The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [41]
Things went well at home. In the first year of their marriage they had a daughter. The three of them were a beautiful sight. The business prospered without their overworking, just the way Lisa wanted. She had carefully sidestepped any possible cause of trouble, allowing the days to flow on in the luxurious air of this lumbering prosperity. It was a little corner of stable contentment, a cozy manger where mother, father, and little girl could grow fat.
Quenu alone was occasionally sad when he thought of poor Florent. Until 1856, he received letters from him, though rarely. Then there were no more letters. Quenu learned from a newspaper that three convicts had attempted to escape from Devil's Island and drowned before they were able to reach the mainland. The police had no definite information, but it was likely that his brother was dead. Quenu still hoped, but the months passed. Meanwhile, Florent was wandering in Dutch Guiana but refrained from writing because he hoped to get back to France. Finally Quenu started to mourn for his brother the way people mourn for someone with whom there was no chance for a farewell. Lisa had never known Florent. When Quenu mourned his loss in front of her, she always found kind words to say, and she showed no impatience when, for about the hundredth time, he began to tell some story of the old days in the big room on rue Royer-Collard, the thirty-six trades he had taken up one after the other, and the little delicacies he had cooked at the stove all dressed in white, while Florent was all dressed in black. She listened peacefully to such talk, with infinite acceptance.
It was into the middle of all this well-planned, mature domestic bliss that one morning in September Florent dropped in, just at the time when Lisa took her morning sun bath and Quenu, his eyelids still heavy from sleep, was absentmindedly fingering the congealed fat left in the pans from the day before. The shop was completely thrown by the event. Gavard advised them to hide “the outlaw,” as he somewhat pompously called him, puffing out his cheeks. Lisa, paler and more serious than usual, led him to the fifth floor, where she gave him the room used by the girl who worked in the shop. Quenu sliced him some bread and ham. But Florent could hardly eat anything. He was nearly overcome with light-headedness and nausea. He went to bed for five days in a state of delirium, the onslaught of brain fever, which, fortunately, he vigorously fought off. When he regained consciousness, he saw Lisa seated by his bed, silently stirring something in a cup with a spoon. When he tried to thank her, she told him that he must remain completely still and that they could talk later. In another three days, Florent was on his feet. Then one morning Quenu came up to tell him that Lisa was waiting for them in her room on the first floor.
Quenu and Lisa lived there in a little apartment, three rooms and a dressing room. The brothers passed through an empty room that contained only chairs, then a little sitting room in which the furniture was covered with white dustcovers in the half-light of closed venetian blinds to keep the soft blue of the covers from fading, and finally arrived in the bedroom, the only room that was used and was comfortably furnished in mahogany. The bed was particularly striking with its four mattresses, four pillows, a thick bundle of blankets, and an eiderdown. This was a bed made for sleeping in. A mirrored wardrobe, a washstand with drawers, a lace-covered table, and several chairs with lace-covered seats expressed solid middle-class comfort. Against the left-hand wall, on either side of the fireplace mantle—which was decorated with vases painted with landscapes and mounted on bronze stands, along with a gilded clock on which a statuette of a pensive Gutenberg, also gilded, pressed his fingers into a book—were hanging