Germinie Lacerteux

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."