The Downfall

by Émile Zola

Finally, their household had received another addition in the person of M. de Gartlauben, a captain in the German landwehr, whose regiment had been sent to Sedan to supply the place of troops dispatched to service in the field. He was a personage of importance, notwithstanding his comparatively modest rank, for he was nephew to the governor-general, who, from his headquarters at Rheims, exercised unlimited power over all the district. He, too, prided himself on having lived at Paris, and seized every occasion ostentatiously to show he was not ignorant of its pleasures and refinements; concealing beneath this film of varnish his inborn rusticity, he assumed as well as he was able the polish of one accustomed to good society. His tall, portly form was always tightly buttoned in a close-fitting uniform, and he lied outrageously about his age, never being able to bring himself to own up to his forty-five years. Had he had more intelligence he might have made himself an object of greater dread, but as it was his over-weening vanity, kept him in a continual state of satisfaction with himself, for never could such a thing have entered his mind as that anyone could dare to ridicule him.

At a subsequent period he rendered Delaherche services that were of inestimable value. But what days of terror and distress were those that followed upon the heels of the capitulation! the city, overrun with German soldiery, trembled in momentary dread of pillage and conflagration. Then the armies of the victors streamed away toward the valley of the Seine, leaving behind them only sufficient men to form a garrison, and the quiet that settled upon the place was that of a necropolis: the houses all closed, the shops shut, the streets deserted as soon as night closed in, the silence unbroken save for the hoarse cries and heavy tramp of the patrols. No letters or newspapers reached them from the outside world; Sedan was become a dungeon, where the immured citizens waited in agonized suspense for the tidings of disaster with which the air was instinct. To render their misery complete they were threatened with famine; the city awoke one morning from its slumbers to find itself destitute of bread and meat and the country roundabout stripped naked, as if a devouring swarm of locusts had passed that way, by the hundreds of thousands of men who for a week past had been pouring along its roads and across its fields in a devastating torrent. There were provisions only for two days, and the authorities were compelled to apply to Belgium for relief; all supplies now came from their neighbors across the frontier, whence the customs guards had disappeared, swept away like all else in the general cataclysm. Finally there were never-ending vexations and annoyances, a conflict that commenced to rage afresh each morning between the Prussian governor and his underlings, quartered at the Sous-Prefecture, and the Municipal Council, which was in permanent session at the Hôtel de Ville. It was all in vain that the city fathers fought like heroes, discussing, objecting, protesting, contesting the ground inch by inch; the inhabitants had to succumb to the exactions that constantly became more burdensome, to the whims and unreasonableness of the stronger.

In the beginning Delaherche suffered great tribulation from the officers and soldiers who were billeted on him. It seemed as if representatives from every nationality on the face of the globe presented themselves at his door, pipe in mouth. Not a day passed but there came tumbling in upon the city two or three thousand men, horse, foot and dragoons, and although they were by rights entitled to nothing more than shelter and firing, it was often found expedient to send out in haste and get them provisions. The rooms they occupied were left in a shockingly filthy condition. It was not an infrequent occurrence that the officers came in drunk and made themselves even more obnoxious than their men. Such strict discipline was maintained, however, that instances of violence and marauding were rare; in all Sedan there were but two cases reported of outrages committed on women. It was not until a later period, when Paris displayed such stubbornness in her resistance, that, exasperated by the length to which the struggle was protracted, alarmed by the attitude of the provinces and fearing a general rising of the populace, the savage war which the francs-tireurs had inaugurated, they laid the full weight of their heavy hand upon the suffering people.

Delaherche had just had an experience with a lodger who had been quartered on him, a captain of cuirassiers, who made a practice of going to bed with his boots on and when he went away left his apartment in an unmentionably filthy condition, when in the last half of September Captain de Gartlauben came to his door one evening when it was raining in torrents. The first hour he was there did not promise well for the pleasantness of their future relations; he carried matters with a high hand, insisting that he should be given the best bedroom, trailing the scabbard of his sword noisily up the marble staircase; but encountering Gilberte in the corridor he drew in his horns, bowed politely, and passed stiffly on. He was courted with great obsequiousness, for everyone was well aware that a word from him to the colonel commanding the post of Sedan would suffice to mitigate a requisition or secure the release of a friend or relative. It was not very long since his uncle, the governor-general at Rheims, had promulgated a particularly detestable and cold-blooded order, proclaiming martial law and decreeing the penalty of death to whomsoever should give aid and comfort to the enemy, whether by acting for them as a spy, by leading astray German troops that had been entrusted to their guidance, by destroying bridges and artillery, or by damaging the railroads and telegraph lines. The enemy meant the French, of course, and the citizens scowled and involuntarily doubled their fists as they read the great white placard nailed against the door of post headquarters which attributed to them as a crime their best and most sacred aspirations. It was so hard, too, to have to receive their intelligence of German victories through the cheering of the garrison! Hardly a day passed over their heads that they were spared this bitter humiliation; the soldiers would light great fires and sit around them, feasting and drinking all night long, while the townspeople, who were not allowed to be in the streets after nine o’clock, listened to the tumult from the depths of their darkened houses, crazed with suspense, wondering what new catastrophe had befallen. It was on one of these occasions, somewhere about the middle of October, that M. de Gartlauben for the first time proved himself to be possessed of some delicacy of feeling. Sedan had been jubilant all that day with renewed hopes, for there was a rumor that the army of the Loire, then marching to the relief of Paris, had gained a great victory; but how many times before had the best of news been converted into tidings of disaster! and sure enough, early in the evening it became known for certain that the Bavarians had taken Orleans. Some soldiers had collected in a house across the way from the factory in the Rue Maqua, and were so boisterous in their rejoicings that the Captain, noticing Gilberte’s annoyance, went and silenced them, remarking that he himself thought their uproar ill-timed.

Toward the close of the month M. de Gartlauben was in position to render some further trifling services. The Prussian authorities, in the course of sundry administrative reforms inaugurated by them, had appointed a German Sous-Prefect, and although this step did not put an end to the exactions to which the city was subjected, the new official showed himself to be comparatively reasonable. One of the most frequent among the causes of difference that were constantly springing up between the officers of the post and the municipal council was that which arose from the custom of requisitioning carriages for the use of the staff, and there was a great hullaballoo raised one morning that Delaherche failed to send his caleche and pair to the Sous-Prefecture: the mayor was arrested and the manufacturer would have gone to keep him company up in the citadel had it not been for M. de Gartlauben, who promptly quelled the rising storm. Another day he secured a stay of proceedings for the city, which had been mulcted in the sum of thirty thousand francs to punish it for its alleged dilatoriness in rebuilding the bridge of Villette, a bridge that the Prussians themselves had destroyed: a disastrous piece of business that was near being the ruin of Sedan. It was after the surrender at Metz, however, that Delaherche contracted his main debt of gratitude to his guest. The terrible news burst on the citizens like a thunderclap, dashing to the ground all their remaining hopes, and early in the ensuing week the streets again began to be encumbered with the countless hosts of the German forces, streaming down from the conquered fortress: the army of Prince Frederick Charles moving on the Loire, that of General Manteuffel, whose destination was Amiens and Rouen, and other corps on the march to reinforce the besiegers before Paris. For several days the houses were full to overflowing with soldiers, the butchers’ and bakers’ shops were swept clean, to the last bone, to the last crumb; the streets were pervaded by a greasy, tallowy odor, as after the passage of the great migratory bands of olden times. The buildings in the Rue Maqua, protected by a friendly influence, escaped the devastating irruption, and were only called on to give shelter to a few of the leaders, men of education and refinement.

Owing to these circumstances, Delaherche at last began to lay aside his frostiness of manner. As a general thing the bourgeois families shut themselves in their apartments and avoided all communication with the officers who were billeted on them; but to him, who was of a sociable nature and liked to extract from life what enjoyment it had to offer, this enforced sulkiness in the end became unbearable. His great, silent house, where the inmates lived apart from one another in a chill atmosphere of distrust and mutual dislike, damped his spirits terribly. He began by stopping M. de Gartlauben on the stairs one day to thank him for his favors, and thus by degrees it became a regular habit with the two men to exchange a few words when they met. The result was that one evening the Prussian captain found himself seated in his host’s study before the fireplace where some great oak logs were blazing, smoking a cigar and amicably discussing the news of the day. For the first two weeks of their new intimacy Gilberte did not make her appearance in the room; he affected to ignore her existence, although, at every faintest sound, his glance would be directed expectantly upon the door of the connecting apartment. It seemed to be his object to keep his position as an enemy as much as possible in the background, trying to show he was not narrow-minded or a bigoted patriot, laughing and joking pleasantly over certain rather ridiculous requisitions. For example, a demand was made one day for a coffin and a shroud; that shroud and coffin afforded him no end of amusement. As regarded other things, such as coal, oil, milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothing, stoves and lamps—all the necessaries of daily life, in a word—he shrugged his shoulders: mon Dieu! what would you have? No doubt it was vexatious; he was even willing to admit that their demands were excessive, but that was how it was in war times; they had to keep themselves alive in the enemy’s country. Delaherche, who was very sore over these incessant requisitions, expressed his opinion of them with frankness, pulling them to pieces mercilessly at their nightly confabs, in much the same way as he might have criticised the cook’s kitchen accounts. On only one occasion did their discussion become at all acrimonious, and that was in relation to the impost of a million francs that the Prussian préfet at Rethel had levied on the department of the Ardennes, the alleged pretense of which was to indemnify Germany for damages caused by French ships of war and by the expulsion of Germans domiciled in French territory. Sedan’s proportionate share of the assessment was forty-two thousand francs. And he labored strenuously with his visitor to convince him of the iniquity of the imposition; the city was differently circumstanced from the other towns, it had had more than its share of affliction, and should not be burdened with that new exaction. The pair always came out of their discussions better friends than when they went in; one delighted to have had an opportunity of hearing himself talk, the other pleased with himself for having displayed a truly Parisian urbanity.

One evening Gilberte came into the room, with her air of thoughtless gayety. She paused at the threshold, affecting embarrassment. M. de Gartlauben rose, and with much tact presently withdrew, but on repeating his visit the following evening and finding Gilberte there again, he settled himself in his usual seat in the chimney-corner. It was the commencement of a succession of delightful evenings that they passed together in the study of the master of the house, not in the drawing-room—wherein lay a nice distinction. And at a later period when, yielding to their guest’s entreaties, the young woman consented to play for him, she did not invite him to the salon, but entered the room alone, leaving the communicating door open. In those bitter winter evenings the old oaks of the Ardennes gave out a grateful warmth from the depths of the great cavernous fireplace; there was a cup of fragrant tea for them about ten o’clock; they laughed and chatted in the comfortable, bright room. And it did not require extra powers of vision to see that M. de Gartlauben was rapidly falling head over ears in love with that sprightly young woman, who flirted with him as audaciously as she had flirted in former days at Charleville with Captain Beaudoin’s friends. He began to pay increased attention to his person, displayed a gallantry that verged on the fantastic, was raised to the pinnacle of bliss by the most trifling favor, tormented by the one ever-present anxiety not to appear a barbarian in her eyes, a rude soldier who did not know the ways of women.

And thus it was that in the big, gloomy house in the Rue Maqua a twofold life went on. While at meal-times Edmond, the wounded cherub with the pretty face, lent a listening ear to Delaherche’s unceasing chatter, blushing if ever Gilberte asked him to pass her the salt, while at evening M. de Gartlauben, seated in the study, with eyes upturned in silent ecstasy, listened to a sonata by Mozart performed for his benefit by the young woman in the adjoining drawing-room, a stillness as of death continued to pervade the apartment where Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche spent their days, the blinds tight drawn, the lamp continually burning, like a votive candle illuminating a tomb. December had come and wrapped the city in a winding-sheet of snow; the cruel news seemed all the bitterer for the piercing cold. After General Ducrot’s repulse at Champigny, after the loss of Orleans, there was left but one dark, sullen hope: that the soil of France might avenge their defeat, exterminate and swallow up the victors. Let the snow fall thicker and thicker still, let the earth’s crust crack and open under the biting frost, that in it the entire German nation might find a grave! And there came another sorrow to wring poor Madame Delaherche’s heart. One night when her son was from home, having been suddenly called away to Belgium on business, chancing to pass Gilberte’s door she heard within a low murmur of voices and smothered laughter. Disgusted and sick at heart she returned to her own room, where her horror of the abominable thing she suspected the existence of would not let her sleep: it could have been none other but the Prussian whose voice she heard; she had thought she had noticed glances of intelligence passing; she was prostrated by this supreme disgrace. Ah, that woman, that abandoned woman, whom her son had insisted on bringing to the house despite her commands and prayers, whom she had forgiven, by her silence, after Captain Beaudoin’s death! And now the thing was repeated, and this time the infamy was even worse. What was she to do? Such an enormity must not go unpunished beneath her roof. Her mind was torn by the conflict that raged there, in her uncertainty as to the course she should pursue. The colonel, desiring to know nothing of what occurred outside his room, always checked her with a gesture when he thought she was about to give him any piece of news, and she had said nothing to him of the matter that had caused her such suffering; but on those days when she came to him with tears standing in her eyes and sat for hours in mournful silence, he would look at her and say to himself that France had sustained yet another defeat.

This was the condition of affairs in the house in the Rue Maqua when Henriette dropped in there one morning to endeavor to secure Delaherche’s influence in favor of Father Fouchard. She had heard people speak, smiling significantly as they did so, of the servitude to which Gilberte had reduced Captain de Gartlauben; she was, therefore, somewhat embarrassed when she encountered old Madame Delaherche, to whom she thought it her duty to explain the object of her visit, ascending the great staircase on her way to the colonel’s apartment.

“Dear madame, it would be so kind of you to assist us! My uncle is in great danger; they talk of sending him away to Germany.”