THE COMPLETE ROUGON-MACQUART SERIES (All 20 Books in One Edition). Эмиль Золя

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СКАЧАТЬ through an iron pipe. How often had she and Christine taken this head in their childish arms to lean forward and reach the stream of water which they loved to feel flowing cold as ice over their little, hands. Then she climbed the great silent staircase, she saw her father at the end of the string of wide rooms; he drew up his tall figure, he slowly passed deeper into the shade of this old house, of this proud solitude in which he had absolutely cloistered himself since his sister’s death; and she thought of the men in the Bois, of that other old man, the Baron Gouraud, rolling his flesh in the sun, on pillows. She climbed higher, she followed the passages, the servants’ stairs, she made the journey towards the children’s room. When she reached the very top, she found the key on its usual nail, a big, rusty key, on to which spiders had spun their web. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad was the children’s room! She felt a pang at her heart on finding it so deserted, so gray, so silent. She closed the open door of the aviary, with the vague idea that it must have been by that door that the joys of her childhood had flown away. She stopped before the flower-boxes, still full of soil hardened and cracked like dry mud, she broke off with her fingers a rhododendron-stalk: this skeleton of a plant, shrivelled and white with dust, was all that remained of their living clusters of verdure. And the matting, the very matting, discoloured, rat-gnawed, displayed itself with the melancholy of a shroud that has for years been awaiting the promised corpse. In a corner, amid this mute despair, this silent weeping abandonment, she found one of her old dolls; all the bran had flowed out through a hole, and the porcelain head continued to smile with its enamelled lips, above the wasted body, which seemed as though exhausted by puppet follies.

      Renée was stifled amid this tainted atmosphere of her childhood. She opened the window, she looked out upon the boundless landscape. There nothing was soiled. She found again the eternal joys, the eternal youth of the open air. The sun must be sinking behind her; she saw only the rays of the setting luminary gilding with infinite softness this bit of town which she knew so well. It was a last song of daylight, a refrain of gaiety which was subsiding slowly over all things. Below, ruddy flames lit up the boom, while the lacework of the iron chains of the Pont de Constantine stood out against the whiteness of its supports. Then, more to the right, the dark foliage of the Halle aux Vins and of the Jardin des Plantes gave the impression of a great pool of stagnant, moss-covered water, whose green surface blended in the distance with the mist of the sky. On the left, the Quai Henri IV and the Quai de la Rapée extended the same row of houses, the houses which the little girls used to see there twenty years ago, together with the same brown patches of sheds, the same red factory-chimneys. And above the trees, the slated roof of the Saltpêtrière, made blue by the suns leave-taking, appeared to her suddenly like an old friend. But what calmed her, what brought coolness to her breast, was the long gray banks, was above all the Seine, the giant, which she watched coming from the edge of the horizon, straight down to her, as in those happy days when they had been afraid lest they should see it swelling and surging up to their window. She remembered their fondness for the river, their love for its colossal flux, for this quivering of murmuring water, spreading like a sheet at their feet, opening out around them, behind them, into two arms which they could not see, though they could still feel its great, pure caress. They were coquettes already, and they used to say, on fine days, that the Seine had put on its pretty dress of green silk shot with white flames; and the eddies where the water rippled trimmed the dress with frills of satin, while in the distance, beyond the belt of the bridges, splashes of light spread out lappets of sun-coloured stuff.

      And Renée, raising her eyes, looked at the vast arch of pale, blue sky, fading little by little in the effacement of the twilight. She thought of the accomplice city, of the flaring nights of the boulevards, of the sultry afternoons in the Bois, of the crude, pallid days in the great, new mansions. Then, when she lowered her head, when she glanced again upon the peaceful horizon of her childhood, this corner of a middle-class and workmen s city, where she had dreamt of a life of peace, a final bitterness mounted to her lips. With clasped hands, she sobbed in the gathering night.

      Next winter, when Renée died of acute meningitis, her father paid her debts. Worms’s bill came to two hundred and fifty-seven thousand francs.

      THE END

      THE FAT AND THE THIN

       Table of Contents

      Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

       Contents

        INTRODUCTION

        CHAPTER I

        CHAPTER II

        CHAPTER III

        CHAPTER IV

        CHAPTER V

        CHAPTER VI

      INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      “THE FAT AND THE THIN,” or, to use the French title, “Le Ventre de Paris,” is a story of life in and around those vast Central Markets which form a distinctive feature of modern Paris. Even the reader who has never crossed the Channel must have heard of the Parisian Halles, for much has been written about them, not only in English books on the French metropolis, but also in English newspapers, magazines, and reviews; so that few, I fancy, will commence the perusal of the present volume without having, at all events, some knowledge of its subject matter.

      The Paris markets form such a world of their own, and teem at certain hours of the day and night with such exuberance of life, that it was only natural they should attract the attention of a novelist like M. Zola, who, to use his own words, delights “in any subject in which vast masses of people can be shown in motion.” Mr. Sherard tells us[*] that the idea of “Le Ventre de Paris” first occurred to M. Zola in 1872, when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ramble through the Halles. I have in my possession, however, an article written by M. Zola some five or six years before that time, and in this one can already detect the germ of the present work; just as the motif of another of M. Zola’s novels, “La Joie de Vivre,” can be traced to a short story written for a Russian review.

      [*] Emile Zola: a Biographical and Critical Study, by Robert Harborough Sherard, pp. 103, 104. London, Chatto & Windus, 1893.

      Similar instances are frequently to be found in the writings of English as well as French novelists, and are, of course, easily explained. A young man unknown to fame, and unable to procure the publication of a long novel, often contents himself with embodying some particular idea in a short sketch or story, which finds its way into one or another periodical, where it lies buried and forgotten by everybody — excepting its author. Time goes by, however, the writer achieves some measure of success, and one day it occurs to him to elaborate and perfect that old idea of his, only a faint apercu of which, for lack of opportunity, he had been able to give in the past. With a little research, no doubt, an interesting essay might be written on these literary resuscitations; but if one except СКАЧАТЬ