Complete Works of Emile Zola (223 page)

In the interior of the mansion was a square court-yard, surrounded by a colonnade, a reduced copy of the Place Royale, paved with enormous flags, and completing the cloistral appearance of this lifeless house. Opposite the porch a fountain, a lion’s head half worn away, its gaping jaws alone distinguishable, discharged a heavy, monotonous stream of water through an iron tube into a basin green with moss, its edges polished by wear. This water was cold as ice. Weeds sprouted between the flagstones. In the summer a meagre ray of sunlight entered the court-yard, and this infrequent visit had whitened a corner of the south façade, while the three other walls, morose and black, were streaked with moisture. There, in the depth of that court-yard, cold and silent as a well, lighted with a white, wintry light, one would have thought one’s self a thousand leagues away from that new Paris in which every passionate enjoyment flamed amid the racket of gold.

The rooms of the house had the sad calm, the cold solemnity of the court-yard. Approached by a broad iron-railed staircase, on which the footsteps and coughs of visitors resounded as in the aisle of a church, they stretched in long strings of wide, lofty rooms, in which the old-fashioned, heavy furniture of dark wood was lost; and the pale light was peopled only by the figures on the tapestries, whose great, pallid bodies could be vaguely discerned. There was all the luxury of the old-fashioned Parisian middle-class, a luxury that is Spartan and all-enduring. Chairs whose oak seats are barely covered with a little tow, beds with stiff sheets, linen-chests the roughness of whose boards would strangely endanger the frail existence of modern garments. M. Béraud du Châtel had selected his rooms in the darkest part of the mansion, between the street and the courtyard, on the first floor. He there found himself in a wonderful surrounding of peacefulness, silence, and gloom. When he opened the doors, traversing the solemnity of the rooms with his slow, serious step, he might have been taken for one of those members of the old parliaments, whose portraits were hung on the walls, returning home wrapt in thought after discussing and refusing to sign an edict of the king.

Yet in this lifeless house, in this cloister, there was one warm nest full of life, a corner of sunshine and gaiety, a nook of adorable childhood, of fresh air, of bright light. One had to climb a host of little stairways, pass along ten or twelve corridors, go down and up again, make a positive journey, and then at last one reached a huge room, a sort of belvedere built on the roof, at the back of the house, over above the Quai de Bethune. It looked due South. The window opened so wide that the heavens, with all their sunbeams, all their ether, all their blue, seemed to enter there. It was perched aloft like a dovecot, and contained long flower-boxes, an immense aviary, and not a single article of furniture. There was only just some matting spread over the floor. This was “the children’s room.” All over the house it was known and spoken of by that name. The house was so cold, the court-yard so damp, that Aunt Elisabeth had dreaded lest Christine and Renée should suffer harm from the chill breath that hung about the walls; many a time had she scolded the children for running about the arcades and amusing themselves by dipping their little arms into the icy water of the fountain. Thereupon she conceived the idea of making use of this forgotten attic for them, the only corner into which the sun had, for nearly two centuries, entered and rejoiced, in the midst of the cobwebs. She gave them some matting, birds, and flowers. The bairns were wild with delight. Renée lived there during the holidays, bathing in the yellow rays of that good sun, who seemed pleased with the decorations lavished upon his retreat and with the two fair-haired heads sent to keep him company. The room became a paradise, ever resounding with the song of the birds and the children’s babbling. It had been yielded to them for their exclusive use. They spoke of “our room;” it was their home; they went so far as to lock themselves in so as to put it beyond doubt that they were the sole mistresses of the room. What a happy nook! On the matting lay a massacre of playthings, expiring in the bright sunshine.

But the great delight of the children’s room was the vastness of the horizon. From the other windows of the house there was nothing to look at but black walls, a few feet away. But from this window one could see all that part of the Seine, all that piece of Paris which extends from the Cité to the Pont de Bercy, boundlessly flat, resembling some quaint Dutch city. Down below, on the Quai de Béthune, were tumble-down wooden sheds, accumulations of beams and crumbling roofs, amid which the children often amused themselves by watching enormous rats run about, with a vague fear of seeing them clamber up the high walls. But beyond all this the real rapture began. The boom, with its tiers of timbers, its buttresses resembling those of a Gothic cathedral, and the slender Pont de Constantine, hanging like a strip of lace beneath the wayfarers’ footsteps: crossed each other at right angles, and seemed to dam up and keep within bounds the huge mass of the river. The trees of the Halle aux Vins opposite and the shrubberies of the Jardin des Plantes, further away, spread out their greenness to the distant horizon: while on the other bank of the river the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended their low and irregular edifices, their row of houses which, from above, resembled the tiny wood and cardboard houses which the little girls kept in boxes. In the background on the right the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière rose blue above the trees. Then, in the centre, sloping down to the Seine, the wide-paved banks formed two long gray tracks, streaked here and there by a row of casks, a cart and its team, an empty wood or coal-barge lying high and dry. But the soul of all this, the soul that filled the whole landscape, was the Seine, the living river; it came from afar, from the vaguely-shimmering edge of the horizon, it emerged from the distance, as from a dream, to flow straight down to the children with its tranquil majesty, its puissant swell, which spread and widened itself into a great sheet of water at their feet, at the extremity of the island. The two bridges that crossed it, the Pont de Bercy and the Pont d’Austerlitz, looked like necessary boundaries placed there to contain it, to prevent it from surging up to the room. The little ones loved this giant, they filled their eyes with its colossal flux, with that eternal murmuring flood which rolled towards them as though to reach them, and which branched out to left and right, and disappeared into the unknown with the docility of a conquered Titan. On fine days, on mornings when the sky hung blue overhead, they would be enraptured with the pretty dresses of the Seine; it wore dresses of a changeable hue that altered from blue to green with a thousand tints of infinite tenderness; dresses of silk shot with white flames and trimmed with frills of satin; and the barges drawn up on either bank bordered it with a black velvet ribbon. In the distance, especially, the material became beautiful and precious as the enchanted gauze of a fairy’s robe; and, beyond the belt of dark-green satin with which the shadow of the bridges girdled the Seine, were breast-plates of gold and lappets of a plaited sun-coloured stuff. The immense sky formed a vault over the water, over the low rows of houses, over the green of the two parks.

Sometimes Renée, wearied of this unbounded horizon, a big girl already, and full of a fleshly curiosity brought back from her boarding-school, would throw a glance into the swimming school attached to Petit’s floating baths, which were moored to the end of the island. She sought to catch a glimpse, through the flapping linen cloths hung up on lines to serve as a roof, of the men in bathing-drawers showing their naked bellies.

CHAPTER III

Maxime remained at school at Plassans until the holidays of 1854. He was a few months over thirteen, and had just passed the fifth class. It was then that his father decided to let him come to Paris. He reflected that a son of that age would give him a certain position, would fix him definitively in the part he played of a wealthy widower, twice married, and serious in his views. When he informed Renée, towards whom he prided himself upon his extreme gallantry, of his intention, she answered, negligently:

“That’s right, have the boy up…. He will amuse us a little. One is bored to death in the mornings.”

The boy arrived a week later. He was already a tall, spare stripling, with a girl’s face, a delicate, forward look, and very light flaxen hair. But great God! how oddly he was got up! He was cropped to the ears, his hair was cut so short that the whiteness of his cranium was barely covered with a shadow of pale down, he wore trousers too short for him, hob-nailed shoes, a hideously threadbare tunic that was much too wide and made him look almost hunchbacked. In this garb, surprised at the new things he saw, he looked about him, not at all timidly, but with the savage, cunning air of a precocious child, that is loth to come out of its shell at first sight.

A servant had just fetched him from the station, and he was waiting in the big drawing-room, charmed with the gilding on the ceiling and furniture, thoroughly delighted with this luxury in which he was about to spend his life, when Renée, returning from her tailor, swept in like a gust of wind. She threw off her hat and the white burnoose which she had placed over her shoulders to protect her from the cold, which was already keen. She appeared before Maxime, who was stupefied with admiration, in all the brilliancy of her marvellous attire.

The child thought she was dressed up. She wore a delicious skirt of blue faille, with deep flounces, and over that a sort of French-guard’s coat in pale-gray silk. The flaps of the coat, lined with blue satin of a deeper shade than the faille of the skirt, were bravely caught up and secured with knots of ribbon; the cuffs of the flat sleeves, the broad lapels of the bodice stood out wide, trimmed with the same satin. And as a supreme effort of trimming, as a bold stroke of eccentricity, two rows of large buttons imitating sapphires and fastening into blue rosettes, adorned the front of the coat. It was ugly and entrancing.

When Renée perceived Maxime:

“It’s the boy, is it not?” asked she of the servant, surprised to find him as tall as herself.

The child was devouring her with his eyes. This lady with a skin so white, whose bosom showed through a gap of her plaited shirt-front, this sudden and charming apparition, with her hair dressed high, her elegant, gloved hands, her little Wellington boots with pointed heels that dug into the carpet, delighted him, seemed to him to be the good fairy of this warm, gilded room. He began to smile, and he was just sufficiently awkward to retain his urchin gracefulness.

“Why, he is quite amusing!” cried Renée….”But what a shame! how they have cut his hair!… Listen, my little friend, your father will probably not come in till dinner-time, and I shall have to make you at home…. I am your stepmother, monsieur. Will you give me a kiss?”

“Yes, if you like,” answered Maxime, boldly.

And he kissed Renée on both cheeks, taking her by the shoulders, whereby the French-guard’s coat was a little rumpled. She freed herself, laughing, saying:

“Oh dear, how amusing he is, the little shaveling!…”

She came back to him, more serious.

“We shall be friends, sha’n’t we?… I want to be a mother to you. I was thinking about it while I was waiting for my tailor, who was engaged, and I said to myself that I must be very kind and bring you up quite properly…. That will be nice!”

Maxime continued to stare at her with his blue forward girl’s eyes, and suddenly:

“How old are you?” he asked.

“But you should never ask that!” she cried, clasping her hands together….”He knows nothing, poor little wretch! He will have to be taught everything…. Luckily I can still tell my age. I am twenty-one.”

“I shall soon be fourteen…. You might be my sister.”

He did not go on, but his look added that he had expected to find his father’s second wife much older. He was standing quite close to her, and examining her neck so attentively that she almost ended by blushing. Her giddy head, moreover, was turning: it was never able to fix itself long on the same subject; and she began to walk about, to speak of her tailor, forgetting she was talking to a child.

“I wanted to be here to receive you. But think, Worms brought me this dress this morning…. I tried it on and I thought it rather successful. It is very smart, is it not?”

She had moved before a mirror. Maxime walked to and fro behind her so as to examine her on every side.

“Only,” she continued, “when I put on the coat, I noticed there was a large fold, there, on the left shoulder, d’you see?… That fold is very ugly, it makes me look as if I had one shoulder higher than the other.”

He came up to her and pressed his finger over the fold as though to smooth it down, and his vicious school-boy hand seemed to linger on that spot with a certain satisfaction.

“Well,” she continued, “I couldn’t wait. I had the horses put to, and I went to tell Worms what I thought of his outrageous carelessness…. He promised me to put it right.”

Thereupon she remained before the mirror, still looking at herself, lost in a sudden reverie. She ended by laying one finger on her lips, with an air of contemplative impatience. And quite low, as if talking to herself:

“It wants something…. Yes, really, it wants something….”

Then, with a quick movement, she turned round, placed herself in front of Maxime, and asked him:

“Is it really right?… Don’t you think it wants something, a trifle, a bow somewhere or other?”

The school-boy was reassured by Renée’s familiarity, and resumed all the assurance of his forward nature. He drew back, came nearer, screwed up his eyes, and murmured:

“No, no, it wants nothing, it’s very pretty, very pretty indeed…. If anything, I think there is something too much.”

He blushed a little, despite his audacity, came nearer still, and with his finger-tip tracing an acute angle on Renée’s breast:

“If I were you,” he continued, “I would hollow out that lace so, and wear a necklace with a great big cross.”

She clapped her hands, radiant with delight.