by Emile Zola
So far Madame Caroline had not had the opportunity to speak to the Countess and her daughter. She had ended up knowing the most intimate details of their life, even the things they thought they had kept hidden from the whole world, yet they had done no more than exchange glances, but glances of the sort that leave behind a sudden sensation of close sympathy. It was the Princess d’Orviedo who was to bring them together. She had had the idea of creating, for her Work Foundation, a sort of supervisory committee composed of ten ladies who met twice a month, made careful inspections of the Foundation, and checked on all the services. As she had reserved for herself the choice of these ladies, among the first she had selected was Madame de Beauvilliers, one of her great friends in former times, though simply a neighbour now that she had withdrawn from the world. And as the supervisory committee had suddenly lost their secretary, Saccard, who was still in charge of the administration of the institution, had thought of recommending Madame Caroline as a model secretary whose like could not be found; in fact the job was quite demanding; there was a great deal of paperwork, and even some physical tasks that these ladies found rather repugnant; and from the start Madame Caroline had shown herself to be an admirable charity-worker, for her unsatisfied maternal longings and her desperate love of children fired her with an active tenderness for all these poor beings that they were trying to save from the gutters of Paris. So, at the most recent meeting of the committee she had met the Countess de Beauvilliers, who, however, only greeted her rather coldly to hide her secret embarrassment, feeling, no doubt, that here was one who knew of her dire poverty. Both now exchanged a greeting every time their eyes met and it would have been grossly rude to pretend not to know each other.
One day, in the big workroom, while Hamelin was making corrections to a map in accordance with some new calculations and Saccard was standing watching him work, Madame Caroline, at the window as usual, was gazing at the Countess and her daughter making their tour of the garden. That morning she could see they were wearing shoes that a rag-picker would not have gathered up from the road.
‘Oh, those poor women!’ she murmured. ‘How terrible it must be, all that charade of wealth they feel they must perform.’
And she drew back, hiding behind the window-curtain for fear the mother might see her and suffer even more from being watched. For herself, she had become more tranquil during the three weeks in which she had lingered each morning at this window; the great pain of her abandonment was no longer so sharp; it seemed as if the sight of other people’s disasters gave her more courage to accept her own, that disaster she had thought was the ruin of her whole life. To her surprise she found herself laughing again.
For just a moment more she followed the women in the mossy green of the garden, with the air of one deep in thought. Then, turning to Saccard, she quickly said:
‘Just tell me why I can’t be sad… No, it just doesn’t last, it has never lasted, I can’t be sad, no matter what happens to me… Is it egoism? Really, I don’t think so. That would be too awful, and besides, no matter how cheerful I am, I still break my heart at the sight of the slightest suffering. Make sense of that if you can—I am cheerful, yet I’d weep over all the unhappy souls I see if I didn’t restrain myself, knowing that the smallest bit of bread would do them much more good than my useless tears.’
As she said this she laughed with her splendidly robust laugh, that of a valiant soul who preferred action to garrulous expressions of pity.
‘God knows, however,’ she continued, ‘if I haven’t had cause enough to despair of everything. Oh, luck has not been over-favourable to me thus far… After my marriage, that hell I fell into, insulted and beaten, I thought the only thing left was to drown myself. But I didn’t; and just a fortnight later I was throbbing with joyfulness and filled with immense hope, when I set off with my brother for the East… And when we came back to Paris, when we were without almost everything, I had some appalling nights, in which I could see us dying of hunger over our lovely plans. We didn’t die, and I began once more to dream of amazing things, happy things that sometimes made me laugh even on my own… And recently, when I was dealt that blow I don’t yet dare to speak of, it seemed as if my heart had been torn out; yes, I definitely felt that it had stopped beating; I thought it was all over, I thought I was finished, quite destroyed. And then, not at all! Life picks me up again, and today I’m laughing and tomorrow I shall have hope, I shall want to go on living, want to live forever… Isn’t it extraordinary, to be unable to be sad for long!’
Saccard, who was now laughing himself, shrugged his shoulders.
‘Bah! You’re just like everybody else. That’s how life is.’
‘Do you think so?’ she cried in astonishment. ‘It seems to me that there are some people who are so sad, never cheerful, and who make life impossible for themselves, painting everything so black… Oh, it’s not that I have illusions about the sweetness and beauty life offers. It has been too harsh with me, I have seen it up close, everywhere and abundantly. It is execrable, when it isn’t vile. But there you are! I love it. Why? I don’t know. Everything around me can topple and collapse, but the next day there I am, still cheerful and confident among the ruins… I’ve often thought that my case is, in microcosm, the case of all humanity, living in the midst of terrible wretchedness, yes, but always cheered by the youthfulness of the next generation. After each one of these crises that knock me down there comes a sort of new youth, a springtime, whose promises of new life revive me and lift up my heart. All of that is so true that after some great sorrow, if I go out into the street in the sun, I immediately begin once more to love, to hope, and be happy. And age has no influence on me, I am naive enough to grow old without noticing… You see, I’ve read far too much for a woman, I don’t know at all where I’m going, any more indeed than this great world does. Only, in spite of myself, it seems to me that I’m going, that we’re all going, to something very nice and perfectly happy.’
She ended up making a joke of it, though very moved and trying to hide the emotion attached to her hopes; while her brother, who had looked up, was gazing at her with an adoration full of gratitude.
‘Oh, you,’ he cried, ‘you’re just made for catastrophes, you really embody the love of life!’
In these daily morning conversations an excitement had gradually become evident, and if Madame Caroline was getting back to that natural joyfulness that was part of her very health, this derived from the courage Saccard brought to them with his active fervour for great ventures. The matter was almost decided, they would exploit the famous portfolio. Under the outbursts of his shrill voice, everything came to life and became extravagant. First they would get their hands on the Mediterranean, they would conquer it with the General United Steamboat Company; and he listed the ports of all the countries along the coast where they would set up stations, mixing some faded classical memories into his enthusiasm as a speculator, celebrating this sea, the only sea the ancient world had known, this blue sea around which civilization had flourished, its waves lapping the ancient cities: Athens, Rome, Tyre, Alexandria, Carthage, Marseilles, the cities that created Europe. Then, once this vast path to the Orient had been secured, they would start over there in Syria with the little venture of the Carmel Silver Mines Company, just a few millions to pick up along the way, but an excellent launching-pad, for the idea of a silver mine, of silver found in the earth and collected by the shovelful, this was always powerfully attractive to the public, especially when you could attach to it a prestigious and resonant name like Carmel.* There were coal mines there too, coal lying close to the surface that would be worth its weight in gold when once the country was covered with factories; not to mention some other smaller ventures which would serve as interludes: the founding of banks, syndicates for the flourishing businesses, exploitation of the vast forests of Lebanon, whose giant trees were simply rotting on the spot for lack of roads. Then at last he came to the big one, the Oriental Railway Company, and at this point h
e began to talk wildly, for this railway system, cast like a net across Asia Minor from one end to the other, this, for him, was speculation, this was the life of money, taking hold of that old world in one fell swoop like a new prey, still intact, a prey of incalculable wealth, hidden under the ignorance and dirt of centuries. He could smell treasure, and seemed to whinny like a warhorse at the scent of battle.
Madame Caroline, with her solid common sense, normally very resistant to overheated imaginings, nevertheless allowed herself to be carried along by this enthusiasm, no longer able to see its excessiveness with any clarity. In truth it appealed to that love she had for the Orient, her nostalgia for that admirable land where she had believed herself to be happy; and in a logical counter-effect it was she, with her colourful descriptions and her flood of detail, who, without meaning to, whipped up Saccard’s fever more and more. When she talked about Beirut, where she had lived for three years, there was no stopping her: Beirut, at the foot of the Lebanon, on that tongue of land between stretches of red sand and piles of fallen rocks, Beirut with its houses built like an amphitheatre, set in vast gardens, a delightful paradise planted with orange trees, lemon trees, and palms. Then it was all the coastal towns—Antioch in the north, now bereft of its splendour, and in the south Saida, the Sidon of long ago, Saint-Jean-d’Acre, Jaffa, and Tyre, now Sour, whose story is the story of them all: Tyre, whose merchants were kings, whose sailors had sailed around Africa, and which now, its harbour choked with sand, is no more than a field of ruins and the dust of palaces, on which are scattered only some wretched fishermen’s huts. She had accompanied her brother everywhere, she knew Aleppo, Angora, Bursa, Smyrna, and even Trebizond; she had lived for a month in Jerusalem, the city half asleep amid the trafficking round the holy places, then two months in Damascus, the queen of the Orient in the middle of its vast plain, the city of trade and industry, made by the caravans from Mecca and Baghdad into a centre full of milling crowds. And she also knew the valleys and mountains, the villages of the Maronites and the Druze, perched high over the plateaus or hidden in the depths of the gorges, and the cultivated fields and the barren ones. And from the smallest corners, from the silent deserts as well as the great cities, she had brought back the same admiration for inexhaustible, luxuriant nature and the same anger at the stupidity and wickedness of men. All those natural riches scorned or spoiled! She spoke of the taxes that crush trade and industry, the idiotic law that limits the amount of capital that can be put into agriculture; and the stagnation that leaves in the hands of the peasant today the plough that was in use before the time of Christ, and the ignorance in which millions of men still languish like idiot children, their development arrested. In former times the coast was too small, the towns almost ran into each other; now life has moved away to the West, and it is as if one were travelling through a vast abandoned cemetery. No schools, no roads, the worst of governments, justice for sale, execrable public servants, excessive taxation, ridiculous laws, laziness and fanaticism; not to mention the continual upheavals of civil wars, and massacres that wipe out entire villages. Then she would grow angry, asking how it could be permitted to spoil in this way the work of nature, a blessed land of exquisite charm, a land where every climate could be found, burning plains and temperate mountainsides and eternal snow on the high summits. And her love of life, her persistent hopefulness, made her passionate about the idea of the all-powerful magic wand of science and speculation that could strike this ancient slumbering land into life.
‘Look,’ cried Saccard, ‘this Carmel Gorge in this drawing of yours, where there’s nothing but stones and mastic trees, you’ll see, once the silver mine gets going, first a village will spring up, then a town… And all those ports silted up with sand, we’ll clean them out and protect them with strong jetties. Great ships will anchor where now even small boats do not dare to moor… And on these depopulated plains, these deserted passes, where our railway lines will run, you’ll see a veritable resurrection, yes! The fields will cease to lie fallow, roads and canals will appear, new cities will rise from the ground and life will at last return, as it does to a sick body when new blood is made to circulate through the depleted veins… Yes! Money will perform these miracles.’
And in what his piercing voice described, Madame Caroline could really see that predicted civilization arising. Those dry technical drawings and those linear outlines came to life, full of people: it was the dream she had sometimes had of an Orient cleansed of its dirt, pulled out of its ignorance, enjoying the fertility of its soil, the charms of its sky, with all the refinements of science. She had already seen such a miracle in Port Said, which in so few years had pushed out on to a bare beach, first sheds to shelter the few workers at the start of the excavation, then the city of two thousand souls, and next the city of ten thousand souls, houses, huge warehouses, an immense jetty, life and well-being stubbornly created by the human ants. And that was what she could see rising up once more, the irresistible forward march, the social drive that rushes towards the greatest possible happiness, the urge to act, to move forward without knowing exactly where one is going, but to go more easily and in better conditions; and the globe turned upside down by the anthill rebuilding its home, and the continual work, new possibilities of enjoyment acquired, man’s power multiplied tenfold, the earth belonging to him more and more each day. Money, backing up science, created progress.
Hamelin, who was listening with a smile, then made a wise remark.
‘All this is the poetry of results, but we haven’t yet even reached the prose of implementation.’
But it was only the excessiveness of his ideas that really excited Saccard, and it got worse on the day when, having started reading books on the Orient, he opened a history of the Egyptian expedition.* He was already haunted by the memory of the Crusades, that return of the West to its cradle in the East, that great movement which had brought the furthest parts of Europe back to the countries of their origin, which were still flourishing and where there was so much to learn. But the lofty figure of Napoleon struck him even more, setting off there to wage war, with a grandiose and mysterious aim. If he spoke of conquering Egypt and setting up a French establishment there, thus giving France the trade of the Levant, he was certainly not telling the whole story: and Saccard tried to read into what remained vague and enigmatic about the expedition some sort of colossally ambitious project, the reconstruction of a huge empire, Napoleon crowned in Constantinople, emperor of the Orient and the Indies, realizing the dream of Alexander, greater than that of Caesar or Charlemagne. Didn’t he say, in Saint-Helena, speaking of Sidney, the English general who had stopped him at the Battle of St-Jean-d’Acre:* ‘That man made me miss my destiny.’ And what the Crusades had attempted, what Napoleon had been unable to accomplish, it was that gigantic idea of conquest of the Orient that fired the imagination of Saccard, a carefully planned conquest, achieved by the twin forces of science and money. Since civilization had spread from East to West, why shouldn’t it go back to the East, returning to the original garden of humanity, to that Eden of the Hindustan peninsula which lay asleep in the weariness of centuries? It would be a new period of youth, it would galvanize the Earthly Paradise, making it habitable once more with steam and electricity, putting Asia Minor back at the centre of that ancient world, as the point of intersection of the great natural paths that link the continents. It was now a matter of making not millions, but billions and billions.
From then on Hamelin and he had long discussions every morning. If their hopes were vast, the difficulties were numerous and enormous. The engineer, who indeed had been in Beirut in 1862 during the terrible butchery that the Druzes carried out on the Maronite Christians, an event in which France had had to intervene,* did not conceal the obstacles they would meet among these perpetually warring peoples, dependent on the whims of the local powers. But he did have powerful contacts in Constantinople, he had secured the support of the Grand Vizier Fuad Pasha,* a man of real merit, a declared partisan of
reform; and he flattered himself he would be able to obtain all the necessary concessions from him. On the other hand, although he predicted the fatal bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, he saw a rather favourable circumstance in its frantic need for money, and the continual loans it took out year after year; a needy government, though it offers no personal guarantee, is very ready to make deals with particular enterprises if it sees the slightest benefit in so doing. And wasn’t it a practical way of answering the everlasting and burdensome question of the Orient, to interest the Empire in great civilizing works and lead it towards progress, so that it would no longer be that monstrous barrier standing between Europe and Asia? What a fine, patriotic role would be played in all this by French companies!
Then one morning Hamelin calmly broached the secret programme to which he had occasionally alluded, the one he referred to, with a smile, as the crowning of the edifice.
‘After this, once we are the masters, we shall remake the kingdom of Palestine and install the Pope there… At first it could be just Jerusalem, with Jaffa as the seaport. Then Syria will be declared independent and we shall add it on… You know, the time draws near when it will be impossible for the Papacy to remain in Rome, with all the revolting humiliations in store for it there. We must be prepared for that day!’
Saccard listened to him open-mouthed as he said these things quite simply, with his profound Catholic faith. He did not himself shrink from extravagant imaginings but would never have gone quite that far. This man of science, so apparently cold, absolutely amazed him.