Germinal - Emile Zola [93]
‘Christ Almighty!’ Étienne exclaimed. ‘It’s a complete bloody massacre. Now they’re setting the workers at each other’s throats!’
Chaval lost his temper. Never! He’d never have lowered his price like that! And when Zacharie wandered up to see what was going on, he said it was disgusting. But Étienne shut them up with a gesture of sullen violence:
‘It’s got to stop. One day we will be the masters!’
Maheu, who had been silent since the auction, seemed to rouse himself, and he repeated after Étienne:
‘The masters!…Yes, and about bloody time, too!’
II
It was the last Sunday in July, the day of the ducasse1 at Montsou. On the previous evening, throughout the village, all good housewives had given their parlour a thorough clean, sluicing their walls and flagstone floors with bucket after bucket of water; and their floors were still wet despite the white sand they had strewn on it, an expensive luxury on a pauper’s budget. Meanwhile the day looked as though it was going to be swelteringly hot. The atmosphere was heavy with a gathering storm, and an oppressive, airless heat smothered the bare, flat expanses of the seemingly boundless countryside of the Département du Nord.
Sunday always disrupted the early-morning routine in the Maheu household. While it infuriated Maheu to have to stay in bed any later than five, when he preferred to get up and dress as usual, the children would have a long lie-in till nine o’clock. That particular day Maheu went into the garden to smoke a pipe before eventually returning indoors to eat a slice of bread and butter on his own, as he waited for everyone else to get up. He spent the rest of the morning pottering about in a similar manner: he mended a leak in the bath-tub, and beneath the cuckoo clock he put up a picture of the Prince Imperial,2 which someone had given to the little ones. In due course, one by one, the others came downstairs. Old Bonnemort had taken a chair outside to sit in the sunshine; La Maheude and Alzire had immediately set to with the cooking. Then Catherine appeared, ushering Lénore and Henri ahead of her, having just dressed them; and by the time Zacharie and Jeanlin came down last of all, bleary-eyed and still yawning, it was eleven o’clock and the house was already filled with the smell of rabbit and potatoes.
The whole village was in a state of great excitement, relishing the prospect of the fair and eager to have their dinner and be off to Montsou one and all. Gaggles of children were rushing all over the place, while men in shirtsleeves sauntered about aimlessly with that easy slouch which comes with days off. The fine weather meant that every door and window had been flung open, revealing parlour after parlour all crammed to bursting with the teeming life of vociferous, gesticulating families. And from one end of a row to the other the rich smell of rabbit vied that day with the persistent reek of fried onion.
The Maheus dined at twelve noon precisely. They made very little noise compared with the constant chatter and bustle going on outside as women hailed or answered their neighbours from doorstep to doorstep, lending things, chasing their kids outside or ordering them back indoors with a smack. In any case the Maheus had not been on speaking terms with their own neighbours, the Levaques, for the past three weeks on account of Zacharie and Philomène getting married. The men were still talking, but the women pretended not to know each other any more. The quarrel had brought each household closer to La Pierronne. But she had gone off early that morning, leaving her mother to look after Pierron and Lydie, and was spending the day with a cousin in Marchiennes; and everybody joked about how they knew this cousin, and how she had a moustache and was an overman at Le Voreux. La Maheude declared that it was just not right abandoning one’s family like that on the Sunday of the ducasse.
As well as the rabbit and potatoes (they had been fattening the rabbit in the shed for the past month), the Maheus had broth and some beef. The fortnightly pay-day had