by Emile Zola
In fact he couldn’t help entering immediately into the details. It was mainly during his journey to Constantinople that he had studied the outline of his railway system. The main—the sole—difficulty was the crossing of the Taurus mountains; but he had gone around the different passes, and was sure there could be a direct and relatively inexpensive route. Besides, he wasn’t thinking of creating the whole system at one stroke. After obtaining the whole concession from the Sultan* it would be sensible to start at first only with the main line from Brousse to Beirut, via Angora and Aleppo. Later there would be the branch from Smyrna to Angora, and one from Trebizond to Angora by way of Erzerum and Sivas.
‘Later, and later still…’ he went on.
But he stopped there and merely smiled, not daring to tell to what lengths he had dared to push his projects. It was his dream.
‘Oh, the plains at the foot of the Taurus range,’ Madame Caroline took up the theme in her slow voice, as if in a waking dream, ‘what a delightful paradise! You scarcely have to scratch the surface of the soil and harvests appear in abundance. Fruit trees—peach, cherry, fig, and almond—breaking under the weight of fruit. And such fields of olive and mulberry trees, like great forests! And what a natural and easy existence it was in that light air, under a sky always blue.’
Saccard began to laugh, with that keen and hungry laugh he had when he scented fortune. And as Hamelin went on to speak of other projects, among them the creation of a bank in Constantinople* and the all-powerful contacts he had established there, especially with the Grand Vizier,* he gaily interrupted him.
‘But it’s a wonderland—very saleable!’
Then, resting his hands very familiarly upon the shoulders of Madame Caroline, who was still sitting down:
‘Don’t despair, Madame Caroline! I am fond of you both, you’ll see, and I’ll get something done with your brother, which will be good for all of us… Be patient. Just wait.’
In the month that followed, Saccard again found some little jobs for the engineer, and though he said no more about those grand schemes, he must have been thinking of them all the time, preoccupied and hesitant over the overwhelming scale of the ventures. But what tightened the growing link of intimacy between them was the way that Madame Caroline began to concern herself with the household of this man on his own, who was being eaten up by needless expense, and the more servants he had, the worse he was served. He, so clever everywhere else, admired for his firm and vigorous dealing with the havoc of grand-scale theft, just let everything go from bad to worse in his own household, careless of the fearful waste that tripled his costs; and the absence of a woman made itself cruelly felt even in the tiniest things. When Madame Caroline observed the pillaging that was going on, she first gave him some advice, then ended up taking it upon herself to help him to make some savings; so one day he suggested with a laugh that she should be his housekeeper—and why not? She had been looking for a teaching post, so she could accept a position which was quite honourable for her, and would give her some breathing-space. The offer, made as a joke, became serious. Wouldn’t it, after all, be a way of keeping busy, and helping her brother out with the three hundred francs a month that Saccard would pay her? She accepted, and within a week, she had reformed the household, dismissing the chef and his wife, replacing them simply with a cook, who, along with the valet and the coachman, should be sufficient. She also kept only one horse and one carriage, took complete charge of everything, and examined the accounts so scrupulously that by the end of the first fortnight she had reduced the expenses by half. Saccard was delighted, and joked that he was now the one who was robbing her, and she should have demanded a percentage on all the savings she was making for him.
Their relationship now began to be very close. Saccard had had the idea of removing the screws fastening the communicating door between the two apartments so they could move easily from one dining-room to the other, using the internal staircase, and while her brother was shut in, working upstairs from morning till night, putting his files on the Orient in order, Madame Caroline, leaving her own housework to the one maid they had kept, would go down at any time of the day to give orders as if she were at home. It had become a joy to Saccard to see the frequent appearances of this tall and beautiful woman walking through the rooms, so strong and proud, with that always unexpected gaiety of her white hair flying around her young face. She was very cheerful once more, she had recovered her former stalwart attitude to life now that she felt useful, and was busy all the time, always on her feet. Without any affectation of simplicity she now always wore a black dress, and in its pockets could be heard the clear jangling of her bunch of keys; and certainly it amused her that she, the scholar, the philosopher, should now be no more than a good domestic, acting as housekeeper to a prodigal whom she was beginning to love, the way one always loves naughty children. He, very attracted to her for a moment, and thinking that there were, after all, only fourteen years between them, had wondered what would happen if, one fine evening, he simply took her in his arms. Was it believable that for the ten years since she had had to flee from her husband, from whom she had received as many blows as caresses, she had lived like a soldier on campaign, without ever seeing a person of the opposite sex? Perhaps her travels had protected her. However, he knew that a friend of her brother’s, a Monsieur Beaudoin, a businessman who had remained in Beirut but whose imminent return was expected, had been very much in love with her, so much so indeed that to marry her he had been prepared to wait for the death of her husband, who had just been locked up in an asylum, driven mad by alcoholism. Of course that marriage would only have regularized a very excusable, almost legitimate, situation. Therefore, since there had already been one, why shouldn’t he be the second? But Saccard got no further than thinking about it, finding in her such a good comrade that the woman in her almost disappeared. When, seeing her go by with her admirable figure, he asked himself the question: what would happen if he were to kiss her, he told himself that what would happen would be very ordinary, perhaps tiresome; and he would put the experiment off until some other time, shaking her hand vigorously, delighted at her cordiality.
Then suddenly Madame Caroline fell back into deep sadness. One morning she came down looking very depressed, very pale, and with swollen eyes; he could get nothing out of her; he gave up asking in the face of her obstinate insistence that there was nothing wrong, that she was just the same as always. It was only on the following day that he understood, when he found, in the upper apartment, a letter-card announcing the marriage of Monsieur Beaudoin to the very young and immensely rich daughter of an English consul. The blow must have been all the harder in that the news had arrived in this banal letter, with nothing to prepare her for it, not even a goodbye. Part of the very existence of this unhappy woman had crumbled away with the loss of that distant hope to which she had clung in times of disaster. And with one of fortune’s own abominable cruelties, she had learned, just two days before, that her husband had died, so for forty-eight hours she had been able to believe in the imminent fulfilment of her dream. Her life was in pieces, and she was devastated. That very evening another shock awaited her: when she went in to see Saccard as usual, before going to bed, to discuss the orders for the next day, he spoke of her unhappiness so gently that she burst into sobs; then, in the throes of this emotion, in a sort of paralysis of her will, she found herself in his arms and gave herself to him, without any joy for either of them. When she came to herself she was not appalled, but her sadness was now infinitely greater. Why had she allowed this to happen? She did not love this man, and he surely didn’t love her. It wasn’t that he seemed to her to be unworthy of love through age or appearance; he certainly wasn’t handsome, and he was already old, but he interested her, with his ever-changing features and the energy of the whole of his small dark figure; and not yet knowing him she wanted to think him helpful, a man of superior intelligence, capable of bringing her brother’s great schemes to fruition and as averagely
honest as any man. But what a stupid fall! She who was so sensible, she who had learned so much from hard experience and was so much the mistress of herself—that she should have succumbed like that, not knowing how or why, in a flood of tears, like some sentimental chit of a girl! The worst of it was that she felt him to be just as astonished as she was, and almost annoyed at this event. When he tried to comfort her, speaking of Monsieur Beaudoin as a former lover whose base treachery deserved only that she forget him, she had protested, swearing that nothing had ever happened between them. At first he had thought she was lying out of womanly pride; but she had repeated her statement with such force, and with eyes so beautiful, so clear and candid, that he ended up convinced of the truth of her story; she, keeping herself through rectitude and dignity for the day of her marriage, and the man, waiting patiently for two years, then growing weary and marrying another, faced by too tempting an offer of youth and wealth. And the odd thing was that this discovery, this conviction that should have delighted Saccard, filled him instead with a sort of embarrassment, so thoroughly did he grasp the stupid fatality of his good fortune. In any case, it did not happen again, for neither of them seemed to want it.
For a whole fortnight Madame Caroline remained dreadfully unhappy. The life-force, that drive that makes life both necessary and joyful, had left her. She attended to her multiple tasks, but as if she were not really there, not even allowing herself any illusions about the reasons for, or the interest of, anything. She was the human machine, going on working even in despair at the emptiness of everything. And in this shipwreck of her courage and gaiety she enjoyed only one distraction, and that was to spend her free hours with her brow pressed against the glass of one of the windows in the big workroom, her eyes fixed on the next-door garden of the Beauvilliers mansion, where, ever since she had first moved in, she had sensed distress, one of those cases of dire poverty, carefully concealed, so painful in the effort to keep up appearances. There too people were suffering, and her own grief seemed as if soaked in their tears; she was dying of melancholy, to the point of believing herself numb and dead, lost in the pain of others.
These Beauvilliers who, in addition to their vast estates in Touraine and Anjou, had once owned a magnificent mansion on the Rue de Grenelle, now in Paris had only this one-time maison de plaisance, built just outside the city at the beginning of the previous century but now shut in among the dark buildings of the Rue Saint-Lazare. The few fine trees in the garden now seemed to be at the bottom of a well, and moss was creeping over the cracked and crumbling steps down to the garden. It was as if a corner of nature had been put in prison, a soft and sad corner of mute despair, down where the sun only entered with a greenish light that provoked an icy shudder in the shoulders. And in this damp and cellar-like peace, the first person Madame Caroline had seen, standing at the top of the broken steps, was the Countess de Beauvilliers, a tall, thin, white-haired woman of sixty, with a very noble air, as of an earlier age. With her long, straight nose, her thin lips, and her unusually long neck she had the look of some very ancient swan, of desolate gentleness. Then, behind her, almost at once, her daughter had appeared, Alice de Beauvilliers, twenty-five years old but of so impoverished a body that she could have been taken for a little girl, except for her already spoiled complexion and pinched features. She was her mother all over again, but puny and lacking her aristocratic nobility, with a calamitously long neck, and having only the pitiable charm of the end of a great line. The two women lived alone since the son, Ferdinand de Beauvilliers, had joined the Papal Zouaves after the Battle of Castelfidardo, which had been lost by Lamoricière.* Every day, if it wasn’t raining, they would appear in this way, one behind the other, descending the flight of steps and walking around the narrow patch of grass in the middle without exchanging a word. The borders were simply ivy, flowers would not have grown there, or perhaps they would have been too expensive. This slow promenade, no doubt a simple constitutional, made by these two very pale women under the centuries-old trees, which had seen such grand festivities and were now suffocated by the bourgeois houses all around, took on a melancholy sadness as if it were a procession of mourning for old, dead things.
So, her interest aroused, Madame Caroline had been watching her neighbours with a tender sympathy, without any unpleasant curiosity, and gradually, looking out over the garden, she began to see into their life, the life they hid with such jealous care from the street. There was still a horse in the stable and a carriage in the outhouse, tended by an old servant who was valet, coachman, and concierge all in one. Similarly there was a cook who also acted as housemaid; but though the carriage still went out from the main entrance with the horse properly harnessed, carrying these ladies on their errands, and though the table still showed a certain luxury in the winter, for the fortnightly dinners for a few friends, through what lengthy fasting and with what sordid and constant economies had that mendacious appearance of wealth been bought! In a small shed, safe from all eyes, there was perpetual washing to reduce the laundress’s bill, poor old garments worn out from soaping, mended thread by thread, and just four vegetables peeled for the evening meal, bread left on a board to go stale so they would eat less; all sorts of miserly practices, petty and touching; the old coachman sewing up the holes in Mademoiselle’s boots, the cook using ink to cover up the ends of Madame’s too shabby gloves. And the mother’s dresses passed on to the daughter after ingenious alterations, and the hats that lasted for years, thanks to changes of flowers and ribbons. When no visitor was expected the reception-rooms on the ground floor were carefully locked up, along with the large rooms on the first floor; for in all this vast house the two women now occupied only one small room, which served as their dining-room and boudoir. When the window was half-open the Countess could be seen mending her linen, like a needy little bourgeois housewife, while the daughter, in between her piano-playing and watercolours, knitted stockings and mittens for her mother. One day when there was a big storm both women were seen going down to the garden to gather up the sand the ferocious rain was washing off the path.
By now Madame Caroline knew their history. The Countess de Beauvilliers had suffered a great deal because of her husband, a profligate about whom she had never complained. One evening he had been carried back to her in Vendôme dying, with a bullet-hole in his body. There was talk of a hunting accident, a shot fired by a jealous gamekeeper whose wife or daughter he must have seduced. And the worst of it was that there disappeared with him the once-colossal fortune of the Beauvilliers, based on huge areas of land and royal domains; the Revolution had already reduced it, and he and his father had finished it off. Of all those vast possessions only one farm remained, Les Aublets, a few leagues from Vendôme, bringing in about fifteen thousand francs a year, the sole source of income for the widow and her two children. The mansion on the Rue de Grenelle had been sold long since, and the one on the Rue Saint-Lazare, mortgaged to the hilt, ate up the greater part of the fifteen thousand francs from the farm, and was also in danger of being sold if the interest wasn’t paid; there remained scarcely more than six or seven thousand francs for the maintenance of four people and the lifestyle of this noble family which refused to renounce its status. Eight years ago, when she had become a widow with a boy of twenty and a girl of seventeen, even as her house collapsed around her, the Countess had stiffened in her aristocratic pride, vowing she would live on bread and water rather than lower her standards. From that time on she had had but one thought—to maintain her status, marry her daughter to a man of equal rank, and make a soldier of her son. Ferdinand had at first caused her mortal anguish as a result of some youthful follies and debts that had had to be paid; but after being warned about their situation in a solemn interview he had never done that again, being a tender soul at heart but idle and useless, cut off from any kind of work and with no possible place in contemporary society. Now he was a soldier of the Pope he was still a cause of secret anxiety for her, for his health was poor and beneath his proud ap
pearance he was delicate, his blood impoverished and thin, which made the Roman climate dangerous for him. As for the marriage of Alice, it was so slow in coming that the sad mother’s eyes would fill with tears as she looked at her, seeing her already ageing, withering away in the long wait. For all her appearance of melancholy and insignificance Alice was not stupid, and she longed ardently for life, for a man who would love her, for happiness; but not wishing to sadden the household further she pretended she had renounced everything, joking about marriage and saying she had a vocation for spinsterhood; and at night she sobbed into her pillow, thinking she would die of the grief of being alone. The Countess, however, through her miserly miracles, had managed to save twenty thousand francs, which was Alice’s entire dowry; she had also saved from the wreckage some jewellery, a bracelet, some rings, some earrings, which might be worth about ten thousand francs; a very meagre dowry, a package of wedding gifts of which she did not even dare to speak, hardly enough indeed to face the immediate expenses if the long-awaited husband should appear. And yet she would not give up hope, but went on struggling, not surrendering any of the privileges of her birth, always just as haughty and pretending to an appropriate fortune, incapable of going out on foot or cutting back one side-dish from an evening reception, but penny-pinching in her hidden life, condemning herself to weeks of plain potatoes with no butter, to add fifty francs to the eternally insufficient dowry for her daughter. It was a painful and puerile daily heroism, while with each day the house crumbled a little more about their heads.