Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a
former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not
returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark
street.
At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would
take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if
to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and,
going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to
both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours,
shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous
and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness
reigned. She followed the line of red-wine shops, the naked arbors, the
_cabaret_ trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits,
low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls,
cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a
night's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed
shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark
passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that
seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is
handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy
little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded
form, tall, mouldy _portes-cocheres_, hedge-rows, within which could be
vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of
unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls
disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements
by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.
From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon
lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their
beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a
cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the
rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the
distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at
long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.
Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where
low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a
hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir
and Montmartre.
The people who passed that way--the workman returning from Paris
whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her
hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her
black cap--would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if
they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run
toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted
footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible
shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.
She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself
a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the
last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if
he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole
thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more
consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see
him.
At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie,
exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would
loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still
burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows.
She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her
impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the
perspiring windows of the wine-shops--the cooking utensils, the bowls of
punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from
their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied
colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons--these things
would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old
announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon,
the advertisements of _gloria_--coffee with brandy--the inscriptions in
yellow letters: _New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes._ For a whole quarter
of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in
a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two
black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest,
through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over
their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was
being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day,
upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had
ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and
growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere
weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of
film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling
over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and
compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.
In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that
semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the
Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened
that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that
she had upon the outer boulevard assumed the terrors of a nightmare.
When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its
varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements,
the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the
rain, and there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the aqueous
darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad with fatigue, would fancy
that she could see a flood rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror
would show her suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly
nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not daring to move, fearing to
feel her feet slip from under her; she would begin to weep, and would
weep on until someone passed by and offered to escort her to the _Hotel
of the Little Blue Hand_.