Germinie Lacerteux

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.