Complete Works of Emile Zola (1626 page)

Her voice was interrupted by sobs, and was tremulous and almost indistinct. And he, powerless, felt that he was growing sadder and sadder.

His happy morning had passed under a cloud. He was chilled by a sudden blast of doubt and despair. He had been so brave. His cheerful, hopeful spirit had given him strength. When things were going well, when material success seemed assured, he had thought he would be able to change men, to develop divine love in their hearts, the fecund plant of which the flower is kindliness and a sympathetic interest in the concerns of others. But if men remained in a state of hatred and violence, his work would not be accomplished; how could tenderness be awakened in them, how could happiness be taught them? That dear Josine, whom he had rescued out of such a depth of ruin, whom he had saved from such frightful destitution, was to him the very type of his whole work. - So long as Josine was not happy, his work would not be accomplished.

She was the woman, the wretched woman, the slave, the victim of toil, or lust, whose savior he had dreamed to be. It was especially by her, and for her, her among all women, that the future city would be built. And if Josine was still unhappy, it was because there was nothing solid as yet, because nothing had been established, because everything remained to be done. In his vexation he foresaw sorrowful days, and had a presentiment that a terrible struggle was going to take place between the past and the future, and that he himself would shed both tears and blood therein.

“Don’t cry, Josine,” said he; “be courageous, and I swear to you that you shall yet be happy, because it is necessary you should, in order that everybody may be happy.”

He said this so gently that at last she smiled.

“Oh! I am courageous, Monsieur Luc. I well know that you will not abandon me, and that your work will come out all right, since you are all kindness and courage. I will wait, I assure you, even if I have to wait all my life.”

It was like an engagement, an exchange of promises, in the hope of happiness to come. He was standing now, and had taken both her hands, which he was squeezing, while he felt that she was returning the pressure. For a few moments there was between them a union of tender feeling; what a blessed existence of joy and peace they might have led in that little dining-room, with its furniture of varnished spruce, so clean and cheerful-looking.

“Good-bye, Josine.”

“Good-bye, Monsieur Luc.”

After that, Luc walked homeward. As he went along the terrace, beneath which ran the road to Combettes, another meeting delayed him for some minutes. He had just perceived Monsieur Jerome, in his wheeled chair, passing by the grounds of La Crêcherie, pushed by a manservant. This apparition recalled other times when he had observed this feeble old man in this same chair, especially the first time, when he had seen him passing by the Pit, and looking with his blue eyes at the noisy, smoky buildings of those works in which he had founded the fortune of the Qurignons. Now he was passing La Crêcherie, and was gazing, with the same blue eyes, which seemed vacant, at its new buildings, which looked so bright in the sunshine. Why, then, had he made his servant roll him to that spot, as if he wished thoroughly to examine them? Perhaps it was mere chance. He was out for an airing; perhaps it was only the caprice of a poor old man who had fallen into second childhood. As the servant wheeled the chair slowly onward, Monsieur Jérôme raised his broad face, with its large, regular features, encircled by long, white hair, and with a grave, impassive look, examined everything, every façade and every chimney, although he seemed hardly to notice them, as if he wished to understand what this new town was that was springing up so near the house which he himself had erected in the past.

But another incident occurred, and Luc felt his emotion increase.

Another old man, likewise infirm, and shambling along on swollen legs, was coming up the road towards the little wheeled chair. It was father Linot, a fat man with flabby, white flesh, whom the Bonnaires had kept under their roof, and who on fine days took short walks around the works. At first, as his eyes were weak, he did not recognize Monsieur Jérôme. Then he gave a start, drew back, and placed himself against the wall, as if the road was not wide enough for two, and, lifting his straw hat, he bowed low and saluted profoundly. It was to the ancestor of the Qurignons, the master-founder, that the first of the Ragus, a wage-earner and the father of wage-earners, was paying homage. Years and, back of him, centuries of labor, suffering, and wretchedness bowed in that trembling salute. At the passage of the master, as decrepit as he was, the old slave, who had the cowardice of ages of servitude in his blood, faltered and bowed down. Monsieur Jérôme, however, did not even see him, but passed on, looking like some stupid idol, as he went on examining the new workshops of La Crêcherie, and perhaps without seeing them.

Luc shuddered. What a past would have to be destroyed, and what ill weeds would have to be rooted up, all connected with the existence of this poor old man! He looked at his town, just rising from the earth, and felt with what difficulty and under what obstacles it would have to grow and prosper. Love alone, he thought, and the influence of women and children, would be able to overcome them.

CHAPTER II

EVER since La Crêcherie had been founded, that is, for four years, an undercurrent of hatred against Luc had been growing strong in Beauclair. At first the feeling was only one of hostile astonishment, of ill-natured jokes about his enterprise; but afterwards, when the interests of Beauclair and La Crêcherie became complicated, anger took the place of pleasantry, and the old town felt the necessity of defending itself by any and all means against the common enemy.

It was the small tradespeople, the retail dealers, who first took the alarm. The co-operative stores in La Crêcherie, which they had made fun of when they were first opened, were succeeding, and, by slow degrees, not only the laborers from the works became their customers, but all those inhabitants of the town who joined the association. And it may easily be imagined that the old shopkeepers were much excited by this unexpected competition, and by the new scale of prices, which cut down the price of articles they sold one-third. It was a struggle in which they could not succeed; their ruin must shortly be accomplished if this miserable Luc should carry out his disastrous plans, and could persuade people that wealth must be more equitably divided, and that the poor ought to live better and cheaper in thi3 world than they had hitherto done. The butchers, grocers, bakers, and vintners would be forced, if he went on, to close their shops, if their position as middlemen was to be attacked, for no profits would cling to their fingers. And they cried out that such new ideas were abominable, that they would overthrow the social system, and that this would take place on the day that they should be forced no longer to increase their profits through the wants of the poor.

But the most concerned were the Laboques, the hardware dealers, who had once carried round their stock to fairs, and who had now opened a sort of large bazaar at the corner of Rue de Brias and the Place de la Mairie. The price of hardware had gone down, ever since La Crêcherie had been making considerable quantities of it, and what was worse was that the idea of association was spreading to the little workshops in the neighborhood; the moment seemed to have arrived when buyers, without availing themselves of the stock in the store of Laboque, were purchasing at first-hand in the co-operative stores of La Crêcherie, the nails of Chodorge & Co., the scythes and spades of Hausser, the machines and agricultural implements of Miranda. Besides hardware, the stores in La Crêcherie furnished many other articles, and the business of the bazaar grew less and less every day. Consequently, the wrath of the Laboques did not diminish; they were exasperated by what they called the cutting down of prices; they thought themselves robbed as soon as they were prevented from getting their own profit out of the money and the labor of the working-classes. Their place became, naturally, the focus of hostility and opposition to Luc and La Crêcherie; on their hearth burned the fire of all the hatreds excited by the reforms of a man whose name was never spoken without some epithet of execration. Foremost among his enemies was Dacheux, the butcher, stammering with rage against his new reforms, and Caffiaux, the saloon-keeper, who, though less violent, was poisonously rancorous against him, but did not lose sight of his own interests. Even handsome Madame Mitaine, the baker’s wife, sometimes deplored the loss of her customers, though she was always inclined to take a kindly view of things.

“Don’t you know,” screamed Laboque, “that this Monsieur Luc, as he calls himself, has one fixed idea at the bottom of his reforms? He wants to ruin us tradespeople. Yes, he is proud of it. He says openly — what is a most monstrous thing — that our retail business is mere theft, that we are all robbers, and that we ought to be put down. It was to make a clean sweep of us that he founded La Crêcherie.”

Dacheux, with an inflamed face, listened to Laboque with great, round eyes.

“And, then, how are people to get food to eat, and clothes to wear, and all the rest of it?”

“Indeed! he says that the consumer must deal with the producer.”

“
How about the money?” asked the butcher.

“Money? Oh! he does away with money, too. There won’t be any more money. Ha! Isn’t that nonsense? As if people could live without money!”

And Dacheux became half choked with anger.

“No more trade! no more money! Why, he wants to destroy everything! And is there no prison for such a rascal? He will ruin Beauclair, if we don’t look out!” But Caffiaux gravely shook his head.

“He says a good many things besides.... He says, in the first place, that -everybody ought to work. He would like to set up a
bagne
, where guards with clubs stood over all of us to see that we performed the tasks assigned to us. He says that there ought to be no more rich men and no more poor ones; that a man, when he dies, should have no more than he had when he was born; that people should earn what they eat, and that each one should earn no more than his neighbor, and should have no right to lay by money out of his savings.”

“Well, then, what becomes of inheritance?” again broke in Dacheux.

“There is not to be any inheritance.”

“What! no inheritance? Am I not to leave my money to my own daughter? Thunder and lightning! That’s a little too much!”

Here the butcher shook the table with a violent blow of his fist.

“
He says, too,” continued Caffiaux, “that there ought to be no authority of any sort, no government, no gendarmes, no more judges, no more prisons. Every one is to live as he likes, and eat and sleep as he likes.... He says that by-and-by machines will do all the work, and that all that workmen will have to do will be to run them. The world will be a kind of paradise, because no one will fight or quarrel; there will be no armies and no wars.... He says, also, that men and women, when they love each other, may come together for as long as they fancy the arrangement, and may then take up with somebody else. If there should be any children, the community will look after them, and bring them up wholesale, as it were, without any mother or father.”

Madame Mitaine, who had till then been silent, now made a vehement protest.

“Oh! poor little things!... I should hope that every mother might have the right to care for her own children. It may do for children whose heartless parents have abandoned them to be brought up anyhow, by the hands of strangers in foundling hospitals or orphan asylums.... All you are saying does not seem to me in the least proper.”

“You had better say it is pure rot,” cried Dacheux, beside himself. “Why, it is what you may see any day in the streets. Their future society would be nothing better than a house of ill-fame!”

Here Laboque, who had not lost sight of the fact that his own interests were at stake, wound up the argument.

“Your Monsieur Luc is mad. We cannot let him ruin and dishonor Beauclair. We shall have to combine and act against him.”

But anger grew greater still in Beauclair when it became known that the reforms at La Crêcherie had infected the neighboring village of Combettes. There was general amazement and indignation when they heard that Monsieur Luc had debauched and poisoned the minds of the peasants as well as of his workmen! That Lenfant, the mayor of Combettes, with the help of his colleague, Yvonnot, had drawn together and reconciled the four hundred inhabitants of the village, had persuaded them to hold all their land in common, and to draw up an agreement of association, like that which regulated capital, brain-work, and labor in the new works. There was to be, thenceforth, one vast domain at Combettes; all were to have the use of its machines and fertilizers; every man might make experiments in cultivation; harvests would be increased tenfold, and hopes were held out that there would be large profits to be shared. Besides this, the two associations were to be consolidated: the peasants were to furnish breadstuffs to the workpeople, who would give them in exchange tools and all other manufactured articles that they needed, so that the two classes, long opposed to each other, would by degrees be fused into each other, and the village and the works would form, as it were, the embryo of a fraternal people. Beauclair said that the old world would come to an end if socialism made its way among the peasantry — the great mass of cultivators of the soil, who had always been considered a barrier against any attack on personal property, men willing to perish on their own little plots of ground, which were inadequate to support them, rather than part with their land. The effect of this news ran through all Beauclair; there was a general shiver, which gave notice that some sort of catastrophe was at hand.

Here again the Laboques were the first people to feel the change. They lost their customers at Combettes. Lenfant — indeed, nobody came to buy spades, ploughshares, saucepans, and tools. In the last visit Lenfant paid them, he had tried to beat down their prices, and had ended by buying nothing, telling them bluntly that he could save thirty per cent, by not buying from them, as they were forced to make their profit on what they bought at the neighboring factories. From that day forward all the inhabitants of Combettes went to La Crêcherie, and became adherents of the co-operative stores, whose importance increased day by day, until they became a terror to all the little retail dealers in Beauclair.