Nana, Émile Zola [reading list txt] 📗

CHAPTER I

THE SWINDLE

 

It was nine o’clock. The little town of Vauchamp, dark and silent,

had just retired to bed amid a chilly November rain. In the Rue des

Recollets, one of the narrowest and most deserted streets of the

district of Saint-Jean, a single window was still alight on the

third floor of an old house, from whose damaged gutters torrents of

water were falling into the street. Mme Burle was sitting up before

a meager fire of vine stocks, while her little grandson Charles

pored over his lessons by the pale light of a lamp.

 

The apartment, rented at one hundred and sixty francs per annum,

consisted of four large rooms which it was absolutely impossible to

keep warm during the winter. Mme Burle slept in the largest

chamber, her son Captain and Quartermaster Burle occupying a

somewhat smaller one overlooking the street, while little Charles

had his iron cot at the farther end of a spacious drawing room with

mildewed hangings, which was never used. The few pieces of

furniture belonging to the captain and his mother, furniture of the

massive style of the First Empire, dented and worn by continuous

transit from one garrison town to another, almost disappeared from

view beneath the lofty ceilings whence darkness fell. The flooring

of red-colored tiles was cold and hard to the feet; before the

chairs there were merely a few threadbare little rugs of poverty-stricken aspect, and athwart this desert all the winds of heaven

blew through the disjointed doors and windows.

 

Near the fireplace sat Mme Burle, leaning back in her old yellow

velvet armchair and watching the last vine branch smoke, with that

stolid, blank stare of the aged who live within themselves. She

would sit thus for whole days together, with her tall figure, her

long stern face and her thin lips that never smiled. The widow of a

colonel who had died just as he was on the point of becoming a

general, the mother of a captain whom she had followed even in his

campaigns, she had acquired a military stiffness of bearing and

formed for herself a code of honor, duty and patriotism which kept

her rigid, desiccated, as it were, by the stern application of

discipline. She seldom, if ever, complained. When her son had

become a widower after five years of married life she had undertaken

the education of little Charles as a matter of course, performing

her duties with the severity of a sergeant drilling recruits. She

watched over the child, never tolerating the slightest waywardness

or irregularity, but compelling him to sit up till midnight when his

exercises were not finished, and sitting up herself until he had

completed them. Under such implacable despotism Charles, whose

constitution was delicate, grew up pale and thin, with beautiful

eyes, inordinately large and clear, shining in his white, pinched

face.

 

During the long hours of silence Mme Burle dwelt continuously upon

one and the same idea: she had been disappointed in her son. This

thought sufficed to occupy her mind, and under its influence she

would live her whole life over again, from the birth of her son,

whom she had pictured rising amid glory to the highest rank, till

she came down to mean and narrow garrison life, the dull, monotonous

existence of nowadays, that stranding in the post of a

quartermaster, from which Burle would never rise and in which he

seemed to sink more and more heavily. And yet his first efforts had

filled her with pride, and she had hoped to see her dreams realized.

Burle had only just left Saint-Cyr when he distinguished himself at

the battle of Solferino, where he had captured a whole battery of

the enemy’s artiliery with merely a handful of men. For this feat

he had won the cross; the papers had recorded his heroism, and he

had become known as one of the bravest soldiers in the army. But

gradually the hero had grown stout, embedded in flesh, timorous,

lazy and satisfied. In 1870, still a captain, he had been made a

prisoner in the first encounter, and he returned from Germany quite

furious, swearing that he would never be caught fighting again, for

it was too absurd. Being prevented from leaving the army, as he was

incapable of embracing any other profession, he applied for and

obtained the position of captain quartermaster, “a kennel,” as he

called it, “in which he would be left to kick the bucket in peace.”

That day Mme Burle experienced a great internal disruption. She

felt that it was all over, and she ever afterward preserved a rigid

attitude with tightened lips.

 

A blast of wind shook the Rue des Recollets and drove the rain

angrily against the windowpanes. The old lady lifted her eyes from

the smoking vine roots now dying out, to make sure that Charles was

not falling asleep over his Latin exercise. This lad, twelve years

of age, had become the old lady’s supreme hope, the one human being

in whom she centered her obstinate yearning for glory. At first she

had hated him with all the loathing she had felt for his mother, a

weak and pretty young lacemaker whom the captain had been foolish

enough to marry when he found out that she would not listen to his

passionate addresses on any other condition. Later on, when the

mother had died and the father had begun to wallow in vice, Mme

Burle dreamed again in presence of that little ailing child whom she

found it so hard to rear. She wanted to see him robust, so that he

might grow into the hero that Burle had declined to be, and for all

her cold ruggedness she watched him anxiously, feeling his limbs and

instilling courage into his soul. By degrees, blinded by her

passionate desires, she imagined that she had at last found the man

of the family. The boy, whose temperament was of a gentle, dreamy

character, had a physical horror of soldiering, but as he lived in

mortal dread of his grandmother and was extremely shy and

submissive, he would echo all she said and resignedly express his

intention of entering the army when he grew up.

 

Mme Burle observed that the exercise was not progressing. In fact,

little Charles, overcome by the deafening noise of the storm, was

dozing, albeit his pen was between his fingers and his eyes were

staring at the paper. The old lady at once struck the edge of the

table with her bony hand; whereupon the lad started, opened his

dictionary and hurriedly began to turn over the leaves. Then, still

preserving silence, his grandmother drew the vine roots together on

the hearth and unsuccessfully attempted to rekindle the fire.

 

At the time when she had still believed in her son she had

sacrificed her small income, which he had squandered in pursuits she

dared not investigate. Even now he drained the household; all its

resources went to the streets, and it was through him that she lived

in penury, with empty rooms and cold kitchen. She never spoke to

him of all those things, for with her sense of discipline he

remained the master. Only at times she shuddered at the sudden fear

that Burle might someday commit some foolish misdeed which would

prevent Charles from entering the army.

 

She was rising up to fetch a fresh piece of wood in the kitchen when

a fearful hurricane fell upon the house, making the doors rattle,

tearing off a shutter and whirling the water in the broken gutters

like a spout against the window. In the midst of the uproar a ring

at the bell startled the old lady. Who could it be at such an hour

and in such weather? Burle never returned till after midnight, if

he came home at all. However, she went to the door. An officer

stood before her, dripping with rain and swearing savagely.

 

“Hell and thunder!” he growled. “What cursed weather!”

 

It was Major Laguitte, a brave old soldier who had served under

Colonel Burle during Mme Burle’s palmy days. He had started in life

as a drummer boy and, thanks to his courage rather than his

intellect, had attained to the command of a battalion, when a

painful