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 crémière. 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 café 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 Mère 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 Chaussée 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 Château-Rouge they found the first tree, the first foliage. Then, at Rue du Château, 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 hopscotch marked out in charcoal, by long walls with an occasional overhanging branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens between. At their left rose treetops 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,
