Complete Works of Emile Zola (126 page)

The woman who proved a real mother to William, was an old servant who had been in the family when Monsieur de Viargue was born. Geneviève and the count’s mother bad been foster-sisters. The latter, who belonged to the nobility of central France, had taken Geneviève with her to Germany, at the time of the emigration, and Monsieur de Viargue, on his return to France, after the death of his mother, had brought her to Véteuil. She was a country-woman from the Cévennes, belonging to the reformed religion, with a narrow zealous mind, filled with all the fanaticism of the early Calvinists, whose blood she felt flowing in her veins. Tall and lank, with sunken eyes, and a big pointed nose, she reminded one of those old witches who used to be burnt at the stake. She carried everywhere an enormous sombre-looking Bible with its binding strengthened with iron clasps; morning and night, she read a few verses from it in a high shrill voice. Sometimes she would come across some of those awful words of anger which the terrible God of the Jews heaped on his dismayed people. The count put up with what he called her madness: he knew the strict uprightness, the sovereign justice of this over-excited nature. Besides, he looked upon Geneviève as a sacred legacy from his mother. She was more a supreme mistress than a servant in the house.

At seventy she was still doing heavy work. She had several servants under her, hut she took great pride in setting herself hard tasks. She was humble and yet incredibly vain. She managed everything at La Noiraude, getting up at day-break, setting each the example of indefatigable activity, and fulfilling her duty with the toughness of a woman who has never felt ill.

One of the greatest troubles of her life was the passion of her master for science. As she saw him shut himself up during long days in a room littered with strange apparatus, she firmly believed that he had become a wizard. When she passed the door of this room and heard the noise of his bellows, she would clasp her hands in terror, convinced that he was hastening on the fire of hell with his breath. One day, she had the courage to go in and solemnly adjure the count, by the name of his mother, to save his soul by renouncing an accursed work. Monsieur de Viargue gently put her to the door, smiling and promising to reconcile himself to God later on when he died. From that time, she prayed for him morning and night. She would often repeat in a sort of prophetic ecstasy, that she heard the devil prowling about every night, and that great calamities were threatening La Noiraude.

Geneviève looked upon the scandalous intimacy of the count with the notary’s wife as a first warning of God’s anger. The day this woman came to live in the château, she was seized with righteous indignation. She declared to her master that she could not live in the same house with this creature, and that she gave up her place to her. And she did as she said: she went and took up her quarters in A sort of summer-house that Monsieur de Viargue possessed at the further end of the park. The country people who went along by the side of the park wall used to catch the sound of her shrill voice chanting the verses of her big Bible at all hours of the day. The count did not disturb her, he visited her several times, receiving with an impassive air the fervent sermons which she made him listen to. Once only did he nearly get angry; he had met the old woman in the path where he was taking a walk with his mistress, and Genevieve had taken upon herself to rate the young woman with a violence of language quite biblical. She, who had not the least fault to reproach herself with, would have cast the dirt from the roads in the face of sinning women. The notary’s wife was very much terrified with this scene, and it is quite credible that the disdain and anger of the old protestant had something to do with her hurried departure.

As soon as Geneviève knew that shame had departed from La Noiraude, she quietly went to take again her position as supreme mistress. She only found there an additional child, little William. The thought of this child, when she was still living in the summer-house, had caused her a sacred horror; he was the child of sin, he might bring with him only misfortune, and perhaps the avenging God had caused him to be born in order to punish his father for his impiety. But when she saw the poor creature, in his pink and white cradle, she felt a sensation of tenderness hitherto unknown to her. This woman, whose feelings and passions had withered in the zealous virginity of a fanatic, experienced a vague sensation that there was awakening in her the yearning of wife and mother which exists in every maiden’s nature. She thought herself tempted by Satan, and wished to resist the tenderness that was taking possession of her being. Then she gave up the struggle, and kissed William with a longing to recommend her soul to God, so as to protect herself against this child of sin on whom Heaven must have laid a curse.

And she gradually became a mother to him, but she was a strange mother whose caresses were never free from a sort of vague terror. At times, she would repulse him, then she would take him again into her arms with the bitter pleasure of a saint who thinks that he feels the devil’s claw penetrating his flesh. When he was still quite small, she would look earnestly into his eyes, full of uneasiness, and asking herself if she was not about to find the light of hell in the pure clear gaze of the innocent creature. She could never bring herself to believe that he did not belong in a small degree to Satan, but her rough kind affection, though it felt the shock, was only lavished the more.

As soon as he was weaned, she sent the nurse away. She alone had charge of him. Monsieur de Viargue had handed him over to her, authorising her even, with his ironical philosopher’s smile, to bring him up in whatever religion she pleased. The hope of saving William from the everlasting fire, by making him a zealous protestant, redoubled Genevieve’s devotion. Up to the age of eight, she kept him with her in the room which she occupied on the second floor at La Noiraude.

William thus grew up in the very midst of nervous excitement. From the cradle he breathed the chilly air, full of religious terror, which the old fanatic shed around her. He saw nothing on awaking but this woman’s face, fervent and speechless bent over him, he heard nothing but the shrill voice of this singer of chants, who would lull him to sleep at night by reciting in a lugubrious fashion one of the seven penitential psalms. The caresses of his foster mother crushed him, her embraces suffocated him, and they were bestowed in shocks and with tears that would send the boy himself into a state of unwholesome tenderness. He acquired, to his hurt, the sensitiveness of a woman, and his nerves became so finely strung that his childish troubles were transformed into real sufferings. Often would his eyes fill with tears, for no apparent reason, and he would weep, not through anger, for hours, like a grown-up person.

When he was seven, Geneviève taught him his letters out of the big Bible with the iron clasps. This bible, with its paper yellowed with age and its forbidding appearance, used to terrify him. He could not understand the sense of the lines he had to spell, but the sinister tone in which his teacher pronounced the words, froze him to his chair. When he was alone, nothing in the world would have induced him to open the bible. The old protestant spoke to him about it as about God himself with awed respect. The child, whose intelligence was awakening, lived from that time in a sort of eternal dread. Shut up with the fanatic who talked to him incessantly of the devil, of hell, of the anger of Heaven, he passed days in a state of agonising terror: at night, he would sob, as he pictured to himself the flames running under his bed. This poor being who wanted nothing but play and laughter, had his imagination so unhinged that he did not dare to go into the park for fear of being damned. Geneviève would repeat to him every morning, in that shrill voice, the tones of which cut like sharp blades, that the world was an infamous place of perdition, and that it would be better for him to die without ever seeing the bright sun. She thought that by these lessons she was saving him from Satan.

Sometimes, however, in the afternoon, he would run about in the long passages at La Noiraude, and venture under the trees in the park.

The mansion, which was called La Noiraude at Véteuil, was a big square building, three stories high, and all dark and ugly, very much like a house of correction. Monsieur de Viargue disdainfully allowed it to fall into ruins. He occupied a very small portion of it: one room on the first floor and another at the top of the house, which he had made into his laboratory: on the ground floor, he had reserved himself a dining-room and a sitting-room. The other apartments in the spacious mansion, except those occupied by Geneviève and the servants, were completely deserted. They were never even opened.

When William went along the gloomy silent passages which traversed La Noiraude in every direction, he felt seized with secret terror. He hurried past the doors of the empty rooms. Filled with the horrible ideas which Geneviève put into his head, he fancied he could hear moanings and stifled sobs from these rooms; he would ask himself fearfully who could inhabit these apartments whose doors were always fastened. He preferred the walks in the park, and yet he did not dare to go far, such a timorous, cowardly mortal had the old protestant made him.

Occasionally, he met his father, but the sight of him made him tremble. Up to the age of five, he had hardly seen him. The count was forgetting that he had a sou. He had not even troubled his head about the formalities he would have to go through some day if he wished to adopt him. The child had been necessarily declared as born of parents unknown. Monsieur de Viargue was aware the notary always pretended to be ignorant of the existence of his wife’s bastard, and he promised himself some day to put William’s position straight. As he had no other heir, he intended to bequeath his fortune to him. These thoughts, however, did not trouble him very much; he was absorbed in his experiments, more ironical and more haughty than ever: he listened impassively to the accounts that Geneviève gave him from time to time about the child.

One day, as he was going down to the park, he met him with the old woman, who was leading him by the hand. He was quite astonished to find him so big. William, who was entering on his fifth year, had on one of those delightful dresses of light bright-coloured material that children wear. The father, somewhat struck, stopped for the first time; he took hold of his son, and raising him up to his face, looked at him attentively. William, by a mysterious phenomenon of blood, was like the count’s mother. The resemblance struck the father, and moved him. He kissed the poor little trembling fellow’s brow.

From that day, he never met his son without kissing him. After his fashion, he loved him as much as he could love. But his embrace was cold, and the hasty kiss which he gave him at times was not enough to win the child’s heart. When William could avoid the count, without the latter noticing it, he was nearly always delighted to escape his embrace. This stern man who haunted La Noiraude like a cold silent shadow, caused him more fear than affection. Geneviève, to whom Monsieur de Viargue had given orders to bring him up openly as his son, always represented his father to him as a terrible and absolute master, and this word father only awoke in his mind an idea of reverential dread.

Such was William’s existence during the first eight years of his life. The strange teaching of the old protestant, and the terror with which his father inspired him, all contributed to make him feeble. He was doomed to keep with him through life the shudders and the unwholesome sensitiveness of his infancy. At eight years of age, Monsieur de Viargue sent him as a boarder to the communal school at Véteuil. He had, no doubt, noticed the cruel way in which Geneviève was bringing him up, and wished to remove him entirely from the influence of this disordered brain. At the school, William began in sorrow the apprenticeship of life: he was fatally doomed to be hurt at every turn.

The years that he spent as a boarder were one long martyrdom, one long ordeal that a neglected and deserted child has to pass through, trodden on by everybody and never knowing what he has done wrong. The inhabitants of Véteuil nursed towards Monsieur de Viargue a secret hatred, which was the result of their jealousy and prudery: they never forgave him for being rich and doing as he liked, while the scandal of William’s birth was an endless theme for their slanderous talk. Though they continued to bow humbly to the father, they avenged themselves for his disdainful indifference on the weakness of the son, whose heart they could break without danger. The boys of the town, those of twelve and sixteen, all knew William’s history through having heard it told a hundred times in their families; at home their relatives would talk with such indignation of this adulterous child, that they looked upon it as their duty, now that he was their play-fellow, to torture the poor being who was cried out upon by the whole of Véteuil. Their very parents encouraged them in their cowardice, smiling slyly at the persecutions which they inflicted on him.

From the very first play-hour, William felt, from the jeering attitude of his new companions, that he was in a hostile country. Two big fellows, fifteen year old louts, came up and asked him his name. When he replied, in a timid voice, that it was William, the whole band jeered.

“Your name is Bastard, you mean!” cried a school-boy, amid the hoots and low jokes of these young scamps, who already had the vices of grown-up men.

The child did not understand the insult, but he began to weep with anguish and terror in the centre of this pitiless circle which surrounded him. He got a few shoves, begged pardon, which highly amused these gentlemen, and brought him a few more knocks.

The bent was followed, the school victim was found. During every play-hour, he caught a few thumps on the head, he heard himself saluted by the name of Bastard, which made the blood mount to his cheeks, he knew not why. The dread of blows made him cowardly; he spent his time in the comers, not daring to stir, like a pariah who finds a whole nation up against him and no longer dares to revolt. His masters banded secretly with his comrades; they saw that it would be a clever stroke of policy to make common cause with the sons of the big wigs at Véteuil, and they overwhelmed the child with punishments, themselves enjoying a wicked pleasure in torturing a feeble creature. William gave himself up to despair; he was a detestable pupil, brutalized with blows, hard words and punishments. Slow, sickly, stupid, he would weep in the dormitory for a whole night: this was his only protest.