Complete Works of Emile Zola (669 page)

“Friend — friend — friend,” repeated the madman, with an outburst of wild tenderness.

Disconcerted in his expectations, Octave little by little became seized with a young and passionate desire for Berthe. If he had at first been merely following his old plan of seduction, his wish to succeed by the aid of women, he now no longer beheld in her the employer simply whose possession would place the whole establishment in his hands; he desired above all the Parisian, that adorable creature of luxury and grace, which he had never had an opportunity of tasting at Marseilles; he felt a sudden hunger for her little gloved hands, her tiny feet encased in high-heeled boots, her delicate neck hidden by gewgaws, even for the questionable unseen, the make-shifts which he suspected were covered by her gorgeous costumes; and this sudden attack of passion went so far as to get the better of his shrewd economical nature, to the extent of causing him to squander in presents and all sorts of other expenses the five thousand francs which he had brought with him from the South, and had already doubled by financial operations which he never mentioned to anybody.

But what mainly put him out was that he had become timid at the same time that he had fallen in love. He no longer possessed his former determination, his hurry to reach the goal, enjoying, on the contrary, a lazy delight in hastening nothing. Moreover, in this passing weakness of his usually so practical mind, he ended by considering Berthe’s conquest to be a campaign of extreme difficulty, which required delays and the caution of high diplomacy. No doubt his two failures with Valérie and Madame Hédouin filled him with the dread of being once more foiled. But, besides this, there lurked beneath his hesitating uneasiness a fear of the adored one, an absolute belief in Berthe’s virtue, all that blindness of love paralysed by desire, and which causes one to despond.

On the morrow of the quarrel, Octave, delighted at having prevailed on the young woman to accept his present, thought that it would be well for him to ingratiate himself with the husband. Therefore, as he took his meals at his employer’s table — the latter being in the habit of feeding his assistants, so as always to have them at hand — he showed him the utmost attention, listened to him at dessert and warmly approved all he said. He even went so far in private as to appear to sympathize with his complaints against his wife, pretending, too, to watch her, and making him little reports. Auguste felt greatly touched;
he admitted one night to the young man that he had been on the point of discharging him, under the idea that he was conniving with his mother-in-law. Octave, turning icy cold, at once expressed the utmost horror of Madame Josserand, which had the effect of binding them together in a complete communion of opinions. Moreover, the husband was a decent fellow at heart, simply disagreeable, but willingly resigned, so long as no one upset him by spending his money or interfering with his moral code. He even swore that he would never again fly into a passion, for after the quarrel he had had an abominable headache, which had driven him crazy for three days.

“You understand me, you do!” he would say to the young man. “I merely want peace. Beyond that I don’t care a hang, virtue excepted of course, and providing my wife doesn’t carry off the cash-box. Eh? am I not reasonable?
I don’t ask her for anything extraordinary?”

And Octave lauded his wisdom, and they celebrated together the sweetness of an uneventful existence, year after year always the same, passed in measuring off silk. One evening, he had alarmed Auguste, by reverting to his dream of vast modern bazaars, and by advising him, as he had advised Madame Hédouin, to purchase the adjoining house, so as to enlarge his premises. Auguste, whose head was already splitting between his four counters, had looked at him with the frightened air of a tradesman accustomed to dividing farthings into four, that he had hastened to withdraw his suggestion and to go into raptures over the honest security of small dealings.

Days passed by, Octave was making his little nest in the place, a cosy nest lined with wool which would keep him nice and warm. The husband esteemed him, Madame Josserand herself, with whom however he avoided being too polite, looked at him encouragingly. As for Berthe, she was becoming charmingly familiar with him. But his great friend was Saturnin, whose dumb affection he felt was increasing daily, a faithful dog’s devotion which grew as his longing for the young woman became more intense. Towards every one else the madman displayed a gloomy jealousy; a man could not approach his sister, without his becoming at once uneasy, curling up his lips, and preparing to bite. But if, on the contrary, Octave leant freely towards her, and caused her to laugh with the soft and tender laughter of a happy mistress, he laughed himself with delight, and his face reflected a little of their sensual joy. The poor creature seemed to feel a gratitude full of happiness for the chosen lover. He would detain the latter in all the corners, casting mistrustful glances about, then if he found they were alone, he would speak to him of her, always repeating the same stories in broken phrases.

“When she was little, she had tiny limbs as large as that; and already plump, and quite rosy, and so gay — Then, she used to sprawl about on the floor. It amused me, I would go down on my knees and watch her — Then, bang! bang! bang! she would kick me in the stomach — And I used to be so pleased, oh! so pleased!”

Octave thus learnt all about Berthe’s childhood, with its little ailments, its playthings, its growth of a charming uncontrolled little creature. Saturnin’s empty brain treasured up unimportant matters, which he alone remembered: the day when she had pricked herself and he had sucked the blood; one morning when she had fallen into his arms on trying to get on to the table. But he invariably returned to the great event, the young girl’s serious illness.

“Ah! if you had only seen her! At nighttime, I was alone beside her. They used to beat me to make me go to bed. And I would creep back, with nothing on my feet. All alone. It made me cry, she was so white. I used to touch her to see if she was turning cold. Then, they left me there. I nursed her better than they, I knew all about the medicines, she took whatever I gave her. At times, when she complained a great deal, I laid her head on my breast. We were so nice together. Then, she got well, and I wished to return, and they beat me again.”

His eyes lighted up, he laughed and cried, just as though these events had occurred the day before. From his broken sentences the history of this strange affection could be spun together: his poor half-witted devotion at the little patient’s bedside, when she had been given up by the doctors; his heart and body devoted to the dying darling, whom he nursed in her nudity with all the tenderness of a mother;
his affection and his desires had been arrested there, checked for evermore by this drama of suffering, from the shock of which he never recovered; and, from that time, in spite of the ingratitude which followed the recovery, Berthe remained everything to him, a mistress before whom he trembled, a child and a sister whom he had saved from death, an idol which he worshipped with a jealous adoration. So that he pursued the husband with the furious hatred of a displeased lover, never at a loss for ill-natured remarks as he opened his heart to Octave.

“He’s got his eye bunged up again. His headache’s becoming a nuisance! — You heard him dragging his feet about yesterday — Look, there he is squinting into the street. Eh! isn’t he a fool! — Dirty beast, dirty beast!”

And Auguste could scarcely move without angering the madman. Then would come the disquieting proposals.

“If you like, we’ll bleed him like a pig between us.”

Octave would calm him. Then, on his quiet days, Saturnin would go from Octave to the young woman, with an air of delight, repeating what one had said about the other, doing their errands, and acting like a continual bond of tenderness between them. He would have thrown himself on the floor at their feet, to serve them as a carpet.

Berthe had not again alluded to the present. She did not seem, to notice Octave’s trembling attentions, but treated him as a friend, without the least confusion. He had never before been so careful in his dress, and he was ever caressing her with his eyes of the colour of old gold, and whose velvety softness he deemed irresistible. But she was only grateful to him for his lies, on the occasions when he helped her to hide some freak. A complicity was thus established between them: he favoured the young woman’s goings-out with her mother, putting the husband off the scent, at the least suspicion. She even ended by giving a free vent to her mania for excursions and visits, relying entirely upon his intelligence. And if, on her return, she found him behind a pile of wares, she thanked him with a good friendly shake of the hand.

One day, however, she experienced a great emotion. On returning from a dog-show, Octave beckoned to her to descend to the basement; and there handed her a bill, amounting to sixty-two francs, for some embroidered stockings which had been brought during her absence. She turned quite pale, and in a cry that came from her heart at once asked:

“Good heavens! has my husband seen this?”

He hastened to set her mind at rest, telling her what trouble he had had to get hold of the bill under Auguste’s very nose. Then in an embarrassed way, he was obliged to add in a low voice:

“I paid it.”

Then she made a show of feeling in her pockets, and, finding nothing, said simply:

“I will pay you back. Ah! what thanks I owe you, Monsieur Octave! It would have killed me, if Auguste had seen this.”

And, this time, she took hold of both his hands, and for a moment held them pressed between her own. But the sixty-two francs were never again mentioned.

With her it was an increasing appetite for liberty and pleasure, all that in her girlhood she had looked for after marriage, all that her mother had taught her to exact from man. She brought with her so to say an old unappeased appetite, she avenged herself for the needy youth passed at her parents’, for the inferior meat cooked without butter in order to be able to buy boots, for the laboriously acquired dresses remade up at least twenty times, for the lie of their position in life kept up at the price of black misery and filth. But she especially made up for the three winters she had spent in floundering through the Paris mud in dancing shoes, seeking for a husband; evenings dead with weariness, during which she gorged herself with syrup on a empty stomach; burdensome with smiles and modest graces directed towards silly young men; and filled with secret exasperations at being obliged to pretend to ignore everything, when she knew all. Then, there were the returns home in the pouring rain and without a cab; next, the chill of her icy cold bed and the maternal cuffs which kept her cheeks warm. At twenty-two years old, she was still despairing, and had become as humble as a cripple, looking at herself in her chemise at night-time, to see if she was deficient of anything. And now she had secured a husband at last, and like the sportsman who finishes off the hare which he has lost his breath in chasing with a brutal blow of his fist, she showed herself without mercy for Auguste, and treated him like a fallen foe.

Thus, little by little, the breach between the couple widened, in spite of the husband’s efforts, he being desirous of having no disturbance in his existence. He desperately defended his desire for a somnolent and idiotic peacefulness, he closed his eyes to small faults, and even stomached some big ones, with the constant dread of discovering something abominable which would drive him into a furious passion. He, therefore, tolerated Berthe’s lies, by which she attributed to her sister’s or her mother’s affection a host of little things, the purchase of which she could not have otherwise explained; he even no longer grumbled overmuch when she went out of an evening, thus enabling Octave to take her twice privately to the theatre, accompanied by Madame Josserand and Hortense; delightful outings, after which these ladies agreed together that the young man knew how to live.

Up till then, moreover, at the least word, Berthe threw her virtue in her husband’s teeth. She lived respectably, he ought to deem himself lucky; for, to her mind, as to her mother’s, a husband only had a legitimate right to complain when he caught his wife in the flagrant act of seriously misbehaving herself. This chaste behaviour, which was genuine during the earlier days when she was gluttonously satisfying her appetites, was not, however, much of a sacrifice to her. She was cold by nature, and selfishly rebellious to all the worries of passion; preferring to take her pleasures alone and utterly devoid of virtue. The court that Octave paid her simply flattered her, after the repulses she had experienced when a girl seeking for a husband, believing herself to be abandoned by men; and she profited from it in many ways, of which she serenely took advantage, having grown up with a mad longing for money. One day, she had allowed the assistant to pay five hours’ cab hire for her; another day, when on the point of going out, she had made him lend her thirty francs, behind her husband’s back, pretending she had forgotten her purse. She never repaid anything. The young man was of no consequence, she had no design upon him, she merely made use of him, always without thinking, just as her pleasure or circumstances required. And, meanwhile, she gloried in her martyrdom of an ill-used woman, who strictly fulfilled all her duties.

It was on a Saturday that a frightful quarrel occurred between the husband and wife, with respect to twenty sous which were deficient in Rachel’s accounts. While Berthe was balancing up the book, Auguste brought, according to his custom, the money necessary for the household expenses of the ensuing week. The Josserands were to dine there that evening, and the kitchen was littered with things: a rabbit, a leg of mutton, and some cauliflowers. Saturnin, squatting on the tiled floor beside the sink, was blacking his sister’s shoes and his brother-in-law’s boots. The quarrel began with long arguments respecting the twenty sou piece. What had become of it?
How could one mislay twenty sous?
Auguste would go over all the additions again. During this time, Rachel, always pliant in spite of her harsh looks, her mouth closed but her eyes on the watch, was quietly spitting the leg of mutton. At length, he gave fifty francs, and was on the point of going downstairs again when he returned, worried by the thought of the missing coin.