Germinal - Emile Zola [204]
The maid, who had brought a towel and some eau de Cologne, insisted:
‘But it’s strange all the same. They’re not bad people.’
Mme Hennebeau sat looking very pale, unable to get over the shock; and she managed a smile only when Négrel was congratulated. Cécile’s parents were particularly grateful to the young man: the marriage was settled. M. Hennebeau looked on silently, his gaze passing from his wife to this lover he had that morning sworn to kill, and then to this young girl who would no doubt soon take him off his hands. He was in no hurry: his only remaining fear was that his wife might stoop lower still, with a servant perhaps.
‘And how about you, my dear little ones?’ Deneulin asked his daughters. ‘No bones broken?’
Lucie and Jeanne had had a considerable fright, but they were glad to have seen it all and were now laughing about it.
‘My goodness, what a day we’ve had!’ their father continued. ‘If you want a dowry, you’ll have to earn it yourselves now, I’m afraid. And what’s more you can expect to have me to feed as well!’
He was joking, but his voice was shaking. His eyes filled with tears as his two daughters flung themselves into his arms.
M. Hennebeau had heard this confession of ruin. A sudden thought lit up his face. Yes, Vandame would become part of Montsou. Here was the compensation he’d hoped for, the stroke of luck that would restore him to favour in the eyes of the Board. Each time he had met with catastrophe during his life he had habitually fallen back on the resort of carrying out his orders to the letter, and from this personal version of military discipline he derived the one small share of happiness he enjoyed.
But everyone was now beginning to relax, and an atmosphere of weary calm fell on the room, thanks to the soft, steady light from the two lamps and the cosy warmth created by the door-curtains. But what was happening outside? The shouting had died away, and stones had ceased to rain against the front wall of the house. All that could be heard was a dull thudding, like the sound of an axe far off in the wood. Everybody wanted to know what was going on, so they returned to the hall and ventured to look through the glass panel in the front door. Even the ladies went upstairs to peep through the shutters on the first floor.
‘Just look at that scoundrel Rasseneur standing in the entrance to that bar over there?’ M. Hennebeau said to Deneulin. ‘I knew it. I knew he had to be involved.’
Yet it was not Rasseneur but Étienne who was attacking Maigrat’s shop with an axe. He kept on calling to the comrades: didn’t everything in the shop belong to the miners? Wasn’t it their right to take back what was theirs from this thief who had been exploiting them for so long and who reduced them all to starvation the minute the Company told him to do so? Gradually everyone abandoned the manager’s house and rushed across to start looting the nearby shop. Once more the cry went up: ‘We want bread! We want bread!’ And bread they would find, beyond this door. They were seized by a frenzy of hunger as if all of a sudden they could wait no longer, as though otherwise they would die right here on this road. And they pressed so hard towards the door that Étienne was afraid of injuring someone each time he swung the axe.
Meanwhile Maigrat had left the hall and taken refuge in the kitchen; but he could hear nothing from there and kept picturing the most terrible assaults taking place against his