Complete Works of Emile Zola (938 page)

PART II

CHAPTER I

It was four o’clock; the dawn was barely breaking: the pink dawn of early May. Under the glimmering sky the buildings of La Borderie still slept, half in gloom: three long buildings on three sides of the vast square yard, the sheep-cot at the end, the barns on the right, the cow-house, stable, and dwelling-house on the left. Closing the fourth side, the cart-entrance was shut, and secured by an iron bar. On the manure-pit a big solitary yellow cock sounded the reveille in brilliant, clarion tones. A second cock made answer, then a third, and thus the call was caught up and passed on from farm to farm throughout the length and breadth of La Beauce.

On that night, as on most other nights, Hourdequin had joined Jacqueline in her bed-room, a little servant’s room that he had allowed her to embellish with flowered wall-paper, chintz curtains, and mahogany furniture. Despite her growing power, she had encountered violent opposition whenever she had made an attempt to share with him the room formerly occupied by his deceased wife, the conjugal chamber which he protected out of some remnant of respect. She was much hurt at this, understanding that she would never be the real mistress until she slept in the old oak bedstead with red cotton hangings.

Jacqueline awoke at early dawn and lay on her back, with her eyelids wide open, while the farmer was still snoring beside her. Amid the exciting warmth of the bed, her black eyes were still dreamy, and her nude, slim, girlish form was throbbing. Nevertheless, she hesitated; then, making up her mind, she lightly stepped across her master — moving so lightly and so deftly that he did not feel her — and noiselessly slipped on a petti­coat with hands feverish with her sudden desire. However, as she happened to knock against a chair, he, in his turn, opened his eyes.

“Why, you’re dressing! Where are you going?”

“I’m anxious about the bread, and am going to look at it.”

Hourdequin dozed off again, mumbling, astonished at the excuse and with his brain at work amid his drowsiness. What an odd notion. The bread didn’t need her at that time in the morning. And, goaded by a sharp suspicion, he all at once became wide awake. Amazed at seeing her no longer there, he gazed wanderingly round this servant’s room, at his slip­pers, his pipe, and his razor. What! another freak of passion of that baggage for some farm hand? During the couple of minutes he needed to recover himself, he took a retrospect of the past.

His father, Isidore Hourdequin, was the descendant of an old peasant family of Cloyes, refined and raised to the middle classes in the sixteenth century. All of them had held posts in the salt-revenue: one had been granary-keeper at Chartres; another, controller at Châteaudun; and Isidore possessed some sixty thousand francs when, at twenty-six years of age, on being deprived of his office by the Revolution, he conceived the idea of making a fortune out of the thefts of those scoundrelly republicans who offered the national property for sale. He had an admirable knowledge of the district, he sniffed round, made calculations, and at last paid thirty thousand francs — a bare fifth of the true value — for the three hundred and seventy acres of La Borderie, which was all that remained of the ancient demesne of the Rognes-Bouquevals. Not a single peasant had dared to risk his crowns; only townsfolk, pettifoggers, and financiers derived profit from the Revolutionary proceedings. Besides, it was purely a speculation, for Isidore had no intention of encumbering himself with a farm. He reckoned confidently on selling it at its full value when the disturbances were over, and thus getting his money back five-fold. But the Directory came on, and the depreciation of property continued; so that he could not sell to the expected advantage. His land held him in its grasp, and he became its prisoner; insomuch that, obstinately unwilling to let any of it go, he resolved to farm it himself, in the hope of thus at last realising his dreams of fortune. About this time he married the daughter of a neighbouring farmer who brought him a hundred and twenty acres, so that he now owned some five hundred; and it was thus that this townsman, sprung three centuries previously from a peasant stock, returned to tillage. To tillage on a large scale, how­ever; to the landed aristocracy that had replaced the old all-powerful feudalism.

Alexander Hourdequin, his only son, was born in 1804. He had commenced his studies, discreditably enough, at the college of Châteaudun. He had a passion for land, and decided to return home and help his father, disappointing another dream of the latter, who, finding his fortune advance but slowly, would have liked to sell everything off and start his son in some liberal profession. The young man was twenty-seven, when, on the death of his father, he became master of La Borderie. He was a champion of new methods; his first care, in marrying, was to look out, not for property but for money, for, according to him, if the farm stagnated, the fault lay in lack of capital. The dower he desired, amounting to fifty thousand francs, was brought him by a sister of the notary, Baillehache, a ripe damsel, his senior by five years, extremely ugly, but good-tempered. Then began a long struggle between the farmer and his property; at first a prudent one, but gradually made feverish by mistakes: a struggle renewed every season, every day, which, without making him rich, en­abled him to lead the broad life of a big full-blooded man, resolved to deny himself no gratification. For several years things went from bad to worse. His wife had presented him with two children: a boy who had enlisted out of distaste for farming, and who had been made a captain after Sol­ferino; and a delicate, charming girl, the apple of his eye, and the heiress of La Borderie, now that his ungrateful son had become a soldier of fortune. But he lost his wife, and, two months later, his daughter. This was a terrible shock. The captain had left off coming to La Borderie save once a year, and the father all at once found himself alone in the world, without a future, without the stimulus of working for his progeny. But bleed as the wound might internally, he remained outwardly erect, violent, and overbearing. Before the peasantry, who sneered at his machines, and longed for the fall of this middle-class man that presumed to dabble in their occupation, he stood firm. Besides, what could he do? He was ever the closer prisoner of his land. The accumulated labour, and the capital sunk, shut him in more tightly every day, and left him no possible outlet but through disaster.

Hourdequin, square shouldered, broad and florid in face, retaining no other token of middle-class refinement than his small hands, had always been despotically virile towards his female servants. Even in his wife’s time he had ravished them all, as a mere matter-of-course, a thing of no further importance. If those daughters of poor peasants that take to dressmaking occasionally avoid a fall, not one of those that take service in farms escape man: servant or master. Madame Hourdequin was still alive when Jacqueline was engaged, out of charity, at La Borderie. Cognet, an old drunkard, used to beat her black and blue; and she was so weazened and scraggy that the bones of her body showed through her rags. Moreover, she was of such reputed ugliness that children used to hoot at her. She would have been taken for under twelve, though in reality she was then nearly eighteen. She helped the servant, and was em­ployed in menial work — in washing up, sweeping the yard, and keeping the live-stock clean — and she became more and more grimy, as if dirt were a delight to her. After the death of the mistress, however, she seemed to get a bit cleaner. All the servants used to turn her up in the straw: not a man came to the farm without doing what he chose with her; and one day, as she went down with her master into the cellar, he also, though previously disdainful, tried to see what the ill-favoured slattern was like. But she resisted furiously, and scratched and bit him so effectually that he was obliged to let her go.

From that moment her fortune was made. She resisted for six months, and then yielded herself up, a little bit at a time. From the yard she rose to the kitchen as servant proper; next she engaged a girl as help; then, grown quite the lady, she had a maid of her own. Now the little scullion had become a stylish, pretty-looking girl, extremely dark, with a firm breast and strong supple limbs, such as develop in those previously made unduly thin by hardship. She became coquettish and extravagant, smothering herself with all sorts of scents, but retaining withal a leaven of uncleanliness. The people of Rognes, the neighbouring farmers, were none the less amazed at the intrigue. Was it actually possible that a man of substance should take a fancy to a wench like that, neither beautiful nor plump — in short, “La Cognette,” the daughter of that drunkard Cognet, who might have been seen for the last twenty years breaking stones on the public highway! A fine papa-in-law! And a pretty piece of goods she was! The peasants did not even comprehend that this “piece of goods” was their vengeance, the revenge of the village upon the farm, of the wretched tiller of the soil upon the enriched townsman who had become a large landholder. Hourdequin, at his critical age of fifty-five, gradually became the slave of his fleshly desires, feeling physical need of Jacqueline, as one has the physical needs of hunger and thirst. When she chose to be especially agreeable, she would twine round him cat-like, and satiate him with unscrupulous, brazen shamelessness, such as courtezans do not venture upon; and for one of those hours he humbled himself and begged of her still to stay after quarrels and terrible spasms of resolution, in which he threatened to kick her out of doors.

Only the evening before he had all but struck her, at the close of a stormy attempt she had made to sleep in the bed where his wife had died; and she had refused his embraces all night, beating him away each time he approached; for, though she constantly indulged herself with the farm servants, she kept him on short commons, whetting his passion by abstinence so as to augment her power over him. And thus that morning, in that moist room, in that tumbled bed where her presence still breathed, anger and desire again seized hold of him. He had long had scent of her many infidelities, and now he leapt out of bed, crying aloud: “The strumpet! If I only catch her!”

He dressed rapidly and went down stairs.

Jacqueline had flitted through the silent house in the first faint glimmer of dawn. As she crossed the yard she gave a start on seeing the old shepherd, Soulas, already up. But her desire was so strong that she paid no heed. So much the worse! She slipped past the stable, accommodating fifteen horses, where four of the farm waggoners slept, and made for the garret at the end where Jean had his bed — some straw and a coverlet, but no sheets. Embracing him in his sleep, closing his mouth with a kiss to stifle his cry of surprise, palpitating and out of breath, she whispered:

“It’s me, you big stupid! Don’t be alarmed. Quick, quick; let’s make haste!”

But he took fright. He wouldn’t, there, in his own bed, for fear of a surprise. The ladder of the loft was near there, however, so they climbed up, leaving the trap-door open, and fell amid the hay.

“Oh, you big stupid! you big stupid!” repeated Jacqueline in ecstacy, with her coo in the throat, which seemed to rise from her loins.

It was near upon two years since Jean Macquart had come to the farm. On leaving the army he had fallen in, at Bazoches-le-Doyen, with a fellow-soldier — a cabinetmaker like himself — at the house of whose father, a small village contractor and builder employing two or three hands, he had resumed his calling. But his heart was no longer in his work. Seven years of service had put his hand out of practice, and had so set him against the saw and plane that he seemed a different being. Formerly, at Plassans, he stayed hard at work on his wood, without aptitude for book-learning, just knowing the three R’s, but yet very reflective and very painstaking, resolved on making himself independent of his horrible family. Old Macquart kept him in leading-strings, appropriated his mistresses under his very eyes, and went every Saturday to the door of his workshop to rob him of his wages. Accordingly, when ill-usage and over­work had killed his mother, he followed the example of his sister Gervaise — who had just run off to Paris with a lover — and decamped, so as not to have to keep his vagabond father. Now he hardly knew himself again; not that he had grown lazy in his turn, but life in the army had enlarged his mind. Politics, for instance, which had once bored him, now absorbed him and led him to reason upon equality and fraternity; so that, what with habits of mouching, troublesome and indolent sentinel work, a sleepy life in barracks, and the wild rough-and-tumble of war, he had so changed that the tools dropped from his hands; he dreamt of his campaign in Italy; and a yearning for rest, a longing to stretch himself on the grass and forget everything, benumbed his efforts.

One morning his master installed him at La Borderie, to make some repairs. There was a good month’s work, rooms to floor, doors and windows to be set right almost everywhere. Jean blissfully dragged the work on for six weeks. Meanwhile his master died, and the son, a married man, went off to set up shop in his wife’s part of the country. Left at La Borderie, where rotting wood was always coming to light and needing attention, the cabinetmaker did several jobs on his own account; then, as the harvest was beginning, he lent a hand and stayed six weeks longer; so that, noting his zeal, and how kindly he took to agriculture, the farmer ended by keeping him altogether. In less than a year, the ex-artisan became a capital farm servant, carting, ploughing, sowing, reaping, and seeming to satisfy his desire for peace in the restfulness of agriculture. Away with saw and plane! His interest was somewhere else! He seemed born for a field life, with his sober, deliberate way, his love of systematic work, his ox-like temperament inherited from his mother. He started on his new career delightedly with a relish for the country that peasants never know, a relish due to odds and ends of sentimental reading, and to notions of simplicity, virtue, and perfect bliss, such as are found in moral tales for children.

To tell the truth, another cause had kept him, and made him happy at the farm. While he was mending the doors, La Cognette had made a display of her charms amid his shavings. The temptation had, indeed, come from her, for she was attracted by the big fellow’s sturdy limbs, and judged him, by his regular massive features, to be a man of virility. He yielded; and then continued as he had begun, dreading that he might be deemed a fool, and tormented, moreover, by a craving for the licentious hussy, who knew so well how to raise men’s passions. At heart his native honesty made protest. It was dishonour­able to dally with the sweetheart of M. Hourdequin, to whom he owed a debt of gratitude. Of course he adduced justifica­tions: she wasn’t the master’s wife, but only his doll, and as she played him false here, there, and everywhere, he might as well profit by it as let others do so. However, such excuses did not prevent his uneasiness from increasing in proportion as he saw the farmer grow more and more fascinated. No doubt it would not end well.