Germinal, Émile Zola [readict .txt] 📗

complete his ruin; he would rather leave his life there. Since he had been here he noticed at a window of his house his wife’s thin silhouette, pale and confused, behind the panes; no doubt she was watching the blows with her usual silent air of a poor beaten creature. Beneath there was a shed, so placed that from the villa garden one could climb it from the palings; then it was easy to get on to the tiles up to the window. And the idea of thus returning home now pursued him in his remorse at having left. Perhaps he would have time to barricade the shop with furniture; he even invented other and more heroic defences⁠—boiling oil, lighted petroleum, poured out from above. But this love of his property struggled against his fear, and he groaned in the battle with cowardice. Suddenly, on hearing a deeper blow of the axe, he made up his mind. Avarice conquered; he and his wife would cover the sacks with their bodies rather than abandon a single loaf.

Almost immediately hooting broke out:

“Look! look!⁠—The tomcat’s up there! After the cat! after the cat!”

The mob had just seen Maigrat on the roof of the shed. In his fever of anxiety he had climbed the palings with agility in spite of his weight, and without troubling over the breaking wood; and now he was flattening himself along the tiles, and endeavouring to reach the window. But the slope was very steep; he was incommoded by his stoutness, and his nails were torn. He would have dragged himself up, however, if he had not begun to tremble with the fear of stones; for the crowd, which he could not see, continued to cry beneath him:

“After the cat! after the cat!⁠—Do for him!”

And suddenly both his hands let go at once, and he rolled down like a ball, leapt at the gutter, and fell across the middle wall in such a way that, by ill-chance, he rebounded on the side of the road, where his skull was broken open on the corner of a stone pillar. His brain had spurted out. He was dead. His wife up above, pale and confused behind the windowpanes, still looked out.

They were stupefied at first. Étienne stopped short, and the axe slipped from his hands. Maheu, Levaque, and the others forgot the shop, with their eyes fixed on the wall along which a thin red streak was slowly flowing down. And the cries ceased, and silence spread over the growing darkness.

All at once the hooting began again. It was the women, who rushed forward overcome by the drunkenness of blood.

“Then there is a good God, after all! Ah! the bloody beast, he’s done for!”

They surrounded the still warm body. They insulted it with laughter, abusing his fractured head, the dirty chops, hurling in the dead man’s face the long venom of their starved lives.

“I owed you sixty francs, now you’re paid, thief!” said Maheude, enraged like the others. “You won’t refuse me credit any more. Wait! wait! I must fatten you once more!”

With her fingers she scratched up some earth, took two handfuls and stuffed it violently into his mouth.

“There! eat that! There! eat! eat! you used to eat us!”

The abuse increased, while the dead man, stretched on his back, gazed motionless with his large fixed eyes at the immense sky from which the night was falling. This earth heaped in his mouth was the bread he had refused to give. And henceforth he would eat of no other bread. It had not brought him luck to starve poor people.

But the women had another revenge to wreak on him. They moved round, smelling him like she-wolves. They were all seeking for some outrage, some savagery that would relieve them.

Mother Brulé’s shrill voice was heard: “Cut him like a tomcat!”

“Yes, yes, after the cat! after the cat! He’s done too much, the dirty beast!”

Mouquette was already unfastening and drawing off the trousers, while the Levaque woman raised the legs. And Mother Brulé with her dry old hands separated the naked thighs and seized this dead virility. She took hold of everything, tearing with an effort which bent her lean spine and made her long arms crack. The soft skin resisted; she had to try again, and at last carried away the fragment, a lump of hairy and bleeding flesh, which she brandished with a laugh of triumph.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

Shrill voices saluted with curses the abominable trophy.

“Ah! swine! you won’t fill our daughters any more!”

“Yes! we’ve done with paying on your beastly body; we shan’t any more have to offer a backside in return for a loaf.”

“Here, I owe you six francs; would you like to settle it? I’m quite willing, if you can do it still!”

This joke shook them all with terrible gaiety. They showed each other the bleeding fragment as an evil beast from which each of them had suffered, and which they had at last crushed, and saw before them there, inert, in their power. They spat on it, they thrust out their jaws, saying over and over again, with furious bursts of contempt:

“He can do no more! he can do no more!⁠—It’s no longer a man that they’ll put away in the earth. Go and rot then, good-for-nothing!”

Mother Brulé then planted the whole lump on the end of her stick, and holding it in the air, bore it about like a banner, rushing along the road, followed, helter-skelter, by the yelling troop of women. Drops of blood rained down, and that pitiful flesh hung like a waste piece of meat on a butcher’s stall. Up above, at the window, Madame Maigrat still stood motionless; but beneath the last gleams of the setting sun, the confused flaws of the windowpanes distorted her white face which looked as though it were laughing. Beaten and deceived at every hour, with shoulders bent from morning to night over a ledger, perhaps she was laughing, while the band of women rushed