His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

a long stretch from Passy to the Quai de Bourbon. During four winter months, from October to February, she came in this fashion, now in drenching rain, now among the mists from the Seine, now in the pale sunlight that threw a little warmth over the quays. Indeed, after the first month, she at times arrived unexpectedly, taking advantage of some errand in town to look in, and then she could only stay for a couple of minutes; they had barely had time enough to say “How do you do?” when she was already scampering down the stairs again, exclaiming “Goodbye.”

And now Claude learned to know Christine. With his everlasting mistrust of woman a suspicion had remained to him, the suspicion of some love adventure in the provinces; but the girl’s soft eyes and bright laughter had carried all before them; he felt that she was as innocent as a big child. As soon as she arrived, quite unembarrassed, feeling fully at her ease, as with a friend, she began to indulge in a ceaseless flow of chatter. She had told him a score of times about her childhood at Clermont, and she constantly reverted to it. On the evening that her father, Captain Hallegrain, had suddenly died, she and her mother had been to church. She perfectly remembered their return home and the horrible night that had followed; the captain, very stout and muscular, lying stretched on a mattress, with his lower jaw protruding to such a degree that in her girlish memory she could not picture him otherwise. She also had that same jaw, and when her mother had not known how to master her, she had often cried: “Ah, my girl, you’ll eat your heart’s blood out like your father.” Poor mother! how she, Christine, had worried her with her love of horseplay, with her mad turbulent fits. As far back as she could remember, she pictured her mother ever seated at the same window, quietly painting fans, a slim little woman with very soft eyes, the only thing she had inherited of her. When people wanted to please her mother they told her, “she has got your eyes.” And then she smiled, happy in the thought of having contributed at least that touch of sweetness to her daughter’s features. After the death of her husband, she had worked so late as to endanger her eyesight. But how else could she have lived? Her widow’s pension⁠—five hundred francs per annum⁠—barely sufficed for the needs of her child. For five years Christine had seen her mother grow thinner and paler, wasting away a little bit each day until she became a mere shadow. And now she felt remorseful at not having been more obedient, at having driven her mother to despair by lack of application. She had begun each week with magnificent intentions, promising that she would soon help her to earn money; but her arms and legs got the fidgets, in spite of her efforts; the moment she became quiet she fell ill. Then one morning her mother had been unable to get up, and had died; her voice too weak to make itself heard, her eyes full of big tears. Ever did Christine behold her thus dead, with her weeping eyes wide open and fixed on her.

At other times, Christine, when questioned by Claude about Clermont, forgot those sorrows to recall more cheerful memories. She laughed gaily at the idea of their encampment, as she called it, in the Rue de l’Éclache; she born in Strasburg, her father a Gascon, her mother a Parisian, and all three thrown into that nook of Auvergne, which they detested. The Rue de l’Éclache, sloping down to the Botanical Gardens, was narrow and dank, gloomy, like a vault. Not a shop, never a passerby⁠—nothing but melancholy frontages, with shutters always closed. At the back, however, their windows, overlooking some courtyards, were turned to the full sunlight. The dining-room opened even on to a spacious balcony, a kind of wooden gallery, whose arcades were hung with a giant wistaria which almost smothered them with foliage. And the girl had grown up there, at first near her invalid father, then cloistered, as it were, with her mother, whom the least exertion exhausted. She had remained so complete a stranger to the town and its neighbourhood, that Claude and herself burst into laughter when she met his inquiries with the constant answer, “I don’t know.” The mountains? Yes, there were mountains on one side, they could be seen at the end of the streets; while on the other side of the town, after passing along other streets, there were flat fields stretching far away; but she never went there, the distance was too great. The only height she remembered was the Puy de Dôme, rounded off at the summit like a hump. In the town itself she could have found her way to the cathedral blindfold; one had to turn round by the Place de Jaude and take the Rue des Gras; but more than that she could not tell him; the rest of the town was an entanglement, a maze of sloping lanes and boulevards; a town of black lava ever dipping downward, where the rain of the thunderstorms swept by torrentially amidst formidable flashes of lightning. Oh! those storms; she still shuddered to think of them. Just opposite her room, above the roofs, the lightning conductor of the museum was always on fire. In the sitting-room she had her own window⁠—a deep recess as big as a room itself⁠—where her worktable and personal knicknacks stood. It was there that her mother had taught her to read; it was there that, later on, she had fallen asleep while listening to her masters, so greatly did the fatigue of learning daze her. And now she made fun of her own ignorance; she was a well-educated young lady, and no mistake, unable even to repeat the names of the Kings of France, with the