The Debacle - Emile Zola [180]
Meanwhile in the dining-room cook had served bowls of coffee for everybody. Henriette and Gilberte were up, the latter refreshed after a good night’s sleep, with bright face and laughing eyes, and she tenderly embraced her friend Henriette, saying she felt for her from the depths of her heart. Maurice sat next to his sister while Jean, feeling a bit awkward, had to accept coffee, too, and sat opposite Delaherche. Madame Delaherche would not hear of sitting down at table, and she was taken a bowl which she agreed to drink. But the breakfast of the five people there, at first silent, soon livened up. They were all the worse for wear and very hungry, and how could they help being glad to be there alive and well when thousands of poor devils were still lying all over the countryside? In the big cool dining-room the snow-white cloth was a joy to look at, and the piping hot coffee and milk seemed delicious.
They started talking. Delaherche had recovered the poise of the rich industrialist, and with the patronizing good fellowship of an employer enjoying popularity, who disapproves only of failure, he came back to Napoleon III, whose face had been haunting him for two days as he gaped in curiosity. He addressed Jean, having only this simple man to talk to.
‘Oh yes, sir, I can say that the Emperor has been a bitter disappointment to me… It’s all very well for his flatterers to plead extenuating circumstances, but obviously he is the prime cause, the sole cause of our misfortunes.’
He was already forgetting that as an ardent Bonapartist he had worked for the success of the plebiscite only a few months earlier. He had even given up pitying the man who was to become the Man of Sedan, but laid on him the iniquity of them all.
‘An incompetent, as we are bound to agree now, but that in itself would not matter… A mere visionary, a crackpot who seemed to pull things off as long as luck was on his side… No, you see, there’s no point in trying to work up our sympathy for him by saying he’s been deceived and that the Opposition denied him the necessary men and credit. It is he who has deceived us, and his misdeeds have landed us in the awful mess we are in.’
Maurice did not want to be drawn in, but could not repress a smile, while Jean, embarrassed by this political talk and afraid of saying something silly, merely said:
‘But still, they do say he’s a nice man.’
But these few words, quietly said, made Delaherche sit up. All the fear he had felt and all the worries he had been through burst out in a cry of exasperation turned to hatred.
‘A nice man, oh yes, that’s easy to say!… Do you know, sir, that my mill has been hit by three shells, and that it’s no fault of the Emperor’s that it hasn’t been burnt down!… Do you know that I, yes I, am going to lose a hundred thousand francs over this ridiculous business?… Oh no, oh no, France invaded, set on fire, exterminated, industry brought to a standstill, commerce destroyed, it’s too much… A nice man of that kind we’ve had quite enough of, and God save us from him!… He’s down in the mud and blood, let him stay there.’
With his fist he went through the energetic motions of shoving down some struggling wretch under the water and holding him there. Then he greedily finished off his coffee. Gilberte had involuntarily smiled at Henriette’s sorrowful absent-mindedness as she fed her like a child. When the bowls were empty they lingered in the peaceful and happy atmosphere of the big dining-room.
At that very time Napoleon III was in the weaver’s humble cottage on the Donchery road. By five in the morning he had insisted on leaving the Sub-Prefecture, feeling ill at ease with Sedan all round him like a reproach and a threat, and moreover