Complete Works of Emile Zola (403 page)

During the anthem, those who were present instinctively cast furtive glances towards the bottom of the empty grave. Vincent, who had planted the cross at the foot of the cavity opposite the priest, pushed the loose earth with his foot, and amused himself by watching it fall. This drew a laugh from Catherine, who was leaning forward from behind him to get a better view. The peasants had set the litter on the grass and were stretching their arms, while Brother Archangias prepared the sprinkler.

‘Come here, Voriau!’ called Fortune.

The big black dog, who had gone to sniff at the coffin, came back sulkily.

‘Why has the dog been brought?’ exclaimed Rosalie.

‘Oh! he followed us,’ said Lisa, smiling quietly.

They were all chatting together in subdued tones round the baby’s coffin. The father and mother occasionally forgot all about it, but on catching sight of it again, lying between them at their feet, they relapsed into silence.

‘And so old Bambousse wouldn’t come?’ said La Rousse. Mother Brichet raised her eyes to heaven.

‘He threatened to break everything to pieces yesterday when the little one died,’ said she. ‘No, no, I must say that he is not a good man. Didn’t he nearly strangle me, crying out that he had been robbed, and that he would have given one of his cornfields for the little one to have died three days before the wedding?’

‘One can never tell what will happen,’ remarked Fortune with a knowing look.

‘What’s the good of the old man putting himself out about it? We are married, all the same, now,’ added Rosalie.

Then they exchanged a smile across the little coffin while Lisa and La Rousse nudged each other with their elbows. But afterwards they all became very serious again. Fortune picked up a clod of earth to throw at Voriau, who was now prowling about amongst the old tombstones.

‘Ah! they’ve nearly finished over there, now!’ La Rousse whispered very softly.

Abbe Mouret was just concluding the
De profundis
in front of Albine’s grave. Then, with slow steps, he approached the coffin, drew himself up erect, and gazed at it for a moment without a quiver in his glance. He looked taller, his face shone with a serenity that seemed to transfigure him. He stooped and picked up a handful of earth, and scattered it over the coffin crosswise. Then, in a voice so steady and clear that not a syllable was lost, he said:

‘
Revertitur in terrain suam unde erat, et spiritus redit ad Deum qui dedit illum
.’

A shudder ran through those who were present. Lisa seemed to reflect for a moment, and then remarked with an expression of worry: ‘It is not very cheerful, eh, when one thinks that one’s own turn will come some day or other.’

But Brother Archangias had now handed the sprinkler to the priest, who took it and shook it several times over the corpse.

‘
Requiescat in pace
,’ he murmured.

‘
Amen
,’ responded Vincent and the Brother together, in tones so respectively shrill and deep that Catherine had to cram her fist into her mouth to keep from laughing.

‘No, indeed, it is certainly not cheerful,’ continued Lisa. ‘There really was nobody at all at that funeral. The graveyard would be quite empty without us.’

‘I’ve heard say that she killed herself,’ said old mother Brichet.

‘Yes, I know,’ interrupted La Rousse. ‘The Brother didn’t want to let her be buried amongst Christians, but Monsieur le Cure said that eternity was for everybody. I was there. But all the same the Philosopher might have come.’

At that very moment Rosalie reduced them all to silence by murmuring: ‘See! there he is, the Philosopher.’

Jeanbernat was, indeed, just entering the graveyard. He walked straight to the group that stood around Albine’s grave; and he stepped along with so lithe, so springy a gait, that none of them heard him coming. When he was close to them, he remained for a moment behind Brother Archangias and seemed to fix his eyes, for an instant, on the nape of the Brother’s neck. Then, just as the Abbe Mouret was finishing the office, he calmly drew a knife from his pocket, opened it, and with a single cut sliced off the Brother’s right ear.

There had been no time for any one to interfere. The Brother gave a terrible yell.

‘The left one will be for another occasion,’ said Jeanbernat quietly, as he threw the ear upon the ground. Then he went off.

So great and so general was the stupefaction that nobody followed him. Brother Archangias had dropped upon the heap of fresh soil which had been thrown out of the grave. He was staunching his bleeding wound with his handkerchief. One of the four peasants who had carried the coffin, wanted to lead him away, conduct him home; but he refused with a gesture and remained where he was, fierce and sullen, wishing to see Albine lowered into the pit.

‘There! it’s our turn at last!’ said Rosalie with a little sigh.

But Abbe Mouret still lingered by the grave, watching the bearers who were slipping cords under Albine’s coffin in order that they might let it down gently. The bell was still tolling; but La Teuse must have been getting tired, for it tolled irregularly, as though it were becoming a little irritated at the length of the ceremony.

The sun was growing hotter and the Solitaire’s shadow crept slowly over the grass and the grave mounds. When Abbe Mouret was obliged to step back in order to give the bearers room, his eyes lighted upon the marble tombstone of Abbe Caffin, that priest who also had loved, and who was now sleeping there so peacefully beneath the wild-flowers.

Then, all at once, even as the coffin descended, supported by the cords, whose knots made it strain and creak, a tremendous uproar arose in the poultry-yard on the other side of the wall. The goat began to bleat. The ducks, the geese, and the turkeys raised their loudest calls and flapped their wings. The fowls all cackled at once. The yellow cock, Alexander, crowed forth his trumpet notes. The rabbits could even be heard leaping in their hutches and shaking their wooden floors. And, above all this lifeful uproar of the animal creation, a loud laugh rang out. There was a rustling of skirts. Desiree, with her hair streaming, her arms bare to the elbows, and her face crimson with triumph, burst into sight, her hands resting upon the coping of the wall. She had doubtless climbed upon the manure-heap.

‘Serge! Serge!’ she cried.

At that moment Albine’s coffin had reached the bottom of the grave. The cords had just been withdrawn. One of the peasants was throwing the first shovelful of earth into the cavity.

‘Serge! Serge!’ Desiree cried, still more loudly, clapping her hands, ‘the cow has got a calf!’

THE END

HIS EXCELLENCY EUGENE ROUGON

Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

Son Excellence Eugène Rougon,
the sixth novel of the
Rougon-Macquart
series, was serialised in 1876 in
Le Siècle
and then published in book form by Charpentier. Set in the highest echelons of Second Empire government, the novel follows the career of Eugène Rougon and his cronies as they work their various machinations for political power and personal gain, embracing the public and personal life of Emperor Napoleon III. The protagonist, the eldest son of Pierre and Félicité Rougon, was first introduced in
La Fortune des Rougon
as an important participant in the coup d’état of 1851 that established Napoleon III as Emperor of the French. Eugène’s manoeuvrings helped establish his parents’ control over the town of Plassans, laying the foundations for solidifying the family fortune. Eugène, acknowledged as one of the prime movers in legitimising the Emperor, has remained in Paris to further his quest for power.

The novel opens in 1857, when Rougon’s career is dwindling into obscurity.  In conflict with the Emperor over an inheritance claim involving a relative of the Empress, Rougon resigns from his position as premier of the Corps legislative, before he can be dismissed, threatening the aspirations of Rougon’s friends. His greatest ally and his greatest adversary is Clorinde Balbi, an Italian woman of dubious background and devious intent. Unlike Rougon who can work openly, Clorinde is forced to act behind the scenes. Rougon refuses to marry her because he believes two such dominant personalities would inevitably destroy each other. Instead, he encourages her to marry M. Delestang, a man of great wealth who can easily be wheedled, while he himself takes a respectable nonentity of a wife who will not hinder his ambition. At the centre of the novel’s conflict is Clorinde. As Rougon’s power has grown, so has hers, until she has an influence at the highest level and on an international scale as the Emperor’s mistress.

The title page of the second edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

PREFACE

We live at such high speed nowadays, and the Second French Empire is already so far behind us, that I am inclined to place
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
in the category of his­torical novels. In some degree it certainly belongs to another class of fiction, the political novel, which in Great Britain sprouted, blossomed, and faded away contemporaneously with the career of Benjamin Disraeli. But, unlike Disraeli’s work, it does not deal with theories or possibilities. Whatever political matter it may contain is a record of incidents which really occurred, of intrigues which were matured, of opinions which were more or less publicly expressed while the third Napoléon was ruling France. In my opinion, with all due allowance for its somewhat limited range of subject,
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire. It is a book for foreigners and particularly Englishmen to read with profit, for there are yet many among them who cherish the delusion that Napoléon III. was not only a good and true friend of England, but also a wise and beneficent ruler of France; and this, although his reign began with bloodshed and trickery, was prolonged by means of innumerable subter­fuges, and ended in woe, horror, and disgrace.

The present translation of M. Zola’s book was not made by me, but I have revised it somewhat severely with the object of ensuring greater accuracy in all the more important passages, and of improving the work generally. And, subject to those limitations which deference for the opinion of the majority of English-speaking readers has imposed on the trans­lator and myself, I consider that this rendering fully conveys the purport of the original. During the work of revision I was struck by the great care shown by M. Zola in the hand­ling of his subject. There is, of course, some fiction in the book; but, again and again, page after page, I have found a simple record of fact, just deftly adapted to suit the require­ments of the narrative. The history of the Second Empire is probably as familiar to me as it is to M. Zola himself — for, like him, I grew to manhood in its midst, with better oppor­tunities, too, than he had of observing certain of its dis­tinguishing features — and thus I have been able to identify innumerable incidents and allusions, and trace to their very source some of the most curious passages in the book. And it is for this reason, and by virtue of my own knowledge and experience, that I claim for
His Excellency
the merit of reflecting things as they really were in the earlier years of the Imperial
régime.

Against one surmise the reader must be cautioned. Napoléon III. and the Empress Eugénie figure in the follow­ing pages without disguise; and wherever the name of the Count de Marsy appears, that of the infamous Duke de Morny — whom Sir Robert Peel, in one of his most slashing speeches, did not scruple to call the greatest jobber in Europe — may be read without a moment’s hesitation. But his Excellency Eugène Rougon is not, as many critics and others have supposed, a mere portrait or caricature of his Excellency Eugène Rouher, the famous Vice-Emperor of history. Symbolism is to be found in every one of M. Zola’s novels, and Rougon, in his main lines, is but the symbol of a principle, or, to be accurate, the symbol of a certain form of the principle of authority. His face is Rouher’s, like his build and his favourite gesture; but with Rouher’s words, actions, opinions, and experiences are blended those of half-a-dozen other personages. The forgotten ones! the men
whose names were once a terror, but who are as little remembered, as little known, in France to-day, as the satraps of the vanished Eastern realms, as the eunuchs who ruled the civi­lised world on behalf of effete Emperors when Byzantium, amidst all her splendour, was, like Paris, tottering to ruin. Baroche, Billault, Delangle, Fialin
alias
Persigny, Espinasse — there is something of each of these, as well as something of Rouher, in the career of Eugène Rougon as narrated by M. Zola. Words which one or another of these men wrote or uttered, things which one or another of them actually did, are fathered upon Rougon. He embodies them all: he is the incarnation of that craving, that lust for power which im­pelled so many men of ability to throw all principle to the winds and become the instruments of an abominable system of government. And his transformation at the close of the story is in strict accordance with historical facts. He salutes the rise of the so-called ‘Liberal’ Empire in the very words of Billault — the most tyrannical of all the third Napoléon’s ‘band.’