Germinie Lacerteux

passing years have effaced the last trace of humanity and the memory of a body! The excavation is renewed when the earth is still themselves, when they are the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential flies whose sting is deadly!

---

Mademoiselle arrived at this spot after passing the wall that separates the lots sold in perpetuity from those sold temporarily only. Following the directions given her by a keeper, she walked along between the further line of crosses and the newly-opened trench. And there she made her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long strides as if they were in danger of being carried over a precipice.

Mademoiselle began to ascend the path by these crosses, spelling out the dates and searching for the names with her wretched eyes. She reached the crosses of the 8th of November: that was the day before her maid’s death, and Germinie should be close by. There were five crosses of the 9th of November, five crosses huddled close together: Germinie was not in the crush. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil went a little farther on, to the crosses of the 10th, then to those of the 11th, then to those of the 12th. She returned to the 8th, and looked carefully around in all directions: there was nothing, absolutely nothing⁠—Germinie had been buried without a cross! Not even a bit of wood had been placed in the ground by which to identify her grave!

At last the old lady dropped on her knees in the snow, between two crosses, one of which bore the date of the 9th and the other of the 10th of November. All that remained of Germinie should be almost in that spot. That ill-defined space was her ill-defined grave. To pray over her body it was necessary to pray at random between two dates⁠—as if the poor girl’s destiny had decreed that there should be no more room on earth for her body than for her heart!

Endnotes

1. Canon is the French word for cannon; it is also used in vulgar parlance to mean a glass of wine drunk at the bar. ↩

2. Battre les murailles⁠—to beat the walls⁠—has a slang meaning: to be so drunk that you can’t see, or can’t lie down without holding on. ↩

3. Literally, red bowels⁠—common slang for hard drinkers. ↩

4. Cuir is an expression used to denote the error in speaking, which consists⁠—in French⁠—in pronouncing a t for an s, and vice versa at the end of words which are joined in pronunciation to the next word: e.g., il étai-z-à la campagne for il était à la campagne. ↩

5. In the slang vocabulary, to console one’s coffee means to add brandy to it. ↩

6. A négresse is a bottle of red wine, and, as applied to that article, morte (dead) means empty. ↩

Colophon

Germinie Lacerteux
was published in 1865 by
Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt.
It was translated from French in 1897 by
John Chestershire.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Bob Reus,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Audrey Longhurst, Meredith Bach, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Kitchen,
a painting completed in 1859 by
Matthijs Maris.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
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