Part 5 (1/2)
Just emerging from boyhood, the young man had brought to his first _liaison_ no other ardor, no other flame than the cold instincts of rascality awakened in boys by vile books, the confidences of their comrades, boarding-school conversation, the first breath of impurity which debauches desire. The sentiment with which the young man usually regards the woman who yields to him, the caresses, the loving words, the affectionate attentions with which he envelops her--nothing of all that existed in Jupillon's case. Woman was to him simply an obscene image; and a pa.s.sion for a woman seemed to him desirable as being prohibited, illicit, vulgar, cynical and amusing--an excellent opportunity for trickery and sarcasm.
Sarcasm--the low, cowardly, despicable sarcasm of the dregs of the people--was the beginning and the end of this youth. He was a perfect type of those Parisians who bear upon their faces the mocking scepticism of the great city of _blague_ in which they are born. The smile, the shrewdness and the mischief of the Parisian physiognomy were always mocking and impertinent in him. Jupillon's smile had the jovial expression imparted by a wicked mouth, a mouth that was almost cruel at the corners of the lips, which curled upward and were always twitching nervously. His face was pale with the pallor that nitric acid strong enough to eat copper gives to the complexion, and in his sharp, pert, bold features were mingled bravado, energy, recklessness, intelligence, impudence and all sorts of rascally expressions, softened, at certain times, by a cat-like, wheedling air. His trade of glove-cutter--he had taken up with that trade after two or three unsuccessful trials as an apprentice in other crafts--the habit of working in the shop-windows, of being on exhibition to the pa.s.sers-by, had given to his whole person the self-a.s.surance and the dandified airs of a _poseur_. Sitting in the work-shop on the street, with his white s.h.i.+rt, his little black cravat _a la Colin_, and his skin-tight pantaloons, he had adopted an awkward air of nonchalance, the pretentious carriage and _canaille_ affectations of the workman who knows he is being stared at. And various little refinements of doubtful taste, the parting of the hair in the middle and brus.h.i.+ng it down over the temples, the low s.h.i.+rt collars that left the whole neck bare, the striving after the coquettish effects that properly belong to the other s.e.x, gave him an uncertain appearance, which was made even more ambiguous by his beardless face, marred only by a faint suggestion of a moustache, and his s.e.xless features to which pa.s.sion and ill-temper imparted all the evil quality of a shrewish woman's face. But in Germinie's eyes all these airs and this Jupillon style were of the highest distinction.
Thus const.i.tuted, with nothing lovable about him and incapable of a genuine attachment even through his pa.s.sions, Jupillon was greatly embarra.s.sed and bored by this adoration which became intoxicated with itself, and waxed greater day by day. Germinie wearied him to death. She seemed to him absurd in her humiliation, and laughable in her devotion.
He was weary, disgusted, worn out with her. He had had enough of her love, enough of her person. And he had no hesitation about cutting loose from her, without charity or pity. He ran away from her. He failed to keep the appointments she made. He pretended that he was kept away by accident, by errands to be done, by a pressure of work. At night, she waited for him and he did not come; she supposed that he was detained by business: in fact he was at some low billiard hall, or at some ball at the barrier.
XVI
There was a ball at the _Boule-Noire_ one Thursday. The dancing was in full blast.
The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amus.e.m.e.nt for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and gla.s.ses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the decorations of a cardboard palace.
Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames, alternated with Prud'hon's _Seasons_, which were much astonished to find themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort used by suburban hair-dressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a cafe.
In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black _paletots_, women in _caracos_ worn s.h.i.+ny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole a.s.semblage not one of the youthful faces was 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 Hotel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piete!
An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side pa.s.sed in front of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red apples.
From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off finery of some kept mistress.
The men wore _paletots_, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears, and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored s.h.i.+rts, had an insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great family.
Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of b.e.s.t.i.a.l pleasure.
And in the evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel addresses given: _Impa.s.se du Depotoir_.
Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the air of _La Casquette du pere Bugeaud_, in which the cymbals, the sleigh-bells and the drum had infected the dancers with the giddiness and madness of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole room, all the men leading their partners back to the places marked by their caps: she had been misled; _he_ was not there, she could not see him.
However, she waited. She entered the dancers' enclosure and sat down on the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much embarra.s.sed. From their linen caps she judged that the women seated in line beside her were servants like herself: comrades of her own cla.s.s alarmed her less than the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets and their hands in the pockets of their _paletots_, who strolled humming about the room.
But soon she aroused hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat--only about a dozen women at the ball wore hats--her flounced skirt, the white hem of which could be seen under her dress, the gold brooch that secured her shawl awakened malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and smiles were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All the women seemed to be asking one another where this new arrival had come from, and to be saying to one another that she would take their lovers from them. Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs, with their arms about one another's waists as if for a waltz, made her lower her eyes as they pa.s.sed in front of her, and then went on with a contemptuous shrug, turning their heads to look back at her.
She changed her place: she was met with the same smiles, the same whispering, the same hostility. She went to the further end of the hall; all the women looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress to the flowers on her hat. Her face flushed. At times she feared that she should weep. She longed to leave the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of the hall all alone.
She began mechanically to watch an old woman who was slowly making the circuit of the hall with a noiseless step, like a bird of night flying in a circle. A black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her _bandeaux_ of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine shoulders, hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan. When she reached the door, she cast a last glance about the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye of a vulture seeking in vain for food.
Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a noise like breaking furniture.
As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he was sitting between two women at a green table in a window-recess, smoking. One of the two was a tall blonde with a small quant.i.ty of frizzled flaxen hair, a flat, stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise lay in folds on her back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black ap.r.o.n which she was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap, was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fishwoman, in a white knitted hood with a blue border.
Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw her rise and approach him, with her eyes fixed upon his face, he whispered something to the woman in the hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and waited.
”Hallo! you here,” he exclaimed when Germinie stood before him, erect, motionless and mute. ”This is a surprise!--Waiter! another bowl!”
And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the two women's gla.s.ses, he continued: ”Come, don't make up faces--sit down there.”
And, as Germinie did not budge: ”Go on! These ladies are friends of mine--ask them!”