Germinal - Emile Zola [104]
This had its effect on Maheu, though he remained very sceptical:
‘As soon as you try anything, they hand you your cards,’3 he said. ‘The old man’s right. It’ll always be the miner’s lot to suffer, and without even the prospect of a nice joint of meat once in a while to keep him going.’
Having been silent for some time, La Maheude spoke as though in a dream:
‘If only it were true what the priests tell you, about the poor in this world being rich in the next!’
She was interrupted by howls of laughter, and even the children gestured in disbelief. For the harsh wind of reality had left them all unbelievers, secretly fearful of the ghosts in the pit but full of mockery at the emptiness of heaven.
‘Oh, don’t give me priests!’ Maheu exclaimed. ‘If they really believed it, they’d eat less and work harder, so they could book a nice spot for themselves up above…No, when you’re dead, you’re dead.’
La Maheude sighed deeply.
‘Dear God, dear God.’
Then, with her hands on her knees and an expression of profound weariness, she said:
‘Well, that’s it, we’re done for, the lot of us.’
They all looked at each other. Old Bonnemort spat into his handkerchief. Maheu’s pipe had gone out, but he just sat there with it in his mouth. Alzire listened, flanked by Lénore and Henri, who had both fallen asleep at the table. But Catherine in particular, her chin in her hands, stared intently at Étienne with her big, bright eyes as he disagreed and began to proclaim his faith, opening up the prospect of a magical future and expounding his dream of a new social order. Around them the village was retiring to bed, and all that could be heard were the distant wailings of a child or the angry reception of a drunk returning home late. Inside the room the cuckoo clock ticked away slowly, and a cool dampness rose from the sanded flag-stones, despite the stuffiness.
‘And there’s another load of nonsense!’ said the young man. ‘Why do you need a God and a paradise to be happy? Can’t you make your own happiness in this world?’
And he would begin to talk, urgently, on and on. All of a sudden the closed horizon had burst asunder, and a shaft of light was breaking through into the grim lives of these poverty-stricken people. The endless round of deprivation, the brutish labour, living like animals to be shorn and slaughtered, all this wretchedness vanished, as though swept away by a great blaze of sunshine; and justice, as if by some dazzling enchantment, came down from above. Now that God was dead, justice would be the means of human happiness, ushering in the age of equality and the brotherhood of man. A new society would emerge in a single day, as in a dream, a great city shining like a vision, in which each citizen would be paid the rate for the job and have his share of the common joy. The old world, already rotten, had crumbled to dust; and humankind, newly young and purged of its crimes, would be one nation of workers, with the motto: ‘To each according to his deserts, and to his deserts according to his works.’ And the dream would grow ever grander and more wonderful, and the higher it reached towards the impossible, the more beguiling it became.
At first La Maheude would refuse to listen, seized with silent apprehension. No, no, it was too wonderful, it didn’t do to go having ideas like that, it just made life awful afterwards when you felt as though you couldn’t care who or what you destroyed just so long as you could be happy. When she saw the troubled look in Maheu’s eyes replaced by a gleam of conviction, she became anxious and interrupted Étienne loudly:
‘Don’t you listen to him, my love! You know it’s all pie in the sky…Do you think the bourgeois will ever agree to work the way we do?’
But gradually she, too, fell under the spell. Her imagination had been caught, and with a smile on her face she entered the fairyland of hope.