The Joy of Life [La joie de vivre]

by Émile Zola

Next the piano afforded them occupation. It was an old instrument of Érard's make, dating from the year 1810, and upon it, in former times, Mademoiselle Eugénie de la Vignière had given lessons for fifteen years. The strings in its mahogany case, from which most of the polish had departed, sighed out far-away tones of a muffled softness. Lazare, who had never been able to persuade his mother to get him a new piano, strummed away on the old instrument with all his might, without succeeding in eliciting from it the sonorous rhapsodies buzzing in his head; and he had got into the habit of adding the notes of his own voice to the instrument's in order to obtain the required volume of sound. His passion for music soon led him to abuse Pauline's easy complaisance. He had found a listener, and for whole afternoons he kept her there while he went through his répertoire, which comprised all that was most complicated in music, and notably the then unacknowledged scores of Berlioz and Wagner. He poured forth his vocal accompaniment, and, as his enthusiasm increased, rendered the piece quite as much with his throat as with his fingers. On these occasions the poor child used to feel dreadfully bored, but she went on listening with an air of rapt attention, so that she might not hurt her cousin's feelings.

Sometimes darkness would surprise them still at the piano, and then Lazare would leave off playing and tell Pauline of his dreams for the future. He would be a great musician in spite of his mother, in spite of everybody. At the college at Caen a professor of the violin, struck by his genius for music, had prophesied a glorious career for him. He had secretly taken private lessons in composition, and now he was working hard by himself. He already had in his head a vague outline of a symphony on the subject of the Earthly Paradise; and, indeed, he had actually written the score of one passage descriptive of Adam and Eve being driven away by the angels, a march of a solemn and mournful character, which he consented to play one evening to Pauline. The child quite approved of it and declared it delightful. Then, however, she began to talk to him; of course it must be very nice, she said, to compose pretty music, but wouldn't it be more prudent if he were to obey the wishes of his parents, who wanted to make him a prefect or a judge? The whole house was made unhappy by the quarrel between the mother and the son; he declaring that he would go to Paris to the Conservatoire, and she replying that she would just give him till next October to make up his mind to embrace some respectable profession. Pauline backed up her aunt's designs, and told her, with an air of tranquil conviction, that she would take upon herself to bring her cousin round to proper views. She indeed argued the matter with Lazare, who grew angry with her and violently closed the piano, telling her that she was 'a horrid bourgeoise.'

For three days they sulked with each other, and then made friends again. To win her over to his musical scheme, Lazare wished to teach her to play on the piano. He showed her how to place her fingers on the keys, and kept her for hours running up and down the scales. But she discouraged him very much by her lack of enthusiasm. She was always on the look-out for something to laugh at and make a joke of, and took great delight in making Minouche promenade along the key-board and execute barbaric symphonies with her paws, asserting that the cat was playing the famous banishment from the Earthly Paradise, whereat the composer himself smiled. Then they broke out into boisterous fun again, she threw her arms round his neck, and he spun her round like a top, while Minouche, joining in the merriment, sprang from the table to the top of the cupboard. As for Matthew, he was not admitted into the room, as he was apt to become over-riotous when he felt merry.

'You drive me crazy, you wretched little shopkeeper!' Lazare one day broke out, quite impatiently. 'You had better get my mother to teach you, if you can persuade her to do so.'

'All this music of yours will never do you any good, you know,' Pauline answered quite roundly. 'If I were you I would be a doctor.'

He stared at her fiercely. A doctor, indeed! What had put that idea into her head? He worked himself into a state of excitement that made him lose all self-control.

'Listen to me!' he cried. 'If they won't let me be a musician, I'll kill myself!'

The summer completed Chanteau's restoration to health, and Pauline was now able to follow Lazare in his rambles out of doors. The big room was deserted, and they set off on wild adventures together. For some days they confined themselves to the terrace, where vegetated tufts of tamarisks, which the salt winds had nipped and blighted. Then they invaded the yard, broke the chain belonging to the well, terrified the dozen skinny fowls that lived upon grasshoppers, and hid themselves in the empty stable and coach-house and knocked the plaster off the walls. Thence they slipped into the kitchen-garden, a bit of poor dry ground, which Véronique dug and hoed like a peasant. There were four beds sown with tough vegetables and planted with miserable stumps of pear-trees, which were all bent by the north-west gales. And while here, on pushing open a little door, they found themselves on the cliffs, under the broad sky, with the open sea in front of them. Pauline's absorbing interest in that mighty expanse of water, now so soft and pure under the bright July sun, had never diminished. It was always for the sea that she looked from every window in the house. But she had never yet been near it, and a new era in her life commenced when she found herself alone with Lazare in the solitude of the shore.

What happy times they had together! Madame Chanteau grumbled and wanted to keep them in the house, in spite of all her confidence in Pauline's discretion; and so they never went out through the yard, where Véronique would have seen them, but glided stealthily through the kitchen-garden, and so escaped, to appear no more till evening. They soon found their rambles round the church and the graveyard, with its shadowing yews and the priest's salad-beds, a trifle monotonous, and in a week they had quite exhausted the attractions of Bonneville, with its thirty cottages clinging to the side of the cliff and its strip of shingle where the fishermen drew up their boats. When the tide was low it was far more amusing to wander along at the foot of the cliffs. They walked over fine sand, frightening the little crabs that scudded away before them, or jumped from rock to rock among the thick seaweed and the sparkling pools where shrimps were skimming about; to say nothing of the fish they caught, of the mussels they ate, raw and even without bread, or the strange-looking creatures they carried away in their handkerchiefs, or the odd discoveries they sometimes made, such as that of a stranded dab or a little lobster lurking at the bottom of a hole. They would sometimes let themselves be overtaken by the rising tide and rush merrily for refuge to some big rock, to wait there till the ebb allowed them to go their way again. They were perfectly happy as they came back home in the evening wet through and with their hair all tossed about by the wind. And they grew so accustomed to this life in the fresh salt breezes that they found the atmosphere of the lamp-lighted room at night quite suffocating.