XXXVIII
“He must have twenty francs,” Germinie mechanically repeated the sentence to herself several times, but her thoughts did not go beyond the words she uttered. The walk and the climb up five flights of stairs had made her dizzy. She fell in a sitting posture on the greasy couch in the kitchen, hung her head, and laid her arms on the table. Her ears were ringing. Her ideas went and came in a disorderly throng, stifling one another in her brain, and of them all but one remained, more and more distinct and persistent: “He must have twenty francs! twenty francs! twenty francs!” And she looked as if she expected to find them somewhere there, in the fireplace, in the wastebasket, under the stove. Then she thought of the people who owed her, of a German maid who had promised to repay her more than a year before. She rose and tied her capstrings. She no longer said: “He must have twenty francs;” she said: “I will get them.”
She went down to Adèle: “You haven’t twenty francs for a note that just came, have you? Mademoiselle has gone out.”
“Nothing here,” said Adèle; “I gave madame my last twenty francs last night to get her supper. The jade hasn’t come back yet. Will you have thirty sous?”
She ran to the grocer’s. It was Sunday, and three o’clock in the afternoon: the grocer had closed his shop.
There were a number of people at the fruitwoman’s; she asked for four sous’ worth of herbs.
“I haven’t any money,” said she. She hoped that the woman would say: “Do you want some?” Instead of that, she said: “What an idea! as if I was afraid of you!” There were other maids there, so she went out without saying anything more.
“Is there anything for us?” she said to the concierge. “Ah! by the way, my Pipelet, you don’t happen to have twenty francs about you, do you? it will save my going way upstairs again.”
“Forty, if you want—”
She breathed freely. The concierge went to a desk at the back of the lodge. “Sapristi! my wife has taken the key. Why! how pale you are!”
“It isn’t anything.” And she rushed out into the courtyard toward the door of the servant’s staircase.
This is what she thought as she went upstairs: “There are people who find twenty-franc pieces. He needed them today, he told me. Mademoiselle gave me my money not five days ago, and I can’t ask her. After all, what are twenty francs more or less to her? The grocer would surely have lent them to me. I had another grocer on Rue Taitbout: he didn’t close till evening Sundays.”
She was in front of her own door. She leaned over the rail of the other staircase, looked to see if anyone was coming up, entered her room, went straight to mademoiselle’s bedchamber, opened the window and breathed long and hard with her elbows on the windowsill. Sparrows hastened to her from the neighboring chimneys, thinking that she was going to toss bread to them. She closed the window and glanced at the top of the commode—first at a vein of marble, then at a little sandalwood box, then at the key—a small steel key left in the lock. Suddenly there was a ringing in her ears; she thought that the bell rang. She ran and opened the door: there was no one there. She returned with the certainty that she was alone, went to the kitchen for a cloth and began to rub a mahogany armchair, turning her back to the commode; but she could still see the box, she could see it lying open, she could see the coins at the right where mademoiselle kept her gold, the papers in which she wrapped it, a hundred francs in each;—her twenty francs were there! She closed her eyes as if the light dazzled them. She felt a dizziness in her conscience; but immediately her whole being rose in revolt against her, and it seemed to her as if her heart in its indignation rose to her throat. In an instant the honor of her whole life stood erect between her hand and that key. Her upright, unselfish, devoted past, twenty years of resistance to the evil counsels and the corruption of that foul quarter, twenty years of scorn for theft, twenty years in which her pocket had not held back a sou from her employers, twenty years of indifference to gain, twenty years in which temptation had never come near her, her long maintained and natural virtue, mademoiselle’s confidence in her—all these things came to her mind in a single instant. Her youthful years clung to her and took possession of her. From her family, from the memory of her parents, from the unsullied reputation of her wretched name, from the dead from whom she was descended, there arose a murmur as of guardian angels hovering about her. For one second she was saved.
And then, insensibly, evil thoughts glided one by one into her brain. She sought for subjects of bitterness, for excuses for ingratitude to her mistress. She compared with her own wages the wages of which the other maids in the house boasted vaingloriously. She concluded that mademoiselle was very fortunate to have her in her service, and that she should have increased her wages more since she had been with her.
“And then,” she suddenly asked herself, “why does she leave the key in her box?” And she began to reflect thereupon that the money in the box was not used for living expenses, but had been laid aside by mademoiselle to buy a velvet dress for a goddaughter.—“Sleeping money,” she said to herself. She marshaled her reasons with precipitation, as if to make it impossible to
