Germinie Lacerteux

XXXVI

The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, this life of shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden from her mistress.

It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her, something that was obscure in her life. She had had moments of doubt, of suspicion, an instinctive feeling of uneasiness, confused glimpses of something wrong, a faint scent that eluded her and vanished in the gloom. She had thought at times that she had stumbled upon sealed, unresponsive recesses in the girl's heart, upon a mystery, upon some unlighted passage of her life. Again, at times it had seemed to her that her maid's eyes did not say what her mouth said. Involuntarily, she had remembered a phrase that Germinie often repeated: "A sin hidden, a sin half forgiven." But the thing that filled her thoughts above all else was amazement that Germinie, despite the increase in her wages and the little gifts that she gave her almost every day, never purchased anything for her toilet, had no new dresses or linen. Where did her money go? She had almost admitted having withdrawn her eighteen hundred francs from the savings bank. Mademoiselle ruminated over it, then said to herself that that was the whole of her maid's mystery; it was about money, she was short of funds, doubtless on account of some obligations she had entered into long ago for her family, and perhaps she had been sending more money to "her canaille of a brother-in-law." She was so kind-hearted and had so little system! She had so little idea of the value of a hundred-sou piece! That was all there was to it: mademoiselle was sure of it; and as she knew the girl's obstinate nature and had no hope of inducing her to change her mind, she said nothing to her. If this explanation did not fully satisfy mademoiselle, she attributed what there was strange and mysterious in her maid's behavior to her somewhat secretive nature, which retained something of the characteristic distrust of the peasant, who is jealous of her own petty affairs and takes delight in burying a corner of her life away down in her heart, as the villager hoards his sous in a woolen stocking. Or else she persuaded herself that it was her ill health, her state of continual suffering that was responsible for her whims and her habit of dissimulation. And her mind, in its interested search for motives, stopped at that point, with the indolence and a little of the selfishness of old people's minds, who, having an instinctive dread of final results and of the real characters of their acquaintances, prefer not to be too inquisitive or to know too much. Who knows? Perhaps all this mystery was nothing but a paltry matter, unworthy to disturb or to interest her, some petty woman's quarrel. She went to sleep thereupon, reassured, and ceased to cudgel her brains.

In truth, how could mademoiselle have guessed Germinie's degradation and the horror of her secret! In her most poignant suffering, in her wildest intoxication, the unhappy creature retained the incredible strength necessary to suppress and keep back everything. From her passionate, overcharged nature, which found relief so naturally in expansion, never a word escaped or a syllable that cast a ray of light upon her secret. Mortification, contempt, disappointment, self-sacrifice, the death of her child, the treachery of her lover, the dying agony of her love, all remained voiceless within her, as if she stifled their cries by pressing her hands upon her heart. Her rare attacks of weakness, when she seemed to be struggling with pains that strangled her, the fierce, feverish caresses lavished upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the sudden paroxysms, as if she were trying to give birth to something, always ended without words and found relief in tears.

Even illness, with its resulting weakness and enervation, forced nothing from her. It could make no impression on that heroic resolution to keep silent to the end. Hysterical attacks extorted shrieks from her and nothing but shrieks. When she was a girl she dreamed aloud; she forced her dreams to cease speaking, she closed the lips of her sleep. As mademoiselle might have discovered from her breath that she had been drinking, she ate shallots and garlic, and concealed the fumes of liquor with their offensive odors. She even trained her intoxication, her drunken torpor to awake at her mistress's footstep, and remain awake in her presence.

Thus she led, as it were, two lives. She was like two women, and by dint of energy, adroitness and feminine diplomacy, with a self-assurance that never failed her even in the mental confusion caused by drink, she succeeded in separating those two existences, in living them both without mingling them, in never allowing the two women that lived in her to be confounded with each other, in continuing to be, with Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the virtuous, respectable girl she had been, in emerging from her orgies without carrying away the taste of them, in displaying, when she left her lover, a sort of old-maidish modesty, shocked by the scandalous courses of other maids. She never uttered a word or bore herself in a way to arouse a suspicion of her clandestine life; nothing about her conveyed a hint as to the way her nights were passed. When she placed her foot upon the door-mat outside Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's apartments, when she approached her, when she stood before her, she adopted the tone and the attitude, even to a certain way of holding the dress, which relieve a woman from so much as a suspicion of having aught to do with men. She talked freely upon all subjects, as if she had nothing to blush for. She spoke with bitterness of the misdoings and shame of others, as if she were herself beyond reproach. She joked with her mistress about love, in a jovial, unembarrassed, indifferent tone; to hear her you would have thought she was talking of an old acquaintance of whom she had lost sight. And in the eyes of all those who saw her only as Mademoiselle de Varandeuil did and at her home, there was a certain atmosphere of chastity about her thirty-five years, the odor of stern, unimpeachable virtue, peculiar to middle-aged maid-servants and plain women.

And yet all this falsehood in the matter of appearances was not hypocrisy in Germinie. It did not arise from downright duplicity, from corrupt striving for effect: it was her affection for mademoiselle that made her what she was with her. She was determined at any price to save her the grief of seeing her as she was, of going to the bottom of her character. She deceived her solely in order to retain her affection, – with a sort of respect; and a feeling of veneration, almost of piety, stole into the ghastly comedy she was playing, like the feeling a girl has who lies to her mother in order not to rend her heart.

XXXVII

To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She felt that it was an impossibility to draw back from her present position. She did not even entertain the idea of an attempt to escape from it, it seemed such a hopeless task, she was so cowardly, so crushed and degraded, and she felt that she was still so firmly bound to that man by all sorts of vile, degrading chains, even by the contempt that he no longer tried to conceal from her!

Sometimes, as she reflected upon her plight, she was dismayed. The simple ideas and terrors of the peasantry recurred to her mind. And the superstitions of her youth whispered to her that the man had cast a spell upon her, that he had perhaps given her enchanted bread to eat. Otherwise would she have been what she was? Would she have felt, at the mere sight of him, that thrill of emotion through her whole frame, that almost brute-like sensation of the approach of a master? Would she have felt her whole body, her mouth, her arms, her loving and caressing gestures involuntarily go out to him? Would she have belonged to him so absolutely? Long and bitterly she dwelt upon all that should have cured her, rescued her: the man's disdain, his insults, the degrading concessions he had forced from her; and she was compelled to admit that there had been nothing too precious for her to sacrifice to him, and that for him she had swallowed the things she loathed most bitterly. She tried to imagine the degree of degradation to which her love would refuse to descend, and she could conceive of none. He could do what he chose with her, insult her, beat her, and she would remain under his heel! She could not think of herself as not belonging to him. She could not think of herself without him. To have that man to love was necessary to her existence; she derived warmth from him, she lived by him, she breathed him. There seemed to be no parallel case to hers among the women of her condition whom she knew. No one of her comrades carried into a liaison the intensity, the bitterness, the torture, the enjoyment of suffering that she found in hers. No one of them carried into it that which was killing her and which she could not dispense with.

To herself she appeared an extraordinary creature, of an exceptional nature, with the temperament of animals whom ill-treatment binds the closer to their masters. There were days when she did not know herself, and when she wondered if she were still the same woman. As she went over in her mind all the base deeds to which Jupillon had induced her to stoop, she could not believe that it was really she who had submitted to it. Had she, violent and impulsive as she knew herself to be, boiling over with fiery passions, rebellious and hotheaded, exhibited such docility and resignation? She had repressed her wrath, forced back the murderous thoughts that had crowded to her brain so many times! She had always obeyed, always possessed her soul in patience, always hung her head! She had forced her nature, her instincts, her pride, her vanity, and more than all else, her jealousy, the fierce passions of her heart, to crawl at that man's feet! For the sake of keeping him she had stooped to share him, to allow him to have mistresses, to receive him from the hands of others, to seek a part of his cheek on which his cousin had not kissed him! And now, after all these sacrifices, with which she had wearied him, she retained her hold upon him by a still more distasteful sacrifice: she drew him to her by gifts, she opened her purse to him to induce him to keep appointments with her, she purchased his good-humor by gratifying his whims and his caprices; she paid this brute, who haggled over the price of his kisses and demanded pourboires of love! And she lived from day to day in constant dread of what the miserable villain would demand of her on the morrow.

XXXVIII

"He must have twenty francs," Germinie mechanically repeated the sentence to herself several times, but her thoughts did not go beyond the words she uttered. The walk and the climb up five flights of stairs had made her dizzy. She fell in a sitting posture on the greasy couch in the kitchen, hung her head, and laid her arms on the table. Her ears were ringing. Her ideas went and came in a disorderly throng, stifling one another in her brain, and of them all but one remained, more and more distinct and persistent: "He must have twenty francs! twenty francs! twenty francs!" And she looked as if she expected to find them somewhere there, in the fireplace, in the waste-basket, under the stove. Then she thought of the people who owed her, of a German maid who had promised to repay her more than a year before. She rose and tied her capstrings. She no longer said: "He must have twenty francs;" she said: "I will get them."

She went down to Adèle: "You haven't twenty francs for a note that just came, have you? Mademoiselle has gone out."

"Nothing here," said Adèle; "I gave madame my last twenty francs last night to get her supper. The jade hasn't come back yet. Will you have thirty sous?"

She ran to the grocer's. It was Sunday, and three o'clock in the afternoon: the grocer had closed his shop.

There were a number of people at the fruitwoman's; she asked for four sous' worth of herbs.

"I haven't any money," said she. She hoped that the woman would say: "Do you want some?" Instead of that, she said: "What an idea! as if I was afraid of you!" There were other maids there, so she went out without saying anything more.

"Is there anything for us?" she said to the concierge. "Ah! by the way, my Pipelet, you don't happen to have twenty francs about you, do you? it will save my going way up-stairs again."

"Forty, if you want – "

She breathed freely. The concierge went to a desk at the back of the lodge. "Sapristi! my wife has taken the key. Why! how pale you are!"

"It isn't anything." And she rushed out into the courtyard toward the door of the servant's staircase.

This is what she thought as she went up-stairs: "There are people who find twenty-franc pieces. He needed them to-day, he told me. Mademoiselle gave me my money not five days ago, and I can't ask her. After all, what are twenty francs more or less to her? The grocer would surely have lent them to me. I had another grocer on Rue Taitbout: he didn't close till evening Sundays."

She was in front of her own door. She leaned over the rail of the other staircase, looked to see if anyone was coming up, entered her room, went straight to mademoiselle's bedchamber, opened the window and breathed long and hard with her elbows on the window-sill. Sparrows hastened to her from the neighboring chimneys, thinking that she was going to toss bread to them. She closed the window and glanced at the top of the commode – first at a vein of marble, then at a little sandal-wood box, then at the key – a small steel key left in the lock. Suddenly there was a ringing in her ears; she thought that the bell rang. She ran and opened the door: there was no one there. She returned with the certainty that she was alone, went to the kitchen for a cloth and began to rub a mahogany armchair, turning her back to the commode; but she could still see the box, she could see it lying open, she could see the coins at the right where mademoiselle kept her gold, the papers in which she wrapped it, a hundred francs in each; – her twenty francs were there! She closed her eyes as if the light dazzled them. She felt a dizziness in her conscience; but immediately her whole being rose in revolt against her, and it seemed to her as if her heart in its indignation rose to her throat. In an instant the honor of her whole life stood erect between her hand and that key. Her upright, unselfish, devoted past, twenty years of resistance to the evil counsels and the corruption of that foul quarter, twenty years of scorn for theft, twenty years in which her pocket had not held back a sou from her employers, twenty years of indifference to gain, twenty years in which temptation had never come near her, her long maintained and natural virtue, mademoiselle's confidence in her – all these things came to her mind in a single instant. Her youthful years clung to her and took possession of her. From her family, from the memory of her parents, from the unsullied reputation of her wretched name, from the dead from whom she was descended, there arose a murmur as of guardian angels hovering about her. For one second she was saved.

And then, insensibly, evil thoughts glided one by one into her brain. She sought for subjects of bitterness, for excuses for ingratitude to her mistress. She compared with her own wages the wages of which the other maids in the house boasted vaingloriously. She concluded that mademoiselle was very fortunate to have her in her service, and that she should have increased her wages more since she had been with her.

"And then," she suddenly asked herself, "why does she leave the key in her box?" And she began to reflect thereupon that the money in the box was not used for living expenses, but had been laid aside by mademoiselle to buy a velvet dress for a goddaughter. – "Sleeping money," she said to herself. She marshaled her reasons with precipitation, as if to make it impossible to discuss them. "And then, it's only for once. She would lend them to me if I asked her. And I will return them."

She put out her hand and turned the key. She stopped; it seemed to her that the intense silence round about was listening to her and looking at her. She raised her eyes: the mirror threw back her face at her. Before that face, her own, she was afraid; she recoiled in terror and shame as if before the face of her crime: it was a thief's head that she had upon her shoulders!

She fled into the corridor. Suddenly she turned upon her heel, went straight to the box, turned the key, put in her hand, fumbled under the hair trinkets and souvenirs, felt in a roll of five louis and took out one piece, closed the box and rushed into the kitchen. She had the little coin in her hand and dared not look at it.

XXXIX

Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began to be visible in her personal appearance, to make her stupid and slovenly. A sort of drowsiness came over her ideas. She was no longer keen and prompt of apprehension. What she had read and what she had learned seemed to escape her. Her memory, which formerly retained everything, became confused and unreliable. The sharp wit of the Parisian maid-servant gradually vanished from her conversation, her retorts, her laughter. Her face, once so animated, was no longer lighted up by gleams of intelligence. In her whole person you would have said that she had become once more the stupid peasant girl that she was when she came from her province, when she went to a stationer's for gingerbread. She seemed not to understand. As mademoiselle expressed it, she made faces like an idiot. She was obliged to explain to her, to repeat two or three times things that Germinie had always grasped on the merest hint. She asked herself, when she saw how slow and torpid she was, if somebody had not exchanged her maid for another. – "Why, you're getting to be a perfect imbecile!" she would sometimes say to her testily. She remembered the time when Germinie was so useful about finding dates, writing an address on a card, telling her what day they had put in the wood or broached the cask of wine, – all of which were things that her old brain could not remember. Now Germinie remembered nothing. In the evening, when she went over her accounts with mademoiselle, she could not think what she had bought in the morning; she would say: "Wait!" but she would simply pass her hand vaguely across her brow; nothing would come to her mind. Mademoiselle, to save her tired old eyes, had fallen into the habit of having Germinie read the newspaper to her; but she got to stumbling so and reading with so little intelligence, that mademoiselle was compelled to decline her services with thanks.

As her faculties failed, she abandoned and neglected her body in a like degree. She gave no thought to her dress, nor to cleanliness even. In her indifference she retained nothing of a woman's natural solicitude touching her personal appearance; she did not dress decently. She wore dresses spotted with grease and torn under the arms, aprons in rags, worn stockings in shoes that were out at heel. She allowed the cooking, the smoke, the coal, the wax, to soil her hands and face and simply wiped them as she would after dusting. Formerly she had had the one coquettish and luxurious instinct of poor women, a love for clean linen. No one in the house had fresher caps than she. Her simple little collars were always of that snowy whiteness that lights up the skin so prettily and makes the whole person clean. Now she wore frayed, dirty caps which looked as if she had slept in them. She went without ruffles, her collar made a band of filth against the skin of her neck, and you felt that she was less clean beneath than above. An odor of poverty, rank and musty, arose from her. Sometimes it was so strong that Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could not refrain from saying to her: "Go and change your clothes, my girl – you smell of the poor!"

In the street she no longer looked as if she belonged to any respectable person. She had not the appearance of a virtuous woman's maid. She lost the aspect of a servant who, by dint of displaying her self-esteem and self-respect even in her garb, reflects in her person the honor and the pride of her masters. From day to day she sank nearer to the level of that abject, shameless creature whose dress drags in the gutter – a dirty slattern.

As she neglected herself, so she neglected everything about her. She kept nothing in order, she did no cleaning or washing. She allowed dirt and disorder to make their way into the apartments, to invade mademoiselle's own sanctum, with whose neatness mademoiselle was formerly so well pleased and so proud. The dust collected there, the spiders spun their webs behind the frames, the mirrors were as if covered with a veil; the marble mantels, the mahogany furniture, lost their lustre; moths flew up from the carpets which were never shaken, worms ensconced themselves where the brush and broom no longer came to disturb them; neglect spread a film of dust over all the sleeping, neglected objects that were formerly awakened and enlivened every morning by the maid's active hand. A dozen times mademoiselle had tried to spur Germinie's self-esteem to action; but thereupon, for a whole day, there was such a frantic scrubbing, accompanied by such gusts of ill-humor, that mademoiselle would take an oath never to try again. One day, however, she made bold to write Germinie's name with her finger in the dust on her mirror; Germinie did not forgive her for a week. At last mademoiselle became resigned. She hardly ventured to remark mildly, when she saw that her maid was in good humor: "Confess, Germinie, that the dust is very well treated with us!"

To the wondering observations of the friends who still came to see her and whom Germinie was forced to admit, mademoiselle would reply, in a compassionate, sympathetic tone: "Yes, it is filthy, I know! But what can you expect? Germinie's sick, and I prefer that she shouldn't kill herself." Sometimes, when Germinie had gone out, she would venture to rub a cloth over a commode or touch a frame with the duster, with her gouty hands. She would do it hurriedly, afraid of being scolded, of having a scene, if the maid should return and detect her.

Germinie did almost no work; she barely served mademoiselle's meals. She had reduced her mistress's breakfast and dinner to the simplest dishes, those which she could cook most easily and quickly. She made her bed without raising the mattress, à l'Anglaise. The servant that she had been was not to be recognized in her, did not exist in her, except on the days when mademoiselle gave a small dinner party, the number of covers being always considerable on account of the party of children invited. On those days Germinie emerged, as if by enchantment, from her indolence and apathy, and, putting forth a sort of feverish strength, she recovered all her former energy in face of her ovens and the lengthened table. And mademoiselle was dumfounded to see her, all by herself, declining assistance and capable of anything, prepare in a few hours a dinner for half a score of persons, serve it and clear the table afterwards, with the nimble hands and all the quick dexterity of her youth.