CHAPTER IV

Antoine Macquart had returned to Plassans after the fall of the first

Napoleon. He had had the incredible good fortune to escape all the

final murderous campaigns of the Empire. He had moved from barracks to

barracks, dragging on his brutifying military life. This mode of

existence brought his natural vices to full development. His idleness

became deliberate; his intemperance, which brought him countless

punishments, became, to his mind, a veritable religious duty. But that

which above all made him the worst of scapegraces was the supercilious

disdain which he entertained for the poor devils who had to earn their

bread.

“I’ve got money waiting for me at home,” he often said to his comrades;

“when I’ve served my time, I shall be able to live like a gentleman.”

This belief, together with his stupid ignorance, prevented him from

rising even to the grade of corporal.

Since his departure he had never spent a day’s furlough at Plassans,

his brother having invented a thousand pretexts to keep him at a

distance. He was therefore completely ignorant of the adroit manner in

which Pierre had got possession of their mother’s fortune. Adélaïde,

with her profound indifference, did not even write to him three times

to tell him how she was going on. The silence which generally greeted

his numerous requests for money did not awaken the least suspicion in

him; Pierre’s stinginess sufficed to explain the difficulty he

experienced in securing from time to time a paltry twenty-franc piece.

This, however, only increased his animosity towards his brother, who

left him to languish in military service in spite of his formal promise

to purchase his discharge. He vowed to himself that on his return home

he would no longer submit like a child, but would flatly demand his

share of the fortune to enable him to live as he pleased. In the

diligence which conveyed him home he dreamed of a delightful life of

idleness. The shattering of his castles in the air was terrible. When

he reached the Faubourg, and could no longer even recognise the

Fouques’ plot of ground, he was stupefied. He was compelled to ask for

his mother’s new address. There a terrible scene occurred. Adélaïde

calmly informed him of the sale of the property. He flew into a rage,

and even raised his hand against her.

The poor woman kept repeating: “Your brother has taken everything; it

is understood that he will take care of you.”

At last he left her and ran off to see Pierre, whom he had previously

informed of his return, and who was prepared to receive him in such a

way as to put an end to the matter at the first word of abuse.

“Listen,” the oil-dealer said to him, affecting distant coldness;

“don’t rouse my anger, or I’ll turn you out. As a matter of fact, I

don’t know you. We don’t bear the same name. It’s quite misfortune

enough for me that my mother misconducted herself, without having her

offspring coming here and insulting me. I was well disposed towards

you, but since you are insolent I shall do nothing for you, absolutely

nothing.”

Antoine was almost choking with rage.

“And what about my money,” he cried; “will you give it up, you thief,

or shall I have to drag you before the judges?”

Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

“I’ve got no money of yours,” he replied, more calmly than ever. “My

mother disposed of her fortune as she thought proper. I am certainly

not going to poke my nose into her business. I willingly renounced all

hope of inheritance. I am quite safe from your foul accusations.”

And as his brother, exasperated by this composure, and not knowing what

to think, muttered something, Pierre thrust Adélaïde’s receipt under

his nose. The reading of this scrap of paper completed Antoine’s

dismay.

“Very well,” he said, in a calmer voice, “I know now what I have to

do.”

The truth was, however, he did not know what to do. His inability to

hit upon any immediate expedient for obtaining his share of the money

and satisfying his desire of revenge increased his fury. He went back

to his mother and subjected her to a disgraceful cross-examination. The

wretched woman could do nothing but again refer him to Pierre.

“Do you think you are going to make me run to and fro like a shuttle?”

he cried, insolently. “I’ll soon find out which of you two has the

hoard. You’ve already squandered it, perhaps?”

And making an allusion to her former misconduct he asked her if there

were still not some low fellow to whom she gave her last sous? He did

not even spare his father, that drunkard Macquart, as he called him,

who must have lived on her till the day of his death, and who left his

children in poverty. The poor woman listened with a stupefied air; big

tears rolled down her cheeks. She defended herself with the terror of a

child, replying to her son’s questions as though he were a judge; she

swore that she was living respectably, and reiterated with emphasis

that she had never had a sou of the money, that Pierre had taken

everything. Antoine almost came to believe it at last.

“Ah! the scoundrel!” he muttered; “that’s why he wouldn’t purchase my

discharge.”

He had to sleep at his mother’s house, on a straw mattress flung in a

corner. He had returned with his pockets perfectly empty, and was

exasperated at finding himself destitute of resources, abandoned like a

dog in the streets, without hearth or home, while his brother, as he

thought, was in a good way of business, and living on the fat of the

land. As he had no money to buy clothes with, he went out on the

following day in his regimental cap and trousers. He had the good

fortune to find, at the bottom of a cupboard, an old yellowish

velveteen jacket, threadbare and patched, which had belonged to

Macquart. In this strange attire he walked about the town, relating his

story to everyone, and demanding justice.

The people whom he went to consult received him with a contempt which

made him shed tears of rage. Provincial folks are inexorable towards

fallen families. In the general opinion it was only natural that the

Rougon-Macquarts should seek to devour each other; the spectators,

instead of separating them, were more inclined to urge them on. Pierre,

however, was at that time already beginning to purify himself of his

early stains. People laughed at his roguery; some even went so far as

to say that he had done quite right, if he really had taken possession

of the money, and that it would be a good lesson to the dissolute folks

of the town.

Antoine returned home discouraged. A lawyer had advised him, in a

scornful manner, to wash his dirty linen at home, though not until he

had skilfully ascertained whether Antoine possessed the requisite means

to carry on a lawsuit. According to this man, the case was very

involved, the pleadings would be very lengthy, and success was

doubtful. Moreover, it would require money, and plenty of it.

Antoine treated his mother yet more harshly that evening. Not knowing

on whom else to wreak his vengeance, he repeated his accusation of the

previous day; he kept the wretched woman up till midnight, trembling

with shame and fright. Adélaïde having informed him that Pierre made

her an allowance, he now felt certain that his brother had pocketed the

fifty thousand francs. But, in his irritation, he still affected to

doubt it, and did not cease to question the poor woman, again and again

reproaching her with misconduct.

Antoine soon found out that, alone and without resources, he could not

successfully carry on a contest with his brother. He then endeavoured

to gain Adélaïde to his cause; an accusation lodged by her might have

serious consequences. But, at Antoine’s first suggestion of it, the

poor, lazy, lethargic creature firmly refused to bring trouble on her

eldest son.

“I am an unhappy woman,” she stammered; “it is quite right of you to

get angry. But I should feel too much remorse if I caused one of my

sons to be sent to prison. No; I’d rather let you beat me.”

He saw that he would get nothing but tears out of her, and contented

himself with saying that she was justly punished, and that he had no

pity for her. In the evening, upset by the continual quarrels which her

son had sought with her, Adélaïde had one of those nervous attacks

which kept her as rigid as if she had been dead. The young man threw

her on her bed, and then began to rummage the house to see if the

wretched woman had any savings hidden away. He found about forty

francs. He took possession of them, and, while his mother still lay

there, rigid and scarce able to breathe, he quietly took the diligence

to Marseilles.

He had just bethought himself that Mouret, the journeyman hatter who

had married his sister Ursule, must be indignant at Pierre’s roguery,

and would no doubt be willing to defend his wife’s interests. But he

did not find in him the man he expected. Mouret plainly told him that

he had become accustomed to look upon Ursule as an orphan, and would

have no contentions with her family at any price. Their affairs were

prospering. Antoine was received so coldly that he hastened to take the

diligence home again. But, before leaving, he was anxious to revenge

himself for the secret contempt which he read in the workman’s eyes;

and, observing that his sister appeared rather pale and dejected, he

said to her husband, in a slyly cruel way, as he took his departure:

“Have a care, my sister was always sickly, and I find her much changed

for the worse; you may lose her altogether.”

The tears which rushed to Mouret’s eyes convinced him that he had

touched a sore wound. But then those work-people made too great a

display of their happiness.

When he was back again in Plassans, Antoine became the more menacing

from the conviction that his hands were tied. During a whole month he

was seen all over the place. He paraded the streets, recounting his

story to all who would listen to him. Whenever he succeeded in

extorting a franc from his mother, he would drink it away at some

tavern, where he would revile his brother, declaring that the rascal

should shortly hear from him. In places like these, the good-natured

fraternity which reigns among drunkards procured him a sympathetic

audience; all the scum of the town espoused his cause, and poured forth

bitter imprecations against that rascal Rougon, who left a brave

soldier to starve; the discussion generally terminating with an

indiscriminate condemnation of the rich. Antoine, the better to revenge

himself, continued to march about in his regimental cap and trousers

and his old yellow velvet jacket, although his mother had offered to

purchase some more becoming clothes for him. But no; he preferred to

make a display of his rags, and paraded them on Sundays in the most

frequented parts of the Cours Sauvaire.

One of his most exquisite pleasures was to pass Pierre’s shop ten times

a day. He would enlarge the holes in his jacket with his fingers,

slacken his step, and sometimes stand talking in front of the door, so

as to remain longer in the street. On these occasions, too, he would

bring one of his drunken friends and gossip to him; telling him about

the theft of the fifty thousand francs, accompanying his narrative with

loud insults and menaces, which could be heard by everyone in the

street, and taking particular care that his abuse should reach the

furthest end of the shop.

“He’ll finish by coming to beg in front of our house,” Félicité used to

say in despair.

The vain little woman suffered terribly from this scandal. She even at

this time felt some regret at ever having married Rougon; his family

connections were so objectionable. She would have given all she had in

the world to prevent Antoine from parading his rags. But Pierre, who

was maddened by his brother’s conduct, would not allow his name to be

mentioned. When his wife tried to convince him that it would perhaps be

better to free himself from all annoyance by giving Antoine a little

money: “No, nothing; not a sou,” he cried with rage. “Let him starve!”

He confessed, however, at last that Antoine’s demeanour was becoming

intolerable. One day, Félicité, desiring to put an end to it, called to

“that man,” as she styled him with a disdainful curl on her lip. “That

man” was in the act of calling her a foul name in the middle of the

street, where he stood with one of his friends, even more ragged than

himself. They were both drunk.

“Come, they want us in there,” said Antoine to his companion in a

jeering tone.

But Félicité drew back, muttering: “It’s you alone we wish to speak

to.”

“Bah!” the young man replied, “my friend’s a decent fellow. You needn’t

mind him hearing. He’ll be my witness.”

The witness sank heavily on a chair. He did not take off his hat, but

began to stare around him, with the maudlin, stupid grin of drunkards

and coarse people who know that they are insolent. Félicité was so

ashamed that she stood in front of the shop door in order that people

outside might not see what strange company she was receiving.

Fortunately her husband came to the rescue. A violent quarrel ensued

between him and his brother. The latter, after stammering insults,

reiterated his old grievances twenty times over. At last he even began

to cry, and his companion was near following his example. Pierre had

defended himself in a very dignified manner.

“Look here,” he said at last, “you’re unfortunate, and I pity you.

Although you have cruelly insulted me, I can’t forget that we are

children of the same mother. If I give you anything, however, you must

understand I give it you out of kindness, and not from fear. Would you

like a hundred francs to help you out of your difficulties?”

This abrupt offer of a hundred francs dazzled Antoine’s companion. He

looked at the other with an air of delight, which clearly signified:

“As the gentleman offers a hundred francs, it is time to leave off

abusing him.” But Antoine was determined to speculate on his brother’s

favourable disposition. He asked him whether he took him for a fool; it

was his share, ten thousand francs, that he wanted.

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong,” stuttered his friend.

At last, as Pierre, losing all patience, was threatening to turn them

both out, Antoine lowered his demands and contented himself with

claiming one thousand francs. They quarrelled for another quarter of an

hour over this amount. Finally, Félicité interfered. A crowd was

gathering round the shop.

“Listen,” she said, excitedly; “my husband will give you two hundred

francs. I’ll undertake to buy you a suit of clothes, and hire a room

for a year for you.”

Rougon got angry at this. But Antoine’s comrade cried, with transports

of delight: “All right, it’s settled, then; my friend accepts.”

Antoine did, in fact, declare, in a surly way, that he would accept. He

felt he would not be able to get any more. It was arranged that the

money and clothes should be sent to him on the following day, and that

a few days later, as soon as Félicité should have found a room for him,

he would take up his quarters there. As they were leaving, the young

man’s sottish companion became as respectful as he had previously been

insolent. He bowed to the company more than a dozen times, in an

awkward and humble manner, muttering many indistinct thanks, as if the

Rougons’ gifts had been intended for himself.

A week later Antoine occupied a large room in the old quarter, in which

Félicité, exceeding her promises, had placed a bed, a table, and some

chairs, on the young man formally undertaking not to molest them in

future. Adélaïde felt no regret at her son leaving her; the short stay

he had made with her had condemned her to bread and water for more than

three months. However, Antoine had soon eaten and drunk the two hundred

francs he received from Pierre. He never for a moment thought of

investing them in some little business which would have helped him to

live. When he was again penniless, having no trade, and being,

moreover, unwilling to work, he again sought to slip a hand into the

Rougons’ purse. Circumstances were not the same as before, however, and

he failed to intimidate them. Pierre even took advantage of this

opportunity to turn him out, and forbade him ever to set foot in his

house again. It was of no avail for Antoine to repeat his former

accusations. The townspeople, who were acquainted with his brother’s

munificence from the publicity which Félicité had given to it, declared

him to be in the wrong, and called him a lazy, idle fellow. Meantime

his hunger was pressing. He threatened to turn smuggler like his

father, and perpetrate some crime which would dishonour his family. At

this the Rougons shrugged their shoulders; they knew he was too much of

a coward to risk his neck. At last, blindly enraged against his

relatives in particular and society in general, Antoine made up his

mind to seek some work.

In a tavern of the Faubourg he made the acquaintance of a basket-maker

who worked at home. He offered to help him. In a short time he learnt

to plait baskets and hampers—a coarse and poorly-paid kind of labour

which finds a ready market. He was very soon able to work on his own

account. This trade pleased him, as it was not over laborious. He could

still indulge his idleness, and that was what he chiefly cared for. He

would only take to his work when he could no longer do otherwise; then

he would hurriedly plait a dozen baskets and go and sell them in the

market. As long as the money lasted he lounged about, visiting all the

taverns and digesting his drink in the sunshine. Then, when he had

fasted a whole day, he would once more take up his osier with a low

growl and revile the wealthy who lived in idleness. The trade of a

basket-maker, when followed in such a manner, is a thankless one.

Antoine’s work would not have sufficed to pay for his drinking bouts if

he had not contrived a means of procuring his osier at low cost. He

never bought any at Plassans, but used to say that he went each month

to purchase a stock at a neighbouring town, where he pretended it was

sold cheaper. The truth, however, was that he supplied himself from the

osier-grounds of the Viorne on dark nights. A rural policeman even

caught him once in the very act, and Antoine underwent a few days’

imprisonment in consequence. It was from that time forward that he

posed in the town as a fierce Republican. He declared that he had been

quietly smoking his pipe by the riverside when the rural policeman

arrested him. And he added: “They would like to get me out of the way

because they know what my opinions are. But I’m not afraid of them,

those rich scoundrels.”

At last, at the end of ten years of idleness, Antoine considered that

he had been working too hard. His constant dream was to devise some

expedient by which he might live at his ease without having to do

anything. His idleness would never have rested content with bread and

water; he was not like certain lazy persons who are willing to put up

with hunger provided they can keep their hands in their pockets. He

liked good feeding and nothing to do. He talked at one time of taking a

situation as servant in some nobleman’s house in the Saint-Marc

quarter. But one of his friends, a groom, frightened him by describing

the exacting ways of his masters. Finally Macquart, sick of his

baskets, and seeing the time approach when he would be compelled to

purchase the requisite osier, was on the point of selling himself as an

army substitute and resuming his military life, which he preferred a

thousand times to that of an artisan, when he made the acquaintance of

a woman, an acquaintance which modified his plans.

Josephine Gavaudan, who was known throughout the town by the familiar

diminutive of Fine, was a tall, strapping wench of about thirty. With a

square face of masculine proportions, and a few terribly long hairs

about her chin and lips, she was cited as a doughty woman, one who

could make the weight of her fist felt. Her broad shoulders and huge

arms consequently inspired the town urchins with marvellous respect;

and they did not even dare to smile at her moustache. Notwithstanding

all this, Fine had a faint voice, weak and clear like that of a child.

Those who were acquainted with her asserted that she was as gentle as a

lamb, in spite of her formidable appearance. As she was very

hard-working, she might have put some money aside if she had not had a

partiality for liqueurs. She adored aniseed, and very often had to be

carried home on Sunday evenings.

On week days she would toil with the stubbornness of an animal. She had

three or four different occupations; she sold fruit or boiled chestnuts

in the market, according to the season; went out charring for a few

well-to-do people; washed up plates and dishes at houses when parties

were given, and employed her spare time in mending old chairs. She was

more particularly known in the town as a chair-mender. In the South

large numbers of straw-bottomed chairs are used.

Antoine Macquart formed an acquaintance with Fine at the market. When

he went to sell his baskets in the winter he would stand beside the

stove on which she cooled her chestnuts and warm himself. He was

astonished at her courage, he who was frightened of the least work. By

degrees he discerned, beneath the apparent roughness of this strapping

creature, signs of timidity and kindliness. He frequently saw her give

handfuls of chestnuts to the ragged urchins who stood in ecstasy round

her smoking pot. At other times, when the market inspector hustled her,

she very nearly began to cry, apparently forgetting all about her heavy

fists. Antoine at last decided that she was exactly the woman he

wanted. She would work for both and he would lay down the law at home.

She would be his beast of burden, an obedient, indefatigable animal. As

for her partiality for liqueurs, he regarded this as quite natural.

After well weighing the advantages of such an union, he declared

himself to Fine, who was delighted with his proposal. No man had ever

yet ventured to propose to her. Though she was told that Antoine was

the most worthless of vagabonds, she lacked the courage to refuse

matrimony. The very evening of the nuptials the young man took up his

abode in his wife’s lodgings in the Rue Civadière, near the market.

These lodgings, consisting of three rooms, were much more comfortably

furnished than his own, and he gave a sigh of satisfaction as he

stretched himself out on the two excellent mattresses which covered the

bedstead.

Everything went on very well for the first few days. Fine attended to

her various occupations as in the past; Antoine, seized with a sort of

marital self-pride which astonished even himself, plaited in one week

more baskets than he had ever before done in a month. On the first

Sunday, however, war broke out. The couple had a goodly sum of money in

the house, and they spent it freely. During the night, when they were

both drunk, they beat each other outrageously, without being able to

remember on the morrow how it was that the quarrel had commenced. They

had remained on most affectionate terms until about ten o’clock, when

Antoine had begun to beat Fine brutally, whereupon the latter, growing

exasperated and forgetting her meekness, had given him back as much as

she received. She went to work again bravely on the following day, as

though nothing had happened. But her husband, with sullen rancour, rose

late and passed the remainder of the day smoking his pipe in the

sunshine.

From that time forward the Macquarts adopted the kind of life which

they were destined to lead in the future. It became, as it were,

tacitly understood between them that the wife should toil and moil to

keep her husband. Fine, who had an instinctive liking for work, did not

object to this. She was as patient as a saint, provided she had had no

drink, thought it quite natural that her husband should remain idle,

and even strove to spare him the most trifling labour. Her little

weakness, aniseed, did not make her vicious, but just. On the evenings

when she had forgotten herself in the company of a bottle of her

favourite liqueur, if Antoine tried to pick a quarrel with her, she

would set upon him with might and main, reproaching him with his

idleness and ingratitude. The neighbours grew accustomed to the

disturbances which periodically broke out in the couple’s room. The two

battered each other conscientiously; the wife slapped like a mother

chastising a naughty child; but the husband, treacherous and spiteful

as he was, measured his blows, and, on several occasions, very nearly

crippled the unfortunate woman.

“You’ll be in a fine plight when you’ve broken one of my arms or legs,”

she would say to him. “Who’ll keep you then, you lazy fellow?”

Excepting for these turbulent scenes, Antoine began to find his new

mode of existence quite endurable. He was well clothed, and ate and

drank his fill. He had laid aside the basket work altogether;

sometimes, when he was feeling over-bored, he would resolve to plait a

dozen baskets for the next market day; but very often he did not even

finish the first one. He kept, under a couch, a bundle of osier which

he did not use up in twenty years.

The Macquarts had three children, two girls and a boy. Lisa,[*] born

the first, in 1827, one year after the marriage, remained but little at

home. She was a fine, big, healthy, full-blooded child, greatly

resembling her mother. She did not, however, inherit the latter’s

animal devotion and endurance. Macquart had implanted in her a most

decided longing for ease and comfort. While she was a child she would

consent to work for a whole day in return for a cake. When she was

scarcely seven years old, the wife of the postmaster, who was a

neighbour of the Macquarts, took a liking to her. She made a little

maid of her. And when she lost her husband in 1839, and went to live in

Paris, she took Lisa with her. The parents had almost given her their

daughter.

[*] The pork-butcher’s wife in _Le Ventre de Paris_ (_The Fat and the

Thin_).

The second girl, Gervaise,[*] born the following year, was a cripple

from birth. Her right thigh was smaller than the left and showed signs

of curvature, a curious hereditary result of the brutality which her

mother had to endure during her fierce drunken brawls with Macquart.

Gervaise remained puny, and Fine, observing her pallor and weakness,

put her on a course of aniseed, under the pretext that she required

something to strengthen her. But the poor child became still more

emaciated. She was a tall, lank girl, whose frocks, invariably too

large, hung round her as if they had nothing under them. Above a

deformed and puny body she had a sweet little doll-like head, a tiny

round face, pale and exquisitely delicate. Her infirmity almost became

graceful. Her body swayed gently at every step with a sort of

rhythmical swing.

[*] The chief female character in _L’Assommoir_ (_The Dramshop_).

The Macquarts’ son, Jean,[*] was born three years later. He was a

robust child, in no respect recalling Gervaise. Like the eldest girl,

he took after his mother, without having any physical resemblance to

her. He was the first to import into the Rougon-Macquart stock a fat

face with regular features, which showed all the coldness of a grave

yet not over-intelligent nature. This boy grew up with the

determination of some day making an independent position for himself.

He attended school diligently, and tortured his dull brain to force a

little arithmetic and spelling into it. After that he became an

apprentice, repeating much the same efforts with a perseverance that

was the more meritorious as it took him a whole day to learn what

others acquired in an hour.

[*] Figures prominently in _La Terre_ (_The Earth_) and _La Debacle_

(_The Downfall_).

As long as these poor little things remained a burden to the house,

Antoine grumbled. They were useless mouths that lessened his own share.

He vowed, like his brother, that he would have no more children, those

greedy creatures who bring their parents to penury. It was something to

hear him bemoan his lot when they sat five at table, and the mother

gave the best morsels to Jean, Lisa, and Gervaise.

“That’s right,” he would growl; “stuff them, make them burst!”

Whenever Fine bought a garment or a pair of boots for them, he would

sulk for days together. Ah! if he had only known, he would never had

had that pack of brats, who compelled him to limit his smoking to four

sous’ worth of tobacco a day, and too frequently obliged him to eat

stewed potatoes for dinner, a dish which he heartily detested.

Later on, however, as soon as Jean and Gervaise earned their first

francs, he found some good in children after all. Lisa was no longer

there. He lived upon the earnings of the two others without

compunction, as he had already lived upon their mother. It was a

well-planned speculation on his part. As soon as little Gervaise was

eight years old, she went to a neighbouring dealer’s to crack almonds;

she there earned ten sous a day, which her father pocketed right

royally, without even a question from Fine as to what became of the

money. The young girl was next apprenticed to a laundress, and as soon

as she received two francs a day for her work, the two francs strayed

in a similar manner into Macquart’s hands. Jean, who had learnt the

trade of a carpenter, was likewise despoiled on pay-days, whenever

Macquart succeeded in catching him before he had handed the money to

his mother. If the money escaped Macquart, which sometimes happened, he

became frightfully surly. He would glare at his wife and children for a

whole week, picking a quarrel for nothing, although he was, as yet,

ashamed to confess the real cause of his irritations. On the next

pay-day, however, he would station himself on the watch, and as soon as

he had succeeded in pilfering the youngster’s earnings, he disappeared

for days together.

Gervaise, beaten and brought up in the streets among all the lads of

the neighbourhood, became a mother when she was fourteen years of age.

The father of her child was not eighteen years old. He was a journeyman

tanner named Lantier. At first Macquart was furious, but he calmed down

somewhat when he learnt that Lantier’s mother, a worthy woman, was

willing to take charge of the child. He kept Gervaise, however; she was

then already earning twenty-five sous a day, and he therefore avoided

all question of marriage. Four years later she had a second child,

which was likewise taken in by Lantier’s mother. This time Macquart

shut his eyes altogether. And when Fine timidly suggested that it was

time to come to some understanding with the tanner, in order to end a

state of things which made people chatter, he flatly declared that his

daughter should not leave him, and that he would give her to her lover

later on, “when he was worthy of her, and had enough money to furnish a

home.”

This was a fine time for Antoine Macquart. He dressed like a gentleman,

in frock-coats and trousers of the finest cloth. Cleanly shaved, and

almost fat, he was no longer the emaciated ragged vagabond who had been

wont to frequent the taverns. He dropped into cafes, read the papers,

and strolled on the Cours Sauvaire. He played the gentleman as long as

he had any money in his pocket. At times of impecuniosity he remained

at home, exasperated at being kept in his hovel and prevented from

taking his customary cup of coffee. On such occasions he would reproach

the whole human race with his poverty, making himself ill with rage and

envy, until Fine, out of pity, would often give him the last silver

coin in the house so that he might spend his evening at the cafe. This

dear fellow was fiercely selfish. Gervaise, who brought home as much as

sixty francs a month, wore only thin cotton frocks, while he had black

satin waistcoats made for him by one of the best tailors in Plassans.

Jean, the big lad who earned three or four francs a day, was perhaps

robbed even more impudently. The cafe where his father passed entire

days was just opposite his master’s workshop, and while he had plane or

saw in hand he could see “Monsieur” Macquart on the other side of the

way, sweetening his coffee or playing piquet with some petty annuitant.

It was his money that the lazy old fellow was gambling away. He, Jean,

never stepped inside a cafe, he never had so much as five sous to pay

for a drink. Antoine treated him like a little girl, never leaving him

a centime, and always demanding an exact account of the manner in which

he had employed his time. If the unfortunate lad, led away by some of

his mates, wasted a day somewhere in the country, on the banks of the

Viorne, or on the slopes of Garrigues, his father would storm and raise

his hand, and long bear him a grudge on account of the four francs less

that he received at the end of the fortnight. He thus held his son in a

state of dependence, sometimes even looking upon the sweethearts whom

the young carpenter courted as his own. Several of Gervaise’s friends

used to come to the Macquarts’ house, work-girls from sixteen to

eighteen years of age, bold and boisterous girls who, on certain

evenings, filled the room with youth and gaiety. Poor Jean, deprived of

all pleasure, ever kept at home by the lack of money, looked at these

girls with longing eyes; but the childish life which he was compelled

to lead had implanted invincible shyness in him; in playing with his

sister’s friends, he was hardly bold enough to touch them with the tips

of his fingers. Macquart used to shrug his shoulders with pity.

“What a simpleton!” he would mutter, with an air of ironical

superiority.

And it was he who would kiss the girls, when his wife’s back was

turned. He carried his attentions even further with a little laundress

whom Jean pursued rather more earnestly than the others. One fine

evening he stole her almost from his arms. The old rogue prided himself

on his gallantry.

There are some men who live upon their mistresses. Antoine Macquart

lived on his wife and children with as much shamelessness and

impudence. He did not feel the least compunction in pillaging the home

and going out to enjoy himself when the house was bare. He still

assumed a supercilious air, returning from the cafe only to rail

against the poverty and wretchedness that awaited him at home. He found

the dinner detestable, he called Gervaise a blockhead, and declared

that Jean would never be a man. Immersed in his own selfish indulgence,

he rubbed his hands whenever he had eaten the best piece in the dish;

and then he smoked his pipe, puffing slowly, while the two poor

children, overcome with fatigue, went to sleep with their heads resting

on the table. Thus Macquart passed his days in lazy enjoyment. It

seemed to him quite natural that he should be kept in idleness like a

girl, to sprawl about on the benches of some tavern, or stroll in the

cool of the day along the Cours or the Mail. At last he went so far as

to relate his amorous escapades in the presence of his son, who

listened with glistening eyes. The children never protested, accustomed

as they were to see their mother humble herself before her husband.

Fine, that strapping woman who drubbed him soundly when they were both

intoxicated, always trembled before him when she was sober, and allowed

him to rule despotically at home. He robbed her in the night of the

coppers which she had earned during the day at the market, but she

never dared to protest, except by veiled rebukes. Sometimes, when he

had squandered the week’s money in advance, he accused her, poor thing,

who worked herself to death, of being stupid and not knowing how to

manage. Fine, as gentle as a lamb, replied, in her soft, clear voice,

which contrasted so strangely with her big figure, that she was no

longer twenty years old, and that money was becoming hard to earn. In

order to console herself, she would buy a pint of aniseed, and drink

little glassfuls of it with her daughter of an evening, after Antoine

had gone back to the cafe. That was their dissipation. Jean went to

bed, while the two women remained at the table, listening attentively

in order to remove the bottle and glasses at the first sound.

When Macquart was late, they often became intoxicated by the many

“nips” they thus thoughtlessly imbibed. Stupefied and gazing at each

other with vague smiles, this mother and daughter would end by

stuttering. Red patches appeared on Gervaise’s cheeks; her delicate

doll-like face assumed a look of maudlin beatitude. Nothing could be

more heart-rending than to see this wretched, pale child, aglow with

drink and wearing the idiotic smile of a confirmed sot about her moist

lips. Fine, huddled up on her chair, became heavy and drowsy. They

sometimes forgot to keep watch, or even lacked the strength to remove

the bottle and glasses when Antoine’s footsteps were heard on the

stairs. On these occasions blows were freely exchanged among the

Macquarts. Jean had to get up to separate his father and mother and

make his sister go to bed, as otherwise she would have slept on the

floor.

Every political party numbers its grotesques and its villains. Antoine

Macquart, devoured by envy and hatred, and meditating revenge against

society in general, welcomed the Republic as a happy era when he would

be allowed to fill his pockets from his neighbour’s cash-box, and even

strangle the neighbour if the latter manifested any displeasure. His

cafe life and all the newspaper articles he had read without

understanding them had made him a terrible ranter who enunciated the

strangest of political theories. It is necessary to have heard one of

those malcontents who ill digest what they read, haranguing the company

in some provincial taproom, in order to conceive the degree of hateful

folly at which Macquart had arrived. As he talked a good deal, had seen

active service, and was naturally regarded as a man of energy and

spirit, he was much sought after and listened to by simpletons.

Although he was not the chief of any party, he had succeeded in

collecting round him a small group of working-men who took his jealous

ravings for expressions of honest and conscientious indignation.

Directly after the Revolution of February ‘48, he persuaded himself

that Plassans was his own, and, as he strolled along the streets, the

jeering manner in which he regarded the little retail traders who stood

terrified at their shop doors clearly signified: “Our day has come, my

little lambs; we are going to lead you a fine dance!” He had grown

insolent beyond belief; he acted the part of a victorious despot to

such a degree that he ceased to pay for his drinks at the cafe, and the

landlord, a simpleton who trembled whenever Antoine rolled his eyes,

dared not present his bill. The number of cups of coffee he consumed

during this period was incalculable; sometimes he invited his friends,

and shouted for hours together that the people were dying of hunger,

and that the rich ought to share their wealth with them. He himself

would never have given a sou to a beggar.

That which chiefly converted him into a fierce Republican was the hope

of at last being able to revenge himself on the Rougons, who had openly

ranged themselves on the side of the reactionary party. Ah, what a

triumph if he could only hold Pierre and Félicité at his mercy!

Although the latter had not succeeded over well in business, they had

at last become gentlefolks, while he, Macquart, had still remained a

working-man. That exasperated him. Perhaps he was still more mortified

because one of their sons was a barrister, another a doctor, and the

third a clerk, while his son Jean merely worked at a carpenter’s shop,

and his daughter Gervaise at a washerwoman’s. When he compared the

Macquarts with the Rougons, he was still more ashamed to see his wife

selling chestnuts in the market, and mending the greasy old

straw-seated chairs of the neighbourhood in the evening. Pierre, after

all, was but his brother, and had no more right than himself to live

fatly on his income. Moreover, this brother was actually playing the

gentleman with money stolen from him. Whenever Macquart touched upon

this subject, he became fiercely enraged; he clamoured for hours

together, incessantly repeating his old accusations, and never wearying

of exclaiming: “If my brother was where he ought to be, I should be the

moneyed man at the present time!”

And when anyone asked him where his brother ought to be, he would

reply, “At the galleys!” in a formidable voice.

His hatred further increased when the Rougons had gathered the

Conservatives round them, and thus acquired a certain influence in

Plassans. The famous yellow drawing-room became, in his hare-brained

chatter at the cafe, a cave of bandits, an assembly of villains who

every evening swore on their daggers that they would murder the people.

In order to incite the starvelings against Pierre, Macquart went so far

as to circulate a report that the retired oil-dealer was not so poor as

he pretended, but that he concealed his treasures through avarice and

fear of robbery. His tactics thus tended to rouse the poor people by a

repetition of absurdly ridiculous tales, which he often came to believe

in himself. His personal animosity and his desire for revenge were ill

concealed beneath his professions of patriotism; but he was heard so

frequently, and he had such a loud voice, that no one would have dared

to doubt the genuineness of his convictions.

At bottom, all the members of this family had the same brutish

passions. Félicité, who clearly understood that Macquart’s wild

theories were simply the fruit of restrained rage and embittered envy,

would much have liked to purchase his silence. Unfortunately, she was

short of money, and did not dare to interest him in the dangerous game

which her husband was playing. Antoine now injured them very much among

the well-to-do people of the new town. It sufficed that he was a

relation of theirs. Granoux and Roudier often scornfully reproached

them for having such a man in their family. Félicité consequently asked

herself with anguish how they could manage to cleanse themselves of

such a stain.

It seemed to her monstrous and indecent that Monsieur Rougon should

have a brother whose wife sold chestnuts, and who himself lived in

crapulous idleness. She at last even trembled for the success of their

secret intrigues, so long as Antoine seemingly took pleasure in

compromising them. When the diatribes which he levelled at the yellow

drawing-room were reported to her, she shuddered at the thought that he

was capable of becoming desperate and ruining all their hopes by force

of scandal.

Antoine knew what consternation his demeanour must cause the Rougons,

and it was solely for the purpose of exhausting their patience that he

from day to day affected fiercer opinions. At the cafe he frequented he

used to speak of “my brother Pierre” in a voice which made everybody

turn round; and if he happened to meet some reactionary from the yellow

drawing-room in the street, he would mutter some low abuse which the

worthy citizen, amazed at such audacity, would repeat to the Rougons in

the evening, as though to make them responsible for his disagreeable

encounter.

One day Granoux arrived in a state of fury.

“Really,” he exclaimed, when scarcely across the threshold, “it’s

intolerable; one can’t move a step without being insulted.” Then,

addressing Pierre, he added: “When one has a brother like yours, sir,

one should rid society of him. I was just quietly walking past the

Sub-Prefecture, when that rascal passed me muttering something in which

I could clearly distinguish the words ‘old rogue.’”

Félicité turned pale, and felt it necessary to apologise to Granoux,

but he refused to accept any excuses, and threatened to leave

altogether. The marquis, however, exerted himself to arrange matters.

“It is very strange,” he said, “that the wretched fellow should have

called you an old rogue. Are you sure that he intended the insult for

you?”

Granoux was perplexed; he admitted at last, however, that Antoine might

have muttered: “So you are again going to that old rogue’s?”

At this Monsieur de Carnavant stroked his chin to conceal the smile

which rose to his lips in spite of himself.

Then Rougon, with superb composure, replied: “I thought as much; the

‘old rogue’ was no doubt intended for me. I’ve very glad that this

misunderstanding is now cleared up. Gentlemen, pray avoid the man in

question, whom I formally repudiate.”

Félicité, however, did not take matters so coolly; every fresh scandal

caused by Macquart made her more and more uneasy; she would sometimes

pass the whole night wondering what those gentlemen must think of the

matter.

A few months before the Coup d’État, the Rougons received an anonymous

letter, three pages of foul insults, in which they were warned that if

their party should ever triumph, the scandalous story of Adélaïde’s

amours would be published in some newspaper, together with an account

of the robbery perpetrated by Pierre, when he had compelled his mother,

driven out of her senses by debauchery, to sign a receipt for fifty

thousand francs. This letter was a heavy blow for Rougon himself.

Félicité could not refrain from reproaching her husband with his

disreputable family; for the husband and wife never for a moment

doubted that this letter was Antoine’s work.

“We shall have to get rid of the blackguard at any price,” said Pierre

in a gloomy tone. “He’s becoming too troublesome by far.”

In the meantime, Macquart, resorting to his former tactics, looked

round among his own relatives for accomplices who would join him

against the Rougons. He had counted upon Aristide at first, on reading

his terrible articles in the “Indépendant.” But the young man, in spite

of all his jealous rage, was not so foolish as to make common cause

with such a fellow as his uncle. He never even minced matters with him,

but invariably kept him at a distance, a circumstance which induced

Antoine to regard him suspiciously. In the taverns, where Macquart

reigned supreme, people went so far as to say the journalist was paid

to provoke disturbances.

Baffled on this side, Macquart had no alternative but to sound his

sister Ursule’s children. Ursule had died in 1839, thus fulfilling her

brother’s evil prophecy. The nervous affection which she had inherited

from her mother had turned into slow consumption, which gradually

killed her. She left three children; a daughter, eighteen years of age,

named Helene, who married a clerk, and two boys, the elder, Francois, a

young man of twenty-three, and the younger, a sickly little fellow

scarcely six years old, named Silvère. The death of his wife, whom he

adored, proved a thunderbolt to Mouret. He dragged on his existence for

another year, neglecting his business and losing all the money he had

saved. Then, one morning, he was found hanging in a cupboard where

Ursule’s dresses were still suspended. His elder son, who had received

a good commercial training, took a situation in the house of his uncle

Rougon, where he replaced Aristide, who had just left.

Rougon, in spite of his profound hatred for the Macquarts, gladly

welcomed this nephew, whom he knew to be industrious and sober. He was

in want of a youth whom he could trust, and who would help him to

retrieve his affairs. Moreover, during the time of Mouret’s prosperity,

he had learnt to esteem the young couple, who knew how to make money,

and thus he had soon become reconciled with his sister. Perhaps he

thought he was making Francois some compensation by taking him into his

business; having robbed the mother, he would shield himself from

remorse by giving employment to the son; even rogues make honest

calculations sometimes. It was, however, a good thing for him. If the

house of Rougon did not make a fortune at this time, it was certainly

through no fault of that quiet, punctilious youth, Francois, who seemed

born to pass his life behind a grocer’s counter, between a jar of oil

and a bundle of dried cod-fish. Although he physically resembled his

mother, he inherited from his father a just if narrow mind, with an

instinctive liking for a methodical life and the safe speculations of a

small business.

Three months after his arrival, Pierre, pursuing his system of

compensation, married him to his young daughter Marthe,[*] whom he did

not know how to dispose of. The two young people fell in love with each

other quite suddenly, in a few days. A peculiar circumstance had

doubtless determined and enhanced their mutual affection. There was a

remarkably close resemblance between them, suggesting that of brother

and sister. Francois inherited, through Ursule, the face of his

grandmother Adélaïde. Marthe’s case was still more curious; she was an

equally exact portrait of Adélaïde, although Pierre Rougon had none of

his mother’s features distinctly marked; the physical resemblance had,

as it were, passed over Pierre, to reappear in his daughter. The

similarity between husband and wife went, however, no further than

their faces; if the worthy son of a steady matter-of-fact hatter was

distinguishable in Francois, Marthe showed the nervousness and mental

weakness of her grandmother. Perhaps it was this combination of

physical resemblance and moral dissimilarity which threw the young

people into each other’s arms. From 1840 to 1844 they had three

children. Francois remained in his uncle’s employ until the latter

retired. Pierre had desired to sell him the business, but the young man

knew what small chance there was of making a fortune in trade at

Plassans; so he declined the offer and repaired to Marseilles, where he

established himself with his little savings.

[*] Both Francois and Marthe figure largely in _The Conquest of

Plassans_.

Macquart soon had to abandon all hope of dragging this big industrious

fellow into his campaign against the Rougons; whereupon, with all the

spite of a lazybones, he regarded him as a cunning miser. He fancied,

however, that he had discovered the accomplice he was seeking in

Mouret’s second son, a lad of fifteen years of age. Young Silvère had

never even been to school at the time when Mouret was found hanging

among his wife’s skirts. His elder brother, not knowing what to do with

him, took him also to his uncle’s. The latter made a wry face on

beholding the child; he had no intention of carrying his compensation

so far as to feed a useless mouth. Thus Silvère, to whom Félicité also

took a dislike, was growing up in tears, like an unfortunate little

outcast, when his grandmother Adélaïde, during one of the rare visits

she paid the Rougons, took pity on him, and expressed a wish to have

him with her. Pierre was delighted; he let the child go, without even

suggesting an increase of the paltry allowance that he made Adélaïde,

and which henceforward would have to suffice for two.

Adélaïde was then nearly seventy-five years of age. Grown old while

leading a cloistered existence, she was no longer the lanky ardent girl

who formerly ran to embrace the smuggler Macquart. She had stiffened

and hardened in her hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, that dismal

silent hole where she lived entirely alone on potatoes and dry

vegetables, and which she did not leave once in the course of a month.

On seeing her pass, you might have thought her to be one of those

delicately white old nuns with automatic gait, whom the cloister has

kept apart from all the concerns of this world. Her pale face, always

scrupulously girt with a white cap, looked like that of a dying woman;

a vague, calm countenance it was, wearing an air of supreme

indifference. Prolonged taciturnity had made her dumb; the darkness of

her dwelling and the continual sight of the same objects had dulled her

glance and given her eyes the limpidity of spring water. Absolute

renunciation, slow physical and moral death, had little by little

converted this crazy _amorosa_ into a grave matron. When, as often

happened, a blank stare came into her eyes, and she gazed before her

without seeing anything, one could detect utter, internal void through

those deep bright cavities.

Nothing now remained of her former voluptuous ardour but weariness of

the flesh and a senile tremor of the hands. She had once loved like a

she-wolf, but was now wasted, already sufficiently worn out for the

grave. There had been strange workings of her nerves during her long

years of chastity. A dissolute life would perhaps have wrecked her less

than the slow hidden ravages of unsatisfied fever which had modified

her organism.

Sometimes, even now, this moribund, pale old woman, who seemed to have

no blood left in her, was seized with nervous fits like electric

shocks, which galvanised her, and for an hour brought her atrocious

intensity of life. She would lie on her bed rigid, with her eyes open;

then hiccoughs would come upon her and she would writhe and struggle,

acquiring the frightful strength of those hysterical madwomen whom one

has to tie down in order to prevent them from breaking their heads

against a wall. This return to former vigour, these sudden attacks,

gave her a terrible shock. When she came to again, she would stagger

about with such a scared, stupefied look, that the gossips of the

Faubourg used to say: “She’s been drinking, the crazy old thing!”

Little Silvère’s childish smile was for her the last pale ray which

brought some warmth to her frozen limbs. Weary of solitude, and

frightened at the thought of dying alone in one of her fits, she had

asked to have the child. With the little fellow running about near her,

she felt secure against death. Without relinquishing her habits of

taciturnity, or seeking to render her automatic movements more supple,

she conceived inexpressible affection for him. Stiff and speechless,

she would watch him playing for hours together, listening with delight

to the intolerable noise with which he filled the old hovel. That tomb

had resounded with uproar ever since Silvère had been running about it,

bestriding broomsticks, knocking up against the doors, and shouting and

crying. He brought Adélaïde back to the world, as it were; she looked

after him with the most adorable awkwardness; she who, in her youth,

had neglected the duties of a mother, now felt the divine pleasures of

maternity in washing his face, dressing him, and watching over his

sickly life. It was a reawakening of love, a last soothing passion

which heaven had granted to this woman who had been so ravaged by the

want of some one to love; the touching agony of a heart that had lived

amidst the most acute desires, and which was now dying full of love for

a child.

She was already too far gone to pour forth the babble of good plump

grandmothers; she adored the child in secret with the bashfulness of a

young girl, without knowing how to fondle him. Sometimes she took him

on her knees, and gazed at him for a long time with her pale eyes. When

the little one, frightened by her mute white visage, began to cry, she

seemed perplexed by what she had done, and quickly put him down upon

the floor without even kissing him. Perhaps she recognised in him a

faint resemblance to Macquart the poacher.

Silvère grew up, ever _tête-à-tête_ with Adélaïde. With childish

cajolery he used to call her aunt Dide, a name which ultimately clung

to the old woman; the word “aunt” employed in this way is simply a term

of endearment in Provence. The child entertained singular affection,

not unmixed with respectful terror, for his grandmother. During her

nervous fits, when he was quite a little boy, he ran away from her,

crying, terrified by her disfigured countenance; and he came back very

timidly after the attack, ready to run away again, as though the old

woman were disposed to beat him. Later on, however, when he was twelve

years old, he would stop there bravely and watch in order that she

might not hurt herself by falling off the bed. He stood for hours

holding her tightly in his arms to subdue the rude shocks which

distorted her. During intervals of calmness he would gaze with pity on

her convulsed features and withered frame, over which her skirts lay

like a shroud. These hidden dramas, which recurred every month, this

old woman as rigid as a corpse, this child bent over her, silently

watching for the return of consciousness, made up amidst the darkness

of the hovel a strange picture of mournful horror and broken-hearted

tenderness.

When aunt Dide came round, she would get up with difficulty, and set

about her work in the hovel without even questioning Silvère. She

remembered nothing, and the child, from a sort of instinctive prudence,

avoided the least allusion to what had taken place. These recurring

fits, more than anything else, strengthened Silvère’s deep attachment

for his grandmother. In the same manner as she adored him without any

garrulous effusiveness, he felt a secret, almost bashful, affection for

her. While he was really very grateful to her for having taken him in

and brought him up, he could not help regarding her as an extraordinary

creature, a prey to some strange malady, whom he ought to pity and

respect. No doubt there was not sufficient life left in Adélaïde; she

was too white and too stiff for Silvère to throw himself on her neck.

Thus they lived together amidst melancholy silence, in the depths of

which they felt the tremor of boundless love.

The sad, solemn atmosphere, which he had breathed from childhood, gave

Silvère a strong heart, in which gathered every form of enthusiasm. He

early became a serious, thoughtful little man, seeking instruction with

a kind of stubbornness. He only learnt a little spelling and arithmetic

at the school of the Christian Brothers, which he was compelled to

leave when he was but twelve years old, on account of his

apprenticeship. He never acquired the first rudiments of knowledge.

However, he read all the odd volumes which fell into his hands, and

thus provided himself with strange equipment; he had some notions of a

multitude of subjects, ill-digested notions, which he could never

classify distinctly in his head. When he was quite young, he had been

in the habit of playing in the workshop of a master wheelwright, a

worthy man named Vian, who lived at the entrance of the blind-alley in

front of the Aire Saint-Mittre where he stored his timber. Silvère used

to jump up on the wheels of the tilted carts undergoing repair, and

amuse himself by dragging about the heavy tools which his tiny hands

could scarcely lift. One of his greatest pleasures, too, was to assist

the workmen by holding some piece of wood for them, or bringing them

the iron-work which they required. When he had grown older he naturally

became apprenticed to Vian. The latter had taken a liking to the little

fellow who was always kicking about his heels, and asked Adélaïde to

let him come, refusing to take anything for his board and lodging.

Silvère eagerly accepted, already foreseeing the time when he would be

able to make his poor aunt Dide some return for all she had spent upon

him.

In a short time he became an excellent workman. He cherished, however,

much higher ambitions. Having once seen, at a coachbuilder’s at

Plassans, a fine new carriage, shining with varnish, he vowed that he

would one day build carriages himself. He remembered this carriage as a

rare and unique work of art, an ideal towards which his aspirations

should tend. The tilted carts at which he worked in Vian’s shop, those

carts which he had lovingly cherished, now seemed unworthy of his

affections. He began to attend the local drawing-school, where he

formed a connection with a youngster who had left college, and who lent

him an old treatise on geometry. He plunged into this study without a

guide, racking his brains for weeks together in order to grasp the

simplest problem in the world. In this matter he gradually became one

of those learned workmen who can hardly sign their name and yet talk

about algebra as though it were an intimate friend.

Nothing unsettles the mind so much as this desultory kind of education,

which reposes on no firm basis. Most frequently such scraps of

knowledge convey an absolutely false idea of the highest truths, and

render persons of limited intellect insufferably stupid. In Silvère’s

case, however, his scraps of stolen knowledge only augmented his

liberal aspirations. He was conscious of horizons which at present

remained closed to him. He formed for himself divine conceptions of

things beyond his reach, and lived on, regarding in a deep, innocent,

religious way the noble thoughts and grand conceptions towards which he

was raising himself, but which he could not as yet comprehend. He was

one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had

remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers

which from a distance he took for stars.

The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre consisted, in the first place, of

a large room into which the street door opened. The only pieces of

furniture in this room, which had a stone floor, and served both as a

kitchen and a dining-room, were some straw-seated chairs, a table on

trestles, and an old coffer which Adélaïde had converted into a sofa,

by spreading a piece of woollen stuff over the lid. In the left hand

corner of the large fireplace stood a plaster image of the Holy Virgin,

surrounded by artificial flowers; she is the traditional good mother of

all old Provencal women, however irreligious they may be. A passage led

from the room into a yard situated at the rear of the house; in this

yard there was a well. Aunt Dide’s bedroom was on the left side of the

passage; it was a little apartment containing an iron bedstead and one

chair; Silvère slept in a still smaller room on the right hand side,

just large enough for a trestle bedstead; and he had been obliged to

plan a set of shelves, reaching up to the ceiling, to keep by him all

those dear odd volumes which he saved his sous to purchase from a

neighbouring general dealer. When he read at night-time, he would hang

his lamp on a nail at the head of the bed. If his grandmother had an

attack, he merely had to leap out at the first gasp to be at her side

in a moment.

The young man led the life of a child. He passed his existence in this

lonely spot. Like his father, he felt a dislike for taverns and Sunday

strolling. His mates wounded his delicate susceptibilities by their

coarse jokes. He preferred to read, to rack his rain over some simple

geometrical problem. Since aunt Dide had entrusted him with the little

household commissions she did not go out at all, but ceased all

intercourse even with her family. The young man sometimes thought of

her forlornness; he reflected that the poor old woman lived but a few

steps from the children who strove to forget her, as though she were

dead; and this made him love her all the more, for himself and for the

others. When he at times entertained a vague idea that aunt Dide might

be expiating some former transgressions, he would say to himself: “I

was born to pardon her.”

A nature such as Silvère’s, ardent yet self-restrained, naturally

cherished the most exalted republican ideas. At night, in his little

hovel, Silvère would again and again read a work of Rousseau’s which he

had picked up at the neighbouring dealer’s among a number of old locks.

The reading of this book kept him awake till daylight. Amidst his dream

of universal happiness so dear to the poor, the words liberty,

equality, fraternity, rang in his ears like those sonorous sacred calls

of the bells, at the sound of which the faithful fall upon their knees.

When, therefore, he learnt that the Republic had just been proclaimed

in France he fancied that the whole world would enjoy a life of

celestial beatitude. His knowledge, though imperfect, made him see

farther than other workmen; his aspirations did not stop at daily

bread; but his extreme ingenuousness, his complete ignorance of

mankind, kept him in the dreamland of theory, a Garden of Eden where

universal justice reigned. His paradise was for a long time a

delightful spot in which he forgot himself.

When he came to perceive that things did not go on quite satisfactorily

in the best of republics he was sorely grieved, and indulged in another

dream, that of compelling men to be happy even by force. Every act

which seemed to him prejudicial to the interest of the people roused

him to revengeful indignation. Though he was as gentle as a child, he

cherished the fiercest political animosity. He would not have killed a

fly, and yet he was for ever talking of a call to arms. Liberty was his

passion, an unreasoning, absolute passion, to which he gave all the

feverish ardour of his blood. Blinded by enthusiasm, he was both too

ignorant and too learned to be tolerant, and would not allow for men’s

weaknesses; he required an ideal government of perfect justice and

perfect liberty. It was at this period that Antoine Macquart thought of

setting him against the Rougons. He fancied that this young enthusiast

would work terrible havoc if he were only exasperated to the proper

pitch. This calculation was not altogether devoid of shrewdness.

Such being Antoine’s scheme, he tried to induce Silvère to visit him,

by professing inordinate admiration for the young man’s ideas. But he

very nearly compromised the whole matter at the outset. He had a way of

regarding the triumph of the Republic as a question of personal

interest, as an era of happy idleness and endless junketing, which

chilled his nephew’s purely moral aspirations. However, he perceived

that he was on the wrong track, and plunged into strange bathos, a

string of empty but high-sounding words, which Silvère accepted as a

satisfactory proof of his civism. Before long the uncle and the nephew

saw each other two or three times a week. During their long

discussions, in which the fate of the country was flatly settled,

Antoine endeavoured to persuade the young man that the Rougons’

drawing-room was the chief obstacle to the welfare of France. But he

again made a false move by calling his mother “old jade” in Silvère’s

presence. He even repeated to him the early scandals about the poor

woman. The young man blushed for shame, but listened without

interruption. He had not asked his uncle for this information; he felt

heart-broken by such confidences, which wounded his feeling of

respectful affection for aunt Dide. From that time forward he lavished

yet more attention upon his grandmother, greeting her always with

pleasant smiles and looks of forgiveness. However, Macquart felt that

he had acted foolishly, and strove to take advantage of Silvère’s

affection for Adélaïde by charging the Rougons with her forlornness and

poverty. According to him, he had always been the best of sons, whereas

his brother had behaved disgracefully; Pierre had robbed his mother,

and now, when she was penniless, he was ashamed of her. He never ceased

descanting on this subject. Silvère thereupon became indignant with his

uncle Pierre, much to the satisfaction of his uncle Antoine.

The scene was much the same every time the young man called. He used to

come in the evening, while the Macquarts were at dinner. The father

would be swallowing some potato stew with a growl, picking out the

pieces of bacon, and watching the dish when it passed into the hands of

Jean and Gervaise.

“You see, Silvère,” he would say with a sullen rage which was

ill-concealed beneath his air of cynical indifference, “more potatoes,

always potatoes! We never eat anything else now. Meat is only for rich

people. It’s getting quite impossible to make both ends meet with

children who have the devil’s appetite and their own too.”

Gervaise and Jean bent over their plates, no longer even daring to cut

some bread. Silvère, who in his dream lived in heaven, did not grasp

the situation. In a calm voice he pronounced these storm-laden words:

“But you should work, uncle.”

“Ah! yes,” sneered Macquart, stung to the quick. “You want me to work,

eh! To let those beggars, the rich folk, continue to prey upon me. I

should earn probably twenty sous a day, and ruin my constitution. It’s

worth while, isn’t it?”

“Everyone earns what he can,” the young man replied. “Twenty sous are

twenty sous; and it all helps in a home. Besides, you’re an old

soldier, why don’t you seek some employment?”

Fine would then interpose, with a thoughtlessness of which she soon

repented.

“That’s what I’m always telling him,” said she. “The market inspector

wants an assistant; I mentioned my husband to him, and he seems well

disposed towards us.”

But Macquart interrupted her with a fulminating glance. “Eh! hold your

tongue,” he growled with suppressed anger. “Women never know what

they’re talking about! Nobody would have me; my opinions are too

well-known.”

Every time he was offered employment he displayed similar irritation.

He did not cease, however, to ask for situations, though he always

refused such as were found for him, assigning the most extraordinary

reasons. When pressed upon the point he became terrible.

If Jean were to take up a newspaper after dinner he would at once

exclaim: “You’d better go to bed. You’ll be getting up late to-morrow,

and that’ll be another day lost. To think of that young rascal coming

home with eight francs short last week! However, I’ve requested his

master not give him his money in future; I’ll call for it myself.”

Jean would go to bed to avoid his father’s recriminations. He had but

little sympathy with Silvère; politics bored him, and he thought his

cousin “cracked.” When only the women remained, if they unfortunately

started some whispered converse after clearing the table, Macquart

would cry: “Now, you idlers! Is there nothing that requires mending?

we’re all in rags. Look here, Gervaise, I was at your mistress’s

to-day, and I learnt some fine things. You’re a good-for-nothing, a

gad-about.”

Gervaise, now a grown girl of more than twenty, coloured up at thus

being scolded in the presence of Silvère, who himself felt

uncomfortable. One evening, having come rather late, when his uncle was

not at home, he had found the mother and daughter intoxicated before an

empty bottle. From that time he could never see his cousin without

recalling the disgraceful spectacle she had presented, with the maudlin

grin and large red patches on her poor, pale, puny face. He was not

less shocked by the nasty stories that circulated with regard to her.

He sometimes looked at her stealthily, with the timid surprise of a

schoolboy in the presence of a disreputable character.

When the two women had taken up their needles, and were ruining their

eyesight in order to mend his old shirts, Macquart, taking the best

seat, would throw himself back with an air of delicious comfort, and

sip and smoke like a man who relishes his laziness. This was the time

when the old rogue generally railed against the wealthy for living on

the sweat of the poor man’s brow. He was superbly indignant with the

gentlemen of the new town, who lived so idly, and compelled the poor to

keep them in luxury. The fragments of communistic notions which he

culled from the newspapers in the morning became grotesque and

monstrous on falling from his lips. He would talk of a time near at

hand when no one would be obliged to work. He always, however, kept his

fiercest animosity for the Rougons. He never could digest the potatoes

he had eaten.

“I saw that vile creature Félicité buying a chicken in the market this

morning,” he would say. “Those robbers of inheritances must eat

chicken, forsooth!”

“Aunt Dide,” interposed Silvère, “says that uncle Pierre was very kind

to you when you left the army. Didn’t he spend a large sum of money in

lodging and clothing you?”

“A large sum of money!” roared Macquart in exasperation; “your

grandmother is mad. It was those thieves who spread those reports

themselves, so as to close my mouth. I never had anything.”

Fine again foolishly interfered, reminding him that he had received two

hundred francs, besides a suit of clothes and a year’s rent. Antoine

thereupon shouted to her to hold her tongue, and continued, with

increasing fury: “Two hundred francs! A fine thing! I want my due, ten

thousand francs. Ah! yes, talk of the hole they shoved me into like a

dog, and the old frock-coat which Pierre gave me because he was ashamed

to wear it any longer himself, it was so dirty and ragged!”

He was not speaking the truth; but, seeing the rage that he was in,

nobody ventured to protest any further. Then, turning towards Silvère:

“It’s very stupid of you to defend them!” he added. “They robbed your

mother, who, good woman, would be alive now if she had had the means of

taking care of herself.”

“Oh! you’re not just, uncle,” the young man said; “my mother did not

die for want of attention, and I’m certain my father would never have

accepted a sou from his wife’s family!”

“Pooh! don’t talk to me! your father would have taken the money just

like anybody else. We were disgracefully plundered, and it’s high time

we had our rights.”

Then Macquart, for the hundredth time, began to recount the story of

the fifty thousand francs. His nephew, who knew it by heart, and all

the variations with which he embellished it, listened to him rather

impatiently.

“If you were a man,” Antoine would say in conclusion, “you would come

some day with me, and we would kick up a nice row at the Rougons. We

would not leave without having some money given us.”

Silvère, however, grew serious, and frankly replied: “If those wretches

robbed us, so much the worse for them. I don’t want their money. You

see, uncle, it’s not for us to fall on our relatives. If they’ve done

wrong, well, one of these days they’ll be severely punished for it.”

“Ah! what a big simpleton you are!” the uncle cried. “When we have the

upper hand, you’ll see whether I sha’n’t settle my own little affairs

myself. God cares a lot about us indeed! What a foul family ours is!

Even if I were starving to death, not one of those scoundrels would

throw me a dry crust.”

Whenever Macquart touched upon this subject, he proved inexhaustible.

He bared all his bleeding wounds of envy and covetousness. He grew mad

with rage when he came to think that he was the only unlucky one in the

family, and was forced to eat potatoes, while the others had meat to

their heart’s content. He would pass all his relations in review, even

his grand-nephews, and find some grievance and reason for threatening

every one of them.

“Yes, yes,” he repeated bitterly, “they’d leave me to die like a dog.”

Gervaise, without raising her head or ceasing to ply her needle, would

sometimes say timidly: “Still, father, cousin Pascal was very kind to

us, last year, when you were ill.”

“He attended you without charging a sou,” continued Fine, coming to her

daughter’s aid, “and he often slipped a five-franc piece into my hand

to make you some broth.”

“He! he’d have killed me if I hadn’t had a strong constitution!”

Macquart retorted. “Hold your tongues, you fools! You’d let yourselves

be twisted about like children. They’d all like to see me dead. When

I’m ill again, I beg you not to go and fetch my nephew, for I didn’t

feel at all comfortable in his hands. He’s only a twopenny-halfpenny

doctor, and hasn’t got a decent patient in all his practice.”

When once Macquart was fully launched, he could not stop. “It’s like

that little viper, Aristide,” he would say, “a false brother, a

traitor. Are you taken in by his articles in the ‘Indépendant,’

Silvère? You would be a fine fool if you were. They’re not even written

in good French; I’ve always maintained that this contraband Republican

is in league with his worthy father to humbug us. You’ll see how he’ll

turn his coat. And his brother, the illustrious Eugène, that big

blockhead of whom the Rougons make such a fuss! Why, they’ve got the

impudence to assert that he occupies a good position in Paris! I know

something about his position; he’s employed at the Rue de Jerusalem;

he’s a police spy.”

“Who told you so? You know nothing about it,” interrupted Silvère,

whose upright spirit at last felt hurt by his uncle’s lying

accusations.

“Ah! I know nothing about it? Do you think so? I tell you he is a

police spy. You’ll be shorn like a lamb one of these days, with your

benevolence. You’re not manly enough. I don’t want to say anything

against your brother Francois; but, if I were in your place, I

shouldn’t like the scurvy manner in which he treats you. He earns a

heap of money at Marseilles, and yet he never sends you a paltry

twenty-franc piece for pocket money. If ever you become poor, I

shouldn’t advise you to look to him for anything.”

“I’ve no need of anybody,” the young man replied in a proud and

slightly injured tone of voice. “My own work suffices for aunt Dide and

myself. You’re cruel, uncle.”

“I only say what’s true, that’s all. I should like to open your eyes.

Our family is a disreputable lot; it’s sad but true. Even that little

Maxime, Aristide’s son, that little nine-year-old brat, pokes his

tongue out at me when he meets me. That child will some day beat his

own mother, and a good job too! Say what you like, all those folks

don’t deserve their luck; but it’s always like this in families, the

good ones suffer while the bad ones make their fortunes.”

All this dirty linen, which Macquart washed with such complacency

before his nephew, profoundly disgusted the young man. He would have

liked to soar back into his dream. As soon as he began to show

unmistakable signs of impatience, Antoine would employ strong

expedients to exasperate him against their relatives.

“Defend them! Defend them!” he would say, appearing to calm down. “I,

for my part, have arranged to have nothing more to do with them. I only

mention the matter out of pity for my poor mother, whom all that gang

treat in a most revolting manner.”

“They are wretches!” Silvère murmured.

“Oh! you don’t know, you don’t understand. These Rougons pour all sorts

of insults and abuse on the good woman. Aristide has forbidden his son

even to recognise her. Félicité talks of having her placed in a lunatic

asylum.”

The young man, as white as a sheet, abruptly interrupted his uncle:

“Enough!” he cried. “I don’t want to know any more about it. There will

have to be an end to all this.”

“I’ll hold my tongue, since it annoys you,” the old rascal replied,

feigning a good-natured manner. “Still, there are some things that you

ought not to be ignorant of, unless you want to play the part of a

fool.”

Macquart, while exerting himself to set Silvère against the Rougons,

experienced the keenest pleasure on drawing tears of anguish from the

young man’s eyes. He detested him, perhaps, more than he did the

others, and this because he was an excellent workman and never drank.

He brought all his instincts of refined cruelty into play, in order to

invent atrocious falsehoods which should sting the poor lad to the

heart; then he revelled in his pallor, his trembling hands and his

heart-rending looks, with the delight of some evil spirit who measures

his stabs and finds that he has struck his victim in the right place.

When he thought that he had wounded and exasperated Silvère

sufficiently, he would at last touch upon politics.

“I’ve been assured,” he would say, lowering his voice, “that the

Rougons are preparing some treachery.”

“Treachery?” Silvère asked, becoming attentive.

“Yes, one of these nights they are going to seize all the good citizens

of the town and throw them into prison.”

The young man was at first disposed to doubt it, but his uncle gave

precise details; he spoke of lists that had been drawn up, he mentioned

the persons whose names were on these lists, he indicated in what

manner, at what hour, and under what circumstances the plot would be

carried into effect. Silvère gradually allowed himself to be taken in

by this old woman’s tale, and was soon raving against the enemies of

the Republic.

“It’s they that we shall have to reduce to impotence if they persist in

betraying the country!” he cried. “And what do they intend to do with

the citizens whom they arrest?”

“What do they intend to do with them? Why, they will shoot them in the

lowest dungeons of the prison, of course,” replied Macquart, with a

hoarse laugh. And as the young man, stupefied with horror, looked at

him without knowing what to say: “This will not be the first lot to be

assassinated there,” he continued. “You need only go and prowl about

the Palais de Justice of an evening to hear the shots and groans.”

“Oh, the wretches!” Silvère murmured.

Thereupon uncle and nephew launched out into high politics. Fine and

Gervaise, on finding them hotly debating things, quietly went to bed

without attracting their attention. Then the two men remained together

till midnight, commenting on the news from Paris and discussing the

approaching and inevitable struggle. Macquart bitterly denounced the

men of his own party, Silvère dreamed his dream of ideal liberty aloud,

and for himself only. Strange conversations these were, during which

the uncle poured out many a little nip for himself, and from which the

nephew emerged quite intoxicated with enthusiasm. Antoine, however,

never succeeded in obtaining from the young Republican any perfidious

suggestion or play of warfare against the Rougons. In vain he tried to

goad him on; he seldom heard him suggest aught but an appeal to eternal

justice, which sooner or later would punish the evil-doers.

The ingenuous youth did indeed speak warmly of taking up arms and

massacring the enemies of the Republic; but, as soon as these enemies

strayed out of his dream or became personified in his uncle Pierre or

any other person of his acquaintance, he relied upon heaven to spare

him the horror of shedding blood. It is very probable that he would

have ceased visiting Macquart, whose jealous fury made him so

uncomfortable, if he had not tasted the pleasure of being able to speak

freely of his dear Republic there. In the end, however, his uncle

exercised decisive influence over his destiny; he irritated his nerves

by his everlasting diatribes, and succeeded in making him eager for an

armed struggle, the conquest of universal happiness by violence.

When Silvère reached his sixteenth year, Macquart had him admitted into

the secret society of the Montagnards, a powerful association whose

influence extended throughout Southern France. From that moment the

young Republican gazed with longing eyes at the smuggler’s carbine,

which Adélaïde had hung over her chimney-piece. Once night, while his

grandmother was asleep, he cleaned and put it in proper condition. Then

he replaced it on its nail and waited, indulging in brilliant reveries,

fancying gigantic epics, Homeric struggles, and knightly tournaments,

whence the defenders of liberty would emerge victorious and acclaimed

by the whole world.

Macquart meantime was not discouraged. He said to himself that he would

be able to strangle the Rougons alone if he could ever get them into a

corner. His envious rage and slothful greed were increased by certain

successive accidents which compelled him to resume work. In the early

part of 1850 Fine died, almost suddenly, from inflammation of the

lungs, which she had caught by going one evening to wash the family

linen in the Viorne, and carrying it home wet on her back. She returned

soaked with water and perspiration, bowed down by her load, which was

terribly heavy, and she never recovered.

Her death filled Macquart with consternation. His most reliable source

of income was gone. When, a few days later, he sold the caldron in

which his wife had boiled her chestnuts, and the wooden horse which she

used in reseating old chairs, he foully accused the Divinity of having

robbed him of that strong strapping woman of whom he had often felt

ashamed, but whose real worth he now appreciated. He now also fell upon

the children’s earnings with greater avidity than ever. But, a month

later, Gervaise, tired of his continual exactions, ran away with her

two children and Lantier, whose mother was dead. The lovers took refuge

in Paris. Antoine, overwhelmed, vented his rage against his daughter by

expressing the hope that she might die in hospital like most of her

kind. This abuse did not, however, improve the situation, which was

decidedly becoming bad. Jean soon followed his sister’s example. He

waited for pay-day to come round, and then contrived to receive the

money himself. As he was leaving he told one of his friends, who

repeated it to Antoine, that he would no longer keep his lazy father,

and that if the latter should take it into his head to have him brought

back by the gendarmes he would touch neither saw nor plane.

On the morrow, when Antoine, having vainly sought him, found himself

alone and penniless in the house where for twenty years he had been

comfortably kept, he flew into the most frantic rage, kicked the

furniture about, and yelled the vilest imprecations. Then he sank down

exhausted, and began to drag himself about and moan like a

convalescent. The fear of having to earn his bread made him positively

ill. When Silvère came to see him, he complained, with tears, of his

children’s ingratitude. Had he not always been a good father to them?

Jean and Gervaise were monsters, who had made him an evil return for

all he had done for them. Now they abandoned him because he was old,

and they could not get anything more out of him!

“But uncle,” said Silvère, “you are not yet too old to work!”

Macquart, coughing and stooping, shook his head mournfully, as if to

say that he could not bear the least fatigue for any length of time.

Just as his nephew was about to withdraw, he borrowed ten francs of

him. Then for a month he lived by taking his children’s old clothes,

one by one, to a second-hand dealer’s, and in the same way, little by

little, he sold all the small articles in the house. Soon nothing

remained but a table, a chair, his bed, and the clothes on his back. He

ended by exchanging the walnut-wood bedstead for a plain strap one.

When he had exhausted all his resources, he cried with rage; and, with

the fierce pallor of a man who is resigned to suicide, he went to look

for the bundle of osier that he had forgotten in some corner for a

quarter of a century past. As he took it up he seemed to be lifting a

mountain. However, he again began to plait baskets and hampers, while

denouncing the human race for their neglect.

It was particularly at this time that he talked of dividing and sharing

the riches of the wealthy. He showed himself terrible. His speeches

kept up a constant conflagration in the tavern, where his furious looks

secured him unlimited credit. Moreover, he only worked when he had been

unable to get a five-franc piece out of Silvère or a comrade. He was no

longer “Monsieur” Macquart, the clean-shaven workman, who wore his

Sunday clothes every day and played the gentleman; he again became the

big slovenly devil who had once speculated on his rags. Félicité did

not dare to go to market now that he was so often coming there to sell

his baskets. He once had a violent quarrel with her there. His hatred

against the Rougons grew with his wretchedness. He swore, with horrible

threats, that he would wreak justice himself, since the rich were

leagued together to compel him to toil.

In this state of mind, he welcomed the Coup d’État with the ardent,

obstreperous delight of a hound scenting the quarry. As the few honest

Liberals in the town had failed to arrive at an understanding amongst

themselves, and therefore kept apart, he became naturally one of the

most prominent agents of the insurrection. The working classes,

notwithstanding the unfavourable opinion which they at last entertained

of this lazy fellow, would, when the time arrived, have to accept him

as a rallying flag. On the first few days, however, the town remained

quiet, and Macquart thought that his plans were frustrated. It was not

until the news arrived of the rising of the rural districts that he

recovered hope. For his own part he would not have left Plassans for

all the world; accordingly he invented some pretext for not following

those workmen who, on the Sunday morning, set off to join the

insurrectionary band of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx.

On the evening of the same day he was sitting in some disreputable

tavern of the old quarter with a few friends, when a comrade came to

inform him that the insurgents were only a few miles from Plassans.

This news had just been brought by an express, who had succeeded in

making his way into the town, and had been charged to get the gates

opened for the column. There was an outburst of triumph. Macquart,

especially, appeared to be delirious with enthusiasm. The unforeseen

arrival of the insurgents seemed to him a delicate attention of

Providence for his own particular benefit. His hands trembled at the

idea that he would soon hold the Rougons by the throat.

He hastily quitted the tavern with his friends. All the Republicans who

had not yet left the town were soon assembled on the Cours Sauvaire. It

was this band that Rougon had perceived as he was hastening to conceal

himself in his mother’s house. When the band had reached the top of the

Rue de la Banne, Macquart, who had stationed himself at the rear,

detained four of his companions, big fellows who were not over-burdened

with brains and whom he swayed by his tavern bluster. He easily

persuaded them that the enemies of the Republic must be arrested

immediately if they wished to prevent the greatest calamities. The

truth was that he feared Pierre might escape him in the midst of the

confusion which the entry of the insurgents would produce. However, the

four big fellows followed him with exemplary docility, and knocked

violently at the door of the Rougons’ abode. In this critical situation

Félicité displayed admirable courage. She went down and opened the

street door herself.

“We want to go upstairs into your rooms,” Macquart said to her

brutally.

“Very well, gentlemen, walk up,” she replied with ironical politeness,

pretending that she did not recognise her brother-in-law.

Once upstairs, Macquart ordered her to fetch her husband.

“My husband is not here,” she said with perfect calmness; “he is

travelling on business. He took the diligence for Marseilles at six

o’clock this evening.”

Antoine at this declaration, which Félicité uttered in a clear voice,

made a gesture of rage. He rushed through the drawing-room, and then

into the bedroom, turned the bed up, looked behind the curtains and

under the furniture. The four big fellows assisted him. They searched

the place for a quarter of an hour. Félicité meantime quietly seated

herself on the drawing-room sofa, and began to fasten the strings of

her petticoats, like a person who has been surprised in her sleep and

has not had time to dress properly.

“It’s true then, he’s run away, the coward!” Macquart muttered on

returning to the drawing-room.

Nevertheless, he continued to look about him with a suspicious air. He

felt a presentiment that Pierre could not have given up the game at the

decisive moment. At last he approached Félicité, who was yawning: “Show

us the place where your husband is hidden,” he said to her, “and I

promise no harm shall be done to him.”

“I have told you the truth,” she replied impatiently. “I can’t deliver

my husband to you, as he’s not here. You have searched everywhere,

haven’t you? Then leave me alone now.”

Macquart, exasperated by her composure, was just going to strike her,

when a rumbling noise arose from the street. It was the column of

insurgents entering the Rue de la Banne.

He then had to leave the yellow drawing-room, after shaking his fist at

his sister-in-law, calling her an old jade, and threatening that he

would soon return. At the foot of the staircase, he took one of the men

who accompanied him, a navvy named Cassoute, the most wooden-headed of

the four, and ordered him to sit on the first step, and remain there.

“You must come and inform me,” he said to him, “if you see the

scoundrel from upstairs return.”

The man sat down heavily. When Macquart reached the pavement, he raised

his eyes and observed Félicité leaning out of the window of the

yellow-drawing room, watching the march past of the insurgents, as if

it was nothing but a regiment passing through the town to the strains

of its band. This last sign of perfect composure irritated him to such

a degree that he was almost tempted to go up again and throw the old

woman into the street. However, he followed the column, muttering in a

hoarse voice: “Yes, yes, look at us passing. We’ll see whether you will

station yourself at your balcony to-morrow.”

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night when the insurgents entered the

town by the Porte de Rome. The workmen remaining in Plassans had opened

the gate for them, in spite of the wailings of the keeper, from whom

they could only wrest the keys by force. This man, very jealous of his

office, stood dumbfoundered in the presence of the surging crowd. To

think of it! he, who never allowed more than one person to pass in at a

time, and then only after a prolonged examination of his face! And he

murmured that he was dishonoured. The men of Plassans were still

marching at the head of the column by way of guiding the others;

Miette, who was in the front rank, with Silvère on her left, held up

her banner more proudly than ever now that she could divine behind the

closed blinds the scared looks of well-to-do bourgeois startled out of

their sleep. The insurgents passed along the Rue de Rome and the Rue de

la Banne slowly and warily; at every crossway, although they well knew

the quiet disposition of the inhabitants, they feared they might be

received with bullets. The town seemed lifeless, however; there was

scarcely a stifled exclamation to be heard at the windows. Only five or

six shutters opened. Some old householder then appeared in his

night-shirt, candle in hand, and leant out to obtain a better view; but

as soon as he distinguished the tall red girl who appeared to be

drawing that crowd of black demons behind her, he hastily closed his

window again, terrified by such a diabolical apparition.

The silence of the slumbering town reassured the insurgents, who

ventured to make their way through the lanes of the old quarter, and

thus reached the market-place and the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, which

was connected by a short but broad street. These open spaces, planted

with slender trees, were brilliantly illumined by the moon. Against the

clear sky the recently restored town-hall appeared like a large patch

of crude whiteness, the fine black lines of the wrought-iron arabesques

of the first-floor balcony showing in bold relief. Several persons

could be plainly distinguished standing on this balcony, the mayor,

Commander Sicardot, three or four municipal councillors, and other

functionaries. The doors below were closed. The three thousand

Republicans, who covered both open spaces, halted with upraised heads,

ready to force the doors with a single push.

The arrival of the insurrectionary column at such an hour took the

authorities by surprise. Before repairing to the mayor’s, Commander

Sicardot had taken time to don his uniform. He then had to run and

rouse the mayor. When the keeper of the Porte de Rome, who had been

left free by the insurgents, came to announce that the villains were

already in the town, the commander had so far only managed to assemble

a score of the national guards. The gendarmes, though their barracks

were close by, could not even be warned. It was necessary to shut the

town-hall doors in all haste, in order to deliberate. Five minutes

later a low continuous rumbling announced the approach of the column.

Monsieur Garconnet, out of hatred to the Republic, would have greatly

liked to offer resistance. But he was of a prudent nature, and

comprehended the futility of a struggle on finding only a few pale men,

who were scarcely awake, around him. So the deliberations did not last

long. Sicardot alone was obstinate; he wanted to fight, asserting that

twenty men would suffice to bring these three thousand villains to

reason. At this Monsieur Garconnet shrugged his shoulders, and declared

that the only step to take was to make an honourable capitulation. As

the uproar of the mob increased, he went out on the balcony, followed

by all the persons present. Silence was gradually obtained. Below,

among the black, quivering mass of insurgents, the guns and scythes

glittered in the moonlight.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” cried the mayor in a loud voice.

Thereupon a man in a greatcoat, a landowner of La Palud, stepped

forward.

“Open the doors,” he said, without replying to Monsieur Garconnet’s

question. “Avoid a fratricidal conflict.”

“I call upon you to withdraw,” the mayor continued. “I protest in the

name of the law.”

These words provoked deafening shouts from the crowd. When the tumult

had somewhat abated, vehement calls ascended to the balcony. Voices

shouted: “It is in the name of the law that we have come here!”

“Your duty as a functionary is to secure respect for the fundamental

law of the land, the constitution, which has just been outrageously

violated.”

“Long live the constitution! Long live the Republic!”

Then as Monsieur Garconnet endeavoured to make himself heard, and

continued to invoke his official dignity, the land-owner of La Palud,

who was standing under the balcony, interrupted him with great

vehemence: “You are now nothing but the functionary of a fallen

functionary; we have come to dismiss you from your office.”

Hitherto, Commander Sicardot had been ragefully biting his moustache,

and muttering insulting words. The sight of the cudgels and scythes

exasperated him; and he made desperate efforts to restrain himself from

treating these twopenny-halfpenny soldiers, who had not even a gun

apiece, as they deserved. But when he heard a gentleman in a mere

greatcoat speak of deposing a mayor girded with his scarf, he could no

longer contain himself and shouted: “You pack of rascals! If I only had

four men and a corporal, I’d come down and pull your ears for you, and

make you behave yourselves!”

Less than this was needed to raise a serious disturbance. A long shout

rose from the mob as it made a rush for the doors. Monsieur Garconnet,

in consternation, hastily quitted the balcony, entreating Sicardot to

be reasonable unless he wished to have them massacred. But in two

minutes the doors gave way, the people invaded the building and

disarmed the national guards. The mayor and the other functionaries

present were arrested. Sicardot, who declined to surrender his sword,

had to be protected from the fury of some insurgents by the chief of

the contingent from Les Tulettes, a man of great self-possession. When

the town-hall was in the hands of the Republicans, they led their

prisoners to a small cafe in the market-place, and there kept them

closely watched.

The insurrectionary army would have avoided marching through Plassans

if its leaders had not decided that a little food and a few hours’ rest

were absolutely necessary for the men. Instead of pushing forward

direct to the chief town of the department, the column, owing to the

inexcusable weakness and the inexperience of the improvised general who

commanded it, was now diverging to the left, making a detour which was

destined, ultimately, to lead it to destruction. It was bound for the

heights of Sainte-Roure, still about ten leagues distant, and it was in

view of this long march that it had been decided to pass through

Plassans, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. It was now

half-past eleven.

When Monsieur Garconnet learnt that the band was in quest of

provisions, he offered his services to procure them. This functionary

formed, under very difficult circumstances, a proper estimate of the

situation. Those three thousand starving men would have to be

satisfied; it would never do for Plassans, on waking up, to find them

still squatting on the pavements; if they withdrew before daybreak they

would simply have passed through the slumbering town like an evil

dream, like one of those nightmares which depart with the arrival of

dawn. And so, although he remained a prisoner, Monsieur Garconnet,

followed by two guards, went about knocking at the bakers’ doors, and

had all the provisions that he could find distributed among the

insurgents.

Towards one o’clock the three thousand men began to eat, squatting on

the ground, with their weapons between their legs. The market-place and

the neighbourhood of the town-hall were turned into vast open-air

refectories. In spite of the bitter cold, humorous sallies were

exchanged among the swarming multitude, the smallest groups of which

showed forth in the brilliant moonlight. The poor famished fellows

eagerly devoured their portions while breathing on their fingers to

warm them; and, from the depths of adjoining streets, where vague black

forms sat on the white thresholds of the houses, there came sudden

bursts of laughter. At the windows emboldened, inquisitive women, with

silk handkerchiefs tied round their heads, watched the repast of those

terrible insurgents, those blood-suckers who went in turn to the market

pump to drink a little water in the hollows of their hands.

While the town-hall was being invaded, the gendarmes’ barracks,

situated a few steps away, in the Rue Canquoin, which leads to the

market, had also fallen into the hands of the mob. The gendarmes were

surprised in their beds and disarmed in a few minutes. The impetus of

the crowd had carried Miette and Silvère along in this direction. The

girl, who still clasped her flagstaff to her breast, was pushed against

the wall of the barracks, while the young man, carried away by the

human wave, penetrated into the interior, and helped his comrades to

wrest from the gendarmes the carbines which they had hastily caught up.

Silvère, waxing ferocious, intoxicated by the onslaught, attacked a big

devil of a gendarme named Rengade, with whom for a few moments he

struggled. At last, by a sudden jerk, he succeeded in wresting his

carbine from him. But the barrel struck Rengade a violent blow in the

face, which put his right eye out. Blood flowed, and, some of it

splashing Silvère’s hands, quickly brought him to his senses. He looked

at his hands, dropped the carbine, and ran out, in a state of frenzy,

shaking his fingers.

“You are wounded!” cried Miette.

“No, no,” he replied in a stifled voice, “I’ve just killed a gendarme.”

“Is he really dead?” asked Miette.

“I don’t know,” replied Silvère, “his face was all covered with blood.

Come quickly.”

Then he hurried the girl away. On reaching the market, he made her sit

down on a stone bench, and told her to wait there for him. He was still

looking at his hands, muttering something at the same time. Miette at

last understood from his disquieted words that he wished to go and kiss

his grandmother before leaving.

“Well, go,” she said; “don’t trouble yourself about me. Wash your

hands.”

But he went quickly away, keeping his fingers apart, without thinking

of washing them at the pump which he passed. Since he had felt

Rengade’s warm blood on his skin, he had been possessed by one idea,

that of running to Aunt Dide’s and dipping his hands in the well-trough

at the back of the little yard. There only, he thought, would he be

able to wash off the stain of that blood. Moreover, all his calm,

gentle childhood seemed to return to him; he felt an irresistible

longing to take refuge in his grandmother’s skirts, if only for a

minute. He arrived quite out of breath. Aunt Dide had not gone to bed,

a circumstance which at any other time would have greatly surprised

Silvère. But on entering he did not even see his uncle Rougon, who was

seated in a corner on the old chest. He did not wait for the poor old

woman’s questions. “Grandmother,” he said quickly, “you must forgive

me; I’m going to leave with the others. You see I’ve got blood on me. I

believe I’ve killed a gendarme.”

“You’ve killed a gendarme?” Aunt Dide repeated in a strange voice.

Her eyes gleamed brightly as she fixed them on the red stains. And

suddenly she turned towards the chimney-piece. “You’ve taken the gun,”

she said; “where’s the gun?”

Silvère, who had left the weapon with Miette, swore to her that it was

quite safe. And for the very first time, Adélaïde made an allusion to

the smuggler Macquart in her grandson’s presence.

“You’ll bring the gun back? You promise me!” she said with singular

energy. “It’s all I have left of him. You’ve killed a gendarme; ah, it

was the gendarmes who killed him!”

She continued gazing fixedly at Silvère with an air of cruel

satisfaction, and apparently without thought of detaining him. She

never asked him for any explanation, nor wept like those good

grandmothers who always imagine, at sight of the least scratch, that

their grandchildren are dying. All her nature was concentrated in one

unique thought, to which she at last gave expression with ardent

curiosity: “Did you kill the gendarme with the gun?”

Either Silvère did not quite catch what she said, or else he

misunderstood her.

“Yes!” he replied. “I’m going to wash my hands.”

It was only on returning from the well that he perceived his uncle.

Pierre had turned pale on hearing the young man’s words. Félicité was

indeed right; his family took a pleasure in compromising him. One of

his nephews had now killed a gendarme! He would never get the post of

receiver of taxes, if he did not prevent this foolish madman from

rejoining the insurgents. So he planted himself in front of the door,

determined to prevent Silvère from going out.

“Listen,” he said to the young fellow, who was greatly surprised to

find him there. “I am the head of the family, and I forbid you to leave

this house. You’re risking both your honour and ours. To-morrow I will

try to get you across the frontier.”

But Silvère shrugged his shoulders. “Let me pass,” he calmly replied.

“I’m not a police-spy; I shall not reveal your hiding-place, never

fear.” And as Rougon continued to speak of the family dignity and the

authority with which his seniority invested him: “Do I belong to your

family?” the young man continued. “You have always disowned me. To-day,

fear has driven you here, because you feel that the day of judgment has

arrived. Come, make way! I don’t hide myself; I have a duty to

perform.”

Rougon did not stir. But Aunt Dide, who had listened with a sort of

delight to Silvère’s vehement language, laid her withered hand on her

son’s arm. “Get out of the way, Pierre,” she said; “the lad must go.”

The young man gave his uncle a slight shove, and dashed outside. Then

Rougon, having carefully shut the door again, said to his mother in an

angry, threatening tone: “If any mischief happens to him it will be

your fault. You’re an old mad-woman; you don’t know what you’ve just

done.”

Adélaïde, however, did not appear to hear him. She went and threw some

vine-branches on the fire, which was going out, and murmured with a

vague smile: “I’m used to it. He would remain away for months together,

and then come back to me in much better health.”

She was no doubt speaking of Macquart.

In the meantime, Silvère hastily regained the market-place. As he

approached the spot where he had left Miette, he heard a loud uproar of

voices and saw a crowd which made him quicken his steps. A cruel scene

had just occurred. Some inquisitive people were walking among the

insurgents, while the latter quietly partook of their meal. Amongst

these onlookers was Justin Rebufat, the son of the farmer of the

Jas-Meiffren, a youth of twenty years old, a sickly, squint-eyed

creature, who harboured implacable hatred against his cousin Miette. At

home he grudged her the bread she ate, and treated her like a beggar

picked up from the gutter out of charity. It is probable that the young

girl had rejected his advances. Lank and pale, with ill-proportioned

limbs and face all awry, he revenged himself upon her for his own

ugliness, and the contempt which the handsome, vigorous girl must have

evinced for him. He ardently longed to induce his father to send her

about her business; and for this reason he was always spying upon her.

For some time past, he had become aware of the meetings with Silvère,

and had only awaited a decisive opportunity to reveal everything to his

father, Rebufat.

On the evening in question, having seen her leave home at about eight

o’clock, Justin’s hatred had overpowered him, and he had been unable to

keep silent any longer. Rebufat, on hearing his story, fell into a

terrible rage, and declared that he would kick the gadabout out of his

house should she have the audacity to return. Justin then went to bed,

relishing beforehand the fine scene which would take place on the

morrow. Then, however, a burning desire came upon him for some

immediate foretaste of his revenge. So he dressed himself again and

went out. Perhaps he might meet Miette. In that case he was resolved to

treat her insolently. This is how he came to witness the arrival of the

insurgents, whom he followed to the town-hall with a vague presentiment

that he would find the lovers there. And, indeed, he at last caught

sight of his cousin on the seat where she was waiting for Silvère.

Seeing her wrapped in her long pelisse, with the red flag at her side,

resting against a market pillar, he began to sneer and deride her in

foul language. The girl, thunderstruck at seeing him, was unable to

speak. She wept beneath his abuse, and whist she was overcome by

sobbing, bowing her head and hiding her face, Justin called her a

convict’s daughter, and shouted that old Rebufat would give her a good

thrashing should she ever dare to return to Jas-Meiffren.

For a quarter of an hour he thus kept her smarting and trembling. Some

people had gathered round, and grinned stupidly at the painful scene.

At last a few insurgents interfered, and threatened the young man with

exemplary chastisement if he did not leave Miette alone. But Justin,

although he retreated, declared that he was not afraid of them. It was

just at this moment that Silvère came up. Young Rebufat, on catching

sight of him, made a sudden bound, as if to take flight; for he was

afraid of him, knowing that he was much stronger than himself. He could

not, however, resist the temptation to cast a parting insult on the

girl in her lover’s presence.

“Ah! I knew very well,” he cried, “that the wheelwright could not be

far off! You left us to run after that crack-brained fellow, eh? You

wretched girl! When’s the baptism to be?”

Then he retreated a few steps further on seeing Silvère clench his

fists.

“And mind,” he continued, with a vile sneer, “don’t come to our house

again. My father will kick you out if you do! Do you hear?”

But he ran away howling, with bruised visage. For Silvère had bounded

upon him and dealt him a blow full in the face. The young man did not

pursue him. When he returned to Miette he found her standing up,

feverishly wiping her tears away with the palm of her hand. And as he

gazed at her tenderly, in order to console her, she made a sudden

energetic gesture. “No,” she said, “I’m not going to cry any more,

you’ll see. I’m very glad of it. I don’t feel any regret now for having

left home. I am free.”

She took up the flag and led Silvère back into the midst of the

insurgents. It was now nearly two o’clock in the morning. The cold was

becoming so intense that the Republicans had risen to their feet and

were marching to and fro in order to warm themselves while they

finished their bread. At last their leaders gave orders for departure.

The column formed again. The prisoners were placed in the middle of it.

Besides Monsieur Garconnet and Commander Sicardot, the insurgents had

arrested Monsieur Peirotte, the receiver of taxes, and several other

functionaries, all of whom they led away.

At this moment Aristide was observed walking about among the groups. In

presence of this formidable rising, the dear fellow had thought it

imprudent not to remain on friendly terms with the Republicans; but as,

on the other hand, he did not desire to compromise himself too much, he

had come to bid them farewell with his arm in a sling, complaining

bitterly of the accursed injury which prevented him from carrying a

weapon. As he walked through the crowd he came across his brother

Pascal, provided with a case of surgical instruments and a little

portable medicine chest. The doctor informed him, in his quiet, way,

that he intended to follow the insurgents. At this Aristide inwardly

pronounced him a great fool. At last he himself slunk away, fearing

lest the others should entrust the care of the town to him, a post

which he deemed exceptionally perilous.

The insurgents could not think of keeping Plassans in their power. The

town was animated by so reactionary a spirit that it seemed impossible

even to establish a democratic municipal commission there, as had

already been done in other places. So they would simply have gone off

without taking any further steps if Macquart, prompted and emboldened

by his own private animosities, had not offered to hold Plassans in

awe, on condition that they left him twenty determined men. These men

were given him, and at their head he marched off triumphantly to take

possession of the town-hall. Meantime the column of insurgents was

wending its way along the Cours Sauvaire, and making its exit by the

Grand’-Porte, leaving the streets, which it had traversed like a

tempest, silent and deserted in its rear. The high road, whitened by

the moonshine, stretched far into the distance. Miette had refused the

support of Silvère’s arm; she marched on bravely, steady and upright,

holding the red flag aloft with both hands, without complaining of the

cold which was turning her fingers blue.