The Joy of Life [La joie de vivre]

by Émile Zola

For some time past he had also been astonishing her by fresh eccentricities. Possessed by a firm conviction that his end was close at hand, he never left a room, or closed a book, or used anything without thinking that it was the last time he would do so, and that he would never again see the thing he had used, the book he had closed, or the room he had left; and he had thus contracted a habit of bidding continual farewells, yielding to a morbid craving to take up and handle different objects that he might see them once more. With all this were mingled certain ideas of symmetry. He would take three steps to the right and then as many to the left, and touch the different articles of furniture on either side of a window or door the same number of times. And beneath this there lurked the superstitious fancy that a certain number of touchings, some five or seven, for instance, distributed in a particular fashion, would prevent the farewell from being a final one. In spite of his keen intelligence and his denial of the supernatural, he carried out these foolish superstitious practices with animal-like docility, though trying to hide them as though they were some shameful failing. This was the revenge taken by the deranged nervous system of this pessimist and positivist, who declared that he believed only in what was actually known. He was becoming quite a nuisance, though.

'Why are you pacing up and down like that?' Pauline cried at times. 'That's three times you've gone up to that cupboard and touched the key. It won't run off!'

In the evening it seemed as though he would never be able to get away from the dining-room. He arranged all the chairs in a certain order, tapped the door a particular number of times, and then entered the room again to lay his hands, first the right and then the left, on his grandfather's masterpiece. Pauline, who waited for him at the foot of the stairs, at last broke out into a peal of laughter.

'What idiotic behaviour for a man of twenty-four! Where is the sense, I should like to know, in touching things in that way?'

But after a time she ceased to make a jest of him, for she felt much distressed by his disquietude. One morning she surprised him kissing—seven times in succession—the framework of the bed on which his mother had died. The sight filled her with alarm, and she began to guess the torments which embittered his existence. When she saw him turn pale as he came upon a reference to the twentieth century in a newspaper, she gave him a compassionate glance which made him turn his head aside. He recognised that she understood him, and he rushed off and hid himself in his own room, all shame and confusion. Over and over again did he upbraid himself as a coward, and swear that he would resist the influence of this weakness. He would argue with himself and bring himself to look death in the face, and then in a spirit of bravado, instead of passing the night awake on his couch, he would quickly undress and jump into bed. Death, he would then say to himself, might come and would be welcome; he would await it there as deliverance. But immediately the throbbing of his heart drove all his oaths away, an icy breath seemed to freeze his bones, and he frantically stretched out his hands as he broke into a despairing cry of 'O God! God!' It was these terrible backslidings which filled him with shame and despair. His cousin's tender pity, too, only served to overwhelm him. The days grew so heavy that as he saw them begin he scarcely dared to hope that they would ever end. In this gradual decay of his vitality, his cheerfulness had been the first to depart, and now physical strength seemed to be failing him in its turn.

Pauline, however, in the pride of her self-devotion, was determined to gain the victory. She recognised the source of her cousin's disease, and tried to impart to him some of her own courage by giving him a love of life. But her compassionate kindliness seemed to receive a continual check. At first she made open attacks upon him with her old jests and jokes about 'that silly, stupid pessimism.' 'What!' she said, 'was it she now who had to chant the praises of the great Saint Schopenhauer, while he, like all the humbugging pessimists, was quite willing to see the world blown to pieces, but refused to be blown up himself?' These jests wrung a constrained smile from the young man, but he seemed to suffer from them so much that she did not persist in them. She next tried the effect of such caressing consolations as might be lavished upon a child, and encompassed him with cheerful amiability and placid laughter. She always let him see her beaming with happiness and revelling in, the pleasantness of life. The house seemed full of sunshine. There was nothing more required of him than to take advantage of it and let his life flow quietly on, but this he could not do; the happiness that was offered to him only made his feeling of horror at what was to come hereafter all the keener. Then Pauline tried stratagem, and racked her brain to promote enthusiasm in something or other which might have the effect of making him forget himself. But his idleness had become a sort of disease; he had no inclination for anything whatever, and found even reading too great an exertion, so that he spent his whole time in gnawing at himself.

For a moment Pauline had a glimpse of hope. They had gone one day for a short walk on the sands, when Lazare, as they reached the ruins of the stockades, a few of the beams of which were still standing upright, began to explain a new system of protective works which, he assured her, could not fail to prove successful. The collapse of the former ones had been caused by the weakness of the supporting timbers. It would only be necessary to double their thickness and to give a greater inclination to the central beams. His voice vibrated and his eyes lighted up with all his old enthusiasm as he spoke, and his cousin besought him to take up the task again and make another effort. The village was gradually being destroyed; every high tide swept away a further portion of it; and there could be no doubt that, if he went to see the Prefect, he would succeed in obtaining the subvention, while she herself would be only too glad to make further advances in order to assist such a noble work. She was so anxious to spur him into action that she would willingly have sacrificed the remains of her fortune to bring about that end. But he only shrugged his shoulders. What would be the good of it, he asked? He turned pale as the thought struck him that, if he were to commence the work, he would be dead before he could finish it; and, to hide the perturbation which this reflection caused him, he began to inveigh against the Bonneville fishermen.

'A pack of grinning idiots, who jeered at me when that wolfish sea swept everything away! No! no! they may do things for themselves now! I won't give them another chance of laughing at my "bits of sticks," as they called them.'

Pauline tried to soothe him. The poor folk were in a terrible state of wretchedness. Since the sea had carried off the Houtelards' house, the most solidly built of all the village, together with three others, cottages of the poorer fishermen, their misery had increased. Houtelard, who had once been the rich man of the district, had now taken up his quarters in an old barn, some twenty yards behind his former dwelling; but the others, who had no such refuge, were housing themselves in clumsy huts made out of the shells of old boats. They were living in a miserable state of nudity and promiscuousness; the women and children were wallowing in vice and vermin. All that was bestowed upon them in charity went in drink. The wretched creatures sold all the food that was given them, with their clothes, pots, and pans, and what little furniture they had left, in order to buy drams of the terrible 'calvados,' which stretched them on the ground across their doorways like so many corpses. Pauline was the only one who still continued to say a word for them. Abbé Horteur had given them up, and Chanteau talked of sending in his resignation, being unwilling to remain any longer the Mayor of such a drove of swine. Lazare, too, when his cousin tried to excite his pity on behalf of that little colony of drunkards, beaten down by the fierceness of the elements, only repeated his father's eternal refrain:

'No one compels them to remain here. All that they have to do is to go elsewhere. Only a pack of idiots would come and stick themselves right under the waves.'