The Soil (La terre): A Realistic Novel

by Émile Zola

This was the season when Jacqueline had the most trouble. The sunrise and sunset decided the work of the day or the morrow. They shook off their fleas at three in the morning, and returned to their straw at about ten at night. She always had to be up the first, for the four o'clock soup; just as she went to bed the last, after serving the heavy nine o'clock meal of bacon, beef, and cabbage. Between these two meals there were three others; bread and cheese at eight, soup again at twelve, a sop of milk by way of a snack in the afternoon. In all, five meals, copiously washed down with cider and wine, for the harvesters, who work hard, are exacting as regards their food. However, she merely laughed, as if stimulated by her duties. She was lithe like a cat, with sinews of iron, and her resistance to fatigue was all the more surprising, on account of her amours with that big lubber Tron, whose soft flesh whetted her appetites. She had made him her creature, and she took him into the barns, the hay-loft, and even the sheep-cot, now that the shepherd, whose espionage she feared, passed the night out-of-doors with his sheep. And withal she became more supple and active. Hourdequin neither saw nor heard anything. He was in his harvest fever, something out of the common, the great annual crisis of his passion for the soil. His brain became on fire, his heart beat fast, and his flesh quivered at sight of the ripe, falling grain.

The nights were so sultry that year, that sometimes Jean could not stay in the loft, where he slept, near the stable. He preferred to stretch himself, with all his clothes on, on the pavement of the yard. It was not merely the intolerable living heat of the horses, and the exhalations from their litter, that drove him outside; but sleeplessness, the ever-present image of Françoise, the constant idea of her coming, of his seizing her, and devouring her with his embraces. Now that Jacqueline, being busy elsewhere, left him to himself, his affection for the young girl turned into a madness of longing. Scores of times, while he suffered at night-time, in a state of semi-somnolence, he swore that he would go the next day and win her; but, on rising up, as soon as he had dipped his head into a bucket of cold water, he thought it disgusting: he was too old for her. And then the next night the torture began again. When the harvesters arrived, he recognised among them a woman, now married to one of the reapers, with whom he had been familiar two years before, while she was yet a girl. One evening he slipped into the sheep-cot, and pulled her by the feet as she lay between her husband and her brother, who were both snoring open-mouthed. She got up and came to him, and they lay silently together in the sultry darkness on the trodden soil which, although it had been raked over, still retained, from the winter sojourn of the sheep, so keen an ammoniacal odour as to bring tears into one's eyes. During the three weeks that the reapers were there, he came back to the sheep-cot every night.

After the second week in August, the work made progress. The reapers had started with the northern fields, and were working down towards those which bordered the valley of the Aigre. The immense stretch of corn fell sheaf by sheaf. Every cut of the scythe told, leaving a circular incision. The puny insects, seemingly lost amid their gigantic task, came forth from it in triumph. Behind them, as they slowly marched onward in line, the razed ground re-appeared, bristling with stubble, over which trampled the pickers-up, bending down It was the season when there was the most gaiety about the vast sad solitude of La Beauce, now full of people and animated by the constant motion of labourers, carts, and horses. As far as the eye could reach, there were parties advancing with the same slant progress, with the same swinging of their arms; some so near that the swish of the steel was audible, others extending in black streaks, like ants, as far as the edge of the sky. On all sides gaps were appearing, as though the plain were a piece of cloth wearing into holes all over. Shred by shred, amid the ant-like activity, La Beauce was stripped of her court mantle formed of cloth-of-gold, her sole summer adornment, the loss of which left her desolate and naked. During the last days of the harvest, the heat was overpowering, especially one day when Jean near the Buteaus' land, and, with his cart and pair, was removing some sheaves to a field of the farm where a large stack, six and twenty feet high, was to be built with some three thousand trusses. The stubble was splitting atwain with the drought, and the heat scorched the motionless wheat which was still standing. The latter seemed as if it were itself flaming with visible fire, in the quivering of the sun-rays. Not the shelter of a leaf; no shadow on the ground save the scanty ones of the toilers. Perspiring since the morning under this blazing sky, Jean had been loading and unloading his cart, without saying a word, simply glancing at each journey towards the field where Françoise, bending double, was slowly gathering behind the reaping Buteau.

Buteau had had to take Palmyre to help him; for Françoise did not suffice, and he could not rely on Lise, who had been in the family way for the last eight months. This had exasperated him. After all the precautions he had taken, how could it possibly have happened? He used to jostle his wife about, accusing her of having done it on purpose, and complaining lugubriously for hours together, as if some destitute wretch or stray animal were coming to eat him out of house and home. Although eight months had gone by, he never noticed Lise's condition without abusing it. Curse the thing! A goose was not so stupid! It was the ruin of the household!

That morning she had come to help in the gathering; but he had sent her back, furious with her heavy, clumsy movements. She was to return, however, with the four o'clock snack.

"Good God!" said Buteau, who was bent on finishing a bit of ground; "My back's baked, and my tongue's a perfect chip."

Then he straightened himself; his sockless feet were thrust into thick shoes, and he wore nothing but a shirt and canvas smock, the former hanging half out of the open smock and showing the hair of his sweating chest down to the navel.

"I must have another drink!" said he.

Then he took from under his jacket on the ground a quart bottle of cider, which he had sheltered there. At last, having swallowed two mouthfuls of the tepid drink, he thought of the girl.