Oxford World’s Classics Page 20

  ‘Well, children,’ said Rougon paternally, ‘time for bed.’

  It was twenty-five past ten. He gave them another five minutes. The guests began to take their leave. Rougon bade farewell to Monsieur Kahn and Monsieur Béjuin, while Madame Rougon begged them to give her regards to their wives, though she never saw them more than twice a year. Then he gently guided the Charbonnels towards the door. They were always too shy to say goodbye. At last, when pretty Madame Bouchard left, with Monsieur d’Escorailles on one side and Monsieur La Rouquette on the other, he turned to the card table, and cried:

  ‘Monsieur Bouchard! Look! They’re abducting your good lady!’

  But the divisional head seemed not to hear as he declared his cards:

  ‘A flush of clubs. What about that? And three kings. Not bad, either, don’t you think?’

  Rougon gathered up the cards in his big fists.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Off you go! Aren’t you embarrassed, getting all worked up like that? I say, Colonel, steady on!’

  It was the same every Thursday and every Sunday. He always had to break up a game, and even put the light out, to make them stop; they would go away outraged, still wrangling.

  Delestang and Clorinde were the last. While her husband looked everywhere for her fan, Clorinde said gently to Rougon:

  ‘You really should take some exercise, or you’ll fall ill.’

  He made a dismissive gesture. Madame Rougon was already collecting the cups and teaspoons. As Delestang shook his hand, he gave a huge yawn; and, out of politeness, not to give the impression that he had yawned because he was bored, he said:

  ‘My word, I’m so tired. I’ll certainly sleep well tonight.’

  These soirées always followed the same pattern. As Du Poizat once said, it was always ‘grey and overcast’ in the Rougons’ drawing room; and he also found it had become ‘too strait-laced’ for his taste. Clorinde, for her part, behaved in a very daughterly fashion to Rougon. She also made frequent afternoon visits to the house, always alone and on some errand or other. To Madame Rougon she would laughingly say she had come to court her husband; and Madame Rougon, with a smile on her bloodless lips, would leave them alone for hours. They would chat cordially together, apparently having forgotten what had happened between them; and they would shake each other’s hands in the same study where only a year earlier he had pawed the ground before her with desire. In this way, with all that cast aside, they delighted in simple camaraderie. He would rearrange stray wisps of her hair — for she was, as ever, windblown — or he would help her to gather up an excessively long skirt when it got caught in the chairs. One day, as they were walking through the garden, she opened the stable door out of curiosity, then, with a little laugh, went inside. Hands in pockets, he too smiled.

  ‘Ha! How stupid we can be sometimes,’ he murmured.

  More often than not, when she came to see him, he had some excellent piece of advice for her. He pleaded the cause of Delestang, who after all was a good husband. She said she greatly respected him; and she maintained that Delestang had no reason whatever to complain about her conduct. She said she did not even flirt with anyone, which was absolutely true. Everything she said, indeed, showed complete indifference to men, even contempt. When a certain woman was mentioned of whom it was rumoured that she had an army of lovers, she gaped, wide-eyed, like a child, and said: ‘That keeps her amused, does it?’ For weeks on end she would completely neglect her appearance, only remembering it when she needed to; but then she could make terrible use of it, like a weapon. So when, with strange insistence, Rougon kept telling her that she should be faithful to Delestang, in the end she became quite annoyed.

  ‘Don’t keep telling me that!’ she cried. ‘There’s no need. You really are quite insulting.’

  One day, she replied quite bluntly:

  ‘In any case, if I wasn’t, what business would it be of yours?’

  He flushed deep red, and for a while he said no more about questions of duty, what people might think, or propriety. This persistent eruption of jealousy was the only trace left of his former passion. He even went so far as to have her watched in the drawing rooms she frequented. If he had detected the slightest sign of flirtation, he might well have alerted her husband. Indeed, when alone with Delestang, he warned him to be careful, and reminded him of his wife’s exceptional beauty. But Delestang just laughed inanely. He was not worried; so that, as far as the Delestang couple were concerned, it was only Rougon who suffered the agonies of the deceived husband.

  His other advice (very practical, too) showed his friendly feelings towards Clorinde. It was he who gently brought her round to the idea of sending her mother back to Italy. Alone now in the house on the Champs-Élysées, Countess Balbi was living a rather unconventional life that provoked a great deal of gossip. Rougon decided to broach with her the delicate question of a life pension. The house on the Champs-Élysées was sold, and thereby the daughter’s past life was as if erased. After that, Rougon began a campaign to cure her of her eccentricities. Here, however, he came up against an absolute simplicity of outlook and a woman’s stubborn refusal to change. Married and wealthy, Clorinde led an amazingly spendthrift existence, punctuated with sudden bouts of extreme miserliness. She had kept her maid, the swarthy little Antonia who sucked oranges at all hours of the day. Between them these two females made the mistress’s rooms in the Rue du Colisée abominably filthy. When Rougon went to see Clorinde, he would find dirty plates on the armchairs, and empty fruit-syrup bottles against the walls, while underneath the chairs he could imagine the piles of things that would have been thrust out of sight as soon as his arrival was announced. Thus, in rooms whose elegant wallpaper was covered in grease-spots, and with furniture grimy with dust, Clorinde continued her eccentricities. Often she received Rougon half-dressed, wrapped in a blanket, and stretched out on a divan, complaining of the strangest physical afflictions — a dog nibbling at her feet or a pin she had accidentally swallowed and which was coming out at her left hip. At other times she would draw the blinds at three o’clock, light all the candles, and dance with her maid; locked in each other’s arms, they would laugh so crazily that when he came in it took the maid a good five minutes, leaning against the door, to catch her breath and leave the room. One day, Clorinde refused to be seen at all. She had tacked her bed-curtains together from top to bottom and sat, propped up against a bolster, in her curtain cage, chatting with him for a whole hour as if they were on either side of a fireplace. It seemed to her quite normal to behave like that, and she was most surprised when he scolded her. She said she was doing no harm and it was pointless for him to give her lessons in propriety or to promise to make her the most seductive woman in Paris. She would become quite angry and repeated:

  ‘That’s how I am, that’s how I behave… Why should it bother other people?’

  Sometimes she smiled, and said:

  ‘Well, some people love me, you know.’

  It was true. Delestang worshipped her. She remained his domineering mistress, the more so the less she seemed his wife. He turned a blind eye to her whims, for he lived in terror of her leaving him, as she had one day threatened to do. Perhaps the real reason for his submissiveness was his vague awareness that she really was superior to him, and strong enough to do what she wanted with him. In company, however, he treated her like a child, speaking of her with the indulgence and affection that befitted a man who took life seriously. But when they were alone, this tall, handsome man with the noble head would burst into tears on the nights when she refused to open her bedroom door. His only act of rebellion was to keep the first-floor rooms locked, and the keys out of her reach, to protect his main drawing room from grease-spots.

  Nevertheless, Rougon did get Clorinde to dress almost like other women, though she was very crafty about it, with the craftiness of the lucid lunatic* who is always so sensible when strangers are present. There were houses in which he saw her behaving very discreetly, letting
her husband take the lead, perfectly seemly despite all the admiration her great beauty provoked. At her house, however, he often came upon Monsieur de Plouguern and she would tease first one, then the other, while they lectured her endlessly. The more familiar of the two, the elderly senator, would pat her cheeks, much to Rougon’s annoyance; but he never dared say what he felt about that. He was less inhibited, however, with regard to Rusconi’s secretary, Luigi Pozzo. He had caught him leaving her house more than once at very unusual hours. When he suggested that this conduct might compromise her, she gave him one of her looks of utter surprise, and burst out laughing. She couldn’t care less about what people thought, she said. In Italy, ladies received what men they liked, and nobody thought any the less of them for it. In any case, Luigi didn’t count, he was a cousin, he came to bring her Milanese biscuits which he bought in the Passage Colbert.

  Politics remained Clorinde’s great passion. Since her marriage to Delestang, all her mental energy had been spent on complicated and obscure manoeuvrings of which nobody knew the purpose. In this she was satisfying her need for intrigue, which for so long had been channelled into her campaigns to seduce men with great careers ahead of them. Now it began to seem as if all those efforts to ensnare the right husband, to which she had devoted her life up to the age of twenty-two, were merely preparation for a much greater task. She kept up a regular correspondence with her mother, who was now established in Turin. She went to the Italian legation nearly every day. Count Rusconi would take her into a corner and they would engage in rapid sotto voce conversation. Then there were mysterious visits to people all over Paris, including furtive calls on eminent personalities and rendezvous arranged in out-of-the-way places. All the refugees from Venice, the Brambillas and Staderinos and Viscardis, saw her in secret and handed her scraps of paper covered with notes. She had bought a red morocco satchel, really huge, with a steel lock, worthy of a minister, which she used to carry around with her a great collection of documents. In a cab she would hold it on her lap like a muff. Everywhere she went, her satchel went with her, tucked under her arm in a way that became quite familiar; she could be seen in the morning clutching it to her bosom, her wrists quite bruised. Soon this satchel grew shabbier, and finally burst at the seams. She then used straps to hold it together. With her extravagant gowns and long skirts, together with this eternal, shapeless leather case crammed to bursting point with papers, she was like a down-and-out lawyer doing the rounds of the police courts to pick up a few francs.

  Several times Rougon had tried to find out what Clorinde’s important business was. One day, left alone for a moment with her famous satchel, he had brazenly pulled out the letters that were sticking through the gaping seams. But what he managed to learn seemed so incoherent, to make such little sense, that her political pretensions simply made him smile. One afternoon she outlined to him a very ambitious project: she was working, she said, towards an alliance between Italy and France in preparation for an imminent campaign against Austria.* Though very impressed by this at first, after a short while Rougon merely shrugged, especially given the other odd things mixed in with the plan. All he saw in it was evidence of a particular style of eccentricity. It certainly did not make him change his opinion of women. In any case, Clorinde was very happy to be his disciple. Whenever she went to see him in the Rue Marbeuf, she was very meek, all deference, merely asking him questions and hanging on his words with all the fervour of a neophyte desperate to learn. He, for his part, often forgot to whom he was speaking, and outlined to her his views on government, to the point of becoming quite outspoken on matters of policy. Gradually, these talks became a routine. He turned her into his confidante, and compensated for the silence he maintained with his friends by treating her as a private pupil whose respect and admiration delighted him.

  During August and September, Clorinde’s visits became more frequent. She was now seeing him three or four times a week. Never had she shown such discipular devotion. She flattered him greatly, going into raptures about his brilliance, and lamenting the great things he would have achieved had he not been pushed aside. One day, in a lucid moment, he laughingly turned to her and said:

  ‘You really need me, then?’

  ‘I do,’ she replied boldly.

  But she promptly resumed her air of rapt attention. Politics, she said, entertained her more than any work of fiction. When he turned away from her, she opened her eyes very wide, and in them flickered a brief flame, the lingering sign of a feeling of resentment that had never died. Often she let him hold her hands in his, as if she still felt too weak; and at such moments her hands would quiver, as if waiting until she had stolen sufficient strength from him to throttle him.

  What worried Clorinde more than anything was Rougon’s growing lethargy. She could see him being lulled by his boredom into complete indifference to everything. At first, she had detected a certain element of play-acting in his attitude. But now, she was beginning to think that he really had lost heart. His movements had become slower, his voice weaker, and there were days when he seemed so apathetic, and so unusually affable, that she wondered, horrified, whether he was not meekly going to accept retirement to the Senate, as if he were just another worn-out politician.

  Towards the end of September, Rougon seemed to become very preoccupied. Eventually, during one of their regular chats, he admitted that he had conceived a great scheme. He was getting bored in Paris, and needed air. Then it all came out. It was a plan for a new life altogether, a kind of voluntary exile in the Landes. He was going to break up a vast area of that wasteland and establish a new township there. Clorinde listened, very pale.

  ‘But your position here, your hopes!’ she cried.

  He made a dismissive gesture, and murmured:

  ‘Just castles in the air! The truth is, I’m not really made for politics at all.’

  He returned to his pet project, of being a great landowner, with vast herds of cattle to reign over. His ambition had grown. He saw himself as the conquering king of a new land, with a whole people under him. He went into endless details. For the past two weeks he had been secretly studying specialized works. He imagined how he would drain waterlogged land, break up panned soil with powerful machinery, halt wind erosion by planting pine trees, thus presenting France with a miraculously fertile tract of territory. His active nature, his colossal energy, were stirred back to life by this creative dream. Clenching his fists, he seemed already to be breaking rocks; his hands were turning the soil as if without effort; he was carrying on his shoulders prefabricated houses and setting them down where he wanted along the banks of a river he had cut with his own feet. It was all so easy. In the Landes he would find fulfilment. No doubt he still enjoyed enough of the Emperor’s goodwill to be given a department to develop. There he stood, cheeks glowing, seeming taller now that his whole body had taken on new energy. He laughed uproariously.

  ‘Ha! That’s an idea!’ he cried. ‘I’ll give the new town my own name! I’m going to found my own little empire!’

  At first Clorinde thought he was just fantasizing, that it was all a wild dream born of the terrible tedium of his present life. But during the following days he spoke to her again about his plan, and even more enthusiastically. Now, every time she went to see him, she found him lost among maps spread all over his desk, as well as on the chairs and the floor. One afternoon she was unable to see him at all: he had two engineers with him, and was deep in conference with them. Then she really did begin to feel very alarmed. Was he actually going to settle there, in that wasteland, and build this town of his? Surely not — surely he must be planning some new political manoeuvre? She refused to accept the truth, but thought it prudent to alert the gang to what was happening.

  There was general consternation. Du Poizat lost his temper. For more than a year, he cried, he had been cooling his heels. When he had gone down to the Vendée the last time, and ventured to ask his father for ten thousand francs to launch a magnificent business scheme, the
old man had taken a pistol from a drawer. Now he was virtually starving, just as in 1848. Monsieur Kahn was equally infuriated. His Bressuire blast furnaces were on the point of bankruptcy. He felt he would be lost if he couldn’t get his railway concession within the next six months. The others — Monsieur Béjuin, the Colonel, the Bouchards, the Charbonnels — were also loud in their complaints. Something would have to give. Really, Rougon was going too far. They would have to speak to him.

  Nevertheless, two whole weeks went by. Clorinde, to whom they all paid great attention, had decided it would be unwise to make a frontal attack on the great man. So they waited. One Sunday evening, towards the middle of October, when the friends were all at the regular ‘at home’ in the Rue Marbeuf, Rougon said with a smile:

  ‘You won’t guess what I received today!’

  And from behind the clock on the mantelpiece he took a pink card which he showed them. It was an invitation from the Emperor to a house party at Compiègne.*

  At this moment the footman discreetly opened the door. The man Rougon was expecting was there. Excusing himself, he withdrew. Clorinde had risen to her feet, all ears at Rougon’s news. In the ensuing silence, she said firmly: