Complete Works of Emile Zola (989 page)

A number of the relations of the nine young men were gathered there. Delhomme and Fanny, proud of their son’s distinguished appearance, wished to be present to see him off, though they felt no anxiety, as they had provided for his exemption. Bécu, wearing his constabular badge of office, threatened to cuff his wife because she began to cry. What was she blubbering for? he asked. Wasn’t Delphin fit to serve his country with credit? The lad, however, would be sure to escape, and draw a lucky number. When at last the nine young fellows were all got together, a feat which it took a good hour to accomplish, Lequeu handed them the banner. Then they began to discuss who should carry it. The general rule was to choose the tallest and most vigorous of the number, and so it was agreed that Delphin should carry it. He seemed very nervous and timid, in spite of his big fists, shy at finding himself mixed up in matters which be did not understand. He seemed to find the long pole awkward to manage, and then it might conduct him to misfortune, he reflected sorrowfully.

At the two corners of the street, Flore and Cœlina were giving a final sweep to their respective public parlours, in view of being ready for the evening. Macqueron was looking out of his door with a sorrowful countenance; then Lengaigne appeared at his, with a sniggering grin on his face. He was in a very triumphant frame of mind just then, for the excise-officers had recently seized four casks of wine which they had found concealed beneath one of his rival’s wood-stacks. Macqueron, it was said, would be dismissed from his mayoralty in consequence, and every one felt quite sure that the anony­mous letter which had led to the wine being discovered had emanated from Lengaigne. To make matters worse, Macqueron had another trouble on his shoulders. His daughter Berthe had so compromised herself with the wheelwright’s son, whom he had previously refused as a son-in-law, that he was now con­strained to let him have her. For the last week the gossips at the fountain had talked of nothing save the daughter’s mar­riage and the prosecution of the father. It was certain that the latter would at least be fined; and it was by no means un­likely that he would be sent to gaol. And so the mayor, seeing his neighbour’s insulting grin, retired again, feeling painfully conscious that every one else was also sniggering at him.

Delphin had now grasped the banner, and the drum sounded the march. Nénesse fell into position, and the other seven took up their places behind him. They formed quite a little troop as they filed along over the level road. A swarm of children ran forward with them, and Delhomme, Fanny, Bécu, and several other relatives accompanied them to the end of the village. Freed of her husband, Madame Bécu hurried away and slipped furtively into the church. Then, glancing around and finding that she was quite alone, she fell down on her knees, though, as a rule, she was by no means addicted to dis­plays of devotion, and burst into tears, while beseeching the good God to grant her son a lucky number. She remained for more than an hour stammering out this heartfelt prayer. Far away, towards Cloyes, the banner was gradually fading from sight in the distance, and the rolling of the drum was lost in space.

It was nearly ten o’clock when Doctor Finet made his appear­ance again, and he seemed surprised to find Françoise still alive. He had quite expected that he would merely have to give the certificate for her burial. He shook his head as he examined the wound. Ever since the previous evening, not having an idea of the real facts, he had been pondering over the story that had been told to him in connection with the wound. He now desired to have the whole narrative repeated to him; and he could not yet understand how the unfortunate young woman had managed to fall in such a disastrous fashion. He finally took his leave, indignant at Françoise’s culpable clumsiness, and annoyed at having to pay yet another visit to certify the death.

Jean still remained in a state of mournful gloom, watching intently over Françoise, who closed her eyes in persistent muteness as soon as she ever caught her husband’s questioning glance. He divined that some lie or other had been told him, and that his wife was hiding something from him. In the early morning he had escaped for a little time, and had run up to the lucern field to see if he could discover anything. But he could learn nothing definite from his inspection. The foot­marks had been nearly effaced by the heavy rain which had fallen during the night, but he discovered a corner where the lucern seemed to have been beaten down, and he concluded that this was the spot where Françoise had fallen. After the surgeon had gone away, Jean again sat down by the side of the dying woman’s bed. He was now quite alone with her, for La Frimat had gone off to breakfast, and La Grande had been obliged to return home for a moment to see that things were not going wrong in her absence.

“Are you in pain?” Jean asked his wife.

Françoise closed her eyes tightly, and made no reply.

“Tell me, now, aren’t you concealing something from me?”

If it had not been for her weak and painful breathing one might have supposed that Françoise was already dead. Ever since the previous evening she had been lying on her back, silent and in the same position, as though incapable of either motion or speech. She was burning with fever, but all her power of will seemed to offer a determined resistance to the approach of delirium, so acute was her fear of letting anything escape her. She had always possessed a strongly-marked character, full of obstinate determination; doing nothing like other people, and giving utterance to ideas which filled every­body who heard her with amazement. Loyalty to her family was probably actuating her now, a loyalty which over-rode all feeling of hatred and craving for vengeance. What good would vengeance do her, now that she was dying? There were matters which were best buried with one’s self, shut up in the spot where they had been born; matters which must never, no never, be disclosed for a stranger’s enlightenment; and Jean was a stranger, whom she had never been really able to love with genuine love. It was perhaps in punishment for having given him her hand that she was never to bring into the world the undeveloped child quickening within her.

Ever since Jean had seen his wife brought home in a dying condition, his thoughts had been harping on the unmade will. All through the night he had kept thinking that, if she died intestate, he would be entitled to nothing, save half of the furniture and the money — a hundred and twenty-seven francs locked up in the drawer. He loved Françoise dearly, and he would have made any sacrifice to keep her; but the thought that, together with his wife, he would also lose the house and land, still further increased his grief. As yet, he had not dared to say a word on the subject: it seemed so hard-hearted, and then there had always been other people in the room. But at last, seeing that he would never be able to glean any further information as to the manner in which the accident had happened, he determined to tackle this other matter.

“Are there any arrangements that you would like to make?” he asked.

It did not seem as though Françoise heard him. Her eyes were closed, and her face was quite expressionless.

“If anything happened to you, you know, your sister would take everything. The paper is still there in the drawer.”

He brought the sheet of stamped paper to her, and then continued, in a voice that grew more and more embarrassed:

“Would you like me to help you? Are you strong enough to write, do you think? I’m not thinking about myself; but I only fancied that you wouldn’t like those folks who have treated you so badly to have anything you left behind.”

Françoise’s eyelids trembled slightly, proving to Jean that she had heard him. So she must still be averse to making a will! He was quite astounded; he could not understand it at all. Probably Françoise, herself, could not have explained why she persisted in thus lying like a corpse, before the time had come for her to be boxed-up within four boards. But the land and the house did not belong to this man, who had come athwart her life like some mere passer-by. She owed him nothing; the child would go away with herself. By what right should the property be taken away from the family? Her obstinate, childish ideas of justice protested against such a thing. This is mine, that is yours; let us each take our own and say good-bye! However, other thoughts besides these were vaguely floating through her mind. Her sister Lise seemed far away from her — lost in the distance — and it was Buteau alone who seemed really present to her; Buteau whom, in spite of all his ill-treatment, she pardoned and loved and longed for.

Jean was getting vexed. The desire for the soil was now gaining hold of him, too, and embittering his mind. He raised Françoise in bed, and attempted to get her into a sitting position and to put a pen between her fingers.

“Come now,” he said, “see if you can’t manage it. You can’t like those scamps better than me, and want them to have everything!”

Then Françoise at last opened her eyes, and the look that she turned upon Jean quite stupefied him. She knew that she was going to die, and her big, widely-opened eyes were full of hopeless despair. Why was he torturing her like this? they seemed to say. She could not, and she would not! Besides, it was her own affair. A low moan of pain was the only sound that escaped her lips. Then she fell back again, her eyelids closed, and her head lay rigid and motionless on the pillow.

Ashamed of his unkind persistence, Jean now felt so miser­able and confused that he was still standing there with the sheet of stamped paper in his hand when La Grande came back into the room. She saw it, and knew what it meant; and at once took Jean aside to inquire if Françoise had made a will. He stammered out that he had just been going to conceal the paper to prevent any one bothering his wife about it, a course which La Grande seemed to approve of, for she was on the Buteaus’ side, foreseeing all kinds of rows and abominable scenes if they succeeded in inheriting the property. Then, seating herself in front of the table, and recommencing her knitting, she continued:

“Well, no one will find himself wronged by me, I’m sure, when I’m taken away. My will has been made long ago. Every one is remembered, and I should think I was acting very wrongly if I showed an unfair preference for any one. None of my children are forgotten, as they will see for them­selves one of these days.”

She recited this formula daily to one or another member of her family, and she made a point of repeating it by the death-bed of her relatives. Every time she delivered herself of it, she chuckled in secret at the thought of that famous will of hers which would set the whole family by the ears when she was gone. She had been careful that it should not contain a single clause that was not pregnant with a lawsuit.

“What a pity it is,” she added, “that one can’t take one’s property with one! But, since one can’t, others must needs have the enjoyment of it.”

La Frimat now returned, sat down at the other side of the table, opposite to La Grande, and also began to knit. So the afternoon glided away. The two old women sat quietly gossipping with each other, while Jean, who could not settle in any one place, kept walking up and down, perpetually leaving the room and then returning in a state of feverish rest­lessness. The doctor had said that there was nothing to be done, and so they did nothing.

At last, La Frimat began expressing her regret that Sourdeau, the bone-setter at Bazoches, who was equally ex­pert in the treatment of wounds, had not been sent for. He just said a few words and then breathed over his patients, and then the wounds closed up at once.

“Oh, he’s a splendid fellow!” exclaimed La Grande in a respectful way. “It was he who put the Lorillon’s breast-bone right. Old Lorillon’s breast-bone, you know, fell out of its place, and hung down and pressed so heavily on his stomach that he almost died from exhaustion. Then, to make matters worse, the old woman caught the dreadful complaint as well: for, as you know, it is contagious. Presently they all had it, the daughter, the son-in-law, and their three children. They would certainly all have died of it if they had not sent for Sourdeau, who put everything right again by just rubbing their bellies with a tortoise-shell comb.”

The other old woman confirmed every detail of this story with a wag of the head. It was all well known, and there was no doubt about it. Then she herself adduced another fact in support of Sourdeau’s skill.

“It was Sourdeau, too, who cured the Budin’s little girl of fever by just cutting a live pigeon in two and applying it to her head.”

Then she turned to Jean, who was standing quite dazed by the bedside.

“If I were you,” she said, “I should send for him. It’s perhaps not too late, even now.”

Jean, however, answered merely with an angry gesture.

His town-breeding prevented him from believing such stories. The two women then went on gossipping together for a long time, telling each other of various quaint remedies, such as placing parsley beneath one’s bed to cure lumbago, or keeping three acorns in one’s pocket in the case of inflammation, or drinking a glass of water which had been exposed to the moon in view of getting rid of wind.

“Well, if you’re not going to send for Sourdeau,” La Frimat abruptly exclaimed, “at any rate you’d better send for his reverence the priest.”

Jean again replied by an angry gesture, and La Grande compressed her lips tightly.

“What good would his reverence do?”

“What good would he do? Why, he would bring the blessed sacrament, and there’s some comfort in that, some­times.”

La Grande shrugged her shoulders, as though to express that now-a-days no one believed in such old-fashioned ideas.

“Besides,” she added, after a pause, “the priest wouldn’t come. He is ill. Madame Bécu told me just now that he is going away in a carriage on Wednesday, as the doctor says that he will certainly die if he remains in Rognes.”

As a matter of fact, the Abbé Madeline’s health had gradually been getting worse during the two years and a-half that he had been stationed at Rognes. A feeling of home­sickness, a broken-hearted longing for his native mountains of Auvergne had been preying upon him with increasing severity every day he had spent in that flat land of La Beauce, where the sight of the far-spreading boundless plain filled his heart with despondent melancholy. Not a tree nor a rock was to be seen; and instead of rushing cascades of foaming water, there were only stagnant pools. The priest’s eyes lost their brightness, and he grew more fleshless than ever, till people said that he was going off in a consumption. Yet he might still have been reconciled to remaining there if he could have de­rived any consolation from the women of his parish. But it was just the other way. Coming, as he did, from a pious and faithful flock, his timid soul was overwhelmed with grief and consternation at finding himself in so irreligious a parish, where only the merest outward forms of the faith were com­plied with. The women deafened and dazed him with their screaming and quarrelling, and so abused his yielding nature that they practically took the religious direction of the place into their own hands: while he, a man full of scrupulous sensitiveness, and constantly afraid of involuntarily falling into sin, stood by in silent consternation. But there was a final blow in store for him. On Christmas day, one of the hand­maidens of the Virgin had been seized with the pangs of labour while in church. Since then the priest had been getting worse and worse, and now he was going to be carried back, in a dying condition, to Auvergne.