Complete Works of Emile Zola (1803 page)

No, I rather fancy it is in a corner of the plain, beside a stream. It is so small that a curtain of poplars suffices to conceal it from view. Its thatched cottages vanish in the osier-holt on the bank, like modest women at the bath. For a sward, it has a bit of green meadow; a quickset hedge encloses it on all sides, like a garden. You pass by it without seeing it. The voices of the women who are washing, resound like the notes of feathered songsters. There is not a single streak of smoke. It slumbers peacefully in the recesses of its verdant alcove.

None of us know it. The neighbouring town is hardly aware of its existence, and it is so humble that no geographer has ever troubled about it. It is nothing. When its name is uttered it recalls no remembrance. Among the swarm of towns with ringing appellations, it is a place unknown, without history, glory, or shame, and it stands modestly in the background.

And it is no doubt for that reason that the little village smiles so sweetly. Its labourers live in the desert; its babes roll on the river’s bank; the women spin in the shade of the trees. As for itself, quite delighted at its obscurity, it finds ample pleasure in the charm of open air. It is so far from the mud and noise of great cities! Its ray of sunshine suffices it. It takes delight in its silence, its humility, and in that curtain of poplars hiding it from the whole world

III

And to-morrow, perhaps, the whole world will know of the existence of the little village.

Ah! what wretchedness! The river will be crimson, the curtain of poplars will have been swept away by bullets, the gutted cottages will testify to the silent despair of the families;
the little village will be famous.

The song of women washing at the stream will be heard no more; there will be no more babes rolling on the river banks, no more harvests, no more silence, no more happy humility. A new name in history, victory or defeat, a new sanguinary page, a new corner of our country enriched with the blood of our offspring.

It smiles, it slumbers, it does not know that it will give its name to a butchery, and to-morrow it will weep, its name will re-echo through Europe with a death-rattle. Then it will remain on the earth like a stain of blood. It, so gay, so tender, will be surrounded by a dark sinister circle, it will see pallid visitors pass before its ruins, as one passes before the slabs at the Morgue. It will be accursed.

As for us, if it be Austerlitz or Magenta, we shall hear it resound in our hearts as the trumpet’s blast. And, if it be Waterloo, it will roll lugubriously in our memory, like the sound of a drum muffled with crape, that heads the funeral procession of a nation.

How it will then regret its solitary river-banks, its ignorant peasantry, its remote corner, so far removed from men, known only to the swallows who returned there each spring! Defiled, ashamed, with its sky overcast by a flight of carrion crows, and its slimy soil stinking of death, it will go down to posterity as a place of slaughter, an ominous spot where two nations slew one another.

The nest of love, the nest of peace, the little village will be naught henceforth but a cemetery, the common pit where weeping mothers will not be able to go and place their wreaths.

IV

France has strewn the world with these distant graveyards. We could kneel and pray at the four corners of Europe. Père Lachaise, Montmartre, Montparnasse, are not our only fields of rest; there are others that bear the names of all our victories and all our defeats. There is not a corner beneath the whole canopy of heaven, from China to Mexico, from the snow of Russia to the sand of Egypt, where some murdered Frenchman does not lie.

They are silent and deserted cemeteries, wrapped in heavy slumber amidst the intense peacefulness of the country. The greater number of them, almost all, spread out beside some desolate hamlet, the crumbling walls of which are still full of horror. Waterloo was but a farm, at Magenta there were barely fifty houses. A frightful blast has blown over these infinitely small places, and the syllables that form their names, which were innocent the previous evening, have taken such an odour of blood and powder that people will for ever shudder when they find them on their lips.

Thoughtfully I cast my eyes on a map of the seat of war. I followed the banks of the Rhine, I searched among the plains and the mountains. Was the little village to the right or left of the river? Must I look for it in the neighbourhood of the fortresses, or further on in some broad expanse of solitude?

And then, closing my eyes, I endeavoured to picture to myself that peaceful spot, that curtain of poplar trees drawn before the white houses, that piece of meadow-land skimmed by the wings of the swallows, those songs of the women washing, that virgin soil to which war was to do violence, and the news of the contamination of which was to be brutally blown to the four comers of the horizon by the bugles.

But where then is the little village?

SOUVENIRS

I

OH! the everlasting rain, the horrid rain, the grey rain that drapes the skies of May and June in crape! You go to the window and draw back the curtain. The sun is swamped. Between two showers, it rises to the surface, pallid, turned green, like a heavenly body that has committed suicide in despair, and which some celestial mariner drags back with his boathook.

Do you remember, Ninon, the bitter north wind in spring, after it has rained? You leave Paris with the spring weather of the poets, the springtime one has been longing for in one’s heart, a mild season, a profusion of flowers, delicious twilights. You reach your destination at nightfall. The sky is deathlike, not a spark of brightness lights up the sunset which recalls to mind a dismal grate full of cold cinders. You have to stride across pools of water in the pathways with the gnawing damp of the foliage on your shoulders. And when you are in the great melancholy room which winter has made chilly, you shiver, you close doors and windows, and light a great fire of old vine stalks, hurling imprecations against the sun’s laziness!

The rain keeps you confined to the house for a week. In the distance, in the middle of the lake formed by the inundated meadows, there is always the same curtain of poplar trees melting into water, streaming with it and looking thin and indistinct in the vapour that envelops them. Then a grey ocean, a fine rain drifting along and barring the horizon. You yawn, you endeavour to take an interest in the ducks that venture into the downpour, in the blue umbrellas of the country folk passing by. You yawn wider. The chimneys smoke, the green wood sweats without burning, it seems as if the flood were rising, that it’s roaring at the door, that it penetrates through all the chinks like fine sand. And in despair you take the train again, you return to Paris vowing that sun and spring do not exist.

And yet nothing causes me more despair than those cabs which you meet hurrying towards the railway stations. They are loaded with trunks, and their occupants pass through the city with the beaming countenances of prisoners who have just been set at liberty.

I tramp along the pavements, I watch them rolling towards blue rivers, great seas, great mountains, great woods. This one is perhaps bound for a hollow amidst rocks, that I know of near Marseilles; you are quite at your ease in that hollow, where you can strip as in a bathing-machine, and where the waves come to meet you. That one is certainly running off to Normandy, to that verdant nook I love, near the hillside which produces that light tart wine with the bouquet that so agreeably tickles the inside of one’s throat. That other is no doubt setting out for the unknown, here or there, some place where one will assuredly be very comfortable, in the shade, perhaps in the sun, I don’t know; in a word, there where I am burning to go.

The drivers flog their sorry nags with the handles of their whips. They seem to have no idea that they are whipping my dream. They are saying to themselves that the trunks are heavy and the gratuities light. They do not even know that they are saddening the hearts of the poor fellows who pass along on Shanks’s mare, and whose destiny it is to char the soles of their boots at Paris, on the burning pavement, in July and August.

Oh! that string of cabs, loaded with trunks, rolling towards the railway stations! that vision of the great cage thrown open, of happy birds taking their flight! that cruel raillery of liberty crossing our galleys of streets and squares! that nightmare of all my springs troubling me in my dungeon, filling me with an uncontrollable desire for foliage and cloudless skies! I should like to become quite small, very small indeed, and slip into the big trunk of that lady with the pink bonnet, whose brougham is going in the direction of the Lyons railway station. One would assuredly feel very comfortable in that lady’s trunk. I can picture to myself the silky skirts, the fine linen, all kinds of soft things perfumed and pleasant. I would lie on some pale silk, I would have cambric pocket-handkerchiefs beneath my nose, and if I were cold, faith, never mind! I would cover myself with all the petticoats.

The lady is extremely pretty. Twenty-five at the most A lovely chin with a dimple that must deepen when she smiles. I should like to make her laugh just to see. That rascal of a coachman is very fortunate to drive her about in his box. She must be fond of violets. I am sure her linen is scented with that perfume. It is exquisite. I roll at the bottom of her trunk for hours and days together. I have hollowed out a place to lie in at the left-hand corner, between the bundle of chemises and a large cardboard box that is somewhat in my way. I had the curiosity to raise the lid of that box; it contained two hats, a small pocket-book full of letters, then things I would not look at. I placed the cardboard box under my head and made a pillow of it. I roll, roll. The stockings are on my right; beneath me are three costumes, and on my left I feel things that offer more resistance, which I fancy I recognise as pairs of little boots. Good gracious, how comfortable one feels among all these musk-pervaded chiffons!

Where may we be going to? Shall we stop in Burgundy? Shall we turn aside towards Switzerland or go down as far as Marseilles? I picture to myself that we are going to that rocky hollow, you know, where one can strip as in a bathing-machine, and where the waves come to meet you. She will bathe. One is a hundred leagues away from idiots. The inlet, at its extremity, is rounded off by the deep blue of the Mediterranean. Above, at the edge of the hollow, are three pines. And, with bare feet on the large slabs of yellow stone which pave the sea, we dislodge arapedes with the points of our knives. She doesn’t look stuck-up. She will enjoy the open-air, and we shall be like children. If she cannot swim, I will teach her.

The trunk is being terribly shaken, we must be ascending the Rue de Lyon. And how delightful it will be when, on reaching Marseilles, she opens her trunk! She will be very much surprised to find me there, in the left-hand corner.

I — trust I shall not crumple all these flounces, on which I am lying, too much!—”What, sir! you are there, you have dared!”

“Certainly, madam; there is nothing one would not dare to get out of prison—” And I will explain it to her and she will forgive me.

Ah! here we are at the railway station. I think they are booking me —

Alas! alas! it rains, and the lady with the pink bonnet is on her way all alone in the rain, with her big trunk, to go and yawn at the house of some old aunt in the country, where she will shiver, in a bad temper, at the chilly spring.

II

One must have resided in a pious and aristocratic town, one of those small places where the grass grows in the streets, and where the convent bells strike the hours in the sleepy atmosphere, to know what processions on Corpus Christi day are like.

At Paris, four priests walk round the Madeleine. In Provence the clergy have possession of the thoroughfares for a week. All the population of the Middle Ages is resuscitated on those bright afternoons, and proceeds along, singing hymns and trotting candles about, with a couple of gendarmes at the head, and the Mayor, girded with his sash, at the tail.

I have not forgotten them. They were delightful times for us college boys, who only wanted an excuse to run about the streets. To be candid, processions in those amorous towns are just the thing for lovers. The girls show off their new gowns all along the way. A new gown is indispensable. There is not a young girl, however poor she may be, who on those occasions does not drape herself in a piece of brand new printed calico. In the evening the churches are in obscurity, and many are the hands that meet.

I belonged to a musical club that took part in all the solemnities. I have heavy sins on my conscience. I tax myself with having at that period awakened more than one functionary at daybreak with a concert, on his return from Paris with the red ribbon. I tax myself with having trotted the official divinity about, as well as the saints who make it rain, and the holy virgins who cure cholera. I have even assisted the moving-out of a convent of cloistered nuns. The poor girls, wrapped up in large pieces of grey linen so that no one might see their faces or limbs, stumbled, supported each other like phantoms of the departed surprised by dawn. And tiny white hands, child-like hands, appeared at the edge of the grey cloths.

Alas! yes, I have partaken of the vestry collations. We were not paid for what we did; they gave us a few cakes. I remember that on the day the nuns were installed in the new convent we were served by means of a turning-box. Bottles, plates of cakes followed one another in the wall as if by enchantment. And what bottles, ye gods I of every shape, every colour, containing every kind of liquor. I have often dreamt of that strange cellar which could supply such a variety of choice wines. It was a hotch-potch of good things.

I have long done penitence since those days of error, and I think I have been pardoned.

The streets which the procession is to follow are decked from early morning with flags. Each window has something. In the wealthy quarters there are old tapestries displaying great mythological figures, all the pagan Olympia, nude and pallid, coming to see Catholic Olympia pass by with its pale virgins and bleeding Christs; there are also silk quilts taken from the beds of certain noble dames, damask curtains unhooked from the poles in the drawing-rooms, velvety carpets, and all sorts of costly material that astonishes the passers-by. The middle classes show their embroidered muslins and finest linen; and, in the quarters of the poor, the good women, rather than display nothing, hang out their neckerchiefs and scarves which they have tacked together. Then the streets are worthy of the Host.