Doctor Pascal: Chapter 14

Chapter 14

In the study Clotilde was buttoning her dress, holding her child, whom
she had been nursing, still in her lap. It was after lunch, about
three o'clock on a hot sunny day at the end of August, and through the
crevices of the carefully closed shutters only a few scattered
sunbeams entered, piercing the drowsy and warm obscurity of the vast
apartment. The rest and peace of the Sunday seemed to enter and
diffuse itself in the room with the last sounds of the distant vesper
bell. Profound silence reigned in the empty house in which the mother
and child were to remain alone until dinner time, the servant having
asked permission to go see a cousin in the faubourg.

For an instant Clotilde looked at her child, now a big boy of three
months. She had been wearing mourning for Pascal for almost ten months
--a long and simple black gown, in which she looked divinely
beautiful, with her tall, slender figure and her sad, youthful face
surrounded by its aureole of fair hair. And although she could not
smile, it filled her with sweet emotion to see the beautiful child, so
plump and rosy, with his mouth still wet with milk, whose gaze had
been arrested by the sunbeam full of dancing motes. His eyes were
fixed wonderingly on the golden brightness, the dazzling miracle of
light. Then sleep came over him, and he let his little, round, bare
head, covered thinly with fair hair, fall back on his mother's arm.

Clotilde rose softly and laid him in the cradle, which stood beside
the table. She remained leaning over him for an instant to assure
herself that he was asleep; then she let down the curtain in the
already darkened room. Then she busied herself with supple and
noiseless movements, walking with so light a step that she scarcely
touched the floor, in putting away some linen which was on the table.
Twice she crossed the room in search of a little missing sock. She was
very silent, very gentle, and very active. And now, in the solitude of
the house, she fell into a reverie and all the past year arose before
her.

First, after the dreadful shock of the funeral, came the departure of
Martine, who had obstinately kept to her determination of going away
at once, not even remaining for the customary week, bringing to
replace her the young cousin of a baker in the neighborhood--a stout
brunette, who fortunately proved very neat and faithful. Martine
herself lived at Sainte-Marthe, in a retired corner, so penuriously
that she must be still saving even out of her small income. She was
not known to have any heir. Who, then, would profit by this
miserliness? In ten months she had not once set foot in La Souleiade--
monsieur was not there, and she had not even the desire to see
monsieur's son.

Then in Clotilde's reverie rose the figure of her grandmother
Felicite. The latter came to see her from time to time with the
condescension of a powerful relation who is liberal-minded enough to
pardon all faults when they have been cruelly expiated. She would come
unexpectedly, kiss the child, moralize, and give advice, and the young
mother had adopted toward her the respectful attitude which Pascal had
always maintained. Felicite was now wholly absorbed in her triumph.
She was at last about to realize a plan that she had long cherished
and maturely deliberated, which would perpetuate by an imperishable
monument the untarnished glory of the family. The plan was to devote
her fortune, which had become considerable, to the construction and
endowment of an asylum for the aged, to be called Rougon Asylum. She
had already bought the ground, a part of the old mall outside the
town, near the railway station; and precisely on this Sunday, at five
o'clock, when the heat should have abated a little, the first stone
was to be laid, a really solemn ceremony, to be honored by the
presence of all the authorities, and of which she was to be the
acknowledged queen, before a vast concourse of people.

Clotilde felt, besides, some gratitude toward her grandmother, who had
shown perfect disinterestedness on the occasion of the opening of
Pascal's will. The latter had constituted the young woman his sole
legatee; and the mother, who had a right to a fourth part, after
declaring her intention to respect her son's wishes, had simply
renounced her right to the succession. She wished, indeed, to
disinherit all her family, bequeathing to them glory only, by
employing her large fortune in the erection of this asylum, which was
to carry down to future ages the revered and glorious name of the
Rougons; and after having, for more than half a century, so eagerly
striven to acquire money, she now disdained it, moved by a higher and
purer ambition. And Clotilde, thanks to this liberality, had no
uneasiness regarding the future--the four thousand francs income would
be sufficient for her and her child. She would bring him up to be a
man. She had sunk the five thousand francs that she had found in the
desk in an annuity for him; and she owned, besides, La Souleiade,
which everybody advised her to sell. True, it cost but little to keep
it up, but what a sad and solitary life she would lead in that great
deserted house, much too large for her, where she would be lost. Thus
far, however, she had not been able to make up her mind to leave it.
Perhaps she would never be able to do so.

Ah, this La Souleiade! all her love, all her life, all her memories
were centered in it. It seemed to her at times as if Pascal were
living here still, for she had changed nothing of their former manner
of living. The furniture remained in the same places, the hours were
the same, the habits the same. The only change she had made was to
lock his room, into which only she went, as into a sanctuary, to weep
when she felt her heart too heavy. And although indeed she felt very
lonely, very lost, at each meal in the bright dining-room downstairs,
in fancy she heard there the echoes of their laughter, she recalled
the healthy appetite of her youth; when they two had eaten and drank
so gaily, rejoicing in their existence. And the garden, too, the whole
place was bound up with the most intimate fibers of her being, for she
could not take a step in it that their united images did not appear
before her--on the terrace; in the slender shadow of the great secular
cypresses, where they had so often contemplated the valley of the
Viorne, closed in by the ridges of the Seille and the parched hills of
Sainte-Marthe; the stone steps among the puny olive and almond trees,
which they had so often challenged each other to run up in a trial of
speed, like boys just let loose from school; and there was the pine
grove, too, the warm, embalsamed shade, where the needles crackled
under their feet; the vast threshing yard, carpeted with soft grass,
where they could see the whole sky at night, when the stars were
coming out; and above all there were the giant plane trees, whose
delightful shade they had enjoyed every day in summer, listening to
the soothing song of the fountain, the crystal clear song which it had
sung for centuries. Even to the old stones of the house, even to the
earth of the grounds, there was not an atom at La Souleiade in which
she did not feel a little of their blood warmly throbbing, with which
she did not feel a little of their life diffused and mingled.

But she preferred to spend her days in the workroom, and here it was
that she lived over again her best hours. There was nothing new in it
but the cradle. The doctor's table was in its place before the window
to the left--she could fancy him coming in and sitting down at it, for
his chair had not even been moved. On the long table in the center,
among the old heap of books and papers, there was nothing new but the
cheerful note of the little baby linen, which she was looking over.
The bookcases displayed the same rows of volumes; the large oaken
press seemed to guard within its sides the same treasure, securely
shut in. Under the smoky ceiling the room was still redolent of work,
with its confusion of chairs, the pleasant disorder of this common
workroom, filled with the caprices of the girl and the researches of
the scientist. But what most moved her to-day was the sight of her old
pastels hanging against the wall, the copies which she had made of
living flowers, scrupulously exact copies, and of dream flowers of an
imaginary world, whither her wild fancy sometimes carried her.

Clotilde had just finished arranging the little garments on the table
when, lifting her eyes, she perceived before her the pastel of old
King David, with his hand resting on the shoulder of Abishag the young
Shunammite. And she, who now never smiled, felt her face flush with a
thrill of tender and pleasing emotion. How they had loved each other,
how they had dreamed of an eternity of love the day on which she had
amused herself painting this proud and loving allegory! The old king,
sumptuously clad in a robe hanging in straight folds, heavy with
precious stones, wore the royal bandeau on his snowy locks; but she
was more sumptuous still, with only her tall slender figure, her
delicate round throat, and her supple arms, divinely graceful. Now he
was gone, he was sleeping under the ground, while she, her pure and
triumphant beauty concealed by her black robes, had only her child to
express the love she had given him before the assembled people, in the
full light of day.

Then Clotilde sat down beside the cradle. The slender sunbeams
lengthened, crossing the room from end to end, the heat of the warm
afternoon grew oppressive in the drowsy obscurity made by the closed
shutters, and the silence of the house seemed more profound than
before. She set apart some little waists, she sewed on some tapes with
slow-moving needle, and gradually she fell into a reverie in the warm
deep peacefulness of the room, in the midst of the glowing heat
outside. Her thoughts first turned to her pastels, the exact copies
and the fantastic dream flowers; she said to herself now that all her
dual nature was to be found in that passion for truth, which had at
times kept her a whole day before a flower in order to copy it with
exactness, and in her need of the spiritual, which at other times took
her outside the real, and carried her in wild dreams to the paradise
of flowers such as had never grown on earth. She had always been thus.
She felt that she was in reality the same to-day as she had been
yesterday, in the midst of the flow of new life which ceaselessly
transformed her. And then she thought of Pascal, full of gratitude
that he had made her what she was. In days past when, a little girl,
he had removed her from her execrable surroundings and taken her home
with him, he had undoubtedly followed the impulses of his good heart,
but he had also undoubtedly desired to try an experiment with her, to
see how she would grow up in the different environment, in an
atmosphere of truthfulness and affection. This had always been an idea
of his. It was an old theory of his which he would have liked to test
on a large scale: culture through environment, complete regeneration
even, the improvement, the salvation of the individual, physically as
well as morally. She owed to him undoubtedly the best part of her
nature; she guessed how fanciful and violent she might have become,
while he had made her only enthusiastic and courageous.

In this retrospection she was clearly conscious of the gradual change
that had taken place within her. Pascal had corrected her heredity,
and she lived over again the slow evolution, the struggle between the
fantastic and the real in her. It had begun with her outbursts of
anger as a child, a ferment of rebellion, a want of mental balance
that had caused her to indulge in most hurtful reveries. Then came her
fits of extreme devotion, the need of illusion and falsehood, of
immediate happiness in the thought that the inequalities and
injustices of this wicked world would he compensated by the eternal
joys of a future paradise. This was the epoch of her struggles with
Pascal, of the torture which she had caused him, planning to destroy
the work of his genius. And at this point her nature had changed; she
had acknowledged him for her master. He had conquered her by the
terrible lesson of life which he had given her on the night of the
storm. Then, environment had acted upon her, evolution had proceeded
rapidly, and she had ended by becoming a well-balanced and rational
woman, willing to live life as it ought to be lived, satisfied with
doing her work in the hope that the sum of the common labor would one
day free the world from evil and pain. She had loved, she was a mother
now, and she understood.

Suddenly she remembered the night which they had spent in the
threshing yard. She could still hear her lamentation under the stars--
the cruelty of nature, the inefficacy of science, the wickedness of
humanity, and the need she felt of losing herself in God, in the
Unknown. Happiness consisted in self-renunciation. Then she heard him
repeat his creed--the progress of reason through science, truths
acquired slowly and forever the only possible good, the belief that
the sum of these truths, always augmenting, would finally confer upon
man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. All was summed up
in his ardent faith in life. As he expressed it, it was necessary to
march with life, which marched always. No halt was to be expected, no
peace in immobility and renunciation, no consolation in turning back.
One must keep a steadfast soul, the only ambition to perform one's
work, modestly looking for no other reward of life than to have lived
it bravely, accomplishing the task which it imposes. Evil was only an
accident not yet explained, humanity appearing from a great height
like an immense wheel in action, working ceaselessly for the future.
Why should the workman who disappeared, having finished his day's
work, abuse the work because he could neither see nor know its end?
Even if it were to have no end why should he not enjoy the delight of
action, the exhilarating air of the march, the sweetness of sleep
after the fatigue of a long and busy day? The children would carry on
the task of the parents; they were born and cherished only for this,
for the task of life which is transmitted to them, which they in their
turn will transmit to others. All that remained, then, was to be
courageously resigned to the grand common labor, without the rebellion
of the ego, which demands personal happiness, perfect and complete.

She questioned herself, and she found that she did not experience that
anguish which had filled her formerly at the thought of what was to
follow death. This anxiety about the Beyond no longer haunted her
until it became a torture. Formerly she would have liked to wrest by
force from heaven the secrets of destiny. It had been a source of
infinite grief to her not to know why she existed. Why are we born?
What do we come on earth to do? What is the meaning of this execrable
existence, without equality, without justice, which seemed to her like
a fevered dream? Now her terror was calmed; she could think of these

things courageously. Perhaps it was her child, the continuation of
herself, which now concealed from her the horror of her end. But her
regular life contributed also to this, the thought that it was
necessary to live for the effort of living, and that the only peace
possible in this world was in the joy of the accomplishment of this
effort. She repeated to herself a remark of the doctor, who would
often say when he saw a peasant returning home with a contented look
after his day's work: "There is a man whom anxiety about the Beyond
will not prevent from sleeping." He meant to say that this anxiety
troubles and perverts only excitable and idle brains. If all performed
their healthful task, all would sleep peacefully at night. She herself
had felt the beneficent power of work in the midst of her sufferings
and her grief. Since he had taught her to employ every one of her
hours; since she had been a mother, especially, occupied constantly
with her child, she no longer felt a chill of horror when she thought
of the Unknown. She put aside without an effort disquieting reveries;
and if she still felt an occasional fear, if some of her daily griefs
made her sick at heart, she found comfort and unfailing strength in
the thought that her child was this day a day older, that he would be
another day older on the morrow, that day by day, page by page, his
work of life was being accomplished. This consoled her delightfully
for all her miseries. She had a duty, an object, and she felt in her
happy serenity that she was doing surely what she had been sent here
to do.

Yet, even at this very moment she knew that the mystic was not
entirely dead within her. In the midst of the profound silence she
heard a slight noise, and she raised her head. Who was the divine
mediator that had passed? Perhaps the beloved dead for whom she
mourned, and whose presence near her she fancied she could divine.
There must always be in her something of the childlike believer she
had always been, curious about the Unknown, having an instinctive
longing for the mysterious. She accounted to herself for this longing,
she even explained it scientifically. However far science may extend
the limits of human knowledge, there is undoubtedly a point which it
cannot pass; and it was here precisely that Pascal placed the only
interest in life--in the effort which we ceaselessly make to know more
--there was only one reasonable meaning in life, this continual
conquest of the unknown. Therefore, she admitted the existence of
undiscovered forces surrounding the world, an immense and obscure
domain, ten times larger than the domain already won, an infinite and
unexplored realm through which future humanity would endlessly ascend.
Here, indeed, was a field vast enough for the imagination to lose
itself in. In her hours of reverie she satisfied in it the imperious
need which man seems to have for the spiritual, a need of escaping
from the visible world, of interrogating the Unknown, of satisfying in
it the dream of absolute justice and of future happiness. All that
remained of her former torture, her last mystic transports, were there
appeased. She satisfied there that hunger for consoling illusions
which suffering humanity must satisfy in order to live. But in her all
was happily balanced. At this crisis, in an epoch overburdened with
science, disquieted at the ruins it has made, and seized with fright
in the face of the new century, wildly desiring to stop and to return
to the past, Clotilde kept the happy mean; in her the passion for
truth was broadened by her eagerness to penetrate the Unknown. If
sectarian scientists shut out the horizon to keep strictly to the
phenomenon, it was permitted to her, a good, simple creature, to
reserve the part that she did not know, that she would never know. And
if Pascal's creed was the logical deduction from the whole work, the
eternal question of the Beyond, which she still continued to put to
heaven, reopened the door of the infinite to humanity marching ever
onward. Since we must always learn, while resigning ourselves never to
know all, was it not to will action, life itself, to reserve the
Unknown--an eternal doubt and an eternal hope?

Another sound, as of a wing passing, the light touch of a kiss upon
her hair, this time made her smile. He was surely here; and her whole
being went out toward him, in the great flood of tenderness with which
her heart overflowed. How kind and cheerful he was, and what a love
for others underlay his passionate love of life! Perhaps he, too, had
been only a dreamer, for he had dreamed the most beautiful of dreams,
the final belief in a better world, when science should have bestowed
incalculable power upon man--to accept everything, to turn everything
to our happiness, to know everything and to foresee everything, to
make nature our servant, to live in the tranquillity of intelligence
satisfied. Meantime faith in life, voluntary and regular labor, would
suffice for health. Evil was only the unexplained side of things;
suffering would one day be assuredly utilized. And regarding from
above the enormous labor of the world, seeing the sum total of
humanity, good and bad--admirable, in spite of everything, for their
courage and their industry--she now regarded all mankind as united in
a common brotherhood, she now felt only boundless indulgence, an
infinite pity, and an ardent charity. Love, like the sun, bathes the
earth, and goodness is the great river at which all hearts drink.

Clotilde had been plying her needle for two hours, with the same
regular movement, while her thoughts wandered away in the profound
silence. But the tapes were sewed on the little waists, she had even
marked some new wrappers, which she had bought the day before. And,
her sewing finished, she rose to put the linen away. Outside the sun
was declining, and only slender and oblique sunbeams entered through
the crevices of the shutters. She could not see clearly, and she
opened one of the shutters, then she forgot herself for a moment, at
the sight of the vast horizon suddenly unrolled before her. The
intense heat had abated, a delicious breeze was blowing, and the sky
was of a cloudless blue. To the left could be distinguished even the
smallest clumps of pines, among the blood-colored ravines of the rocks
of the Seille, while to the right, beyond the hills of Sainte-Marthe,
the valley of the Viorne stretched away in the golden dust of the
setting sun. She looked for a moment at the tower of St. Saturnin, all
golden also, dominating the rose-colored town; and she was about to
leave the window when she saw a sight that drew her back and kept her
there, leaning on her elbow for a long time still.

Beyond the railroad a multitude of people were crowded together on the
old mall. Clotilde at once remembered the ceremony. She knew that her
Grandmother Felicite was going to lay the first stone of the Rougon
Asylum, the triumphant monument destined to carry down to future ages
the glory of the family. Vast preparations had been going on for a
week past. There was talk of a silver hod and trowel, which the old
lady was to use herself, determined to figure to triumph, with her
eighty-two years. What swelled her heart with regal pride was that on
this occasion she made the conquest of Plassans for the third time,
for she compelled the whole town, all the three quarters, to range
themselves around her, to form an escort for her, and to applaud her
as a benefactress. For, of course, there had to be present lady
patronesses, chosen from among the noblest ladies of the Quartier St.
Marc; a delegation from the societies of working-women of the old
quarter, and, finally, the most distinguished residents of the new
town, advocates, notaries, physicians, without counting the common
people, a stream of people dressed in their Sunday clothes, crowding
there eagerly, as to a festival. And in the midst of this supreme
triumph she was perhaps most proud--she, one of the queens of the
Second Empire, the widow who mourned with so much dignity the fallen
government--in having conquered the young republic itself, obliging
it, in the person of the sub-prefect, to come and salute her and thank
her. At first there had been question only of a discourse of the
mayor; but it was known with certainty, since the previous day, that
the sub-prefect also would speak. From so great a distance Clotilde
could distinguish only a moving crowd of black coats and light
dresses, under the scorching sun. Then there was a distant sound of
music, the music of the amateur band of the town, the sonorous strains
of whose brass instruments were borne to her at intervals on the
breeze.

She left the window and went and opened the large oaken press to put
away in it the linen that had remained on the table. It was in this
press, formerly so full of the doctor's manuscripts, and now empty,
that she kept the baby's wardrobe. It yawned open, vast, seemingly
bottomless, and on the large bare shelves there was nothing but the
baby linen, the little waists, the little caps, the little socks, all
the fine clothing, the down of the bird still in the nest. Where so
many thoughts had been stored up, where a man's unremitting labor for
thirty years had accumulated in an overflowing heap of papers, there
was now only a baby's clothing, only the first garments which would
protect it for an hour, as it were, and which very soon it could no
longer use. The vastness of the antique press seemed brightened and
all refreshed by them.

When Clotilde had arranged the wrappers and the waists upon a shelf,
she perceived a large envelope containing the fragments of the
documents which she had placed there after she had rescued them from
the fire. And she remembered a request which Dr. Ramond had come only
the day before to make her--that she would see if there remained among
this _debris_ any fragment of importance having a scientific interest.
He was inconsolable for the loss of the precious manuscripts which the
master had bequeathed to him. Immediately after the doctor's death he
had made an attempt to write from memory his last talk, that summary
of vast theories expounded by the dying man with so heroic a serenity;
but he could recall only parts of it. He would have needed complete
notes, observations made from day to day, the results obtained, and
the laws formulated. The loss was irreparable, the task was to be
begun over again, and he lamented having only indications; he said
that it would be at least twenty years before science could make up
the loss, and take up and utilize the ideas of the solitary pioneer
whose labors a wicked and imbecile catastrophe had destroyed.

The genealogical tree, the only document that had remained intact, was
attached to the envelope, and Clotilde carried the whole to the table
beside the cradle. After she had taken out the fragments, one by one,
she found, what she had been already almost certain of, that not a
single entire page of manuscript remained, not a single complete note
having any meaning. There were only fragments of documents, scraps of
half-burned and blackened paper, without sequence or connection. But
as she examined them, these incomplete phrases, these words half
consumed by fire, assumed for her an interest which no one else could
have understood. She remembered the night of the storm, and the
phrases completed themselves, the beginning of a word evoked before
her persons and histories. Thus her eye fell on Maxime's name, and she
reviewed the life of this brother who had remained a stranger to her,
and whose death, two months before, had left her almost indifferent.
Then, a half-burned scrap containing her father's name gave her an
uneasy feeling, for she believed that her father had obtained
possession of the fortune and the house on the avenue of Bois de
Boulogne through the good offices of his hairdresser's niece, the
innocent Rose, repaid, no doubt, by a generous percentage. Then she
met with other names, that of her uncle Eugene, the former vice
emperor, now dead, the cure of Saint-Eutrope, who, she had been told
yesterday, was dying of consumption. And each fragment became animated
in this way; the execrable family lived again in these scraps, these
black ashes, where were now only disconnected words.

Then Clotilde had the curiosity to unfold the genealogical tree and
spread it out upon the table. A strong emotion gained on her; she was
deeply affected by these relics; and when she read once more the notes
added in pencil by Pascal, a few moments before his death, tears rose
to her eyes. With what courage he had written down the date of his
death! And what despairing regret for life one divined in the
trembling words announcing the birth of the child! The tree ascended,
spread out its branches, unfolded its leaves, and she remained for a
long time contemplating it, saying to herself that all the work of the
master was to be found here in the classified records of this family
tree. She could still hear certain of his words commenting on each
hereditary case, she recalled his lessons. But the children, above
all, interested her; she read again and again the notes on the leaves
which bore their names. The doctor's colleague in Noumea, to whom he
had written for information about the child born of the marriage of
the convict Etienne, had at last made up his mind to answer; but the
only information he gave was in regard to the sex--it was a girl, he
said, and she seemed to be healthy. Octave Mouret had come near losing
his daughter, who had always been very frail, while his little boy
continued to enjoy superb health. But the chosen abode of vigorous
health and of extraordinary fecundity was still the house of Jean, at
Valqueyras, whose wife had had two children in three years and was
about to have a third. The nestlings throve in the sunshine, in the
heart of a fertile country, while the father sang as he guided his
plow, and the mother at home cleverly made the soup and kept the
children in order. There was enough new vitality and industry there to
make another family, a whole race. Clotilde fancied at this moment
that she could hear Pascal's cry: "Ah, our family! what is it going to
be, in what kind of being will it end?" And she fell again into a
reverie, looking at the tree sending its latest branches into the
future. Who could tell whence the healthy branch would spring? Perhaps
the great and good man so long awaited was germinating there.

A slight cry drew Clotilde from her reflections. The muslin curtain of
the cradle seemed to become animate. It was the child who had wakened
up and was moving about and calling to her. She at once took him out
of the cradle and held him up gaily, that he might bathe in the golden
light of the setting sun. But he was insensible to the beauty of the
closing day; his little vacant eyes, still full of sleep, turned away
from the vast sky, while he opened wide his rosy and ever hungry
mouth, like a bird opening its beak. And he cried so loud, he had
wakened up so ravenous, that she decided to nurse him again. Besides,
it was his hour; it would soon be three hours since she had last
nursed him.

Clotilde sat down again beside the table. She took him on her lap, but
he was not very good, crying louder and louder, growing more and more
impatient; and she looked at him with a smile while she unfastened her
dress, showing her round, slender throat. Already the child knew, and
raising himself he felt with his lips for the breast. When she placed
it in his mouth he gave a little grunt of satisfaction; he threw
himself upon her with the fine, voracious appetite of a young
gentleman who was determined to live. At first he had clutched the
breast with his little free hand, as if to show that it was his, to
defend it and to guard it. Then, in the joy of the warm stream that
filled his throat he raised his little arm straight up, like a flag.
And Clotilde kept her unconscious smile, seeing him so healthy, so
rosy, and so plump, thriving so well on the nourishment he drew from
her. During the first few weeks she had suffered from a fissure, and
even now her breast was sensitive; but she smiled, notwithstanding,
with that peaceful look which mothers wear, happy in giving their milk
as they would give their blood.

When she had unfastened her dress, showing her bare throat and breast,
in the solitude and silence of the study, another of her mysteries,
one of her sweetest and most hidden secrets, was revealed at the same
time--the slender necklace with the seven pearls, the seven fine,
milky stars which the master had put around her neck on a day of
misery, in his mania for giving. Since it had been there no one else
had seen it. It seemed as if she guarded it with as much modesty as if
it were a part of her flesh, so simple, so pure, so childlike. And all
the time the child was nursing she alone looked at it in a dreamy
reverie, moved by the tender memory of the kisses whose warm perfume
it still seemed to keep.

A burst of distant music seemed to surprise Clotilde. She turned her
head and looked across the fields gilded by the oblique rays of the
sun. Ah, yes! the ceremony, the laying of the corner stone yonder!
Then she turned her eyes again on the child, and she gave herself up
to the delight of seeing him with so fine an appetite. She had drawn
forward a little bench, to raise one of her knees, resting her foot
upon it, and she leaned one shoulder against the table, beside the
tree and the blackened fragments of the envelopes. Her thoughts
wandered away in an infinitely sweet reverie, while she felt the best
part of herself, the pure milk, flowing softly, making more and more
her own the dear being she had borne. The child had come, the
redeemer, perhaps. The bells rang, the three wise men had set out,
followed by the people, by rejoicing nature, smiling on the infant in
its swaddling clothes. She, the mother, while he drank life in long
draughts, was dreaming already of his future. What would he be when
she should have made him tall and strong, giving herself to him
entirely? A scientist, perhaps, who would reveal to the world
something of the eternal truth; or a great captain, who would confer
glory on his country; or, still better, one of those shepherds of the
people who appease the passions and bring about the reign of justice.
She saw him, in fancy, beautiful, good and powerful. Hers was the
dream of every mother--the conviction that she had brought the
expected Messiah into the world; and there was in this hope, in this
obstinate belief, which every mother has in the certain triumph of her
child, the hope which itself makes life, the belief which gives
humanity the ever renewed strength to live still.

What would the child be? She looked at him, trying to discover whom he
resembled. He had certainly his father's brow and eyes, there was
something noble and strong in the breadth of the head. She saw a
resemblance to herself, too, in his fine mouth and his delicate chin.
Then, with secret uneasiness, she sought a resemblance to the others,
the terrible ancestors, all those whose names were there inscribed on
the tree, unfolding its growth of hereditary leaves. Was it this one,
or this, or yet this other, whom he would resemble? She grew calm,
however, she could not but hope, her heart swelled with eternal hope.
The faith in life which the master had implanted in her kept her brave
and steadfast. What did misery, suffering and wickedness matter!
Health was in universal labor, in the effort made, in the power which
fecundates and which produces. The work was good when the child
blessed love. Then hope bloomed anew, in spite of the open wounds, the
dark picture of human shame. It was life perpetuated, tried anew, life
which we can never weary of believing good, since we live it so
eagerly, with all its injustice and suffering.

Clotilde had glanced involuntarily at the ancestral tree spread out
beside her. Yes, the menace was there--so many crimes, so much filth,
side by side with so many tears, and so much patient goodness; so
extraordinary a mixture of the best and the most vile, a humanity in
little, with all its defects and all its struggles. It was a question
whether it would not be better that a thunderbolt should come and
destroy all this corrupt and miserable ant-hill. And after so many
terrible Rougons, so many vile Macquarts, still another had been born.
Life did not fear to create another of them, in the brave defiance of
its eternity. It continued its work, propagated itself according to
its laws, indifferent to theories, marching on in its endless labor.
Even at the risk of making monsters, it must of necessity create,
since, in spite of all it creates, it never wearies of creating in the
hope, no doubt, that the healthy and the good will one day come. Life,
life, which flows like a torrent, which continues its work, beginning
it over and over again, without pause, to the unknown end! life in
which we bathe, life with its infinity of contrary currents, always in
motion, and vast as a boundless sea!

A transport of maternal fervor thrilled Clotilde's heart, and she
smiled, seeing the little voracious mouth drinking her life. It was a
prayer, an invocation, to the unknown child, as to the unknown God! To
the child of the future, to the genius, perhaps, that was to be, to
the Messiah that the coming century awaited, who would deliver the
people from their doubt and their suffering! Since the nation was to
be regenerated, had he not come for this work? He would make the
experiment anew, he would raise up walls, give certainty to those who
were in doubt, he would build the city of justice, where the sole law
of labor would insure happiness. In troublous times prophets were to
be expected--at least let him not be the Antichrist, the destroyer,
the beast foretold in the Apocalypse--who would purge the earth of its
wickedness, when this should become too great. And life would go on in
spite of everything, only it would be necessary to wait for other
myriads of years before the other unknown child, the benefactor,
should appear.

But the child had drained her right breast, and, as he was growing
angry, Clotilde turned him round and gave him the left. Then she began
to smile, feeling the caress of his greedy little lips. At all events
she herself was hope. A mother nursing, was she not the image of the
world continued and saved? She bent over, she looked into his limpid
eyes, which opened joyously, eager for the light. What did the child
say to her that she felt her heart beat more quickly under the breast
which he was draining? To what cause would he give his blood when he
should be a man, strong with all the milk which he would have drunk?
Perhaps he said nothing to her, perhaps he already deceived her, and
yet she was so happy, so full of perfect confidence in him.

Again there was a distant burst of music. This must be the apotheosis,
the moment when Grandmother Felicite, with her silver trowel, laid the
first stone of the monument to the glory of the Rougons. The vast blue
sky, gladdened by the Sunday festivities, rejoiced. And in the warm
silence, in the solitary peace of the workroom, Clotilde smiled at the
child, who was still nursing, his little arm held straight up in the
air, like a signal flag of life.

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