The person who now entered was a girl of about eighteen, short, and very
much deformed. Though not exactly a hunchback, her spine was curved; her
breast was sunken, and her head deeply set in the shoulders. Her face
was regular, but long, thin, very pale, and pitted with the small pox;
yet it expressed great sweetness and melancholy. Her blue eyes beamed
with kindness and intelligence. By a strange freak of nature, the
handsomest woman would have been proud of the magnificent hair twisted
in a coarse net at the back of her head. She held an old basket in her
hand. Though miserably clad, the care and neatness of her dress revealed
a powerful struggle with her poverty. Notwithstanding the cold, she
wore a scanty frock made of print of an indefinable color, spotted with
white; but it had been so often washed, that its primitive design and
color had long since disappeared. In her resigned, yet suffering face,
might be read a long familiarity with every form of suffering, every
description of taunting. From her birth, ridicule had ever pursued her.
We have said that she was very deformed, and she was vulgarly called
“Mother Bunch.” Indeed it was so usual to give her this grotesque name,
which every moment reminded her of her infirmity, that Frances and
Agricola, though they felt as much compassion as other people showed
contempt for her, never called her, however, by any other name.
Mother Bunch, as we shall therefore call her in future, was born in the
house in which Dagobert’s wife had resided for more than twenty years;
and she had, as it were, been brought up with Agricola and Gabriel.
There are wretches fatally doomed to misery. Mother Bunch had a very
pretty sister, on whom Perrine Soliveau, their common mother, the widow
of a ruined tradesman, had concentrated all her affection, while she
treated her deformed child with contempt and unkindness. The latter
would often come, weeping, to Frances, on this account, who tried to
console her, and in the long evenings amused her by teaching her to read
and sew. Accustomed to pity her by their mother’s example, instead of
imitating other children, who always taunted and sometimes even beat
her, Agricola and Gabriel liked her, and used to protect and defend her.
She was about fifteen, and her sister Cephyse was about seventeen,
when their mother died, leaving them both in utter poverty. Cephyse was
intelligent, active, clever, but different to her sister; she had the
lively, alert, hoydenish character which requires air, exercise and
pleasures--a good girl enough, but foolishly spoiled by her mother.
Cephyse, listening at first to Frances’s good advice, resigned herself
to her lot; and, having learnt to sew, worked like her sister, for
about a year. But, unable to endure any longer the bitter privations her
insignificant earnings, notwithstanding her incessant toil, exposed
her to--privations which often bordered on starvation--Cephyse, young,
pretty, of warm temperament, and surrounded by brilliant offers and
seductions--brilliant, indeed, for her, since they offered food to
satisfy her hunger, shelter from the cold, and decent raiment, without
being obliged to work fifteen hours a day in an obscure and unwholesome
hovel--Cephyse listened to the vows of a young lawyer’s clerk, who
forsook her soon after. She formed a connection with another clerk, whom
she (instructed by the examples set her), forsook in turn for a bagman,
whom she afterwards cast off for other favorites. In a word, what with
changing and being forsaken, Cephyse, in the course of one or two years,
was the idol of a set of grisettes, students and clerks; and acquired
such a reputation at the balls on the Hampstead Heaths of Paris, by her
decision of character, original turn of mind, and unwearied ardor in all
kinds of pleasures, and especially her wild, noisy gayety, that she was
termed the Bacchanal Queen, and proved herself in every way worthy of
this bewildering royalty.
From that time poor Mother Bunch only heard of her sister at rare
intervals. She still mourned for her, and continued to toil hard to
gain her three-and-six a week. The unfortunate girl, having been taught
sewing by Frances, made coarse shirts for the common people and the
army. For these she received half-a-crown a dozen. They had to be
hemmed, stitched, provided with collars and wristbands, buttons, and
button holes; and at the most, when at work twelve and fifteen hours a
day, she rarely succeeded in turning out more than fourteen or sixteen
shirts a week--an excessive amount of toil that brought her in about
three shillings and fourpence a week. And the case of this poor girl
was neither accidental nor uncommon. And this, because the remuneration
given for women’s work is an example of revolting injustice and savage
barbarism. They are paid not half as much as men who are employed at the
needle: such as tailors, and makers of gloves, or waistcoats, etc.--no
doubt because women can work as well as men--because they are more weak
and delicate--and because their need may be twofold as great when they
become mothers.
Well, Mother Bunch fagged on, with three-and-four a week. That is to
say, toiling hard for twelve or fifteen hours every day; she succeeded
in keeping herself alive, in spite of exposure to hunger, cold, and
poverty--so numerous were her privations. Privations? No! The word
privation expresses but weakly that constant and terrible want of all
that is necessary to preserve the existence God gives; namely, wholesome
air and shelter, sufficient and nourishing food and warm clothing.
Mortification would be a better word to describe that total want of all
that is essentially vital, which a justly organized state of society
ought--yes--ought necessarily to bestow on every active, honest
workman and workwoman, since civilization has dispossessed them of all
territorial right, and left them no other patrimony than their hands.
The savage does not enjoy the advantage of civilization; but he has, at
least, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the fish of the
sea, and the fruits of the earth, to feed him, and his native woods for
shelter and for fuel. The civilized man, disinherited of these gifts,
considering the rights of property as sacred, may, in return for his
hard daily labor, which enriches his country, demand wages that will
enable him to live in the enjoyment of health: nothing more, and
nothing less. For is it living, to drag along on the extreme edge which
separates life from the grave, and even there continually struggle
against cold, hunger, and disease? And to show how far the mortification
which society imposes thus inexorably on its millions of honest,
industrious laborers (by its careless disregard of all the questions
which concern the just remuneration of labor), may extend, we will
describe how this poor girl contrived to live on three shillings and
sixpence a week.
Society, perhaps, may then feel its obligation to so many unfortunate
wretches for supporting, with resignation, the horrible existence which
leaves them just sufficient life to feel the worst pangs of humanity.
Yes: to live at such a price is virtue! Yes, society thus organized,
whether it tolerates or imposes so much misery, loses all right to
blame the poor wretches who sell themselves not through debauchery, but
because they are cold and famishing. This poor girl spent her wages as
follows:
Six pounds of bread, second quality........0 8 1/2
Four pails of water................0 2
Lard or dripping (butter being out of the question)0 5
Coarse salt....................0 0 3/4
A bushel of charcoal...............0 4
A quart of dried vegetables............0 3
Three quarts of potatoes..............0 2
Dips........................0 3 1/4
Thread and needles.................0 2 1/2
______
2 7
To save charcoal, Mother Bunch prepared soup only two or three times a
week at most, on a stove that stood on the landing of the fourth story.
On other days she ate it cold. There remained nine or ten pence a week
for clothes and lodging. By rare good fortune, her situation was in one
respect an exception to the lot of many others. Agricola, that he
might not wound her delicacy, had come to a secret arrangement with the
housekeeper, and hired a garret for her, just large enough to hold a
small bed, a chair, and a table; for which the sempstress had to pay
five shillings a year. But Agricola, in fulfilment of his agreement with
the porter, paid the balance, to make up the actual rent of the
garret, which was twelve and sixpence. The poor girl had thus about
eighteenpence a month left for her other expenses. But many workwomen,
whose position is less fortunate than hers, since they have neither
home nor family, buy a piece of bread and some other food to keep them
through the day; and at night patronize the “twopenny rope,” one with
another, in a wretched room containing five or six beds, some of which
are always engaged by men, as male lodgers are by far the most abundant.
Yes; and in spite of the disgust that a poor and virtuous girl must feel
at this arrangement, she must submit to it; for a lodging-house keeper
cannot have separate rooms for females. To furnish a room, however
meanly, the poor workwoman must possess three or four shillings in ready
money. But how save this sum, out of weekly earnings of a couple of
florins, which are scarcely sufficient to keep her from starving, and
are still less sufficient to clothe her? No! no! The poor wretch must
resign herself to this repugnant cohabitation; and so, gradually, the
instinct of modesty becomes weakened; the natural sentiment of chastity,
that saved her from the “gay life,” becomes extinct; vice appears to be
the only means of improving her intolerable condition; she yields;
and the first “man made of money,” who can afford a governess for his
children, cries out against the depravity of the lower orders! And
yet, painful as the condition of the working woman is, it is relatively
fortunate. Should work fail her for one day, two days, what then? Should
sickness come--sickness almost always occasioned by unwholesome food,
want of fresh air, necessary attention, and good rest; sickness, often
so enervating as to render work impossible; though not so dangerous
as to procure the sufferer a bed in an hospital--what becomes of the
hapless wretches then? The mind hesitates, and shrinks from dwelling on
such gloomy pictures.
This inadequacy of wages, one terrible source only of so many evils, and
often of so many vices, is general, especially among women; and, again
this is not private wretchedness, but the wretchedness which afflicts
whole classes, the type of which we endeavor to develop in Mother Bunch.
It exhibits the moral and physical condition of thousands of human
creatures in Paris, obliged to subsist on a scanty four shillings a
week. This poor workwoman, then, notwithstanding the advantages she
unknowingly enjoyed through Agricola’s generosity, lived very miserably;
and her health, already shattered, was now wholly undermined by these
constant hardships. Yet, with extreme delicacy, though ignorant of
the little sacrifice already made for her by Agricola, Mother Bunch
pretended she earned more than she really did, in order to avoid offers
of service which it would have pained her to accept, because she knew
the limited means of Frances and her son, and because it would have
wounded her natural delicacy, rendered still more sensitive by so many
sorrows and humiliations.
But, singular as it may appear, this deformed body contained a loving
and generous soul--a mind cultivated even to poetry; and let us add,
that this was owing to the example of Agricola Baudoin, with whom she
had been brought up, and who had naturally the gift. This poor girl was
the first confidant to whom our young mechanic imparted his literary
essays; and when he told her of the charm and extreme relief he found
in poetic reverie, after a day of hard toil, the workwoman, gifted with
strong natural intelligence, felt, in her turn, how great a resource
this would be to her in her lonely and despised condition.
One day, to Agricola’s great surprise, who had just read some verses to
her, the sewing-girl, with smiles and blushes, timidly communicated to
him also a poetic composition. Her verses wanted rhythm and harmony,
perhaps; but they were simple and affecting, as a non-envenomed
complaint entrusted to a friendly hearer. From that day Agricola and she
held frequent consultations; they gave each other mutual encouragement:
but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl’s
poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of
weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all
her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her
hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle--desponding, but resigned; it
was especially the language of deep tenderness--of mournful sympathy--of
angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, to bear
the double burden of poverty and deformity. Yet she often expressed
a sincere free-spoken admiration of beauty, free from all envy or
bitterness; she admired beauty as she admired the sun. But, alas! many
were the verses of hers that Agricola had never seen, and which he was
never to see.
The young mechanic, though not strictly handsome, had an open masculine
face; was as courageous as kind; possessed a noble, glowing, generous
heart, a superior mind, and a frank, pleasing gayety of spirits. The
young girl, brought up with him, loved him as an unfortunate creature
can love, who, dreading cruel ridicule, is obliged to hide her affection
in the depths of her heart, and adopt reserve and deep dissimulation.
She did not seek to combat her love; to what purpose should she do
so? No one would ever know it. Her well known sisterly affection for
Agricola explained the interest she took in all that concerned him; so
that no one was surprised at the extreme grief of the young workwoman,
when, in 1830, Agricola, after fighting intrepidly for the people’s
flag, was brought bleeding home to his mother. Dagobert’s son, deceived,
like others, on this point, had never suspected, and was destined never
to suspect, this love for him.
Such was the poorly-clad girl who entered the room in which Frances was
preparing her son’s supper.
“Is it you, my poor love,” said she; “I have not seen you since morning:
have you been ill? Come and kiss me.”
The young girl kissed Agricola’s mother, and replied: “I was very busy
about some work, mother; I did not wish to lose a moment; I have only
just finished it. I am going down to fetch some charcoal--do you want
anything while I’m out?”
“No, no, my child, thank you. But I am very uneasy. It is half-past
eight, and Agricola is not come home.” Then she added, after a sigh: “He
kills himself with work for me. Ah, I am very unhappy, my girl; my sight
is quite going. In a quarter of an hour after I begin working, I cannot
see at all--not even to sew sacks. The idea of being a burden to my son
drives me distracted.”
“Oh, don’t, ma’am, if Agricola heard you say that--”
“I know the poor boy thinks of nothing but me, and that augments my
vexation. Only I think that rather than leave me, he gives up the
advantages that his fellow-workmen enjoy at Hardy’s, his good and worthy
master--instead of living in this dull garret, where it is scarcely
light at noon, he would enjoy, like the other workmen, at very little
expense, a good light room, warm in winter, airy in summer, with a view
of the garden. And he is so fond of trees! not to mention that this
place is so far from his work, that it is quite a toil to him to get to
it.”
“Oh, when he embraces you he forgets his fatigue, Mrs. Baudoin,” said
Mother Bunch; “besides, he knows how you cling to the house in which he
was born. M. Hardy offered to settle you at Plessy with Agricola, in the
building put up for the workmen.”
“Yes, my child; but then I must give up church. I can’t do that.”
“But--be easy, I hear him,” said the hunchback, blushing.
A sonorous, joyous voice was heard singing on the stairs.
“At least, I’ll not let him see that I have been crying,” said the good
mother, drying her tears. “This is the only moment of rest and ease from
toil he has--I must not make it sad to him.”