Germinie Lacerteux

"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.