Germinie Lacerteux

LI

Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark street.

At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and, going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours, shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness reigned. She followed the line of red-wine shops, the naked arbors, the cabaret trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits, low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls, cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a night's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded form, tall, mouldy portes-cochères, hedge-rows, within which could be vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy. From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.

Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisière, the Abattoir and Montmartre.

The people who passed that way – the workman returning from Paris whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her black cap – would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.

She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see him.

At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie, exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows. She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the perspiring windows of the wine-shops – the cooking utensils, the bowls of punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons – these things would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon, the advertisements of gloria– coffee with brandy – the inscriptions in yellow letters: New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes. For a whole quarter of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest, through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day, upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.

In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that she had upon the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare. When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements, the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the rain, and there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the aqueous darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad with fatigue, would fancy that she could see a flood rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror would show her suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not daring to move, fearing to feel her feet slip from under her; she would begin to weep, and would weep on until someone passed by and offered to escort her to the Hotel of the Little Blue Hand.

LII

She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last place of refuge. She would fly from the rain and snow and cold, from fear, despair, and fatigue. She would go up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's closed doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely about her in order to leave room for those who went and came up that long steep ladder, and would draw back as far as possible into the corner in order that her shame might fill but little space on the narrow landing.

From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets, of families heaped together in a single room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house, came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, and swallow a mouthful of it to avoid being ill.

But the staircase had its passers, too: honest workmen's wives went up with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint of wine for supper. Their feet would rub against her as they passed, and as they went farther up, Germinie would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and falling upon her with more crushing force at every floor. The children – little girls in fanchons who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood – she saw them stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her; then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs, and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight, she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone might tread upon – having no control of her faculties, dead to everything except the footsteps that she was listening for – and that did not come.

At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice would mount the stairs, stammering "Canaille! canaille of a saloon-keeper! – you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"

It was he.

And almost every day the same scene was enacted.

"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as his eyes fell upon her. "It's like this – I'll tell you all about it. I'm a little bit under water." And, as he put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it. It isn't my fault."

He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove with mangy wings that limped forward to greet him, and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye see. It was Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat as a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He insisted on paying for a sixteen-sous bottle for me. He offered to treat me, and I proffered him thanks. Thereupon we naturally consoled5 our coffee; when you're consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster shells!"

Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted the candle, stuck in a yellow copper candlestick. By its flickering light the dirty paper on the walls could be seen, covered with caricatures from Charivari, torn from the paper and pasted on the wall.

"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim, as he saw her place a cold fowl and two bottles of wine on the table. "For I must tell you all I've had in my stomach to-day – a plate of wretched soup – that's all. Ah! it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put that fellow's eyes out!"

And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with her elbows on the table, watching him and drinking, and her glance would grow dark.

"Pshaw! all the négresses are dead,"6 Gautruche would say at last, as he drained the bottles one by one. "Put the children to bed!"

Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion would ensue between those two strange creatures, savage ardor followed by savage satiety, frantic storms of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the fierce brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood beneath the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at the end, utter exhaustion that swallowed them up and left their bodies like corpses.

Germinie plunged into these debauches with – what shall I say? – delirium, madness, desperation, a sort of supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable passions turned against themselves, and, going beyond their natural appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted them without extinguishing them; and, overpassing the widest limits of excess, they excited themselves to self-torture. In the poor creature's paroxysms of excitement, her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her maddened body, no longer sought pleasure in pleasure, but something sharper, keener, and more violent: pain in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking death in an undertone and seeking to embrace it in the agonies of love.

Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed, listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to envelop her. She seemed to herself to fall and writhe helplessly in the blind unconsciousness of the night. Her will became as naught. All sorts of black things, that seemed to have wings and voices, beat against her temples. The ghastly temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes, close at hand; and hands placed against her back pushed her toward the table where the knives lay. She would close her eyes and move one foot; then fear would lay hold of her and she would cling to the bedclothes; and at last she would turn around, fall back upon the bed, and go to sleep beside the man she had been tempted to murder; why? she had no idea; for nothing – for the sake of killing!

And so, until daybreak, in that wretched furnished lodging, the fierce struggle of those fatal passions would continue, while the poor maimed, limping dove, the infirm bird of Venus, nesting in one of Gautruche's old shoes, would utter now and then, awakened by the noise, a frightened coo.

LIII

In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted with drinking. He felt the first pangs of the disease of the liver that had long been lurking in his heated, alcoholized blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the cords of his stomach for a whole week, caused him to reflect. There came to his mind, together with divers resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost sentimental ideas of the future. He said to himself that he must put a little more water into his life, if he wanted to live to old age. While he lay writhing in bed and tying himself into knots, with his knees up to his chin to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four walls within which he passed his nights, to which he brought his drunken body home in the evening, and from which he fled into the daylight in the morning; and he thought about making a real home for himself. He dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a wife who would make him a good stew, look after him if he were ill, straighten out his affairs, keep his linen in order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the useful qualities of a housekeeper, and who, in addition, would not be a stupid fool, but would understand him and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found: Germinie was the very one. She probably had a little hoard, a few sous laid by during the time she had been in her old mistress's service; and with what he earned they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no doubt of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she would accept his proposition. More than that, her scruples, if she had any, would not hold out against the prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit to her at the end of their liaison.

One Monday she had come to his room as usual.

"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say to this, eh? A good room – not like this box – a real room, with a closet – at Montmartre, and two windows, no less! Rue de l'Empereur – with a view an Englishman would give five thousand francs to carry away with him. Something first-class, bright, and cheerful, you know, a place where you could stay all day without hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to have enough of moving about here and there just to change fleas. And that isn't all, either: I'm tired of being cooped up in furnished lodgings, I'm tired of being all alone. Friends don't make society. They fall on you like flies in your glass when you're to pay, and then, there you are! In the first place, I don't propose to drink any more, honor bright! no more for me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by any means! Attention! We mustn't let drink get the better of us. It seemed to me those days as if I'd been swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to knock at the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to the needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition to Germinie. I'll treat myself to a little furniture. You've got what you have in your room. You know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy bone in my body where work's concerned. And then we might look to not always be working for others: we might take a lodging-house for country thieves. If you had a little something put aside, that would help. We would join forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves straightened out some day before the mayor. That's not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And you'll leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear old Gautruche?"

Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust forward and her chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw herself back with a burst of strident laughter.

"Ha! ha! ha! You thought – and you have the face to tell me so! – you thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle? Did you really think so? You're a fool, you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred thousands, you might be stuffed with gold, do you hear? all stuffed with it. You're joking, aren't you? Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever told you? I would like to see her die and these hands not be there to close her eyes! I'd like to see it! Come now, really, did you think so?"

"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted with me, I thought you cared more for me than that – that you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the painter, disconcerted by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's words.

"Ah! you thought that, too – that I loved you!" And, as if she were suddenly uprooting from the depths of her heart the remorse and suffering of her passions, she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you – I love you as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love you as one loves something that is close at hand – that one makes use of because it is there! I am used to you as one gets used to an old dress and wears it again and again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose I should care for you? I'd like you to tell me what difference it can make to me whether it's you or another? For, after all, what have you been to me more than any other man would be? In the first place, you took me. Well? Is that enough to make me love you? What have you done, then, to attach me to you, will you be kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed a glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken pity on me when I was tramping about in the mud and snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes! And what did people say to me and spit out in my face so that my blood boiled from one end of my body to the other! You never troubled your head about all the insults I've swallowed waiting for you! Look you! I've been wanting to tell you all this for a long time – it's been choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly smile, "do you flatter yourself you've driven me wild with your physical beauty, with your hair, which you've lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took you – I'd have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot day!"

She paused an instant.

"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as long as your hand's in."

"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool! she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me! Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?' No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am, a – " She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she should ever learn anything – but, no fear of that, it won't be long. There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story window, as true as God is my master! But fancy – you are not my heart, you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah! I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest, when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to – even then, if mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I tell you I would have left him!"

"In that case – if that's the way things stand, my dear – if you're so fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"

"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.

"Faith! it's very like it."

"Well! adieu. That suits me!"

She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.

LIV

After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman. She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it were – none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery, – preference, selection, – and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain of conscience and personality, – disgust, even disgust, – she had lost!