The Debacle - Emile Zola [49]
‘Oh hallo, I knew the 106th was somewhere about, I had a letter from Remilly yesterday and was coming down… Let’s go and have a white wine.’
So that they could be alone together he took him off to the little farmhouse that the soldiers had plundered the day before, and in which the farmer, incorrigibly out for the main chance, had fitted up a sort of bar by broaching a cask of white wine. He was serving it on a plank outside the door at four sous a glass, helped by the farm-hand he had taken on three days earlier, the fair giant, the Alsatian.
Honoré was clinking glasses with Maurice when his eyes fell on this man. For a moment he stared at him, thunderstruck. Then he gave vent to a terrible oath:
‘Fucking hell! It’s Goliath!’
He leaped up and made as if to fly at his throat. But the farmer, thinking his house was going to be sacked once again, jumped back and locked the door. There was a moment of scrimmage and all the soldiers rushed up as the furious sergeant shouted himself hoarse:
‘Open the door, open it, you fucking sod! He’s a spy, I tell you he’s a spy!’
Maurice was quite sure now, too. He had had no trouble in recognizing the man they had let go at the camp at Mulhouse for want of proof, and this man was Goliath, once the farm-hand at his Uncle Fouchard’s at Remilly. When at last the farmer consented to open his door they searched everywhere in vain, the Alsatian had vanished, this blond giant with the honest face whom General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had questioned unavailingly the day before, and in front of whom, over the meal, he had so carelessly revealed his own secrets. The fellow had probably jumped out of a back window they found open, but they hunted all round in vain – this great big man had vanished like a wisp of smoke.
Maurice had to take Honoré away, for in his despair he was going to say too much in front of his mates, who had no need to share in all these miserable family affairs.
‘Christ, I would have loved to throttle him! In any case that letter I had just had had made me furious about him!’ They sat down by a haystack a few yards away from the farmhouse and Honoré gave his cousin the letter.
It was the old, old story, this unhappy love affair of Honoré Fouchard and Silvine Morange. She was a dark girl with meek eyes who had lost her mother when she was quite a child, the mother being a factory worker in Raucourt who had been seduced. Dr Dalichamp, who had obligingly stood godfather (he was a kindly soul always prepared to adopt the babies of the poor girls he delivered), had placed her as a maid at old Fouchard’s. It was true that this old peasant, who had become a butcher for love of gain, hawking his meat round twenty neighbouring parishes, was as miserly as hell and as hard as nails, but he looked after the girl and she would do well if she worked. Anyhow, she would be saved from the lusts of the factory. And of course it happened that in old Fouchard’s establishment the son of the house and the young maid fell in love. Honoré was sixteen then and she was twelve, and when she was sixteen and he twenty he had drawn lots for the call-up and to his delight drawn a lucky number and so resolved to marry her. Nothing had passed between them beyond a good deal of kissing and embracing in the barn – an unusual purity which was part and parcel of the thoughtful and level-headed character of the young man. But when he mentioned marriage to his father, the outraged and obstinate old man declared that it would only be over his dead body, and he calmly kept the girl on, hoping that they would have their fun together and get it over with. For nearly another eighteen months the young pair were madly in love and full of desire but never touched each other. Then after a terrible scene between the two men, the son, who could