into the window-recess on the right hand, once more abandoning his
portfolios without any great sign of impatience.
'We have received a letter from your mother,' repeated Madame
Charbonnel, and she was going to read the letter in question, when
Rougon took it from her and glanced over it. Charbonnel was a retired
oil merchant of Plassans, and he and his wife had been protected by
Madame Félicité, as Rougon's mother was called in her own little
town. She had given them a letter of introduction to her son on the
occasion of their presenting a petition to the Council of State. A
cousin of theirs, one Chevassu, a lawyer at Faverolles, the chief town
of a neighbouring department, had died, leaving his fortune of five
hundred thousand francs to the Sisters of the Holy Family. Originally
the Charbonnels had not expected to inherit his fortune, but having
suddenly become his next heirs, owing to his brother's death, they
contested the will on the ground of undue influence; and the Sisterhood
having petitioned the Council of State to authorise the payment of the
bequest to them, they had left their old home at Plassans, hastened to
Paris, and taken lodgings at the Hôtel du Périgord in the Rue Jacob in
order that they might be on the spot to look after their interests. The
matter had been lingering on for the past six months.
'We are feeling extremely depressed,' sighed Madame Charbonnel, while
Rougon was reading the letter. 'I myself was always against bringing
this action, but Monsieur Charbonnel said that with you on our side
we should certainly get the money, as you had only to say a word to
put the five hundred thousand francs into our pocket. Isn't that so,
Monsieur Charbonnel?'
The retired oil merchant nodded his head with a hopeless air.
'And for such a sum as that,' continued Madame Charbonnel, 'it did seem
worth while to make a change in our old way of life. And it has been
nicely changed and disturbed, indeed. Will you believe it, Monsieur
Rougon, they actually refused to change our dirty towels at the hotel
yesterday? We who have five chests full of linen at home!'
She went on railing at Paris, which she detested. They had originally
come thither for a week. Then, as they had always hoped to be able to
return home during the following week, they had not thought it worth
while to send for anything, and, their case still being unsettled,
they doggedly lingered on in their furnished lodgings, eating whatever
it pleased the cook to provide, short too of clean linen and almost of
clothes. Madame Charbonnel was obliged to dress her hair with a broken
comb. Sometimes they sat down on their little valise and wept from very
weariness and indignation.
'And the hotel is frequented by such queer characters!' complained M.
Charbonnel, with a shocked expression. 'A young man has the room next
to ours, and the things we hear----'
But Rougon was folding up the letter. 'My mother,' said he, 'gives you
excellent advice in telling you to be patient. I can only suggest to
you to take fresh courage. You seem, to me, to have a good case, but
now that I have resigned I dare not promise you anything.'
'Then we will leave Paris to-morrow!' cried Madame Charbonnel, in an
outburst of despair.
As soon as this cry had escaped her lips, she turned very pale and her
husband had to support her. For a moment they both remained speechless,
looking at each other with trembling lips and feeling a great desire
to burst into tears. They felt faint and dazed as though they had just
seen the five hundred thousand francs dashed out of their hands.
'You have had to deal with a powerful opponent,' Rougon continued
kindly. 'Monseigneur Rochart, the Bishop of Faverolles, has himself
come to Paris to support the claim of the Sisters of the Holy Family.
If it had not been for his intervention, you would long ago have gained
your cause. Unfortunately the clergy are now very powerful. However, I
am leaving friends here behind me, and I hope to bring some influence
to bear in your favour, while I myself keep in the background. You have
waited so long that if you go away to-morrow----'
'We will remain, we will remain!' Madame Charbonnel hastily gasped.
'Ah, Monsieur Rougon, this inheritance will have cost us very dear!'
Rougon now hastened back to his papers. He cast a glance of
satisfaction round the room, delighted that there was no one else to
take him off into one of the window-recesses. They had all had their
say. And so for a few minutes he made great progress with his task.
Then he waxed bitterly jocose and avenged himself on his visitors for
the bother they had caused him by attacking them with biting satire.
For a quarter of an hour he proved a perfect scourge to those friends
of his to whose various stories he had just listened so obligingly. His
language and manner to pretty Madame Bouchard became indeed so harsh
and cutting that the young woman's eyes filled with tears, though she
still continued to smile. All the others laughed, accustomed as they
were to Rougon's rough ways. They knew that their prospects were never
better than when he was belabouring them in this fashion.
However, all at once, there was a gentle knock at the door. 'No, no!'
cried Rougon to Delestang, who was going to see who was there; 'don't
open it! Am I never to be left in peace? My head is splitting already.'
Then, as the knocking continued with greater energy, he growled between
his teeth: 'Ah, if I were going to stay here, I would send Merle about
his business!'
The knocking ceased, but suddenly a little door in a corner of the room
was thrown back and gave entrance to a huge blue silk skirt, which
came in backwards. This skirt, which was very bright and profusely
ornamented with bows of ribbon, remained stationary for a moment,
half inside the room and half outside, without anything further being
visible. However, a soft female voice was heard speaking.
'Monsieur Rougon!' exclaimed the lady, at last showing her face.
It was Madame Correur, wearing a bonnet with a cluster of roses on it.
Rougon, who had stepped angrily towards the door, with fists clenched,
now bowed and grasped the new-comer's hand.
'I was asking Merle how he liked being here,' she said, casting a
tender glance at the big lanky usher, who stood smiling in front of
her. 'And you, Monsieur Rougon, are you satisfied with him?'
'Oh, yes, certainly,' replied Rougon pleasantly.
Merle's face still retained its sanctimonious smile, and he kept his
eyes fixed upon Madame Correur's plump neck. The latter braced herself
up to her full height and then brought her curls over her forehead.
'I am glad to hear that, my man,' she continued. 'When I get any one a
place, I am anxious that all parties should be satisfied. If you ever
want any advice, Merle, you can come and see me any morning, you know,
between eight and nine. Mind you keep steady, now.'
Then she came inside the room, and said to Rougon: 'There are no
servants so good as those old soldiers.'
And afterwards she took hold of him and made him cross the room,
leading him with short steps to the window at the other end. There
she scolded him for not having admitted her. If Merle had not allowed
her to come in by the little door, she would still have been waiting
outside. And it was absolutely necessary that she should see him, she
said, for he really could not take himself off in that way without
letting her know how her petitions were progressing. Forthwith she drew
from her pocket a little memorandum-book, very richly ornamented and
bound in rose-coloured watered silk.
'I did not see the _Moniteur_ till after _déjeuner_,' she continued;
'and then I took a cab at once. Tell me, now, how is the matter of
Madame Leturc, the captain's widow, who wants a tobacco shop, getting
on? I promised her that she should have a definite answer next week.
There's also the case of Herminie Billecoq, you remember, who used to
be a pupil of Saint Denis. Her seducer, an officer, has consented to
marry her if any charitable soul will give her the regulation dowry. We
thought about applying to the Empress. Then there are all those ladies,
Madame Chardon, Madame Testanière, and Madame Jalaguier, who have been
waiting for months.'
Rougon quietly gave her the replies she sought, explained the various
causes of the delays that had occurred, and entered into minute
details. However, he gave her to understand that she must not reckon
so much upon him in the future as she had done in the past. This threw
her into great distress. It made her so happy, she said, to be able
to be of service to any one. What would become of her with all those
ladies? Then she spoke of her own affairs, with which Rougon was fully
acquainted. She again reminded him that she was a Martineau, one of the
Martineaus of Coulonges, a good family of La Vendée, in which fathers
and sons had been notaries without a break over seven successive
generations. She never clearly explained how she came to bear the name
of Correur. When she was twenty-four years old she had eloped with a
young journeyman butcher, and for six months her father had suffered
the greatest distress from this disgraceful scandal, about which the
neighbourhood still gossiped. Ever since then she had been living in
Paris, utterly ignored by her family. She had written fully a dozen
times to her brother, who was now at the head of the family practice,
but had failed to get any reply from him. His silence, she said,
was due to her sister-in-law, a woman who 'carried on with priests,
and led that imbecile brother of hers by the nose.' One of her most
cherished ambitions, as in Du Poizat's case, was to return to her own
neighbourhood as a well-to-do and honoured woman.
'I wrote again a week ago,' she said; 'but I have no doubt she throws
my letters into the fire. However, if my brother should die, she would
be obliged to let me go to the house, for they have no child, and I
should have interests to look after. My brother is fifteen years older
than I am, and I hear that he suffers from gout.' Then she suddenly
changed her tone, and continued: 'However, don't let us bother about
that now. It's for you that we must use all our energies at present,
Eugène. We will do our best, you shall see. It is necessary that you
should be everything in order that we may be something. You remember
'51, don't you, eh?'
Rougon smiled, and as Madame Correur pressed his hands with a maternal
air, he bent down and whispered into her ear: 'If you see Gilquin, tell
him to be prudent. Only the other week, when he got himself locked up,
he took it into his head to give my name, so that I might bail him out.'
Madame Correur promised to speak to Gilquin, one of her tenants at
the time when Rougon had lodged at the Hôtel Vanneau, and withal a
very useful fellow on certain occasions, though apt to be extremely
compromising. 'I have a cab below, and so now I'll be off,' she said
aloud with a smile as she stepped into the middle of the room.
Nevertheless, she lingered for a few minutes longer, hoping that the
others would take their departure at the same time. In her desire to
effect this, she offered to take one of them with her in her cab. The
colonel accepted the offer, and it was settled that young Auguste
should sit beside the driver. Then general hand-shaking began. Rougon
took up a position by the door, which was thrown wide open; and as his
visitors passed out, each gave him a parting assurance of sympathy.
M. Kahn, Du Poizat, and the colonel stretched out their necks and
whispered a few words in his ear, begging him not to forget them.
However, when the Charbonnels had already reached the first step of
the staircase, and Madame Correur was chatting with Merle at the far
end of the ante-room, Madame Bouchard, for whom her husband and M.
d'Escorailles waited a few paces away, still lingered smilingly before
Rougon, asking him at what time she could see him privately in the Rue
Marbeuf, because she felt too stupid, said she, when he had visitors
with him. At this the colonel, hearing her, suddenly darted back into
the room, and then the others followed, there being a general return.
'We will all come to see you,' the colonel cried.
'You mustn't hide yourself away from every one,' added several voices.
But M. Kahn waved his hand to obtain silence. And then he made that
famous remark of his: 'You don't belong to yourself; you belong to your
friends, and to France.'
At last they all went away, and Rougon was able to close the door. He
heaved a great sigh of relief. Delestang, whom he had quite forgotten,
now made his appearance from behind the heap of pasteboard boxes, in
the shelter of which he had just finished classifying different papers,
like a conscientious friend. He was feeling a little proud of his
work. He had been acting, while the others had merely been talking;
so it was with genuine satisfaction that he received the great man's
thanks. It was only he, so the latter said, who could have rendered
him this service; he had an orderly mind, and a methodical manner of
working which would carry him far. And Rougon made other flattering
observations, without it being possible for one to know whether he was
really in earnest or only jesting. Then, turning round, and glancing
into the different corners, he said: 'There, I think we've finished
everything now, thanks to you. There's nothing more to be done, except
to tell Merle to have these packets carried to my house.'
He called the usher, and pointed out his private papers. And in
reply to all his instructions the usher repeated: 'Yes, Monsieur le
Président.'
'Don't call me President any more, you stupid,' Rougon at last
exclaimed in irritation; 'I'm one no longer.'
Merle bowed, and took a step towards the door. Then he stopped and
seemed to hesitate. Finally he came back and said: 'There's a lady on
horseback down below who wants to see you, sir. She laughed, and said
she would come up, horse and all, if the staircase were wide enough.
She declared that she only wanted to shake hands with you, sir.'
Rougon clenched his fists, thinking this to be some joke; but
Delestang, who had gone to look out of the window on the landing,
hastened back, exclaiming, with an expression of emotion: 'Mademoiselle
Clorinde!'
Then Rougon said that he would go downstairs; and as he and Delestang
took their hats, he looked at his friend, and with a frown and a
suspicious air, prompted by the latter's emotion, exclaimed: 'Beware of
women!'
When he reached the door, he gave a last glance round the room. The
full light of day was streaming through the three open windows,
illumining the open pasteboard boxes, the scattered drawers and the
packets of papers, tied up and heaped together in the middle of the
carpet. The apartment looked very spacious and very mournful. In the
grate only a small heap of black ashes was now left of all the handfuls
of burnt papers. And as Rougon closed the door behind him, the taper,
which had been forgotten on the edge of the writing-table, burnt out,
splitting the cut-glass socket of the candlestick to pieces amid the
silence of the empty room.
III
MADEMOISELLE CLORINDE
Rougon occasionally went to Countess Balbi's for a few minutes towards
four in the afternoon. He walked there in a neighbourly way, for she
lived in a small house overlooking the avenue of the Champs Élysées,
only a few yards from the Rue Marbeuf. She was seldom at home, and
when by chance she did happen to be there she was in bed, and had to
send excuses for not making her appearance. This, however, did not
prevent the staircase of the little house from being crowded with
noisy visitors, or the drawing-room doors from being perpetually on
the swing. Her daughter Clorinde was wont to receive her friends in
a gallery, something like an artist's studio, with large windows
overlooking the avenue.
For nearly three months Rougon, with his blunt distaste for female
wiles, had responded very coldly to the advances of these ladies, who
had managed to get introduced to him at a ball given by the Minister
for Foreign Affairs. He met them everywhere, both of them smiling with
the same winning smile--the mother always silent, while the daughter
always chattered and looked him straight in the face. However, he
still went on avoiding them, lowering his eyes so as not to see
them, and refusing the invitations which they sent him. Then as they
continued to press him hard and pursued him even to his own house, past
which Clorinde used to ride ostentatiously, he made inquiries before at
last venturing to call on them.
At the Sardinian Legation the ladies were spoken of in very favourable
terms. There had been a real Count Balbi, it appeared; the Countess
still kept up relations with persons of high position at Turin, and the
daughter, during the preceding year, had been on the point of marrying
a petty German prince. But at the Duchess of Sanquirino's, where Rougon
made his next inquiries, he heard a different story. There he was
told that Clorinde had been born two years after the Count's death,
and a very complicated history of the Balbis was retailed to him. The
husband and wife had led most adventurous and dissolute lives; they had
been divorced in France, but had afterwards become reconciled to each
other in Italy, their subsequent cohabitation being an illicit one, in
consequence of their previous divorce.
A young attaché, who was thoroughly acquainted with what went on at
the court of King Victor Emmanuel, was still more explicit. According
to him, whatever influence the Countess still retained in Italy was
due to an old connection with a very highly placed personage there,
and he hinted that she would not have left Turin had it not been for a
terrible scandal into the details of which he would not enter. Rougon,
whose interest in the matter was increasing with the extent of his
inquiries, now went to the police authorities, but they could give him
no precise information. Their entries relating to the two foreigners
simply described them as women who kept up a great show without any
proof that they were really in possession of a substantial fortune.
They asserted that they had property in Piedmont; but, as a matter of
fact, there were sudden breaks in their life of luxury, during which
they abruptly disappeared, only to reappear shortly afterwards in
fresh splendour. Briefly, all that the police could say was that they
really knew nothing about them and would prefer to know nothing. At
the same time, it was certain that the women associated with the best
society, and that their house was looked upon as neutral ground, where
Clorinde's eccentricities were tolerated and excused on account of her
being a foreigner. And so Rougon at last made up his mind to see the
ladies.
By the time he had paid his third visit, the great man's curiosity
with respect to them had still further increased. He was of a cold
dispassionate nature which was not easily stirred into life. What
first attracted him in Clorinde was the mystery surrounding her, the
story of a past-away life and the yearning for a new existence which
he could read in the depths of her big goddess-like eyes. He had heard
disgraceful scandal about her--an early love-affair with a coachman,
and a subsequent connection with a banker who had presented her with
the little house in the Champs Élysées. However, every now and then she
seemed to him so child-like that he doubted the truth of what he had
been told, and again and again essayed to find out the secret of this
strange girl, who became to him a living enigma, the solution of which
interested him as much as some intricate political problem. Until then
he had felt a scornful disdain for women, and the first one who excited
his interest was certainly as singular and complicated a being as could
be imagined.
Upon the morrow of the day when Clorinde had gone on her hired horse
to give Rougon a sympathetic shake of the hand at the door of the
Council of State, Rougon himself went to pay her a visit. She had made
him give a solemn promise to do so. She wanted, she said, to show him
something which would brighten his gloomy moods. He laughingly called
her his 'pet vice'; forgot his worries when he was with her, and felt
cheerful and amused. The more so as she kept his mind on the alert, for
he was still seeking the key to her history, and was as yet no nearer
a solution than on the first day. As he turned the corner of the Rue
Marbeuf, he glanced at the house in the Rue du Colisée tenanted by
Delestang, whom he fancied he had several times seen peering through
the half open shutters of his study at Clorinde's window across the
avenue; but to-day the shutters were closed. Delestang had probably
gone off to his model-farm at La Chamade.
The door of the Balbis' house was always wide open. At the foot of the
staircase Rougon met a little dark-complexioned woman, with untidy hair
and a tattered yellow dress. She was biting at an orange as though it
were an apple.
'Is your mistress at home, Antonia?' he asked her.
Her mouth was too full to allow her to reply, so she nodded her head
energetically and smiled. Her lips were streaming with orange juice,
and her little eyes, as she screwed them up, looked like drops of ink
upon her dark skin.
Rougon was already accustomed to the irregular ways of the Balbis'
servants, so without more ado he went up the stairs. On his way he met
a big lanky man-servant, with a face like a brigand's and a long black
beard, who coolly stared at him without giving him the balustrade-side.
When he reached the first floor, he found himself confronted by three
open doors, but saw no one about. The door on his left hand was that
of Clorinde's bedroom. Curiosity prompted him to peep inside. Although
it was four o'clock in the afternoon, the bed had not been made or
the room tidied. Upon a screen standing in front of the bed and half
concealing the tumbled coverlets, some splashed petticoats which
the girl had worn on the previous day had been hung to dry, while a
wash-basin, full of soapy water, stood on the floor in front of the
window, and the cat of the house, a grey one, slept, comfortably
curled, in the midst of a heap of garments.
It was, however, upon the second floor that Clorinde was generally
to be found, in the gallery which she had successively turned into a
studio, a smoking-room, a hot-house, and a summer drawing-room. As
Rougon ascended upwards he heard a growing uproar of voices, shrill
laughter and a noise as of furniture being overturned; and when he
reached the door he could distinguish the notes of a consumptive piano
and sounds of singing. He knocked at the door twice without receiving
any answer, and then determined to enter.
'Ah! bravo, bravo, here he is!' cried Clorinde, clapping her hands.
Rougon, whom it was generally so difficult to put out of countenance,
for a moment remained timidly on the threshold. Chevalier Rusconi, the
Sardinian Minister, a handsome dark-complexioned man, who, under other
circumstances, was a grave diplomatist, sat in front of the piano, the
keys of which he was striking furiously so as to extract a fuller sound
from the instrument. In the middle of the room deputy La Rouquette was
waltzing with a chair, the back of which he amorously encircled with
his arms, and he was so absorbed in his amusement that he had littered
the carpet with other chairs which he had overturned. Then, in the
bright light of one of the window-recesses, Clorinde stood upon the
centre of a table, posing, with perfect unconcern, as the huntress
Diana, in front of a young man who was sketching her with charcoal upon
white canvas. Finally, on a couch, three serious-looking men with their
legs crossed were silently smoking big cigars and looking at Clorinde.
'Wait a moment! don't move!' cried Chevalier Rusconi to Clorinde, who
was about to jump off the table. 'I am going to make the presentations.'
Then, followed by Rougon, he said playfully, as he went past M. La
Rouquette, who had dropped breathless into an easy chair: 'Monsieur
La Rouquette whom you know; a future minister.' And going up to the
artist, he continued: 'Signor Luigi Pozzo, my secretary; diplomatist,
painter, musician, and lover.'