Complete Works of Emile Zola (1598 page)

She was always happy, always sure that things in the end would turn out well. “That Caffiaux,” she said, “is a fellow that all women ought to damn!” She had just seen her man, Bourron, go into his place with Ragu, and she was very certain that they would bring out little change from a five-franc piece if they took it in there. But, then, it was quite natural that a man should want a little amusement after having gone through so much trouble. And she took little Marthe again by the hand and went away much pleased with her nice, new saucepan.

“Now, don’t you see,” Laboque went on, explaining matters to the peasant, “that we need the protection of the soldiers? I am for giving a good lesson to these revolutionists. We want a stable government, which knows how to strike a blow and can make what is respectable respected.”

Lenfant shook his head. His good sense made him hesitate to pronounce an opinion. He went away, taking Arsène and Olympe with him, and saying to himself:

“I only hope it will not turn out ill.... What things these tradespeople and workpeople are saying of each other!”

For some minutes Luc had been looking at Caffiaux’s saloon, which occupied the other corner of the Rue de Brias, opposite the Mairie. Caffiaux and his wife had begun by keeping only a little shop where they sold groceries; now that shop had become very prosperous. It exhibited sacks, with their mouths open, boxes of preserves piled one upon another, and every kind of eatable, protected by nets from the fingers of marauders. Subsequently, the idea had struck them that they might as well set up a wine-shop. So they hired the building next door to them, and turned it into a saloon and restaurant. There they rapidly made money. The factories were near them, so was the Pit, and these consumed a frightful quantity of spirits. A constant stream of workmen passed in and went out of Caffiaux’s place, especially on Saturdays, for Saturday was pay-day. Many stayed till late at night, got their meals there, and did not leave the place until they were dead drunk. Drink was their poison, and its seller the poisoner who destroyed men’s brains and bodies. Luc suddenly thought he would go in and see what was going on there. It was a very easy matter. He had had no dinner, and had intended to dine somewhere in the town. How many times in Paris had not his fancy for knowing all about the working-classes, for looking into the causes of their poverty and their suffering, led him to pass hours in worse places.

Very quietly he seated himself at one of the small tables near the tin-covered bar; the room was large; there were about a dozen workmen standing around, drinking, while others, seated at the tables, were quaffing, shouting, and playing cards, in clouds of thick smoke from their pipes, in which smoke the gas-jets seemed to make only red patches. At his first glance, Luc recognized Ragu and Bourron, sitting opposite to each other, talking excitedly. They had begun by drinking a bottle, then they had ordered an omelette, sausages, and cheese, and after that so many quarts were drunk that both became very tipsy. But what most interested Luc was Caffiaux himself, who was standing near their table. Luc had ordered a slice of roast beef for himself; and, as he ate it, he was listening to the talk of the proprietor. Caffiaux was a big man, stout and smiling, with a sort of paternal face.

“Didn’t I tell you strikers that if you had only stood out three days more you would have had your employers at your mercy, tied hand and foot? Good Heavens! You all know that I am with you — as indeed I am! Ah! yes, if you had not been in such a hurry you would have won the strike.”

Ragu and Bourron, much excited, tapped him on the arm. Yes — yes — they knew him! They were convinced he was a good, true friend. But, all the same, it was too dreadful to keep on with the strike, and it had to come to an end some time.

“Employers will always be employers,” stammered Ragu. “So what then? We had to accept their terms, and then give them as little as we could for their money.

... Another quart, Caffiaux, and do you help us to drink it.”

Caffiaux did not decline. He sat down. He was in favor of violent measures, because he had observed that his establishment, after every strike, grew more flourishing. Nothing makes men so prone to drink as quarrelling; a workman, when he is exasperated, is crazy for liquor; idleness and sullenness send many a man to the
cabaret
. Besides which, he profited in a crisis by being, amiable and opening small credits with the wives of his customers; therefore he never refused a man a glass of liquor, being sure it would be paid for in the end, thus securing for himself the reputation of being a good fellow, while pushing to the last extremity of ruin the victims of the poison that he sold. Some people, indeed, said that Caffiaux, with his insinuating manners, was a traitor, a spy in the service of the managers of the Pit, who had orders to make men talk by dosing them with poison. It was by privation that the miserable wage-earner, without joy or pleasure in getting drunk, was first led into the
cabaret,
and then the
cabaret
ended by gradually reducing him to worthlessness and ruin. Caffiaux’s establishment was a bad place, kept by a bad man, a place where he sold ruin and misery — a place which should have been rightly razed to the ground and its ruins swept away.

Luc, for one moment, had his attention distracted from the talk at the neighboring table by seeing the inner door of the grocery open, and a young girl, about fourteen, look in. It was Honorine, Caffiaux’s daughter, small, dark, and delicate, with beautiful black eyes. She was never allowed to stay in the
cabaret
. She served in the grocery, and she now appeared only to call her mother, who was serving wine at the counter. Madame Caffiaux was a large woman, smiling and motherly, while her husband was smiling and paternal. All these sharp, selfish tradespeople seemed to have handsome, healthy children. Would these children end by becoming, in their turn, sharp, selfish, and cruel?

Suddenly a sad sight appeared in this vile place.

Among its poisonous smells and its thick smoke, in the midst of a violent quarrel which had broken out at the bar, Luc saw Josine. She was standing there, so smoke-enshrouded, so absorbed in what she had come to do, that he at first hardly recognized her. She must have slipped into the
cabaret,
leaving Nanet at the door. Trembling and hesitating, she stood behind
Ragu,
who did not see her, as his back was towards her, and Luc was able for a moment to observe how worn was her once rosy face, yet soft and sweet, half shaded by her ragged shawl. But one thing that he had not seen before, when he stood by her at the Pit, now struck him; her right hand, which was no longer holding her skirts, seemed to be bandaged down to the wrist, the dressing, probably, of some wound.

Josine had at last summoned up her courage. She had looked in at the window and seen Ragu seated at a table. She now came forward with her poor, little, weak tread, and put her little girlish hand upon his shoulder. But he, insensible from drink, did not feel her touch, and’ she had to shake him before he turned round.

“By thunder! — is that you again? What have you come sneaking in here for?”

He struck his fist upon the table, and all the wine bottles and glasses rattled.

“
I had to come, since you will not come home,” she answered, turning very pale and half closing her great, frightened eyes, in expectation of a brutal blow.

But Ragu was no longer listening to her; he was furious; he was acting to a gallery of his comrades.

“I am going to do just whatever I please, and I won’t have a woman spying upon me, do you hear? I am my own master, and I’ll stay here just as long as I think proper.”

“Then,” said she, wildly, “give me the key. At least, don’t let me pass the night in the streets.”

“The key! — the key!” howled the man. “You are asking, are you, for the key?”

And in a burst of savage fury he sprang up, seized her by her wounded hand, and dragged her across the room towards the outer door.

“Don’t I tell you I have done with you — that I want no more of you?... Go and see if the key is in the street!”

Josine, staggering and bewildered, gave a sharp cry of pain.

“Oh! how you hurt me!”

By the violence of his grasp the dressing on her right hand had been wrenched off; the bandage was at once reddened with a large stain of blood, which did not prevent the man, who was now beside himself with liquor, from opening the front door wide and pushing the woman into the street. Then, when he had come back to the table, and had dropped into a chair before his glass, he stammered, with a hoarse laugh:

“Ah! well — if one listened to women, one would have mighty little pleasure!”

Luc, now beside himself, and furious at what he had seen, clinched his fists, ready to come to blows with Ragu.

But he bethought himself of the row that would ensue if he attacked those tipsy brutes. Half stifled in this horrible place, he made haste to pay for what he had had to eat, while Caffiaux, who had taken his wife’s place at the bar, tried to smooth things over by saying, with his paternal air, that, all the same, some women had no tact. “What can you expect to get out of a man who has drunk a glass or two?” Without answering him, Luc hurried into the street, breathing more freely in the open air. He looked round in all directions, pushing through the crowds, for his one idea when he left the
cabaret
so quickly had been to overtake Josine, to help her, not to let her die of hunger, not to let her perish without shelter on this dark, tempestuous night. But in vain he hurried up the Rue de Brias, and came back to the open space before the Mairie, in vain he forced his way among the groups of people; Josine and Nanet had completely disappeared. No doubt, dreading pursuit, they had hidden themselves somewhere; the rain, the wind, and the darkness seemed to have swallowed them up.

What frightful poverty, what execrable suffering! and it all arose out of labor — labor misused, corrupted, turned into a vile fermentation that rotted everything. And Luc, with a bleeding heart and a brain seething with dark forebodings, went on walking in the sordid and now threatening crowd which kept increasing every moment in the Rue de Brias. He again became conscious that there was terror in the air, something indefinable which was felt by all of them, the result of the recent class struggle — a struggle which had never really come to an end, but which, as all men knew, would recommence at the first opportunity. The resumption of work had made peace only for a time; the strikers had given way, but under their resignation there was a sort of low growl, a silent thirst for revenge. They had eyes in which cruelty was not extinct, but was ready to flame forth again. On both sides of the street were
cabarets
crowded with people; liquor was swallowing up the workmen’s pay, exhaling its poison on the very air of the street, while the shops in which provisions were sold were also full, their proprietors making the iniquitously large percentage that retail dealers exact from the scanty funds with which poor women hope to feed their households. Everywhere the starving working-class was being preyed upon, devoured, or crushed under the wheels of the great social grinding machine, whose teeth became sharper when it ran off the track. And Beauclair, in its mud, and under its flaring gas-lights, was full of a crowd wandering blindly, like sheep without a shepherd, towards a precipice — on the eve of some great catastrophe.

In the crowd Luc recognized several persons whom he had seen the previous spring, the first time he had been in Beauclair. The authorities were all there, no doubt dreading some outbreak. He saw Gourier, the mayor, walking with the sub-prefect, Châtelard. The former, as a man of property, felt uneasy, and would have liked to see the soldiers called out; but the other, with better sense, for he was a man who had had some experience in Paris, thought it wiser to trust to the gendarmes. —

Judge Gaume, too, was there, and with him was the half-pay captain Jollivet, who was going to marry his daughter. When they reached Laboque’s place they stopped to bow to the Mazelles, former tradespeople, who had gained their fortune quickly, and had been admitted into the good society of the little town. All these people talked in low tones to one another; they all looked anxious; they gave side-glances at the awkward workmen who, as it was Saturday, thronged the street. As Luc passed near them he heard the Mazelles, like others, talking about theft and looking as if they were asking questions of the judge and the captain. Gossip on this subject ran from mouth to mouth, telling about the five-franc piece taken from Dacheux’s counter, and the box of sardines carried off from the stall of Caffiaux; but, above all, the knives for paring leather that had been stolen from Laboque led to the most discussion. The general feeling of fear spread even among sensible people. Were the revolutionists arming? — had they laid plans for a massacre that night, that stormy night, when all was so black and dark in Beauclair? The miserable strike had disorganized everything. Hunger had made the poor unruly, the liquor sold in drinking-places made them mad for loot and murder. And thus all along the filthy, muddy street, and along the greasy sidewalks, all the poison and degradation of labor, the labor of the many used iniquitously for the advantage of a few, streamed onward — labor dishonored, hateful, and accursed, the labor that entails terrible suffering, besides theft and prostitution, which are its monstrous excrescences. Pale girls passed by who had been workwomen at the factories, had there been seduced, and then had sunk into the gutter; now, sordid and unhappy, they would be sought as companions by the drunken and dissolute. A feeling of intolerable pity, of revolt, part anger and part grief, took possession of Luc. Where could Josine be? — into what dark corner had she shrunk, with little Nanet? Then suddenly there was loud talking in the street; a wave of excitement seemed to have passed over the crowd; it became agitated and noisy. It almost seemed as if an attack were going to be made upon the shops; as if the crowd had looted the provisions set out upon the stalls before the windows. Gendarmes came running up, scampering to the fray; there was a noise from their heavy boots and the clink of their sabres. “What was it?”