But the past and its debts were still there, and whispered to her every
hour: "If mademoiselle knew!"
She lived in the constant panic of a guilty woman, trembling with dread
from morning till night. There was never a ring at the door that she did
not say to herself: "It has come at last!" Letters in a strange
handwriting filled her with anxiety. She would feel of the wax with her
fingers, bury the letters in her pocket, hesitate about delivering them,
and the moment when mademoiselle unfolded the terrible paper and scanned
its contents with the inexpressive eye of elderly people was as full of
suspense to her as if she were awaiting sentence of death. She felt that
her secret and her falsehood were in everybody's hand. The house had
seen her and might speak. The quarter knew her as she was. Of all about
her, there was no one but her mistress whose esteem she could still
steal.
As she went in and out, the concierge looked at her with a smile and a
glance, that said: "I know." She no longer dared to call him: "My
Pipelet." When she returned home he looked into her basket. "I am so
fond of that!" his wife would say, when it contained some tempting
morsel. At night she would take down what was left. She ate nothing
herself. She ended by supplying them with food.
The whole street frightened her no less than the hall and the porter's
lodge. There was a face in every shop that reflected her shame and
commented on her sins. At every step she had to purchase silence by
groveling humility. The dealers she had not been able to repay had her
in their clutches. If she said that anything was too dear, she was
reminded in a bantering way that they were her masters, and that she
must pay the price unless she chose to be denounced. A jest or an
allusion drove the color from her cheeks. She was bound to them,
compelled to trade with them and to allow them to empty her pockets as
if they were accomplices. The successor of Madame Jupillon, who had gone
into the grocery business at Bar-sur Aube,--the new _cremiere_,--gave
her bad milk, and when she suggested that mademoiselle complained about
it, and that she was found fault with every morning, the woman replied:
"Much you care for your mademoiselle!" And at the fish-stall, if she
smelt of a fish, and said: "This has been frozen," the reply would be:
"Bah! tell me next, will you, that I let the moon shine on their gills,
so's to make 'em look fresh! So these are hard days for you, eh, my
duck?" Mademoiselle wanted her to go to the _Halle Centrale_ one day for
her dinner, and she mentioned the fact in the fish-woman's presence.
"Oho! yes, yes, to the _Halle_! I'd like to see you go to the _Halle_!"
And she bestowed a glance upon her in which Germinie saw a threat to
send her account to her mistress. The grocer sold her coffee that smelt
of snuff, rotten prunes, dried rice and old biscuit. If she ventured to
remonstrate, "Nonsense!" he would say; "an old customer like you
wouldn't want to make trouble for me. Don't I tell you I give you good
weight?" And he would coolly give her false weight of the goods that she
ordered, and that he forced her to order.