THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя
pat on the cheek and enjoining on her to be very good. A mother would have enlightened her on the errors of her mind. She grew up with no companionship but her thoughts, and only listening to the advice of others with a sort of distrust. The most childish ideas assumed for her a serious nature, because she accepted them as the only possible rule of conduct. Her companions when they came back from their Sunday visit to their relations, would tell her each time something of the outer world. During this time, she remained in the school more and more persuaded of the correctness of her errors. She even spent her holidays shut up alone with her thoughts. Lobrichon, who was afraid of her noisiness, kept her at a distance. In this way nine years passed. Madeleine was then fifteen, already a woman and destined henceforth to preserve the indelible traces of the dreams in which she had grown up.
She had been taught dancing and music. She could paint very nicely in water-colour and do every imaginable kind of embroidery. Yet she would have been incapable of hemming dusters or making her own bed. As for her knowledge, it was composed of a little grammar, a little arithmetic, and a good deal of sacred history. Her handwriting had been carefully looked after, and yet, to the despair of her teachers, it had remained thick and cramped. Here her learning stopped. She was charged with bowing too stiffly and spoiling the effect of her smile by the cold expression of her grey eyes.
When she was fifteen, Lobrichon, who for some time had been coming to see her nearly every day, asked her if she would like to leave the school. She was in no hurry to enter on the unknown, but as she grew up she began to feel a disdain for the honeyed voice of her teachers and the acquired graces of her companions. She answered Lobrichon that she was ready to follow him. Next day, she was sleeping in a little house which her father’s friend had just bought at Passy.
The former secondhand clothes dealer was nursing a project. He had retired from trade at the age of sixty. For more than thirty years he had led the life of a miser, eating very little, depriving himself of a wife, entirely absorbed in the one object of increasing his fortune. Like Férat, he was a tremendous worker, but he worked for future enjoyment. He intended, when he was rich, to indulge his appetites to the full. When the fortune came, he hired a good cook, bought a quiet country house with a garden in front and a yard behind, and resolved to marry the daughter of his old friend.
Madeleine did not possess a sou, but she was tall and strong, and had already an amplitude of bosom which answered to Lobrichon’s ideal. Besides, he had only made up his mind after careful deliberation. The child was still young; he said that he could bring her up for his own sole delight, and let her develop slowly under his eyes, enjoying thus a foretaste of pleasure in the sight of her ripening beauty; then, he would have her a perfect virgin, he would fashion her to suit his own desires, like a seraglio slave. Thus there entered into his project of preparing a young girl to be his wife, the monstrous refinement of a man whose appetites have been weaned for many a year.
For four years, Madeleine lived peacefully in the little house at Passy. She had only changed her prison, but she did not complain of the active surveillance of her guardian; she felt no desire to go out, spending whole days in embroidery work, without experiencing any of those feelings of discomfort which are so oppressive to girls of her age. Her senses lay dormant till an unusually late period. Besides, Lobrichon was very attentive to his dear child; he would often take her delicate hands in his, or kiss her on the forehead with his warm lips. She received his caresses with a calm smile, and never noticed the strange looks of the old fellow, when she took her neckerchief off in his presence just as she would have done before her father.
She had just completed her eighteenth year, when one night the old rag-dealer so far forgot himself as to kiss her on the lips. She thrust him away with an instinctive movement of revolt, and looked him in the face, still unable to understand anything. The old man fell on his knees, and stammered out words unfit for her to hear. The wretch, who for months and months had been tormented by his burning passion, had been unable to act his part of disinterested protector to the end. Perhaps Madeleine would have married him, had he not been guilty of this outrage. She withdrew quietly, declaring in a distinct voice that she would leave the house next day.
Lobrichon, when left by himself, saw what an irreparable fault he had just committed. He knew Madeleine and was sure she would keep her word. He lost his head, and thought of nothing now but satisfying his passion. He said to himself that a forcible attempt might perhaps subdue the young girl, and make her cast herself vanquished into his arms. Towards midnight he went up to his ward’s bedchamber; he had a key for this room, and often, on warm nights, ho had slipped in, in order to look at the half-naked child as she lay in the disorder of sleep.
Madeleine was suddenly awakened by a strange feverish sensation. The night lamp had not been quite turned out, and she saw Lobrichon who had crept up to her side and was trying to press her to his breast. With incredible force she took him with both hands by the throat, jumped hastily on to the floor, and held the wretch on the bed till the death-rattle came through his teeth. The sight of this old fellow pale and livid, in his shirt, the thought that his limbs had touched hers, filled her with horrible disgust. It seemed to her that she was no longer a virgin. She held on to Lobrichon for a second without moving au inch, looking at him fixedly with her grey eyes and asking herself if she was not going to strangle him; then she thrust him away with such violence that he knocked his head against the wall of the recess and fell back in a swoon.
The young girl dressed herself hastily and left the house. She walked down towards the Seine. As she went along the embankments, she heard the clock strike one. She walked straight on, saying to herself that she would do so till morning and then look for a room. She had become calm, and merely felt profoundly sad. There was one idea only in her head; passion was infamous, and she would never love. There was always before her eyes the sight of the white legs of the old man in his shirt.
When she got to the Pont-Neuf, she turned off into the Rue Dauphine, to avoid a band of students who were hammering away at the walls. She continued to go straight on, no longer knowing where the road would take her to. Soon she noticed that a man was following her; she wanted to escape, but the man began to run and overtook her. Then, with the decision and frankness of her nature, she turned towards the stranger and, in a few words, told him her history. He politely offered her his arm, and advised her to accept his hospitality. He was a tall young fellow with a bright and sympathetic face. Madeleine examined him in silence, then, calmly and confidingly, she took his arm.
The young man had a room in an hotel in the Rue Soufflot. He told his companion to lie down on the bed; as for himself, he would sleep very well on the sofa. Madeleine pondered; she looked round the room which was littered with swords and pipes; she surveyed her protector, who treated her as a comrade with cordial familiarity. She noticed a pair of lady’s gloves on the table. Her companion smilingly reassured her; he told her that no lady would come to disturb them, and that, besides, if he had been married, he would not have run after her in the street. Madeleine blushed.
Next morning, she woke up in the young man’s arms. She had thrown herself into them of her own accord, impelled by a sudden surrender of herself for which she could not account. What she had refused to Lobrichon with savage revolt, she had actually granted two hours later to a stranger. She felt no regret. She was simply astonished.
When her lover learned that the story she had given the night before was no idle tale, he seemed very much surprised. He thought he had met a wily woman who was inventing falsehoods to make him run after her all the more. All the little scene she had acted before getting into the bed had seemed to him got up beforehand. Otherwise, he would have acted more discreetly, he would above all have reflected on the serious consequences of such an intimacy. He was a decent fellow who did not object to amuse himself, but he had a wholesome dread of serious love affairs. He had calculated that he was simply showing hospitality to Madeleine for a night and that he would see her go off next morning. He was very much cast down at his mistake.
“My poor child,” he said to Madeleine in a voice of emotion, “we have been guilty of a serious error. Forgive me and forget — me. I have to leave France in a few weeks and I don’t know if I shall ever come back.”
The young girl listened to this confession pretty calmly. In short, she was not at all in love with this young fellow. For him their intimacy was an adventure,