Jean had only three days left to prepare for his examination for
admission to the Ministry of Finance. These he spent at home,
where the faces of father, aunt, and apprentice seemed strange and
unfamiliar, so completely had they disappeared from his thoughts.
Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid
as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches. His aunt
overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection;
at night she would creep into his room to see if he was sound
asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of her
petty grievances and dislikes.
Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacred
spectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had left
a kind of religious horror in her mind.
"That boy is capable of anything," she used to say. One of the
boy's pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady's back a
war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.
Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair,
and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he
would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by
little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually
gave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutiny
showed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could not
help laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it
was. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the little
farce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her head
sharply, she had found reason to suspect something disrespectful
was going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because of
his lowly origin. The only folks she really hated were the rich.
She was furious because the butcher's wife had gone to a wedding
in a silk dress.
At the upper end of the _Rue de Rennes_, beside a plot of waste
and, was a stall where an old woman sold dusty ginger-bread and
sticks of stale barley-sugar. She had a face the colour of brick
dust under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale,
steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple of
francs, and on windy days the white dust from houses building
in the neighbourhood covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nurses
and mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones who were
casting sheep's eyes at the sweetstuff:
"Dirty!" they would say dissuasively; "dirty!"
But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was past feeling
anything. She did not beg. Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her
good-day in passing, address her by name and fall into talk with
her before the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a
time. The staple of conversation with them both was the neighbours,
accidents that had occurred in the public thoroughfares, cases
of coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and trials of
life and the ways of Providence, "which are not always just."
Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies. He was
a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the
poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless
resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant,
as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces
and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and
empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man
learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught
at school. His thoughts flew from this woman to that other, who
was so beautiful and whom he loved, and he saw life before him
as a whole--a melancholy panorama. He told himself they must
die both of them, and a hideous old woman, squatted before a
few sodden sweetmeats, gave him the same impression of solemn
serenity he had experienced at sight of the jewels from the Queen
of Egypt's sepulchre.