GERMINAL
PART II
CHAPTER I
THE Grégoires' property, Piolaine, was
situated two kilometres to the east of Montsou, on
the Joiselle road. The house was a large square
building, without style, dating from the beginning
of the last century. Of all the land that once
belonged to it there only remained some thirty
hectares, enclosed by walls, and easy to keep up.
The orchard and kitchen garden especially were
everywhere spoken of, being famous for the finest
fruit and vegetables in the country. For the
rest, there was no park, only a small wood. The
avenue of old limes, a vault of foliage three
hundred metres long, reaching from the gate to the
porch, was one of the curiosities of this bare
plain, on which one could count the large trees
between Marchiennes and Beaugnies.
On that morning the Grégoires got up at
eight o'clock. Usually they never stirred until
an hour later, being heavy sleepers; but last
night's tempest had disturbed them. And while her
husband had gone at once to see if the wind had
made any havoc, Madame Grégoire went down
to the kitchen in her slippers and flannel
dressing-gown. She was short and stout, about
fifty-eight years of age, and retained a broad,
surprised, dollish face beneath the dazzling
whiteness of her hair.
"Mélanie," she said to the cook,
"suppose you were to make the brioche this
morning, since the dough is ready. Mademoiselle
will not get up for half an hour yet, and she can
eat it with her chocolate. Eh? It will be a
surprise."
The cook, a lean old woman who had served them for
thirty years, laughed. "That's true! it
will be a famous surprise. My stove is alight,
and the oven must be hot; and then Honorine can
help me a bit."
Honorine, a girl of some twenty years, who had
been taken in as a child and brought up in the
house, now acted as housemaid. Besides these two
women, the only other servant was the coachman,
Francis, who undertook the heavy work. A gardener
and his wife were occupied with the vegetables,
the fruit, the flowers, and the poultry-yard. And
as service here was patriarchal, this little world
lived together, like one large family, on very
good terms.
Madame Grégoire, who had planned this
surprise of the brioche in bed, waited to see the
dough put in the oven. The kitchen was very
large, and one guessed it was the most important
room in the house by its extreme cleanliness and
by the arsenal of saucepans, utensils, and pots
which filled it. It gave an impression of good
feeding. Provisions abounded, hanging from hooks
or in cupboards.
"And let it be well glazed, won't you?"
Madame Grégoire said as she passed into the
dining-room.
In spite of the hot-air stove which warmed the
whole house, a coal fire enlivened this room. In
other respects it exhibited no luxury; a large
table, chairs, a mahogany sideboard; only two deep
easy-chairs betrayed a love of comfort, long happy
hours of digestion. They never went into the
drawing-room, they remained here in a family
circle.
Just then M. Grégoire came back dressed in
a thick fustian jacket; he also was ruddy for his
sixty years, with large, good-natured, honest
features beneath the snow of his curly hair. He
had seen the coachman and the gardener; there had
been no damage of importance, nothing but a fallen
chimney-pot. Every morning he liked to give a
glance round Piolaine, which was not large enough
to cause him anxiety, and from which he derived
all the happiness of ownership.
"And Cécile?" he asked,
"isn't she up yet then?"
"I can't make it out," replied his wife.
"I thought I heard her moving."
The table was set; there were three cups on the
white cloth. They sent Honorine to see what had
become of mademoiselle. But she came back
immediately, restraining her laughter, stifling
her voice, as if she were still upstairs in the
bedroom.
"Oh! if monsieur and madame could see
mademoiselle! She sleeps; oh! she sleeps like an
angel. One can't imagine it! It's a pleasure to
look at her."
The father and mother exchanged tender looks. He
said, smiling:
"Will you come and see?"
"The poor little darling!" she murmured.
"I'll come." And they went up together.
The room was the only luxurious one in the house.
It was draped in blue silk, and the furniture was
lacquered white, with blue tracery--a spoilt
child's whim, which her parents had gratified. In
the vague whiteness of the bed, beneath the
half-light which came through a curtain that was
drawn back, the young girl was sleeping with her
cheek resting on her naked arm. She was not
pretty, too healthy, in too vigorous condition,
fully developed at eighteen; but she had superb
flesh, the freshness of milk, with her chestnut
hair, her round face, and little wilful nose lost
between her cheeks. The coverlet had slipped
down, and she was breathing so softly that her
respiration did not even lift her already
well-developed bosom.
"That horrible wind must have prevented her
from closing her eyes," said the mother
softly.
The father imposed silence with a gesture. Both
of them leant down and gazed with adoration on
this girl, in her virgin nakedness, whom they had
desired so long, and who had come so late, when
they had no longer hoped for her. They found her
perfect, not at all too fat, and could never feed
her sufficiently. And she went on sleeping,
without feeling them near her, with their faces
against hers. However, a slight movement
disturbed her motionless face. They feared that
they would wake her, and went out on tiptoe.
"Hush!" said M. Grégoire, at the
door. "If she has not slept we must leave
her sleeping."
"As long as she likes, the darling!"
agreed Madame Grégoire. "We will
wait."
They went down and seated themselves in the
easy-chairs in the dining-room; while the
servants, laughing at mademoiselle's sound sleep,
kept the chocolate on the stove without grumbling.
He took up a newspaper; she knitted at a large
woollen quilt. It was very hot, and not a sound
was heard in the silent house.
The Grégoires' fortune, about forty
thousand francs a year, was entirely invested in a
share of the Montsou mines. They would
complacently narrate its origin, which dated from
the very formation of the Company.
Towards the beginning of the last century, there
had been a mad search for coal between Lille and
Valenciennes. The success of those who held the
concession, which was afterwards to become the
Anzin Company, had turned all heads. In every
commune the ground was tested; and societies were
formed and concessions grew up in a night. But
among all the obstinate seekers of that epoch,
Baron Desruinaux had certainly left the reputation
for the most heroic intelligence. For forty years
he had struggled without yielding, in the midst of
continual obstacles: early searches unsuccessful,
new pits abandoned at the end of long months of
work, landslips which filled up borings, sudden
inundations which drowned the workmen, hundreds of
thousands of francs thrown into the earth; then
the squabbles of the management, the panics of the
shareholders, the struggle with the lords of the
soil, who were resolved not to recognize royal
concessions if no treaty was first made with
themselves. He had at last founded the
association of Desruinaux, Fauquenoix Co. to
exploit the Montsou concession, and the pits began
to yield a small profit when two neighbouring
concessions, that of Cougny, belonging to the
Comte de Cougny, and that of Joiselle, belonging
to the Cornille and Jenard Company, had nearly
overwhelmed him beneath the terrible assault of
their competition. Happily, on the 25th. August
1760, a treaty was made between the three
concessions, uniting them into a single one. The
Montsou Mining Company was created, such as it
still exists to-day. In the distribution they had
divided the total property, according to the
standard of the money of the time, into
twenty-four sous, of which each was subdivided
into twelve deniers, which made two hundred and
eighty-eight deniers; and as the denier was worth
ten thousand francs the capital represented a sum
of nearly three millions. Desruinaux, dying but
triumphant, received in this division six sous'
and three deniers.
In those days the baron possessed Piolaine, which
had three hundred hectares belonging to it, and he
had in his service as steward Honoré
Grégoire, a Picardy lad, the
great-grandfather of Léon Grégoire,
Cécile's father. When the Montsou treaty
was made, Honor, who had laid up savings to the
amount of some fifty thousand francs, yielded
tremblingly to his master's unshakable faith. He
took out ten thousand francs in fine crowns, and
took a denier, though with the fear of robbing his
children of that sum. His son Eugéne, in
fact, received very small dividends; and as he had
become a bourgeois and had been foolish enough to
throw away the other forty thousand francs of the
paternal inheritance in a company that came to
grief, he lived meanly enough. But the interest
of the denier gradually increased. The fortune
began with Félicien, who was able to
realize a dream with which his grandfather, the
old steward, had nursed his childhood--the
purchase of dismembered Piolaine, which he
acquired as national property for a ludicrous sum.
However, bad years followed. It was necessary to
await the conclusion of the revolutionary
catastrophes, and afterwards Napoleon's bloody
fall; and it was Léon Grégoire who
profited at a stupefying rate of progress by the
timid and uneasy investment of his
great-grandfather. Those poor ten thousand francs
grew and multiplied with the Company's prosperity.
From 1820 they had brought in one hundred per
cent, ten thousand francs. In 1844 they had
produced twenty thousand; in 1850, forty. During
two years the dividend had reached the prodigious
figure of fifty thousand francs; the value of the
denier, quoted at the Lille bourse at a million,
had centupled in a century.
M. Grégoire, who had been advised to sell
out when this figure of a million was reached, had
refused with his smiling paternal air. Six months
later an industrial crisis broke out; the denier
fell to six hundred thousand francs. But he still
smiled; he regretted nothing, for the
Grégoires had maintained an obstinate faith
in their mine. It would rise again: God Himself
was not so solid. Then with his religious faith
was mixed profound gratitude towards an investment
which for a century had supported the family in
doing nothing. It was like a divinity of their
own, whom their egoism surrounded with a kind of
worship, the benefactor of the hearth, lulling
them in their great bed of idleness, fattening
them at their gluttonous table. From father to
son it had gone on. Why risk displeasing fate by
doubting it? And at the bottom of their fidelity
there was a superstitious terror, a fear lest the
million of the denier might suddenly melt away if
they were to realize it and to put it in a drawer.
It seemed to them more sheltered in the earth,
from which a race of miners, generations of
starving people, extracted it for them, a little
every day, as they needed it.
For the rest, happiness rained on this house. M.
Grégoire, when very young, had married the
daughter of a Marchiennes druggist, a plain,
penniless girl, whom he adored, and who repaid him
with happiness. She shut herself up in her
household, and worshipped her husband, having no
other will but his. No difference of tastes
separated them, their desires were mingled in one
idea of comfort; and they had thus lived for forty
years, in affection and little mutual services.
It was a well-regulated existence; the forty
thousand francs were spent quietly, and the
savings expended on Cécile, whose tardy
birth had for a moment disturbed the budget. They
still satisfied all her whims--a second horse, two
more carriages, toilets sent from Paris. But they
tasted in this one more joy; they thought nothing
too good for their daughter, although they had
such a horror of display that they had preserved
the fashions of their youth. Every unprofitable
expense seemed foolish to them.
Suddenly the door opened, and a loud voice called
out:
"Hallo! What now? Having breakfast without
me!"
It was Cécile, just come from her bed, her
eyes heavy with sleep. She had simply put up her
hair and flung on a white woollen dressing-gown.
"No, no!" said the mother; "you see
we are all waiting. Eh? has the wind prevented
you from sleeping, poor darling?"
The young girl looked at her in great surprise.
"Has it been windy? I didn't know anything
about it. I haven't moved all night."
Then they thought this funny, and all three began
to laugh; the servants who were bringing in the
breakfast also broke out laughing, so amused was
the household at the idea that mademoiselle had
been sleeping for twelve hours right off. The
sight of the brioche completed the expansion of
their faces.
"What! Is it cooked, then?" said
Cécile; '"that must be a surprise for
me! That'll be good now, hot, with the
chocolate!"
They sat down to table at last with the smoking
chocolate in their cups, and for a long time
talked of nothing but the brioche. Mélanie
and Honorine remained to give details about the
cooking and watched them stuffing themselves with
greasy lips, saying that it was a pleasure to make
a cake when one saw the masters enjoying it so
much.
But the dogs began to bark loudly; perhaps they
announced the music mistress, who came from
Marchiennes on Mondays and Fridays. A professor
of literature also came. All the young girl's
education was thus carried on at Piolaine in happy
ignorance, with her childish whims, throwing the
book out of the window as soon as anything wearied
her.
"It is M. Deneulin," said Honorine,
returning.
Behind her, Deneulin, a cousin of M.
Grégoire's, appeared without ceremony; with
his loud voice, his quick gestures, he had the
appearance of an old cavalry officer. Although
over fifty, his short hair and thick moustache
were as black as ink.
"Yes! It is I. Good day! Don't disturb
yourselves."
He had sat down amid the family's exclamations.
They turned back at last to their chocolate.
"Have you anything to tell me?" asked M.
Grégoire. "No! nothing at all,"
Deneulin hastened to reply. "I came out on
horseback to rub off the rust a bit, and as I
passed your door I thought I would just look
in."
Cécile questioned him about Jeanne and
Lucie, his daughters. They were perfectly well,
the first was always at her painting, while the
other, the elder, was training her voice at the
piano from morning till night. And there was a
slight quiver in his voice, a disquiet which he
concealed beneath bursts of gaiety.
M. Grégoire began again:
"And everything goes well at the pit?"
"Well, I am upset over this dirty crisis.
Ah! we are paying for the prosperous years! They
have built too many workshops, put down too many
railways, invested too much capital with a view to
a large return, and today the money is asleep.
They can't get any more to make the whole thing
work. Luckily things are not desperate; I shall
get out of it somehow."
Like his cousin he had inherited a denier in the
Montsou mines. But being an enterprising
engineer, tormented by the desire for a royal
fortune, he had hastened to sell out when the
denier had reached a million. For some months he
had been maturing a scheme. His wife possessed,
through an uncle, the little concession of
Vandame, where only two pits were open--Jean-Bart
and Gaston-Marie--in an abandoned state, and with
such defective material that the output hardly
covered the cost. Now he was meditating the
repair of Jean-Bart, the renewal of the engine,
and the enlargement of the shaft so as to
facilitate the descent, keeping Gaston-Marie only
for exhaustion purposes. They ought to be able to
shovel up gold there, he said. The idea was
sound. Only the million had been spent over it,
and this damnable industrial crisis broke out at
the moment when large profits would have shown
that he was right. Besides, he was a bad manager,
with a rough kindness towards his workmen, and
since his wife's death he allowed himself to be
pillaged, and also gave the rein to his daughters,
the elder of whom talked of going on the stage,
while the younger had already had three landscapes
refused at the Salon, both of them joyous amid the
downfall, and exhibiting in poverty their capacity
for good household management.
"You see, Léon," he went on, in a
hesitating voice, "you were wrong not to sell
out at the same time as I did; now everything is
going down. You run risk, and if you had confided
your money to me and you would have seen what we
should have done at Vandame in our mine!"
M. Grégoire finished his chocolate without
haste. He replied peacefully:
"Never! You know that I don't want to
speculate. I live quietly, and it would be too
foolish to worry my head over business affairs.
And as for Montsou, it may continue to go down, we
shall always get our living out of it. It doesn't
do to be so diabolically greedy! Then, listen, it
is you who will bite your fingers one day, for
Montsou will rise again and Cécile's
grandchildren will still get their white bread out
of it."
Deneulin listened with a constrained smile.
"Then," he murmured, "if I were to
ask you to put a hundred thousand francs in my
affair you would refuse?"
But seeing the Grégoires' disturbed faces
he regretted having gone so far; he put off his
idea of a loan, reserving it until the case was
desperate.
"Oh! I have not got to that! it is a joke.
Good heavens! perhaps you are right; the money
that other people earn for you is the best to
fatten on."
They changed the conversation. Cécile
spoke again of her cousins, whose tastes
interested, while at the same time they shocked
her. Madame Grégoire promised to take her
daughter to see those dear little ones on the
first fine day. M. Grégoire, however, with
a distracted air, did not follow the conversation.
He added aloud:
"If I were in your place I wouldn't persist
any more; I would treat with Montsou. They want
it, and you will get your money back."
He alluded to an old hatred which existed between
the concession of Montsou and that of Vandame. In
spite of the latter's slight importance, its
powerful neighbour was enraged at seeing, enclosed
within its own sixty-seven communes, this square
league which did not belong to it, and after
having vainly tried to kill it had plotted to buy
it at a low price when in a failing condition.
The war continued without truce. Each party
stopped its galleries at two hundred metres from
the other; it was a duel to the last drop of
blood, although the managers and engineers
maintained polite relations with each other.
Deneulin's eyes had flamed up.
"Never!" he cried, in his turn.
"Montsou shall never have Vandame as long as
I am alive. I dined on Thursday at Hennebeau's,
and I saw him fluttering around me. Last autumn,
when the big men came to the administration
building, they made me all sorts of advances.
Yes, yes, I know them--those marquises, and dukes,
and generals, and ministers! Brigands who would
take away even your shirt at the corner of a
wood."
He could not cease. Besides, M. Grégoire
did not defend the administration of Montsou--the
six stewards established by the treaty of 1760,
who governed the Company despotically, and the
five survivors of whom on every death chose the
new member among the powerful and rich
shareholders. The opinion of the owner of
Piolaine, with his reasonable ideas, was that
these gentlemen were sometimes rather immoderate
in their exaggerated love of money.
Mélanie had come to clear away the table.
Outside the dogs were again barking, and Honorine
was going to the door, when Cécile, who was
stifled by heat and food, left the table.
"No, never mind! it must be for my
lesson."
Deneulin had also risen. He watched the young
girl go out, and asked, smiling:
"Well! and the marriage with little
Négrel?"
"Nothing has been settled," said Madame
Grégroire; "it is only an idea. We
must reflect."
"No doubt!" he went on, with a gay
laugh. "I believe that the nephew and the
aunt--What baffles me is that Madame Hennebeau
should throw herself so on Cécile's
neck."
But M. Grégoire was indignant. So
distinguished a lady, and fourteen years older
than the young man! It was monstrous; he did not
like joking on such subjects. Deneulin, still
laughing, shook hands with him and left.
"Not yet," said Cécile, coming
back. "It is that woman with the two
children. You know, mamma, the miner's wife whom
we met. Are they to come in here?"
They hesitated. Were they very dirty? No, not
very; and they would leave their sabots in the
porch. Already the father and mother had
stretched themselves out in the depths of their
large easy-chairs. They were digesting there.
The fear of change of air decided them.
"Let them come in, Honorine."
Then Maheude and her little ones entered, frozen
and hungry, seized by fright on finding themselves
in this room, which was so warm and smelled so
nicely of the brioche.