THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя
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been able to protect her. The thought of the coming departure of her lover could not yet break her heart, but the idea of an immediate separation was peculiarly distressing. In an indistinct way she said to herself that this man was her husband and that she could not leave him like that. She took one turn round the room, lost in thought, looking for her clothes; then she came back, sat down on the edge of the bed, and said hesitatingly; “Listen, keep me with yon as long as you stay in Paris. It will be more seemly.”
This last phrase, so touchingly naive, deeply affected the young fellow. He became aware of the lifelong misery be had just given to the life of this big child who had confided herself to him with the calmness of a little girl. He drew her to his breast, and answered that his home was hers.
During the day, Madeleine went to fetch her belongings. She had an interview with her guardian, and made him submit to everything she wished. The old man, fearing a scandal, and still all shaken with the struggle of the night, stood trembling before her. She made him promise never to try to see her again. She carried off the title-deeds of her income of two thousand francs. This money was a great source of pride to her; it enabled her to stay with her lover without selling herself.
That very night, she was peacefully embroidering in the room in the Rue Soufflot as she had been the night before at her guardian’s. Her life did not seem to her too much changed. She did not think she had anything to blush for. None of her feelings of independence and frankness had been wounded in the fault she had committed. She had surrendered herself freely, and she could not yet understand the terrible consequences of this surrender. The future did not concern her.
The esteem which her lover had for women was only that which young men feel who have to do with creatures of an inferior class; but he had the boisterous goodnature of a strong man who lives a happy life. To tell the truth, he speedily forgot his remorse and ceased to pity Madeleine’s fate. He was soon in love with her after his fashion; he thought her very handsome and took a pleasure in showing her to his friends. He treated her as his mistress, taking her on Sundays to Verrières or somewhere else, and to supper with his comrades’ mistresses during the week. These people now simply called her Madeleine.
She would perhaps have rebelled if she had not been charmed with her lover; he had a happy disposition, and made her laugh like a child even at the things that hurt her. She gradually accepted her position. Unknown to herself, her mind was becoming sullied, and she was growing accustomed to shame.
The student, who had just been appointed army-surgeon the day before they met, expected his orders to start every day. But they did not come, and Madeleine saw the months pass by, saying to herself that she would perhaps be a widow next day. She had only expected to stay a few weeks in the Rue Soufflot. She stayed there a year. At first she simply felt a kind of affection for the man she was living with. When at the end of two months she began to live in anxious expectation of his departure, her existence was a series of shocks which gradually bound her to him. Had he set off at once, she would perhaps have seen him go away without too much despair. But to be always fearing to lose him and yet have him always with her, this succeeded finally in uniting her to him in a close bond. She never loved him passionately; she rather received his impression, she felt herself becoming a part of him, and she saw that he was taking entire possession of her body and mind. Now she found that she could not forget him.
One day, she went with one of her new lady friends on a little journey. This friend, a law-student’s mistress, was called Louise, and she was going to see a child that she had put to nurse some sixty miles from Paris. The young women were not to return till the third day, but bad weather came on and they hastened back a day sooner than they had arranged. In a corner of the compartment of the train in which they were returning, Madeleine pondered with a feeling of sadness on the scene which she had just witnessed; the caresses of the mother and the prattle of the child had revealed to her a world of unknown emotions. She was seized with a sudden feeling of anguish at the idea that she too might have become a mother. Then the thought of the near departure of the man she was living with filled her with dismay, like an irreparable calamity of which she had never dreamed. She saw her fall, she saw her false and painful position; she was eager to get home to put her arms round her lover, to beseech him earnestly to marry her and never leave her.
She arrived in the Rue Soufflot in a state of feverish excitement. She had forgotten the slender tie, ready to be snapped at any moment, which she had accepted; she wished in her turn to take entire possession of the man whose memory would possess her for life. When she opened the door of the room in the hotel, she suddenly stopped stupefied on the threshold.
Her lover was bending down in front of the window, fastening the buckles of his trunk; by his side lay a travelling bag and another trunk already fastened up. Madeleine’s clothes and belongings were spread out in disorder on the bed. The young fellow had received his orders to set off that very morning, and he had hastened to make his preparations, emptying the drawers, separating his own things from Madeleine’s. He wanted to get away before his mistress came back, really believing himself to be acting under an impulse of kindness. He thought a letter of explanation would have been quite sufficient.
When he turned round and saw Madeleine on the threshold, he could not suppress a movement of vexation. He got up and went towards her with a somewhat forced smile.
“My dear girl,” he said as he kissed her, “the time for goodbye has come. I wanted to go away without seeing you again. That would have avoided a painful scene for both of us. You see, I was leaving your things on the bed.”
Madeleine felt as if she would faint. She sat down on a chair, without thinking of taking off her hat. She was very pale and could not find what to say. Her tearless burning eyes kept looking first at the trunks and then at the heap of her clothes; it was this unfeeling division of property which put the separation in such a harsh and odious light. Their linen no longer lay side by side in the same drawer; she was henceforth nothing to her lover.
The young fellow was just finishing the fastening up of his last trunk.
“They are sending me to the devil,” he went on, trying to laugh. “I am going to Cochin China.”
Madeleine was able to speak at last.
“Very well,” she said in a hollow voice. “I will go with you to the station.”
She could not think that she had any right to utter a single reproach to this man. He had warned her beforehand, and it was she who had wished to stay. But her feelings revolted, and she felt a strange longing to clasp him round the neck and beg him not to go. Her pride nailed her to her chair. She wished to appear calm, and not to show the young man, who was whistling coolly, how his departure was tugging at her heartstrings.
Towards evening, a few friends came. They all went in a body to the station, Madeleine smiling, and her lover gaily joking, comforted by her apparent good spirits. He had never felt towards her anything but a goodnatured affection, and he went away happy at seeing her so calm. Just as he was going into the waiting-room, he was cruel without meaning to be.
“I don’t ask you to wait for me, dear girl,” he said. “Console yourself and forget me.”
He went off. Madeleine, who had, up to this, preserved a strange pained smile, went mechanically out of the station, without feeling the ground under her feet. She did not even notice that one of the young doctor’s friends was taking her by the arm and going with her. She had been walking in this way nearly a quarter of an hour, stunned, hearing and seeing nothing, when the noise of a voice falling on the chilly silence of her brain, gradually compelled her to listen in spite of herself. The student was proposing to her unceremoniously to share his room with him, now that she was free. When she understood his meaning, she looked at the young fellow with an air of terror; then she let go his arm with a movement of supreme disgust, and ran and shut herself up in the room in the Rue Soufflot. There, all alone at last, she could sob to her heart’s desire.
Her sobs were sobs of shame and despair. She was A widow, and her grief at her desertion bad just been sullied by a proposal which, to her, seemed monstrous. Never yet had she so cruelly comprehended the misery of her position. The right to weep was being denied her. The world seemed to think that she had already