Edmond de Goncourt
Germinie Lacerteux
LII
She would then ascend the stairs; that was her last place of refuge. She would fly from the rain and snow and cold, from fear, despair, and fatigue. She would go up and sit on the top step against Gautruche's closed doors; she would draw her shawl and skirts closely about her in order to leave room for those who went and came up that long steep ladder, and would draw back as far as possible into the corner in order that her shame might fill but little space on the narrow landing.
From the open doors the odor of unventilated closets, of families heaped together in a single room, the exhalations of unhealthy trades, the dense, greasy fumes of cooking done in chafing-dishes on the floor, the stench of rags and the faint damp smell of clothes drying in the house, came forth and filled the hall. The broken-paned window behind Germinie wafted to her nostrils the fetid stench of a leaden pipe in which the whole house emptied its refuse and its filth. Her stomach rose in revolt every moment at a puff of infection; she was obliged to take from her pocket a phial of melissa water that she always carried, and swallow a mouthful of it to avoid being ill.
But the staircase had its passers, too: honest workmen's wives went up with a bushel of charcoal, or a pint of wine for supper. Their feet would rub against her as they passed, and as they went farther up, Germinie would feel their scornful glances resting upon her and falling upon her with more crushing force at every floor. The children – little girls in fanchons who flitted up the dark stairway and brightened it as if with flowers, little girls in whom she saw, as she so often saw in dreams, her own little one, living and grown to girlhood – she saw them stop and look at her with wide open eyes that seemed to recoil from her; then the little creatures would turn and run breathlessly up-stairs, and, when they were well out of reach, would lean over the rail until they almost fell, and hurl impure jests at her, the insults of the children of the common people. Insulting words, poured out upon her by those rosebud mouths, wounded Germinie more deeply than all else. She would half rise for an instant; then, overwhelmed by shame, resigning herself to her fate, she would fall back into her corner, and, pulling her shawl over her head in order to bury herself therein out of sight, she would sit like a dead woman, crushed, inert, insensible, cowering over her own shadow, like a bundle tossed on the floor which everyone might tread upon – having no control of her faculties, dead to everything except the footsteps that she was listening for – and that did not come.
At last, after long hours, hours that she could not count, she would fancy that she heard a stumbling walk in the street; then a vinous voice would mount the stairs, stammering "Canaille! canaille of a saloon-keeper! – you sold me the kind of wine that goes to my head!"
It was he.
And almost every day the same scene was enacted.
"Ah! there y'are, my Germinie," he would say as his eyes fell upon her. "It's like this – I'll tell you all about it. I'm a little bit under water." And, as he put the key in the lock: "I'll tell you all about it. It isn't my fault."
He would enter the room, kick aside a turtle-dove with mangy wings that limped forward to greet him, and close the door. "It wasn't me, d'ye see. It was Paillon, you know Paillon? that little round fellow, fat as a mad dog. Well, it was him, 'pon my honor. He insisted on paying for a sixteen-sous bottle for me. He offered to treat me, and I proffered him thanks. Thereupon we naturally consoled5 our coffee; when you're consoled, you console! and as one thing led to another, we fell upon each other! There was a very devil of a carnage! The proof of it is that that gallows-bird of a saloon-keeper threw us out-o'-doors like lobster shells!"
Germinie, during the explanation, would have lighted the candle, stuck in a yellow copper candlestick. By its flickering light the dirty paper on the walls could be seen, covered with caricatures from Charivari, torn from the paper and pasted on the wall.
"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim, as he saw her place a cold fowl and two bottles of wine on the table. "For I must tell you all I've had in my stomach to-day – a plate of wretched soup – that's all. Ah! it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put that fellow's eyes out!"
And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with her elbows on the table, watching him and drinking, and her glance would grow dark.
"Pshaw! all the négresses are dead,"6 Gautruche would say at last, as he drained the bottles one by one. "Put the children to bed!"
Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion would ensue between those two strange creatures, savage ardor followed by savage satiety, frantic storms of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the fierce brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood beneath the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at the end, utter exhaustion that swallowed them up and left their bodies like corpses.
Germinie plunged into these debauches with – what shall I say? – delirium, madness, desperation, a sort of supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable passions turned against themselves, and, going beyond their natural appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted them without extinguishing them; and, overpassing the widest limits of excess, they excited themselves to self-torture. In the poor creature's paroxysms of excitement, her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her maddened body, no longer sought pleasure in pleasure, but something sharper, keener, and more violent: pain in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking death in an undertone and seeking to embrace it in the agonies of love.
Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed, listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to envelop her. She seemed to herself to fall and writhe helplessly in the blind unconsciousness of the night. Her will became as naught. All sorts of black things, that seemed to have wings and voices, beat against her temples. The ghastly temptations that afford madness a vague glimpse of crime caused a red light, the flash of murder, to pass before her eyes, close at hand; and hands placed against her back pushed her toward the table where the knives lay. She would close her eyes and move one foot; then fear would lay hold of her and she would cling to the bedclothes; and at last she would turn around, fall back upon the bed, and go to sleep beside the man she had been tempted to murder; why? she had no idea; for nothing – for the sake of killing!
And so, until daybreak, in that wretched furnished lodging, the fierce struggle of those fatal passions would continue, while the poor maimed, limping dove, the infirm bird of Venus, nesting in one of Gautruche's old shoes, would utter now and then, awakened by the noise, a frightened coo.
LIII
In those days Gautruche became a little disgusted with drinking. He felt the first pangs of the disease of the liver that had long been lurking in his heated, alcoholized blood, under his brick-red cheek bones. The horrible pains that gnawed at his side, and twisted the cords of his stomach for a whole week, caused him to reflect. There came to his mind, together with divers resolutions inspired by prudence, certain almost sentimental ideas of the future. He said to himself that he must put a little more water into his life, if he wanted to live to old age. While he lay writhing in bed and tying himself into knots, with his knees up to his chin to lessen the pain, he looked about at his den, the four walls within which he passed his nights, to which he brought his drunken body home in the evening, and from which he fled into the daylight in the morning; and he thought about making a real home for himself. He dreamed of a room, where he could keep a wife, a wife who would make him a good stew, look after him if he were ill, straighten out his affairs, keep his linen in order, prevent him from beginning a new score at the wine-shop; a wife, in short, who would combine all the useful qualities of a housekeeper, and who, in addition, would not be a stupid fool, but would understand him and laugh with him. Such a wife was all found: Germinie was the very one. She probably had a little hoard, a few sous laid by during the time she had been in her old mistress's service; and with what he earned they could "grub along" in comfort. He had no doubt of her consent; he was sure beforehand that she would accept his proposition. More than that, her scruples, if she had any, would not hold out against the prospect of marriage which he proposed to exhibit to her at the end of their liaison.
One Monday she had come to his room as usual.
"Say, Germinie," he began, "what would you say to this, eh? A good room – not like this box – a real room, with a closet – at Montmartre, and two windows, no less! Rue de l'Empereur – with a view an Englishman would give five thousand francs to carry away with him. Something first-class, bright, and cheerful, you know, a place where you could stay all day without hating yourself. Because, I tell you I'm beginning to have enough of moving about here and there just to change fleas. And that isn't all, either: I'm tired of being cooped up in furnished lodgings, I'm tired of being all alone. Friends don't make society. They fall on you like flies in your glass when you're to pay, and then, there you are! In the first place, I don't propose to drink any more, honor bright! no more for me, you'll see! You understand I don't intend to use myself up in this life, not if I know myself. Not by any means! Attention! We mustn't let drink get the better of us. It seemed to me those days as if I'd been swallowing corkscrews. And I've no desire to knock at the monument just yet. Well, to go from the thread to the needle, this is what I thought: I'll make the proposition to Germinie. I'll treat myself to a little furniture. You've got what you have in your room. You know I'm not much of a shirker, I haven't a lazy bone in my body where work's concerned. And then we might look to not always be working for others: we might take a lodging-house for country thieves. If you had a little something put aside, that would help. We would join forces in genteel fashion, and have ourselves straightened out some day before the mayor. That's not such a bad scheme, is it, old girl, eh? And you'll leave your old lady this time, won't you, for your dear old Gautruche?"
Germinie, who had listened to him with her head thrust forward and her chin resting on the palm of her hand, threw herself back with a burst of strident laughter.
"Ha! ha! ha! You thought – and you have the face to tell me so! – you thought I'd leave her! Mademoiselle? Did you really think so? You're a fool, you know! Why, you might have thousands and hundred thousands, you might be stuffed with gold, do you hear? all stuffed with it. You're joking, aren't you? Mademoiselle? Why, don't you know? haven't I ever told you? I would like to see her die and these hands not be there to close her eyes! I'd like to see it! Come now, really, did you think so?"
"Damnation! I imagined, from the way you acted with me, I thought you cared more for me than that – that you loved me, in fact!" exclaimed the painter, disconcerted by the terrible, stinging irony of Germinie's words.
"Ah! you thought that, too – that I loved you!" And, as if she were suddenly uprooting from the depths of her heart the remorse and suffering of her passions, she continued: "Well, yes! I do love you – I love you as you love me! just as much! and that's all! I love you as one loves something that is close at hand – that one makes use of because it is there! I am used to you as one gets used to an old dress and wears it again and again. That's how I love you! How do you suppose I should care for you? I'd like you to tell me what difference it can make to me whether it's you or another? For, after all, what have you been to me more than any other man would be? In the first place, you took me. Well? Is that enough to make me love you? What have you done, then, to attach me to you, will you be kind enough to tell me? Have you ever sacrificed a glass of wine to me? Have you even so much as taken pity on me when I was tramping about in the mud and snow at the risk of my life? Oh! yes! And what did people say to me and spit out in my face so that my blood boiled from one end of my body to the other! You never troubled your head about all the insults I've swallowed waiting for you! Look you! I've been wanting to tell you all this for a long time – it's been choking me. Tell me," she continued, with a ghastly smile, "do you flatter yourself you've driven me wild with your physical beauty, with your hair, which you've lost, with that head of yours? Hardly! I took you – I'd have taken anyone, it didn't matter who! It was one of the times when I had to have someone! At those times I don't know anything or see anything. I'm not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot day!"
She paused an instant.
"Go on," said Gautruche, "iron me on all the seams. Don't mind me as long as your hand's in."
"So?" continued Germinie, "how enchanted you imagined I was going to be to take up with you! You said to yourself: 'The good-natured fool! she'll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to promise to marry her. She'll throw up her place. She'll leave her mistress in the lurch.' The idea! Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle, who has no one but me! Ah! you don't know anything about such things. You wouldn't understand if I should tell you. Mademoiselle, who is everything to me! Why, since my mother died, I've had nobody but her, never been treated kindly by anybody but her! Who beside her ever said to me when I was unhappy: 'Are you unhappy?' And, when I was sick: 'Don't you feel well?' No one! There's been no one but her to take care of me, to care what became of me. God! and you talk of loving on account of what there is between us! Ah! mademoiselle has loved me! Yes, loved me! And I'm dying of it, do you know? of having become such a miserable creature as I am, a – " She said the word. "And of deceiving her, of stealing her affection, of allowing her still to love me as her daughter! Ah! if she should ever learn anything – but, no fear of that, it won't be long. There's one woman who would make a pretty leap out of a fifth-story window, as true as God is my master! But fancy – you are not my heart, you are not my life, you are only my pleasure. But I did have a man. Ah! I don't know whether I loved him! but you could have torn me to pieces for him without a word from me. In short, he was the man that made me what I am. Well, d'ye see, when my passion for him was at its hottest, when I breathed only as he wished me to, when I was mad over him and would have let him walk on my stomach if he'd wanted to – even then, if mademoiselle had been sick, if she had motioned to me with her little finger, I'd have gone back to her. Yes, I would have left him for her! I tell you I would have left him!"
"In that case – if that's the way things stand, my dear – if you're so fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give you: you'd better not leave your good lady, d'ye see!"
"That's my dismissal, is it?" said Germinie, rising.
"Faith! it's very like it."
"Well! adieu. That suits me!"
She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.
LIV
After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman. She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it were – none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery, – preference, selection, – and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain of conscience and personality, – disgust, even disgust, – she had lost!
And she wandered about the streets at night, with the furtive, stealthy gait of wild beasts prowling in the shadow in quest of food. As if unsexed, she made the advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage of drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked along, peering on every side, approaching every shadowy corner where impurity might lurk under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along, almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind at work on the brink of deep abysses of melancholy.
LV
One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a wine-shop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.
She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the door of the wine-shop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passers-by, the carriages, the street – she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up the hill, – a white horse, he was, – stood in front of her, worn out and motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog. It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving, with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening, desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by Darkness at a wine-shop door!
At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.
"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes, no scaffold – nothing!
Jupillon felt that his customary blague was arrested in his throat.
"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't lost. But I must have time. Just now, you see, work ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months' time, I promise. Are you pretty well?"
"Canaille! Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd sneak away, would you? But it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber! sneak! It was you."
Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing against him, forcing him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned toward him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to you to make you strike me?"
She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass, – the guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of emptying itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was bursting.
"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.
"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed a police officer, grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees wavered: she thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of the street.