The Debacle - Emile Zola [281]
With a long painful effort Jean got to his feet.
‘Good-bye!’
Henriette remained motionless on the floor.
‘Good-bye!’
Yet Jean went over to Maurice’s body. He looked at him, and his lofty brow looked even more lofty, and from his long, thin face and expressionless eyes, formerly a bit wild, the wildness had gone. He would have liked to kiss his dear kid, as he had called him so many times, but he dared not. He saw himself covered with his blood, and recoiled before the horror of fate. What a death, beneath the ruins of a world! On the last day, amid the last bits of wreckage of the dying Commune, one more victim had been claimed! The poor man had departed still thirsting for justice in the final convulsion of the great dark dream he had dreamed, in the grandiose and monstrous conception of the destruction of the old society, Paris destroyed by fire, the field ploughed up and cleansed so that the idyll of a new golden age might spring up into life.
Full of anguish, Jean turned away and looked at Paris. At this radiant end of a lovely Sunday the slanting sun, low on the horizon, cast over the huge city a blazing red light. It might have been a sun of blood over a limitless sea. The panes of thousands of windows blazed fire as though blown upon by invisible bellows, roofs were catching fire like burning coals, golden yellow walls and tall, rust-coloured monuments seemed to be flaring up in the evening air like spurting wood fires. Was this not the final set-piece, the gigantic fountain of flame, all Paris burning like some huge sacrificial fire, an ancient, dried-up forest shooting up to heaven in a volley of sparks and tongues of flame? The fires were still burning, huge russet clouds of smoke were still billowing up, and a great clamour could be heard, maybe the last death-cries of the shot victims in the Lobau barracks, or perhaps happy women and laughing children eating out of doors after a nice walk or sitting outside cafés. From the looted houses and public buildings, from the disembowelled streets, from so much ruin and suffering, life was still stirring in the blaze of this splendid sunset in which Paris seemed to be burning itself out.
Then Jean felt an extraordinary sensation. It seemed to him, as day was slowly dying over this burning city, that a new dawn was already breaking. Yet it was the end of everything, fate pursuing its relentless course in a series of disasters greater than any nation had ever undergone: continual defeats, provinces lost, milliards to pay, the blood-bath of the most dreadful of civil wars, whole districts full of ruins and dead, no money left, no honour left, a whole world to build up again. He himself was leaving his broken heart here, Maurice, Henriette, his happy future life swept away in the storm. And yet, beyond the still roaring furnace, undying hope was reviving up in that great calm sky so supremely limpid. It was the sure renewal of eternal nature, eternal humanity, the renewal promised to all who hope and toil, the tree throwing up a strong new shoot after the dead branch, whose poisonous sap had yellowed the leaves, had been cut away.
Still weeping, Jean said again:
‘Good-bye!’
Henriette did not look up, but kept her face buried in her hands.
‘Good-bye!’
The ravaged field was lying fallow, the burnt house was down to the ground, and Jean, the most humble and grief-stricken of men, went away, walking into the future to set about the great, hard job of building a new France.
* (Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol. 3, p. 9. Penguin Books, 1965)
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