Claude's Confession and Other Early Novels of Émile Zola. Ðмиль ЗолÑ
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had to do with women of doubtful reputation, for the ladies were most showily dressed, and seemed to them to promise an easy conquest. One young man even pretended that he knew them.
“Hullo! Pomponette!” he exclaimed, addressing Jeanne. And as the young girl stared at him, terrified and speechless: “Are you going to do the proud?” he went on. But he suddenly felt himself seized by the arm. Daniel held him in a close grasp.
“Monsieur,” said he, “you have made a mistake.... Be quick and make your excuses to these ladies.” He pointed to them, and dragged him to the carriage door. The young man stammered, and the only excuse he made was to say:
“Pardon, but if respectable women are dressed like women that are the reverse, how do you expect people to distinguish between them?”
Daniel allowed him to depart, and he entered the carriage of Madame Tellier at her request. The coachman was told to return to the rue d’Amsterdam. He drove off, giggling and cracking his whip.
The carriage was crossing the place de la Concorde when Daniel perceived a queen of the demimonde passing by, laughing immoderately. He pointed her out to Jeanne and quietly said:
“Mademoiselle, there is Pomponette!”
The young girl looked at the creature for whom she had just been mistaken, and she blushed when she saw that they were dressed in exactly the same style. There was the same extremity of fashion and the same reckless luxury. Directly she reached home she went up to her room to weep without being disturbed, and thus get over the wicked temper she felt against Daniel.
But Madame Tellier henceforth hated her husband’s secretary cordially. For his action in the last adventure that had happened to them she could not help but thank him, but she was singularly irritated by the forwardness of this young man, who formed, she said, a dark blot on her establishment.
On several occasions she had tried to have him dismissed, but the deputy clung to Daniel, for he had made himself indispensable to him. He could give full fling to his folly since he paid a brain to be intelligent for him, and he felt so thoroughly at home in his folly that he took great care not to deprive himself of that commodity. He received his wife’s complaints with condescending superiority; he sent her off to her furbelows, telling her that as he was tolerant to her toilettes, she, for her part, ought to tolerate his secretary. So long as he had been the mere tradesman he had shown himself tractable enough, but since he had become a deputy he had taken the attitude of a master, and intended to rule all around him.
Daniel was perfectly ignorant of the disturbance he caused or had caused in the household. He went blindly on, straight to his goal, as a man strong in the righteousness of his intentions. As a matter of fact, he went awkwardly to work at his task. Madame de Rionne could not have found any one with a more whole-hearted devotion and more profound affection; but she probably expected him to display more tact in the accomplishment of his painful task.
The young man was passionately fulfilling his mission of love. His ignorance, his brusque kindheartedness should even have raised him in any one’s estimation.
If he found himself as a stranger in the world in which circumstances compelled him to live, still he was the representative there of plighted faith, of self-sacrifice. The dead woman, with the clear foresight of the dying, had judged Daniel rightly, however. Whilst Monsieur de Rionne was consummating his own downfall, without even remembering that he had a daughter, whilst Madame Tellier selfishly wrought harm to Jeanne, Daniel, having no other tie but that of gratitude, watched over the young girl, and bitterly regretted that he could invoke no human answer to his love. He had ended by understanding that he gave her daily offence. Jeanne must have asked herself by what right he thus followed her about everywhere, looking at her all the while with his serious eyes. All he was to her, he told himself, was a simple employé — a poor devil, with difficulty gaining his daily bread. Out of sheer pity she did not want him to be dismissed. Poor Daniel, his heart almost failed him at times; he felt that Jeanne’s disdainful manner was crushing him, and an immeasurable bitterness took possession of him.
If, however, he had studied more carefully the haughty but timid looks that the young girl cast upon him, he would have experienced a joy that would have somewhat consoled. He excited in her an emotion she could not define; the affection that lay dormant in the depths of her nature was imperceptibly stirred; she mistook for anger what was only the nervous awakening of her true self. Daniel developed in her a remorse she had not yet acknowledged even to herself. When he was near her she felt a sort of shame, and this was what made her angry with him.
Daniel every day fully persuaded himself that he had made a great mistake in not abducting her when she was quite a little thing. This was a perpetual source of despair to him. In the place of this harebrained, mocking girl, he pictured to himself the gentle, good young girl whom he would have brought up. His child’s heart had been spoiled, and now he could not educate her over again; he must look on with anguish at the frivolities, the mischievousness of this poor lost soul, of whom he had promised to make a good, loving, true woman.
One day Jeanne went to Monsieur Tellier’s study to look for a book and took a malicious pleasure in walking round and round Daniel, thinking to embarrass him. She had noticed that the Black Knight was only stem before the world, and that he became extremely timid when he found himself alone with her. And she was right. He felt like a coward before the young girl. He had never dreamt of trying to explain to himself the sudden blushes, the trembling which seized him in her presence when alone together. He dreaded seeing her, hearing her speak, face to face, because then he became for the time being nothing but a little boy, and then she triumphed over him.
Jeanne on this day, despairing of making him lift his head up, was about to withdraw, when her skirt caught on the sharp corner of a piece of furniture and was torn with a rasping noise. At the crackling of the stuff he looked up and saw Jeanne smiling quietly at him, whilst disengaging her dress.
He felt the necessity of speaking, and he said something idiotic.
“There is a dress done for,” he muttered.
Jeanne cast at him a surprised look which clearly signified “What business is it of yours?” Then, with a mischievous smile, she asked: “Do you happen to be a tailor by any chance, that you can thus estimate the amount of damage done?”
“I am poor,” replied Daniel, more firmly than before. “I do not like to see expensive things destroyed. Pray forgive me.”
The young girl was touched with the emotion he had put in these few words. She blamed herself for saying what she did.
“You hate luxury, do you not, Monsieur Daniel?” added she.
“I do not hate it,” answered the young man; “I fear it.”
“Do you, then, frequent places where the fashionable world congregates, in order to test your courage? I fancy I have seen you in very good company sometimes.”
Daniel did not answer at first “I fear luxury,” he repeated, adding, however, afterwards, “because it is dangerous for the soul as well as the mind.”
Jeanne was hurt at the look with which he accompanied these words.
“You are not very polite,” she concluded, drily.
And she went out of the room, irritated, leaving the poor creature in despair at his want of tact and his rudeness.
He realised that she had escaped him, and he condemned himself for not knowing how to give her good advice gently but profitably. The moment he succeeded in touching her feelings, in getting rid of the mocking smile on her lips, that moment he spoiled all by telling her truths so bluntly that she was offended and angered.
The fact was that he could not fight advantageously against the all-powerful influences which surrounded Jeanne. She belonged to the world; she lived in a constant state of excitement which prevented her hearing the suppressed sorrow at her heart. The emotions that Daniel’s words at times gave birth to were quickly stifled by the continual dissipation in the midst of which she found herself.
The scene of the tom dress