Truth [Vérité]

by Émile Zola

'No doubt,' Salvan answered. 'I believe that she felt particularly hurt by those ridiculous mortgage bonds on Paradise.... Ah! what a master-stroke, my friend! Never before was human imbecility exploited to such a degree by religious impudence.'

While conversing the friends had slowly directed their steps towards the railway station, where Salvan intended to take the train in order to return to Beaumont. He did so, and Marc, on quitting him, felt once again full of hope.

As Salvan had indeed suggested, Geneviève—in that little house of the Place des Capucins, which had become yet more mournful and frigid now that death hovered over it so threateningly—was assailed by another crisis which was gradually transforming her. At first she had been thunderstruck by the revelation of the truth, the certainty of Simon's innocence, which the perusal of all the documents had brought her—that terrible light whose blaze had revealed to her the infamy of the holy men whom she had hitherto accepted as the directors of her conscience and her heart. All came from that, doubt penetrated into her mind, faith took flight, she could not do otherwise than reflect, examine and judge everything. A feeling of disquietude had already come upon her at the time when she quitted Father Théodose; and the latter's Bonds of St. Antony, that base attempt to exploit the credulity of the public, had suddenly shown her his venality and disgusted her with him. Moreover, not only did the monk's character decline in her estimation to the lowest level, but the worship he represented—that religion which had cast her into transports of mystical desire likewise lost its semblance of holiness. What! must she accept that unworthy trafficking, that idolatrous superstition, if she desired to remain a practising Catholic, steadfast in her faith? She had long bowed to beliefs and mysteries, even when her natural good sense had covertly protested against them; but there were limits to everything. She could not countenance that flotation of shares in heaven; she refused to walk behind that St. Antony, bedaubed with red and gold and carried about like a guy or an advertisement, to increase the multitude of subscribers. And the revolt of her reason gathered additional strength when she thought of the retirement of Abbé Quandieu, the gentle and paternal confessor, to whom she had returned when the suspicious ardour of Father Théodose had alarmed her. If such a man as the Abbé felt unable to abide in the Church, such as it had been made by the clerical policy of hatred and domination, was it not certain that all upright souls would henceforth find it difficult to remain in it?

Doubtless, however, Geneviève's evolution would not have been so rapid if certain preparatory work had not been already effected in her, slowly and without her knowledge. In order that one might fully understand those first causes, it was necessary to recall the whole of her story. Inheriting much of her father's nature—tender, gay, and amorous—she had fallen in love with Marc, carried away by such ardent passion that, in order to have that modest schoolmaster as her husband, she was willing to dwell with him almost in poverty, in the depths of a lonely village. Weary, too, in her eighteenth year, of the mournful life she had led beside Madame Duparque, the idea of liberty had attracted her; and for a moment it had seemed as if she had cast aside all her pious training, for with her husband she had displayed such youthful enchantment that he had been able to think she was wholly his. Moreover, if any fears lurked within him, he had dismissed them, setting himself to worship her, imagining he would be powerful enough to recast her in his own image, and so carried away by the happiness of the hour that he deferred that moral conquest till some other time.

But her past had revived, and again he had shown weakness, delaying action under the pretext of respecting the freedom of her conscience, and allowing her to return to religious observances. All her childhood then came back, the mystical poison which had not been eliminated from her system asserted itself, and the crisis which fatally assails the souls of women nourished on errors and falsehoods arrived, her case being aggravated by her frequentation of that bigoted and domineering woman, her grandmother. Then a whole series of incidents—the Simon case, the postponement of Louise's first Communion—had precipitated the rupture between husband and wife. In Geneviève there glowed a desire for the au-delà of passion, a hope of finding in heaven the divine and boundless bliss promised to her formerly in her girlish days; and her love for Marc had simply become dimmed amid her dream of the ecstasies which the canticles celebrate, an ever loftier and ever deceptive delight. But in vain had others excited her, lied to her, set her against her husband, by promising to raise her to the highest truth, the most perfect felicity. The failure, the defeat she ever encountered, sprang from her abandonment of the only natural and possible human happiness; for never since that time had she been able to content her longings. She had lived, indeed, amid increasing distress without either repose or joy, however stubbornly she might declare that she had found felicity in her deceptive and empty chimeras.

Even now she did not confess in what a void she had ever remained after her long prayers on the old flagstones of chapels, her useless Communions, when she had vainly hoped to feel the flesh and blood of Jesus mingling with her own in a union of eternal rapture. But good Mother Nature each day was winning her back, restoring her a little more to health and human love; while the old poison of mysticism became in an increasing degree eliminated at each successive defeat of religious imposture. Cast for a time into great perturbation, she strove to divert her thoughts, to stupefy herself, by stern and painful religious practices in order that she might not be compelled to understand that her love for Marc had reawakened, that she craved for rest in his embrace, in the one, sole, eternal certainty which makes of husband and wife the emblems of health and happiness.

But quarrels had broken out between Madame Duparque and Geneviève, and had grown more and more frequent and bitter. The grandmother felt that her granddaughter was escaping from her. She watched her closely, made her almost a prisoner; but, whenever a dispute arose, Geneviève always had the resource of shutting herself up in her own room. There she could dwell upon her thoughts, and she did not answer even when the terrible old woman came up and hammered at the door. In this way she secluded herself on two successive Sundays, refusing to accompany her grandmother to vespers, in spite of both entreaties and threats.

Madame Duparque, now seventy-eight years old, had become a most uncompromising bigot, fashioned in that sense by a long life of absolute servitude to the Church. Reared by a rigid mother, she had found no affection in her husband, whose mind had been set on his business. For nearly five and twenty years they had kept a draper's shop in front of the Cathedral of St. Maxence at Beaumont, a shop whose custom came chiefly from the convents and the parsonages. And it was towards her thirtieth year that Madame Duparque, neglected by her husband and too upright to take a lover, had begun to devote herself more and more to religious observances. She checked her passions, she quieted them amid the ceremonies of the ritual, the smell of the incense, the fervour of the prayers, the mystical assignations she made with the fair-haired Jesus depicted in pious prints. Having never known the transports of love, she found sufficient consolation in the society of priests. And not only did she derive happiness from the unctuous gestures and caressing words of her confessor, but even his occasional rigour, his threats of hell and all its torments, sent a delightful quiver coursing through her veins. In blind belief and strict adherence to the most rigid practices, she found, too, not only satisfaction for her deadened senses, but the support and governance she needed in her weakness as a daughter of the ages. The Church knows it well; it does not conquer woman only by the sensuality of its worship, it makes her its own by brutalising and terrorising her. It treats her as a slave habituated to harsh treatment for centuries, a slave who ends by feeling a bitter delight in her very servitude.

Thus Madame Duparque, broken to obedience from her cradle days, was one of the subjugated daughters of the Church, one of those creatures whom it distrusts, strikes, and disciplines, turning them into docile instruments, which enable it to attack men and conquer them in their turn. When, after losing her husband and liquidating her business, Madame Duparque had installed herself at Maillebois, her one occupation, her one passion had become the practice of that authoritarian piety, by which she strove to remedy the spoiling of her life, and obtain compensation for all the natural joys, all the human forms of happiness, which she had never known. And the roughness with which she tried to impose her narrow, chilling faith upon her granddaughter Geneviève was due, in some degree certainly, to the regret she felt at having never experienced the felicity of love, which she would have liked to forbid her grandchild, as if it were indeed some unknown and perchance delightful hell, where she herself would never set foot.