Germinal - Emile Zola [244]
Her chest rose with each sigh, and her voice was strangulated by an immense sadness.
‘And then there are always the people who know better, promising you that everything can be sorted out if you’ll just make that little bit of effort…And you get carried away, you’re suffering so much because of what does exist that you start wanting what doesn’t. And there was I dreaming away like a fool, imagining a life where everyone was friends with everyone else. Floating on air I was, no question about it, with my head in the clouds. And then you fall flat on your face again, and you hurt all over…It wasn’t true, all those things you thought you could see were just not there. What was really there was simply more misery, oh yes, as much misery as you could possibly want, and then getting shot into the bargain!’
As Étienne listened to this lamentation, he felt a pang of remorse with each tear that fell. He didn’t know what to say to comfort La Maheude, who was utterly bruised by her terrible fall from the summit of the ideal. She had returned into the middle of the room, where she now stood looking at him; and in a final surge of rage she addressed him without ceremony:
‘And what about you? Are you planning to go back to the pit, now that you’ve landed us all in the shit?…Not that I blame you, of course. Only if it was me, I’d have died of shame long ago for having brought so much harm on my friends.’
He was going to reply, but instead he just shrugged in despair: why bother to offer explanations which in her grief she would not understand? It was all too much to bear, and so he departed once more on one of his sorry walks.
Again it was as though the village was waiting for him, the men on their doorsteps, the women at their windows. As soon as he appeared, the muttering started and a crowd began to gather. A storm of whispering had been brewing for the past four days, and now it broke in universal condemnation. Fists were raised in his direction, mothers pointed him out to their sons with gestures of reproach, and old men spat when they saw him. Here was the sudden reversal in sentiment that follows on the heels of a defeat, the inevitable other side of popularity, a hatred fuelled by all the suffering endured to no purpose. He was being made to pay for the hunger and the deaths.
Zacharie, arriving with Philomène, bumped into Étienne as he was leaving and sneered:
‘Blimey, he’s getting fatter! Must be cos he feeds off the rest of us.’
Already La Levaque had stepped out on to her doorstep, with Bouteloup. Mindful of Bébert, her boy who had been killed by a bullet, she shouted:
‘Yeah, there are some cowards about the place who like to get the children slaughtered instead. If he wants to give me mine back, he’d better go and dig him out of the ground.’
She had forgotten all about her imprisoned husband, and her household was no longer on strike since Bouteloup was working. Nevertheless the thought of Levaque did now suddenly occur to her, and she continued in a shrill voice:
‘Shame on you! It’s only the villains that walk about as they like when the good men are locked up inside!’
In trying to avoid her Étienne had run into La Pierronne, who was arriving in a hurry across the gardens. She had welcomed her mother’s death as a blessed relief, for her violent behaviour had threatened to get them all hanged. Nor did