‘Do those ladies also have some trouble hanging over them?’ asked Madame Caroline with anxious sympathy.
He played the innocent.
‘No, I don’t think so… I was simply referring to the wretched situation brought upon them by the bad behaviour of the Count… Yes, I have friends in Vendôme, I know their history.’
And as he at last decided to come away from the window he suddenly, in the midst of his pretended emotion, felt a singular backlash of feeling of his own:
‘Still, when it’s only money troubles! But when death enters a household…’
This time he had real tears in his eyes. He had just thought of his brother, and he was choking. She thought he must have recently lost one of his family, and out of tact asked him no questions. Until that moment she had not been deceived by the base concerns of this personage, who filled her with revulsion; but these unexpected tears convinced her far more than the cleverest tactics would have done, reinforcing her desire to go straight away to the ‘Cité de Naples’.
‘Madame, I can count on you then.’
‘I’m going at once.’
An hour later Madame Caroline had taken a cab and was wandering about behind the Butte Montmartre, unable to find the ‘Cité’. At last, in one of the deserted streets that run through to the Rue Marcadet, an old woman pointed it out to the coachman. At the entrance it was like a country lane, full of potholes, blocked by mud and refuse, pushing on into a stretch of wasteland; and only by looking hard could one just make out the wretched constructions of earth, old planks, and old sheets of zinc, spread around the inner yard like heaps of rubble. On the street a one-storey house, built of breeze-blocks but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to govern the entrance as if it were a gaol. Indeed that was where Madame Méchain lived, a vigilant owner, always on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants.
As soon as Madame Caroline had got down from the coach she saw La Méchain appear on the threshold, enormous, bosom and belly wobbling inside an old blue-silk dress frayed at the folds and cracking at the seams, and her cheeks so puffy and red that her little nose, almost invisible, seemed to be cooking between two braziers. Madame Caroline hesitated, feeling very uneasy, then the very gentle voice, with the rather shrill charm of a rustic flute, reassured her.
‘Ah Madame, you’ve been sent by Monsieur Busch. You’re here for little Victor… Come in, come in. Yes, this is indeed the Cité de Naples. The street is not listed and we don’t have any numbers yet… Come in, first we need to talk about things. My word! It’s so upsetting, and so sad.’
Then Madame Caroline had to accept a tattered chair in a black and greasy dining-room, in which a red stove kept the heat and the smell at a stifling level. La Méchain now went on about how lucky her visitor was to find her in, for she had so much business in Paris that she rarely returned home before six o’clock. Madame Caroline eventually had to interrupt her.
‘Excuse me, Madame, I came about that unfortunate child.’
‘Of course, Madame, I’ll bring him to you… You know his mother was my cousin. Ah! I can certainly say I have done my duty… Here are the papers, and here are the bills.’
She went to a cupboard and pulled out a file of papers, neatly arranged in a blue folder like something from the office of a business agent. She talked on and on about poor Rosalie: she had certainly ended up living a quite disgusting life, going from one man to another, coming back drunk and bloodied after week-long binges. But after all, you had to be understanding, for she had been a good worker until the child’s father dislocated her shoulder the day he took her on the staircase; and with her disability she couldn’t keep herself going in a decent life just selling lemons in the market.
‘You see, Madame, it was in small sums, just twenty or forty sous, that I lent her all that money. The dates are marked: 20 June, twenty sous; 27 June, twenty sous again; 3 July, forty sous. And then, look, she must have been ill at this point, because there’s an endless series of forty sous… Then there was Victor and the clothes I had to get for him. I’ve put a “V” beside all the expenses for the boy… Not to mention that when Rosalie died—oh! so horribly, with a really filthy disease—he fell completely into my care. Then look, I’ve put fifty francs a month. That’s very reasonable. The child’s father is rich, he can easily spare fifty francs a month for his boy… Altogether that makes five thousand four hundred and three francs; and if we add the six hundred for the promissory notes we reach a total of six thousand francs… Yes, the whole lot for six thousand francs, and that’s it!’
Though turning pale with nausea, Madame Caroline managed a comment.
‘But the notes do not belong to you, they are the property of the child.’
‘Ah, I beg your pardon, Madame,’ replied La Méchain sharply, ‘but I advanced money on them. To help out Rosalie I cashed them for her. You can see my endorsement on the back… In fact it’s very good of me not to be claiming interest… You will think it over, my good lady, and you won’t want to take a sou away from a poor woman like me.’
When the good lady, with a weary gesture, accepted the bill, La Méchain calmed down. And it was with her former fluting voice that she said:
‘Now I’ll send for Victor.’
But it was in vain that she sent, one after the other, three urchins who were prowling around; in vain that she planted herself in the doorway, waving her arms about: clearly Victor was refusing to budge. One of the urchins even brought back a dirty word as his answer. Then she bestirred herself, as if intending to drag him back by the ear. But she returned alone, having no doubt decided on reflection that it would be a good idea to show the boy in all his horror.
‘If Madame will kindly take the trouble to follow me,’ she said.
And as they walked she provided some details about the Cité de Naples, that her husband had inherited from an uncle. That husband had to be dead, no one had ever met him and she never mentioned him except to explain the source of her property. A bad business, it would be the end of her, she said, for she got more worry than profit out of it, especially now that the Prefecture was harassing her, sending out inspectors demanding repairs and improvements on the pretext that people were dying like flies there. Anyway, she was utterly determined not to spend a sou. Soon, no doubt, they’d be asking for mantelpieces with mirrors, in rooms that she was letting for only two francs a week! What she didn’t mention was her own avidity about collecting the rent, throwing families out on the street the moment they failed to pay her two francs in advance, doing her own policing, and making herself so feared that homeless beggars would not have dared even to sleep leaning against one of her walls without paying.
With a heavy heart Madame Caroline looked around the yard, a devastated area pitted with potholes, which accumulations of filth had turned into a real midden. Everything was thrown into it; there was no cesspit or sewer, the yard was one ever-growing dunghill, poisoning the air; and it was lucky the weather was cold, for in the heat of the sun it exhaled pestilence. Careful where she placed her feet, Madame Caroline tried to avoid the vegetable-peelings and bones while casting an eye over the dwellings on each side, like the dens of animals: tumbledown shacks, ruined hovels, patched with the most heterogeneous materials. Several were only covered with tarred paper. Many, having no door, allowed a glimpse of black, cellar-like holes from which rose a sickening smell of penury. Families of eight or ten persons were huddled inside these charnel-houses, often without so much as a bed—heaps of men, women, and children, all rotting together like spoiled fruit, abandoned to their instinctive lusts from earliest childhood by this most monstrous promiscuity. So the yard was constantly filled with bands of puny urchins with pinched faces, wasted by hereditary scrofula and syphilis, poor creatures growing on this dungheap like wormy mushrooms, the accidental results of some embrace, with no one knowing exactly who their father might be. When an epidemic of typhoid or smallpox broke out it at once swept half of the Cité i
nto the cemetery.
‘As I was explaining, Madame,’ La Méchain went on, ‘Victor has not had very good models to follow, and it’s time to think about his education for he is now almost thirteen… While his mother was alive of course, he saw some unsuitable things, since she didn’t bother about propriety when she was drunk. She brought men in and everything took place right in front of him… And as for myself, I’ve never had time to watch over him closely enough on account of my business in Paris. He was always running about all day on the fortifications.* Twice I had to go and collect him because he’d been stealing—oh! only trifles. And then, as soon as he was able, he was with the little girls, his mother had shown him so much. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself, he’s already a man at the age of twelve. In the end, just to make him work a bit, I gave him to Mother Eulalie, a woman who sells baskets of vegetables in Montmartre. He goes to the market with her and carries one of her baskets. The trouble is she has an abscess on her thigh at the moment… But we’re here, Madame, please go in.’
Madame Caroline shrank back. There, at the far end of the yard, behind a veritable barricade of filth, was one of the most disgusting holes, a hovel seemingly squashed into the ground, like a pile of rubble held up by bits of planking. There was no window. The door, an old glass door lined with a sheet of zinc, had to be kept open so that one could see at all, and the cold came in, the terrible cold. In a corner she saw a straw mattress simply thrown on the bare earth. There was no other identifiable furniture in the jumble of broken barrels, pieces of torn trellis, and half-rotted baskets acting as tables and chairs. The walls were damp and sticky. A crack, a green gap in the black roof, let in the rain just at the foot of the mattress. And the smell above all, the smell was awful, this was utter human degradation at its most bleak.*
‘Mother Eulalie,’ cried La Méchain, ‘here’s a kind lady come to see about Victor… What’s wrong with the little monkey, that he doesn’t come when he’s called?’
A shapeless bundle of flesh stirred on the mattress, under some ragged old calico that served as a sheet; and Madame Caroline made out the body of a woman of about forty, quite naked, having no nightshirt, and so flabby and wrinkled that she looked like a half-deflated balloon. The face was not ugly, still quite fresh, framed by little blond curls.
‘Ah,’ she groaned, ‘let her in, if she’s come to do us good, for it can’t just go on like this, God knows!… Just think, Madame, that I’ve been laid up here for a fortnight thanks to these filthy big sores digging holes in my thighs!… So, of course, there’s not a sou in the place. Impossible to go on with my trade. I had two nightshirts that Victor went and sold for me; and I really think that tonight we’d have starved to death.’
Then, raising her voice:
‘Come on out, little one… don’t be silly, the lady doesn’t mean you any harm.’
And Madame Caroline shuddered, seeing a sort of bundle that she had taken for a heap of old rags rising from a basket. It was Victor, dressed in the remains of a pair of trousers and cotton jacket, with his bare skin showing through the holes. He was in the full light of the door and she stood open-mouthed, stupefied by his extraordinary resemblance to Saccard. All her doubts vanished, the paternity was beyond question.
‘I don’t want anyone pestering me about going to school,’ he declared.
But she went on looking at him, growing more and more uneasy. In this resemblance, which made such an impression on her, he was disturbing, this lad with one half of his face larger than the other, his nose twisted to the right and his head looking as if it had been crushed against the step in the assault in which his mother had conceived him.* Besides, he seemed prodigiously advanced for his age, not very tall, but stocky and fully developed at the age of twelve, his face already hairy, like some precocious animal. His bold, greedy eyes and sensual mouth were those of a man. And in his evident childhood, his complexion still so pure, with some delicate, even girlish elements, this virility, so startlingly manifest, was disturbing and even frightening, like something monstrous.
‘Does school really frighten you so much, my dear?’ Madame Caroline said at last. ‘But you’d be better off there than here… Where do you sleep?’
With a gesture, he pointed to the mattress.
‘There, with her.’
Put out by the frankness of his answer, Mother Eulalie stirred, seeking to explain:
‘I’d made him up a bed with a little mattress, but it had to be sold. You just sleep wherever you can, you see, when everything’s gone.’
La Méchain felt she should intervene, though she was perfectly aware of what went on.
‘It’s still not at all proper, Eulalie… and as for you, you little rascal, you could have come to sleep in my house instead of sleeping with her.’
But Victor planted himself firmly on his short and sturdy legs, squaring up in his precocious masculinity:
‘Why? She’s my wife!’
At this Mother Eulalie, wallowing in her soft flabbiness, decided to laugh, trying to mitigate the abomination by treating it as a kind of joke. And a tender admiration showed through in her words.
‘Oh as for that, I certainly wouldn’t trust him with my daughter if I had one, he’s a real little man!’
Madame Caroline shuddered. She was overcome with an awful feeling of nausea. And what next? This urchin of twelve, this little monster, with this ravaged and sick woman of forty, on this filthy mattress in the middle of all these scraps and terrible stench. Oh, how destitution destroys and rots everything!
She left twenty francs and fled, taking refuge once more in the house of the owner in order to make a decision and come to a definite agreement with her. An idea had come to her in the face of such abandonment—the Work Foundation: hadn’t it been created for just such cases, for the wretched children of the gutter that one could try to reform through hygiene and work? Victor had to be taken out of this sewer as quickly as possible and placed in the Foundation, to make a new life for him. She was all of a tremble with the idea. And with this decision she included a womanly delicacy: to say nothing as yet to Saccard, to wait until the monster was somewhat cleaned up before showing him to him; for she felt a sort of embarrassment for Saccard as the father of this fearful offspring, she suffered over the shame he would feel about it. A few months, no doubt, would suffice, and then she would speak to him when she was happy with the outcome. La Méchain found it difficult to understand.
‘My word, Madame, just as you please… Only I want my six thousand francs right away. Victor doesn’t move from here until I have my six thousand francs.’
This demand filled Madame Caroline with despair. She did not have that sum of money, and of course she did not want to ask the father for it. She argued and pleaded, but in vain.
‘No, no, if I didn’t have my security any more I could kiss my money goodbye. I know how it is.’
At last, since it was such a large sum and she might end up getting nothing, La Méchain reduced her demands.
‘Oh well, give me two thousand francs straight away and I’ll wait for the rest.’
But for Madame Caroline the problem was still the same, and she was wondering where she could find the two thousand francs when she had the idea of applying to Maxime. She didn’t want to think about it further. He would surely agree to keep the secret and would not refuse the loan of such a small amount, for which his father would certainly reimburse him. So she went away, saying she would come back for Victor next day.
It was only five o’clock, and Madame Caroline was in such a fever of impatience to get this done that, on returning to her coach, she gave the driver Maxime’s address in the Avenue de l’Impératrice. When she arrived the valet told her that Monsieur was dressing, but he would announce her anyway.
For a moment she felt suffocated as she waited in the drawing-room. It was a small house, but arranged with an exquisite refinement of luxury and comfort. Hangings and carpets were lavishly abundant, and a delicate scent of ambergr
is permeated the warm and silent rooms. It all looked pretty, tender and discreet, although there was no woman there; for the young widower, enriched by the death of his wife, had organized his life around the exclusive cult of himself, avoiding, as a young man of some experience, any new sharing. He was determined that the enjoyable life he owed to one woman was not going to be spoiled by another. Disenchanted with vice, he only partook of it now as if it were a dessert forbidden to him because of his lamentable digestion. He had long abandoned the idea of entering the Council of State, he no longer even ran race-horses, being just as sated with horses as with girls. He lived alone, idle and perfectly happy, eating up his fortune with art and caution, and with the relentlessness of a son-in-law formerly depraved and parasitic, but now settled down
The valet now returned to say: ‘If Madame would please follow me, Monsieur will receive her at once in his room.’
Madame Caroline was on familiar terms with Maxime ever since he had seen her installed as a faithful housekeeper whenever he dined at his father’s house. On entering the room she found the curtains drawn and six candles burning on the mantelpiece and a side-table, lighting with their quiet flames this nest of down and silk, a room too softly comfortable, fit for a beautiful courtesan, with its deep armchairs and huge bed of feathery softness. This was Maxime’s favourite room, on which he had lavished every refinement, costly furniture and ornaments, marvels of the previous century, all melting and merging in the most delightful confusion of fabrics imaginable.
But the door to the adjoining dressing-room was wide open and he appeared, saying:
‘What is it? What’s happened?… Papa isn’t dead, is he?’
After his bath Maxime had put on an elegant white-flannel suit, his skin fresh and sweet-smelling, his pretty girlish face already somewhat worn, and his eyes blue and clear over the emptiness of his mind. Through the door you could still hear the dripping of one of the bath-taps, while a powerful scent of flowers arose from the softness of warm bathwater.