Meanwhile, Clorinde’s visits to the house in the Rue Marbeuf became more frequent. Every afternoon she seemed to expect Rougon to have some news, and when he had none she stared at him in surprise. Ever since the house party at Compiègne she had been living in hope of a quick victory. Her mind had conjured up a dramatic denouement, with the Emperor in a rage and Count de Marsy sensationally dismissed, followed by the immediate return to power of the great man. This feminine scheming of hers was bound to succeed, she thought, so when, after a month, the Count was still in the saddle, she was very surprised. She now began to feel a certain contempt for the Emperor. He was incapable of taking revenge. In his shoes, her fury would have known no bounds. What on earth could the man be thinking of, to stay so stubbornly silent?
Nevertheless, Clorinde was still far from giving up hope. She scented victory, an unexpected coup de grâce. Count de Marsy had been weakened. Rougon for his part had become as watchful over her as a husband in fear of being deceived. Ever since his strange fits of jealousy at Compiègne, he had kept a paternal eye on her, moralizing constantly, and insisting on seeing her every day. She smiled; now she was sure he would not leave Paris. Yet, in the middle of December, after several weeks of somnolent calm, he began talking again about his great scheme. He had seen some bankers, and thought that he would be able to do without the Emperor’s support. Once again he would be found surrounded by maps and plans and technical books. Gilquin, he said, had already recruited more than five hundred men ready to go and work on the land reclamation. They would be the first of this new population. This spurred Clorinde into furious activity. She enlisted the help of Rougon’s whole gang.
It was a huge undertaking. Each of them had a role to play. Their plan of action was agreed by hints and nods and whispers in the corners of Rougon’s house on Thursdays and Sundays. They shared out the most difficult tasks. Every day they would launch out into Paris, determined to win support for the cause. No effort was spared. The smallest successes counted. Everything was turned to account; they got what they could out of the most trifling events, working throughout the day from the first morning greeting to the last handshake of the evening. Friends of friends were made accomplices, and they in turn enlisted their friends. The whole of Paris was drawn into the plot. In the remotest parts of the city there were people now yearning for Rougon’s triumph, without exactly knowing why. The gang, ten or a dozen in number, held the city in its grip.
‘We are the government of tomorrow,’ declared Du Poizat, in all seriousness.
He traced parallels between themselves and the men who had made the Empire, adding:
‘I shall be Rougon’s de Marsy.’
One claimant was merely a name. One needed a gang of them to make a government. Twenty stout men with greedy appetites are stronger than any principle, and when they can exploit a principle too, they are invincible. Du Poizat tramped round everywhere, dropping into newspaper offices, where he smoked cigars and slyly undermined de Marsy; he always had some story to tell at his expense; he even charged him with lack of gratitude and self-centredness. Then, mentioning Rougon, he dropped hints, and opened up amazing vistas of ill-defined promise: Rougon was a man who, were he one day able to act generously, would shower everyone with rewards, gifts, grants. Thus Du Poizat fed the press with information, quotations, and stories, all to keep the personality of the great man constantly in the public eye. Two little newspapers published an account of a visit to the house in the Rue Marbeuf. Others mentioned the famous work comparing the English constitution with that of 1852. Popularity seemed within Rougon’s grasp, after two years of hostile silence. The murmurs of praise were growing ever louder. Du Poizat also engaged in other activities, wheeler-dealing that had to be kept secret, the use of bribery to obtain some people’s backing, an extraordinary stock-exchange gamble that assumed Rougon’s virtually certain return to power.
‘He needs our total devotion,’ he would often say, with the outspokenness which the more starchy members of the gang found embarrassing. ‘Later on, he will think of us.’
Monsieur Beulin-d’Orchère first tried a rather clumsy manoeuvre. He concocted a scandalous lawsuit against de Marsy, which was quickly hushed up. He then showed more adroitness by letting the word go round that if his brother-in-law got back into office, he might be minister of justice one day. This assured the loyalty of his fellow judges. Monsieur Kahn was also in charge of some troops. These included financiers, deputies, and civil servants, and as they advanced they swelled their ranks with all the malcontents they happened to come across. He made Monsieur Béjuin his obedient lieutenant, and even made use of Monsieur de Combelot and Monsieur La Rouquette, without either of them having any clear notion of what they were doing. In the meantime, he worked away in the world of officialdom, at a very high level, extending his propaganda as far as the Tuileries, pursuing his underground work for several days at a stretch to ensure that the right words passed from one man’s lips to another’s, until the Emperor himself finally heard them.
But it was the women who applied themselves with real passion. They became involved in all sorts of shady goings-on, a tangle of adventures the extent of which one never quite knew. Madame Correur now never called Madame Bouchard anything else but her ‘sweety-puss’. She took her on trips to the country, so she said. For a whole week, on one occasion, Monsieur Bouchard was a grass widow and Monsieur d’Escorailles was obliged to spend his evenings at the music hall. One day Monsieur Du Poizat bumped into the two ladies with two gentlemen wearing decorations, but he was very careful not to tell anyone. Madame Correur was now running two apartments, one in the Rue Blanche, the other in the Rue Mazarine. The latter was a very smart place indeed. Madame Bouchard used to go there in the afternoons — the concierge kept the key — and there was talk of a very high official having fallen for her, one rainy morning, when she was hitching up her skirt to cross the Pont Royal.
Further, the small fry among the friends got busy and made themselves as useful as they could. Colonel Jobelin went to a café on one of the boulevards to see some old officer friends. They would play piquet, and between games he would indoctrinate them; when he had recruited half a dozen of their number, he rubbed his hands in the evening and said, over and over, that ‘the whole army’s behind us’. Monsieur Bouchard had undertaken a similar task at his Ministry, and little by little had succeeded in instilling in his fellow officials a feeling of real hatred for de Marsy; he even roped in the office boys, making them all sigh in expectation of a golden age, about which he whispered in his closest friends’ ears. Monsieur d’Escorailles, for his part, worked on the gilded youth of Paris, talking up Rougon’s breadth of vision, his tolerance of certain shortcomings, and his love of boldness and strength. Finally, even the Charbonnels, who used to while away their afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens as they waited for a decision on their endless litigation, found a way of enlisting the support of all the little rentiers in the Odéon district.
As for Clorinde, she was far from satisfied merely to have control over the whole gang. She conducted her own complicated operations, about which she never spoke to anyone. In the mornings, casually dressed to say the least, she would take off with her satchel, now bursting at the seams and tied with string, into the seediest areas of the city. She gave her husband extraordinary errands, which he carried out with sheeplike devotion, without an inkling of what their purpose was. She sent Luigi Pozzo about with letters. She had Monsieur de Plouguern escort her somewhere, then left him cooling his heels for a whole hour in the street. At one point she must have had the idea of getting the Italian government to take up Rougon’s cause, for her correspondence with her mother, who was still living in Turin, began to flow fast and furious. Her dream was to shake up the whole of Europe. At one point she was calling on Rusconi twice a day, to meet diplomats. Often now, in this strange campaign, she seemed to remember how beautiful she was. There were afternoons when she went out thoroughly bathed, her hair combed, qu
ite stunning; and when her friends, quite surprised, remarked how beautiful she looked, she said, with a strange air of weary resignation:
‘I need to be!’
She kept herself as a conclusive final argument. Giving herself was, to her, neither here nor there. She got so little pleasure out of sleeping with a man that it was a job like any other, just a little more boring, perhaps. After the Imperial house party, Du Poizat, who knew all about the hunting incident, tried to find out what kind of relationship she had now with de Marsy. He had a vague idea that if Clorinde was going to become his all-powerful mistress, he might well drop Rougon in favour of the Count. But she nearly became quite angry, and strongly denied the whole story. He must think her very stupid, she said, to suspect such a liaison. Then, forgetting that she had denied everything, she said she was not going to see de Marsy any more. In the past, she might certainly have considered becoming the man’s wife, but no intelligent man, in her judgement, ever did anything serious for a mistress. Besides, she had another plan.
‘After all,’ she sometimes said, ‘there’s often more than one way to get what you want, though never more than one way that gives you any pleasure… I’ve got a lot to put up with, I can tell you.’
She kept a constant eye on Rougon. She wanted him to be great. It was as if she was trying to fatten him up with power for some future feast. She maintained her submissive attitude as his pupil, and, humble to the point of flattery, kept well in the shade. But despite the incessant activity of his gang, Rougon seemed oblivious to it all. On Thursdays and Sundays, bent over his games of patience, he would work his packs out laboriously without seeming to hear the whispering behind his back. The gang, however, talked about their campaign, plotted away, signalling to each other over his head as if he was not even there, so unconcerned did he appear. He remained impassive, utterly detached, so remote from the matters being discussed in an undertone that in the end they spoke quite normally and laughed at his distractedness. If anyone ventured to allude to the possibility of his return to power, he would get quite worked up and swear that even if victory awaited him at the end of the Rue Marbeuf, he would not budge from his chair. Indeed, he shut himself away more and more, affecting complete ignorance of what was going on in the outside world. His little town house, from which there radiated such a fever of propaganda, was a place of silence and slumber, so much so that Rougon’s intimates gave each other knowing looks on the doorstep, reminding each other to leave outside the smell of guncotton they carried in their clothes.
‘Don’t be fooled!’ cried Du Poizat. ‘He’s got us all on a string. He can hear us perfectly well. Just watch his ears in the evening, you can actually see them getting bigger.’
At half past ten, when they all withdrew together, this was the usual subject of discussion. The great man could not possibly be ignorant of his friends’ devotion. According to the former sub-prefect, he was playing God. That devil Rougon had become like a Hindu idol, contemplating his own navel all the time, arms folded over his belly, with a beatific smile in the midst of a crowd of the faithful, all showing their devotion by disembowelling themselves. They found this comparison very apt.
‘I’m going to keep an eye on him, you’ll see,’ said Du Poizat as he departed.
But try as they might to decipher Rougon’s expression, he remained detached, relaxed, almost naïve. Perhaps this was what he was like in reality. For that matter, Clorinde would rather he did not get involved. She was afraid he might get in the way of her plans if one day they did force him to open his eyes. It was despite the man, as it were, that they worked for his cause. In the end they would have to push him, heave him up, if they were to get him back on top. But that was something they would decide on when the time came.
Meanwhile, things were developing too slowly, and they were becoming impatient. Du Poizat’s comments became increasingly sarcastic. Not that they reproached Rougon directly for everything they were doing for him, but they did begin to pepper him with allusions and bitter, ambiguous remarks. The Colonel sometimes turned up at his reception with his shoes white with dust, and explained that he had not had time to drop in at his place, having worn himself out running around the whole afternoon on idiotic errands for which, no doubt, he would never receive a word of thanks. On other occasions it was Monsieur Kahn who, hardly able to keep his eyes open, complained of having kept terribly late hours for the past month. He had been going out a lot; not that it gave him any pleasure at all, it was just that he had been meeting certain people on business. Or it was Madame Correur, telling some touching story, about a poor young woman, a respectable widow, whom she had been keeping company; she regretted she had no power, for if she were the government, she said, there was many an injustice she would prevent. Then the friends would talk about their own personal worries. They all had something to complain about. And they remarked on the position they would have been in had Rougon not behaved so unwisely. There was no end to their lamentations, which they underlined with pointed glances at Rougon. They spurred him until they drew blood. They even went so far as to sing the praises of de Marsy. At first Rougon maintained his magnificent calm. He did not always even understand. But at the end of some evenings, his face began to twitch when he heard certain familiar phrases. He showed no anger, but merely pursed his lips a little, as if an invisible hand was pricking him with a needle. Eventually, however, he became so agitated that he abandoned his games of patience; the cards were never right, and he preferred to pace up and down the drawing room, chatting with one or another of the gang for a moment, then suddenly breaking off and leaving his interlocutors when the veiled reproaches began again. There were moments when he seemed white with rage. He would clench his hands fiercely behind his back, as if not to yield to the urge to throw them all out.
‘Well, children,’ said the Colonel, one evening, ‘you won’t see me again for two weeks… We must ignore him. Let’s see how he likes being left on his own.’
Rougon, who had been fantasizing about closing his door to them, was very hurt that they should leave him alone. For the Colonel kept his word, and others followed suit, so that his drawing room was almost empty now, five or six of his friends always absent. When one of them reappeared, and the great man asked if he had been ill, the deserter would simply say no, with an air of surprise, and give no explanation. One Thursday nobody at all came, and Rougon spent the evening alone, pacing up and down the room, his hands behind his back, his head sunk on his chest. For the first time he felt the strength of his attachment to his followers. He shrugged in scorn when he thought of the silliness of the Charbonnels, the envious rage of Du Poizat, the sly sweetness of Madame Correur. But despite this, he found he needed to see these friends of whom he thought so little. He needed to hold sway over them, like a jealous man secretly lamenting the slightest infidelity. In fact, deep down, he found their silliness touching, and quite liked their shortcomings. They seemed now to be part of him. Or rather, it was he who had gradually become part of them, to such a point that on the days when they avoided him he felt somehow diminished. He would even write to them, if they continued to stay away, and went so far as to go and see them, to make peace with them, after really prolonged absences. From now on the house in the Rue Marbeuf was the scene of never-ending friction, with all the tensions of breakings-off and patchings-up to which married couples are subject when love turns sour.
Towards the end of December, a particularly serious breakdown of relations occurred. One evening, for no obvious reason, one thing leading to another, they found themselves tearing each other to pieces. For nearly three weeks they did not meet at all. The truth of the matter was that they were beginning to lose heart. Their best efforts were producing no appreciable result. The situation looked as if it would not change for a long time, and the whole gang was giving up hope of some unexpected catastrophe that would make Rougon essential. They had waited for the new session of the legislative body to begin, but the checking of deputies’ papers wen
t through with nothing more serious than the refusal of two Republican deputies to take the oath. This was the point at which the wily and far-seeing member of the group, Monsieur Kahn, stopped counting on the general political situation turning to their advantage. Exasperated, Rougon busied himself with his Landes project more energetically than ever, as if trying to hide the nervous twitches which he could no longer control.
‘I don’t feel well,’ he sometimes said. ‘Look, my hands are shaking… My doctor has ordered me to take some exercise. I’m out all the time.’
It was quite true, he did go out a lot. They would see him striding along, absent-minded, head high, arms swinging. If he was stopped, he would tell of an endless round of visits. One morning, when he came in for lunch after a walk in the direction of Chaillot, he found a gilt-edged visiting card with Gilquin’s name on it in fine copperplate. The card was very dirty, covered with greasy fingerprints. He rang for his manservant.
‘Did the person who gave you this card leave any message?’ he asked.
New to the house, the man smiled.
‘It was a man in a green overcoat,’ he said. ‘He seemed very friendly. He offered me a cigar… He just said he was a friend of yours.’
He was about to withdraw when he thought again.
‘I think he wrote something on the back.’
Rougon turned the card over and there, in pencil, he read: Couldn’t wait. Will drop in this evening. Urgent. Funny goings-on. He waved it aside, but after lunch the words Urgent. Funny goings-on kept coming back to him, and began to irritate him. Whatever could it be that Gilquin considered funny? Ever since entrusting the former commercial traveller with obscure, complicated tasks, he had been seeing him regularly once a week, in the evenings, but Gilquin had never turned up in the morning. It must be something terribly important. Tormented by curiosity, he decided to go out and find Gilquin, without waiting for the evening.