The Debacle - Emile Zola [240]
Henriette was terribly worried when she heard about all this business. Once again Jean wanted to go away for fear of compromising the people who had harboured him, although the doctor thought he was still not strong enough, and she insisted that he should wait two more weeks, being herself oppressed with renewed sadness at the coming necessity of a separation. When old Fouchard was arrested Jean had been able to avoid capture by hiding in the depths of the barn, but wasn’t he in constant danger of being discovered and taken away at any moment in the likely event of further searches? And besides, she was worried about her uncle’s fate. So she decided to go into Sedan one morning and see the Delaherches, who had billeted on them, it was said, a very influential Prussian officer.
‘Silvine,’ she said as she was leaving, ‘take good care of our invalid, give him his broth at twelve and his medicine at four.’
The maid, busy with her usual jobs, was once again the brave and self-effacing woman, running the farm now in the master’s absence, with Chariot laughing and capering round her.
‘Never you fear, Madame, he won’t go short of anything with me here to look after him.’
6
AT the Delaherches’s house in the rue Maqua in Sedan, life had started up again after the terrible upheavals of the battle and capitulation, and for nearly four months day followed day under the dreary yoke of the Prussian occupation.
But one corner of the great factory block remained shut up and looked uninhabited – the room looking on to the road at one end of the proprietor’s quarters, where Colonel de Vineuil was still living. Whereas the other windows were open and revealed quite a lot of activity and bustle of life, the windows of this room seemed dead, with their blinds obstinately closed. The colonel had complained about his eyes and said that strong light made them hurt. Nobody knew whether it was true or not, but a lamp was kept burning in his room night and day to humour him. He had had to stay in bed for two whole months, although all Major Bouroche had diagnosed was a cracked ankle-bone, but the wound would not heal and all sorts of complications had developed. Now he did get up, but he was in such a state of dejection, afflicted by some indefinable ill which was so intractable and all-pervading that he spent his days lying on a couch in front of a big wood fire. He was losing weight and becoming a wraith, and the doctor who attended him was very puzzled because he could find nothing wrong, no reason for this slow death. He was flickering out like a flame.
Old Madame Delaherche had shut herself up with him on the day after the occupation. They had no doubt come to an understanding, in a few words and once and for all, about their definite wish to remain cloistered together in this room so long as there were Prussians billeted in the house. Many had spent only two or three nights there, but one, Captain von Gartlauben, was there permanently. However, neither the colonel nor the old lady had ever referred to these things again. For all her seventy-eight years she rose at dawn and came and took up her position in an armchair opposite her friend on the other side of the fireplace, and in the unchanging light of the lamp she began knitting stockings for poor children, while he, staring into the wood fire, never did anything, and seemed to be living and dying with but one thought, in a growing lethargy. They certainly did not exchange