The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [93]
Farewells, in the damp night, were done with a great deal of shivering. They lingered a moment on the sidewalk, eyes burning and ears deafened, as though taken aback by the darkness of the street. Behind them Rose was putting up the shutters. After each one had shaken everyone's hands, exhausted and unable to find one more word to say, they went their separate ways, still chewing over the debate and regretting that they had not been able to do a better job of jamming their own beliefs down the others' throats. The rounded shoulders of Robine vanished in the direction of rue Rambuteau, while Charvet and Clémence went side by side along the market to the Luxembourg Gardens, their heels ringing out a martial beat, continuing to discuss some point of politics or philosophy and never taking each other by the arm.
The plot slowly ripened. At the beginning of summer they had only agreed that they should attempt to strike a blow. Florent, who at the beginning had approached the plot with mistrust, ended up believing in the possibility of a revolutionary movement. He took it all very seriously, taking notes, making written plans. The others just talked. Little by little he focused his whole life on this one idea, and he battered his brain with it every evening. He even took Quenu with him to Monsieur Lebigre's, doing it as though this were the most natural thing in the world to do. He still treated him like his student and tried to guide him in the right direction.
Quenu was completely new to politics. But after five or six evenings, he was agreeing with them. He was docile and, if Lisa was not present, showed great respect for his brother's ideas. But what appealed to him most was the bourgeois debauchery of walking out of his charcuterie and shutting himself up in a small room of shouting men, and the presence of Clémence provided a forbidden and delicious undertone. Now he would hurry through his andouille to get there sooner, not wanting to miss a single word of argument that seemed to him deep, even though he was sometimes unable to follow it. Beautiful Lisa was quick to notice his hasty departures, but she said nothing. When Florent led him off, she would stand in the doorway, slightly pale, a stern look in her eyes, and watch them go off to Monsieur Lebigre's.
One evening Mademoiselle Saget looked out the casement window of her garret and recognized the shadow of Quenu on the frosted glass of the tall window on rue Pirouette. She had found herself an excellent observation post. She faced the milky glass window on which the gaslight showed the silhouettes of the men with their sharp noses, the sudden thrusts of their jaws, huge arms stretching out with no sign of a body attached. This unexpected dislocation of limbs, the silent angry profiles, betrayed to the outside world the ferocity of the discussions in the little room. It riveted the attention of Mademoiselle Saget behind her muslin curtain until the transparency turned black. She suspected that something was amiss. By studying carefully, she had come to recognize the various shadows of hands and hair and clothes. As she observed the bedlam of clenched fists, enraged heads, and swaying shoulders, they seemed to have become detached, bobbing around one on top of the other. She would shout, “Oh, there's that big dodo of a cousin, there's that cheapskate Gavard, there's the hunchback, there's that maypole Clémence.”
Then, when the shadows became more lively and they all seemed to have lost their self-control, she felt an irresistible urge to go downstairs and take a look. So she bought her black-currant liqueur at night, claiming that she was feeling under the weather and needed to have a few sips to get out of bed in the morning. The evening that she identified Quenu's giant head crossed by the nervous thrusts of Charvet's skinny arm, she showed up at Monsieur