A Love Story

by Emile Zola

  ‘Stop, stop!’ she repeated.

  ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  She did not answer. She had grown solemn. The swing which had been pushed as far as it could go did not stop. It kept making long, regular swaying motions which still carried Hélène high in the air. And the doctor, surprised and delighted, looked at her admiringly, at her superb figure, tall, strong and pure as a Greek statue, swinging gently like that in the spring sunshine. But she seemed put out. Suddenly she jumped off.

  Everyone shouted, ‘Wait, wait!’

  Hélène uttered a muffled cry. She fell on to the gravel path and couldn’t get up.

  ‘Oh no, how foolish!’ said the doctor, going very pale.

  They all crowded round her. Jeanne was wailing so loudly that Monsieur Rambaud, almost fainting himself, had to pick her up. Meanwhile the doctor was firing rapid questions at Hélène.

  ‘It’s your right leg that took the weight, isn’t it? Can you stand?’

  And as she remained confused, not saying anything, he asked her again:

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘My knee aches a little here,’ she said, with some difficulty.

  Then he sent his wife to get his medicine chest and some bandages.

  ‘We’ll have a look,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect it’s serious.’

  He knelt on the gravel. Hélène let him do what he wanted. But when he touched her she got up with an effort and gathered her dress around her legs.

  ‘No no,’ she said softly.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘we must have a look...’

  She trembled a little and murmured:

  ‘I don’t want... it’s nothing.’

  He looked at her, at first astonished. Her neck had flushed red. For an instant their eyes met and each seemed to read the depths of the other’s soul. Then, troubled himself, he got up slowly and remained by her side but did not ask again to examine her.

  Hélène made a sign to Monsieur Rambaud to come over. She said to him in a low voice:

  ‘Go and get Doctor Bodin and tell him what has happened to me.’

  Ten minutes later when Doctor Bodin arrived, she got to her feet with a superhuman effort, and leaning on him and on Monsieur Rambaud, went back to her house. Jeanne followed, sobbing.

  ‘You must come back,’ Doctor Deberle said to his colleague, ‘and tell us if she is all right.’

  In the garden they were in animated conversation. Malignon was exclaiming that women needed their heads seeing to. Why on earth did the lady think it a good idea to jump off the swing? Pauline, very put out by this adventure, which deprived her of what she enjoyed doing, thought it was foolhardy to swing so hard. The doctor did not speak, seemed anxious.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ said Doctor Bodin, on his return. ‘A straightforward sprain, that’s all... But she will have to lie on the chaise longue for at least two weeks.’

  Monsieur Deberle gave Malignon a friendly tap on the shoulder. He urged his wife to go in, because it was definitely too cold. And gathering up Lucien, he carried him indoors himself, covering him with kisses.

  Chapter 5

  Both windows in the room were open wide and below the house, which was built high up on the hillside, there in a deep chasm lay the immense plain that stretched to Paris. Ten o’clock chimed, the beautiful February morning had the softness and fragrance of spring.

  Lying on her chaise longue with her knee still bandaged, Hélène was reading in front of the window. She was no longer in pain, but for the last week she had been trapped there, not even able to do her usual needlework. Not knowing how to occupy herself, she, who never read anything, had opened a book lying on the little table. It was the one she used every evening to hide the lamp, the only one she had taken out in eighteen months from the little bookcase stocked with suitable books by Monsieur Rambaud. Usually novels seemed to her fanciful and childish. This one, Ivanhoe* by Walter Scott, she had at first found boring. Then she had begun to feel an unusual curiosity. She was getting to the end, sometimes moved, overcome with lassitude, and she let the book fall from her hands for quite some minutes, with her eyes fixed on the vast horizon.

  That morning, Paris woke with an indolent smile. A haze, which travelled up the valley of the Seine, engulfed the two banks. The milky-white cloud brightened as the sun gradually rose higher. Beneath this floating muslin veil of pale blue, the city was invisible. In the dips the thick cloud darkened and took on a bluish tint, but over large expanses it was transparent, extremely fine, a golden dust through which you could just make out where the streets cut through; and higher up, grey shapes of domes and towers, still wrapped in shreds of mist, poking up through the fog. From time to time clouds of yellow haze detached themselves like the wings of a giant bird, and melted into the air, which seemed to drink them up. And above all this immensity, above this cloud which had descended and lay sleeping over Paris, there unfurled a deep vault of purest sky, of a washed-out blue that was almost white. The sun rose, its rays soft and powdery, and the pale light, nebulous as childhood, turned into showers, filling the space with its lukewarm frisson. It was a celebration, a sovereign peace, and a tender, infinite delight, while the city, shot through with golden arrows, lethargic and still full of sleep, had not yet made up its mind to reveal itself from under its gown of lace.

  For a week Hélène had enjoyed this vast spectacle of Paris before her. She never tired of it. It was unfathomable and changing as the sea, innocent in the morning and passionate at night, reflecting the joy and the sadness of the heavens. A flash of sunlight and it unfurled in waves of gold, a cloud darkened it and raised storms. It was always different: there were times when it was an orangey flat calm; gusts of wind which from one hour to the next turned everything leaden; clear, bright weather making the top of each roof shine; downpours which drowned the heavens and the earth, blotting out the horizon in a chaotic, total collapse. In all this, Hélène savoured all the melancholy and all the hope of the open sea. She even fancied she could feel the strong gusts of wind in her face, the tang of the ocean; and everything that lay between her, including the constant rumbling of the city, gave her the illusion of an incoming tide, beating against the cliffs.

  The book slipped from her hands. She dreamed, gazing into the distance. When she dropped it like that, it was because she needed to pause in her reading, take stock and wait awhile. She took pleasure in not satisfying her curiosity immediately. The story filled her with sensations that overwhelmed her. Paris did indeed that morning reflect the joys and the vague troubles of her heart. There was great charm in that: not to know, to half-guess, to abandon herself to a slow initiation, with the inexplicable feeling that she was starting to live her life all over again.

  How these novels lied! And how right she was never to read them! They were fables good for empty-headed folk, who drifted vaguely through life. And yet she was fascinated, could not keep her mind off Ivanhoe, so passionately loved by two women, Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess, and the noble Lady Rowena. She thought she would have loved like the latter, with pride and a patient serenity. Love, love! And that word that she did not utter aloud but that came unbidden into her mind, astonished her and brought a smile to her lips. In the distance pale flakes were floating over Paris, like a flock of swans borne along by the wind. Thick blankets of mist moved across; one moment the Left Bank appeared, trembling and shrouded like a fairy city seen in a dream and then the haze disintegrated and the city was engulfed as by a flood. Now the haziness, distributed equally over all the quartiers, seemed to float around a beautiful lake of smooth white water. But a thicker grey streak was curling its way up the course of the Seine. Shadows seemed to propel rosy sailing boats over these calm white waters and the young woman followed them with a thoughtful eye. Love! Love! And she smiled at her fleeting fancy.

  Meanwhile Hélène had taken up her book again. She was reading the episode about the attack on the castle, where Rebecca looks after the injured Ivanhoe and tell
s him about the battle which she can see from her window. She felt she was in a beautiful fiction, walking around in it as though in an ideal garden, with golden fruit, from which she was drinking in all illusions. Then at the end of the scene when Rebecca, wrapped in her veil, pours out her feelings to the sleeping knight, Hélène let the book drop once more, her heart so full, she could not carry on.

  Goodness, could it all be true? And, leaning back in her chaise longue, stiff with having to remain constantly in one position, she contemplated Paris, drowned, mysterious Paris, in the pale sunlight. Hélène’s own life, brought back by the pages of the novel, rose up before her. She had a vision of herself as a young girl in Marseilles at home with her father, Mouret, the hatmaker. The Rue des Petites-Maries was dark and the house with its vat of boiling water for hat-making gave off a stale, damp odour, even when the weather was fine. She had a vision of her mother too, always ill, kissing her silently with her pale lips. As a child, she had never seen a ray of sunlight in her bedroom. Around her they all earned a living by the sweat of their brow. And that was all. Until she was married, nothing happened to disturb the monotony of those days. Then one morning as she was coming back from the market with her mother she bumped into the Grandjean boy with his basket full of vegetables. Charles had turned and followed them. That was the whole story of her love life. For three months he had been there the whole time, humble and awkward, not daring to talk to her. She was sixteen, rather proud of this lover, who she knew was from a wealthy family. But she thought him ugly, she often made fun of him, and her nights in the darkness of the big damp house were undisturbed. Then they were married. This marriage was still surprising to her. Charles adored her, went on his knees to kiss her naked feet at night when she went to bed. She smiled, full of amicable feelings towards him, reproaching him for being a real child. Then her unexciting life had begun again. For twelve years nothing she could recall had come to upset it. She was very calm and contented, with no fleshly or emotional desires, mired as she was in the daily worries of a lowly domesticity. Charles still kissed her marble-white feet, and she was indulgent towards him and mothered him. Nothing more than that. And then suddenly there was the room in the Hôtel du Var, her dead husband, her widow’s weeds draped over the chair. She had wept, as she had wept that winter evening when her mother died. Afterwards the days had gone on much the same as before. For the last two months with her daughter she had felt very happy, very serene again. God! Was that all there was to life? And what did this book mean, when it talked about the great passions which light up one’s whole life?

  On the horizon, long ripples travelled across the sleeping lake. Then all of a sudden it seemed to break in two; fissures appeared and there was a great crack from end to end that presaged a catastrophe. The sun, higher now, in the triumphant glory of its beams, attacked the fog, and was victorious. Gradually the great lake seemed to dry up as if the plain had been invisibly drained by some wasteweir. The mist, which had been so thick a moment ago, was thinning out and becoming transparent, taking on the bright colours of a rainbow. The whole of the Left Bank was a soft blue, gradually darkening to violet in the background near the Jardin des Plantes. On the Right Bank, the Tuileries were a pale pink, like flesh-coloured material, while in the direction of Montmartre it was like embers, carmine flaming into gold; then a very long way off, the working suburbs went a darker brick shade, fading gradually into the bluish grey of slate. The quivering, elusive city remained indistinct, like submarine depths just visible through clear water, with their terrifying forests of tall weed, their scary swarms of creatures, half-perceived monsters. Meanwhile the mists, like water, continued to ebb away. All that remained were scraps of delicate muslin; and one by one, the muslin scraps vanished, the image of the city took shape and woke from its dream.

  Love, love! Why did this word come to mind again, with all its sweetness, while she was watching the fog disperse? Had she not loved her husband, whom she looked after like a child? But she suddenly had a piercing memory of her father found hanged after his wife’s death, at the back of a wardrobe where her dresses still hung. He died there, stiffening, his face buried in a skirt, wrapped in those clothes which still gave off a slight scent of the woman he adored. Then, in her reverie, she broke off abruptly: she thought about domestic details, about the monthly accounts she had gone through that very morning with Rosalie, and she felt extremely proud of her good housekeeping. She had lived a dignified life for more than thirty years in an absolute firmness of purpose. Right behaviour was all that mattered to her. When her mind turned to her past life she did not consider she had been weak, not for a moment; she saw herself travelling steadily along a smooth, straight path. The days might come or go, she would walk quietly on, without stumbling on the way. And that made her stern, angry, and scornful towards those fictitious lives led astray by the affections of the heart. Hers was the only true life, lived in such tranquillity. But over Paris all that was left was a thin mist, one single shred of quivering gauze about to fly away; and a sudden warmth came over her. Love, love! Everything, even her pride in her principled behaviour brought her back to this tender word. Her reverie grew so light, she was no longer thinking about anything, but, with tears in her eyes, was suffused in the springtime.

  Meanwhile Hélène was about to start reading her book again, when Paris slowly appeared; not a breath of wind, it was like an evocation. The last scrap of gauze detached itself, rose, and vanished into the air. And the city stretched out, shadowless under the all-conquering sun. Hélène sat with her chin in her hands contemplating this colossal awakening.

  One endless valley of heaped-up buildings. On the vanishing line of hills, you could make out piles of roofs; while in the distance, behind the dips in the landscape, in countryside no longer visible, you could sense the overflow of houses. It was like the open sea, with its mysterious never-ending waves. Paris was unfolding, as vast as the sky. On this radiant morning the city, yellow in the sunlight, looked like a field of ripe corn; and the huge picture had simplicity, being of two colours only, the pale blue of the air and the golden reflection on the roofs. These waves of spring sunshine lent an innocent grace to everything. The light was so pure, you could clearly see the smallest details. Paris, a fathomless chaos of stone, shone like crystal. But now and then there was a breath of wind in this brilliant and motionless serenity. And then you could see quartiers whose lines softened and flickered as though you were looking at them through some invisible flame.

  At first Hélène was fascinated by the wide expanse of land beneath her window, the slope of the Trocadéro and the diminishing banks. She had to lean out to get a view of the barren rectangle of the Champ-de-Mars, cut off at the back by the dark block of the École Militaire. Below it on the huge square and on the paths each side of the Seine, she could make out pedestrians, a milling crowd of black spots swarming like ants. A spark was emitted from a yellow omnibus. Trucks and cabs crossed the bridge, small as children’s playthings, with fragile horses that looked like clockwork toys. And along the grassy banks, in amongst other people walking, a maid in a white apron made a bright spot against the green. Hélène raised her eyes, but the crowd was breaking up and vanishing, even the cabs were turning into grains of sand. The only thing that remained was the gigantic carcass of a city, seeming empty and deserted, existing only in the unseen bustle that animated it. There in the foreground, on the left, red roofs glowed, the tall chimneys of the Military Depot* smoked slowly, while on the other side of the river, between the esplanade and the Champ-de-Mars, a clump of tall elms formed a corner of a park, and you could clearly see the branches, the rounded tops, with tips already greening. Between them the Seine widened and reigned supreme, encased by its grey banks, where the unloaded barrels, the steam-powered cranes, and rows of tip-trucks were like the setting for some seaport. Hélène’s eyes returned time and again to this splendid stretch of water where the boats sailed along like ink-coloured birds. She could not resist tracing and re
tracing the superb length of the river. It was like a length of silver braid dividing Paris in two. That morning the water flowed with sunshine, there was no brighter light on the horizon. And the eyes of the young woman first lit on the Pont des Invalides, then the Pont de la Concorde, then the Pont Royal; the bridges carried on, seeming to become closer to one another, one superimposed upon another, creating strange viaducts on several levels, pierced with a variety of differently shaped arches; while the river, in between these delicate constructions, revealed patches of her blue gown, tapering away before petering out altogether. She raised her eyes again. Over there in the crazy jumble of houses the river divided. The bridges on either side of the Cité were like threads stretched from one bank to the other. The towers of Notre-Dame, all golden, rose up like milestones on the horizon, and beyond them the river, the buildings, the clumps of trees, were nothing more than clouds of sundust. Dazzled, she looked away from this triumphal heart of Paris blazing forth in all its glory. On the Right Bank through the trees on the Champs-Élysées, the Palais de l’Industrie with its great glass walls looked like pure snow. Further down, behind the flattened roof of the Madeleine, was the huge bulk of the Opéra,* resembling a tombstone; and there were other buildings, cupolas and towers, the Vendôme column, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the Tour Saint-Jacques; nearer still were the ungainly blocks of the new wings in the Louvre and the Tuileries, half buried in a forest of chestnut trees. On the Left Bank the Dôme des Invalides streamed with gold; beyond, the two uneven towers of Saint-Sulpice grew paler in the light; and still further back to the right of the new spires of Sainte-Clotilde, the bluish Panthéon, sitting squarely on the hill, towered over the city, raising its fine colonnade to the sky, motionless in the air, with the silky hue of a captured balloon.

  Now Hélène, glancing idly around, could encompass the whole of Paris. Valleys were discernible as the flowing of rooftops. The Butte des Moulins emerged from a seething tide of old slates, while the Grands Boulevards ran down like a river, swallowing up a flurry of houses, so that not even their tiles were visible. At that hour of the morning the slant of the sun did not light up the facades facing the Trocadéro. No window shone. Only the glass on the roofs cast a glow, like bright sparks of mica, in the brick red of the surrounding potteries. The houses were still grey, a grey warmed by reflections; but shafts of light pierced the quartiers, long, straight streets leading away from Hélène, cutting through the shadows with their rays of sunshine. Only on the left the Butte Montmartre and the hills of Père-Lachaise made bumps on the unbroken curve of the immense flat horizon. The details that were so clear in the foreground, the denticulation of innumerable chimneys, the small black hachures of a thousand windows, were blotted out, flecked with yellow and blue, jumbled up in the pell-mell of the endless city whose invisible faubourgs seemed to be pebbled shores, extending and drowning, drowning in a violet haze beneath the vast and vibrant brightness spreading across the sky.