The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Page 39

  Then he took a bundle of vine sticks. He lit the wood. He began with the piles on the terrace, under the windows. He ran indoors again and set fire to the ones in the drawing room and the dining room, kitchen and hall. Then he bounded up from one floor to another throwing the burning remains of his bundle of sticks against the heaps that blocked the doors of the Trouches and the Faujas. His increasing rage made him shake all over, the dazzling brightness of the blaze pushed his madness to the limits. With prodigious strength, he descended the stairs in two huge leaps, spinning round and crossing through the dense smoke, blowing on the flames and throwing handfuls of burning coals into them. At times the sight of the fire already devouring the ceilings in the rooms made him sit back on his haunches, laughing and clapping as hard as he could.

  Meanwhile the house was roaring like a stove which has been overfilled. The fire broke out from all parts at the same time, with a violence that cracked the floorboards. The madman ran up again through the sheets of flame, his hair charred, his clothes blackened. He took up a position on the second floor, squatting on his hands, not taking his eyes off the priest’s door.

  ‘Ovide, Ovide!’ called a terrifying voice.

  At the end of the passage Madame Faujas’s door burst open and the fire swept into the room like a tempest. The old woman appeared in the middle of the furnace. Holding her hands in front of her face, she swept aside the blazing bundles, leaped into the passageway, thrust and kicked the burning sticks in front of her son’s door and called his name desperately over and over again. The madman had flattened himself on the floor, his eyes bright, still moaning.

  ‘Wait for me, don’t get out of the window,’ she cried, beating on the door.

  She had to beat it down. The door was burning and gave easily. She reappeared, holding her son in her arms. He had taken the time to put on his soutane. He was suffocating, stifled by the smoke.

  ‘Listen, Ovide, I’m going to carry you,’ she said abruptly and decisively. ‘Hold on to my shoulders, cling on to my hair if you feel yourself falling. Come on, I’ll take you through.’

  She swung him up on to her shoulders as if he were a child, and this sublime mother, this old peasant woman devoted unto death, did not even stagger beneath the crushing weight of the great unconscious, inert body. She stamped out the coals with her bare feet, and made a way through for herself, pushing the flames away with the flat of her hand, so that her son was not even touched by the fire. But the moment she was about to go down, the madman, whom she had not seen, jumped on Abbé Faujas and tore him off her shoulders. His lugubrious moan ended in a howl on the top of the stairs as he writhed in a paroxysm of madness. He beat the priest, clawed at him, took him by the throat.

  ‘Marthe, Marthe!’ he cried.

  And he rolled down the flaming stairs with the priest’s body; while Madame Faujas, who had sunk her teeth into him with all her might, drank his blood. The Trouches burned in their drunken state without so much as a sigh. The house, destroyed, utterly consumed, collapsed amid countless thousands of fiery stars.

  CHAPTER 23

  MACQUART did not find Doctor Porquier at home and it was half past midnight before he came hurrying over. The whole house was still up. Rougon was the only one not to have got out of bed. He said that emotional upsets would be the death of him. Félicité, seated on the same chair at Marthe’s bedside, got up to meet the doctor.

  ‘Oh, Doctor, we are so anxious,’ she said softly. ‘The poor child hasn’t moved since we put her to bed here… Her hands are already cold; I tried to warm them between my own but it was no use.’

  Doctor Porquier studied Marthe’s face. Then, without further examination, he remained standing, tight-lipped, and made a vague sign with his hand.

  ‘My dear Madame Rougon,’ he said, ‘you must be very brave.’

  Félicité burst out sobbing.

  ‘It’s the end,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve been expecting this sad outcome for some time, I must confess. Both of poor Madame Mouret’s lungs were affected, and consumption in her case has been complicated by a psychological disorder.’

  He had sat down. A polite smile still played around the corner of his mouth, for he was a man who observed the niceties of behaviour even in relation to death.

  ‘Do not despair, do not make yourself ill, dear lady. The catastrophe was inevitable, anything could have provoked it any day… Poor Madame Mouret must have coughed a great deal when she was young, did she not? I should say that she has been incubating the germs of her malady for years. Recently, and especially in the last three years, her consumption has progressed at a frightening pace. But what piety! What fervour! I was moved to see her decline in such a saintly fashion… What’s to be done? The decrees of God are unfathomable, science is so often powerless to do anything.’

  And as Madame Rougon was still in tears, he showered upon her all manner of comforts, insisting that she drank a cup of lime-blossom tea to calm her down.

  ‘Do not torment yourself, I beg you,’ he repeated. ‘I assure you she is no longer in pain; she will go to sleep quite quietly and only regain consciousness at the moment of death… I shall remain with you in any case; I shall stay with you, although my attentions are now in vain. I shall stay here because I am your friend, my dear Madame, your friend, do you understand?’

  He settled himself comfortably in an armchair for the night. Félicité calmed down a little. Since Doctor Porquier had made her realize that Marthe only had a few more hours to live, she thought she would send for Serge from the seminary, which was nearby. When she asked Rose if she would go to the seminary, Rose at first refused.

  ‘Do you want to kill that poor young man too!’ she said. ‘It would give him such an awful shock to be wakened in the middle of the night to come and see a dead person. I don’t want to be his executioner.’

  Rose bore her mistress a grudge. Ever since Marthe had been on her deathbed she had been pacing round, furiously rattling the glasses and bottles of hot water.

  ‘Now was it sensible to do what Madame did?’ she added. ‘It’s nobody’s fault if she went and caught her death when she went to see Monsieur. And now everything is ruined, and it’s ended in tears… No of course I don’t want the dear boy to be wakened up suddenly like that.’

  But she did eventually go to the seminary. Doctor Porquier had stretched out in front of the fire. His eyes half shut, he continued to lavish words of comfort upon Madame Rougon. There was a slight rattle in Marthe’s throat and her sides began to heave. Uncle Macquart, who had not put in an appearance for a good two hours, pushed open the door quietly.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ Félicité asked him, taking him aside.

  He answered that he had gone to put away his horse and cart at the Three Pigeons. But his eyes were so bright and he had such a sly, devilish look about him that again she was consumed with suspicion. Scenting some dirty trick that she should know about, she forgot her dying daughter.

  ‘Anyone would think that you’d been following and spying on someone,’ she went on, noticing his muddy trousers. ‘You are hiding something from me, Macquart. It’s not right. We’ve always been good to you.’

  ‘Good!’ echoed Uncle Macquart with a grin. ‘So that’s what you think. Rougon is a donkey. In the business of the cornfield he made a fool of me, treated me as if I was at the bottom of the heap… By the way, where is Rougon? Looking after himself, I’ll be bound. He doesn’t give a jot for the trouble we take for the family.’

  The smile that accompanied these last words alarmed Félicité greatly. She looked him straight in the eyes.

  ‘What trouble have you taken for the family?’ she said. ‘You surely wouldn’t blame me for taking in my poor Marthe when she came back from Les Tulettes?… I am telling you again, in any case, it all seems a bit fishy to me. I questioned Rose and it seems it was your idea to come straight here… But I’m also surprised you didn’t knock louder at the Rue Balande. They would have opened the door… It’s not that
I am put out in any way to have the dear child here. At least she will die amongst her nearest and dearest and will only have loving faces around her…’

  Macquart seemed taken aback. He interrupted her with some concern.

  ‘I thought you were very friendly with Abbé Faujas?’

  She made no answer. She drew nearer to Marthe, whose breathing had become more laboured. When she came back she saw Macquart lifting the curtain and apparently looking out into the night, rubbing the moisture on the glass with his hand.

  ‘Don’t leave tomorrow before we’ve had a talk,’ she urged. ‘I want to get to the bottom of all this.’

  ‘Just as you like,’ he replied. ‘But you are hard to please. One day you like people, the next day you don’t… I don’t give a damn. I just carry on in my own sweet way.’

  It was obvious that he was very annoyed to learn that the Rougons no longer sided with Abbé Faujas. He tapped on the glass with his fingertips, not shifting his gaze from the black night. At that moment a great red glow lit up the sky.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Félicité.

  He opened the casement and looked out.

  ‘It looks like a fire,’ he said softly. ‘Something’s burning behind the sub-prefecture.’

  Noises filled the square. A servant entered in alarm saying that Madame’s daughter’s house was on fire. Madame’s son-in-law—the one they’d had to lock up—had been seen, it was said, wandering round the garden with a lighted branch. The worst was that there was no hope of saving the people inside. Félicité turned round sharply, thought for another minute with her gaze fixed on Macquart. Finally she understood.

  ‘You gave us your solemn promise’, she said in a low voice, ‘to behave yourself when we set you up in your cottage in Les Tulettes. You’ve got everything you need there, in any case. You live there like a man of independent means. It’s disgraceful, do you hear!… How much did Abbé Fenil give you to open the door for François?’

  He got cross but she made him be quiet. She seemed much more anxious about the repercussions than angry at the crime itself.

  ‘And what a terrible scandal if it was all known!’ she said again in a low voice. ‘Have we ever refused you anything? We’ll have a chat tomorrow, we’ll have another talk about the field you keep going on about… If Rougon found out he would die of sorrow.’

  Uncle Macquart could not restrain a smile. He defended himself more strenuously, swore he knew nothing about it, that his hands were clean. Then as the sky lit up more and more and Doctor Porquier had already gone, Uncle Macquart left the room, saying hurriedly, as though he were nothing but a curious onlooker:

  ‘I’m going to go and have a look.’

  It was Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies who had raised the alarm. There had been a party at the prefecture. He was just going to bed when, at a few minutes to one, he noticed a strange red reflection on the ceiling. He went to the window and was startled to see a huge fire burning in Mouret’s garden, while a dark figure he didn’t at first recognize was dancing around in the middle of the smoke, brandishing a lighted stick. Almost immediately flames leapt out from all the windows on the ground floor. The sub-prefect hurried to put his trousers on again. He called his servant, sent the concierge to get the fire brigade and the police. Then, before going to where the fire was, he finished dressing, making sure in the mirror that his moustache was as it should be. He was the first to arrive at the Rue Balande. It was completely deserted. Two cats ran across the road.

  ‘They’ll fry in there,’ thought Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, astonished at the sleepy aspect of the house from the street, where no flame could yet be seen.

  He knocked loudly, but could only hear the roaring of the fire in the stairwell. Then he knocked on Monsieur Rastoil’s door. From there rose shrieks and the sound of loud footsteps, the banging of doors and stifled cries.

  ‘Aurélie, put something round your shoulders!’ shouted the president.

  Monsieur Rastoil leaped out on to the pavement, followed by Madame Rastoil and the younger of the girls, the one not yet married off. Aurélie, in her haste, had thrown on her father’s waistcoat, which left her arms bare. She blushed bright red when she saw Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies.

  ‘What a dreadful calamity!’ said the president. ‘Everything’s going to be burnt. My bedroom wall is already hot. The two houses are adjacent to one another, I’m afraid to say… Oh, Monsieur le Sous-préfet, I didn’t even have time to get the clocks out. We must organize help. One can’t just lose all one’s furniture in a matter of hours.’

  Madame Rastoil, half-dressed, wearing a dressing gown, was lamenting the loss of her drawing-room furniture, that she had just had re-covered. In the meantime some neighbours had appeared at the windows. The president summoned them and began to remove everything from his house. He was especially concerned about the clocks, which he placed on the pavement opposite. When they had cleared the armchairs from the drawing room, he made his wife and daughter sit in them, while the sub-prefect stayed near them to offer comfort.

  ‘Calm yourselves, dear ladies,’ he said. ‘The fire engine’s coming and the fire will be attacked with vigour… I think I can promise you your house will be saved.’

  The Mourets’ casements burst into flames, the fire could be seen on the first floor. All at once the street was brilliantly illuminated. It was bright as day. A drummer in the distance passed through the Place de la Sous-Préfecture, beating the alarm. Men ran up, a chain was organized, but there weren’t enough buckets and the fire brigade didn’t arrive. In the midst of the general panic, Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, who was still with the ladies, was shouting out orders at the top of his voice:

  ‘Make way! The chain is too close over there! Keep two feet away from each other!’

  Then turning to Aurélie he said gently:

  ‘I’m surprised the fire engine hasn’t arrived… It’s a new one; this will be its first outing… I sent the concierge straight away. He must have gone to the police station as well.’

  The police came first. They kept back the crowd of onlookers, whose numbers were increasing despite the lateness of the hour. The sub-prefect had personally gone to sort out the chain which had got out of line because there was some pushing and shoving from those who had come hurrying over from round about. The little bell at Saint-Saturnin was sounding the alarm in its fractured tones. A second, more desultory drum was beating the alarm, towards the bottom of the street on the side of the Mail. Finally the fire brigade arrived, with their equipment jangling. The groups made way for them. The fifteen firemen arrived, at a run and out of breath. But despite the intervention of Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies they needed another good quarter of an hour to get the pump going.

  ‘I’m telling you that the pistons are not running smoothly!’ cried the captain angrily to the sub-prefect, who was claiming that the nuts were too tight.

  When a jet of water rose there was a sigh of relief from the crowd. The house was ablaze like a great torch by then, from the ground floor to the second. The water hissed as it met the fire, while the flames, tearing apart into yellow sheets, rose ever higher. Some firemen had gone up on to the roof of the president’s house and were attacking the tiles with pickaxes to prevent the fire from spreading.

  ‘The old place is ruined,’ commented Macquart with his hands in his pockets, standing quietly on the opposite side of the road, from where he was following the progress of the fire with keen interest.

  An open-air salon had formed near the gutter. Armchairs were arranged into a semicircle as though to permit the spectacle to be viewed in comfort. Madame de Condamin and her husband had arrived. They had only just returned from the sub-prefecture, they said, when they heard the drum beating. Monsieur de Bourdeu, Monsieur Maffre, Doctor Porquier, and Monsieur Delangre, accompanied by several members of the town council, had also hastened along. They all clustered round the poor Rastoil ladies, comforting them, greeting them with exclamations of symp
athy. Before long the assembled company were sitting in armchairs. And the conversation struck up, while ten feet away the fire engine puffed and blew, and the beams caught fire and cracked.

  ‘Did you pick up my watch, my dear?’ asked Madame Rastoil. ‘It was on the mantelpiece with my chain.’

  ‘Yes, I have it in my pocket,’ answered the president, shaking with emotion, his face puffy. ‘I’ve also got the silver… I would have taken it all out but the firemen don’t want to, they say it’s ridiculous.’

  Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies continued very calm and helpful.

  ‘I assure you your house is no longer at risk in any way,’ he affirmed. ‘The fire is under control. You can go and put the cutlery back in your dining room.’

  But Monsieur Rastoil refused to be separated from his silver which he was holding under his arm, folded in a newspaper.

  ‘All the doors are wide open,’ he said. ‘The house is full of people I don’t know… They’ve made a hole in my roof that will be expensive to block up.’

  Madame de Condamin was questioning the sub-prefect. She cried:

  ‘It’s horrible! But I thought the people living there had had time to escape!… So don’t we have any news of Abbé Faujas?’

  ‘I knocked myself,’ said Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies. ‘Nobody answered. When the firemen arrived I had them break down the door and I ordered them to place the ladders against the windows… All in vain. One of our brave policemen who ventured into the hall was almost overcome by the smoke.’

  ‘So… Abbé Faujas?… Oh, what a terrible death!’ Octavie said again, with a shudder.

  The ladies and gentlemen looked at one another, their faces pallid in the flickering light of the fire. Doctor Porquier explained that death by fire was perhaps not as painful as one imagined.