Germinie Lacerteux quotes

We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it due warning of what it will find therein.

The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.

It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.

at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a café. We mechanically take up a copy of L’Illustration and our eyes fall at once upon the solution of its last riddle:

Against death, there is no appeal!

Monday, August 11.—The disease of the lungs is complicated with peritonitis. She has terrible pains in the bowels, she cannot move without assistance, she cannot lie on her back or her left side. In God’s name, is not death enough?

… discharge—in three weeks at most—and so free from all thought of death that she told us of a furious love scene that took place yesterday between a woman in the bed next hers and a brother of the Christian schools, who was there again today.

Poor Rose is death, but death engrossed with life.

Near her bed was a young woman, whose husband, a mechanic, had come to see her. “You see, as soon as I can walk, I shall walk about the garden so much that they’ll have to send me home!” she said.

It was a ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes.

I threw the coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man.

Monday, August 18.—The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to reap the benefit of the service.

The old woman took her head, silently, in both hands, pressed it against her heart, heaved a sigh, and muttered:

“Ah, well! so I must live on!”

This took place in a small room, through the window of which could be seen a small patch of sky cut by three black iron pipes, various neighboring roofs, and in the distance, between two houses that almost touched, the leafless branch of a tree, …

He died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for her who had been his daughter nearly forty years:

“I know that you never loved me!”

Two years before her father’s death, Sempronie’s brother had returned from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had had by the woman before marrying her.

Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face would at once become calm.

She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a deep, bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that have seen everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital nurse.

Kindhearted to admiration she was, and yet something was lacking in her kindness of heart: forgiveness. Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving or bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a trifle, if it touched her heart, wounded her forever. She forgot nothing.

Her faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her mistress’s hair.

She was silently drooping there when her sister found her another place

, with a former actor, a retired comedian, living upon the money that the laughter of all Paris had brought him. The good man was old and had never had any children.

“What the devil!” said she, after a few moments of silent scrutiny, “what! is it really you?—Then I have never used my eyes to look at you.—Good God, yes!⸺But—but—” She mumbled more vague exclamations between her teeth.—

“Where the deuce did you get that mug like an amorous cat’s?”

she said at last, and continued to gaze at her.

… even more slender to the eye by the projection of the hips and the curve of the hoops that gave the balloon-like roundness to her skirt;—an impossible waist, absurdly small but adorable, like everything in woman that offends one’s sense of proportion by its diminutiveness.

From this ugly woman emanated a piquant, mysterious charm.

Light and shadow, jostling and intercepting each other on her face on which hollows and protuberances abounded, imparted to it that suggestion of libertinism which the painter of love scenes gives to the rough sketch of his mistress.

Germinie was passionately jealous.

Jealousy was the foundation of her nature; it was the dregs of her affection and gave it its bitter taste.

Those whom she loved she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess them absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one but her. She could not permit them to take from her and bestow upon others the slightest fragment of their affection:

One day, when she went into Germinie’s kitchen, mademoiselle saw a little earth in a cigar box on the leads.—“What’s that?” she asked.—“That’s grass—that I planted—to look at,” said Germinie.—

“So you’re in love with grass now, eh? All you need now is to have canaries!”

Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles and in fantastic figures over her head. The birds called.

The sky answered the cages.

She heard everything about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at the women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their shirt sleeves in the little gardens, the mothers on the doorsteps with their little ones between their legs.

… of things half-seen, passing the dark houses, and finding that everything along her road had turned paler, as it were—wearied by the long walk over rough roads, and content to be weary and slow and half-fainting, and with a feeling of peace at her heart.

At the first lighted lanterns on Rue du Château, she would fall from her dream to the pavement.

… set off by a collar, not a glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes.

This absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning

; it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of lifelessness and earthiness—a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there was a suggestion of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piété!

“Why, you’re a funny fellow. What’s the matter with you? Ah! it’s on that account, is it?” And she pointed to the bedroom. “You’re a stupid! I love you, don’t I? Well then?”

Germinie said the words simply, as the heart says sublime things.

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 a presentiment that her money was lost so far as they were concerned. She had not even based any hopes on the possibility that this sacrifice would touch the young man. She had acted on the impulse of the moment.

If she had been told to die to prevent his going, she would have died.

The idea of seeing him a soldier, the idea of the battlefield, the cannon, the wounded, in presence of which a woman shuts her eyes in terror, had led her to do something more than die;

His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and found food for laughter and entertainment in everything.

Nothing in the world seemed sad to him⁠—except a glass of water.

With this drunkard’s expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety of his profession, the good humor and the warmheartedness of that free, unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks distraction in …

“In Heaven’s name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!”

“Oh! people don’t fall that way,” said Germinie in a strange tone. “I tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing to do it!”

It was one of the times when I had to have someone! At those times I don’t know anything or see anything. I’m not myself at all. I took you because it was a hot day!”

“Go on,” said Gautruche, “iron me on all the seams. Don’t mind me as long as your hand’s in.”

“So?” continued Germinie, “how enchanted you imagined I was going to be to take up with you! You said to yourself: ‘The good-natured fool! she’ll be glad of the chance! And all I shall have to do will be to promise to marry her.

The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling listlessly at her side.

She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a milestone.

In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passersby, the carriages, the street—she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were far away.

Passion is subject to the most insensate reactions, the most inexplicable revivals.

The accursed love that Germinie believed to have been killed by all the wounds and blows Jupillon had inflicted upon it came to life once more. She was dismayed to find it in her heart when she returned home.

The left lung is entirely gone. The right has begun to be affected at the top, and I fear that there is more or less difficulty all through it. She’s a dead woman. She may live six weeks, two months at most.”

“Great Heaven!” said Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, “everyone I have ever loved will go before me! Tell me, must I wait until everybody has gone?”

“Have you thought of placing her in some institution?” said the doctor, after a moment’s silence. “You can’t keep her here. It’s too great a burden, too great a grief for you to have her with you,” he added, at a gesture from mademoiselle.

The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the butter woman and the laundress—all her debts, incarnate!

The kisses were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their claims and to extort money from her death-agony!