Germinal - Emile Zola [66]
‘Monsieur is quite right,’ La Maheude replied evenly. ‘We don’t always follow the straight and narrow. That’s what I keep telling those good-for-nothings when they start complaining…But I’m one of the lucky ones, my husband doesn’t drink. Mind you, sometimes, when there’s a party on a Sunday night, he’ll have a few too many; but it never goes any further than that. And what’s so good about him is that before we married he used to drink like a bloody fish, if you’ll pardon the expression …And yet, you know, his being sensible like that doesn’t really get us any further. There are days, like today for instance, when you could turn out every drawer in our house and you wouldn’t find a single coin.’
She wanted to get them thinking about the five-franc piece, and she continued in her flat monotone, explaining to them how they had come to be in such serious debt, how it had all begun, in small stages at first, and then grown to the point where it consumed everything they had. They’d make their regular repayments every fortnight, but then one day they’d find themselves behind with the instalments, and that was it, they never managed to catch up again. The gap got wider and wider, and then the men got fed up working when it didn’t even allow them to pay off their debts. Stuff that for a lark, they’d say! If things went on like this, they’d never be clear till the day they died. Anyway, people needed to see the whole picture: a collier needed his beer simply to clear the soot from his throat. That was how it started, and then when things went badly he’d never be out of the bar. So perhaps, not that anyone was to blame, mind, but all the same, perhaps the workers were just not paid enough.
‘But,’ said Mme Grégoire, ‘I thought the Company paid for your rent and heating.’
La Maheude cast a sideways glance at the coal blazing in the fireplace.
‘Oh, yes, they give us coal all right. It’s not wonderful, but at least it burns…As for the rent, it’s only six francs a month, which may not seem very much but sometimes it’s mighty hard to find…Like today, for example, you could search me till the cows come home but you wouldn’t find a single sou on me. Where there’s nothing, there’s nothing.’
The lady and gentleman fell silent, and as they reclined comfortably in their armchairs they began to find this display of poverty increasingly tiresome and upsetting. Afraid that she had offended them, La Maheude added with the calm and equitable air of a practical woman:
‘Not that I’m complaining, of course. That’s how things are, one’s got to make the best of it. Especially as even if we were to try and do something about it, we probably wouldn’t manage to change anything anyway…The wisest thing in the end, don’t you think, Monsieur, Madame, is to try and go about your business honestly and accept the place where the good Lord has put you.’
M. Grégoire agreed heartily.
‘With such sentiments as those, my good woman, one can rise above misfortune.’
Honorine and Mélanie finally brought the parcel. Cécile undid it and produced the two dresses. She added some scarves and even some stockings and mittens. They would all fit just beautifully, and hastily she bid the maids wrap the selected garments, for her piano teacher had just arrived and she was beginning to usher mother and children towards the door.
‘We really are very short,’ stammered La Maheude. ‘If you could just spare a five-franc piece…’
The words stuck in her throat for the Maheu family were proud and did not beg. Cécile looked anxiously towards her father; but he refused point blank with the air of one called upon to perform a painful duty.
‘No, it is not our custom. We simply cannot.’
Then, moved by the look of distress on the mother’s face, Cécile wanted to give the children something extra. They hadn’t taken their