Germinie Lacerteux Part 15

"Mesdames!" said he, with the voice of a paroquet that has sung too much, "here's the health of a man in hard luck: myself! Perhaps it will bring 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 all of 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 two weeks my life has been like a restaurant without a _pousse-cafe_! And when I love love as if it had made me! No wife! That's what I call weaning a grown man! that is to say, since I've known what it is, I take off my hat to the cures: I feel very sorry for them, 'pon my word! No wife! 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 to be stamped by M'sieu le Prefet, and then, people are such fools, it would draw a crowd! All of which, mesdames, is intended to inform you, that if, among the people you have the honor of knowing, there should happen to be one who'd like to make an acquaintance--virtuous acquaintance--a pretty little left-handed marriage--why she needn't look any farther! I'm her man--Victor-Mederic Gautruche! a home body, a genuine house-ivy for sentiment! She has only to apply at my former hotel, _La Clef de Surete_. And gay as a hunchback who's just drowned his wife! Gautruche, called Gogo-la-Gaiete, egad! A pretty fellow who knows what's what, who doesn't beat about the bush, a good old body who takes 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 and hurled it twenty yards away. "Long live the walls! They're the same to papa that the sky is to the good G.o.d! Gogo-la-Gaiete paints them through the week and beats them on Monday![2] And with all that not jealous, not ugly, not a wife-beater, but a real love of a man, who never harmed one of the fair s.e.x in his life! If you want physique, _parbleu_! I'm your man!"

He rose to his feet and, drawing up his wavering body, clad in an old blue coat with gilt b.u.t.tons, to its full height, removing his gray hat so as to show his perspiring, polished, bald skull, and tossing his old plucked _gamin's_ head, he continued: "You see what it is! It isn't a very attractive piece of property; it doesn't help it to exhibit it. But it 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 billiard ball, a witchgra.s.s beard that would make good herb-tea, foundations not too solid, feet as long as La Villette--and with all the rest thin enough to take a bath in a musket-barrel. There's the bill of lading!

Pa.s.s the prospectus along! If any woman wants all that in a lump--any respectable person--not too young--who won't amuse herself by painting me too yellow--you understand, I don't ask for a Princess of Batignolles--why, sure as you're born, I'm her man!"

Germinie seized Gautruche's gla.s.s, half emptied it at a draught and held out the side from which she had drunk to him.

At nightfall the party returned on foot. When they reached the fortifications, Gautruche drew a large heart with the point of his knife on 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 a plaster panel: _Madame Merlin_. _Dresses cut and tried on, two francs_, they stopped at a stone staircase of three steps leading into a dark pa.s.sage, at the end of which shone the red light of an Argand lamp. At the entrance to the pa.s.sage, these words were printed in black on a wooden sign:

_Hotel of the Little Blue Hand._

XLIX

Mederie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians graphically call _boyaux rouges_.[3] Always a little tipsy, tipsy from yesterday when he had drunk nothing to-day, he looked at life through the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched away into the darkness. _Ennui_, care, want, had gained no hold upon him; 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 right arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three sous he was sure of a small gla.s.s of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the world seemed sad to him--except a gla.s.s of water.

With this drunkard's expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety of his profession, the good humor and the warm-heartedness of that free, unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks distraction in singing, and flings the workmen's _blague_ at pa.s.sers-by, from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an instant in aligning them, dash off capitals off-hand. He was also renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not wealthy, 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-a.s.surance, his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the br.i.m.m.i.n.g gutters, the contact with the covers of books, bits of _feuilletons_ swallowed between two gla.s.ses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called _lists_, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if you 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 her head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her sh.e.l.l, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris.

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and the street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without _cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading which women of her cla.s.s have when they read at all. With the two or three kept women in whose service she had been, she had pa.s.sed her nights 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 some of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who worked 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 of the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and one sou novels, and read them.

The air, the keen breath of Quartier Breda, full of the _verve_ of the artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had reached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people, she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligence corresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now, when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her old self and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for her enjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicated her with the wine that was poured into her gla.s.s. And thus it was that she sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people, uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was that she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.

L

As Germinie was returning to the house one morning at daybreak, she heard, 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 found that she was pursued, and as she turned a corner on the landing the concierge seized her. As soon as he recognized her, he said: "Oh! is it you? excuse me; don't be frightened! What a giddy creature you are! It surprises you to see me up so early, eh? It's on account of the thieving that'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 the cook 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. Adele added that it was making a good deal of talk in the street and that there were plenty of people who would believe it and repeat it. Germinie became very indignant and told her mistress all about it. Mademoiselle was even more indignant than she, and, feeling personally outraged by the insult, wrote instantly to the cook's mistress that she must put a stop at once to the slanderous statements concerning a girl who had been in her service twenty years, and for whom she would answer as for herself. The cook was reprimanded. Her husband in his wrath talked louder than ever. He made a great outcry and for several days filled the house with his project of going to the commissioner of police and calling upon him to question Germinie as to where she procured the money to start the _cremiere's_ son in business, as to where she procured the money to purchase a subst.i.tute for him, and how she paid the expenses of the men she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung over Germinie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell to the ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done all the injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden, overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and became overcast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which was so prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly the faculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness and appreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end of which it could find nothing but this e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n and this phrase: "Bah! I will kill myself!"

Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience all the effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night she saw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with her concealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noised abroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's account, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, by all that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and the shopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!

Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before the commissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word and that idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of the lower cla.s.ses; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is everywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source of calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between the police sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme and the arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive terrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would much rather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated in the dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all the unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made them objects of terror to her. Throughout the week her ears heard footsteps on the stairs coming to arrest her!

The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto had 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 of deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the distance, dying away in s.p.a.ce. The temptations that speak to the discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and her 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 of death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five flights--pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would give way and drag her down with it--praying that she might die without having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into s.p.a.ce to which she no longer felt equal.

"Why, you'll fall out!" said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt impulsively in her alarm. "What are you looking at down there in the courtyard?"

"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. "I tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing to do it!"

LI

Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark street.

At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and, going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours, shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness reigned. 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 a night's lodging may be had. She pa.s.sed by closed, hermetically-sealed shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark pa.s.sageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is handed to the jury at the a.s.sizes. As she went on, there were gloomy little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded form, tall, mouldy _portes-cocheres_, hedge-rows, within which could be vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertis.e.m.e.nts by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.

From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.

Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir and Montmartre.

The people who pa.s.sed that way--the workman returning from Paris whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her black cap--would stare at her as they pa.s.sed. Strange men acted as if they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.

She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see him.

At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie, exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still burning, and stand stupidly in the bright glare from the shop windows.

She welcomed the dazzling light in her eyes, she tried to allay her impatience by benumbing it. The objects to be seen through the perspiring windows of the wine-shops--the cooking utensils, the bowls of punch flanked by two empty bottles with sprigs of laurel protruding from their necks, the show-cases in which the liquors combined their varied colors in a single beam, a cup filled with plated spoons--these things would hold her attention for a long while. She would read the old announcements of lottery drawings placarded on the walls of a saloon, the advertis.e.m.e.nts of _gloria_--coffee with brandy--the inscriptions in yellow letters: _New wine, pure blood, 70 centimes._ For a whole quarter of an hour she would stand staring into a back room containing a man in a blouse sitting on a stool by a table, a stove-pipe, a slate, and two black tea-boards against the wall. Her fixed, vacant stare would rest, through the reddish mist, upon the dark forms of shoemakers leaning over their benches. It fell and lingered heedlessly upon a counter that was being washed, upon hands that were counting the receipts of the day, upon a tunnel or jug that was being scoured with sandstone. She had ceased to think. She would simply stand there, nailed to the spot and growing weaker and weaker, feeling her courage vanish from the mere weariness of standing on her feet, seeing things only through a sort of film as in a swoon, hearing the noise made by the muddy cabs rolling over the wet pavements only as a buzzing in her ears, ready to fall and compelled again and again to lean against the wall for support.

In her then condition of prostration and illness, with that semi-hallucination of vertigo that made her so timid of crossing the Seine and impelled her to cling to the bridge railings, it happened that, on certain evenings, when it rained, these fits of weakness that she had upon the outer boulevard a.s.sumed the terrors of a nightmare.

When the light from the lanterns, trembling in misty vapor, cast its varying, flickering reflection on the damp ground; when the pavements, the sidewalks, the earth, seemed to melt away and disappear under the rain, and there was no appearance of solidity anywhere in the aqueous darkness, the wretched creature, almost mad with fatigue, would fancy that she could see a flood rising in the gutter. A mirage of terror would show her suddenly the water all about her, and creeping constantly nearer to her. She would close her eyes, not daring to move, fearing to feel her feet slip from under her; she would begin to weep, and would weep on until someone pa.s.sed by and offered to escort her to the _Hotel of the Little Blue Hand_.

LII

She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last place of refuge. She would fly from the rain and snow and cold, from fear, despair, and fatigue. She would go up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's closed doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely about her in order to leave room for those who went and came up that long steep ladder, and would draw back as far as possible into the corner in order that her shame might fill but little s.p.a.ce on the narrow landing.

From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets, of families heaped together in a single room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house, came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, and swallow a mouthful of it to avoid being ill.

But the staircase had its pa.s.sers, too: honest workmen's wives went up with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint of wine for supper. Their feet would rub against her as they pa.s.sed, and as they went farther up, Germinie would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and falling upon her with more crushing force at every floor. The children--little girls in _fanchons_ who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood--she saw them stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her; then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs, and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight, she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone might tread upon--having no control of her faculties, dead to everything except the footsteps that she was listening for--and that did not come.

At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice would mount the stairs, stammering "_Canaille!_ _canaille_ of a saloon-keeper!--you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"