Germinal - Emile Zola [202]
‘Monsieur, Monsieur! Madame’s arrived. They’re killing Madame!’
When the carriage had been unable to get beyond the Réquillart lane because of the threatening groups of people, Négrel had kept to his plan to walk the last hundred yards to the house and then knock on the little gate leading into the garden, next to the outbuildings: the gardener would hear them, there was bound to be someone there who would let them in. Things had gone well at first, and Mme Hennebeau and the young ladies were already knocking on the gate when some women who had been tipped off came rushing into the lane. Then everything went wrong. No one would open the gate, and Négrel had then vainly tried to force it open with his shoulder. The oncoming crowd of women was growing and he was afraid of being swept away in their path, so in desperation he ushered Mme Hennebeau and the girls forward in front of him, through the besieging mob, all the way to the front steps. But this manœuvre led to further commotion: they were still being pursued by a screaming horde of women, and meanwhile the crowd around them was swirling this way and that, not yet having realized what was going on and merely astonished to see these well-dressed ladies wandering about in the midst of battle. Such was the confusion at this point that there occurred one of those inexplicable things that can happen at moments of blind panic. Lucie and Jeanne, having reached the steps, had slipped in through the front door, which the maid was holding ajar: Mme Hennebeau had managed to follow them in; and finally Négrel entered the house and bolted the door, convinced that he had seen Cécile go in first before any of them. She was not there, she had vanished on the way: she had been so frightened that she had walked off in the opposite direction and straight into danger.
At once the cry went up:
‘Long live socialism! Death to the bourgeois!’
At a distance, and because of the veil covering her face, some people took her for Mme Hennebeau. Others said she was a friend of Mme Hennebeau’s, the young wife of a neighbouring factory-owner who was hated by his workers. Not that it mattered, for what infuriated them was the silk dress, the fur coat, everything about her down to the white feather in her hat. She smelled of scent, she wore a watch, and she had the delicate skin of an idle creature who had never had to handle coal.
‘Just you wait!’ shouted La Brûlé. ‘We’ll soon wipe your arse for you with all that lace.’
‘Those bitches would steal the clothes off your back,’ La Levaque added. ‘Wrapping themselves in furs while the rest of us all freeze to death…Come on, undress her. Let’s show her what life’s really like!’
Suddenly La Mouquette rushed forward:
‘Yes, yes, let’s whip her.’
Spurred on by this savage rivalry the women piled in, ragcovered arms outstretched as each of them tried to grab a piece of this little rich girl. No reason why her bum should be prettier than anyone else’s! In fact plenty of those bourgeois women were just plain filthy beneath all that finery of theirs. No, this injustice had gone on long enough: they’d soon make them dress like working women, these trollops that spent fifty sous on having their petticoats laundered!
Surrounded by these furies Cécile stood there quaking, her legs paralysed with fear, and she kept mumbling