Germinie would gaze at them all and walk along with them; she would goin among them in order to feel the rustling of their aprons. She couldnot take her eyes off the little arms under which the school satchelsleaped about, the little pea-green dresses, the little black leggings,the little legs in the little woolen stockings. In her eyes there was asort of divine light about all those little flaxen heads, with the softhair of the child Jesus. A little stray lock upon a little neck, a bitof baby flesh above a chemise or at the end of a sleeve--at times shesaw nothing but that; it was to her all the sunshine of the street--andthe sky!
Gradually the troop dwindled away. Each street took some children awayto neighboring streets. The school dispersed along the road. The gaietyof all the tiny footsteps died away little by little. The little dressesdisappeared one by one. Germinie followed the last, she attached herselfto those who went the farthest.
On one occasion, as she was walking along thus, devouring with her eyesthe memory of her daughter, she was suddenly seized with a frenziedlonging to embrace something; she rushed at one of the little girls andgrasped her arm just as a kidnapper of children would do. "Mamma!mamma!" the little one cried, and wept as she pulled her arm away.
Germinie fled.
XLV
To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and desolate. She hadreached a point at last where she expected nothing from chance and askednothing from the unforeseen. Her life seemed to her to be foreverencaged in her despair; it would always be the same implacable thing,the same straight, monotonous road to misfortune, the same dark pathwith death at the end. In all the time to come there was no future forher.
And yet, in the depths of despair in which she was crouching, thoughtspassed through her mind at times which made her raise her head and lookbefore her to a point beyond the present. At times the illusion of alast hope smiled upon her. It seemed to her that she might even yet behappy, and that if certain things should come to pass, she would be.Thereupon she imagined that those things did happen. She arrangedincidents and catastrophes. She linked the impossible to the impossible.She reconstructed the opportunities of her life. And her fevered hope,setting about the task of creating events according to her desire on thehorizon of the future, soon became intoxicated with the insane vision ofher suppositions.
Then the delirious hope would gradually fade away. She would tellherself that it was impossible, that nothing of what she dreamed ofcould happen, and she would sink back in her chair and think. After amoment or two she would rise and walk, slowly and uncertainly, to thefireplace, toy with the coffee-pot on the mantelpiece, and at lastdecide to take it: she would learn what the rest of her life was to be.Her good fortune, her ill fortune, everything that was to happen to herwas there, in that fortune-telling device of the woman of the people, onthe plate on which she was about to pour the coffee-grounds. She drainedthe water from the grounds, waited a few minutes, breathed upon themwith the religious breath with which her lips, as a child, touched thepaten at the village church. Then she leaned over them, with her headthrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixedintently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. Shesought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations andthe almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away.She fatigued her eyes by gazing at the innumerable little spots, anddeciphered shapes and letters and signs therein. She put aside somegrains with her finger in order to see them more clearly and moresharply defined. She turned the plate slowly in her hands, this way andthat, questioned its mystery on all sides, and hunted down, within itscircular rim, apparitions, images, rudiments of names, shadowyinitials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects,omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be_victorious_. She wanted to see these things and she compelled herselfto discover them. Under her tense gaze the porcelain became alive withthe visions of her insomnia; her disappointments, her hatreds, the facesshe detested, arose gradually from the magic plate and the designs drawnthereon by chance. By her side the candle, which she forgot to snuff,gave forth an intermittent, dying light: it sank lower and lower in thesilence, night came on apace, and Germinie, as if turned to stone in heragony, always remained rooted there, alone and face to face with herfear of the future, trying to decipher in the dregs of the coffee theconfused features of her destiny, until she thought she could detect across, beside a woman who resembled Jupillon's cousin--a cross, that isto say, _a speedy death_.
XLVI
The love which she lacked, and which it was her determination to denyherself, became the torment of her life, incessant, abominable torture.She had to defend herself against the fevers of her body and theirritations from without, against the easily aroused emotions and theindolent cowardice of her flesh, against all the solicitations of natureby which she was assailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day,with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist warmth of stormyweather, with the breath of her past and her memories, with the picturessuddenly thrown upon the background of her mind, with the voices thatwhispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that sent a thrillof tenderness into her every limb.
Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured, and she did notyield or take another lover. Fearful of herself, she avoided man andfled from his sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits, alwayscloseted with mademoiselle, or else above in her own room. On Sundaysshe did not leave the house. She had ceased to consort with the othermaids in the house, and, in order to occupy her time and forgetherself, she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of sewing, orburied herself in sleep. When musicians came into the courtyard sheclosed the windows in order not to hear them: the sensuousness of musicmoved her very soul.
In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her passions. Herevil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished uponthemselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from herwhole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows noend, that delirium of the senses, obsession,--the obsession that nothingcan dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacableobsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close tothe woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces itsmoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!
At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant assaults, theirritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie'sfaculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastlyhallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses.It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, thecandlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her assumedimpure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything beforeher eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at herkitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longerbelongs to himself: "In five minutes I am going down into the street."And when the five minutes had passed she would stay where she was.
XLVII
The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandonedthe conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed herhead beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution,energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction,of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she wasbeing borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almostimpious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causessuffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a god on themarble of the antique tragedies, and is called _No Chance_ on thetattooed brow of the galley-slave--Fatality--was trampling upon her, andGerminie lowered her head beneath its foot.
When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her pastrecurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the linksin the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictionsthat had followed her years and grown heavier with them; all theincidents that had succeeded one an
other in her life, as if bypreconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having evercaught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard somuch--she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatureswho are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of thosefor whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envyit in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dintof yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of broodingover the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession ofher disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon themost trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of thepersecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and thatwas not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop,an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in whichshe was cheated--all these things were in her opinion due neither to herown fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Lifewas in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, ineverything, great and small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereuponimagined that she was accursed to her finger-tips. Accursed! almostdamned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when shequestioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, inthe fire in her blood, in the appetite of her organs, in her passionateweakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession ofa disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having alreadydelivered her over to the shameful excesses of passion, anddestined--she had a presentiment that it was so--to deliver her again inthe same way?
And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was therefrain of her thought: "What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have hadno chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!" She saidit in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion,every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that shewas in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful thanshe, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens inordinary life. She lived in that state of cowardly unrest wherein theunexpected is dreaded as a possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bellcauses alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing themystery it contains, not daring to open it, wherein the news you areabout to hear, the mouth that opens to speak to you, cause theperspiration to start upon your temples. She was in that state ofsuspicion, of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny,wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and wherein one wouldlike to check the current of his life so that it should not go forwardwhither all the endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.
At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supremedisdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems asatire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength,exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longerfeels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: "Go on!"
XLVIII
"Where are you going in that rig?" said Germinie one Sunday morning toAdele, as she passed in grand array along the corridor on the sixthfloor, in front of her open door.
"Ah! there you are! I'm going to a swell wedding, my dear! There's acrowd of us--big Marie, the _great bully_, you know--Elisa, from 41, thetwo Badiniers, big and little--and men, too! In the first place, there'smy _dealer in sudden death_. Yes, and--Oh! didn't you know--my newflame, the master-at-arms of the 24th--and a friend of his, a painter, areal Father Joy. We're going to Vincennes. Everyone carries something.We shall dine on the grass--the men will pay for the wine. And there'llbe plenty of it, I promise you!"
"I'll go, too," said Germinie.
"You? nonsense! you don't go to parties any more."
"But I tell you I'll go," said Germinie, in a sharp, decided tone. "Justgive me time to tell mademoiselle and put on a dress. If you'll waitI'll go and get half a lobster."
Half an hour later the two women left the house; they skirted the citywall and found the rest of the party sitting outside a cafe on Boulevardde la Chopinette. After taking a glass of currant wine, they entered twolarge cabs and rode away. When they arrived at the fortress at Vincennesthey alighted and the whole party walked along the bank of the moat. Asthey were passing under the wall of the fort, the master-at-arms'friend, the painter, shouted to an artilleryman, who was doing sentryduty beside a cannon: "Say! old fellow, you'd rather drink one thanstand guard over it, eh?"[1]
"Isn't he funny?" said Adele to Germinie, nudging her with her elbow.
Soon they were fairly in the forest of Vincennes.
Narrow paths crossed and recrossed in every direction on the hard,uneven, footprint-covered ground. In the spaces between all these littleroads there was here and there a little grass, but down-trodden,withered, yellow, dead grass, strewn about like bedding for cattle, itsstraw-colored blades were everywhere mingled with briars, amid the dullgreen of nettles. It was easily recognizable as one of the rural spotsto which the great faubourgs resort on Sundays to loll about in thegrass, and which resemble a lawn trampled by a crowd after a display offireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarfelms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots andstripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks,eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. Theverdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, the leaves above hada very unhealthy look; the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made onlyfaint green lines against the sky. Clouds of dust from the high-roadscovered the bushes with a gray pall. Everything had the wretched,impoverished aspect of trampled vegetation that has no chance tobreathe, the melancholy effect of the grass at the barriers! Natureseemed to sprout from beneath the pavements. No birds sang in the trees,no insects hummed about the dusty ground; the noise of the spring-cartsstunned the birds; the hand-organ put the rustling of the trees tosilence; the denizens of the street strolled about through the paths,singing. Women's hats, fastened with four pins to a handkerchief, werehanging from the trees; the red plume of an artilleryman burst upon oneat every moment through the scanty leaves; dealers in honey rose fromthe thickets; on the trampled greensward children in blouses werecutting twigs, workingmen's families idling their time away nibbling at_pleasure_, and little urchins catching butterflies in their caps. Itwas a forest after the pattern of the original Bois de Boulogne, hot anddusty, a much-frequented and sadly-abused promenade, one of those spots,avaricious of shade, to which the common people flock to disportthemselves at the gates of great capitals--burlesque forests, filledwith corks, where you find slices of melon and skeletons in theunderbrush.
The heat on this day was stifling; the sun was swimming in clouds,shedding a veiled diffuse light that was almost blinding to the eyes andthat seemed to portend a storm. The air was heavy and dead; nothingstirred; the leaves and their tiny, meagre shadows did not move; theforest seemed weary and crushed, as it were, beneath the heavy sky. Atrare intervals a breath of air from the south passed lazily along,sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blowupon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With noknowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensationlike the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin.
They went gayly along, with the somewhat excited activity that thecountry air imparts to the common people. The men ran, the women trippedafter them and caught them. They played at rolling on the grass. Therewas a manifest longing to dance and climb trees; the painter amusedhimself by throwing stones at the loop-holes in the gateways of thefortress, and he never missed his aim.
At last they all sat down in a sort of clearing under a clump of oaks,whose shadows were lengthening in the setting sun. The men, lightingmatches on the seats of their trousers, began to smoke. The womenchattered and laughed and threw themselves backward in paroxysms ofinane hilarity and noisy outbursts of delight. Germinie alone did notspeak or laugh. She
did not listen or look. Her eyes, beneath theirlowered lids, were fixed upon the toes of her boots. So engrossed inthought was she that you would have said she was totally oblivious totime and place. Lying at full length on the grass, her head slightlyraised by a hammock, she made no other movement than to lay her hands,palm downwards, on the grass beside her; in a short time she would turnthem on their backs and let them lie in that position, seeking thecoolness of the earth to allay the fever of her flesh.
"There's a lazybones! going to sleep?" said Adele.
Germinie opened wide her blazing eyes, without answering, and untildinner maintained the same position, the same silence, the same air oftorpor, feeling about her for places where her burning hands had notrested.
"Come, old girl!" said a woman's voice, "sing us something."
"Oh! no," Adele replied, "I haven't got wind enough before eating."