The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [112]
Quenu swore that he knew nothing. He made a solemn declaration that he no longer went to Monsieur Lebigre's and was never going back there.
But she shrugged and said, “That's a good thing unless you want to lose your head. Florent is mixed up in something bad. I can feel it. I've learned just enough to figure out where he's headed. He'll go back to the penal colony, you know.”7
After a silence she continued in a calmer voice, “What a fool. Here he was sitting pretty. He could have become an upstanding citizen again. He was surrounded by good role models. But no, there's something in his blood. He's going to break his neck with his politics. I want all this to stop. Do you understand, Quenu? I've warned you.”
She said the last words with particular emphasis. Quenu lowered his head, awaiting sentencing.
“First of all, tell him that he can no longer eat here. It's enough he gets a place to sleep. But he earns money, and he can feed himself.”
He started to protest, but she cut him off with “Fine, choose between him or us. I swear to you, I will leave and take my daughter with me if he stays. Do you want me to finally say it? He's a man who is capable of anything, and he has come here to wreck our home. But I'll fix that, I promise you. You've heard me. It's him or me.”
She left her husband silenced and went back into the charcuterie, where she served up a pound of foie gras with the friendly smile of the neighborhood charcuterie woman.
Gavard, in the course of a political discussion that she had slyly drawn out, had gotten worked up enough to tell her that she would soon see everything razed to the ground, that it would take only two men of real determination such as her brother-in-law and himself, to burn her shop down. This was the bad thing that she had told Quenu that Florent was mixed up in. There was some conspiracy to which the poultry man was constantly alluding with a furtive look and a sly grin, from which he hoped a great deal would be inferred. She could picture a detachment of sergents de ville forcing their way into the charcuterie, seizing the three of them— herself, Quenu, and Pauline—and throwing them into a dungeon.
That night at dinner she was an iceberg. She didn't even serve Florent, and several times she commented, “Isn't it funny how much bread we seem to be going through lately?”
Eventually Florent understood, feeling like a poor relative being shown the door. For the past few months Lisa had been dressing him in Quenu's old pants and coats, and since he was as skinny as his brother was fat, the clothes looked very odd on him. She had also been giving him Quenu's old linens, handkerchiefs mended in dozens of spots, ripped towels, sheets good only to be torn into dishrags, threadbare shirts stretched out by his brother's potbelly and so short that they would have worked better as jackets. Nor did he sense the warmth of earlier times. The entire household shrugged their shoulders at him, exactly the way they had seen Lisa do. Auguste and Augustine would turn their backs on him, and little Pauline, with the viciousness of a child, ridiculed him for the spots on his clothes and the holes in his linen. For the last few days mealtime had been particularly painful. He would see both mother and daughter glaring at him so hard while he cut a piece of bread that he didn't dare to eat it. Quenu gazed at his plate and avoided looking up so that he would not have to participate.
What was tormenting Florent was that he did not know how to leave. For nearly a week he had been working on a sentence in his mind, something that would say that he would take his meals elsewhere. But this gentle soul lived so far from reality that he feared that his brother and sister-in-law would be hurt if he no longer ate with them. It had taken him more than two months to notice Lisa's raw hostility, and he still worried that he was misreading her. He still thought that she was very kind