LXIX
As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kept her bed aweek, ill and raging, filled with indignation that shook her whole body,overflowed through her mouth, and tore from her now and again somecoarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid'svile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever ofmalediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsedwith wrath.
Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothingelse. Debts!--a child!--all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! Sheabhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would havedenounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell sothat she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Hermaid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her servicetwenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits! Drunkenness! shehad sunk so low as that! The horror that succeeds a bad dream came tomademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed from her heartsaid: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth andwhose filth it cast out!"
How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! Andto make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle deVarandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, herjealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bendingover her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. It was all alie! Her devotion was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her, thelove upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told herself over and overagain, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little,from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whosebitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness ofdays gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.
She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her wrath; butreflection brought them back. Thereupon there came to her mind somethings to which she had paid no heed during Germinie's lifetime, triflesof which the grave makes us take thought and upon which death shedslight. She had a vague remembrance of certain strange performances onthe part of her maid, of feverish effusions and frantic embraces, of herthrowing herself on her knees as if she were about to make a confession,of movements of the lips as if a secret were trembling on their verge.She saw, with the eyes we have for those who are no more, Germinie'swistful glances, her gestures and attitudes, the despairing expressionof her face. And now she realized that there were deep wounds beneath,heart-rending pain, the torment of her anguish and her repentance, thetears of blood of her remorse, all sorts of suffering forced out ofsight throughout her life, and in her whole being a Passion of shamethat dared not ask forgiveness except with silence!
Then she would scold herself for the thought and call herself an oldfool. Her instinct of rigid uprightness, the stern conscience and harshjudgment of a stainless life, the things which cause a virtuous woman tocondemn a harlot and should have caused a saint like Mademoiselle deVarandeuil to be without pity for her servant--everything within herrebelled against a pardon. The voice of justice, stifling her kindnessof heart, cried: "Never! never!" And she would expel Germinie's infamousphantom with a pitiless gesture.
There were times, indeed, when, in order to make her condemnation andexecration of her memory more irrevocable, she would heap charges uponher and slander her. She would add to the dead woman's horrible list ofsins. She would reproach Germinie for more than was justly chargeable toher. She would attribute crimes to her dark thoughts, murderous desiresto her impatient dreams. She would strive to think, she would forceherself to think, that she had desired her mistress's death and had beenawaiting it.
But at that very moment, amid the blackest of her thoughts andsuppositions, a vision arose and stood in a bright light before her. Afigure approached, that seemed to come to meet her glance, a figureagainst which she could not defend herself, and which passed through thehands with which she sought to force it back. Mademoiselle de Varandeuilsaw her dead maid once more. She saw once more the face of which she hadcaught a glimpse in the amphitheatre, the crucified face, the torturedface to which the blood and agony of a heart had mounted together. Shesaw it once more with the faculty which the second sight of memoryseparates from its surroundings. And that face, as it became clearer toher, caused her less terror. It appeared to her, divesting itself, as itwere, of its fear-inspiring, horrifying qualities. Suffering aloneremained, but it was the suffering of expiation, almost of prayer, thesuffering of a dead face that would like to weep. And as its expressiongrew ever milder, mademoiselle came at last to see in it a glance ofsupplication, of supplication that, at last, compelled her pity.Insensibly there glided into her reflections indulgent thoughts,suggestions of apology that surprised herself. She asked herself if thepoor girl was as guilty as others, if she had deliberately chosen thepath of evil, if life, circumstances, the misfortune of her body and herdestiny, had not made her the creature she had been, a creature of loveand sorrow. Suddenly she stopped: she was on the point of forgiving her!
One morning she leaped out of bed.
"Here! you--you other!" she cried to her housekeeper, "the devil takeyour name! I can't remember it. Give me my clothes, quick! I have to goout."
"The idea, mademoiselle--just look at the roofs, they're all white."
"Well, it snows, that's all."
Ten minutes later, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil said to the driver of thecab she had sent for:
"Montmartre Cemetery!"
LXX
In the distance an enclosure wall extended, perfectly straight, as faras the eye could see. The thread of snow that marked the outline of itscoping gave it a dirty, rusty color. In a corner at the left threeleafless trees reared their bare black branches against the sky. Theyrustled sadly, with the sound of pieces of dead wood stirred by thesouth wind. Above these trees, behind the wall and close against it,arose the two arms from which hung one of the last oil-lamps in Paris. Afew snow-covered roofs were scattered here and there; beyond, the hillof Montmartre rose sharply, its white shroud broken by oases of brownearth and sandy patches. Low gray walls followed the slope, surmountedby gaunt, stunted trees whose branches had a bluish tint in the mist, asfar as two black windmills. The sky was of a leaden hue, with occasionalcold, bluish streaks as if ink had been applied with a brush! overMontmartre there was a light streak, of a yellow color, like the Seinewater after heavy rains. Above that wintry beam the wings of aninvisible windmill turned and turned,--slow-moving wings, unvarying intheir movement, which seemed to be turning for eternity.
In front of the wall, against which was planted a thicket of deadcypresses, turned red by the frost, was a vast tract of land upon whichwere two rows of crowded, jostling overturned crosses, like two greatfuneral processions. The crosses touched and pushed one another and trodon one another's heels. They bent and fell and collapsed in the ranks.In the middle there was a sort of congestion which had caused them tobulge out on both sides; you could see them lying--covered by the snowand raising it into mounds with the thick wood of which they weremade--upon the paths, somewhat trampled in the centre, that skirted thetwo long files. The broken ranks undulated with the fluctuation of amultitude, the disorder and wavering course of a long march. The blackcrosses with their arms outstretched assumed the appearance of ghostsand persons in distress. The two disorderly columns made one think of ahuman panic, a desperate, frightened army. It was as if one were lookingon at a terrible rout.
All the crosses were laden with wreaths, wreaths of immortelles, wreathsof white paper with silver thread, black wreaths with gold thread; butyou could see them beneath the snow, worn out, withered, ghastly things,souvenirs, as it were, which the other dead would not accept and whichhad been picked up in order to make a little toilet for the crosses withgleanings from the graves.
All the crosses had a name written in white; but there were other namesthat were not even written on a piece of wood,--a broken branch of atree, stuck in the ground, with an envelope tied around it--suchtombstones as that were t
o be seen there!
On the left, where they were digging a trench for a third row ofcrosses, the workman's shovel threw black dirt into the air, which fellupon the white earth around. Profound silence, the deaf silence of thesnow, enveloped everything, and but two sounds could be heard; the dullsound made by the clods of earth and the heavy sound of regularfootsteps; an old priest who was waiting there, his head enveloped in ablack cowl, dressed in a black gown and stole, and with a dirty, yellowsurplice, was trying to keep himself warm by stamping his great galocheson the pavement of the high road, in front of the crosses.
Such was the common ditch in those days. That tract of land, thosecrosses and that priest said this: "Here sleeps the Death of the commonpeople; this is the poor man's end!"
* * * * *
O Paris! thou art the heart of the world, thou art the great city ofhumanity, the great city of charity and brotherly love! Thou hast kindlyintentions, old-fashioned habits of compassion, theatres that give alms.The poor man is thy citizen as well as the rich man. Thy churches speakof Jesus Christ; thy laws speak of equality; thy newspapers speak ofprogress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this iswhere thou castest those who die in thy service, those who killthemselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisomeodors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away workingfor thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors,those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who havelengthened with the links of their lives the chain of thy duration as acapital, those who have been the crowd in thy streets and the commonpeople of thy grandeur. Each of thy cemeteries has a like shamefulcorner, hidden in the angle of a wall, where thou makest haste to burythem, and where thou castest dirt upon them in such stingy clods, thatone can see the ends of their coffins protruding! One would say that thycharity stops with their last breath, that thy only free gift is the bedwhereon they suffer, and that, when the hospital can do no more forthem, thou, who art so vast and so superb, hast no place for them! Thoudost heap them up, crowd them together and mingle them in death, as thoudidst mingle them in the death-agony beneath the sheets of thy hospitalsa hundred years since! As late as yesterday thou hadst only that prieston sentry duty, to throw a drop of paltry holy water on every comer: notthe briefest prayer! Even that symbol of decency was lacking: God couldnot be disturbed for so small a matter! And what the priest blesses isalways the same thing: a trench in which the pine boxes strike againstone another, where the dead enjoy no privacy! Corruption there is commonto all; no one has his own, but each one has that of all the rest: theworms are owned promiscuously! In the devouring soil a Montfauconhastens to make way for the Catacombs. For the dead here have no moretime than room to rot in: the earth is taken from them before it hasfinished with them! before their bones have assumed the color and theancient appearance, so to speak, of stone, before the passing years haveeffaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! Theexcavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they arethe damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned tothem, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! Insummer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered humancharnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In thescorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: thereare flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilentialflies whose sting is deadly!
* * * * *
Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separatesthe lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Followingthe directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between thefurther line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she madeher way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where thetrench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet ofoxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earthsloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seenthe sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large oneand two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of theday before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; theyglided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking longstrides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.
Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out thedates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reachedthe crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid'sdeath, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was notin the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, tothe crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in alldirections: there was nothing, absolutely nothing,--Germinie had beenburied without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in theground by which to identify her grave!
At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between twocrosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10thof November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in thatspot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over herbody it was necessary to pray at random between two dates,--as if thepoor girl's destiny had decreed that there should be no more room onearth for her body than for her heart!
NOTES
[1] _Canon_ is the French word for cannon; it is also used invulgar parlance to mean a glass of wine drunk at the bar.
[2] _Battre les murailles_--to beat the walls--has a slangmeaning: to be so drunk that you can't see, or can't lie down withoutholding on.
[3] Literally, _red bowels_--common slang for hard drinkers.
[4] _Cuir_ is an expression used to denote the error inspeaking, which consists--in French--in pronouncing a _t_ for an _s_,and vice versa at the end of words which are joined in pronunciation tothe next word: _e.g., il etai-z-a la campagne_ for _il etait a lacampagne_.
[5] In the slang vocabulary, to _console_ one's coffee means toadd brandy to it.
[6] A _negresse_ is a bottle of red wine, and, as applied tothat article, _morte_ (dead) means empty.
List of Illustrations
GERMINIE LACERTEUX
PAGE
GERMINIE AND JUPILLON VISIT THEIR CHILD _Fronts._
JUPILLON AND GERMINIE AT THE FORTIFICATIONS 116
GERMINIE BRINGS MONEY FOR A SUBSTITUTE 204
GERMINIE TEMPTED TO MURDER 308
GERMINIE AT LARIBOISIERE 356
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends