Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/89

GERMINAL diluted soot, thick and tenacious enough to retain her sabots. Suddenly she boxed Lénore’s ears, because the little one amused herself by piling the mud on her clogs as on the end of a shovel. On leaving the settlement she had gone along by the pit-bank and followed the road of the canal, making a short cut through broken-up paths, across rough country shut in by mossy palings. Sheds succeeded one another, long workshop buildings, tall chimneys spitting out soot, and soiling this ravaged suburb of an industrial district. Behind a clump of poplars the old Réquillart pit exhibited its crumbling steeple, of which the large skéleton alone stood upright. And turning to the right, Maheude found herself on the high road.

“Stop, stop, dirty pig! I'll teach you to make mincemeat.”

Now it was Henri, who had taken a handful of mud and was moulding it. The two children had their ears impartially boxed, and were brought into good order, looking out of the corner of their eyes at the mud pies they had made. They draggled along, already exhausted by their efforts to unstick their shoes at every step.

On the Marchiennes side the road unrolled its two leagues of pavement, which stretched straight as a ribbon soaked in cart grease between the reddish fields. But on the other side it went down like a braid through Montsou, which was built on the slope of a large undulation in the plain. These roads in the Nord, drawn like a string between manufacturing towns gradually built up, with their slight curves, their slow ascent, tend to make the department one laborious city. The little brick houses daubed over to enliven the climate, some yellow, others blue, others black—the latter, no doubt, in order to reach at once their final shade—went serpentining down to right and to left to the bottom of the slope. A few large two-storeyed villas, the dwellings of the heads of the workshops, made holes in the serried line of straight facades. A church, also of brick, looked like a new model of a large furnace, with its square tower already stained by the floating coal dust. And amid the sugar works, the rope works, and the flour mills, there stood out ballrooms, restaruants and beershops, which were so numerous that to every thousand houses there were more than five hundred inns.

As she approached the Company’s yards, a vast series of [77]