Twelfth Night arrived. It was the day on which Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil gave a grand dinner-party regularly every year. She invited
all the children of her own family or her old friends' families, great
and small. The small suite would hardly hold them all. They were obliged
to put part of the furniture on the landing, and a table was set in each
of the two rooms which formed mademoiselle's whole suite. For the
children, that day was a great festival to which they looked forward for
a week. They came running up the stairway behind the pastry-cook's men.
At table they ate too much without being scolded. At night, they were
unwilling to go to bed, they climbed on the chairs and made a racket
that always gave Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a sick headache the next
day; but she bore them no grudge therefor: she had had the full
enjoyment of a genuine grandmother's fete, in listening to them, looking
at them, tying around their necks the white napkins that made them look
so rosy. And not for anything in the world would she have failed to give
this dinner-party, which filled her old maid's apartments with the
fair-haired little imps of Satan, and brought thither, in a single day,
an atmosphere of activity and youth and laughter that lasted a whole
year.
Germinie was preparing the dinner. She was whipping cream in an earthen
bowl on her knees, when suddenly she felt the first pains. She looked at
her face in the bit of a broken mirror that she had above her kitchen
dresser, and saw that she was pale. She went down to Adele: "Give me
your mistress's rouge," she said. And she put some on her cheeks. Then
she went up again, and, refusing to listen to the voice of her
suffering, finished cooking the dinner. It had to be served, and she
served it. At dessert, she leaned against the furniture and grasped the
backs of chairs as she passed the plates, hiding her torture with the
ghastly set smile of people whose entrails are writhing.
"How's this, are you sick?" said her mistress, looking sharply at her.
"Yes, mademoiselle, a little--it may be the charcoal or the hot
kitchen."
"Go to bed--we don't need you any more, and you can clean up to-morrow."
She went down to Adele once more.
"It's come," she said; "call a cab quick. It was Rue de la Huchette
where you said your midwife lives, wasn't it? opposite a copper
planer's? Haven't you a pen and paper?"
And she sat down to write a line to her mistress. She told her that she
was too ill to work, that she had gone to the hospital, but would not
tell her where, because she would fatigue herself coming to see her;
that she would come back within a week.
"There you are!" said Adele, all out of breath, giving her the number of
the cab.
"I can stay there," said Germinie; "not a word to mademoiselle. That's
all. Swear you won't say a word to her!"
She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.
"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going out?"
"I am going to lie in----It took me during the day. There was a great
dinner-party here----Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I
told you never to come; I don't want you to!"
"Because----I'll tell you----because just now I absolutely must have
forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must."
"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"
"That's hard luck----look out! What do you want to do?" And he offered
his arm to assist her. "_Cristi!_ I'm going to have hard work to get 'em
all the same."
He had opened the carriage door.
"Where do you want him to take you?"
"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his
hand.
"No, no," said Jupillon.
"Oh! nonsense----there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs
left."
The cab started away.
Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the
two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and
said to Germinie through the window:
"At least, I can go with you?"
"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing
on the cushions of the cab.
After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in
front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to
such medical students as happened to pass through the street that there
was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting
spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternite.
The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a
female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of
the four beds in the _salle d'accouchement_. Once in bed, her pains
became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other
beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge
country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front
of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were
drying.
Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was
moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the
blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of
childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming
in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having
created. Suddenly a loud cry: "I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes
in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw
her arms around the neck of one of the assistant nurses, fall back
almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly
still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on
the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who
sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young assistant, with
desperate gestures; the assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell
in a dead faint upon the floor.
Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and
the half-dead assistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to
consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who
were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell
that hung beside each bed to call for help.
Thereafter La Maternite was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal
epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those
cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole
rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the
closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the
plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all
before it and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that
issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie,
at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the
milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws,
agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by
hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the
application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the
victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with
them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they
were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn
from the body. The very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous
aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused
by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.
For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing
her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all
these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was
determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her
child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energy was
exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold wave flowed into her heart.
She said to herself that it was all over. The hand that death lays upon
one's shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching her. She
felt the first breath of the epidemic, the belief that she was its
destined victim, and the impression that she was already half-possessed
by it. Although unresigned, she succumbed. Her life, vanquished
beforehand, hardly made an effort to struggle. At that crisis a head
bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.
It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-assistants, a fair head,
with long golden locks and blue eyes so soft and sweet that the dying
saw heaven opening its gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women
said: "Look! the Blessed Virgin!"
"My child," she said to Germinie, "you must ask for your discharge at
once. You must go away from here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap
up well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must take a hot
draught of something or other. You must try to take a sweat. Then, it
won't do you any harm. But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for
you here to-night," she said, glancing around at the beds. "Don't say
that I told you to go: you would get me discharged if you should."