At the centre window, which they had opened in order to be less likely to be overheard, Monsieur Kahn and Du Poizat were talking, their eyes on the distant roofs of the Tuileries Palace, bluish in the hazy sunlight. They were feeling their way with each other, their brief utterances followed by long silences. Rougon was too impetuous. He should never have got so worked up over the Rodriguez affair. It could so easily have been resolved. Gazing into space, as if talking to himself, Monsieur Kahn murmured:
‘A man knows when he’s down, but he never knows whether he’ll be able to get up again.’
Du Poizat pretended not to have heard, and there was a long pause before he suddenly observed:
‘Yes, but Rougon’s very tough.’
At this pronouncement the deputy swung round and, speaking very fast, said:
‘Between you and me, I’m afraid for him. He’s playing with fire… Of course, we’re his friends, there’s no question of abandoning him. I just want to say it can hardly be claimed he has given much thought to us in all this… Take me, for example, I’m responsible for so many people’s interests, and now he’s put everything at risk with his impetuousness… What I mean is, he would have no reason to be annoyed if I knocked on somebody else’s door, would he? After all, I’m not the only one to suffer, there are ordinary folk involved too.’
‘You will have to knock on somebody else’s door,’ Du Poizat agreed, with a smile.
Then, in a sudden burst of anger, Kahn blurted out the truth of the matter.
‘As if I could!… Damn him, he sets everybody against you! Once you’re in his gang, you’re a marked man!’
He calmed down, sighed, and turned to look in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe, the grey stone mass of which showed above the green expanse of the Champs-Élysées. Then, slowly, he added:
‘Well, that’s just how it is. Loyalty is everything.’
The Colonel had just come up behind them.
‘Loyalty’, he declared, ‘is the path of honour.’
Du Poizat and Monsieur Kahn moved apart to make room for the Colonel, who went on:
‘From now on, Rougon will be in our debt. He’s no longer his own man.’
This declaration was very well received. Rougon, definitely, was no longer his own man. And he ought to be told so, straight, so that he knew what his obligations were. All three now lowered their voices and began to speak in a conspiratorial manner. Every now and then they turned and glanced up and down the big room to make sure none of Rougon’s friends held his attention for too long.
The great man was now busily gathering papers together, while chatting with Madame Bouchard. In the corner, where so far they had been sitting in silent embarrassment, the Charbonnels began to quarrel. Twice they had made an attempt to get hold of Rougon, who had let first the Colonel, then that young woman, engage his attention. In the end, Monsieur Charbonnel began to nudge his wife in Rougon’s direction.
‘We got a letter from your mother this morning,’ she stammered.
Rougon did not let her finish, leading them both to the right-hand window recess, once again relinquishing his files without seeming too annoyed.
‘We got a letter from your mother,’ Madame Charbonnel repeated.
She was about to read it to him when he took it from her and ran his eye over it. Former olive oil merchants in Plassans, the Charbonnels were protégés of Madame Félicité, as everybody in the town called Rougon’s mother.* It was she who had sent them to him, in connection with an application they had made to the Council of State. A second cousin of theirs, by the name of Chevassu, a lawyer in Faverolles, which was the principal town of a neighbouring department, had died, leaving a fortune of half a million francs to the Sisters of the Holy Family. Though they had never counted on getting anything in the will, the Charbonnels suddenly found themselves the heirs because a brother of Chevassu’s had also died, whereupon they immediately challenged Chevassu’s will, claiming they had been tricked by the Sisters; and as the Sisters had applied to the Council of State for authorization to accept the legacy, the Charbonnels had left their old Plassans home and rushed to Paris to take up residence in the Hôtel du Périgord in the Rue Jacob, to be on hand should they be needed. The case had been dragging on for six months.
‘We’re very disheartened,’ sighed Madame Charbonnel, while Rougon read the letter. ‘I never wanted us to make the claim, but Monsieur Charbonnel kept saying that with your help there would be no trouble getting the money, you only had to say the word and we’d be half a million francs better off… Isn’t that right, Monsieur Charbonnel?’
The former oil merchant nodded glumly.
‘We’re talking about a very tidy sum,’ his wife continued. ‘Worth going out of our way for. And our lives have been turned upside down! Would you believe, Monsieur Rougon, only yesterday the maid at our hotel refused to give us fresh sheets. And me with cupboards full in Plassans!’
She went on, complaining bitterly about their life in Paris, which she hated. They had come for a week. Since then they had hoped with every further week that went by that they would soon be gone, and had never had anything sent up from Plassans. Now that it had dragged on so long, they had grown quite stubborn, camping in their room, eating whatever the maid deigned to serve them. They had no linen, almost no clothes. They did not even have a hairbrush. Madame Charbonnel did her hair with a broken comb. There were times when they sat side by side on their little trunk and wept with weariness and frustration.
‘And there are such awful people in the hotel,’ mumbled Monsieur Charbonnel, at his most prudish. ‘There’s a young man in the next room… The things we hear!’
Rougon folded the letter up again.
‘My mother’, he said, ‘advises you to be patient. All I can do is agree with her… Your case looks good to me; but now that I’m out of office, I can’t promise anything.’
‘We’ll leave Paris tomorrow,’ cried Madame Charbonnel in a fit of despair.
No sooner had she uttered these words than she turned as white as a sheet and Monsieur Charbonnel had to support her. For a few moments neither of them spoke. Their lips trembling, they looked at each other, both on the verge of tears. They were losing heart, visibly suffering, as if they had suddenly seen the five hundred thousand francs disappear before their eyes.
Rougon encouraged them once more:
‘You have a very good claim. Monsignor Rochart—the Bishop of Faverolles—has come to Paris to support the Sisters’ claim in person. If he hadn’t intervened, you would have won long ago. These days, unfortunately, the clergy are very powerful… But I’ll still have friends in the administration, and I hope I’ll be able to do something without exposing myself. You’ve waited so long that if you leave tomorrow…’
‘We’ll stay, we’ll stay,’ Madame Charbonnel stammered. ‘Oh, Monsieur Rougon, that inheritance will have cost us so much!’
Rougon returned to his papers. Casting his eye round the room, he was relieved to see there was nobody left to drag him into a window recess. The whole gang had been satisfied, and within a few minutes he had made great strides with the task in hand. He found his own, brutal form of entertainment in all this, scornful of individuals, a kind of vengeance for everything they had put him through. For the next quarter of an hour he berated them mercilessly, these friends whose stories he had listened to so patiently. He was so hard on pretty Madame Bouchard that her eyes filled with tears, though she never stopped smiling. But being used to his sledgehammer style, they all laughed. They had never been better off than when Rougon’s fists pounded away at them.
At this moment there was a discreet tap on the door.
‘No, no,’ Rougon cried to Delestang, who was getting up. ‘Don’t open it! What are people thinking of? My head’s throbbing already!’
Then, hearing the door handle shaken more vigorously, he growled:
‘Damn it! If I was staying, I’d throw Merle out!’
The knocking stopped. But all at
once a little door in a corner opened, to reveal an enormous blue silk skirt, entering the room backwards. Very bright and covered with ribbons, the skirt halted for a moment, half in, half out, without revealing anything further. a flute-like woman’s voice could be heard.
‘Monsieur Rougon!’ she was calling.
Then at last her face appeared. It was Madame Correur, in a hat decked out with a bunch of roses! Rougon had rushed forward, fists clenched, furious, but now he bowed to the inevitable and, going up to this fresh visitor, shook her hand warmly.
‘I was just asking Merle how he was getting on here,’ said Madame Correur, glancing flirtatiously at the burly commissioner, as he leered at her. ‘Are you pleased with him, Monsieur Rougon?’
‘But of course,’ Rougon replied amiably.
Merle continued to smile vacuously, while feasting his eyes on Madame Correur’s shapely figure. She began to preen herself, straightening the kiss-curls on her forehead.
‘That’s excellent, dear boy,’ she resumed. ‘When I find a man a position, I like everybody to be pleased… If you need any advice, come and see me. In the morning, between eight and nine. Well, be good!’
With this, she stepped into the room.
‘Nothing like an old soldier,’ she said.
She stuck to Rougon like a limpet, leading him slowly to the window at the far end of the room. She scolded him for not wanting to let her in. If Merle had not agreed to take her round to the little door, she would still have been waiting outside! It was imperative that she see him! He couldn’t just resign without telling her what stage her various petitions had reached. From her pocket she drew a fancy little notebook bound in pink moiré.
‘I didn’t see the Moniteur until after lunch,’ she said. ‘I took a cab at once… Now let’s see, how is Madame Leturc’s case going—the Captain’s widow who wants a tobacco licence? I promised her it would be approved next week… And the case of that young lady, you know who I mean, Herminie Billecoq, who was a pupil at Saint-Denis, whose seducer agrees to marry her if some decent soul will be so kind as to provide the statutory dowry. We thought of the Empress… And all the other ladies, Madame Chardon, Madame Testanière, Madame Jalaguier… They’ve been waiting for months.’
Calmly, Rougon told her what she wanted to know, explained the delays, went into the smallest details. However, he also made it clear that now she must count on him far less. She was greatly put out by this. She so enjoyed doing people favours! Whatever would become of her, with all those ladies expecting so much? And she carried on until she began to talk about her own affairs, with which Rougon was very familiar. Once again she reminded him that she was a Martineau, one of the Coulonges Martineaus, a good family from the Vendée, in which the profession of notary went back without a break for seven generations. What she never explained was how she had acquired the name Correur. At the age of twenty-four, she had run away with a butcher’s assistant, after a whole summer of secret assignations in a barn. The scandal—which local people still talked about—broke her father’s heart. He died six months later. Since then she had lived in Paris, totally ignored by her family. Ten times she had written to her brother, who was now in charge of the family firm; but he had never replied. She blamed his silence on her sister-in-law, ‘a sanctimonious woman, who leads that fool Martineau by the nose’, she said. One of her obsessions was that, one day, like Du Poizat, she would return home to show them all what a respected, well-to-do woman she was.
‘I wrote again a week ago,’ she murmured. ‘I bet that woman just throws my letters in the fire… But, if anything happened to Martineau, she would have to give the house over to me. They have no children, I would be involved in the inheritance… He’s fifteen years older than me, and I’ve been told he suffers from gout.’
Then, with a sudden change of tone, she continued:
‘But let’s not think about all that now… You’re the one who needs support at the moment, aren’t you, Eugène? And help you we will, you’ll see… You must be everything, so we can be something… Remember ’51?’
Rougon smiled. And as she gave his hands a motherly squeeze, he leaned forward and whispered in her ear:
‘If you see Gilquin, do tell him to be discreet. Just the other week, he had the bright idea of giving my name to bail him out when he was taken in by the police.’
Madame Correur promised to speak to Gilquin, a fellow lodger of Rougon’s back in his days at the Hôtel Vaneau. He could be a very useful fellow, but his disreputable behaviour could be a liability.
‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ Madame Correur said loudly, smiling, as they reached the centre of the room. ‘I’ve got a cab waiting.’
Nevertheless, she stayed a few minutes longer, anxious to see them all leave at the same time. To speed them on their way, she even offered a lift to any of them who might want one. The Colonel accepted, and it was agreed that young Auguste would ride on the box with the driver. There then began a grand distribution of handshakes. Rougon had stationed himself next to the door, now wide open. As one after another said goodbye, they proffered a final word of condolence. Monsieur Kahn, Du Poizat, and the Colonel leaned forward as they did so, to whisper in his ear, so that he might not forget them. The Charbonnels were already at the top of the stairs and Madame Correur was chatting with Merle at the back of the anteroom, while Madame Bouchard, for whom her husband and Monsieur d’Escorailles were waiting, lingered for a few moments with Rougon, very gracious, very sweet, asking him when she might come to see him at his house in the Rue Marbeuf, on her own, because she never knew what to say when surrounded by a lot of people. But the Colonel overheard her, and came striding back, followed by the others. There was a general re-entry.
‘We’ll all come and see you,’ cried the Colonel.
‘You mustn’t hide yourself away,’ several of them said.
With a gesture, Monsieur Kahn called for silence. Then he pronounced the memorable words:
‘Your allegiance is not to yourself, it is to your friends and to France.’
They finally left. Rougon was able to close the door again. He heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. Delestang, whom he had quite forgotten, emerged from behind the pile of box files, where he had taken shelter while, conscientious friend that he was, he finished sorting the papers. He was rather proud of what he had done. He had achieved something practical, while the others had just talked. Thus he was delighted when the great man expressed his gratitude. He was the only one able to provide any real help; he had a sense of order and a gift for method which would take him a long way. Rougon found a number of other flattering things to say, though without making it entirely clear whether he was being ironic or not. Then, turning round and peering into all corners of the room, he concluded:
‘So, that’s all done, I think, thanks to you… It only remains for me to tell Merle to take these bundles round to my place.’
He summoned the commissioner and pointed to his personal papers. To all Rougon’s instructions Merle replied with the same phrase:
‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’
‘For God’s sake, you fool,’ Rougon cried after a while, irritated. ‘Stop calling me President, because I’m not the President any longer!’
Merle bowed, took a step towards the door, hesitated, then came back and said:
‘There’s a lady on horseback outside who wants to see you, Monsieur… She said she’d ride her horse up the stairs, if they were wide enough… She just wants to shake hands, she says.’
Rougon had clenched his fists, suspecting some kind of joke, when Delestang, who had gone to look out of one of the windows on the landing, rushed back in, very excited, and whispered:
‘It’s Mademoiselle Clorinde!’
Rougon immediately sent word that he was coming down. He took his hat, and Delestang did likewise. As he did so, Rougon gazed at him with a frown, for he had been struck by his excited state.
‘Beware of women,’ he said once more.
As he left, he turned to gaze one last time at the office he was vacating. The sun was pouring in through the three wide-open windows, shedding its harsh light over the gutted files, the scattered drawers, and the string-tied packets piled up in the middle of the carpet. The room now seemed even bigger, and very sad. In the fireplace, where he had piled handfuls of paper and burned them, there was nothing but a little shovelful of black ash. When he closed the door, the candle, forgotten on the corner of the desk, went out, and the click of the glass candle-drip as it snapped broke the silence of the empty room.
Chapter 3
It was in the afternoon, between three and four, that Rougon sometimes called on Countess Balbi. He was a neighbour, and would stroll round to her house, which was situated on the Champs-Élysées, a few yards from the corner of the Rue Marbeuf. The Countess was rarely there, and when she did happen to be at home, would be in bed, and Rougon would be told that she ‘begged to be excused’. However, this never prevented the hall from resounding with the din of noisy callers, or doors banging loudly. The Countess’s daughter, Clorinde, always had visitors, whom she received in an upstairs gallery, a kind of artist’s studio, with large bay windows giving on to the avenue.
For nearly three months, with his lack of interest in women, Rougon had been unresponsive to the various approaches both of these ladies had made to him after they had first contrived an introduction at a Foreign Ministry ball. He bumped into them everywhere; they were always smiling, the mother saying little, but the daughter talking loudly and giving him bold looks. But he remained impervious, avoiding them, closing his eyes so as not to see them, declining invitations. They persisted, however, pursuing him even into the Rue Marbeuf, with Clorinde making a point of riding past on her horse; and so, after a while, he made enquiries about them, before risking a visit to their house.
The Italian legation had nothing but good things to say about them: a Count Balbi had really existed; the Countess was in constant contact with Court circles in Turin; and, the previous year, she had nearly married a minor German prince. But the Duchess of Sanquirino, whom he approached next, had quite a different story. She told Rougon that Clorinde had been born two years after the Count’s death. There were all sorts of rumours about the Balbis, both husband and wife having been involved in numerous affairs and scandals. There had been a French divorce, then an Italian reconciliation, which had resulted in their living together in a kind of common-law arrangement. A young Embassy attaché who was extremely well informed about everything that happened at the Court of King Victor Emmanuel was even more precise: according to him, if the Countess still enjoyed some influence in Turin, she owed it to a past liaison with a certain eminent individual; he also hinted that the Countess would never have left Turin had it not been for a great scandal about which he was not at liberty to give details. By now, Rougon’s enquiries had excited his curiosity, and he even went to police headquarters, but was unable to get any clear information there. The files on these two Italian ladies merely indicated that, though there was no evidence that they had real wealth, they lived very lavishly. They themselves spoke of properties in Piedmont. From time to time, however, there were sudden interruptions in their high living; all at once they would vanish from the scene, only to reappear soon afterwards with renewed splendour. In short, nothing was really known about them; indeed, people preferred not to know. They were seen in the best circles, and their house in Paris was accepted as neutral ground, where, as an exotic foreigner, Clorinde’s eccentricity was tolerated. Rougon decided that he would call on the ladies.