Madame Bergeret had a horror of silence and solitude, and now that M.
Bergeret never spoke to her and lived apart from her, her room was
as terrifying as a tomb to her mind. She never entered it without
turning white. Her daughters would, at least, have supplied the noise
and movement needed if she were to remain sane; but when an epidemic
of typhus broke out in the autumn she sent them to visit their aunt,
Mademoiselle Zoé Bergeret, at Arcachon. There they had spent the
winter, and there their father meant to leave them, in the present
state of his affairs. Madame Bergeret was a domesticated woman, with a
housewifely mind. To her, adultery had been nothing more than a mere
extension of wedded life, a gleam from her hearth-fire. She had been
driven to it by a matronly pride in her position far more than by the
wanton promptings of the flesh. She had always intended that her slight
lapse with young M. Roux should remain a secret, homely habit, just a
taste of adultery that would merely involve, imply, and confirm that
state of matrimony which is held in honour by the world, as well as
sanctified by the Church, and which secures a woman in a position of
personal safety and social dignity. Madame Bergeret was a Christian
wife and knew that marriage is a sacrament whose lofty and lasting
results cannot be effaced by any fault such as she had committed, for
serious though it might be, it was yet a pardonable and excusable
lapse. Without being in a position to estimate her offence with great
moral perspicuity, she felt instinctively that it was trifling and
simple, being neither malicious, nor inspired by that deep passion
which alone can dignify error with the splendour of crime and hurl the
guilty woman into the abyss. She not only felt that she was no great
criminal, but also that she had never had the chance of being one.
Yet now she had to stand watching the entirely unforeseen results of
such a trifling episode, as to her terror they slowly and gloomily
unfolded themselves before her. She suffered cruel pangs at finding
herself alone and fallen within her own house, at having lost the
sovereignty of her home, and at having been despoiled, as it were, of
her cares of kitchen and store-cupboard. Suffering was not good for
her and brought no purification in its train; it merely awoke in her
paltry mind, at one moment the instinct of revolt, and at another, a
passion for self-humiliation. Every day, about three o’clock in the
afternoon, she went out and paid visits at her friends’ houses. On
these expeditions she walked with great strides, a grim, stiff figure
with bright eyes, flaming cheeks and gaudy dress. She called on all the
lower-middle-class ladies of the town, on Madame Torquet, the dean’s
wife; on Madame Leterrier, the rector’s wife; on Madame Ossian Colot,
the wife of the prison governor, and on Madame Surcouf, the recorder’s
wife. She was not received by the society ladies, nor by the wives of
the great capitalists. Wherever she went, she poured out a flood of
complaints against M. Bergeret, and charged her husband with every
variety of fantastic crime that occurred to her feeble imagination,
focussed on the one point only. Her usual accusations were that he had
separated her from her daughters, had left her penniless, and finally
had deserted his home to run about in cafés and, most probably, in
less reputable resorts. Wherever she went, she gained sympathy and
became an object of the tenderest interest. The pity she aroused grew,
spread, and rose in volume. Even Madame Dellion, the ironmaster’s
wife, although she was prevented from asking her to call, because they
belonged to different sets, yet sent a message to her that she pitied
her with all her heart, and felt the deepest disgust at M. Bergeret’s
shameful behaviour. In this way Madame Bergeret went about the town
every day, fortifying her hungry soul with the social respect and fair
reputation that it craved. But as she mounted her own staircase in the
evening, her heart sank within her. Her weak knees would hardly sustain
her and she forgot her pride, her longing for vengeance, forgot even
the abuse and frivolous scandal that she had spread through the town.
To escape from loneliness she longed sincerely to be on good terms with
M. Bergeret once more. In such a shallow soul as hers this desire was
absolutely sincere and arose quite naturally. Yet it was a vain and
useless thought, for M. Bergeret went on ignoring the existence of his
wife.
This particular evening Madame Bergeret said as she went into the
kitchen:
“Go and ask your master, Euphémie, how he would like his eggs to be
cooked.”
It was quite a new departure on her side to submit the bill of fare
to the master of the house. For of old, in the days of her lofty
innocence, she had habitually forced him to partake of dishes which
he disliked and which upset the delicate digestion of the sedentary
student. Euphémie’s mind was not of wide range, but it was impartial
and unwavering, and she protested to Madame Bergeret, as she had done
several times before on similar occasions, that it was absolutely
useless for her mistress to ask Monsieur anything. He never answered
a word, because he was in a “contrairy” mood. But Madame, turning her
face away and dropping her eyelids as a sign of determination, repeated
the order she had just given.
“Euphémie,” she said, “do as I tell you. Go and ask your master how he
would like the eggs cooked, and don’t forget to tell him that they are
new-laid and come from Trécul’s.”
M. Bergeret was sitting in his study at work on the _Virgilius
nauticus_, which a publisher had commissioned him to prepare as an
extra embellishment of a learned edition of the _Æneid_, at which three
generations of philologists had been working for more than thirty
years, and the first sheets of which were already through the press.
And now, slip by slip, the professor sat compiling this special lexicon
for it. He conceived a sort of veneration for himself as he worked at
it, and congratulated himself in these words:
“Here am I, a land-lubber who has never sailed on anything more
important than the Sunday steamboat which carries the townsfolk up
the river to drink sparkling wine on the slopes of Tuillières in
summer time; here am I, a good Frenchman, who has never seen the
sea except at Villers; here am I, Lucien Bergeret, acting as the
interpreter of Virgil, the seaman. Here I sit in my study explaining
the nautical terms used by a poet who is accurate, learned and exact,
in spite of all his rhetoric, who is a mathematician, a mechanician,
a geometrician, a well-informed Italian, who was trained in seafaring
matters by the sailors who basked in the sun on the sea-shores of
Naples and Misenum, who had, maybe, his own galley, and under the clear
stars of Helen’s twin-brothers, ploughed the blue furrows of the sea
between Naples and Athens. Thanks to the excellence of my philological
methods I am able to reach this point of perfection, but my pupil, M.
Goubin, would be as fully equipped for the task as I.”
M. Bergeret took the greatest pleasure in this work, for it kept his
mind occupied without any accompanying sense of anxiety or excitement.
It filled him with real satisfaction to trace on thin sheets of
pasteboard his delicate, regular letters, types and symbols as they
were of the mental accuracy demanded in the study of philology. All his
senses joined and shared in this spiritual satisfaction, so true is it
that the pleasures which man can enjoy are more varied than is commonly
supposed. Just now M. Bergeret was revelling in the peaceful joy of
writing thus:
“Servius believes that Virgil wrote _Attolli malos_[11] in
mistake for _Attolli vela_,[12] and the reason which he gives
for this rendering is that _cum navigarent, non est dubium quod
olli erexerant arbores_.[13] Ascencius takes the same side as
Servius, being either forgetful or ignorant of the fact that,
on certain occasions, ships at sea are dismasted. When the
state of the sea was such that the masts....”
[11] _Attolli malos_, for the masts to be raised.
[12] _Attolli vela_, for the sails to be raised.
[13] _Cum navigarent, non est dubium quod olli erexerant
arbores_, when they were at sea, there is no doubt
that the masts were already up.
M. Bergeret had reached this point in his work when Euphémie opened
the study door with the noise that always accompanied her slightest
movement, and repeated the considerate message sent by Madame Bergeret
to her husband:
“Madame wants to know how you would like your eggs cooked?”
M. Bergeret’s only reply was a gentle request to Euphémie to withdraw.
He went on writing:
“ran the risk of breaking, it was customary to lower them,
by lifting them out of the well in which their heels were
inserted....”
Euphémie stood fixed against the door, while M. Bergeret finished his
slip.
“The masts were then stored abaft either on a crossbar or a
bridge.”
“Sir, Madame told me to say that the eggs come from Trécul’s.”
“Una omnes fecere pedem.”[14]
[14] _Una omnes fecere pedem_, then with one accord they
veered out the sheet.
Filled with a sense of sadness M. Bergeret laid down his pen, for he
was suddenly overwhelmed with a perception of the uselessness of his
work. Unfortunately for his own happiness, he was intelligent enough to
recognise his own mediocrity, and, at times, it would actually appear
to him in visible shape, like a thin, little, clumsy figure dancing
about on his table between the inkstand and the file. He knew it well
and hated it, for he would fain have seen his personality come to him
under the guise of a lissom nymph. Yet it always appeared to him in its
true form, as a lanky, unlovely figure. It shocked him to see it, for
he had delicate perceptions and a taste for dainty conceits.
“Monsieur Bergeret,” he said to himself, “you are a professor of
some distinction, an intelligent provincial, a university man with
a tendency to the florid, an average scholar shackled by the barren
quests of philology, a stranger to the true science of language, which
can be plumbed only by men of broad, unbiassed and trenchant views.
Monsieur Bergeret, you are not a scholar, for you are incapable of
grasping or classifying the facts of language. Michel Bréal will never
mention your poor, little, humble name. You will die without fame, and
your ears will never know the sweet accents of men’s praise.”
“Sir ... Sir,” put in Euphémie in urgent tones, “do answer me. I have
no time to hang about. I have my work to do. Madame wants to know how
you’d like your eggs done. I got them at Trécul’s and they were laid
this morning.”
Without so much as turning his head, M. Bergeret answered the girl in a
tone of relentless gentleness:
“I want you to go and never again to enter my study—at any rate, not
until I call you.”
Then the professor returned to his day-dream: “How happy is Torquet,
our dean! How happy is Leterrier, our rector! No distrust of
themselves, no rash misgivings to interrupt the smooth course of their
equable lives! They are like that old fellow Mesange, who was so
beloved by the immortal goddesses that he survived three generations
and attained to the Collège de France and the Institute without having
learnt anything new since the holy days of his innocent childhood.
He carried with him to his grave the same amount of Greek as he had
at the age of fifteen. He died at the close of this century, still
revolving in his little head the mythological fancies that the poets of
the First Empire had turned into verse beside his cradle. But I—how
comes it that I have such a cruel sense of my own inadequacy and of the
laughable folly of all I undertake? For I have a mind as weak as that
Greek scholar’s, who had a bird’s brain as well as a bird’s name; I am
fully as incapable as Torquet the dean, and Leterrier, the rector, of
either system or initiative. I am, in fact, but a foolish, melancholy
juggler with words. May it not be a sign of mental supereminence
and a mark of my superiority in the realm of abstract thought? This
_Virgilius nauticus_, which I use as the touchstone of my powers,
is it really my own work and the fruit of my mind? No, it is a task
foisted on my poverty by a grasping bookseller in league with a pack of
pseudo-scholars who, on the pretext of freeing French scholarship from
German tutelage, are bringing back the trivial methods of former times,
and forcing me to take part in the philological pastimes of 1820. May
the responsibility for it rest on them and not on me! It was no zeal
for knowledge, but the thirst for gain, that induced me to undertake
this _Virgilius nauticus_, at which I have now been working for three
years and which will bring me in five hundred francs: to wit, two
hundred and fifty francs on delivery of the manuscript, and two hundred
and fifty francs on the day of publication of the volume containing
this article. I determined to slake my horrible thirst for gold! I
have failed, not in brain power, but in force of character. That’s a
very different matter!”
In this way did M. Bergeret marshal the flock of his wandering
thoughts. All this time Euphémie had not moved, but at last, for the
third time, she spoke to her master:
“Sir.... Sir....”
But at this attempt her voice stuck in her throat, strangled by sobs.
When M. Bergeret at last glanced at her, he could see the tears rolling
down her round, red, shining cheeks.
She tried to speak, but nothing came from her throat save hoarse
croaks, like the call that the shepherds of her native village sound
on their goat-horns of an evening. Then she crossed her two arms, bare
to the elbow, over her face, showing the fat, white flesh furrowed
with long red scratches, and wiped her eyes with the back of her brown
hands. Sobs tore her narrow chest and shook her stomach, abnormally
enlarged by the tabes from which she had suffered in her seventh year
and which had left her deformed. Then she dropped her arms to her
side, hid her hands under her apron, stifled her sobs, and exclaimed
peevishly, as soon as she could get the words out:
“I cannot live any longer in this house. I cannot any more. Besides,
it isn’t a life at all. I would rather go away than see what I do.”
There was as much rage as misery in her voice, and she looked at M.
Bergeret with inflamed eyes.
She was really very indignant at her master’s behaviour, and this
not at all because she had always been attached to her mistress. For
till quite recently, in the days of her pride and prosperity, Madame
Bergeret had overwhelmed her with insult and humiliation and kept
her half starved. Neither was it because she knew nothing of her
mistress’s lapse from virtue, and believed, with Madame Dellion and
the other ladies, that Madame Bergeret was innocent. She knew every
detail of her mistress’s liaison with M. Roux, as did the concierge,
the bread-woman, and M. Raynaud’s maid. She had discovered the truth
long before M. Bergeret knew it. Neither, on the other hand, was it
because she approved of the affair; for she strongly censured both M.
Roux and Madame Bergeret. For a girl who was mistress of her own person
to have a lover seemed a small thing to her, not worth troubling about,
when one knows how easily these things happen. She had had a narrow
escape herself one night after the fair, when she was close pressed
by a lad who wanted to play pranks at the edge of a ditch. She knew
that an accident might happen all in a moment. But in a middle-aged
married woman with children such conduct was disgusting. She confessed
to the bread-woman one morning that really mistress turned her sick.
Personally, she had no hankering after this kind of thing, and if there
were no one but her to supply the babies, why then, the world might
come to an end for all she cared. But if her mistress felt differently,
there was always a husband for her to turn to. Euphémie considered that
Madame Bergeret had committed a horribly wicked sin, but she could not
bring herself to feel that any sin, however serious, should never be
forgiven and should always remain unpardoned. During her childhood,
before she hired herself out to service, she used to work with her
parents in the fields and vineyards. There she had seen the sun scorch
up the vine-flowers, the hail beat down all the corn in the fields in
a few minutes; yet, the very next year, her father, mother and elder
brothers would be out in the fields, training the vine and sowing the
furrow. There, amid the eternal patience of nature, she had learnt the
lesson that in this world, alternately scorching and freezing, good and
bad, there is nothing that is irreparable, and that, as one pardons the
earth itself, so one must pardon man and woman.
It was according to this principle that the people at home acted, and
after all, they were very likely quite as good as townsfolk. When
Robertet’s wife, the buxom Léocadie, gave a pair of braces to her
footman to induce him to do what she wanted, she was not so clever that
Robertet did not find out the trick. He caught the lovers just in the
nick of time, and chastised his wife so thoroughly with a horsewhip
that she lost all desire to sin again for ever and ever. Since then
Léocadie has been one of the best women in the country: her husband
hasn’t _that_ to find fault with her for. M. Robertet is a man of sense
and knows how to drive men as well as cattle: why don’t people just do
as he did?
Having been often beaten by her respected father, and being, moreover,
a simple, untamed being herself, Euphémie fully understood an act
of violence. Had M. Bergeret broken the two house brooms on Madame
Bergeret’s guilty back, she would have quite approved of his act. One
broom, it is true, had lost half its bristles, and the other, older
still, had no more hair than the palm of the hand, and served, with
the aid of a dishcloth, to wash down the kitchen tiles. But when her
master persisted in a mood of prolonged and sullen spite, the peasant
girl considered it hateful, unnatural and positively fiendish. What
brought home to Euphémie all M. Bergeret’s crimes with still greater
force, was that his behaviour made her work difficult and confusing.
For since Monsieur refused to take his meals with Madame, he had to be
served in one place and she in another, for although M. Bergeret might
stubbornly refuse to recognise his wife’s existence, yet she could
not sustain even non-existence without sustenance of some sort. “It’s
like an inn,” sighed the youthful Euphémie. Then, since M. Bergeret no
longer supplied her with housekeeping money, Madame Bergeret used to
say to Euphémie: “You must settle with your master.” And in the evening
Euphémie would tremblingly carry her book to her master, who would wave
her off with an imperious gesture, for he found it difficult to meet
the increased expenditure. Thus lived Euphémie, perpetually overwhelmed
by difficulties with which she could not cope. In this poisoned air
she was losing all her cheerfulness: she was no longer to be heard in
the kitchen, mingling the noise of laughter and shouts with the crash
of saucepans, with the sizzling of the frying-pan upset on the stove,
or with the heavy blows of the knife, as on the chopping-block she
minced the meat, together with one of her finger-tips. She no longer
revelled in joy, or in noisy grief. She said to herself: “This house is
driving me crazy.” She pitied Madame Bergeret, for now she was kindly
treated. They used to spend the evening, sitting side by side in the
lamp-light, exchanging confidences. It was with her heart full of all
these emotions that Euphémie said to M. Bergeret:
“I am going away. You are too wicked. I want to leave.”
And again she shed a flood of tears.
M. Bergeret was by no means vexed at this reproach. He pretended, in
fact, not to hear it, for he had too much sense not to be able to
make allowances for the rudeness shown by an ignorant girl. He even
smiled within himself, for in the secret depths of his heart, beneath
layers of wise thoughts and fine sayings, he still retained that
primitive instinct which persists even in modern men of the gentlest
and sweetest character, and which makes them rejoice whenever they
see they are taken for ferocious beings, as if the mere power of
injuring and destroying were the motive force of living things, their
essential quality and highest merit. This, on reflection, is indeed
true, since, as life is supported and nourished only upon murder, the
best men must be those who slaughter most. Then again, those who,
under the stimulus of racial and food-conquering instincts, deal the
hardest knocks, obtain the reputation of magnanimity, and please
women, who are naturally interested in securing the strongest mates,
and who are mentally incapable of separating the fruitful from the
destructive element in man, since these two forces are, in actual fact,
indissolubly linked by nature. Hence, when Euphémie in a voice as
countrified as a fable by Æsop, told him he was wicked, M. Bergeret, by
virtue of his philosophical temperament, felt flattered and fancied he
heard a murmur which filled out the gaps in the maid’s simple speech,
and said: “Learn, Lucien Bergeret, that you are a wicked man, in the
vulgar sense of the word—that is to say, you are able to injure
and destroy; in other words, you are in a state of defence, in full
possession of life, on the road to victory. In your own way, you must
know, you are a giant, a monster, an ogre, a man of terror.”
But, being a sceptical man and never given to accepting men’s opinions
unchallenged, he began to ask himself if he were really what Euphémie
said. At the first glance into the inner recesses of his nature he
concluded that, on the whole, he was not wicked; that, on the contrary,
he was full of pity, highly sensitive to the woes of others, and full
of sympathy for the wretched; that he loved his fellow-men, and would
have gladly satisfied their needs by fulfilling all their desires,
whether innocent or guilty, for he refused to trammel his human charity
with the nets of any moral system, and for every kind of misery he
had compassion at his call. And to him everything that harmed no one
was innocent. In this way his heart was kinder than it ought to have
been, according to the laws, the morals, and the varying creeds of the
nations. Looking at himself in this way, he perceived the truth—that
he was not wicked, and the thought caused him some bewilderment. It
pained him to recognise in himself those contemptible qualities of mind
which do nothing to strengthen the life-force.
With praiseworthy thoroughness, he next set himself to inquire whether
he had not thrown off his kindly temper and his peaceable disposition
in certain matters, and particularly in this affair of Madame Bergeret.
He saw at once that on this special occasion he had acted in opposition
to his general principles and habitual sentiments, and that on this
point his conduct presented several marked singularities of which he
noted down the strangest.
“Chief singularities: I feign to consider her a criminal, and I act
as if I had really fallen into this vulgar error. And all the time
that her conscience condemns her for having committed adultery with my
pupil, M. Roux, I myself regard her adultery as an innocent act, since
it has harmed no one. Hence Madame Bergeret’s morality is higher than
mine, for, although she believes herself guilty, she forgives herself,
while I, who do not consider her guilty at all, refuse to forgive her.
My judgment of her is immoral, but merciful; my conduct, however, is
moral, but cruel. What I condemn so pitilessly is not her act, which
I consider to be merely ridiculous and unseemly: it is herself that I
condemn, as being guilty, not of what she has done, but of what she is.
The girl Euphémie is in the right: I _am_ wicked!”
He patted himself on the back, and revolving these new considerations,
said again to himself:
“I am wicked because I act. I knew, before this experience happened to
me, that there is no such thing as an innocent action, for to act is to
injure or destroy. As soon as I began to act, I became a malefactor.”
He had an excellent excuse for speaking thus to himself, since all this
time he had been performing a systematic, continuous, and consistent
act, in making Madame Bergeret’s life unbearable to her, by depriving
her of all the comforts needed by her homely common nature, her
domesticated character, and her gregarious mind. In a word, he was
engaged in driving from his house a disobedient and troublesome wife
who had done him good service by being unfaithful to him.
The opportunity she gave he seized gladly, doing his work with
wonderful vigour, considering the weak character he showed in ordinary
affairs. For, although M. Bergeret was usually vacillating in
purpose and without a will of his own, at this crisis he was driven
on by desire, by an invincible Lust. For it is desire, far stronger
than will, that, having created the world, now upholds it. In this
undertaking of his, M. Bergeret was sustained by unutterable desire, by
a masterful Lust to see Madame Bergeret no more. And this untempered,
transparent desire had the happy force of a great love, for it was
ruffled by no feeling of hatred.
All this time Euphémie stood waiting for her master to answer her, or,
at any rate, to hurl furious words at her. For on this point she agreed
with Madame Bergeret, and considered silence far more cruel than insult
and invective.
At last M. Bergeret broke the silence. He said in a quiet voice: “I
discharge you. You will leave this house in a week’s time.”
Euphémie’s sole response was a plaintive, animal cry. For a moment she
stood motionless. Then, thunderstruck, heart-broken and wretched, she
returned to her kitchen and gazed at the saucepans, now dented like
battle-armour by her valiant hands. She looked at the chair which had
lost its seat—without causing her any inconvenience, however, for the
poor girl hardly ever sat down; at the cistern whose waters had often
swamped the house at night by overflowing from a tap left full on; at
the sink with its wastepipe perpetually choked; at the table notched by
the chopping-knife; at the cast-iron stove all eaten away by the fire;
at the black coal-hole; at the shelves adorned with paper-lace; at the
blacking-box and the bottle of brass-polish. And standing in the midst
of all these witnesses of her weary life, she wept.
On the next day—that is, as they used to say, _l’en demain_, which
happened to be market-day—M. Bergeret set out early to call on
Deniseau, who kept a registry office for country servants in the Place
Saint-Exupère. In the waiting-room he found a score of country girls
waiting, some young, some old, some short, ruddy and chubby-cheeked,
others tall, yellow and wizened, all differing in face and figure,
but all alike in one respect—that is, in the anxious fixity of their
gaze, for they all saw their own fate in the person of every caller who
happened to open the door. For a moment M. Bergeret stood looking at
the group of girls who waited to be hired. Then he passed on into the
office adorned with calendars, where Deniseau sat at a table covered
with dirty registers and old horse-shoes that served as paper-weights.
He told the man that he required a servant, and apparently he wanted
one with quite unusual qualities, for after ten minutes’ conversation
he came out in very low spirits. Then, as he crossed the waiting-room
a second time, he caught sight of a woman in a dark corner whom he had
not noticed the first time. It was a long, thin shape that he beheld,
ageless and sexless, crowned by a bald, bony head, with a forehead
set like an enormous sphere on a short nose that seemed nothing but
nostril. Through her open mouth her great horse-teeth were visible in
all their nakedness, and under her drooping lip there was no chin to
speak of. She stayed in her corner, neither moving nor looking, perhaps
realising that she would not easily find anyone to hire her, and that
others would be taken in preference to her. Yet she seemed quite
satisfied with herself and quite easy in her mind. She was dressed like
the women of the low-lying, agueish lands, and to her wide-brimmed,
knitted hat clung pieces of straw.
For a long time M. Bergeret stood looking at her with saturnine
admiration. Then, pointing her out to Deniseau, he said: “The one over
there will suit me.”
“Marie?” asked the man in a tone of surprise.
“Marie,” answered M. Bergeret.