The Debacle - Emile Zola [86]
‘Here we are, only two of us left… Oh God have mercy on us, it’s too awful!’
The other one, the big eater, looked voraciously at Jean’s hands, outraged to see them empty at this juncture. Perhaps in his sleepwalking state he had dreamed that the corporal had gone for the issue of rations.
‘Bloody hell!’ he growled. ‘Got to squeeze me belly in again!’
Gaude the bugler, leaning against the railings while waiting for the order to blow fall-in, had slipped straight down and gone to sleep flat on his back. One by one they all gave in to sleep and were snoring away dead to the world. Only Sergeant Sapin was still standing, with his eyes wide open and his nose screwed up in his little pale face as though he were reading his own doom on the horizon of this unknown town.
By now Lieutenant Rochas had given in to the irresistible urge to sit down on the ground. He tried to give an order.
‘Corporal, we must… we must…’
He couldn’t find his words, for his mouth was clogged by fatigue, and suddenly he went over as well, knocked out by sleep.
Afraid of falling on the pavement too, Jean moved off. He was determined to find a bed. From the other side of the square, through a window of the Hôtel de la Croix d’Or, he had perceived General Bourgain-Desfeuilles already in his shirtsleeves and preparing to slip between some fine white sheets. What was the point of being conscientious and putting up with any more? He had a sudden burst of joy when a name sprang up in his memory, the name of the cloth manufacturer who was the employer of Maurice’s brother-in-law: Monsieur Delaherche. Yes, that was it! He stopped an old man who was passing.
‘Monsieur Delaherche’s?’
‘Rue Maqua, almost at the corner of the rue au Beurre, a nice big house with carvings on it.’
Then the old man ran after him.
‘I say, you belong to the 106th, don’t you? If you are looking for your regiment, it went off again down by the castle. I’ve just run into the colonel, Monsieur de Vineuil, whom I knew when he was at Mézières.’
But Jean was off with a gesture of wild impatience. Oh no, now he was sure of finding Maurice he wasn’t going to sleep on the hard ground. But there was a slight feeling of guilt nagging inside him as he conjured up a vision of the colonel with his tall figure, a man so resistant to fatigue in spite of his age, sleeping like his men under canvas. But then he entered the Grande-Rue and finally asked a little boy who took him to the rue Maqua.
It was there that a great-uncle of the present Delaherche had built in the last century the huge factory which had not gone out of the family for a hundred and sixty years. There are textile mills like this in Sedan dating from the early years of Louis XV, mills as big as the Louvre, with regal, majestic façades. The one in the rue Maqua had three floors with lofty windows framed with classical carvings, and inside there was a palatial courtyard still planted with the original elms dating from the founding of the business, gigantic trees. Three generations of Delaherches had made sizeable fortunes there. The father of Jules, the present proprietor, had inherited the mill from a cousin who had died childless, and so it was a younger branch of the family that was now in charge. Jules’s father had increased the prosperity of the firm, but he was a gay fellow and had made his wife unhappy. So she, when she was widowed, trembling lest her boy should start on the same fun and games, had tried to keep him completely dependent, like a grown-up good boy, until he was past fifty, having married him off to a simple and pious woman. The terrible thing is that life takes its revenges. His wife died, and Delaherche, never having been allowed any youth, fell head over heels in love with a young widow of Charleville, the pretty Madame Maginot, about whom various tales were whispered, and in spite of his mother’s remonstrances he had married her the previous autumn. Sedan, a very puritanical town, has always been severe on Charleville, a city of gaiety and fun. Not that the marriage would ever have been