by Émile Zola
Sandoz and Bongrand looked at the fire without a word; then, when they had passed it, Sandoz picked up the thread of conversation.
‘His trouble was that he was not the man for his own artistic formula. By that I mean he hadn’t quite the genius necessary to establish it on a firm foundation and impose it on the world in the form of some definitive work. … And now what is there to see for all he’s done? Nothing; nothing but effort being frittered away on all sides; nobody producing anything more than sketches or hasty impressions; nobody capable of being the master everyone’s looking for. Could anything be more frustrating than seeing his new notation of light, his passion for reality pushed to the point of scientific analysis, the evolution he started with such originality, delayed, trifled with by a lot of smart nobodies, leading to nothing, simply because the man for the situation has yet to be born? … But he will be, one day! Nothing’s ever completely wasted, and there’s simply got to be light!’
‘Don’t be too sure!’ replied Bongrand. ‘Life, too, miscarries occasionally, you know. … I listen to all you say, Sandoz, but I haven’t got a great deal of faith. I’m dying of depression, and I feel everything else is dying too. … We’re living in a bad season, in a vitiated atmosphere, with the century coming to an end and everything in process of demolition; buildings torn down wholesale; every plot of land being dug and redug and every mortal thing stinking of death. How can anybody expect to be healthy? The nerves go to pieces, general neurosis sets in, and art begins to totter, faced with a free-for-all, with anarchy to follow, and personality fighting tooth and nail for self-assertion. … I’ve never seen so much squabbling or heard so much nebulous talk as I have since people claimed to know everything.’
Sandoz had turned pale and, as he watched the clouds of rusty smoke swirling in the wind, he said, half aloud, half to himself:
‘It was inevitable. All our activity, our boastfulness about our knowledge was bound to lead us back again to doubt. The present century has cast so much light on so many things, but it was bound to end under the threat of another wave of darkness. … And that is the root of our troubles. We have been promised too much and led to expect too much, including the conquest and the explanation of everything; and now we’ve grown impatient. We’re surprised things don’t move more quickly. We’re resentful because, in a matter of a hundred years, science hasn’t given us absolute certitude and perfect happiness. Why then continue, we ask, since we shall never know everything and our bread will always be bitter? The century has been a failure. Hearts are tortured with pessimism and brains clouded with mysticism for, try as we may to put imagination to flight with the cold light of science, we have the supernatural once more in arms against us and the whole world of legend in revolt, bent on enslaving us again in our moment of fatigue and uncertainty. … I’m no more sure of things than anyone else; my mind, too, is divided. But I do think that this last shattering upheaval of our old religious fears was only to be expected. We are not an end; we are a transition, the beginning only of something new. … And it’s that sets my mind at rest, and somehow encourages me: to know we are moving towards rationality and the firm foundations that only science can give. …’
Then he added, his voice breaking with the depth of his emotion:
‘Unless of course madness makes us come a cropper in the dark and we all end up like our old friend sleeping there in his coffin, strangled by our own ideals.’
The hearse was now leaving Avenue No. 2 and turning to the right into Avenue No. 3, where Bongrand drew Sandoz’s attention to a plot full of graves they were passing.
It was a children’s cemetery full of tiny graves, all set out in perfect order, separated by narrow little pathways. It was a children’s city of the dead, built of tiny white crosses and tiny white edge-stones almost entirely covered by a mass of white and blue wreaths, making the whole quiet plot of milky blue appear to be blossoming with all the childhood buried in its soil. The crosses told the ages of the children: two years, sixteen months, five months. One poor little cross on a grave without an edge-stone and dug a little out of line, announced simply: Eugenie, Aged Three Days. So young, and already sleeping there alone, like children who, at family gatherings, are given their own little table!
The hearse stopped at last, halfway down the avenue. When Sandoz saw the open grave on the corner of the next plot, across from the children’s graves, he murmured tenderly:
‘Dear old Claude! You’d a heart like a child’s; you’ll be in good company here.’
The undertakers lowered the coffin into the grave; the priest stood waiting, glum and cold, and the grave-diggers were ready with their spades. Three neighbours had dropped out on the way, so the ten were now only seven. The second cousin who, in spite of the bitter weather, had held his hat in his hand ever since they left the church, moved up to the graveside. All the others removed their hats and the prayers were about to begin when a piercing whistle made everyone look up.
At the far end of Avenue No. 3 a train was going by on the suburban line which ran on a high embankment overlooking the cemetery. At the top of a grassy slope the telegraph posts and wires made a geometrical pattern in black on the pale grey sky; beneath them stood a signalman’s cabin and the signal itself, its quivering plate providing the only splash of red. As the train thundered by, the coaches, and even the shapes of the people sitting near the windows, stood out like transparencies in a shadow show. When it had passed, the track itself was just a clean black line on the horizon. Then, in the distance, a series of other whistles started up, calling each other in agonized tones, some shrill with fury, others hoarse with suffering or choking with distress. They were followed by one sinister blast on a horn.
‘Revertitur in terram suam unde erat …’ intoned the priest, who had opened a book and was racing through the service.
But his voice was soon drowned by the arrival of a huge, puffing locomotive engaged in shunting on the line immediately above him. This one had a big, thick voice and a throaty, tremendously melancholy whistle. Up and down it went, panting like some ungainly monster; then suddenly it let off steam in one furious, tempestuous hiss.
‘Requiescat in pace,’ said the priest.
‘Amen,’ came the response from the boy.
And the proceedings were rushed to a close to the earsplitting accompaniment of violent clanks and crashes in prolonged succession like endless gunfire.
Furious, Bongrand looked up at the engine, and was relieved when it stopped and there was silence again. Sandoz had tears in his eyes, moved now by the things he had let himself say as he followed his old friend’s coffin, feeling as if they had been having one of the enthralling talks they used to have in the old days. He felt he was burying his own youth, that it was part of himself, and the best part, the illusions and enthusiasms, which the men were lowering into the grave.
At that terrible moment an accident occurred to add to his grief. It had rained so heavily during the past few days, and the earth was so very soft, that one side of the grave suddenly fell in and one of the grave-diggers had to jump down and clear it with his spade; which he did with slow, rhythmic gestures that seemed likely to go on for ever, greatly to the annoyance of the priest but to the excitement of the four neighbours who, though nobody knew why, had stayed with the funeral party to the end. Up on the embankment the railway engine was in action again, backing and blasting out showers of red-hot cinders into the dull grey sky.
At last the grave was cleared and the coffin lowered into it, the holy water was passed round and all was over. Standing at the graveside, correct and charming as ever, the second cousin shook hands with all these people he had never seen before, in memory of the relative whose name he had forgotten till yesterday.
‘Decent fellow, that draper,’ said Bongrand, swallowing back his tears.
‘Very decent,’ answered Sandoz through his own.
The mourners dispersed; the surplices of priest and acolyte disappeared among the green tre
es, the neighbours scattered and meandered away, looking at the inscriptions on the graves, and Sandoz, deciding at last to turn away from the grave which was already half filled-in, said quietly:
‘We shall be the only ones who really knew him. … And this is the end; not even a name.’
‘He’s lucky where he is,’ said Bongrand, ‘with not even a halffinished picture to worry about … lucky to be away from it all, instead of wearing himself out, as we do, producing offspring who are either headless or limbless and never really alive.’
‘Yes, you’ve got to swallow your pride and cheat and make do with half-measures in this life. … My books, for example; I can polish and revise them as much as I like, but in the end I always despise myself for their being, in spite of my efforts, so incomplete, so untrue to life.’
Pale with emotion, the two men moved away side by side past the white graves of the children, the novelist in the full vigour of his work, at the height of his fame, the artist on the decline but covered with glory.
‘There’s one, at least, who was both logical and brave,’ Sandoz continued. ‘He admitted his impotence and did away with himself.’
‘True enough,’ said Bongrand. ‘If we weren’t all so keen on preserving our own miserable skins, we should all do the same, don’t you think?’
‘I believe we should. Since we can’t really create anything, since we’re nothing more than a lot of feeble reproducers, we might just as well blow our brains out at once.’
They were back again near the heap of smouldering coffins which, now that they were properly alight, were steaming and crackling, though still showing no signs of flames. The thick, pungent smoke alone had increased and was being blown in great swirling clouds across the cemetery, covering it as with a funeral pall.
‘Good Lord! Eleven o’clock!’ said Bongrand, looking at his watch. ‘Time I was home.’
Sandoz, too, expressed his surprise:
‘Eleven o’clock already!’ he cried.
Half blinded still with tears, he took one last, despairing look at the vast expanse of graves as they lay, all prim and proper, covered in the blossom of their beads, and added:
‘And now, back to work!’
Explanatory Notes
10 the young ‘open air’ painters: see Introduction, p. xii.
26 His mother, a decent, hardworking laundress … local school: a reference to the story of Gervaise, Lantier, and Coupeau in L’Assommoir.
27 From their earliest years … ‘the three inseparables’: the following account is based on Zola’s own childhood friendships with Paul Cézanne and Baptistin Baille. See Introduction, p. ix.
35 You know the one I did … scrapped it: a reference to an incident from Claude’s days as a young art student in The Belly of Paris.
36 Ingres: Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), whose paintings are noted for their classical technique and purity of line.
Delacroix and Courbet: Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), leader of the Romantic school of painting, noted for the originality of his technique, in particular his bold use of colour; and Gustave Courbet (1819–77), famous for his choice of everyday subjects (as opposed to those taken from mythology or the Bible).
51 ‘To hell with Rome’: signed, Godemard: a reference to the prestigious Prix de Rome awarded annually on the basis of a competition held at the École des Beaux-Arts and enabling the winner to study at the French Academy in Rome (the Villa Medici) for three years at state expense.
59 to draw for conscription: those eligible by age for military service drew lots to see who would serve and who were exempt.
65 Who was Jules Favre … Rouher?: Jules Favre (1809–80), Republican politician and member of the French Academy, who proposed the resignation of the Emperor Louis-Napoleon in 1870, was a member of the ensuing government of National Defence, and negotiated the Treaty of Frankfurt in May 1871 following French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War; and Eugène Rouher (1814–84), Minister of State and later President of the Senate under Louis-Napoleon, sometimes known as the ‘vice-emperor’ and a key model for Zola’s Eugène Rougon.
70 Musée du Luxembourg: works of art by living artists were purchased by the state and displayed in this museum before being transferred to the Louvre (or elsewhere) when the artist died.
108 the opening of the ‘Salon des Refusés’ … was being hung: see Introduction, p. xi.
352 There was an elderly female cousin … wearing a decoration: respectively, Sidonie Rougon who features in The Kill and Octave Mouret, the unscrupulous tycoon, from Pot-bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames.
353 ‘Cayenne’: Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, to which criminals were deported and from which they seldom returned. The prison on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana became especially notorious when Alfred Dreyfus was sent there after being falsely condemned for espionage in 1894.
