Complete Works of Emile Zola (662 page)

Duveyrier, who was puffing, nodded his head and murmured:

“Oh! the crayfish!”

All four looked at each other and chuckled. Their skins were well-nigh bursting, and they were digesting in the slow and selfish way of four worthy citizens who had just had a tuck-out away from the worries of their families. It had cost a great deal; no one had partaken of it with them; there was no girl there to take advantage of their emotion; and they unbuttoned their waistcoats, and laid their stomachs as it were on the table. With eyes half-closed, they even avoided speaking at first, each one absorbed in his solitary pleasure. Then, free and easy, and whilst congratulating themselves that there were no women present, they placed their elbows on the table, and, with their excited faces close together, they did nothing but talk incessantly of them.

“As for myself, I am disabused,” declared uncle Bachelard. “It is after all far preferable to be virtuous.”

Duveyrier nodded his head approvingly.

“So I have said good-bye to pleasure. Ah! I have wallowed in it, I own. Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, for instance, I know every one of them. There are blondes and brunettes, and red-haired ones, and who sometimes, though not often, are very well shaped. Then, there are the dirty holes, you know, furnished lodgings at Montmartre, dark alleys in my neighbourhood, where one meets some most astonishing creatures, very ugly, and most extraordinarily made.”

“Oh! prostitutes!” interrupted Trublot in his supercilious way, “what rot! I keep clear of all such goods!”

This smutty conversation tickled Duveyrier’s fancy. He was sipping kummel, whilst sharp twinges of sensuality kept shooting across his stiff magisterial face.

“For my part,” said he, “I cannot bear vice. It shocks me. Now, to be able to love a woman, one must esteem her, is it not so?
It would be impossible for me to have anything to do with one of those unfortunates, unless, of course, she showed some repentance, and she had been extricated from her life of shame for the purpose of making a respectable woman of her. Love could not have a nobler mission. In short, a virtuous mistress, you understand me?
Then, I do not deny I might succumb.”

“Virtuous mistresses! but I have had no end of them!” cried Bachelard. “They are a far greater nuisance than the others; and such sluts too! Wenches who, behind your back, lead a life fit to give you every possible ailment! Take, for instance, my last, a very respectable-looking little lady, whom I met at a church door. I set her up in business at Les Ternes as a milliner, just to give her a position. She never had a single customer though. Well, sir, believe me or not as you like, but she had the whole street to sleep with her.”

Gueulin was chuckling, whilst his carroty hair bristled more than usual, and his forehead was bathed in perspiration from the heat of the candles. He murmured, as he sucked his cigar:

“And the other, the tall one at Passy, who had a sweet-stuff shop. And the other, she who had a room over there, with her outfits for orphan children. And the other, the captain’s widow, you surely remember her! she used to show the mark of a sword thrust on her body. All, uncle, all of them played the fool with you! Now, I may tell you, may I not? Well! I had to defend myself one night against the one with the sword thrust. She wanted to, but I was not such a fool! One never knows where such women may lead one to!”

Bachelard seemed annoyed. He recovered his good humour, however, and, blinking his heavy eyelids, said:

“My little fellow, you can have them all;
I have something far better.”

And he refused to explain himself further, delighted at having awakened the others’ curiosity. Yet he was burning to be indiscreet, to let them imagine what a treasure he possessed.

“A young girl,” said he at length, “and a genuine one, on my word of honour.”

“Impossible!” cried Trublot. “Such things no longer exist.”

“Of good family?”
asked Duveyrier.

“Of most excellent family,” affirmed the uncle. “Imagine something stupidly chaste. A mere chance. She submitted quite innocently. She has no idea of anything even now.”

Gueulin listened to him in surprise; then, making a sceptical gesture, he murmured:

“Ah! yes, I know.”

“What?
you know!” said Bachelard, angrily. “You know nothing at all, my little fellow; no one knows anything. She is for yours truly. She is neither to be seen nor touched. Hands off!”

And, turning to Duveyrier, he added:

“You will understand, sir, you who have feeling. It affects me so much going there, that when I come away I feel quite young again. In short, it is a cosy little nook for me, where I can recruit myself after all those hussies. And, if you only knew, she is so polite and so fresh, with a skin like a flower, and a figure not in the least thin, sir, but as round and firm as a peach!”

The counsellor’s red blotches were almost bleeding through the rush of blood to his face. Trublot and Gueulin looked at the uncle; and they felt a desire to slap him as they beheld him with his set of false teeth, which were too white, and at the corners of which the saliva trickled. What! that old carcass of an uncle, that wreck of the dirtiest bacchanals of Paris, whose big flaming nose alone retained its place between the hanging flesh of his cheeks, had an innocent little thing stowed away in some room, regular flesh in the bud, which he soiled with his old vices, concealed behind his pretended simplicity of a palsied senile drunkard!

Bachelard became quite tender-hearted, and resumed, licking the brim of his liqueur glass with the tip of his tongue:

“After all, my sole dream is to make the child happy! But there, my pot-belly tells me I’m getting old, I’m like a father to her. I give you my word! if I found a very good young fellow, I’d give her to him, oh! in marriage, not otherwise.”

“You would make two happy ones,” murmured Duveyrier sentimentally.

It was almost stifling in the small apartment A glass of chartreuse that had been upset had made the tablecloth all sticky, it was also covered with cigar ash. The gentlemen were in want of some fresh air.

“Would you like to see her?” abruptly asked the uncle rising from his seat.

They consulted one another with a glance. Well! yes, they were willing, if it could afford him any pleasure; and their affected indifference hid a gluttonous satisfaction at the thought of going and finishing their dessert with the old fellow’s little one. Duveyrier merely observed that Clarisse was expecting them. But Bachelard who, since his proposal, had become pale and agitated, swore that they would not even sit down there; the gentlemen would see her, and then go off at once, at once. They went down, and waited some minutes on the Boulevard whilst he settled the score. When he reappeared, Gueulin pretended not to know where the young person lived.

“Let’s get along, uncle! Which is the way?”

Bachelard became quite grave again, tortured by his ridiculously vain longing to exhibit Fifi and by his terror of being robbed of her. For a moment he looked to the left, then to the right, in an anxious way. At length, he boldly said:

“Well! no, I won’t.”

And he obstinately adhered to his determination, without caring a straw for Trublot’s chaff, nor even deigning to explain by some pretext his sudden change of mind. They therefore had to turn their steps in Clarisse’s direction. As it was a splendid evening, they decided to walk all the way with the hygienic idea of hastening their digestion. Then, they started off down the Rue de Richelieu, pretty steady on their legs, but so full that they considered the pavements far too narrow.

Gueulin and Trublot walked first. Behind them came Bachelard and Duveyrier, deep in fraternal confidences. The first was swearing to the second that it was not him whom he mistrusted: he would have shown her to him, for he knew he was a man of delicacy; but it was always imprudent to expect too much of youth, was it not? And the other approved, confessing also the fears he once entertained respecting Clarisse: at first, he had kept all his friends away; then, he had had the pleasure of receiving them, and had thus made himself a delightful abode, when she had given him the most extraordinary proofs of fidelity. Oh! quite a strong-minded woman, incapable of forgetting herself, and with plenty of heart, and most sound ideas! No doubt, one might reproach her with some little matters in connection with her past, which had occurred through want of proper guidance; only, since she had loved him, she had returned to the path of honour. The counsellor kept on thus all along the Rue de Rivoli; whilst the uncle, annoyed at being unable to put in another word about his little one, did his utmost to restrain himself from telling the other of Clarisse’s goings-on with everybody.

“Yes, yes, no doubt,” murmured he. “But rest assured, dear sir, the best thing after all is virtue.”

The house in the Rue de la Cerisaie seemed asleep amidst the solitude and the silence of the street. Duveyrier was surprised at not seeing any lights in the third floor windows. Trublot said, with a serious air, that Clarisse had no doubt gone to bed to wait for them; or perhaps, Gueulin added, she was playing a game of bézique in the kitchen with her maid. They knocked. The gas on the staircase was burning with the straight and immovable flame of a lamp in some chapel. Not a sound, not a breath. But, as the four men passed before the room of the doorkeeper, the latter hastily came out.

“Sir, sir, the key!”

Duveyrier stood stock-still on the first step.

“Is madame not there then?” asked he.

“No, sir. And, wait a moment, you must take a candle with you.”

As he handed him the candlestick, the doorkeeper allowed quite a chuckle of ferocious and vulgar jocosity to pierce through the exaggerated respect depicted on his pallid countenance. Neither of the two young men nor the uncle had said a word. It was in the midst of this silence, and with bent backs, that they ascended the stairs in single file, the interminable noise of their footsteps resounding up each mournful flight. At their head, Duveyrier, who was puzzling himself trying to understand, lifted his feet with the mechanical movement of a somnambulist; and the candle, which he held with a trembling hand, cast their four shadows on the wall, resembling in their strange ascent a procession of broken puppets.

On the third floor, a faintness came over him, and he was quite unable to find the key-hole. Trublot did him the service of opening the door. The key turned in the lock with a sonorous and reverberating noise, as though beneath the vaulted roof of some cathedral.

“Jupiter!” murmured he, “it doesn’t seem as if the place was inhabited.”

“It sounds empty,” said Bachelard.

“A little family vault,” added Gueulin.

They entered. Duveyrier passed first, holding high the candle. The anteroom was empty, even the hat-pegs had disappeared. The drawing-room and the parlour were also empty: not a stick of furniture, not a curtain at the windows, not even a brass rod. Duveyrier stood as one petrified, first looking down at his feet, then raising his eyes to the ceiling, and then searchingly gazing at the walls, as though he had been seeking the hole through which everything had disappeared.

“What a clear out!” Trublot could not help exclaiming.

“Perhaps the place is going to be done up,” observed Gueulin without so much as a smile. “Let us see the bedroom. The furniture may have been moved in there.”

But the bedroom was also bare, with that ugly and chilly bareness of plaster walls from which the paper has been torn off. Where the bedstead had stood, the iron supports of the canopy, also removed, left gaping holes; and, one of the windows having been left partly open, the air from the street filled the apartment with the humidity and the unsavouriness of a public square.

“My God! my God!” stuttered Duveyrier, at length able to weep, unnerved by the sight of the place where the friction of the mattresses had rubbed the paper off the wall.

Uncle Bachelard became quite paternal.

“Courage, sir!” he kept repeating. “The same thing happened to me and I did not die of it. Honour is safe, damn it all!”

The counsellor shook his head and went into the dressing-room, and then into the kitchen. The evidence of the disaster increased. The piece of American cloth behind the washstand in the dressing-room had been taken down and the hooks had been removed from the kitchen.

“No, that is too much, it is pure capriciousness!” said Gueulin in amazement.” She might have left the hooks.”

Trublot, who was very tired after the dinner and the walk, commenced to find this solitude far from amusing. But Duveyrier, who did not let go of the candle, continued to wander about, as though seized by a necessity to dive deeper into his abandonment; and the others were obliged to follow him. He again went through each room, wishing to have another look at the drawing-room, the parlour and the bed-chamber, carefully casting the light into every corner;
whilst the gentlemen behind him continued the procession of the staircase, with their big dancing shadows, which strangely peopled the naked walls. The noise of their footsteps on the boards assumed a sad sonorousness in the mournful atmosphere. And, to complete the melancholy, the whole place was scrupulously clean, without a scrap of paper or a straw, as spotless as a well-washed porringer, for the doorkeeper had had the cruelty to give a thorough good sweep all round.

“I can’t stand this any longer, you know,” Trublot ended by declaring, as they visited the drawing-room for the third time “Really! I would give ten sous for a chair.”

All four came to a halt, standing.

“When did you see her last?”
asked Bachelard.

“Yesterday, sir!” exclaimed Duveyrier.

Gueulin wagged his head. By Jove! it had not taken long, it had been neatly done. But Trublot uttered an exclamation. He had just caught sight of a dirty collar and a damaged cigar on the mantelpiece.

“Do not complain,” said he laughing, “she has left you a keepsake. It is always something.”

Duveyrier looked at the collar with sudden emotion. Then, he murmured:

“Twenty-five thousand francs’ worth of furniture, there was twenty-five thousand francs’ worth! Well! no, no, it is not that which I regret!”