His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

la Grève. But on reaching the Pont Louis Philippe he pulled up, ragefully breathless; he considered this fear of the rain to be idiotic; and so amid the pitch-like darkness, under the lashing shower which drowned the gas-jets, he crossed the bridge slowly, with his hands dangling by his side.

He had only a few more steps to go. As he was turning on to the Quai Bourbon, on the Isle of St. Louis, a sharp flash of lightning illumined the straight, monotonous line of old houses bordering the narrow road in front of the Seine. It blazed upon the panes of the high, shutterless windows, showing up the melancholy frontages of the old-fashioned dwellings in all their details; here a stone balcony, there the railing of a terrace, and there a garland sculptured on a frieze. The painter had his studio close by, under the eaves of the old Hôtel du Martoy, nearly at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête.3 So he went on while the quay, after flashing forth for a moment, relapsed into darkness, and a terrible thunderclap shook the drowsy quarter.

When Claude, blinded by the rain, got to his door⁠—a low, rounded door, studded with iron⁠—he fumbled for the bell knob, and he was exceedingly surprised⁠—indeed, he started⁠—on finding a living, breathing body huddled against the woodwork. Then, by the light of a second flash, he perceived a tall young girl, dressed in black, and drenched already, who was shivering with fear. When a second thunderclap had shaken both of them, Claude exclaimed:

“How you frighten one! Who are you, and what do you want?”

He could no longer see her; he only heard her sob, and stammer:

“Oh, monsieur, don’t hurt me. It’s the fault of the driver, whom I hired at the station, and who left me at this door, after ill-treating me. Yes, a train ran off the rails, near Nevers. We were four hours late, and a person who was to wait for me had gone. Oh, dear me; I have never been in Paris before, and I don’t know where I am.⁠ ⁠…”

Another blinding flash cut her short, and with dilated eyes she stared, terror-stricken, at that part of the strange capital, that violet-tinted apparition of a fantastic city. The rain had ceased falling. On the opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became clear on the left as far as the blue slate eaves of the Hôtel de Ville, and on the right as far as the leaden-hued dome of St. Paul. What startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy piles of the Pont Marie, to the light arches of the new Pont Louis Philippe. Strange masses peopled the river, a sleeping flotilla of small boats and yawls, a floating washhouse, and a dredger moored to the quay. Then, farther down, against the other bank, were lighters, laden with coals, and barges full of mill stone, dominated as it were by the gigantic arm of a steam crane. But, suddenly, everything disappeared again.

Claude had an instinctive distrust of women⁠—that story of an accident, of a belated train and a brutal cabman, seemed to him a ridiculous invention. At the second thunderclap the girl had shrunk farther still into her corner, absolutely terrified.

“But you cannot stop here all night,” he said.

She sobbed still more and stammered, “I beseech you, monsieur, take me to Passy. That’s where I was going.”

He shrugged his shoulders. Did she take him for a fool? Mechanically, however, he turned towards the Quai des Célestins, where there was a cabstand. Not the faintest glimmer of a lamp to be seen.

“To Passy, my dear? Why not to Versailles? Where do you think one can pick up a cab at this time of night, and in such weather?”

Her only answer was a shriek; for a fresh flash of lightning had almost blinded her, and this time the tragic city had seemed to her to be spattered with blood. An immense chasm had been revealed, the two arms of the river stretching far away amidst the lurid flames of a conflagration. The smallest details had appeared: the little closed shutters of the Quai des Ormes, and the two openings of the Rue de la Masure, and the Rue du Paon-Blanc, which made breaks in the line of frontages; then near the Pont Marie one could have counted the leaves on the lofty plane trees, which there form a bouquet of magnificent verdure; while on the other side, beneath the Pont Louis Philippe, at the Mail, the barges, ranged in a quadruple line, had flared with the piles of yellow apples with which they were heavily laden. And there was also the ripple of the water, the high chimney of the floating washhouse, the tightened chain of the dredger, the heaps of sand on the banks, indeed, an extraordinary agglomeration of things, quite a little world filling the great gap which seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other. But the sky became dark again, and the river flowed on, all obscurity, amid the crashing of the thunder.

“Thank heaven it’s over. Oh, heaven! what’s to become of me?”

Just then the rain began to fall again, so stiffly and impelled by so strong a wind that it swept along the quay with the violence of water escaping through an open lock.

“Come, let me get in,” said Claude; “I can stand this no longer.”

Both were getting drenched. By the flickering light of the gas lamp at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête the young man could see the water dripping from the girl’s dress, which was clinging to her skin, in the deluge that swept against the door. He was seized with compassion. Had he not