For a month this unpleasant state of affairs continued, every day
growing worse, and Clotilde suffered especially at seeing that Pascal
now locked up everything. He had no longer the same tranquil confidence
in her as before, and this wounded her so deeply that, if she had at
any time found the press open, she would have thrown the papers into
the fire as her grandmother Félicité had urged her to do. And the
disagreements began again, so that they often remained without speaking
to each other for two days together.
One morning, after one of these misunderstandings which had lasted
since the day before, Martine said as she was serving the breakfast:
“Just now as I was crossing the Place de la Sous-Préfecture, I saw a
stranger whom I thought I recognized going into Mme. Félicité’s house.
Yes, mademoiselle, I should not be surprised if it were your brother.”
On the impulse of the moment, Pascal and Clotilde spoke.
“Your brother! Did your grandmother expect him, then?”
“No, I don’t think so, though she has been expecting him at any time
for the past six months, I know that she wrote to him again a week
ago.”
They questioned Martine.
“Indeed, monsieur, I cannot say; since I last saw M. Maxime four years
ago, when he stayed two hours with us on his way to Italy, he may
perhaps have changed greatly—I thought, however, that I recognized his
back.”
The conversation continued, Clotilde seeming to be glad of this event,
which broke at last the oppressive silence between them, and Pascal
ended:
“Well, if it is he, he will come to see us.”
It was indeed Maxime. He had yielded, after months of refusal, to the
urgent solicitations of old Mme. Rougon, who had still in this quarter
an open family wound to heal. The trouble was an old one, and it grew
worse every day.
Fifteen years before, when he was seventeen, Maxime had had a child by
a servant whom he had seduced. His father Saccard, and his stepmother
Renée—the latter vexed more especially at his unworthy choice—had acted
in the matter with indulgence. The servant, Justine Mégot, belonged to
one of the neighboring villages, and was a fair-haired girl, also
seventeen, gentle and docile; and they had sent her back to Plassans,
with an allowance of twelve hundred francs a year, to bring up little
Charles. Three years later she had married there a harness-maker of the
faubourg, Frederic Thomas by name, a good workman and a sensible
fellow, who was tempted by the allowance. For the rest her conduct was
now most exemplary, she had grown fat, and she appeared to be cured of
a cough that had threatened a hereditary malady due to the alcoholic
propensities of a long line of progenitors. And two other children born
of her marriage, a boy who was now ten and a girl who was seven, both
plump and rosy, enjoyed perfect health; so that she would have been the
most respected and the happiest of women, if it had not been for the
trouble which Charles caused in the household. Thomas, notwithstanding
the allowance, execrated this son of another man and gave him no peace,
which made the mother suffer in secret, being an uncomplaining and
submissive wife. So that, although she adored him, she would willingly
have given him up to his father’s family.
Charles, at fifteen, seemed scarcely twelve, and he had the infantine
intelligence of a child of five, resembling in an extraordinary degree
his great-great-grandmother, Aunt Dide, the madwoman at the Tulettes.
He had the slender and delicate grace of one of those bloodless little
kings with whom a race ends, crowned with their long, fair locks, light
as spun silk. His large, clear eyes were expressionless, and on his
disquieting beauty lay the shadow of death. And he had neither brain
nor heart—he was nothing but a vicious little dog, who rubbed himself
against people to be fondled. His great-grandmother Félicité, won by
this beauty, in which she affected to recognize her blood, had at first
put him in a boarding school, taking charge of him, but he had been
expelled from it at the end of six months for misconduct. Three times
she had changed his boarding school, and each time he had been expelled
in disgrace. Then, as he neither would nor could learn anything, and as
his health was declining rapidly, they kept him at home, sending him
from one to another of the family. Dr. Pascal, moved to pity, had tried
to cure him, and had abandoned the hopeless task only after he had kept
him with him for nearly a year, fearing the companionship for Clotilde.
And now, when Charles was not at his mother’s, where he scarcely ever
lived at present, he was to be found at the house of Félicité, or that
of some other relative, prettily dressed, laden with toys, living like
the effeminate little dauphin of an ancient and fallen race.
Old Mme. Rougon, however, suffered because of this bastard, and she had
planned to get him away from the gossiping tongues of Plassans, by
persuading Maxime to take him and keep him with him in Paris. It would
still be an ugly story of the fallen family. But Maxime had for a long
time turned a deaf ear to her solicitations, in the fear which
continually haunted him of spoiling his life. After the war, enriched
by the death of his wife, he had come back to live prudently on his
fortune in his mansion on the avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, tormented
by the hereditary malady of which he was to die young, having gained
from his precocious debauchery a salutary fear of pleasure, resolved
above all to shun emotions and responsibilities, so that he might last
as long as possible. Acute pains in the limbs, rheumatic he thought
them, had been alarming him for some time past; he saw himself in fancy
already an invalid tied down to an easy-chair; and his father’s sudden
return to France, the fresh activity which Saccard was putting forth,
completed his disquietude. He knew well this devourer of millions; he
trembled at finding him again bustling about him with his good-humored,
malicious laugh. He felt that he was being watched, and he had the
conviction that he would be cut up and devoured if he should be for a
single day at his mercy, rendered helpless by the pains which were
invading his limbs. And so great a fear of solitude had taken
possession of him that he had now yielded to the idea of seeing his son
again. If he found the boy gentle, intelligent, and healthy, why should
he not take him to live with him? He would thus have a companion, an
heir, who would protect him against the machinations of his father.
Gradually he came to see himself, in his selfish forethought, loved,
petted, and protected; yet for all that he might not have risked such a
journey, if his physician had not just at that time sent him to the
waters of St. Gervais. Thus, having to go only a few leagues out of his
way, he had dropped in unexpectedly that morning on old Mme. Rougon,
firmly resolved to take the train again in the evening, after having
questioned her and seen the boy.
At two o’clock Pascal and Clotilde were still beside the fountain under
the plane trees where they had taken their coffee, when Félicité
arrived with Maxime.
“My dear, here’s a surprise! I have brought you your brother.”
Startled, the young girl had risen, seeing this thin and sallow
stranger, whom she scarcely recognized. Since their parting in 1854 she
had seen him only twice, once at Paris and again at Plassans. Yet his
image, refined, elegant, and vivacious, had remained engraven on her
mind; his face had grown hollow, his hair was streaked with silver
threads. But notwithstanding, she found in him still, with his
delicately handsome head, a languid grace, like that of a girl, even in
his premature decrepitude.
“How well you look!” he said simply, as he embraced his sister.
“But,” she responded, “to be well one must live in the sunshine. Ah,
how happy it makes me to see you again!”
Pascal, with the eye of the physician, had examined his nephew
critically. He embraced him in his turn.
“Goodday, my boy. And she is right, mind you; one can be well only out
in the sunshine—like the trees.”
Félicité had gone hastily to the house. She returned, crying:
“Charles is not here, then?”
“No,” said Clotilde. “We went to see him yesterday. Uncle Macquart has
taken him, and he is to remain for a few days at the Tulettes.”
Félicité was in despair. She had come only in the certainty of finding
the boy at Pascal’s. What was to be done now? The doctor, with his
tranquil air, proposed to write to Uncle Macquart, who would bring him
back in the morning. But when he learned that Maxime wished positively
to go away again by the nine o’clock train, without remaining over
night, another idea occurred to him. He would send to the livery stable
for a landau, and all four would go to see Charles at Uncle Macquart’s.
It would even be a delightful drive. It was not quite three leagues
from Plassans to the Tulettes—an hour to go, and an hour to return, and
they would still have almost two hours to remain there, if they wished
to be back by seven. Martine would get dinner, and Maxime would have
time enough to dine and catch his train.
But Félicité objected, visibly disquieted by this visit to Macquart.
“Oh, no, indeed! If you think I am going down there in this frightful
weather, you are mistaken. It is much simpler to send some one to bring
Charles to us.”
Pascal shook his head. Charles was not always to be brought back when
one wished. He was a boy without reason, who sometimes, if the whim
seized him, would gallop off like an untamed animal. And old Mme.
Rougon, overruled and furious at having been unable to make any
preparation, was at last obliged to yield, in the necessity in which
she found herself of leaving the matter to chance.
“Well, be it as you wish, then! Good Heavens, how unfortunately things
have turned out!”
Martine hurried away to order the landau, and before three o’clock had
struck the horses were on the Nice road, descending the declivity which
slopes down to the bridge over the Viorne. Then they turned to the
left, and followed the wooded banks of the river for about two miles.
After this the road entered the gorges of the Seille, a narrow pass
between two giant walls of rock scorched by the ardent rays of the
summer sun. Pine trees pushed their way through the clefts; clumps of
trees, scarcely thicker at the roots than tufts of grass, fringed the
crests and hung over the abyss. It was a chaos; a blasted landscape, a
mouth of hell, with its wild turns, its droppings of blood-colored
earth sliding down from every cut, its desolate solitude invaded only
by the eagles’ flight.
Félicité did not open her lips; her brain was at work, and she seemed
completely absorbed in her thoughts. The atmosphere was oppressive, the
sun sent his burning rays from behind a veil of great livid clouds.
Pascal was almost the only one who talked, in his passionate love for
this scorched land—a love which he endeavored to make his nephew share.
But it was in vain that he uttered enthusiastic exclamations, in vain
that he called his attention to the persistence of the olives, the fig
trees, and the thorn bushes in pushing through the rock; the life of
the rock itself, that colossal and puissant frame of the earth, from
which they could almost fancy they heard a sound of breathing arise.
Maxime remained cold, filled with a secret anguish in presence of those
blocks of savage majesty, whose mass seemed to crush him. And he
preferred to turn his eyes toward his sister, who was seated in front
of him. He was becoming more and more charmed with her. She looked so
healthy and so happy, with her pretty round head, with its straight,
well-molded forehead. Now and then their glances met, and she gave him
an affectionate smile which consoled him.
But the wildness of the gorge was beginning to soften, the two walls of
rock to grow lower; they passed between two peaceful hills, with gentle
slopes covered with thyme and lavender. It was the desert still, there
were still bare spaces, green or violet hued, from which the faintest
breeze brought a pungent perfume.
Then abruptly, after a last turn they descended to the valley of the
Tulettes, which was refreshed by springs. In the distance stretched
meadows dotted by large trees. The village was seated midway on the
slope, among olive trees, and the country house of Uncle Macquart stood
a little apart on the left, full in view. The landau turned into the
road which led to the insane asylum, whose white walls they could see
before them in the distance.
Félicité’s silence had grown somber, for she was not fond of exhibiting
Uncle Macquart. Another whom the family would be well rid of the day
when he should take his departure. For the credit of every one he ought
to have been sleeping long ago under the sod. But he persisted in
living, he carried his eighty-three years well, like an old drunkard
saturated with liquor, whom the alcohol seemed to preserve. At Plassans
he had left a terrible reputation as a do-nothing and a scoundrel, and
the old men whispered the execrable story of the corpses that lay
between him and the Rougons, an act of treachery in the troublous days
of December, 1851, an ambuscade in which he had left comrades with
their bellies ripped open, lying on the bloody pavement. Later, when he
had returned to France, he had preferred to the good place of which he
had obtained the promise this little domain of the Tulettes, which
Félicité had bought for him. And he had lived comfortably here ever
since; he had no longer any other ambition than that of enlarging it,
looking out once more for the good chances, and he had even found the
means of obtaining a field which he had long coveted, by making himself
useful to his sister-in-law at the time when the latter again
reconquered Plassans from the legitimists—another frightful story that
was whispered also, of a madman secretly let loose from the asylum,
running in the night to avenge himself, setting fire to his house in
which four persons were burned. But these were old stories and
Macquart, settled down now, was no longer the redoubtable scoundrel who
had made all the family tremble. He led a perfectly correct life; he
was a wily diplomat, and he had retained nothing of his air of jeering
at the world but his bantering smile.
“Uncle is at home,” said Pascal, as they approached the house.
This was one of those Provençal structures of a single story, with
discolored tiles and four walls washed with a bright yellow. Before the
facade extended a narrow terrace shaded by ancient mulberry trees,
whose thick, gnarled branches drooped down, forming an arbor. It was
here that Uncle Macquart smoked his pipe in the cool shade, in summer.
And on hearing the sound of the carriage, he came and stood at the edge
of the terrace, straightening his tall form neatly clad in blue cloth,
his head covered with the eternal fur cap which he wore from one year’s
end to the other.
As soon as he recognized his visitors, he called out with a sneer:
“Oh, here come some fine company! How kind of you; you are out for an
airing.”
But the presence of Maxime puzzled him. Who was he? Whom had he come to
see? They mentioned his name to him, and he immediately cut short the
explanations they were adding, to enable him to straighten out the
tangled skein of relationship.
“The father of Charles—I know, I know! The son of my nephew Saccard,
_pardi_! the one who made a fine marriage, and whose wife died—”
He stared at Maxime, seeming happy to find him already wrinkled at
thirty-two, with his hair and beard sprinkled with snow.
“Ah, well!” he added, “we are all growing old. But I, at least, have no
great reason to complain. I am solid.”
And he planted himself firmly on his legs with his air of ferocious
mockery, while his fiery red face seemed to flame and burn. For a long
time past ordinary brandy had seemed to him like pure water; only
spirits of 36 degrees tickled his blunted palate; and he took such
draughts of it that he was full of it—his flesh saturated with it—like
a sponge. He perspired alcohol. At the slightest breath whenever he
spoke, he exhaled from his mouth a vapor of alcohol.
“Yes, truly; you are solid, uncle!” said Pascal, amazed. “And you have
done nothing to make you so; you have good reason to ridicule us. Only
there is one thing I am afraid of, look you, that some day in lighting
your pipe, you may set yourself on fire—like a bowl of punch.”
Macquart, flattered, gave a sneering laugh.
“Have your jest, have your jest, my boy! A glass of cognac is worth
more than all your filthy drugs. And you will all touch glasses with
me, hey? So that it may be said truly that your uncle is a credit to
you all. As for me, I laugh at evil tongues. I have corn and olive
trees, I have almond trees and vines and land, like any _bourgeois_. In
summer I smoke my pipe under the shade of my mulberry trees; in winter
I go to smoke it against my wall, there in the sunshine. One has no
need to blush for an uncle like that, hey? Clotilde, I have syrup, if
you would like some. And you, Félicité, my dear, I know that you prefer
anisette. There is everything here, I tell you, there is everything
here!”
He waved his arm as if to take possession of the comforts he enjoyed,
now that from an old sinner he had become a hermit, while Félicité,
whom he had disturbed a moment before by the enumeration of his riches,
did not take her eyes from his face, waiting to interrupt him.
“Thank you, Macquart, we will take nothing; we are in a hurry. Where is
Charles?”
“Charles? Very good, presently! I understand, papa has come to see his
boy. But that is not going to prevent you taking a glass.”
And as they positively refused he became offended, and said, with his
malicious laugh:
“Charles is not here; he is at the asylum with the old woman.”
Then, taking Maxime to the end of the terrace, he pointed out to him
the great white buildings, whose inner gardens resembled prison yards.
“Look, nephew, you see those three trees in front of you? Well, beyond
the one to the left, there is a fountain in a court. Follow the ground
floor, and the fifth window to the right is Aunt Dide’s. And that is
where the boy is. Yes, I took him there a little while ago.”
This was an indulgence of the directors. In the twenty years that she
had been in the asylum the old woman had not given a moment’s
uneasiness to her keeper. Very quiet, very gentle, she passed the days
motionless in her easy-chair, looking straight before her; and as the
boy liked to be with her, and as she herself seemed to take an interest
in him, they shut their eyes to this infraction of the rules and left
him there sometimes for two or three hours at a time, busily occupied
in cutting out pictures.
But this new disappointment put the finishing stroke to Félicité’s
ill-humor; she grew angry when Macquart proposed that all five should
go in a body in search of the boy.
“What an idea! Go you alone, and come back quickly. We have no time to
lose.”
Her suppressed rage seemed to amuse Uncle Macquart, and perceiving how
disagreeable his proposition was to her, he insisted, with his sneering
laugh:
“But, my children, we should at the same time have an opportunity of
seeing the old mother; the mother of us all. There is no use in
talking; you know that we are all descended from her, and it would
hardly be polite not to go wish her a good-day, when my grandnephew,
who has come from such a distance, has perhaps never before had a good
look at her. I’ll not disown her, may the devil take me if I do. To be
sure she is mad, but all the same, old mothers who have passed their
hundredth year are not often to be seen, and she well deserves that we
should show ourselves a little kind to her.”
There was silence for a moment. A little shiver had run through every
one. And it was Clotilde, silent until now, who first declared in a
voice full of feeling:
“You are right, uncle; we will all go.”
Félicité herself was obliged to consent. They re-entered the landau,
Macquart taking the seat beside the coachman. A feeling of disquietude
had given a sallow look to Maxime’s worn face; and during the short
drive he questioned Pascal concerning Charles with an air of paternal
interest, which concealed a growing anxiety. The doctor constrained by
his mother’s imperious glances, softened the truth. Well, the boy’s
health was certainly not very robust; it was on that account, indeed,
that they were glad to leave him for weeks together in the country with
his uncle: but he had no definite disease. Pascal did not add that he
had for a moment cherished the dream of giving him a brain and muscles
by treating him with his hypodermic injections of nerve substance, but
that he had always been met by the same difficulty; the slightest
puncture brought on a hemorrhage which it was found necessary to stop
by compresses; there was a laxness of the tissues, due to degeneracy; a
bloody dew which exuded from the skin; he had especially, bleedings at
the nose so sudden and so violent that they did not dare to leave him
alone, fearing lest all the blood in his veins should flow out. And the
doctor ended by saying that although the boy’s intelligence had been
sluggish, he still hoped that it would develop in an environment of
quicker mental activity.
They arrived at the asylum and Macquart, who had been listening to the
doctor, descended from his seat, saying:
“He is a gentle little fellow, a very gentle little fellow! And then,
he is so beautiful—an angel!”
Maxime, who was still pale, and who shivered in spite of the stifling
heat, put no more questions. He looked at the vast buildings of the
asylum, the wings of the various quarters separated by gardens, the
men’s quarters from those of the women, those of the harmless insane
from those of the violent insane. A scrupulous cleanliness reigned
everywhere, a gloomy silence—broken from time to time by footsteps and
the noise of keys. Old Macquart knew all the keepers. Besides, the
doors were always to open to Dr. Pascal, who had been authorized to
attend certain of the inmates. They followed a passage and entered a
court; it was here—one of the chambers on the ground floor, a room
covered with a light carpet, furnished with a bed, a press, a table, an
armchair, and two chairs. The nurse, who had orders never to quit her
charge, happened just now to be absent, and the only occupants of the
room were the madwoman, sitting rigid in her armchair at one side of
the table, and the boy, sitting on a chair on the opposite side,
absorbed in cutting out his pictures.
“Go in, go in!” Macquart repeated. “Oh, there is no danger, she is very
gentle!”
The grandmother, Adelaïde Fouqué, whom her grandchildren, a whole swarm
of descendants, called by the pet name of Aunt Dide, did not even turn
her head at the noise. In her youth hysterical troubles had unbalanced
her mind. Of an ardent and passionate nature and subject to nervous
attacks, she had yet reached the great age of eighty-three when a
dreadful grief, a terrible moral shock, destroyed her reason. At that
time, twenty-one years before, her mind had ceased to act; it had
become suddenly weakened without the possibility of recovery. And now,
at the age of 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a
quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain
stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old
age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her
flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained on her bones,
so that she had to be carried from her chair to her bed, for it had
become impossible for her to walk or even to move. And yet she held
herself erect against the back of her chair, a yellow, dried-up
skeleton—like an ancient tree of which the bark only remains—with only
her eyes still living in her thin, long visage, in which the wrinkles
had been, so to say, worn away. She was looking fixedly at Charles.
Clotilde approached her a little tremblingly.
“Aunt Dide, it is we; we have come to see you. Don’t you know me, then?
Your little girl who comes sometimes to kiss you.”
But the madwoman did not seem to hear. Her eyes remained fixed upon the
boy, who was finishing cutting out a picture—a purple king in a golden
mantle.
“Come, mamma,” said Macquart, “don’t pretend to be stupid. You may very
well look at us. Here is a gentleman, a grandson of yours, who has come
from Paris expressly to see you.”
At this voice Aunt Dide at last turned her head. Her clear,
expressionless eyes wandered slowly from one to another, then rested
again on Charles with the same fixed look as before.
They all shivered, and no one spoke again.
“Since the terrible shock she received,” explained Pascal in a low
voice, “she has been that way; all intelligence, all memory seem
extinguished in her. For the most part she is silent; at times she
pours forth a flood of stammering and indistinct words. She laughs and
cries without cause, she is a thing that nothing affects. And yet I
should not venture to say that the darkness of her mind is complete,
that no memories remain stored up in its depths. Ah! the poor old
mother, how I pity her, if the light has not yet been finally
extinguished. What can her thoughts have been for the last twenty-one
years, if she still remembers?”
With a gesture he put this dreadful past which he knew from him. He saw
her again young, a tall, pale, slender girl with frightened eyes, a
widow, after fifteen months of married life with Rougon, the clumsy
gardener whom she had chosen for a husband, throwing herself
immediately afterwards into the arms of the smuggler Macquart, whom she
loved with a wolfish love, and whom she did not even marry. She had
lived thus for fifteen years, with her three children, one the child of
her marriage, the other two illegitimate, a capricious and tumultuous
existence, disappearing for weeks at a time, and returning all bruised,
her arms black and blue. Then Macquart had been killed, shot down like
a dog by a _gendarme_; and the first shock had paralyzed her, so that
even then she retained nothing living but her water-clear eyes in her
livid face; and she shut herself up from the world in the hut which her
lover had left her, leading there for forty years the dead existence of
a nun, broken by terrible nervous attacks. But the other shock was to
finish her, to overthrow her reason, and Pascal recalled the atrocious
scene, for he had witnessed it—a poor child whom the grandmother had
taken to live with her, her grandson Silvère, the victim of family
hatred and strife, whose head another _gendarme_ shattered with a
pistol shot, at the suppression of the insurrectionary movement of
1851. She was always to be bespattered with blood.
Félicité, meanwhile, had approached Charles, who was so engrossed with
his pictures that all these people did not disturb him.
“My darling, this gentleman is your father. Kiss him,” she said.
And then they all occupied themselves with Charles. He was very
prettily dressed in a jacket and short trousers of black velvet,
braided with gold cord. Pale as a lily, he resembled in truth one of
those king’s sons whose pictures he was cutting out, with his large,
light eyes and his shower of fair curls. But what especially struck the
attention at this moment was his resemblance to Aunt Dide; this
resemblance which had overleaped three generations, which had passed
from this withered centenarian’s countenance, from these dead features
wasted by life, to this delicate child’s face that was also as if worn,
aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each other,
the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the race of
which she, forgotten by the world, was the ancestress.
Maxime bent over to press a kiss on the boy’s forehead; and a chill
struck to his heart—this very beauty disquieted him; his uneasiness
grew in this chamber of madness, whence, it seemed to him, breathed a
secret horror come from the far-off past.
“How beautiful you are, my pet! Don’t you love me a little?”
Charles looked at him without comprehending, and went back to his play.
But all were chilled. Without the set expression of her countenance
changing Aunt Dide wept, a flood of tears rolled from her living eyes
over her dead cheeks. Her gaze fixed immovably upon the boy, she wept
slowly, endlessly. A great thing had happened.
And now an extraordinary emotion took possession of Pascal. He caught
Clotilde by the arm and pressed it hard, trying to make her understand.
Before his eyes appeared the whole line, the legitimate branch and the
bastard branch, which had sprung from this trunk already vitiated by
neurosis. Five generations were there present—the Rougons and the
Macquarts, Adelaïde Fouqué at the root, then the scoundrelly old uncle,
then himself, then Clotilde and Maxime, and lastly, Charles. Félicité
occupied the place of her dead husband. There was no link wanting; the
chain of heredity, logical and implacable, was unbroken. And what a
world was evoked from the depths of the tragic cabin which breathed
this horror that came from the far-off past in such appalling shape
that every one, notwithstanding the oppressive heat, shivered.
“What is it, master?” whispered Clotilde, trembling.
“No, no, nothing!” murmured the doctor. “I will tell you later.”
Macquart, who alone continued to sneer, scolded the old mother. What an
idea was hers, to receive people with tears when they put themselves
out to come and make her a visit. It was scarcely polite. And then he
turned to Maxime and Charles.
“Well, nephew, you have seen your boy at last. Is it not true that he
is pretty, and that he is a credit to you, after all?”
Félicité hastened to interfere. Greatly dissatisfied with the turn
which affairs were taking, she was now anxious only to get away.
“He is certainly a handsome boy, and less backward than people think.
Just see how skilful he is with his hands. And you will see when you
have brightened him up in Paris, in a different way from what we have
been able to do at Plassans, eh?”
“No doubt,” murmured Maxime. “I do not say no; I will think about it.”
He seemed embarrassed for a moment, and then added:
“You know I came only to see him. I cannot take him with me now as I am
to spend a month at St. Gervais. But as soon as I return to Paris I
will think of it, I will write to you.”
Then, taking out his watch, he cried:
“The devil! Half-past five. You know that I would not miss the nine
o’clock train for anything in the world.”
“Yes, yes, let us go,” said Félicité brusquely. “We have nothing more
to do here.”
Macquart, whom his sister-in-law’s anger seemed still to divert,
endeavored to delay them with all sorts of stories. He told of the days
when Aunt Dide talked, and he affirmed that he had found her one
morning singing a romance of her youth. And then he had no need of the
carriage, he would take the boy back on foot, since they left him to
him.
“Kiss your papa, my boy, for you know now that you see him, but you
don’t know whether you shall ever see him again or not.”
With the same surprised and indifferent movement Charles raised his
head, and Maxime, troubled, pressed another kiss on his forehead.
“Be very good and very pretty, my pet. And love me a little.”
“Come, come, we have no time to lose,” repeated Félicité.
But the keeper here re-entered the room. She was a stout, vigorous
girl, attached especially to the service of the madwoman. She carried
her to and from her bed, night and morning; she fed her and took care
of her like a child. And she at once entered into conversation with Dr.
Pascal, who questioned her. One of the doctor’s most cherished dreams
was to cure the mad by his treatment of hypodermic injections. Since in
their case it was the brain that was in danger, why should not
hypodermic injections of nerve substance give them strength and will,
repairing the breaches made in the organ? So that for a moment he had
dreamed of trying the treatment with the old mother; then he began to
have scruples, he felt a sort of awe, without counting that madness at
that age was total, irreparable ruin. So that he had chosen another
subject—a hatter named Sarteur, who had been for a year past in the
asylum, to which he had come himself to beg them to shut him up to
prevent him from committing a crime. In his paroxysms, so strong an
impulse to kill seized him that he would have thrown himself upon the
first passer-by. He was of small stature, very dark, with a retreating
forehead, an aquiline face with a large nose and a very short chin, and
his left cheek was noticeably larger than his right. And the doctor had
obtained miraculous results with this victim of emotional insanity, who
for a month past had had no attack. The nurse, indeed being questioned,
answered that Sarteur had become quiet and was growing better every
day.
“Do you hear, Clotilde?” cried Pascal, enchanted. “I have not the time
to see him this evening, but I will come again to-morrow. It is my
visiting day. Ah, if I only dared; if she were young still—”
His eyes turned toward Aunt Dide. But Clotilde, whom his enthusiasm
made smile, said gently:
“No, no, master, you cannot make life anew. There, come. We are the
last.”
It was true; the others had already gone. Macquart, on the threshold,
followed Félicité and Maxime with his mocking glance as they went away.
Aunt Dide, the forgotten one, sat motionless, appalling in her
leanness, her eyes again fixed upon Charles with his white, worn face
framed in his royal locks.
The drive back was full of constraint. In the heat which exhaled from
the earth, the landau rolled on heavily to the measured trot of the
horses. The stormy sky took on an ashen, copper-colored hue in the
deepening twilight. At first a few indifferent words were exchanged;
but from the moment in which they entered the gorges of the Seille all
conversation ceased, as if they felt oppressed by the menacing walls of
giant rock that seemed closing in upon them. Was not this the end of
the earth, and were they not going to roll into the unknown, over the
edge of some abyss? An eagle soared by, uttering a shrill cry.
Willows appeared again, and the carriage was rolling lightly along the
bank of the Viorne, when Félicité began without transition, as if she
were resuming a conversation already commenced.
“You have no refusal to fear from the mother. She loves Charles dearly,
but she is a very sensible woman, and she understands perfectly that it
is to the boy’s advantage that you should take him with you. And I must
tell you, too, that the poor boy is not very happy with her, since,
naturally, the husband prefers his own son and daughter. For you ought
to know everything.”
And she went on in this strain, hoping, no doubt, to persuade Maxime
and draw a formal promise from him. She talked until they reached
Plassans. Then, suddenly, as the landau rolled over the pavement of the
faubourg, she said:
“But look! there is his mother. That stout blond at the door there.”
At the threshold of a harness-maker’s shop hung round with horse
trappings and halters, Justine sat, knitting a stocking, taking the
air, while the little girl and boy were playing on the ground at her
feet. And behind them in the shadow of the shop was to be seen Thomas,
a stout, dark man, occupied in repairing a saddle.
Maxime leaned forward without emotion, simply curious. He was greatly
surprised at sight of this robust woman of thirty-two, with so sensible
and so commonplace an air, in whom there was not a trace of the wild
little girl with whom he had been in love when both of the same age
were entering their seventeenth year. Perhaps a pang shot through his
heart to see her plump and tranquil and blooming, while he was ill and
already aged.
“I should never have recognized her,” he said.
And the landau, still rolling on, turned into the Rue de Rome. Justine
had disappeared; this vision of the past—a past so different from the
present—had sunk into the shadowy twilight, with Thomas, the children,
and the shop.
At La Souleiade the table was set; Martine had an eel from the Viorne,
a _sautéd_ rabbit, and a leg of mutton. Seven o’clock was striking, and
they had plenty of time to dine quietly.
“Don’t be uneasy,” said Dr. Pascal to his nephew. “We will accompany
you to the station; it is not ten minutes’ walk from here. As you left
your trunk, you have nothing to do but to get your ticket and jump on
board the train.”
Then, meeting Clotilde in the vestibule, where she was hanging up her
hat and her umbrella, he said to her in an undertone:
“Do you know that I am uneasy about your brother?”
“Why so?”
“I have observed him attentively. I don’t like the way in which he
walks; and have you noticed what an anxious look he has at times? That
has never deceived me. In short, your brother is threatened with
ataxia.”
“Ataxia!” she repeated turning very pale.
A cruel image rose before her, that of a neighbor, a man still young,
whom for the past ten years she had seen driven about in a little
carriage by a servant. Was not this infirmity the worst of all ills,
the ax stroke that separates a living being from social and active
life?
“But,” she murmured, “he complains only of rheumatism.”
Pascal shrugged his shoulders; and putting a finger to his lip he went
into the dining-room, where Félicité and Maxime were seated.
The dinner was very friendly. The sudden disquietude which had sprung
up in Clotilde’s heart made her still more affectionate to her brother,
who sat beside her. She attended to his wants gayly, forcing him to
take the most delicate morsels. Twice she called back Martine, who was
passing the dishes too quickly. And Maxime was more and more enchanted
by this sister, who was so good, so healthy, so sensible, whose charm
enveloped him like a caress. So greatly was he captivated by her that
gradually a project, vague at first, took definite shape within him.
Since little Charles, his son, terrified him so greatly with his
deathlike beauty, his royal air of sickly imbecility, why should he not
take his sister Clotilde to live with him? The idea of having a woman
in his house alarmed him, indeed, for he was afraid of all women,
having had too much experience of them in his youth; but this one
seemed to him truly maternal. And then, too, a good woman in his house
would make a change in it, which would be a desirable thing. He would
at least be left no longer at the mercy of his father, whom he
suspected of desiring his death so that he might get possession of his
money at once. His hatred and terror of his father decided him.
“Don’t you think of marrying, then?” he asked, wishing to try the
ground.
The young girl laughed.
“Oh, there is no hurry,” she answered.
Then, suddenly, looking at Pascal, who had raised his head, she added:
“How can I tell? Oh, I shall never marry.”
But Félicité protested. When she saw her so attached to the doctor, she
often wished for a marriage that would separate her from him, that
would leave her son alone in a deserted home, where she herself might
become all powerful, mistress of everything. Therefore she appealed to
him. Was it not true that a woman ought to marry, that it was against
nature to remain an old maid?
And he gravely assented, without taking his eyes from Clotilde’s face.
“Yes, yes, she must marry. She is too sensible not to marry.”
“Bah!” interrupted Maxime, “would it be really sensible in her to
marry? In order to be unhappy, perhaps; there are so many ill-assorted
marriages!”
And coming to a resolution, he added:
“Don’t you know what you ought to do? Well, you ought to come and live
with me in Paris. I have thought the matter over. The idea of taking
charge of a child in my state of health terrifies me. Am I not a child
myself, an invalid who needs to be taken care of? You will take care of
me; you will be with me, if I should end by losing the use of my
limbs.”
There was a sound of tears in his voice, so great a pity did he feel
for himself. He saw himself, in fancy, sick; he saw his sister at his
bedside, like a Sister of Charity; if she consented to remain unmarried
he would willingly leave her his fortune, so that his father might not
have it. The dread which he had of solitude, the need in which he
should perhaps stand of having a sick-nurse, made him very pathetic.
“It would be very kind on your part, and you should have no cause to
repent it.”
Martine, who was serving the mutton, stopped short in surprise; and the
proposition caused the same surprise at the table. Félicité was the
first to approve, feeling that the girl’s departure would further her
plans. She looked at Clotilde, who was still silent and stunned, as it
were; while Dr. Pascal waited with a pale face.
“Oh, brother, brother,” stammered the young girl, unable at first to
think of anything else to say.
Then her grandmother cried:
“Is that all you have to say? Why, the proposition your brother has
just made you is a very advantageous one. If he is afraid of taking
Charles now, why, you can go with him, and later on you can send for
the child. Come, come, that can be very well arranged. Your brother
makes an appeal to your heart. Is it not true, Pascal, that she owes
him a favorable answer?”
The doctor, by an effort, recovered his self-possession. The chill that
had seized him made itself felt, however, in the slowness with which he
spoke.
“The offer, in effect, is very kind. Clotilde, as I said before, is
very sensible and she will accept it, if it is right that she should do
so.”
The young girl, greatly agitated, rebelled at this.
“Do you wish to send me away, then, master? Maxime is very good, and I
thank him from the bottom of my heart. But to leave everything, my God!
To leave all that love me, all that I have loved until now!”
She made a despairing gesture, indicating the place and the people,
taking in all La Souleiade.
“But,” responded Pascal, looking at her fixedly, “what if Maxime should
need you, what if you had a duty to fulfil toward him?”
Her eyes grew moist, and she remained for a moment trembling and
desperate; for she alone understood. The cruel vision again arose
before her—Maxime, helpless, driven, about in a little carriage by a
servant, like the neighbor whom she used to pity. Had she indeed any
duty toward a brother who for fifteen years had been a stranger to her?
Did not her duty lie where her heart was? Nevertheless, her distress of
mind continued; she still suffered in the struggle.
“Listen, Maxime,” she said at last, “give me also time to reflect. I
will see. Be assured that I am very grateful to you. And if you should
one day really have need of me, well, I should no doubt decide to go.”
This was all they could make her promise. Félicité, with her usual
vehemence, exhausted all her efforts in vain, while the doctor now
affected to say that she had given her word. Martine brought a cream,
without thinking of hiding her joy. To take away mademoiselle! what an
idea, in order that monsieur might die of grief at finding himself all
alone. And the dinner was delayed, too, by this unexpected incident.
They were still at the dessert when half-past eight struck.
Then Maxime grew restless, tapped the floor with his foot, and declared
that he must go.
At the station, whither they all accompanied him he kissed his sister a
last time, saying:
“Remember!”
“Don’t be afraid,” declared Félicité, “we are here to remind her of her
promise.”
The doctor smiled, and all three, as soon as the train was in motion,
waved their handkerchiefs.
On this day, after accompanying the grandmother to her door, Dr. Pascal
and Clotilde returned peacefully to La Souleiade, and spent a
delightful evening there. The constraint of the past few weeks, the
secret antagonism which had separated them, seemed to have vanished.
Never had it seemed so sweet to them to feel so united, inseparable.
Doubtless it was only this first pang of uneasiness suffered by their
affection, this threatened separation, the postponement of which
delighted them. It was for them like a return to health after an
illness, a new hope of life. They remained for long time in the warm
night, under the plane trees, listening to the crystal murmur of the
fountain. And they did not even speak, so profoundly did they enjoy the
happiness of being together.