Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, wet with
tears. Her affectionate manner was like a sick child's; she had the same
clinging gentleness, the imploring expression, the melancholy of timid,
frightened suffering. She sought excuses for touching her mistress with
her white blue-veined hands. She approached her with a sort of trembling
and fervent humility. Very often, as she sat facing her upon a stool,
and looked up at her with eyes like a dog's, she would rise and go and
kiss some part of her dress, then resume her seat, and in a moment begin
again.
There was heart-rending entreaty in these caresses, these kisses of
Germinie's. Death, whose footsteps she had heard approaching her as if
it were a living person; the hours of utter prostration, when, as she
lay in her bed, alone with herself, she had reviewed her whole past
life; the consciousness of the shame of all she had concealed from
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil; the fear of a judgment of God, rising from
the depths of her former religious ideas; all the reproaches, all the
apprehensions that whisper in the ear of a dying agony had aroused a
horrible dread in her conscience; and remorse,--the remorse that she had
never been able to put down,--was now alive and crying aloud in her
enfeebled, broken body, as yet but partially restored to life, as yet
scarcely firm in the persuasion that it was alive.
Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and
leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret.
She had not, like Adele, one of those vulgar material organizations,
which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses.
She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering
by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a
woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. In her case, an
unhealthy sensitiveness, a sort of cerebral excitement, a disposition on
the part of the brain to be always on the alert, to work itself into a
frenzy of bitterness, anxiety and discontent with itself, a moral sense
that stood erect, as it were, after every one of her backslidings, all
the characteristics of a sensitive mind, predestined to misfortune,
united to torture her, and to renew day after day, more openly and more
cruelly in her despair, the agony due to acts that would hardly have
caused such long-continued suffering in many women in her station.
Germinie yielded to the impulse of passion; but as soon as she had
yielded to it she despised herself. Even in the excitement of pleasure
she could not entirely forget and lose herself. The image of
mademoiselle always arose before her, with her stern, motherly face.
Germinie did not become immodest in the same degree that she abandoned
herself to her passions and sank lower and lower in vice. The degrading
depths to which she descended did not fortify her against her disgust
and horror of herself. Habit did not harden her. Her defiled conscience
rejected its defilement, struggled fiercely in its shame, rent itself in
its repentance and did not for one second permit itself the full
enjoyment of vice, was never completely stunned by its fall.
And so when mademoiselle, forgetting that she was a servant, leaned over
to her with the brusque familiarity of tone and gesture that went
straight to her heart, Germinie, confused and overcome with blushing
timidity, was speechless and seemed bereft of sense under the horrible
torture caused by the consciousness of her own unworthiness. She would
fly from the room, she would invent some pretext to escape from that
affection which she so shamefully betrayed, and which, when it touched
her, stirred her remorse to shuddering activity.