“Oh! the women that come in like that don’t do any work. I’ll mend your clothes. You don’t need anyone.”
“You!—Oh! if we have to rely on your needle!” said mademoiselle jocosely; “and then, will Mère Jupillon ever give you the time?”
“Madame Jupillon? Oh! for all the dust I shall ever leave in her house again!”
“Hoity-toity! What’s that? She too! so she’s on your black books, is she? Oho! hurry up and make another acquaintance, or else, bon Dieu de Dieu! we shall have some bad days here!”
XXVIII
The winter of that year should certainly have assured Mademoiselle de Varandeuil a share of paradise hereafter. She had to undergo the reflex action of her maid’s chagrin, her nervous irritability, the vengeance of her embittered, contradictory moods, which the approaching spring would ere long infect with that species of malignant madness which the critical season, the travail of nature and the restless, disturbing fructification of the summer cause in unhealthily sensitive organizations.
Germinie was forever wiping eyes which no longer wept, but which had once wept copiously. She was always ready with an everlasting: “Nothing’s the matter, mademoiselle!” uttered in the tone that covers a secret. She adopted dumb, despairing, funereal attitudes, the airs by which a woman’s body diffuses melancholy and makes her very shadow a bore. With her face, her glance, her mouth, the folds of her dress, her presence, the noise she made at work in the adjoining room, even with her silence, she enveloped mademoiselle in the despair that exhaled from her person. At the slightest word she would bristle up. Mademoiselle could not address an observation to her, ask her the most trivial question, give her an order or express a wish: everything was taken by her as a reproach. And thereupon she would act like a madwoman. She would wipe her eyes and grumble: “Oh! I am very unfortunate! I can see that mademoiselle doesn’t care for me any more!” Her spite against various people vented itself in sublimely ingenious complaints. “That woman always comes when it rains!” she would say, upon discovering a bit of mud that Madame de Belleuse had left on the carpet. During the week following New Year’s Day, the week when all of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil’s remaining relatives and friends, rich and poor alike, climbed the five flights and waited on the landing at her door for their turns to occupy the six chairs in her bedroom, Germinie redoubled her ill-humor, her impertinent remarks, her sulky muttering. Inventing grievances against her mistress, she punished her constantly by a persistent silence, which it was impossible to break. Then there would be periods of frenzied industry. Mademoiselle would hear through the partitions on all sides furious manipulation of the broom and duster, the sharp, vicious scrubbing and slamming of the servant whom one imagines muttering to herself as she maltreats the furniture: “Oh! yes, I’ll do your work for you!”
Old people are patient with servants who have been long in their service. Long habit, the weakening willpower, the horror of change, the dread of new faces—everything disposes them to weakness and cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited, curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid’s ill-humor had blown over or burst. She bent her back before the storm; she said no word, had no thought of bitterness against her. She simply pitied her for causing herself so much suffering.
In truth Germinie was not Mademoiselle de Varandeuil’s maid; she was Devotion, waiting to close her eyes. The solitary old woman, overlooked by death, alone at the end of her life, dragging her affections from grave to grave, had found her last friend in her servant. She had rested her heart upon her as upon an adopted daughter, and she was especially unhappy because she was powerless to comfort her. Moreover, at intervals, Germinie returned to her from the depths of her brooding melancholy and her savage humor, and threw herself on her knees before her kind heart. Suddenly, at a ray of sunlight, a beggar’s song, or any one of the nothings that float in the air and expand the heart, she would burst into tears and demonstrations of affection; her heart would overflow with burning emotions, she would seem to feel a pleasure in embracing her mistress, as if the joy of living again had effaced everything. At other times some trifling ailment of mademoiselle’s would bring about the change; a smile would come to the old servant’s face and gentleness to her hands. Sometimes, at such moments, mademoiselle would say: “Come, my girl—something’s the matter. Tell me what it is.” And Germinie would reply: “No, mademoiselle, it’s the weather.”—“The weather!” mademoiselle would repeat with a doubtful air, “the weather!”
XXIX
One evening in March the Jupillons, mother and son, were talking together by the stove in their back-shop.
Jupillon had been drafted. The money his mother had put aside to purchase his release had been used up as a result of six months of poor business and by credits given to certain lorettes on the street, who had left the key under their doormat one fine morning. He had not prospered, in a business way, himself, and his stock in trade had been taken on execution. He had been that day to ask a former employer to advance him the money to purchase a substitute. But the old perfumer had not forgiven him for leaving him and setting up for himself, and he refused point-blank.
Mère Jupillon, in despair, was complaining tearfully. She repeated the number drawn by her son: “Twenty-two! twenty-two!” And she said: “And yet I sewed a black spider
