Mademoiselle talked and prayed and implored and scolded to no purpose:
she could not induce Germinie to lay aside her work for a few days.
Germinie would not even listen to the suggestion that she should have an
assistant to do the heavier work. She declared that it was useless,
impossible; that she could never endure the thought of another woman
approaching her, waiting upon her, attending to her wants; that it would
give her a fever simply to think of such a thing as she lay in bed; that
she was not dead yet; and she begged that she might be allowed to go on
as usual, so long as she could put one foot before the other. She said
it in such an affectionate tone, her eyes were so beseeching, her feeble
voice was so humble and so passionate in making the request, that
mademoiselle had not the courage to force her to accept an assistant.
She simply called her a "blockhead," who believed, like all
country-people, that a few days in bed means death.
Keeping on her feet, with an apparent improvement due to the physician's
energetic treatment, Germinie continued to make mademoiselle's bed,
accepting her assistance to turn the mattresses. She also continued to
prepare her food, and that was an especially distasteful task to her.
When she was preparing mademoiselle's breakfast and dinner, she felt as
if she should die in her kitchen, one of the wretched little kitchens
common in great cities, which are the cause of so much pulmonary trouble
in women. The embers that she kindled, and from which a thread of
suffocating smoke slowly arose, began to stir her stomach to revolt;
soon the charcoal that she bought from the charcoal dealer next door,
strong Paris charcoal, full of half-charred wood, enveloped her in its
stifling odor. The dirty, smoking funnel, the low chimney-piece poured
back into her lungs the corroding heat of the waist-high oven. She
suffocated, she felt the fiery heat of all her blood surge upward to her
face and cause red blotches to appear on her forehead. Her head whirled.
In the half-asphyxiated condition of laundresses who pass back and forth
through the vapor of their charcoal stoves, she would rush to the window
and draw a few breaths of the icy outside air.
She had other motives for suffering on her feet, for keeping constantly
about her work despite her increasing weakness, than the repugnance of
country-people to take to their beds, or her fierce, jealous
determination that no one but herself should attend to mademoiselle's
needs: she had a constant terror of denunciation, which might accompany
the installation of a new servant. It was absolutely necessary that she
should be there, to keep watch on mademoiselle and prevent anyone from
coming near her. It was necessary, too, that she should show herself,
that the quarter should see her, and that she should not appear to her
creditors with the aspect of a dead woman. She must make a pretence of
being strong, she must assume a cheerful, lively demeanor, she must
impart confidence to the whole street with the doctor's studied words,
with a hopeful air, and with the promise not to die. She must appear at
her best in order to reassure her debtors and to prevent apprehensions
on the subject of money from ascending the stairs and applying to
mademoiselle.
She acted up to her part in this horrible, but necessary, comedy. She
was absolutely heroic in the way she made her whole body lie,--in
drawing up her enfeebled form to its full height as she passed the
shops, whose proprietors' eyes were upon her; in quickening her trailing
footsteps; in rubbing her cheeks with a rough towel before going out in
order to bring back the color of blood to them; in covering the pallor
of her disease and her death-mask with rouge.
Despite the terrible cough that racked her sleepless nights, despite her
stomach's loathing for food, she passed the whole winter conquering and
overcoming her own weakness and struggling with the ups and downs of her
disease.
At every visit that he made, the doctor told mademoiselle that he was
unable to find that any of her maid's vital organs were seriously
diseased. The lungs were a little ulcerated near the top; but people
recovered from that. "But her body seems worn out, thoroughly worn out,"
he said again and again, in a sad tone, with an almost embarrassed
manner that impressed mademoiselle. And he always had something to say,
at the end of his visit, about a change of air--about the country.