Germinal - Emile Zola [238]
From up above Négrel and Dansaert were shouting at the captain to come in and take refuge with them. He refused, aware that the doors had no locks and that when the buildings were stormed he would suffer the ignominy of being disarmed. Already his small detachment of men was beginning to mutter crossly about not running away from a miserable rabble in clogs. Once again the sixty men stood with their backs to the wall, rifles loaded, and faced the mob.
At first people pulled back a little, and there was complete silence. The show of force had taken the strikers by surprise and left them nonplussed. Then a cry went up, demanding the immediate release of the prisoners: some even claimed they were being murdered. And then, quite unprompted but acting as one in their common need for vengeance, they all rushed over to the nearby stacks of bricks, which were made on the premises out of the local marly clay. Children carried them one by one, women filled their skirts with them, and soon everyone had a pile of ammunition at their feet. The stoning began.
La Brûlé was the first to take up position. She broke each brick across her bony knee and then, with both hands, hurled the two pieces at once. La Lévaque was nearly wrenching her arm out of its socket, so fat and flabby that she had to go right up close in order to hit the target, despite the entreaties of Bouteloup, who kept pulling her back, hoping to take her home now that her husband was out of the way. All the women were getting very excited. La Mouquette had got tired of cutting herself trying to break the bricks across her thighs, which were too fleshy, and decided to throw them whole instead. Even some of the children joined the line, and Bébert was showing Lydie how to chuck them underarm. It was like a hailstorm, with enormous hailstones thudding to the ground. Suddenly Catherine appeared in the midst of these furies, brandishing broken bricks and throwing them as hard as she could with her small arms. She could not have said why, but she felt an absolute, desperate need to slaughter. Was this filthy bloody existence of theirs never going to end? She had had enough, enough of being slapped and thrown out by her man, enough of tramping along muddy roads like a lost dog, not even able to ask her father for a bowl of soup when he was starving to death just like her. Things never got better, ever since she could remember they had only got worse; and she broke the bricks and just threw them, wanting to destroy everything and anything, her eyes so blinded by rage that she couldn’t even see whose jaws she was smashing.
Étienne, who was still standing in front of the soldiers, nearly had his head split open. His ear began to swell up, and he turned round and was shocked to realize that the brick had come from the frenzied hands of Catherine; and, even though he could get killed, he just stood there watching her. Many people were standing like that, with their arms by their sides, absorbed in the spectacle of the battle. Mouquet was assessing the throws as though he were at a cork-tossing contest: good shot! bad luck! He was laughing away and nudging Zacharie, who was having an argument with Philomène because he had smacked Achille and Désirée and refused to lift them on to his shoulders so that they could see better. In the background the road was lined with crowds of onlookers. At the top of the hill, at the entrance to the village, old Bonnemort had just appeared: he had hobbled there on his stick but was now standing still, silhouetted against the rust-coloured sky.
As soon as the bricks started flying, Richomme had again intervened between the soldiers and the miners, entreating one side and rallying the other, heedless of the danger and so distraught that huge tears were running down his cheeks. Nobody could hear what he was saying amid the uproar, they just saw the quivering of his grey moustache.
But the hail of bricks was getting thicker, for