Free Complete Works of Emile Zola by Émile Zola Page A

conversation.
    Marie thinks she is fifteen years old. She does not know where she was born, but vaguely remembers a woman who beat her, her mother without doubt. Her earliest recollections date from the streets; she recalls that she played there and that she slept there. In fact, her life has been a long walk in the thoroughfares. It would be very difficult for her to tell what she did up to the age of eight; when I questioned her in regard to her early years, she replied that she had forgotten all about them, except that she was very hungry and very cold. In her eighth year, like all the little outcasts, she sold flowers. She slept then at the Fontainebleau gate, in a large, gloomy garret which was the refuge of a whole herd of children of the same age as herself, all of whom had been abandoned by their parents to the cold charity of the world. Until she was fourteen, she went to this kennel, choosing her corner every night, sometimes well received by her companions, sometimes beaten by them, growing up amid wretchedness and want, nobody stretching out a hand to save her or uttering a word to awaken her heart. She was in the deepest ignorance, and did not even know that she possessed a mind and a soul. She acquired evil ways, without suspecting that evil existed; at present, though she had become a woman of the world, she still had her childish face and her mind was yet infantile and innocent. She had strayed too early in life for sin to touch her soul.
    I now understood the meaning of her strange visage, made up of shamelessness and innocence, of beauty at once youthful and faded. I had the key to the mystery of this cynical girl, this weary woman, who was dying with the calmness and the whiteness of a martyr. She was the daughter of the great city, and the great city had made of her a monstrous creature neither a child nor a woman. In that being, whose soul no one had awakened, that soul still slumbered. The body itself had, doubtless, never been aroused. Marie was a creature simple in mind and flesh, who, while she had trodden muddy paths, had remained pure amid the mud, knowing nothing and accepting everything. I saw her before me, already branded, with her sweet smile, talking to me of herself, in her somewhat hoarse voice, as our little sisters talk to us of their dolls, and I felt a sickening sensation take possession of my heart.
    When Marie reached fourteen, an old woman, who had no right whatever to her, sold her. She allowed herself to be bought; she almost offered herself for sale, as she had offered her bouquets of violets. She still had rosy cheeks, and her laughter rang out gayly. She now had silk dresses and jewels; she accepted the silk and the gold as she would have accepted playthings, tearing, wasting everything. But Marie lived thus, because she did not know that one could live in any other way; she could not appreciate the value of luxury, and would have accepted with indifference either a hovel or a hôtel. It pleased her to live in idleness, to look at the walls; suffering, which had already bent her, made her love repose, a sort of vague reverie, on coming out of which she seemed uneasy and agitated. When one interrogated her, asking her what she had seen, she responded in a bewildered tone: “I do not know!”
    She lived thus for nearly a year, running about among the furnished lodging houses, sometimes living in one, sometimes in another, without losing anything of her serenity. As I showed some surprise and could not vanquish all the disgust with which such an existence tilled me, she was greatly amazed and did not in the least understand my feelings.
    One evening, poverty returned to her, and Marie was on her way back to the garret at the Fontainebleau gate, when she met Jacques. She told me of this meeting in a voice which I shall never forget, with a stony look in her eyes and noisy laughter upon her lips. It was she who spoke to Jacques, asking him for his arm because it was dark and the