“I? Oh! as for me!” And Mademoiselle de Varandeuil made a gesture indicating that her life was of no consequence.
LXII
Amid Mademoiselle de Varandeuil’s desperate anxiety concerning her maid’s health, she became conscious of a strange feeling, a sort of fear in the presence of the new, unfamiliar, mysterious creature that sickness had made of Germinie. Mademoiselle had a sense of discomfort beside that hollow, ghostly face, which was almost unrecognizable in its implacable rigidity, and which seemed to return to itself, to recover consciousness, only furtively, by fits and starts, in the effort to produce a pallid smile. The old woman had seen many people die; her memories of many painful years recalled the expressions of many dear, doomed faces, of many faces that were sad and desolate and grief-stricken in death; but no face of all those she remembered had ever assumed, as the end drew near, that distressing expression of a face retiring within itself and closing the doors.
Enveloped in her suffering, Germinie maintained her savage, rigid, self-contained, impenetrable demeanor. She was as immovable as bronze. Mademoiselle, as she looked at her, asked herself what it could be that she brooded over thus without moving; whether it was her life rising in revolt, the dread of death, or a secret remorse for something in her past. Nothing external seemed to affect the sick woman. She was no longer conscious of things about her. Her body became indifferent to everything, did not ask to be relieved, seemed not to desire to be cured. She complained of nothing, found no pleasure or diversion in anything. Even her longing for affection had left her. She no longer made any motion to bestow or invite a caress, and every day something human left her body, which seemed to be turning to stone. Often she would bury herself in profound silence that made one expect a heartrending shriek or word; but after glancing about the room, she would say nothing and begin again to stare fixedly, vacantly, at the same spot in space.
When mademoiselle returned from the friend’s house with whom she dined, she would find Germinie in the dark, sunk in an easy-chair with her legs stretched out upon a chair, her head hanging forward on her breast, and so profoundly absorbed that sometimes she did not hear the door open. As she walked forward into the room it seemed to Mademoiselle de Varandeuil as if she were breaking in upon a ghastly tête-à-tête between Disease and the Shadow of Death, wherein Germinie was already seeking, in the terror of the Invisible, the blindness of the grave and the darkness of death.
LXIII
Throughout the month of October, Germinie obstinately refused to take to her bed. Each day, however, she was weaker and more helpless than the day before. She was hardly able to ascend the flight of stairs that led to her sixth floor, dragging herself along by the railing. One day she fell on the stairs: the other servants picked her up and carried her to her chamber. But that did not stop her; the next day she went downstairs again, with the fitful gleam of strength that invalids commonly have in the morning. She prepared mademoiselle’s breakfast, made a pretence of working, and kept moving about the apartment, clinging to the chairs and dragging herself along. Mademoiselle took pity on her; she forced her to lie down on her own bed. Germinie lay there half an hour, an hour, wide awake, not speaking, but with her eyes open, fixed, and staring into vacancy like the eyes of a person in severe pain.
One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle climbed to the sixth floor, turned into a narrow corridor in which the air was heavy with the odors from servants’ water-closets and at last reached Germinie’s door, No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled her to come up. It was impossible for her to put her feet out of the bed. She had terrible pains in her bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle to sit down a moment and, to make room for her, removed the candlestick that stood on the chair at the head of her bed.
Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments, looking about the wretched room—one of those where the doctor has to lay his hat on the bed, and where there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room, without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping roof, which admitted the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Old trunks, clothes bags, a foot-bath, and the little iron bedstead on which Germinie’s niece had slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping roof. The bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand with a broken pitcher, comprised the whole of the furniture. Above the bed, in an imitation violet-wood frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.
The doctor came during the day. “Aha! peritonitis,” he said, when mademoiselle described Germinie’s condition.
He went up to see the sick woman. “I am afraid,” he said, when he came down, “that there’s an abscess in the intestine communicating with an abscess in the bladder. It’s a serious case, very serious. You must tell her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over with great care. She might die suddenly in horrible agony. I suggested to her to go to Lariboisière—she agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at all. But I don’t know how she will bear the journey. However, she has such an unlimited stock of energy; I have never seen anything like it. Tomorrow morning you shall have the order of admission.”
When mademoiselle went up to Germinie’s room again, she found her smiling in her bed, gay as a lark at the idea of going away.
“It’s a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle,” said she.
