As soon as he had removed from Madame Bergeret, deposed, the management
of his house, M. Bergeret himself took command, and a very bad job he
made of it. Yet in excuse it should be said that the maid Marie never
carried out his orders, since she never understood them. But since
action is the essential condition of life and one can by no means avoid
it, Marie acted, and was led by her natural gifts into the most unlucky
decisions and the most noxious deeds. Sometimes, however, the light
of her genius was quenched by drunkenness. One day, having drunk all
the spirits of wine kept for the lamp, she lay stretched unconscious
on the kitchen tiles for forty hours. Her awaking was always terrible,
and every movement she made was followed by catastrophe. She succeeded
in doing what had been beyond the powers of anyone else—in splitting
the marble chimney-piece by dashing a candlestick on it. She took to
cooking all the food in a frying-pan, amid deafening clamour and
poisonous smells, and nothing that she served was eatable.
Shut up alone in the solitude of her bedroom, Madame Bergeret screamed
and sobbed with mingled grief and rage, as she watched the ruin of her
home. Her misery took on strange, unheard-of shapes that were agony
to her conventional soul and became ever more formidable. Until now
M. Bergeret had always handed over to her the whole of his monthly
salary, without even keeping back his cigarette money from it. But
she no longer received a penny from him, and as she had dressed
expensively during the gay time of her liaison with M. Roux, and even
more expensively during her troublous times when she was upholding her
dignity by constantly visiting her entire circle, she was now beginning
to be dunned by her milliner and dressmaker, and Messrs. Achard, a firm
of outfitters, who did not regard her as a regular customer, actually
issued a writ against her, which on this particular evening struck
consternation into the proud heart of the daughter of Pouilly. When
she perceived that these unprecedented trials were the unexpected, but
fatal, results of her sin, she began to perceive the heinousness of
adultery. With this thought came a memory of all she had been taught in
her youth about this unparalleled, this unique crime; for, in truth,
neither envy, nor avarice, nor cruelty bring such shame to the sinner
as this one offence of adultery.
As she stood on the hearthrug before stepping into bed, she opened the
neck of her nightdress, and dropping her chin, looked down at the shape
of her body. Foreshortened in this way beneath the cambric, it looked
like a warm white mass of cushions and pillows, lit up by the rays
of the lamplight. She knew nothing of the beauty of the simple human
form, having merely the dressmaker’s instinct for style, and never
asked herself whether these outlines below her eyes were lovely or not.
Neither did she find grounds for humiliation or self-glorification
in this fleshly envelope; she never even recalled the memory of past
pleasures: the only feeling that came was one of troubled anxiety
at the sight of the body whose secret impulses had worked such
consequences in her home and outside it.
She was a being of moral and religious instincts, and sufficiently
philosophic to grasp the absolute value of the points in a game of
cards: the idea came to her then that an act in itself entirely trivial
might be great in the world of ideas. She felt no remorse, because she
was devoid of imagination, and having a rational conception of God,
felt that she had already been sufficiently punished. But, at the
same time, since she followed the ordinary line of thought in morality
and conceived that a woman’s honour could only be judged by the common
criterion, since she had formed no colossal plan of overthrowing
the moral scheme in order to manufacture for herself an outrageous
innocence, she could feel no quietness, no satisfaction in life, nor
could she enjoy any sense of the inner peace that sustains the mind in
tribulation.
Her troubles were the more harassing because they were so mysterious,
so indefinitely prolonged. They unwound themselves like the ball
of red string that Madame Magloire, the confectioner in the Place
Saint-Exupère, kept on her counter in a boxwood case, and which she
used to tie up hundreds of little parcels by means of the thread that
passed through a hole in the cover. It seemed to Madame Bergeret that
she would never see the end of her worries; she even, under sadness and
regret, began to acquire a certain look of spiritual beauty.
One morning she looked at an enlarged photograph of her father, whom
she had lost during the first year of her married life, and standing in
front of it, she wept, as she thought of the days of her childhood, of
the little white cap worn at her first communion, of her Sunday walks
when she went to drink milk at the Tuilerie with her cousins, the two
Demoiselles Pouilly of the Dictionary, of her mother, still alive, but
now an old lady living in her little native town, far away at the other
end of France in the _département du Nord_. Madame Bergeret’s father,
Victor Pouilly, a headmaster and the author of a popular edition of
Lhomond’s grammar, had entertained a lofty notion of his social dignity
in the world and of his intellectual prowess. Being overshadowed and
patronised by his elder brother, the great Pouilly of the Dictionary,
being also under the thumb of the University authorities, he took it
out of everybody else and became prouder and prouder of his name, his
Grammar, and his gout, which was severe. In his pose he expressed the
Pouilly dignity, and to his daughter his portrait seemed to say: “My
child, I pass over, I purposely pass over everything in your conduct
which cannot be considered exactly conventional. You should recognise
the fact that all your troubles come from having married beneath you.
In vain I flattered myself that I had raised him to our level. This
Bergeret is an uneducated man, and your original mistake, the source
of all your troubles, my daughter, was your marriage.” And Madame
Bergeret gave ear to this speech, while the wisdom and kindness of her
father, so clearly stamped on it, sustained her drooping courage in a
measure. Yet, step by step, she began to yield to fate. She ceased to
pay denunciatory visits in the town, where, in fact, she had already
tired out the curiosity of her friends by the monotonous tenour of her
complaints. Even at the rector’s house they began to believe that the
stories which were told in the town about her liaison with M. Roux were
not entirely fables. She had allowed herself to be compromised, and
she wearied them; they let her plainly see both facts. The only person
whose sympathy she still retained was Madame Dellion, and to this lady
she remained a sort of allegorical figure of injured innocence. But
although Madame Dellion, being of higher rank, pitied her, respected
her, admired her, she would not receive her. Madame Bergeret was
humiliated and alone, childless, husbandless, homeless, penniless.
One last effort she made to resume her rightful position in the house.
It was on the morning after the most miserable and wretched day that
she had ever spent. After having endured the insolent demands of
Mademoiselle Rose, the modiste, and of Lafolie, the butcher, after
having caught Marie stealing the three francs seventy-five centimes
left by the laundress on the dining-room sideboard, Madame Bergeret
went to bed so full of misery and fear that she could not sleep. Her
overwhelming troubles brought on an attack of romantic fancy, and in
the shades of night she saw a vision of Marie pouring out a poisonous
potion that M. Bergeret had prepared for her. With the dawn her fevered
terrors fled, and having dressed carefully, she entered M. Bergeret’s
study with an air of quiet gravity. So little had he expected her that
she found the door open.
“Lucien! Lucien!” said she.
She called upon the innocent names of their three daughters. She begged
and implored, while she gave a fair enough description of the wretched
state of the house. She promised that for the future she would be good,
faithful, economical and good-tempered. But M. Bergeret would not
answer.
Kneeling at his feet, she sobbed and twisted the arms that had once
been so imperious in their gestures. He deigned neither to see nor to
hear her.
She showed him the spectacle of a Pouilly at his feet. But he only took
up his hat and went out. Then she got up and ran after him, and with
outstretched fist and lips drawn back shouted after him from the hall:
“I never loved you. Do you hear that? Never, not even when I first
married you! You are hideous, you are ridiculous and everything else
that’s horrid. And everyone in the town knows that you are nothing but
a ninnyhammer ... yes, a ninnyhammer....”
She had never heard this word save on the lips of Pouilly of the
Dictionary, who had been in his grave for more than twenty years, and
now it recurred to her mind suddenly, as though by a miracle. She
attached no definite meaning to it, but as it sounded excessively
insulting, she shouted down the staircase after him, “Ninnyhammer,
ninnyhammer!”
It was her last effort as a wife. A fortnight after this interview
Madame Bergeret appeared before her husband and said, this time in
quiet, resolute tones, “I cannot remain here any longer. It is your
doing entirely. I am going to my mother’s; you must send me Marianne
and Juliette. Pauline I will let you have....”
Pauline was the eldest; she was like her father, and between them there
existed a certain sympathy.
“I hope,” added Madame Bergeret, “that you will make a suitable
allowance for your two daughters who will live with me. For myself I
ask nothing.”
When M. Bergeret heard these words, when he saw her at the goal whither
he had guided her by foresight and firmness, he tried to conceal his
joy, for fear lest, if he let it be detected, Madame Bergeret might
abandon an arrangement that suited him admirably.
He made no answer, but he bent his head in sign of consent.
Transcriber’s Note:
Hyphenation and spelling have been retained as appeared in the original
publication except as follows:
Page 68
For you’re no stranger to _changed to_
“For you’re no stranger to
Page 76
tho most respected families _changed to_
the most respected families
Page 93
which are associdate _changed to_
which are associated
Page 229
Servius believes that Virgil wrote _changed to_
“Servius believes that Virgil wrote
masts were already up _changed to_
masts were already up.