FOR A
NIGHT OF LOVE
By
EMILE ZOLA
THE WARREN PRESS
New York
Copyright 1911, by The Warren Press
FOR A NIGHT OF LOVE
The little town of P.... is built on a hill. At the foot of the old ramparts runs a deep brook, the Chanteclair, doubtless so named from the crystalline sound of its limpid waters. When one arrives by the Versailles road, one crosses the Chanteclair at the south gate of the city, over a stone bridge with a single arch, of which the broad parapets, low and rounded, serve as benches for all the old people of the suburbs. Opposite, rises Beau-Soleil Street, at the end of which is a silent square, Quatre-Femmes, paved with huge cobbles and invaded by a thickset weed which makes it green as a meadow. The houses sleep. Every half hour, the dragging step of a passer-by starts a dog barking behind a stable-door, and the one excitement in the square is the regular appearance, twice a day, of officers who go to their table d'hôte in Beau-Soleil Street.
In the house of a gardener, to the left, lived Julien Michon. The gardener had rented him a large room, on the first floor; and, as the landlord occupied the other side of the house, facing his garden, Julien was left to himself. Having his own private entrance and stairway, he already lived, although only twenty-five years of age, like a retired bourgeois of small means.
The young man had lost his father and his mother while very young. An uncle had sent the child to a boarding-school. Then, the uncle died, and Julien had been filling a position as clerk in the post-office for the past five years. His salary was fifteen hundred francs, without any hope of ever getting more. But he could economize on that, and he did not imagine a larger or a happier life than his.
Tall, strong, bony, Julien had large hands that seemed in his way.
He felt himself to be ugly, with his square head left in a sketchy state as if roughly modeled by an indifferent sculptor. And that made him timid, especially in the presence of young women. His awkwardness engendered a startled attitude of mind, and a morbid desire for mediocrity and seclusion. He seemed resigned to grow old thus, without a comrade, without a love affair, with his tastes of a cloistered monk.
And that life did not weigh heavily upon his broad shoulders. Julien was very happy. He had a calm, transparent soul. His daily existence, with its fixed rules, was serenity itself. In the morning, he went to his office, peacefully took up the work left off the preceding day; then lunched on a small loaf, and continued his work. Afterwards, he dined, he went to bed and slept. The next day, the sun brought with it the same routine.
On holidays, he would go off on a tramp all alone, happily reeling off the miles, and returning broken with fatigue.
He had never been seen in the company of a petticoat, in the evenings on the ramparts. The working girls of P...., sharp-tongued wantons, had ended by leaving him alone, after seeing him, on several occasions, stand before them almost suffocated from embarrassment, and taking their laughs of encouragement for mockery.
Julien's paradise, the one place where he breathed freely, was his room. There only, he felt sheltered from the world. There, he straightened up; he laughed to himself; and, when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he was surprised to find himself so young.
His room was vast. He had furnished it with a large canopy bed, a round table, two chairs and an armchair. But there still remained plenty of room for walking about. The bed was lost in the depths of an immense alcove; a small chest of drawers, between the two windows, looked like a child's plaything. He walked about, stretched himself, and never seemed bored. He never wrote away from the bureau, and reading tired him. His only passion was music. He would spend entire evenings playing the flute. That was, above everything, his greatest recreation.
Julien had learned by himself to play the flute. For a long time, an old yellow flute at a bric-à-brac merchant's on the market square had aroused his covetousness. He had the money, but he did not dare enter and buy it, for fear of exciting ridicule. At last, one evening, he grew bold enough to get the flute and carry it away on the run, hidden under his coat. Then, doors and windows closed, he had studied for two years out of an old method that he had picked up at a bookseller's.
During the last six months only, he risked playing with the windows open. He knew nothing but ancient airs, slow and simple, romances of the last century, which acquired an infinite tenderness as he stumbled over them with the awkwardness of a pupil filled with emotion. In the warm evenings, when the quarter was asleep, and this light song floated from the large room lighted by a single candle it seemed like a voice of love confiding to the solitude of the night what it never would have uttered in broad daylight.
Julien feared that they might complain of him in the neighborhood, but they sleep soundly in the country towns. Besides, Quatre-Femmes Square was inhabited only by a notary, M. Savournin, and a retired gendarme, Captain Pidoux, very convenient neighbors who went to bed and to sleep at nine o'clock. Julien was more anxious in regard to the inmates of a noble mansion, the Marsanne residence, which reared itself on the other side of the square, directly in front of his windows. It had a sad, gray facade, of the severity of a monastery. A flight of five steps, invaded by weeds, led up to a round door that was studded with enormous nails. The only story had ten windows in a row, the shutters of which were opened and closed always at the same hours, without allowing a view of the rooms behind their heavy drawn curtains. To the left, the large chestnut trees of the garden made a green mass that spread in a widening wave to the ramparts.
Throughout the countryside, the mansion was celebrated, and it was said that strangers came long distances to visit it. There were also legends afloat concerning the wealth of the Marsannes. But Julien, during all the hours that he had sat at his windows seeking to penetrate the mysteries of that enormous fortune, had never seen anything but the gray facade and the dark mass of the chestnut trees. Never had anyone mounted the steps, never had the moss-grown door opened. The Marsannes had ceased to use that door; they went in and out through an iron gate on Saint-Anne Street. There was, besides, at the end of a lane near the ramparts, a little gate opening into the garden, that Julien could not see. For him, the house remained dead, like a palace in a fairy story peopled by invisible inhabitants.
One Sunday, in the square before the church, one of the post-office employees pointed out to Julien a tall old man and an old lady, telling him that they were the Marquis and Marquise de Marsanne. Then his companion informed him that they had a daughter still in the convent, Mademoiselle Therese de Marsanne; and that little Colombel, M. Savournin's clerk, was her foster-brother. As the old couple were about to turn into Saint-Anne Street, little Colombel approached, and the marquis held out his hand,—an honor he had not accorded anyone else. Julien suffered from that handshake; for this Colombel, a youth of twenty years, with sharp eyes and a mean mouth, had long been his enemy. He made fun of Julien's timidity; he had stirred up the laundry-girls of Beau-Soleil Street against him; and one evening, the two youths had come to blows on the ramparts, with the result that the notary's clerk retired with two black eyes.
Julien had lived five years on Quatre-Femmes Square when, one July evening, an event upset his existence. The night was very warm. He was playing his flute without a light, but absent-mindedly, when, all of a sudden, opposite him, a window in the Marsanne mansion opened, showing a brilliant light in the somber facade. A young girl leaned upon the window-railing and she raised her head as if listening. Julien, trembling, had stopped playing. He could not distinguish the face of the young girl, he could only see the waving mass of her loosened hair. And a light voice reached him in the midst of the silence.
"Didst thou not hear, Françoise? It sounded like music."
"A nightingale, miss," answered a coarse voice from the room. "Close the blinds; look out for night-insects."
When the facade had grown dark again, Julien could not leave his armchair. An hour later, he began to play again very softly. He smiled at the thought that the young girl probably imagined that there was a nightingale in the chestnut trees.
II
The next day, at the post-office, the great news was that Mademoiselle Therese de Marsanne had left the convent. Julien did not relate that he had seen her, with bare throat, and loosened hair. He entertained an indefinable sentiment toward that young lady who was to derange his habits. How could he henceforth play his flute? He played too badly to be heard by a young lady who evidently knew music.
Julien returned home furtively that evening. He did not light a candle. The window opposite did not open, but, towards ten o'clock a pale light shone through the blades of the blinds. Then, the light was extinguished, and he was left contemplating the dark window. Every evening, in spite of himself, he began that spying. Nothing seemed changed in the house; the old mansion slept on as before. It required trained eyes and ears to detect the new life. Sometimes, a light ran behind the windows, a corner of a curtain was lifted, there was a glimpse of an immense room. At other times, a light step crossed the garden, the sound of a piano was faintly heard accompanying a voice. Julien explained his curiosity by pretending to be annoyed at the noises. How he regretted the time when the empty house sent back a soft echo of his flute!