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+Project Gutenberg's The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 1, by Zola
+#30 in our series by Emile Zola
+
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+Title: The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 1
+
+Author: Emile Zola
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9164]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 10, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE CITIES: PARIS, VOL. 1 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny [dagnypg@yahoo.com]
+and David Widger [widger@cecomet.net]
+
+
+
+
+                          THE THREE CITIES
+
+
+
+                               PARIS
+
+
+
+                                BY
+
+                            EMILE ZOLA
+
+
+
+                TRANSLATED BY ERNEST A. VIZETELLY
+
+
+
+                               BOOK I
+
+
+
+                        TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
+
+WITH the present work M. Zola completes the "Trilogy of the Three
+Cities," which he began with "Lourdes" and continued with "Rome"; and
+thus the adventures and experiences of Abbe Pierre Froment, the doubting
+Catholic priest who failed to find faith at the miraculous grotto by the
+Cave, and hope amidst the crumbling theocracy of the Vatican, are here
+brought to what, from M. Zola's point of view, is their logical
+conclusion. From the first pages of "Lourdes," many readers will have
+divined that Abbe Froment was bound to finish as he does, for, frankly,
+no other finish was possible from a writer of M. Zola's opinions.
+
+Taking the Trilogy as a whole, one will find that it is essentially
+symbolical. Abbe Froment is Man, and his struggles are the struggles
+between Religion, as personified by the Roman Catholic Church, on the one
+hand, and Reason and Life on the other. In the Abbe's case the victory
+ultimately rests with the latter; and we may take it as being M. Zola's
+opinion that the same will eventually be the case with the great bulk of
+mankind. English writers are often accused of treating subjects from an
+insular point of view, and certainly there may be good ground for such a
+charge. But they are not the only writers guilty of the practice. The
+purview of French authors is often quite as limited: they regard French
+opinion as the only good opinion, and judge the rest of the world by
+their own standard. In the present case, if we leave the world and
+mankind generally on one side, and apply M. Zola's facts and theories to
+France alone, it will be found, I think, that he has made out a
+remarkably good case for himself. For it is certain that Catholicism, I
+may say Christianity, is fast crumbling in France. There may be revivals
+in certain limited circles, efforts of the greatest energy to prop up the
+tottering edifice by a "rallying" of believers to the democratic cause,
+and by a kindling of the most bitter anti-Semitic warfare; but all these
+revivals and efforts, although they are extremely well-advertised and
+create no little stir, produce very little impression on the bulk of the
+population. So far as France is concerned, the policy of Leo XIII. seems
+to have come too late. The French masses regard Catholicism or
+Christianity, whichever one pleases, as a religion of death,--a religion
+which, taking its stand on the text "There shall always be poor among
+you," condemns them to toil and moil in poverty and distress their whole
+life long, with no other consolation than the promise of happiness in
+heaven. And, on the other hand, they see the ministers of the Deity,
+"whose kingdom is not of this world," supporting the wealthy and
+powerful, and striving to secure wealth and power for themselves. Charity
+exists, of course, but the masses declare that it is no remedy; they do
+not ask for doles, they ask for Justice. It is largely by reason of all
+this that Socialism and Anarchism have made such great strides in France
+of recent years. Robespierre, as will be remembered, once tried to
+suppress Christianity altogether, and for a time certainly there was a
+virtually general cessation of religious observances in France. But no
+such Reign of Terror prevails there to-day. Men are perfectly free to
+believe if they are inclined to do so; and yet never were there fewer
+religious marriages, fewer baptisms or smaller congregations in the
+French churches. I refer not merely to Paris and other large cities, but
+to the smaller towns, and even the little hamlets of many parts. Old
+village priests, men practising what they teach and possessed of the most
+loving, benevolent hearts, have told me with tears in their eyes of the
+growing infidelity of their parishioners.
+
+I have been studying this matter for some years, and write without
+prejudice, merely setting down what I believe to be the truth. Of course
+we are all aware that the most stupendous efforts are being made by the
+Catholic clergy and zealous believers to bring about a revival of the
+faith, and certainly in some circles there has been a measure of success.
+But the reconversion of a nation is the most formidable of tasks; and, in
+my own opinion, as in M. Zola's, France as a whole is lost to the
+Christian religion. On this proposition, combined with a second one,
+namely, that even as France as a nation will be the first to discard
+Christianity, so she will be the first to promulgate a new faith based on
+reason, science and the teachings of life, is founded the whole argument
+of M. Zola's Trilogy.
+
+Having thus dealt with the Trilogy's religious aspects, I would now speak
+of "Paris," its concluding volume. This is very different from "Lourdes"
+and "Rome." Whilst recounting the struggles and fate of Abbe Froment and
+his brother Guillaume, and entering largely into the problem of Capital
+and Labour, which problem has done so much to turn the masses away from
+Christianity, it contains many an interesting and valuable picture of the
+Parisian world at the close of the nineteenth century. It is no
+guide-book to Paris; but it paints the city's social life, its rich and
+poor, its scandals and crimes, its work and its pleasures. Among the
+households to which the reader is introduced are those of a banker, an
+aged Countess of the old /noblesse/, a cosmopolitan Princess, of a kind
+that Paris knows only too well, a scientist, a manufacturer, a working
+mechanician, a priest, an Anarchist, a petty clerk and an actress of a
+class that so often dishonours the French stage. Science and art and
+learning and religion, all have their representatives. Then, too, the
+political world is well to the front. There are honest and unscrupulous
+Ministers of State, upright and venal deputies, enthusiastic and cautious
+candidates for power, together with social theoreticians of various
+schools. And the /blase/, weak-minded man of fashion is here, as well as
+the young "symbolist" of perverted, degraded mind. The women are of all
+types, from the most loathsome to the most lovable. Then, too, the
+journalists are portrayed in such life-like fashion that I might give
+each of them his real name. And journalism, Parisian journalism, is
+flagellated, shown as it really is,--if just a few well-conducted organs
+be excepted,--that is, venal and impudent, mendacious and even petty.
+
+The actual scenes depicted are quite as kaleidoscopic as are the
+characters in their variety. We enter the banker's gilded saloon and the
+hovel of the pauper, the busy factory, the priest's retired home and the
+laboratory of the scientist. We wait in the lobbies of the Chamber of
+Deputies, and afterwards witness "a great debate"; we penetrate into the
+private sanctum of a Minister of the Interior; we attend a fashionable
+wedding at the Madeleine and a first performance at the Comedie
+Francaise; we dine at the Cafe Anglais and listen to a notorious vocalist
+in a low music hall at Montmartre; we pursue an Anarchist through the
+Bois de Boulogne; we slip into the Assize Court and see that Anarchist
+tried there; we afterwards gaze upon his execution by the guillotine; we
+are also on the boulevards when the lamps are lighted for a long night of
+revelry, and we stroll along the quiet streets in the small hours of the
+morning, when crime and homeless want are prowling round.
+
+And ever the scene changes; the whole world of Paris passes before one.
+Yet the book, to my thinking, is far less descriptive than analytical.
+The souls of the principal characters are probed to their lowest depths.
+Many of the scenes, too, are intensely dramatic, admirably adapted for
+the stage; as, for instance, Baroness Duvillard's interview with her
+daughter in the chapter which I have called "The Rivals." And side by
+side with baseness there is heroism, while beauty of the flesh finds its
+counterpart in beauty of the mind. M. Zola has often been reproached for
+showing us the vileness of human nature; and no doubt such vileness may
+be found in "Paris," but there are contrasting pictures. If some of M.
+Zola's characters horrify the reader, there are others that the latter
+can but admire. Life is compounded of good and evil, and unfortunately it
+is usually the evil that makes the most noise and attracts the most
+attention. Moreover, in M. Zola's case, it has always been his purpose to
+expose the evils from which society suffers in the hope of directing
+attention to them and thereby hastening a remedy, and thus, in the course
+of his works, he could not do otherwise than drag the whole frightful
+mass of human villany and degradation into the full light of day. But if
+there are, again, black pages in "Paris," others, bright and comforting,
+will be found near them. And the book ends in no pessimist strain.
+Whatever may be thought of the writer's views on religion, most readers
+will, I imagine, agree with his opinion that, despite much social
+injustice, much crime, vice, cupidity and baseness, we are ever marching
+on to better things.
+
+In the making of the coming, though still far-away, era of truth and
+justice, Paris, he thinks, will play the leading part, for whatever the
+stains upon her, they are but surface-deep; her heart remains good and
+sound; she has genius and courage and energy and wit and fancy. She can
+be generous, too, when she chooses, and more than once her ideas have
+irradiated the world. Thus M. Zola hopes much from her, and who will
+gainsay him? Not I, who can apply to her the words which Byron addressed
+to the home of my own and M. Zola's forefathers:--
+
+     "I loved her from my boyhood; she to me
+      Was as a fairy city of the heart."
+
+Thus I can but hope that Paris, where I learnt the little I know, where I
+struggled and found love and happiness, whose every woe and disaster and
+triumph I have shared for over thirty years, may, however dark the clouds
+that still pass over her, some day fully justify M. Zola's confidence,
+and bring to pass his splendid dream of perfect truth and perfect
+justice.
+
+E. A. V.
+
+MERTON, SURREY, ENGLAND,
+
+Feb. 5, 1898.
+
+
+
+                               PARIS
+
+
+
+                               BOOK I
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE PRIEST AND THE POOR
+
+THAT morning, one towards the end of January, Abbe Pierre Froment, who
+had a mass to say at the Sacred Heart at Montmartre, was on the height,
+in front of the basilica, already at eight o'clock. And before going in
+he gazed for a moment upon the immensity of Paris spread out below him.
+
+After two months of bitter cold, ice and snow, the city was steeped in a
+mournful, quivering thaw. From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a
+thick mist fell like a mourning shroud. All the eastern portion of the
+city, the abodes of misery and toil, seemed submerged beneath ruddy
+steam, amid which the panting of workshops and factories could be
+divined; while westwards, towards the districts of wealth and enjoyment,
+the fog broke and lightened, becoming but a fine and motionless veil of
+vapour. The curved line of the horizon could scarcely be divined, the
+expanse of houses, which nothing bounded, appeared like a chaos of stone,
+studded with stagnant pools, which filled the hollows with pale steam;
+whilst against them the summits of the edifices, the housetops of the
+loftier streets, showed black like soot. It was a Paris of mystery,
+shrouded by clouds, buried as it were beneath the ashes of some disaster,
+already half-sunken in the suffering and the shame of that which its
+immensity concealed.
+
+Thin and sombre in his flimsy cassock, Pierre was looking on when Abbe
+Rose, who seemed to have sheltered himself behind a pillar of the porch
+on purpose to watch for him, came forward: "Ah! it's you at last, my dear
+child," said he, "I have something to ask you."
+
+He seemed embarrassed and anxious, and glanced round distrustfully to
+make sure that nobody was near. Then, as if the solitude thereabouts did
+not suffice to reassure him, he led Pierre some distance away, through
+the icy, biting wind, which he himself did not seem to feel. "This is the
+matter," he resumed, "I have been told that a poor fellow, a former
+house-painter, an old man of seventy, who naturally can work no more, is
+dying of hunger in a hovel in the Rue des Saules. So, my dear child, I
+thought of you. I thought you would consent to take him these three
+francs from me, so that he may at least have some bread to eat for a few
+days."
+
+"But why don't you take him your alms yourself?"
+
+At this Abbe Rose again grew anxious, and cast vague, frightened glances
+about him. "Oh, no, oh, no!" he said, "I can no longer do that after all
+the worries that have befallen me. You know that I am watched, and should
+get another scolding if I were caught giving alms like this, scarcely
+knowing to whom I give them. It is true that I had to sell something to
+get these three francs. But, my dear child, render me this service, I
+pray you."
+
+Pierre, with heart oppressed, stood contemplating the old priest, whose
+locks were quite white, whose full lips spoke of infinite kindliness, and
+whose eyes shone clear and childlike in his round and smiling face. And
+he bitterly recalled the story of that lover of the poor, the
+semi-disgrace into which he had fallen through the sublime candour of his
+charitable goodness. His little ground-floor of the Rue de Charonne,
+which he had turned into a refuge where he offered shelter to all the
+wretchedness of the streets, had ended by giving cause for scandal. His
+/naivete/ and innocence had been abused; and abominable things had gone
+on under his roof without his knowledge. Vice had turned the asylum into
+a meeting-place; and at last, one night, the police had descended upon it
+to arrest a young girl accused of infanticide. Greatly concerned by this
+scandal, the diocesan authorities had forced Abbe Rose to close his
+shelter, and had removed him from the church of Ste. Marguerite to that
+of St. Pierre of Montmartre, where he now again acted as curate. Truth to
+tell, it was not a disgrace but a removal to another spot. However, he
+had been scolded and was watched, as he said; and he was much ashamed of
+it, and very unhappy at being only able to give alms by stealth, much
+like some harebrained prodigal who blushes for his faults.
+
+Pierre took the three francs. "I promise to execute your commission, my
+friend, oh! with all my heart," he said.
+
+"You will go after your mass, won't you? His name is Laveuve, he lives in
+the Rue des Saules in a house with a courtyard, just before reaching the
+Rue Marcadet. You are sure to find it. And if you want to be very kind
+you will tell me of your visit this evening at five o'clock, at the
+Madeleine, where I am going to hear Monseigneur Martha's address. He has
+been so good to me! Won't you also come to hear him?"
+
+Pierre made an evasive gesture. Monseigneur Martha, Bishop of Persepolis
+and all powerful at the archiepiscopal palace, since, like the genial
+propagandist he was, he had been devoting himself to increasing the
+subscriptions for the basilica of the Sacred Heart, had indeed supported
+Abbe Rose; in fact, it was by his influence that the abbe had been kept
+in Paris, and placed once more at St. Pierre de Montmartre.
+
+"I don't know if I shall be able to hear the address," said Pierre, "but
+in any case I will go there to meet you."
+
+The north wind was blowing, and the gloomy cold penetrated both of them
+on that deserted summit amidst the fog which changed the vast city into a
+misty ocean. However, some footsteps were heard, and Abbe Rose, again
+mistrustful, saw a man go by, a tall and sturdy man, who wore clogs and
+was bareheaded, showing his thick and closely-cut white hair. "Is not
+that your brother?" asked the old priest.
+
+Pierre had not stirred. "Yes, it is my brother Guillaume," he quietly
+responded. "I have found him again since I have been coming occasionally
+to the Sacred Heart. He owns a house close by, where he has been living
+for more than twenty years, I think. When we meet we shake hands, but I
+have never even been to his house. Oh! all is quite dead between us, we
+have nothing more in common, we are parted by worlds."
+
+Abbe Rose's tender smile again appeared, and he waved his hand as if to
+say that one must never despair of love. Guillaume Froment, a savant of
+lofty intelligence, a chemist who lived apart from others, like one who
+rebelled against the social system, was now a parishioner of the abbe's,
+and when the latter passed the house where Guillaume lived with his three
+sons--a house all alive with work--he must often have dreamt of leading
+him back to God.
+
+"But, my dear child," he resumed, "I am keeping you here in this dark
+cold, and you are not warm. Go and say your mass. Till this evening, at
+the Madeleine." Then, in entreating fashion, after again making sure that
+none could hear them, he added, still with the air of a child at fault:
+"And not a word to anybody about my little commission--it would again be
+said that I don't know how to conduct myself."
+
+Pierre watched the old priest as he went off towards the Rue Cartot,
+where he lived on a damp ground-floor, enlivened by a strip of garden.
+The veil of disaster, which was submerging Paris, now seemed to grow
+thicker under the gusts of the icy north wind. And at last Pierre entered
+the basilica, his heart upset, overflowing with the bitterness stirred up
+by the recollection of Abbe Rose's story--that bankruptcy of charity, the
+frightful irony of a holy man punished for bestowing alms, and hiding
+himself that he might still continue to bestow them. Nothing could calm
+the smart of the wound reopened in Pierre's heart--neither the warm
+peacefulness into which he entered, nor the silent solemnity of the
+broad, deep fabric, whose new stonework was quite bare, without a single
+painting or any kind of decoration; the nave being still half-barred by
+the scaffoldings which blocked up the unfinished dome. At that early hour
+the masses of entreaty had already been said at several altars, under the
+grey light falling from the high and narrow windows, and the tapers of
+entreaty were burning in the depths of the apse. So Pierre made haste to
+go to the sacristy, there to assume his vestments in order that he might
+say his mass in the chapel of St. Vincent de Paul.
+
+But the floodgates of memory had been opened, and he had no thought but
+for his distress whilst, in mechanical fashion, he performed the rites
+and made the customary gestures. Since his return from Rome three years
+previously, he had been living in the very worst anguish that can fall on
+man. At the outset, in order to recover his lost faith, he had essayed a
+first experiment: he had gone to Lourdes, there to seek the innocent
+belief of the child who kneels and prays, the primitive faith of young
+nations bending beneath the terror born of ignorance; but he had rebelled
+yet more than ever in presence of what he had witnessed at Lourdes: that
+glorification of the absurd, that collapse of common sense; and was
+convinced that salvation, the peace of men and nations nowadays, could
+not lie in that puerile relinquishment of reason. And afterwards, again
+yielding to the need of loving whilst yet allowing reason, so hard to
+satisfy, her share in his intellect, he had staked his final peace on a
+second experiment, and had gone to Rome to see if Catholicism could there
+be renewed, could revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity and
+become the religion of the democracy, the faith which the modern world,
+upheaving and in danger of death, was awaiting in order to calm down and
+live. And he had found there naught but ruins, the rotted trunk of a tree
+that could never put forth another springtide; and he had heard there
+naught but the supreme rending of the old social edifice, near to its
+fall. Then it was, that, relapsing into boundless doubt, total negation,
+he had been recalled to Paris by Abbe Rose, in the name of their poor,
+and had returned thither that he might forget and immolate himself and
+believe in them--the poor--since they and their frightful sufferings
+alone remained certain. And then it was too, that for three years he came
+into contact with that collapse, that very bankruptcy of goodness itself:
+charity a derision, charity useless and flouted.
+
+Those three years had been lived by Pierre amidst ever-growing torments,
+in which his whole being had ended by sinking. His faith was forever
+dead; dead, too, even his hope of utilising the faith of the multitudes
+for the general salvation. He denied everything, he anticipated nothing
+but the final, inevitable catastrophe: revolt, massacre and
+conflagration, which would sweep away a guilty and condemned world.
+Unbelieving priest that he was, yet watching over the faith of others,
+honestly, chastely discharging his duties, full of haughty sadness at the
+thought that he had been unable to renounce his mind as he had renounced
+his flesh and his dream of being a saviour of the nations, he withal
+remained erect, full of fierce yet solitary grandeur. And this
+despairing, denying priest, who had dived to the bottom of nothingness,
+retained such a lofty and grave demeanour, perfumed by such pure
+kindness, that in his parish of Neuilly he had acquired the reputation of
+being a young saint, one beloved by Providence, whose prayers wrought
+miracles. He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the
+priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in
+which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping
+women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother
+whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask
+that infant's cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant
+her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of
+His heart, all burning with love.
+
+Clad in his vestments, Pierre had reached the chapel of St. Vincent de
+Paul. He there ascended the altar-step and began the mass; and when he
+turned round with hands spread out to bless the worshippers he showed his
+hollow cheeks, his gentle mouth contracted by bitterness, his loving eyes
+darkened by suffering. He was no longer the young priest whose
+countenance had glowed with tender fever on the road to Lourdes, whose
+face had been illumined by apostolic fervour when he started for Rome.
+The two hereditary influences which were ever at strife within him--that
+of his father to whom he owed his impregnable, towering brow, that of his
+mother who had given him his love-thirsting lips, were still waging war,
+the whole human battle of sentiment and reason, in that now ravaged face
+of his, whither in moments of forgetfulness ascended all the chaos of
+internal suffering. The lips still confessed that unquenched thirst for
+love, self-bestowal and life, which he well thought he could nevermore
+content, whilst the solid brow, the citadel which made him suffer,
+obstinately refused to capitulate, whatever might be the assaults of
+error. But he stiffened himself, hid the horror of the void in which he
+struggled, and showed himself superb, making each gesture, repeating each
+word in sovereign fashion. And gazing at him through her tears, the
+mother who was there among the few kneeling women, the mother who awaited
+a supreme intercession from him, who thought him in communion with Jesus
+for the salvation of her child, beheld him radiant with angelic beauty
+like some messenger of the divine grace.
+
+When, after the offertory, Pierre uncovered the chalice he felt contempt
+for himself. The shock had been too great, and he thought of those things
+in spite of all. What puerility there had been in his two experiments at
+Lourdes and Rome, the /naivete/ of a poor distracted being, consumed by
+desire to love and believe. To have imagined that present-day science
+would in his person accommodate itself to the faith of the year One
+Thousand, and in particular to have foolishly believed that he, petty
+priest that he was, would be able to indoctrinate the Pope and prevail on
+him to become a saint and change the face of the world! It all filled him
+with shame; how people must have laughed at him! Then, too, his idea of a
+schism made him blush. He again beheld himself at Rome, dreaming of
+writing a book by which he would violently sever himself from Catholicism
+to preach the new religion of the democracies, the purified, human and
+living Gospel. But what ridiculous folly! A schism? He had known in Paris
+an abbe of great heart and mind who had attempted to bring about that
+famous, predicted, awaited schism. Ah! the poor man, the sad, the
+ludicrous labour in the midst of universal incredulity, the icy
+indifference of some, the mockery and the reviling of others! If Luther
+were to come to France in our days he would end, forgotten and dying of
+hunger, on a Batignolles fifth-floor. A schism cannot succeed among a
+people that no longer believes, that has ceased to take all interest in
+the Church, and sets its hope elsewhere. And it was all Catholicism, in
+fact all Christianity, that would be swept away, for, apart from certain
+moral maxims, the Gospel no longer supplied a possible code for society.
+And this conviction increased Pierre's torment on the days when his
+cassock weighed more heavily on his shoulders, when he ended by feeling
+contempt for himself at thus celebrating the divine mystery of the mass,
+which for him had become but the formula of a dead religion.
+
+Having half filled the chalice with wine from the vase, Pierre washed his
+hands and again perceived the mother with her face of ardent entreaty.
+Then he thought it was for her that, with the charitable leanings of a
+vow-bound man, he had remained a priest, a priest without belief, feeding
+the belief of others with the bread of illusion. But this heroic conduct,
+the haughty spirit of duty in which he imprisoned himself, was not
+practised by him without growing anguish. Did not elementary probity
+require that he should cast aside the cassock and return into the midst
+of men? At certain times the falsity of his position filled him with
+disgust for his useless heroism; and he asked himself if it were not
+cowardly and dangerous to leave the masses in superstition. Certainly the
+theory of a just and vigilant Providence, of a future paradise where all
+these sufferings of the world would receive compensation, had long seemed
+necessary to the wretchedness of mankind; but what a trap lay in it, what
+a pretext for the tyrannical grinding down of nations; and how far more
+virile it would be to undeceive the nations, however brutally, and give
+them courage to live the real life, even if it were in tears. If they
+were already turning aside from Christianity was not this because they
+needed a more human ideal, a religion of health and joy which should not
+be a religion of death? On the day when the idea of charity should
+crumble, Christianity would crumble also, for it was built upon the idea
+of divine charity correcting the injustice of fate, and offering future
+rewards to those who might suffer in this life. And it was crumbling; for
+the poor no longer believed in it, but grew angry at the thought of that
+deceptive paradise, with the promise of which their patience had been
+beguiled so long, and demanded that their share of happiness should not
+always be put off until the morrow of death. A cry for justice arose from
+every lip, for justice upon this earth, justice for those who hunger and
+thirst, whom alms are weary of relieving after eighteen hundred years of
+Gospel teaching, and who still and ever lack bread to eat.
+
+When Pierre, with his elbows on the altar, had emptied the chalice after
+breaking the sacred wafer, he felt himself sinking into yet greater
+distress. And so a third experiment was beginning for him, the supreme
+battle of justice against charity, in which his heart and his mind would
+struggle together in that great Paris, so full of terrible, unknown
+things. The need for the divine still battled within him against
+domineering intelligence. How among the masses would one ever be able to
+content the thirst for the mysterious? Leaving the /elite/ on one side,
+would science suffice to pacify desire, lull suffering, and satisfy the
+dream? And what would become of himself in the bankruptcy of that same
+charity, which for three years had alone kept him erect by occupying his
+every hour, and giving him the illusion of self-devotion, of being useful
+to others? It seemed, all at once, as if the ground sank beneath him, and
+he heard nothing save the cry of the masses, silent so long, but now
+demanding justice, growling and threatening to take their share, which
+was withheld from them by force and ruse. Nothing more, it seemed, could
+delay the inevitable catastrophe, the fratricidal class warfare that
+would sweep away the olden world, which was condemned to disappear
+beneath the mountain of its crimes. Every hour with frightful sadness he
+expected the collapse, Paris steeped in blood, Paris in flames. And his
+horror of all violence froze him; he knew not where to seek the new
+belief which might dissipate the peril. Fully conscious, though he was,
+that the social and religious problems are but one, and are alone in
+question in the dreadful daily labour of Paris, he was too deeply
+troubled himself, too far removed from ordinary things by his position as
+a priest, and too sorely rent by doubt and powerlessness to tell as yet
+where might be truth, and health, and life. Ah! to be healthy and to
+live, to content at last both heart and reason in the peace, the certain,
+simply honest labour, which man has come to accomplish upon this earth!
+
+The mass was finished, and Pierre descended from the altar, when the
+weeping mother, near whom he passed, caught hold of a corner of the
+chasuble with her trembling hands, and kissed it with wild fervour, as
+one may kiss some relic of a saint from whom one expects salvation. She
+thanked him for the miracle which he must have accomplished, certain as
+she felt that she would find her child cured. And he was deeply stirred
+by that love, that ardent faith of hers, in spite of the sudden and yet
+keener distress which he felt at being in no wise the sovereign minister
+that she thought him, the minister able to obtain a respite from Death.
+But he dismissed her consoled and strengthened, and it was with an ardent
+prayer that he entreated the unknown but conscious Power to succour the
+poor creature. Then, when he had divested himself in the sacristy, and
+found himself again out of doors before the basilica, lashed by the keen
+wintry wind, a mortal shiver came upon him, and froze him, while through
+the mist he looked to see if a whirlwind of anger and justice had not
+swept Paris away: that catastrophe which must some day destroy it,
+leaving under the leaden heavens only the pestilential quagmire of its
+ruins.
+
+Pierre wished to fulfil Abbe Rose's commission immediately. He followed
+the Rue des Norvins, on the crest of Montmartre; and, reaching the Rue
+des Saules, descended by its steep slope, between mossy walls, to the
+other side of Paris. The three francs which he was holding in his
+cassock's pocket, filled him at once with gentle emotion and covert anger
+against the futility of charity. But as he gradually descended by the
+sharp declivities and interminable storeys of steps, the mournful nooks
+of misery which he espied took possession of him, and infinite pity wrung
+his heart. A whole new district was here being built alongside the broad
+thoroughfares opened since the great works of the Sacred Heart had begun.
+Lofty middle-class houses were already rising among ripped-up gardens and
+plots of vacant land, still edged with palings. And these houses with
+their substantial frontages, all new and white, lent a yet more sombre
+and leprous aspect to such of the old shaky buildings as remained, the
+low pot-houses with blood-coloured walls, the /cites/ of workmen's
+dwellings, those abodes of suffering with black, soiled buildings in
+which human cattle were piled. Under the low-hanging sky that day, the
+pavement, dented by heavily-laden carts, was covered with mud; the thaw
+soaked the walls with an icy dampness, whilst all the filth and
+destitution brought terrible sadness to the heart.
+
+After going as far as the Rue Marcadet, Pierre retraced his steps; and in
+the Rue des Saules, certain that he was not mistaken, he entered the
+courtyard of a kind of barracks or hospital, encompassed by three
+irregular buildings. This court was a quagmire, where filth must have
+accumulated during the two months of terrible frost; and now all was
+melting, and an abominable stench arose. The buildings were half falling,
+the gaping vestibules looked like cellar holes, strips of paper streaked
+the cracked and filthy window-panes, and vile rags hung about like flags
+of death. Inside a shanty which served as the door-keeper's abode Pierre
+only saw an infirm man rolled up in a tattered strip of what had once
+been a horse-cloth.
+
+"You have an old workman named Laveuve here," said the priest. "Which
+staircase is it, which floor?"
+
+The man did not answer, but opened his anxious eyes, like a scared idiot.
+The door-keeper, no doubt, was in the neighbourhood. For a moment the
+priest waited; then seeing a little girl on the other side of the
+courtyard, he risked himself, crossed the quagmire on tip-toe, and asked:
+"Do you know an old workman named Laveuve in the house, my child?"
+
+The little girl, who only had a ragged gown of pink cotton stuff about
+her meagre figure, stood there shivering, her hands covered with
+chilblains. She raised her delicate face, which looked pretty though
+nipped by the cold: "Laveuve," said she, "no, don't know, don't know."
+And with the unconscious gesture of a beggar child she put out one of her
+poor, numbed and disfigured hands. Then, when the priest had given her a
+little bit of silver, she began to prance through the mud like a joyful
+goat, singing the while in a shrill voice: "Don't know, don't know."
+
+Pierre decided to follow her. She vanished into one of the gaping
+vestibules, and, in her rear, he climbed a dark and fetid staircase,
+whose steps were half-broken and so slippery, on account of the vegetable
+parings strewn over them, that he had to avail himself of the greasy rope
+by which the inmates hoisted themselves upwards. But every door was
+closed; he vainly knocked at several of them, and only elicited, at the
+last, a stifled growl, as though some despairing animal were confined
+within. Returning to the yard, he hesitated, then made his way to another
+staircase, where he was deafened by piercing cries, as of a child who is
+being butchered. He climbed on hearing this noise and at last found
+himself in front of an open room where an infant, who had been left
+alone, tied in his little chair, in order that he might not fall, was
+howling and howling without drawing breath. Then Pierre went down again,
+upset, frozen by the sight of so much destitution and abandonment.
+
+But a woman was coming in, carrying three potatoes in her apron, and on
+being questioned by him she gazed distrustfully at his cassock. "Laveuve,
+Laveuve? I can't say," she replied. "If the door-keeper were there, she
+might be able to tell you. There are five staircases, you see, and we
+don't all know each other. Besides, there are so many changes. Still try
+over there; at the far end."
+
+The staircase at the back of the yard was yet more abominable than the
+others, its steps warped, its walls slimy, as if soaked with the sweat of
+anguish. At each successive floor the drain-sinks exhaled a pestilential
+stench, whilst from every lodging came moans, or a noise of quarrelling,
+or some frightful sign of misery. A door swung open, and a man appeared
+dragging a woman by the hair whilst three youngsters sobbed aloud. On the
+next floor, Pierre caught a glimpse of a room where a young girl in her
+teens, racked by coughing, was hastily carrying an infant to and fro to
+quiet it, in despair that all the milk of her breast should be exhausted.
+Then, in an adjoining lodging, came the poignant spectacle of three
+beings, half clad in shreds, apparently sexless and ageless, who, amidst
+the dire bareness of their room, were gluttonously eating from the same
+earthen pan some pottage which even dogs would have refused. They barely
+raised their heads to growl, and did not answer Pierre's questions.
+
+He was about to go down again, when right atop of the stairs, at the
+entry of a passage, it occurred to him to make a last try by knocking at
+the door. It was opened by a woman whose uncombed hair was already
+getting grey, though she could not be more than forty; while her pale
+lips, and dim eyes set in a yellow countenance, expressed utter
+lassitude, the shrinking, the constant dread of one whom wretchedness has
+pitilessly assailed. The sight of Pierre's cassock disturbed her, and she
+stammered anxiously: "Come in, come in, Monsieur l'Abbe."
+
+However, a man whom Pierre had not at first seen--a workman also of some
+forty years, tall, thin and bald, with scanty moustache and beard of a
+washed-out reddish hue--made an angry gesture--a threat as it were--to
+turn the priest out of doors. But he calmed himself, sat down near a
+rickety table and pretended to turn his back. And as there was also a
+child present--a fair-haired girl, eleven or twelve years old, with a
+long and gentle face and that intelligent and somewhat aged expression
+which great misery imparts to children--he called her to him, and held
+her between his knees, doubtless to keep her away from the man in the
+cassock.
+
+Pierre--whose heart was oppressed by his reception, and who realised the
+utter destitution of this family by the sight of the bare, fireless room,
+and the distressed mournfulness of its three inmates--decided all the
+same to repeat his question: "Madame, do you know an old workman named
+Laveuve in the house?"
+
+The woman--who now trembled at having admitted him, since it seemed to
+displease her man--timidly tried to arrange matters. "Laveuve, Laveuve?
+no, I don't. But Salvat, you hear? Do you know a Laveuve here?"
+
+Salvat merely shrugged his shoulders; but the little girl could not keep
+her tongue still: "I say, mamma Theodore, it's p'raps the Philosopher."
+
+"A former house-painter," continued Pierre, "an old man who is ill and
+past work."
+
+Madame Theodore was at once enlightened. "In that case it's him, it's
+him. We call him the Philosopher, a nickname folks have given him in the
+neighbourhood. But there's nothing to prevent his real name from being
+Laveuve."
+
+With one of his fists raised towards the ceiling, Salvat seemed to be
+protesting against the abomination of a world and a Providence that
+allowed old toilers to die of hunger just like broken-down beasts.
+However, he did not speak, but relapsed into the savage, heavy silence,
+the bitter meditation in which he had been plunged when the priest
+arrived. He was a journeyman engineer, and gazed obstinately at the table
+where lay his little leather tool-bag, bulging with something it
+contained--something, perhaps, which he had to take back to a work-shop.
+He might have been thinking of a long, enforced spell of idleness, of a
+vain search for any kind of work during the two previous months of that
+terrible winter. Or perhaps it was the coming bloody reprisals of the
+starvelings that occupied the fiery reverie which set his large, strange,
+vague blue eyes aglow. All at once he noticed that his daughter had taken
+up the tool-bag and was trying to open it to see what it might contain.
+At this he quivered and at last spoke, his voice kindly, yet bitter with
+sudden emotion, which made him turn pale. "Celine, you must leave that
+alone. I forbade you to touch my tools," said he; then taking the bag, he
+deposited it with great precaution against the wall behind him.
+
+"And so, madame," asked Pierre, "this man Laveuve lives on this floor?"
+
+Madame Theodore directed a timid, questioning glance at Salvat. She was
+not in favour of hustling priests when they took the trouble to call, for
+at times there was a little money to be got from them. And when she
+realised that Salvat, who had once more relapsed into his black reverie,
+left her free to act as she pleased, she at once tendered her services.
+"If Monsieur l'Abbe is agreeable, I will conduct him. It's just at the
+end of the passage. But one must know the way, for there are still some
+steps to climb."
+
+Celine, finding a pastime in this visit, escaped from her father's knees
+and likewise accompanied the priest. And Salvat remained alone in that
+den of poverty and suffering, injustice and anger, without a fire,
+without bread, haunted by his burning dream, his eyes again fixed upon
+his bag, as if there, among his tools, he possessed the wherewithal to
+heal the ailing world.
+
+It indeed proved necessary to climb a few more steps; and then, following
+Madame Theodore and Celine, Pierre found himself in a kind of narrow
+garret under the roof, a loft a few yards square, where one could not
+stand erect. There was no window, only a skylight, and as the snow still
+covered it one had to leave the door wide open in order that one might
+see. And the thaw was entering the place, the melting snow was falling
+drop by drop, and coming over the tiled floor. After long weeks of
+intense cold, dark dampness rained quivering over all. And there, lacking
+even a chair, even a plank, Laveuve lay in a corner on a little pile of
+filthy rags spread upon the bare tiles; he looked like some animal dying
+on a dung-heap.
+
+"There!" said Celine in her sing-song voice, "there he is, that's the
+Philosopher!"
+
+Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. "Yes, he
+breathes; he's sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat
+every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has
+nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw
+oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that
+a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at
+first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough
+to get a job as night watchman. But that's over, he's been turned away
+from everywhere, and, for two months now, he's been lying in this nook
+waiting to die. The landlord hasn't dared to fling him into the street as
+yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes
+bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing
+oneself, how can one give to others?"
+
+Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that
+remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had
+turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn,
+sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin
+following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over
+his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his
+toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose
+seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his
+resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn
+to death, and now only good for the knackers.
+
+"Ah! the poor fellow," muttered the shuddering priest. "And he is left to
+die of hunger, all alone, without any succour? And not a hospital, not an
+asylum has given him shelter?"
+
+"Well," resumed Madame Theodore in her sad yet resigned voice, "the
+hospitals are built for the sick, and he isn't sick, he's simply
+finishing off, with his strength at an end. Besides he isn't always easy
+to deal with. People came again only lately to put him in an asylum, but
+he won't be shut up. And he speaks coarsely to those who question him,
+not to mention that he has the reputation of liking drink and talking
+badly about the gentle-folks. But, thank Heaven, he will now soon be
+delivered."
+
+Pierre had leant forward on seeing Laveuve's eyes open, and he spoke to
+him tenderly, telling him that he had come from a friend with a little
+money to enable him to buy what he might most pressingly require. At
+first, on seeing Pierre's cassock, the old man had growled some coarse
+words; but, despite his extreme feebleness, he still retained the pert
+chaffing spirit of the Parisian artisan: "Well, then, I'll willingly
+drink a drop," he said distinctly, "and have a bit of bread with it, if
+there's the needful; for I've lost taste of both for a couple of days
+past."
+
+Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf
+and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose's money. And in the interval she told
+Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the
+Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were
+presided over by Baroness Duvillard. However, the usual regulation
+inquiries had doubtless led to such an unfavourable report that matters
+had gone no further.
+
+"Baroness Duvillard! but I know her, and will go to see her to-day!"
+exclaimed Pierre, whose heart was bleeding. "It is impossible for a man
+to be left in such circumstances any longer."
+
+Then, as Celine came back with the loaf and the wine, the three of them
+tried to make Laveuve more comfortable, raised him on his heap of rags,
+gave him to eat and to drink, and then left the remainder of the wine and
+the loaf--a large four-pound loaf--near him, recommending him to wait
+awhile before he finished the bread, as otherwise he might stifle.
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe ought to give me his address in case I should have any
+news to send him," said Madame Theodore when she again found herself at
+her door.
+
+Pierre had no card with him, and so all three went into the room. But
+Salvat was no longer alone there. He stood talking in a low voice very
+quickly, and almost mouth to mouth, with a young fellow of twenty. The
+latter, who was slim and dark, with a sprouting beard and hair cut in
+brush fashion, had bright eyes, a straight nose and thin lips set in a
+pale and slightly freckled face, betokening great intelligence. With
+stern and stubborn brow, he stood shivering in his well-worn jacket.
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe wants to leave me his address for the Philosopher's
+affair," gently explained Madame Theodore, annoyed to find another there
+with Salvat.
+
+The two men had glanced at the priest and then looked at one another,
+each with terrible mien. And they suddenly ceased speaking in the bitter
+cold which fell from the ceiling. Then, again with infinite precaution,
+Salvat went to take his tool-bag from alongside the wall.
+
+"So you are going down, you are again going to look for work?" asked
+Madame Theodore.
+
+He did not answer, but merely made an angry gesture, as if to say that he
+would no longer have anything to do with work since work for so long a
+time had not cared to have anything to do with him.
+
+"All the same," resumed the woman, "try to bring something back with you,
+for you know there's nothing. At what time will you be back?"
+
+With another gesture he seemed to answer that he would come back when he
+could, perhaps never. And tears rising, despite all his efforts, to his
+vague, blue, glowing eyes he caught hold of his daughter Celine, kissed
+her violently, distractedly, and then went off, with his bag under his
+arm, followed by his young companion.
+
+"Celine," resumed Madame Theodore, "give Monsieur l'Abbe your pencil,
+and, see, monsieur, seat yourself here, it will be better for writing."
+
+Then, when Pierre had installed himself at the table, on the chair
+previously occupied by Salvat, she went on talking, seeking to excuse her
+man for his scanty politeness: "He hasn't a bad heart, but he's had so
+many worries in life that he has become a bit cracked. It's like that
+young man whom you just saw here, Monsieur Victor Mathis. There's another
+for you, who isn't happy, a young man who was well brought up, who has a
+lot of learning, and whose mother, a widow, has only just got the
+wherewithal to buy bread. So one can understand it, can't one? It all
+upsets their heads, and they talk of blowing up everybody. For my part
+those are not my notions, but I forgive them, oh! willingly enough."
+
+Perturbed, yet interested by all the mystery and vague horror which he
+could divine around him, Pierre made no haste to write his address, but
+lingered listening, as if inviting confidence.
+
+"If you only knew, Monsieur l'Abbe, that poor Salvat was a forsaken
+child, without father or mother, and had to scour the roads and try every
+trade at first to get a living. Then afterwards he became a mechanician,
+and a very good workman, I assure you, very skilful and very painstaking.
+But he already had those ideas of his, and quarrelled with people, and
+tried to bring his mates over to his views; and so he was unable to stay
+anywhere. At last, when he was thirty, he was stupid enough to go to
+America with an inventor, who traded on him to such a point that after
+six years of it he came back ill and penniless. I must tell you that he
+had married my younger sister Leonie, and that she died before he went to
+America, leaving him little Celine, who was then only a year old. I was
+then living with my husband, Theodore Labitte, a mason; and it's not to
+brag that I say it, but however much I wore out my eyes with needlework
+he used to beat me till he left me half-dead on the floor. But he ended
+by deserting me and going off with a young woman of twenty, which, after
+all, caused me more pleasure than grief. And naturally when Salvat came
+back he sought me out and found me alone with his little Celine, whom he
+had left in my charge when he went away, and who called me mamma. And
+we've all three been living together since then--"
+
+She became somewhat embarrassed, and then, as if to show that she did not
+altogether lack some respectable family connections, she went on to say:
+"For my part I've had no luck; but I've another sister, Hortense, who's
+married to a clerk, Monsieur Chretiennot, and lives in a pretty lodging
+on the Boulevard Rochechouart. There were three of us born of my father's
+second marriage,--Hortense, who's the youngest, Leonie, who's dead, and
+myself, Pauline, the eldest. And of my father's first marriage I've still
+a brother Eugene Toussaint, who is ten years older than me and is an
+engineer like Salvat, and has been working ever since the war in the same
+establishment, the Grandidier factory, only a hundred steps away in the
+Rue Marcadet. The misfortune is that he had a stroke lately. As for me,
+my eyes are done for; I ruined them by working ten hours a day at fine
+needlework. And now I can no longer even try to mend anything without my
+eyes filling with water till I can't see at all. I've tried to find
+charwoman's work, but I can't get any; bad luck always follows us. And so
+we are in need of everything; we've nothing but black misery, two or
+three days sometimes going by without a bite, so that it's like the
+chance life of a dog that feeds on what it can find. And with these last
+two months of bitter cold to freeze us, it's sometimes made us think that
+one morning we should never wake up again. But what would you have? I've
+never been happy, I was beaten to begin with, and now I'm done for, left
+in a corner, living on, I really don't know why."
+
+Her voice had begun to tremble, her red eyes moistened, and Pierre could
+realise that she thus wept through life, a good enough woman but one who
+had no will, and was already blotted out, so to say, from existence.
+
+"Oh! I don't complain of Salvat," she went on. "He's a good fellow; he
+only dreams of everybody's happiness, and he doesn't drink, and he works
+when he can. Only it's certain that he'd work more if he didn't busy
+himself with politics. One can't discuss things with comrades, and go to
+public meetings and be at the workshop at the same time. In that he's at
+fault, that's evident. But all the same he has good reason to complain,
+for one can't imagine such misfortunes as have pursued him. Everything
+has fallen on him, everything has beaten him down. Why, a saint even
+would have gone mad, so that one can understand that a poor beggar who
+has never had any luck should get quite wild. For the last two months he
+has only met one good heart, a learned gentleman who lives up yonder on
+the height, Monsieur Guillaume Froment, who has given him a little work,
+just something to enable us to have some soup now and then."
+
+Much surprised by this mention of his brother, Pierre wished to ask
+certain questions; but a singular feeling of uneasiness, in which fear
+and discretion mingled, checked his tongue. He looked at Celine, who
+stood before him, listening in silence with her grave, delicate air; and
+Madame Theodore, seeing him smile at the child, indulged in a final
+remark: "It's just the idea of that child," said she, "that throws Salvat
+out of his wits. He adores her, and he'd kill everybody if he could, when
+he sees her go supperless to bed. She's such a good girl, she was
+learning so nicely at the Communal School! But now she hasn't even a
+shift to go there in."
+
+Pierre, who had at last written his address, slipped a five-franc piece
+into the little girl's hand, and, desirous as he was of curtailing any
+thanks, he hastily said: "You will know now where to find me if you need
+me for Laveuve. But I'm going to busy myself about him this very
+afternoon, and I really hope that he will be fetched away this evening."
+
+Madame Theodore did not listen, but poured forth all possible blessings;
+whilst Celine, thunderstruck at seeing five francs in her hand, murmured:
+"Oh! that poor papa, who has gone to hunt for money! Shall I run after
+him to tell him that we've got enough for to-day?"
+
+Then the priest, who was already in the passage, heard the woman answer:
+"Oh! he's far away if he's still walking. He'll p'raps come back right
+enough."
+
+However, as Pierre, with buzzing head and grief-stricken heart, hastily
+escaped out of that frightful house of suffering, he perceived to his
+astonishment Salvat and Victor Mathis standing erect in a corner of the
+filthy courtyard, where the stench was so pestilential. They had come
+downstairs, there to continue their interrupted colloquy. And again, they
+were talking in very low tones, and very quickly, mouth to mouth,
+absorbed in the violent thoughts which made their eyes flare. But they
+heard the priest's footsteps, recognised him, and suddenly becoming cold
+and calm, exchanged an energetic hand-shake without uttering another
+word. Victor went up towards Montmartre, whilst Salvat hesitated like a
+man who is consulting destiny. Then, as if trusting himself to stern
+chance, drawing up his thin figure, the figure of a weary, hungry toiler,
+he turned into the Rue Marcadet, and walked towards Paris, his tool-bag
+still under his arm.
+
+For an instant Pierre felt a desire to run and call to him that his
+little girl wished him to go back again. But the same feeling of
+uneasiness as before came over the priest--a commingling of discretion
+and fear, a covert conviction that nothing could stay destiny. And he
+himself was no longer calm, no longer experienced the icy, despairing
+distress of the early morning. On finding himself again in the street,
+amidst the quivering fog, he felt the fever, the glow of charity which
+the sight of such frightful wretchedness had ignited, once more within
+him. No, no! such suffering was too much; he wished to struggle still, to
+save Laveuve and restore a little joy to all those poor folk. The new
+experiment presented itself with that city of Paris which he had seen
+shrouded as with ashes, so mysterious and so perturbing beneath the
+threat of inevitable justice. And he dreamed of a huge sun bringing
+health and fruitfulness, which would make of the huge city the fertile
+field where would sprout the better world of to-morrow.
+
+
+
+II
+
+WEALTH AND WORLDLINESS
+
+THAT same morning, as was the case nearly every day, some intimates were
+expected to /dejeuner/ at the Duvillards', a few friends who more or less
+invited themselves. And on that chilly day, all thaw and fog, the regal
+mansion in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy near the Boulevard de la Madeleine
+bloomed with the rarest flowers, for flowers were the greatest passion of
+the Baroness, who transformed the lofty, sumptuous rooms, littered with
+marvels, into warm and odoriferous conservatories, whither the gloomy,
+livid light of Paris penetrated caressingly with infinite softness.
+
+The great reception rooms were on the ground-floor looking on to the
+spacious courtyard, and preceded by a little winter garden, which served
+as a vestibule where two footmen in liveries of dark green and gold were
+invariably on duty. A famous gallery of paintings, valued at millions of
+francs, occupied the whole of the northern side of the house. And the
+grand staircase, of a sumptuousness which also was famous, conducted to
+the apartments usually occupied by the family, a large red drawing-room,
+a small blue and silver drawing-room, a study whose walls were hung with
+old stamped leather, and a dining-room in pale green with English
+furniture, not to mention the various bedchambers and dressing-rooms.
+Built in the time of Louis XIV. the mansion retained an aspect of noble
+grandeur, subordinated to the epicurean tastes of the triumphant
+/bourgeoisie/, which for a century now had reigned by virtue of the
+omnipotence of money.
+
+Noon had not yet struck, and Baron Duvillard, contrary to custom, found
+himself the first in the little blue and silver /salon/. He was a man of
+sixty, tall and sturdy, with a large nose, full cheeks, broad, fleshy
+lips, and wolfish teeth, which had remained very fine. He had, however,
+become bald at an early age, and dyed the little hair that was left him.
+Moreover, since his beard had turned white, he had kept his face
+clean-shaven. His grey eyes bespoke his audacity, and in his laugh there
+was a ring of conquest, while the whole of his face expressed the fact
+that this conquest was his own, that he wielded the sovereignty of an
+unscrupulous master, who used and abused the power stolen and retained by
+his caste.
+
+He took a few steps, and then halted in front of a basket of wonderful
+orchids near the window. On the mantel-piece and table tufts of violets
+sent forth their perfume, and in the warm, deep silence which seemed to
+fall from the hangings, the Baron sat down and stretched himself in one
+of the large armchairs, upholstered in blue satin striped with silver. He
+had taken a newspaper from his pocket, and began to re-peruse an article
+it contained, whilst all around him the entire mansion proclaimed his
+immense fortune, his sovereign power, the whole history of the century
+which had made him the master. His grandfather, Jerome Duvillard, son of
+a petty advocate of Poitou, had come to Paris as a notary's clerk in
+1788, when he was eighteen; and very keen, intelligent and hungry as he
+was, he had gained the family's first three millions--at first in
+trafficking with the /emigres'/ estates when they were confiscated and
+sold as national property, and later, in contracting for supplies to the
+imperial army. His father, Gregoire Duvillard, born in 1805, and the real
+great man of the family--he who had first reigned in the Rue
+Godot-de-Mauroy, after King Louis Philippe had granted him the title of
+Baron--remained one of the recognized heroes of modern finance by reason
+of the scandalous profits which he had made in every famous thieving
+speculation of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire, such as mines,
+railroads, and the Suez Canal. And he, the present Baron, Henri by name,
+and born in 1836, had only seriously gone into business on Baron
+Gregoire's death soon after the Franco-German War. However, he had done
+so with such a rageful appetite, that in a quarter of a century he had
+again doubled the family fortune. He rotted and devoured, corrupted,
+swallowed everything that he touched; and he was also the tempter
+personified--the man who bought all consciences that were for
+sale--having fully understood the new times and its tendencies in
+presence of the democracy, which in its turn had become hungry and
+impatient. Inferior though he was both to his father and his grandfather,
+being a man of enjoyment, caring less for the work of conquest than the
+division of the spoil, he nevertheless remained a terrible fellow, a
+sleek triumpher, whose operations were all certainties, who amassed
+millions at each stroke, and treated with governments on a footing of
+equality, able as he was to place, if not France, at least a ministry in
+his pocket. In one century and three generations, royalty had become
+embodied in him: a royalty already threatened, already shaken by the
+tempest close ahead. And at times his figure grew and expanded till it
+became, as it were, an incarnation of the whole /bourgeoisie/--that
+/bourgeoisie/ which at the division of the spoils in 1789 appropriated
+everything, and has since fattened on everything at the expense of the
+masses, and refuses to restore anything whatever.
+
+The article which the Baron was re-perusing in a halfpenny newspaper
+interested him. "La Voix du Peuple" was a noisy sheet which, under the
+pretence of defending outraged justice and morality, set a fresh scandal
+circulating every morning in the hope of thereby increasing its sales.
+And that morning, in big type on its front page, this sub-title was
+displayed: "The Affair of the African Railways. Five Millions spent in
+Bribes: Two Ministers Bought, Thirty Deputies and Senators Compromised."
+Then in an article of odious violence the paper's editor, the famous
+Sagnier, announced that he possessed and intended to publish the list of
+the thirty-two members of Parliament, whose support Baron Duvillard had
+purchased at the time when the Chambers had voted the bill for the
+African Railway Lines. Quite a romantic story was mingled with all this,
+the adventures of a certain Hunter, whom the Baron had employed as his
+go-between and who had now fled. The Baron, however, re-perused each
+sentence and weighed each word of the article very calmly; and although
+he was alone he shrugged his shoulders and spoke aloud with the tranquil
+assurance of a man whose responsibility is covered and who is, moreover,
+too powerful to be molested.
+
+"The idiot," he said, "he knows even less than he pretends."
+
+Just then, however, a first guest arrived, a man of barely four and
+thirty, elegantly dressed, dark and good looking, with a delicately
+shaped nose, and curly hair and beard. As a rule, too, he had laughing
+eyes, and something giddy, flighty, bird-like in his demeanour; but that
+morning he seemed nervous, anxious even, and smiled in a scared way.
+
+"Ah! it's you, Duthil," said the Baron, rising. "Have you read this?" And
+he showed the new comer the "Voix du Peuple," which he was folding up to
+replace it in his pocket.
+
+"Why yes, I've read it. It's amazing. How can Sagnier have got hold of
+the list of names? Has there been some traitor?"
+
+The Baron looked at his companion quietly, amused by his secret anguish.
+Duthil, the son of a notary of Angouleme, almost poor and very honest,
+had been sent to Paris as deputy for that town whilst yet very young,
+thanks to the high reputation of his father; and he there led a life of
+pleasure and idleness, even as he had formerly done when a student.
+However, his pleasant bachelor's quarters in the Rue de Suresnes, and his
+success as a handsome man in the whirl of women among whom he lived, cost
+him no little money; and gaily enough, devoid as he was of any moral
+sense, he had already glided into all sorts of compromising and lowering
+actions, like a light-headed, superior man, a charming, thoughtless
+fellow, who attached no importance whatever to such trifles.
+
+"Bah!" said the Baron at last. "Has Sagnier even got a list? I doubt it,
+for there was none; Hunter wasn't so foolish as to draw one up. And then,
+too, it was merely an ordinary affair; nothing more was done than is
+always done in such matters of business."
+
+Duthil, who for the first time in his life had felt anxious, listened
+like one that needs to be reassured. "Quite so, eh?" he exclaimed.
+"That's what I thought. There isn't a cat to be whipped in the whole
+affair."
+
+He tried to laugh as usual, and no longer exactly knew how it was that he
+had received some ten thousand francs in connection with the matter,
+whether it were in the shape of a vague loan, or else under some pretext
+of publicity, puffery, or advertising, for Hunter had acted with extreme
+adroitness so as to give no offence to the susceptibilities of even the
+least virginal consciences.
+
+"No, there's not a cat to be whipped," repeated Duvillard, who decidedly
+seemed amused by the face which Duthil was pulling. "And besides, my dear
+fellow, it's well known that cats always fall on their feet. But have you
+seen Silviane?"
+
+"I just left her. I found her in a great rage with you. She learnt this
+morning that her affair of the Comedie is off."
+
+A rush of anger suddenly reddened the Baron's face. He, who could scoff
+so calmly at the threat of the African Railways scandal, lost his balance
+and felt his blood boiling directly there was any question of Silviane,
+the last, imperious passion of his sixtieth year. "What! off?" said he.
+"But at the Ministry of Fine Arts they gave me almost a positive promise
+only the day before yesterday."
+
+He referred to a stubborn caprice of Silviane d'Aulnay, who, although she
+had hitherto only reaped a success of beauty on the stage, obstinately
+sought to enter the Comedie Francaise and make her /debut/ there in the
+part of "Pauline" in Corneille's "Polyeucte," which part she had been
+studying desperately for several months past. Her idea seemed an insane
+one, and all Paris laughed at it; but the young woman, with superb
+assurance, kept herself well to the front, and imperiously demanded the
+/role/, feeling sure that she would conquer.
+
+"It was the minister who wouldn't have it," explained Duthil.
+
+The Baron was choking. "The minister, the minister! Ah! well, I will soon
+have that minister sent to the rightabout."
+
+However, he had to cease speaking, for at that moment Baroness Duvillard
+came into the little drawing-room. At forty-six years of age she was
+still very beautiful. Very fair and tall, having hitherto put on but
+little superfluous fat, and retaining perfect arms and shoulders, with
+speckless silky skin, it was only her face that was spoiling, colouring
+slightly with reddish blotches. And these blemishes were her torment, her
+hourly thought and worry. Her Jewish origin was revealed by her somewhat
+long and strangely charming face, with blue and softly voluptuous eyes.
+As indolent as an Oriental slave, disliking to have to move, walk, or
+even speak, she seemed intended for a harem life, especially as she was
+for ever tending her person. That day she was all in white, gowned in a
+white silk toilette of delicious and lustrous simplicity.
+
+Duthil complimented her, and kissed her hand with an enraptured air. "Ah!
+madame, you set a little springtide in my heart. Paris is so black and
+muddy this morning."
+
+However, a second guest entered the room, a tall and handsome man of five
+or six and thirty; and the Baron, still disturbed by his passion,
+profited by this opportunity to make his escape. He carried Duthil away
+into his study, saying, "Come here an instant, my dear fellow. I have a
+few more words to say to you about the affair in question. Monsieur de
+Quinsac will keep my wife company for a moment."
+
+The Baroness, as soon as she was alone with the new comer, who, like
+Duthil, had most respectfully kissed her hand, gave him a long, silent
+look, while her soft eyes filled with tears. Deep silence, tinged with
+some slight embarrassment, had fallen, but she ended by saying in a very
+low voice: "How happy I am, Gerard, to find myself alone with you for a
+moment. For a month past I have not had that happiness."
+
+The circumstances in which Henri Duvillard had married the younger
+daughter of Justus Steinberger, the great Jew banker, formed quite a
+story which was often recalled. The Steinbergers--after the fashion of
+the Rothschilds--were originally four brothers--Justus, residing in
+Paris, and the three others at Berlin, Vienna, and London, a circumstance
+which gave their secret association most formidable power in the
+financial markets of Europe. Justus, however, was the least wealthy of
+the four, and in Baron Gregoire Duvillard he had a redoubtable adversary
+against whom he was compelled to struggle each time that any large prey
+was in question. And it was after a terrible encounter between the pair,
+after the eager sharing of the spoils, that the crafty idea had come to
+Justus of giving his younger daughter Eve in marriage, by way of
+/douceur/, to the Baron's son, Henri. So far the latter had only been
+known as an amiable fellow, fond of horses and club life; and no doubt
+Justus's idea was that, at the death of the redoubtable Baron, who was
+already condemned by his physicians, he would be able to lay his hands on
+the rival banking-house, particularly if he only had in front of him a
+son-in-law whom it was easy to conquer. As it happened, Henri had been
+mastered by a violent passion for Eve's blond beauty, which was then
+dazzling. He wished to marry her, and his father, who knew him,
+consented, in reality greatly amused to think that Justus was making an
+execrably bad stroke of business. The enterprise became indeed disastrous
+for Justus when Henri succeeded his father and the man of prey appeared
+from beneath the man of pleasure and carved himself his own huge share in
+exploiting the unbridled appetites of the middle-class democracy, which
+had at last secured possession of power. Not only did Eve fail to devour
+Henri, who in his turn had become Baron Duvillard, the all-powerful
+banker, more and more master of the market; but it was the Baron who
+devoured Eve, and this in less than four years' time. After she had borne
+him a daughter and a son in turn, he suddenly drew away from her,
+neglected her, as if she were a mere toy that he no longer cared for. She
+was at first both surprised and distressed by the change, especially on
+learning that he was resuming his bachelor's habits, and had set his
+fickle if ardent affections elsewhere. Then, however, without any kind of
+recrimination, any display of anger, or even any particular effort to
+regain her ascendency over him, she, on her side, imitated his example.
+She could not live without love, and assuredly she had only been born to
+be beautiful, to fascinate and reap adoration. To the lover whom she
+chose when she was five and twenty she remained faithful for more than
+fifteen years, as faithful as she might have been to a husband; and when
+he died her grief was intense, it was like real widowhood. Six months
+later, however, having met Count Gerard de Quinsac she had again been
+unable to resist her imperative need of adoration, and an intrigue had
+followed.
+
+"Have you been ill, my dear Gerard?" she inquired, noticing the young
+man's embarrassment. "Are you hiding some worry from me?"
+
+She was ten years older than he was; and she clung desperately to this
+last passion of hers, revolting at the thought of growing old, and
+resolved upon every effort to keep the young man beside her.
+
+"No, I am hiding nothing, I assure you," replied the Count. "But my
+mother has had much need of me recently."
+
+She continued looking at him, however, with anxious passion, finding him
+so tall and aristocratic of mien, with his regular features and dark hair
+and moustaches which were always most carefully tended. He belonged to
+one of the oldest families of France, and resided on a ground-floor in
+the Rue St. Dominique with his widowed mother, who had been ruined by her
+adventurously inclined husband, and had at most an income of some fifteen
+thousand francs* to live upon. Gerard for his part had never done
+anything; contenting himself with his one year of obligatory military
+service, he had renounced the profession of arms in the same way as he
+had renounced that of diplomacy, the only one that offered him an opening
+of any dignity. He spent his days in that busy idleness common to all
+young men who lead "Paris life." And his mother, haughtily severe though
+she was, seemed to excuse this, as if in her opinion a man of his birth
+was bound by way of protest to keep apart from official life under a
+Republic. However, she no doubt had more intimate, more disturbing
+reasons for indulgence. She had nearly lost him when he was only seven,
+through an attack of brain fever. At eighteen he had complained of his
+heart, and the doctors had recommended that he should be treated gently
+in all respects. She knew, therefore, what a lie lurked behind his proud
+demeanour, within his lofty figure, that haughty /facade/ of his race. He
+was but dust, ever threatened with illness and collapse. In the depths of
+his seeming virility there was merely girlish /abandon/; and he was
+simply a weak, good-natured fellow, liable to every stumble. It was on
+the occasion of a visit which he had paid with his mother to the Asylum
+of the Invalids of Labour that he had first seen Eve, whom he continued
+to meet; his mother, closing her eyes to this culpable connection in a
+sphere of society which she treated with contempt, in the same way as she
+had closed them to so many other acts of folly which she had forgiven
+because she regarded them as the mere lapses of an ailing child.
+Moreover, Eve had made a conquest of Madame de Quinsac, who was very
+pious, by an action which had recently amazed society. It had been
+suddenly learnt that she had allowed Monseigneur Martha to convert her to
+the Roman Catholic faith. This thing, which she had refused to do when
+solicited by her lawful husband, she had now done in the hope of ensuring
+herself a lover's eternal affection. And all Paris was still stirred by
+the magnificence exhibited at the Madeleine, on the occasion of the
+baptism of this Jewess of five and forty, whose beauty and whose tears
+had upset every heart.
+
+  * About 3000 dollars.
+
+Gerard, on his side, was still flattered by the deep and touching
+tenderness shown to him; but weariness was coming, and he had already
+sought to break off the connection by avoiding any further assignations.
+He well understood Eve's glances and her tears, and though he was moved
+at sight of them he tried to excuse himself. "I assure you," said he, "my
+mother has kept me so busy that I could not get away." But she, without a
+word, still turned her tearful glance on him, and weak, like herself, in
+despair that he should have been left alone with her in this fashion, he
+yielded, unable to continue refusing. "Well, then," said he, "this
+afternoon at four o'clock if you are free."
+
+He had lowered his voice in speaking, but a slight rustle made him turn
+his head and start like one in fault. It was the Baroness's daughter
+Camille entering the room. She had heard nothing; but by the smile which
+the others had exchanged, by the very quiver of the air, she understood
+everything; an assignation for that very day and at the very spot which
+she suspected. Some slight embarrassment followed, an exchange of anxious
+and evil glances.
+
+Camille, at three and twenty, was a very dark young woman, short of
+stature and somewhat deformed, with her left shoulder higher than the
+right. There seemed to be nothing of her father or mother in her. Her
+case was one of those unforeseen accidents in family heredity which make
+people wonder whence they can arise. Her only pride lay in her beautiful
+black eyes and superb black hair, which, short as she was, would, said
+she, have sufficed to clothe her. But her nose was long, her face
+deviated to the left, and her chin was pointed. Her thin, witty, and
+malicious lips bespoke all the rancour and perverse anger stored in the
+heart of this uncomely creature, whom the thought of her uncomeliness
+enraged. However, the one whom she most hated in the whole world was her
+own mother, that /amorosa/ who was so little fitted to be a mother, who
+had never loved her, never paid attention to her, but had abandoned her
+to the care of servants from her very infancy. In this wise real hatred
+had grown up between the two women, mute and frigid on the one side, and
+active and passionate on the other. The daughter hated her mother because
+she found her beautiful, because she had not been created in the same
+image: beautiful with the beauty with which her mother crushed her. Day
+by day she suffered at being sought by none, at realising that the
+adoration of one and all still went to her mother. As she was amusing in
+her maliciousness, people listened to her and laughed; however, the
+glances of all the men--even and indeed especially the younger ones--soon
+reverted to her triumphant mother, who seemingly defied old age. In part
+for this reason Camille, with ferocious determination, had decided that
+she would dispossess her mother of her last lover Gerard, and marry him
+herself, conscious that such a loss would doubtless kill the Baroness.
+Thanks to her promised dowry of five millions of francs, the young woman
+did not lack suitors; but, little flattered by their advances, she was
+accustomed to say, with her malicious laugh: "Oh! of course; why for five
+millions they would take a wife from a mad-house." However, she, herself,
+had really begun to love Gerard, who, good-natured as he was, evinced
+much kindness towards this suffering young woman whom nature had treated
+so harshly. It worried him to see her forsaken by everyone, and little by
+little he yielded to the grateful tenderness which she displayed towards
+him, happy, handsome man that he was, at being regarded as a demi-god and
+having such a slave. Indeed, in his attempt to quit the mother there was
+certainly a thought of allowing the daughter to marry him, which would be
+an agreeable ending to it all, though he did not as yet acknowledge this,
+ashamed as he felt and embarrassed by his illustrious name and all the
+complications and tears which he foresaw.
+
+The silence continued. Camille with her piercing glance, as sharp as any
+knife, had told her mother that she knew the truth; and then with another
+and pain-fraught glance she had complained to Gerard. He, in order to
+re-establish equilibrium, could only think of a compliment: "Good
+morning, Camille. Ah! that havana-brown gown of yours looks nice! It's
+astonishing how well rather sombre colours suit you."
+
+Camille glanced at her mother's white robe, and then at her own dark
+gown, which scarcely allowed her neck and wrists to be seen. "Yes," she
+replied laughing, "I only look passable when I don't dress as a young
+girl."
+
+Eve, ill at ease, worried by the growth of a rivalry in which she did not
+as yet wish to believe, changed the conversation. "Isn't your brother
+there?" she asked.
+
+"Why yes, we came down together."
+
+Hyacinthe, who came in at that moment, shook hands with Gerard in a weary
+way. He was twenty, and had inherited his mother's pale blond hair, and
+her long face full of Oriental languor; while from his father he had
+derived his grey eyes and thick lips, expressive of unscrupulous
+appetites. A wretched scholar, regarding every profession with the same
+contempt, he had decided to do nothing. Spoilt by his father, he took
+some little interest in poetry and music, and lived in an extraordinary
+circle of artists, low women, madmen and bandits; boasting himself of all
+sorts of crimes and vices, professing the very worst philosophical and
+social ideas, invariably going to extremes, becoming in turn a
+Collectivist, an Individualist, an Anarchist, a Pessimist, a Symbolist,
+and what not besides; without, however, ceasing to be a Catholic, as this
+conjunction of Catholicity with something else seemed to him the supreme
+/bon ton/. In reality he was simply empty and rather a fool. In four
+generations the vigorous hungry blood of the Duvillards, after producing
+three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment
+of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was
+incapable alike of great knavery or great debauchery.
+
+Camille, who was too intelligent not to realise her brother's
+nothingness, was fond of teasing him; and looking at him as he stood
+there, tightly buttoned in his long frock coat with pleated skirt--a
+resurrection of the romantic period, which he carried to exaggeration,
+she resumed: "Mamma has been asking for you, Hyacinthe. Come and show her
+your gown. You are the one who would look nice dressed as a young girl."
+
+However, he eluded her without replying. He was covertly afraid of her,
+though they lived together in great intimacy, frankly exchanging
+confidences respecting their perverse views of life. And he directed a
+glance of disdain at the wonderful basket of orchids which seemed to him
+past the fashion, far too common nowadays. For his part he had left the
+lilies of life behind him, and reached the ranunculus, the flower of
+blood.
+
+The two last guests who were expected now arrived almost together. The
+first was the investigating magistrate Amadieu, a little man of five and
+forty, who was an intimate of the household and had been brought into
+notoriety by a recent anarchist affair. Between a pair of fair, bushy
+whiskers he displayed a flat, regular judicial face, to which he tried to
+impart an expression of keenness by wearing a single eyeglass behind
+which his glance sparkled. Very worldly, moreover, he belonged to the new
+judicial school, being a distinguished psychologist and having written a
+book in reply to the abuses of criminalist physiology. And he was also a
+man of great, tenacious ambition, fond of notoriety and ever on the
+lookout for those resounding legal affairs which bring glory. Behind him,
+at last appeared General de Bozonnet, Gerard's uncle on the maternal
+side, a tall, lean old man with a nose like an eagle's beak. Chronic
+rheumatism had recently compelled him to retire from the service. Raised
+to a colonelcy after the Franco-German War in reward for his gallant
+conduct at St. Privat, he had, in spite of his extremely monarchical
+connections, kept his sworn faith to Napoleon III. And he was excused in
+his own sphere of society for this species of military Bonapartism, on
+account of the bitterness with which he accused the Republic of having
+ruined the army. Worthy fellow that he was, extremely fond of his sister,
+Madame de Quinsac, it seemed as though he acted in accordance with some
+secret desire of hers in accepting the invitations of Baroness Duvillard
+by way of rendering Gerard's constant presence in her house more natural
+and excusable.
+
+However, the Baron and Duthil now returned from the study, laughing
+loudly in an exaggerated way, doubtless to make the others believe that
+they were quite easy in mind. And one and all passed into the large
+dining-room where a big wood fire was burning, its gay flames shining
+like a ray of springtide amid the fine mahogany furniture of English make
+laden with silver and crystal. The room, of a soft mossy green, had an
+unassuming charm in the pale light, and the table which in the centre
+displayed the richness of its covers and the immaculate whiteness of its
+linen adorned with Venetian point, seemed to have flowered miraculously
+with a wealth of large tea roses, most admirable blooms for the season,
+and of delicious perfume.
+
+The Baroness seated the General on her right, and Amadieu on her left.
+The Baron on his right placed Duthil, and on his left Gerard. Then the
+young people installed themselves at either end, Camille between Gerard
+and the General, and Hyacinthe between Duthil and Amadieu. And forthwith,
+from the moment of starting on the scrambled eggs and truffles,
+conversation began, the usual conversation of Parisian /dejeuners/, when
+every event, great or little, of the morning or the day before is passed
+in review: the truths and the falsehoods current in every social sphere,
+the financial scandal, and the political adventure of the hour, the novel
+that has just appeared, the play that has just been produced, the stories
+which should only be retailed in whispers, but which are repeated aloud.
+And beneath all the light wit which circulates, beneath all the laughter,
+which often has a false ring, each retains his or her particular worry,
+or distress of mind, at times so acute that it becomes perfect agony.
+
+With his quiet and wonted impudence, the Baron, bravely enough, was the
+first to speak of the article in the "Voix du Peuple." "I say, have you
+read Sagnier's article this morning? It's a good one; he has /verve/ you
+know, but what a dangerous lunatic he is!"
+
+This set everybody at ease, for the article would certainly have weighed
+upon the /dejeuner/ had no one mentioned it.
+
+"It's the 'Panama' dodge over again!" cried Duthil. "But no, no, we've
+had quite enough of it!"
+
+"Why," resumed the Baron, "the affair of the African Railway Lines is as
+clear as spring water! All those whom Sagnier threatens may sleep in
+peace. The truth is that it's a scheme to upset Barroux's ministry. Leave
+to interpellate will certainly be asked for this afternoon. You'll see
+what a fine uproar there'll be in the Chamber."
+
+"That libellous, scandal-seeking press," said Amadieu gravely, "is a
+dissolving agent which will bring France to ruin. We ought to have laws
+against it."
+
+The General made an angry gesture: "Laws, what's the use of them, since
+nobody has the courage to enforce them."
+
+Silence fell. With a light, discreet step the house-steward presented
+some grilled mullet. So noiseless was the service amid the cheerful
+perfumed warmth that not even the faintest clatter of crockery was heard.
+Without anyone knowing how it had come about, however, the conversation
+had suddenly changed; and somebody inquired: "So the revival of the piece
+is postponed?"
+
+"Yes," said Gerard, "I heard this morning that 'Polyeucte' wouldn't get
+its turn till April at the earliest."
+
+At this Camille, who had hitherto remained silent, watching the young
+Count and seeking to win him back, turned her glittering eyes upon her
+father and mother. It was a question of that revival in which Silviane
+was so stubbornly determined to make her /debut/. However, the Baron and
+the Baroness evinced perfect serenity, having long been acquainted with
+all that concerned each other. Moreover Eve was too much occupied with
+her own passion to think of anything else; and the Baron too busy with
+the fresh application which he intended to make in tempestuous fashion at
+the Ministry of Fine Arts, so as to wrest Silviane's engagement from
+those in office. He contented himself with saying: "How would you have
+them revive pieces at the Comedie! They have no actresses left there."
+
+"Oh, by the way," the Baroness on her side simply remarked, "yesterday,
+in that play at the Vaudeville, Delphine Vignot wore such an exquisite
+gown. She's the only one too who knows how to arrange her hair."
+
+Thereupon Duthil, in somewhat veiled language, began to relate a story
+about Delphine and a well-known senator. And then came another scandal,
+the sudden and almost suspicious death of a lady friend of the
+Duvillards'; whereupon the General, without any transition, broke in to
+relieve his bitter feelings by denouncing the idiotic manner in which the
+army was nowadays organised. Meantime the old Bordeaux glittered like
+ruby blood in the delicate crystal glasses. A truffled fillet of venison
+had just cast its somewhat sharp scent amidst the dying perfume of the
+roses, when some asparagus made its appearance, a /primeur/ which once
+had been so rare but which no longer caused any astonishment.
+
+"Nowadays we get it all through the winter," said the Baron with a
+gesture of disenchantment.
+
+"And so," asked Gerard at the same moment, "the Princess de Harn's
+/matinee/ is for this afternoon?"
+
+Camille quickly intervened. "Yes, this afternoon. Shall you go?"
+
+"No, I don't think so, I shan't be able," replied the young man in
+embarrassment.
+
+"Ah! that little Princess, she's really deranged you know," exclaimed
+Duthil. "You are aware that she calls herself a widow? But the truth, it
+seems, is that her husband, a real Prince, connected with a royal house
+and very handsome, is travelling about the world in the company of a
+singer. She with her vicious urchin-like face preferred to come and reign
+in Paris, in that mansion of the Avenue Hoche, which is certainly the
+most extraordinary Noah's ark imaginable, with its swarming of
+cosmopolitan society indulging in every extravagance!"
+
+"Be quiet, you malicious fellow," the Baroness gently interrupted. "We,
+here, are very fond of Rosemonde, who is a charming woman."
+
+"Oh! certainly," Camille again resumed. "She invited us; and we are going
+to her place by-and-by, are we not, mamma?"
+
+To avoid replying, the Baroness pretended that she did not hear, whilst
+Duthil, who seemed to be well-informed concerning the Princess, continued
+to make merry over her intended /matinee/, at which she meant to produce
+some Spanish dancing girls, whose performance was so very indecorous that
+all Paris, forewarned of the circumstance, would certainly swarm to her
+house. And he added: "You've heard that she has given up painting. Yes,
+she busies herself with chemistry. Her /salon/ is full of Anarchists
+now--and, by the way, it seemed to me that she had cast her eyes on you,
+my dear Hyacinthe."
+
+Hyacinthe had hitherto held his tongue, as if he took no interest in
+anything. "Oh! she bores me to death," he now condescended to reply. "If
+I'm going to her /matinee/ it's simply in the hope of meeting my friend
+young Lord George Eldrett, who wrote to me from London to give me an
+appointment at the Princess's. And I admit that hers is the only /salon/
+where I find somebody to talk to."
+
+"And so," asked Amadieu in an ironical way, "you have now gone over to
+Anarchism?"
+
+With his air of lofty elegance Hyacinthe imperturbably confessed his
+creed: "But it seems to me, monsieur, that in these times of universal
+baseness and ignominy, no man of any distinction can be other than an
+Anarchist."
+
+A laugh ran round the table. Hyacinthe was very much spoilt, and
+considered very entertaining. His father in particular was immensely
+amused by the notion that he of all men should have an Anarchist for a
+son. However, the General, in his rancorous moments, talked anarchically
+enough of blowing up a society which was so stupid as to let itself be
+led by half a dozen disreputable characters. And, indeed, the
+investigating magistrate, who was gradually making a specialty of
+Anarchist affairs, proved the only one who opposed the young man,
+defending threatened civilisation and giving terrifying particulars
+concerning what he called the army of devastation and massacre. The
+others, while partaking of some delicious duck's-liver /pate/, which the
+house-steward handed around, continued smiling. There was so much misery,
+said they; one must take everything into account: things would surely end
+by righting themselves. And the Baron himself declared, in a conciliatory
+manner: "It's certain that one might do something, though nobody knows
+exactly what. As for all sensible and moderate claims, oh! I agree to
+them in advance. For instance, the lot of the working classes may be
+ameliorated, charitable enterprises may be undertaken, such, for
+instance, as our Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, which we have reason
+to be proud of. But we must not be asked for impossibilities."
+
+With the dessert came a sudden spell of silence; it was as if, amidst the
+restless fluttering of the conversation, and the dizziness born of the
+copious meal, each one's worry or distress was again wringing the heart
+and setting an expression of perturbation on the countenance. The nervous
+unconscientiousness of Duthil, threatened with denunciation, was seen to
+revive; so, too, the anxious anger of the Baron, who was meditating how
+he might possibly manage to content Silviane. That woman was this sturdy,
+powerful man's taint, the secret sore which would perhaps end by eating
+him away and destroying him. But it was the frightful drama in which the
+Baroness, Camille and Gerard were concerned that flitted by most visibly
+across the faces of all three of them: that hateful rivalry of mother and
+daughter, contending for the man they loved. And, meantime, the
+silver-gilt blades of the dessert-knives were delicately peeling choice
+fruit. And there were bunches of golden grapes looking beautifully fresh,
+and a procession of sweetmeats, little cakes, an infinity of dainties,
+over which the most satiated appetites lingered complacently.
+
+Then, just as the finger-glasses were being served, a footman came and
+bent over the Baroness, who answered in an undertone, "Well, show him
+into the /salon/, I will join him there." And aloud to the others she
+added: "It's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who has called and asks most
+particularly to see me. He won't be in our way; I think that almost all
+of you know him. Oh! he's a genuine saint, and I have much sympathy for
+him."
+
+For a few minutes longer they loitered round the table, and then at last
+quitted the dining-room, which was full of the odours of viands, wines,
+fruits and roses; quite warm, too, with the heat thrown out by the big
+logs of firewood, which were falling into embers amidst the somewhat
+jumbled brightness of all the crystal and silver, and the pale, delicate
+light which fell upon the disorderly table.
+
+Pierre had remained standing in the centre of the little blue and silver
+/salon/. Seeing a tray on which the coffee and the liqueurs were in
+readiness, he regretted that he had insisted upon being received. And his
+embarrassment increased when the company came in rather noisily, with
+bright eyes and rosy cheeks. However, his charitable fervour had revived
+so ardently within him that he overcame this embarrassment, and all that
+remained to him of it was a slight feeling of discomfort at bringing the
+whole frightful morning which he had just spent amid such scenes of
+wretchedness, so much darkness and cold, so much filth and hunger, into
+this bright, warm, perfumed affluence, where the useless and the
+superfluous overflowed around those folks who seemed so gay at having
+made a delightful meal.
+
+However, the Baroness at once came forward with Gerard, for it was
+through the latter, whose mother he knew, that the priest had been
+presented to the Duvillards at the time of the famous conversion. And as
+he apologised for having called at such an inconvenient hour, the
+Baroness responded: "But you are always welcome, Monsieur l'Abbe. You
+will allow me just to attend to my guests, won't you? I will be with you
+in an instant."
+
+She thereupon returned to the table on which the tray had been placed, in
+order to serve the coffee and the liqueurs, with her daughter's
+assistance. Gerard, however, remained with Pierre; and, it so chanced,
+began to speak to him of the Asylum for the Invalids of Labour, where
+they had met one another at the recent laying of the foundation-stone of
+a new pavilion which was being erected, thanks to a handsome donation of
+100,000 francs made by Baron Duvillard. So far, the enterprise only
+comprised four pavilions out of the fourteen which it was proposed to
+erect on the vast site given by the City of Paris on the peninsula of
+Gennevilliers*; and so the subscription fund remained open, and, indeed,
+no little noise was made over this charitable enterprise, which was
+regarded as a complete and peremptory reply to the accusations of those
+evilly disposed persons who charged the satiated /bourgeoisie/ with doing
+nothing for the workers. But the truth was that a magnificent chapel,
+erected in the centre of the site, had absorbed two-thirds of the funds
+hitherto collected. Numerous lady patronesses, chosen from all the
+"worlds" of Paris--the Baroness Duvillard, the Countess de Quinsac, the
+Princess Rosemonde de Harn, and a score of others--were entrusted with
+the task of keeping the enterprise alive by dint of collections and fancy
+bazaars. But success had been chiefly obtained, thanks to the happy idea
+of ridding the ladies of all the weighty cares of organisation, by
+choosing as managing director a certain Fonsegue, who, besides being a
+deputy and editor of the "Globe" newspaper, was a prodigious promoter of
+all sorts of enterprises. And the "Globe" never paused in its propaganda,
+but answered the attacks of the revolutionaries by extolling the
+inexhaustible charity of the governing classes in such wise that, at the
+last elections, the enterprise had served as a victorious electoral
+weapon.
+
+  * This so-called peninsula lies to the northwest of Paris, and
+    is formed by the windings of the Seine.--Trans.
+
+However, Camille was walking about with a steaming cup of coffee in her
+hand: "Will you take some coffee, Monsieur l'Abbe?" she inquired.
+
+"No, thank you, mademoiselle."
+
+"A glass of Chartreuse then?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+Then everybody being served, the Baroness came back and said amiably:
+"Come, Monsieur l'Abbe, what do you desire of me?"
+
+Pierre began to speak almost in an undertone, his throat contracting and
+his heart beating with emotion. "I have come, madame, to appeal to your
+great kindness of heart. This morning, in a frightful house, in the Rue
+des Saules, behind Montmartre, I beheld a sight which utterly upset me.
+You can have no idea what an abode of misery and suffering it was; its
+inmates without fire or bread, the men reduced to idleness because there
+is no work, the mothers having no more milk for their babes, the children
+barely clad, coughing and shivering. And among all these horrors I saw
+the worst, the most abominable of all, an old workman, laid on his back
+by age, dying of hunger, huddled on a heap of rags, in a nook which a dog
+would not even accept as kennel."
+
+He tried to recount things as discreetly as possible, frightened by the
+very words he spoke, the horrors he had to relate in that sphere of
+superlative luxury and enjoyment, before those happy ones who possessed
+all the gifts of this world; for--to use a slang expression--he fully
+realised that he sang out of tune, and in most uncourteous fashion. What
+a strange idea of his to have called at the hour when one has just
+finished /dejeuner/, when the aroma of hot coffee flatters happy
+digestion. Nevertheless he went on, and even ended by raising his voice,
+yielding to the feeling of revolt which gradually stirred him, going to
+the end of his terrible narrative, naming Laveuve, insisting on the
+unjust abandonment in which the old man was left, and asking for succour
+in the name of human compassion. And the whole company approached to
+listen to him; he could see the Baron and the General, and Duthil and
+Amadieu, in front of him, sipping their coffee, in silence, without a
+gesture.
+
+"Well, madame," he concluded, "it seemed to me that one could not leave
+that old man an hour longer in such a frightful position, and that this
+very evening you would have the extreme goodness to have him admitted
+into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, which is, I think, the proper
+and only place for him."
+
+Tears had moistened Eve's beautiful eyes. She was in consternation at so
+sad a story coming to her to spoil her afternoon when she was looking
+forward to her assignation with Gerard. Weak and indolent as she was,
+lacking all initiative, too much occupied moreover with her own person,
+she had only accepted the presidency of the Committee on the condition
+that all administrative worries were to fall on Fonsegue. "Ah! Monsieur
+l'Abbe," she murmured, "you rend my heart. But I can do nothing, nothing
+at all, I assure you. Moreover, I believe that we have already inquired
+into the affair of that man Laveuve. With us, you know, there must be the
+most serious guarantees with regard to every admission. A reporter is
+chosen who has to give us full information. Wasn't it you, Monsieur
+Duthil, who was charged with this man Laveuve's affair?"
+
+The deputy was finishing a glass of Chartreuse. "Yes, it was I. That fine
+fellow played you a comedy, Monsieur l'Abbe. He isn't at all ill, and if
+you left him any money you may be sure he went down to drink it as soon
+as you were gone. For he is always drunk; and, besides that, he has the
+most hateful disposition imaginable, crying out from morning till evening
+against the /bourgeois/, and saying that if he had any strength left in
+his arms he would undertake to blow up the whole show. And, moreover, he
+won't go into the asylum; he says that it's a real prison where one's
+guarded by Beguins who force one to hear mass, a dirty convent where the
+gates are shut at nine in the evening! And there are so many of them like
+that, who rather than be succoured prefer their liberty, with cold and
+hunger and death. Well then, let the Laveuves die in the street, since
+they refuse to be with us, and be warm and eat in our asylums!"
+
+The General and Amadieu nodded their heads approvingly. But Duvillard
+showed himself more generous. "No, no, indeed! A man's a man after all,
+and should be succoured in spite of himself."
+
+Eve, however, in despair at the idea that she would be robbed of her
+afternoon, struggled and sought for reasons. "I assure you that my hands
+are altogether tied. Monsieur l'Abbe does not doubt my heart or my zeal.
+But how call I possibly assemble the Committee without a few days' delay?
+And I have particular reasons for coming to no decision, especially in an
+affair which has already been inquired into and pronounced upon, without
+the Committee's sanction." Then, all at once she found a solution: "What
+I advise you to do, Monsieur l'Abbe, is to go at once to see Monsieur
+Fonsegue, our managing director. He alone can act in an urgent case, for
+he knows that the ladies have unlimited confidence in him and approve
+everything he does."
+
+"You will find Fonsegue at the Chamber," added Duthil smiling, "only the
+sitting will be a warm one, and I doubt whether you will be able to have
+a comfortable chat with him."
+
+Pierre, whose heart had contracted yet more painfully, insisted on the
+subject no further; but at once made up his mind to see Fonsegue, and in
+any event obtain from him a promise that the wretched Laveuve should be
+admitted to the Asylum that very evening. Then he lingered in the saloon
+for a few minutes listening to Gerard, who obligingly pointed out to him
+how he might best convince the deputy, which was by alleging how bad an
+effect such a story could have, should it be brought to light by the
+revolutionary newspapers. However, the guests were beginning to take
+their leave. The General, as he went off, came to ask his nephew if he
+should see him that afternoon at his mother's, Madame de Quinsac, whose
+"day" it was: a question which the young man answered with an evasive
+gesture when he noticed that both Eve and Camille were looking at him.
+Then came the turn of Amadieu, who hurried off saying that a serious
+affair required his presence at the Palace of Justice. And Duthil soon
+followed him in order to repair to the Chamber.
+
+"I'll see you between four and five at Silviane's, eh?" said the Baron as
+he conducted him to the door. "Come and tell me what occurs at the
+Chamber in consequence of that odious article of Sagnier's. I must at all
+events know. For my part I shall go to the Ministry of Fine Arts, to
+settle that affair of the Comedie; and besides I've some calls to make,
+some contractors to see, and a big launching and advertisement affair to
+settle."
+
+"It's understood then, between four and five, at Silviane's," said the
+deputy, who went off again mastered by his vague uneasiness, his anxiety
+as to what turn that nasty affair of the African Railway Lines might
+take.
+
+And all of them had forgotten Laveuve, the miserable wretch who lay at
+death's door; and all of them were hastening away to their business or
+their passions, caught in the toils, sinking under the grindstone and
+whisked away by that rush of all Paris, whose fever bore them along,
+throwing one against another in an ardent scramble, in which the sole
+question was who should pass over the others and crush them.
+
+"And so, mamma," said Camille, who continued to scrutinise her mother and
+Gerard, "you are going to take us to the Princess's /matinee/?"
+
+"By-and-by, yes. Only I shan't be able to stay there with you. I received
+a telegram from Salmon about my corsage this morning, and I must
+absolutely go to try it on at four o'clock."
+
+By the slight trembling of her mother's voice, the girl felt certain that
+she was telling a falsehood. "Oh!" said she, "I thought you were only
+going to try it on to-morrow? In that case I suppose we are to go and
+call for you at Salmon's with the carriage on leaving the /matinee/?"
+
+"Oh! no my dear! One never knows when one will be free; and besides, if I
+have a moment, I shall call at the /modiste's/."
+
+Camille's secret rage brought almost a murderous glare to her dark eyes.
+The truth was evident. But however passionately she might desire to set
+some obstacle across her mother's path, she could not, dared not, carry
+matters any further. In vain had she attempted to implore Gerard with her
+eyes. He was standing to take his leave, and turned away his eyes.
+Pierre, who had become acquainted with many things since he had
+frequented the house, noticed how all three of them quivered, and divined
+thereby the mute and terrible drama.
+
+At this moment, however, Hyacinthe, stretched in an armchair, and
+munching an ether capsule, the only liqueur in which he indulged, raised
+his voice: "For my part, you know, I'm going to the Exposition du Lis.
+All Paris is swarming there. There's one painting in particular, 'The
+Rape of a Soul,' which it's absolutely necessary for one to have seen."
+
+"Well, but I don't refuse to drive you there," resumed the Baroness.
+"Before going to the Princess's we can look in at that exhibition."
+
+"That's it, that's it," hastily exclaimed Camille, who, though she
+harshly derided the symbolist painters as a rule, now doubtless desired
+to delay her mother. Then, forcing herself to smile, she asked: "Won't
+you risk a look-in at the Exposition du Lis with us, Monsieur Gerard?"
+
+"Well, no," replied the Count, "I want to walk. I shall go with Monsieur
+l'Abbe Froment to the Chamber."
+
+Thereupon he took leave of mother and daughter, kissing the hand of each
+in turn. It had just occurred to him that to while away his time he also
+might call for a moment at Silviane's, where, like the others, he had his
+/entrees/. On reaching the cold and solemn courtyard he said to the
+priest, "Ah! it does one good to breathe a little cool air. They keep
+their rooms too hot, and all those flowers, too, give one the headache."
+
+Pierre for his part was going off with his brain in a whirl, his hands
+feverish, his senses oppressed by all the luxury which he left behind
+him, like the dream of some glowing, perfumed paradise where only the
+elect had their abode. At the same time his reviving thirst for charity
+had become keener than ever, and without listening to the Count, who was
+speaking very affectionately of his mother, he reflected as to how he
+might obtain Laveuve's admission to the Asylum from Fonsegue. However,
+when the door of the mansion had closed behind them and they had taken a
+few steps along the street, it occurred to Pierre that a moment
+previously a sudden vision had met his gaze. Had he not seen a workman
+carrying a tool-bag, standing and waiting on the foot pavement across the
+road, gazing at that monumental door, closed upon so much fabulous
+wealth--a workman in whom he fancied he had recognised Salvat, that
+hungry fellow who had gone off that morning in search of work? At this
+thought Pierre hastily turned round. Such wretchedness in face of so much
+affluence and enjoyment made him feel anxious. But the workman, disturbed
+in his contemplation, and possibly fearing that he had been recognised,
+was going off with dragging step. And now, getting only a back view of
+him, Pierre hesitated, and ended by thinking that he must have been
+mistaken.
+
+
+
+III
+
+RANTERS AND RULERS
+
+WHEN Abbe Froment was about to enter the Palais-Bourbon he remembered
+that he had no card, and he was making up his mind that he would simply
+ask for Fonsegue, though he was not known to him, when, on reaching the
+vestibule, he perceived Mege, the Collectivist deputy, with whom he had
+become acquainted in his days of militant charity in the poverty-stricken
+Charonne district.
+
+"What, you here? You surely have not come to evangelise us?" said Mege.
+
+"No, I've come to see Monsieur Fonsegue on an urgent matter, about a poor
+fellow who cannot wait."
+
+"Fonsegue? I don't know if he has arrived. Wait a moment." And stopping a
+short, dark young fellow with a ferreting, mouse-like air, Mege said to
+him: "Massot, here's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who wants to speak to your
+governor at once."
+
+"The governor? But he isn't here. I left him at the office of the paper,
+where he'll be detained for another quarter of an hour. However, if
+Monsieur l'Abbe likes to wait he will surely see him here."
+
+Thereupon Mege ushered Pierre into the large waiting-hall, the Salle des
+Pas Perdus, which in other moments looked so vast and cold with its
+bronze Minerva and Laocoon, and its bare walls on which the pale mournful
+winter light fell from the glass doors communicating with the garden.
+Just then, however, it was crowded, and warmed, as it were, by the
+feverish agitation of the many groups of men that had gathered here and
+there, and the constant coming and going of those who hastened through
+the throng. Most of these were deputies, but there were also numerous
+journalists and inquisitive visitors. And a growing uproar prevailed:
+colloquies now in undertones, now in loud voices, exclamations and bursts
+of laughter, amidst a deal of passionate gesticulation, Mege's return
+into the tumult seemed to fan it. He was tall, apostolically thin, and
+somewhat neglectful of his person, looking already old and worn for his
+age, which was but five and forty, though his eyes still glowed with
+youth behind the glasses which never left his beak-like nose. And he had
+a warm but grating voice, and had always been known to cough, living on
+solely because he was bitterly intent on doing so in order to realise the
+dream of social re-organisation which haunted him. The son of an
+impoverished medical man of a northern town, he had come to Paris when
+very young, living there during the Empire on petty newspaper and other
+unknown work, and first making a reputation as an orator at the public
+meetings of the time. Then, after the war, having become the chief of the
+Collectivist party, thanks to his ardent faith and the extraordinary
+activity of his fighting nature, he had at last managed to enter the
+Chamber, where, brimful of information, he fought for his ideas with
+fierce determination and obstinacy, like a /doctrinaire/ who has decided
+in his own mind what the world ought to be, and who regulates in advance,
+and bit by bit, the whole dogma of Collectivism. However, since he had
+taken pay as a deputy, the outside Socialists had looked upon him as a
+mere rhetorician, an aspiring dictator who only tried to cast society in
+a new mould for the purpose of subordinating it to his personal views and
+ruling it.
+
+"You know what is going on?" he said to Pierre. "This is another nice
+affair, is it not? But what would you have? We are in mud to our very
+ears."
+
+He had formerly conceived genuine sympathy for the priest, whom he had
+found so gentle with all who suffered, and so desirous of social
+regeneration. And the priest himself had ended by taking an interest in
+this authoritarian dreamer, who was resolved to make men happy in spite
+even of themselves. He knew that he was poor, and led a retired life with
+his wife and four children, to whom he was devoted.
+
+"You can well understand that I am no ally of Sagnier's," Mege resumed.
+"But as he chose to speak out this morning and threaten to publish the
+names of all those who have taken bribes, we can't allow ourselves to
+pass as accomplices any further. It has long been said that there was
+some nasty jobbery in that suspicious affair of the African railways. And
+the worst is that two members of the present Cabinet are in question, for
+three years ago, when the Chambers dealt with Duvillard's emission,
+Barroux was at the Home Department, and Monferrand at that of Public
+Works. Now that they have come back again, Monferrand at the Home
+Department, and Barroux at that of Finance, with the Presidency of the
+Council, it isn't possible, is it, for us to do otherwise than compel
+them to enlighten us, in their own interest even, about their former
+goings-on? No, no, they can no longer keep silence, and I've announced
+that I intend to interpellate them this very day."
+
+It was the announcement of Mege's interpellation, following the terrible
+article of the "Voix du Peuple," which thus set the lobbies in an uproar.
+And Pierre remained rather scared at this big political affair falling
+into the midst of his scheme to save a wretched pauper from hunger and
+death. Thus he listened without fully understanding the explanations
+which the Socialist deputy was passionately giving him, while all around
+them the uproar increased, and bursts of laughter rang out, testifying to
+the astonishment which the others felt at seeing Mege in conversation
+with a priest.
+
+"How stupid they are!" said Mege disdainfully. "Do they think then that I
+eat a cassock for /dejeuner/ every morning? But I beg your pardon, my
+dear Monsieur Froment. Come, take a place on that seat and wait for
+Fonsegue."
+
+Then he himself plunged into all the turmoil, and Pierre realised that
+his best course was to sit down and wait quietly. His surroundings began
+to influence and interest him, and he gradually forgot Laveuve for the
+passion of the Parliamentary crisis amidst which he found himself cast.
+The frightful Panama adventure was scarcely over; he had followed the
+progress of that tragedy with the anguish of a man who every night
+expects to hear the tocsin sound the last hour of olden, agonising
+society. And now a little Panama was beginning, a fresh cracking of the
+social edifice, an affair such as had been frequent in all parliaments in
+connection with big financial questions, but one which acquired mortal
+gravity from the circumstances in which it came to the front. That story
+of the African Railway Lines, that little patch of mud, stirred up and
+exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion,
+fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for
+political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various
+"groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole
+question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by
+another. Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught
+of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring--the whole people with
+all its poverty and its sufferings!
+
+Pierre noticed that Massot, "little Massot," as he was generally called,
+had just seated himself on the bench beside him. With his lively eye and
+ready ear listening to everything and noting it, gliding everywhere with
+his ferret-like air, Massot was not there in the capacity of a gallery
+man, but had simply scented a stormy debate, and come to see if he could
+not pick up material for some occasional "copy." And this priest lost in
+the midst of the throng doubtless interested him.
+
+"Have a little patience, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he, with the amiable
+gaiety of a young gentleman who makes fun of everything. "The governor
+will certainly come, for he knows well enough that they are going to heat
+the oven here. You are not one of his constituents from La Correze, are
+you?"
+
+"No, no! I belong to Paris; I've come on account of a poor fellow whom I
+wish to get admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour."
+
+"Oh! all right. Well, I'm a child of Paris, too."
+
+Then Massot laughed. And indeed he was a child of Paris, son of a chemist
+of the St. Denis district, and an ex-dunce of the Lycee Charlemagne,
+where he had not even finished his studies. He had failed entirely, and
+at eighteen years of age had found himself cast into journalism with
+barely sufficient knowledge of orthography for that calling. And for
+twelve years now, as he often said, he had been a rolling stone wandering
+through all spheres of society, confessing some and guessing at others.
+He had seen everything, and become disgusted with everything, no longer
+believing in the existence of great men, or of truth, but living
+peacefully enough on universal malice and folly. He naturally had no
+literary ambition, in fact he professed a deliberate contempt for
+literature. Withal, he was not a fool, but wrote in accordance with no
+matter what views in no matter what newspaper, having neither conviction
+nor belief, but quietly claiming the right to say whatever he pleased to
+the public on condition that he either amused or impassioned it.
+
+"And so," said he, "you know Mege, Monsieur l'Abbe? What a study in
+character, eh? A big child, a dreamer of dreams in the skin of a terrible
+sectarian! Oh! I have had a deal of intercourse with him, I know him
+thoroughly. You are no doubt aware that he lives on with the everlasting
+conviction that he will attain to power in six months' time, and that
+between evening and morning he will have established that famous
+Collectivist community which is to succeed capitalist society, just as
+day follows night. And, by the way, as regards his interpellation to-day,
+he is convinced that in overthrowing the Barroux ministry he'll be
+hastening his own turn. His system is to use up his adversaries. How many
+times haven't I heard him making his calculations: there's such a one to
+be used up, then such a one, and then such a one, so that he himself may
+at last reign. And it's always to come off in six months at the latest.
+The misfortune is, however, that others are always springing up, and so
+his turn never comes at all."
+
+Little Massot openly made merry over it. Then, slightly lowering his
+voice, he asked: "And Sagnier, do you know him? No? Do you see that
+red-haired man with the bull's neck--the one who looks like a butcher?
+That one yonder who is talking in a little group of frayed frock-coats."
+
+Pierre at last perceived the man in question. He had broad red ears, a
+hanging under-lip, a large nose, and big, projecting dull eyes.
+
+"I know that one thoroughly, as well," continued Massot; "I was on the
+'Voix du Peuple' under him before I went on the 'Globe.' The one thing
+that nobody is exactly aware of is whence Sagnier first came. He long
+dragged out his life in the lower depths of journalism, doing nothing at
+all brilliant, but wild with ambition and appetite. Perhaps you remember
+the first hubbub he made, that rather dirty affair of a new Louis XVII.
+which he tried to launch, and which made him the extraordinary Royalist
+that he still is. Then it occurred to him to espouse the cause of the
+masses, and he made a display of vengeful Catholic socialism, attacking
+the Republic and all the abominations of the times in the name of justice
+and morality, under the pretext of curing them. He began with a series of
+sketches of financiers, a mass of dirty, uncontrolled, unproved
+tittle-tattle, which ought to have led him to the dock, but which met, as
+you know, with such wonderful success when gathered together in a volume.
+And he goes on in the same style in the 'Voix du Peuple,' which he
+himself made a success at the time of the Panama affair by dint of
+denunciation and scandal, and which to-day is like a sewer-pipe pouring
+forth all the filth of the times. And whenever the stream slackens, why,
+he invents things just to satisfy his craving for that hubbub on which
+both his pride and his pocket subsist."
+
+Little Massot spoke without bitterness; indeed, he had even begun to
+laugh again. Beneath his thoughtless ferocity he really felt some respect
+for Sagnier. "Oh! he's a bandit," he continued, "but a clever fellow all
+the same. You can't imagine how full of vanity he is. Lately it occurred
+to him to get himself acclaimed by the populace, for he pretends to be a
+kind of King of the Markets, you know. Perhaps he has ended by taking his
+fine judge-like airs in earnest, and really believes that he is saving
+the people and helping the cause of virtue. What astonishes me is his
+fertility in the arts of denunciation and scandalmongering. Never a
+morning comes but he discovers some fresh horror, and delivers fresh
+culprits over to the hatred of the masses. No! the stream of mud never
+ceases; there is an incessant, unexpected spurt of infamy, an increase of
+monstrous fancies each time that the disgusted public shows any sign of
+weariness. And, do you know, there's genius in that, Monsieur l'Abbe; for
+he is well aware that his circulation goes up as soon as he threatens to
+speak out and publish a list of traitors and bribe-takers. His sales are
+certain now for some days to come."
+
+Listening to Massot's gay, bantering voice, Pierre began to understand
+certain things, the exact meaning of which had hitherto escaped him. He
+ended by questioning the young journalist, surprised as he was that so
+many deputies should be in the lobbies when the sitting was in progress.
+Oh! the sitting indeed. The gravest matters, some bill of national
+interest, might be under discussion, yet every member fled from it at the
+sudden threat of an interpellation which might overturn the ministry. And
+the passion stirring there was the restrained anger, the growing anxiety
+of the present ministry's clients, who feared that they might have to
+give place to others; and it was also the sudden hope, the eager hunger
+of all who were waiting--the clients of the various possible ministries
+of the morrow.
+
+Massot pointed to Barroux, the head of the Cabinet, who, though he was
+out of his element in the Department of Finances, had taken it simply
+because his generally recognised integrity was calculated to reassure
+public opinion after the Panama crisis. Barroux was chatting in a corner
+with the Minister of Public Instruction, Senator Taboureau, an old
+university man with a shrinking, mournful air, who was extremely honest,
+but totally ignorant of Paris, coming as he did from some far-away
+provincial faculty. Barroux for his part was of decorative aspect, tall,
+and with a handsome, clean-shaven face, which would have looked quite
+noble had not his nose been rather too small. Although he was sixty, he
+still had a profusion of curly snow-white hair completing the somewhat
+theatrical majesty of his appearance, which he was wont to turn to
+account when in the tribune. Coming of an old Parisian family,
+well-to-do, an advocate by profession, then a Republican journalist under
+the Empire, he had reached office with Gambetta, showing himself at once
+honest and romantic, loud of speech, and somewhat stupid, but at the same
+time very brave and very upright, and still clinging with ardent faith to
+the principles of the great Revolution. However, his Jacobinism was
+getting out of fashion, he was becoming an "ancestor," as it were, one of
+the last props of the middle-class Republic, and the new comers, the
+young politicians with long teeth, were beginning to smile at him.
+Moreover, beneath the ostentation of his demeanour, and the pomp of his
+eloquence, there was a man of hesitating, sentimental nature, a good
+fellow who shed tears when re-perusing the verses of Lamartine.
+
+However, Monferrand, the minister for the Home Department, passed by and
+drew Barroux aside to whisper a few words in his ear. He, Monferrand, was
+fifty, short and fat, with a smiling, fatherly air; nevertheless a look
+of keen intelligence appeared at times on his round and somewhat common
+face fringed by a beard which was still dark. In him one divined a man of
+government, with hands which were fitted for difficult tasks, and which
+never released a prey. Formerly mayor of the town of Tulle, he came from
+La Correze, where he owned a large estate. He was certainly a force in
+motion, one whose constant rise was anxiously watched by keen observers.
+He spoke in a simple quiet way, but with extraordinary power of
+conviction. Having apparently no ambition, affecting indeed the greatest
+disinterestedness, he nevertheless harboured the most ferocious
+appetites. Sagnier had written that he was a thief and a murderer, having
+strangled two of his aunts in order to inherit their property. But even
+if he were a murderer, he was certainly not a vulgar one.
+
+Then, too, came another personage of the drama which was about to be
+performed--deputy Vignon, whose arrival agitated the various groups. The
+two ministers looked at him, whilst he, at once surrounded by his
+friends, smiled at them from a distance. He was not yet thirty-six. Slim,
+and of average height, very fair, with a fine blond beard of which he
+took great care, a Parisian by birth, having rapidly made his way in the
+government service, at one time Prefect at Bordeaux, he now represented
+youth and the future in the Chamber. He had realised that new men were
+needed in the direction of affairs in order to accomplish the more
+urgent, indispensable reforms; and very ambitious and intelligent as he
+was, knowing many things, he already had a programme, the application of
+which he was quite capable of attempting, in part at any rate. However,
+he evinced no haste, but was full of prudence and shrewdness, convinced
+that his day would dawn, strong in the fact that he was as yet
+compromised in nothing, but had all space before him. At bottom he was
+merely a first-class administrator, clear and precise in speech, and his
+programme only differed from Barroux's by the rejuvenation of its
+formulas, although the advent of a Vignon ministry in place of a Barroux
+ministry appeared an event of importance. And it was of Vignon that
+Sagnier had written that he aimed at the Presidency of the Republic, even
+should he have to march through blood to reach the Elysee Palace.
+
+"/Mon Dieu/!" Massot was explaining, "it's quite possible that Sagnier
+isn't lying this time, and that he has really found a list of names in
+some pocket-book of Hunter's that has fallen into his hands. I myself
+have long known that Hunter was Duvillard's vote-recruiter in the affair
+of the African Railways. But to understand matters one must first realise
+what his mode of proceeding was, the skill and the kind of amiable
+delicacy which he showed, which were far from the brutal corruption and
+dirty trafficking that people imagine. One must be such a man as Sagnier
+to picture a parliament as an open market, where every conscience is for
+sale and is impudently knocked down to the highest bidder. Oh! things
+happened in a very different way indeed; and they are explainable, and at
+times even excusable. Thus the article is levelled in particular against
+Barroux and Monferrand, who are designated in the clearest possible
+manner although they are not named. You are no doubt aware that at the
+time of the vote Barroux was at the Home Department and Monferrand at
+that of Public Works, and so now they are accused of having betrayed
+their trusts, the blackest of all social crimes. I don't know into what
+political combinations Barroux may have entered, but I am ready to swear
+that he put nothing in his pocket, for he is the most honest of men. As
+for Monferrand, that's another matter; he's a man to carve himself his
+share, only I should be much surprised if he had put himself in a bad
+position. He's incapable of a blunder, particularly of a stupid blunder,
+like that of taking money and leaving a receipt for it lying about."
+
+Massot paused, and with a jerk of his head called Pierre's attention to
+Duthil, who, feverish, but nevertheless smiling, stood in a group which
+had just collected around the two ministers. "There! do you see that
+young man yonder, that dark handsome fellow whose beard looks so
+triumphant?"
+
+"I know him," said Pierre.
+
+"Oh! you know Duthil. Well, he's one who most certainly took money. But
+he's a mere bird. He came to us from Angouleme to lead the pleasantest of
+lives here, and he has no more conscience, no more scruples, than the
+pretty finches of his native part, who are ever love-making. Ah! for
+Duthil, Hunter's money was like manna due to him, and he never even
+paused to think that he was dirtying his fingers. You may be quite sure
+he feels astonished that people should attach the slightest importance to
+the matter."
+
+Then Massot designated another deputy in the same group, a man of fifty
+or thereabouts, of slovenly aspect and lachrymose mien, lanky, too, like
+a maypole, and somewhat bent by the weight of his head, which was long
+and suggestive of a horse's. His scanty, straight, yellowish hair, his
+drooping moustaches, in fact the whole of his distracted countenance,
+expressed everlasting distress.
+
+"And Chaigneux, do you know him?" continued Massot, referring to the
+deputy in question. "No? Well, look at him and ask yourself if it isn't
+quite as natural that he, too, should have taken money. He came from
+Arras. He was a solicitor there. When his division elected him he let
+politics intoxicate him, and sold his practice to make his fortune in
+Paris, where he installed himself with his wife and his three daughters.
+And you can picture his bewilderment amidst those four women, terrible
+women ever busy with finery, receiving and paying visits, and running
+after marriageable men who flee away. It's ill-luck with a vengeance, the
+daily defeat of a poor devil of mediocre attainments, who imagined that
+his position as a deputy would facilitate money-making, and who is
+drowning himself in it all. And so how can Chaigneux have done otherwise
+than take money, he who is always hard up for a five-hundred-franc note!
+I admit that originally he wasn't a dishonest man. But he's become one,
+that's all."
+
+Massot was now fairly launched, and went on with his portraits, the
+series which he had, at one moment, dreamt of writing under the title of
+"Deputies for Sale." There were the simpletons who fell into the furnace,
+the men whom ambition goaded to exasperation, the low minds that yielded
+to the temptation of an open drawer, the company-promoters who grew
+intoxicated and lost ground by dint of dealing with big figures. At the
+same time, however, Massot admitted that these men were relatively few in
+number, and that black sheep were to be found in every parliament of the
+world. Then Sagnier's name cropped up again, and Massot remarked that
+only Sagnier could regard the French Chambers as mere dens of thieves.
+
+Pierre, meantime, felt most interested in the tempest which the threat of
+a ministerial crisis was stirring up before him. Not only the men like
+Duthil and Chaigneux, pale at feeling the ground tremble beneath them,
+and wondering whether they would not sleep at the Mazas prison that
+night, were gathered round Barroux and Monferrand; all the latters'
+clients were there, all who enjoyed influence or office through them, and
+who would collapse and disappear should they happen to fall. And it was
+something to see the anxious glances and the pale dread amidst all the
+whispered chatter, the bits of information and tittle-tattle which were
+carried hither and thither. Then, in a neighbouring group formed round
+Vignon, who looked very calm and smiled, were the other clients, those
+who awaited the moment to climb to the assault of power, in order that
+they, in their turn, might at last possess influence or office. Eyes
+glittered with covetousness, hopeful delight could be read in them,
+pleasant surprise at the sudden opportunity now offered. Vignon avoided
+replying to the over-direct questions of his friends, and simply
+announced that he did not intend to intervene. Evidently enough his plan
+was to let Mege interpellate and overthrow the ministry, for he did not
+fear him, and in his own estimation would afterwards simply have to stoop
+to pick up the fallen portfolios.
+
+"Ah! Monferrand now," little Massot was saying, "there's a rascal who
+trims his sails! I knew him as an anti-clerical, a devourer of priests,
+Monsieur l'Abbe, if you will allow me so to express myself; however, I
+don't say this to be agreeable to you, but I think I may tell you for
+certain that he has become reconciled to religion. At least, I have been
+told that Monseigneur Martha, who is a great converter, now seldom leaves
+him. This is calculated to please one in these new times, when science
+has become bankrupt, and religion blooms afresh with delicious mysticism
+on all sides, whether in art, literature, or society itself."
+
+Massot was jesting, according to his wont; but he spoke so amiably that
+the priest could not do otherwise than bow. However, a great stir had set
+in before them; it was announced that Mege was about to ascend the
+tribune, and thereupon all the deputies hastened into the assembly hall,
+leaving only the inquisitive visitors and a few journalists in the Salle
+des Pas Perdus.
+
+"It's astonishing that Fonsegue hasn't yet arrived," resumed Massot;
+"he's interested in what's going on. However, he's so cunning, that when
+he doesn't behave as others do, one may be sure that he has his reasons
+for it. Do you know him?" And as Pierre gave a negative answer, Massot
+went on: "Oh! he's a man of brains and real power--I speak with all
+freedom, you know, for I don't possess the bump of veneration; and, as
+for my editors, well, they're the very puppets that I know the best and
+pick to pieces with the most enjoyment. Fonsegue, also, is clearly
+designated in Sagnier's article. Moreover, he's one of Duvillard's usual
+clients. There can be no doubt that he took money, for he takes money in
+everything. Only he always protects himself, and takes it for reasons
+which may be acknowledged--as payment or commission on account of
+advertising, and so forth. And if I left him just now, looking, as it
+seemed to me, rather disturbed, and if he delays his arrival here to
+establish, as it were, a moral alibi, the truth must be that he has
+committed the first imprudent action in his life."
+
+Then Massot rattled on, telling all there was to tell about Fonsegue. He,
+too, came from the department of La Correze, and had quarrelled for life
+with Monferrand after some unknown underhand affairs. Formerly an
+advocate at Tulle, his ambition had been to conquer Paris; and he had
+really conquered it, thanks to his big morning newspaper, "Le Globe," of
+which he was both founder and director. He now resided in a luxurious
+mansion in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and no enterprise was launched
+but he carved himself a princely share in it. He had a genius for
+"business," and employed his newspaper as a weapon to enable him to reign
+over the market. But how very carefully he had behaved, what long and
+skilful patience he had shown, before attaining to the reputation of a
+really serious man, who guided authoritatively the most virtuous and
+respected of the organs of the press! Though in reality he believed
+neither in God nor in Devil, he had made this newspaper the supporter of
+order, property, and family ties; and though he had become a Conservative
+Republican, since it was to his interest to be such, he had remained
+outwardly religious, affecting a Spiritualism which reassured the
+/bourgeoisie/. And amidst all his accepted power, to which others bowed,
+he nevertheless had one hand deep in every available money-bag.
+
+"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," said Massot, "see to what journalism may lead a
+man. There you have Sagnier and Fonsegue: just compare them a bit. In
+reality they are birds of the same feather: each has a quill and uses it.
+But how different the systems and the results. Sagnier's print is really
+a sewer which rolls him along and carries him to the cesspool; while the
+other's paper is certainly an example of the best journalism one can
+have, most carefully written, with a real literary flavour, a treat for
+readers of delicate minds, and an honour to the man who directs it. But
+at the bottom, good heavens! in both cases the farce is precisely the
+same!"
+
+Massot burst out laughing, well pleased with this final thrust. Then all
+at once: "Ah! here's Fonsegue at last!" said he.
+
+Quite at his ease, and still laughing, he forthwith introduced the
+priest. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, my dear /patron/, who has been
+waiting more than twenty minutes for you--I'm just going to see what is
+happening inside. You know that Mege is interpellating the government."
+
+The new comer started slightly: "An interpellation!" said he. "All right,
+all right, I'll go to it."
+
+Pierre was looking at him. He was about fifty years of age, short of
+stature, thin and active, still looking young without a grey hair in his
+black beard. He had sparkling eyes, too, but his mouth, said to be a
+terrible one, was hidden by his moustaches. And withal he looked a
+pleasant companion, full of wit to the tip of his little pointed nose,
+the nose of a sporting dog that is ever scenting game. "What can I do for
+you, Monsieur l'Abbe?" he inquired.
+
+Then Pierre briefly presented his request, recounting his visit to
+Laveuve that morning, giving every heart-rending particular, and asking
+for the poor wretch's immediate admittance to the Asylum.
+
+"Laveuve!" said the other, "but hasn't his affair been examined? Why,
+Duthil drew up a report on it, and things appeared to us of such a nature
+that we could not vote for the man's admittance."
+
+But the priest insisted: "I assure you, monsieur, that your heart would
+have burst with compassion had you been with me this morning. It is
+revolting that an old man should be left in such frightful abandonment
+even for another hour. He must sleep at the Asylum to-night."
+
+Fonsegue began to protest. "To-night! But it's impossible, altogether
+impossible! There are all sorts of indispensable formalities to be
+observed. And besides I alone cannot take such responsibility. I haven't
+the power. I am only the manager; all that I do is to execute the orders
+of the committee of lady patronesses."
+
+"But it was precisely Baroness Duvillard who sent me to you, monsieur,
+telling me that you alone had the necessary authority to grant immediate
+admittance in an exceptional case."
+
+"Oh! it was the Baroness who sent you? Ah! that is just like her,
+incapable of coming to any decision herself, and far too desirous of her
+own quietude to accept any responsibility. Why is it that she wants me to
+have the worries? No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I certainly won't go against
+all our regulations; I won't give an order which would perhaps embroil me
+with all those ladies. You don't know them, but they become positively
+terrible directly they attend our meetings."
+
+He was growing lively, defending himself with a jocular air, whilst in
+secret he was fully determined to do nothing. However, just then Duthil
+abruptly reappeared, darting along bareheaded, hastening from lobby to
+lobby to recruit absent members, particularly those who were interested
+in the grave debate at that moment beginning. "What, Fonsegue!" he cried,
+"are you still here? Go, go to your seat at once, it's serious!" And
+thereupon he disappeared.
+
+His colleague evinced no haste, however. It was as if the suspicious
+affair which was impassioning the Chamber had no concern for him. And he
+still smiled, although a slight feverish quiver made him blink. "Excuse
+me, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said at last. "You see that my friends have need
+of me. I repeat to you that I can do absolutely nothing for your
+/protege/."
+
+But Pierre would not accept this reply as a final one. "No, no,
+monsieur," he rejoined, "go to your affairs, I will wait for you here.
+Don't come to a decision without full reflection. You are wanted, and I
+feel that your mind is not sufficiently at liberty for you to listen to
+me properly. By-and-by, when you come back and give me your full
+attention, I am sure that you will grant me what I ask."
+
+And, although Fonsegue, as he went off, repeated that he could not alter
+his decision, the priest stubbornly resolved to make him do so, and sat
+down on the bench again, prepared, if needful, to stay there till the
+evening. The Salle des Pas Perdus was now almost quite empty, and looked
+yet more frigid and mournful with its Laocoon and its Minerva, its bare
+commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between
+which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without
+even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light
+entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little
+slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the
+tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole
+heavy pile there fell but death-like silence, and a covert quiver of
+distress that had come from far away, perhaps from the entire country.
+
+It was that which now haunted Pierre's reverie. The whole ancient,
+envenomed sore spread out before his mind's eye, with its poison and
+virulence. Parliamentary rottenness had slowly increased till it had
+begun to attack society itself. Above all the low intrigues and the rush
+of personal ambition there certainly remained the loftier struggle of the
+contending principles, with history on the march, clearing the past away
+and seeking to bring more truth, justice, and happiness in the future.
+But in practice, if one only considered the horrid daily cuisine of the
+sphere, what an unbridling of egotistical appetite one beheld, what an
+absorbing passion to strangle one's neighbour and triumph oneself alone!
+Among the various groups one found but an incessant battle for power and
+the satisfactions that it gives. "Left," "Right," "Catholics,"
+"Republicans," "Socialists," the names given to the parties of twenty
+different shades, were simply labels classifying forms of the one burning
+thirst to rule and dominate. All questions could be reduced to a single
+one, that of knowing whether this man, that man, or that other man should
+hold France in his grasp, to enjoy it, and distribute its favours among
+his creatures. And the worst was that the outcome of the great
+parliamentary battles, the days and the weeks lost in setting this man in
+the place of that man, and that other man in the place of this man, was
+simply stagnation, for not one of the three men was better than his
+fellows, and there were but vague points of difference between them; in
+such wise that the new master bungled the very same work as the previous
+one had bungled, forgetful, perforce, of programmes and promises as soon
+as ever he began to reign.
+
+However, Pierre's thoughts invincibly reverted to Laveuve, whom he had
+momentarily forgotten, but who now seized hold of him again with a quiver
+as of anger and death. Ah! what could it matter to that poor old wretch,
+dying of hunger on his bed of rags, whether Mege should overthrow
+Barroux's ministry, and whether a Vignon ministry should ascend to power
+or not! At that rate, a century, two centuries, would be needed before
+there would be bread in the garrets where groan the lamed sons of labour,
+the old, broken-down beasts of burden. And behind Laveuve there appeared
+the whole army of misery, the whole multitude of the disinherited and the
+poor, who agonised and asked for justice whilst the Chamber, sitting in
+all pomp, grew furiously impassioned over the question as to whom the
+nation should belong to, as to who should devour it. Mire was flowing on
+in a broad stream, the hideous, bleeding, devouring sore displayed itself
+in all impudence, like some cancer which preys upon an organ and spreads
+to the heart. And what disgust, what nausea must such a spectacle
+inspire; and what a longing for the vengeful knife that would bring
+health and joy!
+
+Pierre could not have told for how long he had been plunged in this
+reverie, when uproar again filled the hall. People were coming back,
+gesticulating and gathering in groups. And suddenly he heard little
+Massot exclaim near him: "Well, if it isn't down it's not much better
+off. I wouldn't give four sous for its chance of surviving."
+
+He referred to the ministry, and began to recount the sitting to a fellow
+journalist who had just arrived. Mege had spoken very eloquently, with
+extraordinary fury of indignation against the rotten /bourgeoisie/, which
+rotted everything it touched; but, as usual, he had gone much too far,
+alarming the Chamber by his very violence. And so, when Barroux had
+ascended the tribune to ask for a month's adjournment of the
+interpellation, he had merely had occasion to wax indignant, in all
+sincerity be it said, full of lofty anger that such infamous campaigns
+should be carried on by a certain portion of the press. Were the shameful
+Panama scandals about to be renewed? Were the national representatives
+going to let themselves be intimidated by fresh threats of denunciation?
+It was the Republic itself which its adversaries were seeking to submerge
+beneath a flood of abominations. No, no, the hour had come for one to
+collect one's thoughts, and work in quietude without allowing those who
+hungered for scandal to disturb the public peace. And the Chamber,
+impressed by these words, fearing, too, lest the electorate should at
+last grow utterly weary of the continuous overflow of filth, had
+adjourned the interpellation to that day month. However, although Vignon
+had not personally intervened in the debate, the whole of his group had
+voted against the ministry, with the result that the latter had merely
+secured a majority of two votes--a mockery.
+
+"But in that case they will resign," said somebody to Massot.
+
+"Yes, so it's rumoured. But Barroux is very tenacious. At all events if
+they show any obstinacy they will be down before a week is over,
+particularly as Sagnier, who is quite furious, declares that he will
+publish the list of names to-morrow."
+
+Just then, indeed, Barroux and Monferrand were seen to pass, hastening
+along with thoughtful, busy mien, and followed by their anxious clients.
+It was said that the whole Cabinet was about to assemble to consider the
+position and come to a decision. And then Vignon, in his turn, reappeared
+amidst a stream of friends. He, for his part, was radiant, with a joy
+which he sought to conceal, calming his friends in his desire not to cry
+victory too soon. However, the eyes of the band glittered, like those of
+a pack of hounds when the moment draws near for the offal of the quarry
+to be distributed. And even Mege also looked triumphant. He had all but
+overthrown the ministry. That made another one that was worn out, and
+by-and-by he would wear out Vignon's, and at last govern in his turn.
+
+"The devil!" muttered little Massot, "Chaigneux and Duthil look like
+whipped dogs. And see, there's nobody who is worth the governor. Just
+look at him, how superb he is, that Fonsegue! But good-by, I must now be
+off!"
+
+Then he shook hands with his brother journalist unwilling as he was to
+remain any longer, although the sitting still continued, some bill of
+public importance again being debated before the rows of empty seats.
+
+Chaigneux, with his desolate mien, had gone to lean against the pedestal
+of the high figure of Minerva; and never before had he been more bowed
+down by his needy distress, the everlasting anguish of his ill-luck. On
+the other hand, Duthil, in spite of everything, was perorating in the
+centre of a group with an affectation of scoffing unconcern; nevertheless
+nervous twitches made his nose pucker and distorted his mouth, while the
+whole of his handsome face was becoming moist with fear. And even as
+Massot had said, there really was only Fonsegue who showed composure and
+bravery, ever the same with his restless little figure, and his eyes
+beaming with wit, though at times they were just faintly clouded by a
+shadow of uneasiness.
+
+Pierre had risen to renew his request; but Fonsegue forestalled him,
+vivaciously exclaiming: "No, no, Monsieur l'Abbe, I repeat that I cannot
+take on myself such an infraction of our rules. There was an inquiry, and
+a decision was arrived at. How would you have me over-rule it?"
+
+"Monsieur," said the priest, in a tone of deep grief, "it is a question
+of an old man who is hungry and cold, and in danger of death if he be not
+succoured."
+
+With a despairing gesture, the director of "Le Globe" seemed to take the
+very walls as witnesses of his powerlessness. No doubt he feared some
+nasty affair for his newspaper, in which he had abused the Invalids of
+Labour enterprise as an electoral weapon. Perhaps, too, the secret terror
+into which the sitting of the Chamber had just thrown him was hardening
+his heart. "I can do nothing," he repeated. "But naturally I don't ask
+better than to have my hands forced by the ladies of the Committee. You
+already have the support of the Baroness Duvillard, secure that of some
+others."
+
+Pierre, who was determined to fight on to the very end, saw in this
+suggestion a supreme chance. "I know the Countess de Quinsac," he said,
+"I can go to see her at once."
+
+"Quite so! an excellent idea, the Countess de Quinsac! Take a cab and go
+to see the Princess de Harn as well. She bestirs herself a great deal,
+and is becoming very influential. Secure the approval of these ladies, go
+back to the Baroness's at seven, get a letter from her to cover me, and
+then call on me at the office of my paper. That done, your man shall
+sleep at the Asylum at nine o'clock!"
+
+He evinced in speaking a kind of joyous good nature, as though he no
+longer doubted of success now that he ran no risk of compromising
+himself. And great hope again came back to the priest: "Ah! thank you,
+monsieur," he said; "it is a work of salvation that you will accomplish."
+
+"But you surely know that I ask nothing better. Ah! if we could only cure
+misery, prevent hunger and thirst by a mere word. However, make haste,
+you have not a minute to lose."
+
+They shook hands, and Pierre at once tried to get out of the throng.
+This, however, was no easy task, for the various groups had grown larger
+as all the anger and anguish, roused by the recent debate, ebbed back
+there amid a confused tumult. It was as when a stone, cast into a pool,
+stirs the ooze below, and causes hidden, rotting things to rise once more
+to the surface. And Pierre had to bring his elbows into play and force a
+passage athwart the throng, betwixt the shivering cowardice of some, the
+insolent audacity of others, and the smirchings which sullied the greater
+number, given the contagion which inevitably prevailed. However, he
+carried away a fresh hope, and it seemed to him that if he should save a
+life, make but one man happy that day, it would be like a first
+instalment of redemption, a sign that a little forgiveness would be
+extended to the many follies and errors of that egotistical and
+all-devouring political world.
+
+On reaching the vestibule a final incident detained him for a moment
+longer. Some commotion prevailed there following upon a quarrel between a
+man and an usher, the latter of whom had prevented the former from
+entering on finding that the admission ticket which he tendered was an
+old one, with its original date scratched out. The man, very rough at the
+outset, had then refrained from insisting, as if indeed sudden timidity
+had come upon him. And in this ill-dressed fellow Pierre was astonished
+to recognise Salvat, the journeyman engineer, whom he had seen going off
+in search of work that same morning. This time it was certainly he, tall,
+thin and ravaged, with dreamy yet flaming eyes, which set his pale
+starveling's face aglow. He no longer carried his tool-bag; his ragged
+jacket was buttoned up and distended on the left side by something that
+he carried in a pocket, doubtless some hunk of bread. And on being
+repulsed by the ushers, he walked away, taking the Concorde bridge,
+slowly, as if chancewise, like a man who knows not whither he is going.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS
+
+IN her old faded drawing-room--a Louis Seize /salon/ with grey
+woodwork--the Countess de Quinsac sat near the chimney-piece in her
+accustomed place. She was singularly like her son, with a long and noble
+face, her chin somewhat stern, but her eyes still beautiful beneath her
+fine snowy hair, which was arranged in the antiquated style of her youth.
+And whatever her haughty coldness, she knew how to be amiable, with
+perfect, kindly graciousness.
+
+Slightly waving her hand after a long silence, she resumed, addressing
+herself to the Marquis de Morigny, who sat on the other side of the
+chimney, where for long years he had always taken the same armchair. "Ah!
+you are right, my friend, Providence has left us here forgotten, in a
+most abominable epoch."
+
+"Yes, we passed by the side of happiness and missed it," the Marquis
+slowly replied, "and it was your fault, and doubtless mine as well."
+
+Smiling sadly, she stopped him with another wave of her hand. And the
+silence fell once more; not a sound from the streets reached that gloomy
+ground floor at the rear of the courtyard of an old mansion in the Rue
+St. Dominique, almost at the corner of the Rue de Bourgogne.
+
+The Marquis was an old man of seventy-five, nine years older than the
+Countess. Short and thin though he was, he none the less had a
+distinguished air, with his clean-shaven face, furrowed by deep,
+aristocratic wrinkles. He belonged to one of the most ancient families of
+France, and remained one of the last hopeless Legitimists, of very pure
+and lofty views, zealously keeping his faith to the dead monarchy amidst
+the downfall of everything. His fortune, still estimated at several
+millions of francs, remained, as it were, in a state of stagnation,
+through his refusal to invest it in any of the enterprises of the
+century. It was known that in all discretion he had loved the Countess,
+even when M. de Quinsac was alive, and had, moreover, offered marriage
+after the latter's death, at the time when the widow had sought a refuge
+on that damp ground floor with merely an income of some 15,000 francs,
+saved with great difficulty from the wreck of the family fortune. But
+she, who adored her son Gerard, then in his tenth year, and of delicate
+health, had sacrificed everything to the boy from a kind of maternal
+chasteness and a superstitious fear that she might lose him should she
+set another affection and another duty in her life. And the Marquis,
+while bowing to her decision, had continued to worship her with his whole
+soul, ever paying his court as on the first evening when he had seen her,
+still gallant and faithful after a quarter of a century had passed. There
+had never been anything between them, not even the exchange of a kiss.
+
+Seeing how sad she looked, he feared that he might have displeased her,
+and so he asked: "I should have liked to render you happy, but I didn't
+know how, and the fault can certainly only rest with me. Is Gerard giving
+you any cause for anxiety?"
+
+She shook her head, and then replied: "As long as things remain as they
+are we cannot complain of them, my friend, since we accepted them."
+
+She referred to her son's culpable connection with Baroness Duvillard.
+She had ever shown much weakness with regard to that son whom she had had
+so much trouble to rear, for she alone knew what exhaustion, what racial
+collapse was hidden behind his proud bearing. She tolerated his idleness,
+the apathetic disgust which, man of pleasure that he was, had turned him
+from the profession of diplomacy as from that of arms. How many times had
+she not repaired his acts of folly and paid his petty debts, keeping
+silent concerning them, and refusing all pecuniary help from the Marquis,
+who no longer dared offer his millions, so stubbornly intent she was on
+living upon the remnants of her own fortune. And thus she had ended by
+closing her eyes to her son's scandalous love intrigue, divining in some
+measure how things had happened, through self-abandonment and lack of
+conscience--the man weak, unable to resume possession of himself, and the
+woman holding and retaining him. The Marquis, however, strangely enough,
+had only forgiven the intrigue on the day when Eve had allowed herself to
+be converted.
+
+"You know, my friend, how good-natured Gerard is," the Countess resumed.
+"In that lie both his strength and weakness. How would you have me scold
+him when he weeps over it all with me? He will tire of that woman."
+
+M. de Morigny wagged his head. "She is still very beautiful," said he.
+"And then there's the daughter. It would be graver still if he were to
+marry her--"
+
+"But the daughter's infirm?"
+
+"Yes, and you know what would be said: A Quinsac marrying a monster for
+the sake of her millions."
+
+This was their mutual terror. They knew everything that went on at the
+Duvillards, the affectionate friendship of the uncomely Camille and the
+handsome Gerard, the seeming idyll beneath which lurked the most awful of
+dramas. And they protested with all their indignation. "Oh! that, no, no,
+never!" the Countess declared. "My son in that family, no, I will never
+consent to it."
+
+Just at that moment General de Bozonnet entered. He was much attached to
+his sister and came to keep her company on the days when she received,
+for the old circle had gradually dwindled down till now only a few
+faithful ones ventured into that grey gloomy /salon/, where one might
+have fancied oneself at thousands of leagues from present-day Paris. And
+forthwith, in order to enliven the room, he related that he had been to
+/dejeuner/ at the Duvillards, and named the guests, Gerard among them. He
+knew that he pleased his sister by going to the banker's house whence he
+brought her news, a house, too, which he cleansed in some degree by
+conferring on it the great honour of his presence. And he himself in no
+wise felt bored there, for he had long been gained over to the century
+and showed himself of a very accommodating disposition in everything that
+did not pertain to military art.
+
+"That poor little Camille worships Gerard," said he; "she was devouring
+him with her eyes at table."
+
+But M. de Morigny gravely intervened: "There lies the danger, a marriage
+would be absolutely monstrous from every point of view."
+
+The General seemed astonished: "Why, pray? She isn't beautiful, but it's
+not only the beauties who marry! And there are her millions. However, our
+dear child would only have to put them to a good use. True, there is also
+the mother; but, /mon Dieu/! such things are so common nowadays in Paris
+society."
+
+This revolted the Marquis, who made a gesture of utter disgust. What was
+the use of discussion when all collapsed? How could one answer a
+Bozonnet, the last surviving representative of such an illustrious
+family, when he reached such a point as to excuse the infamous morals
+that prevailed under the Republic; after denying his king, too, and
+serving the Empire, faithfully and passionately attaching himself to the
+fortunes and memory of Caesar? However, the Countess also became
+indignant: "Oh! what are you saying, brother? I will never authorize such
+a scandal, I swore so only just now."
+
+"Don't swear, sister," exclaimed the General; "for my part I should like
+to see our Gerard happy. That's all. And one must admit that he's not
+good for much. I can understand that he didn't go into the Army, for that
+profession is done for. But I do not so well understand why he did not
+enter the diplomatic profession, or accept some other occupation. It is
+very fine, no doubt, to run down the present times and declare that a man
+of our sphere cannot possibly do any clean work in them. But, as a matter
+of fact, it is only idle fellows who still say that. And Gerard has but
+one excuse, his lack of aptitude, will and strength."
+
+Tears had risen to the mother's eyes. She even trembled, well knowing how
+deceitful were appearances: a mere chill might carry her son off, however
+tall and strong he might look. And was he not indeed a symbol of that
+old-time aristocracy, still so lofty and proud in appearance, though at
+bottom it is but dust?
+
+"Well," continued the General, "he's thirty-six now; he's constantly
+hanging on your hands, and he must make an end of it all."
+
+However, the Countess silenced him and turned to the Marquis: "Let us put
+our confidence in God, my friend," said she. "He cannot but come to my
+help, for I have never willingly offended Him."
+
+"Never!" replied the Marquis, who in that one word set an expression of
+all his grief, all his affection and worship for that woman whom he had
+adored for so many years.
+
+But another faithful friend came in and the conversation changed. M. de
+Larombiere, Vice-President of the Appeal Court, was an old man of
+seventy-five, thin, bald and clean shaven but for a pair of little white
+whiskers. And his grey eyes, compressed mouth and square and obstinate
+chin lent an expression of great austerity to his long face. The grief of
+his life was that, being afflicted with a somewhat childish lisp, he had
+never been able to make his full merits known when a public prosecutor,
+for he esteemed himself to be a great orator. And this secret worry
+rendered him morose. In him appeared an incarnation of that old royalist
+France which sulked and only served the Republic against its heart, that
+old stern magistracy which closed itself to all evolution, to all new
+views of things and beings. Of petty "gown" nobility, originally a
+Legitimist but now supporting Orleanism, he believed himself to be the
+one man of wisdom and logic in that /salon/, where he was very proud to
+meet the Marquis.
+
+They talked of the last events; but with them political conversation was
+soon exhausted, amounting as it did to a mere bitter condemnation of men
+and occurrences, for all three were of one mind as to the abominations of
+the Republican /regime/. They themselves, however, were only ruins, the
+remnants of the old parties now all but utterly powerless. The Marquis
+for his part soared on high, yielding in nothing, ever faithful to the
+dead past; he was one of the last representatives of that lofty obstinate
+/noblesse/ which dies when it finds itself without an effort to escape
+its fate. The judge, who at least had a pretender living, relied on a
+miracle, and demonstrated the necessity for one if France were not to
+sink into the depths of misfortune and completely disappear. And as for
+the General, all that he regretted of the two Empires was their great
+wars; he left the faint hope of a Bonapartist restoration on one side to
+declare that by not contenting itself with the Imperial military system,
+and by substituting thereto obligatory service, the nation in arms, the
+Republic had killed both warfare and the country.
+
+When the Countess's one man-servant came to ask her if she would consent
+to receive Abbe Froment she seemed somewhat surprised. "What can he want
+of me? Show him in," she said.
+
+She was very pious, and having met Pierre in connection with various
+charitable enterprises, she had been touched by his zeal as well as by
+the saintly reputation which he owed to his Neuilly parishioners.
+
+He, absorbed by his fever, felt intimidated directly he crossed the
+threshold. He could at first distinguish nothing, but fancied he was
+entering some place of mourning, a shadowy spot where human forms seemed
+to melt away, and voices were never raised above a whisper. Then, on
+perceiving the persons present, he felt yet more out of his element, for
+they seemed so sad, so far removed from the world whence he had just
+come, and whither he was about to return. And when the Countess had made
+him sit down beside her in front of the chimney-piece, it was in a low
+voice that he told her the lamentable story of Laveuve, and asked her
+support to secure the man's admittance to the Asylum for the Invalids of
+Labour.
+
+"Ah! yes," said she, "that enterprise which my son wished me to belong
+to. But, Monsieur l'Abbe, I have never once attended the Committee
+meetings. So how could I intervene, having assuredly no influence
+whatever?"
+
+Again had the figures of Eve and Gerard arisen before her, for it was at
+this asylum that the pair had first met. And influenced by her sorrowful
+maternal love she was already weakening, although it was regretfully that
+she had lent her name to one of those noisy charitable enterprises, which
+people abused to further their selfish interests in a manner she
+condemned.
+
+"But, madame," Pierre insisted, "it is a question of a poor starving old
+man. I implore you to be compassionate."
+
+Although the priest had spoken in a low voice the General drew near.
+"It's for your old revolutionary that you are running about, is it not,"
+said he. "Didn't you succeed with the manager, then? The fact is that
+it's difficult to feel any pity for fellows who, if they were the
+masters, would, as they themselves say, sweep us all away."
+
+M. de Larombiere jerked his chin approvingly. For some time past he had
+been haunted by the Anarchist peril. But Pierre, distressed and
+quivering, again began to plead his cause. He spoke of all the frightful
+misery, the homes where there was no food, the women and children
+shivering with cold, and the fathers scouring muddy, wintry Paris in
+search of a bit of bread. All that he asked for was a line on a visiting
+card, a kindly word from the Countess, which he would at once carry to
+Baroness Duvillard to prevail on her to set the regulations aside. And
+his words fell one by one, tremulous with stifled tears, in that mournful
+/salon/, like sounds from afar, dying away in a dead world where there
+was no echo left.
+
+Madame de Quinsac turned towards M. de Morigny, but he seemed to take no
+interest in it all. He was gazing fixedly at the fire, with the haughty
+air of a stranger who was indifferent to the things and beings in whose
+midst an error of time compelled him to live. But feeling that the glance
+of the woman he worshipped was fixed upon him he raised his head; and
+then their eyes met for a moment with an expression of infinite
+gentleness, the mournful gentleness of their heroic love.
+
+"/Mon Dieu/!" said she, "I know your merits, Monsieur l'Abbe, and I won't
+refuse my help to one of your good works."
+
+Then she went off for a moment, and returned with a card on which she had
+written that she supported with all her heart Monsieur l'Abbe Froment in
+the steps he was taking. And he thanked her and went off delighted, as if
+he carried yet a fresh hope of salvation from that drawing-room where, as
+he retired, gloom and silence once more seemed to fall on that old lady
+and her last faithful friends gathered around the fire, last relics of a
+world that was soon to disappear.
+
+Once outside, Pierre joyfully climbed into his cab again, after giving
+the Princess de Harn's address in the Avenue Kleber. If he could also
+obtain her approval he would no longer doubt of success. However, there
+was such a crush on the Concorde bridge, that the driver had to walk his
+horse. And, on the foot-pavement, Pierre again saw Duthil, who, with a
+cigar between his lips, was smiling at the crowd, with his amiable
+bird-like heedlessness, happy as he felt at finding the pavement dry and
+the sky blue on leaving that worrying sitting of the Chamber. Seeing how
+gay and triumphant he looked, a sudden inspiration came to the priest,
+who said to himself that he ought to win over this young man, whose
+report had had such a disastrous effect. As it happened, the cab having
+been compelled to stop altogether, the deputy had just recognized him and
+was smiling at him.
+
+"Where are you going, Monsieur Duthil?" Pierre asked.
+
+"Close by, in the Champs Elysees."
+
+"I'm going that way, and, as I should much like to speak to you for a
+moment, it would be very kind of you to take a seat beside me. I will set
+you down wherever you like."
+
+"Willingly, Monsieur l'Abbe. It won't inconvenience you if I finish my
+cigar?"
+
+"Oh! not at all."
+
+The cab found its way out of the crush, crossed the Place de la Concorde
+and began to ascend the Champs Elysees. And Pierre, reflecting that he
+had very few minutes before him, at once attacked Duthil, quite ready for
+any effort to convince him. He remembered what a sortie the young deputy
+had made against Laveuve at the Baron's; and thus he was astonished to
+hear him interrupt and say quite pleasantly, enlivened as he seemed by
+the bright sun which was again beginning to shine: "Ah, yes! your old
+drunkard! So you didn't settle his business with Fonsegue? And what is it
+you want? To have him admitted to-day? Well, you know I don't oppose it?"
+
+"But there's your report."
+
+"My report, oh, my report! But questions change according to the way one
+looks at them. And if you are so anxious about your Laveuve I won't
+refuse to help you."
+
+Pierre looked at him in astonishment, at bottom extremely well pleased.
+And there was no further necessity even for him to speak.
+
+"You didn't take the matter in hand properly," continued Duthil, leaning
+forward with a confidential air. "It's the Baron who's the master at
+home, for reasons which you may divine, which you may very likely know.
+The Baroness does all that he asks without even discussing the point; and
+this morning,--instead of starting on a lot of useless visits, you only
+had to gain his support, particularly as he seemed to be very well
+disposed. And she would then have given way immediately." Duthil began to
+laugh. "And so," he continued, "do you know what I'll do? Well, I'll gain
+the Baron over to your cause. Yes, I am this moment going to a house
+where he is, where one is certain to find him every day at this time."
+Then he laughed more loudly. "And perhaps you are not ignorant of it,
+Monsieur l'Abbe. When he is there you may be certain he never gives a
+refusal. I promise you I'll make him swear that he will compel his wife
+to grant your man admission this very evening. Only it will, perhaps, be
+rather late."
+
+Then all at once, as if struck by a fresh idea, Duthil went on: "But why
+shouldn't you come with me? You secure a line from the Baron, and
+thereupon, without losing a minute, you go in search of the Baroness. Ah!
+yes, the house embarrasses you a little, I understand it. Would you like
+to see only the Baron there? You can wait for him in a little /salon/
+downstairs; I will bring him to you."
+
+This proposal made Duthil altogether merry, but Pierre, quite scared,
+hesitated at the idea of thus going to Silviane d'Aulnay's. It was hardly
+a place for him. However, to achieve his purpose, he would have descended
+into the very dwelling of the fiend, and had already done so sometimes
+with Abbe Rose, when there was hope of assuaging wretchedness. So he
+turned to Duthil and consented to accompany him.
+
+Silviane d'Aulnay's little mansion, a very luxurious one, displaying,
+too, so to say, the luxury of a temple, refined but suggestive of
+gallantry, stood in the Avenue d'Antin, near the Champs Elysees. The
+inmate of this sanctuary, where the orfrays of old dalmaticas glittered
+in the mauve reflections from the windows of stained-glass, had just
+completed her twenty-fifth year. Short and slim she was, of an adorable,
+dark beauty, and all Paris was acquainted with her delicious, virginal
+countenance of a gentle oval, her delicate nose, her little mouth, her
+candid cheeks and artless chin, above all which she wore her black hair
+in thick, heavy bands, which hid her low brow. Her notoriety was due
+precisely to her pretty air of astonishment, the infinite purity of her
+blue eyes, the whole expression of chaste innocence which she assumed
+when it so pleased her, an expression which contrasted powerfully with
+her true nature, shameless creature that she really was, of the most
+monstrous, confessed, and openly-displayed perversity; such as, in fact,
+often spring up from the rotting soil of great cities. Extraordinary
+things were related about Silviane's tastes and fancies. Some said that
+she was a door-keeper's, others a doctor's, daughter. In any case she had
+managed to acquire instruction and manners, for when occasion required
+she lacked neither wit, nor style, nor deportment. She had been rolling
+through the theatres for ten years or so, applauded for her beauty's
+sake, and she had even ended by obtaining some pretty little successes in
+such parts as those of very pure young girls or loving and persecuted
+young women. Since there had been a question, though, of her entering the
+Comedie Francaise to play the /role/ of Pauline in "Polyeucte," some
+people had waxed indignant and others had roared with laughter, so
+ridiculous did the idea appear, so outrageous for the majesty of classic
+tragedy. She, however, quiet and stubborn, wished this thing to be, was
+resolved that it should be, certain as she was that she would secure it,
+insolent like a creature to whom men had never yet been able to refuse
+anything.
+
+That day, at three o'clock, Gerard de Quinsac, not knowing how to kill
+the time pending the appointment he had given Eve in the Rue Matignon,
+had thought of calling at Silviane's, which was in the neighbourhood. She
+was an old caprice of his, and even nowadays he would sometimes linger at
+the little mansion if its pretty mistress felt bored. But he had this
+time found her in a fury; and, reclining in one of the deep armchairs of
+the /salon/ where "old gold" formed the predominant colour, he was
+listening to her complaints. She, standing in a white gown, white indeed
+from head to foot like Eve herself at the /dejeuner/, was speaking
+passionately, and fast convincing the young man, who, won over by so much
+youth and beauty, unconsciously compared her to his other flame, weary
+already of his coming assignation, and so mastered by supineness, both
+moral and physical, that he would have preferred to remain all day in the
+depths of that armchair.
+
+"You hear me, Gerard!" she at last exclaimed, "I'll have nothing whatever
+to do with him, unless he brings me my nomination."
+
+Just then Baron Duvillard came in, and forthwith she changed to ice and
+received him like some sorely offended young queen who awaits an
+explanation; whilst he, who foresaw the storm and brought moreover
+disastrous tidings, forced a smile, though very ill at ease. She was the
+stain, the blemish attaching to that man who was yet so sturdy and so
+powerful amidst the general decline of his race. And she was also the
+beginning of justice and punishment, taking all his piled-up gold from
+him by the handful, and by her cruelty avenging those who shivered and
+who starved. And it was pitiful to see that feared and flattered man,
+beneath whom states and governments trembled, here turn pale with
+anxiety, bend low in all humility, and relapse into the senile, lisping
+infancy of acute passion.
+
+"Ah! my dear friend," said he, "if you only knew how I have been rushing
+about. I had a lot of worrying business, some contractors to see, a big
+advertisement affair to settle, and I feared that I should never be able
+to come and kiss your hand."
+
+He kissed it, but she let her arm fall, coldly, indifferently, contenting
+herself with looking at him, waiting for what he might have to say to
+her, and embarrassing him to such a point that he began to perspire and
+stammer, unable to express himself. "Of course," he began, "I also
+thought of you, and went to the Fine Arts Office, where I had received a
+positive promise. Oh! they are still very much in your favour at the Fine
+Arts Office! Only, just fancy, it's that idiot of a minister, that
+Taboureau,* an old professor from the provinces who knows nothing about
+our Paris, that has expressly opposed your nomination, saying that as
+long as he is in office you shall not appear at the Comedie."
+
+  * Taboureau is previously described as Minister of Public
+    Instruction. It should be pointed out, however, that
+    although under the present Republic the Ministries of
+    Public Instruction and Fine Arts have occasionally been
+    distinct departments, at other times they have been
+    united, one minister, as in Taboureau's case, having
+    charge of both.--Trans.
+
+Erect and rigid, she spoke but two words: "And then?"
+
+"And then--well, my dear, what would you have me do? One can't after all
+overthrow a ministry to enable you to play the part of Pauline."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+He pretended to laugh, but his blood rushed to his face, and the whole of
+his sturdy figure quivered with anguish. "Come, my little Silviane," said
+he, "don't be obstinate. You can be so nice when you choose. Give up the
+idea of that /debut/. You, yourself, would risk a great deal in it, for
+what would be your worries if you were to fail? You would weep all the
+tears in your body. And besides, you can ask me for so many other things
+which I should be so happy to give you. Come now, at once, make a wish
+and I will gratify it immediately."
+
+In a frolicsome way he sought to take her hand again. But she drew back
+with an air of much dignity. "No, you hear me, my dear fellow, I will
+have nothing whatever to do with you--nothing, so long as I don't play
+Pauline."
+
+He understood her fully, and he knew her well enough to realise how
+rigorously she would treat him. Only a kind of grunt came from his
+contracted throat, though he still tried to treat the matter in a jesting
+way. "Isn't she bad-tempered to-day!" he resumed at last, turning towards
+Gerard. "What have you done to her that I find her in such a state?"
+
+But the young man, who kept very quiet for fear lest he himself might be
+bespattered in the course of the dispute, continued to stretch himself
+out in a languid way and gave no answer.
+
+But Silviane's anger burst forth. "What has he done to me? He has pitied
+me for being at the mercy of such a man as you--so egotistical, so
+insensible to the insults heaped upon me. Ought you not to be the first
+to bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to
+the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a
+defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same
+time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to
+be driven away from all respectable houses."
+
+She went on in this style, coming at last to vile words, the abominable
+words which, in moments of anger, always ended by returning to her
+innocent-looking lips. The Baron, who well knew that a syllable from him
+would only increase the foulness of the overflow, vainly turned an
+imploring glance on the Count to solicit his intervention. Gerard, with
+his keen desire for peace and quietness, often brought about a
+reconciliation, but this time he did not stir, feeling too lazy and
+sleepy to interfere. And Silviane all at once came to a finish, repeating
+her trenchant, severing words: "Well, manage as you can, secure my
+/debut/, or I'll have nothing more to do with you, nothing!"
+
+"All right! all right!" Duvillard at last murmured, sneering, but in
+despair, "we'll arrange it all."
+
+However, at that moment a servant came in to say that M. Duthil was
+downstairs and wished to speak to the Baron in the smoking-room.
+Duvillard was astonished at this, for Duthil usually came up as though
+the house were his own. Then he reflected that the deputy had doubtless
+brought him some serious news from the Chamber which he wished to impart
+to him confidentially at once. So he followed the servant, leaving Gerard
+and Silviane together.
+
+In the smoking-room, an apartment communicating with the hall by a wide
+bay, the curtain of which was drawn up, Pierre stood with his companion,
+waiting and glancing curiously around him. What particularly struck him
+was the almost religious solemnness of the entrance, the heavy hangings,
+the mystic gleams of the stained-glass, the old furniture steeped in
+chapel-like gloom amidst scattered perfumes of myrrh and incense. Duthil,
+who was still very gay, tapped a low divan with his cane and said: "She
+has a nicely-furnished house, eh? Oh! she knows how to look after her
+interests."
+
+Then the Baron came in, still quite upset and anxious. And without even
+perceiving the priest, desirous as he was of tidings, he began: "Well,
+what did they do? Is there some very bad news, then?"
+
+"Mege interpellated and applied for a declaration of urgency so as to
+overthrow Barroux. You can imagine what his speech was."
+
+"Yes, yes, against the /bourgeois/, against me, against you. It's always
+the same thing--And then?"
+
+"Then--well, urgency wasn't voted, but, in spite of a very fine defence,
+Barroux only secured a majority of two votes."
+
+"Two votes, the devil! Then he's down, and we shall have a Vignon
+ministry next week."
+
+"That's what everybody said in the lobbies."
+
+The Baron frowned, as if he were estimating what good or evil might
+result to the world from such a change. Then, with a gesture of
+displeasure, he said: "A Vignon ministry! The devil! that would hardly be
+any better. Those young democrats pretend to be virtuous, and a Vignon
+ministry wouldn't admit Silviane to the Comedie."
+
+This, at first, was his only thought in presence of the crisis which made
+the political world tremble. And so the deputy could not refrain from
+referring to his own anxiety. "Well, and we others, what is our position
+in it all?"
+
+This brought Duvillard back to the situation. With a fresh gesture, this
+time a superbly proud one, he expressed his full and impudent confidence.
+"We others, why we remain as we are; we've never been in peril, I
+imagine. Oh! I am quite at ease. Sagnier can publish his famous list if
+it amuses him to do so. If we haven't long since bought Sagnier and his
+list, it's because Barroux is a thoroughly honest man, and for my part I
+don't care to throw money out of the window--I repeat to you that we fear
+nothing."
+
+Then, as he at last recognised Abbe Froment, who had remained in the
+shade, Duthil explained what service the priest desired of him. And
+Duvillard, in his state of emotion, his heart still rent by Silviane's
+sternness, must have felt a covert hope that a good action might bring
+him luck; so he at once consented to intervene in favour of Laveuve's
+admission. Taking a card and a pencil from his pocket-book he drew near
+to the window. "Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said, "I
+shall be very happy to participate in this good work. Here, this is what
+I have written: 'My dear, please do what M. l'Abbe Froment solicits in
+favour of this unfortunate man, since our friend Fonsegue only awaits a
+word from you to take proper steps.'"
+
+At this moment through the open bay Pierre caught sight of Gerard, whom
+Silviane, calm once more, and inquisitive no doubt to know why Duthil had
+called, was escorting into the hall. And the sight of the young woman
+filled him with astonishment, so simple and gentle did she seem to him,
+full of the immaculate candour of a virgin. Never had he dreamt of a lily
+of more unobtrusive yet delicious bloom in the whole garden of innocence.
+
+"Now," continued Duvillard, "if you wish to hand this card to my wife at
+once, you must go to the Princess de Harn's, where there is a
+/matinee/--"
+
+"I was going there, Monsieur le Baron."
+
+"Very good. You will certainly find my wife there; she is to take the
+children there." Then he paused, for he too had just seen Gerard; and he
+called him: "I say, Gerard, my wife said that she was going to that
+/matinee/, didn't she? You feel sure--don't you?--that Monsieur l'Abbe
+will find her there?"
+
+Although the young man was then going to the Rue Matignon, there to wait
+for Eve, it was in the most natural manner possible that he replied: "If
+Monsieur l'Abbe makes haste, I think he will find her there, for she was
+certainly going there before trying on a corsage at Salmon's."
+
+Then he kissed Silviane's hand, and went off with the air of a handsome,
+indolent man, who knows no malice, and is even weary of pleasure.
+
+Pierre, feeling rather embarrassed, was obliged to let Duvillard
+introduce him to the mistress of the house. He bowed in silence, whilst
+she, likewise silent, returned his bow with modest reserve, the tact
+appropriate to the occasion, such as no /ingenue/, even at the Comedie,
+was then capable of. And while the Baron accompanied the priest to the
+door, she returned to the /salon/ with Duthil, who was scarcely screened
+by the door-curtain before he passed his arm round her waist.
+
+When Pierre, who at last felt confident of success, found himself, still
+in his cab, in front of the Princess de Harn's mansion in the Avenue
+Kleber, he suddenly relapsed into great embarrassment. The avenue was
+crowded with carriages brought thither by the musical /matinee/, and such
+a throng of arriving guests pressed round the entrance, decorated with a
+kind of tent with scallopings of red velvet, that he deemed the house
+unapproachable. How could he manage to get in? And how in his cassock
+could he reach the Princess, and ask for a minute's conversation with
+Baroness Duvillard? Amidst all his feverishness he had not thought of
+these difficulties. However, he was approaching the door on foot, asking
+himself how he might glide unperceived through the throng, when the sound
+of a merry voice made him turn: "What, Monsieur l'Abbe! Is it possible!
+So now I find you here!"
+
+It was little Massot who spoke. He went everywhere, witnessed ten sights
+a day,--a parliamentary sitting, a funeral, a wedding, any festive or
+mourning scene,--when he wanted a good subject for an article. "What!
+Monsieur l'Abbe," he resumed, "and so you have come to our amiable
+Princess's to see the Mauritanians dance!"
+
+He was jesting, for the so-called Mauritanians were simply six Spanish
+dancing-girls, who by the sensuality of their performance were then
+making all Paris rush to the Folies-Bergere. For drawing-room
+entertainments these girls reserved yet more indecorous dances--dances of
+such a character indeed that they would certainly not have been allowed
+in a theatre. And the /beau monde/ rushed to see them at the houses of
+the bolder lady-entertainers, the eccentric and foreign ones like the
+Princess, who in order to draw society recoiled from no "attraction."
+
+But when Pierre had explained to little Massot that he was still running
+about on the same business, the journalist obligingly offered to pilot
+him. He knew the house, obtained admittance by a back door, and brought
+Pierre along a passage into a corner of the hall, near the very entrance
+of the grand drawing-room. Lofty green plants decorated this hall, and in
+the spot selected Pierre was virtually hidden. "Don't stir, my dear
+Abbe," said Massot, "I will try to ferret out the Princess for you. And
+you shall know if Baroness Duvillard has already arrived."
+
+What surprised Pierre was that every window-shutter of the mansion was
+closed, every chink stopped up so that daylight might not enter, and that
+every room flared with electric lamps, an illumination of supernatural
+intensity. The heat was already very great, the atmosphere heavy with a
+violent perfume of flowers and /odore di femina/. And to Pierre, who felt
+both blinded and stifled, it seemed as if he were entering one of those
+luxurious, unearthly Dens of the Flesh such as the pleasure-world of
+Paris conjures from dreamland. By rising on tiptoes, as the drawing-room
+entrance was wide open, he could distinguish the backs of the women who
+were already seated, rows of necks crowned with fair or dark hair. The
+Mauritanians were doubtless executing their first dance. He did not see
+them, but he could divine the lascivious passion of the dance from the
+quiver of all those women's necks, which swayed as beneath a great gust
+of wind. Then laughter arose and a tempest of bravos, quite a tumult of
+enjoyment.
+
+"I can't put my hand on the Princess; you must wait a little," Massot
+returned to say. "I met Janzen and he promised to bring her to me. Don't
+you know Janzen?"
+
+Then, in part because his profession willed it, and in part for
+pleasure's sake, he began to gossip. The Princess was a good friend of
+his. He had described her first /soiree/ during the previous year, when
+she had made her /debut/ at that mansion on her arrival in Paris. He knew
+the real truth about her so far as it could be known. Rich? yes, perhaps
+she was, for she spent enormous sums. Married she must have been, and to
+a real prince, too; no doubt she was still married to him, in spite of
+her story of widowhood. Indeed, it seemed certain that her husband, who
+was as handsome as an archangel, was travelling about with a vocalist. As
+for having a bee in her bonnet that was beyond discussion, as clear as
+noonday. Whilst showing much intelligence, she constantly and suddenly
+shifted. Incapable of any prolonged effort, she went from one thing that
+had awakened her curiosity to another, never attaching herself anywhere.
+After ardently busying herself with painting, she had lately become
+impassioned for chemistry, and was now letting poetry master her.
+
+"And so you don't know Janzen," continued Massot. "It was he who threw
+her into chemistry, into the study of explosives especially, for, as you
+may imagine, the only interest in chemistry for her is its connection
+with Anarchism. She, I think, is really an Austrian, though one must
+always doubt anything she herself says. As for Janzen, he calls himself a
+Russian, but he's probably German. Oh! he's the most unobtrusive,
+enigmatical man in the world, without a home, perhaps without a name--a
+terrible fellow with an unknown past. I myself hold proofs which make me
+think that he took part in that frightful crime at Barcelona. At all
+events, for nearly a year now I've been meeting him in Paris, where the
+police no doubt are watching him. And nothing can rid me of the idea that
+he merely consented to become our lunatic Princess's lover in order to
+throw the detectives off the scent. He affects to live in the midst of
+/fetes/, and he has introduced to the house some extraordinary people,
+Anarchists of all nationalities and all colours--for instance, one
+Raphanel, that fat, jovial little man yonder, a Frenchman he is, and his
+companions would do well to mistrust him. Then there's a Bergaz, a
+Spaniard, I think, an obscure jobber at the Bourse, whose sensual,
+blobber-lipped mouth is so disquieting. And there are others and others,
+adventurers and bandits from the four corners of the earth! . . . Ah! the
+foreign colonies of our Parisian pleasure-world! There are a few spotless
+fine names, a few real great fortunes among them, but as for the rest,
+ah! what a herd!"
+
+Rosemonde's own drawing-room was summed up in those words: resounding
+titles, real millionaires, then, down below, the most extravagant medley
+of international imposture and turpitude. And Pierre thought of that
+internationalism, that cosmopolitanism, that flight of foreigners which,
+ever denser and denser, swooped down upon Paris. Most certainly it came
+thither to enjoy it, as to a city of adventure and delight, and it helped
+to rot it a little more. Was it then a necessary thing, that
+decomposition of the great cities which have governed the world, that
+affluxion of every passion, every desire, every gratification, that
+accumulation of reeking soil from all parts of the world, there where, in
+beauty and intelligence, blooms the flower of civilisation?
+
+However, Janzen appeared, a tall, thin fellow of about thirty, very fair
+with grey, pale, harsh eyes, and a pointed beard and flowing curly hair
+which elongated his livid, cloudy face. He spoke indifferent French in a
+low voice and without a gesture. And he declared that the Princess could
+not be found; he had looked for her everywhere. Possibly, if somebody had
+displeased her, she had shut herself up in her room and gone to bed,
+leaving her guests to amuse themselves in all freedom in whatever way
+they might choose.
+
+"Why, but here she is!" suddenly said Massot.
+
+Rosemonde was indeed there, in the vestibule, watching the door as if she
+expected somebody. Short, slight, and strange rather than pretty, with
+her delicate face, her sea-green eyes, her small quivering nose, her
+rather large and over-ruddy mouth, which was parted so that one could see
+her superb teeth, she that day wore a sky-blue gown spangled with silver;
+and she had silver bracelets on her arms and a silver circlet in her pale
+brown hair, which rained down in curls and frizzy, straggling locks as
+though waving in a perpetual breeze.
+
+"Oh! whatever you desire, Monsieur l'Abbe," she said to Pierre as soon as
+she knew his business. "If they don't take your old man in at our asylum,
+send him to me, I'll take him, I will; I will sleep him somewhere here."
+
+Still, she remained disturbed, and continually glanced towards the door.
+And on the priest asking if Baroness Duvillard had yet arrived, "Why no!"
+she cried, "and I am much surprised at it. She is to bring her son and
+daughter. Yesterday, Hyacinthe positively promised me that he would
+come."
+
+There lay her new caprice. If her passion for chemistry was giving way to
+a budding taste for decadent, symbolical verse, it was because one
+evening, whilst discussing Occultism with Hyacinthe, she had discovered
+an extraordinary beauty in him: the astral beauty of Nero's wandering
+soul! At least, said she, the signs of it were certain.
+
+And all at once she quitted Pierre: "Ah, at last!" she cried, feeling
+relieved and happy. Then she darted forward: Hyacinthe was coming in with
+his sister Camille.
+
+On the very threshold, however, he had just met the friend on whose
+account he was there, young Lord George Eldrett, a pale and languid
+stripling with the hair of a girl; and he scarcely condescended to notice
+the tender greeting of Rosemonde, for he professed to regard woman as an
+impure and degrading creature. Distressed by such coldness, she followed
+the two young men, returning in their rear into the reeking, blinding
+furnace of the drawing-room.
+
+Massot, however, had been obliging enough to stop Camille and bring her
+to Pierre, who at the first words they exchanged relapsed into despair.
+"What, mademoiselle, has not madame your mother accompanied you here?"
+
+The girl, clad according to her wont in a dark gown, this time of
+peacock-blue, was nervous, with wicked eyes and sibilant voice. And as
+she ragefully drew up her little figure, her deformity, her left shoulder
+higher than the right one, became more apparent than ever. "No," she
+rejoined, "she was unable. She had something to try on at her
+dressmaker's. We stopped too long at the Exposition du Lis, and she
+requested us to set her down at Salmon's door on our way here."
+
+It was Camille herself who had skilfully prolonged the visit to the art
+show, still hoping to prevent her mother from meeting Gerard. And her
+rage arose from the ease with which her mother had got rid of her, thanks
+to that falsehood of having something to try on.
+
+"But," ingenuously said Pierre, "if I went at once to this person Salmon,
+I might perhaps be able to send up my card."
+
+Camille gave a shrill laugh, so funny did the idea appear to her. Then
+she retorted: "Oh! who knows if you would still find her there? She had
+another pressing appointment, and is no doubt already keeping it!"
+
+"Well, then, I will wait for her here. She will surely come to fetch you,
+will she not?"
+
+"Fetch us? Oh no! since I tell you that she has other important affairs
+to attend to. The carriage will take us home alone, my brother and I."
+
+Increasing bitterness was infecting the girl's pain-fraught irony. Did he
+not understand her then, that priest who asked such naive questions which
+were like dagger-thrusts in her heart? Yet he must know, since everybody
+knew the truth.
+
+"Ah! how worried I am," Pierre resumed, so grieved indeed that tears
+almost came to his eyes. "It's still on account of that poor man about
+whom I have been busying myself since this morning. I have a line from
+your father, and Monsieur Gerard told me--" But at this point he paused
+in confusion, and amidst all his thoughtlessness of the world, absorbed
+as he was in the one passion of charity, he suddenly divined the truth.
+"Yes," he added mechanically, "I just now saw your father again with
+Monsieur de Quinsac."
+
+"I know, I know," replied Camille, with the suffering yet scoffing air of
+a girl who is ignorant of nothing. "Well, Monsieur l'Abbe, if you have a
+line from papa for mamma, you must wait till mamma has finished her
+business. You might come to the house about six o'clock, but I doubt if
+you'll find her there, as she may well be detained."
+
+While Camille thus spoke, her murderous eyes glistened, and each word she
+uttered, simple as it seemed, became instinct with ferocity, as if it
+were a knife, which she would have liked to plunge into her mother's
+breast. In all certainty she had never before hated her mother to such a
+point as this in her envy of her beauty and her happiness in being loved.
+And the irony which poured from the girl's virgin lips, before that
+simple priest, was like a flood of mire with which she sought to submerge
+her rival.
+
+Just then, however, Rosemonde came back again, feverish and flurried as
+usual. And she led Camille away: "Ah, my dear, make haste. They are
+extraordinary, delightful, intoxicating!"
+
+Janzen and little Massot also followed the Princess. All the men hastened
+from the adjoining rooms, scrambled and plunged into the /salon/ at the
+news that the Mauritanians had again begun to dance. That time it must
+have been the frantic, lascivious gallop that Paris whispered about, for
+Pierre saw the rows of necks and heads, now fair, now dark, wave and
+quiver as beneath a violent wind. With every window-shutter closed, the
+conflagration of the electric lamps turned the place into a perfect
+brazier, reeking with human effluvia. And there came a spell of rapture,
+fresh laughter and bravos, all the delight of an overflowing orgy.
+
+When Pierre again found himself on the footwalk, he remained for a moment
+bewildered, blinking, astonished to be in broad daylight once more.
+Half-past four would soon strike, but he had nearly two hours to wait
+before calling at the house in the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What should he
+do? He paid his driver; preferring to descend the Champs Elysees on foot,
+since he had some time to lose. A walk, moreover, might calm the fever
+which was burning his hands, in the passion of charity which ever since
+the morning had been mastering him more and more, in proportion as he
+encountered fresh and fresh obstacles. He now had but one pressing
+desire, to complete his good work, since success henceforth seemed
+certain. And he tried to restrain his steps and walk leisurely down the
+magnificent avenue, which had now been dried by the bright sun, and was
+enlivened by a concourse of people, while overhead the sky was again
+blue, lightly blue, as in springtime.
+
+Nearly two hours to lose while, yonder, the wretched Laveuve lay with
+life ebbing from him on his bed of rags, in his icy den. Sudden feelings
+of revolt, of well-nigh irresistible impatience ascended from Pierre's
+heart, making him quiver with desire to run off and at once find Baroness
+Duvillard so as to obtain from her the all-saving order. He felt sure
+that she was somewhere near, in one of those quiet neighbouring streets,
+and great was his perturbation, his grief-fraught anger at having to wait
+in this wise to save a human life until she should have attended to those
+affairs of hers, of which her daughter spoke with such murderous glances!
+He seemed to hear a formidable cracking, the family life of the
+/bourgeoisie/ was collapsing: the father was at a hussy's house, the
+mother with a lover, the son and daughter knew everything; the former
+gliding to idiotic perversity, the latter enraged and dreaming of
+stealing her mother's lover to make a husband of him. And meantime the
+splendid equipages descended the triumphal avenue, and the crowd with its
+luxury flowed along the sidewalks, one and all joyous and superb,
+seemingly with no idea that somewhere at the far end there was a gaping
+abyss wherein everyone of them would fall and be annihilated!
+
+When Pierre got as far as the Summer Circus he was much surprised at
+again seeing Salvat, the journeyman engineer, on one of the avenue seats.
+He must have sunk down there, overcome by weariness and hunger, after
+many a vain search. However, his jacket was still distended by something
+he carried in or under it, some bit of bread, no doubt, which he meant to
+take home with him. And leaning back, with his arms hanging listlessly,
+he was watching with dreamy eyes the play of some very little children,
+who, with the help of their wooden spades, were laboriously raising
+mounds of sand, and then destroying them by dint of kicks. As he looked
+at them his red eyelids moistened, and a very gentle smile appeared on
+his poor discoloured lips. This time Pierre, penetrated by disquietude,
+wished to approach and question him. But Salvat distrustfully rose and
+went off towards the Circus, where a concert was drawing to a close; and
+he prowled around the entrance of that festive edifice in which two
+thousand happy people were heaped up together listening to music.
+
+
+
+V
+
+FROM RELIGION TO ANARCHY
+
+AS Pierre was reaching the Place de la Concorde he suddenly remembered
+the appointment which Abbe Rose had given him for five o'clock at the
+Madeleine, and which he was forgetting in the feverishness born of his
+repeated steps to save Laveuve. And at thought of it he hastened on, well
+pleased at having this appointment to occupy and keep him patient.
+
+When he entered the church he was surprised to find it so dark. There
+were only a few candles burning, huge shadows were flooding the nave, and
+amidst the semi-obscurity a very loud, clear voice spoke on with a
+ceaseless streaming of words. All that one could at first distinguish of
+the numerous congregation was a pale, vague mass of heads, motionless
+with extreme attention. In the pulpit stood Monseigneur Martha, finishing
+his third address on the New Spirit. The two former ones had re-echoed
+far and wide, and so what is called "all Paris" was there--women of
+society, politicians, and writers, who were captivated by the speaker's
+artistic oratory, his warm, skilful language, and his broad, easy
+gestures, worthy of a great actor.
+
+Pierre did not wish to disturb the solemn attention, the quivering
+silence above which the prelate's voice alone rang out. Accordingly he
+resolved to wait before seeking Abbe Rose, and remained standing near a
+pillar. A parting gleam of daylight fell obliquely on Monseigneur Martha,
+who looked tall and sturdy in his white surplice, and scarcely showed a
+grey hair, although he was more than fifty. He had handsome features:
+black, keen eyes, a commanding nose, a mouth and chin of the greatest
+firmness of contour. What more particularly struck one, however, what
+gained the heart of every listener, was the expression of extreme
+amiability and anxious sympathy which ever softened the imperious
+haughtiness of the prelate's face.
+
+Pierre had formerly known him as Cure, or parish priest, of Ste.
+Clotilde. He was doubtless of Italian origin, but he had been born in
+Paris, and had quitted the seminary of St. Sulpice with the best possible
+record. Very intelligent and very ambitious, he had evinced an activity
+which even made his superiors anxious. Then, on being appointed Bishop of
+Persepolis, he had disappeared, gone to Rome, where he had spent five
+years engaged in work of which very little was known. However, since his
+return he had been astonishing Paris by his brilliant propaganda, busying
+himself with the most varied affairs, and becoming much appreciated and
+very powerful at the archiepiscopal residence. He devoted himself in
+particular, and with wonderful results, to the task of increasing the
+subscriptions for the completion of the basilica of the Sacred Heart. He
+recoiled from nothing, neither from journeys, nor lectures, nor
+collections, nor applications to Government, nor even endeavours among
+Israelites and Freemasons. And at last, again enlarging his sphere of
+action, he had undertaken to reconcile Science with Catholicism, and to
+bring all Christian France to the Republic, on all sides expounding the
+policy of Pope Leo XIII., in order that the Church might finally triumph.
+
+However, in spite of the advances of this influential and amiable man,
+Pierre scarcely liked him. He only felt grateful to him for one thing,
+the appointment of good Abbe Rose as curate at St. Pierre de Montmartre,
+which appointment he had secured for him no doubt in order to prevent
+such a scandal as the punishment of an old priest for showing himself too
+charitable. On thus finding and hearing the prelate speak in that
+renowned pulpit of the Madeleine, still and ever pursuing his work of
+conquest, Pierre remembered how he had seen him at the Duvillards' during
+the previous spring, when, with his usual /maestria/, he had achieved his
+greatest triumph--the conversion of Eve to Catholicism. That church, too,
+had witnessed her baptism, a wonderfully pompous ceremony, a perfect gala
+offered to the public which figures in all the great events of Parisian
+life. Gerard had knelt down, moved to tears, whilst the Baron triumphed
+like a good-natured husband who was happy to find religion establishing
+perfect harmony in his household. It was related among the spectators
+that Eve's family, and particularly old Justus Steinberger, her father,
+was not in reality much displeased by the affair. The old man sneeringly
+remarked, indeed, that he knew his daughter well enough to wish her to
+belong to his worst enemy. In the banking business there is a class of
+security which one is pleased to see discounted by one's rivals. With the
+stubborn hope of triumph peculiar to his race, Justus, consoling himself
+for the failure of his first scheme, doubtless considered that Eve would
+prove a powerful dissolving agent in the Christian family which she had
+entered, and thus help to make all wealth and power fall into the hands
+of the Jews.
+
+However, Pierre's vision faded. Monseigneur Martha's voice was rising
+with increase of volume, celebrating, amidst the quivering of the
+congregation, the benefits that would accrue from the New Spirit, which
+was at last about to pacify France and restore her to her due rank and
+power. Were there not certain signs of this resurrection on every hand?
+The New Spirit was the revival of the Ideal, the protest of the soul
+against degrading materialism, the triumph of spirituality over filthy
+literature; and it was also Science accepted, but set in its proper
+place, reconciled with Faith, since it no longer pretended to encroach on
+the latter's sacred domain; and it was further the Democracy welcomed in
+fatherly fashion, the Republic legitimated, recognised in her turn as
+Eldest Daughter of the Church. A breath of poetry passed by. The Church
+opened her heart to all her children, there would henceforth be but
+concord and delight if the masses, obedient to the New Spirit, would give
+themselves to the Master of love as they had given themselves to their
+kings, recognising that the Divinity was the one unique power, absolute
+sovereign of both body and soul.
+
+Pierre was now listening attentively, wondering where it was that he had
+previously heard almost identical words. And suddenly he remembered; and
+could fancy that he was again at Rome, listening to the last words of
+Monsignor Nani, the Assessor of the Holy Office. Here, again, he found
+the dream of a democratic Pope, ceasing to support the compromised
+monarchies, and seeking to subdue the masses. Since Caesar was down, or
+nearly so, might not the Pope realise the ancient ambition of his
+forerunners and become both emperor and pontiff, the sovereign, universal
+divinity on earth? This, too, was the dream in which Pierre himself, with
+apostolic naivete, had indulged when writing his book, "New Rome": a
+dream from which the sight of the real Rome had so roughly roused him. At
+bottom it was merely a policy of hypocritical falsehood, the priestly
+policy which relies on time, and is ever tenacious, carrying on the work
+of conquest with extraordinary suppleness, resolved to profit by
+everything. And what an evolution it was, the Church of Rome making
+advances to Science, to the Democracy, to the Republican /regimes/,
+convinced that it would be able to devour them if only it were allowed
+the time! Ah! yes, the New Spirit was simply the Old Spirit of
+Domination, incessantly reviving and hungering to conquer and possess the
+world.
+
+Pierre thought that he recognised among the congregation certain deputies
+whom he had seen at the Chamber. Wasn't that tall gentleman with the fair
+beard, who listened so devoutly, one of Monferrand's creatures? It was
+said that Monferrand, once a devourer of priests, was now smilingly
+coquetting with the clergy. Quite an underhand evolution was beginning in
+the sacristies, orders from Rome flitted hither and thither; it was a
+question of accepting the new form of government, and absorbing it by
+dint of invasion. France was still the Eldest Daughter of the Church, the
+only great nation which had sufficient health and strength to place the
+Pope in possession of his temporal power once more. So France must be
+won; it was well worth one's while to espouse her, even if she were
+Republican. In the eager struggle of ambition the bishop made use of the
+minister, who thought it to his interest to lean upon the bishop. But
+which of the two would end by devouring the other? And to what a /role/
+had religion sunk: an electoral weapon, an element in a parliamentary
+majority, a decisive, secret reason for obtaining or retaining a
+ministerial portfolio! Of divine charity, the basis of religion, there
+was no thought, and Pierre's heart filled with bitterness as he
+remembered the recent death of Cardinal Bergerot, the last of the great
+saints and pure minds of the French episcopacy, among which there now
+seemed to be merely a set of intriguers and fools.
+
+However, the address was drawing to a close. In a glowing peroration,
+which evoked the basilica of the Sacred Heart dominating Paris with the
+saving symbol of the Cross from the sacred Mount of the Martyrs,*
+Monseigneur Martha showed that great city of Paris Christian once more
+and master of the world, thanks to the moral omnipotence conferred upon
+it by the divine breath of the New Spirit. Unable to applaud, the
+congregation gave utterance to a murmur of approving rapture, delighted
+as it was with this miraculous finish which reassured both pocket and
+conscience. Then Monseigneur Martha quitted the pulpit with a noble step,
+whilst a loud noise of chairs broke upon the dark peacefulness of the
+church, where the few lighted candles glittered like the first stars in
+the evening sky. A long stream of men, vague, whispering shadows, glided
+away. The women alone remained, praying on their knees.
+
+  * Montmartre.
+
+Pierre, still in the same spot, was rising on tip-toes, looking for Abbe
+Rose, when a hand touched him. It was that of the old priest, who had
+seen him from a distance. "I was yonder near the pulpit," said he, "and I
+saw you plainly, my dear child. Only I preferred to wait so as to disturb
+nobody. What a beautiful address dear Monseigneur delivered!"
+
+He seemed, indeed, much moved. But there was deep sadness about his
+kindly mouth and clear childlike eyes, whose smile as a rule illumined
+his good, round white face. "I was afraid you might go off without seeing
+me," he resumed, "for I have something to tell you. You know that poor
+old man to whom I sent you this morning and in whom I asked you to
+interest yourself? Well, on getting home I found a lady there, who
+sometimes brings me a little money for my poor. Then I thought to myself
+that the three francs I gave you were really too small a sum, and as the
+thought worried me like a kind of remorse, I couldn't resist the impulse,
+but went this afternoon to the Rue des Saules myself."
+
+He lowered his voice from a feeling of respect, in order not to disturb
+the deep, sepulchral silence of the church. Covert shame, moreover,
+impeded his utterance, shame at having again relapsed into the sin of
+blind, imprudent charity, as his superiors reproachfully said. And,
+quivering, he concluded in a very low voice indeed: "And so, my child,
+picture my grief. I had five francs more to give the poor old man, and I
+found him dead."
+
+Pierre suddenly shuddered. But he was unwilling to understand: "What,
+dead!" he cried. "That old man dead! Laveuve dead?"
+
+"Yes, I found him dead--ah! amidst what frightful wretchedness, like an
+old animal that has laid itself down for the finish on a heap of rags in
+the depths of a hole. No neighbours had assisted him in his last moments;
+he had simply turned himself towards the wall. And ah! how bare and cold
+and deserted it was! And what a pang for a poor creature to go off like
+that without a word, a caress. Ah! my heart bounded within me and it is
+still bleeding!"
+
+Pierre in his utter amazement at first made but a gesture of revolt
+against imbecile social cruelty. Had the bread left near the unfortunate
+wretch, and devoured too eagerly, perhaps, after long days of abstinence,
+been the cause of his death? Or was not this rather the fatal
+/denouement/ of an ended life, worn away by labour and privation?
+However, what did the cause signify? Death had come and delivered the
+poor man. "It isn't he that I pity," Pierre muttered at last; "it is
+we--we who witness all that, we who are guilty of these abominations."
+
+But good Abbe Rose was already becoming resigned, and would only think of
+forgiveness and hope. "No, no, my child, rebellion is evil. If we are all
+guilty we can only implore Providence to forget our faults. I had given
+you an appointment here hoping for good news; and it's I who come to tell
+you of that frightful thing. Let us be penitent and pray."
+
+Then he knelt upon the flagstones near the pillar, in the rear of the
+praying women, who looked black and vague in the gloom. And he inclined
+his white head, and for a long time remained in a posture of humility.
+
+But Pierre was unable to pray, so powerfully did revolt stir him. He did
+not even bend his knees, but remained erect and quivering. His heart
+seemed to have been crushed; not a tear came to his ardent eyes. So
+Laveuve had died yonder, stretched on his litter of rags, his hands
+clenched in his obstinate desire to cling to his life of torture, whilst
+he, Pierre, again glowing with the flame of charity, consumed by
+apostolic zeal, was scouring Paris to find him for the evening a clean
+bed on which he might be saved. Ah! the atrocious irony of it all! He
+must have been at the Duvillards' in the warm /salon/, all blue and
+silver, whilst the old man was expiring; and it was for a wretched corpse
+that he had then hastened to the Chamber of Deputies, to the Countess de
+Quinsac's, to that creature Silviane's, and to that creature Rosemonde's.
+And it was for that corpse, freed from life, escaped from misery as from
+prison, that he had worried people, broken in upon their egotism,
+disturbed the peace of some, threatened the pleasures of others! What was
+the use of hastening from the parliamentary den to the cold /salon/ where
+the dust of the past was congealing; of going from the sphere of
+middle-class debauchery to that of cosmopolitan extravagance, since one
+always arrived too late, and saved people when they were already dead?
+How ridiculous to have allowed himself to be fired once more by that
+blaze of charity, that final conflagration, only the ashes of which he
+now felt within him? This time he thought he was dead himself; he was
+naught but an empty sepulchre.
+
+And all the frightful void and chaos which he had felt that morning at
+the basilica of the Sacred Heart after his mass became yet deeper,
+henceforth unfathomable. If charity were illusory and useless the Gospel
+crumbled, the end of the Book was nigh. After centuries of stubborn
+efforts, Redemption through Christianity failed, and another means of
+salvation was needed by the world in presence of the exasperated thirst
+for justice which came from the duped and wretched nations. They would
+have no more of that deceptive paradise, the promise of which had so long
+served to prop up social iniquity; they demanded that the question of
+happiness should be decided upon this earth. But how? By means of what
+new religion, what combination between the sentiment of the Divine and
+the necessity for honouring life in its sovereignty and its fruitfulness?
+Therein lay the grievous, torturing problem, into the midst of which
+Pierre was sinking; he, a priest, severed by vows of chastity and
+superstition from the rest of mankind.
+
+He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient
+that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given
+justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as
+charity would be needed. Most certainly there was no lack of
+compassionate hearts in that grievous city of Paris; charitable
+foundations sprouted forth there like green leaves at the first warmth of
+springtide. There were some for every age, every peril, every misfortune.
+Through the concern shown for mothers, children were succoured even
+before they were born; then came the infant and orphan asylums lavishly
+provided for all sorts of classes; and, afterwards, man was followed
+through his life, help was tendered on all sides, particularly as he grew
+old, by a multiplicity of asylums, almshouses, and refuges. And there
+were all the hands stretched out to the forsaken ones, the disinherited
+ones, even the criminals, all sorts of associations to protect the weak,
+societies for the prevention of crime, homes that offered hospitality to
+those who repented. Whether as regards the propagation of good deeds, the
+support of the young, the saving of life, the bestowal of pecuniary help,
+or the promotion of guilds, pages and pages would have been needed merely
+to particularise the extraordinary vegetation of charity that sprouted
+between the paving-stones of Paris with so fine a vigour, in which
+goodness of soul was mingled with social vanity. Still that could not
+matter, since charity redeemed and purified all. But how terrible the
+proposition that this charity was a useless mockery! What! after so many
+centuries of Christian charity not a sore had healed. Misery had only
+grown and spread, irritated even to rage. Incessantly aggravated, the
+evil was reaching the point when it would be impossible to tolerate it
+for another day, since social injustice was neither arrested nor even
+diminished thereby. And besides, if only one single old man died of cold
+and hunger, did not the social edifice, raised on the theory of charity,
+collapse? But one victim, and society was condemned, thought Pierre.
+
+He now felt such bitterness of heart that he could remain no longer in
+that church where the shadows ever slowly fell, blurring the sanctuaries
+and the large pale images of Christ nailed upon the Cross. All was about
+to sink into darkness, and he could hear nothing beyond an expiring
+murmur of prayers, a plaint from the women who were praying on their
+knees, in the depths of the shrouding gloom.
+
+At the same time he hardly liked to go off without saying a word to Abbe
+Rose, who in his entreaties born of simple faith left the happiness and
+peace of mankind to the good pleasure of the Invisible. However, fearing
+that he might disturb him, Pierre was making up his mind to retire, when
+the old priest of his own accord raised his head. "Ah, my child," said
+he, "how difficult it is to be good in a reasonable manner. Monseigneur
+Martha has scolded me again, and but for the forgiveness of God I should
+fear for my salvation."
+
+For a moment Pierre paused under the porticus of the Madeleine, on the
+summit of the great flight of steps which, rising above the railings,
+dominates the Place. Before him was the Rue Royale dipping down to the
+expanse of the Place de la Concorde, where rose the obelisk and the pair
+of plashing fountains. And, farther yet, the paling colonnade of the
+Chamber of Deputies bounded the horizon. It was a vista of sovereign
+grandeur under that pale sky over which twilight was slowly stealing, and
+which seemed to broaden the thoroughfares, throw back the edifices, and
+lend them the quivering, soaring aspect of the palaces of dreamland. No
+other capital in the world could boast a scene of such aerial pomp, such
+grandiose magnificence, at that hour of vagueness, when falling night
+imparts to cities a dreamy semblance, the infinite of human immensity.
+
+Motionless and hesitating in presence of the opening expanse, Pierre
+distressfully pondered as to whither he should go now that all which he
+had so passionately sought to achieve since the morning had suddenly
+crumbled away. Was he still bound for the Duvillard mansion in the Rue
+Godot-de-Mauroy? He no longer knew. Then the exasperating remembrance,
+with its cruel irony, returned to him. Since Laveuve was dead, of what
+use was it for him to kill time and perambulate the pavements pending the
+arrival of six o'clock? The idea that he had a home, and that the most
+simple course would be to return to it, did not even occur to him. He
+felt as if there were something of importance left for him to do, though
+he could not possibly tell what it might be. It seemed to him to be
+everywhere and yet very far away, to be so vague and so difficult of
+accomplishment that he would certainly never be in time or have
+sufficient power to do it. However, with heavy feet and tumultuous brain
+he descended the steps and, yielding to some obstinate impulse, began to
+walk through the flower-market, a late winter market where the first
+azaleas were opening with a little shiver. Some women were purchasing
+Nice roses and violets; and Pierre looked at them as if he were
+interested in all that soft, delicate, perfumed luxury. But suddenly he
+felt a horror of it and went off, starting along the Boulevards.
+
+He walked straight before him without knowing why or whither. The falling
+darkness surprised him as if it were an unexpected phenomenon. Raising
+his eyes to the sky he felt astonished at seeing its azure gently pale
+between the slender black streaks of the chimney funnels. And the huge
+golden letters by which names or trades were advertised on every balcony
+also seemed to him singular in the last gleams of the daylight. Never
+before had he paid attention to the motley tints seen on the
+house-fronts, the painted mirrors, the blinds, the coats of arms, the
+posters of violent hues, the magnificent shops, like drawing-rooms and
+boudoirs open to the full light. And then, both in the roadway and along
+the foot-pavements, between the blue, red or yellow columns and kiosks,
+what mighty traffic there was, what an extraordinary crowd! The vehicles
+rolled along in a thundering stream: on all sides billows of cabs were
+parted by the ponderous tacking of huge omnibuses, which suggested lofty,
+bright-hued battle-ships. And on either hand, and farther and farther,
+and even among the wheels, the flood of passengers rushed on incessantly,
+with the conquering haste of ants in a state of revolution. Whence came
+all those people, and whither were all those vehicles going? How
+stupefying and torturing it all was.
+
+Pierre was still walking straight ahead, mechanically, carried on by his
+gloomy reverie. Night was coming, the first gas-burners were being
+lighted; it was the dusk of Paris, the hour when real darkness has not
+yet come, when the electric lights flame in the dying day. Lamps shone
+forth on all sides, the shop-fronts were being illumined. Soon, moreover,
+right along the Boulevards the vehicles would carry their vivid starry
+lights, like a milky way on the march betwixt the foot-pavements all
+glowing with lanterns and cordons and girandoles, a dazzling profusion of
+radiance akin to sunlight. And the shouts of the drivers and the jostling
+of the foot passengers re-echoed the parting haste of the Paris which is
+all business or passion, which is absorbed in the merciless struggle for
+love and for money. The hard day was over, and now the Paris of Pleasure
+was lighting up for its night of /fete/. The cafes, the wine shops, the
+restaurants, flared and displayed their bright metal bars, and their
+little white tables behind their clear and lofty windows, whilst near
+their doors, by way of temptation, were oysters and choice fruits. And
+the Paris which was thus awaking with the first flashes of the gas was
+already full of the gaiety of enjoyment, already yielding to an unbridled
+appetite for whatsoever may be purchased.
+
+However, Pierre had a narrow escape from being knocked down. A flock of
+newspaper hawkers came out of a side street, and darted through the crowd
+shouting the titles of the evening journals. A fresh edition of the "Voix
+du Peuple" gave rise, in particular, to a deafening clamour, which rose
+above all the rumbling of wheels. At regular intervals hoarse voices
+raised and repeated the cry: "Ask for the 'Voix du Peuple'--the new
+scandal of the African Railway Lines, the repulse of the ministry, the
+thirty-two bribe-takers of the Chamber and the Senate!" And these
+announcements, set in huge type, could be read on the copies of the
+paper, which the hawkers flourished like banners. Accustomed as it was to
+such filth, saturated with infamy, the crowd continued on its way without
+paying much attention. Still a few men paused and bought the paper, while
+painted women, who had come down to the Boulevards in search of a dinner,
+trailed their skirts and waited for some chance lover, glancing
+interrogatively at the outside customers of the cafes. And meantime the
+dishonouring shout of the newspaper hawkers, that cry in which there was
+both smirch and buffet, seemed like the last knell of the day, ringing
+the nation's funeral at the outset of the night of pleasure which was
+beginning.
+
+Then Pierre once more remembered his morning and that frightful house in
+the Rue des Saules, where so much want and suffering were heaped up. He
+again saw the yard filthy like a quagmire, the evil-smelling staircases,
+the sordid, bare, icy rooms, the families fighting for messes which even
+stray dogs would not have eaten; the mothers, with exhausted breasts,
+carrying screaming children to and fro; the old men who fell in corners
+like brute beasts, and died of hunger amidst filth. And then came his
+other hours with the magnificence or the quietude or the gaiety of the
+/salons/ through which he had passed, the whole insolent display of
+financial Paris, and political Paris, and society Paris. And at last he
+came to the dusk, and to that Paris-Sodom and Paris-Gomorrah before him,
+which was lighting itself up for the night, for the abominations of that
+accomplice night which, like fine dust, was little by little submerging
+the expanse of roofs. And the hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud
+under the pale sky where the first pure, twinkling stars were gleaming.
+
+A great shudder came upon Pierre as he thought of all that mass of
+iniquity and suffering, of all that went on below amid want and crime,
+and all that went on above amid wealth and vice. The /bourgeoisie/,
+wielding power, would relinquish naught of the sovereignty which it had
+conquered, wholly stolen, while the people, the eternal dupe, silent so
+long, clenched its fists and growled, claiming its legitimate share. And
+it was that frightful injustice which filled the growing gloom with
+anger. From what dark-breasted cloud would the thunderbolt fall? For
+years he had been waiting for that thunderbolt which low rumbles
+announced on all points of the horizon. And if he had written a book full
+of candour and hope, if he had gone in all innocence to Rome, it was to
+avert that thunderbolt and its frightful consequences. But all hope of
+the kind was dead within him; he felt that the thunderbolt was
+inevitable, that nothing henceforth could stay the catastrophe. And never
+before had he felt it to be so near, amidst the happy impudence of some,
+and the exasperated distress of others. And it was gathering, and it
+would surely fall over that Paris, all lust and bravado, which, when
+evening came, thus stirred up its furnace.
+
+Tired out and distracted, Pierre raised his eyes as he reached the Place
+de l'Opera. Where was he then? The heart of the great city seemed to beat
+on this spot, in that vast expanse where met so many thoroughfares, as if
+from every point the blood of distant districts flowed thither along
+triumphal avenues. Right away to the horizon stretched the great gaps of
+the Avenue de l'Opera, the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, and the Rue de la
+Paix, still showing clearly in a final glimpse of daylight, but already
+starred with swarming sparks. The torrent of the Boulevard traffic poured
+across the Place, where clashed, too, all that from the neighbouring
+streets, with a constant turning and eddying which made the spot the most
+dangerous of whirlpools. In vain did the police seek to impose some
+little prudence, the stream of pedestrians still overflowed, wheels
+became entangled and horses reared amidst all the uproar of the human
+tide, which was as loud, as incessant, as the tempest voice of an ocean.
+Then there was the detached mass of the opera-house, slowly steeped in
+gloom, and rising huge and mysterious like a symbol, its lyre-bearing
+figure of Apollo, right aloft, showing a last reflection of daylight
+amidst the livid sky. And all the windows of the house-fronts began to
+shine, gaiety sprang from those thousands of lamps which coruscated one
+by one, a universal longing for ease and free gratification of each
+desire spread with the increasing darkness; whilst, at long intervals,
+the large globes of the electric lights shone as brightly as the moons of
+the city's cloudless nights.
+
+But why was he, Pierre, there, he asked himself, irritated and wondering.
+Since Laveuve was dead he had but to go home, bury himself in his nook,
+and close up door and windows, like one who was henceforth useless, who
+had neither belief nor hope, and awaited naught save annihilation. It was
+a long journey from the Place de l'Opera to his little house at Neuilly.
+Still, however great his weariness, he would not take a cab, but retraced
+his steps, turning towards the Madeleine again, and plunging into the
+scramble of the pavements, amidst the deafening uproar from the roadway,
+with a bitter desire to aggravate his wound and saturate himself with
+revolt and anger. Was it not yonder at the corner of that street, at the
+end of that Boulevard, that he would find the expected abyss into which
+that rotten world, whose old society he could hear rending at each step,
+must soon assuredly topple?
+
+However, when Pierre wished to cross the Rue Scribe a block in the
+traffic made him halt. In front of a luxurious cafe two tall,
+shabbily-clad and very dirty fellows were alternately offering the "Voix
+du Peuple" with its account of the scandals and the bribe-takers of the
+Chamber and the Senate, in voices so suggestive of cracked brass that
+passers-by clustered around them. And here, in a hesitating, wandering
+man, who after listening drew near to the large cafe and peered through
+its windows, Pierre was once again amazed to recognise Salvat. This time
+the meeting struck him forcibly, filled him with suspicion to such a
+point that he also stopped and resolved to watch the journeyman engineer.
+He did not expect that one of such wretched aspect, with what seemed to
+be a hunk of bread distending his old ragged jacket, would enter and seat
+himself at one of the cafe's little tables amidst the warm gaiety of the
+lamps. However, he waited for a moment, and then saw him wander away with
+slow and broken steps as if the cafe, which was nearly empty, did not
+suit him. What could he have been seeking, whither had he been going,
+since the morning, ever on a wild, solitary chase through the Paris of
+wealth and enjoyment while hunger dogged his steps? It was only with
+difficulty that he now dragged himself along, his will and energy seemed
+to be exhausted. As if quite overcome, he drew near to a kiosk, and for a
+moment leant against it. Then, however, he drew himself up again, and
+walked on further, still as it were in search of something.
+
+And now came an incident which brought Pierre's emotion to a climax. A
+tall sturdy man on turning out of the Rue Caumartin caught sight of
+Salvat, and approached him. And just as the new comer without false pride
+was shaking the workman's hand, Pierre recognised him as his brother
+Guillaume. Yes, it was indeed he, with his thick bushy hair already white
+like snow, though he was but seven and forty. However, his heavy
+moustaches had remained quite dark without one silver thread, thus
+lending an expression of vigorous life to his full face with its lofty
+towering brow. It was from his father that he had inherited that brow of
+impregnable logic and reason, similar to that which Pierre himself
+possessed. But the lower part of the elder brother's countenance was
+fuller than that of his junior; his nose was larger, his chin was square,
+and his mouth broad and firm of contour. A pale scar, the mark of an old
+wound, streaked his left temple. And his physiognomy, though it might at
+first seem very grave, rough, and unexpansive, beamed with masculine
+kindliness whenever a smile revealed his teeth, which had remained
+extremely white.
+
+While looking at his brother, Pierre remembered what Madame Theodore had
+told him that morning. Guillaume, touched by Salvat's dire want, had
+arranged to give him a few days' employment. And this explained the air
+of interest with which he now seemed to be questioning him, while the
+engineer, whom the meeting disturbed, stamped about as if eager to resume
+his mournful ramble. For a moment Guillaume appeared to notice the
+other's perturbation, by the embarrassed answers which he obtained from
+him. Still, they at last parted as if each were going his way. Then,
+however, almost immediately, Guillaume turned round again and watched the
+other, as with harassed stubborn mien he went off through the crowd. And
+the thoughts which had come to Guillaume must have been very serious and
+very pressing, for he all at once began to retrace his steps and follow
+the workman from a distance, as if to ascertain for certain what
+direction he would take.
+
+Pierre had watched the scene with growing disquietude. His nervous
+apprehension of some great unknown calamity, the suspicions born of his
+frequent and inexplicable meetings with Salvat, his surprise at now
+seeing his brother mingled with the affair, all helped to fill him with a
+pressing desire to know, witness, and perhaps prevent. So he did not
+hesitate, but began to follow the others in a prudent way.
+
+Fresh perturbation came upon him when first Salvat and then Guillaume
+suddenly turned into the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy. What destiny was thus
+bringing him back to that street whither a little time previously he had
+wished to return in feverish haste, and whence only the death of Laveuve
+had kept him? And his consternation increased yet further when, after
+losing sight of Salvat for a moment, he saw him standing in front of the
+Duvillard mansion, on the same spot where he had fancied he recognised
+him that morning. As it happened the carriage entrance of the mansion was
+wide open. Some repairs had been made to the paving of the porch, and
+although the workmen had now gone off, the doorway remained gaping, full
+of the falling night. The narrow street, running from the glittering
+Boulevard, was steeped in bluish gloom, starred at long intervals by a
+few gas-lamps. Some women went by, compelling Salvat to step off the
+foot-pavement. But he returned to it again, lighted the stump of a cigar,
+some remnant which he had found under a table outside a cafe, and then
+resumed his watch, patient and motionless, in front of the mansion.
+
+Disturbed by his dim conjectures, Pierre gradually grew frightened, and
+asked himself if he ought not to approach that man. The chief thing that
+detained him was the presence of his brother, whom he had seen disappear
+into a neighbouring doorway, whence he also was observing the engineer,
+ready to intervene. And so Pierre contented himself with not losing sight
+of Salvat, who was still waiting and watching, merely taking his eyes
+from the mansion in order to glance towards the Boulevard as though he
+expected someone or something which would come from that direction. And
+at last, indeed, the Duvillards' landau appeared, with coachman and
+footman in livery of green and gold--a closed landau to which a pair of
+tall horses of superb build were harnessed in stylish fashion.
+
+Contrary to custom, however, the carriage, which at that hour usually
+brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the
+son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de
+Harn's /matinee/, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by
+which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his
+perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled
+him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, she was visibly
+irritated and feverish that evening, and, suddenly changing the subject,
+she began to speak of their mother and Gerard de Quinsac.
+
+"But what can it matter to you?" quietly retorted Hyacinthe; and, seeing
+that she almost bounded from the seat at this remark, he continued: "Are
+you still in love with him, then? Do you still want to marry him?"
+
+"Yes, I do, and I will!" she cried with all the jealous rage of an
+uncomely girl, who suffered so acutely at seeing herself spurned whilst
+her yet beautiful mother stole from her the man she wanted.
+
+"You will, you will!" resumed Hyacinthe, well pleased to have an
+opportunity of teasing his sister, whom he somewhat feared. "But you
+won't unless /he/ is willing--And he doesn't care for you."
+
+"He does!" retorted Camille in a fury. "He's kind and pleasant with me,
+and that's enough."
+
+Her brother felt afraid as he noticed the blackness of her glance, and
+the clenching of her weak little hands, whose fingers bent like claws.
+And after a pause he asked: "And papa, what does he say about it?"
+
+"Oh, papa! All that he cares about is the other one."
+
+Then Hyacinthe began to laugh.
+
+But the landau, with its tall horses trotting on sonorously, had turned
+into the street and was approaching the house, when a slim fair-haired
+girl of sixteen or seventeen, a modiste's errand girl with a large
+bandbox on her arm, hastily crossed the road in order to enter the arched
+doorway before the carriage. She was bringing a bonnet for the Baroness,
+and had come all along the Boulevard musing, with her soft blue eyes, her
+pinky nose, and her mouth which ever laughed in the most adorable little
+face that one could see. And it was at this same moment that Salvat,
+after another glance at the landau, sprang forward and entered the
+doorway. An instant afterwards he reappeared, flung his lighted cigar
+stump into the gutter; and without undue haste went off, slinking into
+the depths of the vague gloom of the street.
+
+And then what happened? Pierre, later on, remembered that a dray of the
+Western Railway Company in coming up stopped and delayed the landau for a
+moment, whilst the young errand girl entered the doorway. And with a
+heart-pang beyond description he saw his brother Guillaume in his turn
+spring forward and rush into the mansion as though impelled to do so by
+some revelation, some sudden certainty. He, Pierre, though he understood
+nothing clearly, could divine the approach of some frightful horror. But
+when he would have run, when he would have shouted, he found himself as
+if nailed to the pavement, and felt his throat clutched as by a hand of
+lead. Then suddenly came a thunderous roar, a formidable explosion, as if
+the earth was opening, and the lightning-struck mansion was being
+annihilated. Every window-pane of the neighbouring houses was shivered,
+the glass raining down with the loud clatter of hail. For a moment a
+hellish flame fired the street, and the dust and the smoke were such that
+the few passers-by were blinded and howled with affright, aghast at
+toppling, as they thought, into that fiery furnace.
+
+And that dazzling flare brought Pierre enlightenment. He once more saw
+the bomb distending the tool-bag, which lack of work had emptied and
+rendered useless. He once more saw it under the ragged jacket, a
+protuberance caused, he had fancied, by some hunk of bread, picked up in
+a corner and treasured that it might be carried home to wife and child.
+After wandering and threatening all happy Paris, it was there that it had
+flared, there that it had burst with a thunder-clap, there on the
+threshold of the sovereign /bourgeoisie/ to whom all wealth belonged. He,
+however, at that moment thought only of his brother Guillaume, and flung
+himself into that porch where a volcanic crater seemed to have opened.
+And at first he distinguished nothing, the acrid smoke streamed over all.
+Then he perceived the walls split, the upper floor rent open, the paving
+broken up, strewn with fragments. Outside, the landau which had been on
+the point of entering, had escaped all injury; neither of the horses had
+been touched, nor was there even a scratch on any panel of the vehicle.
+But the young girl, the pretty, slim, fair-haired errand girl, lay there
+on her back, her stomach ripped open, whilst her delicate face remained
+intact, her eyes clear, her smile full of astonishment, so swiftly and
+lightning-like had come the catastrophe. And near her, from the fallen
+bandbox, whose lid had merely come unfastened, had rolled the bonnet, a
+very fragile pink bonnet, which still looked charming in its flowery
+freshness.
+
+By a prodigy Guillaume was alive and already on his legs again. His left
+hand alone streamed with blood, a projectile seemed to have broken his
+wrist. His moustaches moreover had been burnt, and the explosion by
+throwing him to the ground had so shaken and bruised him that he shivered
+from head to feet as with intense cold. Nevertheless, he recognised his
+brother without even feeling astonished to see him there, as indeed often
+happens after great disasters, when the unexplained becomes providential.
+That brother, of whom he had so long lost sight, was there, naturally
+enough, because it was necessary that he should be there. And Guillaume,
+amidst the wild quivers by which he was shaken, at once cried to him
+"Take me away! take me away! To your house at Neuilly, oh! take me away!"
+
+Then, for sole explanation, and referring to Salvat, he stammered: "I
+suspected that he had stolen a cartridge from me; only one, most
+fortunately, for otherwise the whole district would have been blown to
+pieces. Ah! the wretched fellow! I wasn't in time to set my foot upon the
+match."
+
+With perfect lucidity of mind, such as danger sometimes imparts, Pierre,
+neither speaking nor losing a moment, remembered that the mansion had a
+back entrance fronting the Rue Vignon. He had just realised in what
+serious peril his brother would be if he were found mixed up in that
+affair. And with all speed, when he had led him into the gloom of the Rue
+Vignon, he tied his handkerchief round his wrist, which he bade him press
+to his chest, under his coat, as that would conceal it.
+
+But Guillaume, still shivering and haunted by the horror he had
+witnessed, repeated: "Take me away--to your place at Neuilly--not to my
+home."
+
+"Of course, of course, be easy. Come, wait here a second, I will stop a
+cab."
+
+In his eagerness to procure a conveyance, Pierre had brought his brother
+down to the Boulevard again. But the terrible thunderclap of the
+explosion had upset the whole neighbourhood, horses were still rearing,
+and people were running demented, hither and thither. And numerous
+policemen had hastened up, and a rushing crowd was already blocking the
+lower part of the Rue Godot-de-Mauroy, which was now as black as a pit,
+every light in it having been extinguished; whilst on the Boulevard a
+hawker of the "Voix du Peuple" still stubbornly vociferated: "The new
+scandal of the African Railway Lines! The thirty-two bribe-takers of the
+Chamber and the Senate! The approaching fall of the ministry!"
+
+Pierre was at last managing to stop a cab when he heard a person who ran
+by say to another, "The ministry? Ah, well! that bomb will mend it right
+enough!"
+
+Then the brothers seated themselves in the cab, which carried them away.
+And now, over the whole of rumbling Paris black night had gathered, an
+unforgiving night, in which the stars foundered amidst the mist of crime
+and anger that had risen from the house-roofs. The great cry of justice
+swept by amidst the same terrifying flapping of wings which Sodom and
+Gomorrah once heard bearing down upon them from all the black clouds of
+the horizon.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris,
+Vol. 1, by Emile Zola
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE CITIES: PARIS, VOL. 1 ***
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