Complete Works of Emile Zola (123 page)

The sleeper had just awoke. His eyes still heavy with slumber, with a vague smile of awakening on his lips, that sweet smile of recognition on the morrow of a night of love, he held out his arms to Madeleine as she approached.

“Do you love me?” he asked her in a low deep tone.

She smiled in her turn, one of her fond loving girlish smiles. The room passed from her vision, she felt pervaded with tenderness at the young fellow’s endearing question.

She returned William’s kiss.

CHAPTER II.

Madeleine Férat was the daughter of a machine-maker. Her father, who was born in a little village in the mountains of Auvergne, came bare-footed and with empty pockets, to seek his fortune in Paris. He was one of those thick-set broad-shouldered Auvergnians, with a dogged obstinacy for work. He put himself apprentice to a machine-maker, and there, for nearly ten years, he filed and hammered with all the might his hard hands were capable of. Sou by sou he amassed a few thousand francs. From the first stroke he had made with his hammer, he had said to himself that he would only stop when he had saved enough money to commence business on his own account.

When he thought himself well enough off, he rented a sort of shed in the neighbourhood of Montronge, and set up as a boiler-maker. It was the first step on the road to fortune; the first stone in those vast workshops which he dreamed of being at the head of later on. For ten more years, he lived in his shed, filing and hammering with renewed ardour, never indulging in a single amusement, never taking a day’s holiday. Little by little, he enlarged the shed, one by one he increased the number of his workmen; at last he was able to buy the ground and build immense workshops, on the very spot where his little wood erection had formerly stood. The goods that he made had increased in size too; kitchen-boilers had become factory-boilers. The railways with which France was then being covered, furnished him with abundance of work, and put enormous profits into his hands. His dream was being realised; he was rich.

Up to this time, he had stuck to his anvil, resolved to make as much money as possible, without ever asking himself what he would do with this money. Forty sous a-day were more than enough for him to live on. His industrious habits, his ignorance of the pleasures, and of even the commodities of life, made a fortune useless to him. He had made himself rich more out of blind obstinacy than from any wish to derive any comfort from his wealth.

He had vowed to become a master in his turn, and his whole existence had been spent in making his vow good. When he had amassed nearly a million francs, he asked himself what he could possibly do with it. He was moreover by no means a miser.

First he built, close to his workshops, a little plain house which he decorated and furnished with a certain amount of comfort. But he could not feel at ease on the carpets of. his rooms, he preferred to pass his days with his workmen, among his grimy furnaces. He might perhaps have decided to let his house and go back to the apartments he occupied before above his office, had not an important event transpired which modified his whole existence and changed his whole being.

 — Beneath the gruffness of his voice and the austerity of his manners, Férat was as gentle as a child. He would not have crushed a fly. All the tenderness of his nature was lying dormant, stifled by his life of toil, when he met an orphan, a poor girl who was living with an aged relative. Marguerite was so pale, so delicate that she would not have been taken for a girl of more than sixteen; she had one of those sweet submissive faces which move strongmen. Férat was attracted and touched by this child who smiled with a timid air, with the humility of a devoted servant. He had always lived among coarse workmen, he knew nothing of the charms of weakness, and immediately fell in love with Marguerite’s delicate hands and childish face. He married her almost at once, and carried her off to his house like a little girl, in his arms. Once his wife, he loved her with a devotion bordering on worship. He doted on her paleness, her unhealthy appearance, all her frailties as a suffering woman whom he did not dare touch with his horny hands. He had never been in love before; on going over his past life, the only tender feeling that he could remember was one of a sacred nature, which his mother had inspired him with for a white image of the Holy Virgin, who seemed to smile mysteriously under her veil, in one of the shrines of his native village. In Marguerite he seemed to find again this Holy Virgin; there was the same maidenly smile, the same saintly serenity, the same affectionate kindness. From the very first, he had made his wife, an idol and a queen; she was supreme in the house, filling it with a perfume of elegance and comfort; she transformed the cold home, which the former workman had built, into a fragrant retreat, all warm with love. For nearly a year, Férat hardly gave a thought to his workshops; he was absorbed in that exquisite and, to him, new delight of having a frail being to love. What charmed him and at times moved him to tears, was the gratitude which Marguerite showed him. Each look of hers would thank him for the happiness and wealth he had given her. She remained humble in her sovereignty; she adored her husband as a master, as a benefactor, like a woman who can find no affection deep enough to pay her debt of felicity. She had married Férat without looking at his swarthy face, without thinking of his forty years, moved simply by an almost filial affection. She had divined that he was kind. “I love you,” she would often say to her husband, “because you are strong and do not disdain my weakness; I love you because I was nothing and you have made me your wife.” And Férat, as he heard these words murmured in a meek endearing voice, would press her to his bosom, his heart full of unutterable love.

After they had been married a year, Marguerite became enceinte. Her pregnancy was a painful one. A few days before the crisis, the doctor took Férat aside and told him that he was not without apprehensions. The young wife’s constitution seemed to him so delicate, that the sharp pangs of child-birth made him feel afraid for her. Férat was almost out of his senses for a week; he would smile on his wife, as she lay on a long chair, and then go and sob in the street; he would pass whole nights in his deserted workshops, and come every hour to ask for news; at times, when his anguish seemed to choke him, he would take a hammer and then strike furiously at the anvils, as if to soothe his anger. The terrible moment came at last, the fears of the doctor were realised. Marguerite died in giving birth to a daughter.

Férat’s grief was fearful. His tears were dried up. When the poor woman was buried, he shut himself up in the house, and stayed there in a fit of gloomy dejection. At times, he would be seized with crises of blind frenzy. He invariably spent the night in his dark silent workshops; till morning came, he would walk up and down among the motionless machinery, the tools, the bits of iron-ore that lay about. Gradually, the sight of these instruments of his fortune would send him into a paroxysm of rage. He had conquered misery and had not been able to conquer death. For twenty years, his powerful hands had made the bending of iron a plaything, and yet they had been powerless to save the object of his love. And ho would exclaim:

“I am a coward then, and as weak as a child; had I been strong I should not have been robbed.”

For a month, no one dared to disturb this man’s grief. Then, one day, the nurse, who was suckling little Madeleine put the child into his arms. Férat had forgotten that he had a daughter. The tears came at last as he saw this poor little creature, hot scalding tears which eased both his head and his heart. He looked at Madeleine for a long time.

“She is feeble and delicate like her mother,” he muttered,
“
she will die just as she did.”

From that time, his despair melted away. He got into the way of thinking that Marguerite was not altogether dead. He had loved his wife like a father; he was able, by loving his daughter, to deceive himself, to persuade himself that his heart had lost nothing. The child was very frail; she seemed to get her little pale face from her poor dead mother. Férat was delighted at first not to find his own strong nature reproduced in Madeleine; he could thus picture to himself that it was to her solely that she owed her birth. When he danced her on his knees, the strange fancy would come over him that his wife had died in order to become a child again, and that he might love her with fresh affection. Up to two years of age, Madeleine was a puny child. She was always hovering between life and death. The offspring of a dying mother, she had in her eyes a shadowy vagueness which her smile was seldom able to dispel. Her father loved her the more for her sufferings. It was her very weakness which saved her; illness could get no hold on this poor little body. The doctors gave her up, and she went on living; she was like the flame of one of those pale night-lamps which flickers yet never goes out. Then, at two years old, health suddenly burst on her; in a few months the shadow of death was dispelled from her eyes, the blood mounted to her lips and cheeks. It was a resurrection.

Hitherto she had resembled a pale speechless corpse; she could neither laugh nor play. When her legs became strong and she could stand, she filled the house with her prattle and the patter of her toddling limbs. Her father would call her, with his arms stretched out towards her, and then she would rush to him with that hesitating step which is one of the charms of children. Férat would play with his daughter for hours; he would carry her into the workshops among the frightful din of the machinery, saying that he wanted to make her as courageous as a boy. And to make her laugh, he found out little childish tricks that a mother would not have invented.

One curious circumstance redoubled the good fellow’s worship of his child. As Madeleine grew, she became more and more like him. During her earlier days, when she lay in her cradle, trembling all over with fever, she had had her mother’s gentle mournful face. Now, vibrating with life, broad-set and full of vigour, she looked like a boy; she had Férat’s grey eyes and stern brow, and, like him, she was violent and obstinate. But, as the effect of the drama of her birth, there always remained with her a sort of nervous shudder, an innate weakness which would subdue her in the height of her violent childish anger. Then she would weep bitterly, and become submissive. If the upper part of her features had borrowed the sternness of the old workman’s face, she always bore a strong likeness to her mother in the weakness of her mouth and the loving meekness of her smiles.

She grew, and Férat dreamed of a prince for her husband. He had assumed again the superintendence of his workshops, for he knew now what he would do with his millions. He would have liked to heap up treasures at the feet of his dear little idol. He launched out into important speculations, no longer content with the profits of his trade, and risking his fortune in order to double it. All of a sudden came a fall in the price of iron which ruined him.

Madeleine was then six years old. Férat displayed incredible energy. He hardly staggered under the mortal blow which had struck him. With the accurate and rapid perception of men of action, he calculated that his daughter was young and that he had still time to earn her a dowry; but he could not start his giant’s task in France: he must have, as his field of operation, a country where fortunes are made rapidly. His resolution was formed in a few hours. He decided on going to America. Madeleine should await his return in a Paris boarding-school.

He disputed, sou by sou, the remains of his fortune, and succeeded in saving an income of two thousand francs, which he placed in Madeleine’s name. He thought that the child would then always have bread if any misfortune happened to him. As for himself, he set out with a hundred francs in his pocket. The day before he went away, he carried Madeleine to the house of a fellow-countryman of his and asked him to look after her. Lobrichon, who had come to Paris about the same time as himself, had started as a dealer in old clothes and rags; later on, he had become a cloth merchant, and in this trade had made a nice round fortune. Férat had every confidence in this old comrade.

He told Madeleine that he would come back in the evening; he nearly fainted as he received the caresses of her little arms, and went out reeling like a drunken man. He bade farewell to Lobrichon in the next room.

“If I die out yonder,” he said to him in a choking voice, “you will be a father to her.’’

He never reached America. The vessel which carried him, caught in a sudden gale, was driven back and wrecked on the coast of France. Madeleine only heard of the death of her father a long time after.

The day after Férat had started, Lobrichon took the child to a boarding-school at Les Ternes, which an old lady with whom he was acquainted had recommended to him as an excellent establishment. The two thousand Frances were amply sufficient to pay for her board and tuition, and the former dealer in second-hand clothes was not sorry to get rid at once of a little brat whose noisy games disturbed the selfish upstart’s quiet.

The school, surrounded by big gardens, was a very comfortable retreat. The ladies who kept it, took only a few pupils; they had put their terms high so as to have none but rich men’s daughters. They taught their scholars excellent manners; the tuition was more in bows and fashionable simpers than in the catechism and orthography. When a young lady left their school, she was perfectly ignorant, but she could enter a drawing-room, a perfect mistress of coquetry, equipped with every Parisian grace. The ladies knew their trade, and had succeeded in earning for their establishment a reputation for stylish elegance. They conferred an honour on a family by taking charge of a child and undertaking to turn her out a wonderful charming doll.

Madeleine was never at home amongst such surroundings. She was wanting in pliancy, she was noisy and impulsive. During play-hours, she romped like a boy, with joyous transports that disturbed the elegant retreat. Had her father brought her up by his side, she would have become fearless, frank, straightforward, and proudly strong.