Fruitfulness. Emile Zola

the Beauchenes cannot come here on Sunday. Constance never cared much for us, as you well know. Their boy Maurice is suffering in the legs; Dr. Boutan was there, and the question of children was discussed again. I will tell you all about that. On the other hand, the Moranges have promised to come. You can’t have an idea of the delight and vanity they displayed in showing me their new flat. What with their eagerness to make a big fortune I’m much afraid that those worthy folks will do something very foolish. Oh! I was forgetting. I called on the landlord, and though I had a good deal of difficulty over it, he ended by consenting to have the roof entirely relaid. Ah! what a home, too, those Seguins have! I came away feeling quite scared. But I will tell you all about it by and by with the rest.”

      Marianne evinced no loquacious curiosity; she quietly awaited his confidences, and showed anxiety only respecting themselves and the children.

      “You received your salary, didn’t you?” she asked.

      “Yes, yes, you need not be afraid about that.”

      “Oh! I’m not afraid, it’s only our little debts which worry me.”

      Then she asked again: “And did your business dinner go off all right? I was afraid that Beauchene might detain you and make you miss your train.”

      He replied that everything had gone off properly, but as he spoke he flushed and felt a pang at his heart. To rid himself of his emotion he affected sudden gayety.

      “Well, and you, my dear,” he asked, “how did you manage with your thirty sous?”

      “My thirty sous!” she gayly responded, “why, I was much too rich; we fared like princes, all five of us, and I have six sous left.”

      Then, in her turn, she gave an account of her day, her daily life, pure as crystal. She recapitulated what she had done, what she had said; she related how the children had behaved, and she entered into the minutest details respecting them and the house. With her, moreover, one day was like another; each morning she set herself to live the same life afresh, with never-failing happiness.

      “To-day, though, we had a visit,” said she; “Madame Lepailleur, the woman from the mill over yonder, came to tell me that she had some fine chickens for sale. As we owe her twelve francs for eggs and milk, I believe that she simply called to see if I meant to pay her. I told her that I would go to her place to-morrow.”

      While speaking Marianne had pointed through the gloom towards a big black pile, a little way down the Yeuse. It was an old water-mill which was still worked, and the Lepailleurs had now been installed in it for three generations. The last of them, Francois Lepailleur, who considered himself to be no fool, had come back from his military service with little inclination to work, and an idea that the mill would never enrich him, any more than it had enriched his father and grandfather. It then occurred to him to marry a peasant farmer’s daughter, Victoire Cornu, whose dowry consisted of some neighboring fields skirting the Yeuse. And the young couple then lived fairly at their ease, on the produce of those fields and such small quantities of corn as the peasants of the district still brought to be ground at the old mill. If the antiquated and badly repaired mechanism of the mill had been replaced by modern appliances, and if the land, instead of being impoverished by adherence to old-fashioned practices, had fallen into the hands of an intelligent man who believed in progress, there would no doubt have been a fortune in it all. But Lepailleur was not only disgusted with work, he treated the soil with contempt. He indeed typified the peasant who has grown weary of his eternal mistress, the mistress whom his forefathers loved too much. Remembering that, in spite of all their efforts to fertilize the soil, it had never made them rich or happy, he had ended by hating it. All his faith in its powers had departed; he accused it of having lost its fertility, of being used up and decrepit, like some old cow which one sends to the slaughter-house. And, according to him, everything went wrong: the soil simply devoured the seed sown in it, the weather was never such as it should be, the seasons no longer came in their proper order. Briefly, it was all a premeditated disaster brought about by some evil power which had a spite against the peasantry, who were foolish to give their sweat and their blood to such a thankless creature.

      “Madame Lepailleur brought her boy with her, a little fellow three years old, called Antonin,” resumed Marianne, “and we fell to talking of children together. She quite surprised me. Peasant folks, you know, used to have such large families. But she declared that one child was quite enough. Yet she’s only twenty-four, and her husband not yet twenty-seven.”

      These remarks revived the thoughts which had filled Mathieu’s mind all day. For a moment he remained silent. Then he said, “She gave you her reasons, no doubt?”

      “Give reasons – she, with her head like a horse’s, her long freckled face, pale eyes, and tight, miserly mouth – I think she’s simply a fool, ever in admiration before her husband because he fought in Africa and reads the newspapers. All that I could get out of her was that children cost one a good deal more than they bring in. But the husband, no doubt, has ideas of his own. You have seen him, haven’t you? A tall, slim fellow, as carroty and as scraggy as his wife, with an angular face, green eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He looks as though he had never felt in a good humor in his life. And I understand that he is always complaining of his father-in-law, because the other had three daughters and a son. Of course that cut down his wife’s dowry; she inherited only a part of her father’s property. And, besides, as the trade of a miller never enriched his father, Lepailleur curses his mill from morning till night, and declares that he won’t prevent his boy Antonin from going to eat white bread in Paris, if he can find a good berth there when he grows up.”

      Thus, even among the country folks, Mathieu found a small family the rule. Among the causes were the fear of having to split up an inheritance, the desire to rise in the social system, the disgust of manual toil, and the thirst for the luxuries of town life. Since the soil was becoming bankrupt, why indeed continue tilling it, when one knew that one would never grow rich by doing so? Mathieu was on the point of explaining these things to his wife, but he hesitated, and then simply said: “Lepailleur does wrong to complain; he has two cows and a horse, and when there is urgent work he can take an assistant. We, this morning, had just thirty sous belonging to us, and we own no mill, no scrap of land. For my part I think his mill superb; I envy him every time I cross this bridge. Just fancy! we two being the millers – why, we should be very rich and very happy!”

      This made them both laugh, and for another moment they remained seated there, watching the dark massive mill beside the Yeuse. Between the willows and poplars on both banks the little river flowed on peacefully, scarce murmuring as it coursed among the water plants which made it ripple. Then, amid a clump of oaks, appeared the big shed sheltering the wheel, and the other buildings garlanded with ivy, honeysuckle, and creepers, the whole forming a spot of romantic prettiness. And at night, especially when the mill slept, without a light at any of its windows, there was nothing of more dreamy, more gentle charm.

      “Why!” remarked Mathieu, lowering his voice, “there is somebody under the willows, beside the water. I heard a slight noise.”

      “Yes, I know,” replied Marianne with tender gayety. “It must be the young couple who settled themselves in the little house yonder a fortnight ago. You know whom I mean – Madame Angelin, that schoolmate of Constance’s.”

      The Angelins, who had become their neighbors, interested the Froments. The wife was of the same age as Marianne, tall, dark, with fine hair and fine eyes, radiant with continual joy, and fond of pleasure. And the husband was of the same age as Mathieu, a handsome fellow, very much in love, with moustaches waving in the wind, and the joyous spirits of a musketeer. They had married with sudden passion for one another, having between them an income of some ten thousand francs a year, which the husband, a fan painter with a pretty talent, might have doubled had it not been for the spirit of amorous idleness into which his marriage had thrown him. And that spring-time they had sought a refuge in that desert of Janville, that they might love freely, passionately, in the midst of nature. They were always to be met, holding each other by the waist, on the secluded paths in the woods; and at night they loved to stroll across the fields, beside the hedges, along the shady banks of the Yeuse, delighted when they could linger till very late near the murmuring water, in the thick shade of