Germinie Lacerteux
Suddenly a great stone came hurtling through the air and struck theground near Germinie's head; at the same moment she heard the painter'svoice shouting: "Don't be afraid! that's your chair."
One and all laid their handkerchiefs on the ground by way oftablecloth. Eatables were produced from greasy papers. Bottles wereuncorked and the wine went round; the glasses were rested against tuftsof grass, and they fell to upon bits of pork and sausages, with slicesof bread for plates. The painter cut boats out of paper to hold thesalt, and imitated the orders shouted out by waiters in a cafe. "_Boum!Pavillon! Servez!_" he cried. The company gradually became animated. Theopen air, the patches of blue sky, the food and drink started the gayetyof the table in full blast. Hands approached one another, mouths met,coarse remarks were whispered from one to another, shirt sleeves creptaround waists, and now and then energetic embraces were attended bygreedy, resounding kisses.
Germinie drank, and said nothing. The painter, who had taken his placeby her side, felt decidedly chilly and embarrassed beside hisextraordinary neighbor, who amused herself "so entirely inside."Suddenly he began to beat a tattoo with his knife against his glass,drowning the uproar of the party, and rose to his knees.
"Mesdames!" said he, with the voice of a paroquet that has sung toomuch, "here's the health of a man in hard luck: myself! Perhaps it willbring me good luck! Deserted, yes, mesdames; yes, I've been deserted!I'm a widower! you know the kind of widower, _razibus_! I was struck allof a heap. Not that I cared much for her, but habit, that old villain,habit! The fact is I'm as bored as a bed-bug in a watch spring. For twoweeks my life has been like a restaurant without a _pousse-cafe_! Andwhen I love love as if it had made me! No wife! That's what I callweaning a grown man! that is to say, since I've known what it is, I takeoff my hat to the cures: I feel very sorry for them, 'pon my word! Nowife! and there are so many of 'em! But I can't walk about with a sign:_Vacant man to let. Inquire within._ In the first place it would have tobe stamped by M'sieu le Prefet, and then, people are such fools, itwould draw a crowd! All of which, mesdames, is intended to inform you,that if, among the people you have the honor of knowing, there shouldhappen to be one who'd like to make an acquaintance--virtuousacquaintance--a pretty little left-handed marriage--why she needn't lookany farther! I'm her man--Victor-Mederic Gautruche! a home body, agenuine house-ivy for sentiment! She has only to apply at my formerhotel, _La Clef de Surete_. And gay as a hunchback who's just drownedhis wife! Gautruche, called Gogo-la-Gaiete, egad! A pretty fellow whoknows what's what, who doesn't beat about the bush, a good old body whotakes things easy and who won't give himself the colic with that fishes'grog!" With that he took a bottle of water that stood beside him andhurled it twenty yards away. "Long live the walls! They're the same topapa that the sky is to the good God! Gogo-la-Gaiete paints them throughthe week and beats them on Monday![2] And with all that not jealous, notugly, not a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never harmed oneof the fair sex in his life! If you want physique, _parbleu_! I'm yourman!"
He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering body, clad in an oldblue coat with gilt buttons, to its full height, removing his gray hatso as to show his perspiring, polished, bald skull, and tossing his oldplucked _gamin's_ head, he continued: "You see what it is! It isn't avery attractive piece of property; it doesn't help it to exhibit it. Butit yields well, it's a little dilapidated, but well put together. Dame!Here I am with my little forty nine-years--no more hair than a billiardball, a witchgrass beard that would make good herb-tea, foundations nottoo solid, feet as long as La Villette--and with all the rest thinenough to take a bath in a musket-barrel. There's the bill of lading!Pass the prospectus along! If any woman wants all that in a lump--anyrespectable person--not too young--who won't amuse herself by paintingme too yellow--you understand, I don't ask for a Princess ofBatignolles--why, sure as you're born, I'm her man!"
Germinie seized Gautruche's glass, half emptied it at a draught and heldout the side from which she had drunk to him.
* * * * *
At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they reached thefortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart with the point of his knifeon the stone, and all the names with the date were carved inside.
In the evening Gautruche and Germinie were upon the outer boulevards,near Barriere Rochechouart. Beside a low house with these words, in aplaster panel: _Madame Merlin_. _Dresses cut and tried on, two francs_,they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a darkpassage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. Atthe entrance to the passage, these words were printed in black on awooden sign:
_Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._
XLIX
Mederie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen whomake their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lipsforever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined withtartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundiansgraphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy fromyesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life throughthe sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it withthe easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps ofthe wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretchedaway into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold uponhim; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind,he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like_psitt_! which was his way of saying _pshaw_! and, raising his rightarm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss hismelancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superbafter-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knewneither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For threesous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottleof ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, andfound food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in theworld seemed sad to him--except a glass of water.
With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellenthealth and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayetyof his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free,unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeksdistraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at passers-by,from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and didlettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without ameasure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the lettersin white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters inposition inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing aninstant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was alsorenowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded inbronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen totwenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was notwealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wine-shops.
He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother,his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance,his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of thepeople can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. Allthat falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, thestrainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, thethings that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters,the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowedbetween two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, hadendowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though withouteducation, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible,imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly inoriginal remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from thecomic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of theunadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories andbuffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories ofhouse-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haun
tscalled _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was nevertired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And ifyou merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.
A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.
Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in herhead. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with thefrightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters andmistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off hershell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interestedafter the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, hadlong been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she hadgleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house andthe street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistresslike a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettesof them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animateddescription, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy andsometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in themouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprisedMademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, herpromptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune andfacility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how tojest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without_cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography atthe creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as thatof the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came thereto breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate readingwhich women of her class have when they read at all. With the two orthree kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed hernights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the_feuilletons_ cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers,and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of someof the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to makeher desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house whoworked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names ofthe actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads andone sou novels, and read them.
The air, the keen breath of Quartier Breda, full of the _verve_ of theartist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes ofGerminie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Longbefore her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuouscompanionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthycreatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted thecircle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversationsaround the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants ofmademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisomesociety of maids whom their absorption in their employment and thefascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She hadreached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people,she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligencecorresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now,when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her oldself and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for herenjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her whowould make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicatedher with the wine that was poured into her glass. And thus it was thatshe sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people,uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was thatshe fell to the lot of a Gautruche.
L
As Germinie was returning to the house one morning at daybreak, sheheard, from the shadows of the _porte-cochere_ as it closed behind her,a voice cry: "Who's that?" She ran to the servants' staircase, but foundthat she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing theconcierge seized her. As soon as he recognized her, he said: "Oh! is ityou? excuse me; don't be frightened! What a giddy creature you are! Itsurprises you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account of the thievingthat's going on these days in the cook's bedroom on the second.Good-night to you! it's lucky for you I don't tell all I know."
A few days later Germinie learned through Adele that the husband of thecook who had been robbed said that there was no need to look very far;that the thief was in the house, and that he knew what he knew. Adeleadded that it was making a good deal of talk in the street and thatthere were plenty of people who would believe it and repeat it. Germiniebecame very indignant and told her mistress all about it. Mademoisellewas even more indignant than she, and, feeling personally outraged bythe insult, wrote instantly to the cook's mistress that she must put astop at once to the slanderous statements concerning a girl who had beenin her service twenty years, and for whom she would answer as forherself. The cook was reprimanded. Her husband in his wrath talkedlouder than ever. He made a great outcry and for several days filled thehouse with his project of going to the commissioner of police andcalling upon him to question Germinie as to where she procured the moneyto start the _cremiere's_ son in business, as to where she procured themoney to purchase a substitute for him, and how she paid the expenses ofthe men she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung overGerminie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell tothe ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done allthe injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden,overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and becameovercast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which wasso prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly thefaculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness andappreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, whichplunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairingpresentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and wasconstantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the endof which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase:"Bah! I will kill myself!"
Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience allthe effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night shesaw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, hercowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with herconcealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noisedabroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon'saccount, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, byall that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and theshopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran downher back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before thecommissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word andthat idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of thelower classes; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which iseverywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source ofcalamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between thepolice sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme andthe arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctiveterrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would muchrather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated inthe dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all theunfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made themobjects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footstepson the stairs coming to arrest her!
The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mentalupheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hithertohad only hovered about her--the idea of suicide. She began to listen,with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her ofdeliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that wehear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in thedistance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to thediscouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly an
dso easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued andsolicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about herthat could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers andher lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her.She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste ofdeath. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyesfixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the fiveflights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished fromothers! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almostdouble over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it wouldgive way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die withouthaving to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she nolonger felt equal.
"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirtimpulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in thecourtyard?"
"Oh! nothing--the pavements."
"In Heaven's name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!"
"Oh! people don't fall that way," said Germinie in a strange tone. "Itell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longingto do it!"
LI
Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by aformer mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had notreturned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, darkstreet.
At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She wouldtake twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as ifto prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and,going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk toboth ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours,shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitousand horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darknessreigned. 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 anight's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealedshops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by darkpassageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors thatseemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which ishanded to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomylittle gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degradedform, tall, mouldy _portes-cocheres_, hedge-rows, within which could bevaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners ofunfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, wallsdisfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisementsby which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come uponlanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from theirbeginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from acellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with therigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in thedistance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there atlong intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.