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  ‘So, now you’re almost exactly as I wanted you to be,’ he told her. ‘You’re quite right, a woman’s proper place is in the home.’

  And when he had gone, she would burst out laughing and cry:

  ‘Isn’t he stupid! And he thinks women are stupid!’

  At last, one Sunday evening, just before ten o’clock, soon after the whole gang had assembled in Clorinde’s bedroom, in came Monsieur de Plouguern, looking triumphant.

  ‘Well,’ he cried, affecting great indignation, ‘have you heard what Rougon has done now? This time he really has gone too far!’

  They crowded round him. Nobody had heard anything.

  ‘Absolutely disgraceful!’ he continued, waving his arms about. ‘How a minister could sink so low is beyond me!’

  Then he told the whole story, without stopping. The Charbonnels, on arriving in Faverolles to take possession of their cousin’s legacy, had made a huge fuss on discovering that a large part of the silverware had disappeared. They laid this at the door of the maid who was supposed to have been looking after the house. She is a very pious woman. According to them, at the news of the ruling by the Council of Ministers, this wretched woman must have come to some understanding with the Sisters and taken to the convent every valuable they thought they could hide. Three days later, they declared that the maid was blameless. It was the Sisters themselves who had pillaged the house. This had caused a terrible scandal in the town, but the Police Superintendent had refused to search the convent until, merely on receipt of a letter from the Charbonnels, Rougon had telegraphed the Prefect, asking him to order a domiciliary search at once.

  ‘Yes, a domiciliary search, that’s what the telegram said,’ continued Monsieur de Plouguern, drawing the story to a close. ‘So then people saw the Superintendent and two gendarmes turn the convent upside down. They were at it for five hours. They insisted on searching everywhere. Just imagine, they even looked inside the Sisters’ mattresses…’

  ‘The Sisters’ mattresses? Oh, how dreadful!’ cried Madame Bouchard, shocked.

  ‘The man can’t have any religious feelings at all,’ declared the Colonel.

  ‘What do you expect?’ sighed Madame Correur. ‘Rougon was never a believer… I’ve wasted hours of my time trying to reconcile him with God.’

  Monsieur Bouchard and Monsieur Béjuin shook their heads in despair, as if they had just heard of some social catastrophe which made them doubt the capacity of human beings to act rationally. Monsieur Kahn scratched his beard furiously.

  ‘And they found nothing, I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ replied Monsieur de Plouguern.

  Then he added quickly:

  ‘Just a silver saucepan, I believe, a couple of silver goblets, an oil cruet, little things like that, presents the pious old man gave the Sisters before he died, as a kind of reward for looking after him during his illness.’

  ‘But of course,’ the others murmured.

  The senator did not labour the point, but, slowly, emphasizing each sentence with an emphatic gesture, continued:

  ‘That’s not really the issue. It’s a question of respect for the convent, for one of those consecrated houses where virtuous people driven from our midst by our godless society take refuge. How can we expect the common man to be a believer, if religion is attacked from above? Rougon has committed an act of sacrilege, and he must be brought to account… Not surprisingly, the good people of Faverolles are outraged. The Bishop, Monseigneur Rochart, who has always been very concerned for the well-being of the Sisters, left at once for Paris to demand justice. There was much talk about it today in the Senate. It was suggested that the matter should be brought up for formal discussion, just on the basis of the few details I was able to provide. And the Empress herself…’

  They all leaned forward.

  ‘Yes, it seems the Empress heard the whole lamentable story from Madame de Llorentz, who heard it from our friend Monsieur La Rouquette, who heard it from me. Her Majesty said very loudly: “Monsieur Rougon is no longer fit to speak in the name of France!” ’

  ‘Very well said!’ they all cried.

  That Thursday this story was the sole subject of conversation until one o’clock in the morning. Clorinde did not open her mouth once. As soon as Monsieur de Plouguern started talking, she sank back on her chaise longue, looking rather pale, her lips pursed. Then she made the sign of the cross three times, very quickly, without anybody noticing, as if offering her thanks to Heaven for having granted her the grace she sought.

  When the story came to the domiciliary search of the convent, she clenched her hands in pious indignation. Gradually, she became very red in the face. Staring into space, she fell into a deep reverie.

  Then, while the others carried on talking, Monsieur de Plouguern went up to her, slipped his hand round her bodice, and gave her breast a little squeeze. With his libertine snigger and in the tone of a great lord who has seen everything, he bent down and whispered in her ear:

  ‘Now that he has picked a fight with the Almighty, he’s done for!’

  Chapter 13

  For a week, Rougon heard the outcry against him growing ever louder. They would have forgiven him everything — abuse of power, the greed of his gang, his stranglehold on the country; but sending gendarmes to upend the Sisters’ mattresses was so monstrous a crime that at Court the ladies pretended to tremble slightly when Rougon passed by. Monseigneur Rochart made a tremendous stir in official circles. It was said that he had even gone to see the Empress herself. But the scandal must have been artificially sustained by a handful of clever people. Directives were clearly passed round, for the same rumours sprang up all over the place at the same time, in a highly coordinated way. At first Rougon was not worried by the attacks on him. He shrugged them off, calling the whole thing ‘pure nonsense’. He even joked about it. At a reception given by the Minister of Justice he actually said: ‘I don’t believe I mentioned that they found a priest under one of the mattresses.’ When that witticism got abroad, the profanity of it provoked a fresh wave of anger. After that, Rougon’s nerves began to fray. He became quite angry. The Sisters were clearly pilferers, since the silver saucepans and goblets had been found in their possession. He resolved to bring charges, got more deeply involved, and began to speak of serving writs on the entire clergy of Faverolles.

  Early one morning the Charbonnels were announced. He was very surprised. He did not know they were in Paris. As they entered, he assured them that everything was going well; just the previous day, in fact, he had sent instructions to the Prefect not to let the case get stuck in the Public Prosecutor’s office. But Monsieur Charbonnel seemed agitated, and Madame Charbonnel cried:

  ‘No, no, that’s not why we’re here!… You have gone too far, Monsieur Rougon! You don’t understand.’

  And thereupon they broke into lavish praise of the Sisters. They were most God-fearing women. Perhaps they themselves had once spoken against them, but never, absolutely never, had they accused them of criminal behaviour. For that matter, the whole town of Faverolles would have pleaded the Sisters’ cause, so great was the respect in which they were held.

  ‘You would be doing us a very great disservice, Monsieur Rougon,’ Madame Charbonnel concluded, ‘if you go on attacking the Church like this. We have come here to beg you to desist… Good heavens! Can you not see that down there folk really have no idea. They thought at first that we were the ones egging you on; we would have ended up being stoned… We have just made the convent a nice little gift — an ivory crucifix my cousin had at the foot of his bed.’

  ‘Well, anyway, now at least you are warned,’ said Monsieur Charbonnel. ‘It’s up to you now… Our own conscience is clear.’

  Rougon made no attempt to interrupt them. They seemed very unhappy with him. They even began to raise their voices. He felt a slight shiver run up his spine. He stared at them, suddenly feeling tired, as if robbed of some of his strength. But he made no attempt to argue. He just
dismissed them, with a promise to call a halt to his pursuit of the Sisters; and he did indeed hush everything up without delay.

  For several days he had been preoccupied by another scandal in which he had become indirectly involved. There had been a terrible tragedy in Coulonges. Du Poizat, being a stubborn fellow, had tried to ‘get on top of’ his father, as Gilquin put it. He had gone to the old miser’s house one morning and knocked on the door. Five minutes later, after a great deal of shouting, the neighbours heard gunshots, and when they rushed in, they found the old man stretched out at the foot of the stairs with a broken skull and two discharged guns lying in the middle of the hall. And there was Du Poizat, white as a sheet, saying that when his father had seen him head for the stairs he had begun to yell ‘thief!’ as if he had gone mad. Then the old man had fired two shots at him, practically point-blank. He even showed the hole one of the bullets had made in his hat. A moment later, he claimed, his father had fallen backwards and cracked his head open on the edge of the second step.

  This dramatic death, played out mysteriously, without witnesses, had given rise to the most vexatious rumours throughout the department. The doctors said that the death was caused by a massive stroke, but the Prefect’s enemies claimed that Du Poizat must have pushed his father over; and thanks to the very harsh administration which was subjecting Niort to a reign of terror, the number of these enemies was increasing daily. Du Poizat, his jaw set, clenching his small, childlike fists, pale but defiant, silenced the gossip with a mere flash of his grey eyes as he passed people’s doors. Then he had some further bad luck. He was obliged to stop seeing Gilquin, who had got involved in an unsavoury story of release from military service. For one hundred francs he was said to have tried to get the sons of some peasant off, and all Du Poizat could do was save him from prison but cut all ties with him. The trouble was, until now Du Poizat had relied heavily on Rougon, whom he had been implicating in every fresh catastrophe. But he must now have scented the Minister’s impending fall from favour, for he came to Paris without alerting Rougon, feeling vulnerable himself, aware that the authority he himself had helped to undermine was beginning to weaken, and looking around for somebody else to cling on to. He had in mind to request a transfer to another prefecture, in order to avoid his certain dismissal. His father’s death and Gilquin’s crooked behaviour had made it impossible for him to stay in Niort.

  ‘I bumped into Monsieur Du Poizat just now, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré,’ said Clorinde one day, maliciously, to Rougon. ‘So you two have fallen out, have you? He seemed furious with you.’

  Rougon avoided answering. He had had to refuse the Prefect a number of favours, and had gradually begun to sense a chill between them; their relationship was now limited to bare, professional exchanges. And it was the same story with everyone. Even Madame Correur seemed to be dropping him. There were evenings when, once again, he had that feeling of abandonment he had suffered in the Rue Marbeuf when the whole gang had lost faith in him. After days of endless activity, with crowds of people besieging his drawing room, he found himself alone, lost, disconsolate. He missed his intimates. Again he felt an imperious need for the continuous hero-worship of the Colonel and Monsieur Bouchard, for the comfort and reassurance which his little court had given him. He even missed Monsieur Béjuin’s silences. So now he made an attempt to bring them all together again. He became friendly, he wrote letters, he risked visits. But the bonds had been broken and he was unable to rally them all to his side. If he managed at one end there would be some little quarrel at the other which broke the other strings, so he was always lacking one friend or another, until at last they had all deserted him. These were the death throes of his power. Strong as he was, he was bound to these idiots by all the work they had done together for their mutual benefit. As they withdrew, each of them robbed him of part of himself. As his importance dwindled, his great strength became virtually useless; his huge fists flailed pointlessly in the air. And when the sun cast a solitary shadow as he walked past, and he could no longer build himself up by abusing his credit with others, it seemed to him that he occupied less space on earth. His dream was now of some new incarnation, to be resurrected as Jupiter the Thunderer, who would need no troop fawning round him, but could lay down the law by the sheer power of his voice.

  However, Rougon still did not think he was in any serious danger. Their teeth scarcely touched his heels and he treated their attempted bites with scorn. Though unpopular and isolated, his rule continued. He regarded the Emperor as the guarantor of his authority. His sole weakness was his credulity. Every time he saw the Emperor, with that bland, inscrutable smile of his, he found him benevolent and extremely kind. His Majesty assured him that he had complete confidence in him and repeated the same instructions as before, and that sufficed. Surely the Emperor could not be thinking of sacrificing him. Rougon’s confidence prompted him to attempt a masterstroke. To silence his foes and consolidate his power, he conceived the notion of offering his resignation in very dignified terms, referring to complaints that were circulating about him, assuring the Emperor that he had diligently followed all his directives, but adding that he felt the need for his supreme approval before he could go on with his great work of ensuring the public good. And he bluntly insisted that he was a man with an iron fist who stood for merciless repression. The Court was at Fontainebleau at the time, and when he had sent in his letter of resignation, he waited, with all the coolness of an expert gambler. A line was now to be drawn under the recent scandals — the Coulonges tragedy and the house-search at the convent. If he were to fall, he would at least fall from a great height, as a strong man.

  It so happened that on the day when the Minister’s fate was to be decided there was a charity bazaar at the Orangerie, for a nursery of which the Empress was the patron. All the Palace favourites and all prominent dignitaries were bound to attend, to pay court, and Rougon decided that he would put in an appearance. It was sheer bravado, facing up to all these people observing him out of the corner of their eyes, and showing his disdain for their whispering. At about three o’clock, he was giving the head of his staff a final instruction before leaving, when his footman came to tell him that a gentleman and lady wished to see him very urgently in his private apartment. The card bore the names of the Marquis and Marquise d’Escorailles.

  The elderly couple, whom the footman, misled by their threadbare clothes, had left in the dining room, stood up courteously. Rougon hastened at once to take them through to the drawing room. He was somewhat perturbed by their presence, and became quite uneasy. He said how surprised he was that they should suddenly have come to Paris. He tried to appear very friendly, but they remained cold, stiff, and unsmiling.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the Marquis at last, ‘you will forgive our coming to see you like this, but we felt obliged to do so… It’s about our son, Jules. We would like to see him leave the government service. We have come to ask you to let him go.’

  When the Minister gaped at them in astonishment, the Marquis continued:

  ‘Young men take too light a view of things. We have twice written to Jules to tell him our reasons for asking him to resign his post… But he pays no attention, and so we decided to come up to Paris. This is the second time we have been here in thirty years.’

  Only then did Rougon respond. Jules had a fine future ahead of him. They were going to ruin his career. But as he spoke, the Marquise began to fidget with impatience. Now she in turn said her piece, and she was much more forthright than her husband.

  ‘Heaven knows, Monsieur Rougon, it’s not for us to judge you, but our family has its traditions… Jules can’t be associated in any way with this vile persecution of the Church. In Plassans people are already amazed that he’s still here. We’ll end up being ostracized by the whole of the town’s nobility.’

  Now Rougon understood. He wanted to argue, but the Marquise silenced him with an imperious gesture.

  ‘Let me finish… Our son joined you against our w
ishes. You know how sad it made us to see him serve an illegitimate regime. I prevented his father from disowning him, but ever since, our house has been in mourning, and when our friends come to see us, our son’s name is never mentioned. We had sworn to wash our hands of him; but there are limits, and when a d’Escorailles is involved with the enemies of the Holy Church… I hope I make myself clear, Monsieur?’

  Rougon accepted defeat. He did not even feel like smiling at the old lady’s white lies, for he had known the d’Escorailles for many years, since he was starving on the streets of Plassans. These were the haughty, spiteful, arrogant people he knew. If others had addressed him like that, he would have thrown them out. But he now felt upset, hurt, shrunken. Memories of his miserable, poverty-stricken youth came flooding back. For a second, he felt he was wearing his old worn-down clogs again. He promised he would persuade Jules to resign. Then, hinting at the reply he was expecting from the Emperor, he contented himself with adding:

  ‘You may have your son back as early as this evening, Madame.’

  Alone again, he suddenly felt afraid. This old couple had shattered his composure. Now he was even loath to put in an appearance at the charity bazaar, for all eyes would be able to read the discomfiture on his face. But, ashamed of such childish fear, he set out. As he went through his office, he asked Merle if there had been any callers.