The Rougon-Macquart: Complete 20 Book Collection. Эмиль Золя
forgot himself so far as to beat a tattoo with his fingers on the glass. But the night was so black, the outer darkness hung in such strange masses, that he experienced a feeling of uneasiness, and returned to the room where Angèle lay dying. He had forgotten her; he received a terrible shock on finding her half raised up against her pillows; her eyes stood wide open, a flush of life seemed to have returned to her cheeks and lips. Little Clotilde, still nursing her doll, was seated on the edge of the bed; as soon as her father’s back was turned, she had quickly slipped back into that room from which she had been removed, and to which all her happy childish curiosity attracted her. Saccard, his head full of his sister’s recital, saw his dream dashed to the ground. A hideous thought must have shone from his eyes. Angèle, seized with terror, tried to throw herself back into bed, against the wall; but death came, this awakening in agony was the last flicker of the expiring lamp. The dying woman was unable to move; she sank back, keeping her eyes fixed wide open upon her husband, as though to watch his every movement. Saccard, who had dreaded a resurrection, a devil’s device of destiny to keep him in penury, was reassured on seeing that the wretched woman had not an hour to live. He now felt nothing but intolerable uneasiness. Angèle’s eyes told him that she had overheard her husband’s conversation with Mme. Sidonie, and that she feared he would strangle her if she did not die sufficiently quickly. And her eyes still retained the terrified amazement of a sweet and inoffensive nature that learns at the last moment the infamy of this world, and shudders at the thought of the long years passed side by side with a miscreant. Little by little her look softened; she was no longer afraid, she seemed to find an excuse for the wretch as she thought of the desperate struggle he had so long maintained against Fate. Saccard, followed by the dying woman’s gaze, in which he read so deep a reproach, leant against the furniture for support, sought the dark corners of the room. Then, faltering, he made as though to drive away the nightmare that was maddening him, and stepped forward into the light of the lamp. But Angèle signed to him not to speak. And she continued to look at him with her look of terror-stricken anguish, to which was now added a promise of forgiveness. Then he stooped to take Clotilde in his arms and carry her into the other room. She forbade him this, too, with a movement of her lips. She insisted that he should stay there. She expired gently, without removing her gaze from him, and, as her sight grew dimmed, that gaze became more and more gentle. At the last breath she forgave him. She died as she had lived, colourlessly, effacing herself in death as she had effaced herself during life. Saccard stood shivering before those dead eyes, still open, which continued to follow him in their immobility. Little Clotilde nursed her doll on the edge of the sheets, gently, so as not to awaken her mother.
When Mme. Sidonie returned, it was all over. With the trick of the fingers of a woman used to this operation, she closed Angèle’s eyes, to Saccard’s intense relief. Then, after putting the little one to bed, she deftly arranged the mortuary chamber. When she had lit two candles on the chest of drawers, and carefully drawn the sheet to meet the chin of the corpse, she threw a glance of satisfaction around her, and stretched herself out in an easy-chair, where she slumbered till daybreak. Saccard spent the night in the next room, writing out the announcements of the death. He interrupted himself from time to time, forgetting himself, and jotting down columns of figures on scraps of paper.
On the evening of the funeral, Mme. Sidonie carried off Saccard to her entresol. There great resolutions were come to. The clerk decided to send little Clotilde to one of his brothers, Pascal Rougon, a doctor who led a solitary life at Plassans, sunk in research, and who had frequently offered to take his niece to enliven his silent scientific home. Mme. Sidonie next gave him to understand that he must no longer remain in the Rue Saint-Jacques. She would take an elegant set of furnished rooms for him for a month, somewhere round about the Hôtel de Ville; she would try and find some rooms in a private house, so that the furniture might seem to belong to him. As to the chattels in the Rue Saint-Jacques, they would be sold, so as to efface the last traces of the past. He could use the money in buying himself a wedding outfit and some decent clothes. Three days later Clotilde was handed over to an old lady who just happened to be going to the South. And Aristide Saccard, exultant and rosy-cheeked, fattened already in three days by the first smiles of Fortune, occupied in the Marais, in the Rue Payenne, in a severe and respectable house, a smart five-roomed flat, which he perambulated in embroidered slippers. They were the rooms of a young abbé, who had left suddenly for Italy and had sent instructions to his housekeeper to let them. This woman was a friend of Mme. Sidonie, who affected the cloth a little; she loved priests with the love she bestowed on women, instinctively, establishing, possibly, a certain subtle relationship between cassocks and silk skirts. From that time Saccard was prepared; he had thought out his part with exquisite art; he awaited without flinching the difficulties and niceties of the situation he had accepted.
On the hideous night of Angèle’s last agony, Madame Sidonie had faithfully related, in few words, the case of the Béraud family. Its head, M. Béraud du Châtel, a tall old man of sixty, was the last representative of an ancient middle-class family, whose pedigree went further back than that of certain noble houses. One of his ancestors was the friend of Étienne Marcel. In ‘93 his father had died on the scaffold, after welcoming the Republic with all the enthusiasm of a burgess of Paris in whose veins flowed the revolutionary blood of the city. He himself was a Republican of ancient Sparta, whose dream was a reign of universal justice and sound liberty. Grown old in the magistracy, where he had contracted a professional inflexibility and severity, he had resigned his chairmanship in 1851, at the time of the Coup d’État, after refusing to take part in one of those mixed commissions which tended to dishonour French justice. Since that time he had been living alone in retirement in his house on the Île Saint-Louis, situated at the extremity of the island, almost facing the Hotel Lambert. His wife had died young. Some secret tragedy, whose wound remained unhealed, added still further to the gloom of the magistrate’s countenance. He was already the father of an eight-year-old daughter, Renée, when his wife expired in giving birth to a second. The latter, who was called Christine, was taken charge of by a sister of M. Béraud du Châtel, the wife of Aubertot the notary. Renée went to a convent. Madame Aubertot, who had no children, took a maternal fondness for Christine, whom she brought up by her side. On her husband’s death, she brought back the little one to its father, and continued to live with the silent old man and the smiling, fair-haired child. Renée was forgotten at her school. During the holidays she filled the house with such an uproar that her aunt heaved a great sigh of relief when she had at last escorted her back to the ladies of the Visitation, where she had been a boarder since her eighth year. She did not leave the convent until she was nineteen, and went straight to spend the fine season at the home of her friend Adeline, whose parents owned a beautiful estate in the Nivernais. When she returned in October, her Aunt Elisabeth was surprised to find her serious and profoundly melancholy. One evening she discovered her stifling her sobs in her pillow, writhing on her bed in a paroxysm of uncontrollable grief. In the unconstraint of her despair the girl told her a heartrending story: how a man of forty, rich, married — his wife, a young and charming woman, was there — had violated her in a field, without her daring or knowing how to defend herself. This confession terrified Aunt Elisabeth; she accused herself, as though she felt herself to be to blame; her preference for Christine made her deeply unhappy; she thought that, had she kept Renée also beside her, the poor child would not have succumbed. Henceforth, in order to drive away this exquisite remorse, which was rendered still more acute by the tenderness of her nature, she sustained the erring one; she bore the brunt of the anger of the father, to whom they both revealed the horrible truth by the very excess of their precautions; she invented, in the bewilderment of her solicitude, this strange project of matrimony, which to her idea would settle the whole affair, appease the father, and restore Renée to the world of honest women, and she refused to perceive its shameful side or foresee its disastrous consequences.
Nobody ever knew how Madame Sidonie had got wind of this good bit of business. The honour of the Bérauds had been dragged about in her basket among the protested bills of every strumpet in Paris. Once she knew the story, she almost forced her brother, whose wife lay dying, upon them. Aunt Elisabeth ended by believing that she was under an obligation to this gentle, humble lady, who was devoting herself to the unhappy Renée to the degree of finding a husband for her in her own family. The first interview between the aunt and Saccard took place on the entresol in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The clerk, who had