The Debacle - Emile Zola [176]
‘What’s up, lad? Are you ill?’
Then, realizing that it was another lot of what he called ‘those ideas’ you should put out to roost, he turned fatherly.
‘Now, now, what’s the matter, boy? Mustn’t get yourself into a state like this over nothing!’
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Maurice, ‘it’s all up – we might as well get ready to be Prussians.’
As his friend, being a hard-headed, uneducated man, showed surprise, he tried to make him understand the impoverishment of the race, its extinction in a necessary stream of fresh blood. But the countryman obstinately shook his head and turned down the explanation.
‘What! My field no longer my field? Am I supposed to let the Prussians take it away from me before I’m quite dead and while I’ve still got my two arms?… Come off it!’
Then it was his turn to express what he thought, awkwardly and as the words came. All right, they had had a bloody licking, for sure! But they weren’t all dead, were they, and there were still some of them left and they would manage to build the house again if they were sensible blokes, worked hard and didn’t drink what they earned. In a family, if you take the trouble to put something aside you always manage to get by even in the worst trouble. In fact, sometimes it isn’t a bad thing if you do get a good clip on the ear, it makes you think. Of course it was true that there was something rotten somewhere or some limb was septic, well, it was better to see it on the ground, chopped off, than to die because of it as if you had the plague.
‘Done for, oh no, no,’ he said several times. ‘I’m not done for, I don’t feel a bit like that!’
And, although he was wounded, his hair still matted with blood from the graze, he struggled up in an unquenchable urge to live, to handle a tool or a plough and rebuild his house, as he put it. He came from the old, unchanging, careful soil, from the land of reason, hard work and savings.
‘All the same,’ he went on, ‘I feel sorry for the Emperor… Things looked as if they were going well and corn was selling. But he has been too stupid, that’s certain, and people shouldn’t get themselves into such a mess.’
Maurice was still cast down, and he made a gesture of despair once again.
‘Oh I quite liked the Emperor really, for all my ideas about liberty and republicanism… Yes, I had it in my blood from my grandfather, I suppose. And now that’s all gone rotten as well, what are we going to come down to?’
His eyes looked wild and he uttered such a moan of grief that Jean, now really worried, was on the point of jumping up when he saw Henriette come in. She had just woken up, hearing voices in the next room. A dismal grey light now filled the room.
‘You’ve come at the right time to give him a talking to,’ he said, pretending to be joking. ‘He’s not being a good boy.’
But the sight of his sister looking so pale and tragic had shaken Maurice into a salutary fit of compassion. He opened his arms and invited her to come to him, and when she flung herself into his arms he was filled with a great tenderness. She was weeping too, and their tears mingled.
‘Oh my poor, poor dearest, I could kick myself for not being braver so as to console you!… Good, kind Weiss, the husband who loved you so much! What are you going to do? You’ve always been the victim, and never complained. Haven’t I given you enough sorrow as it is, and who can tell how much more I may give you!’
She stopped him by putting her hand on his mouth, and at that moment Delaherche came in, almost out of his mind with exhaustion. He had finally come down from the roof, ravenous again with one of those nervous hungers made worse still by fatigue, and as he had gone back to the kitchen to get something warm to drink he had come upon the cook with a relation of hers, a carpenter from Bazeilles, whom she was giving some mulled wine. And this man, one of the last to stay behind in the midst of the fires, had told him that his dyeworks was completely destroyed, a heap of rubble.
‘What vandals they are!’ he spluttered to Maurice and Jean. ‘All is