The Kill - Emile Zola [40]
On the terrible night of Angèle’s death, Mme Sidonie faithfully if briefly recounted the calamity that had befallen the Béraud family. Its patriarch, M. Béraud Du Châtel, a tall, elderly man of sixty, was the last in a long and respectable bourgeois line whose pedigree could be traced back farther than that of many a noble clan. One of his ancestors had been a companion of Etienne Marcel.11 In 1793, his father had died on the scaffold 12 after welcoming the Revolution with all the enthusiasm of a bourgeois de Paris in whose veins flowed the city’s revolutionary blood. He himself was one of those Spartan republicans who dreamed of a government of thoroughgoing justice and sage liberty. After a lifetime in the magistracy, where he acquired the rigidity and severity associated with his profession, he resigned as chief judge after the coup d’état of 1851 because he had been unwilling to take part in the kangaroo courts that had discredited French justice by punishing those who had resisted the takeover. Since that time he had lived a withdrawn and solitary existence in his home on the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, almost opposite the Hôtel Lambert. His wife had died young. Some private tragedy, the wound from which was still raw, made his already-grave judicial countenance even gloomier. He had a daughter, Renée, who had been eight when his wife passed away while giving birth to a second girl. The younger child, baptized Christine, had been taken in by one of his sisters, the wife of the notary Aubertot. Renée had been sent off to a convent school. Mme Aubertot, who had no children of her own, loved Christine like a daughter and raised her under her own roof. When her husband died, she returned the girl to her father’s home and lived there as companion to the silent old man and his smiling blonde daughter. Renée was left at boarding school. During school vacations she raised such a ruckus in the house that her aunt heaved a great sigh of relief on returning her to the Dames de la Visitation, in whose custody she had been from the age of eight. She did not leave the convent until she was nineteen, at which time she went to spend the summer with the parents of her good friend Adeline, who owned a fine estate in the Nivernais.13 When she returned home in October, her aunt Elisabeth was surprised to find her in a very pensive mood and profoundly sad. One night she found the girl sobbing into her pillow and writhing on her bed in anguish. In the throes of despair, the child told a heartrending tale: a man of forty, wealthy and married, whose young and charming wife was also staying at the house, had raped her in a field, and she had not dared to defend herself, nor would she have known how. This confession filled Aunt Elisabeth with terror. She blamed herself, as if she felt somehow an accomplice. Her preference for Christine weighed on her mind, and she believed that if she had kept Renée at home, the poor child would not have succumbed. To cope with her remorse, which her tender nature only compounded, she supported the wayward child. She bore the brunt of the father’s anger when the very zealousness of their efforts to conceal the terrible truth from him gave it away. In her alarmed state of anxiety she came up with the strange plan of arranging a marriage, which she hoped would fix everything, calming the wrath of Renée’s father and restoring the child to the ranks of respectable womanhood. She refused to see what was shameful about the plan or to acknowledge its inevitable consequences.
No one ever found out how Mme Sidonie had got wind of this stroke of fortune. The