The Soil (La terre): A Realistic Novel

by Émile Zola

Fouan remained standing stiffly outside the pitiless door. The rain was still streaming down with monotonous persistence. Presently he turned away and stepped once more into the inky darkness which the slow, icy downpour from the heavens was flooding.

Where did he go? He could never quite recollect. His feet stumbled in the puddles, and he groped about with his hands to avoid running against the trees and walls. He no longer reflected, he no longer recognised anything: this little village, every stone of which he knew so well, seemed like some unknown and far-off terrible spot, where he was a stranger, lost, unable to find his way. He turned to the left, but, fearing lest he should fall into some hole or other, he turned round again to the right; then he stopped altogether, trembling all over, finding danger at every turn. Presently he discovered a railing, and he followed it till it brought him to a little door, which opened at his touch. Then the ground seemed to slip away beneath his feet, and he rolled down into some sort of a hole. Here, at any rate, he felt more comfortable, for he was sheltered from the rain and the place was warm. A grunt soon warned him, however, that he had a pig for a neighbour, and the disturbed animal, thinking that some food had arrived, was already poking its snout into his ribs. Fouan began to struggle with it, but he felt so weak that he made all haste to escape, for fear he might be devoured. Still he could go no further, and he let himself drop down outside the door, huddling himself up closely against it so that the projecting roof might shelter him from the rain. Heavy drops, however, still continued to soak his legs, and icy gusts of wind seemed to freeze his saturated clothes to his body. He envied the pig, and would have returned to it, if he had not heard it gnawing at the door behind his back and snorting ravenously.

In the early dawn Fouan awoke from the painful somnolence into which he had sunk. A feeling of shame again took possession of him, as he told himself that his story must be the common talk of the neighbourhood, and that every one knew he was a pauper tramping the roads. A man stripped of everything could not hope for either justice or pity. He kept himself well under the hedges as he walked along, in the constant fear of seeing some window open and being recognised by some early-rising woman in his miserable condition as a poor old outcast. The rain was still falling, and when he reached the plain he concealed himself in a rick. He spent the whole day in gliding from one place of concealment to another, in such a state of alarm, indeed, that, when he had lain in any one hiding-place for a couple of hours, he felt sure that he was about to be discovered, and crept out and concealed himself somewhere else. The one thought that now racked his brain was whether it would take him a long time to die in this way. He was now not suffering so much from cold, but he was tortured with hunger, and he said to himself that it was from hunger that he would die. He might perhaps have to live through another night and another day! Still he did not waver; he would rather stay and perish where he was than return to the Buteaus.

But as the darkness again began to close in, he was seized with an agonising terror at the thought of having to spend another night out in the ceaseless deluge of rain. His bones were beginning to shiver with cold again, and an intolerable aching hunger was gnawing at his stomach. When the sky grew black and dark, he felt as though he were being drowned and swept away into the streaming gloom. His mind grew confused and blank, and his feet carried him along mechanically. A purely animal instinct was shaping his course, and thus it happened that, without any conscious intention of doing so, he found himself once more in the kitchen of the Buteaus' house, the door of which he had opened.

Buteau and Lise were just finishing the remains of the previous day's cabbage-soup. Upon hearing the door open the husband turned his head and looked at Fouan, who stood in silence, wrapped in the steam from his saturated clothes. For a long time the son thus looked at his father without saying anything. Then he broke out into a snigger:

"Ah, I knew quite well that you'd show you'd got no spirit!"

The old man, standing bolt upright, and seeming as though rooted to the ground, answered not a word.

"Well, all the same, give him some grub, wife, since it's hunger that has brought him back!"

Lise had already risen and brought a plateful of the soup. Fouan took it and sat down apart from the others on a stool, as though he declined to join his children at table. He began to swallow the soup ravenously, his whole body trembling with the violence of his hunger. Buteau now leisurely finished his meal, and then began to sway about on his chair, making darts with his knife at scraps of cheese, and then putting them into his mouth. He was watching the old man's ravenous appetite with interest, and followed the movements of his spoon with a mocking leer.

"Your walk in the fresh air seems to have given you a rare appetite," said he. "But you mustn't take these strolls every day you know; it would come in much too expensive!"