Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

CHAPTER I

MY PASSING

 

It was on a Saturday, at six in the morning, that I died after a

three days’ illness. My wife was searching a trunk for some linen,

and when she rose and turned she saw me rigid, with open eyes and

silent pulses. She ran to me, fancying that I had fainted, touched

my hands and bent over me. Then she suddenly grew alarmed, burst

into tears and stammered:

 

“My God, my God! He is dead!”

 

I heard everything, but the sounds seemed to come from a great

distance. My left eye still detected a faint glimmer, a whitish

light in which all objects melted, but my right eye was quite bereft

of sight. It was the coma of my whole being, as if a thunderbolt

had struck me. My will was annihilated; not a fiber of flesh obeyed

my bidding. And yet amid the impotency of my inert limbs my

thoughts subsisted, sluggish and lazy, still perfectly clear.

 

My poor Marguerite was crying; she had dropped on her knees beside

the bed, repeating in heart-rending tones:

 

“He is dead! My God, he is dead!”

 

Was this strange state of torpor, this immobility of the flesh,

really death, although the functions of the intellect were not

arrested? Was my soul only lingering for a brief space before it

soared away forever? From my childhood upward I had been subject to

hysterical attacks, and twice in early youth I had nearly succumbed

to nervous fevers. By degrees all those who surrounded me had got

accustomed to consider me an invalid and to see me sickly. So much

so that I myself had forbidden my wife to call in a doctor when I

had taken to my bed on the day of our arrival at the cheap

lodginghouse of the Rue Dauphine in Paris. A little rest would soon

set me right again; it was only the fatigue of the journey which had

caused my intolerable weariness. And yet I was conscious of having

felt singularly uneasy. We had left our province somewhat abruptly;

we were very poor and had barely enough money to support ourselves

till I drew my first month’s salary in the office where I had

obtained a situation. And now a sudden seizure was carrying me off!

 

Was it really death? I had pictured to myself a darker night, a

deeper silence. As a little child I had already felt afraid to die.

Being weak and compassionately petted by everyone, I had concluded

that I had not long to live, that I should soon be buried, and the

thought of the cold earth filled me with a dread I could not master—

a dread which haunted me day and night. As I grew older the same

terror pursued me. Sometimes, after long hours spent in reasoning

with myself, I thought that I had conquered my fear. I reflected,

“After all, what does it matter? One dies and all is over. It is

the common fate; nothing could be better or easier.”

 

I then prided myself on being able to look death boldly in the face,

but suddenly a shiver froze my blood, and my dizzy anguish returned,

as if a giant hand had swung me over a dark abyss. It was some

vision of the earth returning and setting reason at naught. How

often at night did I start up in bed, not knowing what cold breath

had swept over my slumbers but clasping my despairing hands and

moaning, “Must I die?” In those moments an icy horror would stop my

pulses while an appalling vision of dissolution rose before me. It

was with difficulty that I could get to sleep again. Indeed, sleep

alarmed me; it so closely resembled death. If I closed my eyes they

might never open again—I might slumber on forever.

 

I cannot tell if others have endured the same torture; I only know

that my own life was made a torment by it. Death ever rose between

me and all I loved; I can remember how the thought of it poisoned

the happiest moments I spent with Marguerite. During the first

months of our married life, when she lay sleeping by my side and I

dreamed of a fair future for her and with her, the foreboding of

some fatal separation dashed my hopes aside and embittered my

delights. Perhaps we should be parted on the morrow—nay, perhaps

in an hour’s time. Then utter discouragement assailed me; I

wondered what the bliss of being united availed me if it were to end

in so cruel a disruption.

 

My morbid imagination reveled in scenes of mourning. I speculated

as to who would be the first to depart, Marguerite or I. Either

alternative caused me harrowing grief, and tears rose to my eyes at

the thought of our shattered lives. At the happiest periods of my

existence I often became a prey to grim dejection such as nobody

could understand but which was caused by the thought of impending

nihility. When I was most successful I was to general wonder most

depressed. The fatal question, “What avails it?” rang like a knell

in my ears. But the sharpest sting of this torment was that it came

with a secret sense of shame, which rendered me unable to confide my

thoughts to another. Husband and wife lying side by side in the

darkened room may quiver with the same shudder and yet remain mute,

for people do not mention death any more than they pronounce certain

obscene words. Fear makes it nameless.

 

I was musing thus while my dear Marguerite knelt sobbing at my feet.

It grieved me sorely to be unable to comfort her by telling her that

I suffered no pain. If death were merely the annihilation of the

flesh it had been foolish of me to harbor so much dread. I

experienced a selfish kind of restfulness in which all my cares were

forgotten. My memory had become extraordinarily vivid. My whole

life passed before me rapidly like a play in which I no longer acted

a part; it was a curious and enjoyable sensation—I seemed to hear a

far-off voice relating my own history.

 

I saw in particular a certain spot in the country near Guerande, on

the way to Piriac. The road turns sharply, and some scattered pine

trees carelessly dot a rocky slope. When I was seven years old I

used to pass through those pines with my father as far as a

crumbling old house, where Marguerite’s parents gave me pancakes.

They were salt gatherers and earned a scanty livelihood by working

the adjacent salt marshes. Then I remembered the school at Nantes,

where I had grown up, leading a monotonous life within its ancient

walls and yearning for the broad horizon of Guerande and the salt

marshes stretching to the limitless sea widening under the sky.

 

Next came a blank—my father was dead. I entered the hospital as

clerk to the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary

diversion: my Sunday visits to the old house on Piriac road. The

saltworks were doing badly; poverty reigned in the land, and

Marguerite’s parents were nearly penniless. Marguerite, when merely

a child, had been fond of me because I trundled her about in a

wheelbarrow, but on the morning when I asked her in marriage she

shrank from me with a frightened gesture, and I realized that she

thought me hideous. Her parents, however, consented at once; they

looked upon my offer as a godsend, and the daughter submissively

acquiesced. When she became accustomed to the idea of marrying me

she did not seem to dislike it so much. On our wedding day at

Guerande the rain fell in torrents, and when we got home my bride

had to take off her dress, which was soaked through, and sit in her

petticoats.

 

That was all the youth I ever had. We did not remain long in our

province. One day I found my wife in tears. She was miserable;

life was so dull; she wanted to get away. Six months later I had

saved a little money by taking in extra work after office hours, and

through the influence of a friend of my father’s I obtained a petty

appointment in Paris. I started off to settle there with the dear

little woman so that she might cry no more. During the night, which

we spent in the third-class railway carriage, the seats being very

hard, I took her in my arms in order that she might sleep.

 

That was the past, and now I had just died on the narrow couch of a

Paris lodginghouse, and my wife was crouching on the floor, crying

bitterly. The white light before my left eye was growing dim, but I

remembered the room perfectly. On the left there was a chest of

drawers, on the right a mantelpiece surmounted by a damaged clock

without a pendulum, the hands of which marked ten minutes past ten.

The window overlooked the Rue Dauphine, a long, dark street. All

Paris seemed to pass below, and the noise was so great that the

window shook.

 

We knew nobody in the city; we had hurried our departure, but I was

not expected at the office till the following Monday. Since I had

taken to my bed I had wondered at my imprisonment in this narrow

room into which we had tumbled after a railway journey of fifteen

hours, followed by a hurried, confusing transit through the noisy

streets. My wife had nursed me with smiling tenderness, but I knew

that she was