Ten days later the household had fallen back into its former state of
unhappiness. Pascal and Clotilde remained entire afternoons without
exchanging a word; and there were continual outbursts of ill-humor.
Even Martine was constantly out of temper. The home of these three had
again become a hell.
Then suddenly the condition of affairs was still further aggravated. A
Capuchin monk of great sanctity, such as often pass through the towns
of the South, came to Plassans to conduct a mission. The pulpit of St.
Saturnin resounded with his bursts of eloquence. He was a sort of
apostle, a popular and fiery orator, a florid speaker, much given to
the use of metaphors. And he preached on the nothingness of modern
science with an extraordinary mystical exaltation, denying the reality
of this world, and disclosing the unknown, the mysteries of the Beyond.
All the devout women of the town were full of excitement about his
preaching.
On the very first evening on which Clotilde, accompanied by Martine,
attended the sermon, Pascal noticed her feverish excitement when she
returned. On the following day her excitement increased, and she
returned home later, having remained to pray for an hour in a dark
corner of a chapel. From this time she was never absent from the
services, returning languid, and with the luminous eyes of a seer; and
the Capuchin’s burning words haunted her; certain of his images stirred
her to ecstasy. She grew irritable, and she seemed to have conceived a
feeling of anger and contempt for every one and everything around her.
Pascal, filled with uneasiness, determined to have an explanation with
Martine. He came down early one morning as she was sweeping the
dining-room.
“You know that I leave you and Clotilde free to go to church, if that
pleases you,” he said. “I do not believe in oppressing any one’s
conscience. But I do not wish that you should make her sick.”
The servant, without stopping in her work, said in a low voice:
“Perhaps the sick people are those who don’t think that they are sick.”
She said this with such an air of conviction that he smiled.
“Yes,” he returned; “I am the sick soul whose conversion you pray for;
while both of you are in possession of health and of perfect wisdom.
Martine, if you continue to torment me and to torment yourselves, as
you are doing, I shall grow angry.”
He spoke in so furious and so harsh a voice that the servant stopped
suddenly in her sweeping, and looked him full in the face. An infinite
tenderness, an immense desolation passed over the face of the old maid
cloistered in his service. And tears filled her eyes and she hurried
out of the room stammering:
“Ah, monsieur, you do not love us.”
Then Pascal, filled with an overwhelming sadness, gave up the contest.
His remorse increased for having shown so much tolerance, for not
having exercised his authority as master, in directing Clotilde’s
education and bringing up. In his belief that trees grew straight if
they were not interfered with, he had allowed her to grow up in her own
way, after teaching her merely to read and write. It was without any
preconceived plan, while aiding him in making his researches and
correcting his manuscripts, and simply by the force of circumstances,
that she had read everything and acquired a fondness for the natural
sciences. How bitterly he now regretted his indifference! What a
powerful impulse he might have given to this clear mind, so eager for
knowledge, instead of allowing it to go astray, and waste itself in
that desire for the Beyond, which Grandmother Félicité and the good
Martine favored. While he had occupied himself with facts, endeavoring
to keep from going beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so,
through his scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her
thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession,
an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not
satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an
irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when
she was a child, and still more, later, when she grew up, she went
straight to the why and the how of things, she demanded ultimate
causes. If he showed her a flower, she asked why this flower produced a
seed, why this seed would germinate. Then, it would be the mystery of
birth and death, and the unknown forces, and God, and all things. In
half a dozen questions she would drive him into a corner, obliging him
each time to acknowledge his fatal ignorance; and when he no longer
knew what to answer her, when he would get rid of her with a gesture of
comic fury, she would give a gay laugh of triumph, and go to lose
herself again in her dreams, in the limitless vision of all that we do
not know, and all that we may believe. Often she astounded him by her
explanations. Her mind, nourished on science, started from proved
truths, but with such an impetus that she bounded at once straight into
the heaven of the legends. All sorts of mediators passed there, angels
and saints and supernatural inspirations, modifying matter, endowing it
with life; or, again, it was only one single force, the soul of the
world, working to fuse things and beings in a final kiss of love in
fifty centuries more. She had calculated the number of them, she said.
For the rest, Pascal had never before seen her so excited. For the past
week, during which she had attended the Capuchin’s mission in the
cathedral, she had spent the days visibly in the expectation of the
sermon of the evening; and she went to hear it with the rapt exaltation
of a girl who is going to her first rendezvous of love. Then, on the
following day, everything about her declared her detachment from the
exterior life, from her accustomed existence, as if the visible world,
the necessary actions of every moment, were but a snare and a folly.
She retired within herself in the vision of what was not. Thus she had
almost completely given up her habitual occupations, abandoning herself
to a sort of unconquerable indolence, remaining for hours at a time
with her hands in her lap, her gaze lost in vacancy, rapt in the
contemplation of some far-off vision. Now she, who had been so active,
so early a riser, rose late, appearing barely in time for the second
breakfast, and it could not have been at her toilet that she spent
these long hours, for she forgot her feminine coquetry, and would come
down with her hair scarcely combed, negligently attired in a gown
buttoned awry, but even thus adorable, thanks to her triumphant youth.
The morning walks through La Souleiade that she had been so fond of,
the races from the top to the bottom of the terraces planted with olive
and almond trees, the visits to the pine grove balmy with the odor of
resin, the long sun baths in the hot threshing yard, she indulged in no
more; she preferred to remain shut up in her darkened room, from which
not a movement was to be heard. Then, in the afternoon, in the work
room, she would drag herself about languidly from chair to chair, doing
nothing, tired and disgusted with everything that had formerly
interested her.
Pascal was obliged to renounce her assistance; a paper which he gave
her to copy remained three days untouched on her desk. She no longer
classified anything; she would not have stooped down to pick up a paper
from the floor. More than all, she abandoned the pastels, copies of
flowers from nature that she had been making, to serve as plates to a
work on artificial fecundations. Some large red mallows, of a new and
singular coloring, faded in their vase before she had finished copying
them. And yet for a whole afternoon she worked enthusiastically at a
fantastic design of dream flowers, an extraordinary efflorescence
blooming in the light of a miraculous sun, a burst of golden
spike-shaped rays in the center of large purple corollas, resembling
open hearts, whence shot, for pistils, a shower of stars, myriads of
worlds streaming into the sky, like a milky way.
“Ah, my poor girl,” said the doctor to her on this day, “how can you
lose your time in such conceits! And I waiting for the copy of those
mallows that you have left to die there. And you will make yourself
ill. There is no health, nor beauty, even, possible outside reality.”
Often now she did not answer, intrenching herself behind her fierce
convictions, not wishing to dispute. But doubtless he had this time
touched her beliefs to the quick.
“There is no reality,” she answered sharply.
The doctor, amused by this bold philosophy from this big child,
laughed.
“Yes, I know,” he said; “our senses are fallible. We know this world
only through our senses, consequently it is possible that the world
does not exist. Let us open the door to madness, then; let us accept as
possible the most absurd chimeras, let us live in the realm of
nightmare, outside of laws and facts. For do you not see that there is
no longer any law if you suppress nature, and that the only thing that
gives life any interest is to believe in life, to love it, and to put
all the forces of our intelligence to the better understanding of it?”
She made a gesture of mingled indifference and bravado, and the
conversation dropped. Now she was laying large strokes of blue crayon
on the pastel, bringing out its flaming splendor in strong relief on
the background of a clear summer night.
But two days later, in consequence of a fresh discussion, matters went
still further amiss. In the evening, on leaving the table, Pascal went
up to the study to write, while she remained out of doors, sitting on
the terrace. Hours passed by, and he was surprised and uneasy, when
midnight struck, that he had not yet heard her return to her room. She
would have had to pass through the study, and he was very certain that
she had not passed unnoticed by him. Going downstairs, he found that
Martine was asleep; the vestibule door was not locked, and Clotilde
must have remained outside, oblivious of the flight of time. This often
happened to her on these warm nights, but she had never before remained
out so late.
The doctor’s uneasiness increased when he perceived on the terrace the
chair, now vacant, in which the young girl had been sitting. He had
expected to find her asleep in it. Since she was not there, why had she
not come in. Where could she have gone at such an hour? The night was
beautiful: a September night, still warm, with a wide sky whose dark,
velvety expanse was studded with stars; and from the depths of this
moonless sky the stars shone so large and bright that they lighted the
earth with a pale, mysterious radiance. He leaned over the balustrade
of the terrace, and examined the slope and the stone steps which led
down to the railroad; but there was not a movement. He saw nothing but
the round motionless tops of the little olive trees. The idea then
occurred to him that she must certainly be under the plane trees beside
the fountain, whose murmuring waters made perpetual coolness around. He
hurried there, and found himself enveloped in such thick darkness that
he, who knew every tree, was obliged to walk with outstretched hands to
avoid stumbling. Then he groped his way through the dark pine grove,
still without meeting any one. And at last he called in a muffled
voice:
“Clotilde! Clotilde!”
The darkness remained silent and impenetrable.
“Clotilde! Clotilde!” he cried again, in a louder voice. Not a sound,
not a breath. The very echoes seemed asleep. His cry was drowned in the
infinitely soft lake of blue shadows. And then he called her with all
the force of his lungs. He returned to the plane trees. He went back to
the pine grove, beside himself with fright, scouring the entire domain.
Then, suddenly, he found himself in the threshing yard.
At this cool and tranquil hour, the immense yard, the vast circular
paved court, slept too. It was so many years since grain had been
threshed here that grass had sprung up among the stones, quickly
scorched a russet brown by the sun, resembling the long threads of a
woolen carpet. And, under the tufts of this feeble vegetation, the
ancient pavement did not cool during the whole summer, smoking from
sunset, exhaling in the night the heat stored up from so many sultry
noons.
The yard stretched around, bare and deserted, in the cooling
atmosphere, under the infinite calm of the sky, and Pascal was crossing
it to hurry to the orchard, when he almost fell over a form that he had
not before observed, extended at full length upon the ground. He
uttered a frightened cry.
“What! Are you here?”
Clotilde did not deign even to answer. She was lying on her back, her
hands clasped under the back of her neck, her face turned toward the
sky; and in her pale countenance, only her large shining eyes were
visible.
“And here I have been tormenting myself and calling you for an hour
past! Did you not hear me shouting?”
She at last unclosed her lips.
“Yes.”
“Then that is very senseless! Why did you not answer me?”
But she fell back into her former silence, refusing all explanation,
and with a stubborn brow kept her gaze fixed steadily on the sky.
“There, come in and go to bed, naughty child. You will tell me
to-morrow.”
She did not stir, however; he begged her ten times over to go into the
house, but she would not move. He ended by sitting down beside her on
the short grass, through which penetrated the warmth of the pavement
beneath.
“But you cannot sleep out of doors. At least answer me. What are you
doing here?”
“I am looking.”
And from her large eyes, fixed and motionless, her gaze seemed to mount
up among the stars. She seemed wholly absorbed in the contemplation of
the pure starry depths of the summer sky.
“Ah, master!” she continued, in a low monotone; “how narrow and limited
is all that you know compared to what there is surely up there. Yes, if
I did not answer you it was because I was thinking of you, and I was
filled with grief. You must not think me bad.”
In her voice there was a thrill of such tenderness that it moved him
profoundly. He stretched himself on the grass beside her, so that their
elbows touched, and they went on talking.
“I greatly fear, my dear, that your griefs are not rational. It gives
you pain to think of me. Why so?”
“Oh, because of things that I should find it hard to explain to you; I
am not a _savante_. You have taught me much, however, and I have
learned more myself, being with you. Besides, they are things that I
feel. Perhaps I might try to tell them to you, as we are all alone
here, and the night is so beautiful.”
Her full heart overflowed, after hours of meditation, in the peaceful
confidence of the beautiful night. He did not speak, fearing to disturb
her, but awaited her confidences in silence.
“When I was a little girl and you used to talk to me about science, it
seemed to me that you were speaking to me of God, your words burned so
with faith and hope. Nothing seemed impossible to you. With science you
were going to penetrate the secret of the world, and make the perfect
happiness of humanity a reality. According to you, we were progressing
with giant strides. Each day brought its discovery, its certainty. Ten,
fifty, a hundred years more, perhaps, and the heavens would open and we
should see truth face to face. Well, the years pass, and nothing opens,
and truth recedes.”
“You are an impatient girl,” he answered simply. “If ten centuries more
be necessary we must only wait for them to pass.”
“It is true. I cannot wait. I need to know; I need to be happy at once,
and to know everything at once, and to be perfectly and forever happy.
Oh, that is what makes me suffer, not to be able to reach at a bound
complete knowledge, not to be able to rest in perfect felicity, freed
from scruples and doubts. Is it living to advance with tortoiselike
pace in the darkness, not to be able to enjoy an hour’s tranquillity,
without trembling at the thought of the coming anguish? No, no! All
knowledge and all happiness in a single day? Science has promised them
to us, and if she does not give them to us, then she fails in her
engagements.”
Then he, too, began to grow heated.
“But what you are saying is folly, little girl. Science is not
revelation. It marches at its human pace, its very effort is its glory.
And then it is not true that science has promised happiness.”
She interrupted him hastily.
“How, not true! Open your books up there, then. You know that I have
read them. Do they not overflow with promises? To read them one would
think we were marching on to the conquest of earth and heaven. They
demolish everything, and they swear to replace everything—and that by
pure reason, with stability and wisdom. Doubtless I am like the
children. When I am promised anything I wish that it shall be given me
at once. My imagination sets to work, and the object must be very
beautiful to satisfy me. But it would have been easy not to have
promised anything. And above all, at this hour, in view of my eager and
painful longing, it would be very ill done to tell me that nothing has
been promised me.”
He made a gesture, a simple gesture of protestation and impatience, in
the serene and silent night.
“In any case,” she continued, “science has swept away all our past
beliefs. The earth is bare, the heavens are empty, and what do you wish
that I should become, even if you acquit science of having inspired the
hopes I have conceived? For I cannot live without belief and without
happiness. On what solid ground shall I build my house when science
shall have demolished the old world, and while she is waiting to
construct the new? All the ancient city has fallen to pieces in this
catastrophe of examination and analysis; and all that remains of it is
a mad population vainly seeking a shelter among its ruins, while
anxiously looking for a solid and permanent refuge where they may begin
life anew. You must not be surprised, then, at our discouragement and
our impatience. We can wait no longer. Since tardy science has failed
in her promises, we prefer to fall back on the old beliefs, which for
centuries have sufficed for the happiness of the world.”
“Ah! that is just it,” he responded in a low voice; “we are just at the
turning point, at the end of the century, fatigued and exhausted with
the appalling accumulation of knowledge which it has set moving. And it
is the eternal need for falsehood, the eternal need for illusion which
distracts humanity, and throws it back upon the delusive charm of the
unknown. Since we can never know all, what is the use of trying to know
more than we know already? Since the truth, when we have attained it,
does not confer immediate and certain happiness, why not be satisfied
with ignorance, the darkened cradle in which humanity slept the deep
sleep of infancy? Yes, this is the aggressive return of the mysterious,
it is the reaction against a century of experimental research. And this
had to be; desertions were to be expected, since every need could not
be satisfied at once. But this is only a halt; the onward march will
continue, up there, beyond our view, in the illimitable fields of
space.”
For a moment they remained silent, still motionless on their backs,
their gaze lost among the myriads of worlds shining in the dark sky. A
falling star shot across the constellation of Cassiopeia, like a
flaming arrow. And the luminous universe above turned slowly on its
axis, in solemn splendor, while from the dark earth around them arose
only a faint breath, like the soft, warm breath of a sleeping woman.
“Tell me,” he said, in his good-natured voice, “did your Capuchin turn
your head this evening, then?”
“Yes,” she answered frankly; “he says from the pulpit things that
disturb me. He preaches against everything you have taught me, and it
is as if the knowledge which I owe to you, transformed into a poison,
were consuming me. My God! What is going to become of me?”
“My poor child! It is terrible that you should torture yourself in this
way! And yet I had been quite tranquil about you, for you have a
well-balanced mind—you have a good, little, round, clear, solid
headpiece, as I have often told you. You will soon calm down. But what
confusion in the brains of others, at the end of the century, if you,
who are so sane, are troubled! Have you not faith, then?”
She answered only by a heavy sigh.
“Assuredly, viewed from the standpoint of happiness, faith is a strong
staff for the traveler to lean upon, and the march becomes easy and
tranquil when one is fortunate enough to possess it.”
“Oh, I no longer know whether I believe or not!” she cried. “There are
days when I believe, and there are other days when I side with you and
with your books. It is you who have disturbed me; it is through you I
suffer. And perhaps all my suffering springs from this, from my revolt
against you whom I love. No, no! tell me nothing; do not tell me that I
shall soon calm down. At this moment that would only irritate me still
more. I know well that you deny the supernatural. The mysterious for
you is only the inexplicable. Even you concede that we shall never know
all; and therefore you consider that the only interest life can have is
the continual conquest over the unknown, the eternal effort to know
more. Ah, I know too much already to believe. You have already
succeeded but too well in shaking my faith, and there are times when it
seems to me that this will kill me.”
He took her hand that lay on the still warm grass, and pressed it hard.
“No, no; it is life that frightens you, little girl. And how right you
are in saying that happiness consists in continual effort. For from
this time forward tranquil ignorance is impossible. There is no halt to
be looked for, no tranquillity in renunciation and wilful blindness. We
must go on, go on in any case with life, which goes on always.
Everything that is proposed, a return to the past, to dead religions,
patched up religions arranged to suit new wants, is a snare. Learn to
know life, then; to love it, live it as it ought to be lived—that is
the only wisdom.”
But she shook off his hand angrily. And her voice trembled with
vexation.
“Life is horrible. How do you wish me to live it tranquil and happy? It
is a terrible light that your science throws upon the world. Your
analysis opens up all the wounds of humanity to display their horror.
You tell everything; you speak too plainly; you leave us nothing but
disgust for people and for things, without any possible consolation.”
He interrupted her with a cry of ardent conviction.
“We tell everything. Ah, yes; in order to know everything and to remedy
everything!”
Her anger rose, and she sat erect.
“If even equality and justice existed in your nature—but you
acknowledge it yourself, life is for the strongest, the weak infallibly
perishes because he is weak—there are no two beings equal, either in
health, in beauty, or intelligence; everything is left to haphazard
meeting, to the chance of selection. And everything falls into ruin,
when grand and sacred justice ceases to exist.”
“It is true,” he said, in an undertone, as if speaking to himself,
“there is no such thing as equality. No society based upon it could
continue to exist. For centuries, men thought to remedy evil by
character. But that idea is being exploded, and now they propose
justice. Is nature just? I think her logical, rather. Logic is perhaps
a natural and higher justice, going straight to the sum of the common
labor, to the grand final labor.”
“Then it is justice,” she cried, “that crushes the individual for the
happiness of the race, that destroys an enfeebled species to fatten the
victorious species. No, no; that is crime. There is in that only
foulness and murder. He was right this evening in the church. The earth
is corrupt, science only serves to show its rottenness. It is on high
that we must all seek a refuge. Oh, master, I entreat you, let me save
myself, let me save you!”
She burst into tears, and the sound of her sobs rose despairingly on
the stillness of the night. He tried in vain to soothe her, her voice
dominated his.
“Listen to me, master. You know that I love you, for you are everything
to me. And it is you who are the cause of all my suffering. I can
scarcely endure it when I think that we are not in accord, that we
should be separated forever if we were both to die to-morrow. Why will
you not believe?”
He still tried to reason with her.
“Come, don’t be foolish, my dear—”
But she threw herself on her knees, she seized him by the hands, she
clung to him with a feverish force. And she sobbed louder and louder,
in such a clamor of despair that the dark fields afar off were startled
by it.
“Listen to me, he said it in the church. You must change your life and
do penance; you must burn everything belonging to your past errors—your
books, your papers, your manuscripts. Make this sacrifice, master, I
entreat it of you on my knees. And you will see the delightful
existence we shall lead together.”
At last he rebelled.
“No, this is too much. Be silent!”
“If you listen to me, master, you will do what I wish. I assure you
that I am horribly unhappy, even in loving you as I love you. There is
something wanting in our affection. So far it has been profound but
unavailing, and I have an irresistible longing to fill it, oh, with all
that is divine and eternal. What can be wanting to us but God? Kneel
down and pray with me!”
With an abrupt movement he released himself, angry in his turn.
“Be silent; you are talking nonsense. I have left you free, leave me
free.”
“Master, master! it is our happiness that I desire! I will take you
far, far away. We will go to some solitude to live there in God!”
“Be silent! No, never!”
Then they remained for a moment confronting each other, mute and
menacing. Around them stretched La Souleiade in the deep silence of the
night, with the light shadows of its olive trees, the darkness of its
pine and plane trees, in which the saddened voice of the fountain was
singing, and above their heads it seemed as if the spacious sky,
studded with stars, shuddered and grew pale, although the dawn was
still far off.
Clotilde raised her arm as if to point to this infinite, shuddering
sky; but with a quick gesture Pascal seized her hand and drew it down
toward the earth in his. And no word further was spoken; they were
beside themselves with rage and hate. The quarrel was fierce and
bitter.
She drew her hand away abruptly, and sprang backward, like some proud,
untamable animal, rearing; then she rushed quickly through the darkness
toward the house. He heard the patter of her little boots on the stones
of the yard, deadened afterward by the sand of the walk. He, on his
side, already grieved and uneasy, called her back in urgent tones. But
she ran on without answering, without hearing. Alarmed, and with a
heavy heart, he hurried after her, and rounded the clump of plane trees
just in time to see her rush into the house like a whirlwind. He darted
in after her, ran up the stairs, and struck against the door of her
room, which she violently bolted. And here he stopped and grew calm, by
a strong effort resisting the desire to cry out, to call her again, to
break in the door so as to see her once more, to convince her, to have
her all to himself. For a moment he remained motionless, chilled by the
deathlike silence of the room, from which not the faintest sound
issued. Doubtless she had thrown herself on the bed, and was stifling
her cries and her sobs in the pillow. He determined at last to go
downstairs again and close the hall door, and then he returned softly
and listened, waiting for some sound of moaning. And day was breaking
when he went disconsolately to bed, choking back his tears.
Thenceforward it was war without mercy. Pascal felt himself spied upon,
trapped, menaced. He was no longer master of his house; he had no
longer any home. The enemy was always there, forcing him to be
constantly on his guard, to lock up everything. One after the other,
two vials of nerve-substance which he had compounded were found in
fragments, and he was obliged to barricade himself in his room, where
he could be heard pounding for days together, without showing himself
even at mealtime. He no longer took Clotilde with him on his visiting
days, because she discouraged his patients by her attitude of
aggressive incredulity. But from the moment he left the house, the
doctor had only one desire—to return to it quickly, for he trembled
lest he should find his locks forced, and his drawers rifled on his
return. He no longer employed the young girl to classify and copy his
notes, for several of them had disappeared, as if they had been carried
away by the wind. He did not even venture to employ her to correct his
proofs, having ascertained that she had cut out of an article an entire
passage, the sentiment of which offended her Catholic belief. And thus
she remained idle, prowling about the rooms, and having an abundance of
time to watch for an occasion which would put in her possession the key
of the large press. This was her dream, the plan which she revolved in
her mind during her long silence, while her eyes shone and her hands
burned with fever—to have the key, to open the press, to take and burn
everything in an _auto da fé_ which would be pleasing to God. A few
pages of manuscript, forgotten by him on a corner of the table, while
he went to wash his hands and put on his coat, had disappeared, leaving
behind only a little heap of ashes in the fireplace. He could no longer
leave a scrap of paper about. He carried away everything; he hid
everything. One evening, when he had remained late with a patient, as
he was returning home in the dusk a wild terror seized him at the
faubourg, at sight of a thick black smoke rising up in clouds that
darkened the heavens. Was it not La Souleiade that was burning down,
set on fire by the bonfire made with his papers? He ran toward the
house, and was reassured only on seeing in a neighboring field a fire
of roots burning slowly.
But how terrible are the tortures of the scientist who feels himself
menaced in this way in the labors of his intellect! The discoveries
which he has made, the writings which he has counted upon leaving
behind him, these are his pride, they are creatures of his blood—his
children—and whoever destroys, whoever burns them, burns a part of
himself. Especially, in this perpetual lying in wait for the creatures
of his brain, was Pascal tortured by the thought that the enemy was in
his house, installed in his very heart, and that he loved her in spite
of everything, this creature whom he had made what she was. He was left
disarmed, without possible defense; not wishing to act, and having no
other resources than to watch with vigilance. On all sides the
investment was closing around him. He fancied he felt the little
pilfering hands stealing into his pockets. He had no longer any
tranquillity, even with the doors closed, for he feared that he was
being robbed through the crevices.
“But, unhappy child,” he cried one day, “I love but you in the world,
and you are killing me! And yet you love me, too; you act in this way
because you love me, and it is abominable. It would be better to have
done with it all at once, and throw ourselves into the river with a
stone tied around our necks.”
She did not answer, but her dauntless eyes said ardently that she would
willingly die on the instant, if it were with him.
“And if I should suddenly die to-night, what would happen to-morrow?
You would empty the press, you would empty the drawers, you would make
a great heap of all my works and burn them! You would, would you not?
Do you know that that would be a real murder, as much as if you
assassinated some one? And what abominable cowardice, to kill the
thoughts!”
“No,” she said at last, in a low voice; “to kill evil, to prevent it
from spreading and springing up again!”
All their explanations only served to kindle anew their anger. And they
had terrible ones. And one evening, when old Mme. Rougon had chanced in
on one of these quarrels, she remained alone with Pascal, after
Clotilde had fled to hide herself in her room. There was silence for a
moment. In spite of the heartbroken air which she had assumed, a wicked
joy shone in the depths of her sparkling eyes.
“But your unhappy house is a hell!” she cried at last.
The doctor avoided an answer by a gesture. He had always felt that his
mother backed the young girl, inflaming her religious faith, utilizing
this ferment of revolt to bring trouble into his house. He was not
deceived. He knew perfectly well that the two women had seen each other
during the day, and that he owed to this meeting, to a skilful
embittering of Clotilde’s mind, the frightful scene at which he still
trembled. Doubtless his mother had come to learn what mischief had been
wrought, and to see if the _denouement_ was not at last at hand.
“Things cannot go on in this way,” she resumed. “Why do you not
separate since you can no longer agree. You ought to send her to her
brother Maxime. He wrote to me not long since asking her again.”
He straightened himself, pale and determined.
“To part angry with each other? Ah, no, no! that would be an eternal
remorse, an incurable wound. If she must one day go away, I wish that
we may be able to love each other at a distance. But why go away?
Neither of us complains of the other.”
Félicité felt that she had been too hasty. Therefore she assumed her
hypocritical, conciliating air.
“Of course, if it pleases you both to quarrel, no one has anything to
say in the matter. Only, my poor friend, permit me, in that case, to
say that I think Clotilde is not altogether in the wrong. You force me
to confess that I saw her a little while ago; yes, it is better that
you should know, notwithstanding my promise to be silent. Well, she is
not happy; she makes a great many complaints, and you may imagine that
I scolded her and preached complete submission to her. But that does
not prevent me from being unable to understand you myself, and from
thinking that you do everything you can to make yourself unhappy.”
She sat down in a corner of the room, and obliged him to sit down with
her, seeming delighted to have him here alone, at her mercy. She had
already, more than once before, tried to force him to an explanation in
this way, but he had always avoided it. Although she had tortured him
for years past, and he knew her thoroughly, he yet remained a
deferential son, he had sworn never to abandon this stubbornly
respectful attitude. Thus, the moment she touched certain subjects, he
took refuge in absolute silence.
“Come,” she continued; “I can understand that you should not wish to
yield to Clotilde; but to me? How if I were to entreat you to make me
the sacrifice of all those abominable papers which are there in the
press! Consider for an instant if you should die suddenly, and those
papers should fall into strange hands. We should all be disgraced. You
would not wish that, would you? What is your object, then? Why do you
persist in so dangerous a game? Promise me that you will burn them.”
He remained silent for a time, but at last he answered:
“Mother, I have already begged of you never to speak on that subject. I
cannot do what you ask.”
“But at least,” she cried, “give me a reason. Any one would think our
family was as indifferent to you as that drove of oxen passing below
there. Yet you belong to it. Oh, I know you do all you can not to
belong to it! I myself am sometimes astonished at you. I ask myself
where you can have come from. But for all that, it is very wicked of
you to run this risk, without stopping to think of the grief you are
causing to me, your mother. It is simply wicked.”
He grew still paler, and yielding for an instant to his desire to
defend himself, in spite of his determination to keep silent, he said:
“You are hard; you are wrong. I have always believed in the necessity,
the absolute efficacy of truth. It is true that I tell the truth about
others and about myself, and it is because I believe firmly that in
telling the truth I do the only good possible. In the first place,
those papers are not intended for the public; they are only personal
notes which it would be painful to me to part with. And then, I know
well that you would not burn only them—all my other works would also be
thrown into the fire. Would they not? And that is what I do not wish;
do you understand? Never, while I live, shall a line of my writing be
destroyed here.”
But he already regretted having said so much, for he saw that she was
urging him, leading him on to the cruel explanation she desired.
“Then finish, and tell me what it is that you reproach us with. Yes,
me, for instance; what do you reproach me with? Not with having brought
you up with so much difficulty. Ah, fortune was slow to win! If we
enjoy a little happiness now, we have earned it hard. Since you have
seen everything, and since you put down everything in your papers, you
can testify with truth that the family has rendered greater services to
others than it has ever received. On two occasions, but for us,
Plassans would have been in a fine pickle. And it is perfectly natural
that we should have reaped only ingratitude and envy, to the extent
that even to-day the whole town would be enchanted with a scandal that
should bespatter us with mud. You cannot wish that, and I am sure that
you will do justice to the dignity of my attitude since the fall of the
Empire, and the misfortunes from which France will no doubt never
recover.”
“Let France rest, mother,” he said, speaking again, for she had touched
the spot where she knew he was most sensitive. “France is tenacious of
life, and I think she is going to astonish the world by the rapidity of
her convalescence. True, she has many elements of corruption. I have
not sought to hide them, I have rather, perhaps, exposed them to view.
But you greatly misunderstand me if you imagine that I believe in her
final dissolution, because I point out her wounds and her lesions. I
believe in the life which ceaselessly eliminates hurtful substances,
which makes new flesh to fill the holes eaten away by gangrene, which
infallibly advances toward health, toward constant renovation, amid
impurities and death.”
He was growing excited, and he was conscious of it, and making an angry
gesture, he spoke no more. His mother had recourse to tears, a few
little tears which came with difficulty, and which were quickly dried.
And the fears which saddened her old age returned to her, and she
entreated him to make his peace with God, if only out of regard for the
family. Had she not given an example of courage ever since the downfall
of the Empire? Did not all Plassans, the quarter of St. Marc, the old
quarter and the new town, render homage to the noble attitude she
maintained in her fall? All she asked was to be helped; she demanded
from all her children an effort like her own. Thus she cited the
example of Eugène, the great man who had fallen from so lofty a height,
and who resigned himself to being a simple deputy, defending until his
latest breath the fallen government from which he had derived his
glory. She was also full of eulogies of Aristide, who had never lost
hope, who had reconquered, under the new government, an exalted
position, in spite of the terrible and unjust catastrophe which had for
a moment buried him under the ruins of the Union Universelle. And would
he, Pascal, hold himself aloof, would he do nothing that she might die
in peace, in the joy of the final triumph of the Rougons, he who was so
intelligent, so affectionate, so good? He would go to mass, would he
not, next Sunday? and he would burn all those vile papers, only to
think of which made her ill. She entreated, commanded, threatened. But
he no longer answered her, calm and invincible in his attitude of
perfect deference. He wished to have no discussion. He knew her too
well either to hope to convince her or to venture to discuss the past
with her.
“Why!” she cried, when she saw that he was not to be moved, “you do not
belong to us. I have always said so. You are a disgrace to us.”
He bent his head and said:
“Mother, when you reflect you will forgive me.”
On this day Félicité was beside herself with rage when she went away;
and when she met Martine at the door of the house, in front of the
plane trees, she unburdened her mind to her, without knowing that
Pascal, who had just gone into his room, heard all. She gave vent to
her resentment, vowing, in spite of everything, that she would in the
end succeed in obtaining possession of the papers and destroying them,
since he did not wish to make the sacrifice. But what turned the doctor
cold was the manner in which Martine, in a subdued voice, soothed her.
She was evidently her accomplice. She repeated that it was necessary to
wait; not to do anything hastily; that mademoiselle and she had taken a
vow to get the better of monsieur, by not leaving him an hour’s peace.
They had sworn it. They would reconcile him with the good God, because
it was not possible that an upright man like monsieur should remain
without religion. And the voices of the two women became lower and
lower, until they finally sank to a whisper, an indistinct murmur of
gossiping and plotting, of which he caught only a word here and there;
orders given, measures to be taken, an invasion of his personal
liberty. When his mother at last departed, with her light step and
slender, youthful figure, he saw that she went away very well
satisfied.
Then came a moment of weakness, of utter despair. Pascal dropped into a
chair, and asked himself what was the use of struggling, since the only
beings he loved allied themselves against him. Martine, who would have
thrown herself into the fire at a word from him, betraying him in this
way for his good! And Clotilde leagued with this servant, plotting with
her against him in holes and corners, seeking her aid to set traps for
him! Now he was indeed alone; he had around him only traitresses, who
poisoned the very air he breathed. But these two still loved him. He
might perhaps have succeeded in softening them, but when he knew that
his mother urged them on, he understood their fierce persistence, and
he gave up the hope of winning them back. With the timidity of a man
who had spent his life in study, aloof from women, notwithstanding his
secret passion, the thought that they were there to oppose him, to
attempt to bend him to their will, overwhelmed him. He felt that some
one of them was always behind him. Even when he shut himself up in his
room, he fancied that they were on the other side of the wall; and he
was constantly haunted by the idea that they would rob him of his
thought, if they could perceive it in his brain, before he should have
formulated it.
This was assuredly the period in his life in which Dr. Pascal was most
unhappy. To live constantly on the defensive, as he was obliged to do,
crushed him, and it seemed to him as if the ground on which his house
stood was no longer his, as if it was receding from beneath his feet.
He now regretted keenly that he had not married, and that he had no
children. Had not he himself been afraid of life? And had he not been
well punished for his selfishness? This regret for not having children
now never left him. His eyes now filled with tears whenever he met on
the road bright-eyed little girls who smiled at him. True, Clotilde was
there, but his affection for her was of a different kind—crossed at
present by storms—not a calm, infinitely sweet affection, like that for
a child with which he might have soothed his lacerated heart. And then,
no doubt what he desired in his isolation, feeling that his days were
drawing to an end, was above all, continuance; in a child he would
survive, he would live forever. The more he suffered, the greater the
consolation he would have found in bequeathing this suffering, in the
faith which he still had in life. He considered himself indemnified for
the physiological defects of his family. But even the thought that
heredity sometimes passes over a generation, and that the disorders of
his ancestors might reappear in a child of his did not deter him; and
this unknown child, in spite of the old corrupt stock, in spite of the
long succession of execrable relations, he desired ardently at certain
times: as one desires unexpected gain, rare happiness, the stroke of
fortune which is to console and enrich forever. In the shock which his
other affections had received, his heart bled because it was too late.
One sultry night toward the end of September, Pascal found himself
unable to sleep. He opened one of the windows of his room; the sky was
dark, some storm must be passing in the distance, for there was a
continuous rumbling of thunder. He could distinguish vaguely the dark
mass of the plane trees, which occasional flashes of lightning
detached, in a dull green, from the darkness. His soul was full of
anguish; he lived over again the last unhappy days, days of fresh
quarrels, of torture caused by acts of treachery, by suspicions, which
grew stronger every day, when a sudden recollection made him start. In
his fear of being robbed, he had finally adopted the plan of carrying
the key of the large press in his pocket. But this afternoon, oppressed
by the heat, he had taken off his jacket, and he remembered having seen
Clotilde hang it up on a nail in the study. A sudden pang of terror
shot through him, sharp and cold as a steel point; if she had felt the
key in the pocket she had stolen it. He hastened to search the jacket
which he had a little before thrown upon a chair; the key was not here.
At this very moment he was being robbed; he had the clear conviction of
it. Two o’clock struck. He did not again dress himself, but, remaining
in his trousers only, with his bare feet thrust into slippers, his
chest bare under his unfastened nightshirt, he hastily pushed open the
door, and rushed into the workroom, his candle in his hand.
“Ah! I knew it,” he cried. “Thief! Assassin!”
It was true; Clotilde was there, undressed like himself, her bare feet
covered by canvas slippers, her legs bare, her arms bare, her shoulders
bare, clad only in her chemise and a short skirt. Through caution, she
had not brought a candle. She had contented herself with opening one of
the window shutters, and the continual lightning flashes of the storm
which was passing southward in the dark sky, sufficed her, bathing
everything in a livid phosphorescence. The old press, with its broad
sides, was wide open. Already she had emptied the top shelf, taking
down the papers in armfuls, and throwing them on the long table in the
middle of the room, where they lay in a confused heap. And with
feverish haste, fearing lest she should not have the time to burn them,
she was making them up into bundles, intending to hide them, and send
them afterward to her grandmother, when the sudden flare of the candle,
lighting up the room, caused her to stop short in an attitude of
surprise and resistance.
“You rob me; you assassinate me!” repeated Pascal furiously.
She still held one of the bundles in her bare arms. He wished to take
it away from her, but she pressed it to her with all her strength,
obstinately resolved upon her work of destruction, without showing
confusion or repentance, like a combatant who has right upon his side.
Then, madly, blindly, he threw himself upon her, and they struggled
together. He clutched her bare flesh so that he hurt her.
“Kill me!” she gasped. “Kill me, or I shall destroy everything!”
He held her close to him, with so rough a grasp that she could scarcely
breathe, crying:
“When a child steals, it is punished!”
A few drops of blood appeared and trickled down her rounded shoulder,
where an abrasion had cut the delicate satin skin. And, on the instant,
seeing her so breathless, so divine, in her virginal slender height,
with her tapering limbs, her supple arms, her slim body with its
slender, firm throat, he released her. By a last effort he tore the
package from her.
“And you shall help me to put them all up there again, by Heaven! Come
here: begin by arranging them on the table. Obey me, do you hear?”
“Yes, master!”
She approached, and helped him to arrange the papers, subjugated,
crushed by this masculine grasp, which had entered into her flesh, as
it were. The candle which flared up in the heavy night air, lighted
them; and the distant rolling of the thunder still continued, the
window facing the storm seeming on fire.