Edmond de Goncourt

“ Mademoiselle told herself over and over again, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little, from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whose bitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness of days gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.
She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her wrath; but reflection brought them back. Thereupon there came to her mind some things to which she had paid no heed during Germinie's lifetime, trifles of which the grave makes us take thought and upon which death sheds light. ”

“ Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked upon him as an assassin. She conceived a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that one has of a person who is one's Bane! ”

“ Madame Jupillon, who had become too stout and too heavy to do what it was necessary for her to do at the creamery, notwithstanding all the assistance rendered by Germinie, had sent to her province for a niece of hers. She was the embodiment of the blooming youth of the country, a woman in whom there was still something of the child, active and vivacious, with black eyes full of sunlight, lips as round and red as cherries, the summer heat of her province in her complexion, the warmth of perfect health in her blood. ”

“ Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting: "Nothing's the matter, mademoiselle!" uttered in the tone that covers a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by which a woman's body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. ”

“ The air, the keen breath of Quartier Bréda, full of the verve of the artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. ”

“ Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed with wrath.
Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing else. Debts!—a child!—all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service twenty years! ”

“ Never had she heard disdain hurled down from so lofty a height, contempt so tear itself to tatters and gush forth in laughter, a woman's words express such a fierce thirst for vengeance against a man. She ransacked her memory: such play of feature, such intonations, such a dramatic and heart-rending voice as that voice of a consumptive coughing away her life, she could not remember since the days of Mademoiselle Rachel.
At last Germinie awoke abruptly, her eyes filled with the tears of her dream, and jumped down from the bed, seeing that her mistress had returned. ”

“ She began to listen, with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her that could cure the disease called life. ”

“ Then she would scold herself for the thought and call herself an old fool. Her instinct of rigid uprightness, the stern conscience and harsh judgment of a stainless life, the things which cause a virtuous woman to condemn a harlot and should have caused a saint like Mademoiselle de Varandeuil to be without pity for her servant—everything within her rebelled against a pardon. The voice of justice, stifling her kindness of heart, cried: "Never! never!" And she would expel Germinie's infamous phantom with a pitiless gesture. ”

“ A strange country, where everything was mingled—the smoke from the frying-pan and the evening vapor, the noise of quoits on the head of a cask and the silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the idyllic rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh smell of green wheat, the great human Fair and Nature! Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging Jupillon to go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she would constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the fresh, cool sensation of the stalks against her stockings. ”

“ Germinie found strength to say.
All that endless day she passed standing over hot stewpans and sealing up jars, in the torture known only to those whom the chances of life detain at a distance from the sick bed of those dear to them. She suffered [171] such heart-rending agony as those unhappy creatures suffer who cannot go where their anxiety calls them, and who, in the extremity of despair caused by separation and uncertainty, constantly imagine that death will come in their absence.
As she received no letter Thursday evening and none Friday morning, she took courage. ”

“ The smaller ones would amuse themselves by dipping the soles of their shoes in the gutter. And there were some who made a headdress of a cabbage leaf picked up from the ground,—a green cap sent by the good God, beneath which the fresh young face smiled brightly.
Germinie would gaze at them all and walk along with them; she would go in among them in order to feel the rustling of their aprons. She could not take her eyes off the little arms under which the school satchels leaped about, the little pea-green dresses, the little black leggings, the little legs in the little woolen stockings. ”

“ All about Germinie, at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws, agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn from the body. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Little by little everything would fade away, be blotted out, lose its form and color in a dying remnant of colorless daylight, and through the increasing darkness the voices of a class whose life begins at night, and the voice of the wine beginning to sing, would arise, mingled with the din of the rattles. Upon the slope the tops of the tall grass waved to and fro in the gentle breeze. Germinie would make up her mind to go. ”

“ While the candle was still smoking on mademoiselle's night table, Germinie would be back at the creamery, this time to remain until midnight, until one o'clock; often she did not go until a policeman, noticing the light, tapped on the shutters and made them close up.
In order to be always there and to have the right to be always there, to make herself a part of the shop, to keep her eyes constantly upon the man she loved, to hover about him, to keep him, to be always brushing against him, she had become the servant of the establishment. ”

“ The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to mademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed [374] from her heart said: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth and whose filth it cast out!"
How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! And to make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de Varandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, her jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bending over her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. ”

“ He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the things that disturb and agitate her and that bring to [73] 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 class. ”

“ Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret. She had not, like Adèle, one of those vulgar material organizations, which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses. She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. ”

“ She worked all the time; assisted the servants. She was always sitting on the edge of a chair, in a corner of the kitchen, doing something with her fingers. Mademoiselle was obliged to force her to go out, to drive her into the garden to sit. Then Germinie would sit on the green bench, with her umbrella over her head, and the sun in her skirts and on her feet. Hardly moving, she would forget herself utterly as she inhaled the light and air and warmth, passionately and with a sort of feverish joy. ”

“ And when, in the cemetery, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had turned aside the shroud to kiss the dead face for the last time, it seemed to her as if there were no one near to her, as if she were all alone upon the earth.
Thenceforth, yielding to the infirmities which she had no further reason to shake off, she began to live the [59] narrow, confined life of old people who wear out their carpet in one spot only—never leaving her room, reading but little because it tired her eyes, and passing most of her time buried in her easy-chair, reviewing the past and living it over again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One would say that thy charity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bed whereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more for them, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thou dost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thou didst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitals a hundred years since! ”

“ Germinie often found her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the times in which she had lived and by the circumstances of her life. The shell 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. ”

“ Her preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor—everything helped to exasperate Germinie and to arouse a sullen wrath within her; everything wounded that jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals caused it a bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved. ”

“ In all branches of the family the old maid appeared thus providentially, without warning, on days of sorrow, ennui and suffering. She was never seen except when her hands were needed to heal, her devoted friendship to console. She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When they left the theatre, enlivened and heated by the feverish excitement of the performance and the place; when they returned from an excursion to the [104] country, laden with a long day's sunshine, intoxicated with the blue sky and the pure air, excited by the wine imbibed at dinner, amid the sportive liberties in which the woman of the people, drunk with enjoyment and with the delights of unlimited good cheer, and with the senses keyed up to the highest pitch of joviality, makes bold to indulge at night, Germinie tried to be always between the maid and Jupillon. ”

“ There she would rest a few moments; then, loading Germinie down with wreaths of immortelles, she would pass through the cemetery gate, take the path to the left of the cedar at the entrance, and make her pilgrimage slowly from tomb to tomb. She would throw away the withered flowers, sweep up the dead leaves, tie the wreaths together, and, sitting down upon her folding-chair, would gaze and dream, and absent-mindedly remove a bit of moss from the flat stone with the end of her umbrella. ”