The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint) Read online

  ‘One is incinerated,’ he concluded. ‘It must only take a few seconds. It should be said however that it depends how violent the fire is.’

  Monsieur de Condamin counted on his fingers.

  ‘If Madame Mouret is at her parents, as they are saying, that still makes four. Abbé Faujas, his mother, sister, and brother-in-law… Oh, my goodness!’

  At that moment Madame Rastoil leaned towards her husband’s ear.

  ‘Give me my watch,’ she whispered. ‘I am worried about it. You are moving around, you will sit on it.’

  Someone shouted that the wind was sending the sparks flying towards the sub-prefecture; Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies apologized, and rushed to ward off this new danger. Meanwhile Monsieur Delangre suggested they should make one last effort to help the victims. The chief fireman told him roughly to go up the ladders himself if he thought it was possible. He said he had never seen such a fire. It was the devil himself who must have lit that fire for the house to be burning like tinder, on all sides at once. The mayor, followed by some volunteers, went round the back of the house through the Impasse des Chevillottes. Perhaps they could reach it from the garden side.

  ‘It would be so beautiful if it were not so sad,’ remarked Madame de Condamin, collecting herself.

  And indeed, it was a superb conflagration. Sparks rocketed into the night in great blue flames; every window gaped, with depths of blazing red. And the smoke billowed gently, disappeared in a huge purplish cloud, like the smoke from Bengal fireworks in a display of pyrotechnics. The ladies and gentlemen were wrapped up in blankets; they sat back, stretched their legs, gazed up at the spectacle; then there were silences, broken by comments when the brilliance became suddenly more intense. Further off, in the dancing flames which suddenly illumined a deep swell of heads in the darkness, the noise of the crowd grew louder, there was the sound of pouring water, of something drowning. And the fire engine, ten feet away, kept pumping out its breaths at regular intervals, spitting water from its scorched metal throat.

  ‘Just look at the third window on the top floor,’ Monsieur Maffre suddenly cried out in amazement. ‘You can clearly see a bed burning. The curtains are yellow; they are burning like paper.’

  Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies came back at a jog to calm everyone down. Panic had broken out.

  ‘The sparks are certainly being carried by the wind in the direction of the sub-prefecture,’ he said, ‘but they are extinguished in the air. There is no danger at all, we are in control of the fire.’

  ‘But’, asked Madame de Condamin, ‘does anyone know how the fire was started?’

  Monsieur de Bourdeu assured them that he had first seen a tall plume of smoke coming from the kitchen. Monsieur Maffre claimed the opposite: the flames had first appeared in a room on the first floor. The sub-prefect nodded with an air of official reserve. He finally said quietly:

  ‘I believe malice may well be implicated in this fire. I’ve already called for an enquiry.’

  And he recounted that he had seen a man light the fire with a vine branch.

  ‘Yes, I saw him as well,’ interrupted Aurélie Rastoil. ‘It was Monsieur Mouret.’

  Everybody was flabbergasted. Such a thing was impossible. Monsieur Mouret escaping and burning his house down, what a frightful crime! Aurélie was bombarded with questions. She blushed, while her mother looked at her sternly. It wasn’t proper for a young girl to be at her window every night.

  ‘I assure you I recognized Monsieur Mouret easily,’ she went on. ‘I couldn’t sleep, so I got up when I saw a bright light… Monsieur Mouret was dancing around in the middle of the fire.’

  The sub-prefect said decisively:

  ‘Exactly, Mademoiselle is right… I realize who the poor fellow was now. He was so terrifying that I was confused, although his face was not unknown to me… Excuse me… This is very serious; I must go and give some orders.’

  He left again, while everyone remarked on this terrible occurrence, a landlord who incinerated his tenants. Monsieur de Bourdeu got angry with the asylum; the supervision was wholly inadequate. In truth Monsieur de Bourdeu was terrified he might see the prefecture promised him by Abbé Faujas go up in smoke.

  ‘The mad are full of acrimony,’ Monsieur de Condamin said simply.

  This comment embarrassed everyone. Conversation stopped dead. The ladies shivered slightly while the gentlemen exchanged meaningful glances. The blazing house had become still more fascinating since people had learned the name of the perpetrator. Thrilled and horrified by the conflagration, they closed their eyes, imagining the drama which must have taken place there.

  ‘If old Mouret is in there that makes five,’ Monsieur de Condamin said. The ladies hushed him up, accusing him of being a terrible man.

  Since the beginning of the fire the Paloques had been leaning on the windowsill of their dining room, staring. They were just above the improvised salon on the pavement. The justice’s wife eventually came down to offer her gracious hospitality to the Rastoil ladies, as well as to those around them.

  ‘You can see really well from our window, I assure you,’ she said.

  And as the ladies refused:

  ‘But you will catch cold,’ she insisted. ‘It’s a cold night.’

  Madame de Condamin smiled, extending her tiny feet from beneath her skirts out on to the pavement.

  ‘Oh, we are not cold!’ she replied. ‘My feet are burning. I feel fine… Are you cold, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘I’m too hot,’ asserted Aurélie. ‘You would think it was a summer’s night. That fire keeps us nice and warm.’

  Everybody declared that they were comfortable and Madame Paloque decided to go and sit in an armchair as well. Monsieur Maffre had just departed. He had caught sight of his two sons in the company of Guillaume Porquier in the middle of the crowd; all three had come running to see the fire, without ties on, from a house on the ramparts. The judge, who was certain he had locked and bolted them into their bedroom, led Alphonse and Ambroise away by their ears.

  ‘Shall we go to bed?’ said Monsieur de Bourdeu, growing ever more glum.

  Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies had reappeared, tireless, still mindful of the ladies, in spite of being overwhelmed by all the cares of the world. He went eagerly over to meet Monsieur Delangre, who was returning from the Impasse des Chevillottes. They conversed quietly. The mayor must have witnessed some frightful scene; he passed his hand across his face as if to erase from his eyes the terrible image haunting him. The ladies only heard him muttering: ‘We got there too late! It’s horrible, horrible!…’ He would not answer any questions.

  ‘The only ones sorry for the abbé are Bourdeu and Delangre,’ Monsieur de Condamin whispered to Madame Paloque.

  ‘They were doing business with him,’ she replied calmly. ‘Look at Abbé Bourrette, though. He’s really upset.’

  Abbé Bourrette, who had been in the chain, was weeping copiously. The poor man wouldn’t be comforted. He refused to sit down in an armchair. He remained standing, blurry-eyed, watching the last beams burn. Abbé Surin had also been seen, but had vanished after he had gone from group to group and heard the information being passed around.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ repeated Monsieur de Bourdeu. ‘After all, it’s stupid staying here.’

  Everyone got up. It was decided that Monsieur Rastoil, his wife and daughter, would spend the night at the Paloques. Madame de Condamin patted her skirts which were slightly crumpled. They pushed back the armchairs, stood for a moment, saying goodnight to one another. The pumps were still roaring, the fire was fading in the black smoke. All you could hear was the waning sound of footsteps in the crowd and the belated axe of a fireman hacking down some framework.

  ‘It’s the end,’ thought Macquart, who had remained on the pavement opposite.

  But he stayed a moment longer to listen to the last words Monsieur de Condamin was exchanging in an undertone with Madame Paloque.

  ‘Huh,’ said the justice’s wife. �
�No one is going to weep for him, except perhaps that fat fool of a Bourrette. He had become unbearable, we were all his slaves. Monsignor must be laughing now… At last Plassans is freed!’

  ‘And the Rougons,’ remarked Monsieur de Condamin, ‘they must be delighted.’

  ‘My goodness, yes. The Rougons are over the moon! They will be the inheritors of the abbé’s conquest… You can bet they will have paid a good price to anyone prepared to risk setting fire to the house.’

  Macquart went away, very annoyed. He feared he might have been tricked after all. The Rougons’ delight made him feel most uneasy. The Rougons were cunning individuals forever double-crossing you, and whatever you did, they always ended up getting the better of you. As he crossed the Place de la Préfecture he swore he would no longer carry on like that with his eyes shut.

  As he went up to the bedroom where Marthe was in her death throes, he found Rose sitting on a step of the stairs. She was purple with rage. She grumbled:

  ‘No, I shan’t stay in the room. I don’t want to see such things. She can die without me! She can die like a dog! I hate her, I hate everybody. Fancy going to get the boy so that he could be there! And I did it! I shall regret it all my days… The little darling was white as his shirt. I had to hold him up on the way from the seminary. He was crying so much, I thought he would give up the ghost on the way. It’s a disgrace!… And he’s there now, kissing her. It gives me the goosebumps. I wish the house would fall down on us all so it would all be over, just like that!… I shall crawl into a hole and live all by myself and never see another soul, never, never. Life is nothing but a vale of rage and tears.’

  Macquart entered the room. Madame Rougon, on her knees, was hiding her face in her hands, while Serge, standing by the bed with tears pouring down his cheeks, held the head of his dying mother. She had not yet regained consciousness. The last reflected gleams of the fire lit up the room in a red glow.

  Marthe made a sudden gulping. She opened her eyes in surprise and sat up, looking around. Then she joined her hands together in a gesture of inexpressible terror, and died, seeing in the red light Serge’s soutane.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  3 Cours Sauvaire: Plassans is based on Aix-en-Provence, where Zola lived between 1843 and 1858. In the map Zola drew of Plassans, he maintained the shape and plan of Aix-en-Provence, changing only the street names and the names of quartiers. Hence the fictional Cours Sauvaire corresponds to the Cours Mirabeau.

  4 sub-prefecture: the administrative centre of a town that does not have its own prefecture, whose sub-prefect is the civil servant in charge of local executive power.

  5 her three children: Octave Mouret (born in 1840) later makes his fortune in Paris, as described in The Ladies’ Paradise (Au bonheur des dames, 1883), while Serge Mouret (born in 1841) becomes a priest; his story is told in The Sin of Abbé Mouret (La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, 1875). Désirée (born 1844) is presented by Zola as a retarded and innocent girl who, even in her late teens, has the mind of a child. In The Sin of Abbé Mouret, she is taken in and looked after by her brother Serge.

  Les Tulettes: the village outside Plassans where Macquart lives.

  6 Abbé Bourrette: in the Catholic system, the abbé is either the head of a monastery or a prêtre séculier, a priest who does not belong to a congregation or to a specific religious order, like Faujas. At the head of the diocese is the bishop, and attached to a specific church or congregation is the curé or the priest. The vicaire is the priest’s assistant in the parish.

  Missions to China: France had, with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, gained missionary rights to China in addition to advantageous trade and commercial terms. This is one of the many books that appeared about the French missionary work in China.

  7 Besançon: the capital of Franche-Comté in eastern France.

  Saint-Saturnin: the church of Saint-Saturnin is Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence.

  11 two sous: a sou was the smallest denomination of coin, a twentieth of a franc, or five centimes.

  17 piquet: a French society card game played with thirty-two cards.

  20 ‘Voltairean’ freethinker: Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, freethinker, and polemicist. Voltaire often attacked the established Catholic Church and argued for the separation of Church and State.

  33 1848 Revolution: the 1848 Revolution brought the Orléanist monarchy to an end and led to the creation of the Second Republic. In February of that year, King Louis-Philippe was overthrown and the liberal opposition created a provisional government. In June there was an insurrection in Paris in response to the government’s increasingly conservative turn, which was brutally put down. In December 1848, Louis-Napoleon was elected president, and in 1851 he suspended the elected assembly and declared the Second Empire.

  36 Legitimists . . . the bigwigs of the Empire: the Legitimists supported the succession of the Bourbon dynasty, which had officially ended with the deposition of Louis XVI in 1792 prior to his execution in the following year, was restored with Louis XVIII after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and continued with Charles X (1824–30). Charles X, the last Bourbon king, was overthrown in 1830 and abdicated in favour of his grandson, leaving Louis-Philippe d’Orléans as regent. After eleven days of regency, Louis-Philippe was declared king of France by the Chamber of Deputies, thus installing the Orléanist line. The Bourbons went into exile in England, and Louis-Philippe ruled until the 1848 Revolution. The ‘bigwigs of the Empire’ are the supporters of Napoleon III.

  39 The Rougons: the tale of the rise of the Rougons from unsuccessful small-town traders to rich local power brokers is told in The Fortune of the Rougons. (See the Introduction for a fuller summary of the family and its backstory.) Mouret in the same paragraph alludes to the scheming ways in which the Rougons achieved their eminence.

  40 “Thursdays”: like many society women who wish to impose themselves as the centre of a social and intellectual circle, Félicité has a salon, to which she invites townspeople of real or apparent distinction. The salon is often referred to by the day on which it takes place.

  43 Macquart . . . countryside uprisings in 1851: Antoine Macquart is Pierre Rougon’s illegitimate brother, and the uncle of Mouret. Zola refers in this paragraph to the skulduggery in The Fortune of the Rougons whereby Macquart betrays his Republican comrades and earns, from his half-brother Rougon, a pension which enables him to live comfortably in Les Tulettes.

  44 the asylum in Les Tulettes: this is the first reference to Aunt Dide, or Adelaïde Fouque (1768–1873), who, from her marriage to Rougon and her relationship with Macquart, produces the two branches of the family and sets in motion the cycle of hereditary instability that haunts the family across generations. Dide spans the whole Rougon-Macquart cycle, dying aged 105 in Doctor Pascal, the last of the novels. At the end of The Fortune of the Rougons, she is committed to Les Tulettes lunatic asylum. It is revealing that her name is not yet mentioned directly, and that when Mouret alludes to her, the others change the subject and move on.

  45 worth the rope to hang them with: Mouret’s father (in chapter 4 of The Fortune of the Rougons) had hanged himself after the death of his wife. For those who are reading the Rougon-Macquart cycle in sequence, Zola studs the narrative with allusions to past tragedies so as to build up the sense of the Rougon-Macquarts’ damaged inheritance.

  48 the clergymen: the term Zola uses in the French is ‘prêtres habitués’, the most junior priests who assist with ceremonies and parish work under the authority of the priest.

  54 Monsieur Peirotte . . . after 2 December: a reference to events in chapter 5 of The Fortune of the Rougons. Monsieur Peirotte is taken hostage by the insurgents and killed by a stray bullet when government troops attack during the 1851 coup d’état. The Rougons move into his house, at the same time as Louis-Napoleon takes over the royal palace of the Tuileries—another of Zola’s symbolic parallels between the small-town machinations and larger national events
.

  yellow drawing room: the shabby yellow drawing room in the Rougons’ previous home is where Félicité, playing the grande dame in less grand surroundings, hosted her ‘salon’, as described in The Fortune of the Rougons. Félicité is now a rich and established power broker who has moved up in the world and has aggrandized her surroundings accordingly.

  56 after ’51: the 1851 coup d’état, dramatized in The Fortune of the Rougons, by which Louis-Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly.

  58 Chamber of Deputies: this was the lower house of the French parliament. The term is still used to describe members of the National Assembly.

  Sorbonne: the Sorbonne is one of France’s most prestigious universities. The word is also an old term for the brain or the head.

  66 the hypocrite: in French, ‘le tartuffe’; see Introduction, pp. xv–xvi.

  71 ‘My husband is a Macquart and I’m a Rougon’: Marthe and François Mouret are cousins: Marthe comes from the legitimate strand of the Rougons (her grandmother Adelaïde Fouque’s marriage to Marius Rougon) and Mouret from the illegitimate strand (her relationship with Eustache Macquart).

  72 two differing and antagonistic temperaments: in his notes for the novel, Zola uses almost exactly the same words to outline his ‘study’ of the relationship between Marthe and François Mouret. It is interesting to see how Zola uses Faujas to set out his own observations of the Mourets’ situation, the latent tensions in their marriage, and the dangerous elements of their temperaments.

  76 quatorze de rois: a set of four kings in piquet.

  debauchery: Zola uses a genuine incident that took place in Aix-en-Provence in which girls of between 9 and 11 years old were sexually abused. The Work of the Virgin may be partly based on the Notre-Dame Orphanage set up in Aix in 1860 and run by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph.

  115 Horace . . . the Greek Anthology: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BC), Roman poet during the rule of Augustus and best known for his lyrical, and sometimes explicit, love poems, as well as satires. The Greek Anthology is a collection of ancient Greek poems and epigrams in several volumes, most of which was compiled from two manuscripts, and which went through several editions in the nineteenth century.