by Emile Zola
‘Listen!’ he said to Fifi, after kissing her in turn on the forehead, ‘here’s the sugar from the café all the same, and three four-sou pieces for your money-box. Be a good girl until I tell you what to do.’
The girl modestly plied her needle with exemplary diligence. A ray of sunlight, falling across a neighbouring roof, brightened up the little room, touching with its gold this innocent nook where the noise of the traffic outside never came. It stirred all of Bachelard’s romantic instincts.
‘God bless you, Monsieur Narcisse!’ exclaimed aunt Menu, as she showed him out. ‘I’m more relaxed now. Listen to what your heart tells you; that will inspire you.’
The cabman had again dropped off to sleep, and grumbled when Bachelard gave him Monsieur Desmarquay’s address in the Rue Saint-Lazare. No doubt the horse had gone to sleep too, for it needed quite a hail of blows to make it move. At length the cab jolted uncomfortably along.
‘It’s tough, all the same,’ continued Bachelard, after a pause. ‘You can’t imagine how upset I was when I found Gueulin there in his shirt. No, it’s something you’ve got to go through before you can understand it.’
And he went on, entering into every detail without noticing Auguste’s increasing uneasiness. At last the latter, who felt his position becoming more and more false, told him why he was in such a hurry to find Duveyrier.
‘Berthe with that counter-jumper?’ cried Bachelard. ‘You astonish me, sir!’
It seemed that his astonishment was mainly on account of his niece’s choice. But, after a little reflection, he grew indignant. Eléonore, his sister, had a great deal for which to reproach herself. He intended to drop the family altogether. Of course he was not going to get mixed up with this duel; nevertheless, he deemed it essential.
‘Like me, just now, when I saw Fifi with a man in his shirt, my first impulse was to murder everybody … If such a thing had happened to you …’
Auguste started painfully, and Bachelard stopped short.
‘True, I wasn’t thinking. You know only too well what it’s like.’
Then there was another silence, as the cab swayed dismally from side to side. Auguste, whose valour was ebbing with each turn of the wheels, submitted resignedly to the jolting, looking more and more cadaverous and with his left eye half closed because of his headache. Whatever had made Bachelard think that the duel was essential? As the guilty woman’s uncle it was not his place to insist on bloodshed. His brother’s words rang in his ears: ‘It’s ridiculous; you’ll just get spitted!’ The phrase came back to him importunately, obstinately, until it actually seemed part of his headache. He was sure to be killed; he had a sort of presentiment that he would be; such mournful forebodings completely overwhelmed him. He fancied himself dead, and bewailed the sad event.
‘I told you the Rue Saint-Lazare,’ cried Bachelard to the cabman. ‘It’s not at Chaillot. Turn left.’
At last the cab stopped. Out of prudence they sent up for Trublot, who came down bare-headed to talk to them in the doorway.
‘Do you know Clarisse’s address?’ asked Bachelard.
‘Clarisse’s address? Oh, the Rue d’Assas, of course.’
They thanked him, and were about to get into the cab again, when Auguste enquired:
‘What’s the number?’
‘The number? Oh, I don’t know what number!’
Whereupon, Auguste declared that he would rather give the whole thing up. Trublot tried his best to remember; he had dined there once—it was just behind the Luxembourg gardens; but he could not remember whether it was at the end of the street, or on the right or the left. But the door he knew perfectly well, and would be able to recognize it at once. Then Bachelard had another idea and begged Trublot to accompany them, despite Auguste’s protestations and assurances that he would trouble no one further in the matter, but would go home. However, with a somewhat constrained air, Trublot refused. No, he wasn’t going to that hole again. But he avoided giving the real reason, an astounding occurrence, a tremendous smack in the face he had got from Clarisse’s new cook one evening when he had gone to give her a pinch as she stood over her fire. It was incomprehensible! A smack like that in return for a mere civility, just to get to know each other! Such a thing had never happened to him before; it amazed him.
‘No, no,’ he said, trying to find an excuse, ‘I’ll never set foot again in a house where one’s bored to death. Clarisse, you know, has become quite impossible; her temper’s worse than ever, and she’s quite the lady now. And she’s got all her family with her, ever since her father died—a whole tribe of pedlars; mother, two sisters, a big scoundrel of a brother; even an old invalid aunt, who looks like one of those hags who sell dolls in the street! You can’t imagine how dirty and miserable Duveyrier looks in the middle of them all!’
Then he told how, on the rainy day when the magistrate had found Clarisse standing in a doorway, she had been the first to upbraid him, telling him with a flood of tears that he had never had any respect for her. Yes, she had left the Rue de la Cerisaie because of her resentment at a slight upon her personal dignity, though for a long time she had hidden her feelings. Why did he always take off his decoration when he came to see her? Did he think she would spoil it? She was ready to make it up with him, but he must first of all swear upon his honour that he would always wear his decoration, for she valued his esteem and was not going to be perpetually mortified in this way. Discomfited by this remonstration, Duveyrier swore that he would do as she asked. He was completely won over, and deeply touched; she was right; he deemed her a noble-spirited creature.
‘Now he never takes his ribbon off,’ added Trublot. ‘I think she makes him sleep with it on. It impresses her family, too. What’s more, since that big fellow Payan had already spent her twenty-five thousand francs’ worth of furniture, this time she’s got him to buy her thirty thousand francs’ worth. Oh, he’s had it! She’s got him completely under her thumb. Some men will do anything for sex.’
‘Well, I must be off if Monsieur Trublot can’t come,’ said Auguste, whose vexation was merely increased by all these stories.
Trublot, however, suddenly agreed to accompany them; only he would not go upstairs, but would simply show them the door. After fetching his hat and making some excuse, he joined them in the cab.
‘Rue d’Assas,’ he cried to the cabman. ‘I’ll tell you when to stop.’
The driver swore. Rue d’Assas now! Some people liked driving about! But they would just have to be patient. The big white horse, steaming, made hardly any headway, its neck arched at every step in a sort of excruciating nod.
Meanwhile Bachelard had already begun to tell Trublot about his misfortune. This sort of thing made him extremely garrulous. Yes, that pig Gueulin with a delicate young girl like that! He had caught them at it. But at this point of his story he suddenly remembered Auguste, who, glum and doleful, had collapsed in a corner of the cab.
‘Of course; I beg your pardon,’ he muttered. ‘I keep forgetting.’ Then, turning to Trublot, he added: ‘Our friend has just had some trouble at home, too; that’s why we’re trying to find Duveyrier. Yes, you know, last night he caught his wife with …’ With a gesture he completed his sentence, adding simply: ‘Octave, you know!’
Trublot, plain-spoken as he was, was about to say that this did not surprise him. But he forbore to use this phrase, substituting another, full of angry scorn, for an explanation of which Auguste dared not ask:
‘What an idiot Octave is!’
At this criticism of the adultery there was a pause. Each of the three men became lost in thought. The cab could go no further. It seemed to be dawdling along for hours on a bridge when Trublot, the first to awake from his reverie, observed judiciously:
‘This cab doesn’t go very fast.’
But nothing could quicken the horse’s pace; by the time they got to the Rue d’Assas it was eleven o’clock. And there they wasted nearly another quarter of an hour, for, despite Trublot’s boast, he did
not know the door after all. First he let the cabman drive the whole length of the street without stopping him, and then made him come back again. This he did three times. Acting on his precise instructions Auguste called at ten different houses, but the concierges replied that there was ‘no one of that name there’. At last a fruitseller told him the right number. He went upstairs with Bachelard, leaving Trublot in the cab.
It was the big scoundrel of a brother who opened the door. He had a cigarette between his lips, and puffed smoke in their faces as he showed them into the drawing-room. When they asked for Monsieur Duveyrier, at first he stared mockingly at them without answering, and then slouched off, presumably to fetch him. In the middle of the drawing-room, the new blue-satin furniture of which was already stained with grease, one of the sisters, the youngest, was sitting on the carpet wiping out a kitchen saucepan, while the elder girl thumped with clenched fists on a splendid piano, of which she had just found the key. On seeing the gentlemen enter they had both looked up, but did not stop; rather, they went on thumping and scrubbing with redoubled energy. Five minutes passed and nobody came. Deafened by the din, the visitors looked at each other, until shrieks from an adjoining room filled them with terror. It was the invalid aunt being washed.
At last an old woman, Madame Bocquet, Clarisse’s mother, put her head round the door, not daring to show herself because of the filthy dress she had on.
‘Who do the gentlemen want?’ she asked.
‘Monsieur Duveyrier, of course!’ cried Bachelard, losing patience. ‘We told the servant already! Say it’s Monsieur Auguste Vabre and Monsieur Narcisse Bachelard!’
Madame Bocquet shut the door again. Meanwhile the elder sister, standing on a stool, thumped the keyboard with her elbows, while the younger sister scraped the bottom of the saucepan with a steel fork. Another five minutes elapsed. Then, in the midst of this din, which did not seem to bother her in the least, Clarisse appeared.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said to Bachelard, without even looking at Auguste.
Bachelard was quite taken aback. He would never have recognized her, so fat had she grown. The big devil of a woman, who used to be as thin as a rake, and with a fluffy mop of hair like a poodle’s, had been transformed into a dumpy matron, her hair neatly plastered and pomaded. She did not give him time to say a word, but at once told him with brutal frankness that she did not want a mischief-maker like him at her place, for she knew he told Alphonse all sorts of horrid stories. Yes, indeed: he had accused her of sleeping with Alphonse’s friends, and of carrying on with scores of men behind his back. He could not deny it, for Alphonse had told her so himself.
‘Listen, mate,’ she added, ‘if you’ve come here to booze you might as well leave now. The old days are over. From now on I intend to be respectable.’
Then she proclaimed her passion for everything that was proper and upright—a passion that had grown into an obsession. Thus, in her periodic fits of prudery she had one by one chased away all her lover’s friends, not allowing them to smoke, insisting on being called Madame and on receiving formal calls. Her old superficial, secondhand drollery had vanished; all that remained was her extravagant attempt to play the fine lady, who sometimes gave way to foul language and even fouler gestures. By degrees, solitude again surrounded Duveyrier; no amusing nook for him now, but a grisly bourgeois establishment, amid whose dirt and din he encountered all the worries of his own house. As Trublot remarked, ‘the Rue de Choiseul was no more boring, and it was certainly less dirty’.
‘We haven’t called to see you,’ replied Bachelard, recovering himself, used as he was to the robust greetings of ladies such as she. ‘We want to talk to Duveyrier.’
Then Clarisse glanced at his companion. She thought he was a bailiff, knowing that Alphonse’s affairs had recently become rather involved.
‘Oh, what do I care, after all?’ she said. ‘You can have him if you like. It’s not much fun for me to have to look after his pimples!’
She no longer even sought to hide her disgust, feeling certain, moreover, that her rough treatment of him only made him more attached to her. Then, opening a door, she exclaimed:
‘Come in here; these gentlemen insist on seeing you.’
Duveyrier, who seemed to have been waiting behind the door, came in, shook hands with them, and tried to smile. He no longer had the youthful air of former days, when he used to spend the evening with her in the Rue de la Cerisaie. He seemed overcome with weariness; he looked thin and depressed, trembling nervously now and again, as if alarmed by something behind him.
Clarisse stopped to listen. But Bachelard was not going to talk in front of her, so he invited the judge to lunch.
‘Say you’ll come, because Monsieur Vabre wants to see you. I’m sure that Madame will be kind enough to excuse you …’
At that moment Madame noticed her youngest sister thumping on the piano; giving her a hard slap, she drove her out of the room, while she boxed the other child’s ears and packed her off with her saucepan. There was an infernal racket. The invalid aunt in the next room started screaming again, thinking they were about to beat her.
‘Did you hear, my love?’ murmured Duveyrier. ‘These gentlemen have asked me to lunch.’
She was not listening, but shyly, tenderly touched the keys of the piano. For the last month she had been learning to play. This had been the unuttered longing of her whole life, a remote ambition which, if attained, could alone stamp her as a woman of fashion. After making sure that nothing was broken, she was about to stop her lover from going merely in order to be disagreeable to him, when Madame Bocquet once more popped her head round the door.
‘Your music teacher’s here,’ she said.
Whereupon Clarisse instantly changed her mind, and called out to Duveyrier:
‘All right, you can clear off! I’ll have lunch with Théodore. We don’t want you.’
Théodore, her music teacher, was a Belgian with a big rosy face. She at once sat down at the piano, and he placed her fingers on the keyboard, rubbing them, to make them less stiff. For a moment Duveyrier hesitated; evidently he was much annoyed. But the gentlemen were waiting for him, so he went to put on his boots. When he came back she was playing scales in a haphazard fashion, strumming out a perfect hailstorm of wrong notes, which made Bachelard and his companion feel almost ill. Yet Duveyrier, driven wild by his wife’s Mozart and Beethoven, stood still for a moment behind his mistress, apparently enjoying the sound, despite his nervous facial twitchings. Then, turning to the other two, he whispered:
‘Her talent for music is quite amazing.’
After kissing her hair he discreetly withdrew, and left her alone with Théodore. In the hall the big scoundrel of a brother asked him for a franc to buy some tobacco. Then, as they went downstairs and Bachelard expressed surprise at his conversion to the charms of the piano, Duveyrier swore that he had never hated it, and spoke of the ideal, saying how greatly Clarisse’s simple scales stirred his soul, thus yielding to his perpetual desire to bestrew with flowers of innocence the rude pathway of his grosser passions.
Trublot, down below, had given the cabman a cigar and was listening to his talk with the keenest interest. Bachelard insisted on lunching at Foyot’s;* it was just the right time for it, and they could talk better whilst eating. Then, when the cab at last succeeded in starting, he informed Duveyrier of all that had happened; the judge grew very grave.
Auguste’s indisposition seemed to have increased during the visit to Clarisse’s, where he had not uttered a single word. Now, completely worn out by this interminable drive, his head throbbing, he collapsed in a corner. When Duveyrier asked him what he intended to do, he opened his eyes, paused for a moment as if in anguish, and then repeated his previous phrase:
‘Fight, of course!’ His voice, however, sounded fainter; and, closing his eyes as if asking to be left in peace, he added: ‘Unless you can suggest anything else.’
Then, as the vehicle lumbered along, these good gentlemen
held a grand council. Duveyrier, like Bachelard, deemed a duel indispensable. He seemed much affected by the idea of shedding blood, imagining a dark stream of it staining the staircase of his own house. But honour demanded it, and with honour no compromise was possible. Trublot took a broader view: it was stupid, he said, to stake one’s honour on what, for courtesy’s sake, he called a woman’s frailty. With a faint movement of his eyelids Auguste expressed his approval; he was exasperated by the belligerent fury of the other two, who certainly ought to have been wholly for reconciliation. Despite his fatigue, he was obliged once more to tell the story of the night before, of the blow he had given and the blow he had received. Soon the question of adultery was forgotten; the discussion bore solely upon these two blows: they were subjected to comment and analysis in an attempt to find a satisfactory solution to the whole affair.
‘Talk about hair-splitting!’ contemptuously cried Trublot at last. ‘If they hit each other, then they’re quits.’
Duveyrier and Bachelard looked at each other aghast. But by this time they had reached the restaurant, and Bachelard declared that first of all they should have lunch. It would help them to think better. He invited them to a copious meal, ordering expensive dishes and wines, so that for three hours they sat at table in a private room. The duel was not even mentioned. Immediately after the hors-d’oeuvres the talk inevitably turned upon women—Fifi and Clarisse were perpetually explained, overhauled, and plucked. Bachelard now declared the fault to be on his side, so that Duveyrier might not think he had been grossly jilted, while the latter, to make up for having let uncle Bachelard see him weeping that night in the lonely apartment in the Rue de la Cerisaie, protested his present happiness until he actually began to believe it, becoming quite sentimental. Prevented by his migraine from eating or drinking, Auguste sat there, apparently listening, with one elbow on the table and a doleful look in his eyes. During dessert Trublot remembered that the cabman, who had been forgotten, was still waiting down below. Full of sympathy, he sent him the remains of the feast and the heeltaps of the bottles, for, from certain remarks the fellow had made, he had an inkling that he had once been a priest. It struck three. Duveyrier grumbled at having to be assessor at the next assizes. Bachelard, now very drunk, spat sideways on to Trublot’s trousers, who never noticed it, and there, amid the liqueurs, the day would have ended, if Auguste had not roused himself with a sudden start.
