_July 22, 1862._--The disease is gradually doing its work of destruction
in our poor Rose. It is as if the immaterial manifestations of life that
formerly emanated from her body were dying one by one. Her face is
entirely changed. Her expression is not the same, her gestures are not
the same; and she seems to me as if she were putting off every day more
and more of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which makes
the personality of a living being. Disease, before making an end of its
victim, introduces into his body something strange, unfamiliar,
something that is _not he_, makes of him a new being, so to speak, in
whom we must seek to find the former being--he, whose joyous,
affectionate features have already ceased to exist.
_July 31._--Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon whether our dear old
Rose will live or die. I am waiting to hear his ring, which to me, is
equivalent to that of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to
the court room with their verdict. "It is all over, there is no hope, it
is simply a question of time. The disease has progressed very rapidly.
One lung is entirely gone and the other substantially." And we must
return to the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her
reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our faces. Then we
feel an unconquerable longing to rush from the room and from the poor
creature. We leave the house, we wander at random through the streets;
at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a cafe. We
mechanically take up a copy of _L'Illustration_ and our eyes fall at
once upon the solution of its last riddle: _Against death, there is no
appeal!_
_Monday, August 11._--The disease of the lungs is complicated with
peritonitis. She has terrible pains in the bowels, she cannot move
without assistance, she cannot lie on her back or her left side. In
God's name, is not death enough? must she also endure suffering, aye,
torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And
she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the
sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as
stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the
doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep
her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was
unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to take her; it
seems that twenty-five years ago, when she first came to us, she went
there to see the nurse in charge of Edmond, who died there, and so that
particular hospital represents to her the place where people die. I am
waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to go to Lariboisiere.
She passed almost a good night. She is all ready, in high spirits, in
fact. We have covered everything up from her as well as we could. She
longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels that she is going
to get well there. At two o'clock Simon arrives: "Here it is, all
right." She refuses to have a litter: "I should think I was dead!" she
says. She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the signs of
life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is as if the earth had risen
under her skin. She comes down into our apartments. Sitting in the
dining-room, with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock against
one another, she draws her stockings on over a pair of legs like
broomsticks, consumptive legs. Then, for a long moment, she looks about
at the familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to take away
with them the memory of the places they are leaving--and the door of the
apartment closes upon her with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the
foot of the stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The
concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will be well in six
weeks. She bows and says "yes," an inaudible "yes." The cab drives up to
the door. She rests her hand on the concierge's wife. I hold her
against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide open, vacant eyes
she vaguely watches the houses pass, but she does not speak. At the door
of the hospital she tries to alight without assistance. "Can you walk so
far?" the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative gesture and walks on.
Really I cannot imagine where she procured the strength to walk as she
does. Here we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare, clean
place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in the centre. I seat
her in a straw armchair by a door with a glazed wicket. A young man
opens the wicket, asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of
an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious figure at
the head. At last, everything is ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes
one arm, the housekeeper the other.--After that, I saw nothing more.
_Thursday, August 14._--We have been to Lariboisiere. We found Rose
quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching discharge--in three weeks at
most,--and so free from all thought of death that she told us of a
furious love scene that took place yesterday between a woman in the bed
next hers and a brother of the Christian schools, who was there again
to-day. Poor Rose is death, but death engrossed with life. Near her bed
was a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come to see her. "You
see, as soon as I can walk, I shall walk about the garden so much that
they'll have to send me home!" she said. And the mother in her added:
"Does the child ask for me sometimes?"
"Sometimes, oh! yes," the man replied.
_Saturday, August 16._--This morning, at ten o'clock, someone rings the
bell. I hear a colloquy at the door between the housekeeper and the
concierge. The door opens, the concierge enters with a letter. I take
the letter; it bears the stamp of Lariboisiere. Rose died this morning
at seven o'clock.
Poor girl! So it is all over! I knew that she was doomed; but she was so
animated, so cheerful, almost happy, when we saw her Thursday! And here
we are both walking up and down the salon, filled with the thought that
a fellow-creature's death inspires: We shall never see her again!--an
instinctive thought that recurs incessantly within you. What a void!
what a gap in our household! A habit, an attachment of twenty-five years
growth, a girl who knew our whole lives and opened our letters in our
absence, and to whom we told all our business. When I was a bit of a boy
I trundled my hoop with her, and she bought me apple-tarts with her own
money, when we went to walk. She would sit up for Edmond till morning,
to open the door for him, when he went to the Bal de l'Opera without our
mother's knowledge. She was the woman, the excellent nurse, whose hands
mother placed in ours when she was dying. She had the keys to
everything, she managed everything, she did everything for our comfort.
For twenty-five years she tucked us up in bed every night, and every
night there were the same never-ending jokes about her ugliness and her
disgraceful physique. Sorrows and joys alike she shared with us. She was
one of those devoted creatures upon whose solicitude you rely to close
your eyes. Our bodies, when we were ill or indisposed, were accustomed
to her attentions. She was familiar with all our hobbies. She had known
all our mistresses. She was a piece of our life, part of the furniture
of our apartment, a stray memory of our youth, at once loving and
scolding and care-taking, like a watchdog whom we were accustomed to
having always beside us and about us, and who ought to last as long as
ourselves. And we shall never see her again! It is not she moving about
the rooms; she will never again come to our rooms to bid us
good-morning! It is a great wrench, a great change in our lives, which
seems to us, I cannot say why, like one of those solemn breaks in one's
existence, when, as Byron says, destiny changes horses.
_Sunday, August 17._--This morning we are to perform all the last sad
duties. We must return to the hospital, enter once more the reception
hall, where I seem to see again, in the armchair against the wicket, the
ghost of the emaciated creature I seated there less than a week ago.
"Will you identify the body?" the attendant hurls the question at me in
a harsh voice. We go to the further end of the hospital, to a high
yellow door, upon which is written in great black letters:
_Amphitheatre_. The attendant knocks. After some moments the door is
partly opened, and a head like a butcher's boy's appears, with a short
pipe in its mouth: a head which suggests the gladiator and the
grave-digger. I fancied that I was at the circus, and that he was the
slave who received the gladiators' bodies; and he does receive the slain
in that great circus, society. They made us wait a long while before
opening another door, and during those moments of suspense, all our
courage oozed away, as the blood of a wounded man who is forced to
remain standing oozes away, drop by drop. The mystery of what we were
about to see, the horror of a sight that rends your heart, the search
for the one body amid other bodies, the scrutiny and recognition of that
poor face, disfigured doubtless--the thought of all this made us as
timid as children. We were at the end of our strength, at the end of our
will-power, at the end of our nervous tension, and, when the door
opened, we said: "We will send some one," and fled. From there we went
to the mayor's office, riding in a cab that jolted us and shook our
heads about like empty things. And an indefinable horror seized upon us
of death in a hospital, which seems to be only an administrative
formality. One would say that in that abode of agony, everything is so
well administered, regulated, reduced to system, that death opens it as
if it were an administrative bureau.
While we were having the death registered,--_Mon Dieu!_ the paper, all
covered with writing and flourishes for a poor woman's death!--a man
rushed out of an adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the saint of the day and
give it to his child. As he passed, the skirt of the happy father's coat
swept the sheet on which the death was registered from the desk to the
floor.
When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes
together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable
things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. It was a
ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her
last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the
coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.
_Monday, August 18._--The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the
hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the
poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to
reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness
of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the
prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little
girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of
nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a
poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a
head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a
Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited
by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes
there is already a gleam of the life beyond.
Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre
cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the
city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the
intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is
lowered into a cellar.
_Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital. For
since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next
day, there has existed for me a mystery which I force from my thoughts,
but which constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I know
nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and I dread to learn. It
does not seem to me as if she were dead; I think of her simply as of a
person who has disappeared. My imagination returns to her last hours,
gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture
me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At
last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the
hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life
as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls
upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.
In a distant corner, I rang at a door with little white curtains. It was
opened and I found myself in a parlor where a Virgin stood upon a sort
of altar between two windows. On the northern wall of the room, the
cold, bare room, there are--why, I cannot explain--two framed views of
Vesuvius, wretched water-colors which seem to shiver and to be entirely
expatriated there. Through an open door behind me, from a small room in
which the sun shines brightly, I hear the chattering of sisters and
children, childish joys, pretty little bursts of laughter, all sorts of
fresh, clear vocal notes: a sound as from a dovecote bathed in the sun.
Sisters in white with black caps pass and repass; one stops in front of
my chair. She is short, badly developed, with an ugly, sweet face, a
poor face by the grace of God. She is the mother of the Salle
Saint-Joseph. She tells me how Rose died, in hardly any pain, feeling
that she was improving, almost well, overflowing with encouragement and
hope. In the morning, after her bed was made, without any suspicion that
death was near, suddenly she was taken with a hemorrhage, which lasted
some few seconds. I came away, much comforted, delivered from the
thought that she had had the anticipatory taste of death, the horror of
its approach.
_Thursday, October 21._
* * * * *
In the midst of our dinner, which was rendered melancholy enough by the
constant hovering of the conversation around the subject of death,
Maria, who came to dinner to-night, cried out, after two or three
nervous blows with her fingers upon her fluffy blonde locks:--"My
friends, while the poor girl was alive, I kept the professional secret
of my trade. But, now that she is under ground, you must know the
truth."
And thereupon we learned things concerning the unhappy creature that
took away our appetites, leaving in our mouths the bitter taste of fruit
cut with a steel knife. And a whole strange, hateful, repugnant,
deplorable existence was revealed to us. The notes she signed, the debts
she has left behind her at all the dealers, have the most unforeseen,
the most amazing, the most incredible basis. She kept men: the
milkwoman's son, for whom she furnished a chamber; another to whom she
carried our wine, chickens, food of all sorts. A secret life of
nocturnal orgies, of nights passed abroad, of fierce nymphomania, that
made her lovers say: "Either she or I will stay on the field!" A
passion, passions with her whole head and heart and all her senses at
once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures' diseases,
consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure, hysteria, the beginning of
insanity. She had two children by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived
six months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was going on a
visit to her province, it was to lie in. And, with regard to these men,
her passion was so extravagant, so unhealthy, so insane, that she, who
was formerly honesty personified, actually stole from us, took twenty
franc pieces out of rolls of a hundred francs, so that the lovers she
paid might not leave her. Now, after these involuntarily dishonest acts,
these petty crimes extorted from her upright nature, she plunged into
such depths of self-reproach, remorse, melancholy, such black despair,
that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and
unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save
herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments
in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie
wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she
tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how
many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, and
bleeding internally: in the first place the rejection at intervals of
religious ideas by the terrors of a hell of fire and brimstone; then
jealousy, that characteristic jealousy of everything and everybody that
poisoned her life; then, then--then the disgust which these men, after a
time, brutally expressed for her ugliness, and which drove her deeper
and deeper into sottishness,--caused her one day to have a miscarriage,
and she fell half dead on the floor. Such a frightful tearing away of
the veil we have worn over our eyes is like the examination of a
pocketful of horrible things in a dead body suddenly opened. From what
we have heard I suddenly seem to realize what she must have suffered for
ten years past: the dread of an anonymous letter to us or of a
denunciation from some dealer; and the constant trepidation on the
subject of the money that was demanded of her, and that she could not
pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile
Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom
she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility
caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the
Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me
to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far
out--and lastly all the tears that we believed to be without cause--all
these things mingled with a very deep and heartfelt affection for us,
and with a vehement, feverish devotion when either of us was ill. And
this woman possessed an energetic character, a force of will, a skill in
mystification, to which nothing can be compared. Yes, yes, all those
frightful secrets kept under lock and key, hidden, buried deep in her
own heart, so that neither our eyes, nor our ears, nor our powers of
observation ever detected aught amiss, even in her hysterical attacks,
when nothing escaped her but groans: a mystery preserved until her
death, and which she must have believed would be buried with her. And of
what did she die? She died, because, all through one rainy winter's
night, eight months ago, at Montmartre, she spied upon the milkwoman's
son, who had turned her away, in order to find out with what woman he
had filled her place; a whole night leaning against a ground-floor
window, as a result of which she was drenched to the bones with deadly
pleurisy!
Poor creature, we forgive her; indeed, a vast compassion for her fills
our hearts, as we reflect upon all that she has suffered. But we have
become suspicious, for our lives, of the whole female sex, and of women
above us as well as of women below us in station. We are terror-stricken
at the double lining of their hearts, at the marvelous faculty, the
science, the consummate genius of falsehood with which their whole being
is instinct.
* * * * *
The above extracts are from our journal: JOURNAL DES
GONCOURTS--_Memoires de la Vie Litteraire_; they are the documentary
foundation upon which, two years later, my brother and I composed
GERMINIE LACERTEUX, whom we made a study of and taught when she was in
the service of our venerable cousin, Mademoiselle de C----t, of whom we
were writing a veracious biography, after the style of a biography of
modern history.