XIV.

In the study Clotilde was buttoning her dress, holding her child, whom

she had been nursing, still in her lap. It was after lunch, about three

o’clock on a hot sunny day at the end of August, and through the

crevices of the carefully closed shutters only a few scattered sunbeams

entered, piercing the drowsy and warm obscurity of the vast apartment.

The rest and peace of the Sunday seemed to enter and diffuse itself in

the room with the last sounds of the distant vesper bell. Profound

silence reigned in the empty house in which the mother and child were

to remain alone until dinner time, the servant having asked permission

to go see a cousin in the faubourg.

For an instant Clotilde looked at her child, now a big boy of three

months. She had been wearing mourning for Pascal for almost ten

months—a long and simple black gown, in which she looked divinely

beautiful, with her tall, slender figure and her sad, youthful face

surrounded by its aureole of fair hair. And although she could not

smile, it filled her with sweet emotion to see the beautiful child, so

plump and rosy, with his mouth still wet with milk, whose gaze had been

arrested by the sunbeam full of dancing motes. His eyes were fixed

wonderingly on the golden brightness, the dazzling miracle of light.

Then sleep came over him, and he let his little, round, bare head,

covered thinly with fair hair, fall back on his mother’s arm.

Clotilde rose softly and laid him in the cradle, which stood beside the

table. She remained leaning over him for an instant to assure herself

that he was asleep; then she let down the curtain in the already

darkened room. Then she busied herself with supple and noiseless

movements, walking with so light a step that she scarcely touched the

floor, in putting away some linen which was on the table. Twice she

crossed the room in search of a little missing sock. She was very

silent, very gentle, and very active. And now, in the solitude of the

house, she fell into a reverie and all the past year arose before her.

First, after the dreadful shock of the funeral, came the departure of

Martine, who had obstinately kept to her determination of going away at

once, not even remaining for the customary week, bringing to replace

her the young cousin of a baker in the neighborhood—a stout brunette,

who fortunately proved very neat and faithful. Martine herself lived at

Sainte-Marthe, in a retired corner, so penuriously that she must be

still saving even out of her small income. She was not known to have

any heir. Who, then, would profit by this miserliness? In ten months

she had not once set foot in La Souleiade—monsieur was not there, and

she had not even the desire to see monsieur’s son.

Then in Clotilde’s reverie rose the figure of her grandmother Félicité.

The latter came to see her from time to time with the condescension of

a powerful relation who is liberal-minded enough to pardon all faults

when they have been cruelly expiated. She would come unexpectedly, kiss

the child, moralize, and give advice, and the young mother had adopted

toward her the respectful attitude which Pascal had always maintained.

Félicité was now wholly absorbed in her triumph. She was at last about

to realize a plan that she had long cherished and maturely deliberated,

which would perpetuate by an imperishable monument the untarnished

glory of the family. The plan was to devote her fortune, which had

become considerable, to the construction and endowment of an asylum for

the aged, to be called Rougon Asylum. She had already bought the

ground, a part of the old mall outside the town, near the railway

station; and precisely on this Sunday, at five o’clock, when the heat

should have abated a little, the first stone was to be laid, a really

solemn ceremony, to be honored by the presence of all the authorities,

and of which she was to be the acknowledged queen, before a vast

concourse of people.

Clotilde felt, besides, some gratitude toward her grandmother, who had

shown perfect disinterestedness on the occasion of the opening of

Pascal’s will. The latter had constituted the young woman his sole

legatee; and the mother, who had a right to a fourth part, after

declaring her intention to respect her son’s wishes, had simply

renounced her right to the succession. She wished, indeed, to

disinherit all her family, bequeathing to them glory only, by employing

her large fortune in the erection of this asylum, which was to carry

down to future ages the revered and glorious name of the Rougons; and

after having, for more than half a century, so eagerly striven to

acquire money, she now disdained it, moved by a higher and purer

ambition. And Clotilde, thanks to this liberality, had no uneasiness

regarding the future—the four thousand francs income would be

sufficient for her and her child. She would bring him up to be a man.

She had sunk the five thousand francs that she had found in the desk in

an annuity for him; and she owned, besides, La Souleiade, which

everybody advised her to sell. True, it cost but little to keep it up,

but what a sad and solitary life she would lead in that great deserted

house, much too large for her, where she would be lost. Thus far,

however, she had not been able to make up her mind to leave it. Perhaps

she would never be able to do so.

Ah, this La Souleiade! all her love, all her life, all her memories

were centered in it. It seemed to her at times as if Pascal were living

here still, for she had changed nothing of their former manner of

living. The furniture remained in the same places, the hours were the

same, the habits the same. The only change she had made was to lock his

room, into which only she went, as into a sanctuary, to weep when she

felt her heart too heavy. And although indeed she felt very lonely,

very lost, at each meal in the bright dining-room downstairs, in fancy

she heard there the echoes of their laughter, she recalled the healthy

appetite of her youth; when they two had eaten and drank so gaily,

rejoicing in their existence. And the garden, too, the whole place was

bound up with the most intimate fibers of her being, for she could not

take a step in it that their united images did not appear before her—on

the terrace; in the slender shadow of the great secular cypresses,

where they had so often contemplated the valley of the Viorne, closed

in by the ridges of the Seille and the parched hills of Sainte-Marthe;

the stone steps among the puny olive and almond trees, which they had

so often challenged each other to run up in a trial of speed, like boys

just let loose from school; and there was the pine grove, too, the

warm, embalsamed shade, where the needles crackled under their feet;

the vast threshing yard, carpeted with soft grass, where they could see

the whole sky at night, when the stars were coming out; and above all

there were the giant plane trees, whose delightful shade they had

enjoyed every day in summer, listening to the soothing song of the

fountain, the crystal clear song which it had sung for centuries. Even

to the old stones of the house, even to the earth of the grounds, there

was not an atom at La Souleiade in which she did not feel a little of

their blood warmly throbbing, with which she did not feel a little of

their life diffused and mingled.

But she preferred to spend her days in the workroom, and here it was

that she lived over again her best hours. There was nothing new in it

but the cradle. The doctor’s table was in its place before the window

to the left—she could fancy him coming in and sitting down at it, for

his chair had not even been moved. On the long table in the center,

among the old heap of books and papers, there was nothing new but the

cheerful note of the little baby linen, which she was looking over. The

bookcases displayed the same rows of volumes; the large oaken press

seemed to guard within its sides the same treasure, securely shut in.

Under the smoky ceiling the room was still redolent of work, with its

confusion of chairs, the pleasant disorder of this common workroom,

filled with the caprices of the girl and the researches of the

scientist. But what most moved her to-day was the sight of her old

pastels hanging against the wall, the copies which she had made of

living flowers, scrupulously exact copies, and of dream flowers of an

imaginary world, whither her wild fancy sometimes carried her.

Clotilde had just finished arranging the little garments on the table

when, lifting her eyes, she perceived before her the pastel of old King

David, with his hand resting on the shoulder of Abishag the young

Shunammite. And she, who now never smiled, felt her face flush with a

thrill of tender and pleasing emotion. How they had loved each other,

how they had dreamed of an eternity of love the day on which she had

amused herself painting this proud and loving allegory! The old king,

sumptuously clad in a robe hanging in straight folds, heavy with

precious stones, wore the royal bandeau on his snowy locks; but she was

more sumptuous still, with only her tall slender figure, her delicate

round throat, and her supple arms, divinely graceful. Now he was gone,

he was sleeping under the ground, while she, her pure and triumphant

beauty concealed by her black robes, had only her child to express the

love she had given him before the assembled people, in the full light

of day.

Then Clotilde sat down beside the cradle. The slender sunbeams

lengthened, crossing the room from end to end, the heat of the warm

afternoon grew oppressive in the drowsy obscurity made by the closed

shutters, and the silence of the house seemed more profound than

before. She set apart some little waists, she sewed on some tapes with

slow-moving needle, and gradually she fell into a reverie in the warm

deep peacefulness of the room, in the midst of the glowing heat

outside. Her thoughts first turned to her pastels, the exact copies and

the fantastic dream flowers; she said to herself now that all her dual

nature was to be found in that passion for truth, which had at times

kept her a whole day before a flower in order to copy it with

exactness, and in her need of the spiritual, which at other times took

her outside the real, and carried her in wild dreams to the paradise of

flowers such as had never grown on earth. She had always been thus. She

felt that she was in reality the same to-day as she had been yesterday,

in the midst of the flow of new life which ceaselessly transformed her.

And then she thought of Pascal, full of gratitude that he had made her

what she was. In days past when, a little girl, he had removed her from

her execrable surroundings and taken her home with him, he had

undoubtedly followed the impulses of his good heart, but he had also

undoubtedly desired to try an experiment with her, to see how she would

grow up in the different environment, in an atmosphere of truthfulness

and affection. This had always been an idea of his. It was an old

theory of his which he would have liked to test on a large scale:

culture through environment, complete regeneration even, the

improvement, the salvation of the individual, physically as well as

morally. She owed to him undoubtedly the best part of her nature; she

guessed how fanciful and violent she might have become, while he had

made her only enthusiastic and courageous.

In this retrospection she was clearly conscious of the gradual change

that had taken place within her. Pascal had corrected her heredity, and

she lived over again the slow evolution, the struggle between the

fantastic and the real in her. It had begun with her outbursts of anger

as a child, a ferment of rebellion, a want of mental balance that had

caused her to indulge in most hurtful reveries. Then came her fits of

extreme devotion, the need of illusion and falsehood, of immediate

happiness in the thought that the inequalities and injustices of this

wicked world would he compensated by the eternal joys of a future

paradise. This was the epoch of her struggles with Pascal, of the

torture which she had caused him, planning to destroy the work of his

genius. And at this point her nature had changed; she had acknowledged

him for her master. He had conquered her by the terrible lesson of life

which he had given her on the night of the storm. Then, environment had

acted upon her, evolution had proceeded rapidly, and she had ended by

becoming a well-balanced and rational woman, willing to live life as it

ought to be lived, satisfied with doing her work in the hope that the

sum of the common labor would one day free the world from evil and

pain. She had loved, she was a mother now, and she understood.

Suddenly she remembered the night which they had spent in the threshing

yard. She could still hear her lamentation under the stars—the cruelty

of nature, the inefficacy of science, the wickedness of humanity, and

the need she felt of losing herself in God, in the Unknown. Happiness

consisted in self-renunciation. Then she heard him repeat his creed—the

progress of reason through science, truths acquired slowly and forever

the only possible good, the belief that the sum of these truths, always

augmenting, would finally confer upon man incalculable power and peace,

if not happiness. All was summed up in his ardent faith in life. As he

expressed it, it was necessary to march with life, which marched

always. No halt was to be expected, no peace in immobility and

renunciation, no consolation in turning back. One must keep a steadfast

soul, the only ambition to perform one’s work, modestly looking for no

other reward of life than to have lived it bravely, accomplishing the

task which it imposes. Evil was only an accident not yet explained,

humanity appearing from a great height like an immense wheel in action,

working ceaselessly for the future. Why should the workman who

disappeared, having finished his day’s work, abuse the work because he

could neither see nor know its end? Even if it were to have no end why

should he not enjoy the delight of action, the exhilarating air of the

march, the sweetness of sleep after the fatigue of a long and busy day?

The children would carry on the task of the parents; they were born and

cherished only for this, for the task of life which is transmitted to

them, which they in their turn will transmit to others. All that

remained, then, was to be courageously resigned to the grand common

labor, without the rebellion of the ego, which demands personal

happiness, perfect and complete.

She questioned herself, and she found that she did not experience that

anguish which had filled her formerly at the thought of what was to

follow death. This anxiety about the Beyond no longer haunted her until

it became a torture. Formerly she would have liked to wrest by force

from heaven the secrets of destiny. It had been a source of infinite

grief to her not to know why she existed. Why are we born? What do we

come on earth to do? What is the meaning of this execrable existence,

without equality, without justice, which seemed to her like a fevered

dream? Now her terror was calmed; she could think of these things

courageously. Perhaps it was her child, the continuation of herself,

which now concealed from her the horror of her end. But her regular

life contributed also to this, the thought that it was necessary to

live for the effort of living, and that the only peace possible in this

world was in the joy of the accomplishment of this effort. She repeated

to herself a remark of the doctor, who would often say when he saw a

peasant returning home with a contented look after his day’s work:

“There is a man whom anxiety about the Beyond will not prevent from

sleeping.” He meant to say that this anxiety troubles and perverts only

excitable and idle brains. If all performed their healthful task, all

would sleep peacefully at night. She herself had felt the beneficent

power of work in the midst of her sufferings and her grief. Since he

had taught her to employ every one of her hours; since she had been a

mother, especially, occupied constantly with her child, she no longer

felt a chill of horror when she thought of the Unknown. She put aside

without an effort disquieting reveries; and if she still felt an

occasional fear, if some of her daily griefs made her sick at heart,

she found comfort and unfailing strength in the thought that her child

was this day a day older, that he would be another day older on the

morrow, that day by day, page by page, his work of life was being

accomplished. This consoled her delightfully for all her miseries. She

had a duty, an object, and she felt in her happy serenity that she was

doing surely what she had been sent here to do.

Yet, even at this very moment she knew that the mystic was not entirely

dead within her. In the midst of the profound silence she heard a

slight noise, and she raised her head. Who was the divine mediator that

had passed? Perhaps the beloved dead for whom she mourned, and whose

presence near her she fancied she could divine. There must always be in

her something of the childlike believer she had always been, curious

about the Unknown, having an instinctive longing for the mysterious.

She accounted to herself for this longing, she even explained it

scientifically. However far science may extend the limits of human

knowledge, there is undoubtedly a point which it cannot pass; and it

was here precisely that Pascal placed the only interest in life—in the

effort which we ceaselessly make to know more—there was only one

reasonable meaning in life, this continual conquest of the unknown.

Therefore, she admitted the existence of undiscovered forces

surrounding the world, an immense and obscure domain, ten times larger

than the domain already won, an infinite and unexplored realm through

which future humanity would endlessly ascend. Here, indeed, was a field

vast enough for the imagination to lose itself in. In her hours of

reverie she satisfied in it the imperious need which man seems to have

for the spiritual, a need of escaping from the visible world, of

interrogating the Unknown, of satisfying in it the dream of absolute

justice and of future happiness. All that remained of her former

torture, her last mystic transports, were there appeased. She satisfied

there that hunger for consoling illusions which suffering humanity must

satisfy in order to live. But in her all was happily balanced. At this

crisis, in an epoch overburdened with science, disquieted at the ruins

it has made, and seized with fright in the face of the new century,

wildly desiring to stop and to return to the past, Clotilde kept the

happy mean; in her the passion for truth was broadened by her eagerness

to penetrate the Unknown. If sectarian scientists shut out the horizon

to keep strictly to the phenomenon, it was permitted to her, a good,

simple creature, to reserve the part that she did not know, that she

would never know. And if Pascal’s creed was the logical deduction from

the whole work, the eternal question of the Beyond, which she still

continued to put to heaven, reopened the door of the infinite to

humanity marching ever onward. Since we must always learn, while

resigning ourselves never to know all, was it not to will action, life

itself, to reserve the Unknown—an eternal doubt and an eternal hope?

Another sound, as of a wing passing, the light touch of a kiss upon her

hair, this time made her smile. He was surely here; and her whole being

went out toward him, in the great flood of tenderness with which her

heart overflowed. How kind and cheerful he was, and what a love for

others underlay his passionate love of life! Perhaps he, too, had been

only a dreamer, for he had dreamed the most beautiful of dreams, the

final belief in a better world, when science should have bestowed

incalculable power upon man—to accept everything, to turn everything to

our happiness, to know everything and to foresee everything, to make

nature our servant, to live in the tranquillity of intelligence

satisfied. Meantime faith in life, voluntary and regular labor, would

suffice for health. Evil was only the unexplained side of things;

suffering would one day be assuredly utilized. And regarding from above

the enormous labor of the world, seeing the sum total of humanity, good

and bad—admirable, in spite of everything, for their courage and their

industry—she now regarded all mankind as united in a common

brotherhood, she now felt only boundless indulgence, an infinite pity,

and an ardent charity. Love, like the sun, bathes the earth, and

goodness is the great river at which all hearts drink.

Clotilde had been plying her needle for two hours, with the same

regular movement, while her thoughts wandered away in the profound

silence. But the tapes were sewed on the little waists, she had even

marked some new wrappers, which she had bought the day before. And, her

sewing finished, she rose to put the linen away. Outside the sun was

declining, and only slender and oblique sunbeams entered through the

crevices of the shutters. She could not see clearly, and she opened one

of the shutters, then she forgot herself for a moment, at the sight of

the vast horizon suddenly unrolled before her. The intense heat had

abated, a delicious breeze was blowing, and the sky was of a cloudless

blue. To the left could be distinguished even the smallest clumps of

pines, among the blood-colored ravines of the rocks of the Seille,

while to the right, beyond the hills of Sainte-Marthe, the valley of

the Viorne stretched away in the golden dust of the setting sun. She

looked for a moment at the tower of St. Saturnin, all golden also,

dominating the rose-colored town; and she was about to leave the window

when she saw a sight that drew her back and kept her there, leaning on

her elbow for a long time still.

Beyond the railroad a multitude of people were crowded together on the

old mall. Clotilde at once remembered the ceremony. She knew that her

Grandmother Félicité was going to lay the first stone of the Rougon

Asylum, the triumphant monument destined to carry down to future ages

the glory of the family. Vast preparations had been going on for a week

past. There was talk of a silver hod and trowel, which the old lady was

to use herself, determined to figure to triumph, with her eighty-two

years. What swelled her heart with regal pride was that on this

occasion she made the conquest of Plassans for the third time, for she

compelled the whole town, all the three quarters, to range themselves

around her, to form an escort for her, and to applaud her as a

benefactress. For, of course, there had to be present lady patronesses,

chosen from among the noblest ladies of the Quartier St. Marc; a

delegation from the societies of working-women of the old quarter, and,

finally, the most distinguished residents of the new town, advocates,

notaries, physicians, without counting the common people, a stream of

people dressed in their Sunday clothes, crowding there eagerly, as to a

festival. And in the midst of this supreme triumph she was perhaps most

proud—she, one of the queens of the Second Empire, the widow who

mourned with so much dignity the fallen government—in having conquered

the young republic itself, obliging it, in the person of the

sub-prefect, to come and salute her and thank her. At first there had

been question only of a discourse of the mayor; but it was known with

certainty, since the previous day, that the sub-prefect also would

speak. From so great a distance Clotilde could distinguish only a

moving crowd of black coats and light dresses, under the scorching sun.

Then there was a distant sound of music, the music of the amateur band

of the town, the sonorous strains of whose brass instruments were borne

to her at intervals on the breeze.

She left the window and went and opened the large oaken press to put

away in it the linen that had remained on the table. It was in this

press, formerly so full of the doctor’s manuscripts, and now empty,

that she kept the baby’s wardrobe. It yawned open, vast, seemingly

bottomless, and on the large bare shelves there was nothing but the

baby linen, the little waists, the little caps, the little socks, all

the fine clothing, the down of the bird still in the nest. Where so

many thoughts had been stored up, where a man’s unremitting labor for

thirty years had accumulated in an overflowing heap of papers, there

was now only a baby’s clothing, only the first garments which would

protect it for an hour, as it were, and which very soon it could no

longer use. The vastness of the antique press seemed brightened and all

refreshed by them.

When Clotilde had arranged the wrappers and the waists upon a shelf,

she perceived a large envelope containing the fragments of the

documents which she had placed there after she had rescued them from

the fire. And she remembered a request which Dr. Ramond had come only

the day before to make her—that she would see if there remained among

this _debris_ any fragment of importance having a scientific interest.

He was inconsolable for the loss of the precious manuscripts which the

master had bequeathed to him. Immediately after the doctor’s death he

had made an attempt to write from memory his last talk, that summary of

vast theories expounded by the dying man with so heroic a serenity; but

he could recall only parts of it. He would have needed complete notes,

observations made from day to day, the results obtained, and the laws

formulated. The loss was irreparable, the task was to be begun over

again, and he lamented having only indications; he said that it would

be at least twenty years before science could make up the loss, and

take up and utilize the ideas of the solitary pioneer whose labors a

wicked and imbecile catastrophe had destroyed.

The genealogical tree, the only document that had remained intact, was

attached to the envelope, and Clotilde carried the whole to the table

beside the cradle. After she had taken out the fragments, one by one,

she found, what she had been already almost certain of, that not a

single entire page of manuscript remained, not a single complete note

having any meaning. There were only fragments of documents, scraps of

half-burned and blackened paper, without sequence or connection. But as

she examined them, these incomplete phrases, these words half consumed

by fire, assumed for her an interest which no one else could have

understood. She remembered the night of the storm, and the phrases

completed themselves, the beginning of a word evoked before her persons

and histories. Thus her eye fell on Maxime’s name, and she reviewed the

life of this brother who had remained a stranger to her, and whose

death, two months before, had left her almost indifferent. Then, a

half-burned scrap containing her father’s name gave her an uneasy

feeling, for she believed that her father had obtained possession of

the fortune and the house on the avenue of Bois de Boulogne through the

good offices of his hairdresser’s niece, the innocent Rose, repaid, no

doubt, by a generous percentage. Then she met with other names, that of

her uncle Eugène, the former vice emperor, now dead, the curé of

Saint-Eutrope, who, she had been told yesterday, was dying of

consumption. And each fragment became animated in this way; the

execrable family lived again in these scraps, these black ashes, where

were now only disconnected words.

Then Clotilde had the curiosity to unfold the genealogical tree and

spread it out upon the table. A strong emotion gained on her; she was

deeply affected by these relics; and when she read once more the notes

added in pencil by Pascal, a few moments before his death, tears rose

to her eyes. With what courage he had written down the date of his

death! And what despairing regret for life one divined in the trembling

words announcing the birth of the child! The tree ascended, spread out

its branches, unfolded its leaves, and she remained for a long time

contemplating it, saying to herself that all the work of the master was

to be found here in the classified records of this family tree. She

could still hear certain of his words commenting on each hereditary

case, she recalled his lessons. But the children, above all, interested

her; she read again and again the notes on the leaves which bore their

names. The doctor’s colleague in Nouméa, to whom he had written for

information about the child born of the marriage of the convict

Étienne, had at last made up his mind to answer; but the only

information he gave was in regard to the sex—it was a girl, he said,

and she seemed to be healthy. Octave Mouret had come near losing his

daughter, who had always been very frail, while his little boy

continued to enjoy superb health. But the chosen abode of vigorous

health and of extraordinary fecundity was still the house of Jean, at

Valqueyras, whose wife had had two children in three years and was

about to have a third. The nestlings throve in the sunshine, in the

heart of a fertile country, while the father sang as he guided his

plow, and the mother at home cleverly made the soup and kept the

children in order. There was enough new vitality and industry there to

make another family, a whole race. Clotilde fancied at this moment that

she could hear Pascal’s cry: “Ah, our family! what is it going to be,

in what kind of being will it end?” And she fell again into a reverie,

looking at the tree sending its latest branches into the future. Who

could tell whence the healthy branch would spring? Perhaps the great

and good man so long awaited was germinating there.

A slight cry drew Clotilde from her reflections. The muslin curtain of

the cradle seemed to become animate. It was the child who had wakened

up and was moving about and calling to her. She at once took him out of

the cradle and held him up gaily, that he might bathe in the golden

light of the setting sun. But he was insensible to the beauty of the

closing day; his little vacant eyes, still full of sleep, turned away

from the vast sky, while he opened wide his rosy and ever hungry mouth,

like a bird opening its beak. And he cried so loud, he had wakened up

so ravenous, that she decided to nurse him again. Besides, it was his

hour; it would soon be three hours since she had last nursed him.

Clotilde sat down again beside the table. She took him on her lap, but

he was not very good, crying louder and louder, growing more and more

impatient; and she looked at him with a smile while she unfastened her

dress, showing her round, slender throat. Already the child knew, and

raising himself he felt with his lips for the breast. When she placed

it in his mouth he gave a little grunt of satisfaction; he threw

himself upon her with the fine, voracious appetite of a young gentleman

who was determined to live. At first he had clutched the breast with

his little free hand, as if to show that it was his, to defend it and

to guard it. Then, in the joy of the warm stream that filled his throat

he raised his little arm straight up, like a flag. And Clotilde kept

her unconscious smile, seeing him so healthy, so rosy, and so plump,

thriving so well on the nourishment he drew from her. During the first

few weeks she had suffered from a fissure, and even now her breast was

sensitive; but she smiled, notwithstanding, with that peaceful look

which mothers wear, happy in giving their milk as they would give their

blood.

When she had unfastened her dress, showing her bare throat and breast,

in the solitude and silence of the study, another of her mysteries, one

of her sweetest and most hidden secrets, was revealed at the same

time—the slender necklace with the seven pearls, the seven fine, milky

stars which the master had put around her neck on a day of misery, in

his mania for giving. Since it had been there no one else had seen it.

It seemed as if she guarded it with as much modesty as if it were a

part of her flesh, so simple, so pure, so childlike. And all the time

the child was nursing she alone looked at it in a dreamy reverie, moved

by the tender memory of the kisses whose warm perfume it still seemed

to keep.

A burst of distant music seemed to surprise Clotilde. She turned her

head and looked across the fields gilded by the oblique rays of the

sun. Ah, yes! the ceremony, the laying of the corner stone yonder! Then

she turned her eyes again on the child, and she gave herself up to the

delight of seeing him with so fine an appetite. She had drawn forward a

little bench, to raise one of her knees, resting her foot upon it, and

she leaned one shoulder against the table, beside the tree and the

blackened fragments of the envelopes. Her thoughts wandered away in an

infinitely sweet reverie, while she felt the best part of herself, the

pure milk, flowing softly, making more and more her own the dear being

she had borne. The child had come, the redeemer, perhaps. The bells

rang, the three wise men had set out, followed by the people, by

rejoicing nature, smiling on the infant in its swaddling clothes. She,

the mother, while he drank life in long draughts, was dreaming already

of his future. What would he be when she should have made him tall and

strong, giving herself to him entirely? A scientist, perhaps, who would

reveal to the world something of the eternal truth; or a great captain,

who would confer glory on his country; or, still better, one of those

shepherds of the people who appease the passions and bring about the

reign of justice. She saw him, in fancy, beautiful, good and powerful.

Hers was the dream of every mother—the conviction that she had brought

the expected Messiah into the world; and there was in this hope, in

this obstinate belief, which every mother has in the certain triumph of

her child, the hope which itself makes life, the belief which gives

humanity the ever renewed strength to live still.

What would the child be? She looked at him, trying to discover whom he

resembled. He had certainly his father’s brow and eyes, there was

something noble and strong in the breadth of the head. She saw a

resemblance to herself, too, in his fine mouth and his delicate chin.

Then, with secret uneasiness, she sought a resemblance to the others,

the terrible ancestors, all those whose names were there inscribed on

the tree, unfolding its growth of hereditary leaves. Was it this one,

or this, or yet this other, whom he would resemble? She grew calm,

however, she could not but hope, her heart swelled with eternal hope.

The faith in life which the master had implanted in her kept her brave

and steadfast. What did misery, suffering and wickedness matter! Health

was in universal labor, in the effort made, in the power which

fecundates and which produces. The work was good when the child blessed

love. Then hope bloomed anew, in spite of the open wounds, the dark

picture of human shame. It was life perpetuated, tried anew, life which

we can never weary of believing good, since we live it so eagerly, with

all its injustice and suffering.

Clotilde had glanced involuntarily at the ancestral tree spread out

beside her. Yes, the menace was there—so many crimes, so much filth,

side by side with so many tears, and so much patient goodness; so

extraordinary a mixture of the best and the most vile, a humanity in

little, with all its defects and all its struggles. It was a question

whether it would not be better that a thunderbolt should come and

destroy all this corrupt and miserable ant-hill. And after so many

terrible Rougons, so many vile Macquarts, still another had been born.

Life did not fear to create another of them, in the brave defiance of

its eternity. It continued its work, propagated itself according to its

laws, indifferent to theories, marching on in its endless labor. Even

at the risk of making monsters, it must of necessity create, since, in

spite of all it creates, it never wearies of creating in the hope, no

doubt, that the healthy and the good will one day come. Life, life,

which flows like a torrent, which continues its work, beginning it over

and over again, without pause, to the unknown end! life in which we

bathe, life with its infinity of contrary currents, always in motion,

and vast as a boundless sea!

A transport of maternal fervor thrilled Clotilde’s heart, and she

smiled, seeing the little voracious mouth drinking her life. It was a

prayer, an invocation, to the unknown child, as to the unknown God! To

the child of the future, to the genius, perhaps, that was to be, to the

Messiah that the coming century awaited, who would deliver the people

from their doubt and their suffering! Since the nation was to be

regenerated, had he not come for this work? He would make the

experiment anew, he would raise up walls, give certainty to those who

were in doubt, he would build the city of justice, where the sole law

of labor would insure happiness. In troublous times prophets were to be

expected—at least let him not be the Antichrist, the destroyer, the

beast foretold in the Apocalypse—who would purge the earth of its

wickedness, when this should become too great. And life would go on in

spite of everything, only it would be necessary to wait for other

myriads of years before the other unknown child, the benefactor, should

appear.

But the child had drained her right breast, and, as he was growing

angry, Clotilde turned him round and gave him the left. Then she began

to smile, feeling the caress of his greedy little lips. At all events

she herself was hope. A mother nursing, was she not the image of the

world continued and saved? She bent over, she looked into his limpid

eyes, which opened joyously, eager for the light. What did the child

say to her that she felt her heart beat more quickly under the breast

which he was draining? To what cause would he give his blood when he

should be a man, strong with all the milk which he would have drunk?

Perhaps he said nothing to her, perhaps he already deceived her, and

yet she was so happy, so full of perfect confidence in him.

Again there was a distant burst of music. This must be the apotheosis,

the moment when Grandmother Félicité, with her silver trowel, laid the

first stone of the monument to the glory of the Rougons. The vast blue

sky, gladdened by the Sunday festivities, rejoiced. And in the warm

silence, in the solitary peace of the workroom, Clotilde smiled at the

child, who was still nursing, his little arm held straight up in the

air, like a signal flag of life.