Complete Works of Emile Zola (1756 page)

The times of human liberation, which had been so long in coming, which had been awaited so feverishly, were now being brought to pass by sudden evolutions. A terrible blow had been dealt to the Church, for the last Legislature had voted the complete separation of Church and State, and the millions formerly given to the priests, who had employed them to perpetuate among the people both hatred of the Republic and such abasement as was suited to a flock kept merely to be sheared, would now be better employed in doubling the salaries of the elementary schoolmasters. Thus the situation was entirely changed: the schoolmaster ceased to be the poor devil, the ill-paid varlet, whom the peasant regarded with so much contempt when he thought of the well-paid priest, who waxed fat on surplice fees and the presents of the devout. The priest ceased to be a functionary, drawing pay from the State revenue, supported both by the prefect and by the bishop; and thus he lost the respect of the country-folk. They no longer feared him; he was but a kind of chance sacristan, dependent on a few remaining believers, who from time to time paid him for a Mass. Again, the churches ceased to be State institutions, and became theatres rim on commercial lines, subsisting on the payments made by the spectators, the last admirers of the ceremonies performed in them. It was certain, too, that before long many would have to close their doors, business already being so bad with some that they were threatened with bankruptcy. And nothing could be more typical than the position of that terrible Abbé Cognasse, whose outbursts of passion had so long upset Le Moreux and Jonville. His numerous lawsuits had remained famous; one could no longer count the number of times he had been fined for pulling boys’ ears, kicking women, and flinging stones from his garden wall upon those passers who declined to make the sign of the Cross. Nevertheless, he had retained his office amid all the worries brought upon him by the citations he received, for he was virtually irremovable and exercised a paid State function. When, however, in consequence of the separation of Church and State, he suddenly became merely the representative of an opinion, a belief, when he ceased to receive State pay to impose that belief on others, he lapsed into such nothingness that people no longer bowed to him. In a few months’ time he found himself almost alone in his church with his old servant Palmyre, for, however much the latter might pull the bell-rope with her shrivelled arms, only some five or six women still came to Mass. A little later there were but three, and finally only one came. She, fortunately, persevered, and the Abbé was pleased to be able to celebrate the offices in her presence, for he feared lest he should have the same deplorable experience at Jonville as he had encountered at Le Moreux. During a period of three months he had gone every Sunday to the latter village in order to say Mass without even being able to get a child as server, so that he had been obliged to take his little clerk with him from Jonville. And during those three months nobody had come to worship; he had officiated in solitude in the dank, dark, empty church. Naturally, he had ended by no longer returning thither, and at present the closed church was rotting away and falling into ruins. When, indeed, one of the functions of social life disappears, the building and the man associated with it become useless and likewise disappear. And in spite of the violent demeanour which Abbé Cognasse still preserved, his great dread was that he might see his last parishioner forsake him and his church closed, crumbling away amidst an invading growth of brambles.

At Maillebois the separation of Church and State had dealt a last blow to the once prosperous School of the Christian Brothers. Victorious over the secular school at the time of the Simon case, it had fallen into increasing disfavour as the truth had gradually become manifest. But with true clerical obstinacy it had been kept in existence even when only four or five pupils could be recruited for it; and the new laws and the dispersion of the community had been needed to close its doors. The Church was now driven from the national educational service. Henceforth to the sixteen hundred thousand children whom year by year the Congregations had poisoned, a system of purely secular instruction was to be applied. And the reform had spread from the primary to the secondary establishments. Even the celebrated College of Valmarie, already weakened by the expulsion of the Jesuits, was stricken unto death by the great work of renovation which was in progress. The principle of integral and gratuitous instruction for all citizens was beginning to prevail. Why should there be two Frances? Why should there be a lower class doomed to ignorance, and an upper class alone endowed with instruction and culture? Was not this nonsense? Was it not a fault, a danger in a democracy, all of whose children should be called upon to increase the nation’s sum of intelligence and strength? In the near future all the children of France, united in a bond of brotherliness, would begin their education in the primary schools, and would thence pass into the secondary and the superior schools, according to their aptitudes, their choice and their tastes. This was an urgent reform, a great work of salvation and glory, the necessity of which was plainly indicated by the great contemporary social movement, that downfall of the exhausted
bourgeoisie
and the irresistible rise of the masses, in whom quivered the energies of to-morrow. Henceforth it was on them one would have to draw; and among them, as in some huge reservoir of accumulated force, one would find the men of sense, truth and equity, who, in the name of happiness and peace, would build the city of the future. But, as a first step, the bestowal of gratuitous national education on all the children would finish killing off those pretended free and voluntary schools, those hotbeds of clerical infection, where the only work accomplished was a work of servitude and death. And after the Brothers’ school of Maillebois, now empty and long since virtually dead, after the College of Valmarie, whose buildings and grounds were shortly to be sold, the last religious communities would soon disappear, together with all their teaching establishments, their factories of divers kinds, and their princely domains, which represented millions of money filched from human imbecility and expended to maintain the human flock in subjection under the cruel and fanatical clericalism.

Nevertheless, near the dismal Brothers’ school of Maillebois, where the shutters were closed and where spiders spun their webs in the deserted classrooms, the Capuchin community maintained its chapel dedicated to St. Antony, whose painted and gilded statue still stood there erect in a place of honour. But in vain did Father Théodose, now very aged, exert himself to invent some more extraordinary financial devices. The zeal of the masses was exhausted, and only a few old devotees occasionally slipped half-franc pieces into the dusty collection-boxes. It was rumoured, indeed, that the saint had lost his power. He could no longer even find lost things. One day, too, an old woman actually climbed upon a chair in the chapel and slapped the cheeks of his statue because, instead of healing her sick goat, he had allowed the animal to die. Briefly, thanks to public good sense, aroused at last by the acquirement of a little knowledge, one of the basest of superstitions was dying.

Meantime, at the ancient and venerable parish church of St. Martin’s, Abbé Coquard, encountering much the same experience as Abbé Cognasse at Jonville, found himself more and more forsaken, in such wise that it seemed as if he would soon officiate in the solitude and darkness of a necropolis. Unlike Cognasse, however, he evinced no violence. Rigid, gloomy and silent, he seemed to be leading religion to the grave, preserving the while a sombre stubbornness, refusing to concede anything whatever to the impious men of the age. In his distress he more particularly sought refuge in the worship of the Sacred Heart, decorating his church with all the flags which the neighbouring parishes refused to keep — large red, white and blue flags, on which huge gory hearts were embroidered in silk and gold. One of his altar3, too, was covered with other hearts — of metal, porcelain, coffered leather and painted millboard. Of all sizes were these, and one might have thought them just plucked from some bosom, for they seemed to be still warm, to palpitate and shed tears of blood, in such wise that the altar looked like some butcher’s gory stall. But that gross reincarnation no longer touched the masses, which had learnt that a people stricken by disaster raises itself afresh by work and reason, and not by penitence at the feet of monstrous idols. As religions grow old and sink into carnal and base idolatries they seem to rot and fritter away in mouldiness. If the Roman Church, however, was thus at the last gasp, it was, as Abbé Quandieu had said, because it had virtually committed suicide on the day when it had become an upholder of iniquity and falsehood. How was it that it had not foreseen that by siding with liars and forgers it must disappear with them, and share the shame of their infamy on the inevitable day when the innocent and the just would triumph in the full sunlight? Its real master was no longer the Jesus of innocence, of gentleness and charity; it had openly denied Him, driven Him from His temple; and all it retained was that heart of flesh, that barbarous fetish with which it hoped to influence the sick nerves of the poor in spirit. Laden with years and bitterness, Abbé Quandieu had lately passed away repeating: ‘They have for the second time condemned and crucified the Lord — the Church will die of it.’ And dying it was.

Moreover, it was not passing away alone; the aristocratic and
bourgeois
classes, on which it had vainly sought to lean, were collapsing also. All the ancient noble and military forces, even the financial powers, were collapsing, stricken with madness and impotence, since the reorganisation of the conditions of work had been leading to an equitable distribution of the national wealth. Some characteristic incidents which occurred at La Désirade showed what a wretched fate fell on the whilom rich and powerful, whose millions flowed away like water. Hector de Sangleboeuf lost his seat in the Chamber when the electorate, enlightened and moralised by the new schools, at last rid itself of all reactionary and violent representatives. But a greater misfortune was the death of the Marchioness de Boise, that intelligent and broad-minded woman who had so long promoted prosperity and peace at La Désirade. When she was gone the vain and foolish Sangleboeuf went altogether wrong, becoming a gambler, losing huge sums at play, and descending to ignoble amours; with the result that he was one day brought home beaten unmercifully — so battered, indeed, that three days later he died; no complaint, however, being lodged with the authorities, for fear of all the mud which would soil his memory if the real facts of his death were brought to light.

His wife, the once beautiful and indolent Lia, the pious and ever sleepy Marie of later times, then remained alone amid the splendours of that large estate. When her father, Baron Nathan, the millionaire Jew banker, suddenly died after being confined by paralysis to his sumptuous mansion in the Champs Elysées, he had long ceased to see her; and he left her as little as possible of his fortune, slices of which had already gone to all sorts of aristocratic charitable enterprises, and even to certain ladies of society who, during the final years of his life, had procured him the illusion of imagining that he had become really one of their set, and was quite cleansed of all his Jewry. However, his supine and indolent daughter, who had never known a passion in her life, not even one for money, paid due honour to his memory, even ordering Masses to be said for his soul, by way of compelling heaven to admit him within its precincts; for, as she often repeated, he had rendered quite enough services to Catholicism to be entitled to a place on the Deity’s right hand. And now, having no children, Lia led a lonely life at La Désirade, which remained empty and deathly, enclosed on every side by walls and railings, which shut out the public as if it were some forbidden paradise. Yet there were rumours to the effect that, on the closing of the College of Valmarie, the Countess had granted an asylum to her old friend Father Crabot, who had now reached a very great age. His removal to La Désirade was said by some to be a mere change of cell, for in an ascetic spirit he was content to occupy a little garret formerly assigned to a servant, and furnished with merely an iron bedstead, a deal table and a rush-seated chair. But he none the less reigned over the estate, as if he were its sovereign master; the only visitors being a few priests and other clerics, who came to take counsel of him, and whose gowns might be seen occasionally gliding between the clumps of verdure or past the marble basins and their plashing waters. Though his ninetieth year was past, Crabot, ever a conqueror of women, a bewitcher of pious souls, repeated the triumphant stroke of his earlier days. He had lost Valmarie, that royal gift, which he had owed to the love of the Countess de Quédeville, but he won La Désirade from the good grace of that ever-beautiful Lia, whom he so fervently called ‘my sister Marie in Jesus Christ.’ As manager and almoner he set his hands on her fortune, financing all sorts of religious enterprises, and subscribing lavishly to the funds which the reactionary parties established for the purpose of carrying on their desperate campaign against the Republic and its institutions. And thus, when the Countess was found dead on her couch one evening, looking as if in her indolence she had just fallen asleep, she was ruined; her millions had all passed into the cash-boxes of the Black Band, and there only remained the estate of La Désirade, which was willed to Father Crabot on the one condition that he should there establish some such Christian enterprise as he might choose to select.

But these were merely the last convulsions of an expiring world. All Maillebois was now passing into the hands of those Socialists whom the pious dames of other times had pictured as bandits, cut-throats and footpads. That whilom clerical centre had now gone so completely over to the cause of reason that not a single reactionary member remained in its Municipal Council. Both Philis, once the priests’ mayor, and Darras, the so-called traitors’ mayor, were dead, and the latter, who was remembered as a man of weak, timorous, hesitating mind, had been replaced by a mayor of great good sense and industrious energy; this being Jules Savin, the younger brother of the twins, those mediocrities, Achille and Philippe. Jules, after marrying a peasant girl named Rosalie Bonin, had worked most courageously, in fifteen years establishing an admirable model farm, which had revolutionised the agricultural methods of the region and greatly increased its wealth. He was now barely more than forty years old, and rather stubborn by nature, for he only yielded to substantial arguments which tended to the general good. And it was under his presidency that the Municipal Council at last found itself called upon to examine a scheme for offering some public reparation to Simon — that idea which had slumbered for a few years, and which now awoke once more.