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Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature
FOR A
NIGHT OF LOVE
EMILE ZOLA
THE WARREN PRESS New York
Copyright 1911, by The Warren Press
FOR A NIGHT OF LOVE
The little town of P.... is built on a hill. At the foot of the old ramparts runs a deep brook, the Chanteclair, doubtless so named from the crystalline sound of its limpid waters. When one arrives by the Versailles road, one crosses the Chanteclair at the south gate of the city, over a stone bridge with a single arch, of which the broad parapets, low and rounded, serve as benches for all the old people of the suburbs. Opposite, rises Beau-Soleil Street, at the end of which is a silent square, Quatre-Femmes, paved with huge cobbles and invaded by a thickset weed which makes it green as a meadow. The houses sleep. Every half hour, the dragging step of a passer-by starts a dog barking behind a stable-door, and the one excitement in the square is the regular appearance, twice a day, of officers who go to their table d'h?te in Beau-Soleil Street.
In the house of a gardener, to the left, lived Julien Michon. The gardener had rented him a large room, on the first floor; and, as the landlord occupied the other side of the house, facing his garden, Julien was left to himself. Having his own private entrance and stairway, he already lived, although only twenty-five years of age, like a retired bourgeois of small means.
The young man had lost his father and his mother while very young. An uncle had sent the child to a boarding-school. Then, the uncle died, and Julien had been filling a position as clerk in the post-office for the past five years. His salary was fifteen hundred francs, without any hope of ever getting more. But he could economize on that, and he did not imagine a larger or a happier life than his.
Tall, strong, bony, Julien had large hands that seemed in his way.
He felt himself to be ugly, with his square head left in a sketchy state as if roughly modeled by an indifferent sculptor. And that made him timid, especially in the presence of young women. His awkwardness engendered a startled attitude of mind, and a morbid desire for mediocrity and seclusion. He seemed resigned to grow old thus, without a comrade, without a love affair, with his tastes of a cloistered monk.
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