Complete Works of Emile Zola (10 page)

Poverty is mild and infamy light. And now Heaven is punishing me, bowing me beneath a terrible hurricane, beneath an implacable wound.

At last, brothers, you can give up all hope of me: I have no more steps to descend, for I am at the bottom of the ladder; I am about to abandon myself to the gulf — I am lost forever.

Do not question me. I allow my cries to float to your ears, for grief is too bitter for me to succeed in stifling its groans. But I restrain the words upon my lips; I wish neither to frighten you nor to sadden you with the recital of the terrible history of my heart.

Say to yourselves that Claude is dead, that you will never see him more, that all is, indeed, over. I prefer to suffer alone, even if I should die of my suffering, to troubling your holy tranquility by tearing myself open before you, by showing you my bleeding wound.

No, you will suffer from the revelation, but it is impossible for me to maintain silence. I will find some consolation in imparting to you all my thoughts and actions; I will be quieted when I know that you are sobbing with me.

Brothers, I love Laurence!

CHAPTER XVI.

REMINISCENCES.

LET me regret, let me remember, let me review all my youth in a single glance.

We were then twelve years old. I met you one October evening upon the college green, beneath the plane trees, near the little fountain. You were weak and timid. I know not what united us; our weakness, perhaps. From that evening, we walked together, separating from each other for a few hours, but clasping hands with stronger friendship after each separation.

I know that we have neither the same flesh nor the same heart. You live and think differently from me, but you love as I do. There is the secret of our fraternity. You have my tenderness and my pity; you kneel in life, you seek some one upon whom to bestow your souls. We have a communion of tenderness and affection.

Do you remember the first years of our acquaintance? We read together idle tales, grand romances of adventure which held us for six months beneath their fascinating spell. We wrote verses and made chemical experiments; we indulged in painting and music. There was, at the house of one of us, on the fourth floor, a large chamber which served as our laboratory and atelier. There, in the solitude, we committed our childish crimes: we ate the raisins hanging from the ceiling, we risked our eyes over retorts brought to a white heat, we wrote rhymed comedies in three acts which I yet read to-day when I wish to smile. I still see that large chamber, with its broad window, flooded with white light and full of old newspapers, engravings trodden under foot, chairs with their straw bottoms gone, and broken wood horses. It seems to me pleasant and smiling, when I look at my chamber of to-day and perceive, standing in the middle of it, Laurence who terrifies and attracts me.

Later, the open air intoxicated us. We enjoyed the healthful dissipation of the fields and long walks. It was madness, fury. We broke the retorts, forgot the raisins and closed the door of the laboratory. In the morning, we set out before day. I came beneath your windows to summon you in the midst of darkness, and we hastened to quit the town, our game bags on our backs, our guns upon our shoulders. I know not what kind of game we chased; we went along, idling in the dew, running amid the tall grass which bent down beneath our feet with sharp and quick sounds; we wallowed in the country like young colts escaped from the stable. Our game bags were empty on our return, but our minds were full and our hearts also.

What a delicious district is Provence, biting and mild for those who are penetrated by its ardor and tenderness! I remember those white, damp and almost cool dawns, which filled my being and the sky above with the peace of supreme innocence; I remember the overwhelming sun and noon, the hot, heavy and fragrant atmosphere which weighed down upon the earth, those broad rays which poured from the heights like gold in fusion — virile and powerful hour, giving to the blood a precocious maturity and to the earth a marvelous fertility. We walked like brave children amid those dawns and scorching noons, young and frisky in the morning, but grave and more thoughtful in the evening; we talked in brotherly fashion, sharing our bread together and experiencing the same emotions.

The lands were yellow or red, desert and desolate, sown with slender trees; here and there were groves of foliage, of a dark green, staining the broad gray stretch of the plain; then, in the distance, all around the horizon, were low hills ranged in an immense circle, full of jagged spots, of a light blue or a pale violet, standing out with a delicate sharpness against the dark, deep blue of the sky. I can still see those penetrating landscapes of my youth. I well know that I belong to them, that what little of love and truth is in me comes to me from their tranquil delights.

At other times, towards evening, when the sun was sinking, we took the broad white highway which leads to the river. Poor river, meager as a brook, here narrow, troubled and deep, there broad and flowing in a sheet of silver over a bed of stones. We chose one of the hollows, on the edge of a lofty bank which the waters had eaten away, and in it we bathed beneath the overhanging branches of the trees. The last rays of the sun glided between the leaves, sowing the somber shade with luminous specks, and rested upon the bosom of the river in broad plates of gold.

We perceived only water and verdure, little corners of the sky, the summit of a distant mountain, the vineyards in a neighboring field. And we lived thus in the silence and the coolness. Seated upon the bank, in the short grass, with legs hanging and bare feet splashing in the water, we enjoyed our youth and our friendship.

What delicious dreams we indulged in upon those shores, the gravel of which was being gradually borne away every day by the waves! Our dreams vanish thus, borne away by the resistless current of life!

To-day these remembrances are harsh and implacable towards me. At certain hours, in my idleness, a remembrance of that age will suddenly come to me, sharp and dolorous, with the violence of a blow from a club. I feel a burning sensation running across my breast. It is my youth which is awakening in me, desolate and dying. I take my head in my hands, restraining my sobs; I plunge with a bitter delight into the history of those vanished days and take pleasure in enlarging the wound, the while repeating to myself that all this is no more and will never be again.

Then, the recollection vanishes; the lightning has passed over me; I am overwhelmed with grief, recalling nothing.

Later still, at the age when the man awakens in the child, our life changed. I prefer the first hours to those hours of passion and budding virility; the recollections of our hunting excursions, of our vagabond existence, are more agreeable to me than the far off vision of young girls, whose visages remain imprinted on my heart. I see them, pale and indistinct, in their coldness, their virgin indifference; they passed by, knowing me not, and, to-day, when I dream of them again, I say to myself that they cannot dream of me. I know not how it is, but this thought makes them strangers to me; there is no exchange of recollections, and I regard them in the light of thoughts alone, in the light of visions which I have cherished and which have vanished.

Let me also recall the society which surrounded us: those professors, excellent men, who would have been better had they possessed more youth and more love; those comrades of ours, the wicked and the good, who were without pity and without soul like all children. I must be a strange creature, fit only to love and weep, for I was softened and suffered from the time I first walked. My college years were years of weeping. I had in me the pride of loving natures. I was not loved, for I was not understood and I refused to make myself known. To-day, I no longer have any hatred; I see clearly that I was born to tear myself with my own hands. I have pardoned my former comrades who ruffled me, wounded me in my pride and in my tenderness; they were the first to teach me the rude lessons of the world, and I almost thank them for their harshness. Among them were sorry, foolish and envious lads, who must now be perfect imbeciles and wicked men. I have forgotten even their names.

Oh! let me, let me recollect. My past life, at this hour of anguish, comes to me with a singular sensation of pity and regret, of pain and joy. I feel myself deeply agitated, when I compare all that is with all that is no more. All that is no more are Provence, the broad, open country flooded with sunlight, you, my tears and my laughter of other days; all that is no more are my hopes and dreams, my innocence and pride. Alas I all that is are Paris with its mud, my garret with its poverty; all that is are Laurence, infamy, my tenderness and love for that miserable and degraded woman.

Listen: it was, I believe, in the month of June. We were together on the brink of the river, in the grass, our faces turned towards the sky. I was talking to you. I have this instant recollected my words, and the remembrance of them burns me like a red hot iron. I had confided to you that my heart had need of purity and innocence, that I loved the snow because it was white, that I preferred the water of the springs to wine because it was limpid. I pointed to the sky; I told you that it was blue and immense like the clear, deep ocean, and that I loved the ocean and the sky. Then, I spoke to you of woman; I said I would have preferred that she were born, like the wild flowers, in the open air, amid the dew, that she were a water plant, that an eternal current washed her heart and her flesh. I swore to you that I would love only a pure girl, a spotless innocent, whiter than the snow, more limpid than the water of the spring, deeper and more immense in purity than the sky and the ocean. For a long while, I held forth enthusiastically to you thus, quivering with a holy wish, anxious for the companionship of innocence and immaculate whiteness, unable to pause in my dream which was soaring towards the light.

At last, I possess a companion, a spotless innocent! She is beside me and I love her. Oh! if you could see her! She has a sombre and unfeeling visage like a clouded sky; the waters were low and she has bathed in the mud. My spotless innocent is soiled to such an extent that. formerly I would not have dared to touch her with my finger, for fear of dying therefrom. Yet I love her.

I am laughing; I feel a strange delight in jeering at myself. I dreamed of luxury, and I have no longer even a morsel of cloth with which to clothe myself; I dreamed of purity, and I love Laurence!

Amid my poverty, when my heart bled and I realized that I loved, my throat was choked, terror seized upon me. Then it was that my remembrances rose up. I have not been able to drive them away; they have remained with me, implacable, in a crowd, tumultuous, all entering simultaneously into my breast and burning it. I did not summon them; they came and I yielded to them. Every time I weep, my youth returns to console me, but its consolations redouble my tears, for I dream of that youth which is dead forever.

CHAPTER XVII.

CLAUDE’S LOVE.

I CANNOT stop, I cannot lie to myself. I had resolved to hide my misfortune from myself, to seem ignorant of my wound, hoping to forget. One sometimes kills death in its germ when one believes in life.

I suffer and weep. Without doubt, by searching within myself I will find a lamentable certainty, but I prefer to know everything to living thus, affecting a carelessness which costs me such great effort.

I wish to ascertain to what point of despair I have descended; I wish to open my heart and there read the truth; I wish to penetrate to the utmost depths of my being, to interrogate it and to demand from it an account of itself. At least, I ought to discover how it happens that I have fallen so low; I have the right to probe my wound, at the risk of torturing myself and ascertaining that I must die of it.

If, in this disagreeable task, I should make my wound greater than it is, if my love should increase by affirming itself, I will accept this augmented pain with joy, for the brutal truth is necessary to those who walk unshackled in life, obeying only their instincts.

I love Laurence, and I exact from my heart the explanation of this love. I did not fall in love with her at first sight, as men fall in love with women in romances. I have felt myself attracted little by little, melted, so to speak, gnawed and covered gradually by the horrible affliction. Now, I am altogether under its influence; there is not a single fibre of my flesh which does not belong to Laurence.

A month ago I was free; I kept Laurence beside me as one keeps an object which one cannot cast into the street. At present, she has bound me to her; I watch over her, I gaze at her when she is wrapped in slumber; I do not wish her to leave me.

All this was decreed by fate, and I think I can comprehend how love for this woman entered into me, took slow possession of my entire being. Amid suffering and abandonment, one cannot live with impunity beside a woman who suffers as one does, who is abandoned as one is. Tears have their sympathy, hunger is fraternal; those who are dying together, with empty stomachs, warmly grasp each other’s hands.

I have remained five weeks in this sad and cold chamber, always in Laurence’s company. I saw only her in the whole world; she was for me the universe, life, affection. From morning till night, I had before my eyes the face of this woman upon which I imagined I sometimes surprised a rapid flash of friendship. As for me, I was wretched and weak; I lived wrapped in my coverlet, an exile from society, not even possessing the power to go to seek my portion of the sunlight. I no longer had the smallest hope of anything; I had limited my existence to these four dark walls, to that corner of the sky which I saw between the chimney tops; I had fastened myself up in my dungeon, I had there imprisoned my thoughts, my wishes. I know not if you can thoroughly understand this: if you are some day without a shirt, you will realize that man can create a world, vast and full of living beings, from the bed upon which he is stretched.

I was in that condition when I met a woman as I went from the window to the door, enveloped in my coverlet. Laurence, seated in her chair, saw me walking about for hours together. Each time I trudged back and forth, I passed before her and found her eyes tranquilly following me. I felt her glance fasten itself upon me, and I was solaced in my weariness. I cannot tell what intense and strange consolation I derived from knowing myself regarded by a living creature, by a woman. It is from the period of these glances that my love must date. I perceived for the first time that I was not alone; I felt a profound satisfaction in discovering a human creature near me.