III

In the course of her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her eyes.

The maid's story ceased, and the remainder of the history of her life, which was upon her lips that evening, was once more buried in her heart.

The conclusion of her story was as follows:

When little Germinie Lacerteux arrived in Paris, being then less than fifteen years old, her sister, desirous to have her begin to earn her living at once, and to help to put bread in her hand, obtained a place for her in a small cafe on the boulevard, where she performed the double duties of lady's maid to the mistress of the cafe and a.s.sistant to the waiters in carrying on the main business of the establishment. The child, just from her village and dropped suddenly in that place, was completely bewildered and terrified by her surroundings and her duties.

She had the first instinctive feeling of wounded modesty and, foreshadowing the woman she was destined to become, she shuddered at the perpetual contact with the other s.e.x, working, eating, pa.s.sing her whole time with men; and whenever she had an opportunity to go out, and went to her sisters, there were tearful, despairing scenes, when, without actually complaining of anything, she manifested a sort of dread to return, saying that she did not want to stay there, that they were not satisfied with her, that she preferred to return to them. They would reply that it had already cost them enough to bring her to Paris, that it was a silly whim on her part and that she was very well off where she was, and they would send her back to the cafe in tears. She dared not tell all that she suffered in the company of the waiters in the cafe, insolent, boasting, cynical fellows, fed on the remains of debauches, tainted with all the vices to which they ministered, and corrupt to the core with putrefying odds and ends of obscenity. At every turn, she had to submit to the dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything, with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered, overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused her credulity by absurd fables, they overburdened her with fatiguing tasks, they a.s.sailed her with incessant, pitiless ridicule, which well-nigh drove her benumbed intellect to imbecility. In addition, they made her blush at the things they said to her, which made her feel ashamed, although she did not understand them. They soiled the artlessness of her fourteen years with filthy veiled allusions. And they found amus.e.m.e.nt in putting the eyes of her childish curiosity to the keyholes of the private supper-rooms.

The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she dared not.

When, with nourishing food, her body took on a little flesh, her cheeks a little color and she began to have something of the aspect of a woman, they took great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were attempts at familiarity, significant gestures, advances, which she eluded, and from which she escaped unscathed, but which a.s.sailed her purity by breathing upon her innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by the master of the establishment, who was accustomed to abuse his maidservants and who bore her a grudge because she was not old enough or of the right sort for a mistress, she found no support, no touch of humanity, except in his wife. She began to love that woman with a sort of animal devotion, and to obey her with the docility of a dog. She did all her errands without thought or reflection. She carried her letters to her lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She became very active and agile and ingenuously sly in pa.s.sing in and out, evading the awakened suspicions of the husband; and without any clear idea of what she was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a mischievous delight, such as children and monkeys feel, in telling herself vaguely that she was causing some little suffering to that man and that house, which caused her so much. There was among her comrades an old waiter, named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of the cruel plots concocted against her, and, when she was present, put a stop to conversation that was too free, with the authority of his white hairs and his paternal interest in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house increased every day. One week her sisters were compelled to take her back to the cafe by force.

A few days later, there was a great review on the Champ de Mars, and the waiters had leave of absence for the day. Only Germinie and old Joseph remained in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in a small, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She entered the room; she cried out, fell to the floor, wept, implored, struggled, called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.

When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up in her chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, when Joseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For a long time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulse was to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified, bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who feared that she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, and respected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.

She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pa.s.s the evening with her sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed by severe pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came to the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret of their younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of the common people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety, flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.

Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousness under their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands, the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law was there, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of an Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeper red than her sisters' blows.

She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She sought neither to defend nor to excuse herself. She did not tell what had taken place and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.

She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When her older sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded her that there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at the thought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when her mother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightning flash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciences pierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her and kept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almost forced her into her misfortune.

That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters took her to the Rue Saint-Martin, to the house of a repairer of cashmere shawls, with whom she lodged, and who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, was banner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made her lie beside her on a mattress on the floor, and having her there under her hand all night, she vented upon her all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, her bitter resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie by her father and mother. It was a long succession of petty tortures, brutal or hypocritical exhibitions of spite, kicks that bruised her legs, and progressive movements of the body by which she gradually forced her companion out of bed--it was a cold winter's night--to the floor of the fireless room. During the day, the seamstress took Germinie in hand, catechized her, preached at her, and by detailing the tortures of the other life, inspired in her mind a horrible fear of the h.e.l.l whose flames she caused her to feel.

She lived there four months, in close confinement, and was never allowed to leave the house. At the end of four months she gave birth to a dead child. When her health was restored, she entered the service of a depilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she had the joyful feeling of having been released from prison. Two or three times, in her walks, she met old Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; but she escaped him and the old man never knew that he had been a father.

But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new place. The house where she had taken service as a maid of all work was what servants call "a barrack." A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money, as is often the case with women engaged in the occupations that depend upon chance, and in the problematical methods of gaining a livelihood in vogue in Paris, the depilator, who was almost always involved in a lawsuit of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant's nourishment. She often went away for the whole day without leaving her any dinner. The little one would satisfy her appet.i.te as well as she could with some kind of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things that deceive a young woman's appet.i.te, even charcoal, which she would nibble with the depraved taste and capricious stomach of her age and s.e.x. This diet, just after recovering from her confinement, her health being but partially restored and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted the young woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined her const.i.tution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion changed to that dead white that looks green in the daylight. Her swollen eyes were surrounded with a great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips a.s.sumed the hue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the slightest ascent, and the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress's hair.

She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place, with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had never had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interested himself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He took her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to him. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship, the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and pa.s.sageway tradesmen, when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout, in the house of which her sister was concierge.

IV

Those people who look for the death of the Catholic religion in our day, do not realize by what an infinite number of st.u.r.dy roots it still retains its hold upon the hearts of the people. They do not realize the secret, delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people. They do not realize what confession and the confessor are to the impoverished souls of those poor women. In the priest who listens and whose voice falls softly on her ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not so much the minister of G.o.d, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of her welfare, as the confidant of her sorrows and the friend of her misery.

However coa.r.s.e she may be, there is always a little of the true woman in her, a feverish, trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessness and, as it were, the sighing of an invalid who craves caressing words, even as a child's trifling ailments require the nurse's droning lullaby.

She, as well as the woman of the world, must have the consolation of pouring out her heart, of confiding her troubles to a sympathetic ear.

For it is the nature of her s.e.x to seek an outlet for the emotions and an arm to lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must tell, and concerning which she would like to be questioned, pitied and comforted. She dreams of a compa.s.sionate interest, a tender sympathy for hidden feelings of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the kindest, the most friendly, the most approachable of masters to the woman in their employ: their kindness to her will still be of the same sort that they bestow upon a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning her appet.i.te and her health; they will look carefully after the animal part of her, and that will be all. It will not occur to them that she can suffer elsewhere than in her body, and they will not dream that she can have the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for which they seek relief by confiding in those of their own station. In their eyes, the woman who sweeps and does the cooking, has no ideas that can cause her to be sad or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her thoughts. To whom, then, shall she carry them? To the priest who is waiting for them, asks for them, welcomes them, to the churchman who is also a man of the world, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman, who knows everything, speaks well, is always accessible, gentle, patient, attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for the most humble soul, the most shabbily dressed penitent. The priest alone listens to the woman in a cap. He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the things that disturb and agitate her and that bring to a maid, as well as to her mistress, the sudden longing to weep, or excite a tempest within her. There is none but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from her those things which the irony of her daily life holds back, to look to the state of her moral health; none but he to raise her above her material life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity and hope,--such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of the men of her family and of her cla.s.s.

After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germinie became profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. She abandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession, to the priest's smooth, tranquil ba.s.s voice that came to her from the darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothing words, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, free from care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had been applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of her being.

She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere. Her mistress had a certain masculine roughness of demeanor which repelled expansiveness.

She had an abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back all that Germinie would have liked to confide to her. It was in her nature to be brutal in her treatment of all lamentations that were not caused by pain or disappointment. Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare for diseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is created by the thought, for the weariness of spirit that flows from a woman's nerves and from the disordered condition of her mental organism. Germinie often found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the times in which she had lived and by the circ.u.mstances of her life. The sh.e.l.l of her heart was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself, she did not like to hear complaints about her. And by the right of all the tears she had not shed, she detested childish tears in grown persons.

Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous for Germinie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of her first prayer. Throughout the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream; and while she was about her work it was constantly before her eyes, with its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of a winged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, and the mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now her whole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She lived through the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for, promised day. On Thursday, she began to be impatient; she felt, in the redoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were, of the blessed Sat.u.r.day evening; and when Sat.u.r.day came and mademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, she would make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to the penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holy water and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags, between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted floor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forward in the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious, veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbed in the emotion of suspense.

The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her frequent confessions.

He was not sparing of time or attention or charity. He allowed her to talk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, and permitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. He listened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles; he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of a servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns of her existence, as one would speak to a mother and a physician.

This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. A great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to a.s.sume the gown wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy compa.s.sion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who was promised to pa.s.sion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the evident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to that scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose to resist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of the senses that was stronger than she.

This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie lived a concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to G.o.d's service--at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had come gradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended toward himself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer said to him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the first time, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray and becoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watched for him when the services were at an end, followed him into the sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his ca.s.sock. The confessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself.

He became more reserved and a.s.sumed a cold demeanor. In despair at this change, at his apparent indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt, confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken possession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents.

Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her to another confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this other confessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of going, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certain far-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.

Affairs had reached that point when mademoiselle fell ill. Throughout her illness, as Germinie did not want to leave her, she did not attend ma.s.s. And on the first Sunday--when mademoiselle, being fully recovered, did not require her care, she was greatly surprised to find that "her devotee" remained at home and did not run away to church.

"Oho!" said she, "so you don't go and see your cures nowadays? What have they done to you, eh?"

"Nothing," said Germinie.

V

"There, mademoiselle!--Look at me," said Germinie.

It was a few months later. She had asked her mistress's permission to go that evening to the wedding ball of her grocer's sister, who had chosen her for her maid-of-honor, and she had come to exhibit herself _en grande toilette_, in her low-necked muslin dress.

Mademoiselle raised her eyes from the old volume, printed in large type, which she was reading, removed her spectacles, placed them in the book to mark her place, and exclaimed:

"What, my little bigot, you at a ball! Do you know, my girl, this seems to me downright nonsense! You and the hornpipe! Faith, all you need now is to want to get married! A deuce of a want, that! But if you marry, I warn you that I won't keep you--mind that! I've no desire to wait on your brats! Come a little nearer----Oho! why----bless my soul!

Mademoiselle Show-all! We're getting to be a bit of a flirt lately, I find----"

"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie tried to say.

"And then," continued Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, following out her thought, "among you people, the men are such sweet creatures! They'll spend all you have--to say nothing of the blows. But marriage--I am sure that that nonsensical idea of getting married buzzes around in your head when you see the others. That's what gives you that simper, I'll wager.

_Bon Dieu de Dieu!_ Now turn a bit, so that I can see you," said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, with an abrupt change of tone to one that was almost caressing; and placing her thin hands on the arms of her easy-chair, crossing her legs and moving her foot back and forth, she set about inspecting Germinie and her toilet.

"What the devil!" said she, after a few moments of silent scrutiny, "what! is it really you?----Then I have never used my eyes to look at you.----Good G.o.d, yes!----But----but----" She mumbled more vague exclamations between her teeth.----"Where the deuce did you get that mug like an amorous cat's?" she said at last, and continued to gaze at her.

Germinie was ugly. Her hair, of so dark a chestnut that it seemed black, curled and twisted in unruly waves, in little stiff, rebellious locks, which escaped and stood up all over her head, despite the pomade upon her shiny _bandeaux_. Her smooth, narrow, swelling brow protruded above the shadow of the deep sockets in which her eyes were buried and sunken to such a depth as almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling eyes they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant girlish twinkle that softened and lighted up their laughter. They were neither brown eyes nor blue eyes, but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a gray that was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression therein in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing rays of a sort of intoxication, pa.s.sion in phosph.o.r.escence. Her short, turned-up nose, with large, dilated, palpitating nostrils, was one of those noses of which the common people say that it rains inside: upon one side, at the corner of the eye was a thick, swollen blue vein. The square head of the Lorraine race was emphasized in her broad, high, prominent cheek-bones, which were well-covered with the traces of small-pox. The most noticeable defect in her face was the too great distance between the nose and mouth. This lack of proportion gave an almost apish character to the lower part of the head, where the expansive mouth, with white teeth and full lips that looked as if they had been crushed, they were so flat, smiled at you with a strange, vaguely irritating smile.

Her _decollete_ 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 s.e.x. 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 trespa.s.ses 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.