To complete the picture of Mlle. Cormon’s household and domestic life, several figures must be grouped round Mlle. Cormon and the Abbé de Sponde. Jacquelin, and Josette, and Mariette, the cook, ministered to the comfort of uncle and niece.
Jacquelin, a man of forty, short and stout, dark-haired and ruddy, with a countenance of the Breton sailor type, had been in service in the house for twenty-two years. He waited at table, groomed the mare, worked in the garden, cleaned the Abbé’s shoes, ran errands, chopped firewood, drove the cariole, went to the Prébaudet for corn, hay and straw, and slept like a dormouse in the antechamber of an evening. He was supposed to be fond of Josette, and Josette was six-and-thirty. But if she had married him, Mlle. Cormon would have dismissed her, and so the poor lovers were fain to save up their wages in silence, and to wait and hope for mademoiselle’s marriage, much as the Jews look for the advent of the Messiah.
Josette came from the district between Alençon and Mortagne; she was a fat little woman. Her face, which reminded you of a mud-bespattered apricot, was not wanting either in character or intelligence. She was supposed to rule her mistress. Josette and Jacquelin, feeling sure of the event, found consolation, presumably by discounting the future. Mariette, the cook, had likewise been in the family for fifteen years; she was skilled in the cookery of the country and the preparation of the most esteemed provincial dishes.
Perhaps the fat old bay mare, of the Normandy breed, which Mlle. Cormon used to drive to the Prébaudet, ought to count a good deal, for the affection which the five inmates of the house bore the animal amounted to mania. Penelope, for that was her name, had been with them for eighteen years; and so well was she cared for, so regularly tended, that Jacquelin and mademoiselle hoped to get quite another ten years of work out of her. Penelope was a stock subject and source of interest in their lives. It seemed as if poor Mlle. Cormon, with no child of her own, lavished all her maternal affection upon the lucky beast. Almost every human being leading a solitary life in a crowded world will surround himself with a make-believe family of some sort, and Penelope took the place of dogs, cats, or canaries.
These four faithful servants—for Penelope’s intelligence had been trained till it was very nearly on a par with the wits of the other three, while they had sunk pretty much into the dumb, submissive jog-trot life of the animal—these four retainers came and went and did the same things day after day, with the unfailing regularity of clockwork. But, to use their own expression, “they had eaten their white bread first.” Mlle. Cormon suffered from a fixed idea upon the nerves; and, after the wont of such sufferers, she grew fidgety and hard to please, not by force of nature, but because she had no outlet for her energies. She had neither husband nor children to fill her thoughts, so they fastened upon trifles. She would talk for hours at a stretch of some inconceivably small matter, of a dozen serviettes, for instance, lettered Z, which somehow or other had been put before O.
“Why, what can Josette be thinking about?” she cried. “Has she no notion what she is doing?”
Jacquelin chanced to be late in feeding Penelope one afternoon, so every day for a whole week afterwards mademoiselle inquired whether the horse had been fed at two o’clock. Her narrow imagination spent itself on small matters. A layer of dust forgotten by the feather mop, a slice of scorched toast, an omission to close the shutters on Jacquelin’s part when the sun shone in upon furniture and carpets—all these important trifles produced serious trouble, mademoiselle lost her temper over them. “Nothing was the same as it used to be. The servants of old days were so changed that she did not know them. They were spoilt. She was too good to them,” and so forth and so forth. One day Josette gave her mistress the Journée du
