Complete Works of Emile Zola (1724 page)

A month elapsed, and it seemed to Marc that the birth of the expected child must be imminent. After counting the days with feverish longing he felt astonished at receiving no news, when one Thursday morning Pélagie presented herself at the school and drily requested that Mademoiselle Louise might not be sent to see her mamma that afternoon. Then, as Marc, recognising her voice, hastened to the door and demanded an explanation, the servant ended by informing him that Madame’s accouchement had taken place on the Monday evening, and that she was not at all in a favourable state of health. That said, Pélagie took to her heels, feeling worried that she had spoken, for she had been told to say nothing. Marc, on his side, remained confounded. What! his wife’s relations acted as if he did not exist. A child was born to him, and nobody informed him of it! And such rebellion, such a need of protest, arose within him that he at once put on his hat and repaired to the ladies’ house.

When Pélagie opened the door she almost choked, thunderstruck, as she was, by his audacity. But with a wave of the arm he brushed her aside, and without a word walked into the little drawing-room where, according to their wont, Madame Duparque was knitting beside the window, while
Madame
Berthereau, seated a little in the rear, slowly con
tinued some
embroidery. The little room, which smelt as usual of dampness and mouldiness, seemed to be slumbering amid the deep silence and the dismal light coming from the square.

But the grandmother, amazed and indignant at the sight of Marc, sprang abruptly to her feet: ‘What! you take such a liberty as this, sir! What do you want? Why have you come here?’ she cried.

The incredible violence of this greeting, when Marc himself was swayed by such legitimate anger, restored his calmness.

‘I have come to see my child,’ he answered; ‘why was I not warned?’

The old lady, who had remained rigidly erect, seemed to understand on her side also that passion might place her in a position of inferiority.

I had no reason to warn you,’ she replied; ‘I was waiting for Geneviève to request me to do so.’

And she did not ask you?’

‘No.’

All at once Marc fancied that he understood the position.

In the person of his wife the Church had not only striven to kill the loving woman, it had wished to kill the mother also.

If Geneviève, on the eve of her delivery, had not returned to him in accordance with his hopes, if she had hidden herself away as if she were ashamed, the reason must be that her child had been imputed to her as a crime. In order to keep her in that house they must have filled her mind with fear and horror, as if she were guilty of some sin, for which she would never obtain absolution unless she severed every tie that had united her to Satan.

‘Is the baby a boy?’ Marc asked.

‘Yes, a boy.’

‘Where is he? I wish to see and kiss him.’

‘He is no longer here.’

‘No longer here!’

‘No, he was baptised yesterday under the name of the blessed Saint Clément, and has gone away to be nursed.’

‘But that is a crime!’ Marc cried, with a pang of grief.

‘It is not right to baptise a child without its father’s consent, or to send it away, abduct it in that fashion! What! Geneviève, Geneviève, who nursed Louise with such motherly delight, is not to nurse her little Clément!’

Madame
Duparque, still fully retaining her composure,
gave a little grunt of
satisfaction, pleased as she was in her rancour to see him suffer. ‘A Catholic mother,’ she answered, ‘always has the right to have her child baptised, particularly when she has reason to suspect that its salvation may be imperilled by its father’s atheism. And as for keeping the child here, there could be no thought of such a thing; it would have done neither the child itself, nor anybody, any good.’

Things were indeed such as Marc had fancied. The child had been regarded as the progeny of the devil, its birth had been awaited like that of Antichrist, and it had been necessary to baptise it, and send it away with all speed in order to avert the greatest misfortunes. Later, it might be taken back, an attempt might be made to consecrate it to the Deity and make a priest of it, in order to appease the divine anger. In this wise the pious little home of the Place des Capucins would not undergo the shame of sheltering that child, its father would not soil the house by coming to kiss it, and as it would not be constantly before its mother’s eyes the latter would be delivered from remorseful thoughts.

Marc, however, having by an effort calmed himself, exclaimed firmly: ‘I wish to see Geneviève.’

With equal decision Madame Duparque replied: ‘You cannot see her.’

‘I wish to see Geneviève,’ he repeated. ‘Where is she? Upstairs in her old room? I shall know how to find her.’ He was already walking towards the door when the grandmother barred his passage. ‘You cannot see her, it is impossible,’ said she. ‘You do not wish to kill her, do you? The sight of you would give her the most terrible shock. She nearly died during her accouchement. For two days past she has been pale as death, unable to speak. At the least feverishness she loses her senses, the child had to be taken away without letting her see it.... Ah! you may be proud of your work; Heaven chastises all whom you have contaminated!’

Then Marc, no longer restraining himself, relieved his heart in low and quivering words: ‘You evil woman! you have grown old in practising the dark cruelty of your Deity, and now you seek to annihilate your posterity.... You will pursue the work of withering your race as long as it retains in its flesh one drop of blood, one spark of human kindness. Ever since her widowhood you have banished
your daughter
here from life and its sweetness, you have
deprived her
of even the strength to — speak and complain.

And if your granddaughter is dying upstairs, as the result of having been wrenched from her husband and her child, it is also because you agreed to it, for you alone served as the instrument of the abominable authors of this crime.

Ah! yes, my poor, my adored Geneviève, how many lies, how many frightful impostures were needed to take her from me! And here she has been so stupefied, so perverted by black bigotry and senseless practices that she is no longer woman, nor wife, nor mother. Her husband is the devil, whom she may never see again lest she should fall into hell; her babe is the offspring of sin, and she would be in peril of damnation should she give it her breast.

... Well, listen, such crimes will not be carried out to the very end. Life always regains the upper hand, it drives away the darkness and its delirious nightmares at each fresh dawn. You will be vanquished, I am convinced of it, and I even feel less horror than pity for you, wretched old woman that you are, without either mind or heart!’

Madame Duparque had listened, preserving her usual expression of haughty severity, and not even attempting to interrupt. ‘Is that all!’ she now inquired. ‘I am aware that you have no feelings of respect. As you deny God, how could one expect you to show any deference for a grandmother’s white hair? Nevertheless, in order to show you how mistaken you are in accusing me of cloistering Geneviève, I will let you pass.... Go upstairs to her, kill her at your ease, you alone will be responsible for the fearful agony into which the sight of you will cast her.’

As she finished the old lady moved away from the door, and, returning to her seat near the window, resumed her knitting without the slightest sign of emotion, such as might have made another’s hands tremble.

Marc on his side for a moment remained motionless, bewildered, at a loss what to do. Was it possible for him to see Geneviève, talk to her, strive to convince her and win her back at such a time as this? He realised how inopportune, how perilous even, such an effort would be. So without a word of adieu he slowly went towards the door. But a sudden thought made him turn.

‘Since the child is no longer here, give me the address of the nurse,’ he said.

Madame Duparque returned no answer, but continued to
manipulate her knitting
needles with her long, withered
fingers in the same
regular fashion as before.

‘You won’t give me the nurse’s address? ‘Marc repeated. There came a fresh pause, and at last the old woman ended by saying:’ It is not my business to give it you. Go and ask Geneviève for it, since your idea is to kill the poor child.’

Fury then overcame Marc. He sprang to the window and shouted in the grandmother’s impassive face: ‘You must give me the nurse’s address this moment, at once!’ She, however, was still silently braving him with her clear eyes fixed upon his face when Madame Berthereau, now utterly distracted, intervened. At the outset of the dispute she had stubbornly kept her head bent over her embroidery, like one who was resigned to everything, who had become cowardly, and wished to avoid compromising herself for fear of great personal worries. But when Marc, while reproaching Madame Duparque with her harsh and fanatical tyranny, had alluded to all that she herself had suffered since her widowhood in that bigoted home, she had yielded to increasing emotion, to the tears which, long forced back, again rose from her heart and almost choked her. She forgot some of her silent timidity; after long years she raised her head once more, and became impassioned. And when she heard her mother refuse to give that poor, robbed, tortured man the address of his child’s nurse, she at last rebelled, and cried the address aloud:

‘The nurse is a Madame Delorme, at Dherbecourt, near Valmarie!’

At this, suddenly roused from her rigidity, Madame Duparque sprang to her feet with the nimbleness of a young woman, waving her arm the while as if to strike down the audacious creature whom she still treated as a child, though she was more than fifty years old.

‘Who allowed you to speak, my girl? Are you going to relapse into your past weakness?’ she cried. ‘Are years of penitence powerless to efface the fault of a wicked marriage? Take care! Sin is still within you, I feel it is so, in spite of all your apparent resignation. Why did you speak without my orders?’

For a moment Madame Berthereau, who still quivered with love and pity, was able to resist. ‘I spoke,’ said she, ‘because my heart bleeds and protests. We have no right
to refuse
Marc the nurse’s address.... Yes, yes,
what we have
done is abominable!’

‘
Be quiet!
’ cried her mother furiously.

‘I say that it was abominable to separate the wife from the husband, and then to separate the child from both.

... Never would Berthereau, my poor dead husband, who loved me so much, never would he have allowed love to be slain like that, had he been alive.’

‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’

Erect, looking taller than ever in the vigorous leanness of her three and seventy years, the old woman repeated that cry in such an imperious voice that her white-haired daughter, seized with terror, surrendered, and again bent her head over her embroidery. And heavy silence fell while she shook with a slight convulsive tremor, and tears coursed slowly down her withered cheeks, which so many other tears, shed secretly, had ravaged.

Marc had been thunderstruck by the sudden outburst of that poignant family drama, the existence of which he hitherto had merely suspected. He felt intense sympathy for that sad widow who, for more than ten years past, had been hebetated, crushed down by maternal despotism, exercised in the name of a jealous and revengeful God. And if the poor woman had not defended his Geneviève, if she had abandoned her and him to the dark fury of the terrible grandmother, he forgave her for her shuddering cowardice on seeing how greatly she suffered herself.

But Madame Duparque had again recovered her quiet composure. ‘You see, sir,’ she said, ‘your presence here brings scandal and violence. Everything you touch becomes corrupt, your breath suffices to taint the atmosphere of the spot where you are. Here is my daughter, who had never ventured to raise her voice against me, but as soon as you enter the house she lapses into disobedience and insult.

... Go, sir, go to your dirty work! Leave honest folk alone, and work for your filthy Jew, though he will end by rotting where he is, it is I who predict it, for God will never suffer his venerable servants to be defeated.’

In spite of the emotion which made him quiver, Marc could not refrain from smiling as he heard those last words.

‘Ah! you have come to the point,’ he said, gently. ‘The affair, alone, is at the bottom of all this, is it not so? And it is the friend, the defender of Simon who must be annihilated by dint of persecution and moral torture. Well, take heed of this, make no mistake; sooner or later truth and
justice will win the
victory, Simon will some day leave h
is prison, and the
real culprits, the liars, the workers of darkness and death, will some day be swept away with their temples whence for ages past they have terrorised and stupefied mankind!’

Then, turning towards Madame Berthereau, who had sunk once more into silent prostration, he added yet more gently: ‘And I shall wait for Geneviève. Tell her when she is able to understand you that I am waiting for her. I shall wait as long as she is not restored to me. Even if it be only after years, she will come back to me, I know it.... Suffering does not count; it is necessary to suffer a great deal to win the day, and to enjoy, at last, a little happiness.’

Then, with his heart lacerated, swollen with bitterness, yet retaining its courage, he withdrew. Madame Duparque had resumed her everlasting knitting, and it seemed to Marc that the little house he quitted sank once more into the cold gloom which came to it from the neighbouring church.

A month slipped away. Mark learnt that Geneviève was slowly recovering. One Sunday Pélagie came for Louise, who in the evening told her father that she had found her mother looking very thin and broken, but able to go downstairs and seat herself at table, with the others, in the little dining-room. Fresh hope then came to Marc, the hope of seeing Geneviève return to him as soon as she should be able to walk from the Place des Capucins to the school. Assuredly she must have reflected, her heart must have awakened during her sufferings. Thus he started at the slightest sound he heard, imagining it was she. But the weeks went by, and the invisible hands which had taken her from him were doubtless barricading the doors and windows in order to detain her yonder. He then sank into deep sadness, though without losing his invincible faith, his conviction that he would yet conquer by force of truth and love. He found consolation during those dark days in going, as often as possible, to see his little son Clément, at the nurse’s, in that pretty village of Dherbecourt, which looked so fresh and bright amid the meadows of the Verpille, among the poplar and willow trees. He there spent a delightfully comforting hour, hoping perhaps that some happy chance would lead to a meeting with Geneviève beside the dear baby’s cradle. But she was said to be still
too weak to go
to see her son, whom the nurse took to her
on appointed
days.