THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя
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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