Complete Works of Emile Zola (420 page)

Meanwhile, inside the brougham, Clorinde was prattling enthusiastically about the ceremony that had just taken place; while Rougon leaned back with sleepy eyes and listened to her. She had seen the Easter solemnities at Rome, she told him, but they were not finer than what she had just beheld. And she added that, for her, religion lay in a vision of heaven with God the Father seated on His throne like a glittering sun amidst the glory of His encircling angels, a host of lovely youths and maidens. But all at once she broke off to inquire: ‘Are you going to the banquet which the city is giving to their majesties to-night? It will be magnificent.’

She had got an invitation herself, and meant to wear a pink dress, brocaded with forget-me-nots. M. de Plouguern was going to take her, as her mother would not go out at night on account of the headaches to which she was so subject. However, she suddenly changed her subject again, asking abruptly: ‘Who was that judge you were with just now?’

Rougon raised his head, and said all in a breath: ‘Mon­sieur Beulin-d’Orchère, fifty years of age, of a legal family, began as public prosecutor’s assessor at Montbrison, was afterwards public prosecutor at Orléans, advocate-general at Rouen, a member of a mixed commission in 1852, and then came to Paris as councillor at the Appeal Court, of which he is now the president. Oh! I was forgetting; he approved of the decree of the twenty-second of January, 1852, confiscating the property of the Orléans family. There, are you satisfied?’ Clorinde began to laugh. He was making fun of her, she said, just because she asked for information; but there was nothing foolish — was there? — in asking about people whom one was liable to meet. She did not say a word about Mademoiselle Beulin-d’Orchère; but again began to talk of the banquet at the Hôtel de Ville. The grand gallery would be decorated with unheard-of magnificence, and a band would play the whole time the guests were dining. Ah! France was truly a great country! Nowhere, neither in England, nor in Germany, nor in Spain, nor in Italy, had she seen such wonderful balls, such prodigious galas. She had quite made up her mind now, she said, her face beaming with admiration; she meant to be a Frenchwoman.

‘Oh, look!’ she cried; ‘there are some soldiers there!’ The brougham, after rolling along the Rue de la Cité, had now been stopped at the end of the Pont Notre Dame by a regiment which was marching back to its quarters. It was one of the line. The soldiers, all of them little fellows, were hastening on like sheep, their march being somewhat irregular by reason of the trees planted along the roadside. They had been keeping the line for the procession; their faces were scorched by the hot afternoon sun; their feet were white with dust; and their backs bent beneath the weight of their knap­sacks and rifles. And they had felt so bored amid the jostling of the crowd that they still looked dazed and stupid.

‘I adore the French army,’ said Clorinde enthusiastically, as she leant forward to get a better view.

Rougon roused himself, and in his turn looked out of the window. It was the power of the Empire that was passing through the dust. A great many carriages had now gathered together on the bridge, but the coachmen respectfully waited for the soldiers to pass, and distinguished personages in gala costumes smiled sympathisingly at the little fellows who were so stupefied by their long day’s work.

‘Do you see those in the rear?’ exclaimed Clorinde. ‘There’s a whole row of them without a hair on their faces. How nice they look!’

Then, in her enthusiasm, she began to kiss her hands to the little soldiers from the depths of the brougham. She lay back a little so that she might not be seen. Rougon smiled in a paternal manner. He, too, had just felt a thrill of plea­sure, the first he had known during the whole day.

‘What’s going on here?’ he exclaimed, when the brougham was at last able to turn the corner of the quay.

A considerable crowd had formed on the footway and in the road, and the brougham had to stop again. A voice in the throng was heard saying: ‘It’s a drunken man who has insulted the soldiers. The police have just taken him into custody.’

Then, as the crowd parted, Rougon caught sight of Gilquin, dead-drunk, and held by a couple of policemen. His yellow duck clothes were torn, and his naked flesh showed through the rents. But he still retained his garrulous joviality and scarlet face. He addressed the policemen in the most familiar fashion, calling them his little lambs. He told them that he had been quietly spending the afternoon in a neighbouring café with some very rich people, and referred them for inquiries to the Palais Royal theatre, where M. and Madame Charbonnel, who had gone to see
Les Dragées du Baptême,
would readily confirm his statement.

‘Come, let me go, you jokers!’ he cried, suddenly stiffen­ing himself. ‘Confound it all, the café’s close at hand; come with me there, if you don’t believe me. The soldiers insulted me. There was a little scamp who laughed at me, and I shut him up. But for me to insult the French army! Never! Just you mention the name of Théodore to the Emperor and hear what he says. Ah! you’re a nice set, you are!’

The crowd roared with amusement, while the imperturb­able policemen slowly dragged Gilquin towards the Rue Saint Martin, where the red lamp of a police-station could be seen. Rougon had hastily thrown himself back in his brougham, but Gilquin, raising his head, caught sight of him. Then, drunk though he was, he again became good-natured and prudent, and casting a glance at Rougon, exclaimed, so that the latter might hear him: ‘Well, well, my friends: I might get up a scandal if I liked, but I’ve too much self-respect. Ah, you wouldn’t lay your hands on Théodore in this way if he drove about with princesses as a citizen of my acquaint­ance does. All the same, however, I’ve worked with great people, and cleverly, too, though I don’t want to boast about it, and never asked for a big reward. But I know my own worth, and that consoles me for other people’s meanness. Ah, confound it, are friends no longer friends, then?’

He spoke with growing emotion, his speech impeded by hiccoughs, while Rougon quietly beckoned to a man wearing a closely buttoned coat, whom he saw standing near his brougham, and, after whispering a few words to him, gave him Gilquin’s address, 17 Rue Virginie, Grenelle. And thereupon the man — a detective — stepped up to the officers as though he were about to help them with the drunkard who had begun to struggle. However, the crowd was greatly surprised to see the policemen turn to the left and bundle Gilquin into a cab, whose driver, after receiving an order, drove away along the Quai de la Mégisserie. Gilquin, how­ever, thrust his huge unkempt head from the window, and, with a burst of triumphant laughter, shouted: ‘Long live the Republic!’

When the crowd had dispersed, the quays resumed their wonted tranquillity. Paris, weary of enthusiasm, had gone off to dinner. The three hundred thousand sight-seers, who had struggled and crowded there, were now invading the restaurants by the water-side and those of the district of the Temple. None but country cousins paced the deserted pave­ments, quite knocked up and at a loss where to dine. Down below, in the floating laundry the washerwomen were finish­ing their work with vigorous blows. A last ray of sunlight still gilded the towers of Notre Dame, which now rose quite silent above the houses already dark with shadow. And through the slight mist ascending from the Seine, nothing could be distinguished among the grey mass of buildings, on the Ile Saint Louis, save the giant great-coat, that colossal advertisement hanging seemingly from some nail on the horizon, and looking like the garment of a Titan, whose body had been pulverised by the thunderbolts of Jove.

CHAPTER V

PASSION AND MATRIMONY

One morning towards eleven o’clock, Clorinde called at Rougon’s house in the Rue Marbeuf. She was on her way back from the Bois, and a groom held her horse at the door. She went straight into the garden, turned to the left, and halted in front of the open window of the study in which the great man sat at work.

‘Ah! I’ve taken you by surprise!’ she exclaimed.

Rougon quickly raised his head. The girl stood laughing in the warm June sunshine. Her riding-habit of heavy blue cloth made her seem taller. She was carrying its long train over her left arm, and its tight-fitting corsage clung to her shoulders and breast and hips like skin. She wore linen wristbands and collar, and a narrow necktie of blue silk, while atop of her rolled-up hair a tall silk hat was jauntily perched with a veil of bluish gauze powdered with the golden dust of the sunlight.

‘What, is it you?’ cried Rougon, hastening to her. ‘Pray come in!’

‘No, no,’ she answered; ‘don’t disturb yourself, I have only a word to say to you. My mother will be expecting me back to lunch.’

This was the third time that she had come in this way to Rougon’s house in defiance of all propriety. She made a point, however, of remaining in the garden; and upon the previous occasions, as upon this one, she had come in her riding-habit, a costume which seemed to confer masculine privileges upon her.

‘I’ve come to beg,’ she said. ‘I want you to buy some lottery tickets. We are getting up a lottery for the benefit of some poor girls.’

‘Oh, indeed; well, come in,’ repeated Rougon, ‘you can tell me all about it.’

She had kept her whip in her hand, a slight delicate whip with a little silver handle. And on hearing him she again began to laugh while gently tapping her skirt with her whip.

‘Oh, I’ve told you all there is to tell,’ said she. ‘You must take some tickets. That’s all I came for. I’ve been looking for you for the last three days without finding you, and the drawing takes place to-morrow.’ Then, as she took a little case out of her pocket, she inquired: ‘How many tickets would you like?’

‘Not one, if you won’t come in!’ cried Rougon. And he continued, playfully: ‘We can’t transact business at the win­dow, you know, and I’m not going to hand you money out as though you were some beggar-woman.’ — ‘Oh, I don’t object, as long as I get it.’

But Rougon remained firm. She looked at him for a moment in silence, and then resumed: ‘If I come in, will you promise to take ten tickets? They are ten francs each.’

However, she did not make up her mind without some further hesitation, and she even cast a hasty glance round the garden. There was a gardener on his knees planting a bed of geraniums. Then she smiled slightly and stepped towards the little flight of steps upon which the folding-window of the study opened. Rougon held out his hand and drew her into the middle of the room.

‘Are you afraid that I shall eat you?’ he asked her. ‘You know very well that I am the most submissive of your slaves. What are you frightened of?’

‘I! I’m not afraid of anything,’ she replied again, tapping her skirts with her whip, which she then laid upon a couch in order to fumble in her little case once more. ‘You’ll take ten, won’t you?’ she asked.

‘I will take twenty, if you wish it,’ he replied; ‘but do, please, sit down and let us have a little chat. You surely don’t want to be off at once.’

‘Well, then, it shall be a ticket a minute. If I stay a quarter of an hour, you will have to take fifteen tickets, and if I stay twenty minutes, you will have to take twenty tickets, and so on as long as I stay. Is that agreed?’

They laughed merrily over this arrangement, and Clorinde thereupon seated herself in an easy chair in the very embra­sure of the window which remained open. Rougon, on his side, resumed his seat at his table in order to put her at her ease. Then they began to talk, taking the house for their first subject. Clorinde glanced out of the window and re­marked that the garden was rather small, but very charming, with its central lawn and clumps of evergreens. Then Rougon began to describe the house to her. On the ground-floor, said he, were his study, a large drawing-room, a small one, and a very handsome dining-room. On the first-floor there were seven bedrooms, and as many on the second. Although to some people the house might seem a very small one, it was much too big for him, he declared. At the time when the Emperor had made him a present of it he had been engaged to marry a widow, chosen by his Majesty himself; but the lady had died, and now he intended to remain a bachelor.

‘Why?’ asked Clorinde, looking him straight in the face.

‘Oh! I’ve other things to do than to get married. When a man reaches my age, he no longer thinks about a wife.’

‘Don’t be so affected,’ replied Clorinde, with a shrug of her shoulders.

They had become intimate enough to talk very freely together. Clorinde declared that she believed Rougon to be amorously inclined, but he defended himself, and told her of his early times, of the years he had spent in bare rooms, which never a woman entered. Still, she went on questioning him about his lady-loves with childish curiosity, and he again and again replied with a shrug of the shoulders.

‘No! no wife for me!’ he cried at last, though his eyes were glistening at the sight of Clorinde’s careless attitude.

A peculiar smile played on the girl’s lips as she lay back in her chair. There was an expression of soft languor on her face, and her bosom gently heaved. When she replied, it was with an exaggerated Italian accent, and in a sort of sing­ing voice. ‘Nonsense, my friend; you adore us, I know. Will you bet me that you aren’t married by this time next year?’

She was really provoking, so certain did she seem to be of conquering him. For some time past she had been calmly offering herself to Rougon. She no longer attempted to dis­guise her snares and the clever way in which she had worked upon him before laying siege to his desires. She considered that he was now sufficiently overcome for her to bring the matter to an issue. It was a real duel that was going on between them, and although the conditions of the combat were not mentioned in actual words, there were unmistakable con­fessions in their glances. When they looked at each other they could not refrain from smiling. Clorinde had set her eyes upon her goal and went straight towards it, with a haughty boldness; while Rougon, infatuated though he was, resolved to play a wily game in order to prove his superiority. Their pride was engaged in the struggle quite as much as their passions were.