When she mentioned the subject of marriage to Germinie, Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil touched upon the real cause of her trouble. She placed her
hand upon the seat of her _ennui_. Her maid's uneven temper, her
distaste for life, the languor, the emptiness, the discontent of her
existence, arose from that disease which medical science calls the
_melancholia of virgins_. The torment of her twenty-four years was the
ardent, excited, poignant longing for marriage, for that state which was
too holy and honorable for her, and which seemed impossible of
attainment in face of the confession her womanly probity would insist
upon making of her fall and her unworthiness. Family losses and
misfortunes forcibly diverted her mind from her own troubles.
Her brother-in-law, her sister the concierge's husband, had dreamed the
dream of all Auvergnats: he had undertaken to increase his earnings as
concierge by the profits of a dealer in bric-a-brac. He had begun
modestly with a stall in the street, at the doors of the marts where
executors' sales are held; and there you could see, set out upon blue
paper, plated candlesticks, ivory napkin rings, colored lithographs
with frames of gold lace on a black ground, and three or four odd
volumes of Buffon. His profit on the plated candlesticks intoxicated
him. He hired a dark shop on a passage way, opposite an umbrella
mender's, and began to trade upon the credulity that goes in and out of
the lower rooms in the Auction Exchange. He sold _assiettes a coq_,
pieces of Jean Jacques Rousseau's wooden shoe, and water-colors by
Ballue, signed Watteau. In that business he threw away what he had made,
and ran in debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His wife, in
order to straighten matters out a little and to try and get out of debt,
asked for and obtained a place as box-opener at the _Theatre-Historique_.
She hired her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening,
went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at five. After a few
months she caught cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of
pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman
left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles;
the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the
loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by
the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to
try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more was heard of
him.
When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran to the house of an
old woman who made a living in those curious industries which prevent
poverty from absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman
carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles into equal lengths
for brushes, sometimes she sorted out bits of gingerbread. When those
industries failed, she did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars'
children. In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went and took
possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold it for ten or twelve sous
when the crowd arrived. In order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the
den where she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall, to
the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees. Germinie, who knew her
from having given her the crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a
servant's room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her abode
there with the little one. She did it on the impulse of the moment,
without reflection. She did not remember her sister's harsh treatment of
her when she was _enceinte_, so that she had no need to forgive it.
Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her niece. She determined to
rescue her from death and restore her to life by dint of careful
nursing. She would rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up
the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child, give her
her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed, look at her, and rush down
again, all out of breath and red with pleasure. Care, caresses, the
breath from the heart with which we revive a tiny flame on the point of
dying out, consultations, doctor's visits, costly medicines, the
remedies of the wealthy,--Germinie spared nothing for the little one and
gave her everything. Her wages flowed through that channel. For almost a
year she gave her beef juice every morning: sleepyhead that she was, she
left her bed at five o'clock in the morning to prepare it, and awoke
without being called, as mothers do. The child was out of danger at
last, when Germinie received a visit one morning from her sister the
dressmaker, who had been married two or three years to a machinist, and
who came now to bid her adieu: her husband was going to accompany some
fellow-workmen who had been hired to go to Africa. She was going with
him and she proposed to Germinie that they should take the little one
with them as a playmate for their own child. They offered to take her
off her hands. Germinie, they said, would have to pay only for the
journey. It was a separation she would have to make up her mind to
sooner or later on account of her mistress. And then, said the sister,
she was the child's aunt too. And she heaped words upon words to induce
Germinie to give them the child, with whom she and her husband expected,
after their arrival in Africa, to move Germinie to pity, to get
possession of her wages, to play upon her heart and her purse.
It cost Germinie very dear to part with her niece. She had staked a
portion of her existence upon the child. She was attached to her by her
anxiety and her sacrifices. She had disputed possession of her with
disease and had won the day; the girl's life was her miracle. And yet
she realized that she could never take her to mademoiselle's apartments;
that mademoiselle, at her age, with the burden of her years, and an aged
person's need of tranquillity, could never endure the constant noise and
movement of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in the house
would cause idle gossip and set the whole street agog: people would say
she was her child. Germinie made a confidante of her mistress.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that she had
taken charge of her niece, although she had pretended not to know it;
she had chosen to see nothing in order to permit everything. She advised
Germinie to entrust her niece to her sister, pointing out to her all the
difficulties in the way of keeping her herself, and she gave her money
to pay for the journey of the whole family.
The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie. She found herself
left alone and without occupation. Not having the child, she knew not
what to love; her heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the
emptiness of life without the little one, that she turned once more to
religion and transferred her affections to the church.
Three months had passed when she received news of her sister's death.
The husband, who was one of the whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics,
gave her in his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and
threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position, with the burial
to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented him from working, two young
children, without counting the little girl, and a household with no wife
to heat the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her thoughts
turned to living in that house, beside that poor man, among the poor
children, in that horrible Africa; and a vague longing to sacrifice
herself began to awaken within her. Other letters followed, in which,
while thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave to his
poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that enveloped him, a
still more dramatic coloring--the coloring that the common people impart
to trifles, with its memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its
fragments of vile books. Once caught by the _blague_ of this misery,
Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she could hear the
cries of the children calling her. She became completely absorbed,
buried in the project and resolution of going to them. She was haunted
by the idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and over
incessantly in the depths of her mind, without a word. Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil, noticing her thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what
the matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She was pulled this
way and that, tormented between what seemed to her a duty and what
seemed to her ingratitude, between her mistress and her sisters' blood.
She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle. And again she said to
herself that God did not wish her to abandon her family. She would look
about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must go!" Then she would fear
that mademoiselle might be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At
that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied that she could
already see someone stealing her mistress. At other moments, when her
religious ideas impelled her to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all
ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to
go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always
been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief,
whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she
anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have
to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her
imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice with the greater impatience
and ardor. Often the whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a
word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would become herself once
more, and would fail to recognize herself. She felt that she was bound
to her mistress absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror
at having so much as thought of detaching her own life from hers. She
struggled thus for two years. Then she learned one fine day, by chance,
that her niece had died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law
had concealed the child's death in order to maintain his hold upon her,
and to lure her to him in Africa, with her few sous. Germinie's
illusions being wholly dispelled by that revelation, she was cured on
the spot. She hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going
away.