Germinal - Emile Zola [193]
Slumped on a chair and staring at the bed opposite, he remained for several minutes as though poleaxed. A noise roused him, somebody was knocking at the door and trying to open it. He recognized the servant’s voice.
‘Monsieur…Ah, Monsieur has locked the door…’
‘What is it now?’
‘Apparently it’s urgent, the workers are smashing everything. There are two more men downstairs. And some telegrams have arrived.’
‘Leave me be! I’ll be down in a moment.’
The terrible thought had just occurred to him that Hippolyte would have found the bottle himself if he had cleaned the room that morning. In fact the servant probably knew already, there must have been dozens of times when he had found the bed still warm from their adultery, with Madame’s hairs on the pillow and unmentionable stains on the bed-linen. If he insisted on disturbing him like this, it was no doubt with malicious intent. Perhaps he had even listened at the door and been aroused by the sound of debauchery coming from his mistress and young master.
M. Hennebeau sat on. He continued to stare, his eyes never leaving the bed. The long years of unhappiness passed before him, his marriage to this woman, their instant incompatibility of body and heart, the lovers she had had without his knowing who they were, and the one he had tolerated for ten years the way one tolerates some unwholesome craving in a person who is ill. Then there had been the move to Montsou and his foolish hope that he might cure her, by the months spent languishing in this sleepy exile and by the advancing years that would finally bring her back to him. Then their nephew turns up, this Paul to whom she had started playing mother, and to whom she had spoken about her heart being dead to passion, a cinder beneath the ashes. And there was he, the idiot husband who failed to see it coming, adoring this woman who was rightfully his, whom other men had possessed and whom only he was not allowed to have! He adored her with a shameful passion, to the extent that he would have fallen on his knees before her if she had deigned to give him what was left over after all the others! But what was left over was now being given to this child.
At that moment the distant sound of a bell made him start. He recognized it as the signal he had ordered to be given when the postman arrived. He stood up and exclaimed aloud, as in his pain a stream of foul language poured unbidden from his lips:
‘They can go to hell! They can go to fucking hell with their telegrams and their letters!’
He was now filled with rage and felt as though he had need of a cesspit into which he could have trodden all this filth under the heel of his boot. The woman was a slut, and he searched for other crude words with which to defile her image. Suddenly remembering the marriage that she was seeking, so sweetly and calmly, to engineer between Cécile and Paul, he quite lost patience. Wasn’t there even any passion, any jealousy, in this perennial lust of hers? It had become no more than a depraved form of play, the mere habit of having a man, a pastime engaged in with the regularity of pudding at the end of a meal. He laid all the blame on her and in the process almost exonerated the young man to whom she had thus attached herself in this reawakening of her appetites, like someone reaching out to plunder the first unripe fruit encountered on a country walk. Whom would she consume next, how much lower would she stoop, when she could no longer call on obliging nephews sufficiently pragmatic to accept this household regime of free board, free lodging and a free wife?
There was a timid scratching at the door, and the sound of Hippolyte’s voice could be heard as he ventured to whisper through the keyhole:
‘Monsieur, the post…And Monsieur Dansaert has come back, he says people are killing each other…’
‘I’m coming, God damn it!’
What was he going to do to them? Throw them out of the house the moment they returned from Marchiennes, as though they were smelly animals he no longer wanted under his roof? Grab