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  Then, suddenly, Étienne made up his mind. Perhaps he imagined he’d caught another glimpse of Catherine’s bright eyes, up there at the entry to the village. Or perhaps it was the wind of revolt beginning to blow from the direction of Le Voreux. He could not tell. He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle; and he thought angrily of those ‘people’ Bonnemort had told him about, and of the squat and sated deity to whom ten thousand starving men and women daily offered up their flesh without ever knowing who or what this god might be.

  PART II

  I

  The Grégoire property, La Piolaine, was to be found two kilometres east of Montsou, on the road to Joiselle. It was a tall, square house of no particular style, dating from the beginning of the previous century. Of the vast estates that had originally belonged to it only some thirty hectares remained, which were surrounded by walls and easy to maintain. The orchard and kitchen garden enjoyed especial renown, since their fruit and vegetables were celebrated as the finest in the region. For the rest, there was no parkland, but a little wood served in its stead. The avenue of old limes, a vault of foliage running three hundred metres from the gate to the front steps, was one of the sights on this bare and empty plain, where the number of large trees to be found between Marchiennes and Beaugnies was sufficiently small to be calculated exactly.

  That morning the Grégoires had risen at eight o’clock. Generally they did not stir until one hour later, for they were devoted to sleep; but the storm during the night had left them too restive. After her husband had gone out at once to see if the high wind had caused any damage, Mme Grégoire had simply come down to the kitchen in her slippers and flannel dressing-gown. She was short and plump, and although she was already fifty-eight, she still had a big baby face; and beneath the dazzling whiteness of her hair she wore an expression of wide-eyed surprise.

  ‘Mélanie,’ she said to the cook, ‘you might perhaps make that brioche this morning, since the dough is ready. Mademoiselle Cécile will not be up for another half-hour yet, and she could have some with her chocolate…It would be a nice surprise for her, don’t you think?’

  The cook, a thin, elderly woman who had been with them for thirty years, began to laugh.

  ‘Yes, indeed, that would be a lovely surprise for her…My stove’s burning nicely, and the oven must be warm by now. And Honorine can give me a hand.’

  Honorine was a girl of twenty whom they had taken in as a child and brought up, and she now worked as a housemaid. Apart from these two women, the only other servants were the coachman Francis, who did the heavy work, and a gardener and his wife, who looked after the flowers, the fruit and vegetables, and the farmyard animals. And since the household was run on patriarchal lines in a spirit of gentle informality, this small community lived together on the best of terms.

  Mme Grégoire, who had planned the brioche surprise while she was lying in bed, now waited to see the dough placed in the oven. The kitchen was huge, and judging by its extreme cleanliness and the great battery of dishes, saucepans and utensils with which it was filled, it was evidently the most important room in the house. It smelled deliciously of good food. The shelves and cupboards were overflowing with provisions.

  ‘And make sure it’s nice and golden brown, won’t you?’ Mme Grégoire reminded them as she departed into the dining-room.

  Despite the presence of a central-heating system, which warmed the whole house, a coal fire was burning cheerfully in the grate. Otherwise there was no sign of luxury; just a large table, some chairs and a mahogany sideboard. Two deep armchairs alone bore witness to a desire for comfort and to long hours of tranquil digestion. They never used the drawing-room and preferred to sit here surrounded by cosy domesticity.

  M. Grégoire had just returned. He was wearing his thick, fustian jacket, and he looked pink himself for his sixty years, with his strong features and an honest, kindly face wreathed in curls of snowy white hair. He had spoken to the coachman and the gardener; no major damage to report, just one chimney-pot down. Every morning he liked to cast an eye over La Piolaine, which was not large enough to give much cause for concern and yet afforded him all the pleasures of ownership.

  ‘What’s the matter with Cécile?’ he inquired. ‘Isn’t she getting up today?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ his wife replied. ‘I did think I heard her moving about.’

  The table had been laid with three bowls on the white tablecloth. Honorine was sent to see what had become of Mademoiselle. But she came back down almost at once, stifling her giggles and lowering her voice as if she were still up in the bedroom.

  ‘Oh, if Monsieur and Madame could only see Mademoiselle now!…She’s sleeping like…oh, just like a little baby Jesus

  …Really, you can’t imagine. She looks such a picture!’

  Father and mother exchanged affectionate glances.

  ‘Are you coming?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Oh, the poor little darling!’ she murmured. ‘Yes, I’m coming.’

  And together they went upstairs. Cécile’s bedroom was the one luxurious room in the house: it had blue silk hangings and white lacquer furniture picked out in blue, the whim of a spoiled child who had been indulged by her parents. Bathed in the half-light coming through a small gap in the curtains, the girl lay sleeping in the shadowy whiteness of the bed, one cheek propped on a bare arm. She was not pretty; she looked too wholesome and full of health for that, being already fully grown at the age of eighteen. But she had wonderful, milk-white skin, as well as chestnut-brown hair, a round face and an obstinate little nose buried between two plump cheeks. The bedcover had slipped down, and her breathing was so gentle that her already ample bosom neither rose nor fell.

  ‘That cursed wind will have kept her awake all night,’ her mother said softly.

  Father gestured to her to hush. They both leaned over and gazed adoringly at her innocent, unclothed form, at this daughter they had wanted for so long and whom they had conceived when they had ceased to hope. In their eyes she was perfect, not at all too fat, indeed never adequately fed. And she slept on, oblivious to their presence by her side, to their faces next to hers. But a slight tremor ruffled her impassive features. Concerned in case she should wake, they departed on tiptoe.

  ‘Shh!’ M. Grégoire said when they reached the door. ‘If she hasn’t slept, we mustn’t disturb her.’

  ‘The poor darling can sleep as long as she likes,’ Mme Grégoire concurred. ‘We can wait for her.’

  They went downstairs and ensconced themselves in the armchairs in the dining-room. Meanwhile the maids were happy to keep the chocolate warm on the stove, entertained by the thought of Mademoiselle having such a long lie-in. M. Grégoire had picked up a newspaper; his wife was knitting a large woollen bedspread. It was very warm in the room, and not a sound was to be heard coming from the silent house.

  The Grégoire fortune brought in an annual income of some forty thousand francs1 and derived entirely from a holding in the Montsou mines. They loved telling the story of its origins, which went back to the earliest days of the Company itself.

  Towards the beginning of the previous century, from Lille as far as Valenciennes, there had been a mad rush to discover coal. The success of the concession-holders who were later to found the Anzin Mining Company had turned the heads of one and all. In every district people were busy taking soil samples; companies were set up, and concessions materialized overnight. But among all the determined pioneers of the day it was the Baron Desrumaux who was most remembered for his shrewdness and courage. He had persevered for forty years, never faltering, overcoming obstacle after obstacle: an initial lack of success during his early prospecting, the new mines that had to be abandoned after long months of toil, mine-shafts blocked by rock-falls, miners drowned by sudden floods, hundreds of thousands of francs draining away down a few holes in the ground; and then later the problems of managing the business, the panicking shareholders, the tussles with the hereditary landowners o
f ancient estates who were determined not to recognize royal concessions unless people came and negotiated with them first. Finally he had established Desrumaux, Fauquenoix and Company to exploit the Montsou concession, and the pits were just beginning to yield meagre returns when the two neighbouring concessions, the one at Cougny, which belonged to the Comte de Cougny, and the one at Joiselle, belonging to the Company of Cornille and Jenard, had almost ruined him with the ferocity of their competition. Fortunately, on 25 August 1760, a settlement had been reached between the three concessions and they were amalgamated. The Montsou Mining Company thus came into being in its present form. To effect a distribution of shares, the total assets had been divided into twenty-four sous, the standard currency unit of the day;2 and each sou was subdivided into twelve deniers, giving two hundred and eighty-eight deniers; and since each denier was worth ten thousand francs, the total capital value represented a sum of nearly three million francs. Desrumaux, near to death but none the less victorious, had received six sous and three deniers as his share.

  At that time the Baron owned La Piolaine, together with three hundred hectares of land, and he employed as his steward one Honoré Grégoire, a lad from Picardy, who was the great-grandfather of Léon Grégoire, father of Cécile. At the time of the Montsou settlement, Honoré, who had been hoarding his savings of fifty thousand francs in a stocking, nervously yielded to his master’s unswerving conviction. He took out ten thousand francs’ worth of beautiful écus and bought a denier, terrified that he was thereby robbing his children of this part of their inheritance. Indeed his son Eugéne received extremely small dividends; and since he had set himself up as a bourgeois and been foolish enough to squander the remaining forty thousand francs of his paternal legacy in a disastrous business partnership, he lived in rather reduced circumstances. But the income from the denier was gradually rising, and the family fortune dated from the time of Félicien, who realized the dream that his grandfather, the former steward, had instilled in him as a child: the purchase of La Piolaine, now shorn of its land, which he bought from the State for a derisory sum.3 Nevertheless, the years that followed were bad ones, and they had to wait for the catastrophic events of the Revolution to run their course and for the rule of Napoleon to meet its bloody end. And so it was Léon Grégoire who benefited, after an astonishing rise in values, from the investment that his great-grandfather had so nervously and tentatively made. Those paltry ten thousand francs grew and grew with the prosperity of the Company. By 1820 they were yielding a hundred per cent, ten thousand francs. In 1844 they were earning twenty thousand; in 1850, forty thousand. Finally, just two years previously, the dividend had grown to the prodigious figure of fifty thousand francs: the value of a denier was quoted on the Lille stock exchange at one million francs, a hundredfold increase in the course of a century.

  M. Grégoire had been advised to sell when the share price reached one million, but he had refused with a benign and tolerant smile. Six months later, when the industrial crisis began, the value of a denier fell back to six hundred thousand francs. But he kept smiling and had no regrets, for the Grégoires now believed steadfastly in their mine. The value would rise again; why, God Himself was not more reliable! At the same time, mixed with this religious faith in the mine, they felt a profound sense of gratitude towards a stock which had now fed and supported an entire family for over a century. It was like a private god whom they worshipped in their egotism, a fairy godmother who rocked them to sleep in their large bed of idleness and fattened them at their groaning table. And so it would continue, from father to son: why tempt fate by doubting it? And deep within their constancy lay a superstitious terror, the fear that the million francs would suddenly have melted away if they had realized their asset and placed the proceeds in a drawer. To their mind it was safer left in the ground, from whence a race of miners, generation after generation of starving people, would extract it for them, a little each day, sufficient unto their needs.

  Fortune had also smiled on this house in other respects. At a very young age M. Grégoire had married the daughter of a pharmacist in Marchiennes, a plain-looking girl without a penny to her name whom he adored and who had repaid him with happiness in full measure. She had closeted herself within her domestic life, ecstatically devoted to her husband and with no other desire but his. Never once did a difference in taste come between them, as their desires merged in the pursuit of one and the same ideal of comfort and well-being; and they had been living like this for the past forty years in one long, tender exchange of affection and attentiveness to each other’s needs. They lived a well-regulated life: their forty thousand a year was spent without ostentation and what they saved went on Cécile, whose late arrival had momentarily disrupted their budgeting. Even now they continued to pander to her every whim: a second horse, two more carriages, dresses from Paris. But for them this was simply one further source of joy; nothing was too good for their daughter, even though they themselves were so profoundly averse to show that they continued to wear the fashions of their youth. Any expense which did not serve a purpose seemed to them foolish.

  Suddenly the door opened, and a loud voice exclaimed:

  ‘What’s this? You haven’t had breakfast without me, have you!’

  It was Cécile, who had come straight from her bed, her eyes still puffy with sleep. She had merely put her hair up and pulled on a white woollen dressing-gown.

  ‘No, of course we haven’t,’ said her mother. ‘Can’t you see? We’ve been waiting for you…My poor darling, that wind must have kept you awake.’

  The girl looked at her in great surprise.

  ‘It’s been windy?…I had no idea. I’ve been fast asleep all night.’

  They found this funny, and the three of them began to laugh; and the servants bringing in the breakfast burst out laughing also, so hilarious did everyone in the household consider the fact that Mademoiselle had just slept for a whole twelve hours. The appearance of the brioche added the final touch to their general merriment.

  ‘What? You’ve baked it already?’ Cécile kept saying. ‘Well, this is a surprise. Oh, it’s going to taste so good, all lovely and warm in the chocolate!’

  They finally took their places at the table; the chocolate was steaming in the bowls, and for some time the sole subject of conversation was the brioche. Mélanie and Honorine remained in the room, talking about how the baking had gone and watching them all tuck in with buttery lips. What a pleasure it was to cook, they said, when you saw your master and his family eating with such relish.

  But then the dogs started barking loudly, and they thought it must be the lady from Marchiennes who came to give Cécile her piano lesson every Monday and Friday. There was a man also who came to teach her literature. The girl’s entire education had been conducted in this manner at La Piolaine, fostering a state of happy ignorance punctuated by childish whim, with books thrown out of the window the moment she found any subject boring.

  ‘It’s Monsieur Deneulin,’ Honorine announced on her return. Behind her, M. Deneulin, a cousin of M. Grégoire’s, entered without ceremony. At once decisive in manner and forthright in expression, he walked with the gait of a former cavalry officer. Although he was over fifty, his close-cropped hair and thick moustache were still jet black.

  ‘Yes, it is I. Good-morning…No, no, please don’t get up.’

  While the family were still busy exclaiming at his arrival, he took a seat. At length they returned to their chocolate.

  ‘Is there something you wished to tell me?’ M. Grégoire asked.

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ M. Deneulin replied hastily. ‘I was out for a ride – I like to keep my hand in, you know – and since I was passing your gate, I just thought I’d call and say hallo.’

  Cécile asked him how his daughters Jeanne and Lucie were. They were very well. Jeanne was forever painting, and Lucie, the elder, was always at the piano practising her singing from morning till night. There was a slight catch in his voice, an uneasiness which he
was endeavouring to hide beneath his hearty good humour.

  ‘And is everything all right at the pit?’ M. Grégoire continued.

  ‘Ah, this damned slump. The men and I are not having an easy time of it…We’re paying for the good years, I’m afraid! Too many factories were put up, too many railways were built, and everyone was so eager to achieve enormous levels of output that too much capital was invested at once. And now the money’s all tied up and there isn’t any left to keep the whole thing turning…Still, fortunately all is not lost. I’ll get by somehow.’

  Like his cousin he had inherited a denier in the Montsou mines. But in his case, being an engineer and a man of enterprise, he had been consumed with the ambition to make a royal fortune and he had been quick to sell when the denier had reached the million mark. For months he had been hatching a plan. His wife had inherited the small concession of Vandame from an uncle, but only two pits in the concession were still open, Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie, and both of them were in such a poor state of repair and had such defective equipment that it scarcely paid to work them. Well, his dream was to modernize Jean-Bart. He wanted to restore its winding-engine and widen its shaft for better access while keeping Gaston-Marie for drainage purposes only. There was gold to be had by the shovelful, as he put it. The idea was a good one. Except that the million had now been spent on the renovations, and this damned slump had come just at the very moment when high yields were about to prove him right. Added to which he was a poor businessman. He was generous to his workers in his own gruff sort of way, and since the death of his wife he had allowed himself to be swindled by various means. Also he had been letting his daughters have a free rein; the elder one talked of going on the stage, while the younger had already had three landscapes rejected by the Salon Hanging Committee.4 The two girls neverthless remained cheerful in the face of their adversity, and the growing threat of poverty had revealed them to be very astute housekeepers.