The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [169]
Tears ran out of his eyes and down his white apron. His bulk shook with pain. He was silent, melting away. When he managed to speak, he stammered, “You have no idea how good he was to me when we lived on rue Royer-Collard. He cleaned and did the cooking … He loved me like his child, you see. He would come home at night caked in mud, too tired to stand. Meanwhile there was me, staying at home well fed and warm … And now they're going to shoot him.”
Lisa insisted that he was not going to be shot, but he shook his head and continued, “It doesn't matter. I didn't love him enough. It's no use saying that now. I've been heartless. I even hesitated to give him his inheritance.”
“But I offered it to him more than ten times,” she interjected. “We have nothing to reproach ourselves about on that score.”
“Oh, I know, you were very kind. You'd have given him everything. But not me, you see. I'll have to live with this grief for the rest of my life. I will always think that if I had shared with him, he would not have gone back to his bad ways. It's my fault. I'm the one who drove him to this.”
She was even gentler, telling him to stop torturing himself. She felt sorry for Florent too, even though he was very guilty. If he'd had more money, he might have committed even greater follies. Little by little, she managed to convince him that it could not have ended up any other way and that it had all worked out for the best. Quenu was still crying, wiping his cheeks with his apron, stifling his sobs to listen, then melting into a fresh wave of tears. Without thinking, he had sunk his fingers into a pile of sausage meat on the chopping block. He was drilling holes in it, kneading it roughly.
“Do you remember that you weren't feeling well?” Lisa continued. “It was because we had lost our routine. Although I never said anything about it, I was worried. I could see your health was suffering.”
“It was, wasn't it?” he said, holding back his tears for an instant.
“And the shop too. That hasn't done well this year. It was as if a spell … Come on, don't cry. You'll see how everything will be better. You have to take care of yourself. For my sake. And your daughter's. You have your responsibilities to us, too.”
He was kneading the sausage meat more gently now. He was still in the grip of his emotions, but now a more tender kind, which brought a slight smile to his drawn face. Lisa could see that she had convinced him. Quickly she called Pauline, who was playing in the shop, and lifting her onto his lap, she said, “Pauline, isn't it true that your father must be reasonable? Ask him nicely not to make any more trouble.”
The child asked him gently. They looked at each other and hugged in one huge, overflowing embrace, already recuperating from the yearlong illness that was now slipping away from them. Smiles broadened on their round faces, and Lisa said, “After all, there are only three of us, my dear, only three.”
Two months later Florent was once more sentenced to deportation. The incident got widespread attention. Newspapers published the tiniest of details, along with photos of the accused, the designs of the banners and the scarves, and plans of the place where the conspirators had held their meetings. For fifteen days there was no topic in Paris except the Les Halles conspiracy. The police issued statements that were more and more disturbing and in the end stated that the entire Montmartre neighborhood had been mined. Emotions were running so high in the Corps Législatif that the center and right-wing parties forgot about the ill-conceived pensions that had for an instant divided them and agreed to vote with a crushing majority for the unpopular tax. In the panic that gripped the city, not even the people of the lower-class neighborhoods dared complain.
The trial lasted a week. Florent was surprised by the huge number of accomplices he was credited with having. He knew only six, seven at most, of the twenty faces in the dock. After the reading of the arrest decree, he thought he caught