Complete Works of Emile Zola (760 page)

For three days they sulked with each other, and then made friends again. To win her over to his musical scheme, Lazare wished to teach her to play on the piano. He showed her how to place her fingers on the keys, and kept her for hours running up and down the scales. But she discouraged him very much by her lack of enthusiasm. She was always on the look-out for something to laugh at and make a joke of, and took great delight in making Minouche promenade along the key-board and execute barbaric symphonies with her paws, asserting that the cat was playing the famous banish­ment from the Earthly Paradise, whereat the composer himself smiled. Then they broke out into boisterous fun again, she threw her arms round his neck, and he spun her round like a top, while Minouche, joining in the merriment, sprang from the table to the top of the cupboard. As for Matthew, he was not admitted into the room, as he was apt to become over-riotous when he felt merry.

‘You drive me crazy, you wretched little shopkeeper!’ Lazare one day broke out, quite impatiently. ‘You had better get my mother to teach you, if you can persuade her to do so.’

‘All this music of yours will never do you any good, you know,’ Pauline answered quite roundly. ‘If I were you I would be a doctor.’

He stared at her fiercely. A doctor, indeed! What had put that idea into her head? He worked himself into a state of excitement that made him lose all self-control.

‘Listen to me!’ he cried. ‘If they won’t let me be a musician, I’ll kill myself!’

The summer completed Chanteau’s restoration to health, and Pauline was now able to follow Lazare in his rambles out of doors. The big room was deserted, and they set off on wild adventures together. For some days they confined themselves to the terrace, where vegetated tufts of tamarisks, which the salt winds had nipped and blighted. Then they invaded the yard, broke the chain belonging to the well, terrified the dozen skinny fowls that lived upon grasshoppers, and hid themselves in the empty stable and coach-house and knocked the plaster off the walls. Thence they slipped into the kitchen-garden, a bit of poor dry ground, which Véronique dug and hoed like a peasant. There were four beds sown with tough vegetables and planted with miserable stumps of pear-trees, which were all bent by the north-west gales. And while here, on pushing open a little door, they found them­selves on the cliffs, under the broad sky, with the open sea in front of them. Pauline’s absorbing interest in that mighty expanse of water, now so soft and pure under the bright July sun, had never diminished. It was always for the sea that she looked from every window in the house. But she had never yet been near it, and a new era in her life commenced when she found herself alone with Lazare in the solitude of the shore.

What happy times they had together! Madame Chanteau grumbled and wanted to keep them in the house, in spite of all her confidence in Pauline’s discretion; and so they never went out through the yard, where Véronique would have seen them, but glided stealthily through the kitchen-garden, and so escaped, to appear no more till evening. They soon found their rambles round the church and the graveyard, with its shadowing yews and the priest’s salad-beds, a trifle monotonous, and in a week they had quite exhausted the attractions of Bonneville, with its thirty cottages clinging to the side of the cliff and its strip of shingle where the fisher­men drew up their boats. When the tide was low it was far more amusing to wander along at the foot of the cliffs. They walked over fine sand, frightening the little crabs that scudded away before them, or jumped from rock to rock among the thick seaweed and the sparkling pools where shrimps were skimming about; to say nothing of the fish they caught, of the mussels they ate, raw and even without bread, or the strange-looking creatures they carried away in their handkerchiefs, or the odd discoveries they sometimes made, such as that of a stranded dab or a little lobster lurking at the bottom of a hole. They would sometimes let them­selves be overtaken by the rising tide and rush merrily for refuge to some big rock, to wait there till the ebb allowed them to go their way again. They were perfectly happy as they came back home in the evening wet through and with their hair all tossed about by the wind. And they grew so accustomed to this life in the fresh salt breezes that they found the atmosphere of the lamp-lighted room at night quite suffocating.

But their greatest pleasure of all was bathing. The beach was too rocky to attract the inhabitants of Caen and Bayeux, and, whereas every year new villas rose on the cliffs at Arromanches, never a single bather made his appearance at Bonneville. Lazare and Pauline had discovered, about half a mile from the village, over towards Port-en-Bessin, a delightful spot, a little bay shut in by two rocky cliffs and carpeted with soft glittering sand. They called it the Golden Bay, for its secluded waves seemed to wash up pieces of glittering gold. They were quite alone and undisturbed there, and undressed and slipped on their bathing things without any feeling of shame. Lazare in a week taught Pauline to swim. She was much more enthusiastic about this than she had been about the piano, and in her plucky attempts she often swallowed big mouthfuls of salt water. If a larger wave than usual sent them tottering one against the other, they laughed gleefully; and when they came out of the water, they went romping over the sand till the wind had dried them. This was much more amusing than fishing.

The days slipped away, however, and August came round, and as yet Lazare had come to no decision. In October Pauline was to go to a boarding-school at Bayeux. When bathing had tired them, they would sit on the sand and talk over the state of their affairs gravely and sensibly. Pauline had succeeded in interesting Lazare in medical matters by telling him that if she were a man she should think nothing nobler or more delightful than to be able to cure ailing people. Besides, for the last week or so, the Earthly Para­dise had not been getting on satisfactorily, and Lazare was beginning to have doubts about his genius for music. At any rate, there had been great glory won in the practice of medicine, and he bethought him of many illustrious names, Hippocrates, Ambrose Paré, and others.

One afternoon, however, he burst out into a loud cry of delight. He had the score of his masterpiece in his hand at the time. It was all rubbish, he said, that Paradise of his, and could not be worked out. He would destroy it all, and write quite a new symphony on Grief, which should describe in sublime harmonies the hopeless despair of Humanity groaning beneath the skies. He retained the march of Adam and Eve, and boldly transferred it to his new work as the ‘March of Death.’ For a week his enthusiasm increased every hour, and the whole universe entered into the scheme of his symphony. But, when another week had passed away, Pauline was very much astonished to hear him say one evening that he was quite willing to go and study medicine in Paris. He was really thinking that by doing so he would be near the Conservatoire, and would then be able to see what could be done. Madame Chanteau, however, was delighted. She would certainly have preferred seeing her son hold some judicial or administrative office, but, at any rate, doctors were very respectable persons and sometimes made a good deal of money. ‘You must be a little witch!’ she said, kissing Pauline; ‘you have more than repaid us, my dear, for taking you.’

Everything was settled. Lazare was to leave on the 1st of October. During the month of September that remained to them they gave themselves up with greater fervour than ever to their romps and rambles, resolved to finish their term of freedom in a worthy manner. They sported about in the Golden Bay at times till darkness sur­prised them there.

One evening they were sitting on the beach, watching the stars appear like fiery beads in the paling sky. Pauline gazed at them with the placid admiration of a healthy child, whereas Lazare, who had become feverish ever since he had been preparing for his departure, blinked nervously, while in his mind revolved all kinds of schemes and ambitions for the future.

‘How lovely the stars are!’ said Pauline quietly, after a long interval of silence.

He made no reply. All his cheerfulness had left him; his gaze seemed disturbed by some inward anxiety. Up in the sky the stars were growing thicker every minute, as if sparks were being cast by the handful across the heavens.

‘You have never learned anything about them, have you?’ he said at last. ‘Each star up yonder is a sun, round which there are planets wheeling like the earth. There are thousands and thousands of them; and far away beyond those you can see are legions of others. There is no end to them.’ Then he became silent for a moment. By-and-by he resumed in a voice that quivered with emotion: ‘I don’t like to look at them; they make me feel afraid.’

The rising tide was raising a distant wail, like the mournful cry of a multitude lamenting its wretchedness. Over the horizon, black now with fallen night, glittered the gold-dust of wheeling worlds. And amid that sad wail that echoed round them from the world, pressed low beneath the countless stars, Pauline thought she detected a sound of bitter sobbing beside her.

‘What is the matter with you? Are you ill?’

Lazare made no answer. He was indeed sobbing, with his face hidden in his convulsively twitching hands, as though he wanted to blot out the sight of everything. And as soon as he was able to speak, he gasped: ‘Oh, to die! to die!’

The scene filled Pauline with long-lasting astonishment. Lazare rose to his feet with difficulty, and they went back to Bonneville through the darkness, the rising tide pressing closely upon them. Neither spoke a word to the other. As Pauline watched the young man go on in front of her, he seemed to grow shorter, to bend beneath the breeze from the west.

That evening they found a newcomer waiting for them in the dining-room, talking to Chanteau. For a week past they had been expecting the arrival of a young girl called Louise, who was eleven years and a half old, and came to spend a fortnight every year at Bonneville. They had twice gone to meet her at Arromanches, without finding her, and now, that evening, when no one was looking for her, she had turned up quite unexpectedly. Louise’s mother had died in Madame Chanteau’s arms, recommending her daughter to the other’s care. Her father, Monsieur Thibaudier, a banker at Caen, had married again six months afterwards, and had already three children by his present wife. Absorbed by his new family and business matters, he had sent Louise to a boarding-school, and was only too glad when he could get her off his hands during the holidays by sending her upon a round of visits to her friends. He gave himself as little trouble about her as possible, and she had come to the Chanteaus’ a week behind her time, in the charge of a servant. ‘The master had so much to worry him,’ said the latter, who returned home immediately she had deposited her charge at Bonneville, with an intimation that Mademoiselle’s father would do his best to come and fetch her himself when her time was up.

‘Come along, Lazare!’ cried Chanteau. ‘Here she is at last!’

Louise smiled and kissed the young man on both his cheeks, though the acquaintance between them was slight, for she had been constantly shut up in school, and it was barely a year since he had left college. Their knowledge of each other really dated from their last holidays, and Lazare had hitherto treated the girl somewhat ceremoniously, fancying that she already considered herself grown-up, and despised any youthful display of boisterousness.

‘Well, Pauline, aren’t you going to kiss her?’ said Chanteau, entering the room. ‘She is older than you by a year and a half, you know. You must be very fond of each other; it will please me very much to see you so.’

Pauline looked keenly at Louise, who was slight and delicate, with somewhat irregular though very pleasing features. Her hair was thick and fair, and was curled and arranged like that of a young woman. Pauline turned a little pale on seeing Louise kiss Lazare; and when she herself was kissed by her with a smile, it was with quivering lips that she returned the salute.

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked her aunt. ‘Are you cold?’

‘Yes, I think I am a little. The wind was rather chilly,’ she answered, blushing at the falsehood she was telling.

When they sat down to dinner she ate nothing. Her eyes never strayed from the faces of those who were present, and became very black whenever her uncle or her cousin or even Véronique paid any attention to Louise. But she seemed to be especially pained when Matthew, making his customary round of the table, went and laid his huge head upon the newcomer’s knee. It was quite in vain that she called him to her. He would not leave Louise, who gorged him with sugar.

When they rose from the table, Pauline immediately left the room. Véronique was clearing the things away, and as she came back from the kitchen for a fresh trayful she said, with a triumphant expression: ‘Ah, Madame! I know you think your Pauline quite perfect, but just go and look at her now in the yard.’

They all went out to see. Hiding away behind the coach­house, Pauline was holding Matthew against the wall, and, apparently mad with passion, was hitting his head with all the strength of her clenched fists. The poor dog seemed quite stupefied, and, instead of offering resistance to her blows, simply hung down his head. They rushed out at her, but even at their approach she did not desist from her cruel treatment, and they were obliged to carry her off. She was found to be in such a feverish, excited state that she was at once put to bed, and for the greater part of the night her aunt dared not leave her.

‘Oh! yes, she’s a dear little thing, a very dear little thing!’ sneered Véronique, who was quite delighted at having discovered a flaw in the diamond.

‘I remember, now,’ said Madame Chanteau, ‘that people spoke to me about her outbursts of temper when I was in Paris. She is quite jealous — what a nasty thing! I have noticed during the six months that she has been with us several trifling matters that haven’t pleased me; but, really, to try to murder the poor dog beats everything!’

When Pauline saw Matthew the next day, she threw her trembling arms round him and, kissing him on the nose, burst into such a flood of tears that they feared she was going to have another hysterical attack. In spite of her repentance, she could not restrain these outbursts of mad passion. It was as though some sudden storm within her sent all her blood boiling and hissing into her head. She had doubtless inherited this jealous violence from some ancestor on her mother’s side; yet she had a deal of common-sense for a child of ten years old, and used to say that she did all she could to struggle against those outbreaks, but without avail. They made her very miserable, as though they had been the symptoms of some shameful disease.