Germinie Lacerteux

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.