Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/329

GERMINAL who always adored and desired this woman in the dirt in which he had abandoned her.

Beneath the window the yells broke out with increased violence.

"Bread! bread! bread!"

"Idiots!" said M. Hennebeau between his clenched teeth.

He heard them abusing him for his large salary, calling him a bloated idler, a bloody beast who stuffed himself to indigestion with good things, while the worker was dying of hunger. The women had noticed the kitchen, and there was a tempest of imprecations against the pheasant roasting there, against the sauces that with fat odours irritated their empty stomachs. Ah! the stinking bourgeois, they should be stuffed with champagne and truffles till their guts burst.

"Bread! bread! bread!"

"Idiots!" repeated M. Hennebeau; "am I happy?"

Anger arose in him against these people who could not understand. He would willingly have made them a present of his large salary to possess their hard skin and their facility of coupling without regret. Why could he not seat them at his table and stuff them with his pheasant, while he went to fornicate behind the hedges, to tumble over the girls, making fun of those who had tumbled them over before him! He would have given everything, his education, his comfort, his luxury, his power as manager, if he could be for one day the last of the wretches who obeyed him, free of his flesh, enough of a blackguard to beat his wife and to take his pleasure with his neighbours' wives. And he longed also to be dying of hunger, to have an empty belly, a stomach twisted by cramps that would make his head turn with giddiness: perhaps that would have killed the eternal pain. Ah! to live like a brute, to possess nothing, to scour the fields with the ugliest and dirtiest putter, and to be able to be happy!

"Bread! bread! bread!"

Then he grew angry and shouted furiously in the tumult:

"Bread! is that enough, idiots!"

He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment. His desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat like a death agony. Things were not for the best because one had bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition of wealth? These revolutionary [317]