XLIX

Mederie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who

make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips

forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with

tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians

graphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy from

yesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life through

the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with

the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of

the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched

away into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold upon

him; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind,

he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like

_psitt_! which was his way of saying _pshaw_! and, raising his right

arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his

melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb

after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew

neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three

sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle

of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and

found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the

world seemed sad to him--except a glass of water.

With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent

health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety

of his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,

unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks

distraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at passers-by,

from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did

lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a

measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters

in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in

position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an

instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was also

renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in

bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to

twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not

wealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wine-shops.

He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother,

his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance,

his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the

people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All

that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the

strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the

things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,

the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowed

between two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had

endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without

education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible,

imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in

original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the

comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the

unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and

buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of

house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts

called _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never

tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if

you merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.

A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.

Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in her

head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the

frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and

mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her

shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested

after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had

long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had

gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and

the street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress

like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes

of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated

description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and

sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the

mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her

promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and

facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to

jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without

_cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at

the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that

of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there

to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading

which women of her class have when they read at all. With the two or

three kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed her

nights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the

_feuilletons_ cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers,

and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of some

of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make

her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who

worked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;

when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names of

the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and

one sou novels, and read them.

The air, the keen breath of Quartier Breda, full of the _verve_ of the

artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of

Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long

before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous

companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy

creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the

circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations

around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of

mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome

society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the

fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had

reached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people,

she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligence

corresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now,

when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her old

self and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for her

enjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who

would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicated

her with the wine that was poured into her glass. And thus it was that

she sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people,

uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was that

she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.

L

As Germinie was returning to the house one morning at daybreak, she

heard, from the shadows of the _porte-cochere_ as it closed behind her,

a voice cry: "Who's that?" She ran to the servants' staircase, but found

that she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing the

concierge seized her. As soon as he recognized her, he said: "Oh! is it

you? excuse me; don't be frightened! What a giddy creature you are! It

surprises you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account of the thieving

that's going on these days in the cook's bedroom on the second.

Good-night to you! it's lucky for you I don't tell all I know."

A few days later Germinie learned through Adele that the husband of the

cook who had been robbed said that there was no need to look very far;

that the thief was in the house, and that he knew what he knew. Adele

added that it was making a good deal of talk in the street and that

there were plenty of people who would believe it and repeat it. Germinie

became very indignant and told her mistress all about it. Mademoiselle

was even more indignant than she, and, feeling personally outraged by

the insult, wrote instantly to the cook's mistress that she must put a

stop at once to the slanderous statements concerning a girl who had been

in her service twenty years, and for whom she would answer as for

herself. The cook was reprimanded. Her husband in his wrath talked

louder than ever. He made a great outcry and for several days filled the

house with his project of going to the commissioner of police and

calling upon him to question Germinie as to where she procured the money

to start the _cremiere's_ son in business, as to where she procured the

money to purchase a substitute for him, and how she paid the expenses of

the men she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung over

Germinie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell to

the ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done all

the injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden,

overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and became

overcast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which was

so prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly the

faculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness and

appreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which

plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing

presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was

constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end

of which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase:

"Bah! I will kill myself!"

Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience all

the effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night she

saw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her

cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with her

concealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noised

abroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's

account, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, by

all that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and the

shopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down

her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!

Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before the

commissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word and

that idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of the

lower classes; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is

everywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source of

calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between the

police sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme and

the arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive

terrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would much

rather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated in

the dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all the

unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made them

objects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps

on the stairs coming to arrest her!

The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental

upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto

had only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen,

with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of

deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we

hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the

distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the

discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and

so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and

solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her

that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and

her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her.

She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of

death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes

fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five

flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from

others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost

double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would

give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without

having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no

longer felt equal.

"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt

impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the

courtyard?"

"Oh! nothing--the pavements."

"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!"

"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "I

tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing

to do it!"