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+Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Germinie Lacerteux
+
+Author: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2009 [EBook #27711]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMINIE LACERTEUX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Meredith Bach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      CHEFS D'OEUVRE
+                            DU
+                    ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN
+
+                         REALISTS
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter XXI
+
+_Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line._
+
+_And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the
+garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting
+on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream._]
+
+
+
+
+                       BIBLIOTHÈQUE
+                    DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
+                         DU ROMAN
+                       CONTEMPORAIN
+
+
+
+                   _GERMINIE LACERTEUX_
+
+
+
+               EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT
+
+
+              PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
+             GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+                    GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
+
+
+We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it
+due warning of what it will find therein.
+
+The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.
+
+It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to
+fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.
+
+It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans, alcove
+confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a
+bookseller's shop window: that which is contained in the following pages
+is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure
+_décolletée_: the following study is the clinic of Love.
+
+Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures
+that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion
+nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a
+melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure
+the health of the public.
+
+Why then have we written it? For no other purpose than to annoy the
+public and offend its tastes?
+
+By no means.
+
+Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age of universal
+suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves the question
+whether what are called "the lower classes" had no rights in the novel;
+if that world beneath a world, the common people, must needs remain
+subject to the literary interdict, and helpless against the contempt of
+authors who have hitherto said no word to imply that the common people
+possess a heart and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of
+equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the
+author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed,
+catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were curious
+to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a
+vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where
+castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries
+of the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest, emotion,
+compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the great and the rich; if,
+in a word, the tears that are shed in low life have the same power to
+cause tears to flow as the tears shed in high life.
+
+These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble tale, _Soeur
+Philomène_, in 1861; they lead us to put forth _Germinie Lacerteux_
+to-day.
+
+Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters little. At this
+day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it
+is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary
+study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of
+analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary
+morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements
+of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.
+And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to authorize it to
+disclose misery and suffering which it is not well for the fortunate
+people of Paris to forget, and to show to people of fashion what the
+Sisters of Charity have the courage to see for themselves, what the
+queens of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes in the
+hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering that teaches
+charity; to confirm the novel in the practice of that religion which the
+last century called by the vast and far-reaching name, _Humanity_:--it
+needs no other warrant than the consciousness that that is its right.
+
+_Paris, October, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PREFACE
+
+PREPARED FOR A POSTHUMOUS EDITION OF GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+
+_July 22, 1862._--The disease is gradually doing its work of destruction
+in our poor Rose. It is as if the immaterial manifestations of life that
+formerly emanated from her body were dying one by one. Her face is
+entirely changed. Her expression is not the same, her gestures are not
+the same; and she seems to me as if she were putting off every day more
+and more of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which makes
+the personality of a living being. Disease, before making an end of its
+victim, introduces into his body something strange, unfamiliar,
+something that is _not he_, makes of him a new being, so to speak, in
+whom we must seek to find the former being--he, whose joyous,
+affectionate features have already ceased to exist.
+
+_July 31._--Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon whether our dear old
+Rose will live or die. I am waiting to hear his ring, which to me, is
+equivalent to that of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to
+the court room with their verdict. "It is all over, there is no hope, it
+is simply a question of time. The disease has progressed very rapidly.
+One lung is entirely gone and the other substantially." And we must
+return to the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her
+reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our faces. Then we
+feel an unconquerable longing to rush from the room and from the poor
+creature. We leave the house, we wander at random through the streets;
+at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a café. We
+mechanically take up a copy of _L'Illustration_ and our eyes fall at
+once upon the solution of its last riddle: _Against death, there is no
+appeal!_
+
+_Monday, August 11._--The disease of the lungs is complicated with
+peritonitis. She has terrible pains in the bowels, she cannot move
+without assistance, she cannot lie on her back or her left side. In
+God's name, is not death enough? must she also endure suffering, aye,
+torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And
+she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the
+sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as
+stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the
+doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep
+her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was
+unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to take her; it
+seems that twenty-five years ago, when she first came to us, she went
+there to see the nurse in charge of Edmond, who died there, and so that
+particular hospital represents to her the place where people die. I am
+waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to go to Lariboisière.
+She passed almost a good night. She is all ready, in high spirits, in
+fact. We have covered everything up from her as well as we could. She
+longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels that she is going
+to get well there. At two o'clock Simon arrives: "Here it is, all
+right." She refuses to have a litter: "I should think I was dead!" she
+says. She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the signs of
+life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is as if the earth had risen
+under her skin. She comes down into our apartments. Sitting in the
+dining-room, with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock against
+one another, she draws her stockings on over a pair of legs like
+broomsticks, consumptive legs. Then, for a long moment, she looks about
+at the familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to take away
+with them the memory of the places they are leaving--and the door of the
+apartment closes upon her with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the
+foot of the stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The
+concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will be well in six
+weeks. She bows and says "yes," an inaudible "yes." The cab drives up to
+the door. She rests her hand on the concierge's wife. I hold her
+against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide open, vacant eyes
+she vaguely watches the houses pass, but she does not speak. At the door
+of the hospital she tries to alight without assistance. "Can you walk so
+far?" the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative gesture and walks on.
+Really I cannot imagine where she procured the strength to walk as she
+does. Here we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare, clean
+place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in the centre. I seat
+her in a straw armchair by a door with a glazed wicket. A young man
+opens the wicket, asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of
+an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious figure at
+the head. At last, everything is ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes
+one arm, the housekeeper the other.--After that, I saw nothing more.
+
+_Thursday, August 14._--We have been to Lariboisière. We found Rose
+quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching discharge--in three weeks at
+most,--and so free from all thought of death that she told us of a
+furious love scene that took place yesterday between a woman in the bed
+next hers and a brother of the Christian schools, who was there again
+to-day. Poor Rose is death, but death engrossed with life. Near her bed
+was a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come to see her. "You
+see, as soon as I can walk, I shall walk about the garden so much that
+they'll have to send me home!" she said. And the mother in her added:
+"Does the child ask for me sometimes?"
+
+"Sometimes, oh! yes," the man replied.
+
+_Saturday, August 16._--This morning, at ten o'clock, someone rings the
+bell. I hear a colloquy at the door between the housekeeper and the
+concierge. The door opens, the concierge enters with a letter. I take
+the letter; it bears the stamp of Lariboisière. Rose died this morning
+at seven o'clock.
+
+Poor girl! So it is all over! I knew that she was doomed; but she was so
+animated, so cheerful, almost happy, when we saw her Thursday! And here
+we are both walking up and down the salon, filled with the thought that
+a fellow-creature's death inspires: We shall never see her again!--an
+instinctive thought that recurs incessantly within you. What a void!
+what a gap in our household! A habit, an attachment of twenty-five years
+growth, a girl who knew our whole lives and opened our letters in our
+absence, and to whom we told all our business. When I was a bit of a boy
+I trundled my hoop with her, and she bought me apple-tarts with her own
+money, when we went to walk. She would sit up for Edmond till morning,
+to open the door for him, when he went to the Bal de l'Opéra without our
+mother's knowledge. She was the woman, the excellent nurse, whose hands
+mother placed in ours when she was dying. She had the keys to
+everything, she managed everything, she did everything for our comfort.
+For twenty-five years she tucked us up in bed every night, and every
+night there were the same never-ending jokes about her ugliness and her
+disgraceful physique. Sorrows and joys alike she shared with us. She was
+one of those devoted creatures upon whose solicitude you rely to close
+your eyes. Our bodies, when we were ill or indisposed, were accustomed
+to her attentions. She was familiar with all our hobbies. She had known
+all our mistresses. She was a piece of our life, part of the furniture
+of our apartment, a stray memory of our youth, at once loving and
+scolding and care-taking, like a watchdog whom we were accustomed to
+having always beside us and about us, and who ought to last as long as
+ourselves. And we shall never see her again! It is not she moving about
+the rooms; she will never again come to our rooms to bid us
+good-morning! It is a great wrench, a great change in our lives, which
+seems to us, I cannot say why, like one of those solemn breaks in one's
+existence, when, as Byron says, destiny changes horses.
+
+_Sunday, August 17._--This morning we are to perform all the last sad
+duties. We must return to the hospital, enter once more the reception
+hall, where I seem to see again, in the armchair against the wicket, the
+ghost of the emaciated creature I seated there less than a week ago.
+"Will you identify the body?" the attendant hurls the question at me in
+a harsh voice. We go to the further end of the hospital, to a high
+yellow door, upon which is written in great black letters:
+_Amphitheatre_. The attendant knocks. After some moments the door is
+partly opened, and a head like a butcher's boy's appears, with a short
+pipe in its mouth: a head which suggests the gladiator and the
+grave-digger. I fancied that I was at the circus, and that he was the
+slave who received the gladiators' bodies; and he does receive the slain
+in that great circus, society. They made us wait a long while before
+opening another door, and during those moments of suspense, all our
+courage oozed away, as the blood of a wounded man who is forced to
+remain standing oozes away, drop by drop. The mystery of what we were
+about to see, the horror of a sight that rends your heart, the search
+for the one body amid other bodies, the scrutiny and recognition of that
+poor face, disfigured doubtless--the thought of all this made us as
+timid as children. We were at the end of our strength, at the end of our
+will-power, at the end of our nervous tension, and, when the door
+opened, we said: "We will send some one," and fled. From there we went
+to the mayor's office, riding in a cab that jolted us and shook our
+heads about like empty things. And an indefinable horror seized upon us
+of death in a hospital, which seems to be only an administrative
+formality. One would say that in that abode of agony, everything is so
+well administered, regulated, reduced to system, that death opens it as
+if it were an administrative bureau.
+
+While we were having the death registered,--_Mon Dieu!_ the paper, all
+covered with writing and flourishes for a poor woman's death!--a man
+rushed out of an adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
+almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the saint of the day and
+give it to his child. As he passed, the skirt of the happy father's coat
+swept the sheet on which the death was registered from the desk to the
+floor.
+
+When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes
+together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable
+things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. It was a
+ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her
+last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the
+coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.
+
+_Monday, August 18._--The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the
+hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the
+poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to
+reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness
+of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the
+prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little
+girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of
+nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a
+poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a
+head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a
+Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited
+by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes
+there is already a gleam of the life beyond.
+
+Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre
+cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the
+city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the
+intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
+gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is
+lowered into a cellar.
+
+_Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital. For
+since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next
+day, there has existed for me a mystery which I force from my thoughts,
+but which constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I know
+nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and I dread to learn. It
+does not seem to me as if she were dead; I think of her simply as of a
+person who has disappeared. My imagination returns to her last hours,
+gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture
+me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At
+last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the
+hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life
+as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls
+upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.
+
+In a distant corner, I rang at a door with little white curtains. It was
+opened and I found myself in a parlor where a Virgin stood upon a sort
+of altar between two windows. On the northern wall of the room, the
+cold, bare room, there are--why, I cannot explain--two framed views of
+Vesuvius, wretched water-colors which seem to shiver and to be entirely
+expatriated there. Through an open door behind me, from a small room in
+which the sun shines brightly, I hear the chattering of sisters and
+children, childish joys, pretty little bursts of laughter, all sorts of
+fresh, clear vocal notes: a sound as from a dovecote bathed in the sun.
+Sisters in white with black caps pass and repass; one stops in front of
+my chair. She is short, badly developed, with an ugly, sweet face, a
+poor face by the grace of God. She is the mother of the Salle
+Saint-Joseph. She tells me how Rose died, in hardly any pain, feeling
+that she was improving, almost well, overflowing with encouragement and
+hope. In the morning, after her bed was made, without any suspicion that
+death was near, suddenly she was taken with a hemorrhage, which lasted
+some few seconds. I came away, much comforted, delivered from the
+thought that she had had the anticipatory taste of death, the horror of
+its approach.
+
+_Thursday, October 21._
+
+                *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the midst of our dinner, which was rendered melancholy enough by the
+constant hovering of the conversation around the subject of death,
+Maria, who came to dinner to-night, cried out, after two or three
+nervous blows with her fingers upon her fluffy blonde locks:--"My
+friends, while the poor girl was alive, I kept the professional secret
+of my trade. But, now that she is under ground, you must know the
+truth."
+
+And thereupon we learned things concerning the unhappy creature that
+took away our appetites, leaving in our mouths the bitter taste of fruit
+cut with a steel knife. And a whole strange, hateful, repugnant,
+deplorable existence was revealed to us. The notes she signed, the debts
+she has left behind her at all the dealers, have the most unforeseen,
+the most amazing, the most incredible basis. She kept men: the
+milkwoman's son, for whom she furnished a chamber; another to whom she
+carried our wine, chickens, food of all sorts. A secret life of
+nocturnal orgies, of nights passed abroad, of fierce nymphomania, that
+made her lovers say: "Either she or I will stay on the field!" A
+passion, passions with her whole head and heart and all her senses at
+once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures' diseases,
+consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure, hysteria, the beginning of
+insanity. She had two children by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived
+six months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was going on a
+visit to her province, it was to lie in. And, with regard to these men,
+her passion was so extravagant, so unhealthy, so insane, that she, who
+was formerly honesty personified, actually stole from us, took twenty
+franc pieces out of rolls of a hundred francs, so that the lovers she
+paid might not leave her. Now, after these involuntarily dishonest acts,
+these petty crimes extorted from her upright nature, she plunged into
+such depths of self-reproach, remorse, melancholy, such black despair,
+that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and
+unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save
+herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments
+in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie
+wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she
+tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how
+many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, and
+bleeding internally: in the first place the rejection at intervals of
+religious ideas by the terrors of a hell of fire and brimstone; then
+jealousy, that characteristic jealousy of everything and everybody that
+poisoned her life; then, then--then the disgust which these men, after a
+time, brutally expressed for her ugliness, and which drove her deeper
+and deeper into sottishness,--caused her one day to have a miscarriage,
+and she fell half dead on the floor. Such a frightful tearing away of
+the veil we have worn over our eyes is like the examination of a
+pocketful of horrible things in a dead body suddenly opened. From what
+we have heard I suddenly seem to realize what she must have suffered for
+ten years past: the dread of an anonymous letter to us or of a
+denunciation from some dealer; and the constant trepidation on the
+subject of the money that was demanded of her, and that she could not
+pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile
+Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom
+she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility
+caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the
+Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me
+to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far
+out--and lastly all the tears that we believed to be without cause--all
+these things mingled with a very deep and heartfelt affection for us,
+and with a vehement, feverish devotion when either of us was ill. And
+this woman possessed an energetic character, a force of will, a skill in
+mystification, to which nothing can be compared. Yes, yes, all those
+frightful secrets kept under lock and key, hidden, buried deep in her
+own heart, so that neither our eyes, nor our ears, nor our powers of
+observation ever detected aught amiss, even in her hysterical attacks,
+when nothing escaped her but groans: a mystery preserved until her
+death, and which she must have believed would be buried with her. And of
+what did she die? She died, because, all through one rainy winter's
+night, eight months ago, at Montmartre, she spied upon the milkwoman's
+son, who had turned her away, in order to find out with what woman he
+had filled her place; a whole night leaning against a ground-floor
+window, as a result of which she was drenched to the bones with deadly
+pleurisy!
+
+Poor creature, we forgive her; indeed, a vast compassion for her fills
+our hearts, as we reflect upon all that she has suffered. But we have
+become suspicious, for our lives, of the whole female sex, and of women
+above us as well as of women below us in station. We are terror-stricken
+at the double lining of their hearts, at the marvelous faculty, the
+science, the consummate genius of falsehood with which their whole being
+is instinct.
+
+               *       *       *       *       *
+
+The above extracts are from our journal: JOURNAL DES
+GONCOURTS--_Mémoires de la Vie Littéraire_; they are the documentary
+foundation upon which, two years later, my brother and I composed
+GERMINIE LACERTEUX, whom we made a study of and taught when she was in
+the service of our venerable cousin, Mademoiselle de C----t, of whom we
+were writing a veracious biography, after the style of a biography of
+modern history.
+
+                                                   EDMOND DE GONCOURT.
+
+_Auteuil, April, 1886._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Saved! so you are really out of danger, mademoiselle!" exclaimed the
+maid with a cry of joy, as she closed the door upon the doctor, and,
+rushing to the bed on which her mistress lay, she began, in a frenzy of
+happiness and with a shower of kisses to embrace, together with the bed
+covers, the old woman's poor, emaciated body, which seemed, in the huge
+bed, as small as a child's.
+
+The old woman took her head, silently, in both hands, pressed it against
+her heart, heaved a sigh, and muttered: "Ah, well! so I must live on!"
+
+This took place in a small room, through the window of which could be
+seen a small patch of sky cut by three black iron pipes, various
+neighboring roofs, and in the distance, between two houses that almost
+touched, the leafless branch of a tree, whose trunk was invisible.
+
+On the mantelpiece, in a mahogany box, was a square clock with a large
+dial, huge figures and bulky hands. Beside it, under glass covers, were
+two candlesticks formed by three silver swans twisting their necks
+around a golden quiver. Near the fireplace an easy chair _à la
+Voltaire_, covered with one of the pieces of tapestry of checker-board
+pattern, which little girls and old women make, extended its empty arms.
+Two little Italian landscapes, a flower piece in water-colors after
+Bertin, with a date in red ink at the bottom, and a few miniatures hung
+on the walls.
+
+Upon the mahogany commode of an Empire pattern, a statue of Time in
+black bronze, running with his scythe in rest, served as a watch stand
+for a small watch with a monogram in diamonds upon blue enamel,
+surrounded with pearls. The floor was covered with a bright carpet with
+black and green stripes. The curtains at the bed and the window were of
+old-fashioned chintz with red figures upon a chocolate ground.
+
+At the head of the bed, a portrait inclined over the invalid and seemed
+to gaze sternly at her. It represented a man with harsh features, whose
+face emerged from the high collar of a green satin coat, and a muslin
+cravat, with waving ends, tied loosely around the neck, in the style of
+the early years of the Revolution. The old woman in the bed resembled
+the portrait. She had the same bushy, commanding black eyebrows, the
+same aquiline nose, the same clearly marked lines of will, resolution
+and energy. The portrait seemed to cast a reflection upon her, as a
+father's face is reflected in his child's. But in hers the harshness of
+the features was softened by a gleam of rough kindliness, by an
+indefinable flame of sturdy devotion and masculine charity.
+
+The light in the room was the light of an evening in early spring, about
+five o'clock, a light as clear as crystal and as white as silver, the
+cold, chaste, soft light, which fades away in the flush of the sunset
+passing into twilight. The sky was filled with that light of a new life,
+adorably melancholy, like the still naked earth, and so replete with
+pathos that it moves happy souls to tears.
+
+"Well, well! my silly Germinie, weeping?" said the old woman, a moment
+later, withdrawing her hands which were moist with her maid's kisses.
+
+"Oh! my dear, kind mademoiselle, I would like to weep like this all the
+time! it's so good! it brings my poor mother back before my eyes--and
+everything!--if you only knew!"
+
+"Go on, go on," said her mistress, closing her eyes to listen, "tell me
+about it."
+
+"Oh! my poor mother!" The maid paused a moment. Then, with the flood of
+words that gushes forth with tears of joy, she continued, as if, in the
+emotion and outpouring of her happiness, her whole childhood flowed back
+into her heart! "Poor woman! I can see her now the last time she went
+out to take me to mass, one 21st of January, I remember. In those days
+they read from the king's Testament. Ah! she suffered enough on my
+account, did mamma! She was forty-two years old, when I was born----papa
+made her cry a good deal! There were three of us before and there wasn't
+any too much bread in the house. And then he was proud as anything. If
+we'd had only a handful of peas in the house he would never have gone to
+the curé for help. Ah! we didn't eat bacon every day at our house. Never
+mind; for all that mamma loved me a little more and she always found a
+little fat or cheese in some corner to put on my bread. I wasn't five
+when she died. That was a bad thing for us all. I had a tall brother,
+who was white as a sheet, with a yellow beard--and good! you have no
+idea. Everybody loved him. They gave him all sorts of names. Some called
+him Boda--why, I don't know. Others called him Jesus Christ. Ah! he was
+a worker, he was! It didn't make any difference to him that his health
+was good for nothing; at daybreak he was always at his loom--for we were
+weavers, you must know--and he never put his shuttle down till night.
+And honest, too, if you knew! People came from all about to bring him
+their yarn, and without weighing it, too. He was a great friend of the
+schoolmaster, and he used to write the _mottoes_ for the carnival. My
+father, he was a different sort: he'd work for a moment, or an hour, you
+know, and then he'd go off into the fields--and when he came home he'd
+beat us, and beat us hard. He was like a madman; they said it was
+because he was consumptive. It was lucky my brother was there: he used
+to prevent my second sister from pulling my hair and hurting me, because
+she was jealous. He always took me by the hand to go and see them play
+skittles. In fact, he supported the family all alone. For my first
+communion he had the bells rung! Ah! he did a heap of work so that I
+should be like the others, in a little white dress with flounces and a
+little bag in my hand, such as they used to carry in those days. I
+didn't have any cap: I remember making myself a pretty little wreath of
+ribbons and the white pith you pull off when you strip reeds; there was
+lots of it in the places where we used to put the hemp to soak. That was
+one of my great days--that and the drawing lots for the pigs at
+Christmas--and the days when I went to help them tie up the vines; that
+was in June, you know. We had a little vineyard near Saint Hilaire.
+There was one very hard year in those days--do you remember it,
+mademoiselle?--the long frost of 1828 that ruined everything. It
+extended as far as Dijon and farther, too--people had to make bread from
+bran. My brother nearly killed himself with work. Father, who was always
+out of doors tramping about the fields, sometimes brought home a few
+mushrooms. It was pretty bad, all the same; we were hungry oftener than
+anything else. When I was out in the fields myself, I'd look around to
+see if anyone could see me, and then I'd crawl along softly on my knees,
+and when I was under a cow, I'd take off one of my sabots and begin to
+milk her. Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest sister was
+out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and she sent home her
+wages--twenty-four francs--it was always as much as that. The second
+worked at dressmaking in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the
+prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six in the morning till
+dark for eight sous. Out of that she wanted to put some by for a dress
+for the fête on Saint-Remi's day.--Ah! that's the way it is with us:
+there are many who live on two potatoes a day for six months so as to
+have a new dress for that day. Bad luck fell on us on all sides. My
+father died. We had to sell a small field, and a bit of a vineyard that
+yielded a cask of wine every year. The notaries don't work for nothing.
+When my brother was sick there was nothing to give him to drink but
+_lees_ that we'd been putting water to for a year. And there wasn't any
+change of linen for him; all the sheets in the wardrobe, which had a
+golden cross on top of it in mother's time, had gone--and the cross too.
+More than that, before he was sick this time, my brother goes off to the
+fête at Clefmont. He hears someone say that my sister had gone wrong
+with the mayor she worked for; he falls on the men who said it, but he
+wasn't very strong. They were, though, and they threw him down, and when
+he was down, they kicked him with their wooden shoes, in the pit of the
+stomach. He was brought home to us for dead. The doctor put him on his
+feet again, though, and told us he was cured. But he could just drag
+himself along. I could see that he was going when he kissed me. When he
+was dead, poor dear boy, Cadet Ballard had to use all his strength to
+take me away from the body. The whole village, mayor and all, went to
+his funeral. As my sister couldn't keep her place with the mayor on
+account of the things he said to her, and had gone to Paris to find a
+place, my other sister went after her. I was left all alone. One of my
+mother's cousins then took me with her to Damblin; but I was all upset
+there; I cried all night long, and whenever I could run away I always
+went back to our house. Just to see the old vine at our door, from the
+end of the street, did me good! it put strength into my legs. The good
+people who had bought the house would keep me till someone came for me!
+they were always sure to find me there. At last they wrote to my sister
+in Paris that, if she didn't send for me to come and live with her, I
+wasn't likely to live long. It's a fact that I was just like wax. They
+put me in charge of the driver of a small wagon that went from Langres
+to Paris every month, and that's how I came to Paris. I was fourteen
+years old, then. I remember that I went to bed all dressed all the way,
+because they made me sleep in the common room. When I arrived I was
+covered with lice."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her own life with her
+servant's.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She first saw the light in
+a mansion on Rue Royale and Mesdames de France were her sponsors in
+baptism. Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois, in whose
+household he held an important post. He joined in all his
+hunting-parties, and was one of the few familiar spirits, in whose
+presence, at the mass preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King
+Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying in an
+undertone: "Psit! psit! curé, swallow your _Good Lord_ quickly!"
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those marriages which were
+customary enough in his day: he had espoused a sort of actress, a
+singer, who, although she had no great talent, had made a success at the
+_Concert Spirituel_, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil and Madame
+Saint-Huberty. The little girl born of this marriage in 1782 was sickly
+and delicate, ugly of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be
+absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's wrist. She had
+nothing of what her parents' vanity would have liked her to have. After
+making a fiasco on the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by
+her mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of the
+servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she never went near her
+mother, who always made her kiss her under the chin, so that she might
+not disturb her rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de
+Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage, was disburser of
+pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was traveling in Italy, whither she had
+ordered her physician to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving
+her daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge. The absorbing
+anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening wealth and the families
+that handled wealth--Monsieur de Varandeuil's brother was a
+Farmer-General--left that very selfish and unloving father but little
+leisure to attend to the wants of his children. Thereupon, he began to
+be somewhat embarrassed pecuniarily. He left Rue Royale and took up his
+abode at the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais, belonging to his mother, who
+allowed him to install himself there. Events moved rapidly; one evening,
+in the early days of the guillotine, as he was walking along Rue
+Saint-Antoine, he heard a hawker in front of him, crying the journal:
+_Aux Voleurs! Aux Voleurs!_ According to the usual custom of those
+days, he gave a list of the articles contained in the number he had for
+sale: Monsieur de Varandeuil heard his own name mingled with oaths and
+obscenity. He bought the paper and read therein a revolutionary
+denunciation of himself.
+
+Some time after, his brother was arrested and detained at Hôtel Talaru
+with the other Farmers-General. His mother, in a paroxysm of terror, had
+foolishly sold the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais, where he was living, for
+the value of the mirrors: she was paid in _assignats_, and died of
+despair over the constant depreciation of the paper. Luckily Monsieur de
+Varandeuil obtained from the purchasers, who could find no tenants,
+leave to occupy the rooms formerly used by the stableboys. He took
+refuge there, among the outbuildings of the mansion, stripped himself of
+his name and posted at the door, as he was ordered to do, his family
+name of Roulot, under which he buried the _De Varandeuil_ and the former
+courtier of the Comte d'Artois. He lived there alone, buried, forgotten,
+hiding his head, never going out, cowering in his hole, without
+servants, waited upon by his daughter, to whom he left everything. The
+Terror was to them a period of shuddering suspense, the breathless
+excitement of impending death. Every evening, the little girl went and
+listened at a grated window to the day's crop of condemnations, the
+_List of Prize Winners in the Lottery of Saint Guillotine_. She answered
+every knock at the door, thinking that they had come to take her father
+to the Place de la Révolution, whither her uncle had already been taken.
+The moment came when money, the money that was so scarce, no longer
+procured bread. It was necessary to go and get it, almost by force, at
+the doors of the bakeries; it was necessary to earn it by standing for
+hours in the cold, biting night air, in the crushing pressure of crowds
+of people; to stand in line from three o'clock in the morning. The
+father did not care to venture into that mass of humanity. He was afraid
+of being recognized, of compromising himself by one of those outbursts
+to which his impetuous nature would have given vent, no matter where he
+might be. Then, too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the
+task. The little boy was still too small; he would have been crushed; so
+the duty of obtaining bread for three mouths each day fell to the
+daughter. She obtained it. With her little thin body, fairly lost in her
+father's knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes, her
+limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth, she would wait,
+shivering, her eyes aching with cold, amid the pushing and buffeting,
+until the baker's wife on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a
+loaf which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly hold. At
+last, this poor little creature, who returned day after day, with her
+pinched face and her emaciated, trembling body, moved the baker's wife
+to pity. With the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she would
+send the coveted loaf to the little one by her boy as soon as she
+appeared in the long line. But one day, just as she put out her hand to
+take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and
+preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her
+in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the
+blow all her life.
+
+During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had
+it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the
+Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she
+consented to share with the father and the two children.
+
+Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by
+burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact
+that the accounts of his administration of his office were still
+unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of
+the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay
+by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by
+the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had
+conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he
+used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate,
+sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal
+family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon
+him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name almost excused
+him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince
+of the blood, and a place holder.
+
+The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts
+of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her
+confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the
+tables on Rue Pavée, with their legs in the streams of the blood of
+September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that
+Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his
+immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots
+both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in
+great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized
+only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very
+happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the
+municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the
+Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a
+meeting with this father, _who had reached so high a level_, as they
+said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was
+taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to
+satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They
+then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after
+a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her _Sempronie_; a name
+which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and
+which she never abandoned.
+
+Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode, the family passed
+through the terrible days preceding the fall of Robespierre. At last
+came the ninth Thermidor and deliverance. But poverty was none the less
+a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had not lived through
+the bitter days of the Revolution, they were not to live through the
+wretched days of the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent by
+Providence by the hand of Folly. The father and the two children could
+hardly have existed without the income from four shares in the
+_Vaudeville_, an investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily
+inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the best of all
+possible investments in those years of death, when people felt the need
+of forgetting death every evening--in those days of supreme agony, when
+everyone wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song. Soon these
+shares, added to the amount of some outstanding claims that were paid,
+provided the family with something more than bread. They thereupon left
+the eaves of the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais and took a small suite in the
+Marais, on Rue du Chaume.
+
+No change took place, however, in the habits of the household. The
+daughter continued to wait upon her father and brother. Monsieur de
+Varandeuil had gradually become accustomed to see in her only the woman
+indicated by her costume and by the work that she did. The father's eyes
+did not care to recognize a daughter in that servant's garb and in her
+performance of menial occupations. She was no longer a person with his
+blood in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him: she was a
+servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so fully in that idea and in
+his harsh treatment of her, he found that filial, affectionate,
+respectful service,--which cost nothing at all, by the way,--so
+convenient, that it cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a
+little more money mended the family fortunes: battles had to be fought
+to induce him to take a maid to fill his child's place and to relieve
+the girl from the most humiliating domestic labor.
+
+They were without information concerning Madame de Varandeuil, who had
+refused to join her husband at Paris during the early years of the
+Revolution; at last they learned that she had married again in Germany,
+producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the death
+certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal name having been
+changed. The girl grew up, therefore, abandoned, without affection, with
+no mother except a woman dead to her family, whom her father taught her
+to despise. Her childhood was passed in constant anxiety, in the
+privations that wear life away, in the fatigue resulting from labor that
+exhausted the strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death
+that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours
+when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those
+days--to open the door and rush into the street, crying: _Vive le roi!_
+in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood
+with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill
+humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her
+father, which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained by the
+great tempest of the time. She was still doomed to undergo the fatigues
+and humiliations of a servant. She remained alone with her father, kept
+down and humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her heart heavy
+with grief because she longed to love and had nothing to love. She was
+beginning to suffer from the cold void that is formed about a woman by
+an unattractive, unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of beauty
+and sympathetic charm. She could see that she aroused a sort of
+compassion with her long nose, her yellow complexion, her angular
+figure, her thin body. She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness
+was made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal, woolen dresses
+which she made herself, her father paying for the material only after
+much grumbling: she could not induce him to make her a small allowance
+for her toilet until she was thirty-five.
+
+How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life with that morose,
+sour old man, who was always scolding and complaining at home, affable
+only in society, and who left her every evening to go to the great
+houses that were reopened under the Directory and at the beginning of
+the Empire! Only at very long intervals did he take her out, and when he
+did, it was always to that everlasting _Vaudeville_, where he had boxes.
+Even on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She trembled
+all the time that she was with him; she was afraid of his violent
+disposition, of the tone of the old régime that his outbreaks of wrath
+had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an
+insolent remark from the _canaille_. On almost every occasion there were
+scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and
+threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the
+curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in
+the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de
+Varandeuil's price and would keep them waiting one hour, two hours
+without moving; sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and
+leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would vainly implore him
+to submit and pay the price demanded.
+
+Considering that these diversions should suffice for Sempronie, and
+having, moreover, a jealous desire to have her all to himself and always
+under his hand, Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies
+with anybody. He did not take her into society; he did not take her to
+the houses of their kinsfolk who returned after the emigration, except
+on days of formal receptions or family gatherings. He kept her closely
+confined to the house: not until she was forty did he consider that she
+was old enough to be allowed to go out alone. Thus, the girl had no
+friendship, no connection of any sort to lean upon; indeed, she no
+longer had her younger brother with her, as he had gone to the United
+States and enlisted in the American navy.
+
+She was forbidden by her father to marry, he did not admit that she
+would allow herself even to think of marrying and deserting him; all the
+suitors who might have come forward he fought and rejected in advance,
+in order not to leave his daughter the courage to speak to him on the
+subject, if the occasion should ever arise.
+
+Meanwhile our victories were stripping Italy of her treasures. The
+masterpieces of Rome, Florence and Venice were hurrying to Paris.
+Italian art was at a premium. Collectors no longer took pride in any
+paintings but those of the Italian school. Monsieur de Varandeuil saw an
+opening for a fortune in this change of taste. He, also, had fallen a
+victim to the artistic dilettantism which was one of the refined
+passions of the nobility before the Revolution. He had lived in the
+society of artists and collectors; he admired pictures. It occurred to
+him to collect a gallery of Italian works and then to sell them. Paris
+was still overrun with the objects of art sold and scattered under the
+Terror. Monsieur de Varandeuil began to walk back and forth through the
+streets--they were the markets for large canvases in those days,--and at
+every step he made a discovery; every day he purchased something. Soon
+the small apartment was crowded with old, black paintings, so large for
+the most part that the walls would not hold them with their frames, with
+the result that there was no room for the furniture. These were
+christened Raphael, Vinci, or Andrea del Sarto; there were none but
+_chefs d'oeuvre_, and the father would keep his daughter standing in
+front of them hours at a time, forcing his admiration upon her, wearying
+her with his ecstatic flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet,
+would work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium, and would
+end by thinking that he was negotiating with an imaginary purchaser,
+would dispute with him over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry
+out: "A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur, a hundred
+thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed by the large amount of money
+that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many nude men,
+deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon remonstrance and
+tried to check such ruinous extravagance. Monsieur de Varandeuil lost
+his temper, waxed wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his
+blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was her fortune and
+that she would see later if he was an old fool. At last she induced him
+to realize. The sale took place; it was a failure, one of the most
+complete shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hôtel
+Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious with rage at this
+blow, which not only involved pecuniary loss and a serious inroad upon
+his little fortune, but was also a direct denial of his claims to
+connoisseurship, a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the cheek
+of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed his daughter that they
+were too poor to remain in Paris and that they must go into the
+provinces to live. Having been cradled and reared in an epoch little
+adapted to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution: she was
+obliged to go with him wherever he chose to go, and, by leaving Paris,
+to lose the society and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in
+their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her confidence,
+and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to her as to an older sister.
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam. There he was
+near familiar scenes, in the atmosphere of what was formerly a little
+court, close at hand to two or three châteaux, whose owners he knew, and
+which were beginning to throw open their doors once more. Then, too,
+since the Revolution a little community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich
+shopkeepers, had settled upon this territory which once belonged to the
+Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil sounded very grand in the
+ears of all those good people. They bowed very low to him, they
+contended for the honor of entertaining him, they listened
+respectfully, almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it
+was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic of Versailles, he
+had the place of honor and the prestige of a lord among them. When he
+dined with Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand francs a
+year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and all, to go and fry the
+oyster plants herself: Monsieur de Varandeuil did not like them except
+as she cooked them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go into
+retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to the pleasant
+surroundings there, but to a project that he had formed. He had gone
+thither to obtain leisure for a monumental work. That which he had been
+unable to do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection,
+he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a little Italian with his
+wife; he took it into his head to present Vasari's _Lives of the
+Painters_ to the French public, to translate it with the assistance of
+his daughter, who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's maid
+speak Italian and had retained a few words. He plunged the girl into
+Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars,
+dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of
+Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the
+_ennui_ and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness
+of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her;
+when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tête-à-tête with the
+volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood,
+paying visits, gambling at some château or dining among the bourgeois of
+his acquaintance, to whom he would complain pathetically of the
+laborious effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed
+upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading of the translation
+made during the day, make comments and critical remarks, and upset a
+sentence to give it a different meaning, which his daughter would
+eliminate again when he had gone; then he would resume his walks and
+jaunts, like a man who has well earned his leisure, walking very erect,
+with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying
+himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature
+and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common
+to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain
+number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit
+up half the night.
+
+Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were
+ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely
+alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from
+the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners _à la Madame
+Angot_, and too poorly clad to visit at the châteaux. For her, there was
+no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by
+her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers
+that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but
+vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand
+utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention
+to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was
+when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of
+her two young friends for a week--a week which would have been seven
+days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys,
+its diversions, its fêtes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his
+ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about
+trifles--a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in
+her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished
+to take her.
+
+At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a servant, who almost
+immediately became his mistress. A child was born of this connection,
+and the father, in his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to
+have it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years rolled on the
+woman acquired a firm foothold in the house. She ended by ruling the
+household, father and daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de
+Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be served by
+Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil rebelled under
+the insult, and drew herself up to the full height of her indignation.
+Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated by the
+people and the things about her, the girl had built up a resolute,
+straightforward character; tears had tempered instead of softening it.
+Beneath filial docility and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath
+apparent gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character of iron, a
+man's strength of will, one of those hearts which nothing bends and
+which never bend themselves. When her father demanded that she lower
+herself to that extent, she reminded him that she was his daughter, she
+reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of words, the shame and the
+reproach of it in his face, and concluded by informing him that if that
+woman did not leave the house that very evening, she would leave it, and
+that she should have no difficulty in living, thank God! wherever she
+might go, with the simple tastes he had forced upon her. The father,
+thunderstruck and bewildered by this revolt, yielded and dismissed the
+servant; but he retained a dastardly sort of rancor against his daughter
+on account of the sacrifice she had extorted from him. His spleen
+betrayed itself in sharp, aggressive words, ironical thanks and bitter
+smiles. Sempronie's only revenge was to attend to his wants more
+thoroughly, more gently, more patiently than ever. Her devotion was
+destined to be subjected to one final test; the old man had a stroke of
+apoplexy which left him with one whole side of his body stiff and dead,
+lame in one leg, and asleep so far as his intelligence was concerned,
+although keenly conscious of his misfortune and of his dependence upon
+his daughter. Thereupon, all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of
+his nature was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to
+ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his weakness, he became
+a sort of malevolent madman. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days
+and her nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her
+attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied generosity and
+forgiveness, to suffer torments at seeing always by his side,
+indefatigable and kindly, that image of duty. But what a life it was!
+She had to contend against the miserable man's incurable _ennui_, to be
+always ready to bear him company, to lead him about and support him all
+day long. She must play cards with him when he was at home, and not let
+him win or lose too much. She must combat his wishes, his gormandizing
+tendencies, take dishes away from him, and, in connection with
+everything that he wanted, endure complaints, reproaches, insults,
+tears, mad despair, and the outbursts of childish anger in which
+helpless old men indulge. And this lasted ten years! ten years, during
+which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had no other recreation, no other
+consolation than to pour out all the tenderness and warmth of a maternal
+affection upon one of her two young friends, recently married,--her
+_chick_, as she called her. It was Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's delight
+to go and pass a short time every fortnight in that happy household. She
+would kiss the pretty child, already in its cradle and asleep for the
+night when she arrived; she would dine at racing speed; at dessert she
+would send for a carriage and would hasten away like a tardy schoolboy.
+But in the last years of her father's life she could not even obtain
+permission to dine out: the old man would no longer sanction such a long
+absence and kept her almost constantly beside him, repeating again and
+again that he was well aware that it was not amusing to take care of an
+infirm old man like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him. He
+died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for
+her who had been his daughter nearly forty years: "I know that you never
+loved me!"
+
+Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's brother had returned
+from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him
+through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had
+had by the woman before marrying her. Although she was imbued with the
+ideas of the old régime as to the blacks, and although she looked upon
+that ignorant creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild
+beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her clothing, as no
+better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil combated her father's
+horror and unwillingness to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was
+who induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her brother to
+present his wife to him. When her father was dead she reflected that
+her brother's household was all that remained of the family.
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil, to whom the Comte d'Artois had caused the
+arrears of salary of his office to be paid at the return of the
+Bourbons, left about ten thousand francs a year to his children. The
+brother had, before that inheritance, only a pension of fifteen hundred
+francs from the United States. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil considered
+that five or six thousand francs a year would hardly suffice for the
+comfortable support of that family, in which there were two children,
+and it at once occurred to her to add to it her share in the
+inheritance. She suggested this contribution in the most natural and
+simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and she went with him to
+live in a pretty little apartment at the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on
+the fourth floor of one of the first houses built in that neighborhood,
+then hardly known, where the fresh country air blew briskly through the
+framework of the white buildings. She continued there her modest life,
+her humble manner of dressing, her economical habits, content with the
+least desirable room in the suite, and spending upon herself no more
+than eighteen hundred to two thousand francs a year. But, soon, a
+brooding jealousy, slowly gathering strength, took possession of the
+mulattress. She took offence at the fraternal affection which seemed to
+be taking her husband from her arms. She suffered because of the
+communion of speech and thought and reminiscences between them; she
+suffered because of the conversations in which she could take no part,
+because of what she heard in their voices, but could not understand. The
+consciousness of her inferiority kindled in her heart the fires of wrath
+and hatred that burn fiercely in the tropics. She had recourse to her
+children for her revenge; she urged them on, excited them, aroused their
+evil passions against her sister-in-law. She encouraged them to laugh at
+her, to make sport of her. She applauded the manifestations of the
+mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in whom observation
+begins with naughtiness. Once she had let them loose upon their aunt,
+she allowed them to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose,
+her dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their own elegant
+attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little ones soon arrived at
+insolence. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the quick temper that
+accompanies kindness of heart. With her the hand, as well as the heart,
+had a part in the first impulse. And then she shared the prevalent
+opinion of her time as to the proper way of bringing up children. She
+endured two or three impertinent sallies without a word; but at the
+fourth she seized the mocking child, took down her skirts, and
+administered to her, notwithstanding her twelve years, the soundest
+whipping she had ever received. The mulattress made a great outcry and
+told her sister-in-law, that she had always detested her children and
+that she wanted to kill them. The brother interposed between the two
+women and succeeded in reconciling them after a fashion. But new scenes
+took place, when the little ones, inflamed against the woman who made
+their mother weep, assailed their aunt with the refined tortures of
+misbehaved children, mingled with the fiendish cruelty of little
+savages. After several patched-up truces it became necessary to part.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil decided to leave her brother, for she saw how
+unhappy he was amid this daily wrenching of his dearest affections. She
+left him to his wife and his children. This separation was one of the
+great sorrows of her life. She who was so strong against emotion and so
+self-contained, and who seemed to take pride in suffering, as it were,
+almost broke down when she had to leave the apartment, where she had
+dreamed of enjoying a little happiness in her corner, looking on at the
+happiness of others: her last tears mounted to her eyes.
+
+She did not go too far away, so that she might be at hand to nurse her
+brother if he were ill, and to see him and meet him sometimes. But there
+was a great void in her heart and in her life. She had begun to visit
+her kinsfolk since her father's death: she drew nearer to them; she
+allowed the relatives whom the Restoration had placed in a lofty and
+powerful position to come to her, and sought out those whom the new
+order of things left in obscurity and poverty. But she returned to her
+dear _chick_ first of all, and to another distant cousin, also married,
+who had become the _chick's_ sister-in-law. Her relations with her
+kinsfolk soon assumed remarkable regularity. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+never went into society, to an evening party, or to the play. It
+required Mademoiselle Rachel's brilliant success to persuade her to step
+inside a theatre; she ventured there but twice. She never accepted an
+invitation to a large dinner-party. But there were two or three houses
+where, as at the _chick's_, she would invite herself to dine,
+unexpectedly, when there were no guests. "My love," she would say
+without ceremony, "are you and your husband doing nothing this evening?
+Then I will stay and eat some of your ragoût." At eight o'clock
+regularly she rose to go, and when the husband took his hat to escort
+her home, she would knock it out of his hands with a: "Nonsense! an old
+nanny-goat like me! Why, I frighten men in the street!" And then ten
+days or a fortnight would pass, during which they would not see her. But
+if anything went wrong, if there was a death or sickness in the house,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil always heard of it at once, no one knew how;
+she would come, in spite of everything--the weather or the hour--would
+give a loud ring at the bell in her own way--they finally called it
+_cousin's ring_--and a moment later, relieved of her umbrella, which
+never left her, and of her pattens, her hat tossed upon a chair, she was
+at the service of those who needed her. She listened, talked, restored
+their courage with an indescribable martial accent, with language as
+energetic as a soldier might use to console a wounded comrade, and
+stimulating as a cordial. If it was a child that was out of sorts, she
+would go straight to the bed, laugh at the little one, whose fear
+vanished at once, order the father and mother about, run hither and
+thither, assume the management of everything, apply the leeches, arrange
+the cataplasms, and bring back hope, joy and health at the double quick.
+In all branches of the family the old maid appeared thus providentially,
+without warning, on days of sorrow, _ennui_ and suffering. She was never
+seen except when her hands were needed to heal, her devoted friendship
+to console. She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her
+great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have
+made her only to give her to others. Her everlasting black dress which
+she persisted in wearing, her worn, dyed shawl, her absurd hat, her
+impoverished appearance, were, in her eyes, the means of being rich
+enough to help others with her little fortune; she was extravagant in
+almsgiving, and her pockets were always filled with gifts for the poor;
+not of money, for she feared the wineshop, but of four-pound loaves
+which she bought for them at the baker's. And then, too, by dint of
+living in poverty, she was able to give herself what was to her the
+greatest of all luxuries: the joy of her friends' children whom she
+overwhelmed with New Year's and other gifts, with surprises and
+pleasures of all sorts. For instance, suppose that one of them had been
+left by his mother, who was absent from Paris, to pass a lovely summer
+Sunday at his boarding school, and the little rascal, out of spite, had
+misbehaved so that he was not allowed to go out. How surprised he would
+be, as the clock struck nine, to see his old cousin appear in the
+courtyard, just buttoning the last button of her dress, she had come in
+such haste. And what a feeling of desolation at the sight! "Cousin," he
+would say piteously, in one of those fits of passion in which at the
+same moment you long to cry and to kill your _tyrant_, "I--I am kept in,
+and----" "Kept in? Oh! yes, kept in! And do you suppose I've taken all
+this trouble----Is your schoolmaster poking fun at me? Where is the
+puppy, that I may have a word with him? You go and dress yourself
+meanwhile. Off with you!" And the child, not daring to hope that a woman
+so shabbily dressed would have the power to raise the embargo, would
+suddenly feel a hand upon his arm, and the cousin would carry him off,
+toss him into a cab, all bewildered and dumfounded with joy, and take
+him to the Bois de Boulogne. She would let him ride a donkey all day
+long, urging the beast on with a broken branch, and crying: "Get up!"
+And then, after a good dinner at Borne's, she would take him back to
+school, and, under the porte-cochère, as she kissed him she would slip a
+big hundred-sou piece into his hand.
+
+Strange old maid. The bitter experiences of her whole existence, the
+struggle to live, the never-ending physical suffering, the
+long-continued bodily and mental torture had, as it were, cut her loose
+from life and placed her above it. Her education, the things she had
+seen, the spectacle of what seemed the end of everything, the
+Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her to disdain human
+suffering. And this old woman, who had nothing left of life save breath,
+had risen to a serene philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical
+stoicism. Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that
+seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would
+suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face
+would at once become calm. She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a
+deep, bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that have seen
+everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital nurse. Kind-hearted
+to admiration she was, and yet something was lacking in her kindness of
+heart: forgiveness. Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving or
+bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a trifle, if it
+touched her heart, wounded her forever. She forgot nothing. Time, death
+itself, did not disarm her memory.
+
+Of religion, she had none. Born at a period when women did without it,
+she had grown to womanhood at a time when there were no churches. Mass
+did not exist when she was a young maid. There had been nothing to
+accustom her to the thought of God or to make her feel the need of Him,
+and she had retained a sort of shrinking hatred for priests, which must
+have been connected with some family secret of which she never spoke.
+Her faith, her strength, her piety, all consisted in the pride of her
+conscience; she considered that if she retained her own esteem, she
+could be sure of acting rightly and of never failing in her duty. She
+was thus singularly constituted by the two epochs in which she had
+lived, a compound of the two, dipped in the opposing currents of the old
+régime and the Revolution. After Louis XVI. failed to take horse on the
+Tenth of August, she lost her regard for kings; but she detested the
+mob. She desired equality and she held parvenus in horror. She was a
+republican and an aristocrat, combined scepticism with prejudice, the
+horrors of '93, which she saw, with the vague and noble theories of
+humanity which surrounded her cradle.
+
+Her external qualities were altogether masculine. She had the sharp
+voice, the freedom of speech, the unruly tongue of the old woman of the
+eighteenth century, heightened by an accent suggestive of the common
+people, a mannish, highly colored style of elocution peculiar to
+herself, rising above modesty in the choice of words and fearless in
+calling things baldly by their plain names.
+
+Meanwhile, the years rolled on, sweeping away the Restoration and the
+monarchy of Louis-Philippe. She saw all those whom she had loved go
+from her one by one, all her family take the road to the cemetery. She
+was left quite alone, and she marveled and was grieved that death should
+forget her, who would have offered so little resistance, for she was
+already leaning over the grave and was obliged to force her heart down
+to the level of the little children brought to her by the sons and
+daughters of the friends whom she had lost. Her brother was dead. Her
+dear _chick_ was no more. The _chick's_ sister-in-law alone was left to
+her. But hers was a life that hung trembling in the balance, ready to
+fly away. Crushed by the death of a child for whom she had waited for
+years, the poor woman was dying of consumption. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil was in her bedroom every day, from noon until six o'clock,
+for four years. She lived by her side all that time, in the close
+atmosphere and the odor of constant fumigations. She did not allow
+herself to be kept away for one hour by her own gout and rheumatism, but
+gave her time and her life to the peaceful last hours of that dying
+woman, whose eyes were fixed upon heaven, where her dead children
+awaited her. And when, in the cemetery, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had
+turned aside the shroud to kiss the dead face for the last time, it
+seemed to her as if there were no one near to her, as if she were all
+alone upon the earth.
+
+Thenceforth, yielding to the infirmities which she had no further reason
+to shake off, she began to live the narrow, confined life of old people
+who wear out their carpet in one spot only--never leaving her room,
+reading but little because it tired her eyes, and passing most of her
+time buried in her easy-chair, reviewing the past and living it over
+again. She would sit in the same position for days, her eyes wide open
+and dreaming, her thoughts far from herself, far from the room in which
+she sat, journeying whither her memories led her, to distant faces,
+dearly loved, pallid faces, to vanished regions--lost in a profound
+lethargy which Germinie was careful not to disturb, saying to herself:
+"Madame is in her meditations----"
+
+One day in every week, however, she went abroad. Indeed it was with that
+weekly excursion in view, in order to be nearer the spot to which she
+wished to go on that one day, that she left her apartments on Rue
+Taitbout and took up her abode on Rue de Laval. One day in every week,
+deterred by nothing, not even by illness, she repaired to the Montmartre
+Cemetery, where her father and her brother rested, and the women whose
+loss she regretted, all those whose sufferings had come to an end before
+hers. For the dead and for Death she displayed a veneration almost equal
+to that of the ancients. To her, the grave was sacred, and a dear
+friend. She loved to visit the land of hope and deliverance where her
+dear ones were sleeping, there to await death and to be ready with her
+body. On that day, she would start early in the morning, leaning on the
+arm of her maid, who carried a folding-stool. As she drew near the
+cemetery, she would enter the shop of a dealer in wreaths, who had known
+her for many years, and who, in winter, loaned her a foot-warmer. There
+she would rest a few moments; then, loading Germinie down with wreaths
+of immortelles, she would pass through the cemetery gate, take the path
+to the left of the cedar at the entrance, and make her pilgrimage slowly
+from tomb to tomb. She would throw away the withered flowers, sweep up
+the dead leaves, tie the wreaths together, and, sitting down upon her
+folding-chair, would gaze and dream, and absent-mindedly remove a bit of
+moss from the flat stone with the end of her umbrella. Then she would
+rise, turn as if to say _au revoir_ to the tomb she was leaving, walk
+away, stop once more, and talk in an undertone, as she had done before,
+with that part of her that was sleeping under the stone; and having thus
+paid a visit to all the dead who lived in her affections, she would
+return home slowly and reverentially, enveloping herself in silence as
+if she were afraid to speak.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+In the course of her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her
+eyes.
+
+The maid's story ceased, and the remainder of the history of her life,
+which was upon her lips that evening, was once more buried in her heart.
+
+The conclusion of her story was as follows:
+
+When little Germinie Lacerteux arrived in Paris, being then less than
+fifteen years old, her sister, desirous to have her begin to earn her
+living at once, and to help to put bread in her hand, obtained a place
+for her in a small café on the boulevard, where she performed the double
+duties of lady's maid to the mistress of the café and assistant to the
+waiters in carrying on the main business of the establishment. The
+child, just from her village and dropped suddenly in that place, was
+completely bewildered and terrified by her surroundings and her duties.
+She had the first instinctive feeling of wounded modesty and,
+foreshadowing the woman she was destined to become, she shuddered at the
+perpetual contact with the other sex, working, eating, passing her whole
+time with men; and whenever she had an opportunity to go out, and went
+to her sisters, there were tearful, despairing scenes, when, without
+actually complaining of anything, she manifested a sort of dread to
+return, saying that she did not want to stay there, that they were not
+satisfied with her, that she preferred to return to them. They would
+reply that it had already cost them enough to bring her to Paris, that
+it was a silly whim on her part and that she was very well off where she
+was, and they would send her back to the café in tears. She dared not
+tell all that she suffered in the company of the waiters in the café,
+insolent, boasting, cynical fellows, fed on the remains of debauches,
+tainted with all the vices to which they ministered, and corrupt to the
+core with putrefying odds and ends of obscenity. At every turn, she had
+to submit to the dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the
+malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a
+little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything,
+with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and
+pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered,
+overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their
+drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused
+her credulity by absurd fables, they overburdened her with fatiguing
+tasks, they assailed her with incessant, pitiless ridicule, which
+well-nigh drove her benumbed intellect to imbecility. In addition, they
+made her blush at the things they said to her, which made her feel
+ashamed, although she did not understand them. They soiled the
+artlessness of her fourteen years with filthy veiled allusions. And they
+found amusement in putting the eyes of her childish curiosity to the
+keyholes of the private supper-rooms.
+
+The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she dared not.
+When, with nourishing food, her body took on a little flesh, her cheeks
+a little color and she began to have something of the aspect of a woman,
+they took great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were attempts
+at familiarity, significant gestures, advances, which she eluded, and
+from which she escaped unscathed, but which assailed her purity by
+breathing upon her innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by the
+master of the establishment, who was accustomed to abuse his
+maidservants and who bore her a grudge because she was not old enough or
+of the right sort for a mistress, she found no support, no touch of
+humanity, except in his wife. She began to love that woman with a sort
+of animal devotion, and to obey her with the docility of a dog. She did
+all her errands without thought or reflection. She carried her letters
+to her lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She became very
+active and agile and ingenuously sly in passing in and out, evading the
+awakened suspicions of the husband; and without any clear idea of what
+she was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a mischievous
+delight, such as children and monkeys feel, in telling herself vaguely
+that she was causing some little suffering to that man and that house,
+which caused her so much. There was among her comrades an old waiter,
+named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of the cruel plots concocted
+against her, and, when she was present, put a stop to conversation that
+was too free, with the authority of his white hairs and his paternal
+interest in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house increased
+every day. One week her sisters were compelled to take her back to the
+café by force.
+
+A few days later, there was a great review on the Champ de Mars, and the
+waiters had leave of absence for the day. Only Germinie and old Joseph
+remained in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in a
+small, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She entered the
+room; she cried out, fell to the floor, wept, implored, struggled,
+called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.
+
+When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up in
+her chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, when
+Joseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled
+from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For a
+long time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulse
+was to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified,
+bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who feared
+that she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, and
+respected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.
+
+She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pass the evening with
+her sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed by
+severe pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came to
+the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret of
+their younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of the
+common people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety,
+flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.
+Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousness
+under their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands,
+the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law was
+there, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at
+her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of an
+Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeper
+red than her sisters' blows.
+
+She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She sought
+neither to defend nor to excuse herself. She did not tell what had taken
+place and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.
+She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When her
+older sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded her
+that there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at the
+thought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when her
+mother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightning
+flash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciences
+pierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her and
+kept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almost
+forced her into her misfortune.
+
+That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters took her to the Rue
+Saint-Martin, to the house of a repairer of cashmere shawls, with whom
+she lodged, and who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, was
+banner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made her lie beside her
+on a mattress on the floor, and having her there under her hand all
+night, she vented upon her all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, her
+bitter resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie by her
+father and mother. It was a long succession of petty tortures, brutal or
+hypocritical exhibitions of spite, kicks that bruised her legs, and
+progressive movements of the body by which she gradually forced her
+companion out of bed--it was a cold winter's night--to the floor of the
+fireless room. During the day, the seamstress took Germinie in hand,
+catechized her, preached at her, and by detailing the tortures of the
+other life, inspired in her mind a horrible fear of the hell whose
+flames she caused her to feel.
+
+She lived there four months, in close confinement, and was never allowed
+to leave the house. At the end of four months she gave birth to a dead
+child. When her health was restored, she entered the service of a
+depilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she had the joyful
+feeling of having been released from prison. Two or three times, in her
+walks, she met old Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; but
+she escaped him and the old man never knew that he had been a father.
+
+But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new place. The house where
+she had taken service as a maid of all work was what servants call "a
+barrack." A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money, as is
+often the case with women engaged in the occupations that depend upon
+chance, and in the problematical methods of gaining a livelihood in
+vogue in Paris, the depilator, who was almost always involved in a
+lawsuit of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant's
+nourishment. She often went away for the whole day without leaving her
+any dinner. The little one would satisfy her appetite as well as she
+could with some kind of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things that
+deceive a young woman's appetite, even charcoal, which she would nibble
+with the depraved taste and capricious stomach of her age and sex. This
+diet, just after recovering from her confinement, her health being but
+partially restored and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted the
+young woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined her
+constitution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion changed to
+that dead white that looks green in the daylight. Her swollen eyes were
+surrounded with a great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips assumed the
+hue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the slightest ascent, and
+the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat
+was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she
+dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her
+faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at
+all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress's
+hair.
+
+She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place,
+with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the
+laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had
+never had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interested
+himself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He took
+her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the
+sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It
+delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would
+take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a
+fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of
+this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to
+him. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship,
+the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he
+died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service
+of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen,
+when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter
+the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout,
+in the house of which her sister was concierge.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Those people who look for the death of the Catholic religion in our day,
+do not realize by what an infinite number of sturdy roots it still
+retains its hold upon the hearts of the people. They do not realize the
+secret, delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people. They do
+not realize what confession and the confessor are to the impoverished
+souls of those poor women. In the priest who listens and whose voice
+falls softly on her ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not so
+much the minister of God, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of her
+welfare, as the confidant of her sorrows and the friend of her misery.
+However coarse she may be, there is always a little of the true woman in
+her, a feverish, trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessness
+and, as it were, the sighing of an invalid who craves caressing words,
+even as a child's trifling ailments require the nurse's droning lullaby.
+She, as well as the woman of the world, must have the consolation of
+pouring out her heart, of confiding her troubles to a sympathetic ear.
+For it is the nature of her sex to seek an outlet for the emotions and
+an arm to lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must tell,
+and concerning which she would like to be questioned, pitied and
+comforted. She dreams of a compassionate interest, a tender sympathy for
+hidden feelings of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the kindest,
+the most friendly, the most approachable of masters to the woman in
+their employ: their kindness to her will still be of the same sort that
+they bestow upon a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning her
+appetite and her health; they will look carefully after the animal part
+of her, and that will be all. It will not occur to them that she can
+suffer elsewhere than in her body, and they will not dream that she can
+have the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for which they seek
+relief by confiding in those of their own station. In their eyes, the
+woman who sweeps and does the cooking, has no ideas that can cause her
+to be sad or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her thoughts. To
+whom, then, shall she carry them? To the priest who is waiting for them,
+asks for them, welcomes them, to the churchman who is also a man of the
+world, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman, who knows
+everything, speaks well, is always accessible, gentle, patient,
+attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for the most humble soul, the most
+shabbily dressed penitent. The priest alone listens to the woman in a
+cap. He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the things
+that disturb and agitate her and that bring to a maid, as well as to
+her mistress, the sudden longing to weep, or excite a tempest within
+her. There is none but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from her
+those things which the irony of her daily life holds back, to look to
+the state of her moral health; none but he to raise her above her
+material life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity and
+hope,--such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of the
+men of her family and of her class.
+
+After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germinie
+became profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. She
+abandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession,
+to the priest's smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from the
+darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothing
+words, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, free
+from care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had
+been applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of her
+being.
+
+She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere. Her mistress had a
+certain masculine roughness of demeanor which repelled expansiveness.
+She had an abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back all that
+Germinie would have liked to confide to her. It was in her nature to be
+brutal in her treatment of all lamentations that were not caused by pain
+or disappointment. Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare for
+diseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is created by the
+thought, for the weariness of spirit that flows from a woman's nerves
+and from the disordered condition of her mental organism. Germinie often
+found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the times
+in which she had lived and by the circumstances of her life. The shell
+of her heart was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself, she did
+not like to hear complaints about her. And by the right of all the tears
+she had not shed, she detested childish tears in grown persons.
+
+Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous for
+Germinie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of her
+first prayer. Throughout the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream;
+and while she was about her work it was constantly before her eyes, with
+its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of a
+winged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, and
+the mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now her
+whole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She lived
+through the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for,
+promised day. On Thursday, she began to be impatient; she felt, in the
+redoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were,
+of the blessed Saturday evening; and when Saturday came and
+mademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, she
+would make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to the
+penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holy
+water and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags,
+between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted
+floor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forward
+in the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious,
+veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbed
+in the emotion of suspense.
+
+The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her frequent confessions.
+He was not sparing of time or attention or charity. He allowed her to
+talk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty
+troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, and
+permitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. He
+listened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles;
+he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of a
+servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns of
+her existence, as one would speak to a mother and a physician.
+
+This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. A
+great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown
+wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the
+man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy
+compassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He
+understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened
+her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations
+to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for
+that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable
+girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who
+was promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole
+body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her
+temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and
+terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame
+that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the
+evident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to that
+scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose to
+resist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of the
+senses that was stronger than she.
+
+This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie lived
+a concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to God's
+service--at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had come
+gradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended toward
+himself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer said
+to him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the first
+time, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray and
+becoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watched
+for him when the services were at an end, followed him into the
+sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his cassock. The
+confessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself.
+He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor. In despair at this
+change, at his apparent indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt,
+confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken
+possession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents.
+Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her to
+another confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this other
+confessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of
+going, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certain
+far-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.
+
+Affairs had reached that point when mademoiselle fell ill. Throughout
+her illness, as Germinie did not want to leave her, she did not attend
+mass. And on the first Sunday--when mademoiselle, being fully recovered,
+did not require her care, she was greatly surprised to find that "her
+devotee" remained at home and did not run away to church.
+
+"Oho!" said she, "so you don't go and see your curés nowadays? What have
+they done to you, eh?"
+
+"Nothing," said Germinie.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"There, mademoiselle!--Look at me," said Germinie.
+
+It was a few months later. She had asked her mistress's permission to go
+that evening to the wedding ball of her grocer's sister, who had chosen
+her for her maid-of-honor, and she had come to exhibit herself _en
+grande toilette_, in her low-necked muslin dress.
+
+Mademoiselle raised her eyes from the old volume, printed in large type,
+which she was reading, removed her spectacles, placed them in the book
+to mark her place, and exclaimed:
+
+"What, my little bigot, you at a ball! Do you know, my girl, this seems
+to me downright nonsense! You and the hornpipe! Faith, all you need now
+is to want to get married! A deuce of a want, that! But if you marry, I
+warn you that I won't keep you--mind that! I've no desire to wait on
+your brats! Come a little nearer----Oho! why----bless my soul!
+Mademoiselle Show-all! We're getting to be a bit of a flirt lately, I
+find----"
+
+"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie tried to say.
+
+"And then," continued Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, following out her
+thought, "among you people, the men are such sweet creatures! They'll
+spend all you have--to say nothing of the blows. But marriage--I am sure
+that that nonsensical idea of getting married buzzes around in your head
+when you see the others. That's what gives you that simper, I'll wager.
+_Bon Dieu de Dieu!_ Now turn a bit, so that I can see you," said
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, with an abrupt change of tone to one that
+was almost caressing; and placing her thin hands on the arms of her
+easy-chair, crossing her legs and moving her foot back and forth, she
+set about inspecting Germinie and her toilet.
+
+"What the devil!" said she, after a few moments of silent scrutiny,
+"what! is it really you?----Then I have never used my eyes to look at
+you.----Good God, yes!----But----but----" She mumbled more vague
+exclamations between her teeth.----"Where the deuce did you get that mug
+like an amorous cat's?" she said at last, and continued to gaze at her.
+
+Germinie was ugly. Her hair, of so dark a chestnut that it seemed black,
+curled and twisted in unruly waves, in little stiff, rebellious locks,
+which escaped and stood up all over her head, despite the pomade upon
+her shiny _bandeaux_. Her smooth, narrow, swelling brow protruded above
+the shadow of the deep sockets in which her eyes were buried and sunken
+to such a depth as almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling
+eyes they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant girlish
+twinkle that softened and lighted up their laughter. They were neither
+brown eyes nor blue eyes, but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a
+gray that was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression therein
+in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing rays of a sort of
+intoxication, passion in phosphorescence. Her short, turned-up nose,
+with large, dilated, palpitating nostrils, was one of those noses of
+which the common people say that it rains inside: upon one side, at the
+corner of the eye was a thick, swollen blue vein. The square head of the
+Lorraine race was emphasized in her broad, high, prominent cheek-bones,
+which were well-covered with the traces of small-pox. The most
+noticeable defect in her face was the too great distance between the
+nose and mouth. This lack of proportion gave an almost apish character
+to the lower part of the head, where the expansive mouth, with white
+teeth and full lips that looked as if they had been crushed, they were
+so flat, smiled at you with a strange, vaguely irritating smile.
+
+Her _décolleté_ dress disclosed her neck, the upper part of her breast,
+her shoulders and her white back, presenting a striking contrast to her
+swarthy face. It was a lymphatic sort of whiteness, the whiteness, at
+once unhealthy and angelic, of flesh in which there is no life. She had
+let her arms fall by her sides--round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple
+at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray
+the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily,
+with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and
+sway;--a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more
+slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the
+hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;--an impossible
+waist, absurdly small but adorable, like everything in woman that
+offends one's sense of proportion by its diminutiveness.
+
+From this ugly woman emanated a piquant, mysterious charm. Light and
+shadow, jostling and intercepting each other on her face on which
+hollows and protuberances abounded, imparted to it that suggestion of
+libertinism which the painter of love scenes gives to the rough sketch
+of his mistress. Everything about her,--her mouth, her eyes, her very
+plainness--was instinct with allurement and solicitation. Her person
+exhaled an aphrodisiac charm, which challenged and laid fast hold of the
+other sex. It unloosed desire, and caused an electric shock. Sensual
+thoughts were naturally and involuntarily aroused by her, by her
+gestures, her gait, her slightest movement--even by the air in which her
+body had left one of its undulations. Beside her, one felt as if he were
+near one of those disturbing, disquieting creatures, burning with the
+love disease and communicating it to others, whose face appears to man
+in his restless hours, torments his listless noonday thoughts, haunts
+his nights and trespasses upon his dreams.
+
+In the midst of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's scrutiny, Germinie stooped
+over her, and covered her hand with hurried kisses.
+
+"There--there--enough of that," said Mademoiselle. "You would soon wear
+out the skin--with your way of kissing. Come, run along, enjoy yourself,
+and try not to stay out too late. Don't get all tired out."
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was left alone. She placed her elbows on her
+knees, stared at the fire and stirred the burning wood with the tongs.
+Then, as she was accustomed to do when deeply preoccupied, she struck
+herself two or three sharp little blows on the neck with the flat of her
+hand, and thereby set her black cap all awry.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When she mentioned the subject of marriage to Germinie, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil touched upon the real cause of her trouble. She placed her
+hand upon the seat of her _ennui_. Her maid's uneven temper, her
+distaste for life, the languor, the emptiness, the discontent of her
+existence, arose from that disease which medical science calls the
+_melancholia of virgins_. The torment of her twenty-four years was the
+ardent, excited, poignant longing for marriage, for that state which was
+too holy and honorable for her, and which seemed impossible of
+attainment in face of the confession her womanly probity would insist
+upon making of her fall and her unworthiness. Family losses and
+misfortunes forcibly diverted her mind from her own troubles.
+
+Her brother-in-law, her sister the concierge's husband, had dreamed the
+dream of all Auvergnats: he had undertaken to increase his earnings as
+concierge by the profits of a dealer in bric-à-brac. He had begun
+modestly with a stall in the street, at the doors of the marts where
+executors' sales are held; and there you could see, set out upon blue
+paper, plated candlesticks, ivory napkin rings, colored lithographs
+with frames of gold lace on a black ground, and three or four odd
+volumes of Buffon. His profit on the plated candlesticks intoxicated
+him. He hired a dark shop on a passage way, opposite an umbrella
+mender's, and began to trade upon the credulity that goes in and out of
+the lower rooms in the Auction Exchange. He sold _assiettes à coq_,
+pieces of Jean Jacques Rousseau's wooden shoe, and water-colors by
+Ballue, signed Watteau. In that business he threw away what he had made,
+and ran in debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His wife, in
+order to straighten matters out a little and to try and get out of debt,
+asked for and obtained a place as box-opener at the _Théâtre-Historique_.
+She hired her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening,
+went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at five. After a few
+months she caught cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of
+pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman
+left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles;
+the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the
+loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by
+the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to
+try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more was heard of
+him.
+
+When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran to the house of an
+old woman who made a living in those curious industries which prevent
+poverty from absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman
+carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles into equal lengths
+for brushes, sometimes she sorted out bits of gingerbread. When those
+industries failed, she did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars'
+children. In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went and took
+possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold it for ten or twelve sous
+when the crowd arrived. In order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the
+den where she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall, to
+the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees. Germinie, who knew her
+from having given her the crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a
+servant's room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her abode
+there with the little one. She did it on the impulse of the moment,
+without reflection. She did not remember her sister's harsh treatment of
+her when she was _enceinte_, so that she had no need to forgive it.
+
+Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her niece. She determined to
+rescue her from death and restore her to life by dint of careful
+nursing. She would rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up
+the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child, give her
+her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed, look at her, and rush down
+again, all out of breath and red with pleasure. Care, caresses, the
+breath from the heart with which we revive a tiny flame on the point of
+dying out, consultations, doctor's visits, costly medicines, the
+remedies of the wealthy,--Germinie spared nothing for the little one and
+gave her everything. Her wages flowed through that channel. For almost a
+year she gave her beef juice every morning: sleepyhead that she was, she
+left her bed at five o'clock in the morning to prepare it, and awoke
+without being called, as mothers do. The child was out of danger at
+last, when Germinie received a visit one morning from her sister the
+dressmaker, who had been married two or three years to a machinist, and
+who came now to bid her adieu: her husband was going to accompany some
+fellow-workmen who had been hired to go to Africa. She was going with
+him and she proposed to Germinie that they should take the little one
+with them as a playmate for their own child. They offered to take her
+off her hands. Germinie, they said, would have to pay only for the
+journey. It was a separation she would have to make up her mind to
+sooner or later on account of her mistress. And then, said the sister,
+she was the child's aunt too. And she heaped words upon words to induce
+Germinie to give them the child, with whom she and her husband expected,
+after their arrival in Africa, to move Germinie to pity, to get
+possession of her wages, to play upon her heart and her purse.
+
+It cost Germinie very dear to part with her niece. She had staked a
+portion of her existence upon the child. She was attached to her by her
+anxiety and her sacrifices. She had disputed possession of her with
+disease and had won the day; the girl's life was her miracle. And yet
+she realized that she could never take her to mademoiselle's apartments;
+that mademoiselle, at her age, with the burden of her years, and an aged
+person's need of tranquillity, could never endure the constant noise and
+movement of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in the house
+would cause idle gossip and set the whole street agog: people would say
+she was her child. Germinie made a confidante of her mistress.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that she had
+taken charge of her niece, although she had pretended not to know it;
+she had chosen to see nothing in order to permit everything. She advised
+Germinie to entrust her niece to her sister, pointing out to her all the
+difficulties in the way of keeping her herself, and she gave her money
+to pay for the journey of the whole family.
+
+The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie. She found herself
+left alone and without occupation. Not having the child, she knew not
+what to love; her heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the
+emptiness of life without the little one, that she turned once more to
+religion and transferred her affections to the church.
+
+Three months had passed when she received news of her sister's death.
+The husband, who was one of the whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics,
+gave her in his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and
+threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position, with the burial
+to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented him from working, two young
+children, without counting the little girl, and a household with no wife
+to heat the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her thoughts
+turned to living in that house, beside that poor man, among the poor
+children, in that horrible Africa; and a vague longing to sacrifice
+herself began to awaken within her. Other letters followed, in which,
+while thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave to his
+poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that enveloped him, a
+still more dramatic coloring--the coloring that the common people impart
+to trifles, with its memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its
+fragments of vile books. Once caught by the _blague_ of this misery,
+Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she could hear the
+cries of the children calling her. She became completely absorbed,
+buried in the project and resolution of going to them. She was haunted
+by the idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and over
+incessantly in the depths of her mind, without a word. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil, noticing her thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what
+the matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She was pulled this
+way and that, tormented between what seemed to her a duty and what
+seemed to her ingratitude, between her mistress and her sisters' blood.
+She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle. And again she said to
+herself that God did not wish her to abandon her family. She would look
+about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must go!" Then she would fear
+that mademoiselle might be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At
+that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied that she could
+already see someone stealing her mistress. At other moments, when her
+religious ideas impelled her to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all
+ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to
+go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always
+been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief,
+whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she
+anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have
+to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her
+imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice with the greater impatience
+and ardor. Often the whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a
+word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would become herself once
+more, and would fail to recognize herself. She felt that she was bound
+to her mistress absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror
+at having so much as thought of detaching her own life from hers. She
+struggled thus for two years. Then she learned one fine day, by chance,
+that her niece had died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law
+had concealed the child's death in order to maintain his hold upon her,
+and to lure her to him in Africa, with her few sous. Germinie's
+illusions being wholly dispelled by that revelation, she was cured on
+the spot. She hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going
+away.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+About this time a small creamery at the end of the street, with few
+customers, changed hands, as a result of the sale of the real estate by
+order of court. The shop was renovated and repainted. The front windows
+were embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids of
+chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and coffee-cups filled with
+flowers, alternating with small liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the
+shelves. At the door glistened the sign--a copper milk jug divided in
+the middle.
+
+The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern, the new
+_crémière_, was a person of about fifty years of age, whose corpulence
+passed all bounds, and who still retained some _débris_ of beauty, half
+submerged in fat. It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up
+in business with the money of an old gentleman, whose servant she had
+been until his death, in her native province, near Langres; for it
+happened that she was a countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same
+village, but from a small place near by; and although she and
+mademoiselle's maid had never met nor seen each other in the country,
+they knew each other by name and were drawn together by the fact that
+they had acquaintances in common and could compare memories of the same
+places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected, fawning creature.
+She said: "My love" to everybody, talked in a piping voice, and played
+the child with the querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested
+vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles. She adored
+secrets, twisted everything into a confidential communication, invented
+stories and always whispered in your ear. Her life was passed in
+gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she
+lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much
+she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so
+pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept
+indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for
+milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the
+newspapers, she wept for the sake of weeping.
+
+Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity by this wheedling,
+talkative _crémière_, who was always in a state of intense emotion,
+calling upon others to open their hearts to her, and apparently so
+affectionate. After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's
+doors that did not come from Mère Jupillon. Germinie procured
+everything, or almost everything there. She passed hours in the shop.
+Once there it was hard work for her to leave; she remained there,
+unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive cowardice detained
+her. At the door she would stop and talk on, in order to delay her
+departure. She felt bound to the _crémière_ by the invisible charm of
+familiar places to which you constantly return, and which end by
+embracing you like things that would love you. And then, too, in her
+eyes the shop meant Madame Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs;
+she always had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed them and
+talked to them; and when she was warm with their warmth, she would feel
+in the depths of her heart the contentment of a beast rubbing against
+her little ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of the
+quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,--how this one had failed to
+pay her note and that one had received a carriage load of flowers; it
+meant a place that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace
+_peignoir_ going to town on the maid's arm.
+
+In a word everything tended to attach her to the place. Her intimacy
+with the _crémière_ was strengthened by all the mysterious bonds of
+friendship between women of the people, by the continual chatter, the
+daily exchange of the trivial affairs of life, the conversation for the
+sake of conversing, the repetition of the same _bonjour_ and the same
+_bonsoir_, the division of caresses among the same animals, the naps
+side by side and chair against chair. The shop at last became her
+regular place for idling away her time, a place where her thoughts, her
+words, her body and her very limbs were marvelously at ease. There came
+a time when her happiness consisted in sitting drowsily of an evening in
+a straw arm-chair, beside Mère Jupillon--sound asleep with her
+spectacles on her nose--and holding the dogs rolled in a ball in the
+skirt of her dress; and while the lamp, almost dying, burned pale upon
+the counter, she would sit idly there, letting her glance lose itself at
+the back of the shop, and gradually grow dim, with her ideas, as her
+eyes rested vaguely upon a triumphal arch of snail shells joined
+together with old moss, beneath which stood a little copper Napoléon,
+with his hands behind his back.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Madame Jupillon, who claimed to have been married and signed herself
+_Widow Jupillon_, had a son. He was still a child. She had placed him at
+Saint-Nicholas, the great religious establishment where, for thirty
+francs a month, rudimentary instruction and a trade are furnished to the
+children of the common people, and to many natural children. Germinie
+fell into the way of accompanying Madame Jupillon when she went to see
+_Bibi_ on Thursdays. This visit became a means of distraction to her,
+something to look forward to. She would urge the mother to hurry, would
+always arrive first at the omnibus office, and was content to sit with
+her arms resting on a huge basket of provisions all the way.
+
+It happened that Mère Jupillon had trouble with her leg--a carbuncle
+that prevented her from walking for nearly eighteen months. Germinie
+went alone to Saint-Nicholas, and as she was promptly and easily led to
+devote herself to others, she took as deep an interest in that child as
+if he were connected with her in some way. She did not miss a single
+Thursday and always arrived with her hands full of the last week's
+desserts, and with cakes and fruit and sweetmeats she had bought. She
+would kiss the urchin, inquire for his health, and feel to see if he had
+his knitted vest under his blouse; she would notice how flushed he was
+from running, would wipe his face with her handkerchief and make him
+show her the soles of his shoes so that she could see if there were any
+holes in them. She would ask if his teachers were satisfied with him, if
+he attended to his duties and if he had had many good marks. She would
+talk to him of his mother and bid him love the good Lord, and until the
+clock struck two she would walk with him in the courtyard: the child
+would offer her his arm, as proud as you please to be with a woman much
+better dressed than the majority of those who came there--with a woman
+in silk. He was anxious to learn the flageolet. It cost only five francs
+a month, but his mother would not give them. Germinie carried him the
+hundred sous every month, on the sly. It was a humiliating thing to him
+to wear the little uniform blouse when he went out to walk, and on the
+two or three occasions during the year when he went to see his mother.
+On his birthday, one year, Germinie unfolded a large parcel before him:
+she had had a tunic made for him; it is doubtful if twenty of his
+comrades in the whole school belonged to families in sufficiently easy
+circumstances to wear such garments.
+
+She spoiled him thus for several years, not allowing him to suffer with
+a longing for anything, encouraging the caprices and the pride of
+wealthy children in the poor child, softening for him the privations and
+hardships of that trade school, where children were formed for a
+laboring life, wore blouses and ate off plates of brown earthenware; a
+school that by its toilsome apprenticeship hardened the children of the
+people to lives of toil. Meanwhile the boy was growing fast. Germinie
+did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always
+been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was
+summoned before the abbé who was at the head of the school. He spoke to
+her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his
+possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited
+the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she
+succeeded at last in inducing the abbé to forgive the culprit. When she
+went down into the courtyard again she attempted to scold him; but at
+the first word of her moral lecture, Bibi suddenly cast in her face a
+glance and smile in which there was no trace of the child that he was
+the day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one to blush. A
+fortnight passed before she went again to Saint-Nicholas.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+About the time that young Jupillon left the boarding-school, a maid in
+the service of a kept woman who lived on the floor below mademoiselle
+sometimes passed the evening with Germinie at Madame Jupillon's. A
+native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which supplies Paris with coupé
+drivers and lorettes' waiting-maids, this girl was what is called in
+vulgar parlance: "a great _bringue_;" she was an awkward, wild-eyed
+creature, with the eyebrows of a water carrier. She soon fell into the
+habit of going there every evening. She treated everybody to cakes and
+liquors, amused herself by showing off little Jupillon, playing
+pat-a-cake with him, sitting on his knee, telling him to his face that
+he was a beauty, treating him like a child, playing the wanton with him
+and joking him because he was not a man. The boy, happy and proud of
+these attentions from the first woman who had ever taken notice of him,
+manifested before long his preference for Adèle: so was the new-comer
+called.
+
+Germinie was passionately jealous. Jealousy was the foundation of her
+nature; it was the dregs of her affection and gave it its bitter taste.
+Those whom she loved she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess
+them absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one but her. She
+could not permit them to take from her and bestow upon others the
+slightest fragment of their affection: as she had earned it, it no
+longer belonged to them; they were no longer entitled to dispose of it.
+She detested the people whom her mistress seemed to welcome more
+cordially than others, and with whom she was on most intimate terms. By
+her ill-humor and her sullen manner she had offended, had almost driven
+from the house, two or three of mademoiselle's old friends, whose visits
+wounded her; as if the old ladies came there for the purpose of
+abstracting something from the rooms, of taking a little of her mistress
+from her. People of whom she had once been fond became odious to her:
+she did not consider that they were fond enough of her; she hated them
+for all the love she wanted from them. Her heart was despotic and
+exacting in everything. As it gave all, it demanded all in return. At
+the least sign of coldness, at the slightest indication that she had a
+rival, she would fly into a rage, tear her hair, pass her nights in
+weeping, and execrate the whole world.
+
+Seeing that other woman make herself at home in the shop and adopt a
+tone of familiarity with the young man, all Germinie's jealous instincts
+were aroused and changed to furious rage. Her hatred flew to arms and
+rebelled, with her disgust, against the shameless, brazen-faced
+creature, who could be seen on Sunday sitting at table on the outer
+boulevards with soldiers, and who had blue marks on her face on Monday.
+She did her utmost to induce Madame Jupillon to turn her away; but she
+was one of the best customers of the creamery, and the _crémière_ mildly
+refused to close her doors upon her. Germinie had recourse to the son
+and told him that she was a miserable creature. But that only served to
+attach the young man the closer to the vile woman, whose evil reputation
+delighted him. Moreover, he had the cruel mischievous instinct of youth,
+and he redoubled his attentions to her simply to see "the nose" that
+Germinie made and to enjoy her despair. Soon Germinie discovered that
+the woman's intentions were more serious than she had at first supposed:
+she began to understand what she wanted of the child,--for the tall
+youth of seventeen was still a child in her eyes. Thenceforward she hung
+upon their steps; she was always beside them, never left them alone for
+a moment, made one at all their parties, at the theatre or in the
+country, joined them in all their walks, was always at hand and in the
+way, seeking to hold Adèle back, and to restore her sense of decency by
+a word in an undertone: "A mere boy! ain't you ashamed?" she would say
+to her. And the other would laugh aloud, as if it were a good joke.
+
+When they left the theatre, enlivened and heated by the feverish
+excitement of the performance and the place; when they returned from an
+excursion to the country, laden with a long day's sunshine, intoxicated
+with the blue sky and the pure air, excited by the wine imbibed at
+dinner, amid the sportive liberties in which the woman of the people,
+drunk with enjoyment and with the delights of unlimited good cheer, and
+with the senses keyed up to the highest pitch of joviality, makes bold
+to indulge at night, Germinie tried to be always between the maid and
+Jupillon. She never relaxed her efforts to break the lovers' hold upon
+each other's arms, to unbind them, to uncouple them. Never wearying of
+the task, she was forever separating them, luring them away from each
+other. She placed her body between those bodies that were groping for
+each other. She glided between the hands outstretched to touch each
+other; she glided between the lips that were put forth in search of
+other proffered lips. But of all this that she prevented she felt the
+breath and the shock. She felt the pressure of the hands she held apart,
+the caresses that she caught on the wing and that missed their mark and
+went astray upon her. The hot breath of the kisses she intercepted blew
+upon her cheek. Involuntarily, and with a feeling of horror, she became
+a party to the embracing, she was infected with the desires aroused by
+this constant friction and struggling, which diminished day by day the
+young man's restraint and respect for her person.
+
+It happened one day that she was less strong against herself than she
+had previously been. On that occasion she did not elude his advances so
+abruptly as usual. Jupillon felt that she stopped short. Germinie felt
+it even more keenly than he; but she was at the end of her efforts,
+exhausted with the torture she had undergone. The love which, coming
+from another, she had turned aside from Jupillon, had slowly taken full
+possession of her own heart. Now it was firmly rooted there, and,
+bleeding with jealousy, she found that she was incapable of resistance,
+weak and fainting, like a person fatally wounded, in presence of the joy
+that had come to her.
+
+She repelled the young man's audacious attempts, however, without a
+word. She did not dream of belonging to him otherwise than as a friend,
+or giving way farther than she had done. She lived upon the thought of
+love, believing that she could live upon it always. And in the ecstatic
+exaltation of her thoughts, she put aside all memory of her fall, and
+repressed her desires. She remained shuddering and pure, lost and
+suspended in abysses of affection, neither enjoying nor wishing for
+aught from the lover but a caress, as if her heart were made only for
+the joy of kissing.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+This happy though unsatisfied love produced a strange physiological
+phenomenon in Germinie's physical being. One would have said that the
+passion that was alive within her renewed and transformed her lymphatic
+temperament. She did not seem, as before, to extract her life, drop by
+drop, from a penurious spring: it flowed through her arteries in a full,
+generous stream; she felt the tingling sensation of rich blood over her
+whole body. She seemed to be filled with the warm glow of health, and
+the joy of living beat its wings in her breast like a bird in the
+sunlight.
+
+A marvelous animation had come to her. The miserable nervous energy that
+once sustained her had given place to healthy activity, to bustling,
+restless, overflowing gayety. She had no trace now of the weakness, the
+dejection, the prostration, the supineness, the sluggishness that
+formerly distinguished her. The heavy, drowsy feeling in the morning was
+a thing of the past; she awoke feeling fresh and bright, and alive in an
+instant to the cheer of the new day. She dressed in haste, playfully;
+her agile fingers moved of themselves, and she was amazed to be so
+bright and full of activity during the hours of faintness before
+breakfast, when she had so often felt her heart upon her lips. And
+throughout the day she had the same consciousness of physical
+well-being, the same briskness of movement. She must be always on the
+move, walking, running, doing something, expending her strength. At
+times all that she had lived through seemed to have no existence; the
+sensations of living that she had hitherto experienced seemed to her
+like a far-off dream, or as if dimly seen in the background of a
+sleeping memory. The past lay behind her, as if she had traversed it,
+covered with a veil like one in a swoon, or with the unconsciousness of
+a somnambulist. It was the first time that she had experienced the
+feeling, the impression, at once bitter and sweet, violent and
+celestial, of the game of life brilliant in its plenitude, its
+regularity and its power.
+
+She ran up and downstairs for a nothing. At a word from mademoiselle she
+would trip down the whole five flights. When she was seated, her feet
+danced on the floor. She brushed and scrubbed and beat and shook and
+washed and set to rights, without rest or reprieve, always at work,
+filling the apartment with her goings and comings, and the incessant
+bustle that followed her about.--"Mon Dieu!" her mistress would say,
+stunned by the uproar she made, just like a child,--"you're turning
+things upside down, Germinie! that will do for that!"
+
+One day, when she went into Germinie's kitchen, mademoiselle saw a
+little earth in a cigar box on the leads.--"What's that?" she
+asked.--"That's grass--that I planted--to look at," said Germinie.--"So
+you're in love with grass now, eh? All you need now is to have
+canaries!"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In the course of a few months, Germinie's life, her whole life belonged
+to the _crémière_. Mademoiselle's service was not exacting and took but
+little time. A whiting or a cutlet--that was all the cooking there was
+to be done. Mademoiselle might have kept her with her in the evening for
+company: she preferred, however, to send her away, to drive her out of
+doors, to force her to take a little air and diversion. She asked only
+that she would return at ten o'clock to help her to bed; and yet when
+Germinie was a little late, mademoiselle undressed herself and went to
+bed alone very comfortably. Every hour that her mistress left her at
+leisure, Germinie passed in the shop. She fell into the habit of going
+down to the creamery in the morning, when the shutters were removed, and
+generally carried them inside; she would take her _café au lait_ there
+and remain until nine o'clock, when she would go back and give
+mademoiselle her chocolate; and between breakfast and dinner she found
+excuses for returning two or three times, delaying and chattering in the
+back-shop on the slightest pretext. "What a magpie you are getting to
+be!" mademoiselle would say, in a scolding voice, but with a smiling
+face.
+
+At half past five, when her mistress's little dinner was cleared away,
+she would run down the stairs four at a time, install herself at Mère
+Jupillon's, wait until ten o'clock, clamber up the five flights, and in
+five minutes undress her mistress, who submitted unresistingly, albeit
+she was somewhat astonished that Germinie should be in such haste to go
+to bed; she remembered the time when she had a mania for moving her
+sleepy body from one easy-chair to another, and was never willing to go
+up to her room. While the candle was still smoking on mademoiselle's
+night table, Germinie would be back at the creamery, this time to remain
+until midnight, until one o'clock; often she did not go until a
+policeman, noticing the light, tapped on the shutters and made them
+close up.
+
+In order to be always there and to have the right to be always there, to
+make herself a part of the shop, to keep her eyes constantly upon the
+man she loved, to hover about him, to keep him, to be always brushing
+against him, she had become the servant of the establishment. She swept
+the shop, she prepared the old woman's meals and the food for the dogs.
+She waited upon the son; she made his bed, she brushed his clothes, she
+waxed his boots, happy and proud to touch what he touched, thrilling
+with pleasure when she placed her hand where he placed his body, and
+ready to kiss the mud upon the leather of his boots, because it was
+his!
+
+She did the menial work, she kept the shop, she served the customers.
+Madame Jupillon rested everything upon her shoulders; and while the
+good-natured girl was working and perspiring, the bulky matron, assuming
+the majestic, leisurely air of an annuitant, anchored upon a chair in
+the middle of the sidewalk and inhaling the fresh air of the street,
+fingered and rattled the precious coin in the capacious pocket beneath
+her apron--the coin that rings so sweetly in the ears of the petty
+tradesmen of Paris, that the retired shopkeeper is melancholy beyond
+words at first, because he no longer has the chinking and the tinkling
+under his hand.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+When the spring came, Germinie said to Jupillon almost every evening:
+"Suppose we go as far as the beginning of the fields?"
+
+Jupillon would put on his flannel shirt with red and black squares, and
+his black velvet cap; and they would start for what the people of the
+quarter call "the beginning of the fields."
+
+They would go up the Chaussée Clignancourt, and, with the flood of
+Parisians from the faubourg hurrying to drink a little fresh air, would
+walk on toward the great patch of sky that rose straight from the
+pavements, at the top of the ascent, between the two lines of houses,
+unobstructed except by an occasional omnibus. The air was growing cooler
+and the sun shone only upon the roofs of the houses and the chimneys. As
+from a great door opening into the country, there came from the end of
+the street and from the sky beyond, a breath of boundless space and
+liberty.
+
+At the Château-Rouge they found the first tree, the first foliage. Then,
+at Rue du Château, the horizon opened before them in dazzling beauty.
+The fields stretched away in the distance, glistening vaguely in the
+powdery, golden haze of seven o'clock. All nature trembled in the
+daylight dust that the day leaves in its wake, upon the verdure it blots
+from sight and the houses it suffuses with pink.
+
+Frequently they descended the footpath covered with the figures of the
+game of hop-scotch marked out in charcoal, by long walls with an
+occasional overhanging branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens
+between. At their left rose tree-tops filled with light, clustering
+foliage pierced by the beams of the setting sun, which cast lines of
+fire across the bars of the iron gateways. After the gardens came
+hedgerows, estates for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line
+of projected streets and stretching out their jagged walls into empty
+space, with heaps of broken bottles at their feet; large, low, plastered
+houses, with windows filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the Y
+of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into enclosures that
+resembled barnyards, studded with little mounds on which goats were
+browsing.
+
+They would stop here and there and smell the flowers, inhale the perfume
+of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf
+in passing and nibble at it.
+
+Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles and in fantastic
+figures over her head. The birds called. The sky answered the cages. She
+heard everything about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at
+the women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their shirt sleeves
+in the little gardens, the mothers on the doorsteps with their little
+ones between their legs.
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter XII
+
+_But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with
+Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were
+families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small
+annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of
+want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats
+characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red
+beards._]
+
+
+At the foot of the slope the pavement came to an end. The street was
+succeeded by a broad, white, chalky, dusty road, made of débris, old
+pieces of plaster, crumbs of lime and bricks; a sunken road, with deep
+ruts, polished on the edges, made by the iron tires of the huge great
+wheels of carts laden with hewn stone. At that point began the things
+that collect where Paris ends, the things that grow where grass does not
+grow, one of those arid landscapes that large cities create around them,
+the first zone of suburbs _intra muros_ where nature is exhausted, the
+soil used up, the fields sown with oyster shells. Beyond was a
+wilderness of half-enclosed yards displaying numbers of carts and trucks
+with their shafts in the air against the sky, stone-cutters' sheds,
+factories built of boards, unfinished workmen's houses, full of gaps and
+open to the light, and bearing the mason's flag, wastes of gray and
+white sand, kitchen gardens marked out with cords, and, on the lower
+level, bogs to which the embankment of the road slopes down in oceans of
+small stones.
+
+Soon they would reach the last lantern hanging on a green post. People
+were still coming and going about them. The road was alive and amused
+the eyes. They met women carrying their husband's canes, lorettes in
+silk dresses leaning on the arms of their blouse-clad brothers, old
+women in bright-colored ginghams walking about with folded arms,
+enjoying a moment's rest from labor. Workmen were drawing their children
+in little wagons, urchins returning with their rods from fishing at
+Saint-Ouen, and men and women dragging branches of flowering acacia at
+the ends of sticks.
+
+Sometimes a pregnant woman would pass, holding out her arms to a yet
+small child, and casting the shadow of her pregnancy upon the wall.
+
+And everyone moved tranquilly, blissfully, at a pace that told of the
+wish to delay, with the awkward ease and the happy indolence of those
+who walk for pleasure. No one was in a hurry, and against the unbroken
+horizon line, crossed from time to time by the white smoke of a railroad
+train, the groups of promenaders were like black spots, almost
+motionless, in the distance.
+
+Behind Montmartre, they came to those great moats, as it were, those
+sloping squares, where narrow, gray, much-trodden paths cross and
+recross. A few blades of shriveled, yellow grass grew thereabout,
+softened by the rays of the setting sun, which they could see, all
+ablaze, between the houses. And Germinie loved to watch the wool-combers
+at work there, the quarry horses at pasture in the bare fields, the
+madder-red trousers of the soldiers who were playing at bowls, the
+children flying kites that made black spots in the clear air. Passing
+all these, they turned to cross the bridge over the railroad by the
+wretched settlement of ragpickers, the stonemasons' quarter at the foot
+of Clignancourt hill. They would walk quickly by those houses built of
+materials stolen from demolished buildings, and exuding the horrors they
+conceal; the wretched structures, half cabin, half burrow, caused
+Germinie a vague feeling of terror: it seemed to her as if all the
+crimes of Night were lurking there.
+
+But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with
+Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were
+families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small
+annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of
+want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats
+characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red
+beards. The air was full of rich harmonies. Below her, in the moat, a
+musical society was playing at each corner. Before her eyes was a
+multi-colored crowd, white blouses, children in blue aprons running
+around, a game of riding at the ring in progress, wine shops, cake
+shops, fried fish stalls, and shooting galleries half hidden in clumps
+of verdure, from which arose staves bearing the tricolor; and farther
+away, in a bluish haze, a line of tree tops marked the location of a
+road. To the right she could see Saint-Denis and the towering basilica;
+at her left, above a line of houses that were becoming indistinct, the
+sun was setting over Saint-Ouen in a disk of cherry-colored flame, and
+projecting upon the gray horizon shafts of light like red pillars that
+seemed to support it tremblingly. Often a child's balloon would pass
+swiftly across the dazzling expanse of sky.
+
+They would go down, pass through the gate, walk along by the Lorraine
+sausage shops, the dealers in honeycomb, the board _cabarets_, the
+verdureless, still unpainted arbors, where a noisy multitude of men and
+women and children were eating fried potatoes, mussels and prawns, until
+they reached the first field, the first living grass: on the edge of the
+grass there was a handcart laden with gingerbread and peppermint
+lozenges, and a woman selling hot cocoa on a table in the furrow. A
+strange country, where everything was mingled--the smoke from the
+frying-pan and the evening vapor, the noise of quoits on the head of a
+cask and the silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the idyllic
+rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh smell of green wheat, the
+great human Fair and Nature! Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging
+Jupillon to go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she would
+constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the fresh, cool sensation of
+the stalks against her stockings. When they returned she always wanted
+to go upon the slope once more. The sun had by that time disappeared and
+the sky was gray below, pink in the centre and blue above. The horizon
+grew dark; from green the trees became a dark brown and melted into the
+sky; the zinc roofs of the wine shops looked as if the moon were
+shining upon them, fires began to appear in the darkness, the crowd
+became gray, and the white linen took on a bluish tinge. Little by
+little everything would fade away, be blotted out, lose its form and
+color in a dying remnant of colorless daylight, and through the
+increasing darkness the voices of a class whose life begins at night,
+and the voice of the wine beginning to sing, would arise, mingled with
+the din of the rattles. Upon the slope the tops of the tall grass waved
+to and fro in the gentle breeze. Germinie would make up her mind to go.
+She would wend her way homeward, filled with the influence of the
+falling night, abandoning herself to the uncertain vision of things
+half-seen, passing the dark houses, and finding that everything along
+her road had turned paler, as it were--wearied by the long walk over
+rough roads, and content to be weary and slow and half-fainting, and
+with a feeling of peace at her heart.
+
+At the first lighted lanterns on Rue du Château, she would fall from her
+dream to the pavement.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Madame Jupillon's face always wore a pleased expression when Germinie
+appeared; when she kissed her she was very effusive, when she spoke to
+her her voice was caressing, when she looked at her her glance was most
+amiable. The huge creature's kind heart seemed, when with her, to
+abandon itself to the emotion, the affection, the trustfulness of a sort
+of maternal tenderness. She took Germinie into her confidence as to her
+business, as to her woman's secrets, as to the most private affairs of
+her life. She seemed to open her heart to her as to a person of her own
+blood, whom she desired to make familiar with matters of interest to the
+family. When she spoke of the future, she always referred to Germinie as
+one from whom she was never to be separated, and who formed a part of
+the household. Often she allowed certain discreet, mysterious smiles to
+escape her, smiles which made it appear that she saw all that was going
+on and was not angry. Sometimes, too, when her son was sitting by
+Germinie's side, she would let her eyes, moist with a mother's tears,
+rest upon them, and would embrace them with a glance that seemed to
+unite her two children and call down a blessing on their heads.
+
+Without speaking, without ever uttering a word that could be construed
+as an engagement, without divulging her thoughts or binding herself in
+any way, and all the time repeating that her son was still very young to
+think of being married, she encouraged Germinie's hopes and illusions by
+her whole bearing, her airs of secret indulgence and of complicity, so
+far as her heart was concerned; by those meaning silences when she
+seemed to open to her a mother-in-law's arms. And displaying all her
+talents in the way of hypocrisy, drawing upon her hidden mines of
+sentiment, her good-natured shrewdness, and the consummate, intricate
+cunning that fat people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in
+vanquishing Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit assurance
+and promise of marriage; and she finally allowed the young man's ardor
+to extort from her what she believed that she was giving in advance to
+the husband.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+As Germinie was going down the servant's staircase one day, she heard
+Adèle's voice calling her over the banister and telling her to bring her
+two sous' worth of butter and ten of absinthe.
+
+"Oh! you can sit down a minute, you know you can," said Adèle, when she
+brought her the absinthe and the butter. "I never see you now, you'll
+never come in. Come! you have plenty of time to be with your old woman.
+For my part, I couldn't live with an Antichrist's face like hers! So
+stay. This is the house without work to-day. There isn't a sou--madame's
+abed. Whenever there's no money, she goes to bed, does madame; she stays
+in bed all day, reading novels. Have some of this?"--And she offered her
+her glass of absinthe.--"No? oh! no, you don't drink. You're very
+foolish. It's a funny thing not to drink. Say, it would be very nice of
+you to write me a little line for my dearie. Hard work, you know. I have
+told you about it. See, here's madame's pen--and her paper--it smells
+good. Are you ready? He's a good fellow, my dear, and no mistake! He's
+in the butcher line as I told you. Ah! my word! I mustn't rub him the
+wrong way! When he's had a glass of blood after killing his beasts, he's
+like a madman--and if you're obstinate with him--Dame! why then he
+thumps you! But what would you have? He does that to make him strong. If
+you could see him thump himself on the breast--blows that would kill an
+ox, and say: 'That's a wall, that is!' Ah! he's a gentleman, I tell you!
+Are you thinking about the letter, eh? Make it one of the fetching kind.
+Say nice things to him, you know--and a little sad--he adores that. At
+the theatre he doesn't like anything that doesn't make him cry. Look
+here! Imagine that you're writing to a lover of your own."
+
+Germinie began to write.
+
+"Say, Germinie! Have you heard? Madame's taken a strange idea into her
+head. It's a funny thing about women like her, who can hold their heads
+up with the greatest of 'em, who can have everything, hobnob with kings
+if they choose! And there's nothing to be said--when one is like madame,
+you know, when one has such a body as that! And then the way they load
+themselves down with finery, with their tralala of dresses and lace
+everywhere and everything else--how do you suppose anyone can resist
+them? And if it isn't a gentleman, if it's someone like us--you can see
+how much more all that will catch him; a woman in velvet goes to his
+brain. Yes, my dear, just fancy, here's madame gone daft on that
+_gamin_ of a Jupillon! That's all we needed to make us die of hunger
+here!"
+
+Germinie, with her pen in the air over the letter she had begun, looked
+up at Adèle, devouring her with her eyes.
+
+"That brings you to a standstill, doesn't it?" said Adèle, sipping her
+absinthe, her face lighted up with joy at sight of Germinie's
+discomposed features. "Oh! it is too absurd, really; but it's true, 'pon
+my word it's true. She noticed the _gamin_ on the steps of the shop the
+other day, coming home from the races. She's been there two or three
+times on the pretence of buying something. She'll probably have some
+perfumery sent from there--to-morrow, I think.--Bah! it's sickening,
+isn't it? It's their affair. Well! what about my letter? Is it what I
+told you that makes you so stupid? You played the prude--I didn't
+know--Oh! yes, yes, now I remember; that's what it is--What was it you
+said to me about the little one? I believe you didn't want anyone to
+touch him! Idiot!"
+
+At a gesture of denial from Germinie, she continued:
+
+"Nonsense, nonsense! What do I care? The kind of a child that, if you
+blew his nose, milk would come out! Thanks! that's not my style.
+However, that's your business. Come, now for my letter, eh?"
+
+Germinie leaned over the sheet of paper. But she was burning up with
+fever; the quill cracked in her nervous fingers. "There," she said,
+throwing it down after a few seconds, "I don't know what's the matter
+with me to-day. I'll write it for you another time."
+
+"As you like, little one--but I rely on you. Come to-morrow, then.--I'll
+tell you some of madame's nonsense. We'll have a good laugh at her!"
+
+And, when the door was closed, Adèle began to roar with laughter: it had
+cost her only a little _blague_ to unearth Germinie's secret.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+So far as young Jupillon was concerned, love was simply the satisfaction
+of a certain evil curiosity, which sought, in the knowledge and
+possession of a woman, the privilege and the pleasure of despising her.
+Just emerging from boyhood, the young man had brought to his first
+_liaison_ no other ardor, no other flame than the cold instincts of
+rascality awakened in boys by vile books, the confidences of their
+comrades, boarding-school conversation, the first breath of impurity
+which debauches desire. The sentiment with which the young man usually
+regards the woman who yields to him, the caresses, the loving words, the
+affectionate attentions with which he envelops her--nothing of all that
+existed in Jupillon's case. Woman was to him simply an obscene image;
+and a passion for a woman seemed to him desirable as being prohibited,
+illicit, vulgar, cynical and amusing--an excellent opportunity for
+trickery and sarcasm.
+
+Sarcasm--the low, cowardly, despicable sarcasm of the dregs of the
+people--was the beginning and the end of this youth. He was a perfect
+type of those Parisians who bear upon their faces the mocking
+scepticism of the great city of _blague_ in which they are born. The
+smile, the shrewdness and the mischief of the Parisian physiognomy were
+always mocking and impertinent in him. Jupillon's smile had the jovial
+expression imparted by a wicked mouth, a mouth that was almost cruel at
+the corners of the lips, which curled upward and were always twitching
+nervously. His face was pale with the pallor that nitric acid strong
+enough to eat copper gives to the complexion, and in his sharp, pert,
+bold features were mingled bravado, energy, recklessness, intelligence,
+impudence and all sorts of rascally expressions, softened, at certain
+times, by a cat-like, wheedling air. His trade of glove-cutter--he had
+taken up with that trade after two or three unsuccessful trials as an
+apprentice in other crafts--the habit of working in the shop-windows, of
+being on exhibition to the passers-by, had given to his whole person the
+self-assurance and the dandified airs of a _poseur_. Sitting in the
+work-shop on the street, with his white shirt, his little black cravat
+_à la Colin_, and his skin-tight pantaloons, he had adopted an awkward
+air of nonchalance, the pretentious carriage and _canaille_ affectations
+of the workman who knows he is being stared at. And various little
+refinements of doubtful taste, the parting of the hair in the middle and
+brushing it down over the temples, the low shirt collars that left the
+whole neck bare, the striving after the coquettish effects that
+properly belong to the other sex, gave him an uncertain appearance,
+which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by
+a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his sexless features to which
+passion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish
+woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon
+style were of the highest distinction.
+
+Thus constituted, with nothing lovable about him and incapable of a
+genuine attachment even through his passions, Jupillon was greatly
+embarrassed and bored by this adoration which became intoxicated with
+itself, and waxed greater day by day. Germinie wearied him to death. She
+seemed to him absurd in her humiliation, and laughable in her devotion.
+He was weary, disgusted, worn out with her. He had had enough of her
+love, enough of her person. And he had no hesitation about cutting loose
+from her, without charity or pity. He ran away from her. He failed to
+keep the appointments she made. He pretended that he was kept away by
+accident, by errands to be done, by a pressure of work. At night, she
+waited for him and he did not come; she supposed that he was detained by
+business: in fact he was at some low billiard hall, or at some ball at
+the barrier.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+There was a ball at the _Boule-Noire_ one Thursday. The dancing was in
+full blast.
+
+The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement
+for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry
+splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold,
+gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet
+hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an
+ale-house with the decorations of a cardboard palace.
+
+Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows
+and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were
+lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white
+panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames,
+alternated with Prud'hon's _Seasons_, which were much astonished to find
+themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical
+Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort
+used by suburban hair-dressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre
+arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where
+there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken
+rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed
+the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted
+green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a café.
+
+In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat
+of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled
+woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black _paletots_, women in
+_caracos_ worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of
+open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole
+assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a
+glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a
+glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy
+colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This
+absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning;
+it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of
+lifelessness and earthiness--a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there
+was a suggestion of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piété!
+
+An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side passed in front
+of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red
+apples.
+
+From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a
+soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of
+sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached
+face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a
+second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off
+finery of some kept mistress.
+
+The men wore _paletots_, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears,
+and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited
+the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered
+behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored shirts, had an
+insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great
+family.
+
+Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered
+and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure.
+And in the evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel
+addresses given: _Impasse du Dépotoir_.
+
+Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the
+air of _La Casquette du père Bugeaud_, in which the cymbals, the
+sleigh-bells and the drum had infected the dancers with the giddiness
+and madness of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole room,
+all the men leading their partners back to the places marked by their
+caps: she had been misled; _he_ was not there, she could not see him.
+However, she waited. She entered the dancers' enclosure and sat down on
+the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much embarrassed. From their
+linen caps she judged that the women seated in line beside her were
+servants like herself: comrades of her own class alarmed her less than
+the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets and their hands
+in the pockets of their _paletots_, who strolled humming about the room.
+But soon she aroused hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat--only
+about a dozen women at the ball wore hats--her flounced skirt, the white
+hem of which could be seen under her dress, the gold brooch that secured
+her shawl awakened malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and
+smiles were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All the women
+seemed to be asking one another where this new arrival had come from,
+and to be saying to one another that she would take their lovers from
+them. Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs, with their
+arms about one another's waists as if for a waltz, made her lower her
+eyes as they passed in front of her, and then went on with a
+contemptuous shrug, turning their heads to look back at her.
+
+She changed her place: she was met with the same smiles, the same
+whispering, the same hostility. She went to the further end of the hall;
+all the women looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in
+malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress to the flowers on
+her hat. Her face flushed. At times she feared that she should weep. She
+longed to leave the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of
+the hall all alone.
+
+She began mechanically to watch an old woman who was slowly making the
+circuit of the hall with a noiseless step, like a bird of night flying
+in a circle. A black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her
+_bandeaux_ of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine shoulders,
+hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan. When she reached the door, she cast a
+last glance about the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye
+of a vulture seeking in vain for food.
+
+Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive
+youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against
+which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a noise like breaking
+furniture.
+
+As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he was sitting between
+two women at a green table in a window-recess, smoking. One of the two
+was a tall blonde with a small quantity of frizzled flaxen hair, a flat,
+stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise lay in folds on her
+back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black apron which she
+was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark
+creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap,
+was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a
+white knitted hood with a blue border.
+
+Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw her rise and approach him,
+with her eyes fixed upon his face, he whispered something to the woman
+in the hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and waited.
+
+"Hallo! you here," he exclaimed when Germinie stood before him, erect,
+motionless and mute. "This is a surprise!--Waiter! another bowl!"
+
+And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the two women's glasses,
+he continued: "Come, don't make up faces--sit down there."
+
+And, as Germinie did not budge: "Go on! These ladies are friends of
+mine--ask them!"
+
+"Mélie," said the woman in the hood to the other woman, in a voice like
+a diseased crow's, "don't you see? She's monsieur's mother. Make room
+for the lady if she'd like to drink with us."
+
+Germinie cast a murderous glance at the woman.
+
+"Well! what's the matter?" the woman continued; "that don't suit you,
+madame, eh? Excuse me! you ought to have told me beforehand. How old do
+you suppose she is, Mélie, eh? _Sapristi!_ You select young ones, my
+boy, you don't put yourself out!"
+
+Jupillon smiled internally, and simpered and sneered externally. His
+whole manner displayed the cowardly delight that evil-minded persons
+take in watching the suffering of those who suffer because of loving
+them.
+
+"I have something to say to you--to you!--not here--outside," said
+Germinie.
+
+"Much joy to you! Coming, Mélie?" said the woman in the hood, lighting
+the stub of a cigar that Jupillon had left on the table beside a piece
+of lemon.
+
+"What do you want?" said Jupillon, impressed, in spite of himself, by
+Germinie's tone.
+
+"Come!"
+
+And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the people crowded about
+her, laughing. She heard voices, broken sentences, subdued hooting.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Jupillon promised Germinie not to go to the ball again. But he was just
+beginning to make a name for himself at La Brididi, among the low haunts
+near the barrier, the _Boule-Noire_, the _Reine-Blanche_ and the
+_Ermitage_. He had become one of the dancers who make the guests leave
+their seats, who keep a whole roomful of people hanging on the soles of
+their boots as they toss them two inches above their heads, and whom the
+fair dancers of the locality invite to dance with them and sometimes pay
+for their refreshment to that end. The ball to him was not a ball
+simply; it was a stage, an audience, popularity, applause, the
+flattering murmur of his name among the groups of people, an ovation
+accorded to saltatory glory in the glare of the reverberators.
+
+On Sunday he did not go to the _Boule-Noire_; but on the following
+Thursday he went there again; and Germinie, seeing plainly enough that
+she could not prevent him from going, decided to follow him and to stay
+there as long as he did. Sitting at a table in the background, in the
+least brilliantly lighted corner of the ball-room, she would follow him
+eagerly with her eyes throughout the whole contra-dance; and when it was
+at an end, if he held back, she would go and seize him, take him almost
+by force from the hands and caresses of the women who persisted in
+trying to pull him back, to detain him by wicked wiles.
+
+As they soon came to know her, the insulting remarks in her neighborhood
+ceased to be vague and indistinct and muttered under the breath, as at
+the first ball. The words were thrown in her face, the laughter spoke
+aloud. She was obliged to pass her three hours amid a chorus of derision
+that pointed its finger at her, called her by name and cast her age in
+her face. At every turn she was forced to submit to the appellation of:
+_old woman!_ which the young hussies spat at her over their shoulders as
+they passed. But they did at least look at her; often, however, dancing
+women invited by Jupillon to drink, and brought by him to the table at
+which Germinie was, would sit with their elbows on the table and their
+cheeks resting on their hands, drinking the bowl of mulled wine for
+which she paid, apparently unaware that there was another woman there,
+crowding into her place as if it were unoccupied, and making no reply
+when she spoke to them. Germinie could have killed these creatures whom
+Jupillon forced her to entertain and who despised her so utterly that
+they did not even notice her presence.
+
+The time arrived, when, having endured all she could endure and being
+sickened by the humiliation she was forced to swallow, she conceived
+the idea of dancing herself. She saw no other way to avoid leaving her
+lover to others, to keep him by her all the evening, and perhaps to bind
+him more closely to her by her success, if she had any chance of
+succeeding. Throughout a whole month she worked, in secret, to learn to
+dance. She rehearsed the figures and the steps. She forced her body into
+unnatural attitudes, she wore herself out trying to master the
+contortions and the manipulations of the skirt that she saw were
+applauded. At the end of the month she made the venture; but everything
+tended to disconcert her and added to her awkwardness; the hostility
+that she could feel in the atmosphere, the smiles of astonishment and
+pity that played about the lips of the spectators when she took her
+place in the dancers' enclosure. She was so absurd and so laughed at,
+that she had not the courage to make a second attempt. She buried
+herself gloomily in her dark corner, only leaving it to hunt up Jupillon
+and carry him off, with the mute violence of a wife dragging her husband
+out of the wineshop and leading him home by the arm.
+
+It was soon rumored in the street that Germinie went to these balls,
+that she never missed one of them. The fruit woman, at whose shop Adèle
+had already held forth, sent her son "to see;" he returned with a
+confirmation of the rumor, and told of all the petty annoyances to which
+Germinie was subjected, but which did not keep her from returning.
+Thereafter there was no more doubt in the quarter as to the relations
+between mademoiselle's servant and Jupillon--relations which some
+charitable souls had hitherto persisted in denying. The scandal burst
+out, and in a week the poor girl, berated by all the slanderous tongues
+in the quarter, baptized and saluted by the vilest names in the language
+of the streets, fell at a blow from the most emphatically expressed
+esteem to the most brutally advertised contempt.
+
+Thus far her pride--and it was very great--had procured for her the
+respect and consideration which is bestowed, in the lorette quarters,
+upon a servant who honestly serves a virtuous mistress. She had become
+accustomed to respect and deference and attention. She stood apart from
+her comrades. Her unassailable probity, her conduct, as to which not a
+word could be said, her confidential relations with mademoiselle, which
+caused her mistress's honorable character to be reflected upon her, led
+the shopkeeper to treat her on a different footing from the other maids.
+They addressed her, cap in hand; they always called her _Mademoiselle
+Germinie_. They hurried to wait upon her; they offered her the only
+chair in the shop when she had to wait. Even when she contended over
+prices they were still polite with her and never called her _haggler_.
+Jests that were somewhat too broad were cut short when she appeared. She
+was invited to the great banquets, to family parties, and consulted upon
+business matters.
+
+Everything changed as soon as her relations with Jupillon and her
+assiduous attendance at the _Boule-Noire_ were known. The quarter took
+its revenge for having respected her. The brazen-faced maids in the
+house accosted her as one of their own kind. One, whose lover was at
+Mazas, called her: "My dear." The men accosted her familiarly, and with
+all the intimacy of thee and thou in glance and gesture and tone and
+touch. The very children on the sidewalk, who were formerly trained to
+courtesy politely to her, ran away from her as from a person of whom
+they had been told to be afraid. She felt that she was being maligned
+behind her back, handed over to the devil. She could not take a step
+without walking through scorn and receiving a blow from her shame upon
+the cheek.
+
+It was a horrible affliction to her. She suffered as if her honor were
+being torn from her, shred by shred, and dragged in the gutter. But the
+more she suffered, the closer she pressed her love to her heart and
+clung to him. She bore him no ill-will, she uttered no word of reproach
+to him. She attached herself to him by all the tears he caused her pride
+to shed. And now, in the street through which she passed but a short
+time ago, proudly and with head erect, she could be seen, bent double as
+if crouching over her fault, hurrying furtively along, with oblique
+glances, dreading to be recognized, quickening her pace in front of the
+shops that swept their slanders out upon her heels.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Jupillon was constantly complaining that he was tired of working for
+others, that he could not set up for himself, that he could not find
+fifteen or eighteen hundred francs in his mother's purse. He needed no
+more than that, he said, to hire a couple of rooms on the ground floor
+and set up as a glover in a small way. Indeed he was already dreaming of
+what he might do and laying out his plans: he would open a shop in the
+quarter, an excellent quarter for his business, as it was full of
+purchasers, and of makers of wretched gloves at five francs. He would
+soon add a line of perfumery and cravats to his gloves; and then, when
+he had made a tidy sum, he would sell out and take a fine shop on Rue de
+Richelieu.
+
+Whenever he mentioned the subject Germinie asked him innumerable
+questions. She wanted to know everything that was necessary to start in
+business. She made him tell her the names of the tools and
+appurtenances, give her an idea of their prices and where they could be
+bought. She questioned him as to his trade and the details of his work
+so inquisitively and persistently that Jupillon lost his patience at
+last and said to her:
+
+"What's all this to you? The work sickens me enough now; don't mention
+it to me!"
+
+One Sunday she walked toward Montmartre with him. Instead of taking Rue
+Frochot she turned into Rue Pigalle.
+
+"Why, this ain't the way, is it?" said Jupillon.
+
+"I know what I'm about," said she, "come on."
+
+She had taken his arm, and she walked on, turning her head slightly away
+from him so that he could not see what was taking place on her face.
+Half way along Rue Fontaine Saint-Georges, she halted abruptly in front
+of two windows on the ground floor of a house, and said to him: "Look!"
+
+She was trembling with joy.
+
+Jupillon looked; he saw between the two windows, on a glistening copper
+plate:
+
+
+                    _Magasin de Ganterie._
+
+                          JUPILLON.
+
+
+He saw white curtains at the first window. Through the glass in the
+other he saw pigeon-holes and boxes, and, near the window, the little
+glover's cutting board, with the great shears, the jar for clippings,
+and the knife to make holes in the skins in order to stretch them.
+
+"The concierge has your key," she said.
+
+They entered the first room, the shop.
+
+She at once set about showing him everything. She opened the boxes and
+laughed. Then she pushed open the door into the other room. "There, you
+won't be stifled there as you are in the loft at your mother's. Do you
+like it? Oh! it isn't handsome, but it's clean. I'd have liked to give
+you mahogany. Do you like that little rug by the bed? And the paper--I
+didn't think of that----" She put a receipt for the rent in his hand.
+"See! this is for six months. Dame! you must go to work right off and
+earn some money. The few sous I had laid by are all gone. Oh! let me sit
+down. You look so pleased--it gives me a turn--it makes my head spin. I
+haven't any legs."
+
+And she sank into a chair. Jupillon stooped over her to kiss her.
+
+"Ah! yes, they're not there any longer," she said, seeing that he was
+looking for her earrings. "They've gone like my rings. D'ye see, all
+gone----"
+
+And she showed him her hands, bare of the paltry gems she had worked so
+long to buy.
+
+"They all went for the easy-chair, you see--but it's all horsehair."
+
+As Jupillon stood in front of her with an embarrassed air, as if he were
+trying to find words with which to thank her, she continued:
+
+"Why, you're a funny fellow. What's the matter with you? Ah! it's on
+that account, is it?" And she pointed to the bedroom. "You're a stupid!
+I love you, don't I? Well then?"
+
+Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says sublime things.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+She became _enceinte_.
+
+At first she doubted, she dared not believe it. But when she was certain
+of the fact, she was filled with immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed
+her heart. Her happiness was so great and so overpowering that it
+stifled at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling
+that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried women and poisons
+their anticipations of childbirth, the divine hope that lives and moves
+within them. The thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her
+_liaison_, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the abominable
+thing that had always made her think of suicide: dishonor,--even the
+fear of being detected by mademoiselle and dismissed by her--nothing of
+all this could cast a shadow on her felicity. The child that she
+expected allowed her to see nothing but it, as if she had it already in
+her arms before her; and, hardly attempting to conceal her condition,
+she bore her woman's shame almost proudly through the streets, exulting
+and radiant in the thought that she was to be a mother.
+
+She was unhappy only because she had spent all her savings, and was not
+only without money but had been paid several months' wages in advance by
+her mistress. She bitterly deplored having to receive her child in a
+poor way. Often, as she passed through Rue Saint-Lazare, she would stop
+in front of a linen-draper's, in whose windows were displayed stores of
+rich baby-linen. She would devour with her eyes the pretty, dainty
+flowered garments, the piqué bibs, the long short-waisted dresses
+trimmed with English embroidery, the whole doll-like cherub's costume. A
+terrible longing,--the longing of a pregnant woman,--to break the glass
+and steal it all, would come upon her: the clerks standing behind the
+display framework became accustomed to seeing her take up her station
+there and would laughingly point her out to one another.
+
+Again, at intervals, amid the happiness that overflowed her heart, amid
+the ecstasy that exalted her being, another disturbing thought passed
+through her mind. She would ask herself how the father would welcome his
+child. Two or three times she had attempted to tell him of her condition
+but had not dared. At last, one day, seeing that his face wore the
+expression she had awaited so long as a preliminary to telling him
+everything, an expression in which there was a touch of affection, she
+confessed to him, blushing hotly and as if asking his forgiveness, what
+it was that made her so happy.
+
+"That's all imagination!" said Jupillon.
+
+And when she had assured him that it was not imagination and that she
+was positively five months advanced in pregnancy: "Just my luck!" the
+young man rejoined. "Thanks!" And he swore. "Would you mind telling me
+who's going to feed the sparrow?"
+
+"Oh! never you fear! it sha'n't suffer, I'll look out for that. And then
+it'll be so pretty! Don't be afraid, no one shall know anything about
+it. I'll fix myself up. See! the last part of the time I'll walk like
+this, with my head back--I won't wear any petticoats, and I'll pull
+myself in--you'll see! Nobody shall notice anything, I tell you. Just
+think of it! a little child of our own!"
+
+"Well, as long as it's so, it's so, eh?" said the young man.
+
+"Say," ventured Germinie, timidly, "suppose you should tell your
+mother?"
+
+"Ma? Oh! no, I rather think not. You must lie in first. After that we'll
+take the brat to the house. It will give her a start, and perhaps she'll
+consent without meaning to."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Twelfth Night arrived. It was the day on which Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil gave a grand dinner-party regularly every year. She invited
+all the children of her own family or her old friends' families, great
+and small. The small suite would hardly hold them all. They were obliged
+to put part of the furniture on the landing, and a table was set in each
+of the two rooms which formed mademoiselle's whole suite. For the
+children, that day was a great festival to which they looked forward for
+a week. They came running up the stairway behind the pastry-cook's men.
+At table they ate too much without being scolded. At night, they were
+unwilling to go to bed, they climbed on the chairs and made a racket
+that always gave Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a sick headache the next
+day; but she bore them no grudge therefor: she had had the full
+enjoyment of a genuine grandmother's fête, in listening to them, looking
+at them, tying around their necks the white napkins that made them look
+so rosy. And not for anything in the world would she have failed to give
+this dinner-party, which filled her old maid's apartments with the
+fair-haired little imps of Satan, and brought thither, in a single day,
+an atmosphere of activity and youth and laughter that lasted a whole
+year.
+
+Germinie was preparing the dinner. She was whipping cream in an earthen
+bowl on her knees, when suddenly she felt the first pains. She looked at
+her face in the bit of a broken mirror that she had above her kitchen
+dresser, and saw that she was pale. She went down to Adèle: "Give me
+your mistress's rouge," she said. And she put some on her cheeks. Then
+she went up again, and, refusing to listen to the voice of her
+suffering, finished cooking the dinner. It had to be served, and she
+served it. At dessert, she leaned against the furniture and grasped the
+backs of chairs as she passed the plates, hiding her torture with the
+ghastly set smile of people whose entrails are writhing.
+
+"How's this, are you sick?" said her mistress, looking sharply at her.
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle, a little--it may be the charcoal or the hot
+kitchen."
+
+"Go to bed--we don't need you any more, and you can clean up to-morrow."
+
+She went down to Adèle once more.
+
+"It's come," she said; "call a cab quick. It was Rue de la Huchette
+where you said your midwife lives, wasn't it? opposite a copper
+planer's? Haven't you a pen and paper?"
+
+And she sat down to write a line to her mistress. She told her that she
+was too ill to work, that she had gone to the hospital, but would not
+tell her where, because she would fatigue herself coming to see her;
+that she would come back within a week.
+
+"There you are!" said Adèle, all out of breath, giving her the number of
+the cab.
+
+"I can stay there," said Germinie; "not a word to mademoiselle. That's
+all. Swear you won't say a word to her!"
+
+She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.
+
+"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going out?"
+
+"I am going to lie in----It took me during the day. There was a great
+dinner-party here----Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I
+told you never to come; I don't want you to!"
+
+"Because----I'll tell you----because just now I absolutely must have
+forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must."
+
+"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"
+
+"That's hard luck----look out! What do you want to do?" And he offered
+his arm to assist her. "_Cristi!_ I'm going to have hard work to get 'em
+all the same."
+
+He had opened the carriage door.
+
+"Where do you want him to take you?"
+
+"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his
+hand.
+
+"No, no," said Jupillon.
+
+"Oh! nonsense----there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs
+left."
+
+The cab started away.
+
+Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the
+two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and
+said to Germinie through the window:
+
+"At least, I can go with you?"
+
+"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing
+on the cushions of the cab.
+
+After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in
+front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to
+such medical students as happened to pass through the street that there
+was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting
+spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternité.
+
+The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a
+female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of
+the four beds in the _salle d'accouchement_. Once in bed, her pains
+became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other
+beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge
+country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front
+of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were
+drying.
+
+Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was
+moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the
+blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of
+childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming
+in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having
+created. Suddenly a loud cry: "I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes
+in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw
+her arms around the neck of one of the assistant nurses, fall back
+almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly
+still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on
+the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who
+sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young assistant, with
+desperate gestures; the assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell
+in a dead faint upon the floor.
+
+Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and
+the half-dead assistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to
+consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who
+were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell
+that hung beside each bed to call for help.
+
+Thereafter La Maternité was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal
+epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those
+cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole
+rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the
+closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the
+plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all
+before it and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that
+issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie,
+at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the
+milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws,
+agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by
+hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the
+application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the
+victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with
+them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they
+were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn
+from the body. The very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous
+aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused
+by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.
+
+For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing
+her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all
+these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was
+determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her
+child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energy was
+exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold wave flowed into her heart.
+She said to herself that it was all over. The hand that death lays upon
+one's shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching her. She
+felt the first breath of the epidemic, the belief that she was its
+destined victim, and the impression that she was already half-possessed
+by it. Although unresigned, she succumbed. Her life, vanquished
+beforehand, hardly made an effort to struggle. At that crisis a head
+bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.
+
+It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-assistants, a fair head,
+with long golden locks and blue eyes so soft and sweet that the dying
+saw heaven opening its gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women
+said: "Look! the Blessed Virgin!"
+
+"My child," she said to Germinie, "you must ask for your discharge at
+once. You must go away from here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap
+up well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must take a hot
+draught of something or other. You must try to take a sweat. Then, it
+won't do you any harm. But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for
+you here to-night," she said, glancing around at the beds. "Don't say
+that I told you to go: you would get me discharged if you should."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Germinie recovered in a few days. The joy and pride of having given
+birth to a tiny creature in whom her flesh was mingled with the flesh of
+the man she loved, the bliss of being a mother, saved her from the
+natural results of a confinement in which she did not receive proper
+care. She was restored to health and had an apparent pleasure in living
+that her mistress had never before seen her manifest.
+
+Every Sunday, no matter what the weather might be, she left the house
+about eleven o'clock; mademoiselle believed that she went to see a
+friend in the country, and was delighted that her maid derived so much
+benefit from these days passed in the open air. Germinie would capture
+Jupillon, who allowed himself to be taken in tow without too much
+resistance, and they would start for Pommeuse where the child was, and
+where a good breakfast ordered by the mother awaited them. Once in the
+carriage on the Mulhouse railway, Germinie would not speak or reply when
+spoken to. She would lean out of the window, and all her thoughts seemed
+to be upon what lay before her. She gazed, as if her longing were
+striving to outrun the steam. The train would hardly have stopped before
+she had leaped out, tossed her ticket to the ticket-taker, and started
+at a run on the Pommeuse road, leaving Jupillon behind. She drew nearer
+and nearer, she could see the house, she was there: yes, there was the
+child! She would pounce upon her, snatch her from the nurse's arms with
+jealous hands--a mother's hands!--hug her, strain her to her heart, kiss
+her, devour her with kisses and looks and smiles! She would gaze
+admiringly at her for an instant and then, distraught with joy, mad with
+love, would cover her with kisses to the tips of her little bare toes.
+Breakfast would be served. She would sit at the table with the child on
+her knees and eat nothing: she had kissed her so much that she had not
+yet looked at her, and she would begin to seek out points of resemblance
+to themselves in the little one. One feature was his, another
+hers:--"She has your nose and my eyes. Her hair will be like yours in
+time. It will curl! Look, those are your hands--she is all you." And for
+hours she would continue the inexhaustible and charming prattle of a
+woman who is determined to give a man his share of their daughter.
+Jupillon submitted to it all with reasonably good grace, thanks to
+divers three-sou cigars Germinie always produced from her pocket and
+gave to him one by one. Then he had found a means of diversion; the
+Morin flowed at the foot of the garden. Jupillon was a true Parisian: he
+loved to fish with a pole and line.
+
+And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the
+garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting
+on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream. On pleasant
+days, the sun poured down upon the broad sparkling current, from which
+beams of light arose as from a mirror. It was like a display of
+fireworks from the sky and the stream, amid which Germinie would hold
+the little girl upon her feet and let her trample upon her with her
+little bare pink legs, in her short baby dress, her skin shimmering in
+spots in the sunlight, her flesh mottled with sunbeams like the flesh of
+angels Germinie had seen in pictures. She had a divinely sweet sensation
+when the little one, with the active hands of children that cannot talk,
+touched her chin and mouth and cheeks, persisted in putting her fingers
+in her eyes, rested them playfully on the lids, and kept them moving
+over her whole face, tickling and tormenting her with the dear little
+digits that seem to grope in the dark for a mother's features: it was as
+if her child's life and warmth were wandering over her face. From time
+to time she would bestow half of her smile on Jupillon over the little
+one's head, and would call to him: "Do look at her!"
+
+Then the child would fall asleep with the open mouth that laughs in
+sleep. Germinie would lean over her and listen to her breathing in
+repose. And, soothed by the peaceful respiration, she would gradually
+forget herself as she gazed dreamily at the poor abode of her happiness,
+the rustic garden, the apple-trees with their leaves covered with little
+yellow snails and the red-cheeked apples on the southern limbs, the
+poles, at whose feet the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning
+to climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the little
+circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside her, on the edge of
+the stream, the patches of grass covered with dog's mercury, the white
+heads of the nettles against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the
+bottles of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the antics of
+a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and dreamed. She thought of the
+past, having her future on her knees. With the grass and the trees and
+the river that were before her eyes, she reconstructed, in memory, the
+rustic garden of her rustic childhood. She saw again the two stones
+reaching down to the water, from which her mother, when she was a little
+child, used to wash her feet before putting her to bed in summertime.
+
+"Look you, Père Remalard," said Jupillon from his board, on one of the
+hottest days in August, to the peasant who was watching him,--"do you
+know they won't bite at the red worm worth a sou?"
+
+"You must try the gentle," rejoined the peasant sententiously.
+
+"All right, I'll have my revenge with the gentle! Père Remalard, you
+must get some calf's lights Thursday. You hang 'em up in that tree, and
+Sunday we'll see."
+
+On the Sunday Jupillon had miraculous success with his fishing, and
+Germinie heard the first syllable issue from her daughter's mouth.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+On Wednesday morning, when she came downstairs, Germinie found a letter
+for herself. In that letter, written on the back of a laundry receipt,
+the Remalard woman informed her that her child had fallen sick almost
+immediately after her departure; that she had grown steadily worse; that
+she had consulted the doctor; that he said some insect had stung the
+child; that she had been to him a second time; that she did not know
+what more to do; that she had had pilgrimages made for her. The letter
+concluded thus: "If you could see how troubled I am for your little
+one--if you could see how good she is when she isn't suffering!"
+
+This letter produced upon Germinie the effect of a push from behind. She
+went out and instinctively walked toward the railroad that would take
+her to her little one. Her hair was uncombed and she was in her
+slippers, but she did not think of that. She must see her child, she
+must see her instantly. Then she would come back. She thought of
+mademoiselle's breakfast for a moment, then forgot it. Suddenly,
+half-way to the station, she saw a clock at a cab office and noticed
+the hour: she remembered that there was no train at that time. She
+retraced her steps, saying to herself that she would hurry the breakfast
+and then make some excuse to be given her liberty for the rest of the
+day. But when the breakfast was served she could find none: her mind was
+so full of her child that she could not invent a falsehood; her
+imagination was benumbed. And then, if she had spoken, if she had made
+the request, she would have betrayed herself; she could feel the words
+upon her lips: "I want to go and see my child!" At night she dared not
+make her escape; mademoiselle had been a little indisposed the night
+before; she was afraid that she might need her.
+
+The next morning when she entered mademoiselle's room with a fable she
+had invented during the night, all ready to ask for leave of absence,
+mademoiselle said to her, looking up from a letter that had just been
+sent up to her from the lodge: "Ah! my old friend De Belleuse wants you
+for the whole day to-day, to help her with her preserves. Come, give me
+my two eggs, post-haste, and off with you. Eh? what! doesn't that suit
+you? What's the matter?"
+
+"With me? why nothing at all!" Germinie found strength to say.
+
+All that endless day she passed standing over hot stewpans and sealing
+up jars, in the torture known only to those whom the chances of life
+detain at a distance from the sick bed of those dear to them. She
+suffered such heart-rending agony as those unhappy creatures suffer who
+cannot go where their anxiety calls them, and who, in the extremity of
+despair caused by separation and uncertainty, constantly imagine that
+death will come in their absence.
+
+As she received no letter Thursday evening and none Friday morning, she
+took courage. If the little one were growing worse the nurse would have
+written her. The little one was better: she imagined her saved, cured.
+Children are forever coming near dying, and they get well so quickly!
+And then hers was strong. She decided to wait, to be patient until
+Sunday, which was only forty-eight hours away, deceiving the remainder
+of her fears with the superstitions that say yes to hope, persuading
+herself that her daughter had "escaped," because the first person she
+met in the morning was a man, because she had seen a red horse in the
+street, because she had guessed that a certain person would turn into a
+certain street, because she had ascended a flight of stairs in so many
+strides.
+
+On Saturday, in the morning, when she entered Mère Jupillon's shop, she
+found her weeping hot tears over a lump of butter that she was covering
+with a moist cloth.
+
+"Ah! it's you, is it?" said Mère Jupillon. "That poor charcoal woman!
+See, I'm actually crying over her! She just went away from here. You
+don't know--they can't get their faces clean in their trade with
+anything but butter. And here's her love of a daughter--she's at
+death's door, you know, the dear child. That's the way it is with us!
+Ah! _mon Dieu_, yes!--Well, as I was saying, she said to her just now
+like this: 'Mamma, I want you to wash my face in butter right away--for
+the good God.'"
+
+And Mère Jupillon began to sob.
+
+Germinie had fled. All that day she was unable to keep still. Again and
+again she went up to her chamber to prepare the few things she proposed
+to take to her little one the next day, to dress her cleanly, to make a
+little special toilet for her in honor of her recovery. As she went down
+in the evening to put Mademoiselle to bed, Adèle handed her a letter
+that she had found for her below.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Mademoiselle had begun to undress, when Germinie entered her bedroom,
+walked a few steps, dropped upon a chair, and almost immediately, after
+two or three long-drawn, deep, heart-breaking sighs, mademoiselle saw
+her throw herself backward, wringing her hands, and at last roll from
+the chair to the floor. She tried to lift her up, but Germinie was
+shaken by such violent convulsions that the old woman was obliged to let
+the frantic body fall again upon the floor; for all the limbs, which
+were for a moment contracted and rigid, lashed out to right and left, at
+random, with the sharp report of the trigger of a rifle, and threw down
+whatever they came in contact with. At mademoiselle's shrieks on the
+landing, a maid ran to a doctor's office near by but did not find him;
+four other women employed in the house assisted mademoiselle to lift
+Germinie up and carry her to the bed in her mistress's room, on which
+they laid her after cutting her corset lacings.
+
+The terrible convulsions, the nervous contortions of the limbs, the
+snapping of the tendons had ceased; but her neck and her breast, which
+was uncovered where her dress was unbuttoned, moved up and down as if
+waves were rising and falling under the skin, and the rustling of the
+skirts showed that the movement extended to her feet. Her head thrown
+back, her face flushed, her eyes full of melancholy tenderness, of the
+patient agony we see in the eyes of the wounded, the great veins clearly
+marked under her chin, Germinie, breathing hard and paying no heed to
+questions, raised her hands to her neck and throat and clawed at them;
+she seemed to be trying to tear out the sensation of something rising
+and falling within her. In vain did they make her inhale ether and drink
+orange-flower water; the waves of grief that flowed through her body did
+not cease their action; and her face continued to wear the same
+expression of gentle melancholy and sentimental anxiety, which seemed to
+place the suffering of the heart above the suffering of the flesh in
+every feature. For a long time everything seemed to wound her senses and
+to produce a painful effect upon them--the bright light, the sound of
+voices, the odor of the things about her. At last, after an hour or
+more, a deluge of tears suddenly poured from her eyes and put an end to
+the terrible crisis. After that there was nothing more than an
+occasional convulsive shudder in the overburdened body, soon quieted by
+weariness and by general prostration. It was possible to carry Germinie
+to her own room.
+
+The letter Adèle handed her contained the news of her daughter's death.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+As a result of this crisis, Germinie fell into a state of dumb, brutish
+sorrow. For months she was insensible to everything; for months,
+completely possessed and absorbed by the thought of the little creature
+that was no more, she carried her child's death in her entrails as she
+had carried her life. Every evening, when she went up to her chamber,
+she took the poor darling's little cap and dress from the trunk at the
+foot of her bed. She would gaze at them and touch them; she would lay
+them out on the bed; she would sit for hours weeping over them, kissing
+them, talking to them, saying the things that a mother's bitter sorrow
+is wont to say to a little daughter's ghost.
+
+While weeping for her daughter the unhappy creature wept for herself as
+well. A voice whispered to her that she was saved had the child lived;
+that to have that child to love was her Providence; that all that she
+dreaded in herself would be expended upon that dear head and be
+sanctified there--her affections, her unreasoning impulses, her ardor,
+all the passions of her nature. It seemed to her that she had felt her
+mother's heart soothing and purifying her woman's heart. In her
+daughter she saw a sort of celestial vision that would redeem her and
+make her whole, a little angel of deliverance as it were, issuing from
+her errors to fight for her and rescue her from the evil influences
+which pursued her and by which she sometimes thought that she was
+possessed.
+
+When she began to recover from the first prostration of despair, when,
+as the consciousness of life and the perception of objects returned to
+her, she looked about her with eyes that saw, she was aroused from her
+grief by a more poignant cause of bitterness of spirit.
+
+Madame Jupillon, who had become too stout and too heavy to do what it
+was necessary for her to do at the creamery, notwithstanding all the
+assistance rendered by Germinie, had sent to her province for a niece of
+hers. She was the embodiment of the blooming youth of the country, a
+woman in whom there was still something of the child, active and
+vivacious, with black eyes full of sunlight, lips as round and red as
+cherries, the summer heat of her province in her complexion, the warmth
+of perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous as she was, the
+girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally,
+obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She
+had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless
+effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly
+of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant
+hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which
+her cousin's vanity was without means of defence. The child's presence
+deprived Germinie of all hope of repose. Mere girl as she was, she
+wounded her every minute in the day by her presence, her touch, her
+caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of love. Her
+preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly
+together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the
+half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had
+gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor--everything helped
+to exasperate Germinie and to arouse a sullen wrath within her;
+everything wounded that jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals
+caused it a bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved.
+
+She dared not speak to Mère Jupillon and denounce the little one to her,
+for fear of betraying herself; but whenever she found herself alone with
+Jupillon she vented her feelings in recriminations, complaints and
+quarrels. She would remind him of an incident, a word, something he had
+done or said, some answer he had made, a trifle forgotten by him but
+still bleeding in her heart.
+
+"Are you mad?" Jupillon would say to her; "a slip of a girl!"--"A slip
+of a girl, eh? nonsense!--when she has such eyes that all the men stare
+at her in the street! I went out with her the other day--I was
+ashamed--I don't know how she did it, but we were followed by a
+gentleman all the time."--"Well, what if you were? She's a pretty girl,
+you know!"--"Pretty! pretty!" And at that word Germinie would hurl
+herself, figuratively speaking, at the girl's face, and claw it to
+pieces with frantic words.
+
+Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: "Look here! you love
+her!"--"Well! what then?" he would retort, highly entertained by these
+disputes, by the opportunity to watch the antics of this fierce wrath
+which he fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement of
+trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half insane under his
+sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling wildly about and running her
+head against stone walls in the first paroxysms of madness.
+
+As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day, a revolution
+took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle
+course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly
+clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed
+and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out
+every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to
+her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and
+she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked upon him as an
+assassin. She conceived a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him
+as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that one has of a
+person who is one's Bane!
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+One morning, after a night passed by her in turning over and over in her
+mind all her despairing, hate-ridden thoughts, Germinie went to the
+creamery for her four sous' worth of milk and found in the back-shop
+three or four maids from the neighborhood engaged in "taking an
+eye-opener." They were seated at a table, gossiping and sipping
+liqueurs.
+
+"Aha!" said Adèle, striking the table with her glass; "you here already,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil?"
+
+"What's this?" said Germinie, taking Adèle's glass; "I'd like some
+myself."
+
+"Are you so thirsty as all that this morning? Brandy and absinthe,
+that's all!--my soldier boy's _tap_, you know,--he never drank anything
+else. It's a little stiff, eh?"
+
+"Ah! yes," said Germinie, contracting her lips and winking like a child
+who is given a glass of liqueur with the dessert at a grand
+dinner-party.
+
+"It's good, all the same." Her spirits rose. "Madame Jupillon, let's
+have the bottle--I'll pay."
+
+And she tossed money on the table. After the third glass, she cried: "I
+am _tight_!" And she roared with laughter.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had gone out that morning to collect her
+half-yearly income. When she returned at eleven o'clock, she rang once,
+twice! no one came. "Ah!" she said to herself, "she must have gone
+down." She opened the door with her key, went to her bedroom and looked
+in: the mattress and bedclothes lay in a heap on two chairs, and
+Germinie was stretched out across the straw under-mattress, sleeping
+heavily, like a log, in the utterly relaxed condition following a sudden
+attack of lethargy.
+
+At the noise made by mademoiselle, Germinie sprang to her feet and
+passed her hand over her eyes.--"Yes?" she said, as if some one had
+called her; her eyes were wandering.
+
+"What's happened?" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil in alarm; "did you
+fall? Is anything the matter with you?"
+
+"With me? no," Germinie replied; "I fell asleep. What time is it?
+Nothing's the matter. Ah! what a fool!"
+
+And she began to shake the mattress, turning her back to her mistress to
+hide the flush of intoxication on her face.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+One Sunday morning Jupillon was dressing in the room Germinie had
+furnished for him. His mother was sitting by, gazing at him with the
+wondering pride expressed in the eyes of mothers among the common people
+in presence of a son who dresses like a _monsieur_.
+
+"You're dressed up like the young man on the first floor!" she said. "I
+should think it was his coat. I don't mean to say fine things don't look
+well on you, too----"
+
+Jupillon, intent upon tying his cravat, made no reply.
+
+"You'll play the deuce with the poor girls to-day!" continued Mère
+Jupillon, giving to her voice an accent of insinuating sweetness: "Look
+you, bibi, let me tell you this, you great bad boy: if a young woman
+goes wrong, so much the worse for her! that's their look-out. You're a
+man, aren't you? you've got the age and the figure and everything. I
+can't always keep you in leading-strings. So, I said to myself, as well
+one as another. That one will do. And I fixed her so that she wouldn't
+see anything. Yes, Germinie would do, as you seemed to like her. That
+prevented you from wasting your money on bad women--and then I didn't
+see anything out of the way in the girl till now. But now it won't do at
+all. They're telling stories in the quarter--a heap of horrible things
+about us. A pack of vipers! We're above all that, I know. When one has
+been an honest woman all her life, thank God! But you never know what
+will happen--mademoiselle would only have to put the end of her nose
+into her maid's affairs. Why there's the law--the bare idea gives me a
+turn. What do you say to that, bibi, eh?"
+
+"_Dame_, mamma,--whatever you please."
+
+"Ah! I knew you loved your dear darling mamma!" exclaimed the monstrous
+creature embracing him. "Well! invite her to dinner to-night. You can
+get up two bottles of our Lunel--at two francs--the heady kind. And be
+sure she comes. Make eyes at her, so that she'll think to-day's the
+great day. Put on your fine gloves: they'll make you look more
+dignified."
+
+Germinie arrived at seven o'clock, happy and bright and hopeful, her
+head filled with blissful dreams by the mysterious air with which
+Jupillon delivered his mother's invitation. They dined and drank and
+made merry. Mère Jupillon began to cast glances expressive of deep
+emotion, drowned in tears, upon the couple sitting opposite her. When
+the coffee was served, she said, as if for the purpose of being left
+alone with Germinie: "Bibi, you know you have an errand to do this
+evening."
+
+Jupillon went out. Madame Jupillon, as she sipped her coffee, turned to
+Germinie the face of a mother seeking to learn her daughter's secret,
+and, in her indulgence, forgiving her in advance of her confession. For
+a moment the two women sat thus, silent, one waiting for the other to
+speak, the other with the cry of her heart on her lips. Suddenly
+Germinie rushed from her chair into the stout woman's arms.
+
+"If you knew, Madame Jupillon!"
+
+She talked and wept and embraced her all at once. "Oh! you won't be
+angry with me! Well! yes, I love him--I've had a child by him. It's
+true, I love him. Three years ago----"
+
+At every word Madame Jupillon's face became sterner and more icy. She
+coldly pushed Germinie away, and in her most doleful voice, with an
+accent of lamentation and hopeless desolation, she began, like a person
+who is suffocating: "Oh! my God--you!--tell me such things as
+that!--me!--his mother!--to my face! My God, must it be? My son--a
+child--an innocent child! You've had the face to ruin him for me! And
+now you tell me that you did it! No, it ain't possible, my God! And I
+had such confidence. There's nothing worth living for. There's no
+trusting anybody in this world! All the same, mademoiselle, I wouldn't
+ever 'a' believed it of you. _Dame!_ such things give me a turn. Ah!
+this upsets me completely. I know myself, and I'm quite likely to be
+sick after this----"
+
+"Madame Jupillon! Madame Jupillon!" Germinie murmured in an imploring
+tone, half dead with shame and grief on the chair on which she had
+fallen. "I beg you to forgive me. It was stronger than I was. And then I
+thought--I believed----"
+
+"You believed! Oh! my God; you believed! What did you believe? That
+you'd be my son's wife, eh? Ah! Lord God! is it possible, my poor
+child?"
+
+And adopting a more and more plaintive and lamentable tone as the words
+she hurled at Germinie cut deeper and deeper, Mère Jupillon continued:
+"But, my poor girl, you must have a reason, let's hear it. What did I
+always tell you? That it would be all right if you'd been born ten years
+earlier. Let's see, your date was 1820, you told me, and now it's '49.
+You're getting on toward thirty, you see, my dear child. I say! it makes
+me feel bad to say that to you--I'd so much rather not hurt you. But a
+body only has to look at you, my poor young lady. What can I do? It's
+your age--your hair--I can lay my finger in the place where you part
+it."
+
+"But," said Germinie, in whose heart black wrath was beginning to
+rumble, "what about what your son owes me? My money? The money I took
+out of the savings bank, the money I borrowed for him, the money I----"
+
+"Money? he owes you money? Oh! yes, what you lent him to begin business
+with. Well! what about it? Do you think we're thieves? Does anyone want
+to cheat you out of your old money, although there wasn't any paper--I
+know it because the other day--it just occurs to me--that honest man of
+a child of mine wanted to write it down for fear he might die. But the
+next minute we're pickpockets, as glib as you please! Oh! my God, it's
+hardly worth while living in such times as these! Ah! I'm well paid for
+getting attached to you! But I see through it now. You're a politician,
+you are! You wanted to pay yourself with my son, for his whole life!
+Excuse me! No, thank you! It costs less to give back your money! A café
+waiter's leavings! my poor dear boy! God preserve him from it!"
+
+Germinie had snatched her shawl and hat from the hook and was out of
+doors.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Mademoiselle was sitting in her large armchair at the corner of the
+fireplace, where a few live embers were still sleeping under the ashes.
+Her black cap was pulled down over her wrinkled forehead almost to her
+eyes. Her black dress, cut in the shape of a child's frock, was draped
+in scanty folds about her scanty body, showing the location of every
+bone, and fell straight from her knees to the floor. She wore a small
+black shawl crossed on her breast and tied behind her back, as they are
+worn by little girls. Her half-open hands were resting on her hips, with
+the palms turned outward--thin, old woman's hands, awkward and stiff,
+and swollen with gout at the knuckles and finger joints. Sitting in the
+huddled, crouching posture that compels old people to raise their heads
+to look at you and speak to you, she seemed to be buried in all that
+mass of black, whence nothing emerged but her face, to which
+preponderance of bile had imparted the yellow hue of old ivory, and the
+flashing glance of her brown eyes. One who saw her thus, her bright,
+sparkling eyes, the meagre body, the garb of poverty and the noble air
+with which she bore all the burdens of age, might well have fancied
+that he was looking at a fairy on the stage of the Petits-Ménages.
+
+Germinie was by her side. The old lady began:
+
+"The list is still under the door, eh, Germinie?"
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle."
+
+"Do you know, my girl," Mademoiselle de Varandeuil resumed, after a
+pause, "do you know that when one is born in one of the finest houses on
+Rue Royale--when one has been in a fair way to own the Grand and
+Petit-Charolais--when one has almost had the Château of
+Clichy-la-Garenne for a country house--and when it took two servants to
+carry the silver platter on which the joint was served at your
+grandmother's--do you know that it takes no small amount of
+philosophy"--and mademoiselle with difficulty raised a hand to her
+shoulder--"to see yourself end like this, in this devilish nest of
+rheumatism, where, in spite of all the list in the world, you can't keep
+out of draughts.--That's it, stir up the fire a little."
+
+She put out her feet toward Germinie, who was kneeling in front of the
+fireplace, and laughingly placed them under her nose: "Do you know that
+that takes no small amount of philosophy--to wear stockings out at heel!
+Simpleton! I'm not scolding you; I know well enough that you can't do
+everything. So you might as well have a woman come to do the mending.
+That's not very much to do. Why don't you speak to that little girl that
+came here last year? She had a face that I remember."
+
+"Oh! she's black as a mole, mademoiselle."
+
+"Bah! I knew it. In the first place you never think well of anybody.
+That isn't true, you say? Why, wasn't she a niece of Mère Jupillon's? We
+might take her for one or two days a week."
+
+"That hussy shall never set foot here."
+
+"Nonsense, more fables! You're a most astonishing creature, to adore
+people and then not want to see them again. What has she done to you?"
+
+"She's a lost creature, I tell you!"
+
+"Bah! what does my linen care for that?"
+
+"But, mademoiselle."
+
+"All right! find me someone else then. I don't care about her
+particularly. But find me someone."
+
+"Oh! the women that come in like that don't do any work. I'll mend your
+clothes. You don't need any one."
+
+"You!--Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!" said mademoiselle
+jocosely; "and then, will Mère Jupillon ever give you the time?"
+
+"Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall ever leave in her house
+again!"
+
+"Hoity-toity! What's that? She too! so she's on your black books, is
+she? Oho! hurry up and make another acquaintance, or else, _bon Dieu de
+Dieu_! we shall have some bad days here!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+The winter of that year should certainly have assured Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter. She had to undergo the reflex
+action of her maid's chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance of
+her embittered, contradictory moods, which the approaching spring would
+ere long infect with that species of malignant madness which the
+critical season, the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing
+fructification of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive
+organizations.
+
+Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had
+once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting:
+"Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a
+secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by
+which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a
+bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her
+presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with
+her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from
+her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle
+could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial
+question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by
+her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She
+would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see
+that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against
+various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That
+woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit
+of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week
+following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil's remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike,
+climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their
+turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her
+ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing
+grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a
+persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would
+be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the
+partitions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster,
+the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one
+imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: "Oh! yes,
+I'll do your work for you!"
+
+Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their
+service. Long habit, the weakening will-power, the horror of change,
+the dread of new faces,--everything disposes them to weakness and
+cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness
+to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame,
+mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She
+pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited,
+curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over
+or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no
+thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing
+herself so much suffering.
+
+In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's maid; she was
+Devotion, waiting to close her eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked
+by death, alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections from
+grave to grave, had found her last friend in her servant. She had rested
+her heart upon her as upon an adopted daughter, and she was especially
+unhappy because she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at
+intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of her brooding
+melancholy and her savage humor, and threw herself on her knees before
+her kind heart. Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar's song, or any
+one of the nothings that float in the air and expand the heart, she
+would burst into tears and demonstrations of affection; her heart would
+overflow with burning emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in
+embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had effaced
+everything. At other times some trifling ailment of mademoiselle's would
+bring about the change; a smile would come to the old servant's face and
+gentleness to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments, mademoiselle would
+say: "Come, my girl--something's the matter. Tell me what it is." And
+Germinie would reply: "No, mademoiselle, it's the weather."--"The
+weather!" mademoiselle would repeat with a doubtful air, "the weather!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking
+together by the stove in their back-shop.
+
+Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to
+purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor
+business and by credits given to certain _lorettes_ on the street, who
+had left the key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had not
+prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been
+taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to
+advance him the money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer had
+not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he
+refused point-blank.
+
+Mère Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the
+number drawn by her son: "Twenty-two! twenty-two!" And she said: "And
+yet I sewed a black spider into your _paletot_ with his web; a _velvety_
+fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they told me and made
+you wear the cap you were baptized in. Ah! the good God ain't fair!
+There's the fruit woman's son drew a lucky number! That comes of being
+honest! And those two sluts at number eighteen must go and hook it with
+my money! I might have known they meant something by the way they shook
+hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred francs, did you know
+it? And the black creature opposite--and that infernal girl as had the
+face to eat pots of strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well
+have taken me too, the hussies! But you haven't gone yet all the same.
+I'd rather sell the creamery--I'll go out to work again, do cooking or
+housekeeping,--anything! Why, I'd draw money from a stone for you!"
+
+Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking. When she had
+finished, he said: "That'll do for talk, mamma!--all that's nothing but
+words. You'll spoil your digestion and it ain't worth while. You needn't
+sell anything--you needn't strain yourself at all--I'll buy my
+substitute and it sha'n't cost you a sou;--do you want to bet on it?"
+
+"Jesus!" ejaculated Madame Jupillon.
+
+"I have an idea."
+
+After a pause, Jupillon continued: "I didn't want to make trouble with
+you on account of Germinie--you know, at the time the stories about us
+were going round; you thought it was time for me to break with her--that
+she would be in our way--and you kicked her out of the house, stiff.
+That wasn't my idea--I didn't think she was so bad as all that for the
+family butter. But, however, you thought best to do it. And perhaps,
+after all, you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you
+warmed her up for me--yes, warmed her up--I've met her once or
+twice--and she's changed, I tell you. Gad! how she's drying up!"
+
+"But you know very well she hasn't got a sou."
+
+"I don't say she has, of her own. But what's that got to do with it?
+She'll find it somewhere. She's good for twenty-three hundred shiners
+yet!"
+
+"But suppose you get mixed up in it?"
+
+"Oh! she won't steal 'em----"
+
+"The deuce she won't!"
+
+"Well! if she does, it won't be from anyone but her mistress. Do you
+suppose her mademoiselle would have her pinched for that? She'll turn
+her off, and that'll be the end of it. We'll advise her to try the air
+in another quarter--off she goes!--and we sha'n't see her again. But it
+would be too stupid for her to steal. She'll arrange it somehow, she'll
+hunt round and turn things over. I don't know how, not I! but that's her
+affair, you understand. This is the time for her to show her talents. By
+the way, perhaps you don't know, they say her old woman's sick. If the
+dear lady should happen to step out and leave her all the stuff, as the
+story goes in the quarter--why, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have
+played see-saw with her, eh, mamma? We must put on gloves, you see,
+mamma, when we're dealing with people who may have four or five thousand
+a year come tumbling into their aprons."
+
+"Oh! my God! what are you talking about? But after the way I treated
+her--oh! no, she'll never come back here."
+
+"Well! I tell you I'll bring her back--and to-night at the latest," said
+Jupillon, rising, and rolling a cigarette between his fingers. "No
+excuses, you know," he said to his mother, "they won't do any good--and
+be cold to her. Act as if you received her only on my account, because
+you are weak. No one knows what may happen, we must always keep an
+anchor to windward."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Jupillon was walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of
+Germinie's house when she came out.
+
+"Good-evening, Germinie," he said, behind her.
+
+She turned as if she had been struck, and, without answering his
+greeting, instinctively moved on a few steps as if to fly from him.
+
+"Germinie!"
+
+Jupillon said nothing more than that; he did not follow her, he did not
+move. She came back to him like a trained beast when his rope is taken
+off.
+
+"What is it?" said she. "Do you want more money? or do you want to tell
+me some of your mother's foolish remarks?"
+
+"No, but I am going away," said Jupillon, with a serious face. "I am
+drafted--and I am going away."
+
+"You are going away?" said she. She seemed as if her mind was not awake.
+
+"Look here, Germinie," Jupillon continued. "I have made you unhappy. I
+haven't been very kind to you, I know. My cousin's been a little to
+blame. What do you want?"
+
+"You're going away?" rejoined Germinie, taking his arm. "Don't lie to
+me--are you going away?"
+
+"I tell you, yes--and it's true. I'm only waiting for marching orders.
+You have to pay more than two thousand francs for a substitute this
+year. They say there's going to be a war: however, there's a chance."
+
+As he spoke he was leading Germinie down the street.
+
+"Where are you taking me?" said she.
+
+"To mother's, of course--so that you two can make up and put an end to
+all this nonsense."
+
+"After what she said to me? Never!"
+
+And Germinie pushed Jupillon's arm away.
+
+"Well, if that's the way it is, good-bye."
+
+And Jupillon raised his cap.
+
+"Shall I write to you from the regiment?"
+
+Germinie was silent, hesitating, for a moment. Then she said, abruptly:
+"Come on!" and, motioning to Jupillon to walk beside her, she turned
+back up the street.
+
+And so they walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a
+paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two
+lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft
+handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on
+high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of
+the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in
+the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths of a street that follows the
+same wall, the same trees, the same lanterns, and leads on to the same
+darkness beyond. The damp, heavy air that they breathed smelt of sugar
+and tallow and carrion. From time to time a vivid flash passed before
+their eyes: it was the lantern of a butcher's cart that shone upon
+slaughtered cattle and huge pieces of bleeding meat thrown upon the back
+of a white horse; the light upon the flesh, amid the darkness, resembled
+a purple conflagration, a furnace of blood.
+
+"Well! have you reflected?" said Jupillon. "This little Avenue Trudaine
+isn't a very cheerful place, do you know?"
+
+"Come on," Germinie replied.
+
+And, without another word, she set out again at the same fierce, jerky
+gait, agitated by all the tumult raging in her heart. Her thoughts were
+expressed in her gestures. Her feet went astray, madness attacked her
+hands. At times her shadow, seen from behind, reminded one of a woman
+from La Salpêtrière. Two or three passers-by stopped for a moment and
+looked after her; then, remembering that they were in Paris, passed on.
+
+Suddenly she stopped, and with the gesture of one who has made a
+desperate resolution, she said: "Ah! my God! another pin in the
+cushion!--Let us go!"
+
+And she took Jupillon's arm.
+
+"Oh! I know very well," said Jupillon, when they were near the creamery,
+"my mother wasn't fair to you. You see, the woman has been too virtuous
+all her life. She don't know, she don't understand. And then, d'ye see,
+I'll tell you the whole secret: she loves me so much she's jealous of
+any woman who loves me. So go in, do!"
+
+And he pushed her into the arms of Madame Jupillon, who kissed her,
+mumbled a few words of regret, and made haste to weep in order to
+relieve her own embarrassment and make the scene more affecting.
+
+Throughout the evening Germinie sat with her eyes fixed on Jupillon,
+almost terrifying him with her expression.
+
+"Come, come," he said, as he walked home with her, "don't be so down in
+the mouth as all this. We must have a little philosophy in this world.
+Well! here I am a soldier--that's all! To be sure they don't all come
+back. But then--look here! I propose that we enjoy ourselves for the
+fortnight that's left, because it will be so much gained--and if I don't
+come back--Well, at all events, I shall leave you a pleasant memory of
+me."
+
+Germinie made no reply.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+For a whole week Germinie did not set foot in the shop again.
+
+The Jupillons, when she did not return, began to despair. 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.
+
+And, letting go the corners of the cloth, she emptied its contents on
+the table: forth came greasy bank-notes, patched on the back, fastened
+together with pins, old tarnished louis d'or, black hundred-sou pieces,
+forty-sou pieces, ten-sou pieces, the money of the poor, the money of
+toil, money from Christmas-boxes, money soiled by dirty hands, worn out
+in leather purses, rubbed smooth in the cash drawer filled with
+sous--money with a flavor of perspiration.
+
+For a moment she gazed at the display as if to assure her own eyes; then
+she said to Madame Jupillon in a sad voice, the voice of her sacrifice:
+
+"There it is--There's the two thousand three hundred francs for him to
+buy a substitute."
+
+"Oh! my dear Germinie!" said the stout woman, almost suffocated by
+emotion; and she threw herself upon Germinie's neck, who submitted to be
+embraced. "Oh! you must take something with us--a cup of coffee--"
+
+"No, thank you," said Germinie; "I am done up. _Dame!_ I've had to fly
+around, you know, to get them. I'm going to bed now. Some other time."
+
+And she went away.
+
+She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape together such a sum,
+to accomplish that impossibility: to raise two thousand three hundred
+francs--two thousand three hundred francs, of which she had not the
+first five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted them piece by
+piece, almost sou by sou. She had picked them up, scraped them together
+here and there, from this one and from that one, by loans of two
+hundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum anyone would
+lend. She had borrowed from her concierge, her grocer, her fruit woman,
+her poulterer, her laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers in
+the quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she had
+previously lived with mademoiselle. She had made up the amount with
+money drawn from every source, even from her poor miserable
+water-carrier. She had gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly,
+prayed, implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying and
+of seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation of confessing that
+she had no money laid by, as was supposed, and as, through pride, she
+had encouraged people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised,
+the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything, endured what she
+would not have endured to procure bread for herself, and not once only,
+with a single person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had given
+her something or from whom she had hoped for something.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 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
+the Jupillons 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in disarranging 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 again _enceinte_, 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
+interjecting remarks 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
+walked on 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-Soeurs,
+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 a crack.
+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, to _her_! 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she 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, of which
+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 ceased to 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+Half an hour after the horrible meeting when--her mind 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 nothing of 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, 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 a
+horrible 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 forget and 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, 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 that filled 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 "her _canaille_ of 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 her foot 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She felt that 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 that should 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 a _liaison_ the 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 demanded _pourboires_ of love!
+And she lived from day to day in constant dread of what the miserable
+villain would demand of her on the morrow.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+"He must have twenty francs," Germinie mechanically repeated 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 grocer would
+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 erect between
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began 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 perfect
+imbecile!" 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 the house 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 the frames, 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 of being 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.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+"No--not this time, no," said Germinie, rising from the 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+When she returned that evening from a christening dinner, 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 by passion. 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."
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+Soon after this, mademoiselle was amazed to notice an 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's lips. 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+But the past and its debts were still there, and whispered 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 so
+fond 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 new _crémière_,--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 the _Halle Centrale_ one day for
+her dinner, and she mentioned the fact in the fish-woman's presence.
+"Oho! yes, yes, to the _Halle_! I'd like to see you go to the _Halle_!"
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+
+It was a very great trial to Germinie--a trial that she sought,
+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 at most, would stop and talk, like
+little women, at the _portes 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+
+To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and desolate. 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, rudiments of names, shadowy
+initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects,
+omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be
+_victorious_. 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_.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+
+The love which she lacked, and which it was her determination to deny
+herself, became the torment of her life, incessant, abominable torture.
+She had to defend herself against the fevers of her body and the
+irritations from without, against the easily aroused emotions and the
+indolent cowardice of her flesh, against all the solicitations of nature
+by which she was assailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day,
+with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist warmth of stormy
+weather, with the breath of her past and her memories, with the pictures
+suddenly thrown upon the background of her mind, with the voices that
+whispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that sent a thrill
+of tenderness into her every limb.
+
+Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured, and she did not
+yield or take another lover. Fearful of herself, she avoided man and
+fled from his sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits, always
+closeted with mademoiselle, or else above in her own room. On Sundays
+she did not leave the house. She had ceased to consort with the other
+maids in the house, and, in order to occupy her time and forget
+herself, she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of sewing, or
+buried herself in sleep. When musicians came into the courtyard she
+closed the windows in order not to hear them: the sensuousness of music
+moved her very soul.
+
+In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her passions. Her
+evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon
+themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her
+whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no
+end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,--the obsession that nothing
+can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable
+obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to
+the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it
+smoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!
+
+At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant assaults, the
+irritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie's
+faculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly
+hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses.
+It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, the
+candlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her assumed
+impure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything before
+her eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at her
+kitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longer
+belongs to himself: "In five minutes I am going down into the street."
+And when the five minutes had passed she would stay where she was.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+
+The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandoned
+the conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed her
+head beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution,
+energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction,
+of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she was
+being borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost
+impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causes
+suffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a god on the
+marble of the antique tragedies, and is called _No Chance_ on the
+tattooed brow of the galley-slave--Fatality--was trampling upon her, and
+Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.
+
+When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her past
+recurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the links
+in the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions
+that had followed her years and grown heavier with them; all the
+incidents that had succeeded one another in her life, as if by
+preconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having ever
+caught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard so
+much--she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatures
+who are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of those
+for whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envy
+it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dint
+of yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of brooding
+over the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession of
+her disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon the
+most trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of the
+persecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and that
+was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop,
+an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in which
+she was cheated--all these things were in her opinion due neither to her
+own fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Life
+was in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, in
+everything, great and small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.
+There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereupon
+imagined that she was accursed to her finger-tips. Accursed! almost
+damned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when she
+questioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, in
+the fire in her blood, in the appetite of her organs, in her passionate
+weakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of
+a disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having already
+delivered her over to the shameful excesses of passion, and
+destined--she had a presentiment that it was so--to deliver her again in
+the same way?
+
+And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was the
+refrain of her thought: "What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had
+no chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!" She said
+it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion,
+every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that she
+was in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful than
+she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens in
+ordinary life. She lived in that state of cowardly unrest wherein the
+unexpected is dreaded as a possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bell
+causes alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing the
+mystery it contains, not daring to open it, wherein the news you are
+about to hear, the mouth that opens to speak to you, cause the
+perspiration to start upon your temples. She was in that state of
+suspicion, of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny,
+wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and wherein one would
+like to check the current of his life so that it should not go forward
+whither all the endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.
+
+At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supreme
+disdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems a
+satire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength,
+exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer
+feels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: "Go on!"
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+
+"Where are you going in that rig?" said Germinie one Sunday morning to
+Adèle, as she passed in grand array along the corridor on the sixth
+floor, in front of her open door.
+
+"Ah! there you are! I'm going to a swell wedding, my dear! There's a
+crowd of us--big Marie, the _great bully_, you know--Elisa, from 41, the
+two Badiniers, big and little--and men, too! In the first place, there's
+my _dealer in sudden death_. Yes, and--Oh! didn't you know--my new
+flame, the master-at-arms of the 24th--and a friend of his, a painter, a
+real Father Joy. We're going to Vincennes. Everyone carries something.
+We shall dine on the grass--the men will pay for the wine. And there'll
+be plenty of it, I promise you!"
+
+"I'll go, too," said Germinie.
+
+"You? nonsense! you don't go to parties any more."
+
+"But I tell you I'll go," said Germinie, in a sharp, decided tone. "Just
+give me time to tell mademoiselle and put on a dress. If you'll wait
+I'll go and get half a lobster."
+
+Half an hour later the two women left the house; they skirted the city
+wall and found the rest of the party sitting outside a café on Boulevard
+de la Chopinette. After taking a glass of currant wine, they entered two
+large cabs and rode away. When they arrived at the fortress at Vincennes
+they alighted and the whole party walked along the bank of the moat. As
+they were passing under the wall of the fort, the master-at-arms'
+friend, the painter, shouted to an artilleryman, who was doing sentry
+duty beside a cannon: "Say! old fellow, you'd rather drink one than
+stand guard over it, eh?"[1]
+
+"Isn't he funny?" said Adèle to Germinie, nudging her with her elbow.
+
+Soon they were fairly in the forest of Vincennes.
+
+Narrow paths crossed and recrossed in every direction on the hard,
+uneven, footprint-covered ground. In the spaces between all these little
+roads there was here and there a little grass, but down-trodden,
+withered, yellow, dead grass, strewn about like bedding for cattle, its
+straw-colored blades were everywhere mingled with briars, amid the dull
+green of nettles. It was easily recognizable as one of the rural spots
+to which the great faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in the
+grass, and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a display of
+fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarf
+elms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and
+stripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks,
+eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. The
+verdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, the leaves above had
+a very unhealthy look; the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made only
+faint green lines against the sky. Clouds of dust from the high-roads
+covered the bushes with a gray pall. Everything had the wretched,
+impoverished aspect of trampled vegetation that has no chance to
+breathe, the melancholy effect of the grass at the barriers! Nature
+seemed to sprout from beneath the pavements. No birds sang in the trees,
+no insects hummed about the dusty ground; the noise of the spring-carts
+stunned the birds; the hand-organ put the rustling of the trees to
+silence; the denizens of the street strolled about through the paths,
+singing. Women's hats, fastened with four pins to a handkerchief, were
+hanging from the trees; the red plume of an artilleryman burst upon one
+at every moment through the scanty leaves; dealers in honey rose from
+the thickets; on the trampled greensward children in blouses were
+cutting twigs, workingmen's families idling their time away nibbling at
+_pleasure_, and little urchins catching butterflies in their caps. It
+was a forest after the pattern of the original Bois de Boulogne, hot and
+dusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused promenade, one of those spots,
+avaricious of shade, to which the common people flock to disport
+themselves at the gates of great capitals--burlesque forests, filled
+with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons in the
+underbrush.
+
+The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming in clouds,
+shedding a veiled diffuse light that was almost blinding to the eyes and
+that seemed to portend a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothing
+stirred; the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move; the
+forest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath the heavy sky. At
+rare intervals a breath of air from the south passed lazily along,
+sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow
+upon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With no
+knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensation
+like the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin.
+
+They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited activity that the
+country air imparts to the common people. The men ran, the women tripped
+after them and caught them. They played at rolling on the grass. There
+was a manifest longing to dance and climb trees; the painter amused
+himself by throwing stones at the loop-holes in the gateways of the
+fortress, and he never missed his aim.
+
+At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a clump of oaks,
+whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lighting
+matches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The women
+chattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms of
+inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did not
+speak or laugh. She did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their
+lowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed in
+thought was she that you would have said she was totally oblivious to
+time and place. Lying at full length on the grass, her head slightly
+raised by a hammock, she made no other movement than to lay her hands,
+palm downwards, on the grass beside her; in a short time she would turn
+them on their backs and let them lie in that position, seeking the
+coolness of the earth to allay the fever of her flesh.
+
+"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adèle.
+
+Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without answering, and until
+dinner maintained the same position, the same silence, the same air of
+torpor, feeling about her for places where her burning hands had not
+rested.
+
+"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us something."
+
+"Oh! no," Adèle replied, "I haven't got wind enough before eating."
+
+Suddenly a great stone came hurtling through the air and struck the
+ground near Germinie's head; at the same moment she heard the painter's
+voice shouting: "Don't be afraid! that's your chair."
+
+One and all laid their handkerchiefs on the ground by way of
+tablecloth. Eatables were produced from greasy papers. Bottles were
+uncorked and the wine went round; the glasses were rested against tufts
+of grass, and they fell to upon bits of pork and sausages, with slices
+of bread for plates. The painter cut boats out of paper to hold the
+salt, and imitated the orders shouted out by waiters in a café. "_Boum!
+Pavillon! Servez!_" he cried. The company gradually became animated. The
+open air, the patches of blue sky, the food and drink started the gayety
+of the table in full blast. Hands approached one another, mouths met,
+coarse remarks were whispered from one to another, shirt sleeves crept
+around waists, and now and then energetic embraces were attended by
+greedy, resounding kisses.
+
+Germinie drank, and said nothing. The painter, who had taken his place
+by her side, felt decidedly chilly and embarrassed beside his
+extraordinary neighbor, who amused herself "so entirely inside."
+Suddenly he began to beat a tattoo with his knife against his glass,
+drowning the uproar of the party, and rose to his knees.
+
+"Mesdames!" said he, with the voice of a paroquet that has sung too
+much, "here's the health of a man in hard luck: myself! Perhaps it will
+bring me good luck! Deserted, yes, mesdames; yes, I've been deserted!
+I'm a widower! you know the kind of widower, _razibus_! I was struck all
+of a heap. Not that I cared much for her, but habit, that old villain,
+habit! The fact is I'm as bored as a bed-bug in a watch spring. For two
+weeks my life has been like a restaurant without a _pousse-café_! And
+when I love love as if it had made me! No wife! That's what I call
+weaning a grown man! that is to say, since I've known what it is, I take
+off my hat to the curés: I feel very sorry for them, 'pon my word! No
+wife! and there are so many of 'em! But I can't walk about with a sign:
+_Vacant man to let. Inquire within._ In the first place it would have to
+be stamped by M'sieu le Préfet, and then, people are such fools, it
+would draw a crowd! All of which, mesdames, is intended to inform you,
+that if, among the people you have the honor of knowing, there should
+happen to be one who'd like to make an acquaintance--virtuous
+acquaintance--a pretty little left-handed marriage--why she needn't look
+any farther! I'm her man--Victor-Médéric Gautruche! a home body, a
+genuine house-ivy for sentiment! She has only to apply at my former
+hotel, _La Clef de Sûreté_. And gay as a hunchback who's just drowned
+his wife! Gautruche, called Gogo-la-Gaiété, egad! A pretty fellow who
+knows what's what, who doesn't beat about the bush, a good old body who
+takes things easy and who won't give himself the colic with that fishes'
+grog!" With that he took a bottle of water that stood beside him and
+hurled it twenty yards away. "Long live the walls! They're the same to
+papa that the sky is to the good God! Gogo-la-Gaiété paints them through
+the week and beats them on Monday![2] And with all that not jealous, not
+ugly, not a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never harmed one
+of the fair sex in his life! If you want physique, _parbleu_! I'm your
+man!"
+
+He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering body, clad in an old
+blue coat with gilt buttons, to its full height, removing his gray hat
+so as to show his perspiring, polished, bald skull, and tossing his old
+plucked _gamin's_ head, he continued: "You see what it is! It isn't a
+very attractive piece of property; it doesn't help it to exhibit it. But
+it yields well, it's a little dilapidated, but well put together. Dame!
+Here I am with my little forty nine-years--no more hair than a billiard
+ball, a witchgrass beard that would make good herb-tea, foundations not
+too solid, feet as long as La Villette--and with all the rest thin
+enough to take a bath in a musket-barrel. There's the bill of lading!
+Pass the prospectus along! If any woman wants all that in a lump--any
+respectable person--not too young--who won't amuse herself by painting
+me too yellow--you understand, I don't ask for a Princess of
+Batignolles--why, sure as you're born, I'm her man!"
+
+Germinie seized Gautruche's glass, half emptied it at a draught and held
+out the side from which she had drunk to him.
+
+                *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they reached the
+fortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart with the point of his knife
+on the stone, and all the names with the date were carved inside.
+
+In the evening Gautruche and Germinie were upon the outer boulevards,
+near Barrière Rochechouart. Beside a low house with these words, in a
+plaster panel: _Madame Merlin_. _Dresses cut and tried on, two francs_,
+they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a dark
+passage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. At
+the entrance to the passage, these words were printed in black on a
+wooden sign:
+
+                _Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+
+Médérie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who
+make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips
+forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with
+tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians
+graphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy from
+yesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life through
+the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with
+the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of
+the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched
+away into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold upon
+him; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind,
+he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like
+_psitt_! which was his way of saying _pshaw_! and, raising his right
+arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his
+melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb
+after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew
+neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three
+sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle
+of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and
+found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the
+world seemed sad to him--except a glass of water.
+
+With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent
+health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety
+of his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,
+unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks
+distraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at passers-by,
+from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did
+lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a
+measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters
+in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in
+position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an
+instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was also
+renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in
+bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to
+twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not
+wealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wine-shops.
+
+He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother,
+his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance,
+his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the
+people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All
+that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the
+strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the
+things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,
+the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowed
+between two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had
+endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without
+education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible,
+imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in
+original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the
+comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the
+unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and
+buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of
+house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts
+called _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never
+tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if
+you merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.
+
+A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.
+
+Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in her
+head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the
+frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and
+mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her
+shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested
+after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had
+long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had
+gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and
+the street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress
+like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes
+of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated
+description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and
+sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the
+mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her
+promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and
+facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to
+jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without
+_cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at
+the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that
+of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there
+to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading
+which women of her class have when they read at all. With the two or
+three kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed her
+nights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the
+_feuilletons_ cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers,
+and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of some
+of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make
+her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who
+worked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;
+when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names of
+the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and
+one sou novels, and read them.
+
+The air, the keen breath of Quartier Bréda, full of the _verve_ of the
+artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of
+Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long
+before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous
+companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy
+creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the
+circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations
+around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of
+mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome
+society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the
+fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had
+reached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people,
+she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligence
+corresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now,
+when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her old
+self and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for her
+enjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who
+would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicated
+her with the wine that was poured into her glass. And thus it was that
+she sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people,
+uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was that
+she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+
+As Germinie was returning to the house one morning at daybreak, she
+heard, from the shadows of the _porte-cochère_ as it closed behind her,
+a voice cry: "Who's that?" She ran to the servants' staircase, but found
+that she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing the
+concierge seized her. As soon as he recognized her, he said: "Oh! is it
+you? excuse me; don't be frightened! What a giddy creature you are! It
+surprises you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account of the thieving
+that's going on these days in the cook's bedroom on the second.
+Good-night to you! it's lucky for you I don't tell all I know."
+
+A few days later Germinie learned through Adèle that the husband of the
+cook who had been robbed said that there was no need to look very far;
+that the thief was in the house, and that he knew what he knew. Adèle
+added that it was making a good deal of talk in the street and that
+there were plenty of people who would believe it and repeat it. Germinie
+became very indignant and told her mistress all about it. Mademoiselle
+was even more indignant than she, and, feeling personally outraged by
+the insult, wrote instantly to the cook's mistress that she must put a
+stop at once to the slanderous statements concerning a girl who had been
+in her service twenty years, and for whom she would answer as for
+herself. The cook was reprimanded. Her husband in his wrath talked
+louder than ever. He made a great outcry and for several days filled the
+house with his project of going to the commissioner of police and
+calling upon him to question Germinie as to where she procured the money
+to start the _crémière's_ son in business, as to where she procured the
+money to purchase a substitute for him, and how she paid the expenses of
+the men she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung over
+Germinie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell to
+the ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done all
+the injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden,
+overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and became
+overcast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which was
+so prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly the
+faculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness and
+appreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which
+plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing
+presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was
+constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end
+of which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase:
+"Bah! I will kill myself!"
+
+Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience all
+the effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night she
+saw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her
+cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with her
+concealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noised
+abroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's
+account, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, by
+all that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and the
+shopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down
+her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!
+Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before the
+commissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word and
+that idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of the
+lower classes; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is
+everywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source of
+calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between the
+police sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme and
+the arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive
+terrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would much
+rather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated in
+the dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all the
+unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made them
+objects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps
+on the stairs coming to arrest her!
+
+The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental
+upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto
+had only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen,
+with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of
+deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we
+hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the
+distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the
+discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and
+so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and
+solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her
+that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and
+her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her.
+She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of
+death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes
+fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five
+flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from
+others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost
+double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would
+give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without
+having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no
+longer felt equal.
+
+"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt
+impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the
+courtyard?"
+
+"Oh! nothing--the pavements."
+
+"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!"
+
+"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "I
+tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing
+to do it!"
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+
+Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a
+former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not
+returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark
+street.
+
+At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would
+take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if
+to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and,
+going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to
+both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours,
+shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous
+and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness
+reigned. She followed the line of red-wine shops, the naked arbors, the
+_cabaret_ trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits,
+low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls,
+cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a
+night's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed
+shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark
+passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that
+seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is
+handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy
+little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded
+form, tall, mouldy _portes-cochères_, hedge-rows, within which could be
+vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of
+unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls
+disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements
+by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.
+From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon
+lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their
+beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a
+cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the
+rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the
+distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at
+long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.
+
+Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where
+low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a
+hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisière, the Abattoir
+and Montmartre.
+
+The people who passed that way--the workman returning from Paris
+whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her
+hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her
+black cap--would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if
+they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run
+toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted
+footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible
+shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.
+
+She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself
+a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the
+last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if
+he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole
+thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more
+consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see
+him.
+
+At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie,
+exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would
+loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still
+burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows.
+She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her
+impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the
+perspiring windows of the wine-shops--the cooking utensils, the bowls of
+punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from
+their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied
+colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons--these things
+would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old
+announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon,
+the advertisements of _gloria_--coffee with brandy--the inscriptions in
+yellow letters: _New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes._ For a whole quarter
+of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in
+a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two
+black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest,
+through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over
+their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was
+being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day,
+upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had
+ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and
+growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere
+weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of
+film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling
+over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and
+compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.
+
+In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that
+semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the
+Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened
+that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that
+she had upon the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare.
+When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its
+varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements,
+the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the
+rain, and there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the aqueous
+darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad with fatigue, would fancy
+that she could see a flood rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror
+would show her suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly
+nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not daring to move, fearing to
+feel her feet slip from under her; she would begin to weep, and would
+weep on until someone passed by and offered to escort her to the _Hotel
+of the Little Blue Hand_.
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+
+She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last place of refuge. She
+would fly from the rain and snow and cold, from fear, despair, and
+fatigue. She would go up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's
+closed doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely about her in
+order to leave room for those who went and came up that long steep
+ladder, and would draw back as far as possible into the corner in order
+that her shame might fill but little space on the narrow landing.
+
+From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets, of families heaped
+together in a single room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the
+dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the
+stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house,
+came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie
+wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the
+whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt
+every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her
+pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, and swallow a
+mouthful of it to avoid being ill.
+
+But the staircase had its passers, too: honest workmen's wives went up
+with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint of wine for supper. Their feet
+would rub against her as they passed, and as they went farther up,
+Germinie would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and falling
+upon her with more crushing force at every floor. The children--little
+girls in _fanchons_ who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it
+as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in
+dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood--she saw them
+stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her;
+then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs,
+and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until
+they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the
+children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by
+those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She
+would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning
+herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling
+her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight,
+she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering
+over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone
+might tread upon--having no control of her faculties, dead to everything
+except the footsteps that she was listening for--and that did not come.
+
+At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would
+fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice
+would mount the stairs, stammering "_Canaille!_ _canaille_ of a
+saloon-keeper!--you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"
+
+It was he.
+
+And almost every day the same scene was enacted.
+
+"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as his eyes fell upon her.
+"It's like this--I'll tell you all about it. I'm a little bit under
+water." And, as he put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it.
+It isn't my fault."
+
+He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove with mangy wings that
+limped forward to greet him, and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye
+see. It was Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat as
+a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He insisted on paying for a
+sixteen-sous bottle for me. He offered to treat me, and I _proffered_
+him thanks. Thereupon we naturally _consoled_[5] our coffee; when you're
+consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon
+each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that
+that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster
+shells!"
+
+Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted the candle, stuck
+in a yellow copper candlestick. By its flickering light the dirty paper
+on the walls could be seen, covered with caricatures from _Charivari_,
+torn from the paper and pasted on the wall.
+
+"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim, as he saw her place a
+cold fowl and two bottles of wine on the table. "For I must tell you all
+I've had in my stomach to-day--a plate of wretched soup--that's all. Ah!
+it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put that fellow's eyes
+out!"
+
+And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with her elbows on the
+table, watching him and drinking, and her glance would grow dark.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Pshaw! all the négresses are dead,"[6] Gautruche would say at last, as
+he drained the bottles one by one. "Put the children to bed!"
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion would ensue
+between those two strange creatures, savage ardor followed by savage
+satiety, frantic storms of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the
+fierce brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood beneath
+the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at the end, utter
+exhaustion that swallowed them up and left their bodies like corpses.
+
+Germinie plunged into these debauches with--what shall I say?--delirium,
+madness, desperation, a sort of supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable
+passions turned against themselves, and, going beyond their natural
+appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted them without
+extinguishing them; and, overpassing the widest limits of excess, they
+excited themselves to self-torture. In the poor creature's paroxysms of
+excitement, her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her maddened body,
+no longer sought pleasure in pleasure, but something sharper, keener,
+and more violent: pain in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly
+escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking death in an
+undertone and seeking to embrace it in the agonies of love.
+
+Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the
+bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed,
+listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little
+by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to envelop her. She
+seemed to herself to fall and writhe helplessly in the blind
+unconsciousness of the night. Her will became as naught. All sorts of
+black things, that seemed to have wings and voices, beat against her
+temples. The ghastly temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of
+crime caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes,
+close at hand; and hands placed against her back pushed her toward the
+table where the knives lay. She would close her eyes and move one foot;
+then fear would lay hold of her and she would cling to the bedclothes;
+and at last she would turn around, fall back upon the bed, and go to
+sleep beside the man she had been tempted to murder; why? she had no
+idea; for nothing--for the sake of killing!
+
+And so, until daybreak, in that wretched furnished lodging, the fierce
+struggle of those fatal passions would continue, while the poor maimed,
+limping dove, the infirm bird of Venus, nesting in one of Gautruche's
+old shoes, would utter now and then, awakened by the noise, a frightened
+coo.
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter LII
+
+
+_Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the
+bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed,
+listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. The ghastly
+temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime caused a red
+light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes, close at hand; and
+hands placed against her back pushed her toward the table where the
+knives lay._]
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+
+In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted with drinking. He felt
+the first pangs of the disease of the liver that had long been lurking
+in his heated, alcoholized blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The
+horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the cords of his
+stomach for a whole week, caused him to reflect. There came to his mind,
+together with divers resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost
+sentimental ideas of the future. He said to himself that he must put a
+little more water into his life, if he wanted to live to old age. While
+he lay writhing in bed and tying himself into knots, with his knees up
+to his chin to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four
+walls within which he passed his nights, to which he brought his drunken
+body home in the evening, and from which he fled into the daylight in
+the morning; and he thought about making a real home for himself. He
+dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a wife who would make him
+a good stew, look after him if he were ill, straighten out his affairs,
+keep his linen in order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the
+wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the useful qualities
+of a housekeeper, and who, in addition, would not be a stupid fool, but
+would understand him and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found:
+Germinie was the very one. She probably had a little hoard, a few sous
+laid by during the time she had been in her old mistress's service; and
+with what he earned they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no doubt
+of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she would accept his
+proposition. More than that, her scruples, if she had any, would not
+hold out against the prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit
+to her at the end of their _liaison_.
+
+One Monday she had come to his room as usual.
+
+"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say to this, eh? A good
+room--not like this box--a real room, with a closet--at Montmartre, and
+two windows, no less! Rue de l'Empereur--with a view an Englishman would
+give five thousand francs to carry away with him. Something first-class,
+bright, and cheerful, you know, a place where you could stay all day
+without hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to have
+enough of moving about here and there just to change fleas. And that
+isn't all, either: I'm tired of being cooped up in furnished lodgings,
+I'm tired of being all alone. Friends don't make society. They fall on
+you like flies in your glass when you're to pay, and then, there you
+are! In the first place, I don't propose to drink any more, honor
+bright! no more for me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use
+myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by any means!
+Attention! We mustn't let drink get the better of us. It seemed to me
+those days as if I'd been swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to
+knock at the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to the
+needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition to Germinie.
+I'll treat myself to a little furniture. You've got what you have in
+your room. You know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy bone in
+my body where work's concerned. And then we might look to not always be
+working for others: we might take a lodging-house for country thieves.
+If you had a little something put aside, that would help. We would join
+forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves straightened out some day
+before the mayor. That's not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And
+you'll leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear old
+Gautruche?"
+
+Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust forward and her
+chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw herself back with a burst of
+strident laughter.
+
+"Ha! ha! ha! You thought--and you have the face to tell me so!--you
+thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle? Did you really think so? You're a
+fool, you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred thousands, you
+might be stuffed with gold, do you hear? all stuffed with it. You're
+joking, aren't you? Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever
+told you? I would like to see her die and these hands not be there to
+close her eyes! I'd like to see it! Come now, really, did you think so?"
+
+"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted with me, I thought you
+cared more for me than that--that you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the
+painter, disconcerted by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's
+words.
+
+"Ah! you thought that, too--that I loved you!" And, as if she were
+suddenly uprooting from the depths of her heart the remorse and
+suffering of her passions, she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you--I
+love you as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love you as one
+loves something that is close at hand--that one makes use of because it
+is there! I am used to you as one gets used to an old dress and wears it
+again and again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose I should care
+for you? I'd like you to tell me what difference it can make to me
+whether it's you or another? For, after all, what have you been to me
+more than any other man would be? In the first place, you took me. Well?
+Is that enough to make me love you? What have you done, then, to attach
+me to you, will you be kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed
+a glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken pity on me when I
+was tramping about in the mud and snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes!
+And what did people say to me and spit out in my face so that my blood
+boiled from one end of my body to the other! You never troubled your
+head about all the insults I've swallowed waiting for you! Look you!
+I've been wanting to tell you all this for a long time--it's been
+choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly smile, "do you
+flatter yourself you've driven me wild with your physical beauty, with
+your hair, which you've lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took
+you--I'd have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the
+times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything
+or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot
+day!"
+
+She paused an instant.
+
+"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as
+long as your hand's in."
+
+"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be
+to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool!
+she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to
+promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her
+mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no
+one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't
+understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me!
+Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated
+kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was
+unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?'
+No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what
+became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is
+between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying
+of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am,
+a----" She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her
+affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she
+should ever learn anything--but, no fear of that, it won't be long.
+There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story
+window, as true as God is my master! But fancy--you are not my heart,
+you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah!
+I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces
+for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me
+what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest,
+when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and
+would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to--even then, if
+mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little
+finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I
+tell you I would have left him!"
+
+"In that case--if that's the way things stand, my dear--if you're so
+fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give
+you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"
+
+"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.
+
+"Faith! it's very like it."
+
+"Well! adieu. That suits me!"
+
+She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+
+After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below
+shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate
+creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers
+whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met
+on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman.
+She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her
+caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon
+the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized
+him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the
+passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it
+were--none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men
+her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The
+last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery,--preference,
+selection,--and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain
+of conscience and personality,--disgust, even disgust,--she had lost!
+
+And she wandered about the streets at night, with the furtive, stealthy
+gait of wild beasts prowling in the shadow in quest of food. As if
+unsexed, she made the advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage
+of drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked along, peering on
+every side, approaching every shadowy corner where impurity might lurk
+under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to
+swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the
+street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along,
+almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that
+appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets
+the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind at work on the brink
+of deep abysses of melancholy.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+
+One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a
+wine-shop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man
+who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.
+
+She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the
+door of the wine-shop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her,
+her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her
+skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling
+listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a
+milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and
+the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passers-by, the
+carriages, the street--she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were
+far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up
+the hill,--a white horse, he was,--stood in front of her, worn out and
+motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the
+bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog.
+It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if
+the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and
+flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving,
+with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening,
+desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by
+Darkness at a wine-shop door!
+
+At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.
+
+"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to
+possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes,
+no scaffold--nothing!
+
+Jupillon felt that his customary _blague_ was arrested in his throat.
+
+"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't lost. But I must have time.
+Just now, you see, work ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine
+came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months' time, I
+promise. Are you pretty well?"
+
+"_Canaille!_ Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd sneak away, would you? But
+it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber!
+sneak! It was you."
+
+Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing against him, forcing
+him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing
+against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned
+toward him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to
+you to make you strike me?"
+
+She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply
+felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an
+instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer
+in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put
+a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but
+blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the
+lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,--the
+guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the
+commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her
+misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost
+her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of emptying
+itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was
+bursting.
+
+"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who
+tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her
+as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to
+bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.
+
+"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed a police officer,
+grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that
+brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees wavered: she
+thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of
+the street.
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+
+Passion is subject to the most insensate reactions, the most
+inexplicable revivals. The accursed love that Germinie believed to have
+been killed by all the wounds and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it
+came to life once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart when
+she returned home. The mere sight of the man, his proximity for those
+few moments, the sound of his voice, the act of breathing the air that
+he breathed, were enough to turn her heart back to him and relegate her
+to the past.
+
+Notwithstanding all that had happened, she had never been able to tear
+Jupillon's image altogether from her heart: its roots were still
+imbedded there. He was her first love. She belonged to him against her
+own will by all the weaknesses of memory, by all the cowardice of habit.
+Between them there were all the bonds of torture that hold a woman fast
+forever,--sacrifice, suffering, degradation. He owned her, body and
+soul, because he had outraged her conscience, trampled upon her
+illusions, made her life a martyrdom. She belonged to him, belonged to
+him forever, as to the author of all her sorrows.
+
+And that shock, that scene which should have caused her to think with
+horror of ever meeting him again, rekindled in her the frenzied desire
+to meet him again. Her passion seized her again in its full force. The
+thought of Jupillon filled her mind so completely that it purified her.
+She abruptly called a halt in the vagabondage of her passions: she
+determined to belong thenceforth to no one, as that was the only method
+by which she could still belong to him.
+
+She began to spy upon him, to make a study of his usual hours for going
+out, the streets he passed through, the places that he visited. She
+followed him to Batignolles, to his new quarters, walked behind him,
+content to put her foot where he had put his, to be guided by his steps,
+to see him now and then, to notice a gesture that he made, to snatch one
+of his glances. That was all: she dared not speak to him; she kept at
+some distance behind, like a lost dog, happy not to be driven away with
+kicks.
+
+For weeks and weeks she made herself thus the man's shadow, a humble,
+timid shadow that shrank back and moved away a few steps when it thought
+it was in danger of being seen; then drew nearer again with faltering
+steps, and, at an impatient movement from the man, stopped once more, as
+if asking pardon.
+
+Sometimes she waited at the door of a house which he entered, caught him
+up again when he came out and escorted him home, always at a distance,
+without speaking to him, with the air of a beggar begging for crumbs
+and thankful for what she was allowed to pick up. Then she would listen
+at the shutters of the ground-floor apartment in which he lived, to
+ascertain if he was alone, if there was anybody there.
+
+When he had a woman on his arm, although she suffered keenly, she was
+the more persistent in following him. She went where they went to the
+end. She entered the public gardens and ballrooms behind them. She
+walked within sound of their laughter and their words, tore her heart to
+tatters looking at them and listening to them, and stood at their backs
+with every jealous instinct of her nature bleeding.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+
+It was November. For three or four days Germinie had not fallen in with
+Jupillon. She went to hover about his lodgings, watching for him. When
+she reached the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of light
+struggling out through the closed shutters. She approached and heard
+bursts of laughter, the clinking of glasses, women's voices, then a song
+and one voice, that of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred
+of her heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead before
+her, and whose death she had so often sought to discover in the
+coffee-grounds,--the cousin!
+
+She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what they said, absorbed
+in the torture of listening to them, pasturing her famished heart upon
+suffering. It was a cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the
+cold or rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The voice she
+detested seemed at times to grow faint and die away beneath kisses, and
+the notes it sang died in her throat as if stifled by lips placed upon
+the song. The hours passed. Germinie was still at her post. She did not
+think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge of what she was
+waiting for. It seemed to her that she must remain there always, until
+the end. The rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead
+beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided down her neck. An icy
+shiver ran up and down her back. The water dripped from her dress to the
+ground. She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in any of
+her limbs except the pain that flowed from her heart.
+
+Well on toward morning there was a movement in the house, and footsteps
+approached the door. Germinie ran and hid in a recess in the wall some
+steps away, and from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young
+man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something soft and warm on
+her hands that frightened her at first; it was a dog licking her, a
+great dog that she had held in her lap many an evening, when he was a
+puppy, in the _crémière's_ back shop.
+
+"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently twice or thrice in
+the darkness.
+
+The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled about her, and at last
+entered the house. The door closed. The voices and singing lured
+Germinie back to her former position against the shutter, and there she
+remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be drenched, as she
+listened and listened, till morning, till daybreak, till the hour when
+the masons on their way to work, with their dinner loaf under their
+arms, began to laugh at her as they passed.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+
+Two or three days after that night in the rain, Germinie's features were
+distorted with pain, her skin was like marble and her eyes blazing. She
+said nothing, made no complaints, but went about her work as usual.
+
+"Here! girl, look at me a moment," said mademoiselle, and she led her
+abruptly to the window. "What does all this mean? this look of a dead
+woman risen from the grave? Come, tell me honestly, are you sick? My
+God! how hot your hands are!"
+
+She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it down.
+
+"What a silly slut! you're in a burning fever! And you keep it to
+yourself!"
+
+"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I think it's nothing but a
+bad cold. I went to sleep the other evening with my kitchen window
+open."
+
+"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle; "you might be dying and
+you'd never as much as say: 'Ouf!' Wait."
+
+She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her arm-chair to a small
+table by the fireplace, she wrote a few lines in her bold hand.
+
+"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do me the favor to give
+this to your friend Adèle and have her send the concierge with it. And
+now to bed you go!"
+
+But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth while. She would not
+tire herself. She would sit down all day. Besides, the worst of her
+sickness was over; she was getting better already. And then it always
+killed her to stay in bed.
+
+The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came in the evening. He
+examined Germinie, and ordered the application of croton oil. The
+trouble in the chest was of such a nature that he could say nothing
+about it until he had observed the effect of his remedies.
+
+He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed and sounded her chest
+for a long while.
+
+"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle, when he went
+downstairs; "she has had pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a
+moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name? Oh! the energy of some
+women! How old is she?"
+
+"Forty-one."
+
+"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure? She looks fully fifty."
+
+"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please. What can you expect?
+Never in good health,--always sick, disappointment, sorrow,--and a
+disposition that can't help tormenting itself."
+
+"Forty-one years old! it's amazing!" the physician repeated.
+
+After a moment's reflection, he continued:
+
+"So far as you know, is there any hereditary lung trouble in her family?
+Has she had any relatives who have died young?"
+
+"She lost a sister by pleurisy; but she was older. She was forty-eight,
+I think."
+
+The doctor had become very grave. "However, the lung is getting freer,"
+he said, in an encouraging tone. "But it is absolutely necessary that
+she should have rest. And send her to me once a week. Let her come and
+see me. And let her take a pleasant day for it,--a bright, sunny day."
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+
+Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and scolded to no purpose:
+she could not induce Germinie to lay aside her work for a few days.
+Germinie would not even listen to the suggestion that she should have an
+assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that it was useless,
+impossible; that she could never endure the thought of another woman
+approaching her, waiting upon her, attending to her wants; that it would
+give her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in bed; that
+she was not dead yet; and she begged that she might be allowed to go on
+as usual, so long as she could put one foot before the other. She said
+it in such an affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble
+voice was so humble and so passionate in making the request, that
+mademoiselle had not the courage to force her to accept an assistant.
+She simply called her a "blockhead," who believed, like all
+country-people, that a few days in bed means death.
+
+Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement due to the physician's
+energetic treatment, Germinie continued to make mademoiselle's bed,
+accepting her assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to
+prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful task to her.
+
+When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast and dinner, she felt as
+if she should die in her kitchen, one of the wretched little kitchens
+common in great cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble
+in women. The embers that she kindled, and from which a thread of
+suffocating smoke slowly arose, began to stir her stomach to revolt;
+soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door,
+strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its
+stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured
+back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She
+suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her
+face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled.
+In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back and forth
+through the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to the window
+and draw a few breaths of the icy outside air.
+
+She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for keeping constantly
+about her work despite her increasing weakness, than the repugnance of
+country-people to take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous
+determination that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's
+needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which might accompany
+the installation of a new servant. It was absolutely necessary that she
+should be there, to keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from
+coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should show herself,
+that the quarter should see her, and that she should not appear to her
+creditors with the aspect of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of
+being strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she must
+impart confidence to the whole street with the doctor's studied words,
+with a hopeful air, and with the promise not to die. She must appear at
+her best in order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions
+on the subject of money from ascending the stairs and applying to
+mademoiselle.
+
+She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She
+was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie,--in
+drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the
+shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing
+footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before going out in
+order to bring back the color of blood to them; in covering the pallor
+of her disease and her death-mask with rouge.
+
+Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless nights, despite her
+stomach's loathing for food, she passed the whole winter conquering and
+overcoming her own weakness and struggling with the ups and downs of her
+disease.
+
+At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle that he was
+unable to find that any of her maid's vital organs were seriously
+diseased. The lungs were a little ulcerated near the top; but people
+recovered from that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn out,"
+he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an almost embarrassed
+manner that impressed mademoiselle. And he always had something to say,
+at the end of his visit, about a change of air--about the country.
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+
+When August arrived, the doctor had nothing but that to advise or
+prescribe--the country. Notwithstanding the repugnance of elderly people
+to move, to change their abode and the habits and regular hours of their
+life; despite her domestic nature and the sort of pang that she felt at
+being torn from her hearthstone, mademoiselle decided to take Germinie
+into the country. She wrote to the _chick's_ daughter, who lived, with a
+brood of children, on a small estate in a village of Brie, and who had
+been, for many years, begging her to pay her a long visit. She requested
+her hospitality for a month or six weeks for herself and her sick maid.
+
+They set out. Germinie was delighted. On their arrival she felt
+decidedly better. For some days her disease seemed to be diverted by the
+change. But the weather that summer was very uncertain, with much rain,
+sudden changes, and high winds. Germinie had a chill, and mademoiselle
+soon heard again, overhead, just above the room in which she slept, the
+frightful cough that had been so painful and hard to bear at Paris.
+There were hurried paroxysms of coughing that seemed almost to strangle
+her; spasms that would break off for a moment, then begin again; and the
+pauses caused the ear and the heart to experience a nervous, anxious
+anticipation of what was certain to come next, and always did
+come,--racking and tearing, dying away again, but still vibrating in the
+ear, even when it had ceased: never silent, never willing to have done.
+
+And yet Germinie rose from those horrible nights with an energy and
+activity that amazed mademoiselle and at times reassured her. She was
+out of bed as early as anybody in the house. One morning, at five
+o'clock, she went with the man-servant in a _char-à-banc_ to a mill-pond
+three leagues away, for fish; at another time she dragged herself to the
+saint's day ball, with the maids from the house, and did not return
+until they did, at daybreak. She worked all the time; assisted the
+servants. She was always sitting on the edge of a chair, in a corner of
+the kitchen, doing something with her fingers. Mademoiselle was obliged
+to force her to go out, to drive her into the garden to sit. Then
+Germinie would sit on the green bench, with her umbrella over her head,
+and the sun in her skirts and on her feet. Hardly moving, she would
+forget herself utterly as she inhaled the light and air and warmth,
+passionately and with a sort of feverish joy. Her distended lips would
+part to admit the fresh, clear air. Her eyes burned, but did not move;
+and in the light shadow of the silk umbrella her gaunt, wasted, haggard
+face stared vacantly into space like an amorous death's head.
+
+Weary as she was at night, no persuasion could induce her to retire
+before her mistress. She insisted upon being at hand to undress her.
+Seated by her side, she would rise from time to time to wait upon her as
+best she could, assist her to take off a petticoat, then sit down again,
+collect her strength for a moment, rise again, and insist upon doing
+something for her. Mademoiselle had to force her to sit down and order
+her to keep quiet. And all the time that the evening toilet lasted she
+had always upon her lips the same tiresome chatter about the servants of
+the house.
+
+"Why, mademoiselle, you haven't an idea of the eyes they make at each
+other when they think no one sees them--the cook and the man--I mean.
+They keep quiet when I am by; but the other day I surprised them in the
+bakery. They were kissing, fancy! Luckily madame here don't suspect it."
+
+"Ah! there you are again with your tale-bearing! Why, good God!"
+mademoiselle would exclaim, "what difference does it make to you whether
+they _coo_ or don't _coo_? They're kind to you, aren't they? That's all
+that's necessary."
+
+"Oh! very kind, mademoiselle; as far as that's concerned I haven't a
+word to say. Marie got up in the night last night to give me some
+water--and as for him, when there's any dessert left, it's always for
+me. Oh! he's very polite to me--in fact, Marie don't like it very well
+that he thinks so much about me. You understand, mademoiselle----"
+
+"Come, come! go to bed with all your nonsense!" said her mistress
+sharply, sad, and annoyed as well, to find such a keen interest in
+others' love-affairs in one so ill.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+
+When they returned from the country, the doctor, after examining
+Germinie, said to Mademoiselle: "It has been very rapid, very rapid. The
+left lung is entirely gone. The right has begun to be affected at the
+top, and I fear that there is more or less difficulty all through it.
+She's a dead woman. She may live six weeks, two months at most."
+
+"Great Heaven!" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, "everyone I have ever
+loved will go before me! Tell me, must I wait until everybody has gone?"
+
+"Have you thought of placing her in some institution?" said the doctor,
+after a moment's silence. "You can't keep her here. It's too great a
+burden, too great a grief for you to have her with you," he added, at a
+gesture from mademoiselle.
+
+"No, monsieur, no, I haven't thought of it. Oh! yes, I am likely to send
+her away. Why you must have seen, monsieur: that girl isn't a maid, she
+isn't a servant in my eyes; she's like the family I never had! What
+would you have me say to her: 'Be off with you now!' Ah! I never
+suffered so much before on account of not being rich and having a
+wretched four-sou apartment like this. I, mention such a thing to her!
+why, it's impossible! And where could she go? To the Maison Dubois? Oh!
+yes, to the Dubois! She went there once to see the maid I had before,
+who died there. You might as well kill her! The hospital, then? No, not
+there; I don't choose to have her die in that place!"
+
+"Good God, mademoiselle, she'll be a hundred times better off there than
+here. I would get her admitted at Lariboisière, during the term of
+service of a doctor who is a friend of mine. I would recommend her to an
+intern, who is under great obligations to me. She would have a very
+excellent Sister to nurse her in the hall to which I would have her
+sent. If necessary, she could have a private room. But I am sure she
+would prefer to be in a common room. It's the essential thing to do, you
+see, mademoiselle. She can't stay in that chamber up there. You know
+what these horrible servants' quarters are. Indeed, it's my opinion that
+the health authorities ought to compel the landlords to show common
+humanity in that direction; it's an outrage! The cold weather is coming;
+there's no fireplace; with the window and the roof it will be like an
+ice-house. You see she still keeps about. She has a marvelous stock of
+courage, prodigious nervous vitality. But, in spite of everything, the
+bed will claim her in a few days,--she won't get up again. Come, listen
+to reason, mademoiselle. Let me speak to her, will you?"
+
+"No, not yet. I must get used to the idea. And then, when I see her
+around me I imagine she isn't going to die so quickly as all that.
+There's time enough. Later, we'll see about it,--yes, later."
+
+"Excuse me, mademoiselle, if I venture to say to you that you are quite
+capable of making yourself sick nursing her."
+
+"I? Oh! as for me!" And Mademoiselle de Varandeuil made a gesture
+indicating that her life was of no consequence.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+
+Amid Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's desperate anxiety concerning her
+maid's health, she became conscious of a strange feeling, a sort of fear
+in the presence of the new, unfamiliar, mysterious creature that
+sickness had made of Germinie. Mademoiselle had a sense of discomfort
+beside that hollow, ghostly face, which was almost unrecognizable in its
+implacable rigidity, and which seemed to return to itself, to recover
+consciousness, only furtively, by fits and starts, in the effort to
+produce a pallid smile. The old woman had seen many people die; her
+memories of many painful years recalled the expressions of many dear,
+doomed faces, of many faces that were sad and desolate and
+grief-stricken in death; but no face of all those she remembered had
+ever assumed, as the end drew near, that distressing expression of a
+face retiring within itself and closing the doors.
+
+Enveloped in her suffering, Germinie maintained her savage, rigid,
+self-contained, impenetrable demeanor. She was as immovable as bronze.
+Mademoiselle, as she looked at her, asked herself what it could be that
+she brooded over thus without moving; whether it was her life rising in
+revolt, the dread of death, or a secret remorse for something in her
+past. Nothing external seemed to affect the sick woman. She was no
+longer conscious of things about her. Her body became indifferent to
+everything, did not ask to be relieved, seemed not to desire to be
+cured. She complained of nothing, found no pleasure or diversion in
+anything. Even her longing for affection had left her. She no longer
+made any motion to bestow or invite a caress, and every day something
+human left her body, which seemed to be turning to stone. Often she
+would bury herself in profound silence that made one expect a
+heart-rending shriek or word; but after glancing about the room, she
+would say nothing and begin again to stare fixedly, vacantly, at the
+same spot in space.
+
+When mademoiselle returned from the friend's house with whom she dined,
+she would find Germinie in the dark, sunk in an easy-chair with her legs
+stretched out upon a chair, her head hanging forward on her breast, and
+so profoundly absorbed that sometimes she did not hear the door open. As
+she walked forward into the room it seemed to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+as if she were breaking in upon a ghastly _tête-à-tête_ between Disease
+and the Shadow of Death, wherein Germinie was already seeking, in the
+terror of the Invisible, the blindness of the grave and the darkness of
+death.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+
+Throughout the month of October, Germinie obstinately refused to take to
+her bed. Each day, however, she was weaker and more helpless than the
+day before. She was hardly able to ascend the flight of stairs that led
+to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she
+fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to
+her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs
+again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in
+the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's breakfast, made a pretence of
+working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and
+dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; she forced her to
+lie down on her own bed. Germinie lay there half an hour, an hour, wide
+awake, not speaking, but with her eyes open, fixed, and staring into
+vacancy like the eyes of a person in severe pain.
+
+One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle climbed to the sixth
+floor, turned into a narrow corridor in which the air was heavy with the
+odors from servants' water-closets and at last reached Germinie's door,
+No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled her to come up. It was
+impossible for her to put her feet out of the bed. She had terrible
+pains in her bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle
+to sit down a moment and, to make room for her, removed the candlestick
+that stood on the chair at the head of her bed.
+
+Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments, looking about the
+wretched room,--one of those where the doctor has to lay his hat on the
+bed, and where there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room,
+without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping roof, which
+admitted the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Old trunks, clothes
+bags, a foot-bath, and the little iron bedstead on which Germinie's
+niece had slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping roof. The
+bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand with a broken pitcher,
+comprised the whole of the furniture. Above the bed, in an imitation
+violet-wood frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.
+
+The doctor came during the day. "Aha! peritonitis," he said, when
+mademoiselle described Germinie's condition.
+
+He went up to see the sick woman. "I am afraid," he said, when he came
+down, "that there's an abscess in the intestine communicating with an
+abscess in the bladder. It's a serious case, very serious. You must tell
+her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over with great care.
+She might die suddenly in horrible agony. I suggested to her to go to
+Lariboisière,--she agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at
+all. But I don't know how she will bear the journey. However, she has
+such an unlimited stock of energy; I have never seen anything like it.
+To-morrow morning you shall have the order of admission."
+
+When mademoiselle went up to Germinie's room again, she found her
+smiling in her bed, gay as a lark at the idea of going away.
+
+"It's a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle," said she.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+
+At two o'clock the next day the doctor brought the order for her
+admission to Lariboisière. The invalid was ready to start. Mademoiselle
+suggested that they should send to the hospital for a litter. "Oh! no,"
+said Germinie, hastily, "I should think I was dead." She was thinking of
+her debts; she must show herself to her creditors on the street, alive,
+and on her feet to the last!
+
+She got out of bed. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil assisted her to put on
+her petticoat and her dress. As soon as she left her bed, all signs of
+life disappeared from her face, the flush from her complexion: it seemed
+as if earth suddenly took the place of blood under her skin. She went
+down the steep servants' stairway, clinging to the baluster, and reached
+her mistress's apartments. She sat down in an arm-chair near the window
+in the dining-room. She insisted upon putting on her stockings without
+assistance, and as she pulled them on with her poor trembling hands, the
+fingers striking against one another, she afforded a glimpse of her
+legs, which were so thin as to make one shudder. The housekeeper,
+meanwhile, was putting together in a bundle a little linen, a glass, a
+cup, and a pewter plate, which she wished to carry with her. When that
+was done, Germinie looked about her for a moment; she cast one last
+glance around the room, a glance that seemed to long to take everything
+away with her. Then, as her eyes rested on the door through which the
+housekeeper had just gone out, she said to mademoiselle: "At all events
+I leave a good woman with you."
+
+She rose. The door closed noisily behind her, as if to say adieu, and,
+supported by Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who almost carried her, she
+went down the five flights of the main stairway. At every landing she
+paused to take breath. In the vestibule she found the concierge, who had
+brought her a chair. She fell into it. The vulgar fellow laughingly
+promised her that she would be well in six weeks. She moved her head
+slightly as she said _yes_, a muffled _yes_.
+
+She was in the cab, beside her mistress. It was an uncomfortable cab and
+jolted over the pavements. She sat forward on the seat to avoid the
+concussion of the jolting, and clung to the door with her hand. She
+watched the houses pass, but did not speak. When they reached the
+hospital gate, she refused to be carried. "Can you walk as far as that?"
+said the concierge, pointing to the reception-room some sixty feet
+distant. She made an affirmative sign and walked: it was a dead woman
+walking, because she was determined to walk!
+
+At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and clean and bare
+and horrible, with a circle of wooden benches around the waiting litter.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door.
+A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil Germinie's
+name and age, and wrote for a quarter of an hour, covering ten or more
+sheets of paper with a religious emblem at the top. That done,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an
+attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no more, but turned and
+fled, and, throwing herself upon the cushions of the cab, she burst into
+sobs and gave vent to all the tears with which her heart had been
+suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was amazed to hear
+such violent weeping.
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+
+On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started at half-past twelve
+to go and see Germinie. It was her purpose to be at her bedside at the
+moment the doors were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she rode
+through the streets she had passed through four days before, she
+remembered the ghastly ride of Monday. It seemed to her as if she were
+incommoding a sick person in the cab, of which she was the only
+occupant, and she sat close in the corner in order to make room for the
+memory of Germinie. In what condition should she find her? Should she
+find her at all? Suppose her bed should be empty?
+
+The cab passed through a narrow street filled with orange carts, and
+with women sitting on the sidewalk offering biscuit for sale in baskets.
+There was something unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air
+display of fruit and cakes,--the delicacies of the dying, the _viaticum_
+of invalids, craved by feverish mouths, longed for by the
+death-agony,--which workingmen's hands, black with toil, purchase as
+they pass, to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting morsel.
+Children carried them with sober faces, almost reverentially, and
+without touching them, as if they understood.
+
+The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard. It was five minutes to
+one. There was a long line of women crowding about the gate, women with
+their working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil took her place in the line, went forward with the others
+and was admitted: they searched her. She inquired for Salle
+Sainte-Joséphine, and was directed to the second wing on the second
+floor. She found the hall and the bed, No. 14, which was, as she had
+been told, one of the last at the right. Indeed, she was guided thither,
+as it were, from the farther end of the hall, by Germinie's smile--the
+smile of a sick person in a hospital at an unexpected visit, which says,
+so gently, as soon as you enter the room: "Here I am."
+
+She leaned over the bed. Germinie tried to push her away with a gesture
+of humility and the shamefacedness of a servant.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her.
+
+"Ah!" said Germinie, "the time dragged terribly yesterday. I imagined it
+was Thursday and I longed so for you."
+
+"My poor girl! How are you?"
+
+"Oh! I'm getting on finely now--the swelling in my bowels has all gone.
+I have only three weeks to stay here, mademoiselle, you'll see.
+They talk about a month or six weeks, but I know better. And I'm very
+comfortable here, I don't mind it at all. I sleep all night now. My! but
+I was thirsty, when you brought me here Monday! They wouldn't give me
+wine and water."
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter LXV
+
+_One and all, after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to
+kiss her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an
+indistinct murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those
+who kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed._]
+
+
+"What have you there to drink?"
+
+"Oh! what I had at home--lime-water. Would you mind pouring me out some,
+mademoiselle? their pewter things are so heavy!"
+
+She raised herself with one arm by the aid of the little stick that hung
+over the middle of the bed, and putting out the other thin, trembling
+arm, left bare by the sleeve falling back from it, she took the glass
+mademoiselle held out to her, and drank.
+
+"There," said she when she had done, and she placed both her arms
+outside the bed, on the coverlid.
+
+"What a pity that I have to put you out in this way, my poor
+demoiselle!" she continued. "Things must be in a horribly dirty state at
+home!"
+
+"Don't worry about that."
+
+There was a moment's silence. A faint smile came to Germinie's lips. "I
+am sailing under false colors," she said, lowering her voice; "I have
+confessed so as to get well."
+
+Then she moved her head on the pillow in order to bring her mouth nearer
+to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's ear:
+
+"There are tales to tell here. I have a funny neighbor yonder." She
+indicated with a glance and a movement of her shoulder the patient to
+whom her back was turned. "There's a man who comes here to see her. He
+talked to her an hour yesterday. I heard them say they'd had a child.
+She has left her husband. He was like a madman, the man was, when he was
+talking to her."
+
+As she spoke, Germinie's face lighted up as if she were still full of
+the scene of the day before, still stirred up and feverish with
+jealousy, so near death as she was, because she had heard love spoken of
+beside her!
+
+Suddenly her expression changed. A woman came toward her bed. She seemed
+embarrassed when she saw Mademoiselle de Varandeuil. After a few
+moments, she kissed Germinie, and hurriedly withdrew as another woman
+came up. The new-comer did the same, kissed Germinie and at once took
+her leave. After the women a man came; then another woman. One and all,
+after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to kiss her, and
+with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct
+murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those who
+kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed.
+
+"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are well taken care of!"
+
+"Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone, "they take excellent
+care of me!"
+
+She had lost the animation that she displayed at the beginning of the
+visit. The little blood that had mounted to her cheeks remained there in
+one spot only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf, like a
+wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were. Her features were
+concealed beneath the veil of infinite dumb agony. There was nothing
+caressing or eloquent in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and
+filled with one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior
+signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an irresistible power of
+concentration, by a last supreme effort of her will, and that her whole
+being was clinging in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything to
+itself.
+
+The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the
+butter woman and the laundress--all her debts, incarnate! The kisses
+were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their
+claims and to extort money from her death-agony!
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+
+Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning. She was making a little
+package of four jars of Bar preserves, which she intended to carry to
+Germinie the next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between the
+housekeeper and the concierge in the reception room. Almost immediately
+the door opened and the concierge came in.
+
+"Sad news, mademoiselle," he said.
+
+And he handed her a letter he had in his hand; it bore the stamp of the
+Lariboisière hospital: Germinie was dead; she died at seven o'clock that
+morning.
+
+Mademoiselle took the letter; she saw only the letters that said: "Dead!
+dead!" And they repeated the word: "Dead! dead!" to no purpose, for she
+could not believe it. As is always the case with a person of whose death
+one learns abruptly, Germinie appeared to her instinct with life, and
+her body, which was no more, seemed to stand before her with the
+awe-inspiring presence of a ghost. Dead! She should never see her more!
+So there was no longer a Germinie on earth! Dead! She was dead! And the
+person she should hear henceforth moving about in the kitchen would not
+be she; somebody else would open the door for her, somebody else would
+potter about her room in the morning! "Germinie!" she cried at last, in
+the tone with which she was accustomed to call her; then, collecting her
+thoughts: "Machine! creature! What's your name?" she cried, savagely, to
+the bewildered housekeeper. "My dress--I must go there."
+
+She was so taken by surprise by this sudden fatal termination of the
+disease, that she could not accustom her mind to the thought. She could
+hardly realize that sudden, secret, vague death, of which her only
+knowledge was derived from a scrap of paper. Was Germinie really dead?
+Mademoiselle asked herself the question with the doubt of persons who
+have lost a dear one far away, and, not having seen her die, do not
+admit that she is dead. Was she not still alive the last time she saw
+her? How could it have happened? How could she so suddenly have become a
+thing good for nothing except to be put under ground? Mademoiselle dared
+not think about it, and yet she kept on thinking. The mystery of the
+death-agony, of which she knew nothing, attracted and terrified her. The
+anxious interest of her affection turned to her maid's last hours, and
+she tried gropingly to take away the veil and repel the feeling of
+horror. Then she was seized with an irresistible longing to know
+everything, to witness, with the help of what might be told her, what
+she had not seen. She felt that she must know if Germinie had spoken
+before she died,--if she had expressed any desire, spoken of any last
+wishes, uttered one of those sentences which are the final outcry of
+life.
+
+When she reached Lariboisière, she passed the concierge,--a stout man
+reeking with life as one reeks with wine,--passed through the corridors
+where pallid convalescents were gliding hither and thither, and rang at
+a door, veiled with white curtains, at the extreme end of the hospital.
+The door was opened: she found herself in a parlor, lighted by two
+windows, where a plaster cast of the Virgin stood upon an altar, between
+two views of Vesuvius, which seemed to shiver against the bare wall.
+Behind her, through an open door, came the voices of Sisters and little
+girls chattering together, a clamor of youthful voices and fresh
+laughter, the natural gayety of a cheery room where the sun frolics with
+children at play.
+
+Mademoiselle asked to speak with the _mother_ of Salle Sainte-Joséphine.
+A short, half-deformed Sister, with a kind, homely face, a face alight
+with the grace of God, came in answer to her request. Germinie had died
+in her arms. "She hardly suffered at all," the Sister told mademoiselle;
+"she was sure that she was better; she felt relieved; she was full of
+hope. About seven this morning, just as her bed was being made, she
+suddenly began vomiting blood, and passed away without knowing that she
+was dying." The Sister added that she had said nothing, asked for
+nothing, expressed no wish.
+
+Mademoiselle rose, delivered from the horrible thoughts she had had.
+Germinie had been spared all the tortures of the death-agony that she
+had dreamed of. Mademoiselle was grateful for that death by the hand of
+God which gathers in the soul at a single stroke.
+
+As she was going away an attendant came to her and said: "Will you be
+kind enough to identify the body?"
+
+_The body!_ The words gave mademoiselle a terrible shock. Without
+awaiting her reply, the attendant led the way to a high yellow door,
+over which was written: _Amphitheatre_. He knocked; a man in shirt
+sleeves, with a pipe in his mouth, opened the door and bade them wait a
+moment.
+
+Mademoiselle waited. Her thoughts terrified her. Her imagination was on
+the other side of that awful door. She tried to anticipate what she was
+about to see. And her mind was so filled with confused images, with
+fanciful alarms, that she shuddered at the thought of entering the room,
+of recognizing that disfigured face among a number of others, if,
+indeed, she could recognize it! And yet she could not tear herself away;
+she said to herself that she should never see her again!
+
+The man with the pipe opened the door: mademoiselle saw nothing but a
+coffin, the lid of which extended only to the neck, leaving Germinie's
+face uncovered, with the eyes open, and the hair erect upon her head.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+
+Prostrated by the excitement and by this last spectacle, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil took to her bed on returning home, after she had given the
+concierge the money for the purchase of a burial lot, and for the
+burial. And when she was in bed the things she had seen arose before
+her. The horrible dead body was still beside her, the ghastly face
+framed by the coffin. That never-to-be-forgotten face was engraved upon
+her mind; beneath her closed eyelids she saw it and was afraid of it.
+Germinie was there, with the distorted features of one who has been
+murdered, with sunken orbits and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn into
+their holes! She was there with her mouth still distorted by the
+vomiting that accompanied her last breath! She was there with her hair,
+her terrible hair, brushed back and standing erect upon her head!
+
+Her hair!--that haunted mademoiselle more persistently than all the
+rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily, of things that had come to
+her ears when she was a child, of superstitions of the common people
+stored away in the background of her memory; she asked herself if she
+had not been told that dead people whose hair is like that carry a crime
+with them to the grave. And at times it was such hair as that that she
+saw upon that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror and
+stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven, like the hair of the
+condemned man before the scaffold in La Grève!
+
+On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed. On Monday she tried
+to rise and dress, in order to attend the funeral; but she was attacked
+with faintness, and was obliged to return to her bed.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+
+"Well! is it all over?" said mademoiselle from her bed, as the concierge
+entered her room about eleven o'clock, on his return from the cemetery,
+with the black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to the occasion.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, yes, mademoiselle. Thank God! the poor girl is out of
+pain."
+
+"Stay! I have no head to-day. Put the receipts and the rest of the money
+on my table. We will settle our accounts some other day."
+
+The concierge stood before her without moving or evincing any purpose to
+go, shifting from one hand to the other a blue velvet cap made from the
+dress of one of his daughters. After a moment's reflection, he decided
+to speak.
+
+"This burying is an expensive business, mademoiselle. In the first
+place, there's----"
+
+"Who asked you to give the figures?" Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+interrupted, with the haughty air of superb charity.
+
+The concierge continued: "And as I was saying, a lot in the cemetery,
+which you told me to get, ain't given away. It's no use for you to have
+a kind heart, mademoiselle, you ain't any too rich,--everyone knows
+that,--and I says to myself: 'Mademoiselle's going to have no small
+amount to pay out, and I know mademoiselle, she'll pay.' So it'll do no
+harm to economize on that, eh? It'll be just so much saved. The other'll
+be just as safe under ground. And then, what will give her the most
+pleasure up yonder? Why, to know that she isn't making things hard for
+anybody, the excellent girl."
+
+"Pay? What?" said mademoiselle, out of patience with the concierge's
+circumlocution.
+
+"Oh! that's of no account," he replied; "she was very fond of you, all
+the same. And then, when she was very sick, it wasn't the time. Oh! _Mon
+Dieu_, you needn't put yourself out--there's no hurry about it--it's
+money she owed a long while. See, this is it."
+
+He took a stamped paper from the inside pocket of his coat.
+
+"I didn't want her to make a note,--she insisted."
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil seized the stamped paper and saw at the foot:
+
+
+     _"I acknowledge the receipt of the above amount._
+
+                                 "GERMINIE LACERTEUX."
+
+
+It was a promise to pay three hundred francs in monthly installments,
+which were to be endorsed on the back.
+
+"There's nothing there, you see," said the concierge, turning the paper
+over.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took off her spectacles. "I will pay," she
+said.
+
+The concierge bowed. She glanced at him; he did not move.
+
+"That is all, I hope?" she said, sharply.
+
+The concierge had his eyes fixed on a leaf in the carpet. "That's
+all--unless----"
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the same feeling of terror as at the
+moment she passed through the door on whose other side she was to see
+her maid's dead body.
+
+"But how does she owe all this?" she cried. "I paid her good wages, I
+almost clothed her. Where did her money go, eh?"
+
+"Ah! there you are, mademoiselle. I should rather not have told
+you,--but as well to-day as to-morrow. And then, too, it's better that
+you should be warned; when you know beforehand you can arrange matters.
+There's an account with the poultry woman. The poor girl owed a little
+everywhere; she didn't keep things in very good shape these last few
+years. The laundress left her book the last time she came. It amounts to
+quite a little,--I don't know just how much. It seems there's a note at
+the grocer's--an old note--it goes back years. He'll bring you his
+book."
+
+"How much at the grocer's?"
+
+"Something like two hundred and fifty."
+
+All these disclosures, falling upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, one
+after another, extorted exclamations of stupefied surprise from her.
+Resting her elbow on her pillow, she said nothing as the veil was torn
+away, bit by bit, from this life, as its shameful features were brought
+to light one by one.
+
+"Yes, about two hundred and fifty. There's a good deal of wine, he tells
+me."
+
+"I have always had wine in the cellar."
+
+"The _crémière_," continued the concierge, without heeding her remark,
+"that's no great matter,--some seventy-five francs. It's for absinthe
+and brandy."
+
+"She drank!" cried Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, everything made clear to
+her by those words.
+
+The concierge did not seem to hear.
+
+"You see, mademoiselle, knowing the Jupillons was the death of her,--the
+young man especially. It wasn't for herself that she did what she did.
+And the disappointment, you see. She took to drink. She hoped to marry
+him, I ought to say. She fitted up a room for him. When they get to
+buying furniture the money goes fast. She ruined herself,--think of it!
+It was no use for me to tell her not to throw herself away by drinking
+as she did. You don't suppose I was going to tell you, when she came in
+at six o'clock in the morning! It was the same with her child. Oh!" the
+concierge added, in reply to mademoiselle's gesture, "it was a lucky
+thing the little one died. Never mind, you can say she led a gay
+life--and a hard one. That's why I say the common ditch. If I was
+you--she's cost you enough, mademoiselle, all the time she's been living
+on you. And you can leave her where she is--with everybody else."
+
+"Ah! that's how it is! that's what she was! She stole for men! she ran
+in debt! Ah! she did well to die, the hussy! And I must pay! A
+child!--think of that: the slut! Yes, indeed, she can rot where she
+will! You have done well, Monsieur Henri. Steal! She stole from me! In
+the ditch, parbleu! that's quite good enough for her! To think that I
+let her keep all my keys--I never kept any account. My God! That's what
+comes of confidence. Well! here we are--I'll pay--not on her account,
+but on my own. And I gave her my best pair of sheets to be buried in!
+Ah! if I'd known I'd have given you the kitchen dish-clout,
+_mademoiselle how I am duped_!"
+
+And mademoiselle continued in this strain for some moments until the
+words choked one another in her throat and strangled her.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+
+As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kept her bed a
+week, ill and raging, filled with indignation that shook her whole body,
+overflowed through her mouth, and tore from her now and again some
+coarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid's
+vile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of
+malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed
+with wrath.
+
+Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing
+else. Debts!--a child!--all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She
+abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have
+denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so
+that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her
+maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service
+twenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits! Drunkenness! she
+had sunk so low as that! The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to
+mademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed from her heart
+said: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth and
+whose filth it cast out!"
+
+How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! And
+to make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, her
+jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bending
+over her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. It was all a
+lie! Her devotion was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her, the
+love upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told herself over and over
+again, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little,
+from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whose
+bitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness of
+days gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.
+
+She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her wrath; but
+reflection brought them back. Thereupon there came to her mind some
+things to which she had paid no heed during Germinie's lifetime, trifles
+of which the grave makes us take thought and upon which death sheds
+light. She had a vague remembrance of certain strange performances on
+the part of her maid, of feverish effusions and frantic embraces, of her
+throwing herself on her knees as if she were about to make a confession,
+of movements of the lips as if a secret were trembling on their verge.
+She saw, with the eyes we have for those who are no more, Germinie's
+wistful glances, her gestures and attitudes, the despairing expression
+of her face. And now she realized that there were deep wounds beneath,
+heart-rending pain, the torment of her anguish and her repentance, the
+tears of blood of her remorse, all sorts of suffering forced out of
+sight throughout her life, and in her whole being a Passion of shame
+that dared not ask forgiveness except with silence!
+
+Then she would scold herself for the thought and call herself an old
+fool. Her instinct of rigid uprightness, the stern conscience and harsh
+judgment of a stainless life, the things which cause a virtuous woman to
+condemn a harlot and should have caused a saint like Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil to be without pity for her servant--everything within her
+rebelled against a pardon. The voice of justice, stifling her kindness
+of heart, cried: "Never! never!" And she would expel Germinie's infamous
+phantom with a pitiless gesture.
+
+There were times, indeed, when, in order to make her condemnation and
+execration of her memory more irrevocable, she would heap charges upon
+her and slander her. She would add to the dead woman's horrible list of
+sins. She would reproach Germinie for more than was justly chargeable to
+her. She would attribute crimes to her dark thoughts, murderous desires
+to her impatient dreams. She would strive to think, she would force
+herself to think, that she had desired her mistress's death and had been
+awaiting it.
+
+But at that very moment, amid the blackest of her thoughts and
+suppositions, a vision arose and stood in a bright light before her. A
+figure approached, that seemed to come to meet her glance, a figure
+against which she could not defend herself, and which passed through the
+hands with which she sought to force it back. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+saw her dead maid once more. She saw once more the face of which she had
+caught a glimpse in the amphitheatre, the crucified face, the tortured
+face to which the blood and agony of a heart had mounted together. She
+saw it once more with the faculty which the second sight of memory
+separates from its surroundings. And that face, as it became clearer to
+her, caused her less terror. It appeared to her, divesting itself, as it
+were, of its fear-inspiring, horrifying qualities. Suffering alone
+remained, but it was the suffering of expiation, almost of prayer, the
+suffering of a dead face that would like to weep. And as its expression
+grew ever milder, mademoiselle came at last to see in it a glance of
+supplication, of supplication that, at last, compelled her pity.
+Insensibly there glided into her reflections indulgent thoughts,
+suggestions of apology that surprised herself. She asked herself if the
+poor girl was as guilty as others, if she had deliberately chosen the
+path of evil, if life, circumstances, the misfortune of her body and her
+destiny, had not made her the creature she had been, a creature of love
+and sorrow. Suddenly she stopped: she was on the point of forgiving her!
+
+One morning she leaped out of bed.
+
+"Here! you--you other!" she cried to her housekeeper, "the devil take
+your name! I can't remember it. Give me my clothes, quick! I have to go
+out."
+
+"The idea, mademoiselle--just look at the roofs, they're all white."
+
+"Well, it snows, that's all."
+
+Ten minutes later, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil said to the driver of the
+cab she had sent for:
+
+"Montmartre Cemetery!"
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+
+In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly straight, as far
+as the eye could see. The thread of snow that marked the outline of its
+coping gave it a dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left three
+leafless trees reared their bare black branches against the sky. They
+rustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead wood stirred by the
+south wind. Above these trees, behind the wall and close against it,
+arose the two arms from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. A
+few snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there; beyond, the hill
+of Montmartre rose sharply, its white shroud broken by oases of brown
+earth and sandy patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmounted
+by gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint in the mist, as
+far as two black windmills. The sky was of a leaden hue, with occasional
+cold, bluish streaks as if ink had been applied with a brush! over
+Montmartre there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seine
+water after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the wings of an
+invisible windmill turned and turned,--slow-moving wings, unvarying in
+their movement, which seemed to be turning for eternity.
+
+In front of the wall, against which was planted a thicket of dead
+cypresses, turned red by the frost, was a vast tract of land upon which
+were two rows of crowded, jostling overturned crosses, like two great
+funeral processions. The crosses touched and pushed one another and trod
+on one another's heels. They bent and fell and collapsed in the ranks.
+In the middle there was a sort of congestion which had caused them to
+bulge out on both sides; you could see them lying--covered by the snow
+and raising it into mounds with the thick wood of which they were
+made--upon the paths, somewhat trampled in the centre, that skirted the
+two long files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation of a
+multitude, the disorder and wavering course of a long march. The black
+crosses with their arms outstretched assumed the appearance of ghosts
+and persons in distress. The two disorderly columns made one think of a
+human panic, a desperate, frightened army. It was as if one were looking
+on at a terrible rout.
+
+All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of immortelles, wreaths
+of white paper with silver thread, black wreaths with gold thread; but
+you could see them beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things,
+souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not accept and which
+had been picked up in order to make a little toilet for the crosses with
+gleanings from the graves.
+
+All the crosses had a name written in white; but there were other names
+that were not even written on a piece of wood,--a broken branch of a
+tree, stuck in the ground, with an envelope tied around it--such
+tombstones as that were to be seen there!
+
+On the left, where they were digging a trench for a third row of
+crosses, the workman's shovel threw black dirt into the air, which fell
+upon the white earth around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of the
+snow, enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be heard; the dull
+sound made by the clods of earth and the heavy sound of regular
+footsteps; an old priest who was waiting there, his head enveloped in a
+black cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a dirty, yellow
+surplice, was trying to keep himself warm by stamping his great galoches
+on the pavement of the high road, in front of the crosses.
+
+Such was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, those
+crosses and that priest said this: "Here sleeps the Death of the common
+people; this is the poor man's end!"
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city of
+humanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindly
+intentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.
+The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speak
+of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of
+progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is
+where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill
+themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome
+odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working
+for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors,
+those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have
+lengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as a
+capital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the common
+people of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful
+corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to bury
+them, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, that
+one can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thy
+charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed
+whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for
+them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou
+dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou
+didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals
+a hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest
+on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: not
+the briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God could
+not be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is
+always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike against
+one another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is common
+to all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the
+worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfaucon
+hastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no more
+time than room to rot in: the earth is taken from them before it has
+finished with them! before their bones have assumed the color and the
+ancient appearance, so to speak, of stone, before the passing years have
+effaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! The
+excavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they are
+the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to
+them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In
+summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human
+charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the
+scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there
+are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential
+flies whose sting is deadly!
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separates
+the lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Following
+the directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between the
+further line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she made
+her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the
+trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of
+oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth
+sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen
+the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one
+and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the
+day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they
+glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long
+strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.
+
+Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out the
+dates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reached
+the crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid's
+death, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the
+9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was not
+in the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, to
+the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the
+12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in all
+directions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing,--Germinie had been
+buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in the
+ground by which to identify her grave!
+
+At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between two
+crosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10th
+of November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that
+spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over her
+body it was necessary to pray at random between two dates,--as if the
+poor girl's destiny had decreed that there should be no more room on
+earth for her body than for her heart!
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] _Canon_ is the French word for cannon; it is also used in
+vulgar parlance to mean a glass of wine drunk at the bar.
+
+[2] _Battre les murailles_--to beat the walls--has a slang
+meaning: to be so drunk that you can't see, or can't lie down without
+holding on.
+
+[3] Literally, _red bowels_--common slang for hard drinkers.
+
+[4] _Cuir_ is an expression used to denote the error in
+speaking, which consists--in French--in pronouncing a _t_ for an _s_,
+and vice versa at the end of words which are joined in pronunciation to
+the next word: _e.g., il étai-z-à la campagne_ for _il était à la
+campagne_.
+
+[5] In the slang vocabulary, to _console_ one's coffee means to
+add brandy to it.
+
+[6] A _négresse_ is a bottle of red wine, and, as applied to
+that article, _morte_ (dead) means empty.
+
+
+
+
+List of Illustrations
+
+GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+GERMINIE AND JUPILLON VISIT THEIR CHILD              _Fronts._
+
+JUPILLON AND GERMINIE AT THE FORTIFICATIONS                116
+
+GERMINIE BRINGS MONEY FOR A SUBSTITUTE                     204
+
+GERMINIE TEMPTED TO MURDER                                 308
+
+GERMINIE AT LARIBOISIÈRE                                   356
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Germinie Lacerteux
+
+Author: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2009 [EBook #27711]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMINIE LACERTEUX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Meredith Bach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
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+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h3 style="font-size: 140%;">CHEFS D'&OElig;UVRE</h3>
+
+<h4>DU</h4>
+
+<h2>ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 5%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;" />
+<h4>REALISTS</h4>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a><img src="images/ifrontis.jpg" width="397" height="593" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="image">
+<img src="images/ichxxi.png" width="183" height="40" alt="Chapter XXI
+
+Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with
+a pole and line.
+
+And when summer came they stayed there all day, at
+the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream&mdash;Jupillon
+on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole
+in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream." title="" />
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 4%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" />
+<div class="caption"><i>Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with
+a pole and line.</i>
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>And when summer came they stayed there all day, at
+the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream&mdash;Jupillon
+on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole
+in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream.</i></div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h1 style="font-size: 175%; margin-top: -.5em;">BIBLIOTHÈQUE<br />
+DES CHEFS-D'&OElig;UVRE<br />
+DU ROMAN<br />
+CONTEMPORAIN</h1>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<hr style="width: 5%; margin-top: -.5em; margin-bottom: -.5em;" />
+<h2><i>GERMINIE LACERTEUX</i></h2>
+<hr style="width: 5%; margin-top: -.5em; margin-bottom: -.5em;" />
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h3>EDMOND <small>AND</small> JULES <small>DE</small> GONCOURT</h3>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h3>PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY<br />
+GEORGE BARRIE &amp; SONS, <span class="sc">Philadelphia</span></h3>
+<hr />
+
+<h2 style="font-size: 170%;">GERMINIE LACERTEUX</h2>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2 class="chapter">PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION</h2>
+
+
+<p>We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+
+book, and give it due warning of what it will find
+therein.</p>
+
+<p>The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.</p>
+
+<p>It loves books which make a pretence of introducing
+their readers to fashionable society: this book deals
+with the life of the street.</p>
+
+<p>It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans,
+alcove confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked
+away in pictures in a bookseller's shop window: that
+which is contained in the following pages is rigidly
+clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of
+Pleasure <i>décolletée</i>: the following study is the clinic of
+Love.</p>
+
+<p>Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing
+stories, adventures that end happily, imaginative works
+that disturb neither its digestion nor its peace of mind:
+this book furnishes entertainment of a melancholy, violent
+sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure
+the health of the public.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Why then have we written it? For no other purpose
+than to annoy the public and offend its tastes?</p>
+
+<p>By no means.</p>
+
+<p>Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age
+of universal suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we
+asked ourselves the question whether what are called
+"the lower classes" had no rights in the novel; if that
+world beneath a world, the common people, must needs
+remain subject to the literary interdict, and helpless
+against the contempt of authors who have hitherto
+said no word to imply that the common people possess
+a heart and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these
+days of equality in which we live, there are classes
+unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes
+too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes
+too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were
+curious to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten
+literature, of a vanished society, Tragedy, is
+definitely dead; if, in a country where castes no longer
+exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries of
+the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest,
+emotion, compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the
+great and the rich; if, in a word, the tears that are shed
+in low life have the same power to cause tears to flow as
+the tears shed in high life.</p>
+
+<p>These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble
+tale, <i>S&oelig;ur Philomène</i>, in 1861; they lead us to put forth
+<i>Germinie Lacerteux</i> to-day.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters
+little. At this day, when the sphere of the Novel is
+broadening and expanding, when it is beginning to be
+the serious, impassioned, living form of literary study
+and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue
+of analysis and psychological research, the true History
+of contemporary morals, when the novel has taken its
+place among the necessary elements of knowledge, it
+may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.
+And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to
+authorize it to disclose misery and suffering which it is
+not well for the fortunate people of Paris to forget, and
+to show to people of fashion what the Sisters of Charity
+have the courage to see for themselves, what the queens
+of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes
+in the hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering
+that teaches charity; to confirm the novel in the practice
+of that religion which the last century called by the
+vast and far-reaching name, <i>Humanity</i>:&mdash;it needs no
+other warrant than the consciousness that that is its
+right.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Paris, October, 1864.</i></p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">SECOND PREFACE</h2>
+
+<h3 class="chapter2">PREPARED FOR A POSTHUMOUS EDITION OF GERMINIE LACERTEUX</h3>
+
+
+<p><i>July 22, 1862.</i>&mdash;The disease is gradually doing its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+work of destruction in our poor Rose. It is as if the
+immaterial manifestations of life that formerly emanated
+from her body were dying one by one. Her face is
+entirely changed. Her expression is not the same,
+her gestures are not the same; and she seems to me
+as if she were putting off every day more and more
+of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which
+makes the personality of a living being. Disease, before
+making an end of its victim, introduces into
+his body something strange, unfamiliar, something that
+is <i>not he</i>, makes of him a new being, so to speak,
+in whom we must seek to find the former being&mdash;he,
+whose joyous, affectionate features have already ceased
+to exist.</p>
+
+<p><i>July 31.</i>&mdash;Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon
+whether our dear old Rose will live or die. I am waiting
+to hear his ring, which to me, is equivalent to that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to the
+court room with their verdict. "It is all over, there is
+no hope, it is simply a question of time. The disease
+has progressed very rapidly. One lung is entirely gone
+and the other substantially." And we must return to
+the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her
+reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our
+faces. Then we feel an unconquerable longing to rush
+from the room and from the poor creature. We leave
+the house, we wander at random through the streets;
+at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in
+a café. We mechanically take up a copy of <i>L'Illustration</i>
+and our eyes fall at once upon the solution of its
+last riddle: <i>Against death, there is no appeal!</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Monday, August 11.</i>&mdash;The disease of the lungs is
+complicated with peritonitis. She has terrible pains in
+the bowels, she cannot move without assistance, she cannot
+lie on her back or her left side. In God's name, is
+not death enough? must she also endure suffering, aye,
+torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the
+human organism? And she suffers thus, poor wretch! in
+one of the servant's rooms, where the sun, shining in
+through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air
+as stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little
+room that the doctor has to put his hat on the bed.
+We struggled to the last to keep her, but finally we had
+to make up our minds to let her go away. She was
+unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+take her; it seems that twenty-five years ago, when she
+first came to us, she went there to see the nurse in charge
+of Edmond, who died there, and so that particular hospital
+represents to her the place where people die. I
+am waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to
+go to Lariboisière. She passed almost a good night.
+She is all ready, in high spirits, in fact. We have covered
+everything up from her as well as we could. She
+longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels
+that she is going to get well there. At two o'clock
+Simon arrives: "Here it is, all right." She refuses to
+have a litter: "I should think I was dead!" she says.
+She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the
+signs of life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is
+as if the earth had risen under her skin. She comes
+down into our apartments. Sitting in the dining-room,
+with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock
+against one another, she draws her stockings on over
+a pair of legs like broomsticks, consumptive legs.
+Then, for a long moment, she looks about at the
+familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to
+take away with them the memory of the places they are
+leaving&mdash;and the door of the apartment closes upon her
+with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the foot of the
+stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The
+concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will
+be well in six weeks. She bows and says "yes," an
+inaudible "yes." The cab drives up to the door. She<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+rests her hand on the concierge's wife. I hold her
+against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide
+open, vacant eyes she vaguely watches the houses pass,
+but she does not speak. At the door of the hospital
+she tries to alight without assistance. "Can you walk
+so far?" the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative
+gesture and walks on. Really I cannot imagine where
+she procured the strength to walk as she does. Here
+we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare,
+clean place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in
+the centre. I seat her in a straw armchair by a door
+with a glazed wicket. A young man opens the wicket,
+asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of
+an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with
+a religious figure at the head. At last, everything is
+ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes one arm, the
+housekeeper the other.&mdash;After that, I saw nothing
+more.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thursday, August 14.</i>&mdash;We have been to Lariboisière.
+We found Rose quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching
+discharge&mdash;in three weeks at most,&mdash;and so free
+from all thought of death that she told us of a furious
+love scene that took place yesterday between a woman
+in the bed next hers and a brother of the Christian
+schools, who was there again to-day. Poor Rose is
+death, but death engrossed with life. Near her bed was
+a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come
+to see her. "You see, as soon as I can walk, I shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+walk about the garden so much that they'll have to send
+me home!" she said. And the mother in her added:
+"Does the child ask for me sometimes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes, oh! yes," the man replied.</p>
+
+<p><i>Saturday, August 16.</i>&mdash;This morning, at ten o'clock,
+someone rings the bell. I hear a colloquy at the door
+between the housekeeper and the concierge. The door
+opens, the concierge enters with a letter. I take the
+letter; it bears the stamp of Lariboisière. Rose died
+this morning at seven o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>Poor girl! So it is all over! I knew that she was
+doomed; but she was so animated, so cheerful, almost
+happy, when we saw her Thursday! And here we are
+both walking up and down the salon, filled with the
+thought that a fellow-creature's death inspires: We shall
+never see her again!&mdash;an instinctive thought that recurs
+incessantly within you. What a void! what a gap in
+our household! A habit, an attachment of twenty-five
+years growth, a girl who knew our whole lives and
+opened our letters in our absence, and to whom we told
+all our business. When I was a bit of a boy I trundled
+my hoop with her, and she bought me apple-tarts with
+her own money, when we went to walk. She would sit
+up for Edmond till morning, to open the door for him,
+when he went to the Bal de l'Opéra without our mother's
+knowledge. She was the woman, the excellent nurse,
+whose hands mother placed in ours when she was dying.
+She had the keys to everything, she managed everything,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+she did everything for our comfort. For twenty-five years
+she tucked us up in bed every night, and every night
+there were the same never-ending jokes about her ugliness
+and her disgraceful physique. Sorrows and joys
+alike she shared with us. She was one of those devoted
+creatures upon whose solicitude you rely to close your
+eyes. Our bodies, when we were ill or indisposed, were
+accustomed to her attentions. She was familiar with all
+our hobbies. She had known all our mistresses. She
+was a piece of our life, part of the furniture of our
+apartment, a stray memory of our youth, at once loving
+and scolding and care-taking, like a watchdog whom we
+were accustomed to having always beside us and about
+us, and who ought to last as long as ourselves. And we
+shall never see her again! It is not she moving about
+the rooms; she will never again come to our rooms to
+bid us good-morning! It is a great wrench, a great
+change in our lives, which seems to us, I cannot say
+why, like one of those solemn breaks in one's existence,
+when, as Byron says, destiny changes horses.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sunday, August 17.</i>&mdash;This morning we are to perform
+all the last sad duties. We must return to the hospital,
+enter once more the reception hall, where I seem to see
+again, in the armchair against the wicket, the ghost of
+the emaciated creature I seated there less than a week
+ago. "Will you identify the body?" the attendant
+hurls the question at me in a harsh voice. We go to the
+further end of the hospital, to a high yellow door, upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+which is written in great black letters: <i>Amphitheatre</i>.
+The attendant knocks. After some moments the door is
+partly opened, and a head like a butcher's boy's appears,
+with a short pipe in its mouth: a head which suggests
+the gladiator and the grave-digger. I fancied that I was
+at the circus, and that he was the slave who received the
+gladiators' bodies; and he does receive the slain in that
+great circus, society. They made us wait a long while
+before opening another door, and during those moments
+of suspense, all our courage oozed away, as the blood of a
+wounded man who is forced to remain standing oozes
+away, drop by drop. The mystery of what we were
+about to see, the horror of a sight that rends your heart,
+the search for the one body amid other bodies, the
+scrutiny and recognition of that poor face, disfigured
+doubtless&mdash;the thought of all this made us as timid as
+children. We were at the end of our strength, at the
+end of our will-power, at the end of our nervous
+tension, and, when the door opened, we said: "We
+will send some one," and fled. From there we went
+to the mayor's office, riding in a cab that jolted us
+and shook our heads about like empty things. And an
+indefinable horror seized upon us of death in a hospital,
+which seems to be only an administrative formality.
+One would say that in that abode of agony, everything
+is so well administered, regulated, reduced to system,
+that death opens it as if it were an administrative
+bureau.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>While we were having the death registered,&mdash;<i>Mon
+Dieu!</i> the paper, all covered with writing and flourishes
+for a poor woman's death!&mdash;a man rushed out of an
+adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
+almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the
+saint of the day and give it to his child. As he passed,
+the skirt of the happy father's coat swept the sheet on
+which the death was registered from the desk to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>When we returned home, we must look through her
+papers, get her clothes together, sort out the clutter of
+phials, bandages and innumerable things that sickness
+collects&mdash;jostle death about, in short. It was a ghastly
+thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread
+from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the
+bedclothes. I threw the coverlid up over the bolster,
+like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.</p>
+
+<p><i>Monday, August 18.</i>&mdash;The chapel is beside the amphitheatre.
+In the hospital God and the dead body are
+neighbors. At the mass said for the poor woman beside
+her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to
+reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant
+promiscuousness of salvation in that performance:
+it resembled the common grave in the prayer.
+Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping&mdash;the
+little girl she had at our house for a short time, who
+is now a young woman of nineteen, a pupil at the convent
+of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a poor, weazened,
+pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the
+air of a Mayeux&mdash;the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden
+family, awaited by Death and with his hand
+even now heavy upon her,&mdash;in her soft eyes there is
+already a gleam of the life beyond.</p>
+
+<p>Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the
+Montmartre cemetery,&mdash;vast as a necropolis and occupying
+a whole quarter of the city,&mdash;walking at slow steps
+through mud that never ends. Lastly the intoning of
+the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
+gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of
+wine is lowered into a cellar.</p>
+
+<p><i>Wednesday, August 20.</i>&mdash;Once more I must return to
+the hospital. For since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday
+and her sudden death the next day, there has existed for
+me a mystery which I force from my thoughts, but which
+constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I
+know nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and
+I dread to learn. It does not seem to me as if she were
+dead; I think of her simply as of a person who has disappeared.
+My imagination returns to her last hours, gropes
+for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they
+torture me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my
+doubts resolved. At last, this morning, I took my courage
+in both hands. Again I see the hospital, again I see
+the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life as one
+reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning
+light falls upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In a distant corner, I rang at a door with little white
+curtains. It was opened and I found myself in a parlor
+where a Virgin stood upon a sort of altar between two
+windows. On the northern wall of the room, the cold,
+bare room, there are&mdash;why, I cannot explain&mdash;two
+framed views of Vesuvius, wretched water-colors which
+seem to shiver and to be entirely expatriated there.
+Through an open door behind me, from a small room in
+which the sun shines brightly, I hear the chattering of
+sisters and children, childish joys, pretty little bursts of
+laughter, all sorts of fresh, clear vocal notes: a sound as
+from a dovecote bathed in the sun. Sisters in white with
+black caps pass and repass; one stops in front of my
+chair. She is short, badly developed, with an ugly,
+sweet face, a poor face by the grace of God. She is
+the mother of the Salle Saint-Joseph. She tells me how
+Rose died, in hardly any pain, feeling that she was
+improving, almost well, overflowing with encouragement
+and hope. In the morning, after her bed was made,
+without any suspicion that death was near, suddenly she
+was taken with a hemorrhage, which lasted some few
+seconds. I came away, much comforted, delivered
+from the thought that she had had the anticipatory taste
+of death, the horror of its approach.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thursday, October 21.</i></p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>In the midst of our dinner, which was rendered
+melancholy enough by the constant hovering of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+conversation around the subject of death, Maria, who
+came to dinner to-night, cried out, after two or three
+nervous blows with her fingers upon her fluffy blonde
+locks:&mdash;"My friends, while the poor girl was alive, I
+kept the professional secret of my trade. But, now that
+she is under ground, you must know the truth."</p>
+
+<p>And thereupon we learned things concerning the
+unhappy creature that took away our appetites, leaving
+in our mouths the bitter taste of fruit cut with a steel
+knife. And a whole strange, hateful, repugnant, deplorable
+existence was revealed to us. The notes she signed,
+the debts she has left behind her at all the dealers, have
+the most unforeseen, the most amazing, the most incredible
+basis. She kept men: the milkwoman's son, for
+whom she furnished a chamber; another to whom she
+carried our wine, chickens, food of all sorts. A secret
+life of nocturnal orgies, of nights passed abroad, of
+fierce nymphomania, that made her lovers say: "Either
+she or I will stay on the field!" A passion, passions
+with her whole head and heart and all her senses at
+once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures'
+diseases, consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure,
+hysteria, the beginning of insanity. She had two children
+by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived six
+months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was
+going on a visit to her province, it was to lie in. And,
+with regard to these men, her passion was so extravagant,
+so unhealthy, so insane, that she, who was formerly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+honesty personified, actually stole from us, took twenty
+franc pieces out of rolls of a hundred francs, so that the
+lovers she paid might not leave her. Now, after these
+involuntarily dishonest acts, these petty crimes extorted
+from her upright nature, she plunged into such depths of
+self-reproach, remorse, melancholy, such black despair,
+that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin,
+desperate and unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to
+escape herself, to save herself from the present, to
+drown herself and founder for a few moments in the
+heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would
+lie wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she
+fell when she tried to make it. The miserable creature!
+how great an incentive, how many motives and reasons
+she found for devouring her suffering, and bleeding
+internally: in the first place the rejection at intervals of
+religious ideas by the terrors of a hell of fire and brimstone;
+then jealousy, that characteristic jealousy of
+everything and everybody that poisoned her life; then,
+then&mdash;then the disgust which these men, after a time,
+brutally expressed for her ugliness, and which drove her
+deeper and deeper into sottishness,&mdash;caused her one day
+to have a miscarriage, and she fell half dead on the
+floor. Such a frightful tearing away of the veil we have
+worn over our eyes is like the examination of a pocketful
+of horrible things in a dead body suddenly opened. From
+what we have heard I suddenly seem to realize what she
+must have suffered for ten years past: the dread of an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+anonymous letter to us or of a denunciation from some
+dealer; and the constant trepidation on the subject of
+the money that was demanded of her, and that she could
+not pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature,
+perverted by the vile Quartier Saint-Georges, because of
+her intimacy with low wretches whom she despised; and
+the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility
+caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions
+and brutality of the Alphonses of the gutter; and the
+temptations to suicide which caused me to pull her away
+from a window one day, when I found her leaning far
+out&mdash;and lastly all the tears that we believed to be
+without cause&mdash;all these things mingled with a very
+deep and heartfelt affection for us, and with a vehement,
+feverish devotion when either of us was ill. And this
+woman possessed an energetic character, a force of will,
+a skill in mystification, to which nothing can be compared.
+Yes, yes, all those frightful secrets kept under
+lock and key, hidden, buried deep in her own heart, so
+that neither our eyes, nor our ears, nor our powers of
+observation ever detected aught amiss, even in her
+hysterical attacks, when nothing escaped her but groans:
+a mystery preserved until her death, and which she must
+have believed would be buried with her. And of what
+did she die? She died, because, all through one rainy
+winter's night, eight months ago, at Montmartre, she
+spied upon the milkwoman's son, who had turned her
+away, in order to find out with what woman he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+filled her place; a whole night leaning against a ground-floor
+window, as a result of which she was drenched to
+the bones with deadly pleurisy!</p>
+
+<p>Poor creature, we forgive her; indeed, a vast compassion
+for her fills our hearts, as we reflect upon all
+that she has suffered. But we have become suspicious,
+for our lives, of the whole female sex, and of women
+above us as well as of women below us in station. We
+are terror-stricken at the double lining of their hearts,
+at the marvelous faculty, the science, the consummate
+genius of falsehood with which their whole being is
+instinct.</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>The above extracts are from our journal: <span class="sc">Journal
+des Goncourts</span>&mdash;<i>Mémoires de la Vie Littéraire</i>; they
+are the documentary foundation upon which, two years
+later, my brother and I composed <span class="sc">Germinie Lacerteux</span>,
+whom we made a study of and taught when she
+was in the service of our venerable cousin, Mademoiselle
+de C&mdash;&mdash;t, of whom we were writing a veracious biography,
+after the style of a biography of modern history.</p>
+
+<div class="sc" style="text-align: right;">Edmond de Goncourt.</div>
+
+<p><i>Auteuil, April, 1886.</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">I</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Saved! so you are really out of danger, mademoiselle!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+exclaimed the maid with a cry of joy, as she
+closed the door upon the doctor, and, rushing to the bed
+on which her mistress lay, she began, in a frenzy of happiness
+and with a shower of kisses to embrace, together with
+the bed covers, the old woman's poor, emaciated body,
+which seemed, in the huge bed, as small as a child's.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman took her head, silently, in both
+hands, pressed it against her heart, heaved a sigh, and
+muttered: "Ah, well! so I must live on!"</p>
+
+<p>This took place in a small room, through the window
+of which could be seen a small patch of sky cut by
+three black iron pipes, various neighboring roofs, and in
+the distance, between two houses that almost touched,
+the leafless branch of a tree, whose trunk was invisible.</p>
+
+<p>On the mantelpiece, in a mahogany box, was a square
+clock with a large dial, huge figures and bulky hands.
+Beside it, under glass covers, were two candlesticks
+formed by three silver swans twisting their necks around
+a golden quiver. Near the fireplace an easy chair <i>à la
+Voltaire</i>, covered with one of the pieces of tapestry of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+checker-board pattern, which little girls and old women
+make, extended its empty arms. Two little Italian
+landscapes, a flower piece in water-colors after Bertin,
+with a date in red ink at the bottom, and a few miniatures
+hung on the walls.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the mahogany commode of an Empire pattern,
+a statue of Time in black bronze, running with his
+scythe in rest, served as a watch stand for a small watch
+with a monogram in diamonds upon blue enamel, surrounded
+with pearls. The floor was covered with a
+bright carpet with black and green stripes. The curtains
+at the bed and the window were of old-fashioned
+chintz with red figures upon a chocolate ground.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of the bed, a portrait inclined over the
+invalid and seemed to gaze sternly at her. It represented
+a man with harsh features, whose face emerged
+from the high collar of a green satin coat, and a muslin
+cravat, with waving ends, tied loosely around the neck,
+in the style of the early years of the Revolution. The
+old woman in the bed resembled the portrait. She had
+the same bushy, commanding black eyebrows, the same
+aquiline nose, the same clearly marked lines of will,
+resolution and energy. The portrait seemed to cast
+a reflection upon her, as a father's face is reflected in
+his child's. But in hers the harshness of the features
+was softened by a gleam of rough kindliness, by an
+indefinable flame of sturdy devotion and masculine
+charity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The light in the room was the light of an evening in
+early spring, about five o'clock, a light as clear as crystal
+and as white as silver, the cold, chaste, soft light,
+which fades away in the flush of the sunset passing into
+twilight. The sky was filled with that light of a new
+life, adorably melancholy, like the still naked earth, and
+so replete with pathos that it moves happy souls to tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well! my silly Germinie, weeping?" said
+the old woman, a moment later, withdrawing her hands
+which were moist with her maid's kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! my dear, kind mademoiselle, I would like to
+weep like this all the time! it's so good! it brings my
+poor mother back before my eyes&mdash;and everything!&mdash;if
+you only knew!"</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, go on," said her mistress, closing her eyes
+to listen, "tell me about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! my poor mother!" The maid paused a moment.
+Then, with the flood of words that gushes forth
+with tears of joy, she continued, as if, in the emotion
+and outpouring of her happiness, her whole childhood
+flowed back into her heart! "Poor woman! I can
+see her now the last time she went out to take me to
+mass, one 21st of January, I remember. In those days
+they read from the king's Testament. Ah! she suffered
+enough on my account, did mamma! She was forty-two
+years old, when I was born&mdash;&mdash;papa made her cry
+a good deal! There were three of us before and there
+wasn't any too much bread in the house. And then he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+was proud as anything. If we'd had only a handful of
+peas in the house he would never have gone to the curé
+for help. Ah! we didn't eat bacon every day at our
+house. Never mind; for all that mamma loved me a
+little more and she always found a little fat or cheese in
+some corner to put on my bread. I wasn't five when
+she died. That was a bad thing for us all. I had a
+tall brother, who was white as a sheet, with a yellow
+beard&mdash;and good! you have no idea. Everybody loved
+him. They gave him all sorts of names. Some called
+him Boda&mdash;why, I don't know. Others called him
+Jesus Christ. Ah! he was a worker, he was! It didn't
+make any difference to him that his health was good for
+nothing; at daybreak he was always at his loom&mdash;for
+we were weavers, you must know&mdash;and he never put his
+shuttle down till night. And honest, too, if you knew!
+People came from all about to bring him their yarn,
+and without weighing it, too. He was a great friend of
+the schoolmaster, and he used to write the <i>mottoes</i> for
+the carnival. My father, he was a different sort: he'd
+work for a moment, or an hour, you know, and then
+he'd go off into the fields&mdash;and when he came home
+he'd beat us, and beat us hard. He was like a madman;
+they said it was because he was consumptive. It
+was lucky my brother was there: he used to prevent my
+second sister from pulling my hair and hurting me,
+because she was jealous. He always took me by the
+hand to go and see them play skittles. In fact, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+supported the family all alone. For my first communion
+he had the bells rung! Ah! he did a heap of work so
+that I should be like the others, in a little white dress
+with flounces and a little bag in my hand, such as they
+used to carry in those days. I didn't have any cap: I
+remember making myself a pretty little wreath of ribbons
+and the white pith you pull off when you strip
+reeds; there was lots of it in the places where we used
+to put the hemp to soak. That was one of my great
+days&mdash;that and the drawing lots for the pigs at
+Christmas&mdash;and the days when I went to help them tie
+up the vines; that was in June, you know. We had a
+little vineyard near Saint Hilaire. There was one very
+hard year in those days&mdash;do you remember it, mademoiselle?&mdash;the
+long frost of 1828 that ruined everything.
+It extended as far as Dijon and farther, too&mdash;people had
+to make bread from bran. My brother nearly killed
+himself with work. Father, who was always out of
+doors tramping about the fields, sometimes brought
+home a few mushrooms. It was pretty bad, all the
+same; we were hungry oftener than anything else.
+When I was out in the fields myself, I'd look around to
+see if anyone could see me, and then I'd crawl along
+softly on my knees, and when I was under a cow, I'd
+take off one of my sabots and begin to milk her.
+Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest
+sister was out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and
+she sent home her wages&mdash;twenty-four francs&mdash;it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+always as much as that. The second worked at dressmaking
+in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the
+prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six
+in the morning till dark for eight sous. Out of that she
+wanted to put some by for a dress for the fête on Saint-Remi's
+day.&mdash;Ah! that's the way it is with us: there
+are many who live on two potatoes a day for six months
+so as to have a new dress for that day. Bad luck fell
+on us on all sides. My father died. We had to sell a
+small field, and a bit of a vineyard that yielded a cask
+of wine every year. The notaries don't work for
+nothing. When my brother was sick there was nothing
+to give him to drink but <i>lees</i> that we'd been putting
+water to for a year. And there wasn't any change of
+linen for him; all the sheets in the wardrobe, which
+had a golden cross on top of it in mother's time, had
+gone&mdash;and the cross too. More than that, before he
+was sick this time, my brother goes off to the fête at
+Clefmont. He hears someone say that my sister had
+gone wrong with the mayor she worked for; he falls on
+the men who said it, but he wasn't very strong. They
+were, though, and they threw him down, and when he
+was down, they kicked him with their wooden shoes,
+in the pit of the stomach. He was brought home to us
+for dead. The doctor put him on his feet again, though,
+and told us he was cured. But he could just drag himself
+along. I could see that he was going when he
+kissed me. When he was dead, poor dear boy, Cadet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+Ballard had to use all his strength to take me away
+from the body. The whole village, mayor and all, went
+to his funeral. As my sister couldn't keep her place
+with the mayor on account of the things he said to her,
+and had gone to Paris to find a place, my other sister
+went after her. I was left all alone. One of my
+mother's cousins then took me with her to Damblin;
+but I was all upset there; I cried all night long,
+and whenever I could run away I always went back to
+our house. Just to see the old vine at our door, from
+the end of the street, did me good! it put strength into
+my legs. The good people who had bought the house
+would keep me till someone came for me! they were
+always sure to find me there. At last they wrote to my
+sister in Paris that, if she didn't send for me to come
+and live with her, I wasn't likely to live long. It's a
+fact that I was just like wax. They put me in charge of
+the driver of a small wagon that went from Langres to
+Paris every month, and that's how I came to Paris. I
+was fourteen years old, then. I remember that I went
+to bed all dressed all the way, because they made me
+sleep in the common room. When I arrived I was
+covered with lice."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">II</h2>
+
+
+<p>The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+own life with her servant's.</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She
+first saw the light in a mansion on Rue Royale and
+Mesdames de France were her sponsors in baptism.
+Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois,
+in whose household he held an important post. He
+joined in all his hunting-parties, and was one of the
+few familiar spirits, in whose presence, at the mass
+preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King
+Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying
+in an undertone: "Psit! psit! curé, swallow your
+<i>Good Lord</i> quickly!"</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those
+marriages which were customary enough in his day: he
+had espoused a sort of actress, a singer, who, although
+she had no great talent, had made a success at the
+<i>Concert Spirituel</i>, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil
+and Madame Saint-Huberty. The little girl born
+of this marriage in 1782 was sickly and delicate, ugly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be
+absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's
+wrist. She had nothing of what her parents' vanity
+would have liked her to have. After making a fiasco on
+the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by her
+mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of
+the servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she
+never went near her mother, who always made her kiss
+her under the chin, so that she might not disturb her
+rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de
+Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage,
+was disburser of pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was
+traveling in Italy, whither she had ordered her physician
+to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving her
+daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge.
+The absorbing anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening
+wealth and the families that handled wealth&mdash;Monsieur
+de Varandeuil's brother was a Farmer-General&mdash;left
+that very selfish and unloving father but little
+leisure to attend to the wants of his children. Thereupon,
+he began to be somewhat embarrassed pecuniarily.
+He left Rue Royale and took up his abode at the Hôtel
+du Petit-Charolais, belonging to his mother, who allowed
+him to install himself there. Events moved rapidly;
+one evening, in the early days of the guillotine, as he
+was walking along Rue Saint-Antoine, he heard a hawker
+in front of him, crying the journal: <i>Aux Voleurs! Aux
+Voleurs!</i> According to the usual custom of those days,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+he gave a list of the articles contained in the number he
+had for sale: Monsieur de Varandeuil heard his own
+name mingled with oaths and obscenity. He bought
+the paper and read therein a revolutionary denunciation
+of himself.</p>
+
+<p>Some time after, his brother was arrested and detained
+at Hôtel Talaru with the other Farmers-General. His
+mother, in a paroxysm of terror, had foolishly sold the
+Hôtel du Petit-Charolais, where he was living, for the
+value of the mirrors: she was paid in <i>assignats</i>, and
+died of despair over the constant depreciation of the
+paper. Luckily Monsieur de Varandeuil obtained from
+the purchasers, who could find no tenants, leave to occupy
+the rooms formerly used by the stableboys. He took
+refuge there, among the outbuildings of the mansion,
+stripped himself of his name and posted at the door,
+as he was ordered to do, his family name of Roulot,
+under which he buried the <i>De Varandeuil</i> and the
+former courtier of the Comte d'Artois. He lived there
+alone, buried, forgotten, hiding his head, never going
+out, cowering in his hole, without servants, waited upon
+by his daughter, to whom he left everything. The Terror
+was to them a period of shuddering suspense, the breathless
+excitement of impending death. Every evening,
+the little girl went and listened at a grated window to
+the day's crop of condemnations, the <i>List of Prize
+Winners in the Lottery of Saint Guillotine</i>. She
+answered every knock at the door, thinking that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+had come to take her father to the Place de la Révolution,
+whither her uncle had already been taken. The
+moment came when money, the money that was so
+scarce, no longer procured bread. It was necessary to
+go and get it, almost by force, at the doors of the
+bakeries; it was necessary to earn it by standing for
+hours in the cold, biting night air, in the crushing
+pressure of crowds of people; to stand in line from three
+o'clock in the morning. The father did not care to
+venture into that mass of humanity. He was afraid of
+being recognized, of compromising himself by one of
+those outbursts to which his impetuous nature would
+have given vent, no matter where he might be. Then,
+too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the
+task. The little boy was still too small; he would have
+been crushed; so the duty of obtaining bread for three
+mouths each day fell to the daughter. She obtained it.
+With her little thin body, fairly lost in her father's
+knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes,
+her limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth,
+she would wait, shivering, her eyes aching with cold,
+amid the pushing and buffeting, until the baker's wife
+on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a loaf
+which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly
+hold. At last, this poor little creature, who returned
+day after day, with her pinched face and her emaciated,
+trembling body, moved the baker's wife to pity. With
+the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+would send the coveted loaf to the little one by her
+boy as soon as she appeared in the long line. But one
+day, just as she put out her hand to take it, a woman,
+whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and
+preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe
+which kept her in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil bore the marks of the blow all her life.</p>
+
+<p>During that month, the whole family would have died
+of starvation, had it not been for a supply of rice, which
+one of their acquaintances, the Comtesse d'Auteuil, had
+had the forethought to lay aside, and which she consented
+to share with the father and the two children.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary
+Tribunal by burying himself in obscurity. He
+escaped it also by reason of the fact that the accounts of
+his administration of his office were still unsettled, as he
+had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of
+the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept
+suspicion at bay by his personal animosity toward some
+great personages at court, and by the hatred of the
+queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had
+conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of
+that wretched woman, he used violent, bitter, insulting
+words, uttered in such a passionate, sincere tone that
+they almost made him appear as an enemy of the
+royal family; so that those to whom he was simply
+Citizen Roulot looked upon him as a good patriot, and
+those who knew his former name almost excused him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend
+of a prince of the blood, and a place holder.</p>
+
+<p>The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic
+suppers, those repasts of a whole street in the street;
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her confused, terrified
+reminiscences of those days, could still see the tables
+on Rue Pavée, with their legs in the streams of the
+blood of September flowing from La Force! It was at
+one of these suppers that Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived
+a scheme that completely assured his immunity.
+He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted
+patriots both, one of whom was on intimate terms with
+Chaumette, that he was in great embarrassment because
+his daughter had been privately baptized only, so that she
+had no civil status, and said that he would be very happy
+if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of
+the municipality and honor her with a name selected by
+him from the Republican calendar of Greece or Rome.
+Chaumette at once arranged a meeting with this father,
+<i>who had reached so high a level</i>, as they said in those days.
+During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was
+taken into a closet where she found two women who were
+instructed to satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she
+showed them her breast. They then escorted her to the
+great Salle des Declarations, and there, after a metaphorical
+allocution, Chaumette baptized her <i>Sempronie</i>;
+a name which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil and which she never abandoned.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode,
+the family passed through the terrible days preceding
+the fall of Robespierre. At last came the ninth Thermidor
+and deliverance. But poverty was none the less
+a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had
+not lived through the bitter days of the Revolution,
+they were not to live through the wretched days of
+the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent
+by Providence by the hand of Folly. The father
+and the two children could hardly have existed without
+the income from four shares in the <i>Vaudeville</i>, an
+investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily
+inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the
+best of all possible investments in those years of death,
+when people felt the need of forgetting death every
+evening&mdash;in those days of supreme agony, when everyone
+wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song.
+Soon these shares, added to the amount of some outstanding
+claims that were paid, provided the family
+with something more than bread. They thereupon left
+the eaves of the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais and took a
+small suite in the Marais, on Rue du Chaume.</p>
+
+<p>No change took place, however, in the habits of the
+household. The daughter continued to wait upon her
+father and brother. Monsieur de Varandeuil had gradually
+become accustomed to see in her only the woman
+indicated by her costume and by the work that she did.
+The father's eyes did not care to recognize a daughter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+in that servant's garb and in her performance of menial
+occupations. She was no longer a person with his blood
+in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him:
+she was a servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so
+fully in that idea and in his harsh treatment of her, he
+found that filial, affectionate, respectful service,&mdash;which
+cost nothing at all, by the way,&mdash;so convenient, that it
+cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a little
+more money mended the family fortunes: battles had
+to be fought to induce him to take a maid to fill his
+child's place and to relieve the girl from the most
+humiliating domestic labor.</p>
+
+<p>They were without information concerning Madame
+de Varandeuil, who had refused to join her husband at
+Paris during the early years of the Revolution; at last
+they learned that she had married again in Germany,
+producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the
+death certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal
+name having been changed. The girl grew up, therefore,
+abandoned, without affection, with no mother
+except a woman dead to her family, whom her father
+taught her to despise. Her childhood was passed in
+constant anxiety, in the privations that wear life away,
+in the fatigue resulting from labor that exhausted the
+strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death
+that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there
+had been hours when that girl of thirteen was tempted
+to do as many women did in those days&mdash;to open the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+door and rush into the street, crying: <i>Vive le roi!</i> in
+order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation
+of her childhood with less tragic motives of weariness.
+She had to submit to the ill humor, the exactions, the
+bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her father,
+which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained
+by the great tempest of the time. She was still doomed
+to undergo the fatigues and humiliations of a servant.
+She remained alone with her father, kept down and
+humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her
+heart heavy with grief because she longed to love and
+had nothing to love. She was beginning to suffer from
+the cold void that is formed about a woman by an unattractive,
+unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of
+beauty and sympathetic charm. She could see that she
+aroused a sort of compassion with her long nose, her
+yellow complexion, her angular figure, her thin body.
+She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness was
+made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal,
+woolen dresses which she made herself, her father paying
+for the material only after much grumbling: she
+could not induce him to make her a small allowance for
+her toilet until she was thirty-five.</p>
+
+<p>How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life
+with that morose, sour old man, who was always scolding
+and complaining at home, affable only in society,
+and who left her every evening to go to the great houses
+that were reopened under the Directory and at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+beginning of the Empire! Only at very long intervals
+did he take her out, and when he did, it was always to
+that everlasting <i>Vaudeville</i>, where he had boxes. Even
+on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She
+trembled all the time that she was with him; she was
+afraid of his violent disposition, of the tone of the old
+régime that his outbreaks of wrath had retained, of the
+facility with which he would raise his cane at an insolent
+remark from the <i>canaille</i>. On almost every occasion
+there were scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with
+people in the pit, and threats of personal violence to
+which she put an end by lowering the curtain of the
+box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even
+in the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry
+them at Monsieur de Varandeuil's price and would keep
+them waiting one hour, two hours without moving;
+sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and
+leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would
+vainly implore him to submit and pay the price demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Considering that these diversions should suffice for
+Sempronie, and having, moreover, a jealous desire to
+have her all to himself and always under his hand,
+Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies
+with anybody. He did not take her into society;
+he did not take her to the houses of their kinsfolk who
+returned after the emigration, except on days of formal
+receptions or family gatherings. He kept her closely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+confined to the house: not until she was forty did he
+consider that she was old enough to be allowed to go
+out alone. Thus, the girl had no friendship, no connection
+of any sort to lean upon; indeed, she no longer
+had her younger brother with her, as he had gone to
+the United States and enlisted in the American navy.</p>
+
+<p>She was forbidden by her father to marry, he did not
+admit that she would allow herself even to think of
+marrying and deserting him; all the suitors who might
+have come forward he fought and rejected in advance,
+in order not to leave his daughter the courage to speak
+to him on the subject, if the occasion should ever arise.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile our victories were stripping Italy of her
+treasures. The masterpieces of Rome, Florence and
+Venice were hurrying to Paris. Italian art was at a
+premium. Collectors no longer took pride in any paintings
+but those of the Italian school. Monsieur de Varandeuil
+saw an opening for a fortune in this change of
+taste. He, also, had fallen a victim to the artistic dilettantism
+which was one of the refined passions of the
+nobility before the Revolution. He had lived in the
+society of artists and collectors; he admired pictures.
+It occurred to him to collect a gallery of Italian works
+and then to sell them. Paris was still overrun with the
+objects of art sold and scattered under the Terror.
+Monsieur de Varandeuil began to walk back and forth
+through the streets&mdash;they were the markets for large
+canvases in those days,&mdash;and at every step he made a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+discovery; every day he purchased something. Soon
+the small apartment was crowded with old, black paintings,
+so large for the most part that the walls would not
+hold them with their frames, with the result that there
+was no room for the furniture. These were christened
+Raphael, Vinci, or Andrea del Sarto; there were none
+but <i>chefs d'&oelig;uvre</i>, and the father would keep his daughter
+standing in front of them hours at a time, forcing
+his admiration upon her, wearying her with his ecstatic
+flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet, would
+work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium,
+and would end by thinking that he was negotiating
+with an imaginary purchaser, would dispute with him
+over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry out:
+"A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur,
+a hundred thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed
+by the large amount of money that those great,
+ugly things, in which there were so many nude men,
+deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon
+remonstrance and tried to check such ruinous extravagance.
+Monsieur de Varandeuil lost his temper, waxed
+wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his
+blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was
+her fortune and that she would see later if he was an old
+fool. At last she induced him to realize. The sale
+took place; it was a failure, one of the most complete
+shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hôtel
+Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+with rage at this blow, which not only involved pecuniary
+loss and a serious inroad upon his little fortune,
+but was also a direct denial of his claims to connoisseurship,
+a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the
+cheek of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed
+his daughter that they were too poor to remain in Paris
+and that they must go into the provinces to live. Having
+been cradled and reared in an epoch little adapted
+to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution:
+she was obliged to go with him wherever he
+chose to go, and, by leaving Paris, to lose the society
+and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in
+their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her
+confidence, and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to
+her as to an older sister.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam.
+There he was near familiar scenes, in the
+atmosphere of what was formerly a little court, close at
+hand to two or three châteaux, whose owners he knew,
+and which were beginning to throw open their doors
+once more. Then, too, since the Revolution a little
+community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich shopkeepers,
+had settled upon this territory which once belonged to
+the Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil
+sounded very grand in the ears of all those good people.
+They bowed very low to him, they contended for the
+honor of entertaining him, they listened respectfully,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it
+was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic
+of Versailles, he had the place of honor and the prestige
+of a lord among them. When he dined with
+Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand
+francs a year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and
+all, to go and fry the oyster plants herself: Monsieur
+de Varandeuil did not like them except as she cooked
+them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go
+into retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to
+the pleasant surroundings there, but to a project that he
+had formed. He had gone thither to obtain leisure for a
+monumental work. That which he had been unable to
+do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection,
+he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a
+little Italian with his wife; he took it into his head to
+present Vasari's <i>Lives of the Painters</i> to the French
+public, to translate it with the assistance of his daughter,
+who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's
+maid speak Italian and had retained a few words. He
+plunged the girl into Vasari, he locked up her time and
+her thoughts in grammars, dictionaries, commentaries,
+all the works of all the scholiasts of Italian art, kept
+her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the <i>ennui</i>
+and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the
+darkness of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden
+of the book fell upon her; when he had laid out
+her task, he would leave her tête-à-tête with the volumes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the
+neighborhood, paying visits, gambling at some château
+or dining among the bourgeois of his acquaintance, to
+whom he would complain pathetically of the laborious
+effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed
+upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading
+of the translation made during the day, make comments
+and critical remarks, and upset a sentence to give
+it a different meaning, which his daughter would eliminate
+again when he had gone; then he would resume
+his walks and jaunts, like a man who has well earned his
+leisure, walking very erect, with his hat under his arm
+and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying himself, the sky
+and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature
+and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of
+impatience, common to children and old men, would
+overtake him; he would demand a certain number of
+pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter
+to sit up half the night.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three years passed in this labor, in which
+Sempronie's eyes were ruined at last. She lived entombed
+in her father's Vasari, more entirely alone than
+ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance
+from the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and
+their manners <i>à la Madame Angot</i>, and too poorly clad
+to visit at the châteaux. For her, there was no pleasure,
+no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned
+by her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+tore up the flowers that she planted secretly in the
+garden. He would have nothing there but vegetables
+and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand
+utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced
+the Convention to convert the Tuileries into a potato
+field. Her only enjoyment was when her father, at
+very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of her
+two young friends for a week&mdash;a week which would have
+been seven days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her
+father embittered its joys, its diversions, its fêtes, with
+his always threatening outbreaks, his ill-humor always
+armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about
+trifles&mdash;a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked
+for to place in her friend's room, a dish for her dinner,
+or a place to which she wished to take her.</p>
+
+<p>At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a
+servant, who almost immediately became his mistress.
+A child was born of this connection, and the father, in
+his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to have
+it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years
+rolled on the woman acquired a firm foothold in the
+house. She ended by ruling the household, father and
+daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de
+Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be
+served by Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil rebelled under the insult, and
+drew herself up to the full height of her indignation.
+Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+by the people and the things about her, the girl had
+built up a resolute, straightforward character; tears had
+tempered instead of softening it. Beneath filial docility
+and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath apparent
+gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character
+of iron, a man's strength of will, one of those
+hearts which nothing bends and which never bend themselves.
+When her father demanded that she lower herself
+to that extent, she reminded him that she was his
+daughter, she reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of
+words, the shame and the reproach of it in his face, and
+concluded by informing him that if that woman did not
+leave the house that very evening, she would leave it,
+and that she should have no difficulty in living, thank
+God! wherever she might go, with the simple tastes he
+had forced upon her. The father, thunderstruck and
+bewildered by this revolt, yielded and dismissed the
+servant; but he retained a dastardly sort of rancor
+against his daughter on account of the sacrifice she had
+extorted from him. His spleen betrayed itself in sharp,
+aggressive words, ironical thanks and bitter smiles.
+Sempronie's only revenge was to attend to his wants
+more thoroughly, more gently, more patiently than ever.
+Her devotion was destined to be subjected to one final
+test; the old man had a stroke of apoplexy which left
+him with one whole side of his body stiff and dead,
+lame in one leg, and asleep so far as his intelligence was
+concerned, although keenly conscious of his misfortune<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+and of his dependence upon his daughter. Thereupon,
+all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of his nature
+was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to
+ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his
+weakness, he became a sort of malevolent madman.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days and her
+nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her
+attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied
+generosity and forgiveness, to suffer torments at seeing
+always by his side, indefatigable and kindly, that image
+of duty. But what a life it was! She had to contend
+against the miserable man's incurable <i>ennui</i>, to be always
+ready to bear him company, to lead him about and support
+him all day long. She must play cards with him
+when he was at home, and not let him win or lose too
+much. She must combat his wishes, his gormandizing
+tendencies, take dishes away from him, and, in connection
+with everything that he wanted, endure complaints,
+reproaches, insults, tears, mad despair, and the
+outbursts of childish anger in which helpless old men
+indulge. And this lasted ten years! ten years, during
+which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had no other recreation,
+no other consolation than to pour out all the tenderness
+and warmth of a maternal affection upon one of her
+two young friends, recently married,&mdash;her <i>chick</i>, as she
+called her. It was Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's delight
+to go and pass a short time every fortnight in that
+happy household. She would kiss the pretty child,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+already in its cradle and asleep for the night when she
+arrived; she would dine at racing speed; at dessert she
+would send for a carriage and would hasten away like a
+tardy schoolboy. But in the last years of her father's
+life she could not even obtain permission to dine out:
+the old man would no longer sanction such a long
+absence and kept her almost constantly beside him,
+repeating again and again that he was well aware that
+it was not amusing to take care of an infirm old man
+like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him.
+He died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no
+words but these for her who had been his daughter
+nearly forty years: "I know that you never loved
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's
+brother had returned from America. He brought with
+him a colored woman who had nursed him through the
+yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he
+had had by the woman before marrying her. Although
+she was imbued with the ideas of the old régime as to
+the blacks, and although she looked upon that ignorant
+creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild
+beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her
+clothing, as no better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil combated her father's horror and unwillingness
+to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was who
+induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her
+brother to present his wife to him. When her father was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+dead she reflected that her brother's household was all
+that remained of the family.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur de Varandeuil, to whom the Comte d'Artois
+had caused the arrears of salary of his office to be paid
+at the return of the Bourbons, left about ten thousand
+francs a year to his children. The brother had, before
+that inheritance, only a pension of fifteen hundred francs
+from the United States. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+considered that five or six thousand francs a year would
+hardly suffice for the comfortable support of that family,
+in which there were two children, and it at once occurred
+to her to add to it her share in the inheritance.
+She suggested this contribution in the most natural and
+simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and
+she went with him to live in a pretty little apartment at
+the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on the fourth floor of
+one of the first houses built in that neighborhood, then
+hardly known, where the fresh country air blew briskly
+through the framework of the white buildings. She
+continued there her modest life, her humble manner of
+dressing, her economical habits, content with the least
+desirable room in the suite, and spending upon herself
+no more than eighteen hundred to two thousand francs a
+year. But, soon, a brooding jealousy, slowly gathering
+strength, took possession of the mulattress. She took
+offence at the fraternal affection which seemed to be
+taking her husband from her arms. She suffered because
+of the communion of speech and thought and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+reminiscences between them; she suffered because of
+the conversations in which she could take no part,
+because of what she heard in their voices, but could not
+understand. The consciousness of her inferiority kindled
+in her heart the fires of wrath and hatred that
+burn fiercely in the tropics. She had recourse to her
+children for her revenge; she urged them on, excited
+them, aroused their evil passions against her sister-in-law.
+She encouraged them to laugh at her, to make
+sport of her. She applauded the manifestations of the
+mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in
+whom observation begins with naughtiness. Once she
+had let them loose upon their aunt, she allowed them
+to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose, her
+dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their
+own elegant attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little
+ones soon arrived at insolence. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil had the quick temper that accompanies
+kindness of heart. With her the hand, as well as the
+heart, had a part in the first impulse. And then she
+shared the prevalent opinion of her time as to the
+proper way of bringing up children. She endured two
+or three impertinent sallies without a word; but at the
+fourth she seized the mocking child, took down her
+skirts, and administered to her, notwithstanding her
+twelve years, the soundest whipping she had ever received.
+The mulattress made a great outcry and told her
+sister-in-law, that she had always detested her children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+and that she wanted to kill them. The brother interposed
+between the two women and succeeded in reconciling
+them after a fashion. But new scenes took place,
+when the little ones, inflamed against the woman who
+made their mother weep, assailed their aunt with the
+refined tortures of misbehaved children, mingled with
+the fiendish cruelty of little savages. After several
+patched-up truces it became necessary to part. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil decided to leave her brother, for
+she saw how unhappy he was amid this daily wrenching
+of his dearest affections. She left him to his wife
+and his children. This separation was one of the great
+sorrows of her life. She who was so strong against
+emotion and so self-contained, and who seemed to take
+pride in suffering, as it were, almost broke down when
+she had to leave the apartment, where she had dreamed
+of enjoying a little happiness in her corner, looking on
+at the happiness of others: her last tears mounted to her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She did not go too far away, so that she might be at
+hand to nurse her brother if he were ill, and to see him
+and meet him sometimes. But there was a great void
+in her heart and in her life. She had begun to visit
+her kinsfolk since her father's death: she drew nearer
+to them; she allowed the relatives whom the Restoration
+had placed in a lofty and powerful position to come
+to her, and sought out those whom the new order of
+things left in obscurity and poverty. But she returned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+to her dear <i>chick</i> first of all, and to another distant
+cousin, also married, who had become the <i>chick's</i> sister-in-law.
+Her relations with her kinsfolk soon assumed
+remarkable regularity. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+never went into society, to an evening party, or to the
+play. It required Mademoiselle Rachel's brilliant success
+to persuade her to step inside a theatre; she ventured
+there but twice. She never accepted an invitation
+to a large dinner-party. But there were two or three
+houses where, as at the <i>chick's</i>, she would invite herself
+to dine, unexpectedly, when there were no guests. "My
+love," she would say without ceremony, "are you and
+your husband doing nothing this evening? Then I
+will stay and eat some of your ragoût." At eight
+o'clock regularly she rose to go, and when the husband
+took his hat to escort her home, she would knock it out
+of his hands with a: "Nonsense! an old nanny-goat
+like me! Why, I frighten men in the street!" And
+then ten days or a fortnight would pass, during which
+they would not see her. But if anything went wrong,
+if there was a death or sickness in the house, Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil always heard of it at once, no
+one knew how; she would come, in spite of everything&mdash;the
+weather or the hour&mdash;would give a loud ring at
+the bell in her own way&mdash;they finally called it <i>cousin's
+ring</i>&mdash;and a moment later, relieved of her umbrella,
+which never left her, and of her pattens, her hat tossed
+upon a chair, she was at the service of those who needed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+her. She listened, talked, restored their courage with
+an indescribable martial accent, with language as energetic
+as a soldier might use to console a wounded comrade,
+and stimulating as a cordial. If it was a child that
+was out of sorts, she would go straight to the bed, laugh
+at the little one, whose fear vanished at once, order the
+father and mother about, run hither and thither, assume
+the management of everything, apply the leeches,
+arrange the cataplasms, and bring back hope, joy and
+health at the double quick. In all branches of the
+family the old maid appeared thus providentially, without
+warning, on days of sorrow, <i>ennui</i> and suffering.
+She was never seen except when her hands were needed
+to heal, her devoted friendship to console. She was,
+so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her
+great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself:
+God seemed to have made her only to give her to others.
+Her everlasting black dress which she persisted in wearing,
+her worn, dyed shawl, her absurd hat, her impoverished
+appearance, were, in her eyes, the means of
+being rich enough to help others with her little fortune;
+she was extravagant in almsgiving, and her pockets were
+always filled with gifts for the poor; not of money, for
+she feared the wineshop, but of four-pound loaves which
+she bought for them at the baker's. And then, too, by
+dint of living in poverty, she was able to give herself
+what was to her the greatest of all luxuries: the joy of
+her friends' children whom she overwhelmed with New<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+Year's and other gifts, with surprises and pleasures of all
+sorts. For instance, suppose that one of them had been
+left by his mother, who was absent from Paris, to pass a
+lovely summer Sunday at his boarding school, and the
+little rascal, out of spite, had misbehaved so that he was
+not allowed to go out. How surprised he would be, as
+the clock struck nine, to see his old cousin appear in the
+courtyard, just buttoning the last button of her dress,
+she had come in such haste. And what a feeling of
+desolation at the sight! "Cousin," he would say piteously,
+in one of those fits of passion in which at the
+same moment you long to cry and to kill your <i>tyrant</i>,
+"I&mdash;I am kept in, and&mdash;&mdash;" "Kept in? Oh! yes, kept
+in! And do you suppose I've taken all this trouble&mdash;&mdash;Is
+your schoolmaster poking fun at me? Where is the
+puppy, that I may have a word with him? You go and
+dress yourself meanwhile. Off with you!" And the
+child, not daring to hope that a woman so shabbily
+dressed would have the power to raise the embargo,
+would suddenly feel a hand upon his arm, and the cousin
+would carry him off, toss him into a cab, all bewildered
+and dumfounded with joy, and take him to the Bois de
+Boulogne. She would let him ride a donkey all day
+long, urging the beast on with a broken branch, and
+crying: "Get up!" And then, after a good dinner at
+Borne's, she would take him back to school, and, under
+the porte-cochère, as she kissed him she would slip a big
+hundred-sou piece into his hand.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Strange old maid. The bitter experiences of her
+whole existence, the struggle to live, the never-ending
+physical suffering, the long-continued bodily and mental
+torture had, as it were, cut her loose from life and placed
+her above it. Her education, the things she had seen,
+the spectacle of what seemed the end of everything, the
+Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her
+to disdain human suffering. And this old woman, who
+had nothing left of life save breath, had risen to a serene
+philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical stoicism.
+Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow
+that seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her
+tirade, she would suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word
+at herself, upon which her face would at once become
+calm. She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a deep,
+bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that
+have seen everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital
+nurse. Kind-hearted to admiration she was, and
+yet something was lacking in her kindness of heart: forgiveness.
+Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving
+or bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a
+trifle, if it touched her heart, wounded her forever. She
+forgot nothing. Time, death itself, did not disarm her
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>Of religion, she had none. Born at a period when
+women did without it, she had grown to womanhood at
+a time when there were no churches. Mass did not
+exist when she was a young maid. There had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+nothing to accustom her to the thought of God or to
+make her feel the need of Him, and she had retained a
+sort of shrinking hatred for priests, which must have
+been connected with some family secret of which she
+never spoke. Her faith, her strength, her piety, all
+consisted in the pride of her conscience; she considered
+that if she retained her own esteem, she could be sure
+of acting rightly and of never failing in her duty. She
+was thus singularly constituted by the two epochs in
+which she had lived, a compound of the two, dipped in
+the opposing currents of the old régime and the Revolution.
+After Louis XVI. failed to take horse on the
+Tenth of August, she lost her regard for kings; but she
+detested the mob. She desired equality and she held
+parvenus in horror. She was a republican and an aristocrat,
+combined scepticism with prejudice, the horrors
+of '93, which she saw, with the vague and noble theories
+of humanity which surrounded her cradle.</p>
+
+<p>Her external qualities were altogether masculine. She
+had the sharp voice, the freedom of speech, the unruly
+tongue of the old woman of the eighteenth century,
+heightened by an accent suggestive of the common
+people, a mannish, highly colored style of elocution
+peculiar to herself, rising above modesty in the choice of
+words and fearless in calling things baldly by their plain
+names.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the years rolled on, sweeping away the
+Restoration and the monarchy of Louis-Philippe. She<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+saw all those whom she had loved go from her one by
+one, all her family take the road to the cemetery. She
+was left quite alone, and she marveled and was grieved
+that death should forget her, who would have offered so
+little resistance, for she was already leaning over the
+grave and was obliged to force her heart down to the
+level of the little children brought to her by the sons
+and daughters of the friends whom she had lost. Her
+brother was dead. Her dear <i>chick</i> was no more. The
+<i>chick's</i> sister-in-law alone was left to her. But hers was
+a life that hung trembling in the balance, ready to fly
+away. Crushed by the death of a child for whom she
+had waited for years, the poor woman was dying of consumption.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was in her bedroom
+every day, from noon until six o'clock, for four
+years. She lived by her side all that time, in the close
+atmosphere and the odor of constant fumigations. She
+did not allow herself to be kept away for one hour by
+her own gout and rheumatism, but gave her time and
+her life to the peaceful last hours of that dying woman,
+whose eyes were fixed upon heaven, where her dead
+children awaited her. And when, in the cemetery,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had turned aside the
+shroud to kiss the dead face for the last time, it seemed
+to her as if there were no one near to her, as if she were
+all alone upon the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Thenceforth, yielding to the infirmities which she had
+no further reason to shake off, she began to live the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+narrow, confined life of old people who wear out their
+carpet in one spot only&mdash;never leaving her room, reading
+but little because it tired her eyes, and passing most of
+her time buried in her easy-chair, reviewing the past and
+living it over again. She would sit in the same position
+for days, her eyes wide open and dreaming, her thoughts
+far from herself, far from the room in which she sat,
+journeying whither her memories led her, to distant
+faces, dearly loved, pallid faces, to vanished regions&mdash;lost
+in a profound lethargy which Germinie was careful
+not to disturb, saying to herself: "Madame is in her
+meditations&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>One day in every week, however, she went abroad.
+Indeed it was with that weekly excursion in view, in
+order to be nearer the spot to which she wished to go
+on that one day, that she left her apartments on Rue
+Taitbout and took up her abode on Rue de Laval. One
+day in every week, deterred by nothing, not even by
+illness, she repaired to the Montmartre Cemetery, where
+her father and her brother rested, and the women whose
+loss she regretted, all those whose sufferings had come to
+an end before hers. For the dead and for Death she displayed
+a veneration almost equal to that of the ancients.
+To her, the grave was sacred, and a dear friend. She loved
+to visit the land of hope and deliverance where her dear
+ones were sleeping, there to await death and to be ready
+with her body. On that day, she would start early in
+the morning, leaning on the arm of her maid, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+carried a folding-stool. As she drew near the cemetery,
+she would enter the shop of a dealer in wreaths, who
+had known her for many years, and who, in winter,
+loaned her a foot-warmer. There she would rest a few
+moments; then, loading Germinie down with wreaths of
+immortelles, she would pass through the cemetery gate,
+take the path to the left of the cedar at the entrance,
+and make her pilgrimage slowly from tomb to tomb.
+She would throw away the withered flowers, sweep up
+the dead leaves, tie the wreaths together, and, sitting
+down upon her folding-chair, would gaze and dream,
+and absent-mindedly remove a bit of moss from the flat
+stone with the end of her umbrella. Then she would
+rise, turn as if to say <i>au revoir</i> to the tomb she was
+leaving, walk away, stop once more, and talk in an
+undertone, as she had done before, with that part of her
+that was sleeping under the stone; and having thus paid
+a visit to all the dead who lived in her affections, she
+would return home slowly and reverentially, enveloping
+herself in silence as if she were afraid to speak.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">III</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the course of her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+had closed her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The maid's story ceased, and the remainder of the
+history of her life, which was upon her lips that evening,
+was once more buried in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion of her story was as follows:</p>
+
+<p>When little Germinie Lacerteux arrived in Paris,
+being then less than fifteen years old, her sister, desirous
+to have her begin to earn her living at once, and to help
+to put bread in her hand, obtained a place for her in a
+small café on the boulevard, where she performed the
+double duties of lady's maid to the mistress of the café
+and assistant to the waiters in carrying on the main
+business of the establishment. The child, just from her
+village and dropped suddenly in that place, was completely
+bewildered and terrified by her surroundings and
+her duties. She had the first instinctive feeling of
+wounded modesty and, foreshadowing the woman she
+was destined to become, she shuddered at the perpetual
+contact with the other sex, working, eating, passing
+her whole time with men; and whenever she had an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+opportunity to go out, and went to her sisters, there were
+tearful, despairing scenes, when, without actually complaining
+of anything, she manifested a sort of dread to
+return, saying that she did not want to stay there, that
+they were not satisfied with her, that she preferred to
+return to them. They would reply that it had already
+cost them enough to bring her to Paris, that it was a
+silly whim on her part and that she was very well off
+where she was, and they would send her back to the
+café in tears. She dared not tell all that she suffered in
+the company of the waiters in the café, insolent, boasting,
+cynical fellows, fed on the remains of debauches,
+tainted with all the vices to which they ministered, and
+corrupt to the core with putrefying odds and ends of
+obscenity. At every turn, she had to submit to the
+dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the malicious
+tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to
+make a little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child,
+ignorant of everything, with the crushed and sickly air,
+timid and sullen, thin and pale, and pitiably clad in her
+wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered, overwhelmed,
+so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their
+drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived
+her and abused her credulity by absurd fables,
+they overburdened her with fatiguing tasks, they assailed
+her with incessant, pitiless ridicule, which well-nigh
+drove her benumbed intellect to imbecility. In addition,
+they made her blush at the things they said to her, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+made her feel ashamed, although she did not understand
+them. They soiled the artlessness of her fourteen years
+with filthy veiled allusions. And they found amusement
+in putting the eyes of her childish curiosity to the keyholes
+of the private supper-rooms.</p>
+
+<p>The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she
+dared not. When, with nourishing food, her body took
+on a little flesh, her cheeks a little color and she began
+to have something of the aspect of a woman, they took
+great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were
+attempts at familiarity, significant gestures, advances,
+which she eluded, and from which she escaped unscathed,
+but which assailed her purity by breathing upon her
+innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by the
+master of the establishment, who was accustomed to
+abuse his maidservants and who bore her a grudge
+because she was not old enough or of the right sort for
+a mistress, she found no support, no touch of humanity,
+except in his wife. She began to love that woman with
+a sort of animal devotion, and to obey her with the
+docility of a dog. She did all her errands without
+thought or reflection. She carried her letters to her
+lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She
+became very active and agile and ingenuously sly in
+passing in and out, evading the awakened suspicions of
+the husband; and without any clear idea of what she
+was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a
+mischievous delight, such as children and monkeys feel,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+in telling herself vaguely that she was causing some
+little suffering to that man and that house, which caused
+her so much. There was among her comrades an old
+waiter, named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of
+the cruel plots concocted against her, and, when she was
+present, put a stop to conversation that was too free, with
+the authority of his white hairs and his paternal interest
+in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house
+increased every day. One week her sisters were compelled
+to take her back to the café by force.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later, there was a great review on the
+Champ de Mars, and the waiters had leave of absence
+for the day. Only Germinie and old Joseph remained
+in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in
+a small, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help
+him. She entered the room; she cried out, fell to the
+floor, wept, implored, struggled, called desperately for
+help. The empty house was deaf.</p>
+
+<p>When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and
+shut herself up in her chamber. She was not seen again
+that day. On the following day, when Joseph walked
+toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled
+from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad
+with fear. For a long time, whenever a man approached
+her, her first involuntary impulse was to draw back
+suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified, bewildered
+beast, looking about for means of flight.
+Joseph, who feared that she would denounce him, allowed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+her to keep him at a distance, and respected the horrible
+repugnance she exhibited for him.</p>
+
+<p>She became <i>enceinte</i>. One Sunday she had been to
+pass the evening with her sister, the concierge; she had
+an attack of vomiting, followed by severe pain. A
+physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came
+to the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him
+the secret of their younger sister's condition. The brutal,
+intractable pride of the common people in their honor,
+the implacable severity of rigid piety, flew to arms in the
+two women and found vent in fierce indignation. Their
+bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered
+consciousness under their blows, their insults, the wounds
+inflicted by their hands, the harsh words that came from
+their mouths. Her brother-in-law was there, who had
+never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at
+her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious
+joy of an Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed
+the girl's cheeks a deeper red than her sisters' blows.</p>
+
+<p>She received the blows, she did not repel the insults.
+She sought neither to defend nor to excuse herself. She
+did not tell what had taken place and how little her own
+desires had had to do with her misfortune. She was
+dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her.
+When her older sister asked her if there had been no
+violence, and reminded her that there were police officers
+and courts, she closed her eyes at the thought of publishing
+her shame. For one instant only, when her mother's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a
+lightning flash from her eyes, by which the two women
+felt their consciences pierced; they remembered that
+they were the ones who had placed her and kept her in
+that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had
+almost forced her into her misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters
+took her to the Rue Saint-Martin, to the house of a
+repairer of cashmere shawls, with whom she lodged, and
+who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, was
+banner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made
+her lie beside her on a mattress on the floor, and having
+her there under her hand all night, she vented upon her
+all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, her bitter
+resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie
+by her father and mother. It was a long succession of
+petty tortures, brutal or hypocritical exhibitions of spite,
+kicks that bruised her legs, and progressive movements
+of the body by which she gradually forced her companion
+out of bed&mdash;it was a cold winter's night&mdash;to the floor of
+the fireless room. During the day, the seamstress took
+Germinie in hand, catechized her, preached at her, and
+by detailing the tortures of the other life, inspired in her
+mind a horrible fear of the hell whose flames she caused
+her to feel.</p>
+
+<p>She lived there four months, in close confinement, and
+was never allowed to leave the house. At the end of
+four months she gave birth to a dead child. When<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+her health was restored, she entered the service of a
+depilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she
+had the joyful feeling of having been released from
+prison. Two or three times, in her walks, she met old
+Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; but
+she escaped him and the old man never knew that he
+had been a father.</p>
+
+<p>But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new
+place. The house where she had taken service as a
+maid of all work was what servants call "a barrack."
+A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money,
+as is often the case with women engaged in the occupations
+that depend upon chance, and in the problematical
+methods of gaining a livelihood in vogue in Paris, the
+depilator, who was almost always involved in a lawsuit
+of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant's
+nourishment. She often went away for the whole day
+without leaving her any dinner. The little one would
+satisfy her appetite as well as she could with some kind
+of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things that deceive a
+young woman's appetite, even charcoal, which she would
+nibble with the depraved taste and capricious stomach of
+her age and sex. This diet, just after recovering from
+her confinement, her health being but partially restored
+and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted the young
+woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined
+her constitution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion
+changed to that dead white that looks green in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+the daylight. Her swollen eyes were surrounded with a
+great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips assumed the
+hue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the
+slightest ascent, and the incessant vibrating sound that
+came from the arteries of her throat was painful to those
+near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she
+dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden
+for her. Her faculties and her senses were so torpid
+that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a
+matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress's hair.</p>
+
+<p>She was silently drooping there when her sister found
+her another place, with a former actor, a retired comedian,
+living upon the money that the laughter of all
+Paris had brought him. The good man was old and
+had never had any children. He took pity on the
+wretched girl, interested himself in her welfare, took
+care of her and made much of her. He took her into
+the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in
+the sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning
+on her arm. It delighted him to see her in good
+spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would take down a
+moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to
+remember a fragment of some part that had gone from
+his memory. The mere sight of this little maid and her
+white cap was like a ray of returning youth to him. In
+his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship,
+the pleasures and the childish fancies of a
+grandfather's heart. But he died after a few months,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+and Germinie had fallen back into the service of kept
+mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway
+tradesmen, when the sudden death of a maidservant
+gave her an opportunity to enter the service of Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout,
+in the house of which her sister was concierge.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">IV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Those people who look for the death of the Catholic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+religion in our day, do not realize by what an infinite
+number of sturdy roots it still retains its hold upon the
+hearts of the people. They do not realize the secret,
+delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people.
+They do not realize what confession and the confessor
+are to the impoverished souls of those poor women. In
+the priest who listens and whose voice falls softly on her
+ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not so much
+the minister of God, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of
+her welfare, as the confidant of her sorrows and the
+friend of her misery. However coarse she may be, there
+is always a little of the true woman in her, a feverish,
+trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessness
+and, as it were, the sighing of an invalid who craves
+caressing words, even as a child's trifling ailments
+require the nurse's droning lullaby. She, as well as
+the woman of the world, must have the consolation
+of pouring out her heart, of confiding her troubles
+to a sympathetic ear. For it is the nature of her
+sex to seek an outlet for the emotions and an arm to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must
+tell, and concerning which she would like to be questioned,
+pitied and comforted. She dreams of a compassionate
+interest, a tender sympathy for hidden feelings
+of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the
+kindest, the most friendly, the most approachable of
+masters to the woman in their employ: their kindness
+to her will still be of the same sort that they bestow upon
+a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning
+her appetite and her health; they will look carefully
+after the animal part of her, and that will be all. It
+will not occur to them that she can suffer elsewhere
+than in her body, and they will not dream that she can
+have the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for
+which they seek relief by confiding in those of their own
+station. In their eyes, the woman who sweeps and does
+the cooking, has no ideas that can cause her to be sad
+or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her
+thoughts. To whom, then, shall she carry them? To
+the priest who is waiting for them, asks for them, welcomes
+them, to the churchman who is also a man of the
+world, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman,
+who knows everything, speaks well, is always accessible,
+gentle, patient, attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for
+the most humble soul, the most shabbily dressed penitent.
+The priest alone listens to the woman in a cap.
+He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in
+the things that disturb and agitate her and that bring to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+a maid, as well as to her mistress, the sudden longing to
+weep, or excite a tempest within her. There is none
+but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from her
+those things which the irony of her daily life holds back,
+to look to the state of her moral health; none but he
+to raise her above her material life, none but he to
+cheer her with moving words of charity and hope,&mdash;such
+divine words as she has never heard from the mouths
+of the men of her family and of her class.</p>
+
+<p>After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil,
+Germinie became profoundly religious and cared for
+nothing but the church. She abandoned herself little
+by little to the sweet delight of confession, to the priest's
+smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from the
+darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch
+of soothing words, and from which she went forth
+refreshed, light of heart, free from care, and happy
+with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had been
+applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of
+her being.</p>
+
+<p>She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere.
+Her mistress had a certain masculine roughness of
+demeanor which repelled expansiveness. She had an
+abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back
+all that Germinie would have liked to confide to her.
+It was in her nature to be brutal in her treatment of all
+lamentations that were not caused by pain or disappointment.
+Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+diseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is
+created by the thought, for the weariness of spirit that
+flows from a woman's nerves and from the disordered
+condition of her mental organism. Germinie often
+found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been
+hardened by the times in which she had lived and by
+the circumstances of her life. The shell of her heart
+was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself,
+she did not like to hear complaints about her. And by
+the right of all the tears she had not shed, she detested
+childish tears in grown persons.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized
+rendezvous for Germinie's thoughts. Every day it
+was her first idea, the theme of her first prayer. Throughout
+the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream; and
+while she was about her work it was constantly before
+her eyes, with its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its
+pediment in the shape of a winged angel's head, its
+green curtain with the motionless folds, and the mysterious
+darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now
+her whole life centred there, and that every hour tended
+thither. She lived through the week looking forward to
+that longed-for, prayed-for, promised day. On Thursday,
+she began to be impatient; she felt, in the redoubling
+of her blissful agony, the material drawing
+near, as it were, of the blessed Saturday evening; and
+when Saturday came and mademoiselle's dinner had
+been hastily served and her work done, she would make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying
+to the penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her
+fingers dipped in holy water and a genuflexion duly
+made, she would glide over the flags, between the rows
+of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted floor.
+With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly
+forward in the shadow of the side aisles, until she
+reached the mysterious, veiled confessional, where she
+would pause and await her turn, absorbed in the emotion
+of suspense.</p>
+
+<p>The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her
+frequent confessions. He was not sparing of time or
+attention or charity. He allowed her to talk at great
+length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty
+troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering
+soul, and permitted her to pour out freely her
+most trivial afflictions. He listened while she set forth
+her anxieties, her longings, her troubles; he did not
+repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences
+of a servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate,
+secret concerns of her existence, as one would speak to
+a mother and a physician.</p>
+
+<p>This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He
+had lived in the world. A great sorrow had impelled
+him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown wherein
+he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something
+of the man in the depths of his being, and he
+listened, with melancholy compassion, to the outpouring<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+of this maidservant's suffering heart. He understood
+that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and
+strengthened her, that he saved her from herself and
+removed her from the temptations to which her nature
+exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for
+that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet
+tractable girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing
+of her own nature, who was promised to passion by
+every impulse of her heart, by her whole body, and who
+betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of
+her temperament. Enlightened by his past experience,
+he was amazed and terrified sometimes by the gleams
+that emanated from her, by the flame that shot from her
+eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the evident
+tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring
+to that scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly
+sincere purpose to resist seemed to the priest to
+have been betrayed by a convulsion of the senses that
+was stronger than she.</p>
+
+<p>This fever of religion lasted several years, during
+which Germinie lived a concentrated, silent, happy life,
+entirely devoted to God's service&mdash;at least she thought
+so. Her confessor, however, had come gradually to the
+conclusion that all her adoration tended toward himself.
+By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no
+longer said to him, and by others which she made bold
+to say to him for the first time, he realized that his
+penitent's devotion was going astray and becoming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She
+watched for him when the services were at an end, followed
+him into the sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into
+the church after his cassock. The confessor tried to
+warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself.
+He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor.
+In despair at this change, at his apparent indifference,
+Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt, confessed to him one
+day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken possession
+of her for two young girls, who were his favorite
+penitents. Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without
+discussion, and sent her to another confessor. Germinie
+went once or twice to confess to this other confessor;
+then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of
+going, and of all her religion naught remained in her
+mind but a certain far-off sweetness, like the faint odor
+of burned-out incense.</p>
+
+<p>Affairs had reached that point when mademoiselle
+fell ill. Throughout her illness, as Germinie did not
+want to leave her, she did not attend mass. And on the
+first Sunday&mdash;when mademoiselle, being fully recovered,
+did not require her care, she was greatly surprised to find
+that "her devotee" remained at home and did not run
+away to church.</p>
+
+<p>"Oho!" said she, "so you don't go and see your
+curés nowadays? What have they done to you, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," said Germinie.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">V</h2>
+
+
+<p>"There, mademoiselle!&mdash;Look at me," said Germinie.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was a few months later. She had asked her mistress's
+permission to go that evening to the wedding ball
+of her grocer's sister, who had chosen her for her maid-of-honor,
+and she had come to exhibit herself <i>en grande
+toilette</i>, in her low-necked muslin dress.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle raised her eyes from the old volume,
+printed in large type, which she was reading, removed
+her spectacles, placed them in the book to mark her
+place, and exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"What, my little bigot, you at a ball! Do you know,
+my girl, this seems to me downright nonsense! You
+and the hornpipe! Faith, all you need now is to want
+to get married! A deuce of a want, that! But if you
+marry, I warn you that I won't keep you&mdash;mind that!
+I've no desire to wait on your brats! Come a little
+nearer&mdash;&mdash;Oho! why&mdash;&mdash;bless my soul! Mademoiselle
+Show-all! We're getting to be a bit of a flirt
+lately, I find&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie tried to say.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And then," continued Mademoiselle de Varandeuil,
+following out her thought, "among you people, the men
+are such sweet creatures! They'll spend all you have&mdash;to
+say nothing of the blows. But marriage&mdash;I am sure
+that that nonsensical idea of getting married buzzes
+around in your head when you see the others. That's
+what gives you that simper, I'll wager. <i>Bon Dieu de
+Dieu!</i> Now turn a bit, so that I can see you," said
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, with an abrupt change of
+tone to one that was almost caressing; and placing her
+thin hands on the arms of her easy-chair, crossing her
+legs and moving her foot back and forth, she set about
+inspecting Germinie and her toilet.</p>
+
+<p>"What the devil!" said she, after a few moments of
+silent scrutiny, "what! is it really you?&mdash;&mdash;Then I
+have never used my eyes to look at you.&mdash;&mdash;Good
+God, yes!&mdash;--But&mdash;&mdash;but&mdash;&mdash;" She mumbled
+more vague exclamations between her teeth.&mdash;&mdash;"Where
+the deuce did you get that mug like an amorous
+cat's?" she said at last, and continued to gaze at
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was ugly. Her hair, of so dark a chestnut
+that it seemed black, curled and twisted in unruly waves,
+in little stiff, rebellious locks, which escaped and stood
+up all over her head, despite the pomade upon her
+shiny <i>bandeaux</i>. Her smooth, narrow, swelling brow
+protruded above the shadow of the deep sockets in which
+her eyes were buried and sunken to such a depth as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling eyes
+they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant
+girlish twinkle that softened and lighted up their
+laughter. They were neither brown eyes nor blue eyes,
+but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a gray that
+was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression
+therein in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing
+rays of a sort of intoxication, passion in phosphorescence.
+Her short, turned-up nose, with large, dilated,
+palpitating nostrils, was one of those noses of which the
+common people say that it rains inside: upon one side,
+at the corner of the eye was a thick, swollen blue vein.
+The square head of the Lorraine race was emphasized in
+her broad, high, prominent cheek-bones, which were well-covered
+with the traces of small-pox. The most noticeable
+defect in her face was the too great distance
+between the nose and mouth. This lack of proportion
+gave an almost apish character to the lower part of the
+head, where the expansive mouth, with white teeth and
+full lips that looked as if they had been crushed, they
+were so flat, smiled at you with a strange, vaguely irritating
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>Her <i>décolleté</i> dress disclosed her neck, the upper part
+of her breast, her shoulders and her white back, presenting
+a striking contrast to her swarthy face. It was a
+lymphatic sort of whiteness, the whiteness, at once
+unhealthy and angelic, of flesh in which there is no life.
+She had let her arms fall by her sides&mdash;round, smooth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists
+were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the
+servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And
+lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent
+figure to curve and sway;&mdash;a figure that a garter might
+span, and that was made even more slender to the eye
+by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops
+that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;&mdash;an
+impossible waist, absurdly small but adorable, like everything
+in woman that offends one's sense of proportion
+by its diminutiveness.</p>
+
+<p>From this ugly woman emanated a piquant, mysterious
+charm. Light and shadow, jostling and intercepting
+each other on her face on which hollows and protuberances
+abounded, imparted to it that suggestion of libertinism
+which the painter of love scenes gives to the
+rough sketch of his mistress. Everything about her,&mdash;her
+mouth, her eyes, her very plainness&mdash;was instinct with
+allurement and solicitation. Her person exhaled an
+aphrodisiac charm, which challenged and laid fast hold
+of the other sex. It unloosed desire, and caused an
+electric shock. Sensual thoughts were naturally and
+involuntarily aroused by her, by her gestures, her gait,
+her slightest movement&mdash;even by the air in which her
+body had left one of its undulations. Beside her, one
+felt as if he were near one of those disturbing, disquieting
+creatures, burning with the love disease and
+communicating it to others, whose face appears to man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+in his restless hours, torments his listless noonday
+thoughts, haunts his nights and trespasses upon his
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's scrutiny,
+Germinie stooped over her, and covered her hand with
+hurried kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"There&mdash;there&mdash;enough of that," said Mademoiselle.
+"You would soon wear out the skin&mdash;with your way of
+kissing. Come, run along, enjoy yourself, and try not
+to stay out too late. Don't get all tired out."</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was left alone. She placed
+her elbows on her knees, stared at the fire and stirred
+the burning wood with the tongs. Then, as she was
+accustomed to do when deeply preoccupied, she struck
+herself two or three sharp little blows on the neck with
+the flat of her hand, and thereby set her black cap all
+awry.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">VI</h2>
+
+
+<p>When she mentioned the subject of marriage to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+Germinie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil touched upon the
+real cause of her trouble. She placed her hand upon
+the seat of her <i>ennui</i>. Her maid's uneven temper, her
+distaste for life, the languor, the emptiness, the discontent
+of her existence, arose from that disease which
+medical science calls the <i>melancholia of virgins</i>. The
+torment of her twenty-four years was the ardent, excited,
+poignant longing for marriage, for that state which was
+too holy and honorable for her, and which seemed
+impossible of attainment in face of the confession her
+womanly probity would insist upon making of her fall
+and her unworthiness. Family losses and misfortunes
+forcibly diverted her mind from her own troubles.</p>
+
+<p>Her brother-in-law, her sister the concierge's husband,
+had dreamed the dream of all Auvergnats: he
+had undertaken to increase his earnings as concierge by
+the profits of a dealer in bric-à-brac. He had begun
+modestly with a stall in the street, at the doors of the
+marts where executors' sales are held; and there you
+could see, set out upon blue paper, plated candlesticks,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+ivory napkin rings, colored lithographs with frames of
+gold lace on a black ground, and three or four odd
+volumes of Buffon. His profit on the plated candlesticks
+intoxicated him. He hired a dark shop on a
+passage way, opposite an umbrella mender's, and began
+to trade upon the credulity that goes in and out of the
+lower rooms in the Auction Exchange. He sold <i>assiettes
+à coq</i>, pieces of Jean Jacques Rousseau's wooden shoe,
+and water-colors by Ballue, signed Watteau. In that
+business he threw away what he had made, and ran in
+debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His
+wife, in order to straighten matters out a little and to
+try and get out of debt, asked for and obtained a place
+as box-opener at the <i>Théâtre-Historique</i>. She hired
+her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening,
+went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at
+five. After a few months she caught cold in the corridors
+of the theatre, and an attack of pleurisy laid her
+low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman
+left a little girl three years old, who was taken down
+with the measles; the disease assumed its most malignant
+form in the foul stench of the loft, where the child
+had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by
+the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone
+into the country to try and borrow money. He married
+again there. Nothing more was heard of him.</p>
+
+<p>When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran
+to the house of an old woman who made a living in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+those curious industries which prevent poverty from
+absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman
+carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles
+into equal lengths for brushes, sometimes she sorted out
+bits of gingerbread. When those industries failed, she
+did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars' children.
+In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went
+and took possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold
+it for ten or twelve sous when the crowd arrived. In
+order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the den where
+she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall,
+to the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees.
+Germinie, who knew her from having given her the
+crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a servant's
+room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her
+abode there with the little one. She did it on the impulse
+of the moment, without reflection. She did not
+remember her sister's harsh treatment of her when she
+was <i>enceinte</i>, so that she had no need to forgive it.</p>
+
+<p>Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her
+niece. She determined to rescue her from death and
+restore her to life by dint of careful nursing. She would
+rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up
+the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child,
+give her her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed,
+look at her, and rush down again, all out of breath and
+red with pleasure. Care, caresses, the breath from the
+heart with which we revive a tiny flame on the point of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+dying out, consultations, doctor's visits, costly medicines,
+the remedies of the wealthy,&mdash;Germinie spared
+nothing for the little one and gave her everything. Her
+wages flowed through that channel. For almost a year
+she gave her beef juice every morning: sleepyhead that
+she was, she left her bed at five o'clock in the morning
+to prepare it, and awoke without being called, as
+mothers do. The child was out of danger at last, when
+Germinie received a visit one morning from her sister
+the dressmaker, who had been married two or three
+years to a machinist, and who came now to bid her
+adieu: her husband was going to accompany some
+fellow-workmen who had been hired to go to Africa.
+She was going with him and she proposed to Germinie
+that they should take the little one with them as a playmate
+for their own child. They offered to take her off
+her hands. Germinie, they said, would have to pay only
+for the journey. It was a separation she would have
+to make up her mind to sooner or later on account of
+her mistress. And then, said the sister, she was the
+child's aunt too. And she heaped words upon words
+to induce Germinie to give them the child, with whom
+she and her husband expected, after their arrival in
+Africa, to move Germinie to pity, to get possession of
+her wages, to play upon her heart and her purse.</p>
+
+<p>It cost Germinie very dear to part with her niece.
+She had staked a portion of her existence upon the child.
+She was attached to her by her anxiety and her sacrifices.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+She had disputed possession of her with disease and had
+won the day; the girl's life was her miracle. And yet she
+realized that she could never take her to mademoiselle's
+apartments; that mademoiselle, at her age, with the burden
+of her years, and an aged person's need of tranquillity,
+could never endure the constant noise and movement
+of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in
+the house would cause idle gossip and set the whole
+street agog: people would say she was her child. Germinie
+made a confidante of her mistress. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that
+she had taken charge of her niece, although she had
+pretended not to know it; she had chosen to see nothing
+in order to permit everything. She advised Germinie
+to entrust her niece to her sister, pointing out to her all
+the difficulties in the way of keeping her herself, and she
+gave her money to pay for the journey of the whole
+family.</p>
+
+<p>The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie.
+She found herself left alone and without occupation.
+Not having the child, she knew not what to love; her
+heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the emptiness
+of life without the little one, that she turned once
+more to religion and transferred her affections to the
+church.</p>
+
+<p>Three months had passed when she received news of
+her sister's death. The husband, who was one of the
+whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics, gave her in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and
+threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position,
+with the burial to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented
+him from working, two young children, without counting
+the little girl, and a household with no wife to heat
+the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her
+thoughts turned to living in that house, beside that poor
+man, among the poor children, in that horrible Africa;
+and a vague longing to sacrifice herself began to awaken
+within her. Other letters followed, in which, while
+thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave
+to his poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that
+enveloped him, a still more dramatic coloring&mdash;the coloring
+that the common people impart to trifles, with its
+memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its fragments
+of vile books. Once caught by the <i>blague</i> of this misery,
+Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she
+could hear the cries of the children calling her. She
+became completely absorbed, buried in the project and
+resolution of going to them. She was haunted by the
+idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and
+over incessantly in the depths of her mind, without
+a word. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, noticing her
+thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what the
+matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She
+was pulled this way and that, tormented between what
+seemed to her a duty and what seemed to her ingratitude,
+between her mistress and her sisters' blood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle.
+And again she said to herself that God did not
+wish her to abandon her family. She would look
+about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must
+go!" Then she would fear that mademoiselle might
+be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At
+that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied
+that she could already see someone stealing her mistress.
+At other moments, when her religious ideas impelled her
+to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all ready to devote
+her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to
+go and live with this man, whom she detested, with
+whom she had always been on the worst of terms, who
+had almost killed her sister with grief, whom she knew
+to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she anticipated,
+all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have
+to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and
+inflame her imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice
+with the greater impatience and ardor. Often the
+whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a
+word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would
+become herself once more, and would fail to recognize
+herself. She felt that she was bound to her mistress
+absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror
+at having so much as thought of detaching her own life
+from hers. She struggled thus for two years. Then
+she learned one fine day, by chance, that her niece had
+died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+concealed the child's death in order to maintain his
+hold upon her, and to lure her to him in Africa, with her
+few sous. Germinie's illusions being wholly dispelled
+by that revelation, she was cured on the spot. She
+hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going
+away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">VII</h2>
+
+
+<p>About this time a small creamery at the end of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+street, with few customers, changed hands, as a result of
+the sale of the real estate by order of court. The shop
+was renovated and repainted. The front windows were
+embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids
+of chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and
+coffee-cups filled with flowers, alternating with small
+liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the shelves. At
+the door glistened the sign&mdash;a copper milk jug divided
+in the middle.</p>
+
+<p>The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern,
+the new <i>crémière</i>, was a person of about fifty years
+of age, whose corpulence passed all bounds, and who still
+retained some <i>débris</i> of beauty, half submerged in fat.
+It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up in
+business with the money of an old gentleman, whose
+servant she had been until his death, in her native province,
+near Langres; for it happened that she was a
+countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same village,
+but from a small place near by; and although she and
+mademoiselle's maid had never met nor seen each other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+in the country, they knew each other by name and were
+drawn together by the fact that they had acquaintances
+in common and could compare memories of the same
+places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected,
+fawning creature. She said: "My love" to everybody,
+talked in a piping voice, and played the child with the
+querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested
+vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles.
+She adored secrets, twisted everything into a confidential
+communication, invented stories and always whispered
+in your ear. Her life was passed in gossiping and groaning.
+She pitied others and she pitied herself; she
+lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she
+had eaten too much she would say dramatically: "I am
+dying!" and nothing ever was so pathetic as her indigestion.
+She was constantly moved to tears: she wept
+indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who
+had died, for milk that had curdled. She wept over the
+various items in the newspapers, she wept for the sake of
+weeping.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity
+by this wheedling, talkative <i>crémière</i>, who was always in
+a state of intense emotion, calling upon others to open
+their hearts to her, and apparently so affectionate.
+After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's
+doors that did not come from Mère Jupillon.
+Germinie procured everything, or almost everything
+there. She passed hours in the shop. Once there it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+was hard work for her to leave; she remained there,
+unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive
+cowardice detained her. At the door she would stop
+and talk on, in order to delay her departure. She felt
+bound to the <i>crémière</i> by the invisible charm of familiar
+places to which you constantly return, and which end
+by embracing you like things that would love you.
+And then, too, in her eyes the shop meant Madame
+Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs; she always
+had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed
+them and talked to them; and when she was warm with
+their warmth, she would feel in the depths of her heart
+the contentment of a beast rubbing against her little
+ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of
+the quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,&mdash;how
+this one had failed to pay her note and that one had
+received a carriage load of flowers; it meant a place
+that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace
+<i>peignoir</i> going to town on the maid's arm.</p>
+
+<p>In a word everything tended to attach her to the
+place. Her intimacy with the <i>crémière</i> was strengthened
+by all the mysterious bonds of friendship between women
+of the people, by the continual chatter, the daily exchange
+of the trivial affairs of life, the conversation for
+the sake of conversing, the repetition of the same <i>bonjour</i>
+and the same <i>bonsoir</i>, the division of caresses among the
+same animals, the naps side by side and chair against
+chair. The shop at last became her regular place for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+idling away her time, a place where her thoughts, her
+words, her body and her very limbs were marvelously at
+ease. There came a time when her happiness consisted
+in sitting drowsily of an evening in a straw arm-chair,
+beside Mère Jupillon&mdash;sound asleep with her spectacles
+on her nose&mdash;and holding the dogs rolled in a ball in
+the skirt of her dress; and while the lamp, almost
+dying, burned pale upon the counter, she would sit idly
+there, letting her glance lose itself at the back of the
+shop, and gradually grow dim, with her ideas, as her
+eyes rested vaguely upon a triumphal arch of snail
+shells joined together with old moss, beneath which
+stood a little copper Napoléon, with his hands behind
+his back.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Madame Jupillon, who claimed to have been married<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+and signed herself <i>Widow Jupillon</i>, had a son. He was
+still a child. She had placed him at Saint-Nicholas, the
+great religious establishment where, for thirty francs a
+month, rudimentary instruction and a trade are furnished
+to the children of the common people, and to many
+natural children. Germinie fell into the way of accompanying
+Madame Jupillon when she went to see <i>Bibi</i> on
+Thursdays. This visit became a means of distraction to
+her, something to look forward to. She would urge the
+mother to hurry, would always arrive first at the omnibus
+office, and was content to sit with her arms resting on a
+huge basket of provisions all the way.</p>
+
+<p>It happened that Mère Jupillon had trouble with her
+leg&mdash;a carbuncle that prevented her from walking for
+nearly eighteen months. Germinie went alone to Saint-Nicholas,
+and as she was promptly and easily led to
+devote herself to others, she took as deep an interest in
+that child as if he were connected with her in some
+way. She did not miss a single Thursday and always
+arrived with her hands full of the last week's desserts,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+and with cakes and fruit and sweetmeats she had bought.
+She would kiss the urchin, inquire for his health, and
+feel to see if he had his knitted vest under his blouse;
+she would notice how flushed he was from running,
+would wipe his face with her handkerchief and make
+him show her the soles of his shoes so that she could
+see if there were any holes in them. She would ask if
+his teachers were satisfied with him, if he attended to
+his duties and if he had had many good marks. She
+would talk to him of his mother and bid him love the
+good Lord, and until the clock struck two she would
+walk with him in the courtyard: the child would offer
+her his arm, as proud as you please to be with a woman
+much better dressed than the majority of those who
+came there&mdash;with a woman in silk. He was anxious to
+learn the flageolet. It cost only five francs a month,
+but his mother would not give them. Germinie carried
+him the hundred sous every month, on the sly. It was
+a humiliating thing to him to wear the little uniform
+blouse when he went out to walk, and on the two or
+three occasions during the year when he went to see his
+mother. On his birthday, one year, Germinie unfolded
+a large parcel before him: she had had a tunic made for
+him; it is doubtful if twenty of his comrades in the
+whole school belonged to families in sufficiently easy
+circumstances to wear such garments.</p>
+
+<p>She spoiled him thus for several years, not allowing
+him to suffer with a longing for anything, encouraging<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+the caprices and the pride of wealthy children in the poor
+child, softening for him the privations and hardships of
+that trade school, where children were formed for a
+laboring life, wore blouses and ate off plates of brown
+earthenware; a school that by its toilsome apprenticeship
+hardened the children of the people to lives of toil.
+Meanwhile the boy was growing fast. Germinie did
+not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had
+always been. From habit she always stooped to kiss
+him. One day she was summoned before the abbé who
+was at the head of the school. He spoke to her of
+expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in
+his possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought
+of the blows that awaited the child at his mother's
+hands, prayed and begged and implored; she succeeded
+at last in inducing the abbé to forgive the culprit. When
+she went down into the courtyard again she attempted
+to scold him; but at the first word of her moral lecture,
+Bibi suddenly cast in her face a glance and smile in
+which there was no trace of the child that he was the
+day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one
+to blush. A fortnight passed before she went again to
+Saint-Nicholas.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">IX</h2>
+
+
+<p>About the time that young Jupillon left the boarding-school,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+a maid in the service of a kept woman who lived
+on the floor below mademoiselle sometimes passed the
+evening with Germinie at Madame Jupillon's. A native
+of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which supplies
+Paris with coupé drivers and lorettes' waiting-maids,
+this girl was what is called in vulgar parlance: "a great
+<i>bringue</i>;" she was an awkward, wild-eyed creature, with
+the eyebrows of a water carrier. She soon fell into the
+habit of going there every evening. She treated everybody
+to cakes and liquors, amused herself by showing
+off little Jupillon, playing pat-a-cake with him, sitting
+on his knee, telling him to his face that he was a beauty,
+treating him like a child, playing the wanton with him
+and joking him because he was not a man. The boy,
+happy and proud of these attentions from the first woman
+who had ever taken notice of him, manifested before long
+his preference for Adèle: so was the new-comer called.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was passionately jealous. Jealousy was the
+foundation of her nature; it was the dregs of her affection
+and gave it its bitter taste. Those whom she loved<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess them
+absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one
+but her. She could not permit them to take from her
+and bestow upon others the slightest fragment of their
+affection: as she had earned it, it no longer belonged
+to them; they were no longer entitled to dispose of it.
+She detested the people whom her mistress seemed to
+welcome more cordially than others, and with whom she
+was on most intimate terms. By her ill-humor and her
+sullen manner she had offended, had almost driven from
+the house, two or three of mademoiselle's old friends,
+whose visits wounded her; as if the old ladies came
+there for the purpose of abstracting something from the
+rooms, of taking a little of her mistress from her.
+People of whom she had once been fond became
+odious to her: she did not consider that they were fond
+enough of her; she hated them for all the love she
+wanted from them. Her heart was despotic and exacting
+in everything. As it gave all, it demanded all in
+return. At the least sign of coldness, at the slightest
+indication that she had a rival, she would fly into a rage,
+tear her hair, pass her nights in weeping, and execrate
+the whole world.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing that other woman make herself at home in the
+shop and adopt a tone of familiarity with the young man,
+all Germinie's jealous instincts were aroused and changed
+to furious rage. Her hatred flew to arms and rebelled,
+with her disgust, against the shameless, brazen-faced<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+creature, who could be seen on Sunday sitting at table
+on the outer boulevards with soldiers, and who had blue
+marks on her face on Monday. She did her utmost to
+induce Madame Jupillon to turn her away; but she was
+one of the best customers of the creamery, and the
+<i>crémière</i> mildly refused to close her doors upon her.
+Germinie had recourse to the son and told him that she
+was a miserable creature. But that only served to
+attach the young man the closer to the vile woman,
+whose evil reputation delighted him. Moreover, he
+had the cruel mischievous instinct of youth, and he
+redoubled his attentions to her simply to see "the nose"
+that Germinie made and to enjoy her despair. Soon
+Germinie discovered that the woman's intentions were
+more serious than she had at first supposed: she began
+to understand what she wanted of the child,&mdash;for the tall
+youth of seventeen was still a child in her eyes. Thenceforward
+she hung upon their steps; she was always beside
+them, never left them alone for a moment, made one at
+all their parties, at the theatre or in the country, joined
+them in all their walks, was always at hand and in the
+way, seeking to hold Adèle back, and to restore her
+sense of decency by a word in an undertone: "A mere
+boy! ain't you ashamed?" she would say to her. And
+the other would laugh aloud, as if it were a good joke.</p>
+
+<p>When they left the theatre, enlivened and heated by
+the feverish excitement of the performance and the
+place; when they returned from an excursion to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+country, laden with a long day's sunshine, intoxicated
+with the blue sky and the pure air, excited by the wine
+imbibed at dinner, amid the sportive liberties in which
+the woman of the people, drunk with enjoyment and
+with the delights of unlimited good cheer, and with the
+senses keyed up to the highest pitch of joviality, makes
+bold to indulge at night, Germinie tried to be always
+between the maid and Jupillon. She never relaxed her
+efforts to break the lovers' hold upon each other's arms,
+to unbind them, to uncouple them. Never wearying of
+the task, she was forever separating them, luring them
+away from each other. She placed her body between
+those bodies that were groping for each other. She
+glided between the hands outstretched to touch each
+other; she glided between the lips that were put forth in
+search of other proffered lips. But of all this that she
+prevented she felt the breath and the shock. She felt
+the pressure of the hands she held apart, the caresses
+that she caught on the wing and that missed their mark
+and went astray upon her. The hot breath of the kisses
+she intercepted blew upon her cheek. Involuntarily,
+and with a feeling of horror, she became a party to the
+embracing, she was infected with the desires aroused by
+this constant friction and struggling, which diminished
+day by day the young man's restraint and respect for her
+person.</p>
+
+<p>It happened one day that she was less strong against
+herself than she had previously been. On that occasion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+she did not elude his advances so abruptly as usual.
+Jupillon felt that she stopped short. Germinie felt it
+even more keenly than he; but she was at the end of
+her efforts, exhausted with the torture she had undergone.
+The love which, coming from another, she had
+turned aside from Jupillon, had slowly taken full possession
+of her own heart. Now it was firmly rooted there,
+and, bleeding with jealousy, she found that she was
+incapable of resistance, weak and fainting, like a person
+fatally wounded, in presence of the joy that had come
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>She repelled the young man's audacious attempts,
+however, without a word. She did not dream of belonging
+to him otherwise than as a friend, or giving way
+farther than she had done. She lived upon the thought
+of love, believing that she could live upon it always.
+And in the ecstatic exaltation of her thoughts, she put
+aside all memory of her fall, and repressed her desires.
+She remained shuddering and pure, lost and suspended
+in abysses of affection, neither enjoying nor wishing for
+aught from the lover but a caress, as if her heart were
+made only for the joy of kissing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">X</h2>
+
+
+<p>This happy though unsatisfied love produced a strange<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+physiological phenomenon in Germinie's physical being.
+One would have said that the passion that was alive
+within her renewed and transformed her lymphatic temperament.
+She did not seem, as before, to extract her
+life, drop by drop, from a penurious spring: it flowed
+through her arteries in a full, generous stream; she felt
+the tingling sensation of rich blood over her whole
+body. She seemed to be filled with the warm glow of
+health, and the joy of living beat its wings in her breast
+like a bird in the sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>A marvelous animation had come to her. The miserable
+nervous energy that once sustained her had given
+place to healthy activity, to bustling, restless, overflowing
+gayety. She had no trace now of the weakness, the
+dejection, the prostration, the supineness, the sluggishness
+that formerly distinguished her. The heavy, drowsy
+feeling in the morning was a thing of the past; she
+awoke feeling fresh and bright, and alive in an instant
+to the cheer of the new day. She dressed in haste,
+playfully; her agile fingers moved of themselves, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+she was amazed to be so bright and full of activity during
+the hours of faintness before breakfast, when she
+had so often felt her heart upon her lips. And throughout
+the day she had the same consciousness of physical
+well-being, the same briskness of movement. She
+must be always on the move, walking, running, doing
+something, expending her strength. At times all that
+she had lived through seemed to have no existence; the
+sensations of living that she had hitherto experienced
+seemed to her like a far-off dream, or as if dimly seen
+in the background of a sleeping memory. The past
+lay behind her, as if she had traversed it, covered with
+a veil like one in a swoon, or with the unconsciousness
+of a somnambulist. It was the first time that she had
+experienced the feeling, the impression, at once bitter
+and sweet, violent and celestial, of the game of life
+brilliant in its plenitude, its regularity and its power.</p>
+
+<p>She ran up and downstairs for a nothing. At a word
+from mademoiselle she would trip down the whole five
+flights. When she was seated, her feet danced on the
+floor. She brushed and scrubbed and beat and shook
+and washed and set to rights, without rest or reprieve,
+always at work, filling the apartment with her goings
+and comings, and the incessant bustle that followed her
+about.&mdash;"Mon Dieu!" her mistress would say, stunned
+by the uproar she made, just like a child,&mdash;"you're
+turning things upside down, Germinie! that will do for
+that!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One day, when she went into Germinie's kitchen,
+mademoiselle saw a little earth in a cigar box on the
+leads.&mdash;"What's that?" she asked.&mdash;"That's grass&mdash;that
+I planted&mdash;to look at," said Germinie.&mdash;"So
+you're in love with grass now, eh? All you need now
+is to have canaries!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XI</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the course of a few months, Germinie's life, her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+whole life belonged to the <i>crémière</i>. Mademoiselle's service
+was not exacting and took but little time. A whiting
+or a cutlet&mdash;that was all the cooking there was to be
+done. Mademoiselle might have kept her with her in the
+evening for company: she preferred, however, to send
+her away, to drive her out of doors, to force her to take a
+little air and diversion. She asked only that she would
+return at ten o'clock to help her to bed; and yet when
+Germinie was a little late, mademoiselle undressed
+herself and went to bed alone very comfortably. Every
+hour that her mistress left her at leisure, Germinie
+passed in the shop. She fell into the habit of going
+down to the creamery in the morning, when the shutters
+were removed, and generally carried them inside;
+she would take her <i>café au lait</i> there and remain until
+nine o'clock, when she would go back and give mademoiselle
+her chocolate; and between breakfast and
+dinner she found excuses for returning two or three
+times, delaying and chattering in the back-shop on the
+slightest pretext. "What a magpie you are getting to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+be!" mademoiselle would say, in a scolding voice, but
+with a smiling face.</p>
+
+<p>At half past five, when her mistress's little dinner was
+cleared away, she would run down the stairs four at a
+time, install herself at Mère Jupillon's, wait until ten
+o'clock, clamber up the five flights, and in five minutes
+undress her mistress, who submitted unresistingly,
+albeit she was somewhat astonished that Germinie
+should be in such haste to go to bed; she remembered
+the time when she had a mania for moving her sleepy
+body from one easy-chair to another, and was never
+willing to go up to her room. While the candle was
+still smoking on mademoiselle's night table, Germinie
+would be back at the creamery, this time to remain
+until midnight, until one o'clock; often she did not go
+until a policeman, noticing the light, tapped on the
+shutters and made them close up.</p>
+
+<p>In order to be always there and to have the right to
+be always there, to make herself a part of the shop, to
+keep her eyes constantly upon the man she loved, to
+hover about him, to keep him, to be always brushing
+against him, she had become the servant of the establishment.
+She swept the shop, she prepared the old
+woman's meals and the food for the dogs. She waited
+upon the son; she made his bed, she brushed his
+clothes, she waxed his boots, happy and proud to touch
+what he touched, thrilling with pleasure when she placed
+her hand where he placed his body, and ready to kiss<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+the mud upon the leather of his boots, because it was
+his!</p>
+
+<p>She did the menial work, she kept the shop, she
+served the customers. Madame Jupillon rested everything
+upon her shoulders; and while the good-natured
+girl was working and perspiring, the bulky matron,
+assuming the majestic, leisurely air of an annuitant,
+anchored upon a chair in the middle of the sidewalk
+and inhaling the fresh air of the street, fingered and
+rattled the precious coin in the capacious pocket beneath
+her apron&mdash;the coin that rings so sweetly in the ears of
+the petty tradesmen of Paris, that the retired shopkeeper
+is melancholy beyond words at first, because he
+no longer has the chinking and the tinkling under his
+hand.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XII</h2>
+
+
+<p>When the spring came, Germinie said to Jupillon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+almost every evening: "Suppose we go as far as the
+beginning of the fields?"</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon would put on his flannel shirt with red and
+black squares, and his black velvet cap; and they would
+start for what the people of the quarter call "the beginning
+of the fields."</p>
+
+<p>They would go up the Chaussée Clignancourt, and,
+with the flood of Parisians from the faubourg hurrying
+to drink a little fresh air, would walk on toward the
+great patch of sky that rose straight from the pavements,
+at the top of the ascent, between the two lines of houses,
+unobstructed except by an occasional omnibus. The
+air was growing cooler and the sun shone only upon the
+roofs of the houses and the chimneys. As from a great
+door opening into the country, there came from the
+end of the street and from the sky beyond, a breath
+of boundless space and liberty.</p>
+
+<p>At the Château-Rouge they found the first tree, the
+first foliage. Then, at Rue du Château, the horizon
+opened before them in dazzling beauty. The fields<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+stretched away in the distance, glistening vaguely in
+the powdery, golden haze of seven o'clock. All nature
+trembled in the daylight dust that the day leaves in its
+wake, upon the verdure it blots from sight and the
+houses it suffuses with pink.</p>
+
+<p>Frequently they descended the footpath covered with
+the figures of the game of hop-scotch marked out in
+charcoal, by long walls with an occasional overhanging
+branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens
+between. At their left rose tree-tops filled with light,
+clustering foliage pierced by the beams of the setting
+sun, which cast lines of fire across the bars of the iron
+gateways. After the gardens came hedgerows, estates
+for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line
+of projected streets and stretching out their jagged
+walls into empty space, with heaps of broken bottles at
+their feet; large, low, plastered houses, with windows
+filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the
+Y of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into
+enclosures that resembled barnyards, studded with little
+mounds on which goats were browsing.</p>
+
+<p>They would stop here and there and smell the flowers,
+inhale the perfume of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow
+lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf in passing and
+nibble at it.</p>
+
+<p>Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles
+and in fantastic figures over her head. The birds called.
+The sky answered the cages. She heard everything
+about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at the
+women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their
+shirt sleeves in the little gardens, the mothers on the
+doorsteps with their little ones between their legs.</p>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<a name="i116" id="i116"></a><img src="images/ichxii.png" width="170" height="38" alt="Chapter XII
+
+But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She
+would go with Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the
+embankment. Beside her were families innumerable,
+workmen lying flat upon their faces, small annuitants
+gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers
+of want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees,
+the greasy coats characteristic of old men, and black
+hats worn as red as their red beards." title="" /></div>
+<hr style="width: 4%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" />
+<div class="caption"><i>But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She
+would go with Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the
+embankment. Beside her were families innumerable,
+workmen lying flat upon their faces, small annuitants
+gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers
+of want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees,
+the greasy coats characteristic of old men, and black
+hats worn as red as their red beards.</i></div>
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+<div class="image">
+<img src="images/i116.jpg" width="403" height="590" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>At the foot of the slope the pavement came to an end.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+The street was succeeded by a broad, white, chalky,
+dusty road, made of débris, old pieces of plaster, crumbs
+of lime and bricks; a sunken road, with deep ruts,
+polished on the edges, made by the iron tires of the
+huge great wheels of carts laden with hewn stone. At
+that point began the things that collect where Paris ends,
+the things that grow where grass does not grow, one of
+those arid landscapes that large cities create around
+them, the first zone of suburbs <i>intra muros</i> where nature
+is exhausted, the soil used up, the fields sown with
+oyster shells. Beyond was a wilderness of half-enclosed
+yards displaying numbers of carts and trucks with their
+shafts in the air against the sky, stone-cutters' sheds,
+factories built of boards, unfinished workmen's houses,
+full of gaps and open to the light, and bearing the
+mason's flag, wastes of gray and white sand, kitchen
+gardens marked out with cords, and, on the lower level,
+bogs to which the embankment of the road slopes down
+in oceans of small stones.</p>
+
+<p>Soon they would reach the last lantern hanging on a
+green post. People were still coming and going about
+them. The road was alive and amused the eyes. They
+met women carrying their husband's canes, lorettes in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+silk dresses leaning on the arms of their blouse-clad
+brothers, old women in bright-colored ginghams walking
+about with folded arms, enjoying a moment's rest
+from labor. Workmen were drawing their children
+in little wagons, urchins returning with their rods from
+fishing at Saint-Ouen, and men and women dragging
+branches of flowering acacia at the ends of sticks.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes a pregnant woman would pass, holding out
+her arms to a yet small child, and casting the shadow of
+her pregnancy upon the wall.</p>
+
+<p>And everyone moved tranquilly, blissfully, at a pace
+that told of the wish to delay, with the awkward ease
+and the happy indolence of those who walk for pleasure.
+No one was in a hurry, and against the unbroken horizon
+line, crossed from time to time by the white smoke of a
+railroad train, the groups of promenaders were like black
+spots, almost motionless, in the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Behind Montmartre, they came to those great moats,
+as it were, those sloping squares, where narrow, gray,
+much-trodden paths cross and recross. A few blades of
+shriveled, yellow grass grew thereabout, softened by the
+rays of the setting sun, which they could see, all ablaze,
+between the houses. And Germinie loved to watch the
+wool-combers at work there, the quarry horses at pasture
+in the bare fields, the madder-red trousers of the soldiers
+who were playing at bowls, the children flying kites that
+made black spots in the clear air. Passing all these, they
+turned to cross the bridge over the railroad by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+wretched settlement of ragpickers, the stonemasons'
+quarter at the foot of Clignancourt hill. They would
+walk quickly by those houses built of materials stolen
+from demolished buildings, and exuding the horrors they
+conceal; the wretched structures, half cabin, half burrow,
+caused Germinie a vague feeling of terror: it seemed to
+her as if all the crimes of Night were lurking there.</p>
+
+<p>But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She
+would go with Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the
+embankment. Beside her were families innumerable,
+workmen lying flat upon their faces, small annuitants
+gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers
+of want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees,
+the greasy coats characteristic of old men, and black
+hats worn as red as their red beards. The air was full
+of rich harmonies. Below her, in the moat, a musical
+society was playing at each corner. Before her eyes was
+a multi-colored crowd, white blouses, children in blue
+aprons running around, a game of riding at the ring in
+progress, wine shops, cake shops, fried fish stalls, and
+shooting galleries half hidden in clumps of verdure,
+from which arose staves bearing the tricolor; and farther
+away, in a bluish haze, a line of tree tops marked
+the location of a road. To the right she could see
+Saint-Denis and the towering basilica; at her left, above
+a line of houses that were becoming indistinct, the sun
+was setting over Saint-Ouen in a disk of cherry-colored
+flame, and projecting upon the gray horizon shafts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+light like red pillars that seemed to support it tremblingly.
+Often a child's balloon would pass swiftly
+across the dazzling expanse of sky.</p>
+
+<p>They would go down, pass through the gate, walk
+along by the Lorraine sausage shops, the dealers in
+honeycomb, the board <i>cabarets</i>, the verdureless, still
+unpainted arbors, where a noisy multitude of men and
+women and children were eating fried potatoes, mussels
+and prawns, until they reached the first field, the first
+living grass: on the edge of the grass there was a handcart
+laden with gingerbread and peppermint lozenges,
+and a woman selling hot cocoa on a table in the furrow.
+A strange country, where everything was mingled&mdash;the
+smoke from the frying-pan and the evening vapor,
+the noise of quoits on the head of a cask and the
+silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the
+idyllic rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh
+smell of green wheat, the great human Fair and Nature!
+Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging Jupillon to
+go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she
+would constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the
+fresh, cool sensation of the stalks against her stockings.
+When they returned she always wanted to go upon the
+slope once more. The sun had by that time disappeared
+and the sky was gray below, pink in the centre and
+blue above. The horizon grew dark; from green the
+trees became a dark brown and melted into the sky; the
+zinc roofs of the wine shops looked as if the moon were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+shining upon them, fires began to appear in the darkness,
+the crowd became gray, and the white linen took
+on a bluish tinge. Little by little everything would
+fade away, be blotted out, lose its form and color in a
+dying remnant of colorless daylight, and through the
+increasing darkness the voices of a class whose life
+begins at night, and the voice of the wine beginning to
+sing, would arise, mingled with the din of the rattles.
+Upon the slope the tops of the tall grass waved to and
+fro in the gentle breeze. Germinie would make up her
+mind to go. She would wend her way homeward, filled
+with the influence of the falling night, abandoning herself
+to the uncertain vision of things half-seen, passing
+the dark houses, and finding that everything along her
+road had turned paler, as it were&mdash;wearied by the long
+walk over rough roads, and content to be weary and
+slow and half-fainting, and with a feeling of peace at
+her heart.</p>
+
+<p>At the first lighted lanterns on Rue du Château, she
+would fall from her dream to the pavement.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Madame Jupillon's face always wore a pleased expression<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+when Germinie appeared; when she kissed her she
+was very effusive, when she spoke to her her voice was
+caressing, when she looked at her her glance was most
+amiable. The huge creature's kind heart seemed, when
+with her, to abandon itself to the emotion, the affection,
+the trustfulness of a sort of maternal tenderness.
+She took Germinie into her confidence as to her business,
+as to her woman's secrets, as to the most private
+affairs of her life. She seemed to open her heart to her
+as to a person of her own blood, whom she desired to
+make familiar with matters of interest to the family.
+When she spoke of the future, she always referred to
+Germinie as one from whom she was never to be separated,
+and who formed a part of the household. Often
+she allowed certain discreet, mysterious smiles to escape
+her, smiles which made it appear that she saw all that
+was going on and was not angry. Sometimes, too,
+when her son was sitting by Germinie's side, she would
+let her eyes, moist with a mother's tears, rest upon them,
+and would embrace them with a glance that seemed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+unite her two children and call down a blessing on their
+heads.</p>
+
+<p>Without speaking, without ever uttering a word that
+could be construed as an engagement, without divulging
+her thoughts or binding herself in any way, and all the
+time repeating that her son was still very young to think
+of being married, she encouraged Germinie's hopes and
+illusions by her whole bearing, her airs of secret indulgence
+and of complicity, so far as her heart was concerned;
+by those meaning silences when she seemed to
+open to her a mother-in-law's arms. And displaying all
+her talents in the way of hypocrisy, drawing upon her
+hidden mines of sentiment, her good-natured shrewdness,
+and the consummate, intricate cunning that fat
+people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in vanquishing
+Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit
+assurance and promise of marriage; and she finally
+allowed the young man's ardor to extort from her what
+she believed that she was giving in advance to the
+husband.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>As Germinie was going down the servant's staircase<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+one day, she heard Adèle's voice calling her over the
+banister and telling her to bring her two sous' worth of
+butter and ten of absinthe.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! you can sit down a minute, you know you
+can," said Adèle, when she brought her the absinthe
+and the butter. "I never see you now, you'll never
+come in. Come! you have plenty of time to be with
+your old woman. For my part, I couldn't live with an
+Antichrist's face like hers! So stay. This is the house
+without work to-day. There isn't a sou&mdash;madame's
+abed. Whenever there's no money, she goes to bed,
+does madame; she stays in bed all day, reading novels.
+Have some of this?"&mdash;And she offered her her glass of
+absinthe.&mdash;"No? oh! no, you don't drink. You're
+very foolish. It's a funny thing not to drink. Say, it
+would be very nice of you to write me a little line for
+my dearie. Hard work, you know. I have told you
+about it. See, here's madame's pen&mdash;and her paper&mdash;it
+smells good. Are you ready? He's a good fellow,
+my dear, and no mistake! He's in the butcher line as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+I told you. Ah! my word! I mustn't rub him the
+wrong way! When he's had a glass of blood after killing
+his beasts, he's like a madman&mdash;and if you're
+obstinate with him&mdash;Dame! why then he thumps you!
+But what would you have? He does that to make him
+strong. If you could see him thump himself on the
+breast&mdash;blows that would kill an ox, and say: 'That's
+a wall, that is!' Ah! he's a gentleman, I tell you!
+Are you thinking about the letter, eh? Make it one of
+the fetching kind. Say nice things to him, you know&mdash;and
+a little sad&mdash;he adores that. At the theatre he
+doesn't like anything that doesn't make him cry. Look
+here! Imagine that you're writing to a lover of your
+own."</p>
+
+<p>Germinie began to write.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Germinie! Have you heard? Madame's
+taken a strange idea into her head. It's a funny thing
+about women like her, who can hold their heads up with
+the greatest of 'em, who can have everything, hobnob
+with kings if they choose! And there's nothing to be
+said&mdash;when one is like madame, you know, when one
+has such a body as that! And then the way they load
+themselves down with finery, with their tralala of dresses
+and lace everywhere and everything else&mdash;how do you
+suppose anyone can resist them? And if it isn't a gentleman,
+if it's someone like us&mdash;you can see how much
+more all that will catch him; a woman in velvet goes
+to his brain. Yes, my dear, just fancy, here's madame<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+gone daft on that <i>gamin</i> of a Jupillon! That's all we
+needed to make us die of hunger here!"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie, with her pen in the air over the letter she
+had begun, looked up at Adèle, devouring her with her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"That brings you to a standstill, doesn't it?" said
+Adèle, sipping her absinthe, her face lighted up with joy
+at sight of Germinie's discomposed features. "Oh! it is
+too absurd, really; but it's true, 'pon my word it's true.
+She noticed the <i>gamin</i> on the steps of the shop the other
+day, coming home from the races. She's been there
+two or three times on the pretence of buying something.
+She'll probably have some perfumery sent from there&mdash;to-morrow,
+I think.&mdash;Bah! it's sickening, isn't it? It's
+their affair. Well! what about my letter? Is it what
+I told you that makes you so stupid? You played the
+prude&mdash;I didn't know&mdash;Oh! yes, yes, now I remember;
+that's what it is&mdash;What was it you said to me about the
+little one? I believe you didn't want anyone to touch
+him! Idiot!"</p>
+
+<p>At a gesture of denial from Germinie, she continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, nonsense! What do I care? The kind
+of a child that, if you blew his nose, milk would come
+out! Thanks! that's not my style. However, that's
+your business. Come, now for my letter, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie leaned over the sheet of paper. But she
+was burning up with fever; the quill cracked in her
+nervous fingers. "There," she said, throwing it down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+after a few seconds, "I don't know what's the matter
+with me to-day. I'll write it for you another time."</p>
+
+<p>"As you like, little one&mdash;but I rely on you. Come
+to-morrow, then.&mdash;I'll tell you some of madame's nonsense.
+We'll have a good laugh at her!"</p>
+
+<p>And, when the door was closed, Adèle began to roar
+with laughter: it had cost her only a little <i>blague</i> to
+unearth Germinie's secret.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XV</h2>
+
+
+<p>So far as young Jupillon was concerned, love was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+simply the satisfaction of a certain evil curiosity, which
+sought, in the knowledge and possession of a woman,
+the privilege and the pleasure of despising her. Just
+emerging from boyhood, the young man had brought
+to his first <i>liaison</i> no other ardor, no other flame than
+the cold instincts of rascality awakened in boys by vile
+books, the confidences of their comrades, boarding-school
+conversation, the first breath of impurity which
+debauches desire. The sentiment with which the young
+man usually regards the woman who yields to him, the
+caresses, the loving words, the affectionate attentions
+with which he envelops her&mdash;nothing of all that existed
+in Jupillon's case. Woman was to him simply an
+obscene image; and a passion for a woman seemed to
+him desirable as being prohibited, illicit, vulgar, cynical
+and amusing&mdash;an excellent opportunity for trickery and
+sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>Sarcasm&mdash;the low, cowardly, despicable sarcasm of
+the dregs of the people&mdash;was the beginning and the end
+of this youth. He was a perfect type of those Parisians<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+who bear upon their faces the mocking scepticism of
+the great city of <i>blague</i> in which they are born. The
+smile, the shrewdness and the mischief of the Parisian
+physiognomy were always mocking and impertinent in
+him. Jupillon's smile had the jovial expression imparted
+by a wicked mouth, a mouth that was almost
+cruel at the corners of the lips, which curled upward
+and were always twitching nervously. His face was
+pale with the pallor that nitric acid strong enough to eat
+copper gives to the complexion, and in his sharp, pert,
+bold features were mingled bravado, energy, recklessness,
+intelligence, impudence and all sorts of rascally
+expressions, softened, at certain times, by a cat-like,
+wheedling air. His trade of glove-cutter&mdash;he had taken
+up with that trade after two or three unsuccessful trials
+as an apprentice in other crafts&mdash;the habit of working
+in the shop-windows, of being on exhibition to the
+passers-by, had given to his whole person the self-assurance
+and the dandified airs of a <i>poseur</i>. Sitting in the
+work-shop on the street, with his white shirt, his little
+black cravat <i>à la Colin</i>, and his skin-tight pantaloons,
+he had adopted an awkward air of nonchalance, the
+pretentious carriage and <i>canaille</i> affectations of the
+workman who knows he is being stared at. And various
+little refinements of doubtful taste, the parting of the
+hair in the middle and brushing it down over the temples,
+the low shirt collars that left the whole neck bare,
+the striving after the coquettish effects that properly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+belong to the other sex, gave him an uncertain appearance,
+which was made even more ambiguous by his
+beardless face, marred only by a faint suggestion of a
+moustache, and his sexless features to which passion and
+ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish
+woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs
+and this Jupillon style were of the highest distinction.</p>
+
+<p>Thus constituted, with nothing lovable about him and
+incapable of a genuine attachment even through his
+passions, Jupillon was greatly embarrassed and bored
+by this adoration which became intoxicated with itself,
+and waxed greater day by day. Germinie wearied him
+to death. She seemed to him absurd in her humiliation,
+and laughable in her devotion. He was weary,
+disgusted, worn out with her. He had had enough of her
+love, enough of her person. And he had no hesitation
+about cutting loose from her, without charity or pity.
+He ran away from her. He failed to keep the appointments
+she made. He pretended that he was kept away
+by accident, by errands to be done, by a pressure of
+work. At night, she waited for him and he did not
+come; she supposed that he was detained by business:
+in fact he was at some low billiard hall, or at some ball
+at the barrier.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>There was a ball at the <i>Boule-Noire</i> one Thursday.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+The dancing was in full blast.</p>
+
+<p>The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern
+places of amusement for the people. It was brilliant
+with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were
+paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold,
+gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of
+brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the
+shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the decorations
+of a cardboard palace.</p>
+
+<p>Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace
+hung at the windows and were economically copied in
+paint beneath the mirrors, which were lighted by three-branched
+candelabra. On the walls, in large white
+panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with
+painted frames, alternated with Prud'hon's <i>Seasons</i>,
+which were much astonished to find themselves in such
+a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical
+Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a
+pomade jar of the sort used by suburban hair-dressers.
+Square pillars, embellished with meagre arabesques,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where
+there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra.
+An oaken rail, waist high, which served as a back
+to a cheap red bench, enclosed the dancers. And against
+this rail, on the outside, were tables painted green and
+two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a café.</p>
+
+<p>In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare
+and the intense heat of the gas, were women of all
+sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled woolens, women
+in black tulle caps, women in black <i>paletots</i>, women in
+<i>caracos</i> worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets
+bought of open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys.
+And in the whole assemblage not one of the youthful
+faces was set off by a collar, not a glimpse of a white
+skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a
+glimmer of white about these women, who were all
+dressed in gloomy colors, the colors of want, to the
+ends of their unpolished shoes. This absence of linen
+gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning; it
+imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness,
+of lifelessness and earthiness&mdash;a vaguely forbidding
+aspect, in which there was a suggestion of the Hôtel-Dieu
+and the Mont-de-Piété!</p>
+
+<p>An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the
+side passed in front of the tables, with a basket filled
+with pieces of Savoy cake and red apples.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time the dance, in its twisting and
+turning, disclosed a soiled stocking, the typical Jewish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+features of a street pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding
+from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an
+under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before
+last, a second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered
+calico, the cast-off finery of some kept mistress.</p>
+
+<p>The men wore <i>paletots</i>, small, soft caps pulled down
+over their ears, and woolen comforters untied and hanging
+down their backs. They invited the women to
+dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered
+behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and
+colored shirts, had an insolent air of domesticity and a
+swagger befitting grooms in some great family.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The
+women frisked and capered and gamboled, excited and
+stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure. And in the
+evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel
+addresses given: <i>Impasse du Dépotoir</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a
+quadrille to the air of <i>La Casquette du père Bugeaud</i>,
+in which the cymbals, the sleigh-bells and the drum had
+infected the dancers with the giddiness and madness
+of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole
+room, all the men leading their partners back to the
+places marked by their caps: she had been misled; <i>he</i>
+was not there, she could not see him. However, she
+waited. She entered the dancers' enclosure and sat down
+on the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much
+embarrassed. From their linen caps she judged that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+women seated in line beside her were servants like herself:
+comrades of her own class alarmed her less than
+the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets
+and their hands in the pockets of their <i>paletots</i>, who
+strolled humming about the room. But soon she aroused
+hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat&mdash;only
+about a dozen women at the ball wore hats&mdash;her flounced
+skirt, the white hem of which could be seen under her
+dress, the gold brooch that secured her shawl awakened
+malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and smiles
+were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All
+the women seemed to be asking one another where this
+new arrival had come from, and to be saying to one
+another that she would take their lovers from them.
+Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs,
+with their arms about one another's waists as if for a
+waltz, made her lower her eyes as they passed in front
+of her, and then went on with a contemptuous shrug,
+turning their heads to look back at her.</p>
+
+<p>She changed her place: she was met with the same
+smiles, the same whispering, the same hostility. She
+went to the further end of the hall; all the women
+looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in
+malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress
+to the flowers on her hat. Her face flushed. At times
+she feared that she should weep. She longed to leave
+the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of
+the hall all alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She began mechanically to watch an old woman who
+was slowly making the circuit of the hall with a noiseless
+step, like a bird of night flying in a circle. A
+black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her
+<i>bandeaux</i> of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine
+shoulders, hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan.
+When she reached the door, she cast a last glance about
+the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye
+of a vulture seeking in vain for food.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was
+ejecting a diminutive youth who tried to bite his hands
+and clung to the tables, against which, as he was dragged
+along, he struck with a noise like breaking furniture.</p>
+
+<p>As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he
+was sitting between two women at a green table in a
+window-recess, smoking. One of the two was a tall
+blonde with a small quantity of frizzled flaxen hair, a
+flat, stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise
+lay in folds on her back, and she had both hands in the
+pockets of a black apron which she was flapping up
+and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short,
+dark creature, whose face was still red from having been
+scrubbed with soap, was enveloped as to her head, with
+the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a white knitted hood
+with a blue border.</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw
+her rise and approach him, with her eyes fixed upon
+his face, he whispered something to the woman in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and
+waited.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallo! you here," he exclaimed when Germinie
+stood before him, erect, motionless and mute. "This
+is a surprise!&mdash;Waiter! another bowl!"</p>
+
+<p>And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the
+two women's glasses, he continued: "Come, don't
+make up faces&mdash;sit down there."</p>
+
+<p>And, as Germinie did not budge: "Go on! These
+ladies are friends of mine&mdash;ask them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mélie," said the woman in the hood to the other
+woman, in a voice like a diseased crow's, "don't you
+see? She's monsieur's mother. Make room for the
+lady if she'd like to drink with us."</p>
+
+<p>Germinie cast a murderous glance at the woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Well! what's the matter?" the woman continued;
+"that don't suit you, madame, eh? Excuse me! you
+ought to have told me beforehand. How old do you
+suppose she is, Mélie, eh? <i>Sapristi!</i> You select young
+ones, my boy, you don't put yourself out!"</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon smiled internally, and simpered and sneered
+externally. His whole manner displayed the cowardly
+delight that evil-minded persons take in watching the
+suffering of those who suffer because of loving them.</p>
+
+<p>"I have something to say to you&mdash;to you!&mdash;not here&mdash;outside,"
+said Germinie.</p>
+
+<p>"Much joy to you! Coming, Mélie?" said the
+woman in the hood, lighting the stub of a cigar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+that Jupillon had left on the table beside a piece of
+lemon.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want?" said Jupillon, impressed, in
+spite of himself, by Germinie's tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Come!"</p>
+
+<p>And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the
+people crowded about her, laughing. She heard voices,
+broken sentences, subdued hooting.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Jupillon promised Germinie not to go to the ball<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+again. But he was just beginning to make a name for
+himself at La Brididi, among the low haunts near the
+barrier, the <i>Boule-Noire</i>, the <i>Reine-Blanche</i> and the
+<i>Ermitage</i>. He had become one of the dancers who
+make the guests leave their seats, who keep a whole
+roomful of people hanging on the soles of their boots
+as they toss them two inches above their heads, and
+whom the fair dancers of the locality invite to dance
+with them and sometimes pay for their refreshment to
+that end. The ball to him was not a ball simply; it
+was a stage, an audience, popularity, applause, the
+flattering murmur of his name among the groups of
+people, an ovation accorded to saltatory glory in the
+glare of the reverberators.</p>
+
+<p>On Sunday he did not go to the <i>Boule-Noire</i>; but on
+the following Thursday he went there again; and Germinie,
+seeing plainly enough that she could not prevent
+him from going, decided to follow him and to stay there
+as long as he did. Sitting at a table in the background,
+in the least brilliantly lighted corner of the ball-room,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+she would follow him eagerly with her eyes throughout
+the whole contra-dance; and when it was at an end, if
+he held back, she would go and seize him, take him
+almost by force from the hands and caresses of the
+women who persisted in trying to pull him back, to
+detain him by wicked wiles.</p>
+
+<p>As they soon came to know her, the insulting remarks
+in her neighborhood ceased to be vague and indistinct
+and muttered under the breath, as at the first ball. The
+words were thrown in her face, the laughter spoke aloud.
+She was obliged to pass her three hours amid a chorus of
+derision that pointed its finger at her, called her by name
+and cast her age in her face. At every turn she was forced
+to submit to the appellation of: <i>old woman!</i> which the
+young hussies spat at her over their shoulders as they
+passed. But they did at least look at her; often, however,
+dancing women invited by Jupillon to drink, and brought
+by him to the table at which Germinie was, would sit
+with their elbows on the table and their cheeks resting
+on their hands, drinking the bowl of mulled wine for
+which she paid, apparently unaware that there was
+another woman there, crowding into her place as if it
+were unoccupied, and making no reply when she spoke
+to them. Germinie could have killed these creatures
+whom Jupillon forced her to entertain and who despised
+her so utterly that they did not even notice her presence.</p>
+
+<p>The time arrived, when, having endured all she could
+endure and being sickened by the humiliation she was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+forced to swallow, she conceived the idea of dancing
+herself. She saw no other way to avoid leaving her
+lover to others, to keep him by her all the evening, and
+perhaps to bind him more closely to her by her success,
+if she had any chance of succeeding. Throughout a
+whole month she worked, in secret, to learn to dance.
+She rehearsed the figures and the steps. She forced her
+body into unnatural attitudes, she wore herself out trying
+to master the contortions and the manipulations of the
+skirt that she saw were applauded. At the end of the
+month she made the venture; but everything tended to
+disconcert her and added to her awkwardness; the
+hostility that she could feel in the atmosphere, the smiles
+of astonishment and pity that played about the lips of
+the spectators when she took her place in the dancers'
+enclosure. She was so absurd and so laughed at, that
+she had not the courage to make a second attempt. She
+buried herself gloomily in her dark corner, only leaving
+it to hunt up Jupillon and carry him off, with the mute
+violence of a wife dragging her husband out of the
+wineshop and leading him home by the arm.</p>
+
+<p>It was soon rumored in the street that Germinie went
+to these balls, that she never missed one of them. The
+fruit woman, at whose shop Adèle had already held
+forth, sent her son "to see;" he returned with a confirmation
+of the rumor, and told of all the petty annoyances
+to which Germinie was subjected, but which did
+not keep her from returning. Thereafter there was no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+more doubt in the quarter as to the relations between
+mademoiselle's servant and Jupillon&mdash;relations which
+some charitable souls had hitherto persisted in denying.
+The scandal burst out, and in a week the poor girl,
+berated by all the slanderous tongues in the quarter,
+baptized and saluted by the vilest names in the language
+of the streets, fell at a blow from the most emphatically
+expressed esteem to the most brutally advertised
+contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far her pride&mdash;and it was very great&mdash;had procured
+for her the respect and consideration which is
+bestowed, in the lorette quarters, upon a servant who
+honestly serves a virtuous mistress. She had become
+accustomed to respect and deference and attention.
+She stood apart from her comrades. Her unassailable
+probity, her conduct, as to which not a word could be
+said, her confidential relations with mademoiselle, which
+caused her mistress's honorable character to be reflected
+upon her, led the shopkeeper to treat her on a different
+footing from the other maids. They addressed her, cap
+in hand; they always called her <i>Mademoiselle Germinie</i>.
+They hurried to wait upon her; they offered her the only
+chair in the shop when she had to wait. Even when she
+contended over prices they were still polite with her and
+never called her <i>haggler</i>. Jests that were somewhat too
+broad were cut short when she appeared. She was
+invited to the great banquets, to family parties, and
+consulted upon business matters.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Everything changed as soon as her relations with
+Jupillon and her assiduous attendance at the <i>Boule-Noire</i>
+were known. The quarter took its revenge for
+having respected her. The brazen-faced maids in the
+house accosted her as one of their own kind. One,
+whose lover was at Mazas, called her: "My dear."
+The men accosted her familiarly, and with all the
+intimacy of thee and thou in glance and gesture and
+tone and touch. The very children on the sidewalk,
+who were formerly trained to courtesy politely to her,
+ran away from her as from a person of whom they had
+been told to be afraid. She felt that she was being
+maligned behind her back, handed over to the devil.
+She could not take a step without walking through scorn
+and receiving a blow from her shame upon the cheek.</p>
+
+<p>It was a horrible affliction to her. She suffered as if
+her honor were being torn from her, shred by shred,
+and dragged in the gutter. But the more she suffered,
+the closer she pressed her love to her heart and clung to
+him. She bore him no ill-will, she uttered no word of
+reproach to him. She attached herself to him by all
+the tears he caused her pride to shed. And now, in the
+street through which she passed but a short time ago,
+proudly and with head erect, she could be seen, bent
+double as if crouching over her fault, hurrying furtively
+along, with oblique glances, dreading to be recognized,
+quickening her pace in front of the shops that swept
+their slanders out upon her heels.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Jupillon was constantly complaining that he was tired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+of working for others, that he could not set up for himself,
+that he could not find fifteen or eighteen hundred
+francs in his mother's purse. He needed no more than
+that, he said, to hire a couple of rooms on the ground
+floor and set up as a glover in a small way. Indeed he
+was already dreaming of what he might do and laying
+out his plans: he would open a shop in the quarter, an
+excellent quarter for his business, as it was full of purchasers,
+and of makers of wretched gloves at five francs.
+He would soon add a line of perfumery and cravats to
+his gloves; and then, when he had made a tidy sum, he
+would sell out and take a fine shop on Rue de Richelieu.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever he mentioned the subject Germinie asked
+him innumerable questions. She wanted to know everything
+that was necessary to start in business. She made
+him tell her the names of the tools and appurtenances,
+give her an idea of their prices and where they could be
+bought. She questioned him as to his trade and the details
+of his work so inquisitively and persistently that Jupillon
+lost his patience at last and said to her:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What's all this to you? The work sickens me
+enough now; don't mention it to me!"</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday she walked toward Montmartre with him.
+Instead of taking Rue Frochot she turned into Rue Pigalle.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, this ain't the way, is it?" said Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>"I know what I'm about," said she, "come on."</p>
+
+<p>She had taken his arm, and she walked on, turning her
+head slightly away from him so that he could not see what
+was taking place on her face. Half way along Rue Fontaine
+Saint-Georges, she halted abruptly in front of two
+windows on the ground floor of a house, and said to
+him: "Look!"</p>
+
+<p>She was trembling with joy.</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon looked; he saw between the two windows,
+on a glistening copper plate:</p>
+
+<div class="nanospace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="center">
+<i>Magasin de Ganterie.</i><br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Jupillon.</span>
+</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+<p>He saw white curtains at the first window. Through
+the glass in the other he saw pigeon-holes and boxes,
+and, near the window, the little glover's cutting board,
+with the great shears, the jar for clippings, and the knife
+to make holes in the skins in order to stretch them.</p>
+
+<p>"The concierge has your key," she said.</p>
+
+<p>They entered the first room, the shop.</p>
+
+<p>She at once set about showing him everything. She
+opened the boxes and laughed. Then she pushed open
+the door into the other room. "There, you won't be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+stifled there as you are in the loft at your mother's. Do
+you like it? Oh! it isn't handsome, but it's clean.
+I'd have liked to give you mahogany. Do you like that
+little rug by the bed? And the paper&mdash;I didn't think
+of that&mdash;&mdash;" She put a receipt for the rent in his hand.
+"See! this is for six months. Dame! you must go to
+work right off and earn some money. The few sous I
+had laid by are all gone. Oh! let me sit down. You
+look so pleased&mdash;it gives me a turn&mdash;it makes my head
+spin. I haven't any legs."</p>
+
+<p>And she sank into a chair. Jupillon stooped over her
+to kiss her.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! yes, they're not there any longer," she said,
+seeing that he was looking for her earrings. "They've
+gone like my rings. D'ye see, all gone&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And she showed him her hands, bare of the paltry
+gems she had worked so long to buy.</p>
+
+<p>"They all went for the easy-chair, you see&mdash;but it's
+all horsehair."</p>
+
+<p>As Jupillon stood in front of her with an embarrassed
+air, as if he were trying to find words with which to
+thank her, she continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you're a funny fellow. What's the matter
+with you? Ah! it's on that account, is it?" And she
+pointed to the bedroom. "You're a stupid! I love you,
+don't I? Well then?"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says
+sublime things.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>She became <i>enceinte</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At first she doubted, she dared not believe it. But
+when she was certain of the fact, she was filled with
+immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed her heart. Her
+happiness was so great and so overpowering that it stifled
+at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling
+that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried
+women and poisons their anticipations of childbirth, the
+divine hope that lives and moves within them. The
+thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her
+<i>liaison</i>, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the
+abominable thing that had always made her think of
+suicide: dishonor,&mdash;even the fear of being detected by
+mademoiselle and dismissed by her&mdash;nothing of all this
+could cast a shadow on her felicity. The child that she
+expected allowed her to see nothing but it, as if she
+had it already in her arms before her; and, hardly
+attempting to conceal her condition, she bore her
+woman's shame almost proudly through the streets,
+exulting and radiant in the thought that she was to be
+a mother.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was unhappy only because she had spent all her
+savings, and was not only without money but had been
+paid several months' wages in advance by her mistress.
+She bitterly deplored having to receive her child in a
+poor way. Often, as she passed through Rue Saint-Lazare,
+she would stop in front of a linen-draper's, in
+whose windows were displayed stores of rich baby-linen.
+She would devour with her eyes the pretty, dainty flowered
+garments, the piqué bibs, the long short-waisted
+dresses trimmed with English embroidery, the whole
+doll-like cherub's costume. A terrible longing,&mdash;the
+longing of a pregnant woman,&mdash;to break the glass and
+steal it all, would come upon her: the clerks standing
+behind the display framework became accustomed to seeing
+her take up her station there and would laughingly
+point her out to one another.</p>
+
+<p>Again, at intervals, amid the happiness that overflowed
+her heart, amid the ecstasy that exalted her being,
+another disturbing thought passed through her mind.
+She would ask herself how the father would welcome his
+child. Two or three times she had attempted to tell
+him of her condition but had not dared. At last, one
+day, seeing that his face wore the expression she had
+awaited so long as a preliminary to telling him everything,
+an expression in which there was a touch of
+affection, she confessed to him, blushing hotly and as if
+asking his forgiveness, what it was that made her so
+happy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That's all imagination!" said Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>And when she had assured him that it was not imagination
+and that she was positively five months advanced
+in pregnancy: "Just my luck!" the young man
+rejoined. "Thanks!" And he swore. "Would you
+mind telling me who's going to feed the sparrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! never you fear! it sha'n't suffer, I'll look out
+for that. And then it'll be so pretty! Don't be afraid,
+no one shall know anything about it. I'll fix myself up.
+See! the last part of the time I'll walk like this, with
+my head back&mdash;I won't wear any petticoats, and I'll
+pull myself in&mdash;you'll see! Nobody shall notice anything,
+I tell you. Just think of it! a little child of
+our own!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as long as it's so, it's so, eh?" said the young
+man.</p>
+
+<p>"Say," ventured Germinie, timidly, "suppose you
+should tell your mother?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ma? Oh! no, I rather think not. You must lie
+in first. After that we'll take the brat to the house. It
+will give her a start, and perhaps she'll consent without
+meaning to."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Twelfth Night arrived. It was the day on which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil gave a grand dinner-party
+regularly every year. She invited all the children of
+her own family or her old friends' families, great and
+small. The small suite would hardly hold them all.
+They were obliged to put part of the furniture on the
+landing, and a table was set in each of the two rooms
+which formed mademoiselle's whole suite. For the
+children, that day was a great festival to which they
+looked forward for a week. They came running up the
+stairway behind the pastry-cook's men. At table they
+ate too much without being scolded. At night, they
+were unwilling to go to bed, they climbed on the chairs
+and made a racket that always gave Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil a sick headache the next day; but she bore
+them no grudge therefor: she had had the full enjoyment
+of a genuine grandmother's fête, in listening to
+them, looking at them, tying around their necks the
+white napkins that made them look so rosy. And not
+for anything in the world would she have failed to give
+this dinner-party, which filled her old maid's apartments<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+with the fair-haired little imps of Satan, and brought
+thither, in a single day, an atmosphere of activity and
+youth and laughter that lasted a whole year.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was preparing the dinner. She was whipping
+cream in an earthen bowl on her knees, when
+suddenly she felt the first pains. She looked at her face
+in the bit of a broken mirror that she had above her
+kitchen dresser, and saw that she was pale. She went
+down to Adèle: "Give me your mistress's rouge," she
+said. And she put some on her cheeks. Then she
+went up again, and, refusing to listen to the voice of
+her suffering, finished cooking the dinner. It had to
+be served, and she served it. At dessert, she leaned
+against the furniture and grasped the backs of chairs
+as she passed the plates, hiding her torture with
+the ghastly set smile of people whose entrails are
+writhing.</p>
+
+<p>"How's this, are you sick?" said her mistress, looking
+sharply at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mademoiselle, a little&mdash;it may be the charcoal
+or the hot kitchen."</p>
+
+<p>"Go to bed&mdash;we don't need you any more, and you
+can clean up to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>She went down to Adèle once more.</p>
+
+<p>"It's come," she said; "call a cab quick. It was
+Rue de la Huchette where you said your midwife lives,
+wasn't it? opposite a copper planer's? Haven't you a
+pen and paper?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And she sat down to write a line to her mistress. She
+told her that she was too ill to work, that she had gone
+to the hospital, but would not tell her where, because
+she would fatigue herself coming to see her; that she
+would come back within a week.</p>
+
+<p>"There you are!" said Adèle, all out of breath, giving
+her the number of the cab.</p>
+
+<p>"I can stay there," said Germinie; "not a word to
+mademoiselle. That's all. Swear you won't say a
+word to her!"</p>
+
+<p>She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going
+out?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to lie in&mdash;&mdash;It took me during the
+day. There was a great dinner-party here&mdash;&mdash;Oh!
+but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I
+told you never to come; I don't want you to!"</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;&mdash;I'll tell you&mdash;&mdash;because just now I
+absolutely must have forty francs. 'Pon my word, I
+must."</p>
+
+<p>"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's hard luck&mdash;&mdash;look out! What do you
+want to do?" And he offered his arm to assist her.
+"<i>Cristi!</i> I'm going to have hard work to get 'em all
+the same."</p>
+
+<p>He had opened the carriage door.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you want him to take you?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped
+the forty francs into his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no," said Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! nonsense&mdash;&mdash;there or somewhere else! Besides,
+I have seven francs left."</p>
+
+<p>The cab started away.</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk,
+looking at the two napoleons in his hand. Then
+he ran after the cab, stopped it, and said to Germinie
+through the window:</p>
+
+<p>"At least, I can go with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone,"
+she replied, writhing on the cushions of the cab.</p>
+
+<p>After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue
+de Port-Royal, in front of a black door surmounted by
+a violet lantern, which announced to such medical
+students as happened to pass through the street that
+there was that night, and at that moment, the curious
+and interesting spectacle of a difficult labor in progress
+at La Maternité.</p>
+
+<p>The driver descended from his box and rang. The
+concierge, assisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's
+arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four
+beds in the <i>salle d'accouchement</i>. Once in bed, her
+pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked
+about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the
+end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace
+in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and
+bandages were drying.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little
+girl. Her bed was moved into another room. She had
+been there several hours, lost in the blissful after-delivery
+weakness which follows the frightful agony of childbirth,
+happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming
+in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated
+with the joy of having created. Suddenly a loud cry:
+"I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes in the
+direction from which it came: she saw one of her
+neighbors throw her arms around the neck of one of the
+assistant nurses, fall back almost instantly, move a moment
+under the clothes, then lie perfectly still. Almost
+at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on
+the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of
+one who sees death approaching: it was a woman calling
+the young assistant, with desperate gestures; the
+assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell in a dead
+faint upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between
+the two dead bodies and the half-dead assistant, whom
+the cold floor did not restore to consciousness for more
+than an hour, Germinie and the other women who were
+still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring
+the bell that hung beside each bed to call for help.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter La Maternité was the scene of one of those
+terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric
+poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole
+rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which
+once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed
+that it was a visitation of the plague, a plague that
+turns the face black in a few hours, carries all before it
+and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague
+that issues from the cradle&mdash;the Black Plague of
+mothers! All about Germinie, at all hours, especially
+at night, women were dying such deaths as the milk-fever
+causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's
+laws, agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks
+and troubled by hallucinations and delirium, death
+agonies that compelled the application of the strait-waistcoat,
+death agonies that caused the victims to leap
+suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with them,
+and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought
+that they were dead bodies from the amphitheatre!
+Life departed as if it were torn from the body. The
+very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous
+aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by
+the swelling caused by peritonitis, producing a vague,
+horrifying effect in the lamplight.</p>
+
+<p>For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged
+in her bed, closing her eyes and ears as best she could,
+had the strength to combat all these horrors, and yielded
+to them only at long intervals. She was determined to
+live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her
+energy was exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold
+wave flowed into her heart. She said to herself that it
+was all over. The hand that death lays upon one's
+shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching
+her. She felt the first breath of the epidemic, the
+belief that she was its destined victim, and the impression
+that she was already half-possessed by it. Although
+unresigned, she succumbed. Her life, vanquished beforehand,
+hardly made an effort to struggle. At that
+crisis a head bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.</p>
+
+<p>It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-assistants,
+a fair head, with long golden locks and blue eyes
+so soft and sweet that the dying saw heaven opening its
+gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women
+said: "Look! the Blessed Virgin!"</p>
+
+<p>"My child," she said to Germinie, "you must ask
+for your discharge at once. You must go away from
+here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap up
+well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must
+take a hot draught of something or other. You must
+try to take a sweat. Then, it won't do you any harm.
+But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for you
+here to-night," she said, glancing around at the beds.
+"Don't say that I told you to go: you would get me
+discharged if you should."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Germinie recovered in a few days. The joy and pride<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+of having given birth to a tiny creature in whom her
+flesh was mingled with the flesh of the man she loved,
+the bliss of being a mother, saved her from the natural
+results of a confinement in which she did not receive
+proper care. She was restored to health and had an
+apparent pleasure in living that her mistress had never
+before seen her manifest.</p>
+
+<p>Every Sunday, no matter what the weather might be,
+she left the house about eleven o'clock; mademoiselle
+believed that she went to see a friend in the country,
+and was delighted that her maid derived so much benefit
+from these days passed in the open air. Germinie would
+capture Jupillon, who allowed himself to be taken in
+tow without too much resistance, and they would start
+for Pommeuse where the child was, and where a good
+breakfast ordered by the mother awaited them. Once
+in the carriage on the Mulhouse railway, Germinie
+would not speak or reply when spoken to. She would
+lean out of the window, and all her thoughts seemed to
+be upon what lay before her. She gazed, as if her longing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+were striving to outrun the steam. The train would
+hardly have stopped before she had leaped out, tossed
+her ticket to the ticket-taker, and started at a run on the
+Pommeuse road, leaving Jupillon behind. She drew
+nearer and nearer, she could see the house, she was
+there: yes, there was the child! She would pounce
+upon her, snatch her from the nurse's arms with jealous
+hands&mdash;a mother's hands!&mdash;hug her, strain her to her
+heart, kiss her, devour her with kisses and looks and
+smiles! She would gaze admiringly at her for an instant
+and then, distraught with joy, mad with love, would
+cover her with kisses to the tips of her little bare toes.
+Breakfast would be served. She would sit at the table
+with the child on her knees and eat nothing: she had
+kissed her so much that she had not yet looked at her,
+and she would begin to seek out points of resemblance
+to themselves in the little one. One feature was his,
+another hers:&mdash;"She has your nose and my eyes. Her
+hair will be like yours in time. It will curl! Look,
+those are your hands&mdash;she is all you." And for hours she
+would continue the inexhaustible and charming prattle of
+a woman who is determined to give a man his share of
+their daughter. Jupillon submitted to it all with reasonably
+good grace, thanks to divers three-sou cigars Germinie
+always produced from her pocket and gave to him
+one by one. Then he had found a means of diversion;
+the Morin flowed at the foot of the garden. Jupillon
+was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And when summer came they stayed there all day, at
+the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream&mdash;Jupillon
+on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole
+in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream.
+On pleasant days, the sun poured down upon the broad
+sparkling current, from which beams of light arose as
+from a mirror. It was like a display of fireworks from
+the sky and the stream, amid which Germinie would
+hold the little girl upon her feet and let her trample
+upon her with her little bare pink legs, in her short
+baby dress, her skin shimmering in spots in the sunlight,
+her flesh mottled with sunbeams like the flesh
+of angels Germinie had seen in pictures. She had a
+divinely sweet sensation when the little one, with the
+active hands of children that cannot talk, touched her
+chin and mouth and cheeks, persisted in putting her
+fingers in her eyes, rested them playfully on the lids,
+and kept them moving over her whole face, tickling
+and tormenting her with the dear little digits that
+seem to grope in the dark for a mother's features:
+it was as if her child's life and warmth were wandering
+over her face. From time to time she would
+bestow half of her smile on Jupillon over the little
+one's head, and would call to him: "Do look at
+her!"</p>
+
+<p>Then the child would fall asleep with the open mouth
+that laughs in sleep. Germinie would lean over her and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+listen to her breathing in repose. And, soothed by the
+peaceful respiration, she would gradually forget herself
+as she gazed dreamily at the poor abode of her happiness,
+the rustic garden, the apple-trees with their leaves
+covered with little yellow snails and the red-cheeked
+apples on the southern limbs, the poles, at whose feet
+the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning to
+climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the
+little circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside
+her, on the edge of the stream, the patches of grass
+covered with dog's mercury, the white heads of the nettles
+against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the bottles
+of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the
+antics of a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and
+dreamed. She thought of the past, having her future
+on her knees. With the grass and the trees and the
+river that were before her eyes, she reconstructed, in
+memory, the rustic garden of her rustic childhood. She
+saw again the two stones reaching down to the water,
+from which her mother, when she was a little child, used
+to wash her feet before putting her to bed in summertime.</p>
+
+<p>"Look you, Père Remalard," said Jupillon from his
+board, on one of the hottest days in August, to the
+peasant who was watching him,&mdash;"do you know they
+won't bite at the red worm worth a sou?"</p>
+
+<p>"You must try the gentle," rejoined the peasant sententiously.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"All right, I'll have my revenge with the gentle!
+Père Remalard, you must get some calf's lights Thursday.
+You hang 'em up in that tree, and Sunday we'll
+see."</p>
+
+<p>On the Sunday Jupillon had miraculous success with
+his fishing, and Germinie heard the first syllable issue
+from her daughter's mouth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>On Wednesday morning, when she came downstairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+Germinie found a letter for herself. In that letter,
+written on the back of a laundry receipt, the Remalard
+woman informed her that her child had fallen sick
+almost immediately after her departure; that she had
+grown steadily worse; that she had consulted the doctor;
+that he said some insect had stung the child; that
+she had been to him a second time; that she did not
+know what more to do; that she had had pilgrimages
+made for her. The letter concluded thus: "If you
+could see how troubled I am for your little one&mdash;if you
+could see how good she is when she isn't suffering!"</p>
+
+<p>This letter produced upon Germinie the effect of
+a push from behind. She went out and instinctively
+walked toward the railroad that would take her to her
+little one. Her hair was uncombed and she was in her
+slippers, but she did not think of that. She must see
+her child, she must see her instantly. Then she would
+come back. She thought of mademoiselle's breakfast
+for a moment, then forgot it. Suddenly, half-way to
+the station, she saw a clock at a cab office and noticed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+the hour: she remembered that there was no train at
+that time. She retraced her steps, saying to herself that
+she would hurry the breakfast and then make some
+excuse to be given her liberty for the rest of the day.
+But when the breakfast was served she could find none:
+her mind was so full of her child that she could not
+invent a falsehood; her imagination was benumbed.
+And then, if she had spoken, if she had made the
+request, she would have betrayed herself; she could feel
+the words upon her lips: "I want to go and see my
+child!" At night she dared not make her escape;
+mademoiselle had been a little indisposed the night
+before; she was afraid that she might need her.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning when she entered mademoiselle's
+room with a fable she had invented during the night, all
+ready to ask for leave of absence, mademoiselle said to
+her, looking up from a letter that had just been sent
+up to her from the lodge: "Ah! my old friend De
+Belleuse wants you for the whole day to-day, to help her
+with her preserves. Come, give me my two eggs, post-haste,
+and off with you. Eh? what! doesn't that suit
+you? What's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"With me? why nothing at all!" Germinie found
+strength to say.</p>
+
+<p>All that endless day she passed standing over hot
+stewpans and sealing up jars, in the torture known only
+to those whom the chances of life detain at a distance
+from the sick bed of those dear to them. She suffered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+such heart-rending agony as those unhappy creatures
+suffer who cannot go where their anxiety calls them,
+and who, in the extremity of despair caused by separation
+and uncertainty, constantly imagine that death will
+come in their absence.</p>
+
+<p>As she received no letter Thursday evening and none
+Friday morning, she took courage. If the little one were
+growing worse the nurse would have written her. The
+little one was better: she imagined her saved, cured.
+Children are forever coming near dying, and they get
+well so quickly! And then hers was strong. She decided
+to wait, to be patient until Sunday, which was only
+forty-eight hours away, deceiving the remainder of her
+fears with the superstitions that say yes to hope, persuading
+herself that her daughter had "escaped,"
+because the first person she met in the morning was a
+man, because she had seen a red horse in the street,
+because she had guessed that a certain person would turn
+into a certain street, because she had ascended a flight
+of stairs in so many strides.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday, in the morning, when she entered Mère
+Jupillon's shop, she found her weeping hot tears over a
+lump of butter that she was covering with a moist cloth.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! it's you, is it?" said Mère Jupillon. "That
+poor charcoal woman! See, I'm actually crying over
+her! She just went away from here. You don't know&mdash;they
+can't get their faces clean in their trade with anything
+but butter. And here's her love of a daughter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>&mdash;she's
+at death's door, you know, the dear child. That's
+the way it is with us! Ah! <i>mon Dieu</i>, yes!&mdash;Well, as
+I was saying, she said to her just now like this: 'Mamma,
+I want you to wash my face in butter right away&mdash;for the
+good God.'"</p>
+
+<p>And Mère Jupillon began to sob.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie had fled. All that day she was unable to
+keep still. Again and again she went up to her chamber
+to prepare the few things she proposed to take to her
+little one the next day, to dress her cleanly, to make a
+little special toilet for her in honor of her recovery. As
+she went down in the evening to put Mademoiselle to
+bed, Adèle handed her a letter that she had found for
+her below.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mademoiselle had begun to undress, when Germinie<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+entered her bedroom, walked a few steps, dropped upon
+a chair, and almost immediately, after two or three long-drawn,
+deep, heart-breaking sighs, mademoiselle saw
+her throw herself backward, wringing her hands, and at
+last roll from the chair to the floor. She tried to lift her
+up, but Germinie was shaken by such violent convulsions
+that the old woman was obliged to let the frantic body
+fall again upon the floor; for all the limbs, which were
+for a moment contracted and rigid, lashed out to right
+and left, at random, with the sharp report of the trigger
+of a rifle, and threw down whatever they came in contact
+with. At mademoiselle's shrieks on the landing, a
+maid ran to a doctor's office near by but did not find
+him; four other women employed in the house assisted
+mademoiselle to lift Germinie up and carry her to the
+bed in her mistress's room, on which they laid her after
+cutting her corset lacings.</p>
+
+<p>The terrible convulsions, the nervous contortions of
+the limbs, the snapping of the tendons had ceased; but
+her neck and her breast, which was uncovered where her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+dress was unbuttoned, moved up and down as if waves
+were rising and falling under the skin, and the rustling
+of the skirts showed that the movement extended to her
+feet. Her head thrown back, her face flushed, her eyes
+full of melancholy tenderness, of the patient agony we
+see in the eyes of the wounded, the great veins clearly
+marked under her chin, Germinie, breathing hard and
+paying no heed to questions, raised her hands to her
+neck and throat and clawed at them; she seemed to
+be trying to tear out the sensation of something rising
+and falling within her. In vain did they make her inhale
+ether and drink orange-flower water; the waves of grief
+that flowed through her body did not cease their action;
+and her face continued to wear the same expression
+of gentle melancholy and sentimental anxiety, which
+seemed to place the suffering of the heart above the
+suffering of the flesh in every feature. For a long time
+everything seemed to wound her senses and to produce
+a painful effect upon them&mdash;the bright light, the sound
+of voices, the odor of the things about her. At last,
+after an hour or more, a deluge of tears suddenly poured
+from her eyes and put an end to the terrible crisis.
+After that there was nothing more than an occasional
+convulsive shudder in the overburdened body, soon
+quieted by weariness and by general prostration. It was
+possible to carry Germinie to her own room.</p>
+
+<p>The letter Adèle handed her contained the news of
+her daughter's death.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>As a result of this crisis, Germinie fell into a state of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+dumb, brutish sorrow. For months she was insensible
+to everything; for months, completely possessed and
+absorbed by the thought of the little creature that was
+no more, she carried her child's death in her entrails as
+she had carried her life. Every evening, when she went
+up to her chamber, she took the poor darling's little
+cap and dress from the trunk at the foot of her bed.
+She would gaze at them and touch them; she would lay
+them out on the bed; she would sit for hours weeping
+over them, kissing them, talking to them, saying the
+things that a mother's bitter sorrow is wont to say to a
+little daughter's ghost.</p>
+
+<p>While weeping for her daughter the unhappy creature
+wept for herself as well. A voice whispered to her that
+she was saved had the child lived; that to have that
+child to love was her Providence; that all that she
+dreaded in herself would be expended upon that dear
+head and be sanctified there&mdash;her affections, her unreasoning
+impulses, her ardor, all the passions of her
+nature. It seemed to her that she had felt her mother's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+heart soothing and purifying her woman's heart. In her
+daughter she saw a sort of celestial vision that would
+redeem her and make her whole, a little angel of
+deliverance as it were, issuing from her errors to fight
+for her and rescue her from the evil influences which
+pursued her and by which she sometimes thought that
+she was possessed.</p>
+
+<p>When she began to recover from the first prostration
+of despair, when, as the consciousness of life and the
+perception of objects returned to her, she looked about
+her with eyes that saw, she was aroused from her grief
+by a more poignant cause of bitterness of spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Jupillon, who had become too stout and too
+heavy to do what it was necessary for her to do at the
+creamery, notwithstanding all the assistance rendered by
+Germinie, had sent to her province for a niece of hers.
+She was the embodiment of the blooming youth of the
+country, a woman in whom there was still something of
+the child, active and vivacious, with black eyes full of
+sunlight, lips as round and red as cherries, the summer
+heat of her province in her complexion, the warmth of
+perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous
+as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her
+cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction
+that draws the young toward the young. She had
+met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence,
+artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in
+the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood,
+unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against
+which her cousin's vanity was without means of defence.
+The child's presence deprived Germinie of all hope of
+repose. Mere girl as she was, she wounded her every
+minute in the day by her presence, her touch, her
+caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of
+love. Her preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that
+kept them constantly together, the provincial wonderment
+that she constantly exhibited, the half-confidences
+she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had
+gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor&mdash;everything
+helped to exasperate Germinie and to arouse
+a sullen wrath within her; everything wounded that
+jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals caused it a
+bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved.</p>
+
+<p>She dared not speak to Mère Jupillon and denounce
+the little one to her, for fear of betraying herself; but
+whenever she found herself alone with Jupillon she
+vented her feelings in recriminations, complaints and
+quarrels. She would remind him of an incident, a word,
+something he had done or said, some answer he had made,
+a trifle forgotten by him but still bleeding in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you mad?" Jupillon would say to her; "a slip
+of a girl!"&mdash;"A slip of a girl, eh? nonsense!&mdash;when
+she has such eyes that all the men stare at her in the
+street! I went out with her the other day&mdash;I was
+ashamed&mdash;I don't know how she did it, but we were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+followed by a gentleman all the time."&mdash;"Well, what if
+you were? She's a pretty girl, you know!"&mdash;"Pretty!
+pretty!" And at that word Germinie would hurl herself,
+figuratively speaking, at the girl's face, and claw it
+to pieces with frantic words.</p>
+
+<p>Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: "Look
+here! you love her!"&mdash;"Well! what then?" he would
+retort, highly entertained by these disputes, by the opportunity
+to watch the antics of this fierce wrath which he
+fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement
+of trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half
+insane under his sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling
+wildly about and running her head against stone
+walls in the first paroxysms of madness.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day,
+a revolution took place in that excitable, extreme character,
+which knew no middle course, in that heart in
+which the most violent passions were constantly clashing.
+Love, in which poison had long been at work,
+became decomposed and changed to hate. Germinie
+began to detest her lover and to seek out every possible
+pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred
+to her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of
+her death, and she persuaded herself that he had killed
+her. She looked upon him as an assassin. She conceived
+a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him
+as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that
+one has of a person who is one's Bane!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>One morning, after a night passed by her in turning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+over and over in her mind all her despairing, hate-ridden
+thoughts, Germinie went to the creamery for her
+four sous' worth of milk and found in the back-shop
+three or four maids from the neighborhood engaged in
+"taking an eye-opener." They were seated at a table,
+gossiping and sipping liqueurs.</p>
+
+<p>"Aha!" said Adèle, striking the table with her glass;
+"you here already, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's this?" said Germinie, taking Adèle's glass;
+"I'd like some myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you so thirsty as all that this morning? Brandy
+and absinthe, that's all!&mdash;my soldier boy's <i>tap</i>, you
+know,&mdash;he never drank anything else. It's a little stiff,
+eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! yes," said Germinie, contracting her lips and
+winking like a child who is given a glass of liqueur with
+the dessert at a grand dinner-party.</p>
+
+<p>"It's good, all the same." Her spirits rose. "Madame
+Jupillon, let's have the bottle&mdash;I'll pay."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And she tossed money on the table. After the third
+glass, she cried: "I am <i>tight</i>!" And she roared with
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had gone out that morning
+to collect her half-yearly income. When she returned
+at eleven o'clock, she rang once, twice! no one
+came. "Ah!" she said to herself, "she must have
+gone down." She opened the door with her key, went
+to her bedroom and looked in: the mattress and bedclothes
+lay in a heap on two chairs, and Germinie was
+stretched out across the straw under-mattress, sleeping
+heavily, like a log, in the utterly relaxed condition following
+a sudden attack of lethargy.</p>
+
+<p>At the noise made by mademoiselle, Germinie sprang
+to her feet and passed her hand over her eyes.&mdash;"Yes?"
+she said, as if some one had called her; her eyes were
+wandering.</p>
+
+<p>"What's happened?" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+in alarm; "did you fall? Is anything the matter
+with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"With me? no," Germinie replied; "I fell asleep.
+What time is it? Nothing's the matter. Ah! what a
+fool!"</p>
+
+<p>And she began to shake the mattress, turning her
+back to her mistress to hide the flush of intoxication on
+her face.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>One Sunday morning Jupillon was dressing in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+room Germinie had furnished for him. His mother was
+sitting by, gazing at him with the wondering pride expressed
+in the eyes of mothers among the common people
+in presence of a son who dresses like a <i>monsieur</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"You're dressed up like the young man on the first
+floor!" she said. "I should think it was his coat. I
+don't mean to say fine things don't look well on you,
+too&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon, intent upon tying his cravat, made no reply.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll play the deuce with the poor girls to-day!"
+continued Mère Jupillon, giving to her voice an accent
+of insinuating sweetness: "Look you, bibi, let me tell
+you this, you great bad boy: if a young woman goes
+wrong, so much the worse for her! that's their look-out.
+You're a man, aren't you? you've got the age and the
+figure and everything. I can't always keep you in leading-strings.
+So, I said to myself, as well one as another.
+That one will do. And I fixed her so that she wouldn't
+see anything. Yes, Germinie would do, as you seemed
+to like her. That prevented you from wasting your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+money on bad women&mdash;and then I didn't see anything
+out of the way in the girl till now. But now it won't
+do at all. They're telling stories in the quarter&mdash;a heap
+of horrible things about us. A pack of vipers! We're
+above all that, I know. When one has been an honest
+woman all her life, thank God! But you never know
+what will happen&mdash;mademoiselle would only have to put
+the end of her nose into her maid's affairs. Why there's
+the law&mdash;the bare idea gives me a turn. What do you
+say to that, bibi, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dame</i>, mamma,&mdash;whatever you please."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! I knew you loved your dear darling mamma!"
+exclaimed the monstrous creature embracing him.
+"Well! invite her to dinner to-night. You can get
+up two bottles of our Lunel&mdash;at two francs&mdash;the heady
+kind. And be sure she comes. Make eyes at her, so
+that she'll think to-day's the great day. Put on your
+fine gloves: they'll make you look more dignified."</p>
+
+<p>Germinie arrived at seven o'clock, happy and bright
+and hopeful, her head filled with blissful dreams by the
+mysterious air with which Jupillon delivered his mother's
+invitation. They dined and drank and made merry.
+Mère Jupillon began to cast glances expressive of deep
+emotion, drowned in tears, upon the couple sitting
+opposite her. When the coffee was served, she said, as
+if for the purpose of being left alone with Germinie:
+"Bibi, you know you have an errand to do this
+evening."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jupillon went out. Madame Jupillon, as she sipped
+her coffee, turned to Germinie the face of a mother
+seeking to learn her daughter's secret, and, in her indulgence,
+forgiving her in advance of her confession.
+For a moment the two women sat thus, silent, one waiting
+for the other to speak, the other with the cry of her
+heart on her lips. Suddenly Germinie rushed from her
+chair into the stout woman's arms.</p>
+
+<p>"If you knew, Madame Jupillon!"</p>
+
+<p>She talked and wept and embraced her all at once.
+"Oh! you won't be angry with me! Well! yes, I
+love him&mdash;I've had a child by him. It's true, I love
+him. Three years ago&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At every word Madame Jupillon's face became sterner
+and more icy. She coldly pushed Germinie away, and
+in her most doleful voice, with an accent of lamentation
+and hopeless desolation, she began, like a person
+who is suffocating: "Oh! my God&mdash;you!&mdash;tell me
+such things as that!&mdash;me!&mdash;his mother!&mdash;to my face!
+My God, must it be? My son&mdash;a child&mdash;an innocent
+child! You've had the face to ruin him for me! And
+now you tell me that you did it! No, it ain't possible,
+my God! And I had such confidence. There's nothing
+worth living for. There's no trusting anybody in
+this world! All the same, mademoiselle, I wouldn't
+ever 'a' believed it of you. <i>Dame!</i> such things give
+me a turn. Ah! this upsets me completely. I know
+myself, and I'm quite likely to be sick after this&mdash;&mdash;"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Madame Jupillon! Madame Jupillon!" Germinie
+murmured in an imploring tone, half dead with shame
+and grief on the chair on which she had fallen. "I beg
+you to forgive me. It was stronger than I was. And
+then I thought&mdash;I believed&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You believed! Oh! my God; you believed! What
+did you believe? That you'd be my son's wife, eh? Ah!
+Lord God! is it possible, my poor child?"</p>
+
+<p>And adopting a more and more plaintive and lamentable
+tone as the words she hurled at Germinie cut deeper
+and deeper, Mère Jupillon continued: "But, my poor
+girl, you must have a reason, let's hear it. What did I
+always tell you? That it would be all right if you'd been
+born ten years earlier. Let's see, your date was 1820,
+you told me, and now it's '49. You're getting on
+toward thirty, you see, my dear child. I say! it makes
+me feel bad to say that to you&mdash;I'd so much rather not
+hurt you. But a body only has to look at you, my poor
+young lady. What can I do? It's your age&mdash;your hair&mdash;I
+can lay my finger in the place where you part it."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Germinie, in whose heart black wrath
+was beginning to rumble, "what about what your son
+owes me? My money? The money I took out of
+the savings bank, the money I borrowed for him, the
+money I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Money? he owes you money? Oh! yes, what you
+lent him to begin business with. Well! what about it?
+Do you think we're thieves? Does anyone want to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+cheat you out of your old money, although there wasn't
+any paper&mdash;I know it because the other day&mdash;it just
+occurs to me&mdash;that honest man of a child of mine wanted
+to write it down for fear he might die. But the next
+minute we're pickpockets, as glib as you please! Oh!
+my God, it's hardly worth while living in such times as
+these! Ah! I'm well paid for getting attached to you!
+But I see through it now. You're a politician, you are!
+You wanted to pay yourself with my son, for his whole
+life! Excuse me! No, thank you! It costs less to
+give back your money! A café waiter's leavings! my
+poor dear boy! God preserve him from it!"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie had snatched her shawl and hat from the
+hook and was out of doors.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mademoiselle was sitting in her large armchair at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+corner of the fireplace, where a few live embers were
+still sleeping under the ashes. Her black cap was pulled
+down over her wrinkled forehead almost to her eyes.
+Her black dress, cut in the shape of a child's frock, was
+draped in scanty folds about her scanty body, showing
+the location of every bone, and fell straight from her
+knees to the floor. She wore a small black shawl crossed
+on her breast and tied behind her back, as they are worn
+by little girls. Her half-open hands were resting on her
+hips, with the palms turned outward&mdash;thin, old woman's
+hands, awkward and stiff, and swollen with gout at the
+knuckles and finger joints. Sitting in the huddled,
+crouching posture that compels old people to raise their
+heads to look at you and speak to you, she seemed to
+be buried in all that mass of black, whence nothing
+emerged but her face, to which preponderance of bile
+had imparted the yellow hue of old ivory, and the flashing
+glance of her brown eyes. One who saw her thus,
+her bright, sparkling eyes, the meagre body, the garb of
+poverty and the noble air with which she bore all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+burdens of age, might well have fancied that he was
+looking at a fairy on the stage of the Petits-Ménages.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was by her side. The old lady began:</p>
+
+<p>"The list is still under the door, eh, Germinie?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, my girl," Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+resumed, after a pause, "do you know that when
+one is born in one of the finest houses on Rue Royale&mdash;when
+one has been in a fair way to own the Grand and
+Petit-Charolais&mdash;when one has almost had the Château
+of Clichy-la-Garenne for a country house&mdash;and when it
+took two servants to carry the silver platter on which
+the joint was served at your grandmother's&mdash;do you
+know that it takes no small amount of philosophy"&mdash;and
+mademoiselle with difficulty raised a hand to her
+shoulder&mdash;"to see yourself end like this, in this devilish
+nest of rheumatism, where, in spite of all the list in the
+world, you can't keep out of draughts.&mdash;That's it, stir up
+the fire a little."</p>
+
+<p>She put out her feet toward Germinie, who was kneeling
+in front of the fireplace, and laughingly placed them
+under her nose: "Do you know that that takes no small
+amount of philosophy&mdash;to wear stockings out at heel!
+Simpleton! I'm not scolding you; I know well enough
+that you can't do everything. So you might as well have
+a woman come to do the mending. That's not very
+much to do. Why don't you speak to that little girl that
+came here last year? She had a face that I remember."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh! she's black as a mole, mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>"Bah! I knew it. In the first place you never think
+well of anybody. That isn't true, you say? Why,
+wasn't she a niece of Mère Jupillon's? We might take
+her for one or two days a week."</p>
+
+<p>"That hussy shall never set foot here."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense, more fables! You're a most astonishing
+creature, to adore people and then not want to see them
+again. What has she done to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's a lost creature, I tell you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Bah! what does my linen care for that?"</p>
+
+<p>"But, mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>"All right! find me someone else then. I don't care
+about her particularly. But find me someone."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! the women that come in like that don't do any
+work. I'll mend your clothes. You don't need any
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"You!&mdash;Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!"
+said mademoiselle jocosely; "and then, will Mère
+Jupillon ever give you the time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall
+ever leave in her house again!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hoity-toity! What's that? She too! so she's on
+your black books, is she? Oho! hurry up and make
+another acquaintance, or else, <i>bon Dieu de Dieu</i>! we
+shall have some bad days here!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The winter of that year should certainly have assured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter.
+She had to undergo the reflex action of her
+maid's chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance
+of her embittered, contradictory moods, which the
+approaching spring would ere long infect with that
+species of malignant madness which the critical season,
+the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing fructification
+of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive
+organizations.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer
+wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was
+always ready with an everlasting: "Nothing's the
+matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers
+a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes,
+the airs by which a woman's body diffuses melancholy
+and makes her very shadow a bore. With her
+face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her
+presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining
+room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle
+in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle
+could not address an observation to her, ask her the
+most trivial question, give her an order or express a
+wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And
+thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would
+wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate!
+I can see that mademoiselle doesn't care for
+me any more!" Her spite against various people vented
+itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That woman
+always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering
+a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left
+on the carpet. During the week following New Year's
+Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's
+remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike,
+climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her
+door for their turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom,
+Germinie redoubled her ill-humor, her impertinent
+remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing grievances
+against her mistress, she punished her constantly
+by a persistent silence, which it was impossible to break.
+Then there would be periods of frenzied industry.
+Mademoiselle would hear through the partitions on all
+sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster,
+the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant
+whom one imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats
+the furniture: "Oh! yes, I'll do your work for you!"</p>
+
+<p>Old people are patient with servants who have been
+long in their service. Long habit, the weakening will-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>power,
+the horror of change, the dread of new faces,&mdash;everything
+disposes them to weakness and cowardly
+concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her
+promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to
+breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She
+acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading
+when Germinie entered the room. She waited,
+curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor
+had blown over or burst. She bent her back before the
+storm; she said no word, had no thought of bitterness
+against her. She simply pitied her for causing herself
+so much suffering.</p>
+
+<p>In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's
+maid; she was Devotion, waiting to close her
+eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked by death,
+alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections
+from grave to grave, had found her last friend in her
+servant. She had rested her heart upon her as upon an
+adopted daughter, and she was especially unhappy because
+she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at
+intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of
+her brooding melancholy and her savage humor, and
+threw herself on her knees before her kind heart.
+Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar's song, or any
+one of the nothings that float in the air and expand
+the heart, she would burst into tears and demonstrations
+of affection; her heart would overflow with burning
+emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had
+effaced everything. At other times some trifling ailment
+of mademoiselle's would bring about the change;
+a smile would come to the old servant's face and gentleness
+to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments,
+mademoiselle would say: "Come, my girl&mdash;something's
+the matter. Tell me what it is." And Germinie
+would reply: "No, mademoiselle, it's the weather."&mdash;"The
+weather!" mademoiselle would repeat with a
+doubtful air, "the weather!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+were talking together by the stove in their back-shop.</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother
+had put aside to purchase his release had been used up
+as a result of six months of poor business and by credits
+given to certain <i>lorettes</i> on the street, who had left the
+key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had
+not prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock
+in trade had been taken on execution. He had been
+that day to ask a former employer to advance him the
+money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer
+had not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for
+himself, and he refused point-blank.</p>
+
+<p>Mère Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully.
+She repeated the number drawn by her son: "Twenty-two!
+twenty-two!" And she said: "And yet I sewed
+a black spider into your <i>paletot</i> with his web; a <i>velvety</i>
+fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they
+told me and made you wear the cap you were baptized
+in. Ah! the good God ain't fair! There's the fruit
+woman's son drew a lucky number! That comes of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+being honest! And those two sluts at number eighteen
+must go and hook it with my money! I might have
+known they meant something by the way they shook
+hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred
+francs, did you know it? And the black creature opposite&mdash;and
+that infernal girl as had the face to eat pots of
+strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well have
+taken me too, the hussies! But you haven't gone yet
+all the same. I'd rather sell the creamery&mdash;I'll go out
+to work again, do cooking or housekeeping,&mdash;anything!
+Why, I'd draw money from a stone for you!"</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking.
+When she had finished, he said: "That'll do for talk,
+mamma!&mdash;all that's nothing but words. You'll spoil
+your digestion and it ain't worth while. You needn't
+sell anything&mdash;you needn't strain yourself at all&mdash;I'll
+buy my substitute and it sha'n't cost you a sou;&mdash;do you
+want to bet on it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jesus!" ejaculated Madame Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>"I have an idea."</p>
+
+<p>After a pause, Jupillon continued: "I didn't want to
+make trouble with you on account of Germinie&mdash;you
+know, at the time the stories about us were going round;
+you thought it was time for me to break with her&mdash;that
+she would be in our way&mdash;and you kicked her out of the
+house, stiff. That wasn't my idea&mdash;I didn't think she
+was so bad as all that for the family butter. But, however,
+you thought best to do it. And perhaps, after all,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you
+warmed her up for me&mdash;yes, warmed her up&mdash;I've met
+her once or twice&mdash;and she's changed, I tell you. Gad!
+how she's drying up!"</p>
+
+<p>"But you know very well she hasn't got a sou."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't say she has, of her own. But what's that
+got to do with it? She'll find it somewhere. She's good
+for twenty-three hundred shiners yet!"</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose you get mixed up in it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! she won't steal 'em&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The deuce she won't!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well! if she does, it won't be from anyone but her
+mistress. Do you suppose her mademoiselle would have
+her pinched for that? She'll turn her off, and that'll
+be the end of it. We'll advise her to try the air in
+another quarter&mdash;off she goes!&mdash;and we sha'n't see her
+again. But it would be too stupid for her to steal.
+She'll arrange it somehow, she'll hunt round and turn
+things over. I don't know how, not I! but that's her
+affair, you understand. This is the time for her to show
+her talents. By the way, perhaps you don't know, they
+say her old woman's sick. If the dear lady should happen
+to step out and leave her all the stuff, as the story
+goes in the quarter&mdash;why, it wouldn't be a bad thing
+to have played see-saw with her, eh, mamma? We must
+put on gloves, you see, mamma, when we're dealing
+with people who may have four or five thousand a year
+come tumbling into their aprons."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh! my God! what are you talking about? But
+after the way I treated her&mdash;oh! no, she'll never come
+back here."</p>
+
+<p>"Well! I tell you I'll bring her back&mdash;and to-night
+at the latest," said Jupillon, rising, and rolling a cigarette
+between his fingers. "No excuses, you know," he
+said to his mother, "they won't do any good&mdash;and
+be cold to her. Act as if you received her only on
+my account, because you are weak. No one knows
+what may happen, we must always keep an anchor to
+windward."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Jupillon was walking back and forth on the sidewalk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+in front of Germinie's house when she came out.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-evening, Germinie," he said, behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She turned as if she had been struck, and, without
+answering his greeting, instinctively moved on a few
+steps as if to fly from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Germinie!"</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon said nothing more than that; he did not
+follow her, he did not move. She came back to him
+like a trained beast when his rope is taken off.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" said she. "Do you want more money?
+or do you want to tell me some of your mother's foolish
+remarks?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I am going away," said Jupillon, with a
+serious face. "I am drafted&mdash;and I am going away."</p>
+
+<p>"You are going away?" said she. She seemed as if
+her mind was not awake.</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Germinie," Jupillon continued. "I
+have made you unhappy. I haven't been very kind to
+you, I know. My cousin's been a little to blame.
+What do you want?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You're going away?" rejoined Germinie, taking his
+arm. "Don't lie to me&mdash;are you going away?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you, yes&mdash;and it's true. I'm only waiting
+for marching orders. You have to pay more than two
+thousand francs for a substitute this year. They say
+there's going to be a war: however, there's a chance."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke he was leading Germinie down the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you taking me?" said she.</p>
+
+<p>"To mother's, of course&mdash;so that you two can make
+up and put an end to all this nonsense."</p>
+
+<p>"After what she said to me? Never!"</p>
+
+<p>And Germinie pushed Jupillon's arm away.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if that's the way it is, good-bye."</p>
+
+<p>And Jupillon raised his cap.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I write to you from the regiment?"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was silent, hesitating, for a moment. Then
+she said, abruptly: "Come on!" and, motioning to
+Jupillon to walk beside her, she turned back up the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>And so they walked along, side by side, without a
+word. They reached a paved road that stretched out as
+far as the eye could see, between two lines of lanterns,
+between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft handfuls
+of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless
+shadows on high blank walls. There, in the keen air,
+chilled by the evaporation of the snow, they walked on
+and on for a long time, burying themselves in the vague,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+infinite, unfamiliar depths of a street that follows the
+same wall, the same trees, the same lanterns, and leads
+on to the same darkness beyond. The damp, heavy air
+that they breathed smelt of sugar and tallow and carrion.
+From time to time a vivid flash passed before their eyes:
+it was the lantern of a butcher's cart that shone upon
+slaughtered cattle and huge pieces of bleeding meat
+thrown upon the back of a white horse; the light upon
+the flesh, amid the darkness, resembled a purple conflagration,
+a furnace of blood.</p>
+
+<p>"Well! have you reflected?" said Jupillon. "This
+little Avenue Trudaine isn't a very cheerful place, do
+you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come on," Germinie replied.</p>
+
+<p>And, without another word, she set out again at the
+same fierce, jerky gait, agitated by all the tumult raging
+in her heart. Her thoughts were expressed in her gestures.
+Her feet went astray, madness attacked her hands.
+At times her shadow, seen from behind, reminded one of
+a woman from La Salpêtrière. Two or three passers-by
+stopped for a moment and looked after her; then, remembering
+that they were in Paris, passed on.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she stopped, and with the gesture of one
+who has made a desperate resolution, she said: "Ah!
+my God! another pin in the cushion!&mdash;Let us go!"</p>
+
+<p>And she took Jupillon's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I know very well," said Jupillon, when they
+were near the creamery, "my mother wasn't fair to you.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+You see, the woman has been too virtuous all her life.
+She don't know, she don't understand. And then, d'ye
+see, I'll tell you the whole secret: she loves me so much
+she's jealous of any woman who loves me. So go in,
+do!"</p>
+
+<p>And he pushed her into the arms of Madame Jupillon,
+who kissed her, mumbled a few words of regret, and
+made haste to weep in order to relieve her own embarrassment
+and make the scene more affecting.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the evening Germinie sat with her eyes
+fixed on Jupillon, almost terrifying him with her expression.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come," he said, as he walked home with her,
+"don't be so down in the mouth as all this. We must
+have a little philosophy in this world. Well! here I am
+a soldier&mdash;that's all! To be sure they don't all come
+back. But then&mdash;look here! I propose that we enjoy
+ourselves for the fortnight that's left, because it will be
+so much gained&mdash;and if I don't come back&mdash;Well,
+at all events, I shall leave you a pleasant memory of me."</p>
+
+<p>Germinie made no reply.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>For a whole week Germinie did not set foot in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+shop again.</p>
+
+<p>The Jupillons, when she did not return, began to despair.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is!" said she.</p>
+
+<p>And, letting go the corners of the cloth, she emptied
+its contents on the table: forth came greasy bank-notes,
+patched on the back, fastened together with pins, old
+tarnished louis d'or, black hundred-sou pieces, forty-sou
+pieces, ten-sou pieces, the money of the poor, the money
+of toil, money from Christmas-boxes, money soiled by
+dirty hands, worn out in leather purses, rubbed smooth
+in the cash drawer filled with sous&mdash;money with a flavor
+of perspiration.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment she gazed at the display as if to assure
+her own eyes; then she said to Madame Jupillon in a sad
+voice, the voice of her sacrifice:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There it is&mdash;There's the two thousand three hundred
+francs for him to buy a substitute."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! my dear Germinie!" said the stout woman,
+almost suffocated by emotion; and she threw herself
+upon Germinie's neck, who submitted to be embraced.
+"Oh! you must take something with us&mdash;a cup of
+coffee&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, thank you," said Germinie; "I am done up.
+<i>Dame!</i> I've had to fly around, you know, to get them.
+I'm going to bed now. Some other time."</p>
+
+<p>And she went away.</p>
+
+<p>She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape
+together such a sum, to accomplish that impossibility:
+to raise two thousand three hundred francs&mdash;two thousand
+three hundred francs, of which she had not the
+first five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted
+them piece by piece, almost sou by sou. She had
+picked them up, scraped them together here and there,
+from this one and from that one, by loans of two hundred,
+one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum
+anyone would lend. She had borrowed from her concierge,
+her grocer, her fruit woman, her poulterer, her
+laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers in the
+quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she
+had previously lived with mademoiselle. She had made
+up the amount with money drawn from every source,
+even from her poor miserable water-carrier. She had
+gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly, prayed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying
+and of seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation
+of confessing that she had no money laid by, as
+was supposed, and as, through pride, she had encouraged
+people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised,
+the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything,
+endured what she would not have endured to procure
+bread for herself, and not once only, with a single
+person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had given
+her something or from whom she had hoped for something.</p>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<a name="i204" id="i204"></a><img src="images/ichxxxi.png" width="207" height="40" alt="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.
+
+&quot;There it is!&quot; said she." title="" /></div>
+<hr style="width: 4%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" />
+<div class="caption">
+<i>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.</i>
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>&quot;There it is!&quot; said she.</i></div>
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<img src="images/i204.jpg" width="401" height="588" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+<p>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 the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+Jupillons 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+disarranging 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.&mdash;"Why, my girl," mademoiselle
+sometimes could not forbear saying, "anyone
+would think you were tipsy."&mdash;"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.</p>
+
+<p>The moment had arrived when the terrible truth, which
+she had suspected before, at last became clear to her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+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 again <i>enceinte</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for
+what? She did not know: perhaps until he would
+have no more of her.</p>
+
+<p>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 interjecting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+remarks 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 walked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+on 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&mdash;the glance of a frightened child.</p>
+
+<p>When they reached Rue Lamartine, opposite the
+Passage des Deux-S&oelig;urs, 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 a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+crack. 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, to <i>her</i>! She would take her by the arm and say:
+"Yes it's me&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well, what do you want?" said the grocer's
+wife testily, almost frightened by the bearing of this
+woman who did not stir.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"&mdash;She passed her hand across her forehead.&mdash;"Ah!
+I don't know now."</p>
+
+<p>And she left the shop, stumbling as she went.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the torment of the life she was leading, in which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+she 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+which she would take draught upon draught until she
+had found that for which she thirsted&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the
+congested sleep of intoxication, which lulls
+its victim with the arms of Death.</p>
+
+<p>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 ceased<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+to 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Half an hour after the horrible meeting when&mdash;her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+mind having dabbled in crime as if with her fingers&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+of 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+caresses, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+horrible dread in her conscience; and remorse,&mdash;the
+remorse that she had never been able to put down,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 forget<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+and 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+life, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+filled 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 "her <i>canaille</i> of 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+foot 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She felt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+that 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!</p>
+
+<p>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 that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+should 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 a <i>liaison</i> the 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+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 demanded
+<i>pourboires</i> of love! And she lived from day to day in
+constant dread of what the miserable villain would
+demand of her on the morrow.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"He must have twenty francs," Germinie mechanically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
+repeated 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."</p>
+
+<p>She went down to Adèle: "You haven't twenty
+francs for a note that just came, have you? Mademoiselle
+has gone out."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>She ran to the grocer's. It was Sunday, and three
+o'clock in the afternoon: the grocer had closed his
+shop.</p>
+
+<p>There were a number of people at the fruitwoman's;
+she asked for four sous' worth of herbs.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Forty, if you want&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She breathed freely. The concierge went to a desk
+at the back of the lodge. "<i>Sapristi!</i> my wife has
+taken the key. Why! how pale you are!"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't anything." And she rushed out into the
+courtyard toward the door of the servant's staircase.</p>
+
+<p>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 grocer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+would surely have lent them to me. I had another
+grocer on Rue Taitbout: he didn't close till evening
+Sundays."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;first at a vein of marble, then at a
+little sandal-wood box, then at the key&mdash;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;&mdash;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 erect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+between 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XXXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+began 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.&mdash;"Why, you're getting to be a perfect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+imbecile!" 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+house 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&mdash;you smell of
+the poor!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a dirty slattern.</p>
+
+<p>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 the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+frames, 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!"</p>
+
+<p>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 of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+being scolded, of having a scene, if the maid should
+return and detect her.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>à l'Anglaise</i>. 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XL</h2>
+
+
+<p>"No&mdash;not this time, no," said Germinie, rising from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+the foot of Jupillon's bed where she was sitting.
+"There's no way. Why, you know perfectly well that
+I haven't a sou&mdash;anything you can call a sou! You've
+seen the stockings I wear, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;unless!&mdash;--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!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>She repeated: "Till Thursday!" and took her
+leave.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Whom does madame wish to see?" demanded the
+cousin, impudently.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Jupillon?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has gone out."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll wait for him," said Germinie, and she attempted
+to enter the other room.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll wait at the porter's lodge then;" and the
+cousin barred the way.</p>
+
+<p>"When will he return?"</p>
+
+<p>"When the hens have teeth," said the girl, seriously,
+and shut the door in her face.</p>
+
+<p>"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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLI</h2>
+
+
+<p>When she returned that evening from a christening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+dinner, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
+passion. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! mademoiselle," said Germinie, "I wasn't
+lying where you put your head. I have made it nice
+and warm for your feet."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Indeed! Suppose you tell me what you've been
+dreaming? There was a man in it&mdash;you were having a
+dispute with him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Dream?" said Germinie, "I don't remember."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Soon after this, mademoiselle was amazed to notice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
+an 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's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
+lips. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>But the past and its debts were still there, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+whispered to her every hour: "If mademoiselle knew!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+fond 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the new <i>crémière</i>,&mdash;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 the <i>Halle
+Centrale</i> one day for her dinner, and she mentioned the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+fact in the fish-woman's presence. "Oho! yes, yes, to
+the <i>Halle</i>! I'd like to see you go to the <i>Halle</i>!" 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was a very great trial to Germinie&mdash;a trial that she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
+sought, however&mdash;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&mdash;and stood still.</p>
+
+<p>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 at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+most, would stop and talk, like little women, at the
+<i>portes cochères</i>. 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,&mdash;a green cap sent
+by the good God, beneath which the fresh young face
+smiled brightly.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;at times
+she saw nothing but that; it was to her all the sunshine
+of the street&mdash;and the sky!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On one occasion, as she was walking along thus,
+devouring with her eyes the memory of her daughter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie fled.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLV</h2>
+
+
+<p>To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+desolate. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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, rudiments<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
+of names, shadowy initials, resemblances to different
+people, rough outlines of objects, omens in embryo,
+symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be
+<i>victorious</i>. 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&mdash;a
+cross, that is to say, <i>a speedy death</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>The love which she lacked, and which it was her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
+determination to deny herself, became the torment of
+her life, incessant, abominable torture. She had to
+defend herself against the fevers of her body and the
+irritations from without, against the easily aroused
+emotions and the indolent cowardice of her flesh,
+against all the solicitations of nature by which she was
+assailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day,
+with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist
+warmth of stormy weather, with the breath of her past
+and her memories, with the pictures suddenly thrown
+upon the background of her mind, with the voices that
+whispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that
+sent a thrill of tenderness into her every limb.</p>
+
+<p>Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured,
+and she did not yield or take another lover.
+Fearful of herself, she avoided man and fled from his
+sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits,
+always closeted with mademoiselle, or else above in her
+own room. On Sundays she did not leave the house.
+She had ceased to consort with the other maids in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+house, and, in order to occupy her time and forget herself,
+she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of
+sewing, or buried herself in sleep. When musicians
+came into the courtyard she closed the windows in order
+not to hear them: the sensuousness of music moved her
+very soul.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her
+passions. Her evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived
+and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the
+fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became
+throughout her body the fierce torment that
+knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,&mdash;the
+obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly
+returns, the shameless, implacable obsession,
+swarming with images, the obsession that brings love
+close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it
+her closed eyes, forces it smoking into her brain and
+pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!</p>
+
+<p>At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these
+constant assaults, the irritation of this painful continence,
+began to disturb Germinie's faculties. She
+fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly
+hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near
+to her senses. It happened that at certain moments the
+things she saw in her room, the candlesticks, the legs of
+the chairs, everything about her assumed impure appearances
+and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything
+before her eyes and approached her. At such times she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+would look at her kitchen clock, and would say, like a
+condemned man whose body no longer belongs to himself:
+"In five minutes I am going down into the street."
+And when the five minutes had passed she would stay
+where she was.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>The time came at last in this life of torture when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+Germinie abandoned the conflict. Her conscience
+yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed her head beneath
+her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution,
+energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the
+despairing conviction, of her powerlessness to save herself
+from herself. She felt that she was being borne
+along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost
+impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world
+that causes suffering, the malevolent power that bears
+the name of a god on the marble of the antique tragedies,
+and is called <i>No Chance</i> on the tattooed brow of the
+galley-slave&mdash;Fatality&mdash;was trampling upon her, and
+Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.</p>
+
+<p>When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter
+experiences of her past recurred to her memory, when
+she followed, from her infancy, the links in the chain of
+her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions that
+had followed her years and grown heavier with them;
+all the incidents that had succeeded one another in her
+life, as if by preconcerted arrangement on the part of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+misery, without her having ever caught a glimpse of the
+hand of the Providence of which she had heard so
+much&mdash;she said to herself that she was one of those
+miserable creatures who are destined from their birth to
+an eternity of misery, one of those for whom happiness
+was not made, and who know it only because they envy
+it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that
+thought, and by dint of yielding to the despair it
+tended to produce, by dint of brooding over the unbroken
+chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession
+of her disappointments, she reached the point
+where she looked upon the most trifling annoyances of
+her life and her service as a part of the persecution of
+her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and
+that was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off
+upon her in a shop, an errand that she failed to perform
+satisfactorily, a purchase in which she was cheated&mdash;all
+these things were in her opinion due neither to her own
+fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had
+gone before. Life was in a conspiracy against her and
+persecuted her everywhere, in everything, great and
+small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.
+There were days when she broke everything she touched;
+she thereupon imagined that she was accursed to her
+finger-tips. Accursed! almost damned; she persuaded
+herself that she was so in very truth, when she questioned
+her body, when she probed her feelings. Did
+she not feel, in the fire in her blood, in the appetite of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
+her organs, in her passionate weakness, the spur of the
+Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of a disease,
+stronger than her modesty and her reason, having
+already delivered her over to the shameful excesses of
+passion, and destined&mdash;she had a presentiment that it
+was so&mdash;to deliver her again in the same way?</p>
+
+<p>And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a
+sentence that was the refrain of her thought: "What
+can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had no chance.
+From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!"
+She said it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned
+hope. With the persuasion, every day more firm, that
+she was born under an unlucky star, that she was in the
+power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful
+than she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything
+that happens in ordinary life. She lived in that state of
+cowardly unrest wherein the unexpected is dreaded as a
+possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bell causes
+alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing
+the mystery it contains, not daring to open it,
+wherein the news you are about to hear, the mouth that
+opens to speak to you, cause the perspiration to start
+upon your temples. She was in that state of suspicion,
+of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny,
+wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and
+wherein one would like to check the current of his
+life so that it should not go forward whither all the
+endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at
+that supreme disdain, that climax of suffering, where the
+excess of pain seems a satire, where chagrin, exceeding
+the utmost limits of human strength, exceeds its sensibility
+as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer
+feels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: "Go on!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Where are you going in that rig?" said Germinie<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
+one Sunday morning to Adèle, as she passed in grand
+array along the corridor on the sixth floor, in front of
+her open door.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! there you are! I'm going to a swell wedding,
+my dear! There's a crowd of us&mdash;big Marie, the <i>great
+bully</i>, you know&mdash;Elisa, from 41, the two Badiniers, big
+and little&mdash;and men, too! In the first place, there's
+my <i>dealer in sudden death</i>. Yes, and&mdash;Oh! didn't
+you know&mdash;my new flame, the master-at-arms of the
+24th&mdash;and a friend of his, a painter, a real Father Joy.
+We're going to Vincennes. Everyone carries something.
+We shall dine on the grass&mdash;the men will pay
+for the wine. And there'll be plenty of it, I promise
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go, too," said Germinie.</p>
+
+<p>"You? nonsense! you don't go to parties any more."</p>
+
+<p>"But I tell you I'll go," said Germinie, in a sharp,
+decided tone. "Just give me time to tell mademoiselle
+and put on a dress. If you'll wait I'll go and get half
+a lobster."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Half an hour later the two women left the house; they
+skirted the city wall and found the rest of the party
+sitting outside a café on Boulevard de la Chopinette.
+After taking a glass of currant wine, they entered two
+large cabs and rode away. When they arrived at the
+fortress at Vincennes they alighted and the whole party
+walked along the bank of the moat. As they were
+passing under the wall of the fort, the master-at-arms'
+friend, the painter, shouted to an artilleryman, who
+was doing sentry duty beside a cannon: "Say! old
+fellow, you'd rather drink one than stand guard over
+it, eh?"<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>"Isn't he funny?" said Adèle to Germinie, nudging
+her with her elbow.</p>
+
+<p>Soon they were fairly in the forest of Vincennes.</p>
+
+<p>Narrow paths crossed and recrossed in every direction
+on the hard, uneven, footprint-covered ground. In the
+spaces between all these little roads there was here and
+there a little grass, but down-trodden, withered, yellow,
+dead grass, strewn about like bedding for cattle, its
+straw-colored blades were everywhere mingled with
+briars, amid the dull green of nettles. It was easily
+recognizable as one of the rural spots to which the great
+faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in the grass,
+and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a
+display of fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were
+scattered here and there; dwarf elms with gray trunks
+covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and stripped of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy
+oaks, eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like
+lacework. The verdure was scant and sickly and entirely
+unshaded, the leaves above had a very unhealthy look;
+the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made only faint
+green lines against the sky. Clouds of dust from the
+high-roads covered the bushes with a gray pall. Everything
+had the wretched, impoverished aspect of trampled
+vegetation that has no chance to breathe, the melancholy
+effect of the grass at the barriers! Nature seemed to
+sprout from beneath the pavements. No birds sang in
+the trees, no insects hummed about the dusty ground;
+the noise of the spring-carts stunned the birds; the
+hand-organ put the rustling of the trees to silence; the
+denizens of the street strolled about through the paths,
+singing. Women's hats, fastened with four pins to a
+handkerchief, were hanging from the trees; the red
+plume of an artilleryman burst upon one at every moment
+through the scanty leaves; dealers in honey rose
+from the thickets; on the trampled greensward children
+in blouses were cutting twigs, workingmen's families
+idling their time away nibbling at <i>pleasure</i>, and little
+urchins catching butterflies in their caps. It was a
+forest after the pattern of the original Bois de Boulogne,
+hot and dusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused
+promenade, one of those spots, avaricious of shade, to
+which the common people flock to disport themselves
+at the gates of great capitals&mdash;burlesque forests, filled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
+with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons
+in the underbrush.</p>
+
+<p>The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming
+in clouds, shedding a veiled diffuse light that was
+almost blinding to the eyes and that seemed to portend
+a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothing stirred;
+the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move;
+the forest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath
+the heavy sky. At rare intervals a breath of air from
+the south passed lazily along, sweeping the ground, one
+of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow upon the
+senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With
+no knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her
+whole body a sensation like the tickling of the down
+on a ripe peach against the skin.</p>
+
+<p>They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited
+activity that the country air imparts to the common
+people. The men ran, the women tripped after them
+and caught them. They played at rolling on the grass.
+There was a manifest longing to dance and climb trees;
+the painter amused himself by throwing stones at the
+loop-holes in the gateways of the fortress, and he never
+missed his aim.</p>
+
+<p>At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a
+clump of oaks, whose shadows were lengthening in the
+setting sun. The men, lighting matches on the seats
+of their trousers, began to smoke. The women chattered
+and laughed and threw themselves backward in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
+paroxysms of inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of
+delight. Germinie alone did not speak or laugh. She
+did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their lowered
+lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed
+in thought was she that you would have said she was
+totally oblivious to time and place. Lying at full
+length on the grass, her head slightly raised by a hammock,
+she made no other movement than to lay her
+hands, palm downwards, on the grass beside her; in a
+short time she would turn them on their backs and let
+them lie in that position, seeking the coolness of the
+earth to allay the fever of her flesh.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adèle.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without
+answering, and until dinner maintained the same position,
+the same silence, the same air of torpor, feeling
+about her for places where her burning hands had not
+rested.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us
+something."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! no," Adèle replied, "I haven't got wind
+enough before eating."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a great stone came hurtling through the air
+and struck the ground near Germinie's head; at the
+same moment she heard the painter's voice shouting:
+"Don't be afraid! that's your chair."</p>
+
+<p>One and all laid their handkerchiefs on the ground
+by way of tablecloth. Eatables were produced from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
+greasy papers. Bottles were uncorked and the wine
+went round; the glasses were rested against tufts of grass,
+and they fell to upon bits of pork and sausages, with
+slices of bread for plates. The painter cut boats out of
+paper to hold the salt, and imitated the orders shouted
+out by waiters in a café. "<i>Boum! Pavillon! Servez!</i>"
+he cried. The company gradually became animated.
+The open air, the patches of blue sky, the food and
+drink started the gayety of the table in full blast.
+Hands approached one another, mouths met, coarse
+remarks were whispered from one to another, shirt
+sleeves crept around waists, and now and then energetic
+embraces were attended by greedy, resounding kisses.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie drank, and said nothing. The painter, who
+had taken his place by her side, felt decidedly chilly
+and embarrassed beside his extraordinary neighbor, who
+amused herself "so entirely inside." Suddenly he
+began to beat a tattoo with his knife against his glass,
+drowning the uproar of the party, and rose to his knees.</p>
+
+<p>"Mesdames!" said he, with the voice of a paroquet
+that has sung too much, "here's the health of a man in
+hard luck: myself! Perhaps it will bring me good
+luck! Deserted, yes, mesdames; yes, I've been deserted!
+I'm a widower! you know the kind of widower,
+<i>razibus</i>! I was struck all of a heap. Not that I cared
+much for her, but habit, that old villain, habit! The
+fact is I'm as bored as a bed-bug in a watch spring. For
+two weeks my life has been like a restaurant without a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
+<i>pousse-café</i>! And when I love love as if it had made me!
+No wife! That's what I call weaning a grown man!
+that is to say, since I've known what it is, I take off my
+hat to the curés: I feel very sorry for them, 'pon my
+word! No wife! and there are so many of 'em! But I
+can't walk about with a sign: <i>Vacant man to let. Inquire
+within.</i> In the first place it would have to be
+stamped by M'sieu le Préfet, and then, people are such
+fools, it would draw a crowd! All of which, mesdames,
+is intended to inform you, that if, among the people you
+have the honor of knowing, there should happen to be
+one who'd like to make an acquaintance&mdash;virtuous acquaintance&mdash;a
+pretty little left-handed marriage&mdash;why
+she needn't look any farther! I'm her man&mdash;Victor-Médéric
+Gautruche! a home body, a genuine house-ivy
+for sentiment! She has only to apply at my former
+hotel, <i>La Clef de S&ucirc;reté</i>. And gay as a hunchback
+who's just drowned his wife! Gautruche, called Gogo-la-Gaiété,
+egad! A pretty fellow who knows what's
+what, who doesn't beat about the bush, a good old body
+who takes things easy and who won't give himself the
+colic with that fishes' grog!" With that he took a bottle
+of water that stood beside him and hurled it twenty
+yards away. "Long live the walls! They're the same
+to papa that the sky is to the good God! Gogo-la-Gaiété
+paints them through the week and beats them on
+Monday!<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> And with all that not jealous, not ugly, not
+a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
+harmed one of the fair sex in his life! If you want
+physique, <i>parbleu</i>! I'm your man!"</p>
+
+<p>He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering
+body, clad in an old blue coat with gilt buttons, to its
+full height, removing his gray hat so as to show his perspiring,
+polished, bald skull, and tossing his old plucked
+<i>gamin's</i> head, he continued: "You see what it is! It
+isn't a very attractive piece of property; it doesn't help
+it to exhibit it. But it yields well, it's a little dilapidated,
+but well put together. Dame! Here I am with my
+little forty nine-years&mdash;no more hair than a billiard ball,
+a witchgrass beard that would make good herb-tea,
+foundations not too solid, feet as long as La Villette&mdash;and
+with all the rest thin enough to take a bath in a musket-barrel.
+There's the bill of lading! Pass the prospectus
+along! If any woman wants all that in a lump&mdash;any
+respectable person&mdash;not too young&mdash;who won't amuse
+herself by painting me too yellow&mdash;you understand, I
+don't ask for a Princess of Batignolles&mdash;why, sure as
+you're born, I'm her man!"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie seized Gautruche's glass, half emptied it at a
+draught and held out the side from which she had drunk
+to him.</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they
+reached the fortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart
+with the point of his knife on the stone, and all the
+names with the date were carved inside.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the evening Gautruche and Germinie were upon
+the outer boulevards, near Barrière Rochechouart. Beside
+a low house with these words, in a plaster panel:
+<i>Madame Merlin</i>. <i>Dresses cut and tried on, two francs</i>,
+they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading
+into a dark passage, at the end of which shone the red
+light of an Argand lamp. At the entrance to the passage,
+these words were printed in black on a wooden
+sign:</p>
+
+<div class="nanospace"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></div>
+<div class="center"><i>Hotel of the Little Blue Hand.</i></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">XLIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Médérie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
+vagabond workmen who make their whole life a Monday.
+Filled with the love of wine, his lips forever wet
+with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with
+tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the
+Burgundians graphically call <i>boyaux rouges</i>.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Always a
+little tipsy, tipsy from yesterday when he had drunk nothing
+to-day, he looked at life through the sunbeam in his
+head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with the
+easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from
+the steps of the wineshop at things in general, at life and
+the road that stretched away into the darkness. <i>Ennui</i>,
+care, want, had gained no hold upon him; and if by
+chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his
+mind, he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation
+that sounded like <i>psitt</i>! which was his way of saying
+<i>pshaw</i>! and, raising his right arm, caricaturing the
+gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his melancholy
+over his shoulder to the devil. He had the
+superb after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of
+the bottle. He knew neither envy nor longing. His<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
+dreams served him as a cashbox. For three sous he was
+sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle
+of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked
+everything, and found food for laughter and entertainment
+in everything. Nothing in the world seemed sad
+to him&mdash;except a glass of water.</p>
+
+<p>With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety
+of his excellent health and his temperament, Gautruche
+combined the characteristic gayety of his profession, the
+good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,
+unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and
+earth, which seeks distraction in singing, and flings the
+workmen's <i>blague</i> at passers-by, from its lofty perch
+upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did lettering.
+He was the one man in Paris who would attack a
+sign without a measure, with no other guide than a cord,
+without outlining the letters in white; he was the only
+one who could place each of the letters in position
+inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an
+instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He
+was also renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters,
+letters shaded in bronze or gold to imitate those cut in
+stone. Thus he made fifteen to twenty francs on some
+days. But as he drank it all up, he was not wealthy,
+and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the
+wine-shops.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man brought up in the street. The street
+had been his mother, his nurse and his school. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+street had given him his self-assurance, his ready tongue
+and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the
+people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had
+picked up. All that falls from the upper to the lower
+strata of a great city, the strainings and drippings, the
+crumbs of ideas and information, the things that float
+in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,
+the contact with the covers of books, bits of <i>feuilletons</i>
+swallowed between two glasses, odds and ends of plays
+heard on the boulevard, had endowed him with that
+accidental intelligence which, though without education,
+learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable
+store of talk. His words gushed forth
+abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the
+metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds.
+He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated
+farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and
+buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all
+repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member
+of divers of the low haunts called <i>lists</i>, he knew all
+the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of
+singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot.
+And if you merely looked at him you laughed at him,
+as at a comic actor.</p>
+
+<p>A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited
+Germinie.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing
+but her work in her head. She was not the servant,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+who stands like a post, with the frightened face and
+doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and mistresses
+are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her
+shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education
+of Paris. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having
+no occupation, and being interested after the manner
+of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had
+long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her
+what news she had gleaned, what she knew of the
+tenants, all the gossip of the house and the street; and
+this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress like
+a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing
+silhouettes of them, had eventually developed in her a
+facility of animated description, of happy, unconscious
+characterization, a piquancy and sometimes an acrimony
+in her remarks that were most remarkable in the mouth
+of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often
+surprised Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness
+of comprehension, her promptness at grasping things
+only half said, her good fortune and facility in selecting
+such words as good talkers use. She knew how to jest.
+She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself
+without <i>cuirs</i>,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and when there was a discussion concerning
+orthography at the creamery, her opinion was
+listened to with as much deference as that of the clerk
+in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came
+there to breakfast. She had also that background of
+indiscriminate reading which women of her class have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
+when they read at all. With the two or three kept
+women in whose service she had been, she had passed
+her nights devouring novels; since then she had continued
+to read the <i>feuilletons</i> cut by her acquaintances
+from the bottom of newspapers, and she had gathered
+from them a vague idea of many things and of some of
+the kings of France. She had retained enough of such
+subjects to make her desire to talk of them with others.
+Through a woman in the house who worked for an
+author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;
+when she came away she could remember the whole
+play and the names of the actors she had seen on the
+programme. She loved to buy ballads and one sou
+novels, and read them.</p>
+
+<p>The air, the keen breath of Quartier Bréda, full of
+the <i>verve</i> of the artist and the studio, of art and vice,
+had sharpened these tastes of Germinie's mind and had
+created in her new needs and demands. Long before
+her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the
+virtuous companionship of decent women of her rank
+and station, from the worthy creatures who were so
+uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the circle of
+orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations
+around the tea-table under the auspices of the old
+servants of mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She
+had shunned the wearisome society of maids whom their
+absorption in their employment and the fascination of
+the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+reached the point where, before accepting the companionship
+of people, she must satisfy herself that they
+possessed a degree of intelligence corresponding to her
+own and were capable of understanding her. And now,
+when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she
+found her old self and was born again, in diversion and
+pleasure, she must for her enjoyment have kindred
+spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who
+would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit
+that intoxicated her with the wine that was poured into
+her glass. And thus it was that she sank to the level of
+the rascally Bohemia of the common people, uproarious,
+maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was
+that she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">L</h2>
+
+
+<p>As Germinie was returning to the house one morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
+at daybreak, she heard, from the shadows of the <i>porte-cochère</i>
+as it closed behind her, a voice cry: "Who's
+that?" She ran to the servants' staircase, but found that
+she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing
+the concierge seized her. As soon as he recognized
+her, he said: "Oh! is it you? excuse me; don't be
+frightened! What a giddy creature you are! It surprises
+you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account
+of the thieving that's going on these days in the cook's
+bedroom on the second. Good-night to you! it's lucky
+for you I don't tell all I know."</p>
+
+<p>A few days later Germinie learned through Adèle that
+the husband of the cook who had been robbed said that
+there was no need to look very far; that the thief was in
+the house, and that he knew what he knew. Adèle
+added that it was making a good deal of talk in the
+street and that there were plenty of people who would
+believe it and repeat it. Germinie became very indignant
+and told her mistress all about it. Mademoiselle
+was even more indignant than she, and, feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
+personally outraged by the insult, wrote instantly to the
+cook's mistress that she must put a stop at once to the
+slanderous statements concerning a girl who had been
+in her service twenty years, and for whom she would
+answer as for herself. The cook was reprimanded.
+Her husband in his wrath talked louder than ever. He
+made a great outcry and for several days filled the house
+with his project of going to the commissioner of police
+and calling upon him to question Germinie as to where
+she procured the money to start the <i>crémière's</i> son in
+business, as to where she procured the money to purchase
+a substitute for him, and how she paid the expenses
+of the men she kept. For a whole week the
+terrible threat hung over Germinie's head. At last the
+thief was discovered and the threat fell to the ground.
+But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done
+all the injury it could do in that confused brain, where,
+under the sudden, overpowering rush of the blood, her
+reason was wavering and became overcast at the slightest
+shock. It had overturned that brain which was so
+prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so
+quickly the faculty of good judgment, of discernment,
+clear-sightedness and appreciation of its surroundings,
+which exaggerated its troubles, which plunged into
+foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing presentiments,
+which looked upon its terrors as realities, and
+was constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of
+delirium, at the end of which it could find nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+but this ejaculation and this phrase: "Bah! I will kill
+myself!"</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her
+to experience all the effects of the things she thought
+might happen. By day and night she saw her shame
+laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her
+cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about
+with her concealed and sewn in her heart&mdash;she saw it
+all uncovered, noised abroad, disclosed&mdash;disclosed to
+mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's account, augmented
+by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche,
+by all that she purchased now on credit, her
+debt to the concierge and the shopkeepers would soon
+become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down
+her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle
+turning her away! Throughout the week she constantly
+imagined herself standing before the commissioner
+of police. Seven long days she brooded over
+that word and that idea: the Law! the Law as it
+appears to the imagination of the lower classes; something
+terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is everywhere,
+and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent
+source of calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's
+black gown, between the police sergeant and the executioner,
+with the hands of the gendarme and the arms of
+the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive
+terrors of the common people, and who often repeated
+that she would much rather die than appear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+before the court&mdash;she imagined herself seated in the
+dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded
+by all the unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law,
+her ignorance of which made them objects of terror to
+her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps on
+the stairs coming to arrest her!</p>
+
+<p>The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers.
+The mental upheaval of that week of agony possessed
+her with an idea that hitherto had only hovered about
+her&mdash;the idea of suicide. She began to listen, with her
+head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of
+deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of
+death that we hear in the background of life like the fall
+of mighty waters in the distance, dying away in space.
+The temptations that speak to the discouraged heart of
+the things that put an end to life so quickly and so
+easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand,
+pursued and solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully
+upon all the things about her that could cure the disease
+called life. She accustomed her fingers and her lips
+to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them
+near to her. She sought to test her courage upon them
+and to obtain a foretaste of death. She would remain
+for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes fixed on
+the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the
+five flights&mdash;pavements that she knew and could have
+distinguished from others! As the daylight faded she
+would lean farther out bending almost double over the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>
+ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would give
+way and drag her down with it&mdash;praying that she might
+die without having to make the desperate, voluntary
+leap into space to which she no longer felt equal.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day,
+grasping her skirt impulsively in her alarm. "What
+are you looking at down there in the courtyard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! nothing&mdash;the pavements."</p>
+
+<p>"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you
+frightened me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in
+a strange tone. "I tell you, mademoiselle, in order to
+fall one must have a mighty longing to do it!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+who was haunted by a former mistress, to give her the
+key to his room. When he had not returned she was
+obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark
+street.</p>
+
+<p>At first she would walk back and forth in front of the
+house. She would take twenty steps in one direction and
+twenty in the other. Then, as if to prolong her period
+of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and, going
+farther and farther every time, would end by extending
+her walk to both ends of the boulevard. Frequently
+she walked thus for hours, shamefaced and mud-stained,
+in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous and horrible
+surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where
+darkness reigned. She followed the line of red-wine
+shops, the naked arbors, the <i>cabaret</i> trellises supported
+by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits, low, flat hovels
+with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls, cap
+factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels
+where a night's lodging may be had. She passed by
+closed, hermetically-sealed shops, black with bankruptcy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
+by fragments of condemned walls, by dark passageways
+with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that
+seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the
+plan of which is handed to the jury at the assizes. As
+she went on, there were gloomy little gardens, crooked
+buildings, architecture in its most degraded form, tall,
+mouldy <i>portes-cochères</i>, hedge-rows, within which could
+be vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the
+darkness, corners of unfinished buildings from which
+arose the stench of nitrification, walls disfigured by disgusting
+placards and fragments of torn advertisements
+by which they were spotted with loathsome publications
+as by leprosy. From time to time, at a sharp turn in
+the street, she would come upon lanes that seemed to
+plunge into dark holes a few steps from their beginning,
+and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from
+a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the
+sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched
+vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of
+a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals
+upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover
+all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop
+on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital,
+a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisière, the
+Abattoir and Montmartre.</p>
+
+<p>The people who passed that way&mdash;the workman returning
+from Paris whistling; the workingwoman, her day's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
+work ended, hurrying on with her hands under her armpits
+to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her black
+cap&mdash;would stare at her as they passed. Strange men
+acted as if they recognized her; the light made her
+ashamed. She would turn and run toward the other
+end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted footway
+along the city wall; but she was soon driven away
+by horrible shadows of men and by brutally familiar
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly;
+she called herself a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself
+that each turn should be the last, that she would go
+as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if he had not
+returned, she would go away and put an end to the
+whole thing. But she did not go; she walked on and
+on; she waited, more consumed than ever, the longer
+he delayed, with the mad desire to see him.</p>
+
+<p>At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became
+empty, Germinie, exhausted, overdone with weariness,
+would approach the houses. She would loiter from shop
+to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still
+burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the
+shop windows. She welcomed the dazzling light in her
+eyes, she tried to allay her impatience by benumbing it.
+The objects to be seen through the perspiring windows
+of the wine-shops&mdash;the cooking utensils, the bowls of
+punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel
+protruding from their necks, the show-cases in which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+the liquors combined their varied colors in a single
+beam, a cup filled with plated spoons&mdash;these things would
+hold her attention for a long while. She would read
+the old announcements of lottery drawings placarded
+on the walls of a saloon, the advertisements of <i>gloria</i>&mdash;coffee
+with brandy&mdash;the inscriptions in yellow letters:
+<i>New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes.</i> For a whole quarter
+of an hour she would stand staring into a back room
+containing a man in a blouse sitting on a stool by a table,
+a stove-pipe, a slate, and two black tea-boards against the
+wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest, through the
+reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning
+over their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly
+upon a counter that was being washed, upon hands that
+were counting the receipts of the day, upon a tunnel
+or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had
+ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed
+to the spot and growing weaker and weaker, feeling her
+courage vanish from the mere weariness of standing on
+her feet, seeing things only through a sort of film as in
+a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs
+rolling over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her
+ears, ready to fall and compelled again and again to lean
+against the wall for support.</p>
+
+<p>In her then condition of prostration and illness, with
+that semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid
+of crossing the Seine and impelled her to cling to the
+bridge railings, it happened that, on certain evenings,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
+when it rained, these fits of weakness that she had upon
+the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare.
+When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty
+vapor, cast its varying, flickering reflection on the damp
+ground; when the pavements, the sidewalks, the earth,
+seemed to melt away and disappear under the rain, and
+there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the
+aqueous darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad
+with fatigue, would fancy that she could see a flood
+rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror would show her
+suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly
+nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not
+daring to move, fearing to feel her feet slip from under
+her; she would begin to weep, and would weep on until
+someone passed by and offered to escort her to the
+<i>Hotel of the Little Blue Hand</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LII</h2>
+
+
+<p>She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
+place of refuge. She would fly from the rain and snow
+and cold, from fear, despair, and fatigue. She would go
+up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's closed
+doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely
+about her in order to leave room for those who went
+and came up that long steep ladder, and would draw
+back as far as possible into the corner in order that
+her shame might fill but little space on the narrow
+landing.</p>
+
+<p>From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets,
+of families heaped together in a single room, the exhalations
+of unhealthy trades, the dense, greasy fumes of
+cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the stench
+of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in
+the house, came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned
+window behind Germinie wafted to her nostrils
+the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the whole
+house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose
+in revolt every moment at a puff of infection; she was
+obliged to take from her pocket a phial of melissa water<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
+that she always carried, and swallow a mouthful of it to
+avoid being ill.</p>
+
+<p>But the staircase had its passers, too: honest workmen's
+wives went up with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint
+of wine for supper. Their feet would rub against her
+as they passed, and as they went farther up, Germinie
+would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and
+falling upon her with more crushing force at every floor.
+The children&mdash;little girls in <i>fanchons</i> who flitted up the
+dark stairway and brightened it as if with flowers, little
+girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in dreams,
+her own little one, living and grown to girlhood&mdash;she
+saw them stop and look at her with wide open eyes that
+seemed to recoil from her; then the little creatures would
+turn and run breathlessly up-stairs, and, when they were
+well out of reach, would lean over the rail until they
+almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of
+the children of the common people. Insulting words,
+poured out upon her by those rosebud mouths, wounded
+Germinie more deeply than all else. She would half
+rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame,
+resigning herself to her fate, she would fall back into
+her corner, and, pulling her shawl over her head in
+order to bury herself therein out of sight, she would sit
+like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering
+over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the
+floor which everyone might tread upon&mdash;having no
+control of her faculties, dead to everything except<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
+the footsteps that she was listening for&mdash;and that did
+not come.</p>
+
+<p>At last, after long hours, hours that she could not
+count, she would fancy that she heard a stumbling walk
+in the street; then a vinous voice would mount the stairs,
+stammering "<i>Canaille!</i> <i>canaille</i> of a saloon-keeper!&mdash;you
+sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"</p>
+
+<p>It was he.</p>
+
+<p>And almost every day the same scene was enacted.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as
+his eyes fell upon her. "It's like this&mdash;I'll tell you all
+about it. I'm a little bit under water." And, as he
+put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it. It
+isn't my fault."</p>
+
+<p>He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove
+with mangy wings that limped forward to greet him,
+and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye see. It was
+Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat
+as a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He
+insisted on paying for a sixteen-sous bottle for me. He
+offered to treat me, and I <i>proffered</i> him thanks. Thereupon
+we naturally <i>consoled</i><a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> our coffee; when you're
+consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another,
+we fell upon each other! There was a very devil of a
+carnage! The proof of it is that that gallows-bird of a
+saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster shells!"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted
+the candle, stuck in a yellow copper candlestick. By<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+its flickering light the dirty paper on the walls could be
+seen, covered with caricatures from <i>Charivari</i>, torn
+from the paper and pasted on the wall.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim,
+as he saw her place a cold fowl and two bottles of wine
+on the table. "For I must tell you all I've had in my
+stomach to-day&mdash;a plate of wretched soup&mdash;that's all.
+Ah! it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put
+that fellow's eyes out!"</p>
+
+<p>And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with
+her elbows on the table, watching him and drinking,
+and her glance would grow dark.</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>"Pshaw! all the négresses are dead,"<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Gautruche
+would say at last, as he drained the bottles one by one.
+"Put the children to bed!"</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion
+would ensue between those two strange creatures,
+savage ardor followed by savage satiety, frantic storms
+of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the fierce
+brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood
+beneath the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at
+the end, utter exhaustion that swallowed them up and
+left their bodies like corpses.</p>
+
+<p>Germinie plunged into these debauches with&mdash;what
+shall I say?&mdash;delirium, madness, desperation, a sort of
+supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable passions turned<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
+against themselves, and, going beyond their natural
+appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted
+them without extinguishing them; and, overpassing the
+widest limits of excess, they excited themselves to self-torture.
+In the poor creature's paroxysms of excitement,
+her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her
+maddened body, no longer sought pleasure in pleasure,
+but something sharper, keener, and more violent: pain
+in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly
+escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking
+death in an undertone and seeking to embrace it in
+the agonies of love.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up
+on the edge of the bed, rest her bare feet on the cold
+floor, and remain there, wild-eyed, listening to the
+things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little
+by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to
+envelop her. She seemed to herself to fall and writhe
+helplessly in the blind unconsciousness of the night.
+Her will became as naught. All sorts of black things,
+that seemed to have wings and voices, beat against her
+temples. The ghastly temptations that afford madness
+a vague glimpse of crime caused a red light, the flash
+of murder, to pass before her eyes, close at hand; and
+hands placed against her back pushed her toward the
+table where the knives lay. She would close her eyes
+and move one foot; then fear would lay hold of her
+and she would cling to the bedclothes; and at last she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
+would turn around, fall back upon the bed, and go to
+sleep beside the man she had been tempted to murder;
+why? she had no idea; for nothing&mdash;for the sake of
+killing!</p>
+
+<p>And so, until daybreak, in that wretched furnished
+lodging, the fierce struggle of those fatal passions would
+continue, while the poor maimed, limping dove, the
+infirm bird of Venus, nesting in one of Gautruche's old
+shoes, would utter now and then, awakened by the noise,
+a frightened coo.</p>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<a name="i308" id="i308"></a><img src="images/ichlii.png" width="198" height="42" alt="Chapter LII
+
+Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up
+on the edge of the bed, rest her bare feet on the cold
+floor, and remain there, wild-eyed, listening to the
+things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. The ghastly
+temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime
+caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before
+her eyes, close at hand; and hands placed against her
+back pushed her toward the table where the knives lay." title="" /></div>
+<hr style="width: 4%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" />
+<div class="caption"><i>Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up
+on the edge of the bed, rest her bare feet on the cold
+floor, and remain there, wild-eyed, listening to the
+things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. The ghastly
+temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime
+caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before
+her eyes, close at hand; and hands placed against her
+back pushed her toward the table where the knives lay.</i></div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<img src="images/i308.jpg" width="413" height="595" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
+with drinking. He felt the first pangs of the disease of
+the liver that had long been lurking in his heated, alcoholized
+blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The
+horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the
+cords of his stomach for a whole week, caused him to
+reflect. There came to his mind, together with divers
+resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost sentimental
+ideas of the future. He said to himself that he
+must put a little more water into his life, if he wanted
+to live to old age. While he lay writhing in bed and
+tying himself into knots, with his knees up to his chin
+to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four
+walls within which he passed his nights, to which he
+brought his drunken body home in the evening, and
+from which he fled into the daylight in the morning;
+and he thought about making a real home for himself.
+He dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a
+wife who would make him a good stew, look after him
+if he were ill, straighten out his affairs, keep his linen in
+order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
+wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the
+useful qualities of a housekeeper, and who, in addition,
+would not be a stupid fool, but would understand him
+and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found: Germinie
+was the very one. She probably had a little
+hoard, a few sous laid by during the time she had been
+in her old mistress's service; and with what he earned
+they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no
+doubt of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she
+would accept his proposition. More than that, her
+scruples, if she had any, would not hold out against the
+prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit to
+her at the end of their <i>liaison</i>.</p>
+
+<p>One Monday she had come to his room as usual.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say
+to this, eh? A good room&mdash;not like this box&mdash;a real
+room, with a closet&mdash;at Montmartre, and two windows,
+no less! Rue de l'Empereur&mdash;with a view an Englishman
+would give five thousand francs to carry away with
+him. Something first-class, bright, and cheerful, you
+know, a place where you could stay all day without
+hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to
+have enough of moving about here and there just to
+change fleas. And that isn't all, either: I'm tired of
+being cooped up in furnished lodgings, I'm tired of
+being all alone. Friends don't make society. They
+fall on you like flies in your glass when you're to pay,
+and then, there you are! In the first place, I don't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
+propose to drink any more, honor bright! no more for
+me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use
+myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by
+any means! Attention! We mustn't let drink get the
+better of us. It seemed to me those days as if I'd been
+swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to knock at
+the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to
+the needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition
+to Germinie. I'll treat myself to a little furniture.
+You've got what you have in your room. You
+know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy
+bone in my body where work's concerned. And then
+we might look to not always be working for others: we
+might take a lodging-house for country thieves. If you
+had a little something put aside, that would help. We
+would join forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves
+straightened out some day before the mayor. That's
+not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And you'll
+leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear
+old Gautruche?"</p>
+
+<p>Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust
+forward and her chin resting on the palm of her hand,
+threw herself back with a burst of strident laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! ha! ha! You thought&mdash;and you have the
+face to tell me so!&mdash;you thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle?
+Did you really think so? You're a fool,
+you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred
+thousands, you might be stuffed with gold, do you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
+hear? all stuffed with it. You're joking, aren't you?
+Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever
+told you? I would like to see her die and these hands
+not be there to close her eyes! I'd like to see it!
+Come now, really, did you think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted
+with me, I thought you cared more for me than that&mdash;that
+you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the painter, disconcerted
+by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's
+words.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! you thought that, too&mdash;that I loved you!"
+And, as if she were suddenly uprooting from the depths
+of her heart the remorse and suffering of her passions,
+she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you&mdash;I love you
+as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love
+you as one loves something that is close at hand&mdash;that
+one makes use of because it is there! I am used to you
+as one gets used to an old dress and wears it again and
+again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose
+I should care for you? I'd like you to tell me what
+difference it can make to me whether it's you or another?
+For, after all, what have you been to me more than any
+other man would be? In the first place, you took me.
+Well? Is that enough to make me love you? What
+have you done, then, to attach me to you, will you be
+kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed a
+glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken
+pity on me when I was tramping about in the mud and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
+snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes! And what did
+people say to me and spit out in my face so that my
+blood boiled from one end of my body to the other!
+You never troubled your head about all the insults I've
+swallowed waiting for you! Look you! I've been
+wanting to tell you all this for a long time&mdash;it's been
+choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly
+smile, "do you flatter yourself you've driven me wild
+with your physical beauty, with your hair, which you've
+lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took you&mdash;I'd
+have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was
+one of the times when I had to have someone! At
+those times I don't know anything or see anything.
+I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot
+day!"</p>
+
+<p>She paused an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the
+seams. Don't mind me as long as your hand's in."</p>
+
+<p>"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you
+imagined I was going to be to take up with you! You
+said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool! she'll be
+glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be
+to promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place.
+She'll leave her mistress in the lurch.' The idea!
+Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no one but me!
+Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You
+wouldn't understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle,
+who is everything to me! Why, since my mother died,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
+I've had nobody but her, never been treated kindly by
+anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me
+when I was unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when
+I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?' No one! There's
+been no one but her to take care of me, to care what
+became of me. God! and you talk of loving on
+account of what there is between us! Ah! mademoiselle
+has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm
+dying of it, do you know? of having become such a
+miserable creature as I am, a&mdash;&mdash;" She said the word.
+"And of deceiving her, of stealing her affection, of
+allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if
+she should ever learn anything&mdash;but, no fear of that, it
+won't be long. There's one woman who would make a
+pretty leap out of a fifth-story window, as true as God is
+my master! But fancy&mdash;you are not my heart, you are
+not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have
+a man. Ah! I don't know whether I loved him! but
+you could have torn me to pieces for him without a
+word from me. In short, he was the man that made me
+what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him
+was at its hottest, when I breathed only as he wished me
+to, when I was mad over him and would have let him
+walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to&mdash;even then, if
+mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me
+with her little finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I
+would have left him for her! I tell you I would have
+left him!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"In that case&mdash;if that's the way things stand, my
+dear&mdash;if you're so fond of your old lady as that, I have
+only one piece of advice to give you: you'd better not
+leave your good lady, d'ye see!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.</p>
+
+<p>"Faith! it's very like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well! adieu. That suits me!"</p>
+
+<p>She went straight to the door, and left the room
+without a word.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
+fall, below shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower
+the unhappy, passionate creature fell, until she wallowed
+in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions
+are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or
+met on the street, those whom chance throws in the
+way of a wandering woman. She had no need to give
+herself time for the growth of desire: her caprice was
+fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily
+upon the first comer, she hardly looked at him and
+could not have recognized him. Beauty, youth, the
+physical qualities of a lover, in which the passion of the
+most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it
+were&mdash;none of those things tempted her now or touched
+her. In all men her eyes saw nothing but man: the
+individual mattered naught to her. The last indication
+of decency and of human feeling in debauchery,&mdash;preference,
+selection,&mdash;and even that which represents all
+that prostitutes retain of conscience and personality,&mdash;disgust,
+even disgust,&mdash;she had lost!</p>
+
+<p>And she wandered about the streets at night, with the
+furtive, stealthy gait of wild beasts prowling in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
+shadow in quest of food. As if unsexed, she made the
+advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage of
+drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked
+along, peering on every side, approaching every shadowy
+corner where impurity might lurk under cover of the
+darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to
+swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her
+by the light of the street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering
+phantom, gliding along, almost crawling, bent
+double, slinking by in the shadow, with that appearance
+of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which
+sets the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind
+at work on the brink of deep abysses of melancholy.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LV</h2>
+
+
+<p>One evening when she was prowling about Rue du<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>
+Rocher, as she passed a wine-shop at the corner of Rue
+de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man who was
+drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.</p>
+
+<p>She stopped short, turned toward the street with her
+back against the door of the wine-shop, and waited.
+The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders
+against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her
+skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other
+hand falling listlessly at her side. She resembled a
+statue of darkness seated on a milestone. In her attitude
+there was an air of stern determination and the
+necessary patience to wait there forever. The passers-by,
+the carriages, the street&mdash;she saw them all indistinctly
+and as if they were far away. The tow-horse, waiting
+to assist in drawing the omnibuses up the hill,&mdash;a white
+horse, he was,&mdash;stood in front of her, worn out and
+motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet
+in the bright light from the door: she did not see
+him. There was a dense fog. It was one of those vile,
+detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if the water
+that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
+rose and flowed about her feet. She remained thus half
+an hour without moving, with her back to the light and
+her face in the shadow, a threatening, desperate, forbidding
+creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by
+Darkness at a wine-shop door!</p>
+
+<p>At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him
+with folded arms.</p>
+
+<p>"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a
+woman who has ceased to possess a conscience, for
+whom there is no God, no police, no assizes, no
+scaffold&mdash;nothing!</p>
+
+<p>Jupillon felt that his customary <i>blague</i> was arrested
+in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't
+lost. But I must have time. Just now, you see, work
+ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine came to
+grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months'
+time, I promise. Are you pretty well?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Canaille!</i> Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd
+sneak away, would you? But it was you, my curse! it
+was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber!
+sneak! It was you."</p>
+
+<p>Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing
+against him, forcing him back, pressing her body against
+his. She seemed to be rubbing against the blows that
+she invited and provoked, and as she leaned toward
+him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then,
+must I say to you to make you strike me?"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She had ceased to think. She did not know what she
+wanted; she simply felt that she needed to be struck.
+There had come upon her an instinctive, irrational
+desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her
+flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that
+would put a stop to what was going on in her brain.
+She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters
+to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of
+an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,&mdash;the
+guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner!
+the commissioner to whom she could tell
+everything, her story, her misfortunes, how the man
+before her had abused her and what he had cost her!
+Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of
+emptying itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything
+with which it was bursting.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing
+upon Jupillon, who tried to slink away, and, as he
+retreated, tossed caressing words to her as you do to a
+dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to
+bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed
+a police officer, grasping Germinie by the arm
+and swinging her around roughly. Under that brutal
+insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees
+wavered: she thought she should faint. Then she was
+afraid, and fled in the middle of the street.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Passion is subject to the most insensate reactions,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
+the most inexplicable revivals. The accursed love that
+Germinie believed to have been killed by all the wounds
+and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it came to life
+once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart
+when she returned home. The mere sight of the man,
+his proximity for those few moments, the sound of his
+voice, the act of breathing the air that he breathed,
+were enough to turn her heart back to him and relegate
+her to the past.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding all that had happened, she had never
+been able to tear Jupillon's image altogether from her
+heart: its roots were still imbedded there. He was her
+first love. She belonged to him against her own will by
+all the weaknesses of memory, by all the cowardice of
+habit. Between them there were all the bonds of torture
+that hold a woman fast forever,&mdash;sacrifice, suffering,
+degradation. He owned her, body and soul, because he
+had outraged her conscience, trampled upon her illusions,
+made her life a martyrdom. She belonged to
+him, belonged to him forever, as to the author of all her
+sorrows.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And that shock, that scene which should have caused
+her to think with horror of ever meeting him again,
+rekindled in her the frenzied desire to meet him again.
+Her passion seized her again in its full force. The
+thought of Jupillon filled her mind so completely that it
+purified her. She abruptly called a halt in the vagabondage
+of her passions: she determined to belong thenceforth
+to no one, as that was the only method by which
+she could still belong to him.</p>
+
+<p>She began to spy upon him, to make a study of his
+usual hours for going out, the streets he passed through,
+the places that he visited. She followed him to Batignolles,
+to his new quarters, walked behind him, content
+to put her foot where he had put his, to be guided by
+his steps, to see him now and then, to notice a gesture
+that he made, to snatch one of his glances. That was
+all: she dared not speak to him; she kept at some distance
+behind, like a lost dog, happy not to be driven
+away with kicks.</p>
+
+<p>For weeks and weeks she made herself thus the man's
+shadow, a humble, timid shadow that shrank back and
+moved away a few steps when it thought it was in danger
+of being seen; then drew nearer again with faltering
+steps, and, at an impatient movement from the man,
+stopped once more, as if asking pardon.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes she waited at the door of a house which
+he entered, caught him up again when he came out
+and escorted him home, always at a distance, without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>
+speaking to him, with the air of a beggar begging for
+crumbs and thankful for what she was allowed to pick
+up. Then she would listen at the shutters of the
+ground-floor apartment in which he lived, to ascertain
+if he was alone, if there was anybody there.</p>
+
+<p>When he had a woman on his arm, although she
+suffered keenly, she was the more persistent in following
+him. She went where they went to the end. She
+entered the public gardens and ballrooms behind them.
+She walked within sound of their laughter and their
+words, tore her heart to tatters looking at them and
+listening to them, and stood at their backs with every
+jealous instinct of her nature bleeding.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was November. For three or four days Germinie<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
+had not fallen in with Jupillon. She went to hover
+about his lodgings, watching for him. When she reached
+the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of
+light struggling out through the closed shutters. She
+approached and heard bursts of laughter, the clinking of
+glasses, women's voices, then a song and one voice, that
+of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred of her
+heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead
+before her, and whose death she had so often sought to
+discover in the coffee-grounds,&mdash;the cousin!</p>
+
+<p>She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what
+they said, absorbed in the torture of listening to them,
+pasturing her famished heart upon suffering. It was a
+cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the cold or
+rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The
+voice she detested seemed at times to grow faint and
+die away beneath kisses, and the notes it sang died in her
+throat as if stifled by lips placed upon the song. The
+hours passed. Germinie was still at her post. She did
+not think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge
+of what she was waiting for. It seemed to her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span>
+that she must remain there always, until the end. The
+rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead
+beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided
+down her neck. An icy shiver ran up and down her
+back. The water dripped from her dress to the ground.
+She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in
+any of her limbs except the pain that flowed from her
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>Well on toward morning there was a movement in
+the house, and footsteps approached the door. Germinie
+ran and hid in a recess in the wall some steps away, and
+from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young
+man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something
+soft and warm on her hands that frightened her at
+first; it was a dog licking her, a great dog that she had
+held in her lap many an evening, when he was a puppy,
+in the <i>crémière's</i> back shop.</p>
+
+<p>"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently
+twice or thrice in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled
+about her, and at last entered the house. The door
+closed. The voices and singing lured Germinie back to
+her former position against the shutter, and there she
+remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be
+drenched, as she listened and listened, till morning, till
+daybreak, till the hour when the masons on their way to
+work, with their dinner loaf under their arms, began to
+laugh at her as they passed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Two or three days after that night in the rain, Germinie's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span>
+features were distorted with pain, her skin was
+like marble and her eyes blazing. She said nothing,
+made no complaints, but went about her work as usual.</p>
+
+<p>"Here! girl, look at me a moment," said mademoiselle,
+and she led her abruptly to the window.
+"What does all this mean? this look of a dead woman
+risen from the grave? Come, tell me honestly, are you
+sick? My God! how hot your hands are!"</p>
+
+<p>She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it
+down.</p>
+
+<p>"What a silly slut! you're in a burning fever! And
+you keep it to yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I
+think it's nothing but a bad cold. I went to sleep the
+other evening with my kitchen window open."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle;
+"you might be dying and you'd never as much as say:
+'Ouf!' Wait."</p>
+
+<p>She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her
+arm-chair to a small table by the fireplace, she wrote
+a few lines in her bold hand.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do
+me the favor to give this to your friend Adèle and
+have her send the concierge with it. And now to
+bed you go!"</p>
+
+<p>But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth
+while. She would not tire herself. She would sit down
+all day. Besides, the worst of her sickness was over;
+she was getting better already. And then it always
+killed her to stay in bed.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came
+in the evening. He examined Germinie, and ordered
+the application of croton oil. The trouble in the chest
+was of such a nature that he could say nothing about it
+until he had observed the effect of his remedies.</p>
+
+<p>He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed
+and sounded her chest for a long while.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle,
+when he went downstairs; "she has had
+pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a
+moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name?
+Oh! the energy of some women! How old is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Forty-one."</p>
+
+<p>"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure?
+She looks fully fifty."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please.
+What can you expect? Never in good health,&mdash;always
+sick, disappointment, sorrow,&mdash;and a disposition that
+can't help tormenting itself."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Forty-one years old! it's amazing!" the physician
+repeated.</p>
+
+<p>After a moment's reflection, he continued:</p>
+
+<p>"So far as you know, is there any hereditary lung
+trouble in her family? Has she had any relatives who
+have died young?"</p>
+
+<p>"She lost a sister by pleurisy; but she was older.
+She was forty-eight, I think."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor had become very grave. "However, the
+lung is getting freer," he said, in an encouraging tone.
+"But it is absolutely necessary that she should have
+rest. And send her to me once a week. Let her come
+and see me. And let her take a pleasant day for it,&mdash;a
+bright, sunny day."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span>
+scolded to no purpose: she could not induce Germinie
+to lay aside her work for a few days. Germinie would
+not even listen to the suggestion that she should have
+an assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that
+it was useless, impossible; that she could never endure
+the thought of another woman approaching her, waiting
+upon her, attending to her wants; that it would give
+her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in
+bed; that she was not dead yet; and she begged that she
+might be allowed to go on as usual, so long as she could
+put one foot before the other. She said it in such an
+affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble
+voice was so humble and so passionate in making the
+request, that mademoiselle had not the courage to force
+her to accept an assistant. She simply called her a
+"blockhead," who believed, like all country-people,
+that a few days in bed means death.</p>
+
+<p>Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement
+due to the physician's energetic treatment, Germinie
+continued to make mademoiselle's bed, accepting her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
+assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to
+prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful
+task to her.</p>
+
+<p>When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast
+and dinner, she felt as if she should die in her kitchen,
+one of the wretched little kitchens common in great
+cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble
+in women. The embers that she kindled, and from
+which a thread of suffocating smoke slowly arose, began
+to stir her stomach to revolt; soon the charcoal that
+she bought from the charcoal dealer next door, strong
+Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her
+in its stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low
+chimney-piece poured back into her lungs the corroding
+heat of the waist-high oven. She suffocated, she felt
+the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her
+face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead.
+Her head whirled. In the half-asphyxiated condition
+of laundresses who pass back and forth through
+the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to
+the window and draw a few breaths of the icy outside
+air.</p>
+
+<p>She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for
+keeping constantly about her work despite her increasing
+weakness, than the repugnance of country-people to
+take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous determination
+that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's
+needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span>
+might accompany the installation of a new servant. It
+was absolutely necessary that she should be there, to
+keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from
+coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should
+show herself, that the quarter should see her, and that
+she should not appear to her creditors with the aspect
+of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of being
+strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she
+must impart confidence to the whole street with the
+doctor's studied words, with a hopeful air, and with
+the promise not to die. She must appear at her best in
+order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions
+on the subject of money from ascending the stairs
+and applying to mademoiselle.</p>
+
+<p>She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary,
+comedy. She was absolutely heroic in the way she
+made her whole body lie,&mdash;in drawing up her enfeebled
+form to its full height as she passed the shops, whose
+proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her
+trailing footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough
+towel before going out in order to bring back the color
+of blood to them; in covering the pallor of her disease
+and her death-mask with rouge.</p>
+
+<p>Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless
+nights, despite her stomach's loathing for food, she
+passed the whole winter conquering and overcoming
+her own weakness and struggling with the ups and
+downs of her disease.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle
+that he was unable to find that any of her maid's
+vital organs were seriously diseased. The lungs were a
+little ulcerated near the top; but people recovered from
+that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn
+out," he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an
+almost embarrassed manner that impressed mademoiselle.
+And he always had something to say, at the end
+of his visit, about a change of air&mdash;about the country.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LX</h2>
+
+
+<p>When August arrived, the doctor had nothing but that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
+to advise or prescribe&mdash;the country. Notwithstanding
+the repugnance of elderly people to move, to change
+their abode and the habits and regular hours of their
+life; despite her domestic nature and the sort of pang
+that she felt at being torn from her hearthstone, mademoiselle
+decided to take Germinie into the country.
+She wrote to the <i>chick's</i> daughter, who lived, with a
+brood of children, on a small estate in a village of
+Brie, and who had been, for many years, begging her
+to pay her a long visit. She requested her hospitality
+for a month or six weeks for herself and her sick
+maid.</p>
+
+<p>They set out. Germinie was delighted. On their
+arrival she felt decidedly better. For some days her
+disease seemed to be diverted by the change. But the
+weather that summer was very uncertain, with much
+rain, sudden changes, and high winds. Germinie had
+a chill, and mademoiselle soon heard again, overhead,
+just above the room in which she slept, the frightful
+cough that had been so painful and hard to bear at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
+Paris. There were hurried paroxysms of coughing that
+seemed almost to strangle her; spasms that would break
+off for a moment, then begin again; and the pauses
+caused the ear and the heart to experience a nervous,
+anxious anticipation of what was certain to come next,
+and always did come,&mdash;racking and tearing, dying
+away again, but still vibrating in the ear, even when it
+had ceased: never silent, never willing to have done.</p>
+
+<p>And yet Germinie rose from those horrible nights with
+an energy and activity that amazed mademoiselle and at
+times reassured her. She was out of bed as early as anybody
+in the house. One morning, at five o'clock, she
+went with the man-servant in a <i>char-à-banc</i> to a mill-pond
+three leagues away, for fish; at another time she
+dragged herself to the saint's day ball, with the maids
+from the house, and did not return until they did, at
+daybreak. She worked all the time; assisted the servants.
+She was always sitting on the edge of a chair,
+in a corner of the kitchen, doing something with her
+fingers. Mademoiselle was obliged to force her to go
+out, to drive her into the garden to sit. Then Germinie
+would sit on the green bench, with her umbrella over her
+head, and the sun in her skirts and on her feet. Hardly
+moving, she would forget herself utterly as she inhaled the
+light and air and warmth, passionately and with a sort
+of feverish joy. Her distended lips would part to admit
+the fresh, clear air. Her eyes burned, but did not move;
+and in the light shadow of the silk umbrella her gaunt,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span>
+wasted, haggard face stared vacantly into space like an
+amorous death's head.</p>
+
+<p>Weary as she was at night, no persuasion could induce
+her to retire before her mistress. She insisted upon
+being at hand to undress her. Seated by her side, she
+would rise from time to time to wait upon her as best
+she could, assist her to take off a petticoat, then sit down
+again, collect her strength for a moment, rise again, and
+insist upon doing something for her. Mademoiselle had
+to force her to sit down and order her to keep quiet.
+And all the time that the evening toilet lasted she had
+always upon her lips the same tiresome chatter about
+the servants of the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, mademoiselle, you haven't an idea of the eyes
+they make at each other when they think no one sees
+them&mdash;the cook and the man&mdash;I mean. They keep quiet
+when I am by; but the other day I surprised them
+in the bakery. They were kissing, fancy! Luckily
+madame here don't suspect it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! there you are again with your tale-bearing!
+Why, good God!" mademoiselle would exclaim, "what
+difference does it make to you whether they <i>coo</i> or don't
+<i>coo</i>? They're kind to you, aren't they? That's all
+that's necessary."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! very kind, mademoiselle; as far as that's concerned
+I haven't a word to say. Marie got up in the
+night last night to give me some water&mdash;and as for him,
+when there's any dessert left, it's always for me. Oh!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span>
+he's very polite to me&mdash;in fact, Marie don't like it very
+well that he thinks so much about me. You understand,
+mademoiselle&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come! go to bed with all your nonsense!"
+said her mistress sharply, sad, and annoyed as well, to
+find such a keen interest in others' love-affairs in one
+so ill.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXI</h2>
+
+
+<p>When they returned from the country, the doctor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span>
+after examining Germinie, said to Mademoiselle: "It
+has been very rapid, very rapid. The left lung is entirely
+gone. The right has begun to be affected at the
+top, and I fear that there is more or less difficulty all
+through it. She's a dead woman. She may live six
+weeks, two months at most."</p>
+
+<p>"Great Heaven!" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil,
+"everyone I have ever loved will go before me! Tell
+me, must I wait until everybody has gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you thought of placing her in some institution?"
+said the doctor, after a moment's silence.
+"You can't keep her here. It's too great a burden,
+too great a grief for you to have her with you," he
+added, at a gesture from mademoiselle.</p>
+
+<p>"No, monsieur, no, I haven't thought of it. Oh!
+yes, I am likely to send her away. Why you must have
+seen, monsieur: that girl isn't a maid, she isn't a servant
+in my eyes; she's like the family I never had!
+What would you have me say to her: 'Be off with you
+now!' Ah! I never suffered so much before on account<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[342]</a></span>
+of not being rich and having a wretched four-sou apartment
+like this. I, mention such a thing to her! why,
+it's impossible! And where could she go? To the
+Maison Dubois? Oh! yes, to the Dubois! She went
+there once to see the maid I had before, who died
+there. You might as well kill her! The hospital,
+then? No, not there; I don't choose to have her
+die in that place!"</p>
+
+<p>"Good God, mademoiselle, she'll be a hundred times
+better off there than here. I would get her admitted
+at Lariboisière, during the term of service of a doctor
+who is a friend of mine. I would recommend her to
+an intern, who is under great obligations to me. She
+would have a very excellent Sister to nurse her in the
+hall to which I would have her sent. If necessary, she
+could have a private room. But I am sure she would
+prefer to be in a common room. It's the essential
+thing to do, you see, mademoiselle. She can't stay in
+that chamber up there. You know what these horrible
+servants' quarters are. Indeed, it's my opinion that
+the health authorities ought to compel the landlords to
+show common humanity in that direction; it's an outrage!
+The cold weather is coming; there's no fireplace;
+with the window and the roof it will be like an
+ice-house. You see she still keeps about. She has a
+marvelous stock of courage, prodigious nervous vitality.
+But, in spite of everything, the bed will claim her in
+a few days,&mdash;she won't get up again. Come, listen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[343]</a></span>
+to reason, mademoiselle. Let me speak to her, will
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not yet. I must get used to the idea. And
+then, when I see her around me I imagine she isn't
+going to die so quickly as all that. There's time
+enough. Later, we'll see about it,&mdash;yes, later."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, mademoiselle, if I venture to say to
+you that you are quite capable of making yourself sick
+nursing her."</p>
+
+<p>"I? Oh! as for me!" And Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil made a gesture indicating that her life was
+of no consequence.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Amid Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's desperate anxiety<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span>
+concerning her maid's health, she became conscious of
+a strange feeling, a sort of fear in the presence of the
+new, unfamiliar, mysterious creature that sickness had
+made of Germinie. Mademoiselle had a sense of discomfort
+beside that hollow, ghostly face, which was
+almost unrecognizable in its implacable rigidity, and
+which seemed to return to itself, to recover consciousness,
+only furtively, by fits and starts, in the effort to
+produce a pallid smile. The old woman had seen
+many people die; her memories of many painful years
+recalled the expressions of many dear, doomed faces, of
+many faces that were sad and desolate and grief-stricken
+in death; but no face of all those she remembered had
+ever assumed, as the end drew near, that distressing
+expression of a face retiring within itself and closing
+the doors.</p>
+
+<p>Enveloped in her suffering, Germinie maintained her
+savage, rigid, self-contained, impenetrable demeanor.
+She was as immovable as bronze. Mademoiselle, as
+she looked at her, asked herself what it could be that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span>
+she brooded over thus without moving; whether it was
+her life rising in revolt, the dread of death, or a secret
+remorse for something in her past. Nothing external
+seemed to affect the sick woman. She was no longer
+conscious of things about her. Her body became indifferent
+to everything, did not ask to be relieved, seemed
+not to desire to be cured. She complained of nothing,
+found no pleasure or diversion in anything. Even her
+longing for affection had left her. She no longer made
+any motion to bestow or invite a caress, and every day
+something human left her body, which seemed to be
+turning to stone. Often she would bury herself in profound
+silence that made one expect a heart-rending
+shriek or word; but after glancing about the room,
+she would say nothing and begin again to stare fixedly,
+vacantly, at the same spot in space.</p>
+
+<p>When mademoiselle returned from the friend's house
+with whom she dined, she would find Germinie in the
+dark, sunk in an easy-chair with her legs stretched out
+upon a chair, her head hanging forward on her breast,
+and so profoundly absorbed that sometimes she did not
+hear the door open. As she walked forward into the
+room it seemed to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil as if
+she were breaking in upon a ghastly <i>tête-à-tête</i> between
+Disease and the Shadow of Death, wherein Germinie
+was already seeking, in the terror of the Invisible, the
+blindness of the grave and the darkness of death.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Throughout the month of October, Germinie obstinately<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span>
+refused to take to her bed. Each day, however,
+she was weaker and more helpless than the day before.
+She was hardly able to ascend the flight of stairs that
+led to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the
+railing. One day she fell on the stairs: the other
+servants picked her up and carried her to her chamber.
+But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs
+again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids
+commonly have in the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's
+breakfast, made a pretence of working, and
+kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs
+and dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on
+her; she forced her to lie down on her own bed. Germinie
+lay there half an hour, an hour, wide awake, not
+speaking, but with her eyes open, fixed, and staring
+into vacancy like the eyes of a person in severe pain.</p>
+
+<p>One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle
+climbed to the sixth floor, turned into a narrow corridor
+in which the air was heavy with the odors from servants'
+water-closets and at last reached Germinie's door,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span>
+No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled
+her to come up. It was impossible for her to put her
+feet out of the bed. She had terrible pains in her
+bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle
+to sit down a moment and, to make room for
+her, removed the candlestick that stood on the chair at
+the head of her bed.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments,
+looking about the wretched room,&mdash;one of those where
+the doctor has to lay his hat on the bed, and where
+there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room,
+without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping
+roof, which admitted the heat of summer and the cold
+of winter. Old trunks, clothes bags, a foot-bath, and
+the little iron bedstead on which Germinie's niece had
+slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping
+roof. The bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand
+with a broken pitcher, comprised the whole of the furniture.
+Above the bed, in an imitation violet-wood
+frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came during the day. "Aha! peritonitis,"
+he said, when mademoiselle described Germinie's
+condition.</p>
+
+<p>He went up to see the sick woman. "I am afraid,"
+he said, when he came down, "that there's an abscess
+in the intestine communicating with an abscess in the
+bladder. It's a serious case, very serious. You must
+tell her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span>
+with great care. She might die suddenly in horrible
+agony. I suggested to her to go to Lariboisière,&mdash;she
+agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at
+all. But I don't know how she will bear the journey.
+However, she has such an unlimited stock of energy; I
+have never seen anything like it. To-morrow morning
+you shall have the order of admission."</p>
+
+<p>When mademoiselle went up to Germinie's room
+again, she found her smiling in her bed, gay as a lark
+at the idea of going away.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle,"
+said she.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>At two o'clock the next day the doctor brought the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span>
+order for her admission to Lariboisière. The invalid
+was ready to start. Mademoiselle suggested that they
+should send to the hospital for a litter. "Oh! no,"
+said Germinie, hastily, "I should think I was dead."
+She was thinking of her debts; she must show herself
+to her creditors on the street, alive, and on her feet to
+the last!</p>
+
+<p>She got out of bed. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+assisted her to put on her petticoat and her dress. As
+soon as she left her bed, all signs of life disappeared
+from her face, the flush from her complexion: it seemed
+as if earth suddenly took the place of blood under her
+skin. She went down the steep servants' stairway,
+clinging to the baluster, and reached her mistress's
+apartments. She sat down in an arm-chair near the
+window in the dining-room. She insisted upon putting
+on her stockings without assistance, and as she pulled
+them on with her poor trembling hands, the fingers
+striking against one another, she afforded a glimpse of
+her legs, which were so thin as to make one shudder.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span>
+The housekeeper, meanwhile, was putting together in
+a bundle a little linen, a glass, a cup, and a pewter
+plate, which she wished to carry with her. When that
+was done, Germinie looked about her for a moment;
+she cast one last glance around the room, a glance
+that seemed to long to take everything away with her.
+Then, as her eyes rested on the door through which
+the housekeeper had just gone out, she said to mademoiselle:
+"At all events I leave a good woman with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>She rose. The door closed noisily behind her, as if
+to say adieu, and, supported by Mademoiselle de Varandeuil,
+who almost carried her, she went down the five
+flights of the main stairway. At every landing she
+paused to take breath. In the vestibule she found the
+concierge, who had brought her a chair. She fell into
+it. The vulgar fellow laughingly promised her that
+she would be well in six weeks. She moved her head
+slightly as she said <i>yes</i>, a muffled <i>yes</i>.</p>
+
+<p>She was in the cab, beside her mistress. It was an
+uncomfortable cab and jolted over the pavements. She
+sat forward on the seat to avoid the concussion of the
+jolting, and clung to the door with her hand. She
+watched the houses pass, but did not speak. When they
+reached the hospital gate, she refused to be carried.
+"Can you walk as far as that?" said the concierge,
+pointing to the reception-room some sixty feet distant.
+She made an affirmative sign and walked: it was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span>
+dead woman walking, because she was determined to
+walk!</p>
+
+<p>At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and
+clean and bare and horrible, with a circle of wooden
+benches around the waiting litter. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door.
+A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+Germinie's name and age, and wrote for a quarter
+of an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a
+religious emblem at the top. That done, Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an
+attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no
+more, but turned and fled, and, throwing herself upon
+the cushions of the cab, she burst into sobs and gave
+vent to all the tears with which her heart had been
+suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was
+amazed to hear such violent weeping.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXV</h2>
+
+
+<p>On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span>
+at half-past twelve to go and see Germinie. It was her
+purpose to be at her bedside at the moment the doors
+were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she
+rode through the streets she had passed through four
+days before, she remembered the ghastly ride of Monday.
+It seemed to her as if she were incommoding a
+sick person in the cab, of which she was the only occupant,
+and she sat close in the corner in order to make
+room for the memory of Germinie. In what condition
+should she find her? Should she find her at all?
+Suppose her bed should be empty?</p>
+
+<p>The cab passed through a narrow street filled with
+orange carts, and with women sitting on the sidewalk
+offering biscuit for sale in baskets. There was something
+unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air
+display of fruit and cakes,&mdash;the delicacies of the
+dying, the <i>viaticum</i> of invalids, craved by feverish
+mouths, longed for by the death-agony,&mdash;which workingmen's
+hands, black with toil, purchase as they pass,
+to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span>
+morsel. Children carried them with sober faces, almost
+reverentially, and without touching them, as if they
+understood.</p>
+
+<p>The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard.
+It was five minutes to one. There was a long line of
+women crowding about the gate, women with their
+working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took her place in the line,
+went forward with the others and was admitted: they
+searched her. She inquired for Salle Sainte-Joséphine,
+and was directed to the second wing on the second
+floor. She found the hall and the bed, No. 14, which
+was, as she had been told, one of the last at the right.
+Indeed, she was guided thither, as it were, from the
+farther end of the hall, by Germinie's smile&mdash;the
+smile of a sick person in a hospital at an unexpected
+visit, which says, so gently, as soon as you enter the
+room: "Here I am."</p>
+
+<p>She leaned over the bed. Germinie tried to push her
+away with a gesture of humility and the shamefacedness
+of a servant.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Germinie, "the time dragged terribly
+yesterday. I imagined it was Thursday and I longed so
+for you."</p>
+
+<p>"My poor girl! How are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! I'm getting on finely now&mdash;the swelling in
+my bowels has all gone. I have only three weeks to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[357]</a></span>
+stay here, mademoiselle, you'll see. They talk about a
+month or six weeks, but I know better. And I'm very
+comfortable here, I don't mind it at all. I sleep all
+night now. My! but I was thirsty, when you brought
+me here Monday! They wouldn't give me wine and
+water."</p>
+
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<a name="i356" id="i356"></a><img src="images/ichlxv.png" width="180" height="40" alt="Chapter LXV
+
+One and all, after a moment&#39;s conversation, leaned
+over Germinie to kiss her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct murmur
+as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those
+who kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed." title="" /></div>
+<hr style="width: 4%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" />
+<div class="caption"><i>One and all, after a moment&#39;s conversation, leaned
+over Germinie to kiss her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct murmur
+as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those
+who kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed.</i></div>
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image">
+<img src="images/i356.jpg" width="401" height="580" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>"What have you there to drink?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! what I had at home&mdash;lime-water. Would you
+mind pouring me out some, mademoiselle? their pewter
+things are so heavy!"</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself with one arm by the aid of the
+little stick that hung over the middle of the bed, and
+putting out the other thin, trembling arm, left bare
+by the sleeve falling back from it, she took the glass
+mademoiselle held out to her, and drank.</p>
+
+<p>"There," said she when she had done, and she
+placed both her arms outside the bed, on the coverlid.</p>
+
+<p>"What a pity that I have to put you out in this way,
+my poor demoiselle!" she continued. "Things must
+be in a horribly dirty state at home!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry about that."</p>
+
+<p>There was a moment's silence. A faint smile came
+to Germinie's lips. "I am sailing under false colors,"
+she said, lowering her voice; "I have confessed so as
+to get well."</p>
+
+<p>Then she moved her head on the pillow in order to
+bring her mouth nearer to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's
+ear:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[358]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There are tales to tell here. I have a funny neighbor
+yonder." She indicated with a glance and a movement
+of her shoulder the patient to whom her back was
+turned. "There's a man who comes here to see her.
+He talked to her an hour yesterday. I heard them say
+they'd had a child. She has left her husband. He was
+like a madman, the man was, when he was talking to
+her."</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke, Germinie's face lighted up as if she
+were still full of the scene of the day before, still stirred
+up and feverish with jealousy, so near death as she was,
+because she had heard love spoken of beside her!</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly her expression changed. A woman came
+toward her bed. She seemed embarrassed when she
+saw Mademoiselle de Varandeuil. After a few moments,
+she kissed Germinie, and hurriedly withdrew as another
+woman came up. The new-comer did the same, kissed
+Germinie and at once took her leave. After the women
+a man came; then another woman. One and all, after
+a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to kiss
+her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+could hear an indistinct murmur as of words exchanged;
+a whispered question from those who kissed,
+a hasty reply from her who was kissed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are
+well taken care of!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone,
+"they take excellent care of me!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[359]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She had lost the animation that she displayed at the
+beginning of the visit. The little blood that had
+mounted to her cheeks remained there in one spot
+only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf,
+like a wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were.
+Her features were concealed beneath the veil of infinite
+dumb agony. There was nothing caressing or eloquent
+in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and filled with
+one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior
+signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an
+irresistible power of concentration, by a last supreme
+effort of her will, and that her whole being was clinging
+in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything
+to itself.</p>
+
+<p>The visitors she had just received were the grocer,
+the fish-woman, the butter woman and the laundress&mdash;all
+her debts, incarnate! The kisses were the kisses of
+her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their
+claims and to extort money from her death-agony!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[360]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXVI</h2>
+
+
+<p>Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[361]</a></span>
+She was making a little package of four jars of Bar preserves,
+which she intended to carry to Germinie the
+next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between
+the housekeeper and the concierge in the reception
+room. Almost immediately the door opened and
+the concierge came in.</p>
+
+<p>"Sad news, mademoiselle," he said.</p>
+
+<p>And he handed her a letter he had in his hand; it
+bore the stamp of the Lariboisière hospital: Germinie
+was dead; she died at seven o'clock that morning.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle took the letter; she saw only the letters
+that said: "Dead! dead!" And they repeated the
+word: "Dead! dead!" to no purpose, for she could
+not believe it. As is always the case with a person of
+whose death one learns abruptly, Germinie appeared to
+her instinct with life, and her body, which was no
+more, seemed to stand before her with the awe-inspiring
+presence of a ghost. Dead! She should never see her
+more! So there was no longer a Germinie on earth!
+Dead! She was dead! And the person she should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[362]</a></span>
+hear henceforth moving about in the kitchen would not
+be she; somebody else would open the door for her,
+somebody else would potter about her room in the
+morning! "Germinie!" she cried at last, in the tone
+with which she was accustomed to call her; then, collecting
+her thoughts: "Machine! creature! What's
+your name?" she cried, savagely, to the bewildered
+housekeeper. "My dress&mdash;I must go there."</p>
+
+<p>She was so taken by surprise by this sudden fatal termination
+of the disease, that she could not accustom her
+mind to the thought. She could hardly realize that
+sudden, secret, vague death, of which her only knowledge
+was derived from a scrap of paper. Was Germinie
+really dead? Mademoiselle asked herself the
+question with the doubt of persons who have lost a dear
+one far away, and, not having seen her die, do not
+admit that she is dead. Was she not still alive the last
+time she saw her? How could it have happened? How
+could she so suddenly have become a thing good for
+nothing except to be put under ground? Mademoiselle
+dared not think about it, and yet she kept on thinking.
+The mystery of the death-agony, of which she knew
+nothing, attracted and terrified her. The anxious interest
+of her affection turned to her maid's last hours, and
+she tried gropingly to take away the veil and repel the
+feeling of horror. Then she was seized with an irresistible
+longing to know everything, to witness, with the
+help of what might be told her, what she had not seen.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[363]</a></span>
+She felt that she must know if Germinie had spoken before
+she died,&mdash;if she had expressed any desire, spoken
+of any last wishes, uttered one of those sentences which
+are the final outcry of life.</p>
+
+<p>When she reached Lariboisière, she passed the concierge,&mdash;a
+stout man reeking with life as one reeks with
+wine,&mdash;passed through the corridors where pallid convalescents
+were gliding hither and thither, and rang at a
+door, veiled with white curtains, at the extreme end of
+the hospital. The door was opened: she found herself
+in a parlor, lighted by two windows, where a plaster cast
+of the Virgin stood upon an altar, between two views of
+Vesuvius, which seemed to shiver against the bare wall.
+Behind her, through an open door, came the voices of
+Sisters and little girls chattering together, a clamor of
+youthful voices and fresh laughter, the natural gayety of
+a cheery room where the sun frolics with children at play.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle asked to speak with the <i>mother</i> of Salle
+Sainte-Joséphine. A short, half-deformed Sister, with a
+kind, homely face, a face alight with the grace of God,
+came in answer to her request. Germinie had died in
+her arms. "She hardly suffered at all," the Sister told
+mademoiselle; "she was sure that she was better; she
+felt relieved; she was full of hope. About seven this
+morning, just as her bed was being made, she suddenly
+began vomiting blood, and passed away without knowing
+that she was dying." The Sister added that she
+had said nothing, asked for nothing, expressed no wish.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[364]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle rose, delivered from the horrible thoughts
+she had had. Germinie had been spared all the tortures
+of the death-agony that she had dreamed of. Mademoiselle
+was grateful for that death by the hand of God
+which gathers in the soul at a single stroke.</p>
+
+<p>As she was going away an attendant came to her
+and said: "Will you be kind enough to identify the
+body?"</p>
+
+<p><i>The body!</i> The words gave mademoiselle a terrible
+shock. Without awaiting her reply, the attendant led
+the way to a high yellow door, over which was written:
+<i>Amphitheatre</i>. He knocked; a man in shirt sleeves,
+with a pipe in his mouth, opened the door and bade
+them wait a moment.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle waited. Her thoughts terrified her.
+Her imagination was on the other side of that awful
+door. She tried to anticipate what she was about to
+see. And her mind was so filled with confused images,
+with fanciful alarms, that she shuddered at the thought
+of entering the room, of recognizing that disfigured
+face among a number of others, if, indeed, she could
+recognize it! And yet she could not tear herself
+away; she said to herself that she should never see
+her again!</p>
+
+<p>The man with the pipe opened the door: mademoiselle
+saw nothing but a coffin, the lid of which extended
+only to the neck, leaving Germinie's face uncovered,
+with the eyes open, and the hair erect upon her head.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXVII</h2>
+
+
+<p>Prostrated by the excitement and by this last spectacle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[365]</a></span>
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took to her bed on
+returning home, after she had given the concierge the
+money for the purchase of a burial lot, and for the
+burial. And when she was in bed the things she had
+seen arose before her. The horrible dead body was
+still beside her, the ghastly face framed by the coffin.
+That never-to-be-forgotten face was engraved upon her
+mind; beneath her closed eyelids she saw it and was
+afraid of it. Germinie was there, with the distorted
+features of one who has been murdered, with sunken
+orbits and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn into
+their holes! She was there with her mouth still distorted
+by the vomiting that accompanied her last
+breath! She was there with her hair, her terrible hair,
+brushed back and standing erect upon her head!</p>
+
+<p>Her hair!&mdash;that haunted mademoiselle more persistently
+than all the rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily,
+of things that had come to her ears when
+she was a child, of superstitions of the common people
+stored away in the background of her memory; she asked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[366]</a></span>
+herself if she had not been told that dead people whose
+hair is like that carry a crime with them to the grave.
+And at times it was such hair as that that she saw upon
+that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror
+and stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven,
+like the hair of the condemned man before the scaffold
+in La Grève!</p>
+
+<p>On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed.
+On Monday she tried to rise and dress, in order to
+attend the funeral; but she was attacked with faintness,
+and was obliged to return to her bed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXVIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Well! is it all over?" said mademoiselle from her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[367]</a></span>
+bed, as the concierge entered her room about eleven
+o'clock, on his return from the cemetery, with the
+black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to the
+occasion.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Mon Dieu</i>, yes, mademoiselle. Thank God! the
+poor girl is out of pain."</p>
+
+<p>"Stay! I have no head to-day. Put the receipts and
+the rest of the money on my table. We will settle our
+accounts some other day."</p>
+
+<p>The concierge stood before her without moving or
+evincing any purpose to go, shifting from one hand to
+the other a blue velvet cap made from the dress of one
+of his daughters. After a moment's reflection, he
+decided to speak.</p>
+
+<p>"This burying is an expensive business, mademoiselle.
+In the first place, there's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Who asked you to give the figures?" Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil interrupted, with the haughty air
+of superb charity.</p>
+
+<p>The concierge continued: "And as I was saying, a
+lot in the cemetery, which you told me to get, ain't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[368]</a></span>
+given away. It's no use for you to have a kind heart,
+mademoiselle, you ain't any too rich,&mdash;everyone knows
+that,&mdash;and I says to myself: 'Mademoiselle's going to
+have no small amount to pay out, and I know mademoiselle,
+she'll pay.' So it'll do no harm to economize
+on that, eh? It'll be just so much saved. The other'll
+be just as safe under ground. And then, what will give
+her the most pleasure up yonder? Why, to know that
+she isn't making things hard for anybody, the excellent
+girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Pay? What?" said mademoiselle, out of patience
+with the concierge's circumlocution.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! that's of no account," he replied; "she was
+very fond of you, all the same. And then, when she
+was very sick, it wasn't the time. Oh! <i>Mon Dieu</i>, you
+needn't put yourself out&mdash;there's no hurry about it&mdash;it's
+money she owed a long while. See, this is it."</p>
+
+<p>He took a stamped paper from the inside pocket of
+his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't want her to make a note,&mdash;she insisted."</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil seized the stamped paper
+and saw at the foot:</p>
+
+<p style="margin-top: 2em;"><i>"I acknowledge the receipt of the above amount.</i></p>
+
+<div class="sc" style="margin-left: 10em; margin-bottom: 2em;">Germinie Lacerteux."</div>
+
+<p>It was a promise to pay three hundred francs in
+monthly installments, which were to be endorsed on the
+back.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[369]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing there, you see," said the concierge,
+turning the paper over.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took off her spectacles.
+"I will pay," she said.</p>
+
+<p>The concierge bowed. She glanced at him; he did
+not move.</p>
+
+<p>"That is all, I hope?" she said, sharply.</p>
+
+<p>The concierge had his eyes fixed on a leaf in the
+carpet. "That's all&mdash;unless&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the same feeling of
+terror as at the moment she passed through the door on
+whose other side she was to see her maid's dead body.</p>
+
+<p>"But how does she owe all this?" she cried. "I
+paid her good wages, I almost clothed her. Where
+did her money go, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! there you are, mademoiselle. I should rather
+not have told you,&mdash;but as well to-day as to-morrow.
+And then, too, it's better that you should be warned;
+when you know beforehand you can arrange matters.
+There's an account with the poultry woman. The
+poor girl owed a little everywhere; she didn't keep
+things in very good shape these last few years. The
+laundress left her book the last time she came. It
+amounts to quite a little,&mdash;I don't know just how much.
+It seems there's a note at the grocer's&mdash;an old note&mdash;it
+goes back years. He'll bring you his book."</p>
+
+<p>"How much at the grocer's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something like two hundred and fifty."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[370]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All these disclosures, falling upon Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil, one after another, extorted exclamations of
+stupefied surprise from her. Resting her elbow on her
+pillow, she said nothing as the veil was torn away, bit
+by bit, from this life, as its shameful features were
+brought to light one by one.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, about two hundred and fifty. There's a good
+deal of wine, he tells me."</p>
+
+<p>"I have always had wine in the cellar."</p>
+
+<p>"The <i>crémière</i>," continued the concierge, without
+heeding her remark, "that's no great matter,&mdash;some
+seventy-five francs. It's for absinthe and brandy."</p>
+
+<p>"She drank!" cried Mademoiselle de Varandeuil,
+everything made clear to her by those words.</p>
+
+<p>The concierge did not seem to hear.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, mademoiselle, knowing the Jupillons was
+the death of her,&mdash;the young man especially. It wasn't
+for herself that she did what she did. And the disappointment,
+you see. She took to drink. She hoped to
+marry him, I ought to say. She fitted up a room for
+him. When they get to buying furniture the money
+goes fast. She ruined herself,&mdash;think of it! It was
+no use for me to tell her not to throw herself away by
+drinking as she did. You don't suppose I was going to
+tell you, when she came in at six o'clock in the morning!
+It was the same with her child. Oh!" the concierge
+added, in reply to mademoiselle's gesture, "it
+was a lucky thing the little one died. Never mind, you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[371]</a></span>
+can say she led a gay life&mdash;and a hard one. That's
+why I say the common ditch. If I was you&mdash;she's
+cost you enough, mademoiselle, all the time she's
+been living on you. And you can leave her where
+she is&mdash;with everybody else."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! that's how it is! that's what she was! She
+stole for men! she ran in debt! Ah! she did well
+to die, the hussy! And I must pay! A child!&mdash;think
+of that: the slut! Yes, indeed, she can rot where she
+will! You have done well, Monsieur Henri. Steal!
+She stole from me! In the ditch, parbleu! that's quite
+good enough for her! To think that I let her keep all
+my keys&mdash;I never kept any account. My God! That's
+what comes of confidence. Well! here we are&mdash;I'll
+pay&mdash;not on her account, but on my own. And I gave
+her my best pair of sheets to be buried in! Ah! if
+I'd known I'd have given you the kitchen dish-clout,
+<i>mademoiselle how I am duped</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>And mademoiselle continued in this strain for some
+moments until the words choked one another in her
+throat and strangled her.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[372]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXIX</h2>
+
+
+<p>As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[373]</a></span>
+
+kept her bed a week, ill and raging, filled with indignation
+that shook her whole body, overflowed through her
+mouth, and tore from her now and again some coarse
+insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at
+her maid's vile memory. Night and day she was possessed
+by the same fever of malediction, and even in
+her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed with
+wrath.</p>
+
+<p>Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She
+could think of nothing else. Debts!&mdash;a child!&mdash;all
+sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She abhorred
+her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have
+denounced her to the police. She would have liked to
+believe in hell so that she might be consigned to the
+torments that await the dead. Her maid was such a
+creature as that! A girl who had been in her service
+twenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits!
+Drunkenness! she had sunk so low as that!
+The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to mademoiselle,
+and all the waves of loathing that flowed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[374]</a></span>
+from her heart said: "Out upon the dead woman
+whose life the grave vomited forth and whose filth it
+cast out!"</p>
+
+<p>How she had deceived her! How the wretch had
+pretended to love her! And to make her appear more
+ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions,
+her jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration.
+She saw her bending over her when she was ill.
+She thought of her caresses. It was all a lie! Her devotion
+was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her,
+the love upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told
+herself over and over again, she persuaded herself that
+it was so; and yet, little by little, from these reminiscences,
+from these evocations of the past whose bitterness
+she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off
+sweetness of days gone by, there arose within her a first
+sensation of pity.</p>
+
+<p>She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her
+wrath; but reflection brought them back. Thereupon
+there came to her mind some things to which she had
+paid no heed during Germinie's lifetime, trifles of
+which the grave makes us take thought and upon
+which death sheds light. She had a vague remembrance
+of certain strange performances on the part of
+her maid, of feverish effusions and frantic embraces, of
+her throwing herself on her knees as if she were about
+to make a confession, of movements of the lips as if a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[375]</a></span>
+secret were trembling on their verge. She saw, with
+the eyes we have for those who are no more, Germinie's
+wistful glances, her gestures and attitudes, the despairing
+expression of her face. And now she realized that there
+were deep wounds beneath, heart-rending pain, the torment
+of her anguish and her repentance, the tears of
+blood of her remorse, all sorts of suffering forced out
+of sight throughout her life, and in her whole being a
+Passion of shame that dared not ask forgiveness except
+with silence!</p>
+
+<p>Then she would scold herself for the thought and call
+herself an old fool. Her instinct of rigid uprightness,
+the stern conscience and harsh judgment of a stainless
+life, the things which cause a virtuous woman to
+condemn a harlot and should have caused a saint like
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil to be without pity for her
+servant&mdash;everything within her rebelled against a pardon.
+The voice of justice, stifling her kindness of heart,
+cried: "Never! never!" And she would expel Germinie's
+infamous phantom with a pitiless gesture.</p>
+
+<p>There were times, indeed, when, in order to make
+her condemnation and execration of her memory more
+irrevocable, she would heap charges upon her and slander
+her. She would add to the dead woman's horrible
+list of sins. She would reproach Germinie for more
+than was justly chargeable to her. She would attribute
+crimes to her dark thoughts, murderous desires to her
+impatient dreams. She would strive to think, she would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[376]</a></span>
+force herself to think, that she had desired her mistress's
+death and had been awaiting it.</p>
+
+<p>But at that very moment, amid the blackest of her
+thoughts and suppositions, a vision arose and stood in
+a bright light before her. A figure approached, that
+seemed to come to meet her glance, a figure against
+which she could not defend herself, and which passed
+through the hands with which she sought to force it
+back. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil saw her dead maid
+once more. She saw once more the face of which she
+had caught a glimpse in the amphitheatre, the crucified
+face, the tortured face to which the blood and agony of
+a heart had mounted together. She saw it once more
+with the faculty which the second sight of memory separates
+from its surroundings. And that face, as it became
+clearer to her, caused her less terror. It appeared to
+her, divesting itself, as it were, of its fear-inspiring, horrifying
+qualities. Suffering alone remained, but it was
+the suffering of expiation, almost of prayer, the suffering
+of a dead face that would like to weep. And as its expression
+grew ever milder, mademoiselle came at last to
+see in it a glance of supplication, of supplication that,
+at last, compelled her pity. Insensibly there glided into
+her reflections indulgent thoughts, suggestions of apology
+that surprised herself. She asked herself if the poor girl
+was as guilty as others, if she had deliberately chosen the
+path of evil, if life, circumstances, the misfortune of her
+body and her destiny, had not made her the creature she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[377]</a></span>
+had been, a creature of love and sorrow. Suddenly she
+stopped: she was on the point of forgiving her!</p>
+
+<p>One morning she leaped out of bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Here! you&mdash;you other!" she cried to her housekeeper,
+"the devil take your name! I can't remember
+it. Give me my clothes, quick! I have to go out."</p>
+
+<p>"The idea, mademoiselle&mdash;just look at the roofs,
+they're all white."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it snows, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>Ten minutes later, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil said
+to the driver of the cab she had sent for:</p>
+
+<p>"Montmartre Cemetery!"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[378]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2 class="chapter">LXX</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[379]</a></span>
+straight, as far as the eye could see. The thread of
+snow that marked the outline of its coping gave it a
+dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left three leafless
+trees reared their bare black branches against the sky.
+They rustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead
+wood stirred by the south wind. Above these trees,
+behind the wall and close against it, arose the two arms
+from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. A
+few snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there;
+beyond, the hill of Montmartre rose sharply, its white
+shroud broken by oases of brown earth and sandy
+patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmounted
+by gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint
+in the mist, as far as two black windmills. The sky was
+of a leaden hue, with occasional cold, bluish streaks as
+if ink had been applied with a brush! over Montmartre
+there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seine
+water after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the
+wings of an invisible windmill turned and turned,&mdash;slow-moving
+wings, unvarying in their movement, which
+seemed to be turning for eternity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[380]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In front of the wall, against which was planted a
+thicket of dead cypresses, turned red by the frost, was a
+vast tract of land upon which were two rows of crowded,
+jostling overturned crosses, like two great funeral processions.
+The crosses touched and pushed one another
+and trod on one another's heels. They bent and fell
+and collapsed in the ranks. In the middle there was a
+sort of congestion which had caused them to bulge out
+on both sides; you could see them lying&mdash;covered by
+the snow and raising it into mounds with the thick wood
+of which they were made&mdash;upon the paths, somewhat
+trampled in the centre, that skirted the two long
+files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation
+of a multitude, the disorder and wavering course
+of a long march. The black crosses with their arms
+outstretched assumed the appearance of ghosts and
+persons in distress. The two disorderly columns
+made one think of a human panic, a desperate, frightened
+army. It was as if one were looking on at a
+terrible rout.</p>
+
+<p>All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of
+immortelles, wreaths of white paper with silver thread,
+black wreaths with gold thread; but you could see them
+beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things,
+souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not
+accept and which had been picked up in order to make
+a little toilet for the crosses with gleanings from the
+graves.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[381]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All the crosses had a name written in white; but
+there were other names that were not even written on a
+piece of wood,&mdash;a broken branch of a tree, stuck in the
+ground, with an envelope tied around it&mdash;such tombstones
+as that were to be seen there!</p>
+
+<p>On the left, where they were digging a trench for
+a third row of crosses, the workman's shovel threw
+black dirt into the air, which fell upon the white earth
+around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of the snow,
+enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be
+heard; the dull sound made by the clods of earth and
+the heavy sound of regular footsteps; an old priest
+who was waiting there, his head enveloped in a black
+cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a
+dirty, yellow surplice, was trying to keep himself warm
+by stamping his great galoches on the pavement of the
+high road, in front of the crosses.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the common ditch in those days. That
+tract of land, those crosses and that priest said this:
+"Here sleeps the Death of the common people; this is
+the poor man's end!"</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the
+great city of humanity, the great city of charity and
+brotherly love! Thou hast kindly intentions, old-fashioned
+habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.
+The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man.
+Thy churches speak of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[382]</a></span>
+equality; thy newspapers speak of progress; all thy governments
+speak of the common people; and this is where
+thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill
+themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish
+in the noisome odors of thy factories, those who have
+sweated their lives away working for thee, giving thee
+thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors, those who
+have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who
+have lengthened with the links of their lives the chain
+of thy duration as a capital, those who have been the
+crowd in thy streets and the common people of thy
+grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful
+corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest
+haste to bury them, and where thou castest dirt upon
+them in such stingy clods, that one can see the ends of
+their coffins protruding! One would say that thy
+charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free
+gift is the bed whereon they suffer, and that, when the
+hospital can do no more for them, thou, who art so vast
+and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou dost heap
+them up, crowd them together and mingle them in
+death, as thou didst mingle them in the death-agony
+beneath the sheets of thy hospitals a hundred years
+since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest
+on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on
+every comer: not the briefest prayer! Even that symbol
+of decency was lacking: God could not be disturbed
+for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[383]</a></span>
+always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes
+strike against one another, where the dead enjoy no
+privacy! Corruption there is common to all; no one
+has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the
+worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil
+a Montfaucon hastens to make way for the Catacombs.
+For the dead here have no more time than room to rot
+in: the earth is taken from them before it has finished
+with them! before their bones have assumed the color
+and the ancient appearance, so to speak, of stone,
+before the passing years have effaced the last trace of
+humanity and the memory of a body! The excavation
+is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they
+are the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The
+earth is loaned to them, you say? But it does not even
+confine the odor of death! In summer, the wind that
+passes over this scarcely-covered human charnel-house
+wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In
+the scorching days of August the keepers deny admission
+to the place: there are flies that bear upon them
+the poison of the carrion, pestilential flies whose sting is
+deadly!</p>
+
+<hr class="hr2" />
+
+<p>Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the
+wall that separates the lots sold in perpetuity from those
+sold temporarily only. Following the directions given
+her by a keeper, she walked along between the further
+line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[384]</a></span>
+there she made her way over buried wreaths, over the
+snowy pall, to a hole where the trench began. It was
+covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of
+oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue
+blouse. The earth sloped away behind them to the
+bottom of the trench, where could be seen the sinister
+outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large
+one and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of
+the past week, of the day before, of two days before,
+extended in a line down the slope; they glided along,
+plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking
+long strides as if they were in danger of being carried
+over a precipice.</p>
+
+<p>Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these
+crosses, spelling out the dates and searching for the
+names with her wretched eyes. She reached the crosses
+of the 8th of November: that was the day before her
+maid's death, and Germinie should be close by. There
+were five crosses of the 9th of November, five crosses
+huddled close together: Germinie was not in the crush.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on,
+to the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th,
+then to those of the 12th. She returned to the 8th,
+and looked carefully around in all directions: there
+was nothing, absolutely nothing,&mdash;Germinie had been
+buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had
+been placed in the ground by which to identify her
+grave!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[385]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the
+snow, between two crosses, one of which bore the date
+of the 9th and the other of the 10th of November.
+All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that
+spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave.
+To pray over her body it was necessary to pray at random
+between two dates,&mdash;as if the poor girl's destiny
+had decreed that there should be no more room on
+earth for her body than for her heart!</p>
+
+
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<hr />
+
+<h2 class="chapter">NOTES</h2>
+<hr style="width: 4.5%; margin-top: -1.5em;" />
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Canon</i> is the French word for cannon; it is also used in vulgar
+parlance to mean a glass of wine drunk at the bar.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Battre les murailles</i>&mdash;to beat the walls&mdash;has a slang meaning:
+to be so drunk that you can't see, or can't lie down without holding
+on.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Literally, <i>red bowels</i>&mdash;common slang for hard drinkers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Cuir</i> is an expression used to denote the error in speaking,
+which consists&mdash;in French&mdash;in pronouncing a <i>t</i> for an <i>s</i>, and vice
+versa at the end of words which are joined in pronunciation to the
+next word: <i>e.g., il étai-z-à la campagne</i> for <i>il était à la campagne</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> In the slang vocabulary, to <i>console</i> one's coffee means to add
+brandy to it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> A <i>négresse</i> is a bottle of red wine, and, as applied to that article,
+<i>morte</i> (dead) means empty.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[386]</a></span></p></div>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="microspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="image"><img src="images/i_illo.png" width="307" height="48" alt="List of Illustrations" title="" /></div>
+
+<h3>GERMINIE LACERTEUX</h3>
+<hr style="width: 4.5%; margin-top: .5em;" />
+
+
+<div class="center"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[387]</a></span>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="2" summary="list of illustrations" width="48%">
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right' class="sc">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' class="sc">GERMINIE AND JUPILLON VISIT THEIR CHILD</td><td align='right'><i><a href="#frontis">Fronts.</a></i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' class="sc">JUPILLON AND GERMINIE AT THE FORTIFICATIONS</td><td align='right'><a href="#i116">116</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' class="sc">GERMINIE BRINGS MONEY FOR A SUBSTITUTE</td><td align='right'><a href="#i204">204</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' class="sc">GERMINIE TEMPTED TO MURDER</td><td align='right'><a href="#i308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left' class="sc">GERMINIE AT LARIBOISIÈRE</td><td align='right'><a href="#i356">356</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+<div class="minispace">&nbsp;</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
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+Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Germinie Lacerteux
+
+Author: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+Release Date: January 5, 2009 [EBook #27711]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMINIE LACERTEUX ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Meredith Bach and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                      CHEFS D'OEUVRE
+                            DU
+                    ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN
+
+                         REALISTS
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter XXI
+
+_Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line._
+
+_And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the
+garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting
+on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream._]
+
+
+
+
+                       BIBLIOTHEQUE
+                    DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
+                         DU ROMAN
+                       CONTEMPORAIN
+
+
+
+                   _GERMINIE LACERTEUX_
+
+
+
+               EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT
+
+
+              PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
+             GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+                    GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
+
+
+We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it
+due warning of what it will find therein.
+
+The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.
+
+It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to
+fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.
+
+It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans, alcove
+confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a
+bookseller's shop window: that which is contained in the following pages
+is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure
+_decolletee_: the following study is the clinic of Love.
+
+Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures
+that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion
+nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a
+melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure
+the health of the public.
+
+Why then have we written it? For no other purpose than to annoy the
+public and offend its tastes?
+
+By no means.
+
+Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age of universal
+suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves the question
+whether what are called "the lower classes" had no rights in the novel;
+if that world beneath a world, the common people, must needs remain
+subject to the literary interdict, and helpless against the contempt of
+authors who have hitherto said no word to imply that the common people
+possess a heart and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of
+equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the
+author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed,
+catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were curious
+to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a
+vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where
+castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries
+of the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest, emotion,
+compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the great and the rich; if,
+in a word, the tears that are shed in low life have the same power to
+cause tears to flow as the tears shed in high life.
+
+These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble tale, _Soeur
+Philomene_, in 1861; they lead us to put forth _Germinie Lacerteux_
+to-day.
+
+Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters little. At this
+day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it
+is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary
+study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of
+analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary
+morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements
+of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.
+And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to authorize it to
+disclose misery and suffering which it is not well for the fortunate
+people of Paris to forget, and to show to people of fashion what the
+Sisters of Charity have the courage to see for themselves, what the
+queens of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes in the
+hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering that teaches
+charity; to confirm the novel in the practice of that religion which the
+last century called by the vast and far-reaching name, _Humanity_:--it
+needs no other warrant than the consciousness that that is its right.
+
+_Paris, October, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PREFACE
+
+PREPARED FOR A POSTHUMOUS EDITION OF GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+
+_July 22, 1862._--The disease is gradually doing its work of destruction
+in our poor Rose. It is as if the immaterial manifestations of life that
+formerly emanated from her body were dying one by one. Her face is
+entirely changed. Her expression is not the same, her gestures are not
+the same; and she seems to me as if she were putting off every day more
+and more of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which makes
+the personality of a living being. Disease, before making an end of its
+victim, introduces into his body something strange, unfamiliar,
+something that is _not he_, makes of him a new being, so to speak, in
+whom we must seek to find the former being--he, whose joyous,
+affectionate features have already ceased to exist.
+
+_July 31._--Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon whether our dear old
+Rose will live or die. I am waiting to hear his ring, which to me, is
+equivalent to that of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to
+the court room with their verdict. "It is all over, there is no hope, it
+is simply a question of time. The disease has progressed very rapidly.
+One lung is entirely gone and the other substantially." And we must
+return to the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her
+reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our faces. Then we
+feel an unconquerable longing to rush from the room and from the poor
+creature. We leave the house, we wander at random through the streets;
+at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a cafe. We
+mechanically take up a copy of _L'Illustration_ and our eyes fall at
+once upon the solution of its last riddle: _Against death, there is no
+appeal!_
+
+_Monday, August 11._--The disease of the lungs is complicated with
+peritonitis. She has terrible pains in the bowels, she cannot move
+without assistance, she cannot lie on her back or her left side. In
+God's name, is not death enough? must she also endure suffering, aye,
+torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And
+she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the
+sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as
+stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the
+doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep
+her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was
+unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to take her; it
+seems that twenty-five years ago, when she first came to us, she went
+there to see the nurse in charge of Edmond, who died there, and so that
+particular hospital represents to her the place where people die. I am
+waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to go to Lariboisiere.
+She passed almost a good night. She is all ready, in high spirits, in
+fact. We have covered everything up from her as well as we could. She
+longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels that she is going
+to get well there. At two o'clock Simon arrives: "Here it is, all
+right." She refuses to have a litter: "I should think I was dead!" she
+says. She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the signs of
+life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is as if the earth had risen
+under her skin. She comes down into our apartments. Sitting in the
+dining-room, with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock against
+one another, she draws her stockings on over a pair of legs like
+broomsticks, consumptive legs. Then, for a long moment, she looks about
+at the familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to take away
+with them the memory of the places they are leaving--and the door of the
+apartment closes upon her with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the
+foot of the stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The
+concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will be well in six
+weeks. She bows and says "yes," an inaudible "yes." The cab drives up to
+the door. She rests her hand on the concierge's wife. I hold her
+against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide open, vacant eyes
+she vaguely watches the houses pass, but she does not speak. At the door
+of the hospital she tries to alight without assistance. "Can you walk so
+far?" the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative gesture and walks on.
+Really I cannot imagine where she procured the strength to walk as she
+does. Here we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare, clean
+place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in the centre. I seat
+her in a straw armchair by a door with a glazed wicket. A young man
+opens the wicket, asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of
+an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious figure at
+the head. At last, everything is ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes
+one arm, the housekeeper the other.--After that, I saw nothing more.
+
+_Thursday, August 14._--We have been to Lariboisiere. We found Rose
+quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching discharge--in three weeks at
+most,--and so free from all thought of death that she told us of a
+furious love scene that took place yesterday between a woman in the bed
+next hers and a brother of the Christian schools, who was there again
+to-day. Poor Rose is death, but death engrossed with life. Near her bed
+was a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come to see her. "You
+see, as soon as I can walk, I shall walk about the garden so much that
+they'll have to send me home!" she said. And the mother in her added:
+"Does the child ask for me sometimes?"
+
+"Sometimes, oh! yes," the man replied.
+
+_Saturday, August 16._--This morning, at ten o'clock, someone rings the
+bell. I hear a colloquy at the door between the housekeeper and the
+concierge. The door opens, the concierge enters with a letter. I take
+the letter; it bears the stamp of Lariboisiere. Rose died this morning
+at seven o'clock.
+
+Poor girl! So it is all over! I knew that she was doomed; but she was so
+animated, so cheerful, almost happy, when we saw her Thursday! And here
+we are both walking up and down the salon, filled with the thought that
+a fellow-creature's death inspires: We shall never see her again!--an
+instinctive thought that recurs incessantly within you. What a void!
+what a gap in our household! A habit, an attachment of twenty-five years
+growth, a girl who knew our whole lives and opened our letters in our
+absence, and to whom we told all our business. When I was a bit of a boy
+I trundled my hoop with her, and she bought me apple-tarts with her own
+money, when we went to walk. She would sit up for Edmond till morning,
+to open the door for him, when he went to the Bal de l'Opera without our
+mother's knowledge. She was the woman, the excellent nurse, whose hands
+mother placed in ours when she was dying. She had the keys to
+everything, she managed everything, she did everything for our comfort.
+For twenty-five years she tucked us up in bed every night, and every
+night there were the same never-ending jokes about her ugliness and her
+disgraceful physique. Sorrows and joys alike she shared with us. She was
+one of those devoted creatures upon whose solicitude you rely to close
+your eyes. Our bodies, when we were ill or indisposed, were accustomed
+to her attentions. She was familiar with all our hobbies. She had known
+all our mistresses. She was a piece of our life, part of the furniture
+of our apartment, a stray memory of our youth, at once loving and
+scolding and care-taking, like a watchdog whom we were accustomed to
+having always beside us and about us, and who ought to last as long as
+ourselves. And we shall never see her again! It is not she moving about
+the rooms; she will never again come to our rooms to bid us
+good-morning! It is a great wrench, a great change in our lives, which
+seems to us, I cannot say why, like one of those solemn breaks in one's
+existence, when, as Byron says, destiny changes horses.
+
+_Sunday, August 17._--This morning we are to perform all the last sad
+duties. We must return to the hospital, enter once more the reception
+hall, where I seem to see again, in the armchair against the wicket, the
+ghost of the emaciated creature I seated there less than a week ago.
+"Will you identify the body?" the attendant hurls the question at me in
+a harsh voice. We go to the further end of the hospital, to a high
+yellow door, upon which is written in great black letters:
+_Amphitheatre_. The attendant knocks. After some moments the door is
+partly opened, and a head like a butcher's boy's appears, with a short
+pipe in its mouth: a head which suggests the gladiator and the
+grave-digger. I fancied that I was at the circus, and that he was the
+slave who received the gladiators' bodies; and he does receive the slain
+in that great circus, society. They made us wait a long while before
+opening another door, and during those moments of suspense, all our
+courage oozed away, as the blood of a wounded man who is forced to
+remain standing oozes away, drop by drop. The mystery of what we were
+about to see, the horror of a sight that rends your heart, the search
+for the one body amid other bodies, the scrutiny and recognition of that
+poor face, disfigured doubtless--the thought of all this made us as
+timid as children. We were at the end of our strength, at the end of our
+will-power, at the end of our nervous tension, and, when the door
+opened, we said: "We will send some one," and fled. From there we went
+to the mayor's office, riding in a cab that jolted us and shook our
+heads about like empty things. And an indefinable horror seized upon us
+of death in a hospital, which seems to be only an administrative
+formality. One would say that in that abode of agony, everything is so
+well administered, regulated, reduced to system, that death opens it as
+if it were an administrative bureau.
+
+While we were having the death registered,--_Mon Dieu!_ the paper, all
+covered with writing and flourishes for a poor woman's death!--a man
+rushed out of an adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
+almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the saint of the day and
+give it to his child. As he passed, the skirt of the happy father's coat
+swept the sheet on which the death was registered from the desk to the
+floor.
+
+When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes
+together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable
+things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. It was a
+ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her
+last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the
+coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.
+
+_Monday, August 18._--The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the
+hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the
+poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to
+reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness
+of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the
+prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little
+girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of
+nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a
+poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a
+head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a
+Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited
+by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes
+there is already a gleam of the life beyond.
+
+Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre
+cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the
+city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the
+intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
+gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is
+lowered into a cellar.
+
+_Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital. For
+since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next
+day, there has existed for me a mystery which I force from my thoughts,
+but which constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I know
+nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and I dread to learn. It
+does not seem to me as if she were dead; I think of her simply as of a
+person who has disappeared. My imagination returns to her last hours,
+gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture
+me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At
+last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the
+hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life
+as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls
+upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.
+
+In a distant corner, I rang at a door with little white curtains. It was
+opened and I found myself in a parlor where a Virgin stood upon a sort
+of altar between two windows. On the northern wall of the room, the
+cold, bare room, there are--why, I cannot explain--two framed views of
+Vesuvius, wretched water-colors which seem to shiver and to be entirely
+expatriated there. Through an open door behind me, from a small room in
+which the sun shines brightly, I hear the chattering of sisters and
+children, childish joys, pretty little bursts of laughter, all sorts of
+fresh, clear vocal notes: a sound as from a dovecote bathed in the sun.
+Sisters in white with black caps pass and repass; one stops in front of
+my chair. She is short, badly developed, with an ugly, sweet face, a
+poor face by the grace of God. She is the mother of the Salle
+Saint-Joseph. She tells me how Rose died, in hardly any pain, feeling
+that she was improving, almost well, overflowing with encouragement and
+hope. In the morning, after her bed was made, without any suspicion that
+death was near, suddenly she was taken with a hemorrhage, which lasted
+some few seconds. I came away, much comforted, delivered from the
+thought that she had had the anticipatory taste of death, the horror of
+its approach.
+
+_Thursday, October 21._
+
+                *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the midst of our dinner, which was rendered melancholy enough by the
+constant hovering of the conversation around the subject of death,
+Maria, who came to dinner to-night, cried out, after two or three
+nervous blows with her fingers upon her fluffy blonde locks:--"My
+friends, while the poor girl was alive, I kept the professional secret
+of my trade. But, now that she is under ground, you must know the
+truth."
+
+And thereupon we learned things concerning the unhappy creature that
+took away our appetites, leaving in our mouths the bitter taste of fruit
+cut with a steel knife. And a whole strange, hateful, repugnant,
+deplorable existence was revealed to us. The notes she signed, the debts
+she has left behind her at all the dealers, have the most unforeseen,
+the most amazing, the most incredible basis. She kept men: the
+milkwoman's son, for whom she furnished a chamber; another to whom she
+carried our wine, chickens, food of all sorts. A secret life of
+nocturnal orgies, of nights passed abroad, of fierce nymphomania, that
+made her lovers say: "Either she or I will stay on the field!" A
+passion, passions with her whole head and heart and all her senses at
+once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures' diseases,
+consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure, hysteria, the beginning of
+insanity. She had two children by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived
+six months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was going on a
+visit to her province, it was to lie in. And, with regard to these men,
+her passion was so extravagant, so unhealthy, so insane, that she, who
+was formerly honesty personified, actually stole from us, took twenty
+franc pieces out of rolls of a hundred francs, so that the lovers she
+paid might not leave her. Now, after these involuntarily dishonest acts,
+these petty crimes extorted from her upright nature, she plunged into
+such depths of self-reproach, remorse, melancholy, such black despair,
+that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and
+unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save
+herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments
+in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie
+wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she
+tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how
+many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, and
+bleeding internally: in the first place the rejection at intervals of
+religious ideas by the terrors of a hell of fire and brimstone; then
+jealousy, that characteristic jealousy of everything and everybody that
+poisoned her life; then, then--then the disgust which these men, after a
+time, brutally expressed for her ugliness, and which drove her deeper
+and deeper into sottishness,--caused her one day to have a miscarriage,
+and she fell half dead on the floor. Such a frightful tearing away of
+the veil we have worn over our eyes is like the examination of a
+pocketful of horrible things in a dead body suddenly opened. From what
+we have heard I suddenly seem to realize what she must have suffered for
+ten years past: the dread of an anonymous letter to us or of a
+denunciation from some dealer; and the constant trepidation on the
+subject of the money that was demanded of her, and that she could not
+pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile
+Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom
+she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility
+caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the
+Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me
+to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far
+out--and lastly all the tears that we believed to be without cause--all
+these things mingled with a very deep and heartfelt affection for us,
+and with a vehement, feverish devotion when either of us was ill. And
+this woman possessed an energetic character, a force of will, a skill in
+mystification, to which nothing can be compared. Yes, yes, all those
+frightful secrets kept under lock and key, hidden, buried deep in her
+own heart, so that neither our eyes, nor our ears, nor our powers of
+observation ever detected aught amiss, even in her hysterical attacks,
+when nothing escaped her but groans: a mystery preserved until her
+death, and which she must have believed would be buried with her. And of
+what did she die? She died, because, all through one rainy winter's
+night, eight months ago, at Montmartre, she spied upon the milkwoman's
+son, who had turned her away, in order to find out with what woman he
+had filled her place; a whole night leaning against a ground-floor
+window, as a result of which she was drenched to the bones with deadly
+pleurisy!
+
+Poor creature, we forgive her; indeed, a vast compassion for her fills
+our hearts, as we reflect upon all that she has suffered. But we have
+become suspicious, for our lives, of the whole female sex, and of women
+above us as well as of women below us in station. We are terror-stricken
+at the double lining of their hearts, at the marvelous faculty, the
+science, the consummate genius of falsehood with which their whole being
+is instinct.
+
+               *       *       *       *       *
+
+The above extracts are from our journal: JOURNAL DES
+GONCOURTS--_Memoires de la Vie Litteraire_; they are the documentary
+foundation upon which, two years later, my brother and I composed
+GERMINIE LACERTEUX, whom we made a study of and taught when she was in
+the service of our venerable cousin, Mademoiselle de C----t, of whom we
+were writing a veracious biography, after the style of a biography of
+modern history.
+
+                                                   EDMOND DE GONCOURT.
+
+_Auteuil, April, 1886._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Saved! so you are really out of danger, mademoiselle!" exclaimed the
+maid with a cry of joy, as she closed the door upon the doctor, and,
+rushing to the bed on which her mistress lay, she began, in a frenzy of
+happiness and with a shower of kisses to embrace, together with the bed
+covers, the old woman's poor, emaciated body, which seemed, in the huge
+bed, as small as a child's.
+
+The old woman took her head, silently, in both hands, pressed it against
+her heart, heaved a sigh, and muttered: "Ah, well! so I must live on!"
+
+This took place in a small room, through the window of which could be
+seen a small patch of sky cut by three black iron pipes, various
+neighboring roofs, and in the distance, between two houses that almost
+touched, the leafless branch of a tree, whose trunk was invisible.
+
+On the mantelpiece, in a mahogany box, was a square clock with a large
+dial, huge figures and bulky hands. Beside it, under glass covers, were
+two candlesticks formed by three silver swans twisting their necks
+around a golden quiver. Near the fireplace an easy chair _a la
+Voltaire_, covered with one of the pieces of tapestry of checker-board
+pattern, which little girls and old women make, extended its empty arms.
+Two little Italian landscapes, a flower piece in water-colors after
+Bertin, with a date in red ink at the bottom, and a few miniatures hung
+on the walls.
+
+Upon the mahogany commode of an Empire pattern, a statue of Time in
+black bronze, running with his scythe in rest, served as a watch stand
+for a small watch with a monogram in diamonds upon blue enamel,
+surrounded with pearls. The floor was covered with a bright carpet with
+black and green stripes. The curtains at the bed and the window were of
+old-fashioned chintz with red figures upon a chocolate ground.
+
+At the head of the bed, a portrait inclined over the invalid and seemed
+to gaze sternly at her. It represented a man with harsh features, whose
+face emerged from the high collar of a green satin coat, and a muslin
+cravat, with waving ends, tied loosely around the neck, in the style of
+the early years of the Revolution. The old woman in the bed resembled
+the portrait. She had the same bushy, commanding black eyebrows, the
+same aquiline nose, the same clearly marked lines of will, resolution
+and energy. The portrait seemed to cast a reflection upon her, as a
+father's face is reflected in his child's. But in hers the harshness of
+the features was softened by a gleam of rough kindliness, by an
+indefinable flame of sturdy devotion and masculine charity.
+
+The light in the room was the light of an evening in early spring, about
+five o'clock, a light as clear as crystal and as white as silver, the
+cold, chaste, soft light, which fades away in the flush of the sunset
+passing into twilight. The sky was filled with that light of a new life,
+adorably melancholy, like the still naked earth, and so replete with
+pathos that it moves happy souls to tears.
+
+"Well, well! my silly Germinie, weeping?" said the old woman, a moment
+later, withdrawing her hands which were moist with her maid's kisses.
+
+"Oh! my dear, kind mademoiselle, I would like to weep like this all the
+time! it's so good! it brings my poor mother back before my eyes--and
+everything!--if you only knew!"
+
+"Go on, go on," said her mistress, closing her eyes to listen, "tell me
+about it."
+
+"Oh! my poor mother!" The maid paused a moment. Then, with the flood of
+words that gushes forth with tears of joy, she continued, as if, in the
+emotion and outpouring of her happiness, her whole childhood flowed back
+into her heart! "Poor woman! I can see her now the last time she went
+out to take me to mass, one 21st of January, I remember. In those days
+they read from the king's Testament. Ah! she suffered enough on my
+account, did mamma! She was forty-two years old, when I was born----papa
+made her cry a good deal! There were three of us before and there wasn't
+any too much bread in the house. And then he was proud as anything. If
+we'd had only a handful of peas in the house he would never have gone to
+the cure for help. Ah! we didn't eat bacon every day at our house. Never
+mind; for all that mamma loved me a little more and she always found a
+little fat or cheese in some corner to put on my bread. I wasn't five
+when she died. That was a bad thing for us all. I had a tall brother,
+who was white as a sheet, with a yellow beard--and good! you have no
+idea. Everybody loved him. They gave him all sorts of names. Some called
+him Boda--why, I don't know. Others called him Jesus Christ. Ah! he was
+a worker, he was! It didn't make any difference to him that his health
+was good for nothing; at daybreak he was always at his loom--for we were
+weavers, you must know--and he never put his shuttle down till night.
+And honest, too, if you knew! People came from all about to bring him
+their yarn, and without weighing it, too. He was a great friend of the
+schoolmaster, and he used to write the _mottoes_ for the carnival. My
+father, he was a different sort: he'd work for a moment, or an hour, you
+know, and then he'd go off into the fields--and when he came home he'd
+beat us, and beat us hard. He was like a madman; they said it was
+because he was consumptive. It was lucky my brother was there: he used
+to prevent my second sister from pulling my hair and hurting me, because
+she was jealous. He always took me by the hand to go and see them play
+skittles. In fact, he supported the family all alone. For my first
+communion he had the bells rung! Ah! he did a heap of work so that I
+should be like the others, in a little white dress with flounces and a
+little bag in my hand, such as they used to carry in those days. I
+didn't have any cap: I remember making myself a pretty little wreath of
+ribbons and the white pith you pull off when you strip reeds; there was
+lots of it in the places where we used to put the hemp to soak. That was
+one of my great days--that and the drawing lots for the pigs at
+Christmas--and the days when I went to help them tie up the vines; that
+was in June, you know. We had a little vineyard near Saint Hilaire.
+There was one very hard year in those days--do you remember it,
+mademoiselle?--the long frost of 1828 that ruined everything. It
+extended as far as Dijon and farther, too--people had to make bread from
+bran. My brother nearly killed himself with work. Father, who was always
+out of doors tramping about the fields, sometimes brought home a few
+mushrooms. It was pretty bad, all the same; we were hungry oftener than
+anything else. When I was out in the fields myself, I'd look around to
+see if anyone could see me, and then I'd crawl along softly on my knees,
+and when I was under a cow, I'd take off one of my sabots and begin to
+milk her. Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest sister was
+out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and she sent home her
+wages--twenty-four francs--it was always as much as that. The second
+worked at dressmaking in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the
+prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six in the morning till
+dark for eight sous. Out of that she wanted to put some by for a dress
+for the fete on Saint-Remi's day.--Ah! that's the way it is with us:
+there are many who live on two potatoes a day for six months so as to
+have a new dress for that day. Bad luck fell on us on all sides. My
+father died. We had to sell a small field, and a bit of a vineyard that
+yielded a cask of wine every year. The notaries don't work for nothing.
+When my brother was sick there was nothing to give him to drink but
+_lees_ that we'd been putting water to for a year. And there wasn't any
+change of linen for him; all the sheets in the wardrobe, which had a
+golden cross on top of it in mother's time, had gone--and the cross too.
+More than that, before he was sick this time, my brother goes off to the
+fete at Clefmont. He hears someone say that my sister had gone wrong
+with the mayor she worked for; he falls on the men who said it, but he
+wasn't very strong. They were, though, and they threw him down, and when
+he was down, they kicked him with their wooden shoes, in the pit of the
+stomach. He was brought home to us for dead. The doctor put him on his
+feet again, though, and told us he was cured. But he could just drag
+himself along. I could see that he was going when he kissed me. When he
+was dead, poor dear boy, Cadet Ballard had to use all his strength to
+take me away from the body. The whole village, mayor and all, went to
+his funeral. As my sister couldn't keep her place with the mayor on
+account of the things he said to her, and had gone to Paris to find a
+place, my other sister went after her. I was left all alone. One of my
+mother's cousins then took me with her to Damblin; but I was all upset
+there; I cried all night long, and whenever I could run away I always
+went back to our house. Just to see the old vine at our door, from the
+end of the street, did me good! it put strength into my legs. The good
+people who had bought the house would keep me till someone came for me!
+they were always sure to find me there. At last they wrote to my sister
+in Paris that, if she didn't send for me to come and live with her, I
+wasn't likely to live long. It's a fact that I was just like wax. They
+put me in charge of the driver of a small wagon that went from Langres
+to Paris every month, and that's how I came to Paris. I was fourteen
+years old, then. I remember that I went to bed all dressed all the way,
+because they made me sleep in the common room. When I arrived I was
+covered with lice."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her own life with her
+servant's.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She first saw the light in
+a mansion on Rue Royale and Mesdames de France were her sponsors in
+baptism. Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois, in whose
+household he held an important post. He joined in all his
+hunting-parties, and was one of the few familiar spirits, in whose
+presence, at the mass preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King
+Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying in an
+undertone: "Psit! psit! cure, swallow your _Good Lord_ quickly!"
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those marriages which were
+customary enough in his day: he had espoused a sort of actress, a
+singer, who, although she had no great talent, had made a success at the
+_Concert Spirituel_, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil and Madame
+Saint-Huberty. The little girl born of this marriage in 1782 was sickly
+and delicate, ugly of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be
+absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's wrist. She had
+nothing of what her parents' vanity would have liked her to have. After
+making a fiasco on the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by
+her mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of the
+servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she never went near her
+mother, who always made her kiss her under the chin, so that she might
+not disturb her rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de
+Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage, was disburser of
+pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was traveling in Italy, whither she had
+ordered her physician to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving
+her daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge. The absorbing
+anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening wealth and the families
+that handled wealth--Monsieur de Varandeuil's brother was a
+Farmer-General--left that very selfish and unloving father but little
+leisure to attend to the wants of his children. Thereupon, he began to
+be somewhat embarrassed pecuniarily. He left Rue Royale and took up his
+abode at the Hotel du Petit-Charolais, belonging to his mother, who
+allowed him to install himself there. Events moved rapidly; one evening,
+in the early days of the guillotine, as he was walking along Rue
+Saint-Antoine, he heard a hawker in front of him, crying the journal:
+_Aux Voleurs! Aux Voleurs!_ According to the usual custom of those
+days, he gave a list of the articles contained in the number he had for
+sale: Monsieur de Varandeuil heard his own name mingled with oaths and
+obscenity. He bought the paper and read therein a revolutionary
+denunciation of himself.
+
+Some time after, his brother was arrested and detained at Hotel Talaru
+with the other Farmers-General. His mother, in a paroxysm of terror, had
+foolishly sold the Hotel du Petit-Charolais, where he was living, for
+the value of the mirrors: she was paid in _assignats_, and died of
+despair over the constant depreciation of the paper. Luckily Monsieur de
+Varandeuil obtained from the purchasers, who could find no tenants,
+leave to occupy the rooms formerly used by the stableboys. He took
+refuge there, among the outbuildings of the mansion, stripped himself of
+his name and posted at the door, as he was ordered to do, his family
+name of Roulot, under which he buried the _De Varandeuil_ and the former
+courtier of the Comte d'Artois. He lived there alone, buried, forgotten,
+hiding his head, never going out, cowering in his hole, without
+servants, waited upon by his daughter, to whom he left everything. The
+Terror was to them a period of shuddering suspense, the breathless
+excitement of impending death. Every evening, the little girl went and
+listened at a grated window to the day's crop of condemnations, the
+_List of Prize Winners in the Lottery of Saint Guillotine_. She answered
+every knock at the door, thinking that they had come to take her father
+to the Place de la Revolution, whither her uncle had already been taken.
+The moment came when money, the money that was so scarce, no longer
+procured bread. It was necessary to go and get it, almost by force, at
+the doors of the bakeries; it was necessary to earn it by standing for
+hours in the cold, biting night air, in the crushing pressure of crowds
+of people; to stand in line from three o'clock in the morning. The
+father did not care to venture into that mass of humanity. He was afraid
+of being recognized, of compromising himself by one of those outbursts
+to which his impetuous nature would have given vent, no matter where he
+might be. Then, too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the
+task. The little boy was still too small; he would have been crushed; so
+the duty of obtaining bread for three mouths each day fell to the
+daughter. She obtained it. With her little thin body, fairly lost in her
+father's knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes, her
+limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth, she would wait,
+shivering, her eyes aching with cold, amid the pushing and buffeting,
+until the baker's wife on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a
+loaf which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly hold. At
+last, this poor little creature, who returned day after day, with her
+pinched face and her emaciated, trembling body, moved the baker's wife
+to pity. With the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she would
+send the coveted loaf to the little one by her boy as soon as she
+appeared in the long line. But one day, just as she put out her hand to
+take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and
+preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her
+in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the
+blow all her life.
+
+During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had
+it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the
+Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she
+consented to share with the father and the two children.
+
+Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by
+burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact
+that the accounts of his administration of his office were still
+unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of
+the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay
+by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by
+the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had
+conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he
+used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate,
+sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal
+family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon
+him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name almost excused
+him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince
+of the blood, and a place holder.
+
+The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts
+of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her
+confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the
+tables on Rue Pavee, with their legs in the streams of the blood of
+September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that
+Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his
+immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots
+both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in
+great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized
+only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very
+happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the
+municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the
+Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a
+meeting with this father, _who had reached so high a level_, as they
+said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was
+taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to
+satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They
+then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after
+a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her _Sempronie_; a name
+which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and
+which she never abandoned.
+
+Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode, the family passed
+through the terrible days preceding the fall of Robespierre. At last
+came the ninth Thermidor and deliverance. But poverty was none the less
+a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had not lived through
+the bitter days of the Revolution, they were not to live through the
+wretched days of the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent by
+Providence by the hand of Folly. The father and the two children could
+hardly have existed without the income from four shares in the
+_Vaudeville_, an investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily
+inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the best of all
+possible investments in those years of death, when people felt the need
+of forgetting death every evening--in those days of supreme agony, when
+everyone wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song. Soon these
+shares, added to the amount of some outstanding claims that were paid,
+provided the family with something more than bread. They thereupon left
+the eaves of the Hotel du Petit-Charolais and took a small suite in the
+Marais, on Rue du Chaume.
+
+No change took place, however, in the habits of the household. The
+daughter continued to wait upon her father and brother. Monsieur de
+Varandeuil had gradually become accustomed to see in her only the woman
+indicated by her costume and by the work that she did. The father's eyes
+did not care to recognize a daughter in that servant's garb and in her
+performance of menial occupations. She was no longer a person with his
+blood in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him: she was a
+servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so fully in that idea and in
+his harsh treatment of her, he found that filial, affectionate,
+respectful service,--which cost nothing at all, by the way,--so
+convenient, that it cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a
+little more money mended the family fortunes: battles had to be fought
+to induce him to take a maid to fill his child's place and to relieve
+the girl from the most humiliating domestic labor.
+
+They were without information concerning Madame de Varandeuil, who had
+refused to join her husband at Paris during the early years of the
+Revolution; at last they learned that she had married again in Germany,
+producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the death
+certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal name having been
+changed. The girl grew up, therefore, abandoned, without affection, with
+no mother except a woman dead to her family, whom her father taught her
+to despise. Her childhood was passed in constant anxiety, in the
+privations that wear life away, in the fatigue resulting from labor that
+exhausted the strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death
+that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours
+when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those
+days--to open the door and rush into the street, crying: _Vive le roi!_
+in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood
+with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill
+humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her
+father, which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained by the
+great tempest of the time. She was still doomed to undergo the fatigues
+and humiliations of a servant. She remained alone with her father, kept
+down and humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her heart heavy
+with grief because she longed to love and had nothing to love. She was
+beginning to suffer from the cold void that is formed about a woman by
+an unattractive, unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of beauty
+and sympathetic charm. She could see that she aroused a sort of
+compassion with her long nose, her yellow complexion, her angular
+figure, her thin body. She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness
+was made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal, woolen dresses
+which she made herself, her father paying for the material only after
+much grumbling: she could not induce him to make her a small allowance
+for her toilet until she was thirty-five.
+
+How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life with that morose,
+sour old man, who was always scolding and complaining at home, affable
+only in society, and who left her every evening to go to the great
+houses that were reopened under the Directory and at the beginning of
+the Empire! Only at very long intervals did he take her out, and when he
+did, it was always to that everlasting _Vaudeville_, where he had boxes.
+Even on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She trembled
+all the time that she was with him; she was afraid of his violent
+disposition, of the tone of the old regime that his outbreaks of wrath
+had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an
+insolent remark from the _canaille_. On almost every occasion there were
+scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and
+threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the
+curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in
+the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de
+Varandeuil's price and would keep them waiting one hour, two hours
+without moving; sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and
+leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would vainly implore him
+to submit and pay the price demanded.
+
+Considering that these diversions should suffice for Sempronie, and
+having, moreover, a jealous desire to have her all to himself and always
+under his hand, Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies
+with anybody. He did not take her into society; he did not take her to
+the houses of their kinsfolk who returned after the emigration, except
+on days of formal receptions or family gatherings. He kept her closely
+confined to the house: not until she was forty did he consider that she
+was old enough to be allowed to go out alone. Thus, the girl had no
+friendship, no connection of any sort to lean upon; indeed, she no
+longer had her younger brother with her, as he had gone to the United
+States and enlisted in the American navy.
+
+She was forbidden by her father to marry, he did not admit that she
+would allow herself even to think of marrying and deserting him; all the
+suitors who might have come forward he fought and rejected in advance,
+in order not to leave his daughter the courage to speak to him on the
+subject, if the occasion should ever arise.
+
+Meanwhile our victories were stripping Italy of her treasures. The
+masterpieces of Rome, Florence and Venice were hurrying to Paris.
+Italian art was at a premium. Collectors no longer took pride in any
+paintings but those of the Italian school. Monsieur de Varandeuil saw an
+opening for a fortune in this change of taste. He, also, had fallen a
+victim to the artistic dilettantism which was one of the refined
+passions of the nobility before the Revolution. He had lived in the
+society of artists and collectors; he admired pictures. It occurred to
+him to collect a gallery of Italian works and then to sell them. Paris
+was still overrun with the objects of art sold and scattered under the
+Terror. Monsieur de Varandeuil began to walk back and forth through the
+streets--they were the markets for large canvases in those days,--and at
+every step he made a discovery; every day he purchased something. Soon
+the small apartment was crowded with old, black paintings, so large for
+the most part that the walls would not hold them with their frames, with
+the result that there was no room for the furniture. These were
+christened Raphael, Vinci, or Andrea del Sarto; there were none but
+_chefs d'oeuvre_, and the father would keep his daughter standing in
+front of them hours at a time, forcing his admiration upon her, wearying
+her with his ecstatic flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet,
+would work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium, and would
+end by thinking that he was negotiating with an imaginary purchaser,
+would dispute with him over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry
+out: "A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur, a hundred
+thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed by the large amount of money
+that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many nude men,
+deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon remonstrance and
+tried to check such ruinous extravagance. Monsieur de Varandeuil lost
+his temper, waxed wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his
+blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was her fortune and
+that she would see later if he was an old fool. At last she induced him
+to realize. The sale took place; it was a failure, one of the most
+complete shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hotel
+Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious with rage at this
+blow, which not only involved pecuniary loss and a serious inroad upon
+his little fortune, but was also a direct denial of his claims to
+connoisseurship, a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the cheek
+of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed his daughter that they
+were too poor to remain in Paris and that they must go into the
+provinces to live. Having been cradled and reared in an epoch little
+adapted to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution: she was
+obliged to go with him wherever he chose to go, and, by leaving Paris,
+to lose the society and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in
+their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her confidence,
+and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to her as to an older sister.
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam. There he was
+near familiar scenes, in the atmosphere of what was formerly a little
+court, close at hand to two or three chateaux, whose owners he knew, and
+which were beginning to throw open their doors once more. Then, too,
+since the Revolution a little community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich
+shopkeepers, had settled upon this territory which once belonged to the
+Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil sounded very grand in the
+ears of all those good people. They bowed very low to him, they
+contended for the honor of entertaining him, they listened
+respectfully, almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it
+was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic of Versailles, he
+had the place of honor and the prestige of a lord among them. When he
+dined with Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand francs a
+year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and all, to go and fry the
+oyster plants herself: Monsieur de Varandeuil did not like them except
+as she cooked them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go into
+retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to the pleasant
+surroundings there, but to a project that he had formed. He had gone
+thither to obtain leisure for a monumental work. That which he had been
+unable to do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection,
+he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a little Italian with his
+wife; he took it into his head to present Vasari's _Lives of the
+Painters_ to the French public, to translate it with the assistance of
+his daughter, who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's maid
+speak Italian and had retained a few words. He plunged the girl into
+Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars,
+dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of
+Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the
+_ennui_ and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness
+of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her;
+when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tete-a-tete with the
+volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood,
+paying visits, gambling at some chateau or dining among the bourgeois of
+his acquaintance, to whom he would complain pathetically of the
+laborious effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed
+upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading of the translation
+made during the day, make comments and critical remarks, and upset a
+sentence to give it a different meaning, which his daughter would
+eliminate again when he had gone; then he would resume his walks and
+jaunts, like a man who has well earned his leisure, walking very erect,
+with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying
+himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature
+and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common
+to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain
+number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit
+up half the night.
+
+Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were
+ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely
+alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from
+the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners _a la Madame
+Angot_, and too poorly clad to visit at the chateaux. For her, there was
+no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by
+her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers
+that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but
+vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand
+utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention
+to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was
+when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of
+her two young friends for a week--a week which would have been seven
+days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys,
+its diversions, its fetes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his
+ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about
+trifles--a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in
+her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished
+to take her.
+
+At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a servant, who almost
+immediately became his mistress. A child was born of this connection,
+and the father, in his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to
+have it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years rolled on the
+woman acquired a firm foothold in the house. She ended by ruling the
+household, father and daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de
+Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be served by
+Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil rebelled under
+the insult, and drew herself up to the full height of her indignation.
+Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated by the
+people and the things about her, the girl had built up a resolute,
+straightforward character; tears had tempered instead of softening it.
+Beneath filial docility and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath
+apparent gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character of iron, a
+man's strength of will, one of those hearts which nothing bends and
+which never bend themselves. When her father demanded that she lower
+herself to that extent, she reminded him that she was his daughter, she
+reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of words, the shame and the
+reproach of it in his face, and concluded by informing him that if that
+woman did not leave the house that very evening, she would leave it, and
+that she should have no difficulty in living, thank God! wherever she
+might go, with the simple tastes he had forced upon her. The father,
+thunderstruck and bewildered by this revolt, yielded and dismissed the
+servant; but he retained a dastardly sort of rancor against his daughter
+on account of the sacrifice she had extorted from him. His spleen
+betrayed itself in sharp, aggressive words, ironical thanks and bitter
+smiles. Sempronie's only revenge was to attend to his wants more
+thoroughly, more gently, more patiently than ever. Her devotion was
+destined to be subjected to one final test; the old man had a stroke of
+apoplexy which left him with one whole side of his body stiff and dead,
+lame in one leg, and asleep so far as his intelligence was concerned,
+although keenly conscious of his misfortune and of his dependence upon
+his daughter. Thereupon, all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of
+his nature was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to
+ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his weakness, he became
+a sort of malevolent madman. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days
+and her nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her
+attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied generosity and
+forgiveness, to suffer torments at seeing always by his side,
+indefatigable and kindly, that image of duty. But what a life it was!
+She had to contend against the miserable man's incurable _ennui_, to be
+always ready to bear him company, to lead him about and support him all
+day long. She must play cards with him when he was at home, and not let
+him win or lose too much. She must combat his wishes, his gormandizing
+tendencies, take dishes away from him, and, in connection with
+everything that he wanted, endure complaints, reproaches, insults,
+tears, mad despair, and the outbursts of childish anger in which
+helpless old men indulge. And this lasted ten years! ten years, during
+which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had no other recreation, no other
+consolation than to pour out all the tenderness and warmth of a maternal
+affection upon one of her two young friends, recently married,--her
+_chick_, as she called her. It was Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's delight
+to go and pass a short time every fortnight in that happy household. She
+would kiss the pretty child, already in its cradle and asleep for the
+night when she arrived; she would dine at racing speed; at dessert she
+would send for a carriage and would hasten away like a tardy schoolboy.
+But in the last years of her father's life she could not even obtain
+permission to dine out: the old man would no longer sanction such a long
+absence and kept her almost constantly beside him, repeating again and
+again that he was well aware that it was not amusing to take care of an
+infirm old man like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him. He
+died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for
+her who had been his daughter nearly forty years: "I know that you never
+loved me!"
+
+Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's brother had returned
+from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him
+through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had
+had by the woman before marrying her. Although she was imbued with the
+ideas of the old regime as to the blacks, and although she looked upon
+that ignorant creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild
+beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her clothing, as no
+better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil combated her father's
+horror and unwillingness to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was
+who induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her brother to
+present his wife to him. When her father was dead she reflected that
+her brother's household was all that remained of the family.
+
+Monsieur de Varandeuil, to whom the Comte d'Artois had caused the
+arrears of salary of his office to be paid at the return of the
+Bourbons, left about ten thousand francs a year to his children. The
+brother had, before that inheritance, only a pension of fifteen hundred
+francs from the United States. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil considered
+that five or six thousand francs a year would hardly suffice for the
+comfortable support of that family, in which there were two children,
+and it at once occurred to her to add to it her share in the
+inheritance. She suggested this contribution in the most natural and
+simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and she went with him to
+live in a pretty little apartment at the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on
+the fourth floor of one of the first houses built in that neighborhood,
+then hardly known, where the fresh country air blew briskly through the
+framework of the white buildings. She continued there her modest life,
+her humble manner of dressing, her economical habits, content with the
+least desirable room in the suite, and spending upon herself no more
+than eighteen hundred to two thousand francs a year. But, soon, a
+brooding jealousy, slowly gathering strength, took possession of the
+mulattress. She took offence at the fraternal affection which seemed to
+be taking her husband from her arms. She suffered because of the
+communion of speech and thought and reminiscences between them; she
+suffered because of the conversations in which she could take no part,
+because of what she heard in their voices, but could not understand. The
+consciousness of her inferiority kindled in her heart the fires of wrath
+and hatred that burn fiercely in the tropics. She had recourse to her
+children for her revenge; she urged them on, excited them, aroused their
+evil passions against her sister-in-law. She encouraged them to laugh at
+her, to make sport of her. She applauded the manifestations of the
+mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in whom observation
+begins with naughtiness. Once she had let them loose upon their aunt,
+she allowed them to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose,
+her dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their own elegant
+attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little ones soon arrived at
+insolence. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the quick temper that
+accompanies kindness of heart. With her the hand, as well as the heart,
+had a part in the first impulse. And then she shared the prevalent
+opinion of her time as to the proper way of bringing up children. She
+endured two or three impertinent sallies without a word; but at the
+fourth she seized the mocking child, took down her skirts, and
+administered to her, notwithstanding her twelve years, the soundest
+whipping she had ever received. The mulattress made a great outcry and
+told her sister-in-law, that she had always detested her children and
+that she wanted to kill them. The brother interposed between the two
+women and succeeded in reconciling them after a fashion. But new scenes
+took place, when the little ones, inflamed against the woman who made
+their mother weep, assailed their aunt with the refined tortures of
+misbehaved children, mingled with the fiendish cruelty of little
+savages. After several patched-up truces it became necessary to part.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil decided to leave her brother, for she saw how
+unhappy he was amid this daily wrenching of his dearest affections. She
+left him to his wife and his children. This separation was one of the
+great sorrows of her life. She who was so strong against emotion and so
+self-contained, and who seemed to take pride in suffering, as it were,
+almost broke down when she had to leave the apartment, where she had
+dreamed of enjoying a little happiness in her corner, looking on at the
+happiness of others: her last tears mounted to her eyes.
+
+She did not go too far away, so that she might be at hand to nurse her
+brother if he were ill, and to see him and meet him sometimes. But there
+was a great void in her heart and in her life. She had begun to visit
+her kinsfolk since her father's death: she drew nearer to them; she
+allowed the relatives whom the Restoration had placed in a lofty and
+powerful position to come to her, and sought out those whom the new
+order of things left in obscurity and poverty. But she returned to her
+dear _chick_ first of all, and to another distant cousin, also married,
+who had become the _chick's_ sister-in-law. Her relations with her
+kinsfolk soon assumed remarkable regularity. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+never went into society, to an evening party, or to the play. It
+required Mademoiselle Rachel's brilliant success to persuade her to step
+inside a theatre; she ventured there but twice. She never accepted an
+invitation to a large dinner-party. But there were two or three houses
+where, as at the _chick's_, she would invite herself to dine,
+unexpectedly, when there were no guests. "My love," she would say
+without ceremony, "are you and your husband doing nothing this evening?
+Then I will stay and eat some of your ragout." At eight o'clock
+regularly she rose to go, and when the husband took his hat to escort
+her home, she would knock it out of his hands with a: "Nonsense! an old
+nanny-goat like me! Why, I frighten men in the street!" And then ten
+days or a fortnight would pass, during which they would not see her. But
+if anything went wrong, if there was a death or sickness in the house,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil always heard of it at once, no one knew how;
+she would come, in spite of everything--the weather or the hour--would
+give a loud ring at the bell in her own way--they finally called it
+_cousin's ring_--and a moment later, relieved of her umbrella, which
+never left her, and of her pattens, her hat tossed upon a chair, she was
+at the service of those who needed her. She listened, talked, restored
+their courage with an indescribable martial accent, with language as
+energetic as a soldier might use to console a wounded comrade, and
+stimulating as a cordial. If it was a child that was out of sorts, she
+would go straight to the bed, laugh at the little one, whose fear
+vanished at once, order the father and mother about, run hither and
+thither, assume the management of everything, apply the leeches, arrange
+the cataplasms, and bring back hope, joy and health at the double quick.
+In all branches of the family the old maid appeared thus providentially,
+without warning, on days of sorrow, _ennui_ and suffering. She was never
+seen except when her hands were needed to heal, her devoted friendship
+to console. She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her
+great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have
+made her only to give her to others. Her everlasting black dress which
+she persisted in wearing, her worn, dyed shawl, her absurd hat, her
+impoverished appearance, were, in her eyes, the means of being rich
+enough to help others with her little fortune; she was extravagant in
+almsgiving, and her pockets were always filled with gifts for the poor;
+not of money, for she feared the wineshop, but of four-pound loaves
+which she bought for them at the baker's. And then, too, by dint of
+living in poverty, she was able to give herself what was to her the
+greatest of all luxuries: the joy of her friends' children whom she
+overwhelmed with New Year's and other gifts, with surprises and
+pleasures of all sorts. For instance, suppose that one of them had been
+left by his mother, who was absent from Paris, to pass a lovely summer
+Sunday at his boarding school, and the little rascal, out of spite, had
+misbehaved so that he was not allowed to go out. How surprised he would
+be, as the clock struck nine, to see his old cousin appear in the
+courtyard, just buttoning the last button of her dress, she had come in
+such haste. And what a feeling of desolation at the sight! "Cousin," he
+would say piteously, in one of those fits of passion in which at the
+same moment you long to cry and to kill your _tyrant_, "I--I am kept in,
+and----" "Kept in? Oh! yes, kept in! And do you suppose I've taken all
+this trouble----Is your schoolmaster poking fun at me? Where is the
+puppy, that I may have a word with him? You go and dress yourself
+meanwhile. Off with you!" And the child, not daring to hope that a woman
+so shabbily dressed would have the power to raise the embargo, would
+suddenly feel a hand upon his arm, and the cousin would carry him off,
+toss him into a cab, all bewildered and dumfounded with joy, and take
+him to the Bois de Boulogne. She would let him ride a donkey all day
+long, urging the beast on with a broken branch, and crying: "Get up!"
+And then, after a good dinner at Borne's, she would take him back to
+school, and, under the porte-cochere, as she kissed him she would slip a
+big hundred-sou piece into his hand.
+
+Strange old maid. The bitter experiences of her whole existence, the
+struggle to live, the never-ending physical suffering, the
+long-continued bodily and mental torture had, as it were, cut her loose
+from life and placed her above it. Her education, the things she had
+seen, the spectacle of what seemed the end of everything, the
+Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her to disdain human
+suffering. And this old woman, who had nothing left of life save breath,
+had risen to a serene philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical
+stoicism. Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that
+seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would
+suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face
+would at once become calm. She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a
+deep, bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that have seen
+everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital nurse. Kind-hearted
+to admiration she was, and yet something was lacking in her kindness of
+heart: forgiveness. Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving or
+bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a trifle, if it
+touched her heart, wounded her forever. She forgot nothing. Time, death
+itself, did not disarm her memory.
+
+Of religion, she had none. Born at a period when women did without it,
+she had grown to womanhood at a time when there were no churches. Mass
+did not exist when she was a young maid. There had been nothing to
+accustom her to the thought of God or to make her feel the need of Him,
+and she had retained a sort of shrinking hatred for priests, which must
+have been connected with some family secret of which she never spoke.
+Her faith, her strength, her piety, all consisted in the pride of her
+conscience; she considered that if she retained her own esteem, she
+could be sure of acting rightly and of never failing in her duty. She
+was thus singularly constituted by the two epochs in which she had
+lived, a compound of the two, dipped in the opposing currents of the old
+regime and the Revolution. After Louis XVI. failed to take horse on the
+Tenth of August, she lost her regard for kings; but she detested the
+mob. She desired equality and she held parvenus in horror. She was a
+republican and an aristocrat, combined scepticism with prejudice, the
+horrors of '93, which she saw, with the vague and noble theories of
+humanity which surrounded her cradle.
+
+Her external qualities were altogether masculine. She had the sharp
+voice, the freedom of speech, the unruly tongue of the old woman of the
+eighteenth century, heightened by an accent suggestive of the common
+people, a mannish, highly colored style of elocution peculiar to
+herself, rising above modesty in the choice of words and fearless in
+calling things baldly by their plain names.
+
+Meanwhile, the years rolled on, sweeping away the Restoration and the
+monarchy of Louis-Philippe. She saw all those whom she had loved go
+from her one by one, all her family take the road to the cemetery. She
+was left quite alone, and she marveled and was grieved that death should
+forget her, who would have offered so little resistance, for she was
+already leaning over the grave and was obliged to force her heart down
+to the level of the little children brought to her by the sons and
+daughters of the friends whom she had lost. Her brother was dead. Her
+dear _chick_ was no more. The _chick's_ sister-in-law alone was left to
+her. But hers was a life that hung trembling in the balance, ready to
+fly away. Crushed by the death of a child for whom she had waited for
+years, the poor woman was dying of consumption. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil was in her bedroom every day, from noon until six o'clock,
+for four years. She lived by her side all that time, in the close
+atmosphere and the odor of constant fumigations. She did not allow
+herself to be kept away for one hour by her own gout and rheumatism, but
+gave her time and her life to the peaceful last hours of that dying
+woman, whose eyes were fixed upon heaven, where her dead children
+awaited her. And when, in the cemetery, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had
+turned aside the shroud to kiss the dead face for the last time, it
+seemed to her as if there were no one near to her, as if she were all
+alone upon the earth.
+
+Thenceforth, yielding to the infirmities which she had no further reason
+to shake off, she began to live the narrow, confined life of old people
+who wear out their carpet in one spot only--never leaving her room,
+reading but little because it tired her eyes, and passing most of her
+time buried in her easy-chair, reviewing the past and living it over
+again. She would sit in the same position for days, her eyes wide open
+and dreaming, her thoughts far from herself, far from the room in which
+she sat, journeying whither her memories led her, to distant faces,
+dearly loved, pallid faces, to vanished regions--lost in a profound
+lethargy which Germinie was careful not to disturb, saying to herself:
+"Madame is in her meditations----"
+
+One day in every week, however, she went abroad. Indeed it was with that
+weekly excursion in view, in order to be nearer the spot to which she
+wished to go on that one day, that she left her apartments on Rue
+Taitbout and took up her abode on Rue de Laval. One day in every week,
+deterred by nothing, not even by illness, she repaired to the Montmartre
+Cemetery, where her father and her brother rested, and the women whose
+loss she regretted, all those whose sufferings had come to an end before
+hers. For the dead and for Death she displayed a veneration almost equal
+to that of the ancients. To her, the grave was sacred, and a dear
+friend. She loved to visit the land of hope and deliverance where her
+dear ones were sleeping, there to await death and to be ready with her
+body. On that day, she would start early in the morning, leaning on the
+arm of her maid, who carried a folding-stool. As she drew near the
+cemetery, she would enter the shop of a dealer in wreaths, who had known
+her for many years, and who, in winter, loaned her a foot-warmer. There
+she would rest a few moments; then, loading Germinie down with wreaths
+of immortelles, she would pass through the cemetery gate, take the path
+to the left of the cedar at the entrance, and make her pilgrimage slowly
+from tomb to tomb. She would throw away the withered flowers, sweep up
+the dead leaves, tie the wreaths together, and, sitting down upon her
+folding-chair, would gaze and dream, and absent-mindedly remove a bit of
+moss from the flat stone with the end of her umbrella. Then she would
+rise, turn as if to say _au revoir_ to the tomb she was leaving, walk
+away, stop once more, and talk in an undertone, as she had done before,
+with that part of her that was sleeping under the stone; and having thus
+paid a visit to all the dead who lived in her affections, she would
+return home slowly and reverentially, enveloping herself in silence as
+if she were afraid to speak.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+In the course of her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her
+eyes.
+
+The maid's story ceased, and the remainder of the history of her life,
+which was upon her lips that evening, was once more buried in her heart.
+
+The conclusion of her story was as follows:
+
+When little Germinie Lacerteux arrived in Paris, being then less than
+fifteen years old, her sister, desirous to have her begin to earn her
+living at once, and to help to put bread in her hand, obtained a place
+for her in a small cafe on the boulevard, where she performed the double
+duties of lady's maid to the mistress of the cafe and assistant to the
+waiters in carrying on the main business of the establishment. The
+child, just from her village and dropped suddenly in that place, was
+completely bewildered and terrified by her surroundings and her duties.
+She had the first instinctive feeling of wounded modesty and,
+foreshadowing the woman she was destined to become, she shuddered at the
+perpetual contact with the other sex, working, eating, passing her whole
+time with men; and whenever she had an opportunity to go out, and went
+to her sisters, there were tearful, despairing scenes, when, without
+actually complaining of anything, she manifested a sort of dread to
+return, saying that she did not want to stay there, that they were not
+satisfied with her, that she preferred to return to them. They would
+reply that it had already cost them enough to bring her to Paris, that
+it was a silly whim on her part and that she was very well off where she
+was, and they would send her back to the cafe in tears. She dared not
+tell all that she suffered in the company of the waiters in the cafe,
+insolent, boasting, cynical fellows, fed on the remains of debauches,
+tainted with all the vices to which they ministered, and corrupt to the
+core with putrefying odds and ends of obscenity. At every turn, she had
+to submit to the dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the
+malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a
+little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything,
+with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and
+pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered,
+overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their
+drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused
+her credulity by absurd fables, they overburdened her with fatiguing
+tasks, they assailed her with incessant, pitiless ridicule, which
+well-nigh drove her benumbed intellect to imbecility. In addition, they
+made her blush at the things they said to her, which made her feel
+ashamed, although she did not understand them. They soiled the
+artlessness of her fourteen years with filthy veiled allusions. And they
+found amusement in putting the eyes of her childish curiosity to the
+keyholes of the private supper-rooms.
+
+The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she dared not.
+When, with nourishing food, her body took on a little flesh, her cheeks
+a little color and she began to have something of the aspect of a woman,
+they took great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were attempts
+at familiarity, significant gestures, advances, which she eluded, and
+from which she escaped unscathed, but which assailed her purity by
+breathing upon her innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by the
+master of the establishment, who was accustomed to abuse his
+maidservants and who bore her a grudge because she was not old enough or
+of the right sort for a mistress, she found no support, no touch of
+humanity, except in his wife. She began to love that woman with a sort
+of animal devotion, and to obey her with the docility of a dog. She did
+all her errands without thought or reflection. She carried her letters
+to her lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She became very
+active and agile and ingenuously sly in passing in and out, evading the
+awakened suspicions of the husband; and without any clear idea of what
+she was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a mischievous
+delight, such as children and monkeys feel, in telling herself vaguely
+that she was causing some little suffering to that man and that house,
+which caused her so much. There was among her comrades an old waiter,
+named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of the cruel plots concocted
+against her, and, when she was present, put a stop to conversation that
+was too free, with the authority of his white hairs and his paternal
+interest in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house increased
+every day. One week her sisters were compelled to take her back to the
+cafe by force.
+
+A few days later, there was a great review on the Champ de Mars, and the
+waiters had leave of absence for the day. Only Germinie and old Joseph
+remained in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in a
+small, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She entered the
+room; she cried out, fell to the floor, wept, implored, struggled,
+called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.
+
+When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up in
+her chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, when
+Joseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled
+from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For a
+long time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulse
+was to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified,
+bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who feared
+that she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, and
+respected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.
+
+She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pass the evening with
+her sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed by
+severe pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came to
+the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret of
+their younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of the
+common people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety,
+flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.
+Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousness
+under their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands,
+the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law was
+there, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at
+her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of an
+Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeper
+red than her sisters' blows.
+
+She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She sought
+neither to defend nor to excuse herself. She did not tell what had taken
+place and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.
+She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When her
+older sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded her
+that there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at the
+thought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when her
+mother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightning
+flash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciences
+pierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her and
+kept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almost
+forced her into her misfortune.
+
+That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters took her to the Rue
+Saint-Martin, to the house of a repairer of cashmere shawls, with whom
+she lodged, and who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, was
+banner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made her lie beside her
+on a mattress on the floor, and having her there under her hand all
+night, she vented upon her all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, her
+bitter resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie by her
+father and mother. It was a long succession of petty tortures, brutal or
+hypocritical exhibitions of spite, kicks that bruised her legs, and
+progressive movements of the body by which she gradually forced her
+companion out of bed--it was a cold winter's night--to the floor of the
+fireless room. During the day, the seamstress took Germinie in hand,
+catechized her, preached at her, and by detailing the tortures of the
+other life, inspired in her mind a horrible fear of the hell whose
+flames she caused her to feel.
+
+She lived there four months, in close confinement, and was never allowed
+to leave the house. At the end of four months she gave birth to a dead
+child. When her health was restored, she entered the service of a
+depilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she had the joyful
+feeling of having been released from prison. Two or three times, in her
+walks, she met old Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; but
+she escaped him and the old man never knew that he had been a father.
+
+But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new place. The house where
+she had taken service as a maid of all work was what servants call "a
+barrack." A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money, as is
+often the case with women engaged in the occupations that depend upon
+chance, and in the problematical methods of gaining a livelihood in
+vogue in Paris, the depilator, who was almost always involved in a
+lawsuit of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant's
+nourishment. She often went away for the whole day without leaving her
+any dinner. The little one would satisfy her appetite as well as she
+could with some kind of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things that
+deceive a young woman's appetite, even charcoal, which she would nibble
+with the depraved taste and capricious stomach of her age and sex. This
+diet, just after recovering from her confinement, her health being but
+partially restored and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted the
+young woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined her
+constitution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion changed to
+that dead white that looks green in the daylight. Her swollen eyes were
+surrounded with a great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips assumed the
+hue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the slightest ascent, and
+the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat
+was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she
+dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her
+faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at
+all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress's
+hair.
+
+She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place,
+with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the
+laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had
+never had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interested
+himself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He took
+her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the
+sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It
+delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would
+take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a
+fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of
+this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to
+him. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship,
+the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he
+died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service
+of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen,
+when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter
+the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout,
+in the house of which her sister was concierge.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Those people who look for the death of the Catholic religion in our day,
+do not realize by what an infinite number of sturdy roots it still
+retains its hold upon the hearts of the people. They do not realize the
+secret, delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people. They do
+not realize what confession and the confessor are to the impoverished
+souls of those poor women. In the priest who listens and whose voice
+falls softly on her ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not so
+much the minister of God, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of her
+welfare, as the confidant of her sorrows and the friend of her misery.
+However coarse she may be, there is always a little of the true woman in
+her, a feverish, trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessness
+and, as it were, the sighing of an invalid who craves caressing words,
+even as a child's trifling ailments require the nurse's droning lullaby.
+She, as well as the woman of the world, must have the consolation of
+pouring out her heart, of confiding her troubles to a sympathetic ear.
+For it is the nature of her sex to seek an outlet for the emotions and
+an arm to lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must tell,
+and concerning which she would like to be questioned, pitied and
+comforted. She dreams of a compassionate interest, a tender sympathy for
+hidden feelings of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the kindest,
+the most friendly, the most approachable of masters to the woman in
+their employ: their kindness to her will still be of the same sort that
+they bestow upon a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning her
+appetite and her health; they will look carefully after the animal part
+of her, and that will be all. It will not occur to them that she can
+suffer elsewhere than in her body, and they will not dream that she can
+have the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for which they seek
+relief by confiding in those of their own station. In their eyes, the
+woman who sweeps and does the cooking, has no ideas that can cause her
+to be sad or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her thoughts. To
+whom, then, shall she carry them? To the priest who is waiting for them,
+asks for them, welcomes them, to the churchman who is also a man of the
+world, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman, who knows
+everything, speaks well, is always accessible, gentle, patient,
+attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for the most humble soul, the most
+shabbily dressed penitent. The priest alone listens to the woman in a
+cap. He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the things
+that disturb and agitate her and that bring to a maid, as well as to
+her mistress, the sudden longing to weep, or excite a tempest within
+her. There is none but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from her
+those things which the irony of her daily life holds back, to look to
+the state of her moral health; none but he to raise her above her
+material life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity and
+hope,--such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of the
+men of her family and of her class.
+
+After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germinie
+became profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. She
+abandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession,
+to the priest's smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from the
+darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothing
+words, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, free
+from care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had
+been applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of her
+being.
+
+She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere. Her mistress had a
+certain masculine roughness of demeanor which repelled expansiveness.
+She had an abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back all that
+Germinie would have liked to confide to her. It was in her nature to be
+brutal in her treatment of all lamentations that were not caused by pain
+or disappointment. Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare for
+diseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is created by the
+thought, for the weariness of spirit that flows from a woman's nerves
+and from the disordered condition of her mental organism. Germinie often
+found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the times
+in which she had lived and by the circumstances of her life. The shell
+of her heart was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself, she did
+not like to hear complaints about her. And by the right of all the tears
+she had not shed, she detested childish tears in grown persons.
+
+Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous for
+Germinie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of her
+first prayer. Throughout the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream;
+and while she was about her work it was constantly before her eyes, with
+its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of a
+winged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, and
+the mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now her
+whole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She lived
+through the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for,
+promised day. On Thursday, she began to be impatient; she felt, in the
+redoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were,
+of the blessed Saturday evening; and when Saturday came and
+mademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, she
+would make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to the
+penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holy
+water and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags,
+between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted
+floor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forward
+in the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious,
+veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbed
+in the emotion of suspense.
+
+The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her frequent confessions.
+He was not sparing of time or attention or charity. He allowed her to
+talk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty
+troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, and
+permitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. He
+listened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles;
+he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of a
+servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns of
+her existence, as one would speak to a mother and a physician.
+
+This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. A
+great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown
+wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the
+man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy
+compassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He
+understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened
+her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations
+to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for
+that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable
+girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who
+was promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole
+body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her
+temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and
+terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame
+that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the
+evident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to that
+scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose to
+resist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of the
+senses that was stronger than she.
+
+This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie lived
+a concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to God's
+service--at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had come
+gradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended toward
+himself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer said
+to him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the first
+time, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray and
+becoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watched
+for him when the services were at an end, followed him into the
+sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his cassock. The
+confessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself.
+He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor. In despair at this
+change, at his apparent indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt,
+confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken
+possession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents.
+Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her to
+another confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this other
+confessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of
+going, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certain
+far-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.
+
+Affairs had reached that point when mademoiselle fell ill. Throughout
+her illness, as Germinie did not want to leave her, she did not attend
+mass. And on the first Sunday--when mademoiselle, being fully recovered,
+did not require her care, she was greatly surprised to find that "her
+devotee" remained at home and did not run away to church.
+
+"Oho!" said she, "so you don't go and see your cures nowadays? What have
+they done to you, eh?"
+
+"Nothing," said Germinie.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"There, mademoiselle!--Look at me," said Germinie.
+
+It was a few months later. She had asked her mistress's permission to go
+that evening to the wedding ball of her grocer's sister, who had chosen
+her for her maid-of-honor, and she had come to exhibit herself _en
+grande toilette_, in her low-necked muslin dress.
+
+Mademoiselle raised her eyes from the old volume, printed in large type,
+which she was reading, removed her spectacles, placed them in the book
+to mark her place, and exclaimed:
+
+"What, my little bigot, you at a ball! Do you know, my girl, this seems
+to me downright nonsense! You and the hornpipe! Faith, all you need now
+is to want to get married! A deuce of a want, that! But if you marry, I
+warn you that I won't keep you--mind that! I've no desire to wait on
+your brats! Come a little nearer----Oho! why----bless my soul!
+Mademoiselle Show-all! We're getting to be a bit of a flirt lately, I
+find----"
+
+"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie tried to say.
+
+"And then," continued Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, following out her
+thought, "among you people, the men are such sweet creatures! They'll
+spend all you have--to say nothing of the blows. But marriage--I am sure
+that that nonsensical idea of getting married buzzes around in your head
+when you see the others. That's what gives you that simper, I'll wager.
+_Bon Dieu de Dieu!_ Now turn a bit, so that I can see you," said
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, with an abrupt change of tone to one that
+was almost caressing; and placing her thin hands on the arms of her
+easy-chair, crossing her legs and moving her foot back and forth, she
+set about inspecting Germinie and her toilet.
+
+"What the devil!" said she, after a few moments of silent scrutiny,
+"what! is it really you?----Then I have never used my eyes to look at
+you.----Good God, yes!----But----but----" She mumbled more vague
+exclamations between her teeth.----"Where the deuce did you get that mug
+like an amorous cat's?" she said at last, and continued to gaze at her.
+
+Germinie was ugly. Her hair, of so dark a chestnut that it seemed black,
+curled and twisted in unruly waves, in little stiff, rebellious locks,
+which escaped and stood up all over her head, despite the pomade upon
+her shiny _bandeaux_. Her smooth, narrow, swelling brow protruded above
+the shadow of the deep sockets in which her eyes were buried and sunken
+to such a depth as almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling
+eyes they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant girlish
+twinkle that softened and lighted up their laughter. They were neither
+brown eyes nor blue eyes, but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a
+gray that was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression therein
+in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing rays of a sort of
+intoxication, passion in phosphorescence. Her short, turned-up nose,
+with large, dilated, palpitating nostrils, was one of those noses of
+which the common people say that it rains inside: upon one side, at the
+corner of the eye was a thick, swollen blue vein. The square head of the
+Lorraine race was emphasized in her broad, high, prominent cheek-bones,
+which were well-covered with the traces of small-pox. The most
+noticeable defect in her face was the too great distance between the
+nose and mouth. This lack of proportion gave an almost apish character
+to the lower part of the head, where the expansive mouth, with white
+teeth and full lips that looked as if they had been crushed, they were
+so flat, smiled at you with a strange, vaguely irritating smile.
+
+Her _decollete_ dress disclosed her neck, the upper part of her breast,
+her shoulders and her white back, presenting a striking contrast to her
+swarthy face. It was a lymphatic sort of whiteness, the whiteness, at
+once unhealthy and angelic, of flesh in which there is no life. She had
+let her arms fall by her sides--round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple
+at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray
+the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily,
+with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and
+sway;--a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more
+slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the
+hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;--an impossible
+waist, absurdly small but adorable, like everything in woman that
+offends one's sense of proportion by its diminutiveness.
+
+From this ugly woman emanated a piquant, mysterious charm. Light and
+shadow, jostling and intercepting each other on her face on which
+hollows and protuberances abounded, imparted to it that suggestion of
+libertinism which the painter of love scenes gives to the rough sketch
+of his mistress. Everything about her,--her mouth, her eyes, her very
+plainness--was instinct with allurement and solicitation. Her person
+exhaled an aphrodisiac charm, which challenged and laid fast hold of the
+other sex. It unloosed desire, and caused an electric shock. Sensual
+thoughts were naturally and involuntarily aroused by her, by her
+gestures, her gait, her slightest movement--even by the air in which her
+body had left one of its undulations. Beside her, one felt as if he were
+near one of those disturbing, disquieting creatures, burning with the
+love disease and communicating it to others, whose face appears to man
+in his restless hours, torments his listless noonday thoughts, haunts
+his nights and trespasses upon his dreams.
+
+In the midst of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's scrutiny, Germinie stooped
+over her, and covered her hand with hurried kisses.
+
+"There--there--enough of that," said Mademoiselle. "You would soon wear
+out the skin--with your way of kissing. Come, run along, enjoy yourself,
+and try not to stay out too late. Don't get all tired out."
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was left alone. She placed her elbows on her
+knees, stared at the fire and stirred the burning wood with the tongs.
+Then, as she was accustomed to do when deeply preoccupied, she struck
+herself two or three sharp little blows on the neck with the flat of her
+hand, and thereby set her black cap all awry.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When she mentioned the subject of marriage to Germinie, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil touched upon the real cause of her trouble. She placed her
+hand upon the seat of her _ennui_. Her maid's uneven temper, her
+distaste for life, the languor, the emptiness, the discontent of her
+existence, arose from that disease which medical science calls the
+_melancholia of virgins_. The torment of her twenty-four years was the
+ardent, excited, poignant longing for marriage, for that state which was
+too holy and honorable for her, and which seemed impossible of
+attainment in face of the confession her womanly probity would insist
+upon making of her fall and her unworthiness. Family losses and
+misfortunes forcibly diverted her mind from her own troubles.
+
+Her brother-in-law, her sister the concierge's husband, had dreamed the
+dream of all Auvergnats: he had undertaken to increase his earnings as
+concierge by the profits of a dealer in bric-a-brac. He had begun
+modestly with a stall in the street, at the doors of the marts where
+executors' sales are held; and there you could see, set out upon blue
+paper, plated candlesticks, ivory napkin rings, colored lithographs
+with frames of gold lace on a black ground, and three or four odd
+volumes of Buffon. His profit on the plated candlesticks intoxicated
+him. He hired a dark shop on a passage way, opposite an umbrella
+mender's, and began to trade upon the credulity that goes in and out of
+the lower rooms in the Auction Exchange. He sold _assiettes a coq_,
+pieces of Jean Jacques Rousseau's wooden shoe, and water-colors by
+Ballue, signed Watteau. In that business he threw away what he had made,
+and ran in debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His wife, in
+order to straighten matters out a little and to try and get out of debt,
+asked for and obtained a place as box-opener at the _Theatre-Historique_.
+She hired her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening,
+went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at five. After a few
+months she caught cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of
+pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman
+left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles;
+the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the
+loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by
+the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to
+try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more was heard of
+him.
+
+When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran to the house of an
+old woman who made a living in those curious industries which prevent
+poverty from absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman
+carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles into equal lengths
+for brushes, sometimes she sorted out bits of gingerbread. When those
+industries failed, she did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars'
+children. In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went and took
+possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold it for ten or twelve sous
+when the crowd arrived. In order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the
+den where she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall, to
+the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees. Germinie, who knew her
+from having given her the crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a
+servant's room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her abode
+there with the little one. She did it on the impulse of the moment,
+without reflection. She did not remember her sister's harsh treatment of
+her when she was _enceinte_, so that she had no need to forgive it.
+
+Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her niece. She determined to
+rescue her from death and restore her to life by dint of careful
+nursing. She would rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up
+the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child, give her
+her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed, look at her, and rush down
+again, all out of breath and red with pleasure. Care, caresses, the
+breath from the heart with which we revive a tiny flame on the point of
+dying out, consultations, doctor's visits, costly medicines, the
+remedies of the wealthy,--Germinie spared nothing for the little one and
+gave her everything. Her wages flowed through that channel. For almost a
+year she gave her beef juice every morning: sleepyhead that she was, she
+left her bed at five o'clock in the morning to prepare it, and awoke
+without being called, as mothers do. The child was out of danger at
+last, when Germinie received a visit one morning from her sister the
+dressmaker, who had been married two or three years to a machinist, and
+who came now to bid her adieu: her husband was going to accompany some
+fellow-workmen who had been hired to go to Africa. She was going with
+him and she proposed to Germinie that they should take the little one
+with them as a playmate for their own child. They offered to take her
+off her hands. Germinie, they said, would have to pay only for the
+journey. It was a separation she would have to make up her mind to
+sooner or later on account of her mistress. And then, said the sister,
+she was the child's aunt too. And she heaped words upon words to induce
+Germinie to give them the child, with whom she and her husband expected,
+after their arrival in Africa, to move Germinie to pity, to get
+possession of her wages, to play upon her heart and her purse.
+
+It cost Germinie very dear to part with her niece. She had staked a
+portion of her existence upon the child. She was attached to her by her
+anxiety and her sacrifices. She had disputed possession of her with
+disease and had won the day; the girl's life was her miracle. And yet
+she realized that she could never take her to mademoiselle's apartments;
+that mademoiselle, at her age, with the burden of her years, and an aged
+person's need of tranquillity, could never endure the constant noise and
+movement of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in the house
+would cause idle gossip and set the whole street agog: people would say
+she was her child. Germinie made a confidante of her mistress.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that she had
+taken charge of her niece, although she had pretended not to know it;
+she had chosen to see nothing in order to permit everything. She advised
+Germinie to entrust her niece to her sister, pointing out to her all the
+difficulties in the way of keeping her herself, and she gave her money
+to pay for the journey of the whole family.
+
+The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie. She found herself
+left alone and without occupation. Not having the child, she knew not
+what to love; her heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the
+emptiness of life without the little one, that she turned once more to
+religion and transferred her affections to the church.
+
+Three months had passed when she received news of her sister's death.
+The husband, who was one of the whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics,
+gave her in his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and
+threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position, with the burial
+to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented him from working, two young
+children, without counting the little girl, and a household with no wife
+to heat the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her thoughts
+turned to living in that house, beside that poor man, among the poor
+children, in that horrible Africa; and a vague longing to sacrifice
+herself began to awaken within her. Other letters followed, in which,
+while thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave to his
+poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that enveloped him, a
+still more dramatic coloring--the coloring that the common people impart
+to trifles, with its memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its
+fragments of vile books. Once caught by the _blague_ of this misery,
+Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she could hear the
+cries of the children calling her. She became completely absorbed,
+buried in the project and resolution of going to them. She was haunted
+by the idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and over
+incessantly in the depths of her mind, without a word. Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil, noticing her thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what
+the matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She was pulled this
+way and that, tormented between what seemed to her a duty and what
+seemed to her ingratitude, between her mistress and her sisters' blood.
+She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle. And again she said to
+herself that God did not wish her to abandon her family. She would look
+about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must go!" Then she would fear
+that mademoiselle might be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At
+that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied that she could
+already see someone stealing her mistress. At other moments, when her
+religious ideas impelled her to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all
+ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to
+go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always
+been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief,
+whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she
+anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have
+to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her
+imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice with the greater impatience
+and ardor. Often the whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a
+word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would become herself once
+more, and would fail to recognize herself. She felt that she was bound
+to her mistress absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror
+at having so much as thought of detaching her own life from hers. She
+struggled thus for two years. Then she learned one fine day, by chance,
+that her niece had died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law
+had concealed the child's death in order to maintain his hold upon her,
+and to lure her to him in Africa, with her few sous. Germinie's
+illusions being wholly dispelled by that revelation, she was cured on
+the spot. She hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going
+away.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+About this time a small creamery at the end of the street, with few
+customers, changed hands, as a result of the sale of the real estate by
+order of court. The shop was renovated and repainted. The front windows
+were embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids of
+chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and coffee-cups filled with
+flowers, alternating with small liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the
+shelves. At the door glistened the sign--a copper milk jug divided in
+the middle.
+
+The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern, the new
+_cremiere_, was a person of about fifty years of age, whose corpulence
+passed all bounds, and who still retained some _debris_ of beauty, half
+submerged in fat. It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up
+in business with the money of an old gentleman, whose servant she had
+been until his death, in her native province, near Langres; for it
+happened that she was a countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same
+village, but from a small place near by; and although she and
+mademoiselle's maid had never met nor seen each other in the country,
+they knew each other by name and were drawn together by the fact that
+they had acquaintances in common and could compare memories of the same
+places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected, fawning creature.
+She said: "My love" to everybody, talked in a piping voice, and played
+the child with the querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested
+vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles. She adored
+secrets, twisted everything into a confidential communication, invented
+stories and always whispered in your ear. Her life was passed in
+gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she
+lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much
+she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so
+pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept
+indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for
+milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the
+newspapers, she wept for the sake of weeping.
+
+Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity by this wheedling,
+talkative _cremiere_, who was always in a state of intense emotion,
+calling upon others to open their hearts to her, and apparently so
+affectionate. After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's
+doors that did not come from Mere Jupillon. Germinie procured
+everything, or almost everything there. She passed hours in the shop.
+Once there it was hard work for her to leave; she remained there,
+unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive cowardice detained
+her. At the door she would stop and talk on, in order to delay her
+departure. She felt bound to the _cremiere_ by the invisible charm of
+familiar places to which you constantly return, and which end by
+embracing you like things that would love you. And then, too, in her
+eyes the shop meant Madame Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs;
+she always had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed them and
+talked to them; and when she was warm with their warmth, she would feel
+in the depths of her heart the contentment of a beast rubbing against
+her little ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of the
+quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,--how this one had failed to
+pay her note and that one had received a carriage load of flowers; it
+meant a place that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace
+_peignoir_ going to town on the maid's arm.
+
+In a word everything tended to attach her to the place. Her intimacy
+with the _cremiere_ was strengthened by all the mysterious bonds of
+friendship between women of the people, by the continual chatter, the
+daily exchange of the trivial affairs of life, the conversation for the
+sake of conversing, the repetition of the same _bonjour_ and the same
+_bonsoir_, the division of caresses among the same animals, the naps
+side by side and chair against chair. The shop at last became her
+regular place for idling away her time, a place where her thoughts, her
+words, her body and her very limbs were marvelously at ease. There came
+a time when her happiness consisted in sitting drowsily of an evening in
+a straw arm-chair, beside Mere Jupillon--sound asleep with her
+spectacles on her nose--and holding the dogs rolled in a ball in the
+skirt of her dress; and while the lamp, almost dying, burned pale upon
+the counter, she would sit idly there, letting her glance lose itself at
+the back of the shop, and gradually grow dim, with her ideas, as her
+eyes rested vaguely upon a triumphal arch of snail shells joined
+together with old moss, beneath which stood a little copper Napoleon,
+with his hands behind his back.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Madame Jupillon, who claimed to have been married and signed herself
+_Widow Jupillon_, had a son. He was still a child. She had placed him at
+Saint-Nicholas, the great religious establishment where, for thirty
+francs a month, rudimentary instruction and a trade are furnished to the
+children of the common people, and to many natural children. Germinie
+fell into the way of accompanying Madame Jupillon when she went to see
+_Bibi_ on Thursdays. This visit became a means of distraction to her,
+something to look forward to. She would urge the mother to hurry, would
+always arrive first at the omnibus office, and was content to sit with
+her arms resting on a huge basket of provisions all the way.
+
+It happened that Mere Jupillon had trouble with her leg--a carbuncle
+that prevented her from walking for nearly eighteen months. Germinie
+went alone to Saint-Nicholas, and as she was promptly and easily led to
+devote herself to others, she took as deep an interest in that child as
+if he were connected with her in some way. She did not miss a single
+Thursday and always arrived with her hands full of the last week's
+desserts, and with cakes and fruit and sweetmeats she had bought. She
+would kiss the urchin, inquire for his health, and feel to see if he had
+his knitted vest under his blouse; she would notice how flushed he was
+from running, would wipe his face with her handkerchief and make him
+show her the soles of his shoes so that she could see if there were any
+holes in them. She would ask if his teachers were satisfied with him, if
+he attended to his duties and if he had had many good marks. She would
+talk to him of his mother and bid him love the good Lord, and until the
+clock struck two she would walk with him in the courtyard: the child
+would offer her his arm, as proud as you please to be with a woman much
+better dressed than the majority of those who came there--with a woman
+in silk. He was anxious to learn the flageolet. It cost only five francs
+a month, but his mother would not give them. Germinie carried him the
+hundred sous every month, on the sly. It was a humiliating thing to him
+to wear the little uniform blouse when he went out to walk, and on the
+two or three occasions during the year when he went to see his mother.
+On his birthday, one year, Germinie unfolded a large parcel before him:
+she had had a tunic made for him; it is doubtful if twenty of his
+comrades in the whole school belonged to families in sufficiently easy
+circumstances to wear such garments.
+
+She spoiled him thus for several years, not allowing him to suffer with
+a longing for anything, encouraging the caprices and the pride of
+wealthy children in the poor child, softening for him the privations and
+hardships of that trade school, where children were formed for a
+laboring life, wore blouses and ate off plates of brown earthenware; a
+school that by its toilsome apprenticeship hardened the children of the
+people to lives of toil. Meanwhile the boy was growing fast. Germinie
+did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always
+been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was
+summoned before the abbe who was at the head of the school. He spoke to
+her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his
+possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited
+the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she
+succeeded at last in inducing the abbe to forgive the culprit. When she
+went down into the courtyard again she attempted to scold him; but at
+the first word of her moral lecture, Bibi suddenly cast in her face a
+glance and smile in which there was no trace of the child that he was
+the day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one to blush. A
+fortnight passed before she went again to Saint-Nicholas.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+About the time that young Jupillon left the boarding-school, a maid in
+the service of a kept woman who lived on the floor below mademoiselle
+sometimes passed the evening with Germinie at Madame Jupillon's. A
+native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which supplies Paris with coupe
+drivers and lorettes' waiting-maids, this girl was what is called in
+vulgar parlance: "a great _bringue_;" she was an awkward, wild-eyed
+creature, with the eyebrows of a water carrier. She soon fell into the
+habit of going there every evening. She treated everybody to cakes and
+liquors, amused herself by showing off little Jupillon, playing
+pat-a-cake with him, sitting on his knee, telling him to his face that
+he was a beauty, treating him like a child, playing the wanton with him
+and joking him because he was not a man. The boy, happy and proud of
+these attentions from the first woman who had ever taken notice of him,
+manifested before long his preference for Adele: so was the new-comer
+called.
+
+Germinie was passionately jealous. Jealousy was the foundation of her
+nature; it was the dregs of her affection and gave it its bitter taste.
+Those whom she loved she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess
+them absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one but her. She
+could not permit them to take from her and bestow upon others the
+slightest fragment of their affection: as she had earned it, it no
+longer belonged to them; they were no longer entitled to dispose of it.
+She detested the people whom her mistress seemed to welcome more
+cordially than others, and with whom she was on most intimate terms. By
+her ill-humor and her sullen manner she had offended, had almost driven
+from the house, two or three of mademoiselle's old friends, whose visits
+wounded her; as if the old ladies came there for the purpose of
+abstracting something from the rooms, of taking a little of her mistress
+from her. People of whom she had once been fond became odious to her:
+she did not consider that they were fond enough of her; she hated them
+for all the love she wanted from them. Her heart was despotic and
+exacting in everything. As it gave all, it demanded all in return. At
+the least sign of coldness, at the slightest indication that she had a
+rival, she would fly into a rage, tear her hair, pass her nights in
+weeping, and execrate the whole world.
+
+Seeing that other woman make herself at home in the shop and adopt a
+tone of familiarity with the young man, all Germinie's jealous instincts
+were aroused and changed to furious rage. Her hatred flew to arms and
+rebelled, with her disgust, against the shameless, brazen-faced
+creature, who could be seen on Sunday sitting at table on the outer
+boulevards with soldiers, and who had blue marks on her face on Monday.
+She did her utmost to induce Madame Jupillon to turn her away; but she
+was one of the best customers of the creamery, and the _cremiere_ mildly
+refused to close her doors upon her. Germinie had recourse to the son
+and told him that she was a miserable creature. But that only served to
+attach the young man the closer to the vile woman, whose evil reputation
+delighted him. Moreover, he had the cruel mischievous instinct of youth,
+and he redoubled his attentions to her simply to see "the nose" that
+Germinie made and to enjoy her despair. Soon Germinie discovered that
+the woman's intentions were more serious than she had at first supposed:
+she began to understand what she wanted of the child,--for the tall
+youth of seventeen was still a child in her eyes. Thenceforward she hung
+upon their steps; she was always beside them, never left them alone for
+a moment, made one at all their parties, at the theatre or in the
+country, joined them in all their walks, was always at hand and in the
+way, seeking to hold Adele back, and to restore her sense of decency by
+a word in an undertone: "A mere boy! ain't you ashamed?" she would say
+to her. And the other would laugh aloud, as if it were a good joke.
+
+When they left the theatre, enlivened and heated by the feverish
+excitement of the performance and the place; when they returned from an
+excursion to the country, laden with a long day's sunshine, intoxicated
+with the blue sky and the pure air, excited by the wine imbibed at
+dinner, amid the sportive liberties in which the woman of the people,
+drunk with enjoyment and with the delights of unlimited good cheer, and
+with the senses keyed up to the highest pitch of joviality, makes bold
+to indulge at night, Germinie tried to be always between the maid and
+Jupillon. She never relaxed her efforts to break the lovers' hold upon
+each other's arms, to unbind them, to uncouple them. Never wearying of
+the task, she was forever separating them, luring them away from each
+other. She placed her body between those bodies that were groping for
+each other. She glided between the hands outstretched to touch each
+other; she glided between the lips that were put forth in search of
+other proffered lips. But of all this that she prevented she felt the
+breath and the shock. She felt the pressure of the hands she held apart,
+the caresses that she caught on the wing and that missed their mark and
+went astray upon her. The hot breath of the kisses she intercepted blew
+upon her cheek. Involuntarily, and with a feeling of horror, she became
+a party to the embracing, she was infected with the desires aroused by
+this constant friction and struggling, which diminished day by day the
+young man's restraint and respect for her person.
+
+It happened one day that she was less strong against herself than she
+had previously been. On that occasion she did not elude his advances so
+abruptly as usual. Jupillon felt that she stopped short. Germinie felt
+it even more keenly than he; but she was at the end of her efforts,
+exhausted with the torture she had undergone. The love which, coming
+from another, she had turned aside from Jupillon, had slowly taken full
+possession of her own heart. Now it was firmly rooted there, and,
+bleeding with jealousy, she found that she was incapable of resistance,
+weak and fainting, like a person fatally wounded, in presence of the joy
+that had come to her.
+
+She repelled the young man's audacious attempts, however, without a
+word. She did not dream of belonging to him otherwise than as a friend,
+or giving way farther than she had done. She lived upon the thought of
+love, believing that she could live upon it always. And in the ecstatic
+exaltation of her thoughts, she put aside all memory of her fall, and
+repressed her desires. She remained shuddering and pure, lost and
+suspended in abysses of affection, neither enjoying nor wishing for
+aught from the lover but a caress, as if her heart were made only for
+the joy of kissing.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+This happy though unsatisfied love produced a strange physiological
+phenomenon in Germinie's physical being. One would have said that the
+passion that was alive within her renewed and transformed her lymphatic
+temperament. She did not seem, as before, to extract her life, drop by
+drop, from a penurious spring: it flowed through her arteries in a full,
+generous stream; she felt the tingling sensation of rich blood over her
+whole body. She seemed to be filled with the warm glow of health, and
+the joy of living beat its wings in her breast like a bird in the
+sunlight.
+
+A marvelous animation had come to her. The miserable nervous energy that
+once sustained her had given place to healthy activity, to bustling,
+restless, overflowing gayety. She had no trace now of the weakness, the
+dejection, the prostration, the supineness, the sluggishness that
+formerly distinguished her. The heavy, drowsy feeling in the morning was
+a thing of the past; she awoke feeling fresh and bright, and alive in an
+instant to the cheer of the new day. She dressed in haste, playfully;
+her agile fingers moved of themselves, and she was amazed to be so
+bright and full of activity during the hours of faintness before
+breakfast, when she had so often felt her heart upon her lips. And
+throughout the day she had the same consciousness of physical
+well-being, the same briskness of movement. She must be always on the
+move, walking, running, doing something, expending her strength. At
+times all that she had lived through seemed to have no existence; the
+sensations of living that she had hitherto experienced seemed to her
+like a far-off dream, or as if dimly seen in the background of a
+sleeping memory. The past lay behind her, as if she had traversed it,
+covered with a veil like one in a swoon, or with the unconsciousness of
+a somnambulist. It was the first time that she had experienced the
+feeling, the impression, at once bitter and sweet, violent and
+celestial, of the game of life brilliant in its plenitude, its
+regularity and its power.
+
+She ran up and downstairs for a nothing. At a word from mademoiselle she
+would trip down the whole five flights. When she was seated, her feet
+danced on the floor. She brushed and scrubbed and beat and shook and
+washed and set to rights, without rest or reprieve, always at work,
+filling the apartment with her goings and comings, and the incessant
+bustle that followed her about.--"Mon Dieu!" her mistress would say,
+stunned by the uproar she made, just like a child,--"you're turning
+things upside down, Germinie! that will do for that!"
+
+One day, when she went into Germinie's kitchen, mademoiselle saw a
+little earth in a cigar box on the leads.--"What's that?" she
+asked.--"That's grass--that I planted--to look at," said Germinie.--"So
+you're in love with grass now, eh? All you need now is to have
+canaries!"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In the course of a few months, Germinie's life, her whole life belonged
+to the _cremiere_. Mademoiselle's service was not exacting and took but
+little time. A whiting or a cutlet--that was all the cooking there was
+to be done. Mademoiselle might have kept her with her in the evening for
+company: she preferred, however, to send her away, to drive her out of
+doors, to force her to take a little air and diversion. She asked only
+that she would return at ten o'clock to help her to bed; and yet when
+Germinie was a little late, mademoiselle undressed herself and went to
+bed alone very comfortably. Every hour that her mistress left her at
+leisure, Germinie passed in the shop. She fell into the habit of going
+down to the creamery in the morning, when the shutters were removed, and
+generally carried them inside; she would take her _cafe au lait_ there
+and remain until nine o'clock, when she would go back and give
+mademoiselle her chocolate; and between breakfast and dinner she found
+excuses for returning two or three times, delaying and chattering in the
+back-shop on the slightest pretext. "What a magpie you are getting to
+be!" mademoiselle would say, in a scolding voice, but with a smiling
+face.
+
+At half past five, when her mistress's little dinner was cleared away,
+she would run down the stairs four at a time, install herself at Mere
+Jupillon's, wait until ten o'clock, clamber up the five flights, and in
+five minutes undress her mistress, who submitted unresistingly, albeit
+she was somewhat astonished that Germinie should be in such haste to go
+to bed; she remembered the time when she had a mania for moving her
+sleepy body from one easy-chair to another, and was never willing to go
+up to her room. While the candle was still smoking on mademoiselle's
+night table, Germinie would be back at the creamery, this time to remain
+until midnight, until one o'clock; often she did not go until a
+policeman, noticing the light, tapped on the shutters and made them
+close up.
+
+In order to be always there and to have the right to be always there, to
+make herself a part of the shop, to keep her eyes constantly upon the
+man she loved, to hover about him, to keep him, to be always brushing
+against him, she had become the servant of the establishment. She swept
+the shop, she prepared the old woman's meals and the food for the dogs.
+She waited upon the son; she made his bed, she brushed his clothes, she
+waxed his boots, happy and proud to touch what he touched, thrilling
+with pleasure when she placed her hand where he placed his body, and
+ready to kiss the mud upon the leather of his boots, because it was
+his!
+
+She did the menial work, she kept the shop, she served the customers.
+Madame Jupillon rested everything upon her shoulders; and while the
+good-natured girl was working and perspiring, the bulky matron, assuming
+the majestic, leisurely air of an annuitant, anchored upon a chair in
+the middle of the sidewalk and inhaling the fresh air of the street,
+fingered and rattled the precious coin in the capacious pocket beneath
+her apron--the coin that rings so sweetly in the ears of the petty
+tradesmen of Paris, that the retired shopkeeper is melancholy beyond
+words at first, because he no longer has the chinking and the tinkling
+under his hand.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+When the spring came, Germinie said to Jupillon almost every evening:
+"Suppose we go as far as the beginning of the fields?"
+
+Jupillon would put on his flannel shirt with red and black squares, and
+his black velvet cap; and they would start for what the people of the
+quarter call "the beginning of the fields."
+
+They would go up the Chaussee Clignancourt, and, with the flood of
+Parisians from the faubourg hurrying to drink a little fresh air, would
+walk on toward the great patch of sky that rose straight from the
+pavements, at the top of the ascent, between the two lines of houses,
+unobstructed except by an occasional omnibus. The air was growing cooler
+and the sun shone only upon the roofs of the houses and the chimneys. As
+from a great door opening into the country, there came from the end of
+the street and from the sky beyond, a breath of boundless space and
+liberty.
+
+At the Chateau-Rouge they found the first tree, the first foliage. Then,
+at Rue du Chateau, the horizon opened before them in dazzling beauty.
+The fields stretched away in the distance, glistening vaguely in the
+powdery, golden haze of seven o'clock. All nature trembled in the
+daylight dust that the day leaves in its wake, upon the verdure it blots
+from sight and the houses it suffuses with pink.
+
+Frequently they descended the footpath covered with the figures of the
+game of hop-scotch marked out in charcoal, by long walls with an
+occasional overhanging branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens
+between. At their left rose tree-tops filled with light, clustering
+foliage pierced by the beams of the setting sun, which cast lines of
+fire across the bars of the iron gateways. After the gardens came
+hedgerows, estates for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line
+of projected streets and stretching out their jagged walls into empty
+space, with heaps of broken bottles at their feet; large, low, plastered
+houses, with windows filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the Y
+of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into enclosures that
+resembled barnyards, studded with little mounds on which goats were
+browsing.
+
+They would stop here and there and smell the flowers, inhale the perfume
+of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf
+in passing and nibble at it.
+
+Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles and in fantastic
+figures over her head. The birds called. The sky answered the cages. She
+heard everything about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at
+the women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their shirt sleeves
+in the little gardens, the mothers on the doorsteps with their little
+ones between their legs.
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter XII
+
+_But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with
+Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were
+families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small
+annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of
+want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats
+characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red
+beards._]
+
+
+At the foot of the slope the pavement came to an end. The street was
+succeeded by a broad, white, chalky, dusty road, made of debris, old
+pieces of plaster, crumbs of lime and bricks; a sunken road, with deep
+ruts, polished on the edges, made by the iron tires of the huge great
+wheels of carts laden with hewn stone. At that point began the things
+that collect where Paris ends, the things that grow where grass does not
+grow, one of those arid landscapes that large cities create around them,
+the first zone of suburbs _intra muros_ where nature is exhausted, the
+soil used up, the fields sown with oyster shells. Beyond was a
+wilderness of half-enclosed yards displaying numbers of carts and trucks
+with their shafts in the air against the sky, stone-cutters' sheds,
+factories built of boards, unfinished workmen's houses, full of gaps and
+open to the light, and bearing the mason's flag, wastes of gray and
+white sand, kitchen gardens marked out with cords, and, on the lower
+level, bogs to which the embankment of the road slopes down in oceans of
+small stones.
+
+Soon they would reach the last lantern hanging on a green post. People
+were still coming and going about them. The road was alive and amused
+the eyes. They met women carrying their husband's canes, lorettes in
+silk dresses leaning on the arms of their blouse-clad brothers, old
+women in bright-colored ginghams walking about with folded arms,
+enjoying a moment's rest from labor. Workmen were drawing their children
+in little wagons, urchins returning with their rods from fishing at
+Saint-Ouen, and men and women dragging branches of flowering acacia at
+the ends of sticks.
+
+Sometimes a pregnant woman would pass, holding out her arms to a yet
+small child, and casting the shadow of her pregnancy upon the wall.
+
+And everyone moved tranquilly, blissfully, at a pace that told of the
+wish to delay, with the awkward ease and the happy indolence of those
+who walk for pleasure. No one was in a hurry, and against the unbroken
+horizon line, crossed from time to time by the white smoke of a railroad
+train, the groups of promenaders were like black spots, almost
+motionless, in the distance.
+
+Behind Montmartre, they came to those great moats, as it were, those
+sloping squares, where narrow, gray, much-trodden paths cross and
+recross. A few blades of shriveled, yellow grass grew thereabout,
+softened by the rays of the setting sun, which they could see, all
+ablaze, between the houses. And Germinie loved to watch the wool-combers
+at work there, the quarry horses at pasture in the bare fields, the
+madder-red trousers of the soldiers who were playing at bowls, the
+children flying kites that made black spots in the clear air. Passing
+all these, they turned to cross the bridge over the railroad by the
+wretched settlement of ragpickers, the stonemasons' quarter at the foot
+of Clignancourt hill. They would walk quickly by those houses built of
+materials stolen from demolished buildings, and exuding the horrors they
+conceal; the wretched structures, half cabin, half burrow, caused
+Germinie a vague feeling of terror: it seemed to her as if all the
+crimes of Night were lurking there.
+
+But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with
+Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were
+families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small
+annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of
+want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats
+characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red
+beards. The air was full of rich harmonies. Below her, in the moat, a
+musical society was playing at each corner. Before her eyes was a
+multi-colored crowd, white blouses, children in blue aprons running
+around, a game of riding at the ring in progress, wine shops, cake
+shops, fried fish stalls, and shooting galleries half hidden in clumps
+of verdure, from which arose staves bearing the tricolor; and farther
+away, in a bluish haze, a line of tree tops marked the location of a
+road. To the right she could see Saint-Denis and the towering basilica;
+at her left, above a line of houses that were becoming indistinct, the
+sun was setting over Saint-Ouen in a disk of cherry-colored flame, and
+projecting upon the gray horizon shafts of light like red pillars that
+seemed to support it tremblingly. Often a child's balloon would pass
+swiftly across the dazzling expanse of sky.
+
+They would go down, pass through the gate, walk along by the Lorraine
+sausage shops, the dealers in honeycomb, the board _cabarets_, the
+verdureless, still unpainted arbors, where a noisy multitude of men and
+women and children were eating fried potatoes, mussels and prawns, until
+they reached the first field, the first living grass: on the edge of the
+grass there was a handcart laden with gingerbread and peppermint
+lozenges, and a woman selling hot cocoa on a table in the furrow. A
+strange country, where everything was mingled--the smoke from the
+frying-pan and the evening vapor, the noise of quoits on the head of a
+cask and the silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the idyllic
+rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh smell of green wheat, the
+great human Fair and Nature! Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging
+Jupillon to go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she would
+constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the fresh, cool sensation of
+the stalks against her stockings. When they returned she always wanted
+to go upon the slope once more. The sun had by that time disappeared and
+the sky was gray below, pink in the centre and blue above. The horizon
+grew dark; from green the trees became a dark brown and melted into the
+sky; the zinc roofs of the wine shops looked as if the moon were
+shining upon them, fires began to appear in the darkness, the crowd
+became gray, and the white linen took on a bluish tinge. Little by
+little everything would fade away, be blotted out, lose its form and
+color in a dying remnant of colorless daylight, and through the
+increasing darkness the voices of a class whose life begins at night,
+and the voice of the wine beginning to sing, would arise, mingled with
+the din of the rattles. Upon the slope the tops of the tall grass waved
+to and fro in the gentle breeze. Germinie would make up her mind to go.
+She would wend her way homeward, filled with the influence of the
+falling night, abandoning herself to the uncertain vision of things
+half-seen, passing the dark houses, and finding that everything along
+her road had turned paler, as it were--wearied by the long walk over
+rough roads, and content to be weary and slow and half-fainting, and
+with a feeling of peace at her heart.
+
+At the first lighted lanterns on Rue du Chateau, she would fall from her
+dream to the pavement.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Madame Jupillon's face always wore a pleased expression when Germinie
+appeared; when she kissed her she was very effusive, when she spoke to
+her her voice was caressing, when she looked at her her glance was most
+amiable. The huge creature's kind heart seemed, when with her, to
+abandon itself to the emotion, the affection, the trustfulness of a sort
+of maternal tenderness. She took Germinie into her confidence as to her
+business, as to her woman's secrets, as to the most private affairs of
+her life. She seemed to open her heart to her as to a person of her own
+blood, whom she desired to make familiar with matters of interest to the
+family. When she spoke of the future, she always referred to Germinie as
+one from whom she was never to be separated, and who formed a part of
+the household. Often she allowed certain discreet, mysterious smiles to
+escape her, smiles which made it appear that she saw all that was going
+on and was not angry. Sometimes, too, when her son was sitting by
+Germinie's side, she would let her eyes, moist with a mother's tears,
+rest upon them, and would embrace them with a glance that seemed to
+unite her two children and call down a blessing on their heads.
+
+Without speaking, without ever uttering a word that could be construed
+as an engagement, without divulging her thoughts or binding herself in
+any way, and all the time repeating that her son was still very young to
+think of being married, she encouraged Germinie's hopes and illusions by
+her whole bearing, her airs of secret indulgence and of complicity, so
+far as her heart was concerned; by those meaning silences when she
+seemed to open to her a mother-in-law's arms. And displaying all her
+talents in the way of hypocrisy, drawing upon her hidden mines of
+sentiment, her good-natured shrewdness, and the consummate, intricate
+cunning that fat people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in
+vanquishing Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit assurance
+and promise of marriage; and she finally allowed the young man's ardor
+to extort from her what she believed that she was giving in advance to
+the husband.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+As Germinie was going down the servant's staircase one day, she heard
+Adele's voice calling her over the banister and telling her to bring her
+two sous' worth of butter and ten of absinthe.
+
+"Oh! you can sit down a minute, you know you can," said Adele, when she
+brought her the absinthe and the butter. "I never see you now, you'll
+never come in. Come! you have plenty of time to be with your old woman.
+For my part, I couldn't live with an Antichrist's face like hers! So
+stay. This is the house without work to-day. There isn't a sou--madame's
+abed. Whenever there's no money, she goes to bed, does madame; she stays
+in bed all day, reading novels. Have some of this?"--And she offered her
+her glass of absinthe.--"No? oh! no, you don't drink. You're very
+foolish. It's a funny thing not to drink. Say, it would be very nice of
+you to write me a little line for my dearie. Hard work, you know. I have
+told you about it. See, here's madame's pen--and her paper--it smells
+good. Are you ready? He's a good fellow, my dear, and no mistake! He's
+in the butcher line as I told you. Ah! my word! I mustn't rub him the
+wrong way! When he's had a glass of blood after killing his beasts, he's
+like a madman--and if you're obstinate with him--Dame! why then he
+thumps you! But what would you have? He does that to make him strong. If
+you could see him thump himself on the breast--blows that would kill an
+ox, and say: 'That's a wall, that is!' Ah! he's a gentleman, I tell you!
+Are you thinking about the letter, eh? Make it one of the fetching kind.
+Say nice things to him, you know--and a little sad--he adores that. At
+the theatre he doesn't like anything that doesn't make him cry. Look
+here! Imagine that you're writing to a lover of your own."
+
+Germinie began to write.
+
+"Say, Germinie! Have you heard? Madame's taken a strange idea into her
+head. It's a funny thing about women like her, who can hold their heads
+up with the greatest of 'em, who can have everything, hobnob with kings
+if they choose! And there's nothing to be said--when one is like madame,
+you know, when one has such a body as that! And then the way they load
+themselves down with finery, with their tralala of dresses and lace
+everywhere and everything else--how do you suppose anyone can resist
+them? And if it isn't a gentleman, if it's someone like us--you can see
+how much more all that will catch him; a woman in velvet goes to his
+brain. Yes, my dear, just fancy, here's madame gone daft on that
+_gamin_ of a Jupillon! That's all we needed to make us die of hunger
+here!"
+
+Germinie, with her pen in the air over the letter she had begun, looked
+up at Adele, devouring her with her eyes.
+
+"That brings you to a standstill, doesn't it?" said Adele, sipping her
+absinthe, her face lighted up with joy at sight of Germinie's
+discomposed features. "Oh! it is too absurd, really; but it's true, 'pon
+my word it's true. She noticed the _gamin_ on the steps of the shop the
+other day, coming home from the races. She's been there two or three
+times on the pretence of buying something. She'll probably have some
+perfumery sent from there--to-morrow, I think.--Bah! it's sickening,
+isn't it? It's their affair. Well! what about my letter? Is it what I
+told you that makes you so stupid? You played the prude--I didn't
+know--Oh! yes, yes, now I remember; that's what it is--What was it you
+said to me about the little one? I believe you didn't want anyone to
+touch him! Idiot!"
+
+At a gesture of denial from Germinie, she continued:
+
+"Nonsense, nonsense! What do I care? The kind of a child that, if you
+blew his nose, milk would come out! Thanks! that's not my style.
+However, that's your business. Come, now for my letter, eh?"
+
+Germinie leaned over the sheet of paper. But she was burning up with
+fever; the quill cracked in her nervous fingers. "There," she said,
+throwing it down after a few seconds, "I don't know what's the matter
+with me to-day. I'll write it for you another time."
+
+"As you like, little one--but I rely on you. Come to-morrow, then.--I'll
+tell you some of madame's nonsense. We'll have a good laugh at her!"
+
+And, when the door was closed, Adele began to roar with laughter: it had
+cost her only a little _blague_ to unearth Germinie's secret.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+So far as young Jupillon was concerned, love was simply the satisfaction
+of a certain evil curiosity, which sought, in the knowledge and
+possession of a woman, the privilege and the pleasure of despising her.
+Just emerging from boyhood, the young man had brought to his first
+_liaison_ no other ardor, no other flame than the cold instincts of
+rascality awakened in boys by vile books, the confidences of their
+comrades, boarding-school conversation, the first breath of impurity
+which debauches desire. The sentiment with which the young man usually
+regards the woman who yields to him, the caresses, the loving words, the
+affectionate attentions with which he envelops her--nothing of all that
+existed in Jupillon's case. Woman was to him simply an obscene image;
+and a passion for a woman seemed to him desirable as being prohibited,
+illicit, vulgar, cynical and amusing--an excellent opportunity for
+trickery and sarcasm.
+
+Sarcasm--the low, cowardly, despicable sarcasm of the dregs of the
+people--was the beginning and the end of this youth. He was a perfect
+type of those Parisians who bear upon their faces the mocking
+scepticism of the great city of _blague_ in which they are born. The
+smile, the shrewdness and the mischief of the Parisian physiognomy were
+always mocking and impertinent in him. Jupillon's smile had the jovial
+expression imparted by a wicked mouth, a mouth that was almost cruel at
+the corners of the lips, which curled upward and were always twitching
+nervously. His face was pale with the pallor that nitric acid strong
+enough to eat copper gives to the complexion, and in his sharp, pert,
+bold features were mingled bravado, energy, recklessness, intelligence,
+impudence and all sorts of rascally expressions, softened, at certain
+times, by a cat-like, wheedling air. His trade of glove-cutter--he had
+taken up with that trade after two or three unsuccessful trials as an
+apprentice in other crafts--the habit of working in the shop-windows, of
+being on exhibition to the passers-by, had given to his whole person the
+self-assurance and the dandified airs of a _poseur_. Sitting in the
+work-shop on the street, with his white shirt, his little black cravat
+_a la Colin_, and his skin-tight pantaloons, he had adopted an awkward
+air of nonchalance, the pretentious carriage and _canaille_ affectations
+of the workman who knows he is being stared at. And various little
+refinements of doubtful taste, the parting of the hair in the middle and
+brushing it down over the temples, the low shirt collars that left the
+whole neck bare, the striving after the coquettish effects that
+properly belong to the other sex, gave him an uncertain appearance,
+which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by
+a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his sexless features to which
+passion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish
+woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon
+style were of the highest distinction.
+
+Thus constituted, with nothing lovable about him and incapable of a
+genuine attachment even through his passions, Jupillon was greatly
+embarrassed and bored by this adoration which became intoxicated with
+itself, and waxed greater day by day. Germinie wearied him to death. She
+seemed to him absurd in her humiliation, and laughable in her devotion.
+He was weary, disgusted, worn out with her. He had had enough of her
+love, enough of her person. And he had no hesitation about cutting loose
+from her, without charity or pity. He ran away from her. He failed to
+keep the appointments she made. He pretended that he was kept away by
+accident, by errands to be done, by a pressure of work. At night, she
+waited for him and he did not come; she supposed that he was detained by
+business: in fact he was at some low billiard hall, or at some ball at
+the barrier.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+There was a ball at the _Boule-Noire_ one Thursday. The dancing was in
+full blast.
+
+The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement
+for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry
+splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold,
+gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet
+hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an
+ale-house with the decorations of a cardboard palace.
+
+Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows
+and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were
+lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white
+panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames,
+alternated with Prud'hon's _Seasons_, which were much astonished to find
+themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical
+Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort
+used by suburban hair-dressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre
+arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where
+there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken
+rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed
+the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted
+green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a cafe.
+
+In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat
+of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled
+woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black _paletots_, women in
+_caracos_ worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of
+open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole
+assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a
+glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a
+glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy
+colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This
+absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning;
+it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of
+lifelessness and earthiness--a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there
+was a suggestion of the Hotel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piete!
+
+An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side passed in front
+of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red
+apples.
+
+From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a
+soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of
+sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached
+face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a
+second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off
+finery of some kept mistress.
+
+The men wore _paletots_, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears,
+and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited
+the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered
+behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored shirts, had an
+insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great
+family.
+
+Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered
+and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure.
+And in the evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel
+addresses given: _Impasse du Depotoir_.
+
+Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the
+air of _La Casquette du pere Bugeaud_, in which the cymbals, the
+sleigh-bells and the drum had infected the dancers with the giddiness
+and madness of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole room,
+all the men leading their partners back to the places marked by their
+caps: she had been misled; _he_ was not there, she could not see him.
+However, she waited. She entered the dancers' enclosure and sat down on
+the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much embarrassed. From their
+linen caps she judged that the women seated in line beside her were
+servants like herself: comrades of her own class alarmed her less than
+the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets and their hands
+in the pockets of their _paletots_, who strolled humming about the room.
+But soon she aroused hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat--only
+about a dozen women at the ball wore hats--her flounced skirt, the white
+hem of which could be seen under her dress, the gold brooch that secured
+her shawl awakened malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and
+smiles were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All the women
+seemed to be asking one another where this new arrival had come from,
+and to be saying to one another that she would take their lovers from
+them. Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs, with their
+arms about one another's waists as if for a waltz, made her lower her
+eyes as they passed in front of her, and then went on with a
+contemptuous shrug, turning their heads to look back at her.
+
+She changed her place: she was met with the same smiles, the same
+whispering, the same hostility. She went to the further end of the hall;
+all the women looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in
+malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress to the flowers on
+her hat. Her face flushed. At times she feared that she should weep. She
+longed to leave the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of
+the hall all alone.
+
+She began mechanically to watch an old woman who was slowly making the
+circuit of the hall with a noiseless step, like a bird of night flying
+in a circle. A black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her
+_bandeaux_ of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine shoulders,
+hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan. When she reached the door, she cast a
+last glance about the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye
+of a vulture seeking in vain for food.
+
+Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive
+youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against
+which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a noise like breaking
+furniture.
+
+As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he was sitting between
+two women at a green table in a window-recess, smoking. One of the two
+was a tall blonde with a small quantity of frizzled flaxen hair, a flat,
+stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise lay in folds on her
+back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black apron which she
+was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark
+creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap,
+was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a
+white knitted hood with a blue border.
+
+Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw her rise and approach him,
+with her eyes fixed upon his face, he whispered something to the woman
+in the hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and waited.
+
+"Hallo! you here," he exclaimed when Germinie stood before him, erect,
+motionless and mute. "This is a surprise!--Waiter! another bowl!"
+
+And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the two women's glasses,
+he continued: "Come, don't make up faces--sit down there."
+
+And, as Germinie did not budge: "Go on! These ladies are friends of
+mine--ask them!"
+
+"Melie," said the woman in the hood to the other woman, in a voice like
+a diseased crow's, "don't you see? She's monsieur's mother. Make room
+for the lady if she'd like to drink with us."
+
+Germinie cast a murderous glance at the woman.
+
+"Well! what's the matter?" the woman continued; "that don't suit you,
+madame, eh? Excuse me! you ought to have told me beforehand. How old do
+you suppose she is, Melie, eh? _Sapristi!_ You select young ones, my
+boy, you don't put yourself out!"
+
+Jupillon smiled internally, and simpered and sneered externally. His
+whole manner displayed the cowardly delight that evil-minded persons
+take in watching the suffering of those who suffer because of loving
+them.
+
+"I have something to say to you--to you!--not here--outside," said
+Germinie.
+
+"Much joy to you! Coming, Melie?" said the woman in the hood, lighting
+the stub of a cigar that Jupillon had left on the table beside a piece
+of lemon.
+
+"What do you want?" said Jupillon, impressed, in spite of himself, by
+Germinie's tone.
+
+"Come!"
+
+And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the people crowded about
+her, laughing. She heard voices, broken sentences, subdued hooting.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Jupillon promised Germinie not to go to the ball again. But he was just
+beginning to make a name for himself at La Brididi, among the low haunts
+near the barrier, the _Boule-Noire_, the _Reine-Blanche_ and the
+_Ermitage_. He had become one of the dancers who make the guests leave
+their seats, who keep a whole roomful of people hanging on the soles of
+their boots as they toss them two inches above their heads, and whom the
+fair dancers of the locality invite to dance with them and sometimes pay
+for their refreshment to that end. The ball to him was not a ball
+simply; it was a stage, an audience, popularity, applause, the
+flattering murmur of his name among the groups of people, an ovation
+accorded to saltatory glory in the glare of the reverberators.
+
+On Sunday he did not go to the _Boule-Noire_; but on the following
+Thursday he went there again; and Germinie, seeing plainly enough that
+she could not prevent him from going, decided to follow him and to stay
+there as long as he did. Sitting at a table in the background, in the
+least brilliantly lighted corner of the ball-room, she would follow him
+eagerly with her eyes throughout the whole contra-dance; and when it was
+at an end, if he held back, she would go and seize him, take him almost
+by force from the hands and caresses of the women who persisted in
+trying to pull him back, to detain him by wicked wiles.
+
+As they soon came to know her, the insulting remarks in her neighborhood
+ceased to be vague and indistinct and muttered under the breath, as at
+the first ball. The words were thrown in her face, the laughter spoke
+aloud. She was obliged to pass her three hours amid a chorus of derision
+that pointed its finger at her, called her by name and cast her age in
+her face. At every turn she was forced to submit to the appellation of:
+_old woman!_ which the young hussies spat at her over their shoulders as
+they passed. But they did at least look at her; often, however, dancing
+women invited by Jupillon to drink, and brought by him to the table at
+which Germinie was, would sit with their elbows on the table and their
+cheeks resting on their hands, drinking the bowl of mulled wine for
+which she paid, apparently unaware that there was another woman there,
+crowding into her place as if it were unoccupied, and making no reply
+when she spoke to them. Germinie could have killed these creatures whom
+Jupillon forced her to entertain and who despised her so utterly that
+they did not even notice her presence.
+
+The time arrived, when, having endured all she could endure and being
+sickened by the humiliation she was forced to swallow, she conceived
+the idea of dancing herself. She saw no other way to avoid leaving her
+lover to others, to keep him by her all the evening, and perhaps to bind
+him more closely to her by her success, if she had any chance of
+succeeding. Throughout a whole month she worked, in secret, to learn to
+dance. She rehearsed the figures and the steps. She forced her body into
+unnatural attitudes, she wore herself out trying to master the
+contortions and the manipulations of the skirt that she saw were
+applauded. At the end of the month she made the venture; but everything
+tended to disconcert her and added to her awkwardness; the hostility
+that she could feel in the atmosphere, the smiles of astonishment and
+pity that played about the lips of the spectators when she took her
+place in the dancers' enclosure. She was so absurd and so laughed at,
+that she had not the courage to make a second attempt. She buried
+herself gloomily in her dark corner, only leaving it to hunt up Jupillon
+and carry him off, with the mute violence of a wife dragging her husband
+out of the wineshop and leading him home by the arm.
+
+It was soon rumored in the street that Germinie went to these balls,
+that she never missed one of them. The fruit woman, at whose shop Adele
+had already held forth, sent her son "to see;" he returned with a
+confirmation of the rumor, and told of all the petty annoyances to which
+Germinie was subjected, but which did not keep her from returning.
+Thereafter there was no more doubt in the quarter as to the relations
+between mademoiselle's servant and Jupillon--relations which some
+charitable souls had hitherto persisted in denying. The scandal burst
+out, and in a week the poor girl, berated by all the slanderous tongues
+in the quarter, baptized and saluted by the vilest names in the language
+of the streets, fell at a blow from the most emphatically expressed
+esteem to the most brutally advertised contempt.
+
+Thus far her pride--and it was very great--had procured for her the
+respect and consideration which is bestowed, in the lorette quarters,
+upon a servant who honestly serves a virtuous mistress. She had become
+accustomed to respect and deference and attention. She stood apart from
+her comrades. Her unassailable probity, her conduct, as to which not a
+word could be said, her confidential relations with mademoiselle, which
+caused her mistress's honorable character to be reflected upon her, led
+the shopkeeper to treat her on a different footing from the other maids.
+They addressed her, cap in hand; they always called her _Mademoiselle
+Germinie_. They hurried to wait upon her; they offered her the only
+chair in the shop when she had to wait. Even when she contended over
+prices they were still polite with her and never called her _haggler_.
+Jests that were somewhat too broad were cut short when she appeared. She
+was invited to the great banquets, to family parties, and consulted upon
+business matters.
+
+Everything changed as soon as her relations with Jupillon and her
+assiduous attendance at the _Boule-Noire_ were known. The quarter took
+its revenge for having respected her. The brazen-faced maids in the
+house accosted her as one of their own kind. One, whose lover was at
+Mazas, called her: "My dear." The men accosted her familiarly, and with
+all the intimacy of thee and thou in glance and gesture and tone and
+touch. The very children on the sidewalk, who were formerly trained to
+courtesy politely to her, ran away from her as from a person of whom
+they had been told to be afraid. She felt that she was being maligned
+behind her back, handed over to the devil. She could not take a step
+without walking through scorn and receiving a blow from her shame upon
+the cheek.
+
+It was a horrible affliction to her. She suffered as if her honor were
+being torn from her, shred by shred, and dragged in the gutter. But the
+more she suffered, the closer she pressed her love to her heart and
+clung to him. She bore him no ill-will, she uttered no word of reproach
+to him. She attached herself to him by all the tears he caused her pride
+to shed. And now, in the street through which she passed but a short
+time ago, proudly and with head erect, she could be seen, bent double as
+if crouching over her fault, hurrying furtively along, with oblique
+glances, dreading to be recognized, quickening her pace in front of the
+shops that swept their slanders out upon her heels.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Jupillon was constantly complaining that he was tired of working for
+others, that he could not set up for himself, that he could not find
+fifteen or eighteen hundred francs in his mother's purse. He needed no
+more than that, he said, to hire a couple of rooms on the ground floor
+and set up as a glover in a small way. Indeed he was already dreaming of
+what he might do and laying out his plans: he would open a shop in the
+quarter, an excellent quarter for his business, as it was full of
+purchasers, and of makers of wretched gloves at five francs. He would
+soon add a line of perfumery and cravats to his gloves; and then, when
+he had made a tidy sum, he would sell out and take a fine shop on Rue de
+Richelieu.
+
+Whenever he mentioned the subject Germinie asked him innumerable
+questions. She wanted to know everything that was necessary to start in
+business. She made him tell her the names of the tools and
+appurtenances, give her an idea of their prices and where they could be
+bought. She questioned him as to his trade and the details of his work
+so inquisitively and persistently that Jupillon lost his patience at
+last and said to her:
+
+"What's all this to you? The work sickens me enough now; don't mention
+it to me!"
+
+One Sunday she walked toward Montmartre with him. Instead of taking Rue
+Frochot she turned into Rue Pigalle.
+
+"Why, this ain't the way, is it?" said Jupillon.
+
+"I know what I'm about," said she, "come on."
+
+She had taken his arm, and she walked on, turning her head slightly away
+from him so that he could not see what was taking place on her face.
+Half way along Rue Fontaine Saint-Georges, she halted abruptly in front
+of two windows on the ground floor of a house, and said to him: "Look!"
+
+She was trembling with joy.
+
+Jupillon looked; he saw between the two windows, on a glistening copper
+plate:
+
+
+                    _Magasin de Ganterie._
+
+                          JUPILLON.
+
+
+He saw white curtains at the first window. Through the glass in the
+other he saw pigeon-holes and boxes, and, near the window, the little
+glover's cutting board, with the great shears, the jar for clippings,
+and the knife to make holes in the skins in order to stretch them.
+
+"The concierge has your key," she said.
+
+They entered the first room, the shop.
+
+She at once set about showing him everything. She opened the boxes and
+laughed. Then she pushed open the door into the other room. "There, you
+won't be stifled there as you are in the loft at your mother's. Do you
+like it? Oh! it isn't handsome, but it's clean. I'd have liked to give
+you mahogany. Do you like that little rug by the bed? And the paper--I
+didn't think of that----" She put a receipt for the rent in his hand.
+"See! this is for six months. Dame! you must go to work right off and
+earn some money. The few sous I had laid by are all gone. Oh! let me sit
+down. You look so pleased--it gives me a turn--it makes my head spin. I
+haven't any legs."
+
+And she sank into a chair. Jupillon stooped over her to kiss her.
+
+"Ah! yes, they're not there any longer," she said, seeing that he was
+looking for her earrings. "They've gone like my rings. D'ye see, all
+gone----"
+
+And she showed him her hands, bare of the paltry gems she had worked so
+long to buy.
+
+"They all went for the easy-chair, you see--but it's all horsehair."
+
+As Jupillon stood in front of her with an embarrassed air, as if he were
+trying to find words with which to thank her, she continued:
+
+"Why, you're a funny fellow. What's the matter with you? Ah! it's on
+that account, is it?" And she pointed to the bedroom. "You're a stupid!
+I love you, don't I? Well then?"
+
+Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says sublime things.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+She became _enceinte_.
+
+At first she doubted, she dared not believe it. But when she was certain
+of the fact, she was filled with immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed
+her heart. Her happiness was so great and so overpowering that it
+stifled at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling
+that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried women and poisons
+their anticipations of childbirth, the divine hope that lives and moves
+within them. The thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her
+_liaison_, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the abominable
+thing that had always made her think of suicide: dishonor,--even the
+fear of being detected by mademoiselle and dismissed by her--nothing of
+all this could cast a shadow on her felicity. The child that she
+expected allowed her to see nothing but it, as if she had it already in
+her arms before her; and, hardly attempting to conceal her condition,
+she bore her woman's shame almost proudly through the streets, exulting
+and radiant in the thought that she was to be a mother.
+
+She was unhappy only because she had spent all her savings, and was not
+only without money but had been paid several months' wages in advance by
+her mistress. She bitterly deplored having to receive her child in a
+poor way. Often, as she passed through Rue Saint-Lazare, she would stop
+in front of a linen-draper's, in whose windows were displayed stores of
+rich baby-linen. She would devour with her eyes the pretty, dainty
+flowered garments, the pique bibs, the long short-waisted dresses
+trimmed with English embroidery, the whole doll-like cherub's costume. A
+terrible longing,--the longing of a pregnant woman,--to break the glass
+and steal it all, would come upon her: the clerks standing behind the
+display framework became accustomed to seeing her take up her station
+there and would laughingly point her out to one another.
+
+Again, at intervals, amid the happiness that overflowed her heart, amid
+the ecstasy that exalted her being, another disturbing thought passed
+through her mind. She would ask herself how the father would welcome his
+child. Two or three times she had attempted to tell him of her condition
+but had not dared. At last, one day, seeing that his face wore the
+expression she had awaited so long as a preliminary to telling him
+everything, an expression in which there was a touch of affection, she
+confessed to him, blushing hotly and as if asking his forgiveness, what
+it was that made her so happy.
+
+"That's all imagination!" said Jupillon.
+
+And when she had assured him that it was not imagination and that she
+was positively five months advanced in pregnancy: "Just my luck!" the
+young man rejoined. "Thanks!" And he swore. "Would you mind telling me
+who's going to feed the sparrow?"
+
+"Oh! never you fear! it sha'n't suffer, I'll look out for that. And then
+it'll be so pretty! Don't be afraid, no one shall know anything about
+it. I'll fix myself up. See! the last part of the time I'll walk like
+this, with my head back--I won't wear any petticoats, and I'll pull
+myself in--you'll see! Nobody shall notice anything, I tell you. Just
+think of it! a little child of our own!"
+
+"Well, as long as it's so, it's so, eh?" said the young man.
+
+"Say," ventured Germinie, timidly, "suppose you should tell your
+mother?"
+
+"Ma? Oh! no, I rather think not. You must lie in first. After that we'll
+take the brat to the house. It will give her a start, and perhaps she'll
+consent without meaning to."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Twelfth Night arrived. It was the day on which Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil gave a grand dinner-party regularly every year. She invited
+all the children of her own family or her old friends' families, great
+and small. The small suite would hardly hold them all. They were obliged
+to put part of the furniture on the landing, and a table was set in each
+of the two rooms which formed mademoiselle's whole suite. For the
+children, that day was a great festival to which they looked forward for
+a week. They came running up the stairway behind the pastry-cook's men.
+At table they ate too much without being scolded. At night, they were
+unwilling to go to bed, they climbed on the chairs and made a racket
+that always gave Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a sick headache the next
+day; but she bore them no grudge therefor: she had had the full
+enjoyment of a genuine grandmother's fete, in listening to them, looking
+at them, tying around their necks the white napkins that made them look
+so rosy. And not for anything in the world would she have failed to give
+this dinner-party, which filled her old maid's apartments with the
+fair-haired little imps of Satan, and brought thither, in a single day,
+an atmosphere of activity and youth and laughter that lasted a whole
+year.
+
+Germinie was preparing the dinner. She was whipping cream in an earthen
+bowl on her knees, when suddenly she felt the first pains. She looked at
+her face in the bit of a broken mirror that she had above her kitchen
+dresser, and saw that she was pale. She went down to Adele: "Give me
+your mistress's rouge," she said. And she put some on her cheeks. Then
+she went up again, and, refusing to listen to the voice of her
+suffering, finished cooking the dinner. It had to be served, and she
+served it. At dessert, she leaned against the furniture and grasped the
+backs of chairs as she passed the plates, hiding her torture with the
+ghastly set smile of people whose entrails are writhing.
+
+"How's this, are you sick?" said her mistress, looking sharply at her.
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle, a little--it may be the charcoal or the hot
+kitchen."
+
+"Go to bed--we don't need you any more, and you can clean up to-morrow."
+
+She went down to Adele once more.
+
+"It's come," she said; "call a cab quick. It was Rue de la Huchette
+where you said your midwife lives, wasn't it? opposite a copper
+planer's? Haven't you a pen and paper?"
+
+And she sat down to write a line to her mistress. She told her that she
+was too ill to work, that she had gone to the hospital, but would not
+tell her where, because she would fatigue herself coming to see her;
+that she would come back within a week.
+
+"There you are!" said Adele, all out of breath, giving her the number of
+the cab.
+
+"I can stay there," said Germinie; "not a word to mademoiselle. That's
+all. Swear you won't say a word to her!"
+
+She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.
+
+"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going out?"
+
+"I am going to lie in----It took me during the day. There was a great
+dinner-party here----Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I
+told you never to come; I don't want you to!"
+
+"Because----I'll tell you----because just now I absolutely must have
+forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must."
+
+"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"
+
+"That's hard luck----look out! What do you want to do?" And he offered
+his arm to assist her. "_Cristi!_ I'm going to have hard work to get 'em
+all the same."
+
+He had opened the carriage door.
+
+"Where do you want him to take you?"
+
+"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his
+hand.
+
+"No, no," said Jupillon.
+
+"Oh! nonsense----there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs
+left."
+
+The cab started away.
+
+Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the
+two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and
+said to Germinie through the window:
+
+"At least, I can go with you?"
+
+"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing
+on the cushions of the cab.
+
+After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in
+front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to
+such medical students as happened to pass through the street that there
+was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting
+spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternite.
+
+The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a
+female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of
+the four beds in the _salle d'accouchement_. Once in bed, her pains
+became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other
+beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge
+country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front
+of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were
+drying.
+
+Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was
+moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the
+blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of
+childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming
+in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having
+created. Suddenly a loud cry: "I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes
+in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw
+her arms around the neck of one of the assistant nurses, fall back
+almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly
+still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on
+the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who
+sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young assistant, with
+desperate gestures; the assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell
+in a dead faint upon the floor.
+
+Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and
+the half-dead assistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to
+consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who
+were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell
+that hung beside each bed to call for help.
+
+Thereafter La Maternite was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal
+epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those
+cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole
+rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the
+closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the
+plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all
+before it and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that
+issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie,
+at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the
+milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws,
+agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by
+hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the
+application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the
+victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with
+them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they
+were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn
+from the body. The very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous
+aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused
+by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.
+
+For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing
+her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all
+these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was
+determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her
+child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energy was
+exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold wave flowed into her heart.
+She said to herself that it was all over. The hand that death lays upon
+one's shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching her. She
+felt the first breath of the epidemic, the belief that she was its
+destined victim, and the impression that she was already half-possessed
+by it. Although unresigned, she succumbed. Her life, vanquished
+beforehand, hardly made an effort to struggle. At that crisis a head
+bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.
+
+It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-assistants, a fair head,
+with long golden locks and blue eyes so soft and sweet that the dying
+saw heaven opening its gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women
+said: "Look! the Blessed Virgin!"
+
+"My child," she said to Germinie, "you must ask for your discharge at
+once. You must go away from here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap
+up well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must take a hot
+draught of something or other. You must try to take a sweat. Then, it
+won't do you any harm. But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for
+you here to-night," she said, glancing around at the beds. "Don't say
+that I told you to go: you would get me discharged if you should."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Germinie recovered in a few days. The joy and pride of having given
+birth to a tiny creature in whom her flesh was mingled with the flesh of
+the man she loved, the bliss of being a mother, saved her from the
+natural results of a confinement in which she did not receive proper
+care. She was restored to health and had an apparent pleasure in living
+that her mistress had never before seen her manifest.
+
+Every Sunday, no matter what the weather might be, she left the house
+about eleven o'clock; mademoiselle believed that she went to see a
+friend in the country, and was delighted that her maid derived so much
+benefit from these days passed in the open air. Germinie would capture
+Jupillon, who allowed himself to be taken in tow without too much
+resistance, and they would start for Pommeuse where the child was, and
+where a good breakfast ordered by the mother awaited them. Once in the
+carriage on the Mulhouse railway, Germinie would not speak or reply when
+spoken to. She would lean out of the window, and all her thoughts seemed
+to be upon what lay before her. She gazed, as if her longing were
+striving to outrun the steam. The train would hardly have stopped before
+she had leaped out, tossed her ticket to the ticket-taker, and started
+at a run on the Pommeuse road, leaving Jupillon behind. She drew nearer
+and nearer, she could see the house, she was there: yes, there was the
+child! She would pounce upon her, snatch her from the nurse's arms with
+jealous hands--a mother's hands!--hug her, strain her to her heart, kiss
+her, devour her with kisses and looks and smiles! She would gaze
+admiringly at her for an instant and then, distraught with joy, mad with
+love, would cover her with kisses to the tips of her little bare toes.
+Breakfast would be served. She would sit at the table with the child on
+her knees and eat nothing: she had kissed her so much that she had not
+yet looked at her, and she would begin to seek out points of resemblance
+to themselves in the little one. One feature was his, another
+hers:--"She has your nose and my eyes. Her hair will be like yours in
+time. It will curl! Look, those are your hands--she is all you." And for
+hours she would continue the inexhaustible and charming prattle of a
+woman who is determined to give a man his share of their daughter.
+Jupillon submitted to it all with reasonably good grace, thanks to
+divers three-sou cigars Germinie always produced from her pocket and
+gave to him one by one. Then he had found a means of diversion; the
+Morin flowed at the foot of the garden. Jupillon was a true Parisian: he
+loved to fish with a pole and line.
+
+And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the
+garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting
+on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
+skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream. On pleasant
+days, the sun poured down upon the broad sparkling current, from which
+beams of light arose as from a mirror. It was like a display of
+fireworks from the sky and the stream, amid which Germinie would hold
+the little girl upon her feet and let her trample upon her with her
+little bare pink legs, in her short baby dress, her skin shimmering in
+spots in the sunlight, her flesh mottled with sunbeams like the flesh of
+angels Germinie had seen in pictures. She had a divinely sweet sensation
+when the little one, with the active hands of children that cannot talk,
+touched her chin and mouth and cheeks, persisted in putting her fingers
+in her eyes, rested them playfully on the lids, and kept them moving
+over her whole face, tickling and tormenting her with the dear little
+digits that seem to grope in the dark for a mother's features: it was as
+if her child's life and warmth were wandering over her face. From time
+to time she would bestow half of her smile on Jupillon over the little
+one's head, and would call to him: "Do look at her!"
+
+Then the child would fall asleep with the open mouth that laughs in
+sleep. Germinie would lean over her and listen to her breathing in
+repose. And, soothed by the peaceful respiration, she would gradually
+forget herself as she gazed dreamily at the poor abode of her happiness,
+the rustic garden, the apple-trees with their leaves covered with little
+yellow snails and the red-cheeked apples on the southern limbs, the
+poles, at whose feet the beanstalks, twisted and parched, were beginning
+to climb, the square of cabbages, the four sunflowers in the little
+circle in the centre of the path; and, close beside her, on the edge of
+the stream, the patches of grass covered with dog's mercury, the white
+heads of the nettles against the wall, the washerwomen's boxes, the
+bottles of lye and the bundle of straw scattered about by the antics of
+a puppy just out of the water. She gazed and dreamed. She thought of the
+past, having her future on her knees. With the grass and the trees and
+the river that were before her eyes, she reconstructed, in memory, the
+rustic garden of her rustic childhood. She saw again the two stones
+reaching down to the water, from which her mother, when she was a little
+child, used to wash her feet before putting her to bed in summertime.
+
+"Look you, Pere Remalard," said Jupillon from his board, on one of the
+hottest days in August, to the peasant who was watching him,--"do you
+know they won't bite at the red worm worth a sou?"
+
+"You must try the gentle," rejoined the peasant sententiously.
+
+"All right, I'll have my revenge with the gentle! Pere Remalard, you
+must get some calf's lights Thursday. You hang 'em up in that tree, and
+Sunday we'll see."
+
+On the Sunday Jupillon had miraculous success with his fishing, and
+Germinie heard the first syllable issue from her daughter's mouth.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+On Wednesday morning, when she came downstairs, Germinie found a letter
+for herself. In that letter, written on the back of a laundry receipt,
+the Remalard woman informed her that her child had fallen sick almost
+immediately after her departure; that she had grown steadily worse; that
+she had consulted the doctor; that he said some insect had stung the
+child; that she had been to him a second time; that she did not know
+what more to do; that she had had pilgrimages made for her. The letter
+concluded thus: "If you could see how troubled I am for your little
+one--if you could see how good she is when she isn't suffering!"
+
+This letter produced upon Germinie the effect of a push from behind. She
+went out and instinctively walked toward the railroad that would take
+her to her little one. Her hair was uncombed and she was in her
+slippers, but she did not think of that. She must see her child, she
+must see her instantly. Then she would come back. She thought of
+mademoiselle's breakfast for a moment, then forgot it. Suddenly,
+half-way to the station, she saw a clock at a cab office and noticed
+the hour: she remembered that there was no train at that time. She
+retraced her steps, saying to herself that she would hurry the breakfast
+and then make some excuse to be given her liberty for the rest of the
+day. But when the breakfast was served she could find none: her mind was
+so full of her child that she could not invent a falsehood; her
+imagination was benumbed. And then, if she had spoken, if she had made
+the request, she would have betrayed herself; she could feel the words
+upon her lips: "I want to go and see my child!" At night she dared not
+make her escape; mademoiselle had been a little indisposed the night
+before; she was afraid that she might need her.
+
+The next morning when she entered mademoiselle's room with a fable she
+had invented during the night, all ready to ask for leave of absence,
+mademoiselle said to her, looking up from a letter that had just been
+sent up to her from the lodge: "Ah! my old friend De Belleuse wants you
+for the whole day to-day, to help her with her preserves. Come, give me
+my two eggs, post-haste, and off with you. Eh? what! doesn't that suit
+you? What's the matter?"
+
+"With me? why nothing at all!" Germinie found strength to say.
+
+All that endless day she passed standing over hot stewpans and sealing
+up jars, in the torture known only to those whom the chances of life
+detain at a distance from the sick bed of those dear to them. She
+suffered such heart-rending agony as those unhappy creatures suffer who
+cannot go where their anxiety calls them, and who, in the extremity of
+despair caused by separation and uncertainty, constantly imagine that
+death will come in their absence.
+
+As she received no letter Thursday evening and none Friday morning, she
+took courage. If the little one were growing worse the nurse would have
+written her. The little one was better: she imagined her saved, cured.
+Children are forever coming near dying, and they get well so quickly!
+And then hers was strong. She decided to wait, to be patient until
+Sunday, which was only forty-eight hours away, deceiving the remainder
+of her fears with the superstitions that say yes to hope, persuading
+herself that her daughter had "escaped," because the first person she
+met in the morning was a man, because she had seen a red horse in the
+street, because she had guessed that a certain person would turn into a
+certain street, because she had ascended a flight of stairs in so many
+strides.
+
+On Saturday, in the morning, when she entered Mere Jupillon's shop, she
+found her weeping hot tears over a lump of butter that she was covering
+with a moist cloth.
+
+"Ah! it's you, is it?" said Mere Jupillon. "That poor charcoal woman!
+See, I'm actually crying over her! She just went away from here. You
+don't know--they can't get their faces clean in their trade with
+anything but butter. And here's her love of a daughter--she's at
+death's door, you know, the dear child. That's the way it is with us!
+Ah! _mon Dieu_, yes!--Well, as I was saying, she said to her just now
+like this: 'Mamma, I want you to wash my face in butter right away--for
+the good God.'"
+
+And Mere Jupillon began to sob.
+
+Germinie had fled. All that day she was unable to keep still. Again and
+again she went up to her chamber to prepare the few things she proposed
+to take to her little one the next day, to dress her cleanly, to make a
+little special toilet for her in honor of her recovery. As she went down
+in the evening to put Mademoiselle to bed, Adele handed her a letter
+that she had found for her below.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Mademoiselle had begun to undress, when Germinie entered her bedroom,
+walked a few steps, dropped upon a chair, and almost immediately, after
+two or three long-drawn, deep, heart-breaking sighs, mademoiselle saw
+her throw herself backward, wringing her hands, and at last roll from
+the chair to the floor. She tried to lift her up, but Germinie was
+shaken by such violent convulsions that the old woman was obliged to let
+the frantic body fall again upon the floor; for all the limbs, which
+were for a moment contracted and rigid, lashed out to right and left, at
+random, with the sharp report of the trigger of a rifle, and threw down
+whatever they came in contact with. At mademoiselle's shrieks on the
+landing, a maid ran to a doctor's office near by but did not find him;
+four other women employed in the house assisted mademoiselle to lift
+Germinie up and carry her to the bed in her mistress's room, on which
+they laid her after cutting her corset lacings.
+
+The terrible convulsions, the nervous contortions of the limbs, the
+snapping of the tendons had ceased; but her neck and her breast, which
+was uncovered where her dress was unbuttoned, moved up and down as if
+waves were rising and falling under the skin, and the rustling of the
+skirts showed that the movement extended to her feet. Her head thrown
+back, her face flushed, her eyes full of melancholy tenderness, of the
+patient agony we see in the eyes of the wounded, the great veins clearly
+marked under her chin, Germinie, breathing hard and paying no heed to
+questions, raised her hands to her neck and throat and clawed at them;
+she seemed to be trying to tear out the sensation of something rising
+and falling within her. In vain did they make her inhale ether and drink
+orange-flower water; the waves of grief that flowed through her body did
+not cease their action; and her face continued to wear the same
+expression of gentle melancholy and sentimental anxiety, which seemed to
+place the suffering of the heart above the suffering of the flesh in
+every feature. For a long time everything seemed to wound her senses and
+to produce a painful effect upon them--the bright light, the sound of
+voices, the odor of the things about her. At last, after an hour or
+more, a deluge of tears suddenly poured from her eyes and put an end to
+the terrible crisis. After that there was nothing more than an
+occasional convulsive shudder in the overburdened body, soon quieted by
+weariness and by general prostration. It was possible to carry Germinie
+to her own room.
+
+The letter Adele handed her contained the news of her daughter's death.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+As a result of this crisis, Germinie fell into a state of dumb, brutish
+sorrow. For months she was insensible to everything; for months,
+completely possessed and absorbed by the thought of the little creature
+that was no more, she carried her child's death in her entrails as she
+had carried her life. Every evening, when she went up to her chamber,
+she took the poor darling's little cap and dress from the trunk at the
+foot of her bed. She would gaze at them and touch them; she would lay
+them out on the bed; she would sit for hours weeping over them, kissing
+them, talking to them, saying the things that a mother's bitter sorrow
+is wont to say to a little daughter's ghost.
+
+While weeping for her daughter the unhappy creature wept for herself as
+well. A voice whispered to her that she was saved had the child lived;
+that to have that child to love was her Providence; that all that she
+dreaded in herself would be expended upon that dear head and be
+sanctified there--her affections, her unreasoning impulses, her ardor,
+all the passions of her nature. It seemed to her that she had felt her
+mother's heart soothing and purifying her woman's heart. In her
+daughter she saw a sort of celestial vision that would redeem her and
+make her whole, a little angel of deliverance as it were, issuing from
+her errors to fight for her and rescue her from the evil influences
+which pursued her and by which she sometimes thought that she was
+possessed.
+
+When she began to recover from the first prostration of despair, when,
+as the consciousness of life and the perception of objects returned to
+her, she looked about her with eyes that saw, she was aroused from her
+grief by a more poignant cause of bitterness of spirit.
+
+Madame Jupillon, who had become too stout and too heavy to do what it
+was necessary for her to do at the creamery, notwithstanding all the
+assistance rendered by Germinie, had sent to her province for a niece of
+hers. She was the embodiment of the blooming youth of the country, a
+woman in whom there was still something of the child, active and
+vivacious, with black eyes full of sunlight, lips as round and red as
+cherries, the summer heat of her province in her complexion, the warmth
+of perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous as she was, the
+girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally,
+obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She
+had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless
+effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly
+of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant
+hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which
+her cousin's vanity was without means of defence. The child's presence
+deprived Germinie of all hope of repose. Mere girl as she was, she
+wounded her every minute in the day by her presence, her touch, her
+caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of love. Her
+preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly
+together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the
+half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had
+gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor--everything helped
+to exasperate Germinie and to arouse a sullen wrath within her;
+everything wounded that jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals
+caused it a bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved.
+
+She dared not speak to Mere Jupillon and denounce the little one to her,
+for fear of betraying herself; but whenever she found herself alone with
+Jupillon she vented her feelings in recriminations, complaints and
+quarrels. She would remind him of an incident, a word, something he had
+done or said, some answer he had made, a trifle forgotten by him but
+still bleeding in her heart.
+
+"Are you mad?" Jupillon would say to her; "a slip of a girl!"--"A slip
+of a girl, eh? nonsense!--when she has such eyes that all the men stare
+at her in the street! I went out with her the other day--I was
+ashamed--I don't know how she did it, but we were followed by a
+gentleman all the time."--"Well, what if you were? She's a pretty girl,
+you know!"--"Pretty! pretty!" And at that word Germinie would hurl
+herself, figuratively speaking, at the girl's face, and claw it to
+pieces with frantic words.
+
+Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: "Look here! you love
+her!"--"Well! what then?" he would retort, highly entertained by these
+disputes, by the opportunity to watch the antics of this fierce wrath
+which he fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement of
+trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half insane under his
+sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling wildly about and running her
+head against stone walls in the first paroxysms of madness.
+
+As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day, a revolution
+took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle
+course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly
+clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed
+and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out
+every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to
+her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and
+she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked upon him as an
+assassin. She conceived a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him
+as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that one has of a
+person who is one's Bane!
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+One morning, after a night passed by her in turning over and over in her
+mind all her despairing, hate-ridden thoughts, Germinie went to the
+creamery for her four sous' worth of milk and found in the back-shop
+three or four maids from the neighborhood engaged in "taking an
+eye-opener." They were seated at a table, gossiping and sipping
+liqueurs.
+
+"Aha!" said Adele, striking the table with her glass; "you here already,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil?"
+
+"What's this?" said Germinie, taking Adele's glass; "I'd like some
+myself."
+
+"Are you so thirsty as all that this morning? Brandy and absinthe,
+that's all!--my soldier boy's _tap_, you know,--he never drank anything
+else. It's a little stiff, eh?"
+
+"Ah! yes," said Germinie, contracting her lips and winking like a child
+who is given a glass of liqueur with the dessert at a grand
+dinner-party.
+
+"It's good, all the same." Her spirits rose. "Madame Jupillon, let's
+have the bottle--I'll pay."
+
+And she tossed money on the table. After the third glass, she cried: "I
+am _tight_!" And she roared with laughter.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had gone out that morning to collect her
+half-yearly income. When she returned at eleven o'clock, she rang once,
+twice! no one came. "Ah!" she said to herself, "she must have gone
+down." She opened the door with her key, went to her bedroom and looked
+in: the mattress and bedclothes lay in a heap on two chairs, and
+Germinie was stretched out across the straw under-mattress, sleeping
+heavily, like a log, in the utterly relaxed condition following a sudden
+attack of lethargy.
+
+At the noise made by mademoiselle, Germinie sprang to her feet and
+passed her hand over her eyes.--"Yes?" she said, as if some one had
+called her; her eyes were wandering.
+
+"What's happened?" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil in alarm; "did you
+fall? Is anything the matter with you?"
+
+"With me? no," Germinie replied; "I fell asleep. What time is it?
+Nothing's the matter. Ah! what a fool!"
+
+And she began to shake the mattress, turning her back to her mistress to
+hide the flush of intoxication on her face.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+One Sunday morning Jupillon was dressing in the room Germinie had
+furnished for him. His mother was sitting by, gazing at him with the
+wondering pride expressed in the eyes of mothers among the common people
+in presence of a son who dresses like a _monsieur_.
+
+"You're dressed up like the young man on the first floor!" she said. "I
+should think it was his coat. I don't mean to say fine things don't look
+well on you, too----"
+
+Jupillon, intent upon tying his cravat, made no reply.
+
+"You'll play the deuce with the poor girls to-day!" continued Mere
+Jupillon, giving to her voice an accent of insinuating sweetness: "Look
+you, bibi, let me tell you this, you great bad boy: if a young woman
+goes wrong, so much the worse for her! that's their look-out. You're a
+man, aren't you? you've got the age and the figure and everything. I
+can't always keep you in leading-strings. So, I said to myself, as well
+one as another. That one will do. And I fixed her so that she wouldn't
+see anything. Yes, Germinie would do, as you seemed to like her. That
+prevented you from wasting your money on bad women--and then I didn't
+see anything out of the way in the girl till now. But now it won't do at
+all. They're telling stories in the quarter--a heap of horrible things
+about us. A pack of vipers! We're above all that, I know. When one has
+been an honest woman all her life, thank God! But you never know what
+will happen--mademoiselle would only have to put the end of her nose
+into her maid's affairs. Why there's the law--the bare idea gives me a
+turn. What do you say to that, bibi, eh?"
+
+"_Dame_, mamma,--whatever you please."
+
+"Ah! I knew you loved your dear darling mamma!" exclaimed the monstrous
+creature embracing him. "Well! invite her to dinner to-night. You can
+get up two bottles of our Lunel--at two francs--the heady kind. And be
+sure she comes. Make eyes at her, so that she'll think to-day's the
+great day. Put on your fine gloves: they'll make you look more
+dignified."
+
+Germinie arrived at seven o'clock, happy and bright and hopeful, her
+head filled with blissful dreams by the mysterious air with which
+Jupillon delivered his mother's invitation. They dined and drank and
+made merry. Mere Jupillon began to cast glances expressive of deep
+emotion, drowned in tears, upon the couple sitting opposite her. When
+the coffee was served, she said, as if for the purpose of being left
+alone with Germinie: "Bibi, you know you have an errand to do this
+evening."
+
+Jupillon went out. Madame Jupillon, as she sipped her coffee, turned to
+Germinie the face of a mother seeking to learn her daughter's secret,
+and, in her indulgence, forgiving her in advance of her confession. For
+a moment the two women sat thus, silent, one waiting for the other to
+speak, the other with the cry of her heart on her lips. Suddenly
+Germinie rushed from her chair into the stout woman's arms.
+
+"If you knew, Madame Jupillon!"
+
+She talked and wept and embraced her all at once. "Oh! you won't be
+angry with me! Well! yes, I love him--I've had a child by him. It's
+true, I love him. Three years ago----"
+
+At every word Madame Jupillon's face became sterner and more icy. She
+coldly pushed Germinie away, and in her most doleful voice, with an
+accent of lamentation and hopeless desolation, she began, like a person
+who is suffocating: "Oh! my God--you!--tell me such things as
+that!--me!--his mother!--to my face! My God, must it be? My son--a
+child--an innocent child! You've had the face to ruin him for me! And
+now you tell me that you did it! No, it ain't possible, my God! And I
+had such confidence. There's nothing worth living for. There's no
+trusting anybody in this world! All the same, mademoiselle, I wouldn't
+ever 'a' believed it of you. _Dame!_ such things give me a turn. Ah!
+this upsets me completely. I know myself, and I'm quite likely to be
+sick after this----"
+
+"Madame Jupillon! Madame Jupillon!" Germinie murmured in an imploring
+tone, half dead with shame and grief on the chair on which she had
+fallen. "I beg you to forgive me. It was stronger than I was. And then I
+thought--I believed----"
+
+"You believed! Oh! my God; you believed! What did you believe? That
+you'd be my son's wife, eh? Ah! Lord God! is it possible, my poor
+child?"
+
+And adopting a more and more plaintive and lamentable tone as the words
+she hurled at Germinie cut deeper and deeper, Mere Jupillon continued:
+"But, my poor girl, you must have a reason, let's hear it. What did I
+always tell you? That it would be all right if you'd been born ten years
+earlier. Let's see, your date was 1820, you told me, and now it's '49.
+You're getting on toward thirty, you see, my dear child. I say! it makes
+me feel bad to say that to you--I'd so much rather not hurt you. But a
+body only has to look at you, my poor young lady. What can I do? It's
+your age--your hair--I can lay my finger in the place where you part
+it."
+
+"But," said Germinie, in whose heart black wrath was beginning to
+rumble, "what about what your son owes me? My money? The money I took
+out of the savings bank, the money I borrowed for him, the money I----"
+
+"Money? he owes you money? Oh! yes, what you lent him to begin business
+with. Well! what about it? Do you think we're thieves? Does anyone want
+to cheat you out of your old money, although there wasn't any paper--I
+know it because the other day--it just occurs to me--that honest man of
+a child of mine wanted to write it down for fear he might die. But the
+next minute we're pickpockets, as glib as you please! Oh! my God, it's
+hardly worth while living in such times as these! Ah! I'm well paid for
+getting attached to you! But I see through it now. You're a politician,
+you are! You wanted to pay yourself with my son, for his whole life!
+Excuse me! No, thank you! It costs less to give back your money! A cafe
+waiter's leavings! my poor dear boy! God preserve him from it!"
+
+Germinie had snatched her shawl and hat from the hook and was out of
+doors.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Mademoiselle was sitting in her large armchair at the corner of the
+fireplace, where a few live embers were still sleeping under the ashes.
+Her black cap was pulled down over her wrinkled forehead almost to her
+eyes. Her black dress, cut in the shape of a child's frock, was draped
+in scanty folds about her scanty body, showing the location of every
+bone, and fell straight from her knees to the floor. She wore a small
+black shawl crossed on her breast and tied behind her back, as they are
+worn by little girls. Her half-open hands were resting on her hips, with
+the palms turned outward--thin, old woman's hands, awkward and stiff,
+and swollen with gout at the knuckles and finger joints. Sitting in the
+huddled, crouching posture that compels old people to raise their heads
+to look at you and speak to you, she seemed to be buried in all that
+mass of black, whence nothing emerged but her face, to which
+preponderance of bile had imparted the yellow hue of old ivory, and the
+flashing glance of her brown eyes. One who saw her thus, her bright,
+sparkling eyes, the meagre body, the garb of poverty and the noble air
+with which she bore all the burdens of age, might well have fancied
+that he was looking at a fairy on the stage of the Petits-Menages.
+
+Germinie was by her side. The old lady began:
+
+"The list is still under the door, eh, Germinie?"
+
+"Yes, mademoiselle."
+
+"Do you know, my girl," Mademoiselle de Varandeuil resumed, after a
+pause, "do you know that when one is born in one of the finest houses on
+Rue Royale--when one has been in a fair way to own the Grand and
+Petit-Charolais--when one has almost had the Chateau of
+Clichy-la-Garenne for a country house--and when it took two servants to
+carry the silver platter on which the joint was served at your
+grandmother's--do you know that it takes no small amount of
+philosophy"--and mademoiselle with difficulty raised a hand to her
+shoulder--"to see yourself end like this, in this devilish nest of
+rheumatism, where, in spite of all the list in the world, you can't keep
+out of draughts.--That's it, stir up the fire a little."
+
+She put out her feet toward Germinie, who was kneeling in front of the
+fireplace, and laughingly placed them under her nose: "Do you know that
+that takes no small amount of philosophy--to wear stockings out at heel!
+Simpleton! I'm not scolding you; I know well enough that you can't do
+everything. So you might as well have a woman come to do the mending.
+That's not very much to do. Why don't you speak to that little girl that
+came here last year? She had a face that I remember."
+
+"Oh! she's black as a mole, mademoiselle."
+
+"Bah! I knew it. In the first place you never think well of anybody.
+That isn't true, you say? Why, wasn't she a niece of Mere Jupillon's? We
+might take her for one or two days a week."
+
+"That hussy shall never set foot here."
+
+"Nonsense, more fables! You're a most astonishing creature, to adore
+people and then not want to see them again. What has she done to you?"
+
+"She's a lost creature, I tell you!"
+
+"Bah! what does my linen care for that?"
+
+"But, mademoiselle."
+
+"All right! find me someone else then. I don't care about her
+particularly. But find me someone."
+
+"Oh! the women that come in like that don't do any work. I'll mend your
+clothes. You don't need any one."
+
+"You!--Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!" said mademoiselle
+jocosely; "and then, will Mere Jupillon ever give you the time?"
+
+"Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall ever leave in her house
+again!"
+
+"Hoity-toity! What's that? She too! so she's on your black books, is
+she? Oho! hurry up and make another acquaintance, or else, _bon Dieu de
+Dieu_! we shall have some bad days here!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+The winter of that year should certainly have assured Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter. She had to undergo the reflex
+action of her maid's chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance of
+her embittered, contradictory moods, which the approaching spring would
+ere long infect with that species of malignant madness which the
+critical season, the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing
+fructification of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive
+organizations.
+
+Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had
+once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting:
+"Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a
+secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by
+which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a
+bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her
+presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with
+her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from
+her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle
+could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial
+question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by
+her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She
+would wipe her eyes and grumble: "Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see
+that mademoiselle doesn't care for me any more!" Her spite against
+various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. "That
+woman always comes when it rains!" she would say, upon discovering a bit
+of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week
+following New Year's Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil's remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike,
+climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their
+turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her
+ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing
+grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a
+persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would
+be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the
+partitions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster,
+the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one
+imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: "Oh! yes,
+I'll do your work for you!"
+
+Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their
+service. Long habit, the weakening will-power, the horror of change,
+the dread of new faces,--everything disposes them to weakness and
+cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness
+to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame,
+mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She
+pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited,
+curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over
+or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no
+thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing
+herself so much suffering.
+
+In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's maid; she was
+Devotion, waiting to close her eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked
+by death, alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections from
+grave to grave, had found her last friend in her servant. She had rested
+her heart upon her as upon an adopted daughter, and she was especially
+unhappy because she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at
+intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of her brooding
+melancholy and her savage humor, and threw herself on her knees before
+her kind heart. Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar's song, or any
+one of the nothings that float in the air and expand the heart, she
+would burst into tears and demonstrations of affection; her heart would
+overflow with burning emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in
+embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had effaced
+everything. At other times some trifling ailment of mademoiselle's would
+bring about the change; a smile would come to the old servant's face and
+gentleness to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments, mademoiselle would
+say: "Come, my girl--something's the matter. Tell me what it is." And
+Germinie would reply: "No, mademoiselle, it's the weather."--"The
+weather!" mademoiselle would repeat with a doubtful air, "the weather!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking
+together by the stove in their back-shop.
+
+Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to
+purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor
+business and by credits given to certain _lorettes_ on the street, who
+had left the key under their door-mat one fine morning. He had not
+prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been
+taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to
+advance him the money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer had
+not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he
+refused point-blank.
+
+Mere Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the
+number drawn by her son: "Twenty-two! twenty-two!" And she said: "And
+yet I sewed a black spider into your _paletot_ with his web; a _velvety_
+fellow he was! Oh, dear! I ought to have done as they told me and made
+you wear the cap you were baptized in. Ah! the good God ain't fair!
+There's the fruit woman's son drew a lucky number! That comes of being
+honest! And those two sluts at number eighteen must go and hook it with
+my money! I might have known they meant something by the way they shook
+hands. They did me out of more than seven hundred francs, did you know
+it? And the black creature opposite--and that infernal girl as had the
+face to eat pots of strawberries at twenty francs! they might as well
+have taken me too, the hussies! But you haven't gone yet all the same.
+I'd rather sell the creamery--I'll go out to work again, do cooking or
+housekeeping,--anything! Why, I'd draw money from a stone for you!"
+
+Jupillon smoked and let his mother do the talking. When she had
+finished, he said: "That'll do for talk, mamma!--all that's nothing but
+words. You'll spoil your digestion and it ain't worth while. You needn't
+sell anything--you needn't strain yourself at all--I'll buy my
+substitute and it sha'n't cost you a sou;--do you want to bet on it?"
+
+"Jesus!" ejaculated Madame Jupillon.
+
+"I have an idea."
+
+After a pause, Jupillon continued: "I didn't want to make trouble with
+you on account of Germinie--you know, at the time the stories about us
+were going round; you thought it was time for me to break with her--that
+she would be in our way--and you kicked her out of the house, stiff.
+That wasn't my idea--I didn't think she was so bad as all that for the
+family butter. But, however, you thought best to do it. And perhaps,
+after all, you did the best thing; instead of cooling her off, you
+warmed her up for me--yes, warmed her up--I've met her once or
+twice--and she's changed, I tell you. Gad! how she's drying up!"
+
+"But you know very well she hasn't got a sou."
+
+"I don't say she has, of her own. But what's that got to do with it?
+She'll find it somewhere. She's good for twenty-three hundred shiners
+yet!"
+
+"But suppose you get mixed up in it?"
+
+"Oh! she won't steal 'em----"
+
+"The deuce she won't!"
+
+"Well! if she does, it won't be from anyone but her mistress. Do you
+suppose her mademoiselle would have her pinched for that? She'll turn
+her off, and that'll be the end of it. We'll advise her to try the air
+in another quarter--off she goes!--and we sha'n't see her again. But it
+would be too stupid for her to steal. She'll arrange it somehow, she'll
+hunt round and turn things over. I don't know how, not I! but that's her
+affair, you understand. This is the time for her to show her talents. By
+the way, perhaps you don't know, they say her old woman's sick. If the
+dear lady should happen to step out and leave her all the stuff, as the
+story goes in the quarter--why, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have
+played see-saw with her, eh, mamma? We must put on gloves, you see,
+mamma, when we're dealing with people who may have four or five thousand
+a year come tumbling into their aprons."
+
+"Oh! my God! what are you talking about? But after the way I treated
+her--oh! no, she'll never come back here."
+
+"Well! I tell you I'll bring her back--and to-night at the latest," said
+Jupillon, rising, and rolling a cigarette between his fingers. "No
+excuses, you know," he said to his mother, "they won't do any good--and
+be cold to her. Act as if you received her only on my account, because
+you are weak. No one knows what may happen, we must always keep an
+anchor to windward."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+Jupillon was walking back and forth on the sidewalk in front of
+Germinie's house when she came out.
+
+"Good-evening, Germinie," he said, behind her.
+
+She turned as if she had been struck, and, without answering his
+greeting, instinctively moved on a few steps as if to fly from him.
+
+"Germinie!"
+
+Jupillon said nothing more than that; he did not follow her, he did not
+move. She came back to him like a trained beast when his rope is taken
+off.
+
+"What is it?" said she. "Do you want more money? or do you want to tell
+me some of your mother's foolish remarks?"
+
+"No, but I am going away," said Jupillon, with a serious face. "I am
+drafted--and I am going away."
+
+"You are going away?" said she. She seemed as if her mind was not awake.
+
+"Look here, Germinie," Jupillon continued. "I have made you unhappy. I
+haven't been very kind to you, I know. My cousin's been a little to
+blame. What do you want?"
+
+"You're going away?" rejoined Germinie, taking his arm. "Don't lie to
+me--are you going away?"
+
+"I tell you, yes--and it's true. I'm only waiting for marching orders.
+You have to pay more than two thousand francs for a substitute this
+year. They say there's going to be a war: however, there's a chance."
+
+As he spoke he was leading Germinie down the street.
+
+"Where are you taking me?" said she.
+
+"To mother's, of course--so that you two can make up and put an end to
+all this nonsense."
+
+"After what she said to me? Never!"
+
+And Germinie pushed Jupillon's arm away.
+
+"Well, if that's the way it is, good-bye."
+
+And Jupillon raised his cap.
+
+"Shall I write to you from the regiment?"
+
+Germinie was silent, hesitating, for a moment. Then she said, abruptly:
+"Come on!" and, motioning to Jupillon to walk beside her, she turned
+back up the street.
+
+And so they walked along, side by side, without a word. They reached a
+paved road that stretched out as far as the eye could see, between two
+lines of lanterns, between two rows of gnarled trees that held aloft
+handfuls of bare branches and cast their slender, motionless shadows on
+high blank walls. There, in the keen air, chilled by the evaporation of
+the snow, they walked on and on for a long time, burying themselves in
+the vague, infinite, unfamiliar depths of a street that follows the
+same wall, the same trees, the same lanterns, and leads on to the same
+darkness beyond. The damp, heavy air that they breathed smelt of sugar
+and tallow and carrion. From time to time a vivid flash passed before
+their eyes: it was the lantern of a butcher's cart that shone upon
+slaughtered cattle and huge pieces of bleeding meat thrown upon the back
+of a white horse; the light upon the flesh, amid the darkness, resembled
+a purple conflagration, a furnace of blood.
+
+"Well! have you reflected?" said Jupillon. "This little Avenue Trudaine
+isn't a very cheerful place, do you know?"
+
+"Come on," Germinie replied.
+
+And, without another word, she set out again at the same fierce, jerky
+gait, agitated by all the tumult raging in her heart. Her thoughts were
+expressed in her gestures. Her feet went astray, madness attacked her
+hands. At times her shadow, seen from behind, reminded one of a woman
+from La Salpetriere. Two or three passers-by stopped for a moment and
+looked after her; then, remembering that they were in Paris, passed on.
+
+Suddenly she stopped, and with the gesture of one who has made a
+desperate resolution, she said: "Ah! my God! another pin in the
+cushion!--Let us go!"
+
+And she took Jupillon's arm.
+
+"Oh! I know very well," said Jupillon, when they were near the creamery,
+"my mother wasn't fair to you. You see, the woman has been too virtuous
+all her life. She don't know, she don't understand. And then, d'ye see,
+I'll tell you the whole secret: she loves me so much she's jealous of
+any woman who loves me. So go in, do!"
+
+And he pushed her into the arms of Madame Jupillon, who kissed her,
+mumbled a few words of regret, and made haste to weep in order to
+relieve her own embarrassment and make the scene more affecting.
+
+Throughout the evening Germinie sat with her eyes fixed on Jupillon,
+almost terrifying him with her expression.
+
+"Come, come," he said, as he walked home with her, "don't be so down in
+the mouth as all this. We must have a little philosophy in this world.
+Well! here I am a soldier--that's all! To be sure they don't all come
+back. But then--look here! I propose that we enjoy ourselves for the
+fortnight that's left, because it will be so much gained--and if I don't
+come back--Well, at all events, I shall leave you a pleasant memory of
+me."
+
+Germinie made no reply.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+For a whole week Germinie did not set foot in the shop again.
+
+The Jupillons, when she did not return, began to despair. 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.
+
+And, letting go the corners of the cloth, she emptied its contents on
+the table: forth came greasy bank-notes, patched on the back, fastened
+together with pins, old tarnished louis d'or, black hundred-sou pieces,
+forty-sou pieces, ten-sou pieces, the money of the poor, the money of
+toil, money from Christmas-boxes, money soiled by dirty hands, worn out
+in leather purses, rubbed smooth in the cash drawer filled with
+sous--money with a flavor of perspiration.
+
+For a moment she gazed at the display as if to assure her own eyes; then
+she said to Madame Jupillon in a sad voice, the voice of her sacrifice:
+
+"There it is--There's the two thousand three hundred francs for him to
+buy a substitute."
+
+"Oh! my dear Germinie!" said the stout woman, almost suffocated by
+emotion; and she threw herself upon Germinie's neck, who submitted to be
+embraced. "Oh! you must take something with us--a cup of coffee--"
+
+"No, thank you," said Germinie; "I am done up. _Dame!_ I've had to fly
+around, you know, to get them. I'm going to bed now. Some other time."
+
+And she went away.
+
+She had had to "fly around," as she said, to scrape together such a sum,
+to accomplish that impossibility: to raise two thousand three hundred
+francs--two thousand three hundred francs, of which she had not the
+first five! She had collected them, begged them, extorted them piece by
+piece, almost sou by sou. She had picked them up, scraped them together
+here and there, from this one and from that one, by loans of two
+hundred, one hundred, fifty, twenty francs, or whatever sum anyone would
+lend. She had borrowed from her concierge, her grocer, her fruit woman,
+her poulterer, her laundress; she had borrowed from all the dealers in
+the quarter, and from the dealers in the quarters where she had
+previously lived with mademoiselle. She had made up the amount with
+money drawn from every source, even from her poor miserable
+water-carrier. She had gone a-begging everywhere, importuned humbly,
+prayed, implored, invented fables, swallowed the shame of lying and
+of seeing that she was not believed. The humiliation of confessing that
+she had no money laid by, as was supposed, and as, through pride, she
+had encouraged people to suppose, the sympathy of people she despised,
+the refusals, the alms, she had undergone everything, endured what she
+would not have endured to procure bread for herself, and not once only,
+with a single person, but with thirty, forty, all those who had given
+her something or from whom she had hoped for something.
+
+
+[Illustration: 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 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
+the Jupillons 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in disarranging 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 again _enceinte_, 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
+interjecting remarks 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 Breda. 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 Breda 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
+walked on 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-Soeurs,
+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 a crack.
+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, to _her_! 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she suffered the
+horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden
+her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from
+Adele'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 Adele, 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, of which
+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 ceased to 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+Half an hour after the horrible meeting when--her mind 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 nothing of 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 Adele, 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, 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 a
+horrible 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 Adele, 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 forget and 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, 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 that filled 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 "her _canaille_ of 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 her foot 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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She felt that 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 that should 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 a _liaison_ the 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 demanded _pourboires_ of love!
+And she lived from day to day in constant dread of what the miserable
+villain would demand of her on the morrow.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+"He must have twenty francs," Germinie mechanically repeated 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 Adele: "You haven't twenty francs for a note that just
+came, have you? Mademoiselle has gone out."
+
+"Nothing here," said Adele; "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 grocer would
+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 erect between
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began 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 perfect
+imbecile!" 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 the house 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 the frames, 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 of being 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, _a 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.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+
+"No--not this time, no," said Germinie, rising from the 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-Piete--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.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+When she returned that evening from a christening dinner, 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 by passion. 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."
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+Soon after this, mademoiselle was amazed to notice an 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's lips. 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+But the past and its debts were still there, and whispered 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 so
+fond 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 new _cremiere_,--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 the _Halle Centrale_ one day for
+her dinner, and she mentioned the fact in the fish-woman's presence.
+"Oho! yes, yes, to the _Halle_! I'd like to see you go to the _Halle_!"
+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.
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+
+It was a very great trial to Germinie--a trial that she sought,
+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 at most, would stop and talk, like
+little women, at the _portes cocheres_. 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+
+To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and desolate. 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, rudiments of names, shadowy
+initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects,
+omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be
+_victorious_. 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_.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+
+The love which she lacked, and which it was her determination to deny
+herself, became the torment of her life, incessant, abominable torture.
+She had to defend herself against the fevers of her body and the
+irritations from without, against the easily aroused emotions and the
+indolent cowardice of her flesh, against all the solicitations of nature
+by which she was assailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day,
+with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist warmth of stormy
+weather, with the breath of her past and her memories, with the pictures
+suddenly thrown upon the background of her mind, with the voices that
+whispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that sent a thrill
+of tenderness into her every limb.
+
+Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured, and she did not
+yield or take another lover. Fearful of herself, she avoided man and
+fled from his sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits, always
+closeted with mademoiselle, or else above in her own room. On Sundays
+she did not leave the house. She had ceased to consort with the other
+maids in the house, and, in order to occupy her time and forget
+herself, she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of sewing, or
+buried herself in sleep. When musicians came into the courtyard she
+closed the windows in order not to hear them: the sensuousness of music
+moved her very soul.
+
+In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her passions. Her
+evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon
+themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her
+whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no
+end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,--the obsession that nothing
+can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable
+obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to
+the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it
+smoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!
+
+At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant assaults, the
+irritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie's
+faculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly
+hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses.
+It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, the
+candlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her assumed
+impure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything before
+her eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at her
+kitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longer
+belongs to himself: "In five minutes I am going down into the street."
+And when the five minutes had passed she would stay where she was.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+
+The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandoned
+the conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed her
+head beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution,
+energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction,
+of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she was
+being borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost
+impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causes
+suffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a god on the
+marble of the antique tragedies, and is called _No Chance_ on the
+tattooed brow of the galley-slave--Fatality--was trampling upon her, and
+Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.
+
+When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her past
+recurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the links
+in the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions
+that had followed her years and grown heavier with them; all the
+incidents that had succeeded one another in her life, as if by
+preconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having ever
+caught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard so
+much--she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatures
+who are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of those
+for whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envy
+it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dint
+of yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of brooding
+over the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession of
+her disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon the
+most trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of the
+persecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and that
+was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop,
+an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in which
+she was cheated--all these things were in her opinion due neither to her
+own fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Life
+was in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, in
+everything, great and small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.
+There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereupon
+imagined that she was accursed to her finger-tips. Accursed! almost
+damned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when she
+questioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, in
+the fire in her blood, in the appetite of her organs, in her passionate
+weakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of
+a disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having already
+delivered her over to the shameful excesses of passion, and
+destined--she had a presentiment that it was so--to deliver her again in
+the same way?
+
+And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was the
+refrain of her thought: "What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had
+no chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!" She said
+it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion,
+every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that she
+was in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful than
+she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens in
+ordinary life. She lived in that state of cowardly unrest wherein the
+unexpected is dreaded as a possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bell
+causes alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing the
+mystery it contains, not daring to open it, wherein the news you are
+about to hear, the mouth that opens to speak to you, cause the
+perspiration to start upon your temples. She was in that state of
+suspicion, of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny,
+wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and wherein one would
+like to check the current of his life so that it should not go forward
+whither all the endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.
+
+At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supreme
+disdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems a
+satire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength,
+exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer
+feels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: "Go on!"
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+
+"Where are you going in that rig?" said Germinie one Sunday morning to
+Adele, as she passed in grand array along the corridor on the sixth
+floor, in front of her open door.
+
+"Ah! there you are! I'm going to a swell wedding, my dear! There's a
+crowd of us--big Marie, the _great bully_, you know--Elisa, from 41, the
+two Badiniers, big and little--and men, too! In the first place, there's
+my _dealer in sudden death_. Yes, and--Oh! didn't you know--my new
+flame, the master-at-arms of the 24th--and a friend of his, a painter, a
+real Father Joy. We're going to Vincennes. Everyone carries something.
+We shall dine on the grass--the men will pay for the wine. And there'll
+be plenty of it, I promise you!"
+
+"I'll go, too," said Germinie.
+
+"You? nonsense! you don't go to parties any more."
+
+"But I tell you I'll go," said Germinie, in a sharp, decided tone. "Just
+give me time to tell mademoiselle and put on a dress. If you'll wait
+I'll go and get half a lobster."
+
+Half an hour later the two women left the house; they skirted the city
+wall and found the rest of the party sitting outside a cafe on Boulevard
+de la Chopinette. After taking a glass of currant wine, they entered two
+large cabs and rode away. When they arrived at the fortress at Vincennes
+they alighted and the whole party walked along the bank of the moat. As
+they were passing under the wall of the fort, the master-at-arms'
+friend, the painter, shouted to an artilleryman, who was doing sentry
+duty beside a cannon: "Say! old fellow, you'd rather drink one than
+stand guard over it, eh?"[1]
+
+"Isn't he funny?" said Adele to Germinie, nudging her with her elbow.
+
+Soon they were fairly in the forest of Vincennes.
+
+Narrow paths crossed and recrossed in every direction on the hard,
+uneven, footprint-covered ground. In the spaces between all these little
+roads there was here and there a little grass, but down-trodden,
+withered, yellow, dead grass, strewn about like bedding for cattle, its
+straw-colored blades were everywhere mingled with briars, amid the dull
+green of nettles. It was easily recognizable as one of the rural spots
+to which the great faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in the
+grass, and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a display of
+fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarf
+elms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and
+stripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks,
+eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. The
+verdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, the leaves above had
+a very unhealthy look; the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made only
+faint green lines against the sky. Clouds of dust from the high-roads
+covered the bushes with a gray pall. Everything had the wretched,
+impoverished aspect of trampled vegetation that has no chance to
+breathe, the melancholy effect of the grass at the barriers! Nature
+seemed to sprout from beneath the pavements. No birds sang in the trees,
+no insects hummed about the dusty ground; the noise of the spring-carts
+stunned the birds; the hand-organ put the rustling of the trees to
+silence; the denizens of the street strolled about through the paths,
+singing. Women's hats, fastened with four pins to a handkerchief, were
+hanging from the trees; the red plume of an artilleryman burst upon one
+at every moment through the scanty leaves; dealers in honey rose from
+the thickets; on the trampled greensward children in blouses were
+cutting twigs, workingmen's families idling their time away nibbling at
+_pleasure_, and little urchins catching butterflies in their caps. It
+was a forest after the pattern of the original Bois de Boulogne, hot and
+dusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused promenade, one of those spots,
+avaricious of shade, to which the common people flock to disport
+themselves at the gates of great capitals--burlesque forests, filled
+with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons in the
+underbrush.
+
+The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming in clouds,
+shedding a veiled diffuse light that was almost blinding to the eyes and
+that seemed to portend a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothing
+stirred; the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move; the
+forest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath the heavy sky. At
+rare intervals a breath of air from the south passed lazily along,
+sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow
+upon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With no
+knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensation
+like the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin.
+
+They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited activity that the
+country air imparts to the common people. The men ran, the women tripped
+after them and caught them. They played at rolling on the grass. There
+was a manifest longing to dance and climb trees; the painter amused
+himself by throwing stones at the loop-holes in the gateways of the
+fortress, and he never missed his aim.
+
+At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a clump of oaks,
+whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lighting
+matches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The women
+chattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms of
+inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did not
+speak or laugh. She did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their
+lowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed in
+thought was she that you would have said she was totally oblivious to
+time and place. Lying at full length on the grass, her head slightly
+raised by a hammock, she made no other movement than to lay her hands,
+palm downwards, on the grass beside her; in a short time she would turn
+them on their backs and let them lie in that position, seeking the
+coolness of the earth to allay the fever of her flesh.
+
+"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adele.
+
+Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without answering, and until
+dinner maintained the same position, the same silence, the same air of
+torpor, feeling about her for places where her burning hands had not
+rested.
+
+"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us something."
+
+"Oh! no," Adele replied, "I haven't got wind enough before eating."
+
+Suddenly a great stone came hurtling through the air and struck the
+ground near Germinie's head; at the same moment she heard the painter's
+voice shouting: "Don't be afraid! that's your chair."
+
+One and all laid their handkerchiefs on the ground by way of
+tablecloth. Eatables were produced from greasy papers. Bottles were
+uncorked and the wine went round; the glasses were rested against tufts
+of grass, and they fell to upon bits of pork and sausages, with slices
+of bread for plates. The painter cut boats out of paper to hold the
+salt, and imitated the orders shouted out by waiters in a cafe. "_Boum!
+Pavillon! Servez!_" he cried. The company gradually became animated. The
+open air, the patches of blue sky, the food and drink started the gayety
+of the table in full blast. Hands approached one another, mouths met,
+coarse remarks were whispered from one to another, shirt sleeves crept
+around waists, and now and then energetic embraces were attended by
+greedy, resounding kisses.
+
+Germinie drank, and said nothing. The painter, who had taken his place
+by her side, felt decidedly chilly and embarrassed beside his
+extraordinary neighbor, who amused herself "so entirely inside."
+Suddenly he began to beat a tattoo with his knife against his glass,
+drowning the uproar of the party, and rose to his knees.
+
+"Mesdames!" said he, with the voice of a paroquet that has sung too
+much, "here's the health of a man in hard luck: myself! Perhaps it will
+bring me good luck! Deserted, yes, mesdames; yes, I've been deserted!
+I'm a widower! you know the kind of widower, _razibus_! I was struck all
+of a heap. Not that I cared much for her, but habit, that old villain,
+habit! The fact is I'm as bored as a bed-bug in a watch spring. For two
+weeks my life has been like a restaurant without a _pousse-cafe_! And
+when I love love as if it had made me! No wife! That's what I call
+weaning a grown man! that is to say, since I've known what it is, I take
+off my hat to the cures: I feel very sorry for them, 'pon my word! No
+wife! and there are so many of 'em! But I can't walk about with a sign:
+_Vacant man to let. Inquire within._ In the first place it would have to
+be stamped by M'sieu le Prefet, and then, people are such fools, it
+would draw a crowd! All of which, mesdames, is intended to inform you,
+that if, among the people you have the honor of knowing, there should
+happen to be one who'd like to make an acquaintance--virtuous
+acquaintance--a pretty little left-handed marriage--why she needn't look
+any farther! I'm her man--Victor-Mederic Gautruche! a home body, a
+genuine house-ivy for sentiment! She has only to apply at my former
+hotel, _La Clef de Surete_. And gay as a hunchback who's just drowned
+his wife! Gautruche, called Gogo-la-Gaiete, egad! A pretty fellow who
+knows what's what, who doesn't beat about the bush, a good old body who
+takes things easy and who won't give himself the colic with that fishes'
+grog!" With that he took a bottle of water that stood beside him and
+hurled it twenty yards away. "Long live the walls! They're the same to
+papa that the sky is to the good God! Gogo-la-Gaiete paints them through
+the week and beats them on Monday![2] And with all that not jealous, not
+ugly, not a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never harmed one
+of the fair sex in his life! If you want physique, _parbleu_! I'm your
+man!"
+
+He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering body, clad in an old
+blue coat with gilt buttons, to its full height, removing his gray hat
+so as to show his perspiring, polished, bald skull, and tossing his old
+plucked _gamin's_ head, he continued: "You see what it is! It isn't a
+very attractive piece of property; it doesn't help it to exhibit it. But
+it yields well, it's a little dilapidated, but well put together. Dame!
+Here I am with my little forty nine-years--no more hair than a billiard
+ball, a witchgrass beard that would make good herb-tea, foundations not
+too solid, feet as long as La Villette--and with all the rest thin
+enough to take a bath in a musket-barrel. There's the bill of lading!
+Pass the prospectus along! If any woman wants all that in a lump--any
+respectable person--not too young--who won't amuse herself by painting
+me too yellow--you understand, I don't ask for a Princess of
+Batignolles--why, sure as you're born, I'm her man!"
+
+Germinie seized Gautruche's glass, half emptied it at a draught and held
+out the side from which she had drunk to him.
+
+                *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they reached the
+fortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart with the point of his knife
+on the stone, and all the names with the date were carved inside.
+
+In the evening Gautruche and Germinie were upon the outer boulevards,
+near Barriere Rochechouart. Beside a low house with these words, in a
+plaster panel: _Madame Merlin_. _Dresses cut and tried on, two francs_,
+they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a dark
+passage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. At
+the entrance to the passage, these words were printed in black on a
+wooden sign:
+
+                _Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+
+Mederie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who
+make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips
+forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with
+tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians
+graphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy from
+yesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life through
+the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with
+the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of
+the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched
+away into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold upon
+him; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind,
+he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like
+_psitt_! which was his way of saying _pshaw_! and, raising his right
+arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his
+melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb
+after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew
+neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three
+sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle
+of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and
+found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the
+world seemed sad to him--except a glass of water.
+
+With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent
+health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety
+of his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,
+unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks
+distraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at passers-by,
+from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did
+lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a
+measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters
+in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in
+position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an
+instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was also
+renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in
+bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to
+twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not
+wealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wine-shops.
+
+He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother,
+his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance,
+his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the
+people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All
+that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the
+strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the
+things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,
+the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowed
+between two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had
+endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without
+education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible,
+imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in
+original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the
+comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the
+unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and
+buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of
+house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts
+called _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never
+tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if
+you merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.
+
+A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.
+
+Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in her
+head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the
+frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and
+mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her
+shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested
+after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had
+long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had
+gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and
+the street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress
+like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes
+of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated
+description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and
+sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the
+mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her
+promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and
+facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to
+jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without
+_cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at
+the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that
+of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there
+to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading
+which women of her class have when they read at all. With the two or
+three kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed her
+nights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the
+_feuilletons_ cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers,
+and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of some
+of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make
+her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who
+worked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;
+when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names of
+the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and
+one sou novels, and read them.
+
+The air, the keen breath of Quartier Breda, full of the _verve_ of the
+artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of
+Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long
+before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous
+companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy
+creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the
+circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations
+around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of
+mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome
+society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the
+fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had
+reached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people,
+she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligence
+corresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now,
+when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her old
+self and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for her
+enjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who
+would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicated
+her with the wine that was poured into her glass. And thus it was that
+she sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people,
+uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was that
+she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+
+As Germinie was returning to the house one morning at daybreak, she
+heard, from the shadows of the _porte-cochere_ as it closed behind her,
+a voice cry: "Who's that?" She ran to the servants' staircase, but found
+that she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing the
+concierge seized her. As soon as he recognized her, he said: "Oh! is it
+you? excuse me; don't be frightened! What a giddy creature you are! It
+surprises you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account of the thieving
+that's going on these days in the cook's bedroom on the second.
+Good-night to you! it's lucky for you I don't tell all I know."
+
+A few days later Germinie learned through Adele that the husband of the
+cook who had been robbed said that there was no need to look very far;
+that the thief was in the house, and that he knew what he knew. Adele
+added that it was making a good deal of talk in the street and that
+there were plenty of people who would believe it and repeat it. Germinie
+became very indignant and told her mistress all about it. Mademoiselle
+was even more indignant than she, and, feeling personally outraged by
+the insult, wrote instantly to the cook's mistress that she must put a
+stop at once to the slanderous statements concerning a girl who had been
+in her service twenty years, and for whom she would answer as for
+herself. The cook was reprimanded. Her husband in his wrath talked
+louder than ever. He made a great outcry and for several days filled the
+house with his project of going to the commissioner of police and
+calling upon him to question Germinie as to where she procured the money
+to start the _cremiere's_ son in business, as to where she procured the
+money to purchase a substitute for him, and how she paid the expenses of
+the men she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung over
+Germinie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell to
+the ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done all
+the injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden,
+overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and became
+overcast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which was
+so prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly the
+faculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness and
+appreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which
+plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing
+presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was
+constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end
+of which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase:
+"Bah! I will kill myself!"
+
+Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience all
+the effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night she
+saw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her
+cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with her
+concealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noised
+abroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's
+account, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, by
+all that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and the
+shopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down
+her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!
+Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before the
+commissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word and
+that idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of the
+lower classes; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is
+everywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source of
+calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between the
+police sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme and
+the arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive
+terrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would much
+rather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated in
+the dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all the
+unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made them
+objects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps
+on the stairs coming to arrest her!
+
+The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental
+upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto
+had only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen,
+with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of
+deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we
+hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the
+distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the
+discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and
+so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and
+solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her
+that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and
+her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her.
+She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of
+death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes
+fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five
+flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from
+others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost
+double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would
+give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without
+having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no
+longer felt equal.
+
+"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt
+impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the
+courtyard?"
+
+"Oh! nothing--the pavements."
+
+"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!"
+
+"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "I
+tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing
+to do it!"
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+
+Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a
+former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not
+returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark
+street.
+
+At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would
+take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if
+to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and,
+going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to
+both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours,
+shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous
+and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness
+reigned. She followed the line of red-wine shops, the naked arbors, the
+_cabaret_ trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits,
+low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls,
+cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a
+night's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed
+shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark
+passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that
+seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is
+handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy
+little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded
+form, tall, mouldy _portes-cocheres_, hedge-rows, within which could be
+vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of
+unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls
+disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements
+by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.
+From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon
+lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their
+beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a
+cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the
+rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the
+distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at
+long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.
+
+Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where
+low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a
+hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir
+and Montmartre.
+
+The people who passed that way--the workman returning from Paris
+whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her
+hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her
+black cap--would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if
+they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run
+toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted
+footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible
+shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.
+
+She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself
+a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the
+last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if
+he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole
+thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more
+consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see
+him.
+
+At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie,
+exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would
+loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still
+burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows.
+She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her
+impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the
+perspiring windows of the wine-shops--the cooking utensils, the bowls of
+punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from
+their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied
+colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons--these things
+would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old
+announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon,
+the advertisements of _gloria_--coffee with brandy--the inscriptions in
+yellow letters: _New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes._ For a whole quarter
+of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in
+a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two
+black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest,
+through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over
+their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was
+being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day,
+upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had
+ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and
+growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere
+weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of
+film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling
+over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and
+compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.
+
+In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that
+semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the
+Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened
+that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that
+she had upon the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare.
+When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its
+varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements,
+the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the
+rain, and there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the aqueous
+darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad with fatigue, would fancy
+that she could see a flood rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror
+would show her suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly
+nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not daring to move, fearing to
+feel her feet slip from under her; she would begin to weep, and would
+weep on until someone passed by and offered to escort her to the _Hotel
+of the Little Blue Hand_.
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+
+She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last place of refuge. She
+would fly from the rain and snow and cold, from fear, despair, and
+fatigue. She would go up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's
+closed doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely about her in
+order to leave room for those who went and came up that long steep
+ladder, and would draw back as far as possible into the corner in order
+that her shame might fill but little space on the narrow landing.
+
+From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets, of families heaped
+together in a single room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the
+dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the
+stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house,
+came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie
+wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the
+whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt
+every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her
+pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, and swallow a
+mouthful of it to avoid being ill.
+
+But the staircase had its passers, too: honest workmen's wives went up
+with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint of wine for supper. Their feet
+would rub against her as they passed, and as they went farther up,
+Germinie would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and falling
+upon her with more crushing force at every floor. The children--little
+girls in _fanchons_ who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it
+as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in
+dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood--she saw them
+stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her;
+then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs,
+and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until
+they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the
+children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by
+those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She
+would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning
+herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling
+her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight,
+she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering
+over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone
+might tread upon--having no control of her faculties, dead to everything
+except the footsteps that she was listening for--and that did not come.
+
+At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would
+fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice
+would mount the stairs, stammering "_Canaille!_ _canaille_ of a
+saloon-keeper!--you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"
+
+It was he.
+
+And almost every day the same scene was enacted.
+
+"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as his eyes fell upon her.
+"It's like this--I'll tell you all about it. I'm a little bit under
+water." And, as he put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it.
+It isn't my fault."
+
+He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove with mangy wings that
+limped forward to greet him, and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye
+see. It was Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat as
+a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He insisted on paying for a
+sixteen-sous bottle for me. He offered to treat me, and I _proffered_
+him thanks. Thereupon we naturally _consoled_[5] our coffee; when you're
+consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon
+each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that
+that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster
+shells!"
+
+Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted the candle, stuck
+in a yellow copper candlestick. By its flickering light the dirty paper
+on the walls could be seen, covered with caricatures from _Charivari_,
+torn from the paper and pasted on the wall.
+
+"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim, as he saw her place a
+cold fowl and two bottles of wine on the table. "For I must tell you all
+I've had in my stomach to-day--a plate of wretched soup--that's all. Ah!
+it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put that fellow's eyes
+out!"
+
+And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with her elbows on the
+table, watching him and drinking, and her glance would grow dark.
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Pshaw! all the negresses are dead,"[6] Gautruche would say at last, as
+he drained the bottles one by one. "Put the children to bed!"
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion would ensue
+between those two strange creatures, savage ardor followed by savage
+satiety, frantic storms of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the
+fierce brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood beneath
+the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at the end, utter
+exhaustion that swallowed them up and left their bodies like corpses.
+
+Germinie plunged into these debauches with--what shall I say?--delirium,
+madness, desperation, a sort of supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable
+passions turned against themselves, and, going beyond their natural
+appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted them without
+extinguishing them; and, overpassing the widest limits of excess, they
+excited themselves to self-torture. In the poor creature's paroxysms of
+excitement, her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her maddened body,
+no longer sought pleasure in pleasure, but something sharper, keener,
+and more violent: pain in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly
+escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking death in an
+undertone and seeking to embrace it in the agonies of love.
+
+Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the
+bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed,
+listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little
+by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to envelop her. She
+seemed to herself to fall and writhe helplessly in the blind
+unconsciousness of the night. Her will became as naught. All sorts of
+black things, that seemed to have wings and voices, beat against her
+temples. The ghastly temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of
+crime caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes,
+close at hand; and hands placed against her back pushed her toward the
+table where the knives lay. She would close her eyes and move one foot;
+then fear would lay hold of her and she would cling to the bedclothes;
+and at last she would turn around, fall back upon the bed, and go to
+sleep beside the man she had been tempted to murder; why? she had no
+idea; for nothing--for the sake of killing!
+
+And so, until daybreak, in that wretched furnished lodging, the fierce
+struggle of those fatal passions would continue, while the poor maimed,
+limping dove, the infirm bird of Venus, nesting in one of Gautruche's
+old shoes, would utter now and then, awakened by the noise, a frightened
+coo.
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter LII
+
+
+_Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the
+bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed,
+listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. The ghastly
+temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime caused a red
+light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes, close at hand; and
+hands placed against her back pushed her toward the table where the
+knives lay._]
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+
+In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted with drinking. He felt
+the first pangs of the disease of the liver that had long been lurking
+in his heated, alcoholized blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The
+horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the cords of his
+stomach for a whole week, caused him to reflect. There came to his mind,
+together with divers resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost
+sentimental ideas of the future. He said to himself that he must put a
+little more water into his life, if he wanted to live to old age. While
+he lay writhing in bed and tying himself into knots, with his knees up
+to his chin to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four
+walls within which he passed his nights, to which he brought his drunken
+body home in the evening, and from which he fled into the daylight in
+the morning; and he thought about making a real home for himself. He
+dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a wife who would make him
+a good stew, look after him if he were ill, straighten out his affairs,
+keep his linen in order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the
+wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the useful qualities
+of a housekeeper, and who, in addition, would not be a stupid fool, but
+would understand him and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found:
+Germinie was the very one. She probably had a little hoard, a few sous
+laid by during the time she had been in her old mistress's service; and
+with what he earned they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no doubt
+of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she would accept his
+proposition. More than that, her scruples, if she had any, would not
+hold out against the prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit
+to her at the end of their _liaison_.
+
+One Monday she had come to his room as usual.
+
+"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say to this, eh? A good
+room--not like this box--a real room, with a closet--at Montmartre, and
+two windows, no less! Rue de l'Empereur--with a view an Englishman would
+give five thousand francs to carry away with him. Something first-class,
+bright, and cheerful, you know, a place where you could stay all day
+without hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to have
+enough of moving about here and there just to change fleas. And that
+isn't all, either: I'm tired of being cooped up in furnished lodgings,
+I'm tired of being all alone. Friends don't make society. They fall on
+you like flies in your glass when you're to pay, and then, there you
+are! In the first place, I don't propose to drink any more, honor
+bright! no more for me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use
+myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by any means!
+Attention! We mustn't let drink get the better of us. It seemed to me
+those days as if I'd been swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to
+knock at the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to the
+needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition to Germinie.
+I'll treat myself to a little furniture. You've got what you have in
+your room. You know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy bone in
+my body where work's concerned. And then we might look to not always be
+working for others: we might take a lodging-house for country thieves.
+If you had a little something put aside, that would help. We would join
+forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves straightened out some day
+before the mayor. That's not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And
+you'll leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear old
+Gautruche?"
+
+Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust forward and her
+chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw herself back with a burst of
+strident laughter.
+
+"Ha! ha! ha! You thought--and you have the face to tell me so!--you
+thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle? Did you really think so? You're a
+fool, you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred thousands, you
+might be stuffed with gold, do you hear? all stuffed with it. You're
+joking, aren't you? Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever
+told you? I would like to see her die and these hands not be there to
+close her eyes! I'd like to see it! Come now, really, did you think so?"
+
+"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted with me, I thought you
+cared more for me than that--that you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the
+painter, disconcerted by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's
+words.
+
+"Ah! you thought that, too--that I loved you!" And, as if she were
+suddenly uprooting from the depths of her heart the remorse and
+suffering of her passions, she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you--I
+love you as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love you as one
+loves something that is close at hand--that one makes use of because it
+is there! I am used to you as one gets used to an old dress and wears it
+again and again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose I should care
+for you? I'd like you to tell me what difference it can make to me
+whether it's you or another? For, after all, what have you been to me
+more than any other man would be? In the first place, you took me. Well?
+Is that enough to make me love you? What have you done, then, to attach
+me to you, will you be kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed
+a glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken pity on me when I
+was tramping about in the mud and snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes!
+And what did people say to me and spit out in my face so that my blood
+boiled from one end of my body to the other! You never troubled your
+head about all the insults I've swallowed waiting for you! Look you!
+I've been wanting to tell you all this for a long time--it's been
+choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly smile, "do you
+flatter yourself you've driven me wild with your physical beauty, with
+your hair, which you've lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took
+you--I'd have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the
+times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything
+or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot
+day!"
+
+She paused an instant.
+
+"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as
+long as your hand's in."
+
+"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be
+to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool!
+she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to
+promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her
+mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no
+one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't
+understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me!
+Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated
+kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was
+unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?'
+No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what
+became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is
+between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying
+of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am,
+a----" She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her
+affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she
+should ever learn anything--but, no fear of that, it won't be long.
+There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story
+window, as true as God is my master! But fancy--you are not my heart,
+you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah!
+I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces
+for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me
+what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest,
+when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and
+would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to--even then, if
+mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little
+finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I
+tell you I would have left him!"
+
+"In that case--if that's the way things stand, my dear--if you're so
+fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give
+you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"
+
+"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.
+
+"Faith! it's very like it."
+
+"Well! adieu. That suits me!"
+
+She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+
+After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below
+shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate
+creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers
+whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met
+on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman.
+She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her
+caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon
+the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized
+him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the
+passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it
+were--none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men
+her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The
+last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery,--preference,
+selection,--and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain
+of conscience and personality,--disgust, even disgust,--she had lost!
+
+And she wandered about the streets at night, with the furtive, stealthy
+gait of wild beasts prowling in the shadow in quest of food. As if
+unsexed, she made the advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage
+of drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked along, peering on
+every side, approaching every shadowy corner where impurity might lurk
+under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to
+swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the
+street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along,
+almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that
+appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets
+the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind at work on the brink
+of deep abysses of melancholy.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+
+One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a
+wine-shop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man
+who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.
+
+She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the
+door of the wine-shop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her,
+her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her
+skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling
+listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a
+milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and
+the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passers-by, the
+carriages, the street--she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were
+far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up
+the hill,--a white horse, he was,--stood in front of her, worn out and
+motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the
+bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog.
+It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if
+the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and
+flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving,
+with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening,
+desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by
+Darkness at a wine-shop door!
+
+At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.
+
+"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to
+possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes,
+no scaffold--nothing!
+
+Jupillon felt that his customary _blague_ was arrested in his throat.
+
+"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't lost. But I must have time.
+Just now, you see, work ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine
+came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months' time, I
+promise. Are you pretty well?"
+
+"_Canaille!_ Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd sneak away, would you? But
+it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber!
+sneak! It was you."
+
+Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing against him, forcing
+him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing
+against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned
+toward him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to
+you to make you strike me?"
+
+She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply
+felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an
+instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer
+in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put
+a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but
+blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the
+lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,--the
+guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the
+commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her
+misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost
+her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of emptying
+itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was
+bursting.
+
+"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who
+tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her
+as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to
+bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.
+
+"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed a police officer,
+grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that
+brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees wavered: she
+thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of
+the street.
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+
+Passion is subject to the most insensate reactions, the most
+inexplicable revivals. The accursed love that Germinie believed to have
+been killed by all the wounds and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it
+came to life once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart when
+she returned home. The mere sight of the man, his proximity for those
+few moments, the sound of his voice, the act of breathing the air that
+he breathed, were enough to turn her heart back to him and relegate her
+to the past.
+
+Notwithstanding all that had happened, she had never been able to tear
+Jupillon's image altogether from her heart: its roots were still
+imbedded there. He was her first love. She belonged to him against her
+own will by all the weaknesses of memory, by all the cowardice of habit.
+Between them there were all the bonds of torture that hold a woman fast
+forever,--sacrifice, suffering, degradation. He owned her, body and
+soul, because he had outraged her conscience, trampled upon her
+illusions, made her life a martyrdom. She belonged to him, belonged to
+him forever, as to the author of all her sorrows.
+
+And that shock, that scene which should have caused her to think with
+horror of ever meeting him again, rekindled in her the frenzied desire
+to meet him again. Her passion seized her again in its full force. The
+thought of Jupillon filled her mind so completely that it purified her.
+She abruptly called a halt in the vagabondage of her passions: she
+determined to belong thenceforth to no one, as that was the only method
+by which she could still belong to him.
+
+She began to spy upon him, to make a study of his usual hours for going
+out, the streets he passed through, the places that he visited. She
+followed him to Batignolles, to his new quarters, walked behind him,
+content to put her foot where he had put his, to be guided by his steps,
+to see him now and then, to notice a gesture that he made, to snatch one
+of his glances. That was all: she dared not speak to him; she kept at
+some distance behind, like a lost dog, happy not to be driven away with
+kicks.
+
+For weeks and weeks she made herself thus the man's shadow, a humble,
+timid shadow that shrank back and moved away a few steps when it thought
+it was in danger of being seen; then drew nearer again with faltering
+steps, and, at an impatient movement from the man, stopped once more, as
+if asking pardon.
+
+Sometimes she waited at the door of a house which he entered, caught him
+up again when he came out and escorted him home, always at a distance,
+without speaking to him, with the air of a beggar begging for crumbs
+and thankful for what she was allowed to pick up. Then she would listen
+at the shutters of the ground-floor apartment in which he lived, to
+ascertain if he was alone, if there was anybody there.
+
+When he had a woman on his arm, although she suffered keenly, she was
+the more persistent in following him. She went where they went to the
+end. She entered the public gardens and ballrooms behind them. She
+walked within sound of their laughter and their words, tore her heart to
+tatters looking at them and listening to them, and stood at their backs
+with every jealous instinct of her nature bleeding.
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+
+It was November. For three or four days Germinie had not fallen in with
+Jupillon. She went to hover about his lodgings, watching for him. When
+she reached the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of light
+struggling out through the closed shutters. She approached and heard
+bursts of laughter, the clinking of glasses, women's voices, then a song
+and one voice, that of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred
+of her heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead before
+her, and whose death she had so often sought to discover in the
+coffee-grounds,--the cousin!
+
+She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what they said, absorbed
+in the torture of listening to them, pasturing her famished heart upon
+suffering. It was a cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the
+cold or rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The voice she
+detested seemed at times to grow faint and die away beneath kisses, and
+the notes it sang died in her throat as if stifled by lips placed upon
+the song. The hours passed. Germinie was still at her post. She did not
+think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge of what she was
+waiting for. It seemed to her that she must remain there always, until
+the end. The rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead
+beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided down her neck. An icy
+shiver ran up and down her back. The water dripped from her dress to the
+ground. She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in any of
+her limbs except the pain that flowed from her heart.
+
+Well on toward morning there was a movement in the house, and footsteps
+approached the door. Germinie ran and hid in a recess in the wall some
+steps away, and from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young
+man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something soft and warm on
+her hands that frightened her at first; it was a dog licking her, a
+great dog that she had held in her lap many an evening, when he was a
+puppy, in the _cremiere's_ back shop.
+
+"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently twice or thrice in
+the darkness.
+
+The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled about her, and at last
+entered the house. The door closed. The voices and singing lured
+Germinie back to her former position against the shutter, and there she
+remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be drenched, as she
+listened and listened, till morning, till daybreak, till the hour when
+the masons on their way to work, with their dinner loaf under their
+arms, began to laugh at her as they passed.
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+
+Two or three days after that night in the rain, Germinie's features were
+distorted with pain, her skin was like marble and her eyes blazing. She
+said nothing, made no complaints, but went about her work as usual.
+
+"Here! girl, look at me a moment," said mademoiselle, and she led her
+abruptly to the window. "What does all this mean? this look of a dead
+woman risen from the grave? Come, tell me honestly, are you sick? My
+God! how hot your hands are!"
+
+She grasped her wrist, and in a moment threw it down.
+
+"What a silly slut! you're in a burning fever! And you keep it to
+yourself!"
+
+"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie stammered. "I think it's nothing but a
+bad cold. I went to sleep the other evening with my kitchen window
+open."
+
+"Oh! you're a good one!" retorted mademoiselle; "you might be dying and
+you'd never as much as say: 'Ouf!' Wait."
+
+She put on her spectacles, and hastily moving her arm-chair to a small
+table by the fireplace, she wrote a few lines in her bold hand.
+
+"Here," said she, folding the note, "you will do me the favor to give
+this to your friend Adele and have her send the concierge with it. And
+now to bed you go!"
+
+But Germinie refused to go to bed. It was not worth while. She would not
+tire herself. She would sit down all day. Besides, the worst of her
+sickness was over; she was getting better already. And then it always
+killed her to stay in bed.
+
+The doctor, summoned by mademoiselle's note, came in the evening. He
+examined Germinie, and ordered the application of croton oil. The
+trouble in the chest was of such a nature that he could say nothing
+about it until he had observed the effect of his remedies.
+
+He returned a few days later, sent Germinie to bed and sounded her chest
+for a long while.
+
+"It's a most extraordinary thing," he said to mademoiselle, when he went
+downstairs; "she has had pleurisy upon her and hasn't kept her bed for a
+moment! Is she made of iron, in Heaven's name? Oh! the energy of some
+women! How old is she?"
+
+"Forty-one."
+
+"Forty-one! Oh! it's not possible. Are you sure? She looks fully fifty."
+
+"Ah! as to that, she looks as old as you please. What can you expect?
+Never in good health,--always sick, disappointment, sorrow,--and a
+disposition that can't help tormenting itself."
+
+"Forty-one years old! it's amazing!" the physician repeated.
+
+After a moment's reflection, he continued:
+
+"So far as you know, is there any hereditary lung trouble in her family?
+Has she had any relatives who have died young?"
+
+"She lost a sister by pleurisy; but she was older. She was forty-eight,
+I think."
+
+The doctor had become very grave. "However, the lung is getting freer,"
+he said, in an encouraging tone. "But it is absolutely necessary that
+she should have rest. And send her to me once a week. Let her come and
+see me. And let her take a pleasant day for it,--a bright, sunny day."
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+
+Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and scolded to no purpose:
+she could not induce Germinie to lay aside her work for a few days.
+Germinie would not even listen to the suggestion that she should have an
+assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that it was useless,
+impossible; that she could never endure the thought of another woman
+approaching her, waiting upon her, attending to her wants; that it would
+give her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in bed; that
+she was not dead yet; and she begged that she might be allowed to go on
+as usual, so long as she could put one foot before the other. She said
+it in such an affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble
+voice was so humble and so passionate in making the request, that
+mademoiselle had not the courage to force her to accept an assistant.
+She simply called her a "blockhead," who believed, like all
+country-people, that a few days in bed means death.
+
+Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement due to the physician's
+energetic treatment, Germinie continued to make mademoiselle's bed,
+accepting her assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to
+prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful task to her.
+
+When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast and dinner, she felt as
+if she should die in her kitchen, one of the wretched little kitchens
+common in great cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble
+in women. The embers that she kindled, and from which a thread of
+suffocating smoke slowly arose, began to stir her stomach to revolt;
+soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door,
+strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its
+stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured
+back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She
+suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her
+face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled.
+In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back and forth
+through the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to the window
+and draw a few breaths of the icy outside air.
+
+She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for keeping constantly
+about her work despite her increasing weakness, than the repugnance of
+country-people to take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous
+determination that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's
+needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which might accompany
+the installation of a new servant. It was absolutely necessary that she
+should be there, to keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from
+coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should show herself,
+that the quarter should see her, and that she should not appear to her
+creditors with the aspect of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of
+being strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she must
+impart confidence to the whole street with the doctor's studied words,
+with a hopeful air, and with the promise not to die. She must appear at
+her best in order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions
+on the subject of money from ascending the stairs and applying to
+mademoiselle.
+
+She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She
+was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie,--in
+drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the
+shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing
+footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before going out in
+order to bring back the color of blood to them; in covering the pallor
+of her disease and her death-mask with rouge.
+
+Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless nights, despite her
+stomach's loathing for food, she passed the whole winter conquering and
+overcoming her own weakness and struggling with the ups and downs of her
+disease.
+
+At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle that he was
+unable to find that any of her maid's vital organs were seriously
+diseased. The lungs were a little ulcerated near the top; but people
+recovered from that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn out,"
+he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an almost embarrassed
+manner that impressed mademoiselle. And he always had something to say,
+at the end of his visit, about a change of air--about the country.
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+
+When August arrived, the doctor had nothing but that to advise or
+prescribe--the country. Notwithstanding the repugnance of elderly people
+to move, to change their abode and the habits and regular hours of their
+life; despite her domestic nature and the sort of pang that she felt at
+being torn from her hearthstone, mademoiselle decided to take Germinie
+into the country. She wrote to the _chick's_ daughter, who lived, with a
+brood of children, on a small estate in a village of Brie, and who had
+been, for many years, begging her to pay her a long visit. She requested
+her hospitality for a month or six weeks for herself and her sick maid.
+
+They set out. Germinie was delighted. On their arrival she felt
+decidedly better. For some days her disease seemed to be diverted by the
+change. But the weather that summer was very uncertain, with much rain,
+sudden changes, and high winds. Germinie had a chill, and mademoiselle
+soon heard again, overhead, just above the room in which she slept, the
+frightful cough that had been so painful and hard to bear at Paris.
+There were hurried paroxysms of coughing that seemed almost to strangle
+her; spasms that would break off for a moment, then begin again; and the
+pauses caused the ear and the heart to experience a nervous, anxious
+anticipation of what was certain to come next, and always did
+come,--racking and tearing, dying away again, but still vibrating in the
+ear, even when it had ceased: never silent, never willing to have done.
+
+And yet Germinie rose from those horrible nights with an energy and
+activity that amazed mademoiselle and at times reassured her. She was
+out of bed as early as anybody in the house. One morning, at five
+o'clock, she went with the man-servant in a _char-a-banc_ to a mill-pond
+three leagues away, for fish; at another time she dragged herself to the
+saint's day ball, with the maids from the house, and did not return
+until they did, at daybreak. She worked all the time; assisted the
+servants. She was always sitting on the edge of a chair, in a corner of
+the kitchen, doing something with her fingers. Mademoiselle was obliged
+to force her to go out, to drive her into the garden to sit. Then
+Germinie would sit on the green bench, with her umbrella over her head,
+and the sun in her skirts and on her feet. Hardly moving, she would
+forget herself utterly as she inhaled the light and air and warmth,
+passionately and with a sort of feverish joy. Her distended lips would
+part to admit the fresh, clear air. Her eyes burned, but did not move;
+and in the light shadow of the silk umbrella her gaunt, wasted, haggard
+face stared vacantly into space like an amorous death's head.
+
+Weary as she was at night, no persuasion could induce her to retire
+before her mistress. She insisted upon being at hand to undress her.
+Seated by her side, she would rise from time to time to wait upon her as
+best she could, assist her to take off a petticoat, then sit down again,
+collect her strength for a moment, rise again, and insist upon doing
+something for her. Mademoiselle had to force her to sit down and order
+her to keep quiet. And all the time that the evening toilet lasted she
+had always upon her lips the same tiresome chatter about the servants of
+the house.
+
+"Why, mademoiselle, you haven't an idea of the eyes they make at each
+other when they think no one sees them--the cook and the man--I mean.
+They keep quiet when I am by; but the other day I surprised them in the
+bakery. They were kissing, fancy! Luckily madame here don't suspect it."
+
+"Ah! there you are again with your tale-bearing! Why, good God!"
+mademoiselle would exclaim, "what difference does it make to you whether
+they _coo_ or don't _coo_? They're kind to you, aren't they? That's all
+that's necessary."
+
+"Oh! very kind, mademoiselle; as far as that's concerned I haven't a
+word to say. Marie got up in the night last night to give me some
+water--and as for him, when there's any dessert left, it's always for
+me. Oh! he's very polite to me--in fact, Marie don't like it very well
+that he thinks so much about me. You understand, mademoiselle----"
+
+"Come, come! go to bed with all your nonsense!" said her mistress
+sharply, sad, and annoyed as well, to find such a keen interest in
+others' love-affairs in one so ill.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+
+When they returned from the country, the doctor, after examining
+Germinie, said to Mademoiselle: "It has been very rapid, very rapid. The
+left lung is entirely gone. The right has begun to be affected at the
+top, and I fear that there is more or less difficulty all through it.
+She's a dead woman. She may live six weeks, two months at most."
+
+"Great Heaven!" said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, "everyone I have ever
+loved will go before me! Tell me, must I wait until everybody has gone?"
+
+"Have you thought of placing her in some institution?" said the doctor,
+after a moment's silence. "You can't keep her here. It's too great a
+burden, too great a grief for you to have her with you," he added, at a
+gesture from mademoiselle.
+
+"No, monsieur, no, I haven't thought of it. Oh! yes, I am likely to send
+her away. Why you must have seen, monsieur: that girl isn't a maid, she
+isn't a servant in my eyes; she's like the family I never had! What
+would you have me say to her: 'Be off with you now!' Ah! I never
+suffered so much before on account of not being rich and having a
+wretched four-sou apartment like this. I, mention such a thing to her!
+why, it's impossible! And where could she go? To the Maison Dubois? Oh!
+yes, to the Dubois! She went there once to see the maid I had before,
+who died there. You might as well kill her! The hospital, then? No, not
+there; I don't choose to have her die in that place!"
+
+"Good God, mademoiselle, she'll be a hundred times better off there than
+here. I would get her admitted at Lariboisiere, during the term of
+service of a doctor who is a friend of mine. I would recommend her to an
+intern, who is under great obligations to me. She would have a very
+excellent Sister to nurse her in the hall to which I would have her
+sent. If necessary, she could have a private room. But I am sure she
+would prefer to be in a common room. It's the essential thing to do, you
+see, mademoiselle. She can't stay in that chamber up there. You know
+what these horrible servants' quarters are. Indeed, it's my opinion that
+the health authorities ought to compel the landlords to show common
+humanity in that direction; it's an outrage! The cold weather is coming;
+there's no fireplace; with the window and the roof it will be like an
+ice-house. You see she still keeps about. She has a marvelous stock of
+courage, prodigious nervous vitality. But, in spite of everything, the
+bed will claim her in a few days,--she won't get up again. Come, listen
+to reason, mademoiselle. Let me speak to her, will you?"
+
+"No, not yet. I must get used to the idea. And then, when I see her
+around me I imagine she isn't going to die so quickly as all that.
+There's time enough. Later, we'll see about it,--yes, later."
+
+"Excuse me, mademoiselle, if I venture to say to you that you are quite
+capable of making yourself sick nursing her."
+
+"I? Oh! as for me!" And Mademoiselle de Varandeuil made a gesture
+indicating that her life was of no consequence.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+
+Amid Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's desperate anxiety concerning her
+maid's health, she became conscious of a strange feeling, a sort of fear
+in the presence of the new, unfamiliar, mysterious creature that
+sickness had made of Germinie. Mademoiselle had a sense of discomfort
+beside that hollow, ghostly face, which was almost unrecognizable in its
+implacable rigidity, and which seemed to return to itself, to recover
+consciousness, only furtively, by fits and starts, in the effort to
+produce a pallid smile. The old woman had seen many people die; her
+memories of many painful years recalled the expressions of many dear,
+doomed faces, of many faces that were sad and desolate and
+grief-stricken in death; but no face of all those she remembered had
+ever assumed, as the end drew near, that distressing expression of a
+face retiring within itself and closing the doors.
+
+Enveloped in her suffering, Germinie maintained her savage, rigid,
+self-contained, impenetrable demeanor. She was as immovable as bronze.
+Mademoiselle, as she looked at her, asked herself what it could be that
+she brooded over thus without moving; whether it was her life rising in
+revolt, the dread of death, or a secret remorse for something in her
+past. Nothing external seemed to affect the sick woman. She was no
+longer conscious of things about her. Her body became indifferent to
+everything, did not ask to be relieved, seemed not to desire to be
+cured. She complained of nothing, found no pleasure or diversion in
+anything. Even her longing for affection had left her. She no longer
+made any motion to bestow or invite a caress, and every day something
+human left her body, which seemed to be turning to stone. Often she
+would bury herself in profound silence that made one expect a
+heart-rending shriek or word; but after glancing about the room, she
+would say nothing and begin again to stare fixedly, vacantly, at the
+same spot in space.
+
+When mademoiselle returned from the friend's house with whom she dined,
+she would find Germinie in the dark, sunk in an easy-chair with her legs
+stretched out upon a chair, her head hanging forward on her breast, and
+so profoundly absorbed that sometimes she did not hear the door open. As
+she walked forward into the room it seemed to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+as if she were breaking in upon a ghastly _tete-a-tete_ between Disease
+and the Shadow of Death, wherein Germinie was already seeking, in the
+terror of the Invisible, the blindness of the grave and the darkness of
+death.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+
+Throughout the month of October, Germinie obstinately refused to take to
+her bed. Each day, however, she was weaker and more helpless than the
+day before. She was hardly able to ascend the flight of stairs that led
+to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she
+fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to
+her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs
+again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in
+the morning. She prepared mademoiselle's breakfast, made a pretence of
+working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and
+dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; she forced her to
+lie down on her own bed. Germinie lay there half an hour, an hour, wide
+awake, not speaking, but with her eyes open, fixed, and staring into
+vacancy like the eyes of a person in severe pain.
+
+One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle climbed to the sixth
+floor, turned into a narrow corridor in which the air was heavy with the
+odors from servants' water-closets and at last reached Germinie's door,
+No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled her to come up. It was
+impossible for her to put her feet out of the bed. She had terrible
+pains in her bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle
+to sit down a moment and, to make room for her, removed the candlestick
+that stood on the chair at the head of her bed.
+
+Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments, looking about the
+wretched room,--one of those where the doctor has to lay his hat on the
+bed, and where there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room,
+without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping roof, which
+admitted the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Old trunks, clothes
+bags, a foot-bath, and the little iron bedstead on which Germinie's
+niece had slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping roof. The
+bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand with a broken pitcher,
+comprised the whole of the furniture. Above the bed, in an imitation
+violet-wood frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.
+
+The doctor came during the day. "Aha! peritonitis," he said, when
+mademoiselle described Germinie's condition.
+
+He went up to see the sick woman. "I am afraid," he said, when he came
+down, "that there's an abscess in the intestine communicating with an
+abscess in the bladder. It's a serious case, very serious. You must tell
+her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over with great care.
+She might die suddenly in horrible agony. I suggested to her to go to
+Lariboisiere,--she agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at
+all. But I don't know how she will bear the journey. However, she has
+such an unlimited stock of energy; I have never seen anything like it.
+To-morrow morning you shall have the order of admission."
+
+When mademoiselle went up to Germinie's room again, she found her
+smiling in her bed, gay as a lark at the idea of going away.
+
+"It's a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle," said she.
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+
+At two o'clock the next day the doctor brought the order for her
+admission to Lariboisiere. The invalid was ready to start. Mademoiselle
+suggested that they should send to the hospital for a litter. "Oh! no,"
+said Germinie, hastily, "I should think I was dead." She was thinking of
+her debts; she must show herself to her creditors on the street, alive,
+and on her feet to the last!
+
+She got out of bed. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil assisted her to put on
+her petticoat and her dress. As soon as she left her bed, all signs of
+life disappeared from her face, the flush from her complexion: it seemed
+as if earth suddenly took the place of blood under her skin. She went
+down the steep servants' stairway, clinging to the baluster, and reached
+her mistress's apartments. She sat down in an arm-chair near the window
+in the dining-room. She insisted upon putting on her stockings without
+assistance, and as she pulled them on with her poor trembling hands, the
+fingers striking against one another, she afforded a glimpse of her
+legs, which were so thin as to make one shudder. The housekeeper,
+meanwhile, was putting together in a bundle a little linen, a glass, a
+cup, and a pewter plate, which she wished to carry with her. When that
+was done, Germinie looked about her for a moment; she cast one last
+glance around the room, a glance that seemed to long to take everything
+away with her. Then, as her eyes rested on the door through which the
+housekeeper had just gone out, she said to mademoiselle: "At all events
+I leave a good woman with you."
+
+She rose. The door closed noisily behind her, as if to say adieu, and,
+supported by Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who almost carried her, she
+went down the five flights of the main stairway. At every landing she
+paused to take breath. In the vestibule she found the concierge, who had
+brought her a chair. She fell into it. The vulgar fellow laughingly
+promised her that she would be well in six weeks. She moved her head
+slightly as she said _yes_, a muffled _yes_.
+
+She was in the cab, beside her mistress. It was an uncomfortable cab and
+jolted over the pavements. She sat forward on the seat to avoid the
+concussion of the jolting, and clung to the door with her hand. She
+watched the houses pass, but did not speak. When they reached the
+hospital gate, she refused to be carried. "Can you walk as far as that?"
+said the concierge, pointing to the reception-room some sixty feet
+distant. She made an affirmative sign and walked: it was a dead woman
+walking, because she was determined to walk!
+
+At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and clean and bare
+and horrible, with a circle of wooden benches around the waiting litter.
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door.
+A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil Germinie's
+name and age, and wrote for a quarter of an hour, covering ten or more
+sheets of paper with a religious emblem at the top. That done,
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an
+attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no more, but turned and
+fled, and, throwing herself upon the cushions of the cab, she burst into
+sobs and gave vent to all the tears with which her heart had been
+suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was amazed to hear
+such violent weeping.
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+
+On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started at half-past twelve
+to go and see Germinie. It was her purpose to be at her bedside at the
+moment the doors were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she rode
+through the streets she had passed through four days before, she
+remembered the ghastly ride of Monday. It seemed to her as if she were
+incommoding a sick person in the cab, of which she was the only
+occupant, and she sat close in the corner in order to make room for the
+memory of Germinie. In what condition should she find her? Should she
+find her at all? Suppose her bed should be empty?
+
+The cab passed through a narrow street filled with orange carts, and
+with women sitting on the sidewalk offering biscuit for sale in baskets.
+There was something unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air
+display of fruit and cakes,--the delicacies of the dying, the _viaticum_
+of invalids, craved by feverish mouths, longed for by the
+death-agony,--which workingmen's hands, black with toil, purchase as
+they pass, to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting morsel.
+Children carried them with sober faces, almost reverentially, and
+without touching them, as if they understood.
+
+The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard. It was five minutes to
+one. There was a long line of women crowding about the gate, women with
+their working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent. Mademoiselle
+de Varandeuil took her place in the line, went forward with the others
+and was admitted: they searched her. She inquired for Salle
+Sainte-Josephine, and was directed to the second wing on the second
+floor. She found the hall and the bed, No. 14, which was, as she had
+been told, one of the last at the right. Indeed, she was guided thither,
+as it were, from the farther end of the hall, by Germinie's smile--the
+smile of a sick person in a hospital at an unexpected visit, which says,
+so gently, as soon as you enter the room: "Here I am."
+
+She leaned over the bed. Germinie tried to push her away with a gesture
+of humility and the shamefacedness of a servant.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her.
+
+"Ah!" said Germinie, "the time dragged terribly yesterday. I imagined it
+was Thursday and I longed so for you."
+
+"My poor girl! How are you?"
+
+"Oh! I'm getting on finely now--the swelling in my bowels has all gone.
+I have only three weeks to stay here, mademoiselle, you'll see.
+They talk about a month or six weeks, but I know better. And I'm very
+comfortable here, I don't mind it at all. I sleep all night now. My! but
+I was thirsty, when you brought me here Monday! They wouldn't give me
+wine and water."
+
+
+[Illustration: Chapter LXV
+
+_One and all, after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to
+kiss her, and with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an
+indistinct murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those
+who kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed._]
+
+
+"What have you there to drink?"
+
+"Oh! what I had at home--lime-water. Would you mind pouring me out some,
+mademoiselle? their pewter things are so heavy!"
+
+She raised herself with one arm by the aid of the little stick that hung
+over the middle of the bed, and putting out the other thin, trembling
+arm, left bare by the sleeve falling back from it, she took the glass
+mademoiselle held out to her, and drank.
+
+"There," said she when she had done, and she placed both her arms
+outside the bed, on the coverlid.
+
+"What a pity that I have to put you out in this way, my poor
+demoiselle!" she continued. "Things must be in a horribly dirty state at
+home!"
+
+"Don't worry about that."
+
+There was a moment's silence. A faint smile came to Germinie's lips. "I
+am sailing under false colors," she said, lowering her voice; "I have
+confessed so as to get well."
+
+Then she moved her head on the pillow in order to bring her mouth nearer
+to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's ear:
+
+"There are tales to tell here. I have a funny neighbor yonder." She
+indicated with a glance and a movement of her shoulder the patient to
+whom her back was turned. "There's a man who comes here to see her. He
+talked to her an hour yesterday. I heard them say they'd had a child.
+She has left her husband. He was like a madman, the man was, when he was
+talking to her."
+
+As she spoke, Germinie's face lighted up as if she were still full of
+the scene of the day before, still stirred up and feverish with
+jealousy, so near death as she was, because she had heard love spoken of
+beside her!
+
+Suddenly her expression changed. A woman came toward her bed. She seemed
+embarrassed when she saw Mademoiselle de Varandeuil. After a few
+moments, she kissed Germinie, and hurriedly withdrew as another woman
+came up. The new-comer did the same, kissed Germinie and at once took
+her leave. After the women a man came; then another woman. One and all,
+after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to kiss her, and
+with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct
+murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those who
+kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed.
+
+"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are well taken care of!"
+
+"Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone, "they take excellent
+care of me!"
+
+She had lost the animation that she displayed at the beginning of the
+visit. The little blood that had mounted to her cheeks remained there in
+one spot only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf, like a
+wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were. Her features were
+concealed beneath the veil of infinite dumb agony. There was nothing
+caressing or eloquent in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and
+filled with one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior
+signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an irresistible power of
+concentration, by a last supreme effort of her will, and that her whole
+being was clinging in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything to
+itself.
+
+The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the
+butter woman and the laundress--all her debts, incarnate! The kisses
+were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their
+claims and to extort money from her death-agony!
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+
+Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning. She was making a little
+package of four jars of Bar preserves, which she intended to carry to
+Germinie the next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between the
+housekeeper and the concierge in the reception room. Almost immediately
+the door opened and the concierge came in.
+
+"Sad news, mademoiselle," he said.
+
+And he handed her a letter he had in his hand; it bore the stamp of the
+Lariboisiere hospital: Germinie was dead; she died at seven o'clock that
+morning.
+
+Mademoiselle took the letter; she saw only the letters that said: "Dead!
+dead!" And they repeated the word: "Dead! dead!" to no purpose, for she
+could not believe it. As is always the case with a person of whose death
+one learns abruptly, Germinie appeared to her instinct with life, and
+her body, which was no more, seemed to stand before her with the
+awe-inspiring presence of a ghost. Dead! She should never see her more!
+So there was no longer a Germinie on earth! Dead! She was dead! And the
+person she should hear henceforth moving about in the kitchen would not
+be she; somebody else would open the door for her, somebody else would
+potter about her room in the morning! "Germinie!" she cried at last, in
+the tone with which she was accustomed to call her; then, collecting her
+thoughts: "Machine! creature! What's your name?" she cried, savagely, to
+the bewildered housekeeper. "My dress--I must go there."
+
+She was so taken by surprise by this sudden fatal termination of the
+disease, that she could not accustom her mind to the thought. She could
+hardly realize that sudden, secret, vague death, of which her only
+knowledge was derived from a scrap of paper. Was Germinie really dead?
+Mademoiselle asked herself the question with the doubt of persons who
+have lost a dear one far away, and, not having seen her die, do not
+admit that she is dead. Was she not still alive the last time she saw
+her? How could it have happened? How could she so suddenly have become a
+thing good for nothing except to be put under ground? Mademoiselle dared
+not think about it, and yet she kept on thinking. The mystery of the
+death-agony, of which she knew nothing, attracted and terrified her. The
+anxious interest of her affection turned to her maid's last hours, and
+she tried gropingly to take away the veil and repel the feeling of
+horror. Then she was seized with an irresistible longing to know
+everything, to witness, with the help of what might be told her, what
+she had not seen. She felt that she must know if Germinie had spoken
+before she died,--if she had expressed any desire, spoken of any last
+wishes, uttered one of those sentences which are the final outcry of
+life.
+
+When she reached Lariboisiere, she passed the concierge,--a stout man
+reeking with life as one reeks with wine,--passed through the corridors
+where pallid convalescents were gliding hither and thither, and rang at
+a door, veiled with white curtains, at the extreme end of the hospital.
+The door was opened: she found herself in a parlor, lighted by two
+windows, where a plaster cast of the Virgin stood upon an altar, between
+two views of Vesuvius, which seemed to shiver against the bare wall.
+Behind her, through an open door, came the voices of Sisters and little
+girls chattering together, a clamor of youthful voices and fresh
+laughter, the natural gayety of a cheery room where the sun frolics with
+children at play.
+
+Mademoiselle asked to speak with the _mother_ of Salle Sainte-Josephine.
+A short, half-deformed Sister, with a kind, homely face, a face alight
+with the grace of God, came in answer to her request. Germinie had died
+in her arms. "She hardly suffered at all," the Sister told mademoiselle;
+"she was sure that she was better; she felt relieved; she was full of
+hope. About seven this morning, just as her bed was being made, she
+suddenly began vomiting blood, and passed away without knowing that she
+was dying." The Sister added that she had said nothing, asked for
+nothing, expressed no wish.
+
+Mademoiselle rose, delivered from the horrible thoughts she had had.
+Germinie had been spared all the tortures of the death-agony that she
+had dreamed of. Mademoiselle was grateful for that death by the hand of
+God which gathers in the soul at a single stroke.
+
+As she was going away an attendant came to her and said: "Will you be
+kind enough to identify the body?"
+
+_The body!_ The words gave mademoiselle a terrible shock. Without
+awaiting her reply, the attendant led the way to a high yellow door,
+over which was written: _Amphitheatre_. He knocked; a man in shirt
+sleeves, with a pipe in his mouth, opened the door and bade them wait a
+moment.
+
+Mademoiselle waited. Her thoughts terrified her. Her imagination was on
+the other side of that awful door. She tried to anticipate what she was
+about to see. And her mind was so filled with confused images, with
+fanciful alarms, that she shuddered at the thought of entering the room,
+of recognizing that disfigured face among a number of others, if,
+indeed, she could recognize it! And yet she could not tear herself away;
+she said to herself that she should never see her again!
+
+The man with the pipe opened the door: mademoiselle saw nothing but a
+coffin, the lid of which extended only to the neck, leaving Germinie's
+face uncovered, with the eyes open, and the hair erect upon her head.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+
+Prostrated by the excitement and by this last spectacle, Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil took to her bed on returning home, after she had given the
+concierge the money for the purchase of a burial lot, and for the
+burial. And when she was in bed the things she had seen arose before
+her. The horrible dead body was still beside her, the ghastly face
+framed by the coffin. That never-to-be-forgotten face was engraved upon
+her mind; beneath her closed eyelids she saw it and was afraid of it.
+Germinie was there, with the distorted features of one who has been
+murdered, with sunken orbits and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn into
+their holes! She was there with her mouth still distorted by the
+vomiting that accompanied her last breath! She was there with her hair,
+her terrible hair, brushed back and standing erect upon her head!
+
+Her hair!--that haunted mademoiselle more persistently than all the
+rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily, of things that had come to
+her ears when she was a child, of superstitions of the common people
+stored away in the background of her memory; she asked herself if she
+had not been told that dead people whose hair is like that carry a crime
+with them to the grave. And at times it was such hair as that that she
+saw upon that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror and
+stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven, like the hair of the
+condemned man before the scaffold in La Greve!
+
+On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed. On Monday she tried
+to rise and dress, in order to attend the funeral; but she was attacked
+with faintness, and was obliged to return to her bed.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+
+"Well! is it all over?" said mademoiselle from her bed, as the concierge
+entered her room about eleven o'clock, on his return from the cemetery,
+with the black coat and the sanctimonious manner suited to the occasion.
+
+"_Mon Dieu_, yes, mademoiselle. Thank God! the poor girl is out of
+pain."
+
+"Stay! I have no head to-day. Put the receipts and the rest of the money
+on my table. We will settle our accounts some other day."
+
+The concierge stood before her without moving or evincing any purpose to
+go, shifting from one hand to the other a blue velvet cap made from the
+dress of one of his daughters. After a moment's reflection, he decided
+to speak.
+
+"This burying is an expensive business, mademoiselle. In the first
+place, there's----"
+
+"Who asked you to give the figures?" Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+interrupted, with the haughty air of superb charity.
+
+The concierge continued: "And as I was saying, a lot in the cemetery,
+which you told me to get, ain't given away. It's no use for you to have
+a kind heart, mademoiselle, you ain't any too rich,--everyone knows
+that,--and I says to myself: 'Mademoiselle's going to have no small
+amount to pay out, and I know mademoiselle, she'll pay.' So it'll do no
+harm to economize on that, eh? It'll be just so much saved. The other'll
+be just as safe under ground. And then, what will give her the most
+pleasure up yonder? Why, to know that she isn't making things hard for
+anybody, the excellent girl."
+
+"Pay? What?" said mademoiselle, out of patience with the concierge's
+circumlocution.
+
+"Oh! that's of no account," he replied; "she was very fond of you, all
+the same. And then, when she was very sick, it wasn't the time. Oh! _Mon
+Dieu_, you needn't put yourself out--there's no hurry about it--it's
+money she owed a long while. See, this is it."
+
+He took a stamped paper from the inside pocket of his coat.
+
+"I didn't want her to make a note,--she insisted."
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil seized the stamped paper and saw at the foot:
+
+
+     _"I acknowledge the receipt of the above amount._
+
+                                 "GERMINIE LACERTEUX."
+
+
+It was a promise to pay three hundred francs in monthly installments,
+which were to be endorsed on the back.
+
+"There's nothing there, you see," said the concierge, turning the paper
+over.
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil took off her spectacles. "I will pay," she
+said.
+
+The concierge bowed. She glanced at him; he did not move.
+
+"That is all, I hope?" she said, sharply.
+
+The concierge had his eyes fixed on a leaf in the carpet. "That's
+all--unless----"
+
+Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the same feeling of terror as at the
+moment she passed through the door on whose other side she was to see
+her maid's dead body.
+
+"But how does she owe all this?" she cried. "I paid her good wages, I
+almost clothed her. Where did her money go, eh?"
+
+"Ah! there you are, mademoiselle. I should rather not have told
+you,--but as well to-day as to-morrow. And then, too, it's better that
+you should be warned; when you know beforehand you can arrange matters.
+There's an account with the poultry woman. The poor girl owed a little
+everywhere; she didn't keep things in very good shape these last few
+years. The laundress left her book the last time she came. It amounts to
+quite a little,--I don't know just how much. It seems there's a note at
+the grocer's--an old note--it goes back years. He'll bring you his
+book."
+
+"How much at the grocer's?"
+
+"Something like two hundred and fifty."
+
+All these disclosures, falling upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, one
+after another, extorted exclamations of stupefied surprise from her.
+Resting her elbow on her pillow, she said nothing as the veil was torn
+away, bit by bit, from this life, as its shameful features were brought
+to light one by one.
+
+"Yes, about two hundred and fifty. There's a good deal of wine, he tells
+me."
+
+"I have always had wine in the cellar."
+
+"The _cremiere_," continued the concierge, without heeding her remark,
+"that's no great matter,--some seventy-five francs. It's for absinthe
+and brandy."
+
+"She drank!" cried Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, everything made clear to
+her by those words.
+
+The concierge did not seem to hear.
+
+"You see, mademoiselle, knowing the Jupillons was the death of her,--the
+young man especially. It wasn't for herself that she did what she did.
+And the disappointment, you see. She took to drink. She hoped to marry
+him, I ought to say. She fitted up a room for him. When they get to
+buying furniture the money goes fast. She ruined herself,--think of it!
+It was no use for me to tell her not to throw herself away by drinking
+as she did. You don't suppose I was going to tell you, when she came in
+at six o'clock in the morning! It was the same with her child. Oh!" the
+concierge added, in reply to mademoiselle's gesture, "it was a lucky
+thing the little one died. Never mind, you can say she led a gay
+life--and a hard one. That's why I say the common ditch. If I was
+you--she's cost you enough, mademoiselle, all the time she's been living
+on you. And you can leave her where she is--with everybody else."
+
+"Ah! that's how it is! that's what she was! She stole for men! she ran
+in debt! Ah! she did well to die, the hussy! And I must pay! A
+child!--think of that: the slut! Yes, indeed, she can rot where she
+will! You have done well, Monsieur Henri. Steal! She stole from me! In
+the ditch, parbleu! that's quite good enough for her! To think that I
+let her keep all my keys--I never kept any account. My God! That's what
+comes of confidence. Well! here we are--I'll pay--not on her account,
+but on my own. And I gave her my best pair of sheets to be buried in!
+Ah! if I'd known I'd have given you the kitchen dish-clout,
+_mademoiselle how I am duped_!"
+
+And mademoiselle continued in this strain for some moments until the
+words choked one another in her throat and strangled her.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+
+As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kept her bed a
+week, ill and raging, filled with indignation that shook her whole body,
+overflowed through her mouth, and tore from her now and again some
+coarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid's
+vile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of
+malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed
+with wrath.
+
+Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing
+else. Debts!--a child!--all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She
+abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have
+denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so
+that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her
+maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service
+twenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits! Drunkenness! she
+had sunk so low as that! The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to
+mademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed from her heart
+said: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth and
+whose filth it cast out!"
+
+How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! And
+to make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, her
+jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bending
+over her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. It was all a
+lie! Her devotion was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her, the
+love upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told herself over and over
+again, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little,
+from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whose
+bitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness of
+days gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.
+
+She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her wrath; but
+reflection brought them back. Thereupon there came to her mind some
+things to which she had paid no heed during Germinie's lifetime, trifles
+of which the grave makes us take thought and upon which death sheds
+light. She had a vague remembrance of certain strange performances on
+the part of her maid, of feverish effusions and frantic embraces, of her
+throwing herself on her knees as if she were about to make a confession,
+of movements of the lips as if a secret were trembling on their verge.
+She saw, with the eyes we have for those who are no more, Germinie's
+wistful glances, her gestures and attitudes, the despairing expression
+of her face. And now she realized that there were deep wounds beneath,
+heart-rending pain, the torment of her anguish and her repentance, the
+tears of blood of her remorse, all sorts of suffering forced out of
+sight throughout her life, and in her whole being a Passion of shame
+that dared not ask forgiveness except with silence!
+
+Then she would scold herself for the thought and call herself an old
+fool. Her instinct of rigid uprightness, the stern conscience and harsh
+judgment of a stainless life, the things which cause a virtuous woman to
+condemn a harlot and should have caused a saint like Mademoiselle de
+Varandeuil to be without pity for her servant--everything within her
+rebelled against a pardon. The voice of justice, stifling her kindness
+of heart, cried: "Never! never!" And she would expel Germinie's infamous
+phantom with a pitiless gesture.
+
+There were times, indeed, when, in order to make her condemnation and
+execration of her memory more irrevocable, she would heap charges upon
+her and slander her. She would add to the dead woman's horrible list of
+sins. She would reproach Germinie for more than was justly chargeable to
+her. She would attribute crimes to her dark thoughts, murderous desires
+to her impatient dreams. She would strive to think, she would force
+herself to think, that she had desired her mistress's death and had been
+awaiting it.
+
+But at that very moment, amid the blackest of her thoughts and
+suppositions, a vision arose and stood in a bright light before her. A
+figure approached, that seemed to come to meet her glance, a figure
+against which she could not defend herself, and which passed through the
+hands with which she sought to force it back. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
+saw her dead maid once more. She saw once more the face of which she had
+caught a glimpse in the amphitheatre, the crucified face, the tortured
+face to which the blood and agony of a heart had mounted together. She
+saw it once more with the faculty which the second sight of memory
+separates from its surroundings. And that face, as it became clearer to
+her, caused her less terror. It appeared to her, divesting itself, as it
+were, of its fear-inspiring, horrifying qualities. Suffering alone
+remained, but it was the suffering of expiation, almost of prayer, the
+suffering of a dead face that would like to weep. And as its expression
+grew ever milder, mademoiselle came at last to see in it a glance of
+supplication, of supplication that, at last, compelled her pity.
+Insensibly there glided into her reflections indulgent thoughts,
+suggestions of apology that surprised herself. She asked herself if the
+poor girl was as guilty as others, if she had deliberately chosen the
+path of evil, if life, circumstances, the misfortune of her body and her
+destiny, had not made her the creature she had been, a creature of love
+and sorrow. Suddenly she stopped: she was on the point of forgiving her!
+
+One morning she leaped out of bed.
+
+"Here! you--you other!" she cried to her housekeeper, "the devil take
+your name! I can't remember it. Give me my clothes, quick! I have to go
+out."
+
+"The idea, mademoiselle--just look at the roofs, they're all white."
+
+"Well, it snows, that's all."
+
+Ten minutes later, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil said to the driver of the
+cab she had sent for:
+
+"Montmartre Cemetery!"
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+
+In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly straight, as far
+as the eye could see. The thread of snow that marked the outline of its
+coping gave it a dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left three
+leafless trees reared their bare black branches against the sky. They
+rustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead wood stirred by the
+south wind. Above these trees, behind the wall and close against it,
+arose the two arms from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. A
+few snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there; beyond, the hill
+of Montmartre rose sharply, its white shroud broken by oases of brown
+earth and sandy patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmounted
+by gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint in the mist, as
+far as two black windmills. The sky was of a leaden hue, with occasional
+cold, bluish streaks as if ink had been applied with a brush! over
+Montmartre there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seine
+water after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the wings of an
+invisible windmill turned and turned,--slow-moving wings, unvarying in
+their movement, which seemed to be turning for eternity.
+
+In front of the wall, against which was planted a thicket of dead
+cypresses, turned red by the frost, was a vast tract of land upon which
+were two rows of crowded, jostling overturned crosses, like two great
+funeral processions. The crosses touched and pushed one another and trod
+on one another's heels. They bent and fell and collapsed in the ranks.
+In the middle there was a sort of congestion which had caused them to
+bulge out on both sides; you could see them lying--covered by the snow
+and raising it into mounds with the thick wood of which they were
+made--upon the paths, somewhat trampled in the centre, that skirted the
+two long files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation of a
+multitude, the disorder and wavering course of a long march. The black
+crosses with their arms outstretched assumed the appearance of ghosts
+and persons in distress. The two disorderly columns made one think of a
+human panic, a desperate, frightened army. It was as if one were looking
+on at a terrible rout.
+
+All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of immortelles, wreaths
+of white paper with silver thread, black wreaths with gold thread; but
+you could see them beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things,
+souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not accept and which
+had been picked up in order to make a little toilet for the crosses with
+gleanings from the graves.
+
+All the crosses had a name written in white; but there were other names
+that were not even written on a piece of wood,--a broken branch of a
+tree, stuck in the ground, with an envelope tied around it--such
+tombstones as that were to be seen there!
+
+On the left, where they were digging a trench for a third row of
+crosses, the workman's shovel threw black dirt into the air, which fell
+upon the white earth around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of the
+snow, enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be heard; the dull
+sound made by the clods of earth and the heavy sound of regular
+footsteps; an old priest who was waiting there, his head enveloped in a
+black cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a dirty, yellow
+surplice, was trying to keep himself warm by stamping his great galoches
+on the pavement of the high road, in front of the crosses.
+
+Such was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, those
+crosses and that priest said this: "Here sleeps the Death of the common
+people; this is the poor man's end!"
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city of
+humanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindly
+intentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.
+The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speak
+of Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of
+progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is
+where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill
+themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome
+odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working
+for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors,
+those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have
+lengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as a
+capital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the common
+people of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shameful
+corner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to bury
+them, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, that
+one can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thy
+charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed
+whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for
+them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou
+dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou
+didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals
+a hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that priest
+on sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: not
+the briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God could
+not be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses is
+always the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike against
+one another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is common
+to all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: the
+worms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfaucon
+hastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no more
+time than room to rot in: the earth is taken from them before it has
+finished with them! before their bones have assumed the color and the
+ancient appearance, so to speak, of stone, before the passing years have
+effaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! The
+excavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they are
+the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to
+them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In
+summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human
+charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the
+scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there
+are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential
+flies whose sting is deadly!
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separates
+the lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Following
+the directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between the
+further line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she made
+her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the
+trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of
+oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth
+sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen
+the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one
+and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the
+day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they
+glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long
+strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.
+
+Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out the
+dates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reached
+the crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid's
+death, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the
+9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was not
+in the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, to
+the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the
+12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in all
+directions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing,--Germinie had been
+buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in the
+ground by which to identify her grave!
+
+At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between two
+crosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10th
+of November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that
+spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over her
+body it was necessary to pray at random between two dates,--as if the
+poor girl's destiny had decreed that there should be no more room on
+earth for her body than for her heart!
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] _Canon_ is the French word for cannon; it is also used in
+vulgar parlance to mean a glass of wine drunk at the bar.
+
+[2] _Battre les murailles_--to beat the walls--has a slang
+meaning: to be so drunk that you can't see, or can't lie down without
+holding on.
+
+[3] Literally, _red bowels_--common slang for hard drinkers.
+
+[4] _Cuir_ is an expression used to denote the error in
+speaking, which consists--in French--in pronouncing a _t_ for an _s_,
+and vice versa at the end of words which are joined in pronunciation to
+the next word: _e.g., il etai-z-a la campagne_ for _il etait a la
+campagne_.
+
+[5] In the slang vocabulary, to _console_ one's coffee means to
+add brandy to it.
+
+[6] A _negresse_ is a bottle of red wine, and, as applied to
+that article, _morte_ (dead) means empty.
+
+
+
+
+List of Illustrations
+
+GERMINIE LACERTEUX
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+GERMINIE AND JUPILLON VISIT THEIR CHILD              _Fronts._
+
+JUPILLON AND GERMINIE AT THE FORTIFICATIONS                116
+
+GERMINIE BRINGS MONEY FOR A SUBSTITUTE                     204
+
+GERMINIE TEMPTED TO MURDER                                 308
+
+GERMINIE AT LARIBOISIERE                                   356
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Germinie Lacerteux, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GERMINIE LACERTEUX ***
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