Complete Works of Emile Zola (125 page)

During the day, Madeleine went to fetch her belongings. She had an interview with her guardian, and made him submit to everything she wished. The old man, fearing a scandal, and still all shaken with the struggle of the night, stood trembling before her. She made him promise never to try to see her again. She carried off the title-deeds of her income of two thousand francs. This money was a great source of pride to her; it enabled her to stay with her lover without selling herself.

That very night, she was peacefully embroidering in the room in the Rue Soufflot as she had been the night before at her guardian’s. Her life did not seem to her too much changed. She did not think she had anything to blush for. None of her feelings of independence and frankness had been wounded in the fault she had committed. She had surrendered herself freely, and she could not yet understand the terrible consequences of this surrender. The future did not concern her.

The esteem which her lover had for women was only that which young men feel who have to do with creatures of an inferior class; but he had the boisterous good-nature of a strong man who lives a happy life. To tell the truth, he speedily forgot his remorse and ceased to pity Madeleine’s fate. He was soon in love with her after his fashion; he thought her very handsome and took a pleasure in showing her to his friends. He treated her as his mistress, taking her on Sundays to Verrières or somewhere else, and to supper with his comrades’ mistresses during the week. These people now simply called her Madeleine.

She would perhaps have rebelled if she had not been charmed with her lover; he had a happy disposition, and made her laugh like a child even at the things that hurt her. She gradually accepted her position. Unknown to herself, her mind was becoming sullied, and she was growing accustomed to shame.

The student, who had just been appointed army-surgeon the day before they met, expected his orders to start every day. But they did not come, and Madeleine saw the months pass by, saying to herself that she would perhaps be a widow next day. She had only expected to stay a few weeks in the Rue Soufflot. She stayed there a year. At first she simply felt a kind of affection for the man she was living with. When at the end of two months she began to live in anxious expectation of his departure, her existence was a series of shocks which gradually bound her to him. Had he set off at once, she would perhaps have seen him go away without too much despair. But to be always fearing to lose him and yet have him always with her, this succeeded finally in uniting her to him in a close bond. She never loved him passionately; she rather received his impression, she felt herself becoming a part of him, and she saw that he was taking entire possession of her body and mind. Now she found that she could not forget him.

One day, she went with one of her new lady friends on a little journey. This friend, a law-student’s mistress, was called Louise, and she was going to see a child that she had put to nurse some sixty miles from Paris. The young women were not to return till the third day, but bad weather came on and they hastened back a day sooner than they had arranged. In a corner of the compartment of the train in which they were returning, Madeleine pondered with a feeling of sadness on the scene which she had just witnessed; the caresses of the mother and the prattle of the child had revealed to her a world of unknown emotions. She was seized with a sudden feeling of anguish at the idea that she too might have become a mother. Then the thought of the near departure of the man she was living with filled her with dismay, like an irreparable calamity of which she had never dreamed. She saw her fall, she saw her false and painful position; she was eager to get home to put her arms round her lover, to beseech him earnestly to marry her and never leave her.

She arrived in the Rue Soufflot in a state of feverish excitement. She had forgotten the slender tie, ready to be snapped at any moment, which she had accepted; she wished in her turn to take entire possession of the man whose memory would possess her for life. When she opened the door of the room in the hotel, she suddenly stopped stupefied on the threshold.

Her lover was bending down in front of the window, fastening the buckles of his trunk; by his side lay a travelling bag and another trunk already fastened up. Madeleine’s clothes and belongings were spread out in disorder on the bed. The young fellow had received his orders to set off that very morning, and he had hastened to make his preparations, emptying the drawers, separating his own things from Madeleine’s. He wanted to get away before his mistress came back, really believing himself to be acting under an impulse of kindness. He thought a letter of explanation would have been quite sufficient.

When he turned round and saw Madeleine on the threshold, he could not suppress a movement of vexation. He got up and went towards her with a somewhat forced smile.

“My dear girl,” he said as he kissed her, “the time for good-bye has come. I wanted to go away without seeing you again. That would have avoided a painful scene for both of us. You see, I was leaving your things on the bed.”

Madeleine felt as if she would faint. She sat down on a chair, without thinking of taking off her hat. She was very pale and could not find what to say. Her tearless burning eyes kept looking first at the trunks and then at the heap of her clothes; it was this unfeeling division of property which put the separation in such a harsh and odious light. Their linen no longer lay side by side in the same drawer; she was henceforth nothing to her lover.

The young fellow was just finishing the fastening up of his last trunk.

“They are sending me to the devil,” he went on, trying to laugh. “I am going to Cochin China.”

Madeleine was able to speak at last.

“Very well,” she said in a hollow voice. “I will go with you to the station.”

She could not think that she had any right to utter a single reproach to this man. He had warned her beforehand, and it was she who had wished to stay. But her feelings revolted, and she felt a strange longing to clasp him round the neck and beg him not to go. Her pride nailed her to her chair. She wished to appear calm, and not to show the young man, who was whistling coolly, how his departure was tugging at her heart-strings.

Towards evening, a few friends came. They all went in a body to the station, Madeleine smiling, and her lover gaily joking, comforted by her apparent good spirits. He had never felt towards her anything but a good-natured affection, and he went away happy at seeing her so calm. Just as he was going into the waiting-room, he was cruel without meaning to be.

“I don’t ask you to wait for me, dear girl,” he said. “Console yourself and forget me.”

He went off. Madeleine, who had, up to this, preserved a strange pained smile, went mechanically out of the station, without feeling the ground under her feet. She did not even notice that one of the young doctor’s friends was taking her by the arm and going with her. She had been walking in this way nearly a quarter of an hour, stunned, hearing and seeing nothing, when the noise of a voice falling on the chilly silence of her brain, gradually compelled her to listen in spite of herself. The student was proposing to her unceremoniously to share his room with him, now that she was free. When she understood his meaning, she looked at the young fellow with an air of terror; then she let go his arm with a movement of supreme disgust, and ran and shut herself up in the room in the Rue Soufflot. There, all alone at last, she could sob to her heart’s desire.

Her sobs were sobs of shame and despair. She was A widow, and her grief at her desertion bad just been sullied by a proposal which, to her, seemed monstrous. Never yet had she so cruelly comprehended the misery of her position. The right to weep was being denied her. The world seemed to think that she had already been able to obliterate the kisses of her first lover. And yet she felt that these kisses were in her soul: she said to herself that they would always be burning there. Then, in the midst of her tears she swore to remain a widow. She felt the eternity of the bonds of the flesh; any fresh love would degrade her and fill her with avenging memories.

She did not sleep in the Rue Soufflot. She went the same night, and took up her quarters in another hotel in the Rue de l’Est. There she lived for two mouths, unsociable and solitary. One time, she had thought of shutting herself up in a convent. But she did not feel that she had faith enough. While she was at school, God had been represented to her as a nice young man. She did not believe in a God like that.

It was at this period that she met William.

CHAPTER III.

Véteuil is a little town of ten thousand inhabitants, situated on the borders of Normandy. The streets are clean and deserted. It is a place that has had its day. People who want to travel by rail have to go fifteen miles by coach, and wait for the trains that pass through Mantes. Round the town, the open country is very fertile; it spreads out in rich grazing-land intersected by rows of poplars: a brook, on its way to the Seine, cuts a course through these broad flat tracts and traverses them with along line of trees and reeds.

It was in this forsaken hole that William was born. His father, Monsieur de Viargue, was one of the last representatives of the old nobility of the district. Born in Germany, during the “emigration,” he came to France with the Bourbons, as into a foreign and hostile country. His mother had been cruelly banished, and was now lying in a cemetery at Berlin: his father had died on the scaffold. He could not pardon the soil which had drunk the blood of his guillotined father, and did not cover the corpse of his poor mother. The restoration gave him back his family possessions, he recovered the title and the position attached to his name, but he preserved a no less bitter hatred against that accursed France which he did not recognise as his country. He went and buried himself at Vétcuil, refusing preferment, turning a deaf ear to the offers of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., and disdaining to live amongst a people who had assassinated his kindred. He would often repeat that he was no Frenchman; he called the Germans his fellow countrymen, and spoke of himself as though he were a, veritable exile.

He was still young when he came to France. Tall, strong, and of fiery activity, he soon grew mortally bored in the inaction which he was imposing on himself. He wished to live alone, far from all public events. But his intelligence was of too high an order, the restlessness of his mind was too great, to be satisfied with the boorish pleasures of field sports. The dull unoccupied life which he was setting himself dismayed him. He looked round for something to do. By a singular inconsistency, he was fond of science, that new spirit of method the breath of which had turned upside down the old world that he regretted. He devoted himself to the study of chemistry, he who would dream of the splendour of the nobility under Louis XIV.

He was a strange scholar, a solitary scholar who studied and made researches for himself only. He turned into a huge laboratory a room in La Noiraude, the name given in the country to the château which he lived in, at five minutes’ walk from Véteuil. In it he would spend whole days, bending over his crucibles, always eager, and yet never succeeding in satisfying his curiosity. He was a member of no learned society, and would shut the door in the face of people who came to talk with him about his researches. He wanted to be considered a gentleman. His servants were never, under pain of dismissal, to make any allusion to him, or to the employment of his time. He looked upon his taste for chemistry as a passion whose secret follies no one had a right to penetrate.

For nearly forty years, he shut himself up every morning in his laboratory. There, his disregard for the bustle of the world became more pronounced. Though he never owned it, he buried his loves and his hatreds in his retorts and alembics. When he had weighed the substance in his powerful hands, he forgot all about France, and his father’s death on the scaffold, and his mother’s in a foreign land: nothing of the gentleman remained but his cold and haughty sceptical nature. The scholar had killed the man.

No one, moreover, could get to the bottom of this strange organization. His own friends were ignorant of the sudden void that had been made in his heart. He kept to himself the secret of the blank, that blank which he thought he had touched with his finger. If he still lived far from the world in exile, as he never ceased to say, it was because he despised his fellow-men both rich and poor, and compared himself to a worm. But he remained solemn and disdainful, icy even in his coldness. He never lowered his mask of pride.

There was, however, one shock in the calm existence of this man. A foolish young woman, the wife of a notary in Véteuil, threw herself into his arms. He was then forty, and still treated his neighbours like serfs. He kept the young woman as his mistress, publicly acknowledged her ten miles round, and even had the audacity to keep her at La Noiraude. This was an unprecedented scandal in the little town. The brusque ways of Monsieur dc Viargue had already caused the finger of dislike to be pointed at him. When he lived openly with the wife of the notary, people were for tearing him to pieces. The husband, a poor fellow who had a mortal dread of losing his place, kept quiet for the two years that the intimacy lasted. He shut his eyes and ears, and seemed to believe that his wife was merely spending a little holiday at Monsieur de Viargue’s. The woman became enciente and was delivered of her child in the château. A few months later, she grew tired of her lover, who was again passing his days in the laboratory. One fine morning, she went back to her husband, taking care to forget her child. The count was not fool enough to run after her. The notary quietly took her back, as if she had returned from a journey. Next day, he went for a walk with her on his arm, through the streets of the town, and from that day she became a model wife. Twenty years after, this scandal had not died out at Véteuil.

William, the child of this singular intimacy, was brought up at La Noiraude. His father, who had had for his mistress only a passing affection, mingled with a little disdain, accepted this child of fortune with perfect indifference. He let him live with him, that he might not be accused of wishing to hide the living testimony of his folly: but, as the memory of the notary’s wife was disagreeable to him, he never troubled his head about him. The poor creature grew up in almost complete solitude. His mother, who had not even felt any reason for getting her husband to leave Véteuil, never tried to see him. This woman saw now how foolish she had been: she trembled as she thought of the consequences her fault might have: age was creeping on her, and she followed the dictates of her plebeian blood and became religious and prudish.