The Dream E-Book

Émile Zola

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 400

Beschreibung

Le rêve is a simple tale of the orphan Angélique Marie (b. 1851), adopted by a couple of embroiderers, the Huberts, whose marriage is blighted by a childlessness which they attribute to a curse uttered by Mme Hubert's mother on her deathbed. Angélique is enthralled by the tales of the saints and martyrs — particularly Saint Agnes and Saint George — as told in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. Her dream is to be saved by a handsome prince and to live happily ever after, in the same way the virgin martyrs have their faiths tested on earth before being rescued and married to Jesus in heaven. Her dream is realized when she falls in love with Félicien d'Hautecœur, the last in an old family of knights, heroes, and nobles in the service of Christ and of France. His father, the present Monseigneur, objects to their marrying for reasons of his own. (Before entering the Church he had married for love a woman much younger than himself; when she died giving birth to Félicien, he sent the child away and took holy orders.) Angélique falls ill and pines away. Won over by her virtue and innocence, the Monseigneur finally relents and the lovers are married; but Angélique dies on the steps of the cathedral as she kisses her husband for the first time. Her death, however, is a happy one: her innocence has freed the Huberts and the Monseigneur from their curses. Le rêve (The Dream) is the sixteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Ýmile Zola. It is about an orphan girl who falls in love with a nobleman, and is set in the years 1860-1869.

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Praise for The Dream

‘Zola uses the veneer of a religious fable to explore themes themes of sensuality, mortality, adolescence and the nature of belief … A fascinating and painstakingly detailed pyschological novel that staggers in its attention to detail and its lyricism … at once a love idyll, a sophisticated criticism of Catholicism and experiment in symbolist writing. This new English translation, the first in over a century, serves the text well.’

– Paris Voice

‘In his fascinating introduction to this text, translator Michael Glencross draws attention to the use of colour and flower symbolism … The central character, Angélique, is an embroideress of ecclesiastical garments, using roses and lilies in her work; the roses are symbolic of conflict between heredity and environment, the white of the lilies denotes innocence and temptation, the bareness of flesh, the colour of a woman’s intimate undergarments. As Glencross further explains, Zola also places emphasis on the contrast of dark and light, the shadows in a church, the brightness of moonlight, the ceremony of last rites, when death takes us from a darkening world to a glorious bright place … So much, so academic, you might be thinking, but you don’t need to follow that, nor the historical context of this among the social concerns of the period to enjoy this ‘fairy-tale’ … The story is reminiscent of tales by Grimm or Andersen in which women are locked up, waiting to be rescued, romantic and fatalistic.’

– Susie Maguire, The Herald

‘For some time now, anglophone readers seeking English editions of the earlier and later Zola works have been poorly served, now they have a great new translation.’

– Times Literary Supplement

THE DREAM

Emile Zola’s novel Le Rêve (1888) is a love idyll between a poor embroideress, Angélique, and the son of a wealthy aristocratic family, set against the backdrop of a sleepy cathedral town in northern France.

A far cry from the seething, teeming world evoked in Zola’s best- known novels, it may at first seem a strange interlude between La Terre and La Bête Humaine in the twenty-volume sequence known as the Rougon-Macquart Novels.

However, belying its appearance as a simple fairy-tale, the work reveals many of Zola’s characteristic themes, in particular the conflict between heredity and environment, between spirituality and sensuality, between the powerful and the powerless. The dream of Angélique is at once reality and illusion, and this interplay provides the driving force of the novel. Above all, the novel is, as Zola himself described it, ‘a poem of passion’, displaying the lyrical dimension of his genius.

This important new translation by Michael Glencross, the first in English since that of Eliza Chase in 1893, recaptures the vigour of Zola’s original. The translator also provides an introduction that places the novel in the context of Zola’s life and work as a whole.

EMILE ZOLA was born on 2 April 1840, and grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he was a childhood friend of the painter Paul Cézanne.This association was to last into adulthood, but broke up over Zola’s fictionalized depiction of the artist in his novel L’Œuvre (1886).

In 1858 Zola and his mother moved to Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Saint-Louis. After failing his baccalaureate, much to his mother’s disappointment, he worked as a clerk in a shipping firm and then for the publisher Hachette. He also began to write a literary column for a newspaper as well as art reviews. He was dismissed from Hachette after the publication of his autobiographical novel, La Confession de Claude (1865), which also attracted the attention of the police.

His earliest venture into the style of naturalistic fiction for which he is famous was Thérèse Raquin (1867). After this he was to become the most significant exponent of French naturalism, a literary school that maintained that the novel should be objective and scientific in its approach.

Zola’s most important novels belong to the twenty-volume series known as the Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), of which Le Rêve is one. This cycle of novels, documenting the rise and fall of a family subject to the twin forces of heredity and environment, is set in France’s Second Empire under Napolean III, of which and of whom Zola was fiercely critical. It traces the hereditary influence over five generations of violence, alcoholism and prostitution in two branches of a family, the respectable Rougons and the disreputable Macquarts. Best known are L’Assommoir (The Drunkard, 1877), which concerns the destructive effects of drunkenness among the Parisian working classes, Nana (1880), which addresses sexual exploitation, Germinal (1885), which is set among the coal miners of northern France, and La Bête humaine (The Beast in Man, 1890), a story of sexual and criminal violence.

Zola had an ardent zeal for social reform. He was anti-clerical, and wrote numerous diatribes denouncing the Roman Catholic hierarchy. His part in the Dreyfus Affair (notably his article ‘J’accuse’ of 1898, published as an open letter in L’Aurore) was his most conspicuous public action. His defence of the Jewish army officer, Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason, caused him to become the special object of hatred for conservatives in the Establishment. Prosecuted for libel over the article, he escaped to Britain, where he remained for a few months until an amnesty allowed his return to France.

Zola died in Paris on 29 September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a stopped chimney. There was talk of foul play, but nothing was ever proved. After being buried initially in the Cimetière de Montmartre, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1908.

Translator MICHAEL GLENCROSS studied French at Oxford and Aix-en-Provence. He is the author of Reconstructing Camelot – a book on French Romantic Medievalism – as well as a wide range of scholarly articles on French literature. He has translated numerous French works, including a Penguin edition of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

INTRODUCTION

LIKE ALL ZOLA’S best-known fiction, with the exception of Thérèse Raquin (1867), Le Rêve, first published in 1888, belongs to the twenty-volume series of novels known as the Rougon-Macquart cycle. In this vast fresco of French society during the Second Empire (1851–70) each novel forms a distinct and autonomous artistic whole but is linked to the others by Zola’s ideology of heredity and by the narrative structuring device of genealogy, the central characters being members of one or other branch of the eponymous family. Le Rêve conforms to this pattern since the central character, Angélique, is the abandoned, illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon, a character presented in the second volume of the series, La Curée (The Rush for the Spoil or The Kill).

However, to the average English-language reader – and French, for that matter – the most famous works in the sequence remain the social novels, studies of both the dynamic and the destructive effects of industrialization on the French bourgeoisie and working classes in nineteenth-century capitalism. Hence the continuing success of novels such as L’Assommoir (sometimes known in English as The Dram Shop or The Drinking Den), Nana, Germinal, Au Bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Delight or The Ladies’ Paradise) and La Bête humaine (The Beast in Man). In these works Zola reveals himself as one of the great epic poets of modernity, rendering the transforming, disruptive power of the forces at work within the society of the time, symbolized by the changes to what Walter Benjamin called the capital of the nineteenth century, Paris itself.

Nevertheless, within the Rougon-Macquart cycle there exists another type of work, which could loosely be called the psychological novel. Such works have as their primary focus not the external dynamics of social change and disorder but the internal dramas of domestic relationships. They are equally interesting and important examples of Zola’s art and confirm how all Zola’s imaginative writings are fictions of desire. It is to this second subset, which also includes La Conquête de Plassans (The Conquest of Plassans or A Priest in the House), La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (Abbé Mouret’s Transgression or The Sin of Father Mouret), Une Page d’amour (A Love Episode or A Love Affair) and La Joie de vivre (The Joy of Life or Zest for Life), that Le Rêve belongs.

While it is clear that Le Rêve did not form part of Zola’s original plan for the Rougon-Macquart series – which in any case was initially intended to consist of ten not twenty novels – modern critics and scholars still argue about how best to understand the origin of the work. Some see it primarily as a topical response to hostile reviews of the supposedly pornographic nature of La Terre (The Soil or The Earth), the preceding novel in the cycle (1887). Others emphasize the attempt to exploit, albeit in critical vein, the contemporary revival of interest in the spiritual, evidenced by the rise of symbolism, a literary movement whose success was displacing the school to which Zola had devoted his own critical and creative energies since the 1860s, naturalism.

More important than this debate for the modern reader of Le Rêve is an appreciation of the specific qualities of the text and an understanding of its thematic structure, especially its treatment of religion. In the novels prior to Le Rêve the question of faith and the figures of the (female) believer and the priest are central to La Conquête de Plassans and to the novel that has the most obvious parallels with Le Rêve, La Faute de l’abbé Mouret. It is also important to remember that after completing the Rougon-Macquart cycle Zola’s next project was a three-volume series of novels entitled Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities), the central figure of which is a priest, Pierre Froment, who is undergoing a crisis of faith. Religious belief is, then, an important theme in Zola’s novels and Le Rêve is centrally placed from this point of view in Zola’s output, looking backwards to the other Rougon-Macquart novels already mentioned and forwards to his next major project, especially its first volume, Lourdes, the story of a ‘miracle’ like Le Rêve.

Zola’s attitude to Christianity and more especially to the Catholic Church is representative of the Republican anticlericalism of the period. To Zola Catholic ritual is obsessed with the cult of death and suffering and the priest is the symbol not so much of chastity as of sterility. By sacrificing his sexuality and virility to the Church the priest performs in effect an act of self-castration. The virgin saint, best represented in Le Rêve by St Agnes, under whose protection Angélique places herself both literally and figuratively, is another but this time female embodiment of the theme of sterility since virginity is preserved or paid for by death.

The cult of suffering and self-sacrifice and the displaced, even deviant, form of pleasure derived from it are important facets of Angélique’s experience in Le Rêve and explain her fascination with the martyrdom of the early Christian saints she takes such pleasure in reading about in the text of the Golden Legend. This critique of the basis of religious sentiment does not, however, prevent the reader from participating in the intensity and emotional reality of this experience. Zola’s stance is not one of ironic distance but of imaginative identification with his characters. It is only after having shared in the experience of a character like Angélique that the reader reflects on its validity and meaning. Angélique’s dream of happiness may ultimately prove illusory but the illusion is not cheapened, devalued or undermined by the way it is presented in the novel.

Although the notional time setting of Le Rêve is that of the Second Empire – the action of the narrative opens in 1860 – Zola is at pains to build up from the opening scene, when Angélique seeks shelter under the cathedral doorway, an atmosphere more evocative of the Middle Ages than of the nineteenth century. The town in which the action of the novel takes place is symbolically divided in two, with the lower part given over to modern industrial activities and the upper part dominated by the massive bulk of the twelfth-century cathedral. The lives of the inhabitants of the upper town are exclusively devoted – in all senses of the term – to this single building. Moreover the house in which Angélique will live with the Hubert family is built on to the cathedral. It is an appendage to the great church but it, too, is steeped in history with parts of it dating back to the fifteenth century. Similarly Angélique’s craft, ecclesiastical embroidery, is based on pre-industrial techniques that have no relation to the normal patterns of contemporary production and consumption. In the same way her lover Félicien deliberately revives lost methods and skills of painting on stained glass. These archaic elements in the narrative frame-work are reinforced by Angélique’s fascination with an illustrated sixteenth-century copy of the Golden Legend, which enables Zola to embed archaism into the text itself by using quite extensive quotations from a 1549 French version of the original Latin text. It is also significant that Zola’s main source of documentation on the techniques of embroidery was not a contemporary study but one published in 1770. Any connection with the architecture, economy and technology of the modern world is therefore purely coincidental.

Just as Zola suspends time in this novel, so he breaks with his normal representation of social organization based on the division between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Despite her assertion that both she and Félicien share a common bond as workers, each of them has more in common with the artist than with the manual worker. Angélique’s pretence at one point that she is only interested in money is simply a ploy to forestall Félicien’s advances, for neither is interested in financial gain. Or rather, neither is motivated or excited by the processes of acquiring money, an obsession typical of the bourgeois figures in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Félicien already possesses great wealth and Angélique only dreams of using it. Even then she does not indulge the female desire to spend (the subject of Au Bonheur des dames) but simply wants to give it away as charity to the poor. In any case Angélique’s essential currency is gold, which she uses in her embroidery and dreams of giving away on her wedding day. Money in the normal sense is of no value.

Apart from Angélique, Zola’s most interesting and powerful creation in the novel is Félicien’s father, the bishop. The most striking feature of this autocratic figure, undoubtedly the most complex male character in the novel, is his duality and contradiction: he is a man of the flesh, still haunted by the memory of his dead wife, but since being widowed and taking holy orders he has become a servant of God. He is beset by conflicting emotions of love (for his dead wife) and hatred (for Angélique), born of jealousy towards his son. As a descendant of the noble Hautecœur family he embodies the values of the feudal aristocracy, a preoccupation with status and rank and a pride in origins, valued above even money and success. In this way he is central to the fictional world Zola creates in this novel, one that suspends the normal rules of naturalism. What the trio – or trinity – of Angélique, Félicien and the bishop have in common is that despite their centrality to the narrative they are all figures of marginality, set apart from the normal social categories – as are prostitutes and criminals in Zola’s view – by their status as artists or priest. This sense of marginality and apartness of the characters is fully in accord with the break with the normal temporal and social settings of naturalistic fiction that characterizes this novel.

Against this trio of characters stands the couple formed by the Huberts. They belong to the workaday world of ecclesiastical vestment-makers and their house is also their place of work. However, they too are marked out for a special, symbolic fate: they are sterile, supposedly because they have transgressed social convention by crossing the class barrier dividing their respective families, a prefiguration of Angélique’s situation. The vengeful figure of Hubertine’s dead mother haunts them from beyond the grave, insensitive to their prayers for forgiveness, just as the daunting figure of the bishop denies Angélique her happiness and is deaf to her plea to allow her to marry his son. In the end, however, the miraculous touches the couple as well as Angélique. They, too, belong more to the realm of sign and symbol than to the literal, functional world of their workroom, littered with ancient tools.

In the same way that Zola gives the characters a symbolic dimension that goes beyond or even at times contradicts the socially realistic, so he repeats certain motifs in the narrative until they too take on a special importance and meaning. In this way Zola’s technique is reminiscent of the use of the leitmotiv in the operas of Wagner, a musician whom Zola greatly admired. More than this, Le Rêve formed the basis of an opera first performed with considerable success in 1891, the work of Alfred Bruneau, a now forgotten composer but one of the leading French Wagnerians of the period. Flowers are a particular example of the use of motifs, and two in particular recur constantly, roses and lilies. Roses are one of Angélique’s favourite decorative motifs in her embroidery and white roses are the flowers placed at her bedside when she is dying. The most significant use of the rose, however, is as a symbol of the conflict between heredity and environment: Angélique pulls up a wild briar rose and replants it, wishing it to bloom, to mark the transition from her wild to her tamed state, her life before and after adoption by the couple. The lily, which is also one of the most common attributes of the Virgin Mary in Christian imagery, is the other flower Angélique uses in her embroidery, and Zola’s descriptions of her frequently refer to the lily-like grace of her neck. The scent of flowers also has a particularly powerful effect on Angélique’s sensibility, either calming or exciting her. The parallel here is with the extraordinary death scene in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, where Albine, the priest’s lover, expires in ecstasy, suffocated by the heady fragrance of exotic flowers. Like the paradise garden, the Paradou, in the earlier novel, the now abandoned monastic garden of the Clos-Marie is the natural setting for the love idyll of the young couple, a space where social conventions are temporarily set aside.

Above all, though, it is colour that plays the central role in the thematic structure of the novel. Indeed one French critic has said that the book could be subtitled ‘The Red and the White’. Red obviously suggests the blood of the saints and martyrs who fill Angélique’s imagination after her reading of the Golden Legend, but it is also the colour associated with her fits of anger and pride, the reminder of her flawed Rougon inheritance. Whiteness has similar and paradoxical dual associations in the novel. Firstly it is synonymous with purity and innocence, and all Zola’s descriptions of Angélique’s bedroom highlight this colour. In certain contexts, however, whiteness is associated with the temptations of the flesh and the stirrings of desire, as in the chapter devoted to the wash day, especially the scene in which Félicien runs after and recovers an item of her clothing that has blown away, a cotton bodice. Similarly, later in the book Angélique is embarrassed when Félicien notices her white feet after she has given away her shoes and stockings to the poverty-stricken Lemballeuse family. The two contrasting values of whiteness come together in the figure of Angélique’s favourite saint, Agnes: whiteness denotes her status as a virgin but also her humiliation before martyrdom when she is stripped naked, though miraculously her hair suddenly grows long to protect her modesty. Another structuring device using colour is the opposition between white and black, light and darkness, that runs throughout the text, notably in the descriptions of the natural surroundings – for example the secret meetings between Angélique and Félicien in the moonlight – and in the frequent references to the play of light and shadow in the passages describing the architecture of the cathedral and the religious ceremonies that take place inside it. More important than these descriptions, however, is the Christian value of the symbolism of darkness and light, as in the celebrating of the last rites in the penultimate chapter of the novel.

The other colour that Zola highlights in the novel is yellow or gold, which is associated with the world of nature (the sun), the world of objects (embroidery) and the world of religious ceremony (the monstrance). These examples – and there are many others in this text – demonstrate the pictorial or painterly aspect of Zola’s imagination. This is hardly surprising in a writer so closely associated with artists, especially Manet, Cézanne and the impressionists, who provided the subject matter for his novel L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece). Another indicator of its pictorial quality is that Le Rêve was the only one of Zola’s novels to be serialized in an illustrated magazine, rather than a periodical or newspaper, before publication in book form. It was also the novel that the Swiss-born artist Carlos Schwabe (1866–1926) chose to illustrate in what became one of the most famous examples of symbolist book illustration of the 1890s.

Though the specific setting and subject matter of Le Rêve are far removed from those of Zola’s other novels, this work continues his study of the interaction between heredity and environment but also shows the increasing importance of the thematic opposition between sterility and fecundity, a preoccupation that has clear roots in Zola’s family situation at this stage in his life. Despite the recent neglect of this text, a situation compounded in the English-speaking world by the long lack of a modern translation, Le Rêve is a richly textured work, as carefully designed and as skilfully executed as one of Angélique’s own most intricate works of embroidery.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

As with his other novels, Zola went to considerable lengths to research topics important to the setting he was creating for his characters. In the case of Le Rêve these areas include church architecture, the medieval lives of the saints, old techniques of embroidery, heraldry and Catholic ritual, all of which shape Angélique’s experience and imagination. This translation employs where appropriate English terms that reflect Zola’s use of technical and archaic words or expressions, a feature that contributes to both the precision and the richness of the French original.

1

DURING THE HARSH winter of 1860 the River Oise froze over and heavy falls of snow covered the plains of Lower Picardy. More than that, on Christmas Day a blizzard came in from the north-east and almost buried the town of Beaumont. The snow, which had begun to fall in the morning, grew heavier towards evening, and piled up throughout the night. In the upper part of the town, in the Rue des Orfèvres, which was blocked off at its far end by the north side of the cathedral transept, the snow swept along, whipped up by the wind, and beat against the doorway of St Agnes, an ancient Romanesque doorway but with elements of Gothic, highly decorated with sculptures in contrast to the spareness of the gable. By dawn the following morning there was almost three feet of snow lying there.

The street was still dozing, lazy from the festivities of the previous day. Six o’clock struck. In the darkness, softened to blue by the slow, stubborn falling of the snowflakes, the only sign of life was the indistinct shape of a young girl of nine, who, after seeking refuge under the archivolt of the doorway, had spent the night shivering, sheltering there as best she could. She was dressed in rags, her head covered with a tattered scarf, her bare feet in heavy, men’s shoes. No doubt she had only ended up there after long hours of wandering the town, for she had collapsed from exhaustion. For her it was the end of the world, no one and nothing left, the final abandonment, the hunger that gnaws at the bone, the cold that kills. In her weakened state, crushed by the heaviness in her heart, she had ceased to struggle. All that was left in her was a bodily reflex, the instinct to move, to huddle against these ancient stones as the snow swirled in the gusting wind.

Hours and hours went by. For a long time she remained propped against the central pillar that divided the archway. The pillar bore a statue of St Agnes, the thirteen-year-old martyr, a young girl like her, carrying a palm branch and with a lamb at her feet. And in the tympanum, above the lintel, the whole legend of the virgin child, betrothed to Christ, was depicted in high relief, the expression of a naïve faith: her hair that grew long to clothe her when the governor, whose son she had spurned, sent her naked into the dens of iniquity; the flames of the pyre, which left her limbs unscathed but consumed her executioners as they set fire to the wood; the miracles wrought by her relics, as when Constance the Emperor’s daughter was cured of leprosy, and the miracles worked by painted figures of her. Thus the priest Paulinus, tormented by the desire to take a wife and following the advice of the Pope, presented an emerald ring to the statue, which held out its finger, then withdrew it, retaining the ring that can still be seen on it today, so saving him from damnation. At the apex of the tympanum, set in a nimbus, Agnes is at last received into heaven, where Jesus her betrothed weds her, so small and so young, by giving her the kiss of eternal joy.

But when the wind blew along the street, the snow whipped straight in and white heaps were threatening to block the threshold of the doorway. Then the child stationed herself to the side, against the jamb statues of the virgins above the stylobate. These were St Agnes’s companions, the saints forming her escort: three to her right, Dorothy, nourished in prison by miraculous bread, Barbara, who lived in a tower, and Genevieve, whose virginity saved Paris. On her left were three others: Agatha, her breasts twisted and torn, Christina, tortured by her father, who threw pieces of her own flesh in her face, and Cecilia who was loved by an angel. Above them were still more virgins, three serried ranks ascending with the arches of the keystones and decorating the three archivolts with a blossoming of triumphant, chaste bodies, below martyred, crushed and tortured but above welcomed by a flight of cherubim, and rapt with ecstasy amidst the heavenly host.

The child had been exposed to the elements for a long time when eight o’clock struck and daylight arrived. Had she not trodden it down, the snow would have been up to her shoulders. Behind her the ancient doorway was coated with it, as if clothed in ermine, as white as a wayside altar, at the base of the grey façade, so naked and so smooth that not a single snowflake clung to it. The large statues of saints, especially those on the splay, were clad in it, white from head to toe, radiant with purity. Higher up, the scenes on the tympanum and the smaller saints on the archivolts stood out in sharp detail, bright lines against a dark background. They continued up until the final scene of ecstasy, the wedding of Agnes, which the archangels seemed to be celebrating beneath a shower of white roses. Upright on her pillar with her white palm branch and her white lamb, the statue of the virgin child was white and pure, her body immaculate with snow, stiff and still in the cold that froze around her the mystical raptures of virginity triumphant. At her feet, the other, a poor and wretched child, also white with snow, stiff and white as if turned to stone, was no longer distinguishable from the tall virgins.

However, along the sleepy façades the banging of a shutter being pushed back made her look up. It came from her right on the first floor of the house next to the cathedral. A very beautiful, dark-haired, strong-looking woman of about forty had just leaned out and, despite the heavy frost, she kept her bare arm outside for a moment, as she had seen the child stir. Surprise mingled with pity brought sadness to her calm face. Then with a shiver she closed the window. She took away with her the fleeting image of a fair-haired young girl, glimpsed beneath a tattered scarf, with violet-coloured eyes, a long face and an especially slender neck that had the elegance of a lily, on sloping shoulders. Her tiny hands and feet, blue with cold, were half dead, and all that was living about her was the faint steam of her breath.

The child stayed staring up abstractedly at the house, a very ancient, narrow, single-storey building dating from about the end of the fifteenth century. It was embedded into the side of the cathedral, between two buttresses, like a wart between the toes of a giant. Joined up so, it had been perfectly preserved, with its stone base course, its timber-framed first floor decorated with facing bricks, its roof timbers that projected a metre out over the gable, and, in the left-hand corner, its turret staircase, where the narrow window still kept the original leading. The passage of time had, however, made certain repairs necessary. The roof tiles must have dated from the reign of Louis XIV. It was easy to tell the repairs made about that time: a small window inserted in the pedestal of the turret, frames with window bars replacing all the original stained-glass windows, the three joined-up bays on the first floor reduced to only two, with the middle one blocked up with bricks, all of which gave the façade the symmetrical proportions of the other, more recent buildings in the street. On the ground floor the changes were no less obvious: a moulded oak door instead of the old door with iron fittings under the staircase, and the great central arch, of which the bottom, sides and top had been filled in so as to leave only a rectangular opening, a sort of wide window instead of the pointed bay that had previously opened on to the cobbled street.

Unthinkingly the child continued to look at the venerable dwelling of this master craftsman, a well-kept house, and she was reading a yellow sign nailed to the left of the door saying Hubert vestment maker in old black lettering when once again the noise of a shutter being pushed back caught her attention. This time it was the shutter on the square window on the ground floor: now a man leaned out. His face looked anguished, he had a hooked nose and an uneven forehead, with a head of thick hair that had already turned grey, though he was barely forty-five, and he, too, forgot what he was doing for a moment as he looked at her carefully, his large, tender mouth creased with pain. Next she saw him still standing upright, behind the small greenish windows. He turned around, made a gesture, and his wife reappeared, looking very beautiful. Both of them, side by side, were motionless and kept looking at her with a deeply sad expression on their faces.

For four hundred years the Hubert lineage, vestment makers from father to son, had lived in this house. A master vestment maker had it built in the reign of Louis XI, another had it repaired in the reign of Louis XIV, and this was where, like all his predecessors, the present Hubert embroidered his vestments. When he was twenty he had fallen so madly in love with a young girl of sixteen, Hubertine, that after her mother, the widow of a magistrate, refused to give her consent, he eloped with the girl, then married her. She was remarkably beautiful, and that was the cause of their whole idyll, their joy and their unhappiness. When eight months later and pregnant she went to visit her dying mother, the old woman disinherited and cursed her, with the result that the baby, who was born that very night, died. Since then in the graveyard, from her tomb, the stubborn bourgeoise still would not forgive, for the couple had no more children, though they dearly wanted to. After twenty-four years they were still mourning the one they had lost, and had given up hope of ever making the dead woman relent.

Unsettled by the way they looked at her, the young girl shrank back behind the pillar of St Agnes. She was anxious, too, about the street coming to life: the shops were opening, people were beginning to venture out. The Rue des Orfèvres, the end of which comes right up against the side of the cathedral, would really be a dead end, blocked off on the apse side by the Huberts’ house, were it not for the fact that the Rue Soleil, a narrow corridor, opened it up on the other side, running the length of the cathedral as far as the west front on the Place du Cloître. Two pious-looking women went past and cast a surprised eye on this little beggar girl, whom they had never seen before in Beaumont. The snow continued to fall slowly but insistently; the cold seemed to grow sharper with the wan daylight. All that could be heard was the far-off echo of voices in the dull thickness of the great white shroud covering the town.

But, frightened and shameful of having being abandoned as if she were guilty of some misdeed, the child drew further back until suddenly in front of her she saw Hubertine, who, not having a servant, had gone out to fetch bread.

‘Little one, what are you doing there? Who are you?’

She made no reply but hid her face. However, she had lost all feeling in her limbs; she was losing consciousness as if her heart had turned to ice and had stopped beating. When the good woman had turned her back on her with a gesture of discreet pity, she sank to her knees, utterly exhausted, and slipped down on to the snow like a rag, while the snowflakes silently buried her. When she came back with the still warm bread, the woman noticed the girl now on the ground and went up to her again.

‘Come, little one, you cannot stay under this doorway.’

At that moment Hubert, who had in turn come outside and was standing on the doorstep of the house, took the bread from his wife and said, ‘Take her, then. Bring her in.’

Without another word, Hubertine took her in her strong arms. The child no longer recoiled. She was carried like an object, her teeth clenched, her eyes shut, completely cold, as light as a fledgling fallen from its nest.

They went inside, Hubert closing the door while Hubertine, weighed down by her burden, crossed the room looking on to the street, the one that they used as their parlour, and where a few pieces of embroidery were on show in front of the large square window. Then she went into the kitchen, formerly the main room, which had been preserved almost intact, with its exposed beams, its flagging repaired in numerous places and its huge chimney with a stone mantelpiece. On the shelves were the cooking utensils, pots, kettles and basins, a hundred or more years old, and ancient pieces of porcelain, earthenware and pewter. But in the hearth of the fireplace there was a modern stove, a large cast iron one with gleaming brass fittings. It was red hot and water could be heard bubbling away in a large pot. A saucepan, full of coffee and milk, was keeping warm at one end.

‘Goodness, it’s warmer here than outside,’ said Hubert, putting the bread down on a heavy Louis XIII table that took up the middle of the room. ‘Put the poor mite near the stove to thaw out.’

Hubertine was already sitting the child down and both of them watched her as she came round. The snow on her clothes melted, falling in heavy drops. Through the holes in her heavy, men’s shoes could be seen her tiny, sore feet, while her flimsy dress showed the outline of her stiffened limbs, a pitiful body racked by poverty and pain. A long shiver ran through her and when she opened her eyes she had a lost, startled expression like an animal awaking to find itself caught in a trap. Her face seemed to withdraw beneath the tattered piece of cloth tied under her chin. They thought she had a bad right arm, because she held it firm and tight against her breast.

‘Don’t be afraid. We don’t mean you any harm. Where are you from? Who are you?’

The more they spoke to her the more afraid she became, turning around as if someone was behind her and about to beat her. She studied the kitchen suspiciously, the stone floor, the beams and the gleaming cooking utensils, then she turned her gaze outside through the two irregular windows that had been let into the former opening and examined closely the garden down to the trees in the bishop’s palace, their white silhouettes dominating the end wall. She seemed surprised to rediscover there, to the left down an alley, the cathedral with the Romanesque windows in the chapels of its apse. Another long shiver ran through her, a reaction to the heat from the stove that was beginning to enter her body, and she looked back down at the ground, but did not move.

‘Are you from Beaumont? Who is your father?’

When she said nothing, Hubert supposed that she was perhaps too tense to reply.

‘Instead of asking her so many questions,’ he said, ‘we’d be better advised to give her a good cup of hot coffee with milk.’

It was so obviously the sensible thing to do that Hubertine immediately handed over her own cup. As she cut her two thick slices of bread, the child remained distrustful and kept recoiling but the pangs of hunger were too strong and she ate and drank greedily. So as not to unsettle her, the couple remained silent, moved at seeing her tiny hand tremble so much that she had difficulty putting the food in her mouth. She made use only of her left hand; her right arm remained firmly pressed against her body. When she had finished she almost dropped the cup but caught it again with her elbow, awkwardly as if she were crippled.

‘You’ve injured your arm, have you?’ Hubertine asked. ‘Don’t be afraid, let me see, my sweet.’

But as she touched her the child reacted violently, getting to her feet and hitting out. In the struggle she moved her arm. A hard-covered booklet, which she had been hiding by holding it under her clothes, slipped out of a tear in her blouse. She tried to take it back and wrung her hands in anger when she saw these two strangers opening and reading it.

It was a record book, issued by the Board for Children in Care of the department of the Seine. On the first page, below an inset portrait of St Vincent de Paul, were printed headings: against the child’s surname there was simply the stroke of a pen; then against the Christian names were written ‘Angélique’ and ‘Marie’; against the dates were ‘Born 22 January 1851’ and ‘Admitted 23 of the same month’, with the roll number 1634. So father and mother were unknown; there were no documents, not even a birth certificate, nothing except this coldly impersonal record book, with its pale pink cloth cover. Nobody in the world, just an entry, abandonment reduced to statistics and categories.

‘Oh! An abandoned child!’ exclaimed Hubertine.

Then Angélique spoke, in an uncontrollable state of anger. ‘I’m worth more than everyone else. Yes. I’m better, better, better … I’ve never stolen anything from other people but they steal everything from me … Give me back what you’ve stolen from me.’

Her young body was seething with such powerless pride and such a passionate sense of her own superiority that the Huberts were taken aback. They could no longer recognize the fair-haired little girl with violet-coloured eyes and a long neck as graceful as a lily. Her eyes had become black and her face angry; her sensual neck had swelled with a rush of blood. Now that she was warm she rose up and hissed, like a grass snake picked up in the snow.

‘So you are wicked, are you?’ the embroiderer said to her gently. ‘It’s for your own good that we want to know who you are.’ Looking over his wife’s shoulder, he peered at the record book that she was perusing. On the second page he found the name of her foster mother. ‘The infant Angélique Marie was on 25 January 1851 placed in the care of the foster mother Françoise, wife of M. Hamelin, a farmer by profession, domiciled in the commune of Soulanges, in the arrondissement of Nevers, the said foster mother having received when she took in the child one month’s supply of food and a set of clothes.’ There followed a baptism certificate, signed by the chaplain to the orphanage, then the medical certificates for when the child entered and left the orphanage. Further on, the monthly and termly payments filled four pages of columns, each bearing the illegible signature of the tax officer.

‘What? Nevers?’ asked Hubertine. ‘You were brought up near Nevers, were you?’

Angélique, furious at not being able to stop them reading the record book, had retreated into her defiant silence. But anger made her open her mouth to speak of her foster mother.

‘Well, of course, Mama Nini would have beaten you. She stood up for me, she did even though she would smack me … Well, of course I wasn’t that badly off there, with the animals She struggled to speak, continuing in broken, incoherent sentences to talk about the meadows where she would take the family cow, the wide road where she would play, the cakes that they baked and the big dog that bit her.

Hubert interrupted her, reading out aloud, ‘In the case of serious illness or ill-treatment the assistant inspector is entitled to move children to a new foster mother.’

Below it was stated that the child Angélique Marie was on 20 June 1860 given into the care of Thérèse, the wife of Louis Franchomme, both of them makers of artificial flowers, residing in Paris.

‘Good. I understand. You became ill and were taken to Paris.’

But that wasn’t quite it. The Huberts only discovered the full story after they had dragged it out of Angélique little by little. Louis Franchomme, who was Mama Nini’s cousin, had been forced to go back to his village for a month to recover from a fever, and that was when his wife Thérèse became very fond of the child and got permission to take her to Paris where she promised to teach her the trade of making artificial flowers. Three months later her husband died and after becoming ill herself she was forced to go and live with her brother Rabier, a tanner, who had settled in Beaumont. Just before she died in early December she had handed over the young girl to her sister-in-law, and since then Angélique had been insulted, beaten and subjected to ill-treatment.

‘The Rabiers,’ whispered Hubert. ‘Yes, of course. Tanners, living alongside the Ligneul in the lower part of the town. The husband drinks and the wife is a woman of ill repute.’

‘They called me a street urchin,’ continued Angélique, rebellious with anger and wounded pride. ‘They said the gutter was the right place for a bastard. After she beat me black and blue the woman would put scraps on the floor for me, as if I was a cat. And even then I often went to bed without eating … I felt like killing myself by the end …’ She made a gesture of anger and despair. ‘Yesterday morning on Christmas Day they’d had too much to drink and they went for me, threatening to gouge my eyes out, just for the fun of it. Then things didn’t go to plan and they ended up fighting, hitting each other so hard that I thought they were both dead, flat out on the bedroom floor … I’d made up my mind a long time before to run away but I wanted my record book. Mama Nini showed me it sometimes and said, “Look. This is all you possess and if you didn’t have that you’d have nothing in the world.” I knew where they used to hide it, since Mama Thérèse had died, in the top drawer of the chest of drawers … So I stepped over them, took the book and ran out, holding it tight under my arm, right against me. It was too big. I thought everyone would see it and steal it from me. I ran and ran and when it became pitch dark I was so cold in this doorway, so cold I thought I was dead. But the main thing is that I didn’t let go of it, and here it is.’

She suddenly sprang forward and snatched it from the Huberts, just as they were closing it to give it back to her. Then she sat down and slumped across the table, holding the record book in her arms and sobbing, pressing her cheek against the pink cloth cover. An awful humility beat down her pride; her whole being seemed to melt away at the bitter sight of these few dog-eared pages, this poor object that was for her a treasure, her sole link with the outside world. She could not empty her heart of so great a sense of despair, her tears flowed unstoppably, and under the weight of this suffering she became once more that young girl with fair hair and a pretty face, with its long, oval shape and perfect features, whose violet-coloured eyes had been tempered by tenderness, and whose delicately curved neck made her look like a little virgin in a stained-glass window. Suddenly she took Hubertine’s hand and, desperate for affection, pressed it to her lips, kissing it passionately.

The Huberts were overwhelmed with emotion, unable to speak coherently, close to tears themselves, ‘Dear, dear child.’

So perhaps she wasn’t all evil after all. It might still be possible to cure her of the violence that had frightened them.

‘Oh, I beg you not to take me back to the others,’ she stammered. ‘Don’t take me back to the others.’

Husband and wife looked at each other. As it happened they had been thinking since the autumn of taking on a permanent apprentice, a young girl who would liven up a house steeped in the sadness and regrets of a childless couple. They made up their minds there and then.

‘Would you like to?’ asked Hubert.

Hubertine replied unhurriedly in that calm voice of hers. ‘Yes, I would.’

They immediately set about the formalities. The embroiderer recounted the story to the magistrate for the north canton of Beaumont, M. Grandsire, a cousin of his wife’s, the one relative she was still in contact with. The latter saw to everything: he wrote to the Board of Public Assistance, who were easily able to identify Angélique from her roll number, and he arranged for her to stay as an apprentice with the Huberts, who were well respected locally. The assistant inspector for the arrondissement updated the record book and drew up a new contract with the new employer, under the terms of which the latter had to treat the child kindly, make sure she was clean and tidy, send her to school and to church, and give her her own bed to sleep in. For their part the authorities agreed to pay him an allowance and to supply items of clothing, as laid down in the regulations.