Germinal - Emile Zola [246]
Standing in the background, Étienne felt sickened, and his heart was filled with bitterness. He remembered Rasseneur’s prediction in the forest when he had warned him about the ingratitude of the crowd. What mindless brutality! How appalling it was, the way they had forgotten everything he had done for them! They were like a blind force constantly feeding on itself. But beneath his anger at seeing these brutes wrecking their own cause there lay despair at his own collapse, at the tragic end of his own ambitions. So that was it? It was all over? He remembered the occasion, under the beech trees, when he had listened to three thousand hearts beating in time with his own. That day he had been in control of his popularity, these people had belonged to him, he had felt himself to be their master. Then he had been drunk on wild dreams: Montsou at his feet, Paris beckoning, perhaps election to the Chamber of Deputies, lambasting the bourgeois with his oratory, the first parliamentary speech ever made by a working man. And now it was all over! Now he had awoken from the dream, wretched and hated, and his people had just thrown bricks at him and banished him from their midst.
Rasseneur’s voice grew louder.
‘Violence has never succeeded. You can’t remake the world in a single day. Those who promised you they could change things at a stroke were either fools or rogues.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried the crowd.
So who was to blame? For Étienne this question, which he had never ceased to ask himself, was the last straw. Was it really his fault, all this suffering – which affected him too after all –this poverty, the shooting, these emaciated women and children who had no bread to eat? He had once had a dire vision of this kind, one evening before everything began to go wrong. But at that stage he had already felt buoyed up by some external force, which had carried him away with the rest of the comrades. Besides, it had never been a case of his telling them what to do; rather it was they who had led him, forcing him to do things that he would never have done on his own without the pressure of the mob urging him on from behind. With each new act of violence he had been left stunned by the outcome, which he had neither sought nor foreseen. How could he have ever predicted, for example, that one day his loyal flock from the village would actually stone him? These madmen were lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of leisure and plenty to eat. Yet behind his attempts at self-justification, behind all the arguments with which he tried to combat his remorse, lay the unspoken fear that he had not been equal to his task and the niggling doubt of the semi-educated man who realizes that he doesn’t know the half of it. But he had run out of courage, and he no longer felt the same bond with the comrades, indeed he was afraid of them, of the huge, blind, irresistible mass that is the people, passing like a force of nature and sweeping away everything in its path, beyond the compass of rule or theory. He had begun to view them with distaste and had gradually grown apart from them, as his more refined tastes made him feel ill at ease in their company, and as his whole nature slowly began to aspire towards membership of a higher class.
At that moment Rasseneur’s voice was drowned by enthusiastic shouting.
‘Three cheers for Rasseneur! He’s the man for us! Hip, hip!’
Rasseneur shut the door as the mob dispersed; and the two men looked at each other in silence. They both shrugged. Then they had a drink together.
That same day there was a grand dinner at La Piolaine, where they were celebrating the engagement of Négrel and Cécile. The previous twenty-four hours had seen much dusting and polishing in the Grégoires’ dining-room and drawing-room. Mélanie reigned supreme in the kitchen, supervising the roasts and stirring the sauces, the smell of which wafted all the way up through the house as far as the attic. It had been decided that Francis the coachman would