When she returned that evening from a christening dinner, which she had
been unable to avoid attending, mademoiselle heard talking in her room.
She thought that there was someone with Germinie, and, marveling
thereat, she opened the door. In the dim light shed by an untrimmed,
smoking candle she saw nothing at first; but, upon looking more closely,
she discovered her maid lying in a heap at the foot of the bed.
Germinie was talking in her sleep. She was talking with a strange accent
that caused emotion, almost fear. The vague solemnity of supernatural
things, a breath from regions beyond this life, arose in the room, with
those words of sleep, involuntary, fugitive words, palpitating,
half-spoken, as if a soul without a body were wandering about a dead
man's lips. The voice was slow and deep, and had a far-off sound, with
long pauses of heavy breathing, and words breathed forth like sighs,
with now and then a vibrating, painful note that went to the heart,--a
voice laden with mystery and with the nervous tremor of the darkness, in
which the sleeper seemed to be groping for souvenirs of the past and
passing her hand over faces. "Oh! she loved me dearly," mademoiselle
heard her say. "And if he had not died we should be very happy now,
shouldn't we? No! no! But it's done, worse luck, and I don't want to
tell of it."
The words were followed by a nervous contraction of her features as if
she sought to seize her secret on the edge of her lips and force it
back.
Mademoiselle, with something very like terror, leaned over the poor,
forlorn body, powerless to direct its own acts, to which the past
returned as a ghost returns to a deserted house. She listened to the
confessions that were all ready to rush forth but were instinctively
checked, to the unconscious mind that spoke without restraint, to the
voice that did not hear itself. A sensation of horror came over her: she
felt as if she were beside a dead body haunted by a dream.
After a pause of some duration, and what seemed to be a sort of conflict
between the things that were present in her mind, Germinie apparently
turned her attention to the circumstances of her present life. The words
that escaped her, disjointed, incoherent words, were, as far as
mademoiselle could understand them, addressed to some person by way of
reproach. And as she talked on, her language became as unrecognizable as
her voice, which had taken on the tone and accent of the dreamer. It
rose above the woman, above her ordinary style, above her daily
expressions. It was the language of the people, purified and
transfigured by passion. Germinie accentuated words according to their
orthography; she uttered them with all their eloquence. The sentences
came from her mouth with their proper rhythm, their heart-rending pathos
and their tears, as from the mouth of an admirable actress. There were
bursts of tenderness, interlarded with shrieks; then there were
outbreaks of rebellion, fierce bursts of passion, and the most
extraordinary, biting, implacable irony, always merging into a paroxysm
of nervous laughter that repeated the same result and prolonged it from
echo to echo. Mademoiselle was confounded, stupefied, and listened as at
the theatre. Never had she heard disdain hurled down from so lofty a
height, contempt so tear itself to tatters and gush forth in laughter, a
woman's words express such a fierce thirst for vengeance against a man.
She ransacked her memory: such play of feature, such intonations, such a
dramatic and heart-rending voice as that voice of a consumptive coughing
away her life, she could not remember since the days of Mademoiselle
Rachel.
At last Germinie awoke abruptly, her eyes filled with the tears of her
dream, and jumped down from the bed, seeing that her mistress had
returned. "Thanks," said mademoiselle, "don't disturb yourself! Wallow
about on my bed all you please!"
"Oh! mademoiselle," said Germinie, "I wasn't lying where you put your
head. I have made it nice and warm for your feet."
"Indeed! Suppose you tell me what you've been dreaming? There was a man
in it--you were having a dispute with him----"
"Dream?" said Germinie, "I don't remember."
She silently set about undressing her mistress, trying to recall her
dream. When she had put her in bed, she said, drawing near to her: "Ah!
mademoiselle, won't you give me a fortnight, for once, to go home? I
remember now."