Germinal - Emile Zola [91]
This time the three men were in agreement. One after another they spoke in despairing tones, and theirs was a long tale of woe. The working man wouldn’t be able to survive; the Revolution had only made things worse for him; the bourgeois had been living off the fat of the land since 1789, greedily taking everything for themselves and leaving not so much as the scraps off their plates. How could anyone say that the workers had had their fair share of the extraordinary increase in wealth and living standards that had taken place over the previous hundred years? People had simply told them they were free and then washed their hands of them. Free? Yes, free to die of starvation. There was no shortage in that department. But you didn’t get bread on your table by voting for splendid fellows who then promptly went off and led the life of Riley and spared no more of a thought for the poor than they did for an old pair of boots. No, one way or another it was time to put a stop to things, whether they did it all nice and friendly by agreeing new laws between them, or else like savages, torching the place and fighting each other down to the last man. It would happen in their children’s time if not in their own, because there would have to be another revolution before the century was through. A workers’ revolution this time, a right bust-up that would sort society out from top to bottom and rebuild it on a just and proper basis.
‘Things can’t go on like this!’ Mme Rasseneur repeated insistently.
‘Quite right!’ the three of them cried. ‘Things can’t go on like this!’
Souvarine was now stroking Poland’s ears, and she wrinkled her nose with pleasure. Staring into space, he said softly and as though to himself:
‘But how can they put the wages up? Wage levels are fixed by the iron law of the irreducible minimum,4 the amount which is just sufficient for the workers to be able to eat stale bread and make babies…If the amount falls too low, the workers die and the demand for new men pushes it up again. If it goes up too high, the surplus supply of labour pushes it down again…The point of equilibrium is the empty stomach, life imprisonment in the house of hunger.’
Whenever he let go like this and touched on socialist theories in the way of an educated man, Étienne and Rasseneur became anxious. It unsettled them to hear these grim assertions, and they did not quite know how to respond.
‘Can’t you see!’ he went on in his usual calm way, looking at them now. ‘We’ve got to bring the whole lot down, or the hunger will simply start all over again. Yes, anarchy! All gone, a world washed clean by blood, purified by fire!…And then we’ll see.’
‘The gentleman’s quite right,’ declared Mme Rasseneur, who was always most polite in the expression of her extreme revolutionary views.
Étienne, in despair at his own ignorance, had had enough of this discussion. Getting to his feet, he said:
‘Time for bed. That’s all well and good, but I’ve still got to get up at three o’clock tomorrow morning.’
Souvarine had put out the remains of a cigarette that continued to cling to his lips and was already lifting Poland gently under the belly to set her down on the floor. Rasseneur began to lock up. Then they all went their separate ways in silence, their ears buzzing and their heads filled to bursting with the weighty matters they had just been debating.
And every evening, here in this bare room, they had further conversations of this kind, gathered round the single beer that it took Étienne an hour to drink. A whole store of half-conscious thoughts that had lain dormant in Étienne’s mind now began to stir and develop. Though preoccupied above all by a need for greater knowledge, he had nevertheless hesitated for a long time before asking his fellow-lodger if he could borrow some of his books, most of which unfortunately were in either German or Russian.