Читать книгу The Complete Works of Emile Zola - Emile Zola - Страница 159

THE four years that followed were calm and happy. The newly-married couple spent them at La Noiraude. They had made plans, the first year, for travelling: they had wished to air their love in Italy or on the banks of the Rhine, as is the fashion. But they always held back at the moment of starting, finding it useless to go and seek so far away for a happiness which they had at home. They did not even pay a single visit to Paris. The memories which they had left in their little house in the Rue de Boulogne, filled them with uneasiness. Shut up in their beloved solitude, they thought themselves protected against the miseries of this world and defied sorrow.

William’s existence was one of unmixed bliss. Marriage was realising the dream of his youth. He lived an unchequered life, free from all agitation, a round of peace and affection. Since Madeleine had come to live at La Noiraude, he was full of hope, and thought of the future without a fear. It would be what the present was, a long sleep of affection, a succession of days like these and equally happy. His restless mind must have this assurance of uninterrupted tranquillity: his dearest wish was to arrive at the hour of death like this, after a stagnant existence, an existence free from events, an existence of one unbroken sentiment. He was at rest, and he felt an aversion to quit this state of repose.

Madeleine’s heart too was at rest. She was enjoying a delicious repose from the troubles of her past in the calm of her present life. There was nothing now to hurt her. She could respect herself, and forget the shame of the past. Now she shared her husband’s fortune without scruple, and reigned in the house as legitimate wife. The solitude of La Noiraude, of this huge building, all black and ruinous, pleased her. She would not allow William to have the old house done up in modern fashion. She simply permitted him to repair an apartment on the first floor, and the dining and drawingrooms down stairs. The other rooms remained closed. In four years they never once climbed the staircase to the attics. Madeleine liked to feel all this empty space round her; it seemed to isolate her all the more, and protect her against harm from without. She took a pleasure in forgetting everything in the spacious room on the ground floor: a silence which calmed her seemed to fall from the lofty ceiling, and the dark corners of the room made her dream of immensities of peaceful shade. At night, when the lamp was lit, she was deeply soothed at the thought of being alone, and so small in the midst of this infinity. Not a sound came from the country: the secluded sanctity of a cloister, that seclusion one finds in a sleepy province, seemed to have settled on La Noiraude. Then Madeleine’s thoughts would recur at times to one of the noisy evenings she had passed in the Rue Soufflot with James; she would hear the deafening rumble of the carriages on the pavement in Paris, she would see the harsh glare of the gaslamps, and she would live again, for a second, in the little hotel-apartment full of the fumes of tobacco, chinking of glasses, bursts of laughter and kisses. It was only a flash, like a whiff of warm and nauseous air coming right into her face, but she would look round, terrified, stifling already. And then she would breathe freely again as she found herself in the sombre and deserted big room: she would awake from her bad dream, trustful and comforted, to bury herself once more with greater pleasure, in the silence and shade around her.

How sweet this placid life was for her straightforward and cold nature, after the agitations of the flesh to which fate had exposed her! She would thank the cold ceiling, the dumb walls and all this building which enveloped her in a winding-sheet: she would stretch out her hands to William, as if to return thanks to him: he had brought her true joy by restoring to her her lost dignity, he was her beloved deliverer.

They thus passed their winters in almost complete solitude. They never left the drawingroom on the ground-floor, a big fire of logs of wood blazed in the huge fireplace, and they stayed there the whole day long, spending each hour alike. They led a clockwork life, clinging to their habits with the obstinacy of people who are perfectly happy and fear the least agitation. They hardly did anything, they never grew weary, or at least the feeling of gloomy weariness in which they indulged seemed to them bliss itself. Yet, there were no passionate caresses, no pleasures to make them forget the slow march of time. Two lovers will shut themselves up sometimes, and live for a season in each other’s arms, satisfying their desires and turning days into nights of love. William and Madeleine simply smiled on each other, their solitude was chaste; if they shut themselves up, it was not because they had kisses to conceal, it was because they loved the still silence of the winter, the tranquillity of the cold. It was enough for them to live alone, side by side, and to bestow on each other the calm of their presence.

Then, directly the fine days came, they opened their windows and went down to the park. Instead of isolating themselves in the huge room, they would hide in some thicket. There was no change. In this way they lived in the fine weather, wild and retired, shunning the noise.

William preferred winter, and the warm moist atmosphere of the hearth, but Madeleine was always passionately fond of the sunshine, the blazing sunshine which scorched her neck and made her pulse beat steady and strong. She would often take her husband into the country, they would go and revisit the spring, or follow the open space by the brook reminding each other of their walks in the days gone by, or they would visit the farms again, rambling about, striking into the fields, far away from the villages. But the pilgrimage they loved best was to go and spend the afternoon in the little house where Madeleine had lived. A few months after their marriage, they had bought this house, for they could not bear the idea of its not belonging to them, and they felt an unconquerable desire to go in, whenever they passed by it. When it was theirs, their minds were at rest, and they said to themselves that no one could enter and drive away the memories of their affection. And when the air was mild, they used to go there nearly every day, for a few hours. It was like their country-house, although it was only ten minutes’ walk from La Noiraude. Their life there was even more solitary than at La Noiraude, for they had given orders that they were never to be disturbed. They sometimes even slept there, and on these nights they forgot the whole world. Often would William say:

“If any calamity ever overtakes us, we will come here and forget it; here we shall be proof against suffering.”

In this way the months glided by, in this way season succeeded season. The first year after their marriage, a joyful event had happened — Madeleine had given birth to a daughter. William welcomed with profound gratitude this child which his lawful wife, and not his mistress, as might have happened, had presented to him. He saw in this retardation of maternity a kind design on the part of Heaven. Little Lucy peopled their solitude herself. Her mother, strong as she was, could not suckle her herself, and she chose for her nurse a young woman who had been in her service before her marriage. This woman, whose father managed the farm by the little house, thus suckled the child quite close to La Noiraude. The parents used to go to inquire about her every day, and later on, when Lucy had grown, they would leave her for weeks at the farm, where she used to like to stay and lived a healthy life. There they would see her every afternoon, when they went to seclude themselves in their little house. They would take her with them, enjoying an exquisite pleasure in surrounding this little fair head with their happy memories. The dear girl gave a perfume of childhood to the little rooms where they had loved each other, and they would listen to her prattle with melting affection, in their meditation on the past. When they were all three together in their retreat, William would take Lucy with her laughing rosy lips and blue eyes on his knees and say gently:

“Madeleine, here we have the present and the future.” Then the fond mother would smile serenely on them both. Maternity had given the finishing touch to the equilibrium of Madeleine’s temperament. Up to that time, she had retained her girlish impulsiveness, and her young woman’s amorous gestures; her golden hair fell down her back in wanton freedom; her hips were too obtrusive in their movements, and in her grey eyes, or on her red lips would play bold expressions of desire. Now, her whole being had toned down, and marriage had imparted to her a sort of precocious maturity; there was a slight rotundity in her figure, her movements were more gentle and dignified; her golden-hair, carefully tied up, was now merely a charming token of strength, a vigorous setting for the picture of her now calm face. The girl was giving place to the mother, to the fruitful woman, settled in the plenitude of her beauty. What especially gave to Madeleine her dignified bearing, her noble expression of peace and health, her complexion clear and smooth as tranquil water, was the internal contentedness of her being. She felt herself free, she lived proud and satisfied with herself; her new existence was a suitable atmosphere in which her better part was rapidly developing. Before this, during the first few months that she had spent in the country, she had expanded in joy and strength; but then she had not been free from a something that seemed coarse, and this coarseness was now being transformed into serenity.

Madeleine’s smiling vigour was a great solace for William. When he pressed her to his heart, he felt invigorated with a share of her strength. He loved to lay his head on her bosom, to listen to the steady beat of her heart. It was this beat which regulated his life. A fiery and nervous woman would have put him into a state of keen anguish, for his body and mind shrank from the slightest shock. Madeleine’s regular and steady breathing on the contrary strengthened him. He was becoming a man. His timid weakness was now simply gentleness. His young wife had absorbed him: he was now a part of her. As happens in every union, the strong nature had taken undisputed possession of the weak one, and henceforth William was hers who ruled him. He was in her poorer in a strange way, in a way which affected his whole being. He was continually influenced by her, subject to her joys and sorrows, following her in each change of her nature. His own identity was disappearing, and he could no longer assert himself. He would have wished to revolt against thus being led captive by Madeleine’s will. But from henceforth his tranquillity depended on this woman, and her life was irrevocably destined to become his. If she was at peace, he too would live in peace; if she became agitated, his agitation would be as strong as hers. It was a complete fusion of body and mind.

Besides, a broad peaceful future was opening before them, and the husband and wife could look forward to it without tear. The four years of bliss were removing from their minds all apprehension of calamity. William was contented to abandon himself to Madeleine’s will, and to feel himself breathing freely, and growing stronger in this submission; he would say to her sometimes with a smile: “It is you Madeleine who are the man.” Then she would kiss him, half-abashed at this power which she was acquiring, in spite of herself, by the force of her character. Had you seen them going down to the park, with little Lucy between them, each holding one of her hands, you could not have failed to guess the happy serenity of their union. The child was like a bond which united them. When she was not with them, William seemed almost timid by Madeleine’s side; but there was so much affection in their lingering gait, that the thought of an event to mar the happiness of these two smiling beings would never have occurred to anyone.

During these first years of their married life, they received very few visitors. They knew scarcely anybody, and were slow to form connections, having no love for new faces. Their most frequent guests were two neighbours, Monsieur de Rieu and his wife, who lived in Paris during the winter, and came to spend the summer at Véteuil. Monsieur de Rieu had formerly been the most intimate friend of William’s father. He was a fine old gentleman, of aristocratic bearing, stiff and ironical; his pale lips were at times lit up by a faint smile, a smile that looked as sharp as a blade of steel. Almost completely deaf, all the keenness of the wanting sense had concentrated in his look. He saw the smallest things, even those that went on behind him. Yet, he seemed to see nothing, his proud bearing never relaxed; not a crease in his lips would show that he had seen or heard. On entering a house, he would sit down in an armchair, and stay there for hours together, as if absorbed in his eternal silence. He would throw his head back, never relaxing the rigidity of his features, and half close his eyes as if asleep: the truth was, he was carefully following the conversation, and studying the smallest play of features on the faces of the speakers. This amused him wonderfully; he took a savage delight in this pastime, noting the coarse and wicked thoughts that he fancied he could detect on the faces of these people who looked on him as a post, before which they could without fear confide to each other the most important secrets. For him, smiles, and pretty delicate expressions did not exist; he had no eye for anything but grimaces. As he could hear no sounds, he thought every sudden contraction, every playful turn of the features grotesque. When two people were talking in his presence, he watched them curiously, as if they were two animals showing their teeth. “Which of the two will eat the other,” he would think. This continual study, this observation and this science of what he called the grimaces of features had given him a supreme contempt for mankind. Soured by his deafness, which he would not admit, he would tell himself sometimes that he was fortunate in being deaf and able to isolate himself in a corner. His pride of birth was turning into pitiless raillery; he appeared to think himself living in the midst of a race of wretched puppets, splashing in the dirt like stray dogs, crouching with a skulk at the sight of the whip, and worrying one another for a bone picked up on the dunghill. His proud impassive face protested against the turbulence of other faces, and his keen-edged laughs were the bitter jeers of a man delighted with infamy, and disdaining to feel angry at brutes deprived of reason.

Yet he felt a little kindness towards the young couple; but this did not go so far as to disarm his derisive curiosity. When he came to La Noiraude, he looked at his young friend William, with a certain amount of pity; the latter’s attitude of adoration in Madeleine’s presence did not escape his notice, and this spectacle of a man at a woman’s knees had always seemed to him monstrous. Still, the young couple, who talked but little, and on whose faces sat an expression of relative placidity, seemed to him the most sensible beings he had yet met, and his visit to them was always one of pleasure. His victim, the eternal subject of his bitter observation and mockery, was his own wife.

Hélène de Rieu, who nearly always accompanied him to La Noiraude, was a woman above forty. She was a little dumpy person, with an insipid fair complexion, and, to her great despair, slightly inclined to stoutness. Picture a chubby-cheeked doll transformed into a woman. Affected, with a passionate love for puerility, she had a quiverful of pouts, glances, and smiles; she played with her face as on an exquisite instrument, whose celestial harmony was to seduce everybody; she never allowed her features to remain at rest, hanging her head down in a languishing fashion, raising it to the sky with sudden feints of passion and poetry, turning it, nodding it, according to the exigencies of attack or defence. She made a vigorous resistance to age, which was bringing flesh and wrinkles: smeared with unguents and pomades, laced up in stays that choked the breath out of her, she fancied herself growing young again. These were only her follies; but the dear woman had vices. She looked on her husband as a dummy whom she had married to give herself a position in the world, and she thought she ought to be easily excused for never having loved him. “What! talk about love to a man who can’t hear you!” she would say to her friends. And then she would put on the air of an unhappy and misunderstood woman. The truth was, she did not stint herself of consolation. Not wishing to forget the love phrases which she could not utter to Monsieur de Rieu, she rehearsed them to people who had good ears. She always selected lovers of a tender and delicate age, eighteen to twenty at the most. Her girlish tastes must have young fellows with rosy cheeks, who had not yet lost the odour of their nurses’ milk. Had she dared, she would have debauched the collegians that she met, for there was in her passion for children, an appetite of shameful pleasure, a wish to teach vice, and to taste strange delights in the soft embraces of arms still weak. She was fastidious; she liked timid kisses, which tickled her cheeks without bearing a deep imprint. Thus she was always to be seen in the company of five or six young sparks; she hid them under her bed, in the wardrobes, everywhere where she could put them. Her happiness consisted in having half-a-dozen tractable lovers fastened to her skirts. She soon tired them out, changing them every fortnight, and living in a perpetual renewal of followers. You would have thought her a boarding-school mistress, dragging her pupils about. She was never without admirers, she got them anywhere, from that crowd of young idiots whose dream is to have a middle-aged married woman for a mistress. Her forty years, her Billy girlish airs, her insipid white skin which repelled men of riper years, were an invincible attraction for the young rascals of sixteen.

In the eyes of her husband, Hélène was a singularly curious little machine. He had married her on a day that he felt bored, and he would have driven her away from his house the next, if he had thought her worth getting angry about. The laborious toil that this coquette made her physiognomy undergo, gave him the greatest pleasure, for he tried to find out the secret wheels that set the eyes and lips of this little machine in motion. This pale face, plastered with paint, which was never at rest, seemed to him a mournful comedy, with its winks, its contortions of the mouth, all its rapid and, to him, silent play. It was after a long contemplation of his wife, that he bad come to the conclusion that humanity was composed of wicked and stupid marionettes. When he pried into the wrinkles of this aged doll, he discovered, beneath her grimaces, thoughts of infamy and foolishness which made him look on her as a creature that he ought to have whipped. Yet, he preferred to amuse himself by studying and despising her. He treated her as a domestic animal; her vices left him as indifferent as the caterwauling of a tabby-cat after a tom; setting his honour high above the shame of such a creature, he sat still, with superb disdain and cold irony, at the procession of young sparks marching into his wife’s room. One might have thought that he took a pleasure in showing off his contempt for mankind, his denial of every virtue, by thus tolerating the vices that were taking place under his own roof, and by seeming to accept debauch and adultery as quite usual and natural things. His silence, his cruelly derisive smile said plainly: “The world is a vile hole of filth; I have fallen into it, and I have to live there.”

Hélène did not stand on ceremony with her husband. She spoke to her lovers in his presence, in the most offhand, familiar way, convinced that he could not hear her. Monsieur de Rieu could read these familiar expressions on her lips, and he then displayed an exquisite politeness to the young men, amusing himself at their embarrassment, and obliging them to shout gracious answers into his ears. He never manifested the slightest astonishment at seeing his drawingroom filled with new faces every month; he welcomed Hélène’s boarders with a paternal good nature, which was a cloak to his terrible sarcasm. He asked them their ages, and made inquiries about their studies. “We are fond of children,” he would often say, in a tone of bantering kindness. When the drawingroom was empty, he would complain of the way in which young people forget their elders. One day even, as his wife’s court was not very well attended, he brought her a young fellow of seventeen, but ho was humpbacked, and Hélène speedily dismissed him. Sometimes Monsieur de Rieu would be even more cruel still; he would hurriedly enter his wife’s room, and keep her panting for an hour, talking to her about the fine weather or the rain, while some poor, simple creature was stifling under the bedclothes, which had been hastily pulled over him at the unexpected entrance of the husband. The title, (title, by the “way, which is found in every little town) of cuckolded husband was bestowed on him at Véteuil; having caught his wife in the very act with a collegian who had slipped out of bounds, he had simply said to this young lover, in his cold, polite voice: “Ah, sir, so young, and without being forced to it! you must be very courageous.” But Monsieur de Rieu was not the man to thrust his nose into a place where he was likely to catch his wife at this sort of thing; he tried to appear blind as well as deaf; for this allowed him to preserve his haughty bearing, and his terribly calm attitude. What made his enjoyment more delicious, was the stupidity of his wife, who thought him simple enough not to suspect anything. He pretended to he a goodnatured fellow, made scathing allusions with exquisite politeness, enjoying, like a connoisseur, the bitterness of the double-pointed words that he addressed to her, words the refined cruelty of which he alone understood. He played with this woman every hour, and would have been really annoyed if she had repented. At bottom, Monsieur de Rieu wished to know how far disdain can go.

There had been between this ironical nature and the disordered mind of Monsieur de Viargue, a sort of sympathy which explained the previous friendship of the two old men. Both had reached the same degree of disdain and denial; the philosopher, as he thought he had put his finger on nothingness; the deaf man, as he fancied he had discovered, beneath the human mask, the mouth of a lewd beast. During the count’s lifetime, Monsieur de Rieu was the only person who entered his laboratory, and they often spent a whole day there together. The suicide of the chemist did not appear to surprise his old friend. He came back the following year to La Noiraude, as unmoved as ever; only, he took the liberty of introducing his wife, accompanied by her young gentlemen.

William and Madeleine had been married a few months, when Hélène brought them her last conquest, a young fellow from Véteuil, whom she had taken into her house to wile away the leisures of her residence in the country. This youth’s name was Tiburce Rouillard: he was rather ashamed of the Rouillard, and very proud of the Tiburce. The son of a man who had been a cattle-dealer, and who was to leave him a pretty round sum, Monsieur Tiburce had an unbounded ambition: he was vegetating at Véteuil, and intended to go and push his way in Paris. Boorish, crafty, and capable of any act of cowardice likely to prove useful to him, he was already beginning to feel his strength. He was of those scamps who say to themselves, “I am a millionaire ten times over,” and who always end by getting their ten millions. Madame de Rieu, when she took him in his youth, had thought, as usual, that she was taking a child in hand. The truth was, the child was already steeped in vice; if he pretended ignorance and timidity, it was because he had an interest in showing himself ignorant and timid. Hélène had at last found a master. Tiburce, who had seemed to throw himself thoughtlessly in her way, had long calculated his thoughtlessness. He told himself that an intimacy with such a woman, carefully worked, would take him to Paris, where she would open every door to him; he made himself indispensable to the debauched appetites of his mistress; whether she would or not he would make her the instrument of his fortune the day he had her under his thumb as a submissive slave. If this scheme had not been the motive of his actions, he would have burst out laughing in Hélène’s face at their first meeting. This old woman, who had filthy tastes, and yet talked about the ideal, seemed to him a grotesque creature; her embraces took his breath away, but he was a youth with courage, who would have wallowed in a gutter, in order to pick up a twenty-franc-piece.

Madame de Rieu appeared delighted with her young friend. He charmed her as yet with his most delicate flattery and was remarkably docile. She had never found a candour more spiced with budding vice. She adored the rascal to such a degree that her husband had to take a thousand precautions so as not to catch them every minute with their arms round each other’s necks. She trotted Tiburce out like a young dog, calling for him, and coaxing him with look and voice. When she introduced him to La Noiraude, he looked upon that as a first service that she was rendering him. He had been at the school at the same time as William, and had shown himself one of his most cruel tormentors: younger than William by two or three years, he took advantage of the latter’s terrors as an outcast to enjoy the malicious delight of beating a boy bigger than himself. To-day, he was sorry for this error of his youth: for he had laid it down as a maxim that people ought to beat the poor only, those whose services they are not likely to want in after life. Before becoming acquainted with Hélène, he had schemed in vain to get into La Noiraude. William hardly returned his salute. When his mistress had brought him in the folds of her skirt, he humbled himself to the dust in the presence of his former victim; he called him “De Viargue” without the Monsieur, laying stress on the aristocratic “de,” just as formerly he had laid stress on the name Bastard which he had been so ready to cast in his face. His plan was to set up at Véteuil as a person living on familiar terras with the rich and noble in the country. He would not have objected besides to utilise William and Madeleine for his future career. He even tried to make love to the young wife: he knew, in an indistinct way, the history of her secret intimacy with William, which made him think her of easy virtue. If he had been able to seduce her, he would have had two women instead of one in his service. He dreamed already of turning their rivalry skilfully to account so as to stimulate their zeal and make them bid against each for his love. But Madeleine received his proposals with such disdain that he had to abandon his project.

The young couple saw with repugnance Tiburce Rouillard come to La Noiraude. There was, besides, at the bottom of this crafty nature, a provincial foolishness, and an obtrusive stupid pride which William could hardly tolerate. When the coxcomb called him his friend, with a sort of personal satisfaction, he could hardly resist his longing to show him the door. It would certainly have come to this, had he not been afraid of causing a scandal which would have affected Monsieur de Rieu. Madeleine and he then put up with the intrusion as patiently as they could. Besides, they scarcely had a thought for anything but the tranquillity of their affection, and they troubled their heads very little about their visitors and forgot them immediately the door was shut behind them.

Once a week, every Sunday, they were certain to see the three coming to spend the evening with them at La Noiraude. Hélène, leaning on Tiburce’s arm, would come first; while Monsieur de Rieu followed with a serious, uninterested look. Then they all went down to the park; and it was a sight to see, under the arbour of foliage where they sat, the languishing looks of the lady and the respectful attentions of the young man. The husband, in front of them, watched them with half-closed eyes. By certain despicable and cruel smiles, which curled Tiburce’s beardless lips, ho had guessed the vile character and evil designs of this youth. His science, as an observer, told him that his wife had fallen into the hands of a master who would beat her some day. The drama promised to be a curious one, and he enjoyed beforehand the rupture that was to take place between these two puppets; he fancied he could see the claws on the yet caressing fingers of the lover, and he awaited the hour when Hélène would raise a cry of anguish as she felt these claws enter her neck. She would be punished by vice; she would tremble and humiliate herself at the feet of a child, she who had revelled so much in young flesh. Monsieur de Rieu, in his silent, sneering fashion, pondered over this vengeance which fate was sending him. At times, Tiburce’s cold face with its aped affection almost frightened him too. He treated him with great cordiality and seemed to take care of him like a bulldog that he was training to bite people.

Madeleine, who knew of Madame de Rieu’s amours, always looked at her with a sort of astonishment. How could this woman live peaceably in her sins? When she asked herself this question, she really thought that she had to deal with a monster, with a diseased and exceptional creature. The fact is, Madeleine had one of those sound, cool temperaments which can only accept clearly-defined positions. If her feet had slipped into the mud for a moment, it was by accident, and she had long suffered from the effects of her fall. Her pride could never have become inured to the agitations of mind and the cruel wounds inflicted on the senses by adultery: she must live surrounded by esteem and peace, in an atmosphere where she could walk with her head erect. As she looked on Hélène, she could not help thinking of the fears with which she must be harassed when she was hiding a lover in her bed. As she was not passionate herself, she could not understand the keen charms of passion; she saw only its sufferings, the terror and the shame in the presence of the husband, the kisses, often cruel, of the lover, and the existence troubled at every hour by the affection and anger of these two men. Her open nature would never have accepted such an existence of baseness and falsehood, and she would have revolted against it at the first feeling of anguish. It is feeble characters and weak bodies that submit to blows, and end at last by building themselves a luxurious nest in anxiety itself, where they willingly go to sleep. As she looked at Hélène’s sleek, shining face, Madeleine would think: “If I ever surrender myself to any other man than William, I will kill myself.”

For four summers, the visitors came to La Noiraude. Tiburce’s father had placed him with a lawyer and unfeelingly kept him at Veteuil, where the young fellow chafed bitterly at not being able to follow his mistress to Paris. Hélène was so touched by his grief, that on two occasions she passed several of the winter months at Véteuil; yet, each spring, she took him again with renewed eagerness, for the woman doted on him and found no other lover who satisfied her. Tiburce was beginning to feel a singular detestation for her. When she turned up, in the middle of December, he felt half disposed to turn a deaf ear to her, for he cared not a straw for her kisses that took his breath away, and was growing desperate at not being able to turn her to advantage. Four summers of useless love-making to this woman, who might have been his mother, had so irritated him, that he would, some day, have eased his feelings by insulting and beating her and then leaving her to chance, if the old cattle-dealer had not had the happy idea of dying from a fit. A fortnight afterwards, young Rouillard was on his way to Paris in the same compartment as Hélène, more respectful, more affectionate than ever, while Monsieur de Rieu carefully surveyed the couple through his half-closed eyes.

When the De Rieus were away, especially during the long winter nights, William and Madeleine found themselves alone with Geneviève. She lived with them on a footing of equality, sitting down at the same table, and occupying the same rooms. She was then ninety; still perfectly straight, though lanker and more bony, she had relaxed none of the gloomy fervour of her mind; her pointed nose, her sunken lips, and the wrinkles that seamed her face, gave to her appearance the harsh outlines and deep shadows of a sinister mask. At night, when the work of the day was over, she would come and sit in the room where the husband and wife were, she would bring her Bible with its iron clasps, open it wide, and, under the yellow light of the lamp, read through the verses in a singsong undertone. She would read thus for hours together, with a dull continual murmur, broken only by the rustling of the leaves as she turned them over. In the silence, her droning voice seemed as though it were reciting the prayers for the dead; she drawled along in mournful lamentations, like the monotonous murmur of the waves. In the huge room one felt quite shivery at this hum which seemed to proceed from invisible mouths hidden in the gloom of the ceiling.

Some nights, Madeleine was seized with secret terror, as she caught a few words of Genevieve’s reading. She chose for preference the gloomiest pages of the Old Testament, narratives of blood and horror, which excited her feelings and gave to her accents a sort of restrained fury. She spoke with implacable joy of the anger and of the jealousy of the terrible God, of that God of the Prophets, who was the only Deity she knew of; she would represent him crushing the earth at His will, and chastising with His cruel arm both beings and things. When she came to verses about murder and fire, her voice would proceed more slowly, in order that she might dwell with longer pleasure on the terrors of hell, and the displays of the unrelenting justice of Heaven. Her big Bible always showed her Israel prostrate and trembling at the feet of its Judge, and she would feel in her flesh the sacred shudder that shook the Jews, and in her excitement she would give stifled sobs, fancying that on her shoulders were falling the fiery drops of the rain of Sodom. At times, she would resume her reading in a sinister tone: she would condemn the guilty as Jehovah did; her pitiless fanaticism took a delight in casting sinners into the abyss. To smite the wicked, kill them, burn them, seemed to her a sacred duty, for she looked on God as an executioner, whose mission was to whip the impious world.

This hardhearted woman filled Madeleine with dejection. She would become quite pale, as she thought of the year of her life that needed absolution. Pardon had come, and she had thought herself absolved by William’s love and esteem, and now in the very midst of her peace she heard these inexorable words of chastisement. Had not God then blotted out her faults? Was she to remain till death crushed beneath the burden of the sin of her youth? Would she have to pay some day her debt of repentance? As these thoughts disturbed her peaceful life she would think of the future with secret disquietude; she grew alarmed at her present tranquillity, at this smooth water which fed her hope; abysses were forming perhaps beneath this clear peaceful surface, a breath would suffice to throw it into a raging storm and to engulf her in its cruel waves. The heaven which Geneviève disclosed to her eyes, this sombre tribunal of judges, this chamber of torture, where there were cries of agony and odours of burnt flesh, seemed to her like a vision of blood. In her early days, when she was at the boarding-school, she had been taught, at her first communion, that paradise was a delightful confectioner’s shop, full of sweetmeats, distributed to the elect by white and pink angels. In after life, she had been amused at her girlish credulity, and she had never afterwards set foot in a church. To-day she saw the confectioner’s shop changed into a court of justice; she could no more believe in the eternal sweetmeats than in the eternal red fires of the fallen angels; but the mournful pictures which the disordered brain of the fanatic evoked, if they did not make her afraid of God, filled her with strange uneasiness as they caused her to think of her past life. She felt that the day Geneviève learnt her sin, she would condemn her to one of the punishments of which she spoke with such delight; strong and proud in her life of purity, the old woman would be implacable. At times, Madeleine would fancy that Geneviève was looking at her in a fierce way; then she would hang her head; she would almost blush, and tremble like a guilty person who can hope for no pardon. While she could not believe in God, she had a belief in powers and fatal necessities. The old woman would stand erect, severe and unrelenting, pitiless and cruel, and declare to her: “You bear in you the anguish of your past existence. Some day this anguish will rise to your throat and strangle you.” It seemed to her that fatality lived at La Noiraude, and surrounded her path, chanting mournful verses of penitence.

When she was alone with William, in their bedroom, she thought of her secret shudders of the evening, and spoke in spite of herself of the terror which the protestant caused her.

“I am a child,” she said to her husband, with a forced smile, “Geneviève has frightened me to-day. She was muttering horrible things by the side of us. Could you not tell her to go and read her Bible somewhere else?”

“Nonsense!” William answered, laughing frankly, “that would vex her perhaps. She thinks she is assuring our salvation in giving us a share in her readings. However, I will ask her tomorrow to read not quite so loud.”

Madeleine, seated on the edge of the bed, with a far-off look, seemed to see again the visions evoked by the fanatic. Her lips quivered with a slight movement.

“She spoke of blood and anger,” she went on in a slow voice. “She does not possess the indulgent good nature of old age, she would be inexorable. How can she be so hardhearted, when she lives with us, in our happiness, in our peace? Really, William, there are moments when this woman makes me afraid.”

The young man continued to laugh.

“My poor Madeleine,” he would say taking his wife to his arms, “you are nervous tonight. Come, get into bed, and don’t have bad dreams. Geneviève is an old fool, and it is wrong of you to mind her gloomy prayers. It is all habit; formerly, I could not see her open her Bible without being terrified; now, I should feel something was wanting if she did not lull me with her monotonous murmur. Don’t you feel greatly soothed, at night, as we sit lovingly in this silence, tremulous with complaints?”

“Yes, sometimes,” replied the young wife, “when I don’t catch the words, and her voice moves along like a breath of wind. But what stories of horror! what crimes and punishments!”

“Geneviève,” William went on to say, “is a devoted creature; she saves us a great deal of trouble and annoyance by looking after everything in the château; she was with us when I was born and when my father was horn too. Do you know that she must be more than ninety years old, and that she is still strong and straight? She will work till she is more than a hundred... You must try to like her, Madeleine; she is an old servant of the family.” Madeleine was not listening. She was rapt in an uneasy reverie. Then, with sudden anxiety, she asked:

“Do you think that Heaven never pardons?”

Her husband, surprised and saddened, then kissed her, as he asked her, in a voice touched with emotion, why she had doubts about pardon. She did not give a direct reply but murmured:

“Geneviève says that Heaven will have its reckoning of tears — There is no pardon.”

This scene occurred several times. It was, however, the only trouble which disturbed the serenity of the young couple. In this way they passed the first four years of their marriage, in a seclusion scarcely disturbed by the visits of the De Rieus, and in a state of happiness, the smooth course of which even Geneviève’s lamentations were powerless to trouble seriously. It would have taken a greater calamity than this to rack their hearts again.

It was at the beginning of the fifth year, in the early part of November, that Tiburce accompanied Hélène to Paris. William and Madeleine, certain of not being disturbed again, settled down to spend their winter in the large quiet room where they bad already lived so peacefully for four seasons. At one time, they spoke of going to live in Paris in their little house in the Rue de Boulogne; but they put off this project to the following winter, as they did every year; they could not see any necessity for leaving Véteuil. For two months, from November to January, they lived their secluded life, enlivened by the prattle of little Lucy, who was now growing up. A peaceful tranquillity shed on them its balm, and they thought that they would never be disturbed in their bliss.