About this time a small creamery at the end of the street, with few
customers, changed hands, as a result of the sale of the real estate by
order of court. The shop was renovated and repainted. The front windows
were embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids of
chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and coffee-cups filled with
flowers, alternating with small liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the
shelves. At the door glistened the sign--a copper milk jug divided in
the middle.
The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern, the new
_cremiere_, was a person of about fifty years of age, whose corpulence
passed all bounds, and who still retained some _debris_ of beauty, half
submerged in fat. It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up
in business with the money of an old gentleman, whose servant she had
been until his death, in her native province, near Langres; for it
happened that she was a countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same
village, but from a small place near by; and although she and
mademoiselle's maid had never met nor seen each other in the country,
they knew each other by name and were drawn together by the fact that
they had acquaintances in common and could compare memories of the same
places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected, fawning creature.
She said: "My love" to everybody, talked in a piping voice, and played
the child with the querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested
vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles. She adored
secrets, twisted everything into a confidential communication, invented
stories and always whispered in your ear. Her life was passed in
gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she
lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much
she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so
pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept
indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for
milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the
newspapers, she wept for the sake of weeping.
Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity by this wheedling,
talkative _cremiere_, who was always in a state of intense emotion,
calling upon others to open their hearts to her, and apparently so
affectionate. After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's
doors that did not come from Mere Jupillon. Germinie procured
everything, or almost everything there. She passed hours in the shop.
Once there it was hard work for her to leave; she remained there,
unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive cowardice detained
her. At the door she would stop and talk on, in order to delay her
departure. She felt bound to the _cremiere_ by the invisible charm of
familiar places to which you constantly return, and which end by
embracing you like things that would love you. And then, too, in her
eyes the shop meant Madame Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs;
she always had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed them and
talked to them; and when she was warm with their warmth, she would feel
in the depths of her heart the contentment of a beast rubbing against
her little ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of the
quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,--how this one had failed to
pay her note and that one had received a carriage load of flowers; it
meant a place that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace
_peignoir_ going to town on the maid's arm.
In a word everything tended to attach her to the place. Her intimacy
with the _cremiere_ was strengthened by all the mysterious bonds of
friendship between women of the people, by the continual chatter, the
daily exchange of the trivial affairs of life, the conversation for the
sake of conversing, the repetition of the same _bonjour_ and the same
_bonsoir_, the division of caresses among the same animals, the naps
side by side and chair against chair. The shop at last became her
regular place for idling away her time, a place where her thoughts, her
words, her body and her very limbs were marvelously at ease. There came
a time when her happiness consisted in sitting drowsily of an evening in
a straw arm-chair, beside Mere Jupillon--sound asleep with her
spectacles on her nose--and holding the dogs rolled in a ball in the
skirt of her dress; and while the lamp, almost dying, burned pale upon
the counter, she would sit idly there, letting her glance lose itself at
the back of the shop, and gradually grow dim, with her ideas, as her
eyes rested vaguely upon a triumphal arch of snail shells joined
together with old moss, beneath which stood a little copper Napoleon,
with his hands behind his back.