Complete Works of Emile Zola (131 page)

CHAPTER V.

MONSIEUR DE VIARGUE was dead. The truth had been concealed from William in order that the sad news might he broken gently.

Long after, the circumstances connected with this poor man’s death would make the servants of La Noiraude shudder. The day before, the count had shut himself up as usual in his laboratory. As she did not see him come down at night, Geneviève seemed surprised; but he sometimes worked late, and took some food up with him, so the old woman did not disturb him for dinner. That evening, however, she felt a presentiment of something wrong; the window of the laboratory, which usually shone over the country, like one of the red mouths of the infernal regions, remained in darkness the whole night.

Next day, Geneviève, feeling very uneasy, went and listened at the door. She could hear nothing, not a sound, not a breath. Alarmed at this silence, she shouted out, but there was no reply. She noticed then that the door was simply closed; this detail terrified her, for the count always double locked it when he went in. She entered. In the middle of the room, Monsieur de Viargue was lying dead on his back, his legs all stiff, his arms apart and convulsed; the grinning head, disfigured with livid spots, was thrown back, exposing the neck which was covered also with long yellow marks. In the fall, the skull had knocked against the floor; a little stream of blood was trickling on and forming a tiny pool right under the stove. The death-straggle hardly seemed to have lasted more than a few seconds.

At the sight of the dead body, Geneviève fell back with a shriek. She leaned against the wall and mumbled a short prayer. What terrified her most, were the marks on the face and the neck which looked like contusions; the devil had strangled her master at last, the imprint of his fingers clearly proved it. She had long been expecting this event; when she had seen the count shut himself up, she had murmured: “He is going again to invoke the Accursed One: Satan will be even with him; one of these nights, he will take him by the throat and so have his soul at once.” Her prediction was being realised, and she shuddered as she thought of the terrible struggle which must have brought about the death of the heretic. Her ardent imagination pictured the devil to her eyes, hairy and black, seizing his victim by the throat, tearing out his soul and then disappearing up the chimney.

The shriek she had uttered brought the servants. These domestics whom Monsieur de Viargue had carefully chosen from the most illiterate in the country, were convinced, like Geneviève, that their master had died in a conflict with the demon. They carried him down and laid him on a bed, with shudders of terror, as they trembled to see some unclean animal come forth from the black, open mouth of the corpse. It was firmly believed, for miles round, that the count was a sorcerer, and that the devil had carried him off. The doctor who came to inquire into the cause of death, explained it otherwise; he could see by the appearance of the livid spots which disfigured the skin, that it was a case of poisoning, and his curiosity as a medical man was singularly piqued by the strange nature of these yellow marks, the presence of which the action of no known poison could explain: he thought rightly that the old chemist must have poisoned himself by the aid of some new agent discovered by him during the course of his long researches. This doctor was a prudent man; he made a sketch of the marks from his love for science, and kept the secret of this violent death to himself. He attributed the decease to an attack of apoplexy, wishing by this to avoid the scandal there must have been, had any mention of Monsieur de Viargue’s suicide been made. There is always an interested respect for the memory of the rich and the influential.

William arrived an hour before the funeral. His grief was great. The count had always treated him with coldness, and when he lost him, he could not feel that the snapping of the bonds of an affection which had never been very close could tear his heart; but the poor fellow was then in such a feverish state of mind that he wept bitterly. After the restless and painful days which he had just spent with Madeleine, the least sorrow would melt him to tears. Perhaps two months before, he would not have even sobbed.

On the return from the funeral, Geneviève took him up to her room. There, with the cruel calmness of her fanaticism, she told him that she had been guilty of sacrilege, in allowing his father to be buried in consecrated ground. Unfeelingly, she related to him, after her fashion, the story of that death which she attributed to the devil. Perhaps she would not have given these details over the hardly closed grave of the count, had she not wished to draw a moral from them; she adjured the young man, and solemnly implored him to swear that he would never form a compact with hell. William swore to everything she asked. He listened to her with a stupefied look, crushed by his grief, unable to understand why she spoke of Satan, and feeling himself going mad at the tale, uttered in her shrill voice, of his father’s struggle with the devil. He listened quietly to what she said about the spots on the face and neck of the dead body, but he became quite pale, not daring yet to accept the thought which presented itself to his mind.

He was informed, just at this moment, that somebody wished to speak to him. In the hall, William found the doctor, who had investigated the cause of death. Then, this man, after beating about the bush for a long time, told him the horrible truth; be added, that if he had allowed himself to conceal it from the public, he had thought it his duty to declare everything to the deceased’s son. The young man, chilled by such a confidence, thanked him for his concealment of the facts. He was not weeping now, he was looking before him with a fixed and gloomy gaze; it seemed to him that an unfathomable abyss was opening at his feet.

He was going away staggering like one drunk, when the doctor held him back. This man had not come simply, as he said, to inform him of the real truth. Impelled by an irresistible wish to penetrate into the count’s laboratory, he had seen that a better opportunity would never occur: the son was to show him into that sanctuary, the door of which had always been closed to him by the father, during his lifetime.

“Excuse me,” he said to William, “if I mention these matters to you at a moment like this. But I am afraid that to-morrow it will be too late to investigate certain details. The marks which I noticed on Monsieur de Viargue, were of such a peculiar nature, that I am totally ignorant of the poison which could have produced them — I beg you to be kind enough to allow me to visit the room in which the corpse was found; that will enable me, no doubt, to give you more precise information.”

William asked for the key of the laboratory, and went up with the doctor. Had he been asked, he would have taken him anywhere, to the stables, to the cellars, without manifesting the least surprise, without knowing even what he was doing.

But, when he entered the laboratory, the look of this room astonished him so, that the shock roused him from his stupor. The big chamber was so strangely altered, that be hardly knew it again. When he had been in it before, about three years ago, the day that his father had forbidden him all work and all connection with science, it was in a perfect state of order and cleanliness: the tiles in the stove shone bright; the copper and glass-work of the apparatus reflected the clear light from the big window; the shelves that ran round the walls were covered with bottles, phials, and receivers of every description: on the middle of the table had stood piles of huge books, all open, and bundles of manuscripts. He still remembered the impression of reverential surprise produced on him by the sight of this study-workshop, littered methodically, so to speak, with quite a multitude of objects. There reposed the fruits of a long life of labour, the precious secrets of a philosopher who had questioned nature for more than half a century, never wishing to confide to anyone the results of his ardent curiosity.

As William penetrated into the laboratory, he expected to find again, in their place, the apparatus and the shelves, the books and the manuscripts. He entered into a veritable ruin. A storm seemed to have passed through the room, soiling and breaking everything; the stove, black with smoke, looked as if it had not been lit for months, and the heap of cold ashes which filled it had partly fallen out on to the floor: the copper of the apparatus was all bent, the glass broken: the phials and bottles on the shelves shivered into a thousand bits, lay piled in a comer, like those heaps of broken crockery one sees in slums; the shelves themselves were hanging down, as if they had been torn from their supports by some furious hand: as for the books and manuscripts, they were strewn, tom and half burnt, in another corner. And this wreck was not of yesterday; the laboratory seemed to have been devastated for a considerable time; huge spider-webs hung from the ceiling, and a thick layer of dust covered the rubbish that lay scattered everywhere.

At the sight of such destruction, William felt an oppression at his heart. He thought he could account for it. His father had formerly spoken to him of science with secret jealousy and bitter irony. He must have looked on it as a lewd and cruel mistress sapping his life-blood with her charms: and so, from tenderness for her, and disdain for the world, he would have no one take her after him. And the young man drew a sad picture of the day when the old philosopher, seized with rage, had wrecked his laboratory. He could see him kicking the apparatus against the walls, smashing the phials on the floor, wrenching down the shelves, and tearing and burning his manuscripts. An hour, a few minutes perhaps, had been enough to destroy the researches of a lifetime. Then, when not one of his discoveries, not one of his observations remained, when he had found himself standing alone in the midst of his laboratory in ruins, he must have sat down and wiped his face with a terrible smile.

What horrified William above everything, was the thought of the frightful days which the man had passed afterwards, buried in this room, this tomb where slept his life, his toils, his loves. For months, he had shut himself up here as before, touching nothing, walking up and down, lost in the nothingness that he thought he had found. He would crush beneath his feet the fragments of his beloved instruments, he would kick away disdainfully the scraps of his manuscripts, the broken pieces of the phials that still contained a few atoms of the substances that he had analysed or discovered: or he would finish the work of destruction, upsetting a vessel still full, or giving a last stamp to an apparatus. What thoughts of supreme disdain, what bitter jeers, what a longing for death must have risen to his powerful mind, during the long hours that he spent in idleness musing on the self-made ruins of his labour!

Nothing remained. As William went round the room, he noticed at last, however, an object which his father’s hand had spared; it was a sort of cupboard fastened in the wall, a little bookcase with glass doors containing small bottles full of liquids of different colours. The count, who had taken great interest in toxicology, had kept there certain violent poisons still unknown, and discovered by himself. The little bookshelf had come from a sitting-room on the ground-floor where William remembered to have seen it in his childhood; it was of foreign wood, ornamented at the corners with brass, and very chastely inlaid at the sides. This costly bit of furniture, of rich and wonderful workmanship, would not have disfigured a pretty woman’s boudoir. The count had dipped his finger in the ink and written the word “Poisons” on each pane, in big black letters.

William was deeply touched at his father’s cruel irony in preserving from all harm this cupboard and its contents. The whole life, the whole range of knowledge of the count was concentrated there, in a few phials of new poisons. He had destroyed his other discoveries, those which might have been useful, and out of his vast researches, out of the labours of his powerful mind, had bequeathed to humanity merely a few agents of suffering and death. This hit at learning, this sinister mockery, this disdain for mankind, this last avowal of sorrow, showed clearly what the death-agony of this man must have been, who after fifty years of study seemed to have found in his retorts nothing but the few drops of the drug with which he had poisoned himself.

William fell back to the door. Fright and disgust were driving him out. This filthy room, full of nameless rubbish, with its spider webs and its thick dust, exhaled a fetid odour which almost made him sick. The dirty heaps of broken bottles and old papers lying in the corners, seemed to him the filth of that science from which the count had estranged him, and which he seemed to have scornfully swept aside before dying, as one puts to the door a vile creature that one loves, with a contempt still full of longing desires. And as he opened the door of this poison cupboard, he fancied he could hear the pained laugh of the old chemist as he meditated for months on his suicide. Then, in the middle of the laboratory, he shuddered as he saw the narrow streak of blood which had come from his father’s skull and trickled right under the stove. He could see too that this blood was beginning to clot.

Meantime the doctor was rummaging about. The moment he had crossed the threshold, he had understood all, and he had become really angry.

“What a man! what a man,” he murmured. “He has destroyed everything, broken everything — Oh! if I had been there, I would have chained him up as a furious madman.” —

And turning towards William he went on:

“Your father was a very clever man. He must have made some wonderful discoveries. And see what he has left. It is madness, sheer madness — Can you understand it? A scholar who might have been a member of the Institute and yet preferred to keep to himself the result of his labours! Still, if I unearth one of his manuscripts, I will publish it, and it will be an honour both to him and myself.”

He went and groped about among the heap of papers, regardless of the dust; but he soon began to moan:

“Nothing, not a single whole page. I never saw such a madman.”

When he had visited the pile of papers, he passed on to the heap of broken bottles, and there continued to moan and cry out. He put his nose to the broken necks of the phials, sniffing, trying to discover the chemist’s secrets.