THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ÉMILE ZOLA. Эмиль Золя

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СКАЧАТЬ years of age, Madeleine was a puny child. She was always hovering between life and death. The offspring of a dying mother, she had in her eyes a shadowy vagueness which her smile was seldom able to dispel. Her father loved her the more for her sufferings. It was her very weakness which saved her; illness could get no hold on this poor little body. The doctors gave her up, and she went on living; she was like the flame of one of those pale night-lamps which flickers yet never goes out. Then, at two years old, health suddenly burst on her; in a few months the shadow of death was dispelled from her eyes, the blood mounted to her lips and cheeks. It was a resurrection.

      Hitherto she had resembled a pale speechless corpse; she could neither laugh nor play. When her legs became strong and she could stand, she filled the house with her prattle and the patter of her toddling limbs. Her father would call her, with his arms stretched out towards her, and then she would rush to him with that hesitating step which is one of the charms of children. Férat would play with his daughter for hours; he would carry her into the workshops among the frightful din of the machinery, saying that he wanted to make her as courageous as a boy. And to make her laugh, he found out little childish tricks that a mother would not have invented.

      One curious circumstance redoubled the good fellow’s worship of his child. As Madeleine grew, she became more and more like him. During her earlier days, when she lay in her cradle, trembling all over with fever, she had had her mother’s gentle mournful face. Now, vibrating with life, broad-set and full of vigour, she looked like a boy; she had Férat’s grey eyes and stern brow, and, like him, she was violent and obstinate. But, as the effect of the drama of her birth, there always remained with her a sort of nervous shudder, an innate weakness which would subdue her in the height of her violent childish anger. Then she would weep bitterly, and become submissive. If the upper part of her features had borrowed the sternness of the old workman’s face, she always bore a strong likeness to her mother in the weakness of her mouth and the loving meekness of her smiles.

      She grew, and Férat dreamed of a prince for her husband. He had assumed again the superintendence of his workshops, for he knew now what he would do with his millions. He would have liked to heap up treasures at the feet of his dear little idol. He launched out into important speculations, no longer content with the profits of his trade, and risking his fortune in order to double it. All of a sudden came a fall in the price of iron which ruined him.

      Madeleine was then six years old. Férat displayed incredible energy. He hardly staggered under the mortal blow which had struck him. With the accurate and rapid perception of men of action, he calculated that his daughter was young and that he had still time to earn her a dowry; but he could not start his giant’s task in France: he must have, as his field of operation, a country where fortunes are made rapidly. His resolution was formed in a few hours. He decided on going to America. Madeleine should await his return in a Paris boarding-school.

      He disputed, sou by sou, the remains of his fortune, and succeeded in saving an income of two thousand francs, which he placed in Madeleine’s name. He thought that the child would then always have bread if any misfortune happened to him. As for himself, he set out with a hundred francs in his pocket. The day before he went away, he carried Madeleine to the house of a fellow-countryman of his and asked him to look after her. Lobrichon, who had come to Paris about the same time as himself, had started as a dealer in old clothes and rags; later on, he had become a cloth merchant, and in this trade had made a nice round fortune. Férat had every confidence in this old comrade.

      He told Madeleine that he would come back in the evening; he nearly fainted as he received the caresses of her little arms, and went out reeling like a drunken man. He bade farewell to Lobrichon in the next room.

      “If I die out yonder,” he said to him in a choking voice, “you will be a father to her.’’

      He never reached America. The vessel which carried him, caught in a sudden gale, was driven back and wrecked on the coast of France. Madeleine only heard of the death of her father a long time after.

      The day after Férat had started, Lobrichon took the child to a boarding-school at Les Ternes, which an old lady with whom he was acquainted had recommended to him as an excellent establishment. The two thousand Frances were amply sufficient to pay for her board and tuition, and the former dealer in secondhand clothes was not sorry to get rid at once of a little brat whose noisy games disturbed the selfish upstart’s quiet.

      The school, surrounded by big gardens, was a very comfortable retreat. The ladies who kept it, took only a few pupils; they had put their terms high so as to have none but rich men’s daughters. They taught their scholars excellent manners; the tuition was more in bows and fashionable simpers than in the catechism and orthography. When a young lady left their school, she was perfectly ignorant, but she could enter a drawingroom, a perfect mistress of coquetry, equipped with every Parisian grace. The ladies knew their trade, and had succeeded in earning for their establishment a reputation for stylish elegance. They conferred an honour on a family by taking charge of a child and undertaking to turn her out a wonderful charming doll.

      Madeleine was never at home amongst such surroundings. She was wanting in pliancy, she was noisy and impulsive. During play-hours, she romped like a boy, with joyous transports that disturbed the elegant retreat. Had her father brought her up by his side, she would have become fearless, frank, straightforward, and proudly strong.

      It was her little schoolmates who taught her to be a woman. At first, by her actions and shouts, she displeased these young ten year old dolls who were already learned in the art of not disarranging the folds of their skirts. The pupils played very little: they used to walk up and down the paths like important personages, and there were little brats no higher than one’s stick who could already throw a kiss with their gloved fingers. Madeleine learnt from these charming dolls a host of things which she was completely ignorant of. In secluded corners, behind the foliage of some hedge, she came on knots of them who were talking about men: she joined in these conversations, with the eager curiosity of the woman awakening in the child, and thus received the precocious education of her life. The worst thing was that these little imps, knowing as they thought themselves to be, chattered aloud; they openly declared their wishes for a lover: they confided to one another their little fondnesses for the young fellows they had met the last time they walked out; they read to one another the long love letters they used to write during the English class, and never concealed their hope of being carried off some night or other. There was no danger to sly compliant beings in such talk as this. In the case of Madeleine, on the contrary, it exerted a lifelong influence.

      She inherited from her father his clear head, his rapid and logical workman’s decision. Directly the child thought that she was beginning to know something of life, she tried to form a definite idea of the world, from what she saw and heard in the school. She concluded, from the childish chatter of her school-companions, that there was no harm in falling in love with a man, and that she might take the first that came. The word marriage was hardly ever pronounced by these young misses. Madeleine, whose ideas were always simple ideas, ideas of action, imagined that a woman picked up a lover in the street and walked away quietly on his arm. These thoughts never made her uneasy in the slightest, she was of a cold temperament and talked about love with her friends as she would have talked of her toilet. She used to say to herself only: “If I am ever in love with a man, I will do as Blanche does: I will write long letters to him, and try to make him run away with me.” And there was, in her reverie, a thought of opposition which filled her with delight: it was the only thing that she looked forward to with pleasure.

      In later life, when she knew from experience something of the infamy of the world, she would smile sadly as she remembered her girlish thoughts. But there always remained deep down in her heart, unknown even to herself, the idea that it is quite logical and straightforward for a woman, when she is in love with a man, to tell him so and to go off with him.

      Such a character would have been fit to become the seat of the strongest will. Unfortunately, there СКАЧАТЬ