Chapter XXXI At last, one evening about half past ten, she pushed the door open, entered the shop without a word of greeting, walked up to the little table where the mother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed upon it, beneath her hand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloth that gave forth a ringing sound. "There it is!" said she.
At last, one evening about half past ten, she pushed the door open, entered the shop without a word of greeting, walked up to the little table where the mother and son were sitting half asleep, and placed upon it, beneath her hand which was closed like a claw, an old piece of cloth that gave forth a ringing sound."There it is!" said she.
At last she had succeeded in collecting the money; but it was her master and had possession of her forever. Her life thenceforth belonged to the obligations she had entered into with all these people, to the service her dealers had rendered her, knowing very well what they were doing. She belonged to her debt, to the sum she would have to pay every year. She knew it; she knew that all her wages would go in that way; that with the rates of interest, which she had left entirely at the discretion of her creditors, and the written obligations demanded by them, mademoiselle's three hundred francs would hardly suffice to pay the interest on the twenty-three hundred she had borrowed. She knew that she was in debt, that she should be in debt forever, that she was doomed forever to privation and embarrassment, to the strictest economy in her manner of living and her dress. She had hardly any more illusions as to theJupillons than as to her own future. She had a presentiment that her money was lost so far as they were concerned. She had not even based any hopes on the possibility that this sacrifice would touch the young man. She had acted on the impulse of the moment. If she had been told to die to prevent his going, she would have died. The idea of seeing him a soldier, the idea of the battlefield, the cannon, the wounded, in presence of which a woman shuts her eyes in terror, had led her to do something more than die; to sell her life for that man, to consign herself to everlasting poverty.
Disorders of the nervous system frequently result indisarranging the natural sequence of human joys and sorrows, in destroying their proportion and equilibrium, and in carrying them to the greatest possible excess. It seems that, under the influence of this disease of sensitiveness, the sharpened, refined, spiritualized sensations exceed their natural measure and limits, reach a point beyond themselves, and, as it were, make the enjoyment and suffering of the individual infinite. So the infrequent joys that Germinie still knew were insane joys, from which she emerged drunk, and with the physical symptoms of drunkenness.—"Why, my girl," mademoiselle sometimes could not forbear saying, "anyone would think you were tipsy."—"Mademoiselle makes you pay dear for a little amusement once in a while!" Germinie would reply. And when she relapsed into her sorrowful, disappointed, restless condition, her desolation was more intense, more frantic and delirious than her gayety.
The moment had arrived when the terrible truth, which she had suspected before, at last became clear to her.She saw that she had failed to lay hold of Jupillon by the devotion her love had manifested, by stripping herself of all she possessed, by all the pecuniary sacrifices which involved her life in the toils and embarrassment of a debt it was impossible for her to pay. She felt that he gave her his love grudgingly, a love to which he imparted all the humiliation of an act of charity. When she told him that she was againenceinte, the man whom she was about to make a father once more said to her: "Well, women like you are amusing creatures! always full or just empty!" She conceived the ideas, the suspicions that come to genuine love when it is betrayed, the presentiments of the heart that tell women they are no longer in undisputed possession of their lovers, and that there is another because there is likely to be another.
She complained no more, she wept no more, she indulged no more in recrimination. She abandoned the struggle with this man, armed with indifference, who, with the cold-blooded sarcasm of the vulgar cad, was so expert in insulting her passion, her unreasoning impulses, her wild outbursts of affection. And so, in agonizing resignation, she set herself the task of waiting—for what? She did not know: perhaps until he would have no more of her.
Heart-broken and silent, she kept watch upon Jupillon; she followed him about and never lost sight of him; she tried to make him speak by interjectingremarks in his fits of distraction. She hovered about him, but she saw nothing wrong, she could lay hold of nothing, detect nothing; and yet she was convinced that there was something and that what she feared was true; she felt a woman's presence in the air.
One morning, as she went down the street rather earlier than usual, she spied him a few yards before her on the sidewalk. He was dressed up, and constantly looked himself over as he walked along. From time to time he raised his trouser leg a little to see the polish on his boots. She followed him. He went straight on without looking back. She was not far behind him when he reached Place Bréda. There was a woman walking on the square beside the cabstand. Germinie could see nothing of her but her back. Jupillon went up to her and she turned: it was his cousin. They began to walk side by side, up and down the square; then they started through Rue Bréda toward Rue de Navarin. There the girl took Jupillon's arm; she did not lean on it at first, but little by little, as they proceeded, she leaned toward him, with the movement of a branch when it is bent, and drew closer and closer. They walked slowly, so slowly that at times Germinie was obliged to stop in order to keep at a safe distance from them. They ascended Rue des Martyrs, passed through Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne, and went down Rue Montholon. Jupillon was talking earnestly; the cousin said nothing, but listened to Jupillon, and walkedon with the absent-minded air of a woman smelling of a bouquet, now and then darting a little vague glance on one side or the other—the glance of a frightened child.
When they reached Rue Lamartine, opposite the Passage des Deux-Sœurs, they turned. Germinie had barely time to throw herself in at a hall door. They passed without seeing her. The little one was very serious and walked slowly. Jupillon was talking into her ear. They stopped for a moment; Jupillon gesticulated earnestly; the girl stared fixedly at the pavement. Germinie thought they were about to part; but they resumed their walk together and made four or five turns, passing back and forth by the end of the passage. At last they turned in; Germinie darted from her hiding-place and rushed after them. From the gateway of the passage she saw the skirt of a dress disappear through the door of a small furnished lodging-house, beside a wine shop. She ran to the door, looked into the hall and could see nothing. Thereupon all her blood rushed to her head, with one thought, a single thought that her lips kept repeating like an idiot: "Vitriol! vitriol! vitriol!" And as her thoughts were instantly transformed into the act of which she thought, and her delirium transported her abruptly to the crime she contemplated, she said to herself that she would go up the stairs with the bottle well hidden under her shawl; she would knock at the door very loud and continuously. He would come at last and would open the door acrack. She would say nothing to him, not her name even. She would go in without heeding him. She was strong enough to kill him! and she would go to the bed, toher! She would take her by the arm and say: "Yes it's me—this is for your life!" And over her face, her throat, her skin, over everything about her that was youthful and attractive and that invited love, Germinie watched the vitriol sear and seam and burn and hiss, transforming her into a horrible object that filled Germinie's heart to overflowing with joy! The bottle was empty, and she laughed! And, in her frightful dream, her body also dreaming, her feet began to move. She walked unconsciously down the passage, into the street and to a grocer's shop. Ten minutes she stood motionless at the counter, with eyes that did not see, the vacant, wandering eyes of one who has murder in his heart.
"Well, well, what do you want?" said the grocer's wife testily, almost frightened by the bearing of this woman who did not stir.
"What do I want?" said Germinie. She was so filled, so possessed with the thought of what she wanted that she believed she had asked for vitriol. "What do I want?"—She passed her hand across her forehead.—"Ah! I don't know now."
And she left the shop, stumbling as she went.
In the torment of the life she was leading, in whichshe suffered the horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from Adèle's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. From that day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morning draughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunk with this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came to breakfast at the creamery; she had drunk with Adèle, who drank like a man and who took a base delight in seeing this virtuous woman's maid descend as low as herself.
At first she had needed excitement, company, the clinking of glasses, the encouragement of speech, the inspiration of the challenge, in order to arouse the desire to drink; but she had soon reached the point where she drank alone. Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filled glass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen; that she had taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy, ofwhich she would take draught upon draught until she had found that for which she thirsted—sleep. For what she craved was not the fevered brain, the happy confusion, the living folly, the delirious, waking dream of drunkenness; what she needed, what she sought was the negative joy of sleep, Lethean, dreamless sleep, a leaden sleep falling upon her like the blow of the sledge upon the ox's head: and she found it in those compounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward on the waxed cover of the kitchen table.
To sleep that overpowering sleep, to wallow, by day, in that midnight darkness, had come to mean to her a truce, deliverance from an existence that she had not the courage to continue or to end. An overwhelming longing for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke. The hours of her life that she passed in possession of her faculties, contemplating herself, examining her conscience, looking on at her own shame, seemed to her so execrable! She preferred to kill them. There was nothing in the world but sleep to make her forget everything—the congested sleep of intoxication, which lulls its victim with the arms of Death.
In that glass, from which she forced herself to drink, and which she emptied in a sort of frenzy, her sufferings, her sorrows, all her horrible present would be drowned and disappear. In a half hour, her mind would have ceased to think, her life would have ceasedto exist; nothing of her surroundings would have any being for her, there would be no more time even, so far as she was concerned. "I drink away my troubles!" she said to a woman who told her that she would wreck her health by drinking. And as, in the periods of reaction that followed her debauches, there came to her a more painful feeling of her own shame, a greater sense of desolation and a fiercer detestation of her mistakes and her sins, she sought stronger decoctions of alcohol, more fiery brandy, and even drank pure absinthe, in order to produce a more deathly lethargy, and to make her more utterly oblivious to everything.
She ended by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness, from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence, blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, the motions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will, memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of the confused waking hours of the morning.
Half an hour after the horrible meeting when—hermind having dabbled in crime as if with her fingers—she had determined to disfigure her rival with vitriol and had believed that she had done so, Germinie returned to Rue de Laval with a bottle of brandy procured at the grocer's.
For two weeks she had been mistress of the apartment, free to indulge her brutish appetite. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who as a general rule hardly stirred from her chair, had gone, strangely enough, to pass six weeks with an old friend in the country; and she decided not to take Germinie with her for fear of setting a bad example to the other servants, and arousing their jealousy of a maid who was accustomed to very light duties and was treated on a different footing from themselves.
Germinie went into mademoiselle's bedroom and took no more time than was necessary to throw her shawl and hat on the floor before she began to drink, with the neck of the bottle between her teeth, pouring down the liquid hurriedly until everything in the room was whirling around her, and she remembered nothingof the day. Thereupon, staggering, feeling that she was about to fall, she tried to throw herself on her mistress's bed to sleep; but her dizziness threw her against the night table. From that she fell to the floor and lay without moving; she simply snored. But the blow was so violent that during the night she had a miscarriage, followed by one of those hemorrhages in which the life often ebbs away. She tried to rise and go out on the landing to call; she tried to stand up: she could not. She felt that she was gliding on to death, entering its portals and descending with gentle moderation. At last, summoning all her strength for a final effort, she dragged herself as far as the hall door; but it was impossible for her to lift her head to the keyhole, impossible to cry out. And she would have died where she lay had not Adèle, as she was passing in the morning, heard a groan, and, in her alarm, fetched a locksmith to open the door, and afterward a midwife to attend to the dying woman.
When mademoiselle returned a month later, she found Germinie up and about, but so weak that she was constantly obliged to sit down, and so pale that she seemed to have no blood left in her body. They told her that she had had a hemorrhage of which she nearly died: mademoiselle suspected nothing.
Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with meltingcaresses, wet with tears. Her affectionate manner was like a sick child's; she had the same clinging gentleness, the imploring expression, the melancholy of timid, frightened suffering. She sought excuses for touching her mistress with her white blue-veined hands. She approached her with a sort of trembling and fervent humility. Very often, as she sat facing her upon a stool, and looked up at her with eyes like a dog's, she would rise and go and kiss some part of her dress, then resume her seat, and in a moment begin again.
There was heart-rending entreaty in these caresses, these kisses of Germinie's. Death, whose footsteps she had heard approaching her as if it were a living person; the hours of utter prostration, when, as she lay in her bed, alone with herself, she had reviewed her whole past life; the consciousness of the shame of all she had concealed from Mademoiselle de Varandeuil; the fear of a judgment of God, rising from the depths of her former religious ideas; all the reproaches, all the apprehensions that whisper in the ear of a dying agony had aroused ahorrible dread in her conscience; and remorse,—the remorse that she had never been able to put down,—was now alive and crying aloud in her enfeebled, broken body, as yet but partially restored to life, as yet scarcely firm in the persuasion that it was alive.
Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret. She had not, like Adèle, one of those vulgar material organizations, which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses. She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. In her case, an unhealthy sensitiveness, a sort of cerebral excitement, a disposition on the part of the brain to be always on the alert, to work itself into a frenzy of bitterness, anxiety and discontent with itself, a moral sense that stood erect, as it were, after every one of her backslidings, all the characteristics of a sensitive mind, predestined to misfortune, united to torture her, and to renew day after day, more openly and more cruelly in her despair, the agony due to acts that would hardly have caused such long-continued suffering in many women in her station.
Germinie yielded to the impulse of passion; but as soon as she had yielded to it she despised herself. Even in the excitement of pleasure she could not entirely forgetand lose herself. The image of mademoiselle always arose before her, with her stern, motherly face. Germinie did not become immodest in the same degree that she abandoned herself to her passions and sank lower and lower in vice. The degrading depths to which she descended did not fortify her against her disgust and horror of herself. Habit did not harden her. Her defiled conscience rejected its defilement, struggled fiercely in its shame, rent itself in its repentance and did not for one second permit itself the full enjoyment of vice, was never completely stunned by its fall.
And so when mademoiselle, forgetting that she was a servant, leaned over to her with the brusque familiarity of tone and gesture that went straight to her heart, Germinie, confused and overcome with blushing timidity, was speechless and seemed bereft of sense under the horrible torture caused by the consciousness of her own unworthiness. She would fly from the room, she would invent some pretext to escape from that affection which she so shamefully betrayed, and which, when it touched her, stirred her remorse to shuddering activity.
The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandonedlife, this life of shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden from her mistress.
It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her, something that was obscure in her life. She had had moments of doubt, of suspicion, an instinctive feeling of uneasiness, confused glimpses of something wrong, a faint scent that eluded her and vanished in the gloom. She had thought at times that she had stumbled upon sealed, unresponsive recesses in the girl's heart, upon a mystery, upon some unlighted passage of her life. Again, at times it had seemed to her that her maid's eyes did not say what her mouth said. Involuntarily, she had remembered a phrase that Germinie often repeated: "A sin hidden, a sin half forgiven." But the thing thatfilled her thoughts above all else was amazement that Germinie, despite the increase in her wages and the little gifts that she gave her almost every day, never purchased anything for her toilet, had no new dresses or linen. Where did her money go? She had almost admitted having withdrawn her eighteen hundred francs from the savings bank. Mademoiselle ruminated over it, then said to herself that that was the whole of her maid's mystery; it was about money, she was short of funds, doubtless on account of some obligations she had entered into long ago for her family, and perhaps she had been sending more money to "hercanailleof a brother-in-law." She was so kind-hearted and had so little system! She had so little idea of the value of a hundred-sou piece! That was all there was to it: mademoiselle was sure of it; and as she knew the girl's obstinate nature and had no hope of inducing her to change her mind, she said nothing to her. If this explanation did not fully satisfy mademoiselle, she attributed what there was strange and mysterious in her maid's behavior to her somewhat secretive nature, which retained something of the characteristic distrust of the peasant, who is jealous of her own petty affairs and takes delight in burying a corner of her life away down in her heart, as the villager hoards his sous in a woolen stocking. Or else she persuaded herself that it was her ill health, her state of continual suffering that was responsible for her whims and her habit of dissimulation.And her mind, in its interested search for motives, stopped at that point, with the indolence and a little of the selfishness of old people's minds, who, having an instinctive dread of final results and of the real characters of their acquaintances, prefer not to be too inquisitive or to know too much. Who knows? Perhaps all this mystery was nothing but a paltry matter, unworthy to disturb or to interest her, some petty woman's quarrel. She went to sleep thereupon, reassured, and ceased to cudgel her brains.
In truth, how could mademoiselle have guessed Germinie's degradation and the horror of her secret! In her most poignant suffering, in her wildest intoxication, the unhappy creature retained the incredible strength necessary to suppress and keep back everything. From her passionate, overcharged nature, which found relief so naturally in expansion, never a word escaped or a syllable that cast a ray of light upon her secret. Mortification, contempt, disappointment, self-sacrifice, the death of her child, the treachery of her lover, the dying agony of her love, all remained voiceless within her, as if she stifled their cries by pressing her hands upon her heart. Her rare attacks of weakness, when she seemed to be struggling with pains that strangled her, the fierce, feverish caresses lavished upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the sudden paroxysms, as if she were trying to give birth to something, always ended without words and found relief in tears.
Even illness, with its resulting weakness and enervation, forced nothing from her. It could make no impression on that heroic resolution to keep silent to the end. Hysterical attacks extorted shrieks from her and nothing but shrieks. When she was a girl she dreamed aloud; she forced her dreams to cease speaking, she closed the lips of her sleep. As mademoiselle might have discovered from her breath that she had been drinking, she ate shallots and garlic, and concealed the fumes of liquor with their offensive odors. She even trained her intoxication, her drunken torpor to awake at her mistress's footstep, and remain awake in her presence.
Thus she led, as it were, two lives. She was like two women, and by dint of energy, adroitness and feminine diplomacy, with a self-assurance that never failed her even in the mental confusion caused by drink, she succeeded in separating those two existences, in living them both without mingling them, in never allowing the two women that lived in her to be confounded with each other, in continuing to be, with Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the virtuous, respectable girl she had been, in emerging from her orgies without carrying away the taste of them, in displaying, when she left her lover, a sort of old-maidish modesty, shocked by the scandalous courses of other maids. She never uttered a word or bore herself in a way to arouse a suspicion of her clandestine life; nothing about her conveyed a hint as to the way her nights were passed. When she placed herfoot upon the door-mat outside Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's apartments, when she approached her, when she stood before her, she adopted the tone and the attitude, even to a certain way of holding the dress, which relieve a woman from so much as a suspicion of having aught to do with men. She talked freely upon all subjects, as if she had nothing to blush for. She spoke with bitterness of the misdoings and shame of others, as if she were herself beyond reproach. She joked with her mistress about love, in a jovial, unembarrassed, indifferent tone; to hear her you would have thought she was talking of an old acquaintance of whom she had lost sight. And in the eyes of all those who saw her only as Mademoiselle de Varandeuil did and at her home, there was a certain atmosphere of chastity about her thirty-five years, the odor of stern, unimpeachable virtue, peculiar to middle-aged maid-servants and plain women.
And yet all this falsehood in the matter of appearances was not hypocrisy in Germinie. It did not arise from downright duplicity, from corrupt striving for effect: it was her affection for mademoiselle that made her what she was with her. She was determined at any price to save her the grief of seeing her as she was, of going to the bottom of her character. She deceived her solely in order to retain her affection,—with a sort of respect; and a feeling of veneration, almost of piety, stole into the ghastly comedy she was playing, like the feeling a girl has who lies to her mother in order not to rend her heart.
To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She feltthat it was an impossibility to draw back from her present position. She did not even entertain the idea of an attempt to escape from it, it seemed such a hopeless task, she was so cowardly, so crushed and degraded, and she felt that she was still so firmly bound to that man by all sorts of vile, degrading chains, even by the contempt that he no longer tried to conceal from her!
Sometimes, as she reflected upon her plight, she was dismayed. The simple ideas and terrors of the peasantry recurred to her mind. And the superstitions of her youth whispered to her that the man had cast a spell upon her, that he had perhaps given her enchanted bread to eat. Otherwise would she have been what she was? Would she have felt, at the mere sight of him, that thrill of emotion through her whole frame, that almost brute-like sensation of the approach of a master? Would she have felt her whole body, her mouth, her arms, her loving and caressing gestures involuntarily go out to him? Would she have belonged to him so absolutely? Long and bitterly she dwelt upon all thatshould have cured her, rescued her: the man's disdain, his insults, the degrading concessions he had forced from her; and she was compelled to admit that there had been nothing too precious for her to sacrifice to him, and that for him she had swallowed the things she loathed most bitterly. She tried to imagine the degree of degradation to which her love would refuse to descend, and she could conceive of none. He could do what he chose with her, insult her, beat her, and she would remain under his heel! She could not think of herself as not belonging to him. She could not think of herself without him. To have that man to love was necessary to her existence; she derived warmth from him, she lived by him, she breathed him. There seemed to be no parallel case to hers among the women of her condition whom she knew. No one of her comrades carried into aliaisonthe intensity, the bitterness, the torture, the enjoyment of suffering that she found in hers. No one of them carried into it that which was killing her and which she could not dispense with.
To herself she appeared an extraordinary creature, of an exceptional nature, with the temperament of animals whom ill-treatment binds the closer to their masters. There were days when she did not know herself, and when she wondered if she were still the same woman. As she went over in her mind all the base deeds to which Jupillon had induced her to stoop, she could not believe that it was really she who had submitted to it. Had she,violent and impulsive as she knew herself to be, boiling over with fiery passions, rebellious and hotheaded, exhibited such docility and resignation? She had repressed her wrath, forced back the murderous thoughts that had crowded to her brain so many times! She had always obeyed, always possessed her soul in patience, always hung her head! She had forced her nature, her instincts, her pride, her vanity, and more than all else, her jealousy, the fierce passions of her heart, to crawl at that man's feet! For the sake of keeping him she had stooped to share him, to allow him to have mistresses, to receive him from the hands of others, to seek a part of his cheek on which his cousin had not kissed him! And now, after all these sacrifices, with which she had wearied him, she retained her hold upon him by a still more distasteful sacrifice: she drew him to her by gifts, she opened her purse to him to induce him to keep appointments with her, she purchased his good-humor by gratifying his whims and his caprices; she paid this brute, who haggled over the price of his kisses and demandedpourboiresof love! And she lived from day to day in constant dread of what the miserable villain would demand of her on the morrow.
"He must have twenty francs," Germinie mechanicallyrepeated the sentence to herself several times, but her thoughts did not go beyond the words she uttered. The walk and the climb up five flights of stairs had made her dizzy. She fell in a sitting posture on the greasy couch in the kitchen, hung her head, and laid her arms on the table. Her ears were ringing. Her ideas went and came in a disorderly throng, stifling one another in her brain, and of them all but one remained, more and more distinct and persistent: "He must have twenty francs! twenty francs! twenty francs!" And she looked as if she expected to find them somewhere there, in the fireplace, in the waste-basket, under the stove. Then she thought of the people who owed her, of a German maid who had promised to repay her more than a year before. She rose and tied her capstrings. She no longer said: "He must have twenty francs;" she said: "I will get them."
She went down to Adèle: "You haven't twenty francs for a note that just came, have you? Mademoiselle has gone out."
"Nothing here," said Adèle; "I gave madame my last twenty francs last night to get her supper. The jade hasn't come back yet. Will you have thirty sous?"
She ran to the grocer's. It was Sunday, and three o'clock in the afternoon: the grocer had closed his shop.
There were a number of people at the fruitwoman's; she asked for four sous' worth of herbs.
"I haven't any money," said she. She hoped that the woman would say: "Do you want some?" Instead of that, she said: "What an idea! as if I was afraid of you!" There were other maids there, so she went out without saying anything more.
"Is there anything for us?" she said to the concierge. "Ah! by the way, my Pipelet, you don't happen to have twenty francs about you, do you? it will save my going way up-stairs again."
"Forty, if you want——"
She breathed freely. The concierge went to a desk at the back of the lodge. "Sapristi!my wife has taken the key. Why! how pale you are!"
"It isn't anything." And she rushed out into the courtyard toward the door of the servant's staircase.
This is what she thought as she went up-stairs: "There are people who find twenty-franc pieces. He needed them to-day, he told me. Mademoiselle gave me my money not five days ago, and I can't ask her. After all, what are twenty francs more or less to her? The grocerwould surely have lent them to me. I had another grocer on Rue Taitbout: he didn't close till evening Sundays."
She was in front of her own door. She leaned over the rail of the other staircase, looked to see if anyone was coming up, entered her room, went straight to mademoiselle's bedchamber, opened the window and breathed long and hard with her elbows on the window-sill. Sparrows hastened to her from the neighboring chimneys, thinking that she was going to toss bread to them. She closed the window and glanced at the top of the commode—first at a vein of marble, then at a little sandal-wood box, then at the key—a small steel key left in the lock. Suddenly there was a ringing in her ears; she thought that the bell rang. She ran and opened the door: there was no one there. She returned with the certainty that she was alone, went to the kitchen for a cloth and began to rub a mahogany armchair, turning her back to the commode; but she could still see the box, she could see it lying open, she could see the coins at the right where mademoiselle kept her gold, the papers in which she wrapped it, a hundred francs in each;—her twenty francs were there! She closed her eyes as if the light dazzled them. She felt a dizziness in her conscience; but immediately her whole being rose in revolt against her, and it seemed to her as if her heart in its indignation rose to her throat. In an instant the honor of her whole life stood erectbetween her hand and that key. Her upright, unselfish, devoted past, twenty years of resistance to the evil counsels and the corruption of that foul quarter, twenty years of scorn for theft, twenty years in which her pocket had not held back a sou from her employers, twenty years of indifference to gain, twenty years in which temptation had never come near her, her long maintained and natural virtue, mademoiselle's confidence in her—all these things came to her mind in a single instant. Her youthful years clung to her and took possession of her. From her family, from the memory of her parents, from the unsullied reputation of her wretched name, from the dead from whom she was descended, there arose a murmur as of guardian angels hovering about her. For one second she was saved.
And then, insensibly, evil thoughts glided one by one into her brain. She sought for subjects of bitterness, for excuses for ingratitude to her mistress. She compared with her own wages the wages of which the other maids in the house boasted vaingloriously. She concluded that mademoiselle was very fortunate to have her in her service, and that she should have increased her wages more since she had been with her.
"And then," she suddenly asked herself, "why does she leave the key in her box?" And she began to reflect thereupon that the money in the box was not used for living expenses, but had been laid aside by mademoiselle to buy a velvet dress for a goddaughter.—"Sleeping money," she said to herself. She marshaled her reasons with precipitation, as if to make it impossible to discuss them. "And then, it's only for once. She would lend them to me if I asked her. And I will return them."
She put out her hand and turned the key. She stopped; it seemed to her that the intense silence round about was listening to her and looking at her. She raised her eyes: the mirror threw back her face at her. Before that face, her own, she was afraid; she recoiled in terror and shame as if before the face of her crime: it was a thief's head that she had upon her shoulders!
She fled into the corridor. Suddenly she turned upon her heel, went straight to the box, turned the key, put in her hand, fumbled under the hair trinkets and souvenirs, felt in a roll of five louis and took out one piece, closed the box and rushed into the kitchen. She had the little coin in her hand and dared not look at it.
Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradationbegan to be visible in her personal appearance, to make her stupid and slovenly. A sort of drowsiness came over her ideas. She was no longer keen and prompt of apprehension. What she had read and what she had learned seemed to escape her. Her memory, which formerly retained everything, became confused and unreliable. The sharp wit of the Parisian maid-servant gradually vanished from her conversation, her retorts, her laughter. Her face, once so animated, was no longer lighted up by gleams of intelligence. In her whole person you would have said that she had become once more the stupid peasant girl that she was when she came from her province, when she went to a stationer's for gingerbread. She seemed not to understand. As mademoiselle expressed it, she made faces like an idiot. She was obliged to explain to her, to repeat two or three times things that Germinie had always grasped on the merest hint. She asked herself, when she saw how slow and torpid she was, if somebody had not exchanged her maid for another.—"Why, you're getting to be a perfectimbecile!" she would sometimes say to her testily. She remembered the time when Germinie was so useful about finding dates, writing an address on a card, telling her what day they had put in the wood or broached the cask of wine,—all of which were things that her old brain could not remember. Now Germinie remembered nothing. In the evening, when she went over her accounts with mademoiselle, she could not think what she had bought in the morning; she would say: "Wait!" but she would simply pass her hand vaguely across her brow; nothing would come to her mind. Mademoiselle, to save her tired old eyes, had fallen into the habit of having Germinie read the newspaper to her; but she got to stumbling so and reading with so little intelligence, that mademoiselle was compelled to decline her services with thanks.
As her faculties failed, she abandoned and neglected her body in a like degree. She gave no thought to her dress, nor to cleanliness even. In her indifference she retained nothing of a woman's natural solicitude touching her personal appearance; she did not dress decently. She wore dresses spotted with grease and torn under the arms, aprons in rags, worn stockings in shoes that were out at heel. She allowed the cooking, the smoke, the coal, the wax, to soil her hands and face and simply wiped them as she would after dusting. Formerly she had had the one coquettish and luxurious instinct of poor women, a love for clean linen. No one in thehouse had fresher caps than she. Her simple little collars were always of that snowy whiteness that lights up the skin so prettily and makes the whole person clean. Now she wore frayed, dirty caps which looked as if she had slept in them. She went without ruffles, her collar made a band of filth against the skin of her neck, and you felt that she was less clean beneath than above. An odor of poverty, rank and musty, arose from her. Sometimes it was so strong that Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could not refrain from saying to her: "Go and change your clothes, my girl—you smell of the poor!"
In the street she no longer looked as if she belonged to any respectable person. She had not the appearance of a virtuous woman's maid. She lost the aspect of a servant who, by dint of displaying her self-esteem and self-respect even in her garb, reflects in her person the honor and the pride of her masters. From day to day she sank nearer to the level of that abject, shameless creature whose dress drags in the gutter—a dirty slattern.
As she neglected herself, so she neglected everything about her. She kept nothing in order, she did no cleaning or washing. She allowed dirt and disorder to make their way into the apartments, to invade mademoiselle's own sanctum, with whose neatness mademoiselle was formerly so well pleased and so proud. The dust collected there, the spiders spun their webs behind theframes, the mirrors were as if covered with a veil; the marble mantels, the mahogany furniture, lost their lustre; moths flew up from the carpets which were never shaken, worms ensconced themselves where the brush and broom no longer came to disturb them; neglect spread a film of dust over all the sleeping, neglected objects that were formerly awakened and enlivened every morning by the maid's active hand. A dozen times mademoiselle had tried to spur Germinie's self-esteem to action; but thereupon, for a whole day, there was such a frantic scrubbing, accompanied by such gusts of ill-humor, that mademoiselle would take an oath never to try again. One day, however, she made bold to write Germinie's name with her finger in the dust on her mirror; Germinie did not forgive her for a week. At last mademoiselle became resigned. She hardly ventured to remark mildly, when she saw that her maid was in good humor: "Confess, Germinie, that the dust is very well treated with us!"
To the wondering observations of the friends who still came to see her and whom Germinie was forced to admit, mademoiselle would reply, in a compassionate, sympathetic tone: "Yes, it is filthy, I know! But what can you expect? Germinie's sick, and I prefer that she shouldn't kill herself." Sometimes, when Germinie had gone out, she would venture to rub a cloth over a commode or touch a frame with the duster, with her gouty hands. She would do it hurriedly, afraid ofbeing scolded, of having a scene, if the maid should return and detect her.
Germinie did almost no work; she barely served mademoiselle's meals. She had reduced her mistress's breakfast and dinner to the simplest dishes, those which she could cook most easily and quickly. She made her bed without raising the mattress,à l'Anglaise. The servant that she had been was not to be recognized in her, did not exist in her, except on the days when mademoiselle gave a small dinner party, the number of covers being always considerable on account of the party of children invited. On those days Germinie emerged, as if by enchantment, from her indolence and apathy, and, putting forth a sort of feverish strength, she recovered all her former energy in face of her ovens and the lengthened table. And mademoiselle was dumfounded to see her, all by herself, declining assistance and capable of anything, prepare in a few hours a dinner for half a score of persons, serve it and clear the table afterwards, with the nimble hands and all the quick dexterity of her youth.
"No—not this time, no," said Germinie, rising fromthe foot of Jupillon's bed where she was sitting. "There's no way. Why, you know perfectly well that I haven't a sou—anything you can call a sou! You've seen the stockings I wear, haven't you?"
She lifted her skirt and showed him her stockings, all full of holes and tied together with strings. "I haven't a change of anything. Money? Why, I didn't even have enough to give mademoiselle a few flowers on her birthday. I bought her a bunch of violets for a sou! Oh! yes, money, indeed! That last twenty francs—do you know where I got them? I took them out of mademoiselle's box! I've put them back. But that's done with. I don't want any more of that kind of thing. It will do for once. Where do you expect me to get money now, just tell me that, will you? You can't pawn your skin at the Mont-de-Piété—unless!—--But as to doing anything of that sort again, never in my life! Whatever else you choose, but no stealing! I won't do it again. Oh! I know very well what you will do. So much the worse!"
"Well! have you worked yourself up enough?" said Jupillon. "If you'd told me that about the twenty francs, do you suppose I'd have taken it? I didn't suppose you were as hard up as all that. I saw that you went on as usual. I fancied it wouldn't put you out to lend me a twenty-franc piece, and I'd have returned it in a week or two with the others. But you don't say anything? Oh! well, I'm done, I won't ask you for any more. But that's no reason we should quarrel, as I can see." And he added, with an indefinable glance at Germinie: "Till Thursday, eh?"
"Till Thursday!" said Germinie, desperately. She longed to throw herself into Jupillon's arms, to ask his pardon for her poverty, to say to him: "You see, I can't do it!"
She repeated: "Till Thursday!" and took her leave.
When, on Thursday, she knocked at the door of Jupillon's apartment on the ground floor, she thought she heard a man's hurried step at the other end of the room. The door opened; before her stood Jupillon's cousin with her hair in a net, wearing a red jacket and slippers, and with the costume and bearing of a woman who is at home in a man's house. Her belongings were tossed about here and there: Germinie saw them on the chairs she had paid for.
"Whom does madame wish to see?" demanded the cousin, impudently.
"Monsieur Jupillon?"
"He has gone out."
"I'll wait for him," said Germinie, and she attempted to enter the other room.
"You'll wait at the porter's lodge then;" and the cousin barred the way.
"When will he return?"
"When the hens have teeth," said the girl, seriously, and shut the door in her face.
"Well! this is just what I expected of him," said Germinie to herself, as she walked along the street. The pavement seemed to give way beneath her trembling legs.
When she returned that evening from a christeningdinner, which she had been unable to avoid attending, mademoiselle heard talking in her room. She thought that there was someone with Germinie, and, marveling thereat, she opened the door. In the dim light shed by an untrimmed, smoking candle she saw nothing at first; but, upon looking more closely, she discovered her maid lying in a heap at the foot of the bed.
Germinie was talking in her sleep. She was talking with a strange accent that caused emotion, almost fear. The vague solemnity of supernatural things, a breath from regions beyond this life, arose in the room, with those words of sleep, involuntary, fugitive words, palpitating, half-spoken, as if a soul without a body were wandering about a dead man's lips. The voice was slow and deep, and had a far-off sound, with long pauses of heavy breathing, and words breathed forth like sighs, with now and then a vibrating, painful note that went to the heart,—a voice laden with mystery and with the nervous tremor of the darkness, in which the sleeper seemed to be groping for souvenirs of the past and passing her hand over faces. "Oh! she loved me dearly,"mademoiselle heard her say. "And if he had not died we should be very happy now, shouldn't we? No! no! But it's done, worse luck, and I don't want to tell of it."
The words were followed by a nervous contraction of her features as if she sought to seize her secret on the edge of her lips and force it back.
Mademoiselle, with something very like terror, leaned over the poor, forlorn body, powerless to direct its own acts, to which the past returned as a ghost returns to a deserted house. She listened to the confessions that were all ready to rush forth but were instinctively checked, to the unconscious mind that spoke without restraint, to the voice that did not hear itself. A sensation of horror came over her: she felt as if she were beside a dead body haunted by a dream.
After a pause of some duration, and what seemed to be a sort of conflict between the things that were present in her mind, Germinie apparently turned her attention to the circumstances of her present life. The words that escaped her, disjointed, incoherent words, were, as far as mademoiselle could understand them, addressed to some person by way of reproach. And as she talked on, her language became as unrecognizable as her voice, which had taken on the tone and accent of the dreamer. It rose above the woman, above her ordinary style, above her daily expressions. It was the language of the people, purified and transfigured bypassion. Germinie accentuated words according to their orthography; she uttered them with all their eloquence. The sentences came from her mouth with their proper rhythm, their heart-rending pathos and their tears, as from the mouth of an admirable actress. There were bursts of tenderness, interlarded with shrieks; then there were outbreaks of rebellion, fierce bursts of passion, and the most extraordinary, biting, implacable irony, always merging into a paroxysm of nervous laughter that repeated the same result and prolonged it from echo to echo. Mademoiselle was confounded, stupefied, and listened as at the theatre. Never had she heard disdain hurled down from so lofty a height, contempt so tear itself to tatters and gush forth in laughter, a woman's words express such a fierce thirst for vengeance against a man. She ransacked her memory: such play of feature, such intonations, such a dramatic and heart-rending voice as that voice of a consumptive coughing away her life, she could not remember since the days of Mademoiselle Rachel.
At last Germinie awoke abruptly, her eyes filled with the tears of her dream, and jumped down from the bed, seeing that her mistress had returned. "Thanks," said mademoiselle, "don't disturb yourself! Wallow about on my bed all you please!"
"Oh! mademoiselle," said Germinie, "I wasn't lying where you put your head. I have made it nice and warm for your feet."
"Indeed! Suppose you tell me what you've been dreaming? There was a man in it—you were having a dispute with him——"
"Dream?" said Germinie, "I don't remember."
She silently set about undressing her mistress, trying to recall her dream. When she had put her in bed, she said, drawing near to her: "Ah! mademoiselle, won't you give me a fortnight, for once, to go home? I remember now."
Soon after this, mademoiselle was amazed to noticean entire change in her maid's manner and habits. Germinie no longer had her sullen, savage moods, her outbreaks of rebellion, her fits of muttering words expressive of discontent. She suddenly threw off her indolence and became once more an energetic worker. She no longer passed hours in doing her marketing; she seemed to avoid the street. She ceased to go out in the evening; indeed, she hardly stirred from mademoiselle's side, hovering about her and watching her from the time she rose in the morning until she went to bed at night, lavishing continuous, incessant, almost irritating attentions upon her, never allowing her to rise or even to put out her hand for anything, waiting upon her and keeping watch of her as if she were a child. At times mademoiselle was so worn out with her, so weary of this constant fussing about her person, that she would open her mouth to say: "Come, come! aren't you almost ready to clear out!" But Germinie would look up at her with a smile, a smile so sad and sweet that it checked the impatient exclamation on the old maid'slips. And so she stayed on with her, going about with a sort of fascinated, divinely stolid air, in the impassibility of profound adoration, buried in almost idiotic contemplation.
At that period all the poor girl's affection turned to mademoiselle. Her voice, her gestures, her eyes, her silence, her thoughts, went out to her mistress with the fervor of expiation, with the contrition of a prayer, the rapt intensity of a cult. She loved her with all the loving violence of her nature. She loved her with all the deceptive ardor of her passion. She strove to give her all that she had not given her, all that others had taken from her. Every day her love clung more closely, more devoutly, to the old maid, who was conscious of being enveloped, embraced, agreeably warmed by the heat from those two arms that were thrown about her old age.
But the past and its debts were still there, andwhispered to her every hour: "If mademoiselle knew!"
She lived in the constant panic of a guilty woman, trembling with dread from morning till night. There was never a ring at the door that she did not say to herself: "It has come at last!" Letters in a strange handwriting filled her with anxiety. She would feel of the wax with her fingers, bury the letters in her pocket, hesitate about delivering them, and the moment when mademoiselle unfolded the terrible paper and scanned its contents with the inexpressive eye of elderly people was as full of suspense to her as if she were awaiting sentence of death. She felt that her secret and her falsehood were in everybody's hand. The house had seen her and might speak. The quarter knew her as she was. Of all about her, there was no one but her mistress whose esteem she could still steal.
As she went in and out, the concierge looked at her with a smile and a glance, that said: "I know." She no longer dared to call him: "My Pipelet." When she returned home he looked into her basket. "I am sofond of that!" his wife would say, when it contained some tempting morsel. At night she would take down what was left. She ate nothing herself. She ended by supplying them with food.
The whole street frightened her no less than the hall and the porter's lodge. There was a face in every shop that reflected her shame and commented on her sins. At every step she had to purchase silence by groveling humility. The dealers she had not been able to repay had her in their clutches. If she said that anything was too dear, she was reminded in a bantering way that they were her masters, and that she must pay the price unless she chose to be denounced. A jest or an allusion drove the color from her cheeks. She was bound to them, compelled to trade with them and to allow them to empty her pockets as if they were accomplices. The successor of Madame Jupillon, who had gone into the grocery business at Bar-sur Aube,—the newcrémière,—gave her bad milk, and when she suggested that mademoiselle complained about it, and that she was found fault with every morning, the woman replied: "Much you care for your mademoiselle!" And at the fish-stall, if she smelt of a fish, and said: "This has been frozen," the reply would be: "Bah! tell me next, will you, that I let the moon shine on their gills, so's to make 'em look fresh! So these are hard days for you, eh, my duck?" Mademoiselle wanted her to go to theHalle Centraleone day for her dinner, and she mentioned thefact in the fish-woman's presence. "Oho! yes, yes, to theHalle! I'd like to see you go to theHalle!" And she bestowed a glance upon her in which Germinie saw a threat to send her account to her mistress. The grocer sold her coffee that smelt of snuff, rotten prunes, dried rice and old biscuit. If she ventured to remonstrate, "Nonsense!" he would say; "an old customer like you wouldn't want to make trouble for me. Don't I tell you I give you good weight?" And he would coolly give her false weight of the goods that she ordered, and that he forced her to order.
It was a very great trial to Germinie—a trial that shesought, however—to have to pass through a street where there was a school for young girls, when she went out before dinner to buy an evening paper for mademoiselle. She often happened to be at the door when the school was dismissed; she tried to run away—and stood still.
At first there would be a sound like that made by a swarm of bees, a buzzing and humming, one of those great outbursts of childish joy that wake the echoes in the streets of Paris. From the dark and narrow passageway leading to the schoolroom the children would rush forth as if escaping from an open cage, and run about and frolic in the sunlight. They would push and jostle one another, and toss their empty baskets in the air. Then some would call to one another and form little groups; tiny hands would go forth to meet other tiny hands; friends would take one another by the arm or put their arms around one another's waists or necks, and walk along nibbling at the same tart. Soon the whole band would be in motion, walking slowly up the filthy street with loitering step. The larger ones, ten years old atmost, would stop and talk, like little women, at theportes cochères. Others would stop to drink from their luncheon bottles. The smaller ones would amuse themselves by dipping the soles of their shoes in the gutter. And there were some who made a headdress of a cabbage leaf picked up from the ground,—a green cap sent by the good God, beneath which the fresh young face smiled brightly.
Germinie would gaze at them all and walk along with them; she would go in among them in order to feel the rustling of their aprons. She could not take her eyes off the little arms under which the school satchels leaped about, the little pea-green dresses, the little black leggings, the little legs in the little woolen stockings. In her eyes there was a sort of divine light about all those little flaxen heads, with the soft hair of the child Jesus. A little stray lock upon a little neck, a bit of baby flesh above a chemise or at the end of a sleeve—at times she saw nothing but that; it was to her all the sunshine of the street—and the sky!
Gradually the troop dwindled away. Each street took some children away to neighboring streets. The school dispersed along the road. The gaiety of all the tiny footsteps died away little by little. The little dresses disappeared one by one. Germinie followed the last, she attached herself to those who went the farthest.
On one occasion, as she was walking along thus, devouring with her eyes the memory of her daughter,she was suddenly seized with a frenzied longing to embrace something; she rushed at one of the little girls and grasped her arm just as a kidnapper of children would do. "Mamma! mamma!" the little one cried, and wept as she pulled her arm away.
Germinie fled.
To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy anddesolate. She had reached a point at last where she expected nothing from chance and asked nothing from the unforeseen. Her life seemed to her to be forever encaged in her despair; it would always be the same implacable thing, the same straight, monotonous road to misfortune, the same dark path with death at the end. In all the time to come there was no future for her.
And yet, in the depths of despair in which she was crouching, thoughts passed through her mind at times which made her raise her head and look before her to a point beyond the present. At times the illusion of a last hope smiled upon her. It seemed to her that she might even yet be happy, and that if certain things should come to pass, she would be. Thereupon she imagined that those things did happen. She arranged incidents and catastrophes. She linked the impossible to the impossible. She reconstructed the opportunities of her life. And her fevered hope, setting about the task of creating events according to her desire on the horizon of the future, soon became intoxicated with the insane vision of her suppositions.
Then the delirious hope would gradually fade away. She would tell herself that it was impossible, that nothing of what she dreamed of could happen, and she would sink back in her chair and think. After a moment or two she would rise and walk, slowly and uncertainly, to the fireplace, toy with the coffee-pot on the mantelpiece, and at last decide to take it: she would learn what the rest of her life was to be. Her good fortune, her ill fortune, everything that was to happen to her was there, in that fortune-telling device of the woman of the people, on the plate on which she was about to pour the coffee-grounds. She drained the water from the grounds, waited a few minutes, breathed upon them with the religious breath with which her lips, as a child, touched the paten at the village church. Then she leaned over them, with her head thrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixed intently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. She sought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations and the almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away. She fatigued her eyes by gazing at the innumerable little spots, and deciphered shapes and letters and signs therein. She put aside some grains with her finger in order to see them more clearly and more sharply defined. She turned the plate slowly in her hands, this way and that, questioned its mystery on all sides, and hunted down, within its circular rim, apparitions, images, rudimentsof names, shadowy initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects, omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would bevictorious. She wanted to see these things and she compelled herself to discover them. Under her tense gaze the porcelain became alive with the visions of her insomnia; her disappointments, her hatreds, the faces she detested, arose gradually from the magic plate and the designs drawn thereon by chance. By her side the candle, which she forgot to snuff, gave forth an intermittent, dying light: it sank lower and lower in the silence, night came on apace, and Germinie, as if turned to stone in her agony, always remained rooted there, alone and face to face with her fear of the future, trying to decipher in the dregs of the coffee the confused features of her destiny, until she thought she could detect a cross, beside a woman who resembled Jupillon's cousin—a cross, that is to say,a speedy death.