The Kill - Emile Zola [157]
“Bah, they’re used to it!” said the doctor, putting his cigar back in his mouth. “They’re brutes.”
Meanwhile the members of the committee had reached one of the buildings they were supposed to inspect. They polished off their work in fifteen minutes and resumed their walk. Little by little they lost their fear of the mud. They walked right through puddles, abandoning all hope of keeping their boots dry. As they passed rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the former knife grinder, grew anxious. He scrutinized the ruins around him, and the neighborhood no longer seemed familiar. He had lived there more than thirty years before, he said, just after arriving in Paris, and it would please him greatly to locate the spot. He continued to cast his eyes about until the sight of a house cut in two by the demolition workers’ axes brought him up short in the middle of the path. He studied the building’s door and windows. Then, pointing at a corner of the ruin, he cried out, “There it is! I recognize it!”
“What are you talking about?” asked the doctor.
“My room, for heaven’s sake! That’s it!”
It was a small bedroom on the sixth floor that must once have overlooked a courtyard. A breach in one wall exposed the room, already demolished on one side, and a large section of wallpaper bearing a yellow floral pattern had been torn away from the wall and could be seen flapping in the wind. On the left you could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And next to it was the hole for a stove, with a piece of pipe sticking out.
The erstwhile worker was gripped by emotion.
“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “Life was hard in those days, but it made no difference, I was young. . . . See that cupboard? That’s where I kept the 300 francs I saved sou by sou. And the hole for the stove—I can still remember the day I made it. The room had no fireplace, and it was bitter cold, all the more so because it wasn’t often that I was with somebody.”
“Hold on there,” the doctor interrupted in a jocular tone. “Nobody wants to know your secrets. You had your fun like everybody else.”
“That’s true,” the dignitary naïvely admitted. “I can still remember a laundress from the house across the street. . . . See up there, the bed was on the right, near the window. . . . What they’ve done to my poor bedroom!”
He was really quite sad about it.
“Now listen here,” said Saccard. “There’s nothing wrong with knocking down old dumps like these. They’re going to build fine new freestone houses in their place. . . . Would you still live in a hovel like that? Whereas on the new boulevard you’ll be able to find quite suitable housing.”
“That’s true,” repeated the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled by the thought.
The investigative commission stopped at two more buildings. The doctor remained outside, smoking and staring at the sky. When the men came to the rue des Amandiers, the houses thinned out, and now they made their way through fenced lots and land undeveloped but for a few tumbledown cottages. Saccard seemed delighted by this stroll through the ruins. He was reminded of the dinner he had had long ago with his first wife on the Buttes Montmartre and vividly recalled having gestured with the edge of his hand to indicate where Paris would be sliced