The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint)

by Emile Zola

  ‘Why don’t you use the dozen handkerchiefs Madame Mouret gave you?’ his mother asked. ‘The poor woman would be so pleased to see you use them. She has spent a whole month embroidering them with your monogram.’

  With an angry gesture he answered:

  ‘No, you use them, Mother. They are women’s handkerchiefs. I can’t bear the smell of them.’

  If Marthe was always obedient to the priest’s will, and no longer anything but his creature, every day she became more bitter and irritated by the thousand little worries of daily life. Rose said that she had never known her so touchy. But most of all her hatred increased towards her husband. The ancient resentment of the Rougons rose up in her against this son of the Macquarts, this man she accused of being the bane of her life. Downstairs in the dining room when Madame Faujas or Olympe came to keep her company she poured it all out to them, heaping abuse upon Mouret.

  ‘Remember he kept me stuck in between a jar of oil and a sack of almonds for twenty years, with a pencil tucked behind my ear like a saleswoman! Never any treats, never any presents… He has taken my children away. He might even run away himself one of these days on the pretext that I am making his life a misery. It’s a good job you are here. You would tell everyone the truth.’

  She attacked Mouret without provocation. Everything he did, the way he looked and acted, the occasional words he uttered, enraged her. The very sight of him threw her into a mindless fury. The quarrels broke out particularly at the end of meals when Mouret, without waiting for dessert, folded his napkin and got up without a word.

  ‘You could leave the table at the same time as everyone else,’ she would say sourly. ‘What you are doing is not polite!’

  ‘I’ve finished and I’m off,’ he replied in his ponderous voice.

  But she could only see this daily retreat as a tactic dreamed up by her husband to hurt Abbé Faujas. Then she lost all control:

  ‘You are so rude, you make me so ashamed!… Oh, my life would be unbearable with you if I didn’t have friends to console me for your brutish behaviour. Even your table manners are dreadful… You won’t let me have one single meal in peace… Stay there, do you hear? If you can’t eat, then you can watch us eat.’

  He calmly finished folding his napkin, not hurrying, as though he hadn’t heard her speak. Then, slowly, slowly, he left the table. They heard him climb the stairs and lock and bolt himself inside his room. At that she choked with rage, stammering out:

  ‘Oh, the monster… He’s killing me, he’s killing me!’

  Madame Faujas had to comfort her. Rose ran to the bottom of the stairs, shouting as loudly as she could so that Mouret could hear her through the door:

  ‘You are a monster, Monsieur. Madame is quite right when she calls you a monster!’

  Some quarrels were especially violent. Marthe, who was becoming rather unbalanced, imagined that her husband was going to beat her. She was obsessed by this idea. She claimed he was watching her, and waiting for his opportunity. He did not dare, she said, because he never found her on her own. At night he was afraid she would call out and cry for help. Rose swore that she had seen Monsieur hide a big stick in his desk. Madame Faujas and Olympe were all too ready to believe these stories; they sympathized deeply with their landlady, trying to outdo one another in setting themselves up as her guardians. It was possible that ‘the brute’, as they now called Mouret, would not abuse her while they were there. In the evening they advised her to come and fetch them if he made a move. The house now lived in a state of perpetual alert.

  ‘He is capable of doing something wicked,’ the cook declared.

  That year Marthe observed the sacred ceremonies of Holy Week with great fervour. On Good Friday she suffered with Christ in the darkened church while the candles were extinguished, one by one, beneath the lamentations that rose like a storm from the depths of the shadowy nave. It seemed to her that with these last glimmers of light her own breath expired too. When the final candle went out and the wall of darkness in front of her was implacable and closed, she fainted, her legs clenched and her heart drained. For an hour she remained bent over her chair in the attitude of prayer, without the women who were kneeling around her noticing her crisis. When she regained consciousness the church was deserted. She dreamed that she was being beaten with sticks, that the blood was flowing from her limbs; she felt such unbearable pain in her head that she put her hands up to it as if to tear out the thorns whose pricking she could feel in her skull. At dinner that night her behaviour was odd. The nervous tremors persisted; when she closed her eyes she could see the dying spirits of candles flying off into the blackness; mechanically she examined her hands, seeking the holes through which her blood had flowed. All the Passion bled in her.

  When Madame Faujas saw she was in pain she suggested she go to bed early. She went up with her and helped her into bed. Mouret, who had a key to the bedroom, had already retired to his study, where he spent his evenings. When Marthe, with the bedclothes up to her chin, said she was warm and felt better, Madame Faujas said she would blow out the candle, so that she might sleep in peace, but the sick woman sat up in a fright and begged:

  ‘No, don’t blow it out; put the candle on the chest of drawers so that I can see it… I should die if it were all dark.’

  And with wide eyes, as though in terror at the memory of some dreadful drama:

  ‘It’s horrible, horrible!’ Her voice faded to a whisper, in alarm and despair.

  She fell back again on the pillow, seemed to drift into a slumber, and Madame Faujas quietly left the bedroom. That evening the whole house was asleep by ten o’clock. When Rose went upstairs she noticed that Mouret was still in his study. She looked through the keyhole and saw him asleep on the table next to a dim kitchen candle with a charred wick.

  ‘Well, too bad!’ she exclaimed. ‘I shan’t wake him up.’ And she carried on upstairs. ‘Let him have a stiff neck if he wants to.’

  Towards midnight the household was deeply asleep, when cries were heard from upstairs. First there was moaning, but before long it turned into real wails and hoarse, strangled cries as though someone’s throat was being cut. Abbé Faujas woke with a start and called his mother. She took time only to put on a petticoat and went to knock at Rose’s door, saying:

  ‘Quick, go down. I think someone is assassinating Madame Mouret.’

  Meanwhile the cries got louder. The whole house was soon roused. Olympe appeared with her shoulders covered only by a light wrap, followed by Trouche, who had only just got in and was slightly tipsy. Rose went down followed by the others.

  ‘Open up, open up, Madame!’ she cried, out of her mind with worry, hammering at the door.

  Nothing but deep sighs met her ears; then the sound of a body falling to the floor and what sounded like a dreadful struggle amongst the upturned furniture. Dull thuds shook the walls. The dreadful rattle of a throat, heard through the keyhole, caused the Faujas and the Trouches to look at each other and turn pale.

  ‘It’s her husband beating her to death,’ whispered Olympe.

  ‘The brute, you are right!’ said the cook. ‘As I came upstairs I could see him pretending to sleep. He must have been planning to do it then.’

  And again she battered the door with her fists to try and break it down, saying:

  ‘Open up, Monsieur. We shall call the police if you don’t… Oh, the wretch, it’ll be the scaffold for him!’

  Then the moaning began again. Trouche claimed the fellow must be bleeding the poor woman to death, like a chicken.

  ‘We can’t just knock,’ said Abbé Faujas moving forward. ‘Wait a minute.’

  He placed one of his strong shoulders against the door and with a slow, sustained effort, managed to break it down. The women rushed into the room and were met with the strangest of sights.

  Marthe, gasping for breath, lay on the floor in the middle of the room with her nightgown torn, her skin scraped and bleeding and bruised from being beaten.* Her hair was loose and h
ad become entangled with a chair leg; her hands must have grasped the chest with such force that it was lying across the doorway. In one corner Mouret stood holding the candlestick and was watching her with a bemused air as she writhed upon the floor.

  Abbé Faujas had to push the chest of drawers out of the way.

  ‘You monster,’ cried Rose, clenching her fist at Mouret. ‘Treating a woman like that!… He would have finished her off if we hadn’t got here in time.’

  Madame Faujas and Olympe hurried to attend to Marthe.

  ‘Poor dear!’ muttered Madame Faujas. ‘She had a feeling something was going to happen this evening, she was in such a state.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ asked the cook. ‘You haven’t broken anything, have you? Your shoulder is all black; your knee has a huge scratch… Calm down now. We are here, we’ll look after you.’

  Marthe was whimpering now like a child. While the two women were examining her, forgetting there were men present, Trouche peered at her and threw insinuating glances at the priest who, without fuss, was putting the furniture back into place. Rose came and helped her into bed again. When she was in bed with her hair up they all remained there for a moment studying the bedroom curiously and awaiting further explanations. Mouret remained standing in the same corner still clutching the candlestick, as though petrified by what he had seen.

  ‘I assure you,’ he stammered, ‘I haven’t hurt her. I haven’t touched her at all.’

  Rose shouted in exasperation: ‘Huh! You’ve been waiting for your chance for a month. We know, we’ve been watching you long enough. The dear lady was expecting you to attack her. Don’t lie to us; it makes me mad!’

  The other two women, who felt they couldn’t talk to him in that manner, threw threatening glances in his direction.

  ‘I assure you,’ Mouret repeated softly, ‘I didn’t beat her. I had just gone to bed and put my nightcap on, and then she suddenly started up when I touched the candle on the chest of drawers. She stretched out her arms and shouted and then began to beat her forehead with her fists and tear at her body with her fingernails.’

  The cook shook her head at him menacingly.

  ‘Why didn’t you open the door?’ she said. ‘We banged loud enough.’

  ‘I tell you it wasn’t me,’ he said again still more quietly. ‘I didn’t know what was wrong with her. She threw herself on to the floor. She bit herself, she leapt about as if she was going to destroy the furniture. I didn’t dare get in her way. I was foolish. I shouted to you twice to come in but you couldn’t hear me because she was shouting so loud. I was very scared. It wasn’t me, I assure you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rose jeering. ‘So she hit herself, did she?’

  And she added, addressing Madame Faujas:

  ‘He must have thrown his stick out of the window when he heard us coming.’

  Mouret, finally placing his candlestick back on the chest of drawers, sat down, his hands on his lap. He made no further protest. He looked at the half-dressed women waving their skinny arms around in front of the bed. Trouche winked at Abbé Faujas. Poor Mouret didn’t look very fierce, in his shirtsleeves with a yellow kerchief tied around his bald head. They advanced as one to look at Marthe, who, her face convulsed, seemed to be emerging from a dream.

  ‘What is it, Rose?’ she asked. ‘Why is everybody here? I am exhausted. Please tell everyone to leave me alone.’

  For a moment Rose hesitated.

  ‘Your husband is here in the bedroom, Madame,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being left alone with him?’

  Marthe looked at her in astonishment.

  ‘No no,’ she replied. ‘Go away, I’m very sleepy.’

  So the five of them left the room, leaving Mouret sitting, his glazed eyes fixed on the bed.

  ‘He won’t be able to lock the door any more,’ said the cook as she went upstairs again. ‘The first time I hear her cry I shall race downstairs and throw myself at the beast. I shall keep my clothes on when I get into bed. Did you hear how she lied, the dear lady, so that we didn’t blame that savage of a husband of hers? She’d let herself be killed rather than accuse him of anything. What a hypocritical expression he had, didn’t he?’

  The three women chatted for a while on the second-floor landing, holding their candlesticks, their thin bony bodies showing through their loose wraps. They concluded that there was no punishment bad enough for such a man. Trouche, who had been last to go to bed, sneered behind Abbé Faujas’s soutane:

  ‘Our landlady’s still got a nice bit of flesh on her bones; but it can’t always be much fun having a wife as jumpy as that.’

  They went their ways. The house sank again into a deep silence and the night passed peacefully. The next day when the three women wanted to bring up the subject of the terrible scene, Marthe was surprised and looked ashamed and embarrassed. She would not answer them, but cut short the conversation. She waited until there was no one around to get a workman to come and repair the door. Madame Faujas and Olympe took that to mean that Madame Mouret wished to avoid a scandal by keeping quiet about it.

  The day after that, Easter Day, Marthe experienced a passionate reawakening at Saint-Saturnin, in the triumphant joy of the Resurrection. The darkness of Good Friday was swept away by the dawn. The church clothed itself in white, and was scented and lit up as though for a heavenly wedding; the voices of the choristers were drawn out like the sound of flutes; and Marthe in the middle of this joyous psalmody was exalted by a rapture still more terrifying than the anguish of the Crucifixion. She came back with burning eyes and hoarse voice. She wanted the evening to last, talking with a joyfulness not usual in her. When she went up to bed Mouret was already there. And towards midnight screams woke the whole house again.

  The scene from two days before was re-enacted. Except that at the first knocking on the door Mouret came and opened it in his nightshirt, looking distraught. Marthe, fully dressed, was convulsed with sobs, lying on her stomach, banging her head on the foot of the bed. The top of her dress appeared to be torn; two bruises could be seen on her bare neck.

  ‘He must have tried to strangle her this time,’ muttered Rose.

  The women undressed her. Mouret, after opening the door, had got back into bed shivering, white as a sheet. He did not protest, nor did he even appear to hear the insults, but disappeared to the far side of the bed.

  From then on, similar scenes took place at irregular intervals. The household was constantly expecting something terrible to happen. At the slightest noise the lodgers on the second floor were on their feet. Marthe always shied away from mentioning anything. She was adamant that she did not want Rose to put up a truckle bed for Mouret in the study. When the day broke it was as though it bore away with it the very memory of what had taken place in the night.

  However, in the district rumours spread that strange things were going on at the Mourets. They said the husband was beating his wife with a cudgel every night. Rose had made Madame Faujas and Olympe swear not to say anything, since her mistress seemed to want to keep it quiet. But she herself, by her lamentations, allusions, and repression of certain facts, had contributed to the story going round among the tradespeople. The butcher, who enjoyed a joke, claimed that Mouret was hitting his wife because he had found her in bed with the priest. But the greengrocer stuck up for the ‘poor lady’—a real lamb, incapable of doing anything bad; while the baker saw in her husband ‘one of those men who take pleasure in treating their wives badly’. At the market whenever Marthe’s name was mentioned people raised their eyes, and spoke of her pityingly as you might a sick child. When Olympe went to buy a pound of cherries or a pot of strawberries the conversation turned inevitably to the Mourets. For a quarter of an hour the sympathetic words came pouring out.

  ‘Well, how are things at home?’

  ‘Don’t speak of it! She cries her eyes out… Poor thing. She’d be better off dead.’

  ‘She bought some artichokes from me the other day. Her
cheek was all scratched.’

  ‘And don’t I know it! She’s being butchered. If you saw her body, like I have!… It’s one big wound… He kicks her when she’s on the floor. I’m always afraid I’m going to find her with her head crushed to bits when we go down in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It can’t be very nice for you living in that house. I’d move out if it were me. I’d be very ill if I had to put up with horrific things like that every night.’

  ‘And what would become of the poor woman then? She is so ladylike, so gentle! We stay on her account… Is that five sous for the pound of cherries?’

  ‘Yes, five sous… Well, never mind, you are loyal and a good friend to her.’

  This story of a husband who was waiting till midnight to attack his wife with a stick was especially designed to capture the imagination of the market stallholders. Day by day the story was embroidered with more terrifying details. One very pious woman affirmed that Mouret was possessed by the devil, that he sank his teeth into his wife’s neck with such force that Abbé Faujas had to make the sign of the cross with his left thumb three times to make him let go. ‘And then,’ she added, ‘Mouret dropped like a stone on the tiles and a huge black rat jumped out of his mouth and disappeared, without anyone being able to discover the slightest hole in the floor.’ The tripe-seller on the corner of the Rue Taravelle spread terror in the locality by expressing the opinion that ‘this rogue might have been bitten by a rabid dog’.

  But the story found disbelievers among the respectable members of Plassans society. The gentlemen who frequented the Cours Sauvaire were vastly amused when they got to hear of it, sitting in a row along the benches in the warm May sunshine.

  ‘Mouret is incapable of beating his wife,’ said the retired almond merchants. ‘He looks as though he’s been whipped; he doesn’t even take a walk any more… His wife must be putting him on dry bread.’

  ‘You never know,’ added a retired captain. ‘I knew an officer in my regiment whose wife used to box him round the ears if he said the least little thing. That lasted ten years. One day she took it into her head to kick him. He got mad and almost strangled her… Perhaps Mouret doesn’t like being kicked around either.’