Complete Works of Emile Zola (1631 page)

Ah! that ascent of the Rue de Brias, with the steadily increasing crowd of enemies at his heels, enduring, as he went, that ignominious storm of threats and insults. Luc recalled the evening of his first arrival at Beauclair, four years before, when the despairing misery of the poor, and the hungry faces in this same street, had filled him with such acute pity that he had vowed to devote his own life to the relief of these unfortunates. What had he done, in these four years, that he should be the victim of such accumulated hatred, even to the point of being hounded by this unseemly rabble, all clamoring for his destruction? He had made himself the apostle of the future, of social conditions which were to be established on firm foundations, and governed by brotherly kindness. He had set an example of these things in La Crêcherie, where the future city was shown in embryo, and where justice and happiness already reigned. And all this only sufficed to make the whole town regard him as a malefactor, a fact of which he was made aware by this pack of hounds which barked at his heels. But what had he done that he should endure the agony of martyrdom, through which he was now passing, at the hands of those whose redemption had been his dearest work? He could pardon the hatred of those
bourgeois
whose tranquil existence he troubled, for he understood their terror of having to part with their selfish gains. He could forgive the shopkeepers, too, for they believed themselves to be ruined by him, while he had thought only of a better employment of social forces, in order to avoid a useless waste of public money. He could excuse the working-people, whom it had been his mission to save from misery, and for whom he had so carefully built his model town; yes, even though it was they who hounded him and insulted him, for their minds had been poisoned and their hearts hardened. They were but an ignorant crowd, raised in revolt against the man who desired nothing but their good, refusing to quit the chains of servitude in which they suffered, clinging to want and to the filth of ages, and closing their eyes and ears to the happiness put before them. But although he was able to find excuse for all in the charity of his sorrowful heart, it was agony to him to see among the most insulting of his followers workmen from his own factories and workshops, whom he had labored to make noble, free, and happy in the future.

Luc continued his way along the Rue de Brias, which, had never seemed so long. The frantic mob was still increasing; its shouts became more violent, and he felt its steps close upon him.

“To death with him! To death with the thief and murderer! To death with him!”

For one moment he paused and looked at his pursuers, that they might not think that he was running away, and, as it so happened that just then there was a pile of stones before a house that was being built, a man stooped, picked one up, and flung it at him. Instantly others picked up stones, and a perfect hail of them was hurled at him, with fiercer threats than ever.

“To death with him! To death with the thief and murderer! To death with him!”

They stoned him, but he made no gesture, and he would not attempt to escape the stones. He went on his way as before — on his way up his hill of suffering. He had nothing in his hands, for the slender cane that he carried he had put under his arm; and he walked calmly on, impressed with the idea that his mission made him invulnerable if he had to succeed in it. Only his sad heart suffered terribly to witness such madness and such error. Tears came into his eyes, and he had to make a great effort to prevent them from falling.

“To death with him! To death with the thief and murderer! To death with him!”

A stone struck him on the heel, another on the thigh.

It became like a game, and children joined in it, but they were not expert. The stones fell back upon the street. Twice, however, they passed so near his head that some of the crowd thought they had broken his skull. He did not turn his head, but went on up the Rue de Brias with the same measured step as if he had been quietly going home after a walk. In his grief at such an outbreak of ingratitude, it seemed as if he did not choose to inform himself of what was passing behind him all along that street of misery in which he endured martyrdom. But at last a stone hit him. It tore his right ear, while another struck him on the left hand, cutting the palm like a sharp knife. His blood flowed and fell in great red drops upon the ground.

“To death with him! To death with the thief and murderer! To death with him!”

A sudden panic seemed to seize the crowd. Some ran away in their fright. Several women screamed, and carried off their children. There were only a few of the most furious who still pursued their victim. Luc continued on his painful way. He merely looked down at his hand. Then he pulled out his handkerchief and, after wiping his ear, wrapped it round his bloody hand. His pace had grown slower, but he braced himself for a last effort as he felt upon his neck the very breath of the pursuing mob.

In front was the little, thin workman with the red hair and the uneasy eyes, in a perfect transport of passion. He was said to be a smith from the Pit. He had followed Luc steadily from the lower part of the street, and now, making a last effort, he sprang forward, and with all his strength, unconscious probably of any reason for his frenzy of hatred, he spat violently in Luc’s face.

“To death with him! To death with him, the thief and murderer! To death with him!”

Luc had now reached the end of the Rue de Brias, and this time he trembled under such an abominable insult. He became deathly pale; his whole body quivered, and he raised his strong fist, clinched in a movement of revenge.

Splendid colossus that he was, he could have annihilated this puny dwarf with one blow. But standing still for one moment in his magnificent strength, he had time to recover himself, and restrained the descent of his fist. Two large tears, however, coursed down his cheeks, tears of distress which up to that moment he had been able to restrain, but which he was powerless to conceal in the last extremity of the agony that had wrung them from him. He wept for the depths of ignorance and misunderstanding displayed by these unhappy people, whose welfare was so dear to him, and who would not permit him to save them. At length, in the midst of taunts and jeers, he was suffered to enter his own house, solitary and bleeding.

That evening Luc wished to be alone, and, therefore, he shut himself up in the cottage where he still lived, at the end of the park on the road to Combettes. He indulged no illusions in regard to the success of his acquittal. The overwhelming violence of the afternoon, the demonstration of the crowd against him, indicated the sort of warfare which would be waged against him, now that the whole town was roused. It was the last agony of a dying social condition that did not wish to die. It resisted and struggled violently in the hope of arresting the progress of humanity. Some persons, those in authority especially, relied for safety upon pitiless repression; others, of a sentimental character, made appeals to the past, to the poetry of the past, and to all that man regrets to leave forever; and there were others still, who, filled with exasperation, allied themselves with the revolutionists, as though in haste to see the end. All this Luc had had cause to perceive in the attack made upon him by Beauclair, which represented a world in miniature in the midst of the great one. He remained steadfast, determined not to abandon the struggle; but he was, none the less, profoundly distressed, and felt the necessity of overmastering his distress this evening, if he did not wish that it should be perceived. During his rare hours of weakness, he preferred to shut himself up alone, as he was now doing, and to drink his cup of suffering to the dregs, that he might reappear before men as a conqueror. Therefore he fastened the doors and windows, and gave positive orders, as he did so, that he should not be disturbed.

Towards eleven o’clock it seemed to him that he heard light steps on the road. Then it seemed as though there were a call, which, although it was soft as a breath, startled him. He went quickly to the window, opened it, and, looking through the blinds, perceived a light shadow. Then a voice of great sweetness greeted him.

“Monsieur Luc, it is I, and it is necessary that I should speak to you at once.”

It was Josine. He did not pause to reflect, but went down and unclosed the little door which opened on the road. He made her come in, and led her by the hand into his carefully closed chamber. In it a lighted lamp sent forth a peaceful glow. Then, when he looked at her closely, he was seized with great uneasiness. Her clothes were in disorder, and her face was bruised.

“Heavens, Josine! What is the matter with you? What has happened?”

She burst into tears. The collar of her dress was tom, and showed the whiteness of her neck, upon which her hair fell in confusion.

“Ah, Monsieur Luc, I made up my mind to tell you.... Not because he beat me when he came home, but because of the threats that he has made against you. It was necessary that you should know them this very evening.”

Then she proceeded to relate how Ragu, when he heard what had taken place in the Rue de Brias, and was made acquainted with the ignominious treatment accorded to his employer, had gone on a debauch to Caffiaux’s
cabaret
with Bourron and his other boon companions. He had just come back from there, intoxicated, crying out that he had had enough of the old sty at La Crêcherie, and that he would not remain another day in a place where one was bored within an inch of his life, and had not even the right to drink a glass too much. Then, after having delivered himself of a storm of vulgar abuse, he had ordered her to pack their goods, so as to move the very next morning to the Pit, where all workmen from La Crêcherie were received with open arms. And when she tried to put him off, he had ended by beating her and turning her out-of-doors.

“For me, Monsieur Luc, it does not matter. It is you; great Heavens, it is you whom they insult, and whom they wish so much to injure! Ragu will go off to-morrow morning; nothing will stop him, and he will take with him five or six of his friends, whose names I do not know;... and I — what can I do? I shall be obliged to follow him, and all this troubles me so greatly that I felt that I must tell you about it at once, for fear I should never see you again.”

He looked at her steadily. A new wave of bitterness surged over his heart. The evil was even greater, then, than he had anticipated. He saw his own workmen leaving him, in order to return to their hard, filthy, miserable life of former times; mere homesickness was taking them back to the inferno from which he had struggled so patiently to deliver them. Four years had given him no hold whatever upon either their intelligence or their affection. Worst of all, Josine was no happier than she had been then; she came back to him, insulted, beaten, thrust out into the street, just as she had been on that first day. Nothing had been accomplished; everything was still to be begun, for was not Josine the representative of the suffering people? His impulse towards action had begun upon that evening when he found her so sad, so desolate, the victim of this accursed system of labor, which held her in its clutches, as though it were some species of slavery. She had been, then, the humblest, the lowliest, the most abased of human creatures, yet she was the fairest, the gentlest, the most saintly. The world would never be saved so long as woman suffered.

“Oh, Josine, Josine, how much pain you give me, and how I love you!” he murmured, in a voice of infinite tenderness, while she also wept, moved by his distress.

But the sight of his tears caused her still greater suffering. For Luc to give way thus, to show such deep emotion! he who was her god, whom she adored as all-powerful because of the help he had given her, the happiness which he had brought into her life! The thought of the insults he had just endured, and of his fearful martyrdom upon the Rue de Brias, redoubled her adoration, and drew her insensibly towards him with an irresistible impulse to pour balm into his wounds and to yield him her entire devotion, if by so doing she could for a moment ease his pain. Her only thought was how she could relieve his torture, and by what means she could efface the insults offered him, and make him feel that one heart at least admired, venerated, adored him. She leaned forward, her hands extended, and her face transfigured with love.

“Ah, Monsieur Luc, how grieved I am to see your distress, and how delighted I should be if I could relieve your suffering, even for a moment!”

They were so near each other that her warm breath touched his face. Their mutual sorrow inspired them both with a tenderness that struggled for expression. How great was his suffering! How great was hers! For the moment his mind was entirely filled with the thought of her, even as she, in her turn, had no thought but of him; and the hearts of both were overflowing with an infinite compassion, an infinite yearning for love and for each other.

“It is not I who should be pitied; it is only you, Josine, whose suffering is a cruel wrong, and whom I long to save.”

“No, no, Monsieur Luc; I am of no consequence; it is you who do not deserve to suffer, because, in everything, you are to us like the good God Himself.”

She leaned forward gently, and he pressed her to him with passionate fervor. A common need impelled them towards each other, like two flames, which meet and mingle to become a single focus of light and warmth. The destiny that designed them for each other, that meant them to be sharers in a common yearning for the happiness of their race, was but fulfilled. Everything lent itself to this brief vision of love, which for so long had gathered strength as it penetrated into the depths of their hearts, and which this night had suddenly called into being. Their two souls met in this embrace so long deferred, and in it their love expanded like a perfect blossom. It was but the natural course of their existence, and no regret or remorse for it troubled their minds.

As Luc held Josine in his arms, in the calmness of that quiet room, he was conscious of an abiding consolation. He felt that through her his communion with the disinherited of the earth was attained. His union with them was sealed, for only through a woman’s tenderness could he redeem humanity. Ah, what comfort she had brought him, this little working-woman, ill-treated and oppressed, whom he had first met dying of hunger, but who now came to him as the vision of relief and gladness. She had known the worst depths of degradation, and through this knowledge she would aid him to create a new world of joy and happiness. She was the one thing needful to accomplish his mission, for upon the day that he should have redeemed woman, the whole earth would be saved.