Germinal - Emile Zola [119]
‘What’s more,’ she continued when her maid had left the room, ‘you know perfectly well why I am so anxious to have these people to lunch. And you ought to care more about this marriage yourself than about all this nonsense with your workmen…So there we are. I want them to come, and I shall not have you stand in my way.’
He looked at her, trembling slightly, and the hard, closed face of this man of discipline registered the secret pain of a heart that was used to being bruised. She had continued to sit there with her shoulders bare, a woman already past her prime and yet still dazzling and desirable, and with the bust of an earth goddess turned golden brown by autumn. For a moment, no doubt, he felt the animal urge to take her, to roll his head from side to side between those two breasts thus presented for display, here in this warm room with its luxurious, intimate aura of female sensuality and its provocative scent of musk; but he drew back. For ten years now they had slept apart.
‘Very well,’ he said as he left her. ‘We’ll leave things as they are.’
M. Hennebeau was a native of the Ardennes. He came from a poor background and had been abandoned as an orphan on the streets of Paris. After several years of arduous study at the École des Mines2 he had left at the age of twenty-four for La Grand ’Combe,3 where he had been appointed engineer at the Sainte-Barbe pit. Three years later he became divisional engineer at the Marles collieries in the Pas-de-Calais; and there, by one of those strokes of good fortune which seem to be the rule for graduates of the École des Mines, he married the daughter of a rich spinning-mill owner from Arras. For fifteen years the couple lived in the same small provincial town, and not a single noteworthy event broke the monotony of their lives, not even the birth of a child. A growing irritation began to distance Mme Hennebeau from her husband, for she had been brought up to respect money and she looked down on this man who worked hard to earn a paltry salary and who had brought her none of the vain gratifications she had dreamed of as a schoolgirl. He, a man of strict integrity, never took financial risks and merely did his job, sticking to his post like a soldier. The gulf between them had quite simply grown wider and wider, exacerbated by one of those curious instances of physical incompatibility that can cool even the warmest ardour: he adored his wife, and she had the sensuality of the voluptuous blonde, and yet already they had ceased to share a bed, both of them ill at ease with the other and quick to take offence. Unbeknownst to him, she then took a lover. Eventually he left the Pas-de-Calais for a desk job in Paris, hoping that this would make her grateful to him. But Paris drove them apart completely, for this was the Paris she had dreamed of ever since she had played with her first doll and where she now sloughed off her provincial existence in the space of a single week, becoming all at once the woman of fashion in pursuit of every latest foolish luxury. The ten years she spent there were filled by one great passion, a public liaison with a man whose abandonment of her nearly destroyed her. This time her husband had been unable to remain in ignorance of the facts, and after many terrible scenes he resigned himself to the situation, powerless in the face of the total lack of remorse shown by this woman who took her pleasure where she found it. It was following the end of this affair, when he saw how ill her unhappiness was making her, that he had accepted the job as manager of the Montsou mines, hoping that up there in that black wilderness he might yet manage to make her mend her ways.
Since their arrival in Montsou the Hennebeaus had relapsed into the state of irritable boredom