On one occasion, as she was walking along thus, devouring with her eyes the memory of her daughter, she was suddenly seized with a frenzied longing to embrace something; she rushed at one of the little girls and grasped her arm just as a kidnapper of children would do. "Mamma!

mamma!" the little one cried, and wept as she pulled her arm away.

Germinie fled.

XLV

To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and desolate. She had reached a point at last where she expected nothing from chance and asked nothing from the unforeseen. Her life seemed to her to be forever encaged in her despair; it would always be the same implacable thing, the same straight, monotonous road to misfortune, the same dark path with death at the end. In all the time to come there was no future for her.

And yet, in the depths of despair in which she was crouching, thoughts pa.s.sed through her mind at times which made her raise her head and look before her to a point beyond the present. At times the illusion of a last hope smiled upon her. It seemed to her that she might even yet be happy, and that if certain things should come to pa.s.s, she would be.

Thereupon she imagined that those things did happen. She arranged incidents and catastrophes. She linked the impossible to the impossible.

She reconstructed the opportunities of her life. And her fevered hope, setting about the task of creating events according to her desire on the horizon of the future, soon became intoxicated with the insane vision of her suppositions.

Then the delirious hope would gradually fade away. She would tell herself that it was impossible, that nothing of what she dreamed of could happen, and she would sink back in her chair and think. After a moment or two she would rise and walk, slowly and uncertainly, to the fireplace, toy with the coffee-pot on the mantelpiece, and at last decide to take it: she would learn what the rest of her life was to be.

Her good fortune, her ill fortune, everything that was to happen to her was there, in that fortune-telling device of the woman of the people, on the plate on which she was about to pour the coffee-grounds. She drained the water from the grounds, waited a few minutes, breathed upon them with the religious breath with which her lips, as a child, touched the paten at the village church. Then she leaned over them, with her head thrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixed intently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. She sought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations and the almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away.

She fatigued her eyes by gazing at the innumerable little spots, and deciphered shapes and letters and signs therein. She put aside some grains with her finger in order to see them more clearly and more sharply defined. She turned the plate slowly in her hands, this way and that, questioned its mystery on all sides, and hunted down, within its circular rim, apparitions, images, rudiments of names, shadowy initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects, omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be _victorious_. She wanted to see these things and she compelled herself to discover them. Under her tense gaze the porcelain became alive with the visions of her insomnia; her disappointments, her hatreds, the faces she detested, arose gradually from the magic plate and the designs drawn thereon by chance. By her side the candle, which she forgot to snuff, gave forth an intermittent, dying light: it sank lower and lower in the silence, night came on apace, and Germinie, as if turned to stone in her agony, always remained rooted there, alone and face to face with her fear of the future, trying to decipher in the dregs of the coffee the confused features of her destiny, until she thought she could detect a cross, beside a woman who resembled Jupillon's cousin--a cross, that is to say, _a speedy death_.

XLVI

The love which she lacked, and which it was her determination to deny herself, became the torment of her life, incessant, abominable torture.

She had to defend herself against the fevers of her body and the irritations from without, against the easily aroused emotions and the indolent cowardice of her flesh, against all the solicitations of nature by which she was a.s.sailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day, with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist warmth of stormy weather, with the breath of her past and her memories, with the pictures suddenly thrown upon the background of her mind, with the voices that whispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that sent a thrill of tenderness into her every limb.

Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured, and she did not yield or take another lover. Fearful of herself, she avoided man and fled from his sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits, always closeted with mademoiselle, or else above in her own room. On Sundays she did not leave the house. She had ceased to consort with the other maids in the house, and, in order to occupy her time and forget herself, she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of sewing, or buried herself in sleep. When musicians came into the courtyard she closed the windows in order not to hear them: the sensuousness of music moved her very soul.

In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her pa.s.sions. Her evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,--the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it smoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!

At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant a.s.saults, the irritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie's faculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses.

It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, the candlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her a.s.sumed impure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything before her eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at her kitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longer belongs to himself: "In five minutes I am going down into the street."

And when the five minutes had pa.s.sed she would stay where she was.

XLVII

The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandoned the conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succ.u.mbed, she bowed her head beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution, energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction, of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she was being borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causes suffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a G.o.d on the marble of the antique tragedies, and is called _No Chance_ on the tattooed brow of the galley-slave--Fatality--was trampling upon her, and Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.

When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her past recurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the links in the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions that had followed her years and grown heavier with them; all the incidents that had succeeded one another in her life, as if by preconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having ever caught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard so much--she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatures who are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of those for whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envy it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dint of yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of brooding over the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession of her disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon the most trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of the persecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and that was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop, an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in which she was cheated--all these things were in her opinion due neither to her own fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Life was in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, in everything, great and small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.

There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereupon imagined that she was accursed to her finger-tips. Accursed! almost d.a.m.ned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when she questioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, in the fire in her blood, in the appet.i.te of her organs, in her pa.s.sionate weakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of a disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having already delivered her over to the shameful excesses of pa.s.sion, and destined--she had a presentiment that it was so--to deliver her again in the same way?

And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was the refrain of her thought: "What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had no chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!" She said it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion, every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that she was in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful than she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens in ordinary life. She lived in that state of cowardly unrest wherein the unexpected is dreaded as a possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bell causes alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing the mystery it contains, not daring to open it, wherein the news you are about to hear, the mouth that opens to speak to you, cause the perspiration to start upon your temples. She was in that state of suspicion, of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny, wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and wherein one would like to check the current of his life so that it should not go forward whither all the endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.

At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supreme disdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems a satire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength, exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer feels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: "Go on!"

XLVIII

"Where are you going in that rig?" said Germinie one Sunday morning to Adele, as she pa.s.sed in grand array along the corridor on the sixth floor, in front of her open door.

"Ah! there you are! I'm going to a swell wedding, my dear! There's a crowd of us--big Marie, the _great bully_, you know--Elisa, from 41, the two Badiniers, big and little--and men, too! In the first place, there's my _dealer in sudden death_. Yes, and--Oh! didn't you know--my new flame, the master-at-arms of the 24th--and a friend of his, a painter, a real Father Joy. We're going to Vincennes. Everyone carries something.

We shall dine on the gra.s.s--the men will pay for the wine. And there'll be plenty of it, I promise you!"

"I'll go, too," said Germinie.

"You? nonsense! you don't go to parties any more."

"But I tell you I'll go," said Germinie, in a sharp, decided tone. "Just give me time to tell mademoiselle and put on a dress. If you'll wait I'll go and get half a lobster."

Half an hour later the two women left the house; they skirted the city wall and found the rest of the party sitting outside a cafe on Boulevard de la Chopinette. After taking a gla.s.s of currant wine, they entered two large cabs and rode away. When they arrived at the fortress at Vincennes they alighted and the whole party walked along the bank of the moat. As they were pa.s.sing under the wall of the fort, the master-at-arms'

friend, the painter, shouted to an artilleryman, who was doing sentry duty beside a cannon: "Say! old fellow, you'd rather drink one than stand guard over it, eh?"[1]

"Isn't he funny?" said Adele to Germinie, nudging her with her elbow.

Soon they were fairly in the forest of Vincennes.

Narrow paths crossed and recrossed in every direction on the hard, uneven, footprint-covered ground. In the s.p.a.ces between all these little roads there was here and there a little gra.s.s, but down-trodden, withered, yellow, dead gra.s.s, strewn about like bedding for cattle, its straw-colored blades were everywhere mingled with briars, amid the dull green of nettles. It was easily recognizable as one of the rural spots to which the great faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in the gra.s.s, and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a display of fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarf elms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and stripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks, eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. The verdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, the leaves above had a very unhealthy look; the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made only faint green lines against the sky. Clouds of dust from the high-roads covered the bushes with a gray pall. Everything had the wretched, impoverished aspect of trampled vegetation that has no chance to breathe, the melancholy effect of the gra.s.s at the barriers! Nature seemed to sprout from beneath the pavements. No birds sang in the trees, no insects hummed about the dusty ground; the noise of the spring-carts stunned the birds; the hand-organ put the rustling of the trees to silence; the denizens of the street strolled about through the paths, singing. Women's hats, fastened with four pins to a handkerchief, were hanging from the trees; the red plume of an artilleryman burst upon one at every moment through the scanty leaves; dealers in honey rose from the thickets; on the trampled greensward children in blouses were cutting twigs, workingmen's families idling their time away nibbling at _pleasure_, and little urchins catching b.u.t.terflies in their caps. It was a forest after the pattern of the original Bois de Boulogne, hot and dusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused promenade, one of those spots, avaricious of shade, to which the common people flock to disport themselves at the gates of great capitals--burlesque forests, filled with corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons in the underbrush.

The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming in clouds, shedding a veiled diffuse light that was almost blinding to the eyes and that seemed to portend a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothing stirred; the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move; the forest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath the heavy sky. At rare intervals a breath of air from the south pa.s.sed lazily along, sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow upon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With no knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensation like the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin.

They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited activity that the country air imparts to the common people. The men ran, the women tripped after them and caught them. They played at rolling on the gra.s.s. There was a manifest longing to dance and climb trees; the painter amused himself by throwing stones at the loop-holes in the gateways of the fortress, and he never missed his aim.

At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a clump of oaks, whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lighting matches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The women chattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms of inane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did not speak or laugh. She did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath their lowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed in thought was she that you would have said she was totally oblivious to time and place. Lying at full length on the gra.s.s, her head slightly raised by a hammock, she made no other movement than to lay her hands, palm downwards, on the gra.s.s beside her; in a short time she would turn them on their backs and let them lie in that position, seeking the coolness of the earth to allay the fever of her flesh.

"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adele.

Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without answering, and until dinner maintained the same position, the same silence, the same air of torpor, feeling about her for places where her burning hands had not rested.

"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us something."

"Oh! no," Adele replied, "I haven't got wind enough before eating."

Suddenly a great stone came hurtling through the air and struck the ground near Germinie's head; at the same moment she heard the painter's voice shouting: "Don't be afraid! that's your chair."

One and all laid their handkerchiefs on the ground by way of tablecloth. Eatables were produced from greasy papers. Bottles were uncorked and the wine went round; the gla.s.ses were rested against tufts of gra.s.s, and they fell to upon bits of pork and sausages, with slices of bread for plates. The painter cut boats out of paper to hold the salt, and imitated the orders shouted out by waiters in a cafe. "_Boum!

Pavillon! Servez!_" he cried. The company gradually became animated. The open air, the patches of blue sky, the food and drink started the gayety of the table in full blast. Hands approached one another, mouths met, coa.r.s.e remarks were whispered from one to another, shirt sleeves crept around waists, and now and then energetic embraces were attended by greedy, resounding kisses.

Germinie drank, and said nothing. The painter, who had taken his place by her side, felt decidedly chilly and embarra.s.sed beside his extraordinary neighbor, who amused herself "so entirely inside."

Suddenly he began to beat a tattoo with his knife against his gla.s.s, drowning the uproar of the party, and rose to his knees.