The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned life, this life of
shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no
trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her
lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her
manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden
from her mistress.
It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that
her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her,
something that was obscure in her life. She had had moments of doubt, of
suspicion, an instinctive feeling of uneasiness, confused glimpses of
something wrong, a faint scent that eluded her and vanished in the
gloom. She had thought at times that she had stumbled upon sealed,
unresponsive recesses in the girl's heart, upon a mystery, upon some
unlighted passage of her life. Again, at times it had seemed to her that
her maid's eyes did not say what her mouth said. Involuntarily, she had
remembered a phrase that Germinie often repeated: "A sin hidden, a sin
half forgiven." But the thing that filled her thoughts above all else
was amazement that Germinie, despite the increase in her wages and the
little gifts that she gave her almost every day, never purchased
anything for her toilet, had no new dresses or linen. Where did her
money go? She had almost admitted having withdrawn her eighteen hundred
francs from the savings bank. Mademoiselle ruminated over it, then said
to herself that that was the whole of her maid's mystery; it was about
money, she was short of funds, doubtless on account of some obligations
she had entered into long ago for her family, and perhaps she had been
sending more money to "her _canaille_ of a brother-in-law." She was so
kind-hearted and had so little system! She had so little idea of the
value of a hundred-sou piece! That was all there was to it: mademoiselle
was sure of it; and as she knew the girl's obstinate nature and had no
hope of inducing her to change her mind, she said nothing to her. If
this explanation did not fully satisfy mademoiselle, she attributed what
there was strange and mysterious in her maid's behavior to her somewhat
secretive nature, which retained something of the characteristic
distrust of the peasant, who is jealous of her own petty affairs and
takes delight in burying a corner of her life away down in her heart, as
the villager hoards his sous in a woolen stocking. Or else she persuaded
herself that it was her ill health, her state of continual suffering
that was responsible for her whims and her habit of dissimulation. And
her mind, in its interested search for motives, stopped at that point,
with the indolence and a little of the selfishness of old people's
minds, who, having an instinctive dread of final results and of the real
characters of their acquaintances, prefer not to be too inquisitive or
to know too much. Who knows? Perhaps all this mystery was nothing but a
paltry matter, unworthy to disturb or to interest her, some petty
woman's quarrel. She went to sleep thereupon, reassured, and ceased to
cudgel her brains.
In truth, how could mademoiselle have guessed Germinie's degradation and
the horror of her secret! In her most poignant suffering, in her wildest
intoxication, the unhappy creature retained the incredible strength
necessary to suppress and keep back everything. From her passionate,
overcharged nature, which found relief so naturally in expansion, never
a word escaped or a syllable that cast a ray of light upon her secret.
Mortification, contempt, disappointment, self-sacrifice, the death of
her child, the treachery of her lover, the dying agony of her love, all
remained voiceless within her, as if she stifled their cries by pressing
her hands upon her heart. Her rare attacks of weakness, when she seemed
to be struggling with pains that strangled her, the fierce, feverish
caresses lavished upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the sudden paroxysms,
as if she were trying to give birth to something, always ended without
words and found relief in tears.
Even illness, with its resulting weakness and enervation, forced nothing
from her. It could make no impression on that heroic resolution to keep
silent to the end. Hysterical attacks extorted shrieks from her and
nothing but shrieks. When she was a girl she dreamed aloud; she forced
her dreams to cease speaking, she closed the lips of her sleep. As
mademoiselle might have discovered from her breath that she had been
drinking, she ate shallots and garlic, and concealed the fumes of liquor
with their offensive odors. She even trained her intoxication, her
drunken torpor to awake at her mistress's footstep, and remain awake in
her presence.
Thus she led, as it were, two lives. She was like two women, and by dint
of energy, adroitness and feminine diplomacy, with a self-assurance that
never failed her even in the mental confusion caused by drink, she
succeeded in separating those two existences, in living them both
without mingling them, in never allowing the two women that lived in her
to be confounded with each other, in continuing to be, with Mademoiselle
de Varandeuil, the virtuous, respectable girl she had been, in emerging
from her orgies without carrying away the taste of them, in displaying,
when she left her lover, a sort of old-maidish modesty, shocked by the
scandalous courses of other maids. She never uttered a word or bore
herself in a way to arouse a suspicion of her clandestine life; nothing
about her conveyed a hint as to the way her nights were passed. When she
placed her foot upon the door-mat outside Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's
apartments, when she approached her, when she stood before her, she
adopted the tone and the attitude, even to a certain way of holding the
dress, which relieve a woman from so much as a suspicion of having aught
to do with men. She talked freely upon all subjects, as if she had
nothing to blush for. She spoke with bitterness of the misdoings and
shame of others, as if she were herself beyond reproach. She joked with
her mistress about love, in a jovial, unembarrassed, indifferent tone;
to hear her you would have thought she was talking of an old
acquaintance of whom she had lost sight. And in the eyes of all those
who saw her only as Mademoiselle de Varandeuil did and at her home,
there was a certain atmosphere of chastity about her thirty-five years,
the odor of stern, unimpeachable virtue, peculiar to middle-aged
maid-servants and plain women.
And yet all this falsehood in the matter of appearances was not
hypocrisy in Germinie. It did not arise from downright duplicity, from
corrupt striving for effect: it was her affection for mademoiselle that
made her what she was with her. She was determined at any price to save
her the grief of seeing her as she was, of going to the bottom of her
character. She deceived her solely in order to retain her
affection,--with a sort of respect; and a feeling of veneration, almost
of piety, stole into the ghastly comedy she was playing, like the
feeling a girl has who lies to her mother in order not to rend her
heart.