The Dream (Oxford World's Classics), page 5
1882 (April) Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille). (3 September) Death of Turgenev
1883 (13 February) Death of Wagner. (March) The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames). (30 April) Death of Manet
1884 (March) The Bright Side of Life (La Joie de vivre). Preface to catalogue of Manet exhibition
1885 (March) Germinal. (12 May) Begins writing The Masterpiece (L’Œuvre). (22 May) Death of Victor Hugo. (23 December) First instalment of The Masterpiece appears in Le Gil Blas
1886 (27 March) Final instalment of The Masterpiece, which is published in book form in April
1887 (18 August) Denounced as an onanistic pornographer in the Manifesto of the Five in Le Figaro. (November) Earth
1888 (October) The Dream. Jeanne Rozerot becomes his mistress
1889 (20 September) Birth of Denise, daughter of Zola and Jeanne
1890 (March) La Bête humaine
1891 (March) Money. (April) Elected President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. (25 September) Birth of Jacques, son of Zola and Jeanne
1892 ( June) La Débâcle
1893 ( July) Doctor Pascal, the last of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Fêted on visit to London
1894 (August) Lourdes, the first novel of the trilogy Three Cities. (22 December) Dreyfus found guilty by a court martial
1896 (May) Rome
1898 (13 January) ‘J’accuse’, his article in defence of Dreyfus, published in L’Aurore. (21 February) Found guilty of libelling the Minister of War and given the maximum sentence of one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. Appeal for retrial granted on a technicality. (March) Paris. (23 May) Retrial delayed. (18 July) Leaves for England instead of attending court
1899 (4 June) Returns to France. (October) Fecundity, the first of his Four Gospels
1901 (May) Toil, the second ‘Gospel’
1902 (29 September) Dies of fumes from his bedroom fire, the chimney having been capped either by accident or anti-Dreyfusard design. Wife survives. (5 October) Public funeral
1903 (March) Truth, the third ‘Gospel’, published posthumously. Justice was to be the fourth
1908 (4 June) Remains transferred to the Panthéon
The Dream
Chapter 1
During the bitter winter of 1860 the River Oise* froze over and heavy snowfall covered the plains of Lower Picardy, and on Christmas Day a blizzard blew out of the north-east and almost buried the town of Beaumont. The snow, which had begun falling in the early morning, came down more heavily towards evening, and banked up all through the night. In the upper town, driven by the wind, the snow swept down the Rue des Orfèvres—at the far end of which rises the north face of the cathedral transept, hemmed in by buildings on either side—and beat against St Agnes’s door, an ancient Romanesque portal which contains elements of the early Gothic,* elaborately adorned as it is with sculptures beneath a stark gable. By dawn the next morning the snow there lay almost three feet deep.
The street slumbered on, lethargic after the festivities of the previous day. Six o’clock struck. In the darkness tinged blue by the slowly, stubbornly falling flakes, a vague form offered the only sign of life—a little girl of 9, who had taken refuge beneath the arches of the portal, and had shivered through the night, sheltering there as best she could. She was dressed in rags, with a torn scarf wrapped about her head, and her bare feet thrust into a sturdy pair of men’s shoes. Doubtless she had ended up there after wandering the town for many hours, and had collapsed, exhausted. She must have felt as though she had come to the ends of the earth, friendless, bereft and utterly abandoned, a prey to gnawing hunger and deadly cold. In her weakened state, choked by the weight of her sorrows, she had ceased struggling and moved only instinctively—shifting her position or burrowing into the old stones whenever a gust of wind sent the snow swirling.
The hours slipped slowly by. For a long time she propped herself against the central pier that divides the double doors of the twin bay, its pillar bearing a statue of St Agnes,* the 13-year-old martyr, a little girl like herself, carrying a palm branch with a lamb at her feet. Above the lintel, the whole legend of the virgin child betrothed to Jesus unfolds across the tympanum,* carved in high relief and suffused with simple faith. It tells how her hair grew down and covered her when the governor, whose son she had refused, sent her naked into houses of ill repute; and how the flames of the pyre turned aside from her limbs and burned the executioners when they set the wood alight. It tells of the miracle of her relics: how Constance, the emperor’s daughter, was cured of leprosy;* and of the miracle of one of her painted effigies: how the priest Paulinus,* wracked by the desire to take a wife, on the pope’s advice offered an emerald ring to the effigy, which held out a finger, and then withdrew it, keeping the ring (which it still wears)—thereby delivering Paulinus from temptation. At the apex of the tympanum, Agnes appears in a radiant circle of light as she is received into heaven, where Jesus, her betrothed, weds his delicate young bride with a kiss of eternal rapture.
When the wind blew down the street it whipped the snow straight into her face, heaping it into white drifts which threatened to engulf the doorway. And so the child crept to one side and huddled against the virgins that stand in the jambs,* above the stylobate.* These saints are Agnes’s companions and her escort: three on her right, Dorothea, who survived in prison on miraculous bread,* Barbara, who lived in a tower,* and Genevieve, whose virginity saved Paris;* and three on her left, Agatha, whose breasts were twisted and torn,* Christina, who was tortured by her father,* and threw pieces of her own flesh in his face, and Cecilia, who was loved by an angel.* Above them, there are still more virgins, rising in three serried ranks along the curves of the voussoirs,* covering the three recessed arches with a great bloom of chaste and exultant flesh; below, they are martyred, crushed, and tortured, and, above, they are greeted by flights of cherubim as they rapturously enter into the company of heaven.
She had long been without shelter by the time eight o’clock struck and day began to break. By then the snow would have reached her shoulders if she had not trodden it down. Behind her the old door was covered with snow, as though cloaked with ermine, as flawlessly white as an altar of repose,* while above it, the grey façade was so smooth and bare that not a single snowflake clung there. The great saints in the jambs were completely coated with snow, from their white feet to their white hair, and shone with pale innocence. Above them, the scenes on the tympanum and the small saints in the archivolts* stood out in vivid relief, drawn with bright strokes against a dark background; and the stonework appeared thus all the way up to that final ecstatic scene, Agnes’s wedding, which the archangels seemed to celebrate beneath a shower of white roses. Upright on her pillar, with her white palm branch and white lamb, the statue of the virgin child radiated pale purity, her snow-covered body immaculate in the paralysing cold which had frozen this mystical flight of triumphant virginity all around her. And at her feet, another, a poor, wretched girl, pale also in a mantle of snow, so pale and rigid, in fact, that she seemed to have turned to stone, and could no longer be distinguished from the great virgins.
Along the line of sleeping house-fronts a shutter clattered open, and she looked up. The noise came from her right—from the first floor of the house abutting the cathedral. A dark-haired woman of about 40, well-made and very beautiful, had leant out and seen the child stir. She did not at once draw in her bare arm despite the intense cold. An expression of sorrowful surprise overtook her composed features. She shuddered, and closed the window. The sight she had glimpsed remained with her: beneath the tattered scarf, a blonde-haired girl with violet-coloured eyes, a long face, and a very slender neck that had the elegance of a lily, poised on thin shoulders. But she was blue with cold, her little hands and feet appeared frozen, and that small cloud of breath was the only sign that she was still alive.
The child went on staring dully up at the house. It was an ancient, narrow, two-storey construction, built towards the end of the fifteenth century, and was attached to the wall of the cathedral itself, with buttresses on either side, like a wart that has grown between two toes of a colossus. Supported in this way, the house had been admirably preserved. The ground floor was built of stone, while the upper floor was timber-framed and faced with brick. The roof timbers projected a metre beyond the gable, and at the left-hand corner of the house stood a stair-turret which had a narrow window still with its original leading. On account of its great age, the house had undergone many repairs. The roof tiles must have dated from the age of Louis XIV.* It was easy to identify the work that had been done in that period: a small window had been inserted in the turret head; the original stained-glass windows had everywhere been replaced by wooden-framed windows. On the first floor, the central bay window in a row of three had been bricked up, lending the façade the symmetrical proportions of the other buildings in the street, which were of more recent date. The modifications which had been made on the ground floor were also plain to see: a door of moulded oak had replaced the old one with iron bands under the staircase; and, within the great central arch, the base, sides and summit had been bricked in, leaving just a rectangular opening—a sort of large casement—in place of the ogival bay* which had formerly given onto the street.
The child was still gazing blankly at this venerable building, the well-maintained abode of a master craftsman, and was reading a yellow sign nailed to the left of the door which bore the words Hubert Vestment-Maker written in ancient black lettering, when the banging of a shutter once again caught her attention. This time it was the shutter of the rectangular window on the ground floor. A man leaned out, his expression deeply troubled. He had an aquiline nose, a bulging forehead, and a thick head of hair which had already turned white, although he was only 45. He too studied the girl for a while, his broad, gentle mouth creased as though he were in pain. She watched him as he stood behind the little greenish panes. He turned around and made a sign, and his beautiful wife reappeared. Side by side, the couple stood motionless, staring at her sadly.
For four hundred years, generations of Huberts, each son an embroiderer like his father, had lived in the house. A master vestment-maker had built it during the reign of Louis XI;* another had made repairs to it while Louis XIV was on the throne. Like all his ancestors, this latest member of the Hubert line worked as an embroiderer there. At the age of 20 he had fallen so passionately in love with Hubertine, a girl of 16, that when her mother, a magistrate’s widow, refused the match, he had run away with the girl and married her. She was marvellously beautiful—and this was the wellspring of their whole romance, their happiness and their misfortune. Eight months later, when she had come to her dying mother’s bedside, she was pregnant; her mother disinherited her and cursed her so cruelly that the baby, born that same evening, did not survive. Ever since, the stubborn old lady had refused to grant forgiveness from her coffin in the graveyard, and the couple remained childless, despite their deepest longings. After twenty-four years they still wept for the child they had lost, and despaired of ever swaying the dead woman’s resolve.
Unsettled by their gaze, the child had retreated behind the pillar of St Agnes. The street was starting to awaken, and she was greatly perturbed. Shops were opening up and people were venturing out. The Rue des Orfèvres terminates abruptly where it meets the lateral façade of the cathedral; on the apse side it is blocked off by the Huberts’ house, and the only egress is by the Rue Soleil, a narrow lane which runs adjacent to the side aisle as far as the cathedral’s main façade, where it opens into the Place du Cloître. As they passed by, two pious ladies glanced with surprise at this little beggar-girl whom they had never seen before in Beaumont. The snow continued falling, lightly but stubbornly, and the cold seemed to grow more intense as the wan day advanced. All that could be heard was a distant sound of voices, muffled and deadened by the great white shroud which lay across the town.
Shy of contact, and ashamed of her plight as though of some crime, she shrank back further. And then, all at once, she saw Hubertine—who did without a maid-servant and had stepped out to buy bread—standing in front of her.
‘What are you doing there, child? Who are you?’
She did not reply, and simply hid her face. By now her limbs were numb, and she felt as though she were fainting—as though her heart had quite simply turned to ice and stopped beating. After the good lady turned away with a gentle shrug of pity, she sank to her knees, having reached the end of her strength, and collapsed into the snow like a crumpled rag. Snowflakes fell silently, covering her over. When the lady returned carrying her warm loaf, she saw the girl lying on the ground, and went up to her again.
‘You can’t stay under this porch, child.’
Hubert had come outside now and was standing on the doorstep. He took the bread from his wife, and said:
‘Come on, pick her up. Bring her inside.’
Without another word, Hubertine lifted up the girl in her strong arms. The child did not flinch, and was carried off like a dead thing, her eyes shut tight, her teeth clenched, completely cold to the touch, as light as a fledgling that has fallen from its nest.
Once they were inside, Hubert closed the door and Hubertine carried her burden across the front room, which served as a sitting room and looked out into the street. Several panels of embroidery were on display in front of the great rectangular window. She went through to the kitchen, which had in past times been used as a common room, and was preserved almost intact, with its exposed beams, and its flagstones repaired in twenty different places, and its great fireplace and stone mantel. Arranged along the shelves were utensils, pots, kettles, and bowls, all dating from a century or two earlier, along with old earthenware, stoneware, and pewter vessels. In the middle of the hearth, however, stood a modern stove—a large, cast-iron model with shiny copper fittings. It was glowing red, and water could be heard bubbling away in a large kettle. A saucepan containing café au lait was warming to one side.
‘Goodness, it’s much nicer in here than outside,’ said Hubert, placing the bread on a sturdy Louis XIII table* which stood in the centre of the room. ‘Put the poor little thing in front of the stove to thaw out.’
Hubertine sat the child down and both of them watched as she started to come around. The snow which had lodged in her clothing began to melt and fell in thick droplets. Through the holes in her thick shoes they could see her bruised little feet. The thin dress she wore clung to her stiff limbs and revealed the outline of her pitiful little body which had already endured so much hardship and pain. She shuddered deeply, opening a pair of frightened eyes, and jumped like wild animal that has awoken to find itself caught in a trap. She seemed to try and hide her face beneath the ragged scarf she had tied under her chin. They thought her right arm must be crippled, so stiffly did she hold it across her chest.
‘Don’t be alarmed, we’re not going to hurt you. Where are you from? Who are you?’
The more they spoke, the more frightened she became. She kept turning her head, as though expecting to find someone behind her ready to give her a beating. She cast furtive glances over the kitchen, the flagstones, the beams, and the shiny utensils. And then she looked outside, out through the two irregular-shaped windows which had been inserted into the old bay, and her gaze travelled all around the garden until it reached the white silhouettes of the trees which stood in the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace and loomed over the far wall. She seemed surprised to see the cathedral again and the Romanesque windows of the apse chapels at the end of a pathway on the left. She shuddered deeply once more as the warmth from the stove began to spread through her body. And then she turned her eyes to the floor, and sat motionless.
‘Are you from Beaumont?… Who is your father?’
Faced by her silence, Hubert imagined that her throat was perhaps too parched for her to speak.
‘Instead of asking questions,’ he said, ‘we would be better off serving her a nice warm cup of café au lait.’
It was obviously a sensible idea, and Hubertine at once passed her own cup of coffee to the girl. She then cut two large pieces of bread for her, but the child was still wary, and shrank away. Soon though the torments of hunger proved stronger, and she ate and drank greedily. To avoid disturbing her the couple remained silent. They were distressed to see that the little girl’s hand trembled so violently that sometimes she missed her mouth all together. She used only her left hand to serve herself, and held her right arm stubbornly to her body. When she finished, she almost dropped the cup, but wagged her arm lamely, and managed to catch it clumsily in the crook of her elbow.
‘Have you hurt your arm?’ asked Hubertine. ‘Don’t be scared, show me, my darling.’
But as Hubertine touched her, the girl reacted violently, leaping up and hitting out. In the ensuing struggle, she moved her arm away from her side, and a small book bound in cloth boards, which she had been hiding against her skin, fell out through a rip in her bodice. She tried to pick it up, and stood with her fists clenched angrily as she watched the two strangers open it and start reading.
It was a record book issued by the Child Welfare Services in the region of the Seine. On the first page, beneath a medallion image of St Vincent de Paul, appeared various printed headings. After ‘Surname of child’ a simple dash in ink filled the blank. Her ‘Christian names’ were recorded as ‘Angélique Marie’. And as for her dates, she had been born on 22 January 1851, and admitted on the 23rd of the same month, with the registration number 1634. So her father and mother were unknown, and she had no other papers, not even a birth certificate. She had nothing apart from this coldly officious little book bound in pale pink cloth.* She had no one in the wide world, just this record of committal, which numbered and classified her utter abandonment.
