In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted with drinking. He felt
the first pangs of the disease of the liver that had long been lurking
in his heated, alcoholized blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The
horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the cords of his
stomach for a whole week, caused him to reflect. There came to his mind,
together with divers resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost
sentimental ideas of the future. He said to himself that he must put a
little more water into his life, if he wanted to live to old age. While
he lay writhing in bed and tying himself into knots, with his knees up
to his chin to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four
walls within which he passed his nights, to which he brought his drunken
body home in the evening, and from which he fled into the daylight in
the morning; and he thought about making a real home for himself. He
dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a wife who would make him
a good stew, look after him if he were ill, straighten out his affairs,
keep his linen in order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the
wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the useful qualities
of a housekeeper, and who, in addition, would not be a stupid fool, but
would understand him and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found:
Germinie was the very one. She probably had a little hoard, a few sous
laid by during the time she had been in her old mistress's service; and
with what he earned they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no doubt
of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she would accept his
proposition. More than that, her scruples, if she had any, would not
hold out against the prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit
to her at the end of their _liaison_.
One Monday she had come to his room as usual.
"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say to this, eh? A good
room--not like this box--a real room, with a closet--at Montmartre, and
two windows, no less! Rue de l'Empereur--with a view an Englishman would
give five thousand francs to carry away with him. Something first-class,
bright, and cheerful, you know, a place where you could stay all day
without hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to have
enough of moving about here and there just to change fleas. And that
isn't all, either: I'm tired of being cooped up in furnished lodgings,
I'm tired of being all alone. Friends don't make society. They fall on
you like flies in your glass when you're to pay, and then, there you
are! In the first place, I don't propose to drink any more, honor
bright! no more for me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use
myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by any means!
Attention! We mustn't let drink get the better of us. It seemed to me
those days as if I'd been swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to
knock at the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to the
needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition to Germinie.
I'll treat myself to a little furniture. You've got what you have in
your room. You know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy bone in
my body where work's concerned. And then we might look to not always be
working for others: we might take a lodging-house for country thieves.
If you had a little something put aside, that would help. We would join
forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves straightened out some day
before the mayor. That's not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And
you'll leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear old
Gautruche?"
Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust forward and her
chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw herself back with a burst of
strident laughter.
"Ha! ha! ha! You thought--and you have the face to tell me so!--you
thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle? Did you really think so? You're a
fool, you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred thousands, you
might be stuffed with gold, do you hear? all stuffed with it. You're
joking, aren't you? Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever
told you? I would like to see her die and these hands not be there to
close her eyes! I'd like to see it! Come now, really, did you think so?"
"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted with me, I thought you
cared more for me than that--that you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the
painter, disconcerted by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's
words.
"Ah! you thought that, too--that I loved you!" And, as if she were
suddenly uprooting from the depths of her heart the remorse and
suffering of her passions, she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you--I
love you as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love you as one
loves something that is close at hand--that one makes use of because it
is there! I am used to you as one gets used to an old dress and wears it
again and again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose I should care
for you? I'd like you to tell me what difference it can make to me
whether it's you or another? For, after all, what have you been to me
more than any other man would be? In the first place, you took me. Well?
Is that enough to make me love you? What have you done, then, to attach
me to you, will you be kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed
a glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken pity on me when I
was tramping about in the mud and snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes!
And what did people say to me and spit out in my face so that my blood
boiled from one end of my body to the other! You never troubled your
head about all the insults I've swallowed waiting for you! Look you!
I've been wanting to tell you all this for a long time--it's been
choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly smile, "do you
flatter yourself you've driven me wild with your physical beauty, with
your hair, which you've lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took
you--I'd have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the
times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything
or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot
day!"
She paused an instant.
"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as
long as your hand's in."
"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be
to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool!
she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to
promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her
mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no
one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't
understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me!
Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated
kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was
unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?'
No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what
became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is
between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying
of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am,
a----" She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her
affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she
should ever learn anything--but, no fear of that, it won't be long.
There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story
window, as true as God is my master! But fancy--you are not my heart,
you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah!
I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces
for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me
what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest,
when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and
would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to--even then, if
mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little
finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I
tell you I would have left him!"
"In that case--if that's the way things stand, my dear--if you're so
fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give
you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"
"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.
"Faith! it's very like it."
"Well! adieu. That suits me!"
She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.