Madame Jupillon, who claimed to have been married and signed herself
_Widow Jupillon_, had a son. He was still a child. She had placed him at
Saint-Nicholas, the great religious establishment where, for thirty
francs a month, rudimentary instruction and a trade are furnished to the
children of the common people, and to many natural children. Germinie
fell into the way of accompanying Madame Jupillon when she went to see
_Bibi_ on Thursdays. This visit became a means of distraction to her,
something to look forward to. She would urge the mother to hurry, would
always arrive first at the omnibus office, and was content to sit with
her arms resting on a huge basket of provisions all the way.
It happened that Mere Jupillon had trouble with her leg--a carbuncle
that prevented her from walking for nearly eighteen months. Germinie
went alone to Saint-Nicholas, and as she was promptly and easily led to
devote herself to others, she took as deep an interest in that child as
if he were connected with her in some way. She did not miss a single
Thursday and always arrived with her hands full of the last week's
desserts, and with cakes and fruit and sweetmeats she had bought. She
would kiss the urchin, inquire for his health, and feel to see if he had
his knitted vest under his blouse; she would notice how flushed he was
from running, would wipe his face with her handkerchief and make him
show her the soles of his shoes so that she could see if there were any
holes in them. She would ask if his teachers were satisfied with him, if
he attended to his duties and if he had had many good marks. She would
talk to him of his mother and bid him love the good Lord, and until the
clock struck two she would walk with him in the courtyard: the child
would offer her his arm, as proud as you please to be with a woman much
better dressed than the majority of those who came there--with a woman
in silk. He was anxious to learn the flageolet. It cost only five francs
a month, but his mother would not give them. Germinie carried him the
hundred sous every month, on the sly. It was a humiliating thing to him
to wear the little uniform blouse when he went out to walk, and on the
two or three occasions during the year when he went to see his mother.
On his birthday, one year, Germinie unfolded a large parcel before him:
she had had a tunic made for him; it is doubtful if twenty of his
comrades in the whole school belonged to families in sufficiently easy
circumstances to wear such garments.
She spoiled him thus for several years, not allowing him to suffer with
a longing for anything, encouraging the caprices and the pride of
wealthy children in the poor child, softening for him the privations and
hardships of that trade school, where children were formed for a
laboring life, wore blouses and ate off plates of brown earthenware; a
school that by its toilsome apprenticeship hardened the children of the
people to lives of toil. Meanwhile the boy was growing fast. Germinie
did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always
been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was
summoned before the abbe who was at the head of the school. He spoke to
her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his
possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited
the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she
succeeded at last in inducing the abbe to forgive the culprit. When she
went down into the courtyard again she attempted to scold him; but at
the first word of her moral lecture, Bibi suddenly cast in her face a
glance and smile in which there was no trace of the child that he was
the day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one to blush. A
fortnight passed before she went again to Saint-Nicholas.