the only pleasures Julien indulged in. On his days off, he would set out on foot by himself, happily walking for miles and coming back exhausted. He had also made friends with a mute wood-carver: arm in arm they would stroll up and down the riverside walk for entire afternoons, without even exchanging a sign. At other times, ensconced in the back of the Café des Voyageurs, he and the mute would get stuck into interminable games of draughts, punctuated by long periods of immobility while they planned their moves. He had once had a dog that had got run over by a carriage, and he remembered him with such religious devotion that he didn’t want any more pets. At the post office, they teased him about a kid girl, a ten-year-old, barefooted ragamuffin who sold boxes of matches: he would give her a big handful of coins without buying any of her wares; but he was cross at being noticed and made sure no one was watching when he slipped her the money. He was never seen out, of an evening, with some piece of skirt on the ramparts. The working girls of P***, streetwise lasses with nothing to learn about life, had themselves ended up leaving him alone, seeing him choked with shyness in their presence, convinced as he was that their friendly come-hitherish laughter was really mockery. Some of the townspeople said he was stupid, others maintained that you had to watch boys like that, the quiet ones, the loners.
Julien’s paradise, the place where he could breathe easily, was his room. Only there did he feel safe from the world. There he could stand tall, laugh to himself; and, when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, he couldn’t get over his surprise at how young he looked. The room was huge; he had furnished it with a big settee, and a round table with two upright chairs and an armchair. But this still left room for him to walk about: the bed was set well back in the recesses of a deep alcove; a small walnut chest of drawers, between the two windows, seemed no bigger than a child’s toy. He would pace up and down, stretching his legs, never tiring of his own company. He never wrote, outside his office hours, and reading tired him. As the old woman who kept the guest house where he ate insisted on trying to educate him by lending him novels, he would bring them back to her, unable to say what was in them: such complicated stories were in his view entirely lacking in common sense. He drew a little, always the same head, a woman in profile, severe of aspect, with broad headbands and a string of pearls in her chignon. His sole passion was music. For entire evenings, he would play the flute, and this, more than anything, was his main way of relaxing.
Julien had taught himself the flute. For a long time, an old flute in yellow wood that he saw in a junk shop on the Place du Marché had been the object of some of his most intense longings. He had the money: it was just that he didn’t dare go in and buy it, for fear of looking ridiculous. Finally, one evening, he had plucked up enough courage to run off with the flute hidden under his jacket, hugged tight to his chest. Then, having closed his doors and windows, very softly so no one would hear, he had spent two years fingering his way through an old flute manual he came across in a little bookshop. Only in the last six months had he risked playing it with his windows open. He knew only old, slow, simple tunes, eighteenth-century romances, that were filled with infinite tenderness when he stuttered them out with the faltering breath of an over-emotional pupil. On warm evenings, when everyone in the neighbourhood was asleep, and this delicate melody wafted out from the big room lit by one candle, it sounded like the voice of someone in love, tremulous and low, confiding to solitude and night what it would never have dared say to the light of day.
Often, indeed, as he knew the tunes by heart, Julien would blow out the candle, to save expenses. In any case, he liked the shadows. Then, sitting at the window, looking out at the sky, he would play in the dark. People going by would look up to see where this music was coming from, so frail and so beautiful, like the distant trills of a nightingale. The old flute in yellow wood was slightly cracked, which gave it a veiled sound, a delightfully reedy voice like that of a marquise of bygone times, still singing in the purest tones the minuets of her youth. One by one the notes would fly away, gently rustling their wings. It seemed that the song was being sung by Night herself, so closely did it mingle with the discreet breezes in the darkness.
Julien lived in fear that people in the neighbourhood might complain. But they are heavy sleepers out in the provinces. In any case, there were only two residents living in the Place des Quatre-Femmes: a lawyer, M. Savournin, and an old retired gendarme, Captain Pidoux, both of them no trouble as neighbours, in bed and asleep by nine. Julien was more worried about the people who lived in the noble dwelling known as the Hôtel de Marsanne, which rose on the other side of the square, its grey and gloomy façade as grim as a monastery’s, right opposite his windows. Five grass-grown steps led up to a round-arched front door, defended by enormous nail-heads. Ten window casements stretched along the house’s single upper floor, and their shutters opened and closed at the same times every day, without letting anyone see into the rooms, sheltered behind the thick curtains that were always closed. On the left, the tall chestnut trees in the garden formed a clump of greenery, its leaves swelling up to the ramparts. And this imposing town house, with its grounds, its sombre walls, its atmosphere of royal boredom, made Julien reflect that if the Marsanne family didn’t like the flute, they need certainly only say the word, and he would have to stop playing.
Moreover, the young man felt a sense of religious awe when he leaned out of his window and gazed at the vast extent of
the garden and the buildings. The house was famous in this part of the world, and it was said that strangers came from miles around to visit it. And the wealth of the Marsannes was swathed in legend. For a long time, Julien had watched the ancient house, trying to fathom the mysteries of the all-powerful fortune it concealed. But in all the hours he spent there in absorbed contemplation, he never saw anything but the grey façade and the black clump of the chestnut trees. Never once did he see a soul go up the loose, wobbly steps, never once did the front door, green with moss, open. The Marsannes had blocked it up, the entrance was through an iron gate on the rue Sainte-Anne; in addition, at the far end of a narrow street, near the ramparts, there was a little gate onto the garden, which Julien couldn’t see. For him, the house remained dead, like one of those palaces in fairy tales, peopled with invisible inhabitants. Every morning and every evening, all he ever saw were the arms of the servant pushing open or closing the shutters. Then, the house would reassume its intensely melancholy feel of some abandoned tomb in the stillness of a cemetery. The foliage of the chestnut trees was so thick that their branches concealed the garden paths. And this hermetically sealed existence, haughty and silent, made the young man’s heart beat twice as fast. So this was wealth, was it? – this gloomy tranquillity, in which he recognised the same religious shudder that befalls anyone gazing up at the vaulting of churches.
How often, before going to bed, had he blown out his candle and stood for an hour at his window, trying to pierce the secrets of the Marsanne family house! At night, it stood out in a dark mass against the sky, and the chestnut trees spread out in a pool of inky darkness. The people inside must have drawn the curtains tightly closed, since not a gleam of light escaped between the slats of the shutters. The house didn’t even have that lived-in atmosphere of a place where you can sense people breathing in their sleep. It vanished into nothing in the darkness. It was at such times that Julien plucked up courage and picked up his flute. He could play with impunity; his rippling little notes echoed back from the empty house; some of his slower phrases melted into the garden shadows where not even the flapping of a bird’s wings could be heard. The old yellow-wood flute seemed to be playing its ancient tunes outside the castle of the Sleeping Beauty.
One Sunday, on the Place de l’Eglise, one of the postal workers abruptly pointed out to Julien a tall old man and an elderly lady, and told him their names. It was the Marquis and Marquise de Marsanne. They went out so rarely that he had never seen them before. He was overwhelmed at the sight of their pinched, solemn frames, walking along at a measured pace, greeted by deep bows and replying with the merest nod. Then, Julien’s friend informed him in rapid succession that they had a daughter still at convent school, Mlle Thérèse de Marsanne, and that young Colombel, the clerk of M. Savournin the lawyer, had been suckled by the same wet-nurse. And indeed, as the two elderly people were turning into the rue Sainte-Anne, young Colombel, who was just passing, went up, and the Marquis proffered him his hand, an honour he had shown no one else. Julien was jealous at this handshake, for this Colombel, a youth of twenty, bright-eyed and mean-mouthed, had been his enemy for a long time. He teased Julien for his timidity, and set all the washerwomen of the rue Beau-Soleil against him – with the result that one day, on the ramparts, they had challenged each other to a fist-fight, from which the lawyer’s clerk had emerged with two black eyes. And the evening he found out these new details, Julien played his flute even more softly.
Yet he did not allow his obsession with the Marsanne house to disturb his habits, still as regular as clockwork. He continued to go to his office, to have lunch and dinner, to go for his usual walk by the Chanteclair. The house itself, with its vast peacefulness, finally became one more part of his life’s even tenor. Two years went by. He was so used to the sight of the grass growing on the steps, the grey façade, the black shutters, that these things seemed to him to be definitive, necessary to the slumber of the neighbourhood.
Julien had been living on the Place des Quatre-Femmes for five years when, one July evening, an event turned his life upside down. The night was very warm and lit with bright stars. He was playing his flute in the dark, but absentmindedly, slowing down and almost dozing off at certain notes, when suddenly, right opposite, a window of the Marsanne house opened, a slash of brilliant light in the dark façade. A young girl had come to lean out, and remained at the window: he could see her slender outline, she seemed to be looking across, lending an attentive ear. Julien, trembling, had stopped playing. He couldn’t make out the girl’s face, he could see only her flowing hair, already let down round her neck. And a light voice came to him through the silence.
‘Didn’t you hear that, Françoise? It sounded like music.’
‘It must be a nightingale, mademoiselle,’ replied a rough voice from within. ‘Close the shutters, don’t let in the night creatures.’
Once the façade had become black once more, Julien was unable to leave his armchair, his eyes still dazzled by the gash of light in the wall that up until then had been dead. And he couldn’t stop shaking, wondering if he should be pleased at this apparition. Then, an hour later, he resumed his quiet flute-playing. The thought that the young girl doubtless imagined there was a nightingale in the chestnut trees made him smile.
2
Next day, at the post office, the latest news was that Mlle Thérèse de Marsanne had just left her convent school. Julien told no one he had seen her with her hair down and her neck bare. He was in a state of great disquiet; he felt an indefinable hostility towards this young girl, who was going to upset his habits. Certainly, that window would annoy him terribly: he would dread seeing its shutters opening at all hours. He would no longer feel at home, he would even have preferred a man than a woman to live opposite, since women are more prone to make fun. How would he find the courage to play his flute now? He played too badly to please a lady who was bound to know about music. So, that evening, after turning it over and over in his mind, he was sure he hated Thérèse.
Julien returned home furtively. He didn’t light a candle. That way, she wouldn’t see him. He wanted to go to bed straight away, to show what a bad mood he was in. But he couldn’t resist the need to know what was going on opposite. The window didn’t open. Only around ten o’clock did a pale light finally gleam between the slats of the shutters; then the gleam was extinguished, and he was left gazing at the dark window. From then on, every evening, he resumed this espionage, in spite of himself. He kept the house under surveillance; as he had at first, he strained every nerve to pick up the tiniest tremors that gave life to its old mute stones. Nothing seemed changed, the house continued to sleep its deep sleep; you needed expert ears and eyes to catch a hint of the new life there. Sometimes, there was a flicker of light moving behind the windows, the corner of a curtain was lifted, giving him a glimpse into a huge room. At other times, light footsteps could be heard crossing the garden, the distant sound of a piano reached him, accompanying a voice singing; or the sounds remained even vaguer, a simple passing ripple pointing to the beating of a young heart in the old dwelling. Julien explained his curiosity to himself as the result of his great irritation at all this noise. How he missed the time when the empty house echoed back the subdued sound of his flute!
One of his most avid desires, though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, was to see Thérèse again. He imagined her in his mind’s eye, pink-faced, mocking, her eyes gleaming. But as he never ventured to his window in daylight, he caught a glimpse of her only at night, when she was swallowed up in the grey shadows. One morning, as he was closing one of his shutters to keep the sun out, he caught sight of Thérèse standing in the middle of her room. He remained rooted to the spot, not daring to move a muscle. She seemed to be thinking something over, she was very tall, very pale, her face classically beautiful. And he felt almost intimidated by her, she was so different from the light-hearted image he had formed of her. Especially noticeable was her mouth, rather large with bright-red lips, and deep eyes,
dark and lustreless, which gave her the appearance of a cruel queen. Slowly, she came over to the window; but she didn’t seem to see him, as if he were too far off, too indistinct. She moved away, and the swing of her head was so powerful in its grace that he felt weaker than a child in comparison with her, for all his broad shoulders. When he got to know her, he feared her all the more.
Thus began for the young man a wretched existence. This beautiful young lady, so grave and noble, who lived near him, drove him to despair. She never looked at him, she was unaware of his existence. But this did not stop his heart quailing at the thought that she might notice him and find him ridiculous. His pathological shyness made him think that she was spying on his every move so as to make fun of him. He would scurry home with his tail between his legs, and in his room he avoided moving about. Then, after a month, he started to suffer from the girl’s disdain. Why didn’t she ever look at him? She would come over to the window, let her dark eyes wander across the deserted cobbles, and then withdraw, without guessing that he was there, filled with anxiety, on the other side of the square. And just as he had trembled at the idea of being seen by her, now he quivered with the need to feel her fix her gaze on him. She was at the forefront of his thoughts every hour of his life.
When Thérèse got up in the morning, he, who had once been so punctual, forgot all about his office. He was still afraid of that white face with its red lips, but his fear gave him an exquisite, sensual thrill. Concealed behind a curtain, he let the terror she filled him with pour through his body, until it made him feel ill, his legs shaking as if he had been walking for hours. He would dream that she suddenly caught sight of him and smiled at him, and that his fear would vanish.