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Updated: June 23, 2025
The style was perfectly courteous; the long phrases rolled on, measured and carefully worded, like diplomatic phrases, whose only aim is to convince. It was demonstrated to him with a superabundance of arguments that the scandal of La Souleiade had lasted too long already.
Although La Souleiade dated from the last century, it must have been refurnished under the First Empire, for it was hung with an old-fashioned printed calico, with a pattern representing busts of the Sphinx, and garlands of oak leaves. Originally of a bright red, this calico had faded to a pink an undecided pink, inclining to orange.
On this day, on arriving at La Souleiade, old Mme. Rougon perceived Martine in the kitchen garden, engaged in planting leeks; and, as she sometimes did, she went over to the servant to have a chat with her, and find out from her how things were going on, before entering the house. For some time past she had been in despair about what she called Clotilde's desertion.
"I should never have recognized her," he said. And the landau, still rolling on, turned into the Rue de Rome. Justine had disappeared; this vision of the past a past so different from the present had sunk into the shadowy twilight, with Thomas, the children, and the shop. At La Souleiade the table was set; Martine had an eel from the Viorne, a sauted rabbit, and a leg of mutton.
She made a despairing gesture, indicating the place and the people, taking in all La Souleiade. "But," responded Pascal, looking at her fixedly, "what if Maxime should need you, what if you had a duty to fulfil toward him?" Her eyes grew moist, and she remained for a moment trembling and desperate; for she alone understood.
Then the weather changed, fierce winds began to blow, and a last storm channeled gullies in the hillsides. And to the melancholy household at La Souleiade the approach of winter seemed to have brought an infinite sadness. It was a new hell. There were no more violent quarrels between Pascal and Clotilde. The doors were no longer slammed.
True, it cost but little to keep it up, but what a sad and solitary life she would lead in that great deserted house, much too large for her, where she would be lost. Thus far, however, she had not been able to make up her mind to leave it. Perhaps she would never be able to do so. Ah, this La Souleiade! all her love, all her life, all her memories were centered in it.
The winds at the end of September, in the valley of the Viorne, are terrible. So that the servant took care to go into every room in the house to assure herself that the shutters were securely fastened. When the mistral blew it caught La Souleiade slantingly, above the roofs of the houses of Plassans, on the little plateau on which the house was built.
Around them stretched La Souleiade in the deep silence of the night, with the light shadows of its olive trees, the darkness of its pine and plane trees, in which the saddened voice of the fountain was singing, and above their heads it seemed as if the spacious sky, studded with stars, shuddered and grew pale, although the dawn was still far off.
This Souleiade, situated outside the town gates on a plateau dominating the plain, was part of a large estate whose once vast grounds were reduced to less than two hectares in consequence of successive sales, without counting that the construction of the railroad had taken away the last arable fields.
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