BOOK I.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

WITH the present work M. Zola completes the “Trilogy of the Three

Cities,” which he began with “Lourdes” and continued with “Rome”; and

thus the adventures and experiences of Abbe Pierre Froment, the doubting

Catholic priest who failed to find faith at the miraculous grotto by the

Cave, and hope amidst the crumbling theocracy of the Vatican, are here

brought to what, from M. Zola’s point of view, is their logical

conclusion. From the first pages of “Lourdes,” many readers will have

divined that Abbe Froment was bound to finish as he does, for, frankly,

no other finish was possible from a writer of M. Zola’s opinions.

Taking the Trilogy as a whole, one will find that it is essentially

symbolical. Abbe Froment is Man, and his struggles are the struggles

between Religion, as personified by the Roman Catholic Church, on the one

hand, and Reason and Life on the other. In the Abbe’s case the victory

ultimately rests with the latter; and we may take it as being M. Zola’s

opinion that the same will eventually be the case with the great bulk of

mankind. English writers are often accused of treating subjects from an

insular point of view, and certainly there may be good ground for such a

charge. But they are not the only writers guilty of the practice. The

purview of French authors is often quite as limited: they regard French

opinion as the only good opinion, and judge the rest of the world by

their own standard. In the present case, if we leave the world and

mankind generally on one side, and apply M. Zola’s facts and theories to

France alone, it will be found, I think, that he has made out a

remarkably good case for himself. For it is certain that Catholicism, I

may say Christianity, is fast crumbling in France. There may be revivals

in certain limited circles, efforts of the greatest energy to prop up the

tottering edifice by a “rallying” of believers to the democratic cause,

and by a kindling of the most bitter anti-Semitic warfare; but all these

revivals and efforts, although they are extremely well-advertised and

create no little stir, produce very little impression on the bulk of the

population. So far as France is concerned, the policy of Leo XIII. seems

to have come too late. The French masses regard Catholicism or

Christianity, whichever one pleases, as a religion of death,--a religion

which, taking its stand on the text “There shall always be poor among

you,” condemns them to toil and moil in poverty and distress their whole

life long, with no other consolation than the promise of happiness in

heaven. And, on the other hand, they see the ministers of the Deity,

“whose kingdom is not of this world,” supporting the wealthy and

powerful, and striving to secure wealth and power for themselves. Charity

exists, of course, but the masses declare that it is no remedy; they do

not ask for doles, they ask for Justice. It is largely by reason of all

this that Socialism and Anarchism have made such great strides in France

of recent years. Robespierre, as will be remembered, once tried to

suppress Christianity altogether, and for a time certainly there was a

virtually general cessation of religious observances in France. But no

such Reign of Terror prevails there to-day. Men are perfectly free to

believe if they are inclined to do so; and yet never were there fewer

religious marriages, fewer baptisms or smaller congregations in the

French churches. I refer not merely to Paris and other large cities, but

to the smaller towns, and even the little hamlets of many parts. Old

village priests, men practising what they teach and possessed of the most

loving, benevolent hearts, have told me with tears in their eyes of the

growing infidelity of their parishioners.

I have been studying this matter for some years, and write without

prejudice, merely setting down what I believe to be the truth. Of course

we are all aware that the most stupendous efforts are being made by the

Catholic clergy and zealous believers to bring about a revival of the

faith, and certainly in some circles there has been a measure of success.

But the reconversion of a nation is the most formidable of tasks; and, in

my own opinion, as in M. Zola’s, France as a whole is lost to the

Christian religion. On this proposition, combined with a second one,

namely, that even as France as a nation will be the first to discard

Christianity, so she will be the first to promulgate a new faith based on

reason, science and the teachings of life, is founded the whole argument

of M. Zola’s Trilogy.

Having thus dealt with the Trilogy’s religious aspects, I would now speak

of “Paris,” its concluding volume. This is very different from “Lourdes”

and “Rome.” Whilst recounting the struggles and fate of Abbe Froment and

his brother Guillaume, and entering largely into the problem of Capital

and Labour, which problem has done so much to turn the masses away from

Christianity, it contains many an interesting and valuable picture of the

Parisian world at the close of the nineteenth century. It is no

guide-book to Paris; but it paints the city’s social life, its rich and

poor, its scandals and crimes, its work and its pleasures. Among the

households to which the reader is introduced are those of a banker, an

aged Countess of the old _noblesse_, a cosmopolitan Princess, of a kind

that Paris knows only too well, a scientist, a manufacturer, a working

mechanician, a priest, an Anarchist, a petty clerk and an actress of a

class that so often dishonours the French stage. Science and art and

learning and religion, all have their representatives. Then, too, the

political world is well to the front. There are honest and unscrupulous

Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious

candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various

schools. And the _blase_, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as

the young “symbolist” of perverted, degraded mind. The women are of all

types, from the most loathsome to the most lovable. Then, too, the

journalists are portrayed in such life-like fashion that I might give

each of them his real name. And journalism, Parisian journalism, is

flagellated, shown as it really is,--if just a few well-conducted organs

be excepted,--that is, venal and impudent, mendacious and even petty.

The actual scenes depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the

characters in their variety. We enter the banker’s gilded saloon and the

hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest’s retired home and the

laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber of

Deputies, and afterwards witness “a great debate”; we penetrate into the

private sanctum of a Minister of the Interior; we attend a fashionable

wedding at the Madeleine and a first performance at the Comedie

Francaise; we dine at the Cafe Anglais and listen to a notorious vocalist

in a low music hall at Montmartre; we pursue an Anarchist through the

Bois de Boulogne; we slip into the Assize Court and see that Anarchist

tried there; we afterwards gaze upon his execution by the guillotine; we

are also on the boulevards when the lamps are lighted for a long night of

revelry, and we stroll along the quiet streets in the small hours of the

morning, when crime and homeless want are prowling round.

And ever the scene changes; the whole world of Paris passes before one.

Yet the book, to my thinking, is far less descriptive than analytical.

The souls of the principal characters are probed to their lowest depths.

Many of the scenes, too, are intensely dramatic, admirably adapted for

the stage; as, for instance, Baroness Duvillard’s interview with her

daughter in the chapter which I have called “The Rivals.” And side by

side with baseness there is heroism, while beauty of the flesh finds its

counterpart in beauty of the mind. M. Zola has often been reproached for

showing us the vileness of human nature; and no doubt such vileness may

be found in “Paris,” but there are contrasting pictures. If some of M.

Zola’s characters horrify the reader, there are others that the latter

can but admire. Life is compounded of good and evil, and unfortunately it

is usually the evil that makes the most noise and attracts the most

attention. Moreover, in M. Zola’s case, it has always been his purpose to

expose the evils from which society suffers in the hope of directing

attention to them and thereby hastening a remedy, and thus, in the course

of his works, he could not do otherwise than drag the whole frightful

mass of human villany and degradation into the full light of day. But if

there are, again, black pages in “Paris,” others, bright and comforting,

will be found near them. And the book ends in no pessimist strain.

Whatever may be thought of the writer’s views on religion, most readers

will, I imagine, agree with his opinion that, despite much social

injustice, much crime, vice, cupidity and baseness, we are ever marching

on to better things.

In the making of the coming, though still far-away, era of truth and

justice, Paris, he thinks, will play the leading part, for whatever the

stains upon her, they are but surface-deep; her heart remains good and

sound; she has genius and courage and energy and wit and fancy. She can

be generous, too, when she chooses, and more than once her ideas have

irradiated the world. Thus M. Zola hopes much from her, and who will

gainsay him? Not I, who can apply to her the words which Byron addressed

to the home of my own and M. Zola’s forefathers:--

“I loved her from my boyhood; she to me

Was as a fairy city of the heart.”

Thus I can but hope that Paris, where I learnt the little I know, where I

struggled and found love and happiness, whose every woe and disaster and

triumph I have shared for over thirty years, may, however dark the clouds

that still pass over her, some day fully justify M. Zola’s confidence,

and bring to pass his splendid dream of perfect truth and perfect

justice.

E. A. V.

MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,

Feb. 5, 1898.

I. THE PRIEST AND THE POOR

THAT morning, one towards the end of January, Abbe Pierre Froment, who

had a mass to say at the Sacred Heart at Montmartre, was on the height,

in front of the basilica, already at eight o’clock. And before going in

he gazed for a moment upon the immensity of Paris spread out below him.

After two months of bitter cold, ice and snow, the city was steeped in a

mournful, quivering thaw. From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a

thick mist fell like a mourning shroud. All the eastern portion of the

city, the abodes of misery and toil, seemed submerged beneath ruddy

steam, amid which the panting of workshops and factories could be

divined; while westwards, towards the districts of wealth and enjoyment,

the fog broke and lightened, becoming but a fine and motionless veil of

vapour. The curved line of the horizon could scarcely be divined, the

expanse of houses, which nothing bounded, appeared like a chaos of stone,

studded with stagnant pools, which filled the hollows with pale steam;

whilst against them the summits of the edifices, the housetops of the

loftier streets, showed black like soot. It was a Paris of mystery,

shrouded by clouds, buried as it were beneath the ashes of some disaster,

already half-sunken in the suffering and the shame of that which its

immensity concealed.

Thin and sombre in his flimsy cassock, Pierre was looking on when Abbe

Rose, who seemed to have sheltered himself behind a pillar of the porch

on purpose to watch for him, came forward: “Ah! it’s you at last, my dear

child,” said he, “I have something to ask you.”

He seemed embarrassed and anxious, and glanced round distrustfully to

make sure that nobody was near. Then, as if the solitude thereabouts did

not suffice to reassure him, he led Pierre some distance away, through

the icy, biting wind, which he himself did not seem to feel. “This is the

matter,” he resumed, “I have been told that a poor fellow, a former

house-painter, an old man of seventy, who naturally can work no more, is

dying of hunger in a hovel in the Rue des Saules. So, my dear child, I

thought of you. I thought you would consent to take him these three

francs from me, so that he may at least have some bread to eat for a few

days.”

“But why don’t you take him your alms yourself?”

At this Abbe Rose again grew anxious, and cast vague, frightened glances

about him. “Oh, no, oh, no!” he said, “I can no longer do that after all

the worries that have befallen me. You know that I am watched, and should

get another scolding if I were caught giving alms like this, scarcely

knowing to whom I give them. It is true that I had to sell something to

get these three francs. But, my dear child, render me this service, I

pray you.”

Pierre, with heart oppressed, stood contemplating the old priest, whose

locks were quite white, whose full lips spoke of infinite kindliness, and

whose eyes shone clear and childlike in his round and smiling face. And

he bitterly recalled the story of that lover of the poor, the

semi-disgrace into which he had fallen through the sublime candour of his

charitable goodness. His little ground-floor of the Rue de Charonne,

which he had turned into a refuge where he offered shelter to all the

wretchedness of the streets, had ended by giving cause for scandal. His

_naivete_ and innocence had been abused; and abominable things had gone

on under his roof without his knowledge. Vice had turned the asylum into

a meeting-place; and at last, one night, the police had descended upon it

to arrest a young girl accused of infanticide. Greatly concerned by this

scandal, the diocesan authorities had forced Abbe Rose to close his

shelter, and had removed him from the church of Ste. Marguerite to that

of St. Pierre of Montmartre, where he now again acted as curate. Truth to

tell, it was not a disgrace but a removal to another spot. However, he

had been scolded and was watched, as he said; and he was much ashamed of

it, and very unhappy at being only able to give alms by stealth, much

like some harebrained prodigal who blushes for his faults.

Pierre took the three francs. “I promise to execute your commission, my

friend, oh! with all my heart,” he said.

“You will go after your mass, won’t you? His name is Laveuve, he lives in

the Rue des Saules in a house with a courtyard, just before reaching the

Rue Marcadet. You are sure to find it. And if you want to be very kind

you will tell me of your visit this evening at five o’clock, at the

Madeleine, where I am going to hear Monseigneur Martha’s address. He has

been so good to me! Won’t you also come to hear him?”

Pierre made an evasive gesture. Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis

and all powerful at the archiepiscopal palace, since, like the genial

propagandist he was, he had been devoting himself to increasing the

subscriptions for the basilica of the Sacred Heart, had indeed supported

Abbe Rose; in fact, it was by his influence that the abbe had been kept

in Paris, and placed once more at St. Pierre de Montmartre.

“I don’t know if I shall be able to hear the address,” said Pierre, “but

in any case I will go there to meet you.”

The north wind was blowing, and the gloomy cold penetrated both of them

on that deserted summit amidst the fog which changed the vast city into a

misty ocean. However, some footsteps were heard, and Abbe Rose, again

mistrustful, saw a man go by, a tall and sturdy man, who wore clogs and

was bareheaded, showing his thick and closely-cut white hair. “Is not

that your brother?” asked the old priest.

Pierre had not stirred. “Yes, it is my brother Guillaume,” he quietly

responded. “I have found him again since I have been coming occasionally

to the Sacred Heart. He owns a house close by, where he has been living

for more than twenty years, I think. When we meet we shake hands, but I

have never even been to his house. Oh! all is quite dead between us, we

have nothing more in common, we are parted by worlds.”

Abbe Rose’s tender smile again appeared, and he waved his hand as if to

say that one must never despair of love. Guillaume Froment, a savant of

lofty intelligence, a chemist who lived apart from others, like one who

rebelled against the social system, was now a parishioner of the abbe’s,

and when the latter passed the house where Guillaume lived with his three

sons--a house all alive with work--he must often have dreamt of leading

him back to God.

“But, my dear child,” he resumed, “I am keeping you here in this dark

cold, and you are not warm. Go and say your mass. Till this evening, at

the Madeleine.” Then, in entreating fashion, after again making sure that

none could hear them, he added, still with the air of a child at fault:

“And not a word to anybody about my little commission--it would again be

said that I don’t know how to conduct myself.”

Pierre watched the old priest as he went off towards the Rue Cartot,

where he lived on a damp ground-floor, enlivened by a strip of garden.

The veil of disaster, which was submerging Paris, now seemed to grow

thicker under the gusts of the icy north wind. And at last Pierre entered

the basilica, his heart upset, overflowing with the bitterness stirred up

by the recollection of Abbe Rose’s story--that bankruptcy of charity, the

frightful irony of a holy man punished for bestowing alms, and hiding

himself that he might still continue to bestow them. Nothing could calm

the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre’s heart--neither the warm

peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the

broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single

painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by

the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour

the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the

grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of

entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to

go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might

say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.

But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but

for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites

and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years

previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on

man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a

first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent

belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young

nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled

yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that

glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was

convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could

not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again

yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to

satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a

second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there

be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and

become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world,

upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and

live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree

that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there

naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its

fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation,

he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor,

and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and

believe in them--the poor--since they and their frightful sufferings

alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came

into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself:

charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.

Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments,

in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever

dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes

for the general salvation. He denied everything, he anticipated nothing

but the final, inevitable catastrophe: revolt, massacre and

conflagration, which would sweep away a guilty and condemned world.

Unbelieving priest that he was, yet watching over the faith of others,

honestly, chastely discharging his duties, full of haughty sadness at the

thought that he had been unable to renounce his mind as he had renounced

his flesh and his dream of being a saviour of the nations, he withal

remained erect, full of fierce yet solitary grandeur. And this

despairing, denying priest, who had dived to the bottom of nothingness,

retained such a lofty and grave demeanour, perfumed by such pure

kindness, that in his parish of Neuilly he had acquired the reputation of

being a young saint, one beloved by Providence, whose prayers wrought

miracles. He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the

priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in

which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping

women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother

whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask

that infant’s cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant

her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of

His heart, all burning with love.

Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de

Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he

turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his

hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes

darkened by suffering. He was no longer the young priest whose

countenance had glowed with tender fever on the road to Lourdes, whose

face had been illumined by apostolic fervour when he started for Rome.

The two hereditary influences which were ever at strife within him--that

of his father to whom he owed his impregnable, towering brow, that of his

mother who had given him his love-thirsting lips, were still waging war,

the whole human battle of sentiment and reason, in that now ravaged face

of his, whither in moments of forgetfulness ascended all the chaos of

internal suffering. The lips still confessed that unquenched thirst for

love, self-bestowal and life, which he well thought he could nevermore

content, whilst the solid brow, the citadel which made him suffer,

obstinately refused to capitulate, whatever might be the assaults of

error. But he stiffened himself, hid the horror of the void in which he

struggled, and showed himself superb, making each gesture, repeating each

word in sovereign fashion. And gazing at him through her tears, the

mother who was there among the few kneeling women, the mother who awaited

a supreme intercession from him, who thought him in communion with Jesus

for the salvation of her child, beheld him radiant with angelic beauty

like some messenger of the divine grace.

When, after the offertory, Pierre uncovered the chalice he felt contempt

for himself. The shock had been too great, and he thought of those things

in spite of all. What puerility there had been in his two experiments at

Lourdes and Rome, the _naivete_ of a poor distracted being, consumed by

desire to love and believe. To have imagined that present-day science

would in his person accommodate itself to the faith of the year One

Thousand, and in particular to have foolishly believed that he, petty

priest that he was, would be able to indoctrinate the Pope and prevail on

him to become a saint and change the face of the world! It all filled him

with shame; how people must have laughed at him! Then, too, his idea of a

schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of

writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism

to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and

living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris

an abbe of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that

famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the

ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy

indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! If Luther

were to come to France in our days he would end, forgotten and dying of

hunger, on a Batignolles fifth-floor. A schism cannot succeed among a

people that no longer believes, that has ceased to take all interest in

the Church, and sets its hope elsewhere. And it was all Catholicism, in

fact all Christianity, that would be swept away, for, apart from certain

moral maxims, the Gospel no longer supplied a possible code for society.

And this conviction increased Pierre’s torment on the days when his

cassock weighed more heavily on his shoulders, when he ended by feeling

contempt for himself at thus celebrating the divine mystery of the mass,

which for him had become but the formula of a dead religion.

Having half filled the chalice with wine from the vase, Pierre washed his

hands and again perceived the mother with her face of ardent entreaty.

Then he thought it was for her that, with the charitable leanings of a

vow-bound man, he had remained a priest, a priest without belief, feeding

the belief of others with the bread of illusion. But this heroic conduct,

the haughty spirit of duty in which he imprisoned himself, was not

practised by him without growing anguish. Did not elementary probity

require that he should cast aside the cassock and return into the midst

of men? At certain times the falsity of his position filled him with

disgust for his useless heroism; and he asked himself if it were not

cowardly and dangerous to leave the masses in superstition. Certainly the

theory of a just and vigilant Providence, of a future paradise where all

these sufferings of the world would receive compensation, had long seemed

necessary to the wretchedness of mankind; but what a trap lay in it, what

a pretext for the tyrannical grinding down of nations; and how far more

virile it would be to undeceive the nations, however brutally, and give

them courage to live the real life, even if it were in tears. If they

were already turning aside from Christianity was not this because they

needed a more human ideal, a religion of health and joy which should not

be a religion of death? On the day when the idea of charity should

crumble, Christianity would crumble also, for it was built upon the idea

of divine charity correcting the injustice of fate, and offering future

rewards to those who might suffer in this life. And it was crumbling; for

the poor no longer believed in it, but grew angry at the thought of that

deceptive paradise, with the promise of which their patience had been

beguiled so long, and demanded that their share of happiness should not

always be put off until the morrow of death. A cry for justice arose from

every lip, for justice upon this earth, justice for those who hunger and

thirst, whom alms are weary of relieving after eighteen hundred years of

Gospel teaching, and who still and ever lack bread to eat.

When Pierre, with his elbows on the altar, had emptied the chalice after

breaking the sacred wafer, he felt himself sinking into yet greater

distress. And so a third experiment was beginning for him, the supreme

battle of justice against charity, in which his heart and his mind would

struggle together in that great Paris, so full of terrible, unknown

things. The need for the divine still battled within him against

domineering intelligence. How among the masses would one ever be able to

content the thirst for the mysterious? Leaving the _elite_ on one side,

would science suffice to pacify desire, lull suffering, and satisfy the

dream? And what would become of himself in the bankruptcy of that same

charity, which for three years had alone kept him erect by occupying his

every hour, and giving him the illusion of self-devotion, of being useful

to others? It seemed, all at once, as if the ground sank beneath him, and

he heard nothing save the cry of the masses, silent so long, but now

demanding justice, growling and threatening to take their share, which

was withheld from them by force and ruse. Nothing more, it seemed, could

delay the inevitable catastrophe, the fratricidal class warfare that

would sweep away the olden world, which was condemned to disappear

beneath the mountain of its crimes. Every hour with frightful sadness he

expected the collapse, Paris steeped in blood, Paris in flames. And his

horror of all violence froze him; he knew not where to seek the new

belief which might dissipate the peril. Fully conscious, though he was,

that the social and religious problems are but one, and are alone in

question in the dreadful daily labour of Paris, he was too deeply

troubled himself, too far removed from ordinary things by his position as

a priest, and too sorely rent by doubt and powerlessness to tell as yet

where might be truth, and health, and life. Ah! to be healthy and to

live, to content at last both heart and reason in the peace, the certain,

simply honest labour, which man has come to accomplish upon this earth!

The mass was finished, and Pierre descended from the altar, when the

weeping mother, near whom he passed, caught hold of a corner of the

chasuble with her trembling hands, and kissed it with wild fervour, as

one may kiss some relic of a saint from whom one expects salvation. She

thanked him for the miracle which he must have accomplished, certain as

she felt that she would find her child cured. And he was deeply stirred

by that love, that ardent faith of hers, in spite of the sudden and yet

keener distress which he felt at being in no wise the sovereign minister

that she thought him, the minister able to obtain a respite from Death.

But he dismissed her consoled and strengthened, and it was with an ardent

prayer that he entreated the unknown but conscious Power to succour the

poor creature. Then, when he had divested himself in the sacristy, and

found himself again out of doors before the basilica, lashed by the keen

wintry wind, a mortal shiver came upon him, and froze him, while through

the mist he looked to see if a whirlwind of anger and justice had not

swept Paris away: that catastrophe which must some day destroy it,

leaving under the leaden heavens only the pestilential quagmire of its

ruins.

Pierre wished to fulfil Abbe Rose’s commission immediately. He followed

the Rue des Norvins, on the crest of Montmartre; and, reaching the Rue

des Saules, descended by its steep slope, between mossy walls, to the

other side of Paris. The three francs which he was holding in his

cassock’s pocket, filled him at once with gentle emotion and covert anger

against the futility of charity. But as he gradually descended by the

sharp declivities and interminable storeys of steps, the mournful nooks

of misery which he espied took possession of him, and infinite pity wrung

his heart. A whole new district was here being built alongside the broad

thoroughfares opened since the great works of the Sacred Heart had begun.

Lofty middle-class houses were already rising among ripped-up gardens and

plots of vacant land, still edged with palings. And these houses with

their substantial frontages, all new and white, lent a yet more sombre

and leprous aspect to such of the old shaky buildings as remained, the

low pot-houses with blood-coloured walls, the _cites_ of workmen’s

dwellings, those abodes of suffering with black, soiled buildings in

which human cattle were piled. Under the low-hanging sky that day, the

pavement, dented by heavily-laden carts, was covered with mud; the thaw

soaked the walls with an icy dampness, whilst all the filth and

destitution brought terrible sadness to the heart.

After going as far as the Rue Marcadet, Pierre retraced his steps; and in

the Rue des Saules, certain that he was not mistaken, he entered the

courtyard of a kind of barracks or hospital, encompassed by three

irregular buildings. This court was a quagmire, where filth must have

accumulated during the two months of terrible frost; and now all was

melting, and an abominable stench arose. The buildings were half falling,

the gaping vestibules looked like cellar holes, strips of paper streaked

the cracked and filthy window-panes, and vile rags hung about like flags

of death. Inside a shanty which served as the door-keeper’s abode Pierre

only saw an infirm man rolled up in a tattered strip of what had once

been a horse-cloth.

“You have an old workman named Laveuve here,” said the priest. “Which

staircase is it, which floor?”

The man did not answer, but opened his anxious eyes, like a scared idiot.

The door-keeper, no doubt, was in the neighbourhood. For a moment the

priest waited; then seeing a little girl on the other side of the

courtyard, he risked himself, crossed the quagmire on tip-toe, and asked:

“Do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house, my child?”

The little girl, who only had a ragged gown of pink cotton stuff about

her meagre figure, stood there shivering, her hands covered with

chilblains. She raised her delicate face, which looked pretty though

nipped by the cold: “Laveuve,” said she, “no, don’t know, don’t know.”

And with the unconscious gesture of a beggar child she put out one of her

poor, numbed and disfigured hands. Then, when the priest had given her a

little bit of silver, she began to prance through the mud like a joyful

goat, singing the while in a shrill voice: “Don’t know, don’t know.”

Pierre decided to follow her. She vanished into one of the gaping

vestibules, and, in her rear, he climbed a dark and fetid staircase,

whose steps were half-broken and so slippery, on account of the vegetable

parings strewn over them, that he had to avail himself of the greasy rope

by which the inmates hoisted themselves upwards. But every door was

closed; he vainly knocked at several of them, and only elicited, at the

last, a stifled growl, as though some despairing animal were confined

within. Returning to the yard, he hesitated, then made his way to another

staircase, where he was deafened by piercing cries, as of a child who is

being butchered. He climbed on hearing this noise and at last found

himself in front of an open room where an infant, who had been left

alone, tied in his little chair, in order that he might not fall, was

howling and howling without drawing breath. Then Pierre went down again,

upset, frozen by the sight of so much destitution and abandonment.

But a woman was coming in, carrying three potatoes in her apron, and on

being questioned by him she gazed distrustfully at his cassock. “Laveuve,

Laveuve? I can’t say,” she replied. “If the door-keeper were there, she

might be able to tell you. There are five staircases, you see, and we

don’t all know each other. Besides, there are so many changes. Still try

over there; at the far end.”

The staircase at the back of the yard was yet more abominable than the

others, its steps warped, its walls slimy, as if soaked with the sweat of

anguish. At each successive floor the drain-sinks exhaled a pestilential

stench, whilst from every lodging came moans, or a noise of quarrelling,

or some frightful sign of misery. A door swung open, and a man appeared

dragging a woman by the hair whilst three youngsters sobbed aloud. On the

next floor, Pierre caught a glimpse of a room where a young girl in her

teens, racked by coughing, was hastily carrying an infant to and fro to

quiet it, in despair that all the milk of her breast should be exhausted.

Then, in an adjoining lodging, came the poignant spectacle of three

beings, half clad in shreds, apparently sexless and ageless, who, amidst

the dire bareness of their room, were gluttonously eating from the same

earthen pan some pottage which even dogs would have refused. They barely

raised their heads to growl, and did not answer Pierre’s questions.

He was about to go down again, when right atop of the stairs, at the

entry of a passage, it occurred to him to make a last try by knocking at

the door. It was opened by a woman whose uncombed hair was already

getting grey, though she could not be more than forty; while her pale

lips, and dim eyes set in a yellow countenance, expressed utter

lassitude, the shrinking, the constant dread of one whom wretchedness has

pitilessly assailed. The sight of Pierre’s cassock disturbed her, and she

stammered anxiously: “Come in, come in, Monsieur l’Abbe.”

However, a man whom Pierre had not at first seen--a workman also of some

forty years, tall, thin and bald, with scanty moustache and beard of a

washed-out reddish hue--made an angry gesture--a threat as it were--to

turn the priest out of doors. But he calmed himself, sat down near a

rickety table and pretended to turn his back. And as there was also a

child present--a fair-haired girl, eleven or twelve years old, with a

long and gentle face and that intelligent and somewhat aged expression

which great misery imparts to children--he called her to him, and held

her between his knees, doubtless to keep her away from the man in the

cassock.

Pierre--whose heart was oppressed by his reception, and who realised the

utter destitution of this family by the sight of the bare, fireless room,

and the distressed mournfulness of its three inmates--decided all the

same to repeat his question: “Madame, do you know an old workman named

Laveuve in the house?”

The woman--who now trembled at having admitted him, since it seemed to

displease her man--timidly tried to arrange matters. “Laveuve, Laveuve?

no, I don’t. But Salvat, you hear? Do you know a Laveuve here?”

Salvat merely shrugged his shoulders; but the little girl could not keep

her tongue still: “I say, mamma Theodore, it’s p’raps the Philosopher.”

“A former house-painter,” continued Pierre, “an old man who is ill and

past work.”

Madame Theodore was at once enlightened. “In that case it’s him, it’s

him. We call him the Philosopher, a nickname folks have given him in the

neighbourhood. But there’s nothing to prevent his real name from being

Laveuve.”

With one of his fists raised towards the ceiling, Salvat seemed to be

protesting against the abomination of a world and a Providence that

allowed old toilers to die of hunger just like broken-down beasts.

However, he did not speak, but relapsed into the savage, heavy silence,

the bitter meditation in which he had been plunged when the priest

arrived. He was a journeyman engineer, and gazed obstinately at the table

where lay his little leather tool-bag, bulging with something it

contained--something, perhaps, which he had to take back to a work-shop.

He might have been thinking of a long, enforced spell of idleness, of a

vain search for any kind of work during the two previous months of that

terrible winter. Or perhaps it was the coming bloody reprisals of the

starvelings that occupied the fiery reverie which set his large, strange,

vague blue eyes aglow. All at once he noticed that his daughter had taken

up the tool-bag and was trying to open it to see what it might contain.

At this he quivered and at last spoke, his voice kindly, yet bitter with

sudden emotion, which made him turn pale. “Celine, you must leave that

alone. I forbade you to touch my tools,” said he; then taking the bag, he

deposited it with great precaution against the wall behind him.

“And so, madame,” asked Pierre, “this man Laveuve lives on this floor?”

Madame Theodore directed a timid, questioning glance at Salvat. She was

not in favour of hustling priests when they took the trouble to call, for

at times there was a little money to be got from them. And when she

realised that Salvat, who had once more relapsed into his black reverie,

left her free to act as she pleased, she at once tendered her services.

“If Monsieur l’Abbe is agreeable, I will conduct him. It’s just at the

end of the passage. But one must know the way, for there are still some

steps to climb.”

Celine, finding a pastime in this visit, escaped from her father’s knees

and likewise accompanied the priest. And Salvat remained alone in that

den of poverty and suffering, injustice and anger, without a fire,

without bread, haunted by his burning dream, his eyes again fixed upon

his bag, as if there, among his tools, he possessed the wherewithal to

heal the ailing world.

It indeed proved necessary to climb a few more steps; and then, following

Madame Theodore and Celine, Pierre found himself in a kind of narrow

garret under the roof, a loft a few yards square, where one could not

stand erect. There was no window, only a skylight, and as the snow still

covered it one had to leave the door wide open in order that one might

see. And the thaw was entering the place, the melting snow was falling

drop by drop, and coming over the tiled floor. After long weeks of

intense cold, dark dampness rained quivering over all. And there, lacking

even a chair, even a plank, Laveuve lay in a corner on a little pile of

filthy rags spread upon the bare tiles; he looked like some animal dying

on a dung-heap.

“There!” said Celine in her sing-song voice, “there he is, that’s the

Philosopher!”

Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. “Yes, he

breathes; he’s sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat

every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has

nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw

oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that

a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at

first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough

to get a job as night watchman. But that’s over, he’s been turned away

from everywhere, and, for two months now, he’s been lying in this nook

waiting to die. The landlord hasn’t dared to fling him into the street as

yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes

bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing

oneself, how can one give to others?”

Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that

remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had

turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve’s white, worn,

sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin

following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve’s unkempt beard straggled over

his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his

toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose

seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his

resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn

to death, and now only good for the knackers.

“Ah! the poor fellow,” muttered the shuddering priest. “And he is left to

die of hunger, all alone, without any succour? And not a hospital, not an

asylum has given him shelter?”

“Well,” resumed Madame Theodore in her sad yet resigned voice, “the

hospitals are built for the sick, and he isn’t sick, he’s simply

finishing off, with his strength at an end. Besides he isn’t always easy

to deal with. People came again only lately to put him in an asylum, but

he won’t be shut up. And he speaks coarsely to those who question him,

not to mention that he has the reputation of liking drink and talking

badly about the gentle-folks. But, thank Heaven, he will now soon be

delivered.”

Pierre had leant forward on seeing Laveuve’s eyes open, and he spoke to

him tenderly, telling him that he had come from a friend with a little

money to enable him to buy what he might most pressingly require. At

first, on seeing Pierre’s cassock, the old man had growled some coarse

words; but, despite his extreme feebleness, he still retained the pert

chaffing spirit of the Parisian artisan: “Well, then, I’ll willingly

drink a drop,” he said distinctly, “and have a bit of bread with it, if

there’s the needful; for I’ve lost taste of both for a couple of days

past.”

Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf

and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose’s money. And in the interval she told

Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the

Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were

presided over by Baroness Duvillard. However, the usual regulation

inquiries had doubtless led to such an unfavourable report that matters

had gone no further.

“Baroness Duvillard! but I know her, and will go to see her to-day!”

exclaimed Pierre, whose heart was bleeding. “It is impossible for a man

to be left in such circumstances any longer.”

Then, as Celine came back with the loaf and the wine, the three of them

tried to make Laveuve more comfortable, raised him on his heap of rags,

gave him to eat and to drink, and then left the remainder of the wine and

the loaf--a large four-pound loaf--near him, recommending him to wait

awhile before he finished the bread, as otherwise he might stifle.

“Monsieur l’Abbe ought to give me his address in case I should have any

news to send him,” said Madame Theodore when she again found herself at

her door.

Pierre had no card with him, and so all three went into the room. But

Salvat was no longer alone there. He stood talking in a low voice very

quickly, and almost mouth to mouth, with a young fellow of twenty. The

latter, who was slim and dark, with a sprouting beard and hair cut in

brush fashion, had bright eyes, a straight nose and thin lips set in a

pale and slightly freckled face, betokening great intelligence. With

stern and stubborn brow, he stood shivering in his well-worn jacket.

“Monsieur l’Abbe wants to leave me his address for the Philosopher’s

affair,” gently explained Madame Theodore, annoyed to find another there

with Salvat.

The two men had glanced at the priest and then looked at one another,

each with terrible mien. And they suddenly ceased speaking in the bitter

cold which fell from the ceiling. Then, again with infinite precaution,

Salvat went to take his tool-bag from alongside the wall.

“So you are going down, you are again going to look for work?” asked

Madame Theodore.

He did not answer, but merely made an angry gesture, as if to say that he

would no longer have anything to do with work since work for so long a

time had not cared to have anything to do with him.

“All the same,” resumed the woman, “try to bring something back with you,

for you know there’s nothing. At what time will you be back?”

With another gesture he seemed to answer that he would come back when he

could, perhaps never. And tears rising, despite all his efforts, to his

vague, blue, glowing eyes he caught hold of his daughter Celine, kissed

her violently, distractedly, and then went off, with his bag under his

arm, followed by his young companion.

“Celine,” resumed Madame Theodore, “give Monsieur l’Abbe your pencil,

and, see, monsieur, seat yourself here, it will be better for writing.”

Then, when Pierre had installed himself at the table, on the chair

previously occupied by Salvat, she went on talking, seeking to excuse her

man for his scanty politeness: “He hasn’t a bad heart, but he’s had so

many worries in life that he has become a bit cracked. It’s like that

young man whom you just saw here, Monsieur Victor Mathis. There’s another

for you, who isn’t happy, a young man who was well brought up, who has a

lot of learning, and whose mother, a widow, has only just got the

wherewithal to buy bread. So one can understand it, can’t one? It all

upsets their heads, and they talk of blowing up everybody. For my part

those are not my notions, but I forgive them, oh! willingly enough.”

Perturbed, yet interested by all the mystery and vague horror which he

could divine around him, Pierre made no haste to write his address, but

lingered listening, as if inviting confidence.

“If you only knew, Monsieur l’Abbe, that poor Salvat was a forsaken

child, without father or mother, and had to scour the roads and try every

trade at first to get a living. Then afterwards he became a mechanician,

and a very good workman, I assure you, very skilful and very painstaking.

But he already had those ideas of his, and quarrelled with people, and

tried to bring his mates over to his views; and so he was unable to stay

anywhere. At last, when he was thirty, he was stupid enough to go to

America with an inventor, who traded on him to such a point that after

six years of it he came back ill and penniless. I must tell you that he

had married my younger sister Leonie, and that she died before he went to

America, leaving him little Celine, who was then only a year old. I was

then living with my husband, Theodore Labitte, a mason; and it’s not to

brag that I say it, but however much I wore out my eyes with needlework

he used to beat me till he left me half-dead on the floor. But he ended

by deserting me and going off with a young woman of twenty, which, after

all, caused me more pleasure than grief. And naturally when Salvat came

back he sought me out and found me alone with his little Celine, whom he

had left in my charge when he went away, and who called me mamma. And

we’ve all three been living together since then--”

She became somewhat embarrassed, and then, as if to show that she did not

altogether lack some respectable family connections, she went on to say:

“For my part I’ve had no luck; but I’ve another sister, Hortense, who’s

married to a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, and lives in a pretty lodging

on the Boulevard Rochechouart. There were three of us born of my father’s

second marriage,--Hortense, who’s the youngest, Leonie, who’s dead, and

myself, Pauline, the eldest. And of my father’s first marriage I’ve still

a brother Eugene Toussaint, who is ten years older than me and is an

engineer like Salvat, and has been working ever since the war in the same

establishment, the Grandidier factory, only a hundred steps away in the

Rue Marcadet. The misfortune is that he had a stroke lately. As for me,

my eyes are done for; I ruined them by working ten hours a day at fine

needlework. And now I can no longer even try to mend anything without my

eyes filling with water till I can’t see at all. I’ve tried to find

charwoman’s work, but I can’t get any; bad luck always follows us. And so

we are in need of everything; we’ve nothing but black misery, two or

three days sometimes going by without a bite, so that it’s like the

chance life of a dog that feeds on what it can find. And with these last

two months of bitter cold to freeze us, it’s sometimes made us think that

one morning we should never wake up again. But what would you have? I’ve

never been happy, I was beaten to begin with, and now I’m done for, left

in a corner, living on, I really don’t know why.”

Her voice had begun to tremble, her red eyes moistened, and Pierre could

realise that she thus wept through life, a good enough woman but one who

had no will, and was already blotted out, so to say, from existence.

“Oh! I don’t complain of Salvat,” she went on. “He’s a good fellow; he

only dreams of everybody’s happiness, and he doesn’t drink, and he works

when he can. Only it’s certain that he’d work more if he didn’t busy

himself with politics. One can’t discuss things with comrades, and go to

public meetings and be at the workshop at the same time. In that he’s at

fault, that’s evident. But all the same he has good reason to complain,

for one can’t imagine such misfortunes as have pursued him. Everything

has fallen on him, everything has beaten him down. Why, a saint even

would have gone mad, so that one can understand that a poor beggar who

has never had any luck should get quite wild. For the last two months he

has only met one good heart, a learned gentleman who lives up yonder on

the height, Monsieur Guillaume Froment, who has given him a little work,

just something to enable us to have some soup now and then.”

Much surprised by this mention of his brother, Pierre wished to ask

certain questions; but a singular feeling of uneasiness, in which fear

and discretion mingled, checked his tongue. He looked at Celine, who

stood before him, listening in silence with her grave, delicate air; and

Madame Theodore, seeing him smile at the child, indulged in a final

remark: “It’s just the idea of that child,” said she, “that throws Salvat

out of his wits. He adores her, and he’d kill everybody if he could, when

he sees her go supperless to bed. She’s such a good girl, she was

learning so nicely at the Communal School! But now she hasn’t even a

shift to go there in.”

Pierre, who had at last written his address, slipped a five-franc piece

into the little girl’s hand, and, desirous as he was of curtailing any

thanks, he hastily said: “You will know now where to find me if you need

me for Laveuve. But I’m going to busy myself about him this very

afternoon, and I really hope that he will be fetched away this evening.”

Madame Theodore did not listen, but poured forth all possible blessings;

whilst Celine, thunderstruck at seeing five francs in her hand, murmured:

“Oh! that poor papa, who has gone to hunt for money! Shall I run after

him to tell him that we’ve got enough for to-day?”

Then the priest, who was already in the passage, heard the woman answer:

“Oh! he’s far away if he’s still walking. He’ll p’raps come back right

enough.”

However, as Pierre, with buzzing head and grief-stricken heart, hastily

escaped out of that frightful house of suffering, he perceived to his

astonishment Salvat and Victor Mathis standing erect in a corner of the

filthy courtyard, where the stench was so pestilential. They had come

downstairs, there to continue their interrupted colloquy. And again, they

were talking in very low tones, and very quickly, mouth to mouth,

absorbed in the violent thoughts which made their eyes flare. But they

heard the priest’s footsteps, recognised him, and suddenly becoming cold

and calm, exchanged an energetic hand-shake without uttering another

word. Victor went up towards Montmartre, whilst Salvat hesitated like a

man who is consulting destiny. Then, as if trusting himself to stern

chance, drawing up his thin figure, the figure of a weary, hungry toiler,

he turned into the Rue Marcadet, and walked towards Paris, his tool-bag

still under his arm.

For an instant Pierre felt a desire to run and call to him that his

little girl wished him to go back again. But the same feeling of

uneasiness as before came over the priest--a commingling of discretion

and fear, a covert conviction that nothing could stay destiny. And he

himself was no longer calm, no longer experienced the icy, despairing

distress of the early morning. On finding himself again in the street,

amidst the quivering fog, he felt the fever, the glow of charity which

the sight of such frightful wretchedness had ignited, once more within

him. No, no! such suffering was too much; he wished to struggle still, to

save Laveuve and restore a little joy to all those poor folk. The new

experiment presented itself with that city of Paris which he had seen

shrouded as with ashes, so mysterious and so perturbing beneath the

threat of inevitable justice. And he dreamed of a huge sun bringing

health and fruitfulness, which would make of the huge city the fertile

field where would sprout the better world of to-morrow.

II. WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS

THAT same morning, as was the case nearly every day, some intimates were

expected to _dejeuner_ at the Duvillards’, a few friends who more or less

invited themselves. And on that chilly day, all thaw and fog, the regal

mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy near the Boulevard de la Madeleine

bloomed with the rarest flowers, for flowers were the greatest passion of

the Baroness, who transformed the lofty, sumptuous rooms, littered with

marvels, into warm and odoriferous conservatories, whither the gloomy,

livid light of Paris penetrated caressingly with infinite softness.

The great reception rooms were on the ground-floor looking on to the

spacious courtyard, and preceded by a little winter garden, which served

as a vestibule where two footmen in liveries of dark green and gold were

invariably on duty. A famous gallery of paintings, valued at millions of

francs, occupied the whole of the northern side of the house. And the

grand staircase, of a sumptuousness which also was famous, conducted to

the apartments usually occupied by the family, a large red drawing-room,

a small blue and silver drawing-room, a study whose walls were hung with

old stamped leather, and a dining-room in pale green with English

furniture, not to mention the various bedchambers and dressing-rooms.

Built in the time of Louis XIV. the mansion retained an aspect of noble

grandeur, subordinated to the epicurean tastes of the triumphant

_bourgeoisie_, which for a century now had reigned by virtue of the

omnipotence of money.

Noon had not yet struck, and Baron Duvillard, contrary to custom, found

himself the first in the little blue and silver _salon_. He was a man of

sixty, tall and sturdy, with a large nose, full cheeks, broad, fleshy

lips, and wolfish teeth, which had remained very fine. He had, however,

become bald at an early age, and dyed the little hair that was left him.

Moreover, since his beard had turned white, he had kept his face

clean-shaven. His grey eyes bespoke his audacity, and in his laugh there

was a ring of conquest, while the whole of his face expressed the fact

that this conquest was his own, that he wielded the sovereignty of an

unscrupulous master, who used and abused the power stolen and retained by

his caste.

He took a few steps, and then halted in front of a basket of wonderful

orchids near the window. On the mantel-piece and table tufts of violets

sent forth their perfume, and in the warm, deep silence which seemed to

fall from the hangings, the Baron sat down and stretched himself in one

of the large armchairs, upholstered in blue satin striped with silver. He

had taken a newspaper from his pocket, and began to re-peruse an article

it contained, whilst all around him the entire mansion proclaimed his

immense fortune, his sovereign power, the whole history of the century

which had made him the master. His grandfather, Jerome Duvillard, son of

a petty advocate of Poitou, had come to Paris as a notary’s clerk in

1788, when he was eighteen; and very keen, intelligent and hungry as he

was, he had gained the family’s first three millions--at first in

trafficking with the _emigres’_ estates when they were confiscated and

sold as national property, and later, in contracting for supplies to the

imperial army. His father, Gregoire Duvillard, born in 1805, and the real

great man of the family--he who had first reigned in the Rue

Godot-de-Mauroy, after King Louis Philippe had granted him the title of

Baron--remained one of the recognized heroes of modern finance by reason

of the scandalous profits which he had made in every famous thieving

speculation of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, such as mines,

railroads, and the Suez Canal. And he, the present Baron, Henri by name,

and born in 1836, had only seriously gone into business on Baron

Gregoire’s death soon after the Franco-German War. However, he had done

so with such a rageful appetite, that in a quarter of a century he had

again doubled the family fortune. He rotted and devoured, corrupted,

swallowed everything that he touched; and he was also the tempter

personified--the man who bought all consciences that were for

sale--having fully understood the new times and its tendencies in

presence of the democracy, which in its turn had become hungry and

impatient. Inferior though he was both to his father and his grandfather,

being a man of enjoyment, caring less for the work of conquest than the

division of the spoil, he nevertheless remained a terrible fellow, a

sleek triumpher, whose operations were all certainties, who amassed

millions at each stroke, and treated with governments on a footing of

equality, able as he was to place, if not France, at least a ministry in

his pocket. In one century and three generations, royalty had become

embodied in him: a royalty already threatened, already shaken by the

tempest close ahead. And at times his figure grew and expanded till it

became, as it were, an incarnation of the whole _bourgeoisie_--that

_bourgeoisie_ which at the division of the spoils in 1789 appropriated

everything, and has since fattened on everything at the expense of the

masses, and refuses to restore anything whatever.

The article which the Baron was re-perusing in a halfpenny newspaper

interested him. “La Voix du Peuple” was a noisy sheet which, under the

pretence of defending outraged justice and morality, set a fresh scandal

circulating every morning in the hope of thereby increasing its sales.

And that morning, in big type on its front page, this sub-title was

displayed: “The Affair of the African Railways. Five Millions spent in

Bribes: Two Ministers Bought, Thirty Deputies and Senators Compromised.”

Then in an article of odious violence the paper’s editor, the famous

Sagnier, announced that he possessed and intended to publish the list of

the thirty-two members of Parliament, whose support Baron Duvillard had

purchased at the time when the Chambers had voted the bill for the

African Railway Lines. Quite a romantic story was mingled with all this,

the adventures of a certain Hunter, whom the Baron had employed as his

go-between and who had now fled. The Baron, however, re-perused each

sentence and weighed each word of the article very calmly; and although

he was alone he shrugged his shoulders and spoke aloud with the tranquil

assurance of a man whose responsibility is covered and who is, moreover,

too powerful to be molested.

“The idiot,” he said, “he knows even less than he pretends.”

Just then, however, a first guest arrived, a man of barely four and

thirty, elegantly dressed, dark and good looking, with a delicately

shaped nose, and curly hair and beard. As a rule, too, he had laughing

eyes, and something giddy, flighty, bird-like in his demeanour; but that

morning he seemed nervous, anxious even, and smiled in a scared way.

“Ah! it’s you, Duthil,” said the Baron, rising. “Have you read this?” And

he showed the new comer the “Voix du Peuple,” which he was folding up to

replace it in his pocket.

“Why yes, I’ve read it. It’s amazing. How can Sagnier have got hold of

the list of names? Has there been some traitor?”

The Baron looked at his companion quietly, amused by his secret anguish.

Duthil, the son of a notary of Angouleme, almost poor and very honest,

had been sent to Paris as deputy for that town whilst yet very young,

thanks to the high reputation of his father; and he there led a life of

pleasure and idleness, even as he had formerly done when a student.

However, his pleasant bachelor’s quarters in the Rue de Suresnes, and his

success as a handsome man in the whirl of women among whom he lived, cost

him no little money; and gaily enough, devoid as he was of any moral

sense, he had already glided into all sorts of compromising and lowering

actions, like a light-headed, superior man, a charming, thoughtless

fellow, who attached no importance whatever to such trifles.

“Bah!” said the Baron at last. “Has Sagnier even got a list? I doubt it,

for there was none; Hunter wasn’t so foolish as to draw one up. And then,

too, it was merely an ordinary affair; nothing more was done than is

always done in such matters of business.”

Duthil, who for the first time in his life had felt anxious, listened

like one that needs to be reassured. “Quite so, eh?” he exclaimed.

“That’s what I thought. There isn’t a cat to be whipped in the whole

affair.”

He tried to laugh as usual, and no longer exactly knew how it was that he

had received some ten thousand francs in connection with the matter,

whether it were in the shape of a vague loan, or else under some pretext

of publicity, puffery, or advertising, for Hunter had acted with extreme

adroitness so as to give no offence to the susceptibilities of even the

least virginal consciences.

“No, there’s not a cat to be whipped,” repeated Duvillard, who decidedly

seemed amused by the face which Duthil was pulling. “And besides, my dear

fellow, it’s well known that cats always fall on their feet. But have you

seen Silviane?”

“I just left her. I found her in a great rage with you. She learnt this

morning that her affair of the Comedie is off.”

A rush of anger suddenly reddened the Baron’s face. He, who could scoff

so calmly at the threat of the African Railways scandal, lost his balance

and felt his blood boiling directly there was any question of Silviane,

the last, imperious passion of his sixtieth year. “What! off?” said he.

“But at the Ministry of Fine Arts they gave me almost a positive promise

only the day before yesterday.”

He referred to a stubborn caprice of Silviane d’Aulnay, who, although she

had hitherto only reaped a success of beauty on the stage, obstinately

sought to enter the Comedie Francaise and make her _debut_ there in the

part of “Pauline” in Corneille’s “Polyeucte,” which part she had been

studying desperately for several months past. Her idea seemed an insane

one, and all Paris laughed at it; but the young woman, with superb

assurance, kept herself well to the front, and imperiously demanded the

_role_, feeling sure that she would conquer.

“It was the minister who wouldn’t have it,” explained Duthil.

The Baron was choking. “The minister, the minister! Ah! well, I will soon

have that minister sent to the rightabout.”

However, he had to cease speaking, for at that moment Baroness Duvillard

came into the little drawing-room. At forty-six years of age she was

still very beautiful. Very fair and tall, having hitherto put on but

little superfluous fat, and retaining perfect arms and shoulders, with

speckless silky skin, it was only her face that was spoiling, colouring

slightly with reddish blotches. And these blemishes were her torment, her

hourly thought and worry. Her Jewish origin was revealed by her somewhat

long and strangely charming face, with blue and softly voluptuous eyes.

As indolent as an Oriental slave, disliking to have to move, walk, or

even speak, she seemed intended for a harem life, especially as she was

for ever tending her person. That day she was all in white, gowned in a

white silk toilette of delicious and lustrous simplicity.

Duthil complimented her, and kissed her hand with an enraptured air. “Ah!

madame, you set a little springtide in my heart. Paris is so black and

muddy this morning.”

However, a second guest entered the room, a tall and handsome man of five

or six and thirty; and the Baron, still disturbed by his passion,

profited by this opportunity to make his escape. He carried Duthil away

into his study, saying, “Come here an instant, my dear fellow. I have a

few more words to say to you about the affair in question. Monsieur de

Quinsac will keep my wife company for a moment.”

The Baroness, as soon as she was alone with the new comer, who, like

Duthil, had most respectfully kissed her hand, gave him a long, silent

look, while her soft eyes filled with tears. Deep silence, tinged with

some slight embarrassment, had fallen, but she ended by saying in a very

low voice: “How happy I am, Gerard, to find myself alone with you for a

moment. For a month past I have not had that happiness.”

The circumstances in which Henri Duvillard had married the younger

daughter of Justus Steinberger, the great Jew banker, formed quite a

story which was often recalled. The Steinbergers--after the fashion of

the Rothschilds--were originally four brothers--Justus, residing in

Paris, and the three others at Berlin, Vienna, and London, a circumstance

which gave their secret association most formidable power in the

financial markets of Europe. Justus, however, was the least wealthy of

the four, and in Baron Gregoire Duvillard he had a redoubtable adversary

against whom he was compelled to struggle each time that any large prey

was in question. And it was after a terrible encounter between the pair,

after the eager sharing of the spoils, that the crafty idea had come to

Justus of giving his younger daughter Eve in marriage, by way of

_douceur_, to the Baron’s son, Henri. So far the latter had only been

known as an amiable fellow, fond of horses and club life; and no doubt

Justus’s idea was that, at the death of the redoubtable Baron, who was

already condemned by his physicians, he would be able to lay his hands on

the rival banking-house, particularly if he only had in front of him a

son-in-law whom it was easy to conquer. As it happened, Henri had been

mastered by a violent passion for Eve’s blond beauty, which was then

dazzling. He wished to marry her, and his father, who knew him,

consented, in reality greatly amused to think that Justus was making an

execrably bad stroke of business. The enterprise became indeed disastrous

for Justus when Henri succeeded his father and the man of prey appeared

from beneath the man of pleasure and carved himself his own huge share in

exploiting the unbridled appetites of the middle-class democracy, which

had at last secured possession of power. Not only did Eve fail to devour

Henri, who in his turn had become Baron Duvillard, the all-powerful

banker, more and more master of the market; but it was the Baron who

devoured Eve, and this in less than four years’ time. After she had borne

him a daughter and a son in turn, he suddenly drew away from her,

neglected her, as if she were a mere toy that he no longer cared for. She

was at first both surprised and distressed by the change, especially on

learning that he was resuming his bachelor’s habits, and had set his

fickle if ardent affections elsewhere. Then, however, without any kind of

recrimination, any display of anger, or even any particular effort to

regain her ascendency over him, she, on her side, imitated his example.

She could not live without love, and assuredly she had only been born to

be beautiful, to fascinate and reap adoration. To the lover whom she

chose when she was five and twenty she remained faithful for more than

fifteen years, as faithful as she might have been to a husband; and when

he died her grief was intense, it was like real widowhood. Six months

later, however, having met Count Gerard de Quinsac she had again been

unable to resist her imperative need of adoration, and an intrigue had

followed.

“Have you been ill, my dear Gerard?” she inquired, noticing the young

man’s embarrassment. “Are you hiding some worry from me?”

She was ten years older than he was; and she clung desperately to this

last passion of hers, revolting at the thought of growing old, and

resolved upon every effort to keep the young man beside her.

“No, I am hiding nothing, I assure you,” replied the Count. “But my

mother has had much need of me recently.”

She continued looking at him, however, with anxious passion, finding him

so tall and aristocratic of mien, with his regular features and dark hair

and moustaches which were always most carefully tended. He belonged to

one of the oldest families of France, and resided on a ground-floor in

the Rue St. Dominique with his widowed mother, who had been ruined by her

adventurously inclined husband, and had at most an income of some fifteen

thousand francs* to live upon. Gerard for his part had never done

anything; contenting himself with his one year of obligatory military

service, he had renounced the profession of arms in the same way as he

had renounced that of diplomacy, the only one that offered him an opening

of any dignity. He spent his days in that busy idleness common to all

young men who lead “Paris life.” And his mother, haughtily severe though

she was, seemed to excuse this, as if in her opinion a man of his birth

was bound by way of protest to keep apart from official life under a

Republic. However, she no doubt had more intimate, more disturbing

reasons for indulgence. She had nearly lost him when he was only seven,

through an attack of brain fever. At eighteen he had complained of his

heart, and the doctors had recommended that he should be treated gently

in all respects. She knew, therefore, what a lie lurked behind his proud

demeanour, within his lofty figure, that haughty _facade_ of his race. He

was but dust, ever threatened with illness and collapse. In the depths of

his seeming virility there was merely girlish _abandon_; and he was

simply a weak, good-natured fellow, liable to every stumble. It was on

the occasion of a visit which he had paid with his mother to the Asylum

of the Invalids of Labour that he had first seen Eve, whom he continued

to meet; his mother, closing her eyes to this culpable connection in a

sphere of society which she treated with contempt, in the same way as she

had closed them to so many other acts of folly which she had forgiven

because she regarded them as the mere lapses of an ailing child.

Moreover, Eve had made a conquest of Madame de Quinsac, who was very

pious, by an action which had recently amazed society. It had been

suddenly learnt that she had allowed Monseigneur Martha to convert her to

the Roman Catholic faith. This thing, which she had refused to do when

solicited by her lawful husband, she had now done in the hope of ensuring

herself a lover’s eternal affection. And all Paris was still stirred by

the magnificence exhibited at the Madeleine, on the occasion of the

baptism of this Jewess of five and forty, whose beauty and whose tears

had upset every heart.

* About 3000 dollars.

Gerard, on his side, was still flattered by the deep and touching

tenderness shown to him; but weariness was coming, and he had already

sought to break off the connection by avoiding any further assignations.

He well understood Eve’s glances and her tears, and though he was moved

at sight of them he tried to excuse himself. “I assure you,” said he, “my

mother has kept me so busy that I could not get away.” But she, without a

word, still turned her tearful glance on him, and weak, like herself, in

despair that he should have been left alone with her in this fashion, he

yielded, unable to continue refusing. “Well, then,” said he, “this

afternoon at four o’clock if you are free.”

He had lowered his voice in speaking, but a slight rustle made him turn

his head and start like one in fault. It was the Baroness’s daughter

Camille entering the room. She had heard nothing; but by the smile which

the others had exchanged, by the very quiver of the air, she understood

everything; an assignation for that very day and at the very spot which

she suspected. Some slight embarrassment followed, an exchange of anxious

and evil glances.

Camille, at three and twenty, was a very dark young woman, short of

stature and somewhat deformed, with her left shoulder higher than the

right. There seemed to be nothing of her father or mother in her. Her

case was one of those unforeseen accidents in family heredity which make

people wonder whence they can arise. Her only pride lay in her beautiful

black eyes and superb black hair, which, short as she was, would, said

she, have sufficed to clothe her. But her nose was long, her face

deviated to the left, and her chin was pointed. Her thin, witty, and

malicious lips bespoke all the rancour and perverse anger stored in the

heart of this uncomely creature, whom the thought of her uncomeliness

enraged. However, the one whom she most hated in the whole world was her

own mother, that _amorosa_ who was so little fitted to be a mother, who

had never loved her, never paid attention to her, but had abandoned her

to the care of servants from her very infancy. In this wise real hatred

had grown up between the two women, mute and frigid on the one side, and

active and passionate on the other. The daughter hated her mother because

she found her beautiful, because she had not been created in the same

image: beautiful with the beauty with which her mother crushed her. Day

by day she suffered at being sought by none, at realising that the

adoration of one and all still went to her mother. As she was amusing in

her maliciousness, people listened to her and laughed; however, the

glances of all the men--even and indeed especially the younger ones--soon

reverted to her triumphant mother, who seemingly defied old age. In part

for this reason Camille, with ferocious determination, had decided that

she would dispossess her mother of her last lover Gerard, and marry him

herself, conscious that such a loss would doubtless kill the Baroness.

Thanks to her promised dowry of five millions of francs, the young woman

did not lack suitors; but, little flattered by their advances, she was

accustomed to say, with her malicious laugh: “Oh! of course; why for five

millions they would take a wife from a mad-house.” However, she, herself,

had really begun to love Gerard, who, good-natured as he was, evinced

much kindness towards this suffering young woman whom nature had treated

so harshly. It worried him to see her forsaken by everyone, and little by

little he yielded to the grateful tenderness which she displayed towards

him, happy, handsome man that he was, at being regarded as a demi-god and

having such a slave. Indeed, in his attempt to quit the mother there was

certainly a thought of allowing the daughter to marry him, which would be

an agreeable ending to it all, though he did not as yet acknowledge this,

ashamed as he felt and embarrassed by his illustrious name and all the

complications and tears which he foresaw.

The silence continued. Camille with her piercing glance, as sharp as any

knife, had told her mother that she knew the truth; and then with another

and pain-fraught glance she had complained to Gerard. He, in order to

re-establish equilibrium, could only think of a compliment: “Good

morning, Camille. Ah! that havana-brown gown of yours looks nice! It’s

astonishing how well rather sombre colours suit you.”

Camille glanced at her mother’s white robe, and then at her own dark

gown, which scarcely allowed her neck and wrists to be seen. “Yes,” she

replied laughing, “I only look passable when I don’t dress as a young

girl.”

Eve, ill at ease, worried by the growth of a rivalry in which she did not

as yet wish to believe, changed the conversation. “Isn’t your brother

there?” she asked.

“Why yes, we came down together.”

Hyacinthe, who came in at that moment, shook hands with Gerard in a weary

way. He was twenty, and had inherited his mother’s pale blond hair, and

her long face full of Oriental languor; while from his father he had

derived his grey eyes and thick lips, expressive of unscrupulous

appetites. A wretched scholar, regarding every profession with the same

contempt, he had decided to do nothing. Spoilt by his father, he took

some little interest in poetry and music, and lived in an extraordinary

circle of artists, low women, madmen and bandits; boasting himself of all

sorts of crimes and vices, professing the very worst philosophical and

social ideas, invariably going to extremes, becoming in turn a

Collectivist, an Individualist, an Anarchist, a Pessimist, a Symbolist,

and what not besides; without, however, ceasing to be a Catholic, as this

conjunction of Catholicity with something else seemed to him the supreme

_bon ton_. In reality he was simply empty and rather a fool. In four

generations the vigorous hungry blood of the Duvillards, after producing

three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment

of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was

incapable alike of great knavery or great debauchery.

Camille, who was too intelligent not to realise her brother’s

nothingness, was fond of teasing him; and looking at him as he stood

there, tightly buttoned in his long frock coat with pleated skirt--a

resurrection of the romantic period, which he carried to exaggeration,

she resumed: “Mamma has been asking for you, Hyacinthe. Come and show her

your gown. You are the one who would look nice dressed as a young girl.”

However, he eluded her without replying. He was covertly afraid of her,

though they lived together in great intimacy, frankly exchanging

confidences respecting their perverse views of life. And he directed a

glance of disdain at the wonderful basket of orchids which seemed to him

past the fashion, far too common nowadays. For his part he had left the

lilies of life behind him, and reached the ranunculus, the flower of

blood.

The two last guests who were expected now arrived almost together. The

first was the investigating magistrate Amadieu, a little man of five and

forty, who was an intimate of the household and had been brought into

notoriety by a recent anarchist affair. Between a pair of fair, bushy

whiskers he displayed a flat, regular judicial face, to which he tried to

impart an expression of keenness by wearing a single eyeglass behind

which his glance sparkled. Very worldly, moreover, he belonged to the new

judicial school, being a distinguished psychologist and having written a

book in reply to the abuses of criminalist physiology. And he was also a

man of great, tenacious ambition, fond of notoriety and ever on the

lookout for those resounding legal affairs which bring glory. Behind him,

at last appeared General de Bozonnet, Gerard’s uncle on the maternal

side, a tall, lean old man with a nose like an eagle’s beak. Chronic

rheumatism had recently compelled him to retire from the service. Raised

to a colonelcy after the Franco-German War in reward for his gallant

conduct at St. Privat, he had, in spite of his extremely monarchical

connections, kept his sworn faith to Napoleon III. And he was excused in

his own sphere of society for this species of military Bonapartism, on

account of the bitterness with which he accused the Republic of having

ruined the army. Worthy fellow that he was, extremely fond of his sister,

Madame de Quinsac, it seemed as though he acted in accordance with some

secret desire of hers in accepting the invitations of Baroness Duvillard

by way of rendering Gerard’s constant presence in her house more natural

and excusable.