Free For a Night of Love by Émile Zola

his hands to find a position worthy of him. That same day, he launched his campaign . He had been given letters of recommendation that he took to the addresses indicated; in addition, he knocked on the doors of several people from his own region, hoping for their support. But, after a month, he had obtained nothing in the way of results; the time wasn’t right, he was told; in other places, people made him promises that they quickly broke. Meanwhile, his meagre purse was getting emptier, he had at most some twenty francs left. And it was off these twenty francs that he had to live for a whole month more, eating nothing other than bread, traipsing round Paris from morning to evening, and coming back to bed, in his room without light, worn-out, always empty-handed. He refused to be discouraged ; but a dull anger rose within him. Destiny seemed to him illogical and unjust.
    One evening, Nantas returned home without having eaten. The day before, he had finished his last hunk of bread. No money left, and not a friend to lend him twenty sous. Rain had been falling all day long, that grey Paris rain that can be so cold. A river of mud was flowing down the streets. Nantas, soaked to the skin, had been to Bercy, then to Montmartre, where he had been told that jobs were available; but at Bercy the position had been taken, and his handwriting had been considered not neat enough in Montmartre. These were his two last chances. He would have accepted anything at all, certain as he was that he would carve out his fortune once he had landed his first position. All he asked for, to begin with, was bread, enough money to live on in Paris, and a little patch of land on which he could then build stone by stone. FromMontmartre to the rue de Lille he walked slowly, his heart full to the brim with bitterness. The rain had stopped falling, a bustling crowd jostled him on the pavements. He halted for several minutes outside a money changer’s: five francs might perhaps have sufficed for him to be one day the master of this whole world; with five francs you can live for a week, and in a week you can do a great many things. As he dreamed on, a carriage splashed him, and he had to wipe his mud-spattered brow. That made him walk more quickly, his teeth clenched, seized by a fierce desire to lash out with his fists at the crowd blocking every street: this would have avenged him for the obtuseness of destiny. An omnibus almost ran over him in the rue Richelieu. Halfway across the Place du Carrousel, he cast an envious glance at the Tuileries. On the Pont des Saints-Pères, a well-dressed little girl obliged him to deviate from the headlong path he was pursuing with all the blind persistence of a boar being hunted by a pack of hounds; and this detour struck him as the ultimate humiliation: even children were getting in his way! Finally, when he had found refuge in his room, like a wounded animal returning to its lair to die, he slumped into his chair, exhausted, examining his trousers stiffened by the dried mud, and his down-at-heel shoes from which a pool of water was leaking out over the tiled floor.
    This time it really was the end. Nantas wondered how he would kill himself. His pride was still intact, he reckoned that his suicide would punish Paris. To have such strength, to feel such power within yourself, and not to find a single person who divines your aspirations and can start you off with a few francs! This seemed to him a monstrous absurdity, his entire being rose in anger. Then he was filled with an immense sense of regret, as his eyes fell on his arms hanging at his sides. Andyet he was quite undaunted by any task; with the tip of his little finger he could have lifted up a whole world; and there he sat, flung back into his corner, reduced to impotence, like a caged lion gnawing its own paws. But soon he calmed down, deciding that death was more glorious. As a boy, he had been told the story of an inventor who, having constructed a marvellous