



Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Meredith Bach and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net







                      CHEFS D'OEUVRE
                            DU
                    ROMAN CONTEMPORAIN

                         REALISTS




[Illustration: Chapter XXI

_Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line._

_And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the
garden, on the bank of the stream--Jupillon on a laundry board resting
on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her
skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream._]




                       BIBLIOTHEQUE
                    DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
                         DU ROMAN
                       CONTEMPORAIN



                   _GERMINIE LACERTEUX_



               EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT


              PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY
             GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA




                    GERMINIE LACERTEUX




PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION


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.

It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans, alcove
confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a
bookseller's shop window: that which is contained in the following pages
is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure
_decolletee_: the following study is the clinic of Love.

Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures
that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion
nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a
melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure
the health of the public.

Why then have we written it? For no other purpose than to annoy the
public and offend its tastes?

By no means.

Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age of universal
suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves the question
whether what are called "the lower classes" had no rights in the novel;
if that world beneath a world, the common people, must needs remain
subject to the literary interdict, and helpless against the contempt of
authors who have hitherto said no word to imply that the common people
possess a heart and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of
equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the
author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed,
catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were curious
to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a
vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where
castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries
of the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest, emotion,
compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the great and the rich; if,
in a word, the tears that are shed in low life have the same power to
cause tears to flow as the tears shed in high life.

These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble tale, _Soeur
Philomene_, in 1861; they lead us to put forth _Germinie Lacerteux_
to-day.

Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters little. At this
day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it
is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary
study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of
analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary
morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements
of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.
And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to authorize it to
disclose misery and suffering which it is not well for the fortunate
people of Paris to forget, and to show to people of fashion what the
Sisters of Charity have the courage to see for themselves, what the
queens of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes in the
hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering that teaches
charity; to confirm the novel in the practice of that religion which the
last century called by the vast and far-reaching name, _Humanity_:--it
needs no other warrant than the consciousness that that is its right.

_Paris, October, 1864._




SECOND PREFACE

PREPARED FOR A POSTHUMOUS EDITION OF GERMINIE LACERTEUX


_July 22, 1862._--The disease is gradually doing its work of destruction
in our poor Rose. It is as if the immaterial manifestations of life that
formerly emanated from her body were dying one by one. Her face is
entirely changed. Her expression is not the same, her gestures are not
the same; and she seems to me as if she were putting off every day more
and more of that something, humanly speaking indefinable, which makes
the personality of a living being. Disease, before making an end of its
victim, introduces into his body something strange, unfamiliar,
something that is _not he_, makes of him a new being, so to speak, in
whom we must seek to find the former being--he, whose joyous,
affectionate features have already ceased to exist.

_July 31._--Doctor Simon is to tell me very soon whether our dear old
Rose will live or die. I am waiting to hear his ring, which to me, is
equivalent to that of a jury at the assizes, announcing their return to
the court room with their verdict. "It is all over, there is no hope, it
is simply a question of time. The disease has progressed very rapidly.
One lung is entirely gone and the other substantially." And we must
return to the invalid, restore her serenity with a smile, give her
reason to hope for convalescence in every line of our faces. Then we
feel an unconquerable longing to rush from the room and from the poor
creature. We leave the house, we wander at random through the streets;
at last, overdone with fatigue, we sit down at a table in a cafe. 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? must she also endure suffering, aye,
torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And
she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the
sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as
stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the
doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep
her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was
unwilling to go to Maison Dubois, where we proposed to take her; it
seems that twenty-five years ago, when she first came to us, she went
there to see the nurse in charge of Edmond, who died there, and so that
particular hospital represents to her the place where people die. I am
waiting for Simon who is to bring her a permit to go to Lariboisiere.
She passed almost a good night. She is all ready, in high spirits, in
fact. We have covered everything up from her as well as we could. She
longs to be gone. She is in a great hurry. She feels that she is going
to get well there. At two o'clock Simon arrives: "Here it is, all
right." She refuses to have a litter: "I should think I was dead!" she
says. She is dressed. As soon as she leaves her bed, all the signs of
life to be seen upon her face disappear. It is as if the earth had risen
under her skin. She comes down into our apartments. Sitting in the
dining-room, with a trembling hand, the knuckles of which knock against
one another, she draws her stockings on over a pair of legs like
broomsticks, consumptive legs. Then, for a long moment, she looks about
at the familiar objects with dying eyes that seem desirous to take away
with them the memory of the places they are leaving--and the door of the
apartment closes upon her with a noise as of farewell. She reaches the
foot of the stairs, where she rests for an instant on a chair. The
concierge, in a bantering tone, assures her that she will be well in six
weeks. She bows and says "yes," an inaudible "yes." The cab drives up to
the door. She rests her hand on the concierge's wife. I hold her
against the pillow she has behind her back. With wide open, vacant eyes
she vaguely watches the houses pass, but she does not speak. At the door
of the hospital she tries to alight without assistance. "Can you walk so
far?" the concierge asks. She makes an affirmative gesture and walks on.
Really I cannot imagine where she procured the strength to walk as she
does. Here we are at last in the great hall, a high, cold, bare, clean
place with a litter standing, all ready for use, in the centre. I seat
her in a straw armchair by a door with a glazed wicket. A young man
opens the wicket, asks my name and age and writes busily for quarter of
an hour, covering ten or more sheets of paper with a religious figure at
the head. At last, everything is ready, and I embrace her. A boy takes
one arm, the housekeeper the other.--After that, I saw nothing more.

_Thursday, August 14._--We have been to Lariboisiere. We found Rose
quiet, hopeful, talking of her approaching 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
to-day. 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. And the mother in her added:
"Does the child ask for me sometimes?"

"Sometimes, oh! yes," the man replied.

_Saturday, August 16._--This morning, at ten o'clock, someone rings the
bell. I hear a colloquy at the door between the housekeeper and the
concierge. The door opens, the concierge enters with a letter. I take
the letter; it bears the stamp of Lariboisiere. Rose died this morning
at seven o'clock.

Poor girl! So it is all over! I knew that she was doomed; but she was so
animated, so cheerful, almost happy, when we saw her Thursday! And here
we are both walking up and down the salon, filled with the thought that
a fellow-creature's death inspires: We shall never see her again!--an
instinctive thought that recurs incessantly within you. What a void!
what a gap in our household! A habit, an attachment of twenty-five years
growth, a girl who knew our whole lives and opened our letters in our
absence, and to whom we told all our business. When I was a bit of a boy
I trundled my hoop with her, and she bought me apple-tarts with her own
money, when we went to walk. She would sit up for Edmond till morning,
to open the door for him, when he went to the Bal de l'Opera without our
mother's knowledge. She was the woman, the excellent nurse, whose hands
mother placed in ours when she was dying. She had the keys to
everything, she managed everything, she did everything for our comfort.
For twenty-five years she tucked us up in bed every night, and every
night there were the same never-ending jokes about her ugliness and her
disgraceful physique. Sorrows and joys alike she shared with us. She was
one of those devoted creatures upon whose solicitude you rely to close
your eyes. Our bodies, when we were ill or indisposed, were accustomed
to her attentions. She was familiar with all our hobbies. She had known
all our mistresses. She was a piece of our life, part of the furniture
of our apartment, a stray memory of our youth, at once loving and
scolding and care-taking, like a watchdog whom we were accustomed to
having always beside us and about us, and who ought to last as long as
ourselves. And we shall never see her again! It is not she moving about
the rooms; she will never again come to our rooms to bid us
good-morning! It is a great wrench, a great change in our lives, which
seems to us, I cannot say why, like one of those solemn breaks in one's
existence, when, as Byron says, destiny changes horses.

_Sunday, August 17._--This morning we are to perform all the last sad
duties. We must return to the hospital, enter once more the reception
hall, where I seem to see again, in the armchair against the wicket, the
ghost of the emaciated creature I seated there less than a week ago.
"Will you identify the body?" the attendant hurls the question at me in
a harsh voice. We go to the further end of the hospital, to a high
yellow door, upon which is written in great black letters:
_Amphitheatre_. The attendant knocks. After some moments the door is
partly opened, and a head like a butcher's boy's appears, with a short
pipe in its mouth: a head which suggests the gladiator and the
grave-digger. I fancied that I was at the circus, and that he was the
slave who received the gladiators' bodies; and he does receive the slain
in that great circus, society. They made us wait a long while before
opening another door, and during those moments of suspense, all our
courage oozed away, as the blood of a wounded man who is forced to
remain standing oozes away, drop by drop. The mystery of what we were
about to see, the horror of a sight that rends your heart, the search
for the one body amid other bodies, the scrutiny and recognition of that
poor face, disfigured doubtless--the thought of all this made us as
timid as children. We were at the end of our strength, at the end of our
will-power, at the end of our nervous tension, and, when the door
opened, we said: "We will send some one," and fled. From there we went
to the mayor's office, riding in a cab that jolted us and shook our
heads about like empty things. And an indefinable horror seized upon us
of death in a hospital, which seems to be only an administrative
formality. One would say that in that abode of agony, everything is so
well administered, regulated, reduced to system, that death opens it as
if it were an administrative bureau.

While we were having the death registered,--_Mon Dieu!_ the paper, all
covered with writing and flourishes for a poor woman's death!--a man
rushed out of an adjoining room, in joyous exultation, and looked at the
almanac hanging on the wall to find the name of the saint of the day and
give it to his child. As he passed, the skirt of the happy father's coat
swept the sheet on which the death was registered from the desk to the
floor.

When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes
together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable
things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. 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. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness
of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the
prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little
girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of
nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a
poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a
head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a
Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited
by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes
there is already a gleam of the life beyond.

Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre
cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the
city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the
intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the
gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is
lowered into a cellar.

_Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital. For
since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next
