Complete Works of Emile Zola (432 page)

‘Oh, the poor animals!’ said Madame de Combelot, with an air of languid compassion.

‘Splendid!’ cried M. La Rouquette.

Chevalier Rusconi applauded loudly. Several of the ladies were leaning forward in their excitement, while their lips quivered and their hearts throbbed with desire to see the hounds devour their prey. Would they not be allowed to have the bones at once? they asked.

‘No, not just yet,’ said several voices.

Firmin had again twice dropped and then raised his whip. The hounds were exasperated and foamed at the mouth. But the third time, Firmin did not raise his whip again. The valet rushed away, carrying off the stag’s head and skin, while the dogs leapt forward and seized the offal. Their furious barking subsided into a low quivering growl of enjoy­ment. Bones could be heard cracking. Then general satis­faction was expressed upon the balcony and at the windows. The ladies smiled in chilly fashion and clenched their white teeth, and the men looked on with glistening eyes, while twisting the toothpicks they had brought from the dining-room. In the courtyard came sudden brilliance. The hunts­men sounded a flourish on their horns; the dog-keepers waved their torches, and a blaze of coloured lights arose, setting the night aflare and then raining sanguineously on the placid heads of the townsfolk on either hand.

The Emperor, however, turned his back upon the scene, and on noticing Rougon close to him, he seemed to awake from the moody reverie in which he had been absorbed since dinner. ‘Monsieur Rougon,’ he said, ‘I have been thinking about that scheme of yours. There are difficulties in the way — many difficulties.’ Then, after a momentary pause, he opened his lips to speak again, but closed them without saying anything. However, as he went away, he added: ‘You must remain in Paris, Monsieur Rougon.’

Clorinde, who heard him, made a gesture of triumph. The Emperor’s remark immediately spread through the company, and the guests once more became grave and anxious, as Rougon slowly made his way through their midst, towards the Gallery of the Maps.

Down below in the courtyard, the hounds were finishing their bones. They flung themselves wildly a-top of one another in order to reach the prey. With their writhing backs, white and black, all jumbled together, they were like a living wave, surging and struggling and roaring hungrily. Their jaws snapped, and they bolted mouthful after mouthful in their feverish eagerness to devour all. Quarrels, brief and sudden, ended in a loud howl. One large hound, a magnificent creature, finding himself too far away from the quarry, stepped back and then sprang into the very middle of the pack. He forced his way through the others, and soon gulped down a great strip of the stag’s entrails.

CHAPTER VIII

RECALLED TO POWER

Some weeks went by. Rougon had relapsed into his life of lassitude and ennui. He never referred to the Emperor’s order that he should remain in Paris. He only spoke of his disappointment and of the alleged obstacles which stood in the way of his clearing some portion of the Landes. Upon this topic he talked continually. What obstacles could there possibly be? he asked. For his part, he could see none. He even went so far as to show some irritation against the Emperor, from whom it was impossible, he complained, to obtain any explanations. Perhaps, however, his Majesty felt afraid lest he should be obliged to come forward with a sub­vention for the proposed expedition.

As the days went by, Clorinde’s visits to the Rue Marbeuf increased in frequency. She seemed every afternoon to expect some great news from Rougon, and she gazed at him in sur­prise on finding him so silent. Ever since her visit to Compiègne she had been living in the hope of a sudden triumph. She had pictured a series of dramatic scenes: furious anger on the part of the Emperor, M. de Marsy’s utter fall and disgrace, and the great man’s immediate restoration to power. She no doubt imagined that her feminine wiles would have this result; and so her astonishment was un­bounded when, at the end of a month, she still saw the Count in office. She began to feel contempt for the Emperor, who seemed incapable of avenging himself. What could he be thinking about in the everlasting silence he preserved?

However, Clorinde had not yet abandoned all hope. She had an intuition that some unforeseen turn of the wheel of chance would bring round the triumph she desired, for M. de Marsy’s influence was certainly shaken. Rougon now treated her with all the watchful attention of a jealous husband. Ever since his strange outbreaks at Compiègne, he had exercised a most fatherly surveillance over her, had plied her with moral dissertations, and expressed his desire to see her every day. The young woman smiled, feeling certain now that he would not leave Paris. Towards the middle of December, however, after weeks of drowsy listlessness, he again reverted to his great scheme. He had consulted some bankers, and had hopes of doing without the Emperor’s assistance. And once more he buried himself in maps and plans and technical treatises. Gilquin, he said, had already enrolled more than five hundred workmen who were willing to go out with him. They would form the first instalment of his future people. At this Clorinde, feeling quite provoked, again set the whole coterie of friends in motion.

It was a tremendous undertaking. Each of them took some special
rôle
; and whispered councils were held in the corners of Rougon’s own drawing-room on Sunday and Thursday evenings. They portioned out the various difficult matters, and every day they scattered through Paris, invinc­ibly determined upon gaining some influence or other to their cause. No assistance was too insignificant for their accept­ance; the most trifling help might be useful. They availed themselves of everything, they drew whatever advantage they could from the most trivial incidents, and worked and worked from the first thing in the morning until the last thing at night. They enlisted their friends as accomplices, and their friends enlisted others. All Paris seemed to share in the intrigue. In the most out-of-the-way districts people began to yearn for Rougon’s triumph, without being able to say why. The little band, though it only comprised some ten or twelve persons, was influencing the whole city.

‘We are the coming government,’ said Du Poizat, in all seriousness; and, establishing a parallel between themselves and the men who had made the Second Empire, he added: ‘I shall be Rougon’s Marsy.’

A pretender by himself was a mere name. A band of supporters was needed to establish a government. Twenty stout fellows of ambition are stronger than a mere principle, and when they can combine a principle with their ambition they become invincible. Such were Du Poizat’s views. He himself spent his time in perambulating Paris, often calling at newspaper offices, where he smoked his cigar and did what he could to undermine M. de Marsy’s reputation. He always had some secret little story to relate about the minister, whom he accused of ingratitude and egotism. Then, when he had managed to bring in Rougon’s name, he would drop vague hints and promises of the rewards and presents and subven­tions which the latter would shower down upon every one should he be in the position to do so. In this way Du Poi­zat contrived to supply numerous suggestions, anecdotes, and quotations to the newspapers, which continually brought the great man under the notice of the public. Two journals pub­lished an account of a visit to the house in the Rue Marbeuf, and others spoke of Rougon’s famous work on the English constitution and that of 1852. Thus, after a hostile silence of two years, a murmur of eulogy arose, and Rougon’s popu­larity seemed to be reviving. Du Poizat, too, devoted himself to other intrigues, very secret ones, such as the purchase of certain persons’ support by a kind of gambling on the prospects of Rougon’s return to office.

‘Let us only think of him,’ he often said, with that frank­ness of his which was distasteful to the more affected mem­bers of the band. ‘Later on, he will think of us.’

M. Beulin-d’Orchère was not a very subtle intriguer. When he unearthed a scandalous affair to the detriment of M. de Marsy it was immediately hushed up. He showed greater shrewdness in hinting that he might very well become Minister of Justice if ever his brother-in-law should return to power, an intimation which brought all his brother judges over to his side. M. Kahn meanwhile had put himself at the head of another company of auxiliaries, financiers, deputies, and functionaries, who helped to swell the army of malcon­tents. He had a docile lieutenant in M. Béjuin, and even availed himself of the services of M. de Combelot and M. La Rouquette, without those gentlemen having the faintest idea of the object for which he made them work. For his part, he acted in the official world, even its highest spheres, carrying his propaganda into the Tuileries, and covertly labouring for days at a time in order that some remark or other might be repeated from mouth to mouth till it reached the Emperor himself.

But it was the women who manifested the most passionate enthusiasm. There were some terribly strange underplots, some complicated intrigues among them, whose full scope was never known. Madame Correur began to call pretty Madame Bouchard ‘her little pet,’ and took her, she said, on a visit to the country; so that for a week M. Bouchard was left to lead a bachelor’s life, and M. d’Escorailles had to spend his evenings at the minor theatres. Du Poizat, however, met the two ladies one day in the company of some gentlemen who wore decorations, but he said nothing about having done so. Madame Correur now rented two flats: one in the Rue Blanche, and the other in the Rue Mazarine. The latter was very elegantly furnished, and Madame Bouchard would go there of an afternoon, taking the key from the doorkeeper of the house. It was said that the young woman had made an effectual conquest of a very high functionary.

Then, too, the minor members of the band bestirred them­selves, doing all they could. Colonel Jobelin betook himself regularly to a café on the boulevards to catch his old army friends, whom he catechised between their games of piquet; and when he had enlisted the sympathies of half a dozen, he rubbed his hands gleefully in the evening and declared that the whole army had joined the good cause. M. Bouchard devoted himself to a like task in the govern­ment offices, and gradually instilled a strong feeling of enmity against M. de Marsy into the clerks. He even won over the messengers, and made the whole staff sigh for the golden age of which he hinted the advent. M. d’Escorailles, on his side, devoted himself to the wealthy young men he knew, extolling Rougon’s broad views, his tolerance of certain misdemeanours, and his love of daring. Even the Charbonnels, as they sat on the benches of the Luxembourg garden, whither they went each afternoon while awaiting the issue of their inter­minable lawsuit, found a means of enlisting the sympathy and support of the petty cits residing in the neighbourhood of the Odéon.

Clorinde was not content with being the guiding spirit of the band, but engaged in very elaborate operations of her own, of which she never spoke. She was to be seen more fre­quently than ever, hurrying through streets of questionable repute, carelessly dressed and tightly hugging her big official-looking portfolio, which was now so split at the seams that it was only kept together by means of string. She also gave her husband extraordinary commissions to perform, and he did her bidding with the docility of a sheep, never seeking to understand her even. Then, too, she sent Luigi Pozzo about carrying letters; asked M. de Plouguern to give her his escort, and then kept him waiting in the street for her by the hour. At one moment she even thought of getting the Italian government to interfere in Rougon’s favour. Her correspond­ence with her mother, who was still living at Turin, had become extremely active. She had dreams of turning Europe topsy-turvy, and would go twice a day to Chevalier Rusconi’s to meet his diplomatic acquaintances. In this strange cam­paign of hers, she also frequently remembered her beauty, and would go out on certain afternoons most superbly arrayed. And when her friends, quite surprised by the change, told her that she looked lovely, ‘I have need to be,’ she replied, with an air of resigned weariness.

On her return from Compiègne, Du Poizat, having heard of her adventure at the hunt, had tried to find out on what terms she was with M. de Marsy. He had some vague idea of betraying Rougon in favour of the Count were Clorinde likely to become the latter’s all-powerful mistress. She, how­ever, with considerable irritation, denied the truth of any such supposition. He must think her very silly to suspect her of such a connection, she said. She even gave him to under­stand that she should never see M. de Marsy again. In her earlier days she might possibly have thought of becoming his wife. Now, however, she had other schemes in her head.

‘There are often many ways of getting at what you want,’ she sometimes said, ‘but there is never more than one of them that is pleasant. I myself have a craving to satisfy.’

When she said this she would keep her eyes fixed upon Rougon as though she dreamt of fattening him up for some future feast of her own. She still displayed a disciple-like submission, however, and kept herself in the background with cajoling humility. Rougon himself seemed quite unconscious of all that was going on about him. In his drawing-room, on Sundays and Thursdays, he still consulted playing cards like a fortune-teller, bending over them, and apparently hearing nothing of the talk that went on behind him. The members of the band discussed his affairs, made signs to each other over his head, and plotted by his fireside as though he were not in the room. He seemed so unconcerned with what they whispered that they at last began to chat in louder tones, smiling at his absent-mindedness. However, when they turned the conversation upon the subject of his return to power he flew into a tantrum, and swore that he would not move even if he knew that triumph awaited him at the end of the street; and indeed he shut himself up more than ever, and affected absolute ignorance of what went on in the world. The little house in the Rue Marbeuf, whence streamed such a flow of feverish propaganda, was itself a silent, drowsy home, on the threshold of which Rougon’s friends cast glances at one another as a warning to leave outside the scent of battle which they carried in the folds of their garments.