Free The Flood by Émile Zola Page A

didn’t recognise him. Compared to us – we were pale and delicate, like women – he looked like a man. Julien watched him for as long as he could keep him in sight, and I heard him murmur, with tears in his eyes, shaking with emotion:
    ‘Beautiful… It
is
beautiful…’
    That evening I met them in a café in the Latin Quarter. It was a quiet tiny place down a backstreet, where we often met to talk undisturbed. By the time I arrived, Julien was already engrossed in Louis’s tales of Solferino, listening with both elbows on the table. Never was a battle more unexpected, Louis said. The Austrians were supposed to be pulling out. The Allied troops were on the march when suddenly – it was around five o’clock on the morning of the 24th – they heard gunfire. The Austrians had done a U-turn and outflanked us. Skirmishes broke out involving each division in turn. The generals fought all day long – but, isolated from one another, they had no clear idea of the overall pattern that the battle was taking. Louis had taken part in fierce hand-to-hand combat, in a cemetery, in the middle of all the graves; that was about as much as he’d seen. He said that a terrible storm had broken towards the evening. So the sky played a part: it was the thunder and lightning that silenced the cannons. The Austrians had to retreat, utterly drenched. The two sides had been shooting at each other since six in the morning. It was a terrifying night, because the soldiers didn’t know who had won; in the dark, every sound seemed to signal a new phase of battle.
    Not once during this long narrative did Julien’s eyes stray from his brother. Maybe he wasn’t even listening, happy simply to be able to sit in front of him. I’ll never forget that evening, in this empty, out-of-the-way café; while Louis was marching us across the blood-soaked fields of Solferino, we could hear the buzz of Paris out on the lash. When his brother had finished, Julien said quietly, ‘So what? You’re back. Who cares about anything else!’

3
    In 1870, eleven years later, we were grown-ups. Louis was a captain. Julien, after dabbling in this and that, had slipped into the work-shy yet ever-so-busy lifestyle of the sort led by well-off Parisians who loiter at literary parties and first hangings without ever picking up a pen or a paintbrush. He’d published one decent collection of poems, but that was it – nothing more. I saw him now and again; he talked about his brother, posted to some garrison town out in the sticks.
    The news that we would be at war with Germany was greeted with great enthusiasm. Talk all you like about how Napoleon III plunged France into conflict out of self-interest; you have to admit that the entire nation answered his call. 8 I’m only saying what I saw happening around me. There was a lot of hot-headed bluster about taking back our rightful border at the Rhine, and about getting revenge for Waterloo, which was a millstone around all our necks. 9 If only the campaign had started with a victory, France would surely have celebrated this war, instead of cursing it. Of course, had there been no fighting, we would have been disappointed, especially after the stormy exchanges in the Corps Législatif. 10 Once war was certain, every heart beat faster. I’m not talking about the crowds that were chanting on the boulevards, or the people who, allegedly, were paid to drum up support; I’m talking about the decent, hard-working majority who straight away traced out on maps the progress of our troops all the way into Berlin. We were going to drive back the Prussians with our rifle butts! Our complete confidence in the victory was a legacy of the days when our troops conquered all Europe. No danger of such jingoism these days.
    On the Boulevard des Capucines one evening I saw crowds of men coming out of work and yelling
À Berlin! À Berlin!
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Julien. He was grimfaced . I laughed, berating him for not