She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place, with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had never had any children. He took pity on the wretched girl, interested himself in her welfare, took care of her and made much of her. He took her into the country. He walked with her on the boulevards in the sunlight, and enjoyed the warmth the more for leaning on her arm. It delighted him to see her in good spirits. Often, to amuse her, he would take down a moth-eaten costume from his wardrobe and try to remember a fragment of some part that had gone from his memory. The mere sight of this little maid and her white cap was like a ray of returning youth to him. In his old age, Jocrisse leaned upon her with the good-fellowship, the pleasures and the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen, when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout, 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 still retains its hold upon the hearts of the people. They do not realize the secret, delicate fascination it has for the woman of the people. They do not realize what confession and the confessor are to the impoverished souls of those poor women. In the priest who listens and whose voice falls softly on her ear, the woman of toil and suffering sees not so much the minister of God, the judge of her sins, the arbiter of her welfare, 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 in her, a feverish, trembling, sensitive, wounded something, a restlessness and, 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 of pouring 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 and an arm to lean upon. There are in her mind things that she must tell, and concerning which she would like to be questioned, pitied and comforted. She dreams of a compassionate interest, a tender sympathy for hidden feelings of which she is ashamed. Her masters may be the kindest, the most friendly, the most approachable of masters to the woman in their employ: their kindness to her will still be of the same sort that they bestow upon a domestic animal. They will be uneasy concerning her appetite and her health; they will look carefully after the animal part of her, and that will be all. It will not occur to them that she can suffer elsewhere than in her body, and they will not dream that she can have the heartache, the sadness and immaterial pain for which they seek relief by confiding in those of their own station. In their eyes, the woman who sweeps and does the cooking, has no ideas that can cause her to be sad or thoughtful, and they never speak to her of her thoughts. To whom, 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 the world, a superior creature, a well-educated gentleman, who knows everything, speaks well, is always accessible, gentle, patient, attentive, and seems to feel no scorn for the most humble soul, the most shabbily dressed penitent. The priest alone listens to the woman in a cap. He alone takes an interest in her secret sufferings, in the things that disturb and agitate her and that bring to a maid, as well as to her mistress, the sudden longing to weep, or excite a tempest within her. There is none but he to encourage her outpourings, to draw from her those things which the irony of her daily life holds back, to look to the state of her moral health; none but he to raise her above her material life, none but he to cheer her with moving words of charity and hope,—such divine words as she has never heard from the mouths of the men of her family and of her class.

After entering the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, Germinie became profoundly religious and cared for nothing but the church. She abandoned herself little by little to the sweet delight of confession, to the priest's smooth, tranquil bass voice that came to her from the darkness, to the conversations which resembled the touch of soothing words, and from which she went forth refreshed, light of heart, free from care, and happy with a delightful sense of relief, as if a balm had been applied to all the tender, suffering, fettered portions of her being.

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

Soon the confessional became a sort of sacred, idolized rendezvous for Germinie's thoughts. Every day it was her first idea, the theme of her first 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, with its oaken frame with fillets of gold, its pediment in the shape of a winged angel's head, its green curtain with the motionless folds, and the mysterious darkness on both sides. It seemed to her that now her whole life centred there, and that every hour tended thither. She lived through the week looking forward to that longed-for, prayed-for, promised day. On Thursday, she began to be impatient; she felt, in the redoubling of her blissful agony, the material drawing near, as it were, of the blessed Saturday evening; and when Saturday came and mademoiselle's dinner had been hastily served and her work done, she would make her escape and run to Notre-Dame de Lorette, hurrying to the penitential stool as to a lover's rendezvous. Her fingers dipped in holy water and a genuflexion duly made, she would glide over the flags, between the rows of chairs, as softly as a cat steals across a carpeted floor. With bent head, almost crawling, she would go noiselessly forward in the shadow of the side aisles, until she reached the mysterious, veiled confessional, where she would pause and await her turn, absorbed in 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 to talk at great length and tell him, with many words, of all her petty troubles. He was indulgent to the diffuseness of a suffering soul, and permitted her to pour out freely her most trivial afflictions. He listened while she set forth her anxieties, her longings, her troubles; he did not repel or treat with scorn any portion of the confidences of a servant who spoke to him of all the most delicate, secret concerns of her 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. A great sorrow had impelled him, crushed and broken, to assume the gown wherein he wore mourning for his heart. There remained something of the man in the depths of his being, and he listened, with melancholy compassion, to the outpouring of this maidservant's suffering heart. He understood that Germinie needed him, that he sustained and strengthened her, that he saved her from herself and removed her from the temptations to which her nature exposed her. He was conscious of a sad sympathy for that heart overflowing with affection, for the ardent, yet tractable girl, for the unhappy creature who knew nothing of her own nature, who was promised to passion by every impulse of her heart, by her whole body, and who betrayed in every detail of her person the vocation of her temperament. Enlightened by his past experience, he was amazed and terrified sometimes by the gleams that emanated from her, by the flame that shot from her eyes at the outburst of love in a prayer, by the evident tendency of her confessions, by her constantly recurring to that scene of violence, that scene in which her perfectly sincere purpose to resist seemed to the priest to have been betrayed by a convulsion of the senses that was stronger than she.

This fever of religion lasted several years, during which Germinie lived a concentrated, silent, happy life, entirely devoted to God's service—at least she thought so. Her confessor, however, had come gradually to the conclusion that all her adoration tended toward himself. By her glances, by her blushes, by the words she no longer said to him, and by others which she made bold to say to him for the first time, he realized that his penitent's devotion was going astray and becoming unduly fervent, deceiving itself as to its object. She watched for him when the services were at an end, followed him into the sacristy, hung on his skirts, ran into the church after his cassock. The confessor tried to warn her, to divert her amorous fervor from himself. He became more reserved and assumed a cold demeanor. In despair at this change, at his apparent indifference, Germinie, feeling bitter and hurt, confessed to him one day, in the confessional, the hatred that had taken possession of her for two young girls, who were his favorite penitents. Thereupon the priest dismissed her, without discussion, and sent her to another confessor. Germinie went once or twice to confess to this other confessor; then she ceased to go; soon she ceased even to think of going, and of all her religion naught remained in her mind but a certain far-off sweetness, like the faint odor of burned-out incense.

Affairs had reached that point when mademoiselle fell ill. Throughout her illness, as Germinie did not want to leave her, she did not attend mass. And on the first Sunday—when mademoiselle, being fully recovered, did not require her care, she was greatly surprised to find that "her devotee" remained at home and did not run away to church.

"Oho!" said she, "so you don't go and see your cures nowadays? What have they done to you, eh?"

"Nothing," said Germinie.



V

"There, mademoiselle!—Look at me," said Germinie.

It was a few months later. She had asked her mistress's permission to go that evening to the wedding ball of her grocer's sister, who had chosen her for her maid-of-honor, and she had come to exhibit herself en grande toilette, in her low-necked muslin dress.

Mademoiselle raised her eyes from the old volume, printed in large type, which she was reading, removed her spectacles, placed them in the book to mark her place, and exclaimed:

"What, my little bigot, you at a ball! Do you know, my girl, this seems to me downright nonsense! You and the hornpipe! Faith, all you need now is to want to get married! A deuce of a want, that! But if you marry, I warn you that I won't keep you—mind that! I've no desire to wait on your brats! Come a little nearer——Oho! why——bless my soul! Mademoiselle Show-all! We're getting to be a bit of a flirt lately, I find——"

"Why no, mademoiselle," Germinie tried to say.

"And then," continued Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, following out her thought, "among you people, the men are such sweet creatures! They'll spend all you have—to say nothing of the blows. But marriage—I am sure that that nonsensical idea of getting married buzzes around in your head when you see the others. That's what gives you that simper, I'll wager. Bon Dieu de Dieu! Now turn a bit, so that I can see you," said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, with an abrupt change of tone to one that was almost caressing; and placing her thin hands on the arms of her easy-chair, crossing her legs and moving her foot back and forth, she set about inspecting Germinie and her toilet.

"What the devil!" said she, after a few moments of silent scrutiny, "what! is it really you?——Then I have never used my eyes to look at you.——Good God, yes!——But——but——" She mumbled more vague exclamations between her teeth.——"Where the deuce did you get that mug like an amorous cat's?" she said at last, and continued to gaze at her.

Germinie was ugly. Her hair, of so dark a chestnut that it seemed black, curled and twisted in unruly waves, in little stiff, rebellious locks, which escaped and stood up all over her head, despite the pomade upon her shiny bandeaux. Her smooth, narrow, swelling brow protruded above the shadow of the deep sockets in which her eyes were buried and sunken to such a depth as almost to denote disease; small, bright, sparkling eyes they were, made to seem smaller and brighter by a constant girlish twinkle that softened and lighted up their laughter. They were neither brown eyes nor blue eyes, but were of an undefinable, changing gray, a gray that was not a color, but a light! Emotion found expression therein in the flame of fever, pleasure in the flashing rays of a sort of intoxication, passion in phosphorescence. Her short, turned-up nose, with large, dilated, palpitating nostrils, was one of those noses of which the common people say that it rains inside: upon one side, at the corner of the eye was a thick, swollen blue vein. The square head of the Lorraine race was emphasized in her broad, high, prominent cheek-bones, which were well-covered with the traces of small-pox. The most noticeable defect in her face was the too great distance between the nose and mouth. This lack of proportion gave an almost apish character to the lower part of the head, where the expansive mouth, with white teeth and full lips that looked as if they had been crushed, they were so flat, smiled at you with a strange, vaguely irritating smile.

Her decollete dress disclosed her neck, the upper part of her breast, her shoulders and her white back, presenting a striking contrast to her swarthy face. It was a lymphatic sort of whiteness, the whiteness, at once unhealthy and angelic, of flesh in which there is no life. She had let her arms fall by her sides—round, smooth arms with a pretty dimple at the elbow. Her wrists were delicate; her hands, which did not betray the servant, were embellished with a lady's fingernails. And lazily, with graceful sloth, she allowed her indolent figure to curve and sway;—a figure that a garter might span, and that was made even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an impossible waist, absurdly small but adorable, like everything in woman that offends one's sense of proportion by its diminutiveness.

From this ugly woman emanated a piquant, mysterious charm. Light and shadow, jostling and intercepting each other on her face on which hollows and protuberances abounded, imparted to it that suggestion of libertinism which the painter of love scenes gives to the rough sketch of his mistress. Everything about her,—her mouth, her eyes, her very plainness—was instinct with allurement and solicitation. Her person exhaled an aphrodisiac charm, which challenged and laid fast hold of the other sex. It unloosed desire, and caused an electric shock. Sensual thoughts were naturally and involuntarily aroused by her, by her gestures, her gait, her slightest movement—even by the air in which her body had left one of its undulations. Beside her, one felt as if he were near one of those disturbing, disquieting creatures, burning with the love disease and communicating it to others, whose face appears to man in his restless hours, torments his listless noonday thoughts, haunts his nights and trespasses upon his dreams.

In the midst of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's scrutiny, Germinie stooped over her, and covered her hand with hurried kisses.

"There—there—enough of that," said Mademoiselle. "You would soon wear out the skin—with your way of kissing. Come, run along, enjoy yourself, and try not to stay out too late. Don't get all tired out."

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was left alone. She placed her elbows on her knees, stared at the fire and stirred the burning wood with the tongs. Then, as she was accustomed to do when deeply preoccupied, she struck herself two or three sharp little blows on the neck with the flat of her hand, and thereby set her black cap all awry.



VI

When she mentioned the subject of marriage to Germinie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil touched upon the real cause of her trouble. She placed her hand upon the seat of her ennui. Her maid's uneven temper, her distaste for life, the languor, the emptiness, the discontent of her existence, arose from that disease which medical science calls the melancholia of virgins. The torment of her twenty-four years was the ardent, excited, poignant longing for marriage, for that state which was too holy and honorable for her, and which seemed impossible of attainment in face of the confession her womanly probity would insist upon making of her fall and her unworthiness. Family losses and misfortunes forcibly diverted her mind from her own troubles.

Her brother-in-law, her sister the concierge's husband, had dreamed the dream of all Auvergnats: he had undertaken to increase his earnings as concierge by the profits of a dealer in bric-a-brac. He had begun modestly with a stall in the street, at the doors of the marts where executors' sales are held; and there you could see, set out upon blue paper, plated candlesticks, ivory napkin rings, colored lithographs with frames of gold lace on a black ground, and three or four odd volumes of Buffon. His profit on the plated candlesticks intoxicated him. He hired a dark shop on a passage way, opposite an umbrella mender's, and began to trade upon the credulity that goes in and out of the lower rooms in the Auction Exchange. He sold assiettes a coq, pieces of Jean Jacques Rousseau's wooden shoe, and water-colors by Ballue, signed Watteau. In that business he threw away what he had made, and ran in debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His wife, in order to straighten matters out a little and to try and get out of debt, asked for and obtained a place as box-opener at the Theatre-Historique. She hired her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening, went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at five. After a few months she caught cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles; the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more was heard of him.

When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran to the house of an old woman who made a living in those curious industries which prevent poverty from absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles into equal lengths for brushes, sometimes she sorted out bits of gingerbread. When those industries failed, she did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars' children. In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went and took possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold it for ten or twelve sous when the crowd arrived. In order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the den where she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall, to the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees. Germinie, who knew her from having given her the crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a servant's room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her abode there with the little one. She did it on the impulse of the moment, without reflection. She did not remember her sister's harsh treatment of her when she was enceinte, so that she had no need to forgive it.

Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her niece. She determined to rescue her from death and restore her to life by dint of careful nursing. She would rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child, give her her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed, look at her, and rush down again, all out of breath and red with pleasure. Care, caresses, the breath from the heart with which we revive a tiny flame on the point of dying out, consultations, doctor's visits, costly medicines, the remedies of the wealthy,—Germinie spared nothing for the little one and gave her everything. Her wages flowed through that channel. For almost a year she gave her beef juice every morning: sleepyhead that she was, she left her bed at five o'clock in the morning to prepare it, and awoke without being called, as mothers do. The child was out of danger at last, when Germinie received a visit one morning from her sister the dressmaker, who had been married two or three years to a machinist, and who came now to bid her adieu: her husband was going to accompany some fellow-workmen who had been hired to go to Africa. She was going with him and she proposed to Germinie that they should take the little one with them as a playmate for their own child. They offered to take her off her hands. Germinie, they said, would have to pay only for the journey. It was a separation she would have to make up her mind to sooner or later on account of her mistress. And then, said the sister, she was the child's aunt too. And she heaped words upon words to induce Germinie to give them the child, with whom she and her husband expected, after their arrival in Africa, to move Germinie to pity, to get possession of her wages, to play upon her heart and her purse.

It cost Germinie very dear to part with her niece. She had staked a portion of her existence upon the child. She was attached to her by her anxiety and her sacrifices. She had disputed possession of her with disease and had won the day; the girl's life was her miracle. And yet she realized that she could never take her to mademoiselle's apartments; that mademoiselle, at her age, with the burden of her years, and an aged person's need of tranquillity, could never endure the constant noise and movement of a child. And then, the little girl's presence in the house would cause idle gossip and set the whole street agog: people would say she was her child. Germinie made a confidante of her mistress. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil knew the whole story. She knew that she had taken charge of her niece, although she had pretended not to know it; she had chosen to see nothing in order to permit everything. She advised Germinie to entrust her niece to her sister, pointing out to her all the difficulties in the way of keeping her herself, and she gave her money to pay for the journey of the whole family.

The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie. She found herself left alone and without occupation. Not having the child, she knew not what to love; her heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the emptiness of life without the little one, that she turned once more to religion and transferred her affections to the church.

Three months had passed when she received news of her sister's death. The husband, who was one of the whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics, gave her in his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position, with the burial to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented him from working, two young children, without counting the little girl, and a household with no wife to heat the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her thoughts turned to living in that house, beside that poor man, among the poor children, in that horrible Africa; and a vague longing to sacrifice herself began to awaken within her. Other letters followed, in which, while thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave to his poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that enveloped him, a still more dramatic coloring—the coloring that the common people impart to trifles, with its memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its fragments of vile books. Once caught by the blague of this misery, Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she could hear the cries of the children calling her. She became completely absorbed, buried in the project and resolution of going to them. She was haunted by the idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and over incessantly in the depths of her mind, without a word. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, noticing her thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what the matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She was pulled this way and that, tormented between what seemed to her a duty and what seemed to her ingratitude, between her mistress and her sisters' blood. She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle. And again she said to herself that God did not wish her to abandon her family. She would look about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must go!" Then she would fear that mademoiselle might be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied that she could already see someone stealing her mistress. At other moments, when her religious ideas impelled her to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief, whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice with the greater impatience and ardor. Often the whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would become herself once more, and would fail to recognize herself. She felt that she was bound to her mistress absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror at having so much as thought of detaching her own life from hers. She struggled thus for two years. Then she learned one fine day, by chance, that her niece had died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law had concealed the child's death in order to maintain his hold upon her, and to lure her to him in Africa, with her few sous. Germinie's illusions being wholly dispelled by that revelation, she was cured on the spot. She hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going away.



VII

About this time a small creamery at the end of the street, with few customers, changed hands, as a result of the sale of the real estate by order of court. The shop was renovated and repainted. The front windows were embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids of chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and coffee-cups filled with flowers, alternating with small liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the shelves. At the door glistened the sign—a copper milk jug divided in the middle.

The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern, the new cremiere, was a person of about fifty years of age, whose corpulence passed all bounds, and who still retained some debris of beauty, half submerged in fat. It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up in business with the money of an old gentleman, whose servant she had been until his death, in her native province, near Langres; for it happened that she was a countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same village, but from a small place near by; and although she and mademoiselle's maid had never met nor seen each other in the country, they knew each other by name and were drawn together by the fact that they had acquaintances in common and could compare memories of the same places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected, fawning creature. She said: "My love" to everybody, talked in a piping voice, and played the child with the querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles. She adored secrets, twisted everything into a confidential communication, invented stories and always whispered in your ear. Her life was passed in gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the newspapers, she wept for the sake of weeping.

Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity by this wheedling, talkative cremiere, who was always in a state of intense emotion, calling upon others to open their hearts to her, and apparently so affectionate. After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's doors that did not come from Mere Jupillon. Germinie procured everything, or almost everything there. She passed hours in the shop. Once there it was hard work for her to leave; she remained there, unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive cowardice detained her. At the door she would stop and talk on, in order to delay her departure. She felt bound to the cremiere by the invisible charm of familiar places to which you constantly return, and which end by embracing you like things that would love you. And then, too, in her eyes the shop meant Madame Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs; she always had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed them and talked to them; and when she was warm with their warmth, she would feel in the depths of her heart the contentment of a beast rubbing against her little ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of the quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,—how this one had failed to pay her note and that one had received a carriage load of flowers; it meant a place that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace peignoir going to town on the maid's arm.

In a word everything tended to attach her to the place. Her intimacy with the cremiere was strengthened by all the mysterious bonds of friendship between women of the people, by the continual chatter, the daily exchange of the trivial affairs of life, the conversation for the sake of conversing, the repetition of the same bonjour and the same bonsoir, the division of caresses among the same animals, the naps side by side and chair against chair. The shop at last became her regular place for idling away her time, a place where her thoughts, her words, her body and her very limbs were marvelously at ease. There came a time when her happiness consisted in sitting drowsily of an evening in a straw arm-chair, beside Mere Jupillon—sound asleep with her spectacles on her nose—and holding the dogs rolled in a ball in the skirt of her dress; and while the lamp, almost dying, burned pale upon the counter, she would sit idly there, letting her glance lose itself at the back of the shop, and gradually grow dim, with her ideas, as her eyes rested vaguely upon a triumphal arch of snail shells joined together with old moss, beneath which stood a little copper Napoleon, with his hands behind his back.



VIII

Madame Jupillon, who claimed to have been married and signed herself Widow Jupillon, had a son. He was still a child. She had placed him at Saint-Nicholas, the great religious establishment where, for thirty francs a month, rudimentary instruction and a trade are furnished to the children of the common people, and to many natural children. Germinie fell into the way of accompanying Madame Jupillon when she went to see Bibi on Thursdays. This visit became a means of distraction to her, something to look forward to. She would urge the mother to hurry, would always arrive first at the omnibus office, and was content to sit with her arms resting on a huge basket of provisions all the way.

It happened that Mere Jupillon had trouble with her leg—a carbuncle that prevented her from walking for nearly eighteen months. Germinie went alone to Saint-Nicholas, and as she was promptly and easily led to devote herself to others, she took as deep an interest in that child as if he were connected with her in some way. She did not miss a single Thursday and always arrived with her hands full of the last week's desserts, and with cakes and fruit and sweetmeats she had bought. She would kiss the urchin, inquire for his health, and feel to see if he had his knitted vest under his blouse; she would notice how flushed he was from running, would wipe his face with her handkerchief and make him show her the soles of his shoes so that she could see if there were any holes in them. She would ask if his teachers were satisfied with him, if he attended to his duties and if he had had many good marks. She would talk to him of his mother and bid him love the good Lord, and until the clock struck two she would walk with him in the courtyard: the child would offer her his arm, as proud as you please to be with a woman much better dressed than the majority of those who came there—with a woman in silk. He was anxious to learn the flageolet. It cost only five francs a month, but his mother would not give them. Germinie carried him the hundred sous every month, on the sly. It was a humiliating thing to him to wear the little uniform blouse when he went out to walk, and on the two or three occasions during the year when he went to see his mother. On his birthday, one year, Germinie unfolded a large parcel before him: she had had a tunic made for him; it is doubtful if twenty of his comrades in the whole school belonged to families in sufficiently easy circumstances to wear such garments.

She spoiled him thus for several years, not allowing him to suffer with a longing for anything, encouraging the caprices and the pride of wealthy children in the poor child, softening for him the privations and hardships of that trade school, where children were formed for a laboring life, wore blouses and ate off plates of brown earthenware; a school that by its toilsome apprenticeship hardened the children of the people to lives of toil. Meanwhile the boy was growing fast. Germinie did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was summoned before the abbe who was at the head of the school. He spoke to her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she succeeded at last in inducing the abbe to forgive the culprit. When she went down into the courtyard again she attempted to scold him; but at the first word of her moral lecture, Bibi suddenly cast in her face a glance and smile in which there was no trace of the child that he was the day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one to blush. A fortnight passed before she went again to Saint-Nicholas.



IX

About the time that young Jupillon left the boarding-school, a maid in the service of a kept woman who lived on the floor below mademoiselle sometimes passed the evening with Germinie at Madame Jupillon's. A native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which supplies Paris with coupe drivers and lorettes' waiting-maids, this girl was what is called in vulgar parlance: "a great bringue;" she was an awkward, wild-eyed creature, with the eyebrows of a water carrier. She soon fell into the habit of going there every evening. She treated everybody to cakes and liquors, amused herself by showing off little Jupillon, playing pat-a-cake with him, sitting on his knee, telling him to his face that he was a beauty, treating him like a child, playing the wanton with him and joking him because he was not a man. The boy, happy and proud of these attentions from the first woman who had ever taken notice of him, manifested before long his preference for Adele: so was the new-comer called.

Germinie was passionately jealous. Jealousy was the foundation of her nature; it was the dregs of her affection and gave it its bitter taste. Those whom she loved she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess them absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one but her. She could not permit them to take from her and bestow upon others the slightest fragment of their affection: as she had earned it, it no longer belonged to them; they were no longer entitled to dispose of it. She detested the people whom her mistress seemed to welcome more cordially than others, and with whom she was on most intimate terms. By her ill-humor and her sullen manner she had offended, had almost driven from the house, two or three of mademoiselle's old friends, whose visits wounded her; as if the old ladies came there for the purpose of abstracting something from the rooms, of taking a little of her mistress from her. People of whom she had once been fond became odious to her: she did not consider that they were fond enough of her; she hated them for all the love she wanted from them. Her heart was despotic and exacting in everything. As it gave all, it demanded all in return. At the least sign of coldness, at the slightest indication that she had a rival, she would fly into a rage, tear her hair, pass her nights in weeping, and execrate the whole world.

Seeing that other woman make herself at home in the shop and adopt a tone of familiarity with the young man, all Germinie's jealous instincts were aroused and changed to furious rage. Her hatred flew to arms and rebelled, with her disgust, against the shameless, brazen-faced creature, who could be seen on Sunday sitting at table on the outer boulevards with soldiers, and who had blue marks on her face on Monday. She did her utmost to induce Madame Jupillon to turn her away; but she was one of the best customers of the creamery, and the cremiere mildly refused to close her doors upon her. Germinie had recourse to the son and told him that she was a miserable creature. But that only served to attach the young man the closer to the vile woman, whose evil reputation delighted him. Moreover, he had the cruel mischievous instinct of youth, and he redoubled his attentions to her simply to see "the nose" that Germinie made and to enjoy her despair. Soon Germinie discovered that the woman's intentions were more serious than she had at first supposed: she began to understand what she wanted of the child,—for the tall youth of seventeen was still a child in her eyes. Thenceforward she hung upon their steps; she was always beside them, never left them alone for a moment, made one at all their parties, at the theatre or in the country, joined them in all their walks, was always at hand and in the way, seeking to hold Adele back, and to restore her sense of decency by a word in an undertone: "A mere boy! ain't you ashamed?" she would say to her. And the other would laugh aloud, as if it were a good joke.

When they left the theatre, enlivened and heated by the feverish excitement of the performance and the place; when they returned from an excursion to the country, laden with a long day's sunshine, intoxicated with the blue sky and the pure air, excited by the wine imbibed at dinner, amid the sportive liberties in which the woman of the people, drunk with enjoyment and with the delights of unlimited good cheer, and with the senses keyed up to the highest pitch of joviality, makes bold to indulge at night, Germinie tried to be always between the maid and Jupillon. She never relaxed her efforts to break the lovers' hold upon each other's arms, to unbind them, to uncouple them. Never wearying of the task, she was forever separating them, luring them away from each other. She placed her body between those bodies that were groping for each other. She glided between the hands outstretched to touch each other; she glided between the lips that were put forth in search of other proffered lips. But of all this that she prevented she felt the breath and the shock. She felt the pressure of the hands she held apart, the caresses that she caught on the wing and that missed their mark and went astray upon her. The hot breath of the kisses she intercepted blew upon her cheek. Involuntarily, and with a feeling of horror, she became a party to the embracing, she was infected with the desires aroused by this constant friction and struggling, which diminished day by day the young man's restraint and respect for her person.

It happened one day that she was less strong against herself than she had previously been. On that occasion she did not elude his advances so abruptly as usual. Jupillon felt that she stopped short. Germinie felt it even more keenly than he; but she was at the end of her efforts, exhausted with the torture she had undergone. The love which, coming from another, she had turned aside from Jupillon, had slowly taken full possession of her own heart. Now it was firmly rooted there, and, bleeding with jealousy, she found that she was incapable of resistance, weak and fainting, like a person fatally wounded, in presence of the joy that had come to her.

She repelled the young man's audacious attempts, however, without a word. She did not dream of belonging to him otherwise than as a friend, or giving way farther than she had done. She lived upon the thought of love, believing that she could live upon it always. And in the ecstatic exaltation of her thoughts, she put aside all memory of her fall, and repressed her desires. She remained shuddering and pure, lost and suspended in abysses of affection, neither enjoying nor wishing for aught from the lover but a caress, as if her heart were made only for the joy of kissing.



X

This happy though unsatisfied love produced a strange physiological phenomenon in Germinie's physical being. One would have said that the passion that was alive within her renewed and transformed her lymphatic temperament. She did not seem, as before, to extract her life, drop by drop, from a penurious spring: it flowed through her arteries in a full, generous stream; she felt the tingling sensation of rich blood over her whole body. She seemed to be filled with the warm glow of health, and the joy of living beat its wings in her breast like a bird in the sunlight.

A marvelous animation had come to her. The miserable nervous energy that once sustained her had given place to healthy activity, to bustling, restless, overflowing gayety. She had no trace now of the weakness, the dejection, the prostration, the supineness, the sluggishness that formerly distinguished her. The heavy, drowsy feeling in the morning was a thing of the past; she awoke feeling fresh and bright, and alive in an instant to the cheer of the new day. She dressed in haste, playfully; her agile fingers moved of themselves, and she was amazed to be so bright and full of activity during the hours of faintness before breakfast, when she had so often felt her heart upon her lips. And throughout the day she had the same consciousness of physical well-being, the same briskness of movement. She must be always on the move, walking, running, doing something, expending her strength. At times all that she had lived through seemed to have no existence; the sensations of living that she had hitherto experienced seemed to her like a far-off dream, or as if dimly seen in the background of a sleeping memory. The past lay behind her, as if she had traversed it, covered with a veil like one in a swoon, or with the unconsciousness of a somnambulist. It was the first time that she had experienced the feeling, the impression, at once bitter and sweet, violent and celestial, of the game of life brilliant in its plenitude, its regularity and its power.

She ran up and downstairs for a nothing. At a word from mademoiselle she would trip down the whole five flights. When she was seated, her feet danced on the floor. She brushed and scrubbed and beat and shook and washed and set to rights, without rest or reprieve, always at work, filling the apartment with her goings and comings, and the incessant bustle that followed her about.—"Mon Dieu!" her mistress would say, stunned by the uproar she made, just like a child,—"you're turning things upside down, Germinie! that will do for that!"

One day, when she went into Germinie's kitchen, mademoiselle saw a little earth in a cigar box on the leads.—"What's that?" she asked.—"That's grass—that I planted—to look at," said Germinie.—"So you're in love with grass now, eh? All you need now is to have canaries!"



XI

In the course of a few months, Germinie's life, her whole life belonged to the cremiere. Mademoiselle's service was not exacting and took but little time. A whiting or a cutlet—that was all the cooking there was to be done. Mademoiselle might have kept her with her in the evening for company: she preferred, however, to send her away, to drive her out of doors, to force her to take a little air and diversion. She asked only that she would return at ten o'clock to help her to bed; and yet when Germinie was a little late, mademoiselle undressed herself and went to bed alone very comfortably. Every hour that her mistress left her at leisure, Germinie passed in the shop. She fell into the habit of going down to the creamery in the morning, when the shutters were removed, and generally carried them inside; she would take her cafe au lait there and remain until nine o'clock, when she would go back and give mademoiselle her chocolate; and between breakfast and dinner she found excuses for returning two or three times, delaying and chattering in the back-shop on the slightest pretext. "What a magpie you are getting to be!" mademoiselle would say, in a scolding voice, but with a smiling face.

At half past five, when her mistress's little dinner was cleared away, she would run down the stairs four at a time, install herself at Mere Jupillon's, wait until ten o'clock, clamber up the five flights, and in five minutes undress her mistress, who submitted unresistingly, albeit she was somewhat astonished that Germinie should be in such haste to go to bed; she remembered the time when she had a mania for moving her sleepy body from one easy-chair to another, and was never willing to go up to her room. While the candle was still smoking on mademoiselle's night table, Germinie would be back at the creamery, this time to remain until midnight, until one o'clock; often she did not go until a policeman, noticing the light, tapped on the shutters and made them close up.

In order to be always there and to have the right to be always there, to make herself a part of the shop, to keep her eyes constantly upon the man she loved, to hover about him, to keep him, to be always brushing against him, she had become the servant of the establishment. She swept the shop, she prepared the old woman's meals and the food for the dogs. She waited upon the son; she made his bed, she brushed his clothes, she waxed his boots, happy and proud to touch what he touched, thrilling with pleasure when she placed her hand where he placed his body, and ready to kiss the mud upon the leather of his boots, because it was his!

She did the menial work, she kept the shop, she served the customers. Madame Jupillon rested everything upon her shoulders; and while the good-natured girl was working and perspiring, the bulky matron, assuming the majestic, leisurely air of an annuitant, anchored upon a chair in the middle of the sidewalk and inhaling the fresh air of the street, fingered and rattled the precious coin in the capacious pocket beneath her apron—the coin that rings so sweetly in the ears of the petty tradesmen of Paris, that the retired shopkeeper is melancholy beyond words at first, because he no longer has the chinking and the tinkling under his hand.



XII

When the spring came, Germinie said to Jupillon almost every evening: "Suppose we go as far as the beginning of the fields?"

Jupillon would put on his flannel shirt with red and black squares, and his black velvet cap; and they would start for what the people of the quarter call "the beginning of the fields."

They would go up the Chaussee Clignancourt, and, with the flood of Parisians from the faubourg hurrying to drink a little fresh air, would walk on toward the great patch of sky that rose straight from the pavements, at the top of the ascent, between the two lines of houses, unobstructed except by an occasional omnibus. The air was growing cooler and the sun shone only upon the roofs of the houses and the chimneys. As from a great door opening into the country, there came from the end of the street and from the sky beyond, a breath of boundless space and liberty.

At the Chateau-Rouge they found the first tree, the first foliage. Then, at Rue du Chateau, the horizon opened before them in dazzling beauty. The fields stretched away in the distance, glistening vaguely in the powdery, golden haze of seven o'clock. All nature trembled in the daylight dust that the day leaves in its wake, upon the verdure it blots from sight and the houses it suffuses with pink.

Frequently they descended the footpath covered with the figures of the game of hop-scotch marked out in charcoal, by long walls with an occasional overhanging branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens between. At their left rose tree-tops filled with light, clustering foliage pierced by the beams of the setting sun, which cast lines of fire across the bars of the iron gateways. After the gardens came hedgerows, estates for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line of projected streets and stretching out their jagged walls into empty space, with heaps of broken bottles at their feet; large, low, plastered houses, with windows filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the Y of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into enclosures that resembled barnyards, studded with little mounds on which goats were browsing.

They would stop here and there and smell the flowers, inhale the perfume of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf in passing and nibble at it.

Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles and in fantastic figures over her head. The birds called. The sky answered the cages. She heard everything about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at the women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their shirt sleeves in the little gardens, the mothers on the doorsteps with their little ones between their legs.



At the foot of the slope the pavement came to an end. The street was succeeded by a broad, white, chalky, dusty road, made of debris, old pieces of plaster, crumbs of lime and bricks; a sunken road, with deep ruts, polished on the edges, made by the iron tires of the huge great wheels of carts laden with hewn stone. At that point began the things that collect where Paris ends, the things that grow where grass does not grow, one of those arid landscapes that large cities create around them, the first zone of suburbs intra muros where nature is exhausted, the soil used up, the fields sown with oyster shells. Beyond was a wilderness of half-enclosed yards displaying numbers of carts and trucks with their shafts in the air against the sky, stone-cutters' sheds, factories built of boards, unfinished workmen's houses, full of gaps and open to the light, and bearing the mason's flag, wastes of gray and white sand, kitchen gardens marked out with cords, and, on the lower level, bogs to which the embankment of the road slopes down in oceans of small stones.

Soon they would reach the last lantern hanging on a green post. People were still coming and going about them. The road was alive and amused the eyes. They met women carrying their husband's canes, lorettes in silk dresses leaning on the arms of their blouse-clad brothers, old women in bright-colored ginghams walking about with folded arms, enjoying a moment's rest from labor. Workmen were drawing their children in little wagons, urchins returning with their rods from fishing at Saint-Ouen, and men and women dragging branches of flowering acacia at the ends of sticks.

Sometimes a pregnant woman would pass, holding out her arms to a yet small child, and casting the shadow of her pregnancy upon the wall.

And everyone moved tranquilly, blissfully, at a pace that told of the wish to delay, with the awkward ease and the happy indolence of those who walk for pleasure. No one was in a hurry, and against the unbroken horizon line, crossed from time to time by the white smoke of a railroad train, the groups of promenaders were like black spots, almost motionless, in the distance.

Behind Montmartre, they came to those great moats, as it were, those sloping squares, where narrow, gray, much-trodden paths cross and recross. A few blades of shriveled, yellow grass grew thereabout, softened by the rays of the setting sun, which they could see, all ablaze, between the houses. And Germinie loved to watch the wool-combers at work there, the quarry horses at pasture in the bare fields, the madder-red trousers of the soldiers who were playing at bowls, the children flying kites that made black spots in the clear air. Passing all these, they turned to cross the bridge over the railroad by the wretched settlement of ragpickers, the stonemasons' quarter at the foot of Clignancourt hill. They would walk quickly by those houses built of materials stolen from demolished buildings, and exuding the horrors they conceal; the wretched structures, half cabin, half burrow, caused Germinie a vague feeling of terror: it seemed to her as if all the crimes of Night were lurking there.

But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red beards. The air was full of rich harmonies. Below her, in the moat, a musical society was playing at each corner. Before her eyes was a multi-colored crowd, white blouses, children in blue aprons running around, a game of riding at the ring in progress, wine shops, cake shops, fried fish stalls, and shooting galleries half hidden in clumps of verdure, from which arose staves bearing the tricolor; and farther away, in a bluish haze, a line of tree tops marked the location of a road. To the right she could see Saint-Denis and the towering basilica; at her left, above a line of houses that were becoming indistinct, the sun was setting over Saint-Ouen in a disk of cherry-colored flame, and projecting upon the gray horizon shafts of light like red pillars that seemed to support it tremblingly. Often a child's balloon would pass swiftly across the dazzling expanse of sky.

They would go down, pass through the gate, walk along by the Lorraine sausage shops, the dealers in honeycomb, the board cabarets, the verdureless, still unpainted arbors, where a noisy multitude of men and women and children were eating fried potatoes, mussels and prawns, until they reached the first field, the first living grass: on the edge of the grass there was a handcart laden with gingerbread and peppermint lozenges, and a woman selling hot cocoa on a table in the furrow. A strange country, where everything was mingled—the smoke from the frying-pan and the evening vapor, the noise of quoits on the head of a cask and the silence shed from the sky, the city barrier and the idyllic rural scene, the odor of manure and the fresh smell of green wheat, the great human Fair and Nature! Germinie enjoyed it, however; and, urging Jupillon to go farther, walking on the very edge of the road, she would constantly step in among the grain to enjoy the fresh, cool sensation of the stalks against her stockings. When they returned she always wanted to go upon the slope once more. The sun had by that time disappeared and the sky was gray below, pink in the centre and blue above. The horizon grew dark; from green the trees became a dark brown and melted into the sky; the zinc roofs of the wine shops looked as if the moon were shining upon them, fires began to appear in the darkness, the crowd became gray, and the white linen took on a bluish tinge. Little by little everything would fade away, be blotted out, lose its form and color in a dying remnant of colorless daylight, and through the increasing darkness the voices of a class whose life begins at night, and the voice of the wine beginning to sing, would arise, mingled with the din of the rattles. Upon the slope the tops of the tall grass waved to and fro in the gentle breeze. Germinie would make up her mind to go. She would wend her way homeward, filled with the influence of the falling night, abandoning herself to the uncertain vision of things half-seen, passing the dark houses, and finding that everything along her road had turned paler, as it were—wearied by the long walk over rough roads, and content to be weary and slow and half-fainting, and with a feeling of peace at her heart.

At the first lighted lanterns on Rue du Chateau, she would fall from her dream to the pavement.



XIII

Madame Jupillon's face always wore a pleased expression when Germinie appeared; when she kissed her she was very effusive, when she spoke to her her voice was caressing, when she looked at her her glance was most amiable. The huge creature's kind heart seemed, when with her, to abandon itself to the emotion, the affection, the trustfulness of a sort of maternal tenderness. She took Germinie into her confidence as to her business, as to her woman's secrets, as to the most private affairs of her life. She seemed to open her heart to her as to a person of her own blood, whom she desired to make familiar with matters of interest to the family. When she spoke of the future, she always referred to Germinie as one from whom she was never to be separated, and who formed a part of the household. Often she allowed certain discreet, mysterious smiles to escape her, smiles which made it appear that she saw all that was going on and was not angry. Sometimes, too, when her son was sitting by Germinie's side, she would let her eyes, moist with a mother's tears, rest upon them, and would embrace them with a glance that seemed to unite her two children and call down a blessing on their heads.

Without speaking, without ever uttering a word that could be construed as an engagement, without divulging her thoughts or binding herself in any way, and all the time repeating that her son was still very young to think of being married, she encouraged Germinie's hopes and illusions by her whole bearing, her airs of secret indulgence and of complicity, so far as her heart was concerned; by those meaning silences when she seemed to open to her a mother-in-law's arms. And displaying all her talents in the way of hypocrisy, drawing upon her hidden mines of sentiment, her good-natured shrewdness, and the consummate, intricate cunning that fat people possess, the corpulent matron succeeded in vanquishing Germinie's last resistance by dint of this tacit assurance and promise of marriage; and she finally allowed the young man's ardor to extort from her what she believed that she was giving in advance to the husband.



XIV

As Germinie was going down the servant's staircase one day, she heard Adele's voice calling her over the banister and telling her to bring her two sous' worth of butter and ten of absinthe.

"Oh! you can sit down a minute, you know you can," said Adele, when she brought her the absinthe and the butter. "I never see you now, you'll never come in. Come! you have plenty of time to be with your old woman. For my part, I couldn't live with an Antichrist's face like hers! So stay. This is the house without work to-day. There isn't a sou—madame's abed. Whenever there's no money, she goes to bed, does madame; she stays in bed all day, reading novels. Have some of this?"—And she offered her her glass of absinthe.—"No? oh! no, you don't drink. You're very foolish. It's a funny thing not to drink. Say, it would be very nice of you to write me a little line for my dearie. Hard work, you know. I have told you about it. See, here's madame's pen—and her paper—it smells good. Are you ready? He's a good fellow, my dear, and no mistake! He's in the butcher line as I told you. Ah! my word! I mustn't rub him the wrong way! When he's had a glass of blood after killing his beasts, he's like a madman—and if you're obstinate with him—Dame! why then he thumps you! But what would you have? He does that to make him strong. If you could see him thump himself on the breast—blows that would kill an ox, and say: 'That's a wall, that is!' Ah! he's a gentleman, I tell you! Are you thinking about the letter, eh? Make it one of the fetching kind. Say nice things to him, you know—and a little sad—he adores that. At the theatre he doesn't like anything that doesn't make him cry. Look here! Imagine that you're writing to a lover of your own."

Germinie began to write.

"Say, Germinie! Have you heard? Madame's taken a strange idea into her head. It's a funny thing about women like her, who can hold their heads up with the greatest of 'em, who can have everything, hobnob with kings if they choose! And there's nothing to be said—when one is like madame, you know, when one has such a body as that! And then the way they load themselves down with finery, with their tralala of dresses and lace everywhere and everything else—how do you suppose anyone can resist them? And if it isn't a gentleman, if it's someone like us—you can see how much more all that will catch him; a woman in velvet goes to his brain. Yes, my dear, just fancy, here's madame gone daft on that gamin of a Jupillon! That's all we needed to make us die of hunger here!"

Germinie, with her pen in the air over the letter she had begun, looked up at Adele, devouring her with her eyes.

"That brings you to a standstill, doesn't it?" said Adele, sipping her absinthe, her face lighted up with joy at sight of Germinie's discomposed features. "Oh! it is too absurd, really; but it's true, 'pon my word it's true. She noticed the gamin on the steps of the shop the other day, coming home from the races. She's been there two or three times on the pretence of buying something. She'll probably have some perfumery sent from there—to-morrow, I think.—Bah! it's sickening, isn't it? It's their affair. Well! what about my letter? Is it what I told you that makes you so stupid? You played the prude—I didn't know—Oh! yes, yes, now I remember; that's what it is—What was it you said to me about the little one? I believe you didn't want anyone to touch him! Idiot!"

At a gesture of denial from Germinie, she continued:

"Nonsense, nonsense! What do I care? The kind of a child that, if you blew his nose, milk would come out! Thanks! that's not my style. However, that's your business. Come, now for my letter, eh?"

Germinie leaned over the sheet of paper. But she was burning up with fever; the quill cracked in her nervous fingers. "There," she said, throwing it down after a few seconds, "I don't know what's the matter with me to-day. I'll write it for you another time."

"As you like, little one—but I rely on you. Come to-morrow, then.—I'll tell you some of madame's nonsense. We'll have a good laugh at her!"

And, when the door was closed, Adele began to roar with laughter: it had cost her only a little blague to unearth Germinie's secret.



XV

So far as young Jupillon was concerned, love was simply the satisfaction of a certain evil curiosity, which sought, in the knowledge and possession of a woman, the privilege and the pleasure of despising her. Just emerging from boyhood, the young man had brought to his first liaison no other ardor, no other flame than the cold instincts of rascality awakened in boys by vile books, the confidences of their comrades, boarding-school conversation, the first breath of impurity which debauches desire. The sentiment with which the young man usually regards the woman who yields to him, the caresses, the loving words, the affectionate attentions with which he envelops her—nothing of all that existed in Jupillon's case. Woman was to him simply an obscene image; and a passion for a woman seemed to him desirable as being prohibited, illicit, vulgar, cynical and amusing—an excellent opportunity for trickery and sarcasm.

Sarcasm—the low, cowardly, despicable sarcasm of the dregs of the people—was the beginning and the end of this youth. He was a perfect type of those Parisians who bear upon their faces the mocking scepticism of the great city of blague in which they are born. The smile, the shrewdness and the mischief of the Parisian physiognomy were always mocking and impertinent in him. Jupillon's smile had the jovial expression imparted by a wicked mouth, a mouth that was almost cruel at the corners of the lips, which curled upward and were always twitching nervously. His face was pale with the pallor that nitric acid strong enough to eat copper gives to the complexion, and in his sharp, pert, bold features were mingled bravado, energy, recklessness, intelligence, impudence and all sorts of rascally expressions, softened, at certain times, by a cat-like, wheedling air. His trade of glove-cutter—he had taken up with that trade after two or three unsuccessful trials as an apprentice in other crafts—the habit of working in the shop-windows, of being on exhibition to the passers-by, had given to his whole person the self-assurance and the dandified airs of a poseur. Sitting in the work-shop on the street, with his white shirt, his little black cravat a la Colin, and his skin-tight pantaloons, he had adopted an awkward air of nonchalance, the pretentious carriage and canaille affectations of the workman who knows he is being stared at. And various little refinements of doubtful taste, the parting of the hair in the middle and brushing it down over the temples, the low shirt collars that left the whole neck bare, the striving after the coquettish effects that properly belong to the other sex, gave him an uncertain appearance, which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his sexless features to which passion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon style were of the highest distinction.

Thus constituted, with nothing lovable about him and incapable of a genuine attachment even through his passions, Jupillon was greatly embarrassed and bored by this adoration which became intoxicated with itself, and waxed greater day by day. Germinie wearied him to death. She seemed to him absurd in her humiliation, and laughable in her devotion. He was weary, disgusted, worn out with her. He had had enough of her love, enough of her person. And he had no hesitation about cutting loose from her, without charity or pity. He ran away from her. He failed to keep the appointments she made. He pretended that he was kept away by accident, by errands to be done, by a pressure of work. At night, she waited for him and he did not come; she supposed that he was detained by business: in fact he was at some low billiard hall, or at some ball at the barrier.



XVI

There was a ball at the Boule-Noire one Thursday. The dancing was in full blast.

The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the decorations of a cardboard palace.

Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames, alternated with Prud'hon's Seasons, which were much astonished to find themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort used by suburban hair-dressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a cafe.

In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black paletots, women in caracos worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning; it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of lifelessness and earthiness—a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there was a suggestion of the Hotel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piete!

An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side passed in front of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red apples.

From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off finery of some kept mistress.

The men wore paletots, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears, and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored shirts, had an insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great family.

Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure. And in the evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel addresses given: Impasse du Depotoir.

Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the air of La Casquette du pere Bugeaud, in which the cymbals, the sleigh-bells and the drum had infected the dancers with the giddiness and madness of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole room, all the men leading their partners back to the places marked by their caps: she had been misled; he was not there, she could not see him. However, she waited. She entered the dancers' enclosure and sat down on the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much embarrassed. From their linen caps she judged that the women seated in line beside her were servants like herself: comrades of her own class alarmed her less than the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets and their hands in the pockets of their paletots, who strolled humming about the room. But soon she aroused hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat—only about a dozen women at the ball wore hats—her flounced skirt, the white hem of which could be seen under her dress, the gold brooch that secured her shawl awakened malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and smiles were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All the women seemed to be asking one another where this new arrival had come from, and to be saying to one another that she would take their lovers from them. Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs, with their arms about one another's waists as if for a waltz, made her lower her eyes as they passed in front of her, and then went on with a contemptuous shrug, turning their heads to look back at her.

She changed her place: she was met with the same smiles, the same whispering, the same hostility. She went to the further end of the hall; all the women looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress to the flowers on her hat. Her face flushed. At times she feared that she should weep. She longed to leave the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of the hall all alone.

She began mechanically to watch an old woman who was slowly making the circuit of the hall with a noiseless step, like a bird of night flying in a circle. A black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her bandeaux of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine shoulders, hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan. When she reached the door, she cast a last glance about the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye of a vulture seeking in vain for food.

Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a noise like breaking furniture.

As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he was sitting between two women at a green table in a window-recess, smoking. One of the two was a tall blonde with a small quantity of frizzled flaxen hair, a flat, stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise lay in folds on her back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black apron which she was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap, was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a white knitted hood with a blue border.

Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw her rise and approach him, with her eyes fixed upon his face, he whispered something to the woman in the hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and waited.

"Hallo! you here," he exclaimed when Germinie stood before him, erect, motionless and mute. "This is a surprise!—Waiter! another bowl!"

And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the two women's glasses, he continued: "Come, don't make up faces—sit down there."

And, as Germinie did not budge: "Go on! These ladies are friends of mine—ask them!"

"Melie," said the woman in the hood to the other woman, in a voice like a diseased crow's, "don't you see? She's monsieur's mother. Make room for the lady if she'd like to drink with us."

Germinie cast a murderous glance at the woman.

"Well! what's the matter?" the woman continued; "that don't suit you, madame, eh? Excuse me! you ought to have told me beforehand. How old do you suppose she is, Melie, eh? Sapristi! You select young ones, my boy, you don't put yourself out!"

Jupillon smiled internally, and simpered and sneered externally. His whole manner displayed the cowardly delight that evil-minded persons take in watching the suffering of those who suffer because of loving them.

"I have something to say to you—to you!—not here—outside," said Germinie.

"Much joy to you! Coming, Melie?" said the woman in the hood, lighting the stub of a cigar that Jupillon had left on the table beside a piece of lemon.

"What do you want?" said Jupillon, impressed, in spite of himself, by Germinie's tone.

"Come!"

And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the people crowded about her, laughing. She heard voices, broken sentences, subdued hooting.



XVII

Jupillon promised Germinie not to go to the ball again. But he was just beginning to make a name for himself at La Brididi, among the low haunts near the barrier, the Boule-Noire, the Reine-Blanche and the Ermitage. He had become one of the dancers who make the guests leave their seats, who keep a whole roomful of people hanging on the soles of their boots as they toss them two inches above their heads, and whom the fair dancers of the locality invite to dance with them and sometimes pay for their refreshment to that end. The ball to him was not a ball simply; it was a stage, an audience, popularity, applause, the flattering murmur of his name among the groups of people, an ovation accorded to saltatory glory in the glare of the reverberators.

On Sunday he did not go to the Boule-Noire; but on the following Thursday he went there again; and Germinie, seeing plainly enough that she could not prevent him from going, decided to follow him and to stay there as long as he did. Sitting at a table in the background, in the least brilliantly lighted corner of the ball-room, she would follow him eagerly with her eyes throughout the whole contra-dance; and when it was at an end, if he held back, she would go and seize him, take him almost by force from the hands and caresses of the women who persisted in trying to pull him back, to detain him by wicked wiles.

As they soon came to know her, the insulting remarks in her neighborhood ceased to be vague and indistinct and muttered under the breath, as at the first ball. The words were thrown in her face, the laughter spoke aloud. She was obliged to pass her three hours amid a chorus of derision that pointed its finger at her, called her by name and cast her age in her face. At every turn she was forced to submit to the appellation of: old woman! which the young hussies spat at her over their shoulders as they passed. But they did at least look at her; often, however, dancing women invited by Jupillon to drink, and brought by him to the table at which Germinie was, would sit with their elbows on the table and their cheeks resting on their hands, drinking the bowl of mulled wine for which she paid, apparently unaware that there was another woman there, crowding into her place as if it were unoccupied, and making no reply when she spoke to them. Germinie could have killed these creatures whom Jupillon forced her to entertain and who despised her so utterly that they did not even notice her presence.

The time arrived, when, having endured all she could endure and being sickened by the humiliation she was forced to swallow, she conceived the idea of dancing herself. She saw no other way to avoid leaving her lover to others, to keep him by her all the evening, and perhaps to bind him more closely to her by her success, if she had any chance of succeeding. Throughout a whole month she worked, in secret, to learn to dance. She rehearsed the figures and the steps. She forced her body into unnatural attitudes, she wore herself out trying to master the contortions and the manipulations of the skirt that she saw were applauded. At the end of the month she made the venture; but everything tended to disconcert her and added to her awkwardness; the hostility that she could feel in the atmosphere, the smiles of astonishment and pity that played about the lips of the spectators when she took her place in the dancers' enclosure. She was so absurd and so laughed at, that she had not the courage to make a second attempt. She buried herself gloomily in her dark corner, only leaving it to hunt up Jupillon and carry him off, with the mute violence of a wife dragging her husband out of the wineshop and leading him home by the arm.

It was soon rumored in the street that Germinie went to these balls, that she never missed one of them. The fruit woman, at whose shop Adele had already held forth, sent her son "to see;" he returned with a confirmation of the rumor, and told of all the petty annoyances to which Germinie was subjected, but which did not keep her from returning. Thereafter there was no more doubt in the quarter as to the relations between mademoiselle's servant and Jupillon—relations which some charitable souls had hitherto persisted in denying. The scandal burst out, and in a week the poor girl, berated by all the slanderous tongues in the quarter, baptized and saluted by the vilest names in the language of the streets, fell at a blow from the most emphatically expressed esteem to the most brutally advertised contempt.

Thus far her pride—and it was very great—had procured for her the respect and consideration which is bestowed, in the lorette quarters, upon a servant who honestly serves a virtuous mistress. She had become accustomed to respect and deference and attention. She stood apart from her comrades. Her unassailable probity, her conduct, as to which not a word could be said, her confidential relations with mademoiselle, which caused her mistress's honorable character to be reflected upon her, led the shopkeeper to treat her on a different footing from the other maids. They addressed her, cap in hand; they always called her Mademoiselle Germinie. They hurried to wait upon her; they offered her the only chair in the shop when she had to wait. Even when she contended over prices they were still polite with her and never called her haggler. Jests that were somewhat too broad were cut short when she appeared. She was invited to the great banquets, to family parties, and consulted upon business matters.

Everything changed as soon as her relations with Jupillon and her assiduous attendance at the Boule-Noire were known. The quarter took its revenge for having respected her. The brazen-faced maids in the house accosted her as one of their own kind. One, whose lover was at Mazas, called her: "My dear." The men accosted her familiarly, and with all the intimacy of thee and thou in glance and gesture and tone and touch. The very children on the sidewalk, who were formerly trained to courtesy politely to her, ran away from her as from a person of whom they had been told to be afraid. She felt that she was being maligned behind her back, handed over to the devil. She could not take a step without walking through scorn and receiving a blow from her shame upon the cheek.

It was a horrible affliction to her. She suffered as if her honor were being torn from her, shred by shred, and dragged in the gutter. But the more she suffered, the closer she pressed her love to her heart and clung to him. She bore him no ill-will, she uttered no word of reproach to him. She attached herself to him by all the tears he caused her pride to shed. And now, in the street through which she passed but a short time ago, proudly and with head erect, she could be seen, bent double as if crouching over her fault, hurrying furtively along, with oblique glances, dreading to be recognized, quickening her pace in front of the shops that swept their slanders out upon her heels.



XVIII

Jupillon was constantly complaining that he was tired of working for others, that he could not set up for himself, that he could not find fifteen or eighteen hundred francs in his mother's purse. He needed no more than that, he said, to hire a couple of rooms on the ground floor and set up as a glover in a small way. Indeed he was already dreaming of what he might do and laying out his plans: he would open a shop in the quarter, an excellent quarter for his business, as it was full of purchasers, and of makers of wretched gloves at five francs. He would soon add a line of perfumery and cravats to his gloves; and then, when he had made a tidy sum, he would sell out and take a fine shop on Rue de Richelieu.

Whenever he mentioned the subject Germinie asked him innumerable questions. She wanted to know everything that was necessary to start in business. She made him tell her the names of the tools and appurtenances, give her an idea of their prices and where they could be bought. She questioned him as to his trade and the details of his work so inquisitively and persistently that Jupillon lost his patience at last and said to her:

"What's all this to you? The work sickens me enough now; don't mention it to me!"

One Sunday she walked toward Montmartre with him. Instead of taking Rue Frochot she turned into Rue Pigalle.

"Why, this ain't the way, is it?" said Jupillon.

"I know what I'm about," said she, "come on."

She had taken his arm, and she walked on, turning her head slightly away from him so that he could not see what was taking place on her face. Half way along Rue Fontaine Saint-Georges, she halted abruptly in front of two windows on the ground floor of a house, and said to him: "Look!"

She was trembling with joy.

Jupillon looked; he saw between the two windows, on a glistening copper plate:

Magasin de Ganterie.

JUPILLON.

He saw white curtains at the first window. Through the glass in the other he saw pigeon-holes and boxes, and, near the window, the little glover's cutting board, with the great shears, the jar for clippings, and the knife to make holes in the skins in order to stretch them.

"The concierge has your key," she said.

They entered the first room, the shop.

She at once set about showing him everything. She opened the boxes and laughed. Then she pushed open the door into the other room. "There, you won't be stifled there as you are in the loft at your mother's. Do you like it? Oh! it isn't handsome, but it's clean. I'd have liked to give you mahogany. Do you like that little rug by the bed? And the paper—I didn't think of that——" She put a receipt for the rent in his hand. "See! this is for six months. Dame! you must go to work right off and earn some money. The few sous I had laid by are all gone. Oh! let me sit down. You look so pleased—it gives me a turn—it makes my head spin. I haven't any legs."

And she sank into a chair. Jupillon stooped over her to kiss her.

"Ah! yes, they're not there any longer," she said, seeing that he was looking for her earrings. "They've gone like my rings. D'ye see, all gone——"

And she showed him her hands, bare of the paltry gems she had worked so long to buy.

"They all went for the easy-chair, you see—but it's all horsehair."

As Jupillon stood in front of her with an embarrassed air, as if he were trying to find words with which to thank her, she continued:

"Why, you're a funny fellow. What's the matter with you? Ah! it's on that account, is it?" And she pointed to the bedroom. "You're a stupid! I love you, don't I? Well then?"

Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says sublime things.



XIX

She became enceinte.

At first she doubted, she dared not believe it. But when she was certain of the fact, she was filled with immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed her heart. Her happiness was so great and so overpowering that it stifled at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried women and poisons their anticipations of childbirth, the divine hope that lives and moves within them. The thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her liaison, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the abominable thing that had always made her think of suicide: dishonor,—even the fear of being detected by mademoiselle and dismissed by her—nothing of all this could cast a shadow on her felicity. The child that she expected allowed her to see nothing but it, as if she had it already in her arms before her; and, hardly attempting to conceal her condition, she bore her woman's shame almost proudly through the streets, exulting and radiant in the thought that she was to be a mother.

She was unhappy only because she had spent all her savings, and was not only without money but had been paid several months' wages in advance by her mistress. She bitterly deplored having to receive her child in a poor way. Often, as she passed through Rue Saint-Lazare, she would stop in front of a linen-draper's, in whose windows were displayed stores of rich baby-linen. She would devour with her eyes the pretty, dainty flowered garments, the pique bibs, the long short-waisted dresses trimmed with English embroidery, the whole doll-like cherub's costume. A terrible longing,—the longing of a pregnant woman,—to break the glass and steal it all, would come upon her: the clerks standing behind the display framework became accustomed to seeing her take up her station there and would laughingly point her out to one another.

Again, at intervals, amid the happiness that overflowed her heart, amid the ecstasy that exalted her being, another disturbing thought passed through her mind. She would ask herself how the father would welcome his child. Two or three times she had attempted to tell him of her condition but had not dared. At last, one day, seeing that his face wore the expression she had awaited so long as a preliminary to telling him everything, an expression in which there was a touch of affection, she confessed to him, blushing hotly and as if asking his forgiveness, what it was that made her so happy.

"That's all imagination!" said Jupillon.

And when she had assured him that it was not imagination and that she was positively five months advanced in pregnancy: "Just my luck!" the young man rejoined. "Thanks!" And he swore. "Would you mind telling me who's going to feed the sparrow?"

"Oh! never you fear! it sha'n't suffer, I'll look out for that. And then it'll be so pretty! Don't be afraid, no one shall know anything about it. I'll fix myself up. See! the last part of the time I'll walk like this, with my head back—I won't wear any petticoats, and I'll pull myself in—you'll see! Nobody shall notice anything, I tell you. Just think of it! a little child of our own!"

"Well, as long as it's so, it's so, eh?" said the young man.

"Say," ventured Germinie, timidly, "suppose you should tell your mother?"

"Ma? Oh! no, I rather think not. You must lie in first. After that we'll take the brat to the house. It will give her a start, and perhaps she'll consent without meaning to."



XX

Twelfth Night arrived. It was the day on which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil gave a grand dinner-party regularly every year. She invited all the children of her own family or her old friends' families, great and small. The small suite would hardly hold them all. They were obliged to put part of the furniture on the landing, and a table was set in each of the two rooms which formed mademoiselle's whole suite. For the children, that day was a great festival to which they looked forward for a week. They came running up the stairway behind the pastry-cook's men. At table they ate too much without being scolded. At night, they were unwilling to go to bed, they climbed on the chairs and made a racket that always gave Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a sick headache the next day; but she bore them no grudge therefor: she had had the full enjoyment of a genuine grandmother's fete, in listening to them, looking at them, tying around their necks the white napkins that made them look so rosy. And not for anything in the world would she have failed to give this dinner-party, which filled her old maid's apartments with the fair-haired little imps of Satan, and brought thither, in a single day, an atmosphere of activity and youth and laughter that lasted a whole year.

Germinie was preparing the dinner. She was whipping cream in an earthen bowl on her knees, when suddenly she felt the first pains. She looked at her face in the bit of a broken mirror that she had above her kitchen dresser, and saw that she was pale. She went down to Adele: "Give me your mistress's rouge," she said. And she put some on her cheeks. Then she went up again, and, refusing to listen to the voice of her suffering, finished cooking the dinner. It had to be served, and she served it. At dessert, she leaned against the furniture and grasped the backs of chairs as she passed the plates, hiding her torture with the ghastly set smile of people whose entrails are writhing.

"How's this, are you sick?" said her mistress, looking sharply at her.

"Yes, mademoiselle, a little—it may be the charcoal or the hot kitchen."

"Go to bed—we don't need you any more, and you can clean up to-morrow."

She went down to Adele once more.

"It's come," she said; "call a cab quick. It was Rue de la Huchette where you said your midwife lives, wasn't it? opposite a copper planer's? Haven't you a pen and paper?"

And she sat down to write a line to her mistress. She told her that she was too ill to work, that she had gone to the hospital, but would not tell her where, because she would fatigue herself coming to see her; that she would come back within a week.

"There you are!" said Adele, all out of breath, giving her the number of the cab.

"I can stay there," said Germinie; "not a word to mademoiselle. That's all. Swear you won't say a word to her!"

She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.

"Hallo!" said he, "where are you going? going out?"

"I am going to lie in——It took me during the day. There was a great dinner-party here——Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I told you never to come; I don't want you to!"

"Because——I'll tell you——because just now I absolutely must have forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must."

"Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!"

"That's hard luck——look out! What do you want to do?" And he offered his arm to assist her. "Cristi! I'm going to have hard work to get 'em all the same."

He had opened the carriage door.

"Where do you want him to take you?"

"To La Bourbe," said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his hand.

"No, no," said Jupillon.

"Oh! nonsense——there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs left."

The cab started away.

Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and said to Germinie through the window:

"At least, I can go with you?"

"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing on the cushions of the cab.

After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to such medical students as happened to pass through the street that there was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternite.

The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the salle d'accouchement. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were drying.