Émile Zola
NAÏS MICOULIN
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-1856-1
I
DURING the fruit season a brown-skinned little girl with bushy black hair used to come every month to the house of Monsieur Rostand, a lawyer of Aix, in Provence, bringing with her a huge basket of apricots or peaches, so heavy that she had hardly strength enough to carry it. She would wait in the large entrance-hall, whither all the family went to greet her.
‘So it’s you, Naïs,’ the lawyer would say. ‘You’ve brought us some fruit, eh? Come, you’re a good girl. And how is your father?’
‘Quite well, sir,’ replied the little girl, showing her white teeth.
Then Madame Rostand would take her into the kitchen and ask her about the olives, the almonds, and the vines. But the most important question was whether there had been any rain at L’Estaque, where the Rostands’ estate was situated, a place called La Blancarde, which was cultivated by the Micoulins. There were but a few dozen almond and olive trees, but the question of rain was none the less an important one in this province, where everything perishes from drought.
‘There have been a few drops,’ Naïs would say. ‘The vines want more.’
Then, having imparted her news, she ate a piece of bread and some scraps of meat, and set out again for L’Estaque in a butcher’s cart which came to Aix every fortnight. Frequently she brought some shell-fish, a lobster, a fine eel, for Micoulin fished more than he tilled the ground. When she came during the holidays, Frédéric, the lawyer’s son, used to rush into the kitchen to tell her that the family would soon take up their quarters at La Blancarde, and that she must get some nets and lines ready. He was almost like a brother to her, for they had played together as children. Since the age of twelve, however, she had called him ‘Monsieur Frédéric,’ out of respect. Every time old Micoulin heard her speak familiarly to the young man he boxed her ears, but in spite of this the two children were sworn allies.
‘Don’t forget to mend the nets,’ repeated the schoolboy.
‘No fear, Monsieur Frédéric,’ replied Naïs. ‘They’ll be ready for you.’
Monsieur Rostand was very wealthy. He had bought a splendid seignorial mansion in the Rue du Collège at a very low price. The Hôtel de Coiron, built during the latter part of the seventeenth century, had twelve windows in its frontage, and contained enough rooms to house a religious order. Amid those vast rooms the family, consisting of five persons, including the two old servants, seemed lost. The lawyer occupied merely the first floor. For ten years he had tried, without success, to let the ground and second floors, and finally he had decided to lock them up, thus abandoning two-thirds of the house to the spiders. Echoes like those of a cathedral resounded through the empty sonorous mansion at the least noise in the entrance-hall, an enormous hall with a staircase from which one could easily have obtained sufficient material to build a modern dwelling.
Immediately after his purchase, Monsieur Rostand had divided the grand drawingroom into two offices, by means of a partition. It was a room thirty-six feet long by twenty-four broad, lighted by six windows. Of one of the two parts he had formed his own private room, the other being allotted to his clerks. The first floor contained four other apartments, the smallest of which measured twenty feet by fifteen. Madame Rostand, Frédéric, and the two old servants had bedrooms as lofty as churches. The lawyer had been forced, for convenience’ sake, to convert an old boudoir into a kitchen; for at an earlier stage, when they had made use of the kitchen on the ground floor, the food, after passing through the chilly atmosphere of the entrance-hall and staircase, had come to table quite cold. To make matters worse, the gigantic apartments were furnished in the most sparing manner. In the lawyer’s private room an ancient suite of furniture, upholstered in green Utrecht velvet, and of the stiff and comfortless-looking Empire style, did its best to fill up the space, with its sofa and eight chairs; a little round table, belonging to the same period, looked like a toy in that immensity; on the chimney-piece there was nothing beyond a horrible modern marble clock between two vases, whilst the tiled floor, looking much the worse for age, showed a dirty red. The bedrooms were more empty still. The whole house brought home to one the tranquil disdain which Southern families — even the richest of them — display for comfort and luxury, in that happy land of the sun, where life is mainly spent out of doors. The Rostands were certainly not conscious of the sad, mortal chilliness which brooded over those huge rooms, mainly though the scantiness and poverty-stricken aspect of the furniture.
Yet the lawyer was a shrewd man. His father had left him one of the best practices in Aix, and he had managed to improve it considerably by displaying an amount of activity rare in that land of indolence. Small, brisk, weasel-faced, his sole thought was of his work. No other matters troubled his brain; he never even looked at a paper during the rare hours of idleness he spent at his club. His wife, on the contrary, had the reputation of being one of the cleverest and most accomplished women in the town. She was a De Villebonne, a fact which invested her with a certain amount of dignity, in spite of her mésalliance. But she was straitlaced to such a point, she practised her religious duties with such bigoted fortitude, that she had, as it were, become shrivelled up by the methodical life she led.
As for Frédéric, he grew up between his busy father and rigid mother. During his schoolboy days he was a dunce of the first water, trembling before his mother, but having such a distaste for work that he would often sit in the drawingroom during the evening poring for hours over his books without reading a single line, his mind wandering, whilst his parents imagined from the look of him that he was preparing his lessons. Irritated by his laziness, they put him to board at the college; but he then worked less than ever, being less looked after than at home, and delighted to feel that he was no longer under his parents’ stern eyes. Accordingly, alarmed by the airs of liberty which he put on, they took him away, in order to have him under their ferule again. So narrowly did they look after him that he was forced to work: his mother examined his exercises, made him repeat his lessons, and mounted guard over him unremittingly like a gendarme. Thanks to this supervision, Frédéric failed but twice in passing the examination for his degree.
Aix is celebrated for its law school, and young Rostand was naturally sent to it. In that ancient town the population is largely composed of barristers, notaries, and solicitors practising at the Appeal Court. A youth takes a law degree as a matter of course, following it up or not as he pleases. So Frédéric remained at the college, working as little as possible, but trying to make his parents believe that he was working a great deal. Madame Rostand, to her great sorrow, had been forced to give him more liberty. He now went out when he chose in the daytime, and was only expected to be at home to meals. He had, however, to be in by nine o’clock in the evening, except on those days when he was allowed to go to the theatre. Thus began that country student’s life, so full of vice when it is not entirely devoted to work.
A person must know Aix, be acquainted with the quiet grass-grown streets, the state of torpor which enwraps the whole town, in order to understand the purposeless life which the students lead there. Those who work can manage to kill time over their books; but those who refuse to exert themselves steadily have no other places where they can while away their leisure save the cafés and other resorts, where people gamble and drink, and call it ‘seeing life.’ Thus Frédéric soon became an inveterate gambler: he passed the greater part of his evenings at cards, and finished them elsewhere. When he found his evenings too short for him he managed, by stealing a key of the house door, to have all night as