The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (36 page)

‘There, what did I tell you?’ cried Rose when she saw them. ‘What a state she’s in! And how are we going to get back? My God, can you believe anyone has a head put together so queer as that? Monsieur should have strangled her, that would have taught her a lesson!’

‘Too bad,’ said Uncle Macquart, ‘I’ll put her in my bed. It won’t hurt us to spend the night beside the fire.’

He pulled back a curtain made of cotton fabric to reveal an alcove with a bed. Rose, grumbling, went to help her mistress get undressed. ‘All we can do is put a warm brick in for her feet,’ she said.

‘Now she’s asleep, we can have a drink,’ laughed her uncle with his great wolfish laugh. ‘It smells devilish good, your mulled wine, Mother!’

‘I put in a lemon I found on the mantelpiece,’ said Rose.

‘Quite right! I’ve got everything here. When I cook a rabbit, I do it properly, you may rely upon it.’

He had pulled the table over to the fire. He sat down between the cook and Alexandre, pouring the hot wine into large yellow mugs.

‘Goddammit!’ he cried, having appreciatively swallowed two mouthfuls. He smacked his lips. ‘That’s a fine mulled wine! Ha! You know how to make it. It’s better than mine. You must give me your recipe.’

Rose, calm now, tickled by these compliments, started to laugh. The fire of vine-stubs blazed red and threw out great heat. The mugs were refilled.

‘So,’ said Macquart leaning on his elbows to look straight at the cook, ‘did my niece come here just like that, on an impulse?’

‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ she replied. ‘It’ll make me angry… Madame is going mad, just like Monsieur. She doesn’t know who she likes or doesn’t like… I think she quarrelled with Monsieur le Curé before she left. I heard them shouting at one another.’

The uncle gave a coarse laugh.

‘They used to get on pretty well,’ he muttered.

‘No doubt, but nothing lasts if you’ve got a brain like Madame’s…
I bet she’s missing the beatings Monsieur used to give her in the night. We found the stick in the garden.’

He studied her more carefully, saying between two mouthfuls of mulled wine:

‘Perhaps she was coming to fetch François.’

‘Heaven preserve us!’ cried Rose, looking terrified. ‘Monsieur would go berserk in the house. He’d kill us all… That’s my biggest fear, you know. I am always scared he’ll come back one of these nights and murder the lot of us. When I think of that I can’t sleep easy in my bed. I imagine I am seeing him come in through the window with his hair standing up on end and his eyes blazing like matches.’

Macquart was delighted; he banged his mug noisily on the table.

‘That would be funny, that would be funny,’ he repeated. ‘He must hate you all, especially the curé, who has taken his place. He’d gobble him up, that curé, although he’s such a big chap, for madmen are terribly strong, they say… What do you say, Alexandre, can’t you just see poor old François jumping on him? He would clean the place up—what a treat that would be!’

And he winked at the warder, who was calmly drinking his mulled wine, and nodding agreement.

‘I’m only saying that for a joke,’ Macquart said, seeing the terrified looks that Rose was sending in his direction.

At that moment, Marthe was twisting and turning furiously behind the curtain. They had to hold her still for several minutes so that she didn’t fall. When she had stretched out again in her corpse-like stiffness, her uncle went back to warm his backside in front of the brazier, thinking aloud, and not thinking what he was saying:

‘She’s not a very easy woman.’

Then suddenly he enquired:

‘What do the Rougons say about all these goings-on? They are on the priest’s side, aren’t they?’

‘Monsieur was not so nice to them that they’re sorry he’s gone,’ replied Rose. ‘He didn’t know what to do next to annoy them.’

‘He was quite right about that,’ Uncle Macquart said. ‘They are skinflints. When you think they wouldn’t ever buy that cornfield opposite. That would have been a marvellous deal and I would have overseen it… Félicité’s the one whose nose would be put out if she saw François back again!’

He gave another laugh and took a turn around the table. And
relighting his pipe as if to wind up the conversation, he winked at Alexandre once more:

‘We mustn’t forget the time, my boy. I’ll come back with you… Marthe seems to have settled down now. Rose can lay the table while she’s waiting… You must be hungry, aren’t you, Rose? Since you have to spend the night here you’ll have something to eat with me.’

He went off with the warder. After half an hour he had not returned. The cook, bored with waiting there on her own, opened the door, and leaned over the terrace, looking at the empty road in the clear night. As she went back in she thought she could see on the other side of the road two black forms standing in the middle of a path behind a hedge.

‘It looks like her uncle,’ she thought. ‘He seems to be talking to a priest.’

A few minutes later Macquart arrived. That rascal of an Alexandre had been telling him tales the whole time, he said.

‘Wasn’t it you just now with a priest?’ asked Rose.

‘Me, with a priest!’ he cried. ‘Oh, where the devil did you dream up that? There is no priest round here.’

He rolled his small bright eyes. Then, apparently unhappy with this lie, he went on:

‘Well, there’s Abbé Fenil, but he might as well not be here. He never goes out.’

‘Abbé Fenil’s not up to much,’ said the cook.

Then Uncle Macquart got cross.

‘Why not up to much? He does a lot of good here. He’s a good chap… Very good. He’s worth a heap more than a whole lot of priests who cause trouble.’

But his anger suddenly subsided. He started to laugh seeing that Rose was looking at him in surprise.

‘What’s it to me, after all?’ he muttered. ‘You are right, all priests are tarred with the same brush. Hypocrites, the lot of ’em… I know now who you must have seen me with. I met the woman from the grocery; she was wearing a black dress, you must have thought it was a soutane.’

Rose made an omelette and Macquart put a slab of cheese on the table. They had not finished eating when Marthe sat up with the astonished look of a person who has awoken in an unknown bed. When she pushed back her hair and remembered where she was,
she jumped up, saying she wanted to leave straight away. Macquart seemed very cross at her waking.

‘Impossible, you can’t go back to Plassans this evening,’ he said. ‘You are shivery and you have a fever, you will fall ill on the way. Get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll see. Anyway, there’s no coach.’

‘You can take me in your cart,’ she answered.

‘No, I don’t want to do that, I can’t.’

Marthe, who was dressing in feverish haste, declared that she’d walk to Plassans rather than spend the night at Les Tulettes. Her uncle turned it over in his mind. He had locked the door and slipped the key into his pocket. He begged his niece, threatened her, made up fibs while she finished putting on her hat, without listening to him.

‘If you think you will make her give in!’ said Rose, calmly eating up her piece of cheese. ‘She’d rather get through the window. Harness your horse, you may as well.’

Macquart after a short silence, shrugged, shouting angrily:

‘I couldn’t care less anyway! Let her be ill, if she insists! I wanted to avoid an accident… Oh well, what’s it to me? Whatever will be, will be. I’ll drive you.’

They had to carry Marthe to the cart; she was trembling, in the throes of a terrible fever. Her uncle threw an old coat over her shoulders. He clacked his tongue gently and off they went.

‘I don’t mind a bit going to Plassans tonight,’ he said. ‘Quite the contrary!… You can have a good time in Plassans.’

It was about ten o’clock. The sky was full of rain with an orange light that lit up the road. All along the way, Macquart leaned out, peering into the ditch and behind the hedges. Rose asked him what he was looking for and he replied he had descended from the wolves of La Seille. He had recovered his good humour. A few miles from Plassans it started to rain, a cold, hard rain. Macquart swore. Rose almost came to blows with her mistress who was in agonies under the coat. When they finally arrived the sky had turned blue again.

‘Are you going to the Rue Balande?’ asked Macquart.

‘Of course,’ said Rose, surprised by the question.

He explained then that Marthe seemed to him very ill and perhaps it would be better to take her to her mother’s. However, after some hesitation, he agreed to stop his horse outside the Mourets’ house. Marthe had not even taken her key, but Rose luckily found hers in her pocket. However, when she tried to open the door, it did not give. The
Trouches must have bolted it. She banged on it with her fist without eliciting any sound except a faint echo in the large hall.

‘No point carrying on like that,’ said Macquart, with a wide grin. ‘They won’t come downstairs, it’d be too much trouble… Well, there you are stuck outside the door of your own house, children. My first idea was best, you see. We must take the dear girl to the Rougons. She will be better off there than in her own bedroom, I’m certain of it.’

Félicité uttered a shriek of despair when she saw her daughter at that time of night, soaked to the skin and half-dead. She put her to bed on the second floor, disturbed the entire house, got all the servants up. When she had calmed down a little and was sitting by Marthe’s bedside she asked them to explain what had happened.

‘How has this come about? How is it that you have brought her back in this state?’

Macquart, in his most genial voice, told her all about the ‘dear child’s’ journey. He protested that he had done all he could to prevent her from going anywhere near François. He ended up appealing to Rose for corroboration, as he could see Félicité studying him carefully and suspiciously. The latter continued to shake her head.

‘It’s a very peculiar story,’ she muttered. ‘There’s something I don’t understand.’

She knew Macquart of old and could tell by the secret delight which made the corners of his eyelids crinkle that he was up to something fishy.

‘You’re an odd woman,’ he said, working up his anger in order to escape this cross-examination. ‘You always think the most fantastic things are going on. I can’t tell you what I don’t know… I love Marthe more than you do, I’ve never acted against her interests. I’ll go and fetch the doctor if you like.’

Madame Rougon stared at him. She interrogated Rose at length but learned nothing. Whatever the case, she seemed very happy to have her daughter there with her. She made acid remarks about people who let you die of hunger outside your own door and did not bother to open it. Marthe, her head thrown back on the pillow, was dying.

CHAPTER 22

I
N
the hut at Les Tulettes it was blackest night. An icy draught brought Mouret out of the cataleptic stupor he had been thrown into by the crisis that evening. Crouched against the wall, he remained motionless for a moment, his eyes open, rolling his head gently on the cold stone, moaning like a child who is waking up from his sleep. But such a damp draught cut across his legs that he got up and looked around. Facing him he could see the door of the hut wide open.

‘She’s left the door open,’ said the madman aloud. ‘I expect she’s waiting for me. I must go.’

He went out and came back in again, patting his clothes in the manner of a level-headed man who is afraid he has forgotten something. Then he shut the door carefully behind him. He strolled across the first courtyard in a leisurely way, like any honest citizen out for a walk. As he went into the second courtyard, he saw a guard who seemed to be watching. He stopped and took stock a moment. But when the guard disappeared he crossed the yard to another gate which was open and led out into the country. He shut it again behind him, without surprise and without hurrying.

‘But she’s a good wife to me, I must say,’ he murmured. ‘She must have heard me calling her… It’s getting late. I’m going home, then they won’t be worried back there.’

He started down a path. It seemed to him quite natural to be out in the fields. After a hundred yards he forgot all about Les Tulettes, which he had left behind him. He thought he was coming back from a vine-grower from whom he had bought fifty barrels of wine. As he reached a crossroads where five roads met, he recognized where he was. He began to chuckle to himself, saying:

‘How silly I am. I was going to go up the hill in the direction of Saint-Eutrope. But it’s the road to the left I need… A good hour and a half and I’ll be in Plassans.’

Then, in cheerful mood, he followed the main road, looking at each milestone as if it were an old friend. He stopped to look with interest at fields, country houses. The sky was the colour of ash, lit by large rosy streaks, like the pale reflections of a dying furnace. Heavy drops
of rain began to fall. The wind was blowing from the east, and it was full of rain.

‘The devil of it!’ said Mouret, looking at the sky with concern. ‘I mustn’t dally, there’s going to be a real downpour! I’ll never get to Plassans before the rain comes. And besides I haven’t got very much on.’

And he drew across his chest the thick grey woollen coat that he had reduced to shreds in Les Tulettes. He had a deep bruise on his jaw and felt it with his hand, without being conscious of the sharp pain he felt there. The highway was deserted. He met nothing but a small cart trundling lazily down a hill. The driver, who was sleeping, did not return his friendly greeting. It was at the Pont de la Viorne that the downpour came. He found the wet unpleasant and went down under the bridge to shelter, grumbling that he couldn’t bear it, that nothing ruined your clothes so much as that and that if he had known he would have brought his umbrella. He stayed there a good half-hour, enjoying the sound of the streaming water. Then when the shower was over, he climbed up to the road again, and finally reached Plassans. He went to great lengths to avoid the muddy puddles.

It was nearly midnight. By Mouret’s calculations it was not quite eight o’clock. He crossed the empty streets, worried at having made his wife wait so long.

‘She must be wondering why I’m late,’ he thought. ‘Dinner will be cold… Rose won’t be very pleased to see me!’

He had reached the Rue Balande. He was outside the door.

‘Bother,’ he exclaimed, ‘I haven’t got my keys.’

But he did not knock. The kitchen window was dark, and none of the other windows on the front seemed to be lit either. The madman was beset with suspicion. With an instinct that was entirely animal, he sniffed danger. He drew back into the shadow of the neighbouring houses and studied the front of the house again; then he appeared to come to a decision, and went round by the Impasse des Chevillottes. But the small garden gate was bolted. So, seized by a sudden rage, he threw himself with prodigious strength against it, and, damaged by the damp, it split in two. He was bewildered by the violence of the break, not knowing why he’d just smashed it, and he tried to repair it by piecing it together again.

‘That was a silly thing to do, when it was so easy to knock!’ he
muttered with sudden compunction. ‘A new door will cost me at least thirty francs.’

He was in the garden. He looked up and seeing the bedroom brightly lit, he believed his wife was going to bed. That caused him great astonishment. He must have fallen asleep under the bridge while he was waiting for the shower to be over. It must be very late. And indeed the windows in the neighbours’ houses, Monsieur Rastoil’s, as well as those of the sub-prefecture, were black. His eyes travelled back to the second floor when he saw the gleam of a lamp behind the thick curtains in Abbé Faujas’s room. It was like a fiery eye lit up at the front of the house, blazing at him. He pressed his burning hands to his temples, losing his reason, reeling in the horrendous memory of some vanished nightmare, where nothing was clear, and where for him and his loved ones there stirred the threat of an old danger that had slowly increased and grown more terrifying; the house would be swallowed up if he didn’t save it.

‘Marthe, Marthe, where are you?’ he faltered in a subdued voice. ‘Come out and bring the children with you.’

He searched for Marthe in the garden. But he couldn’t recognize the garden any more. It seemed to him bigger and emptier and greyer, like a cemetery. The box hedge had gone, the lettuces were no longer there, the fruit trees seemed to have moved. He retraced his steps and got down on his knees to see if it was the slugs which had devoured everything. The box trees especially, the death of this high green hedge cut him to the quick, as if it were a living part of the house. So who had killed the box? What scythe had passed there, razing everything? Everything, even the little clumps of violets he had planted at the bottom of the terrace had been dug up. At the sight of this devastation, a soft moaning began in his throat.

‘Marthe, Marthe, where are you?’ he called again.

He looked for her in the small greenhouse, to the right of the terrace. The little greenhouse was piled high with the dry corpses of the tall box bushes. They were stacked up in bundles, in the midst of the trunks of the fruit trees lying here and there like limbs that had been cut off. In a corner the cage that had housed Désirée’s birds was hanging pathetically on a nail, with its door broken and bits of wire sticking out of it. Paralysed with fear, the madman took a step back, as if he had opened the door of a vault. Muttering to himself, his blood rising, he went up on the terrace and prowled around outside
the closed door and windows. His increasing anger made his limbs as supple as an animal’s. He crouched down, crept along quietly and looked for some crack he might squeeze into. The cellar window was wide enough. He slid in with the agility of a cat, scratching the wall with his fingernails. Finally he was inside the house.

The cellar was only on the latch. He advanced through the dense darkness of the hall, feeling the walls each side, and pushed open the kitchen door. The matches were on the left on a wooden shelf. He went straight to this shelf, struck a match to give himself enough light to take a lamp from the mantelpiece, without breaking anything. Then he looked around. There must have been some big meal that evening. The kitchen was in a mess, as if there had been feasting: plates, serving dishes, dirty glasses littered the table. Saucepans, still warm, were piled up in the sink, lay on the chairs and the floor; a coffee pot, forgotten on the edge of a lighted stove, was still boiling, tilted like a drunk. Mouret set the coffee pot the right way up again and tidied away the pans; he sniffed at them and at the remains of alcohol in the glasses, counted the dishes and the plates, grumbling more loudly than ever. This was not the clean, cool kitchen of a retired businessman; the food from an entire inn had been consumed there; this gluttonous mess reeked of indigestion.

‘Marthe, Marthe!’ he said again coming back into the hall, his lamp in his hand. ‘Answer me, tell me where they have locked you up? We must leave, leave straight away.’

He looked for her in the dining room. The two cupboards to the right and left of the stove were open. A brown paper bag of sugar on the edge of one of the shelves had burst and the sugar was trickling on to the floor. Above that he could see a bottle of cognac without a top on, plugged with a rag. He climbed on a chair to inspect the cupboards. They were half empty. The bottles of fruit preserved in brandy were all opened and begun simultaneously, the open pots of jam had been tasted, the fruit bitten into, the provisions of all kinds had been nibbled and spoiled, as if an army of rats had been at them. Since he could not find Marthe in the cupboards he searched everywhere behind the curtains, under the table; there were bones there amongst the crumbs of wasted bread. Syrupy stains had been left from the bottoms of glasses on the oilcloth. So he went across the passage and looked for her in the drawing room. But as soon as he got through the door, he stopped short. This wasn’t his home. The lilac
wallpaper, the carpet with red flowers on, the new armchairs covered with cerise damask astonished him. He was afraid he had come to the wrong house, and shut the door again.

‘Marthe, Marthe!’ he stammered again in desperation.

He had returned to the middle of the hall to think, unable to quieten the hoarse breathing that swelled in his throat. Where was he then, that he did not recognize any of the rooms? Who had transformed his house in this way? His memories were submerged. All he could see were two shades sliding through the hall: at first they were two black shadows, poor, polite, self-effacing; then they turned into two drunken, disreputable figures, laughing horribly. He raised the lamp with its flickering wick; the shadows grew bigger, lengthening along the walls, spread up into the stairwell, filled and consumed the entire house. Something foul, something decomposing in there had rotted the woodwork, rusted the iron, made cracks in the walls. He could hear the house crumbling, like plaster that had fallen with the damp, melting like a block of salt in warm water.

Upstairs clear laughter rang out, making his hair stand on end. He put the lamp down on the floor and went up to look for Marthe, on all fours, without making a noise, lightly and softly as a wolf. When he was on the first floor landing he crouched down outside the bedroom door. A ray of light showed under the door. Marthe must be on her way to bed.

‘Oh, that’s nice!’ came Olympe’s voice. ‘Their bed is really cosy. See how you sink into it, Honoré. I’ve got feathers up to my eyes.’

She was laughing, stretching, diving under the covers.

‘Shall I tell you something?’ she went on. ‘Well, ever since I came to this house, I’ve wanted to sleep in this cosy bed… I was dying to, I tell you! I couldn’t see that great gawk of a landlady tucked up, without a crazy longing to turf her out and put myself in her place… You get warm straight away! I feel as if I am wrapped up in cotton wool.’

Trouche, who was still up, was fiddling with scent bottles in the bathroom.

‘She’s got all sorts of perfumes,’ he muttered.

‘Well,’ Olympe continued, ‘since she isn’t here, we can enjoy the luxury of all this! There’s no danger of her coming to disturb us; I’ve bolted the doors… You’ll catch cold, Honoré.’

He was opening all the drawers, and feeling around among the underwear.

‘Put this on,’ he said, throwing Olympe a nightdress. ‘It’s covered in lace. I’ve always dreamed of sleeping with a woman who has got lace on… I’m going to put on this red bandana… Did you change the sheets?’

‘My goodness, no I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t think of it; they are still clean… She’s very careful about personal cleanliness, I’m not concerned about that.’

And as Trouche was finally getting into bed, she shouted to him:

‘Bring the grog over to the bedside table! We aren’t going to get out of bed to drink it at the other side of the bedroom… There, darling, my great big man, we are like real property owners.’

They had stretched out side by side, with the eiderdown up to their chins, basking in its soft warmth.

‘I ate well this evening,’ said Trouche softly after a silence.

‘And drank!’ added Olympe with a laugh. ‘I feel good; I can see things are changing… What’s annoying is that Maman is always on our backs; she was so bossy today. I can’t move a step in the house… There’s no point in the landlady going if Maman stays here acting like a policeman. It spoiled my day.’

‘Doesn’t the priest think about leaving?’ asked Trouche, after another silence. ‘If they make him bishop, he’ll have to leave the house to us.’

‘We don’t know,’ she said crossly. ‘Maman thinks perhaps she can keep it… We should be so well off on our own! I’d put the landlady in my brother’s room upstairs; I’d tell her it’s healthier… Pass me the glass, Honoré.’

Both drank and snuggled down under the blankets.

‘Huh!’ went on Trouche. ‘It wouldn’t be easy to get them out; but we could always try… I think the priest would already have moved if he hadn’t been worried the landlady would make a fuss and feel abandoned… I want to work on her. I’ll tell her some tales to get her to chuck them out.’

He had another drink.

‘Supposing I started making up to her, eh darling?’

‘Oh no,’ Olympe cried, starting to giggle as though she were being tickled. ‘You’re too old, you’re not handsome enough. I wouldn’t care at all, but she wouldn’t have you, that’s for sure… Let me take care of it. I’ll think up some scheme. I’ll get rid of Maman and Ovide because they are so nasty to us.’

‘Anyway, if you don’t manage to,’ he murmured, ‘I’ll tell everyone that we found the priest in bed with the landlady. That’ll cause such a scandal he’ll have to move.’

Olympe sat up in bed.

‘Well, that’s a good idea! We must start tomorrow. Before the month is out the house’ll be ours… I’ll give you a kiss for your efforts.’