The Debacle - Emile Zola [175]
veil and see Le Liry, La Marfée, the batteries at Frénois and Wadelincourt, the circle of bronze beasts of prey that he sensed were there, straining forward with open jaws. As he brought his eyes back to the town round him, he could hear its anguished breathing. It was not merely the uneasy sleep of the soldiers lying in the streets, the faint creakings of the mass of men and animals and cannons. What he seemed to be hearing was the anxious insomnia of townspeople and neighbours who couldn’t sleep any more than he could, but were feverishly waiting for daylight. They must all be aware that the capitulation was not signed, and were all counting the hours and shudderingly thinking that if it were not signed there would be nothing for them to do but go down into their cellars and die there, crushed and buried beneath the ruins. He thought a wild voice came up from the rue des Voyards crying Murder! amid a sudden clicking of rifles. He stayed there leaning over into the thick night, lost in a misty starless sky, and taken with such a shivering that all the hairs on his body seemed to be standing on end.
Down below Maurice woke up on the sofa at daybreak. Aching all over, he lay still and stared at the window gradually lightening in a grey dawn. Horrible memories came back, the lost battle, flight, disaster, all with the sharp clarity of the morning after. He could see it all again in the minutest detail, and the defeat pained him terribly, penetrating to the depths of his being as if he felt personally guilty. He considered his own pain, analysed himself and recovered his old faculty of tearing himself to pieces, but more successfully than ever. Was he not just the ordinary man, the man in the street of the period, highly educated no doubt, but crassly ignorant of all the things that ought to be known, and moreover conceited to the point of blindness, perverted by the lust for pleasure and the deceptive prosperity of the régime? Then his mind moved on to another vision – his grandfather, born in 1780, one of the heroes of the Grande Armée, the victors of Austerlitz, Wagram and Friedland; his father, born in 1811, who had come down to bureaucracy, a humdrum salaried official, tax-collector at Le Chêne-Populeux, where he had burnt himself out; and finally himself, born in 1841, brought up to be a gentleman, a qualified lawyer and capable of the worst sillinesses and greatest enthusiasms, beaten at Sedan in a catastrophe that he knew must be immense and mark the end of a world. The degeneration of his race, which explained how France, victorious with the grandfathers, could be beaten in the time of their grandsons, weighed down on his heart like a hereditary disease getting steadily worse and leading to inevitable destruction when the appointed hour came. If it had been victory he would have felt so brave, so triumphant! In defeat he was as weak and nervous as a woman and giving in to one of those fits of despair in which the whole world collapsed. There was nothing left. France was dead. He began sobbing and cried, putting his hands together and going back to the faltering prayers of his childhood:
‘Oh God, take me away… Oh God, take away all these poor, suffering people!’
Jean, wrapped in his blanket on the floor,