The Debacle - Emile Zola [279]
‘My dear old Jean, you are the pure in heart, the stout-hearted one… Go and take up your pick and trowel, turn over the soil and rebuild the house!… As for me, you did the best thing when you cut me out, for I was the ulcer clinging to your bones!’
He went on wandering, tried to get up and look out of the window.
‘Paris is burning and there’ll be nothing left… This fire which is taking everything away and healing everything was my idea, yes, it’s doing a good job… Let me go down and finish off the work of humanity and freedom…’
Jean had all the trouble in the world to get him back into bed, while Henriette in tears went on talking to him about their childhood together, begging him to calm down in the name of their love for each other. Over the vast space of Paris the fiery glow had spread still more, and the sea of flame seemed to be reaching the dark limits of the horizon, the sky was like the vault of a gigantic furnace, heated up to bright red. The dense smoke clouds from the Ministry of Finance, which had been steadily burning for two days without any flames, still floated across this lurid background of fires like a stately cloud of deepest mourning.
The next day, Saturday, brought a sudden improvement in Maurice’s condition, and he was much calmer, his temperature had gone down, and it was a great joy to Jean when he found Henriette smiling and going back to the dream of an intimate life for the three of them, in a future happiness which still seemed possible but which she did not want to put into so many words. Was fate about to relent? She spent the nights in that room which she never left, and which her busy Cinderella sweetness, her gentle, silent care filled with a continual caress. That evening Jean lingered there with his friends and his pleasure surprised him and made him tremble. During the day the troops had taken Belleville and the Buttes-Chaumont. Only the Père-Lachaise cemetery, which had been turned into an armed camp, still held out. It seemed to him that it was all over and he even said that there were no more shootings. He simply mentioned convoys of prisoners setting off for Versailles. He had seen one that morning going along by the river, men in overalls, coats or shirtsleeves, women of all ages, some with the wrinkled faces of old harridans, others in the flower of their youth, children of barely fifteen – a stream of misery and revolt being moved on by soldiers in the bright sunshine, and whom the good people of Versailles, it was said, welcomed with catcalls and hit with sticks and sunshades.
But on Sunday Jean was horrified. It was the last day of that hateful week. As soon as the sun rose in glory on a clear and warm holiday morning he had the eerie sensation that this was to be the final agony. News had only just broken of renewed slaughter of hostages. The archbishop, the parish priest of the Madeleine and others had been shot on the Wednesday at La Roquette, and on Thursday the Dominicans of Arcueil had been picked off on the run like hares, on Friday more priests and forty-seven gendarmes had been shot point blank in the rue Haxo sector, and a fury of reprisals had flared up again, the troops executing en masse their most recent prisoners. All through that lovely Sunday the crackle of the firing-squads had never