In the course of her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her
eyes.
The maid's story ceased, and the remainder of the history of her life,
which was upon her lips that evening, was once more buried in her heart.
The conclusion of her story was as follows:
When little Germinie Lacerteux arrived in Paris, being then less than
fifteen years old, her sister, desirous to have her begin to earn her
living at once, and to help to put bread in her hand, obtained a place
for her in a small cafe on the boulevard, where she performed the double
duties of lady's maid to the mistress of the cafe and assistant to the
waiters in carrying on the main business of the establishment. The
child, just from her village and dropped suddenly in that place, was
completely bewildered and terrified by her surroundings and her duties.
She had the first instinctive feeling of wounded modesty and,
foreshadowing the woman she was destined to become, she shuddered at the
perpetual contact with the other sex, working, eating, passing her whole
time with men; and whenever she had an opportunity to go out, and went
to her sisters, there were tearful, despairing scenes, when, without
actually complaining of anything, she manifested a sort of dread to
return, saying that she did not want to stay there, that they were not
satisfied with her, that she preferred to return to them. They would
reply that it had already cost them enough to bring her to Paris, that
it was a silly whim on her part and that she was very well off where she
was, and they would send her back to the cafe in tears. She dared not
tell all that she suffered in the company of the waiters in the cafe,
insolent, boasting, cynical fellows, fed on the remains of debauches,
tainted with all the vices to which they ministered, and corrupt to the
core with putrefying odds and ends of obscenity. At every turn, she had
to submit to the dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the
malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a
little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything,
with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and
pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered,
overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their
drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused
her credulity by absurd fables, they overburdened her with fatiguing
tasks, they assailed her with incessant, pitiless ridicule, which
well-nigh drove her benumbed intellect to imbecility. In addition, they
made her blush at the things they said to her, which made her feel
ashamed, although she did not understand them. They soiled the
artlessness of her fourteen years with filthy veiled allusions. And they
found amusement in putting the eyes of her childish curiosity to the
keyholes of the private supper-rooms.
The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she dared not.
When, with nourishing food, her body took on a little flesh, her cheeks
a little color and she began to have something of the aspect of a woman,
they took great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were attempts
at familiarity, significant gestures, advances, which she eluded, and
from which she escaped unscathed, but which assailed her purity by
breathing upon her innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by the
master of the establishment, who was accustomed to abuse his
maidservants and who bore her a grudge because she was not old enough or
of the right sort for a mistress, she found no support, no touch of
humanity, except in his wife. She began to love that woman with a sort
of animal devotion, and to obey her with the docility of a dog. She did
all her errands without thought or reflection. She carried her letters
to her lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She became very
active and agile and ingenuously sly in passing in and out, evading the
awakened suspicions of the husband; and without any clear idea of what
she was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a mischievous
delight, such as children and monkeys feel, in telling herself vaguely
that she was causing some little suffering to that man and that house,
which caused her so much. There was among her comrades an old waiter,
named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of the cruel plots concocted
against her, and, when she was present, put a stop to conversation that
was too free, with the authority of his white hairs and his paternal
interest in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house increased
every day. One week her sisters were compelled to take her back to the
cafe by force.
A few days later, there was a great review on the Champ de Mars, and the
waiters had leave of absence for the day. Only Germinie and old Joseph
remained in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in a
small, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She entered the
room; she cried out, fell to the floor, wept, implored, struggled,
called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.
When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up in
her chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, when
Joseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled
from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For a
long time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulse
was to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified,
bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who feared
that she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, and
respected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.
She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pass the evening with
her sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed by
severe pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came to
the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret of
their younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of the
common people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety,
flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.
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. She did not tell what had taken
place and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.
She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When her
older sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded her
that there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at the
thought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when her
mother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightning
flash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciences
pierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her and
kept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almost
forced her into her misfortune.
That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters took her to the Rue
Saint-Martin, to the house of a repairer of cashmere shawls, with whom
she lodged, and who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, was
banner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made her lie beside her
on a mattress on the floor, and having her there under her hand all
night, she vented upon her all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, her
bitter resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie by her
father and mother. It was a long succession of petty tortures, brutal or
hypocritical exhibitions of spite, kicks that bruised her legs, and
progressive movements of the body by which she gradually forced her
companion out of bed--it was a cold winter's night--to the floor of the
fireless room. During the day, the seamstress took Germinie in hand,
catechized her, preached at her, and by detailing the tortures of the
other life, inspired in her mind a horrible fear of the hell whose
flames she caused her to feel.
She lived there four months, in close confinement, and was never allowed
to leave the house. At the end of four months she gave birth to a dead
child. When her health was restored, she entered the service of a
depilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she had the joyful
feeling of having been released from prison. Two or three times, in her
walks, she met old Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; but
she escaped him and the old man never knew that he had been a father.
But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new place. The house where
she had taken service as a maid of all work was what servants call "a
barrack." A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money, as is
often the case with women engaged in the occupations that depend upon
chance, and in the problematical methods of gaining a livelihood in
vogue in Paris, the depilator, who was almost always involved in a
lawsuit of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant's
nourishment. She often went away for the whole day without leaving her
any dinner. The little one would satisfy her appetite as well as she
could with some kind of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things that
deceive a young woman's appetite, even charcoal, which she would nibble
with the depraved taste and capricious stomach of her age and sex. This
diet, just after recovering from her confinement, her health being but
partially restored and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted the
young woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined her
constitution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion changed to
that dead white that looks green in the daylight. Her swollen eyes were
surrounded with a great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips assumed the
hue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the slightest ascent, and
the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat
was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she
dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her
faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at
all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress's
hair.
She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place,
with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the
laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had
never had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interested
himself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He took
her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the
sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It
delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would
take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a
fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of
this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to
him. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship,
the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he
died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service
of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen,
when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter
the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout,
in the house of which her sister was concierge.