The Debacle - Emile Zola [227]
All the same, during the long afternoons when he was alone, Jean could not help letting his mind wander. What he felt for her was infinite gratitude and a sort of religious devotion which would have made him thrust aside any thought of sexual love as sacrilegious. Nevertheless he told himself that with a wife like her, so tender, so gentle and yet so practical, life would have been very heaven. His own misfortune, the unpleasant years he had spent at Rognes, his disastrous marriage and the violent death of his wife – all his past life now reminded him of the tenderness he had missed, and inspired in him a vague, scarcely formulated hope of trying to find happiness once more. He would shut his eyes and let himself fall into a half-sleep, when he would see himself somehow in Remilly, remarried and owner of a small-holding that was sufficient to keep a family of honest folk with little ambition. It was such a tenuous vision that it did not really exist, and certainly never would. He didn’t think he had anything left in him but friendship and he only loved Henriette like this because he felt himself to be Maurice’s brother. So this uncertain dream of marriage became a kind of consolation, one of those daydreams one knows to be unrealizable but with which one whiles away hours of sadness.
But no such thoughts even touched Henriette’s mind. After the dreadful drama at Bazeilles her heart remained dead, and any comfort or new affection could only enter it unrecognized, like the unperceived movement of germinating seed that nothing betrays to the human eye. She was not even conscious of the pleasure she had come to take in lingering for hours at Jean’s bedside, reading the papers to him even though they gave her nothing but sorrow. Her hand when it touched his had not even felt any warmth, never had the idea of the morrow left her thoughtful, with a wish to be loved once again. And yet only in this room could she forget or find consolation. When she was there, quietly busying herself with her tasks, she found rest to her soul and felt that her brother would soon come back, that all would work out for the best and they would eventually all be happy together and never be parted again. She talked about it quite freely, for it seemed so natural that things should be so and it never entered her mind to look more deeply into the chaste and hidden gift of her heart.
But one afternoon, as she was setting off for the hospital, the terror that froze her when she saw a Prussian captain and two other officers in the kitchen revealed to her the deep affection she had for Jean. Evidently these men had heard of the presence of the wounded man at the farm and had come to get him, it would inevitably mean departure and captivity in Germany in some fortress. She listened trembling, with her heart beating wildly.
The captain, a big man who spoke French, was giving old Fouchard a violent dressing-down.
‘This can’t go on any longer, what do you take us for?… So I’ve come myself to warn you that if this happens again I shall hold you responsible. Yes, I shall know what steps to take!’
Quite unruffled, the old man pretended to be thunderstruck, standing with dangling arms as though he hadn’t understood.
‘Beg pardon, sir, what do you mean?’
‘Oh, don’t make me lose my temper. You know quite well that the three cows you sold us on Sunday were rotten. Yes, quite rotten and diseased, they had died of some foul disease, and they have poisoned my men, and two of them may be dead by now.’
Thereupon Fouchard registered revolt and indignation.
‘Diseased! What, my cows? It was such good meat, meat you could give a woman with a newborn baby, to build up her strength!’
He snivelled, beat his breast, declared he was an honest man, that he would as soon cut out his own flesh as sell any that was bad. For thirty years everybody had known him, and nobody in the world could say he had not had full weight and finest quality.
‘Those cows were as healthy as I am, sir, and if your soldiers had the colic it may be that they ate too much – unless it was that some