Germinie Lacerteux

  The little one longed to confide in her sisters, but she dared not.When, with nourishing food, her body took on a little flesh, her cheeksa little color and she began to have something of the aspect of a woman,they took great liberties with her and grew bolder. There were attemptsat familiarity, significant gestures, advances, which she eluded, andfrom which she escaped unscathed, but which assailed her purity bybreathing upon her innocence. Roughly treated, scolded, reviled by themaster of the establishment, who was accustomed to abuse hismaidservants and who bore her a grudge because she was not old enough orof the right sort for a mistress, she found no support, no touch ofhumanity, except in his wife. She began to love that woman with a sortof animal devotion, and to obey her with the docility of a dog. She didall her errands without thought or reflection. She carried her lettersto her lovers and was very clever about delivering them. She became veryactive and agile and ingenuously sly in passing in and out, evading theawakened suspicions of the husband; and without any clear idea of whatshe was doing or of what she was concealing, she felt a mischievousdelight, such as children and monkeys feel, in telling herself vaguelythat she was causing some little suffering to that man and that house,which caused her so much. There was among her comrades an old waiter,named Joseph, who defended her, warned her of the cruel plots concoctedagainst her, and, when she was present, put a stop to conversation thatwas too free, with the authority of his white hairs and his paternalinterest in the girl. Meanwhile Germinie's horror of the house increasedevery day. One week her sisters were compelled to take her back to thecafe by force.

  A few days later, there was a great review on the Champ de Mars, and thewaiters had leave of absence for the day. Only Germinie and old Josephremained in the house. Joseph was at work sorting soiled linen in asmall, dark room. He told Germinie to come and help him. She entered theroom; she cried out, fell to the floor, wept, implored, struggled,called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.

  When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up inher chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, whenJoseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiledfrom him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For along time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulsewas to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified,bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who fearedthat she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, andrespected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.

  She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pass the evening withher sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed bysevere pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came tothe lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret oftheir younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of thecommon people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety,flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousnessunder their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands,the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law wasthere, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced ather with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of anAuvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeperred than her sisters' blows.

  She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She soughtneither to defend nor to excuse herself. She did not tell what had takenplace and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When herolder sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded herthat there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at thethought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when hermother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightningflash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciencespierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her andkept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almostforced her into her misfortune.

  That same evening, the younger of Germinie's sisters took her to the RueSaint-Martin, to the house of a repairer of cashmere shawls, with whomshe lodged, and who, being almost daft on the subject of religion, wasbanner-bearer in a sisterhood of the Virgin. She made her lie beside heron a mattress on the floor, and having her there under her hand allnight, she vented upon her all her long-standing, venomous jealousy, herbitter resentment at the preference, the caresses given Germinie by herfather and mother. It was a long succession of petty tortures, brutal orhypocritical exhibitions of spite, kicks that bruised her legs, andprogressive movements of the body by which she gradually forced hercompanion out of bed--it was a cold winter's night--to the floor of thefireless room. During the day, the seamstress took Germinie in hand,catechized her, preached at her, and by detailing the tortures of theother life, inspired in her mind a horrible fear of the hell whoseflames she caused her to feel.

  She lived there four months, in close confinement, and was never allowedto leave the house. At the end of four months she gave birth to a deadchild. When her health was restored, she entered the service of adepilator on Rue Laffitte, and for the first few days she had the joyfulfeeling of having been released from prison. Two or three times, in herwalks, she met old Joseph who ran after her and wanted to marry her; butshe escaped him and the old man never knew that he had been a father.

  But soon Germinie began to pine away in her new place. The house whereshe had taken service as a maid of all work was what servants call "abarrack." A spendthrift and glutton, devoid of order as of money, as isoften the case with women engaged in the occupations that depend uponchance, and in the problematical methods of gaining a livelihood invogue in Paris, the depilator, who was almost always involved in alawsuit of some sort, paid but little heed to her small servant'snourishment. She often went away for the whole day without leaving herany dinner. The little one would satisfy her appetite as well as shecould with some kind of uncooked food, salads, vinegary things thatdeceive a young woman's appetite, even charcoal, which she would nibblewith the depraved taste and capricious stomach of her age and sex. Thisdiet, just after recovering from her confinement, her health being butpartially restored and greatly in need of stimulants, exhausted theyoung woman's strength, reduced her flesh and undermined herconstitution. She had a terrifying aspect. Her complexion changed tothat dead white that looks green in the daylight. Her swollen eyes weresurrounded with a great, bluish shadow. Her discolored lips assumed thehue of faded violets. Her breath failed her at the slightest ascent, andthe incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throatwas painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, shedragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Herfaculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause atall, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress'shair.

  She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place,with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that thelaughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and hadnever had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interestedhimself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He tookher into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in thesunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. Itdelighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he wouldtake down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember afragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight ofthis little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth tohim. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship,the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But hedied after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the serviceof kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen,when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enterthe service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Ta
itbout,in the house of which her sister was concierge.

  IV

  Those people who look for the death of the Catholic religion in our day,do not realize by what an infinite number of sturdy roots it stillretains its hold upon the hearts of the people. They do not realize thesecret, delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people. They donot realize what confession and the confessor are to the impoverishedsouls of those poor women. In the priest who listens and whose voicefalls softly on her ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not somuch the minister of God, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of herwelfare, as the confidant of her sorrows and the friend of her misery.However coarse she may be, there is always a little of the true woman inher, a feverish, trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessnessand, as it were, the sighing of an invalid who craves caressing words,even as a child's trifling ailments require the nurse's droning lullaby.She, as well as the woman of the world, must have the consolation ofpouring out her heart, of confiding her troubles to a sympathetic ear.For it is the nature of her sex to seek an outlet for the emotions andan arm to lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must tell,and concerning which she would like to be questioned, pitied andcomforted. She dreams of a compassionate interest, a tender sympathy forhidden feelings of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the kindest,the most friendly, the most approachable of masters to the woman intheir employ: their kindness to her will still be of the same sort thatthey bestow upon a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning herappetite and her health; they will look carefully after the animal partof her, and that will be all. It will not occur to them that she cansuffer elsewhere than in her body, and they will not dream that she canhave the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for which they seekrelief by confiding in those of their own station. In their eyes, thewoman who sweeps and does the cooking, has no ideas that can cause herto be sad or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her thoughts. Towhom, then, shall she carry them? To the priest who is waiting for them,asks for them, welcomes them, to the churchman who is also a man of theworld, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman, who knowseverything, speaks well, is always accessible, gentle, patient,attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for the most humble soul, the mostshabbily dressed penitent. The priest alone listens to the woman in acap. He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the thingsthat disturb and agitate her and that bring to a maid, as well as toher mistress, the sudden longing to weep, or excite a tempest withinher. There is none but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from herthose things which the irony of her daily life holds back, to look tothe state of her moral health; none but he to raise her above hermaterial life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity andhope,--such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of themen of her family and of her class.

  After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germiniebecame profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. Sheabandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession,to the priest's smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from thedarkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothingwords, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, freefrom care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm hadbeen applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of herbeing.

  She did not, could not, open her heart elsewhere. Her mistress had acertain masculine roughness of demeanor which repelled expansiveness.She had an abrupt, exclamatory way of speaking that forced back all thatGerminie would have liked to confide to her. It was in her nature to bebrutal in her treatment of all lamentations that were not caused by painor disappointment. Her virile kindliness had no pity to spare fordiseases of the imagination, for the suffering that is created by thethought, for the weariness of spirit that flows from a woman's nervesand from the disordered condition of her mental organism. Germinie oftenfound her unfeeling; the old woman had simply been hardened by the timesin which she had lived and by the circumstances of her life. The shellof her heart was as hard as her body. Never complaining herself, she didnot like to hear complaints about her. And by the right of all the tearsshe had not shed, she detested childish tears in grown persons.

  Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous forGerminie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of herfirst prayer. Throughout the day, she was kneeling there as in a dream;and while she was about her work it was constantly before her eyes, withits oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of awinged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, andthe mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now herwhole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She livedthrough the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for,promised day. On Thursday, she began to be impatient; she felt, in theredoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were,of the blessed Saturday evening; and when Saturday came andmademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, shewould make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to thepenitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holywater and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags,between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpetedfloor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forwardin the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious,veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbedin the emotion of suspense.

  The young priest who confessed her, encouraged her frequent confessions.He was not sparing of time or attention or charity. He allowed her totalk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her pettytroubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, andpermitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. Helistened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles;he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of aservant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns ofher existence, as one would speak to a mother and a physician.

  This priest was young. He was kind-hearted. He had lived in the world. Agreat sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gownwherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of theman in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholycompassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. Heunderstood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthenedher, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptationsto which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy forthat heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractablegirl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, whowas promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her wholebody, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of hertemperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed andterrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flamethat shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by theevident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to thatscene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose toresist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of thesenses that was stronger than she.

  This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie liveda concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to God'sservice--at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had comegradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended towardhimself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer saidto him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the firsttime, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray andbecoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watchedfor him when the services were at an end, followed him into thesacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his cassock. Theconfessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself.He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor. In despair at thischange, at his apparen
t indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt,confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had takenpossession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents.Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her toanother confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this otherconfessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think ofgoing, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certainfar-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.