Complete Works of Emile Zola (144 page)

When they locked the door of the cottage, something clutched at both their hearts. They had rushed here to find the peace of their old love, but they had now left the place, more shattered than ever. They had merely sullied their memories, and would never be able to go back there to pass a happy day, and they now asked themselves where this wind of misfortune which was lashing at them would eventually cast them.

At
Noiraude,
they learned that Jacques had left only about half an hour earlier. They dined rapidly, scarcely touching anything. Geneviève did not say a word to them, only glowered at Madeleine. When nine o’clock struck, Guillaume had the brougham brought round. It was too late to take the train, and his crazy brain had now conceived the idea of driving all the way to Paris. It had occurred to him that the silence of the dark, deserted highways might calm his soul. He told Madeleine to dress warmly, and a few minutes later they were out on the Mantes road.

CHAPTER IX.

IT was stingingly cold. Last night’s gale had cleared the sky of cloud and it was freezing hard. The moon, at the full, lighted the whole sky with the bluish glint of polished steel. In that universal glow, translucent as chill spring water, every detail of the countryside stood out, all the way to the very skyline. Seized in mid thaw, the fields looked as if the frost had caught them still contorted by the storm. Ribs of upland stood out rigid between expanses of frozen mud. The land was like a corpse caught by death, convulsed in its final throes. The smallest twig stood out black, the smallest stones of the walls glinted whitish, blotches of crude colour plastered on an immense uniformly grey ground.

The brougham which Guillaume had selected was a two-seater with a collapsible leather hood, which some time back he had bought for them to make trips about the country with, when he preferred to go without a coachman and drive himself. On the narrow seat there was indeed only room for himself and Madeleine. As he urged the horse to faster gait with flicks of the whip he was conscious of his young wife’s legs pressing warm against his own. How often they had been out in that little vehicle, finding the way it jolted them against each other terribly funny. Tonight it bowled over the highway with monotonous bumping. Against the vast silence of the ice-bound fields the only sound of which husband and wife were conscious was the regular, metallic click-clack of their horse’s hooves on the frozen road. Their two head lamps reached out yellowish fingers of light on to the road, with its thin coating of rimy ice. The cones of illumination raced ahead, picking out the ditches on either side with jerky bounds. The moonshine thinned their light away. They were dim like candles lighted in early dusk.

Over their knees, Guillaume and Madeleine had drawn a thick grey rug. Reins in hand, he was taciturn, opening his mouth solely to give the horse an occasional sharp word of encouragement. Madeleine in her corner seemed asleep. Enveloped in furs, her feet warmly wrapped in the rug, her hands too tucked in, she felt the cold only on her face. This brisk air pricking at eyes and lips was rather pleasant. It kept her awake, soothing her hot forehead. Her eyes automatically followed the carriage-lamp cones of lights as these bounded ahead of them. Her mind was lost in thoughts which leapt jerkily ahead too. As she thought of all she had just gone through, she was amazed. However had she come so to lose her head? As a rule she was governed by her resilient, unswerving will. Her imagination was cold, her senses left her untroubled. One minute of clear thought would probably have been enough to master the whole situation, yet she who was always so sensible all at once lost her head. There could be no doubt about it, it was Jacques who had caused her thus to lose control. But she could not understand why he should have proved to be so much alive in her veins, why his resurrection should so have upset her. Flitting from one detail to another, she sought an explanation of this, but got lost in the obvious contradictions of her own nature. In a vague way, deep within her, she was aware of the truth stirring, but the reactions she found in herself were so unexpected that she recoiled from them.

When Madeleine had lost her head first in Jacques’ arms, her virginal body had assumed that vigorous young man’s ineffaceable imprint, and it was then that there had taken place an inward marriage which was indestructible. At that moment her sap was rising in full flow. She was at that stage of life at which a woman’s body ripens, and the mere contact of a man impregnates. Her powerful body and her even temperament were the more profoundly penetrated by Jacques’ full-bloodedness and healthy vitality. It was with all her serenity, all her frankness, that she had yielded her flesh to that flow of bodily essence from her lover into her. This being so, her cold temperament had merely proved an additional cause, making the possession of her entire self the more complete and more lasting. One might put it that when he crushed her to his bosom Jacques moulded her according to his image, giving her his muscles and his bones, making her his for life. Chance had tossed her into this man’s arms, chance still held her in his grasp, and while he held her there, despite the chance nature of their union, ever on the point of being widowed by him, she was bound more and more closely to him by ineluctable physiological forces, her flesh filled with him. When, after a year of this occult shaping of the blood and the nerves, the surgeon did leave her, what he left behind him was a young woman stamped for ever with the mark of his kisses, possessed to such a point that she was no longer merely mistress to his body, but in herself bore another being, those male essences which had completed her and in that new shape consolidated her. It was a purely physical process at work.

Today, the bond of affection was broken, but the bond of the flesh was knotted as tightly as ever. If her heart no longer loved Jacques, the fatal memory of her flesh was unchanged. She was his for ever. In vain had the love emotion faded out, the bodily effect of that possession had thereby lost none of its potency. The marks of the liaison which had made a woman of a girl had survived her love. Even though all she now felt for him was a dull hatred, she was still Jacques’ wife. Guillaume’s caresses, five years of other embraces, had never sufficed to purge her limbs of the man who had first entered there, to take her puberty. She was shaped, fashioned by the male, for all time, and a crowd might have tried in vain with their kisses to fade out those first kisses she had known. Her husband possessed merely her heart. Her body was no longer to be given, she could only lend it.

Yes, since her marriage, it had all been but a loan. Of this she had living, undeniable proof. Little Lucie was like Jacques. Even though he had engendered this daughter of Madeleine’s, Guillaume had been powerless to give the child his image. Though he had fecundated, it was the woman who had given the child her features, and they were those of the man whose imprint she herself bore. There could be no doubt about it, Jacques’ blood was largely responsible for Madeleine’s pregnancy. He was still the primal father, he was the one who had transformed the virgin into spouse.

What was more, Madeleine had been well aware of her enslavement that day when Guillaume proposed to her. She was not free, instinctively repulsive forces roused her flesh against the very idea of a new marriage, in which she would never be able to give herself. Despite her intentions, a clear rejection came first to her lips. Her affections had been astonished by her own refusal. Did she not love Guillaume? Had she not been living with him then for the previous year? But she refused then to give ear to this cry of her flesh, this revolt of the blood, warning her, reminding her that though she was quite free to take a second lover, she was not free at all to bind herself entirely to any other man than Jacques. And now she was weeping tears of blood for not having heeded that cry of her enslaved flesh.

Here she had to do with so inward a phenomenon, one so deep with strangeness and terror, that she still refused to accept such an explanation of her rebellion. Had she been sure she was thus possessed for ever by a man whom she did not love, she would have gone out of her mind, and rather flung herself under the wheels of the brougham in sheer fear of the frightful suffering which lay in wait for her. Were that true, it meant that she would always have the misery of bearing a body thus enslaved, would never cease to feel within her that hated blood-flow of Jacques, would never be able to forget herself in Guillaume’s embrace without the thought that the act was prostitution. Indeed, she was totally ignorant of this fatefulness of our flesh which can bind a virgin to her first lover so closely that she is never after able to break off that casual marriage, but obliged for ever to accept the husband of a moment, or else commit lifelong adultery. To calm her mind, she now dwelt on these four years of peaceful affection which she had just spent. But yet she did realize that Jacques had never left her system, merely slumbered within her, hence one instant had been enough to restore him in all his powerful vitality.

Here had been the cause through which so steady, so strong- charactered a woman as Madeleine had all at once lost her head. The only force which could upset her unswerving levelheadedness and bring to fever senses which in her normally slept, was Jacques. His hand was on her bowels and the sound of his voice, even the mere memory of him, threw her at once into a state of surexcitation. When he reared up, alive, before her, she simply lost her head and she was bound to do the same again every time that she felt him suddenly stir within her. This sense she now had that peace was never to be hers again, alarmed her particularly. Usually so sure of her own cold temperament, she thought of the love shudders which had gone through her the day before and she was both afraid and disgusted. The thought that such feelings might once more burn her with shame, if ever she came across Jacques again in future, distressed her greatly. Even the horror which epileptics feel at the thought of future bouts of their disease could not be more repulsive than what she felt. She was indeed like an epileptic, with the chill at heart, and the deep depression, which they still feel from the repulsive convulsions which have taken possession of them.

Not that Madeleine, slumped in the corner of the brougham, watching the yellow glimmer of the carriage lamps leaping and bounding before her on the road, thought these thoughts clearly. On the contrary, she shrank from any precision of mind. Her mind was lost, beset with questions she did not want to answer. She was worn out, and she put off probing her conscience till later, when she told herself that she would take vigorous measures against it all, she would struggle. She merely dwelt on it all at this moment because she could hardly help doing so. It was indeed no more than a hazy, spasmodic reverie, while the swaying brougham lulled her to sleep. She could indeed have blissfully forgotten the world entirely, had it not been for that brisk night air stinging lips and eyes. She peered ahead, over the horse’s ears, and saw the landscape stretched out, rigid and frozen, lifeless as a corpse under the white shroud of the moon, and the harshness of those dead outlines started new reveries about the bliss of the eternal void.

Guillaume thought Madeleine was asleep. He drove automatically, ears intent on the night silence. The deserted turnpike and this dry cold which soothed his fever made him happy. Ever since they left, Jacques’ words had been ringing in his mind: “A man should never marry his mistress.” He could not tell what had wakened that pronouncement out of the depths of his memory, but it forced itself on him with singular tenacity, and he turned it over and over, debating it. Secretly, it frightened him, for all that he refused to accept it as an inevitable law of life by which to be guided.

The stupid notion of trying to redeem a sinful woman had never been his. Marrying Madeleine, it had never occurred to him that he was rehabilitating her, or, as the catchphrase has it, by reason of his respect and his love “restoring her virginity” to her. He had married her because he loved her, that was all. He was far too sensitive by nature, far too closely and egotistically governed by his feelings, ever to get entangled in stupid moralistic considerations. It was his heart which had prompted him, not his mind which had set him a task, which anyway his utter lack of control of body or mind would have made it beyond him to even try to accomplish. Of course he regretted his dear one’s past and would have liked her to forget it, but that was from selfish reasons, by reason of a temperamental revolt which made it unbearable to him to think he did not possess her entirely. It is only young idiots or old men tired of everything who sometimes propose to themselves to redeem a soul. Guillaume was a novice in living, yes, but he certainly did not get engulfed in any such false idealistic heaven, He had never for a moment thought that Madeleine was in any need of being saved. All he was concerned with had been to be loved himself, the only thing in the world that he could perceive to be lacking being his own requirement of absolute, eternal affection. But even had the dream of a work of rehabilitation come to him, the idea would not have halted him, for to him it would have been obvious that love of itself washed away any stain.

The consequence was that Jacques’ pronouncement really remained incomprehensible to him. Why should one not marry one’s mistress? On the contrary, to him it seemed sane enough to find complete repose between the arms of a woman one both knew and worshipped. The nightmares of the previous night alone could not efface that conviction. If he had suffered, it was by a cruel trick of chance. He felt that Madeleine still loved him and he had no regrets about having married her. He had but one persistent thought — that he should be a still better husband to her, tenderer, more understanding, now that she wept. He had no more thought her to blame than he thought himself unwise. It was a misfortune which had struck at them, they had to become more united still and find consolation in each other’s arms, and then their mutual affection would rescue them.

Thus his personality, for a time rigid from pain, gradually relaxed in new hopes. Extreme pain brought its own reaction, which threw him on to Madeleine’s bosom with the longing to find refuge there, shelter from the wounds which the outer world gave him. At his side he still saw only a woman whose embraces could bring him oblivion of the ills of life. Forgetting that she was the cause of this anguish he had just suffered, he dreamed that in her he would now find the heights of bliss, joys powerful enough to absorb his whole being and render the rest of the world as nought. What did they need? A hidden nook where they might burrow together, out of sight, in their love for each other. He allowed his thoughts thus to drift in this dream of a life apart, that dream which he had nurtured since childhood, now seeming sweeter than ever in proportion to these cruel blows fate levelled at them. His requirements of peace increased, his longing to keep Madeleine’s love turned to sheer weakness, till there were moments in which, even if she had struck him herself, he would have clung to her neck and begged her to wipe away his tears. And yet there were still moments when his inner pride flared up and, holding him distant from her, forced his mind to dwell on the isolation of his heart, and his super-sensitive, nervous love condemned him to utter loneliness, lost in unassuaged craving for ultimate serenity and absolute love.