s soon as he had removed from madame bergeret, deposed, the management of his house, m. bergeret himself took command, and a very bad job he made of it. yet in excuse it should be said that the maid marie never carried out his orders, since she never understood them. but since action is the essential condition of life and one can by no means avoid it, marie acted, and was led by her natural gifts into the most unlucky decisions and the most noxious deeds. sometimes, however, the light of her genius was quenched by drunkenness. one day, having drunk all the spirits of wine kept for the lamp, she lay stretched unconscious on the kitchen tiles for forty hours. her awaking was always terrible, and every movement she made was followed by catastrophe. she succeeded in doing what had been beyond the powers of anyone else—in splitting the marble chimney-piece by dashing a candlestick on it. she took to cooking all the food in a267 frying-pan, amid deafening clamour and poisonous smells, and nothing that she served was eatable.
shut up alone in the solitude of her bedroom, madame bergeret screamed and sobbed with mingled grief and rage, as she watched the ruin of her home. her misery took on strange, unheard-of shapes that were agony to her conventional soul and became ever more formidable. until now m. bergeret had always handed over to her the whole of his monthly salary, without even keeping back his cigarette money from it. but she no longer received a penny from him, and as she had dressed expensively during the gay time of her liaison with m. roux, and even more expensively during her troublous times when she was upholding her dignity by constantly visiting her entire circle, she was now beginning to be dunned by her milliner and dressmaker, and messrs. achard, a firm of outfitters, who did not regard her as a regular customer, actually issued a writ against her, which on this particular evening struck consternation into the proud heart of the daughter of pouilly. when she perceived that these unprecedented trials were the unexpected, but fatal, results of her sin, she began to perceive the heinousness of adultery. with this thought came a memory of all she had been taught in her youth about this unparalleled, this unique crime; for, in268 truth, neither envy, nor avarice, nor cruelty bring such shame to the sinner as this one offence of adultery.
as she stood on the hearthrug before stepping into bed, she opened the neck of her nightdress, and dropping her chin, looked down at the shape of her body. foreshortened in this way beneath the cambric, it looked like a warm white mass of cushions and pillows, lit up by the rays of the lamplight. she knew nothing of the beauty of the simple human form, having merely the dressmaker’s instinct for style, and never asked herself whether these outlines below her eyes were lovely or not. neither did she find grounds for humiliation or self-glorification in this fleshly envelope; she never even recalled the memory of past pleasures: the only feeling that came was one of troubled anxiety at the sight of the body whose secret impulses had worked such consequences in her home and outside it.
she was a being of moral and religious instincts, and sufficiently philosophic to grasp the absolute value of the points in a game of cards: the idea came to her then that an act in itself entirely trivial might be great in the world of ideas. she felt no remorse, because she was devoid of imagination, and having a rational conception of god, felt that she had already been sufficiently punished.269 but, at the same time, since she followed the ordinary line of thought in morality and conceived that a woman’s honour could only be judged by the common criterion, since she had formed no colossal plan of overthrowing the moral scheme in order to manufacture for herself an outrageous innocence, she could feel no quietness, no satisfaction in life, nor could she enjoy any sense of the inner peace that sustains the mind in tribulation.
her troubles were the more harassing because they were so mysterious, so indefinitely prolonged. they unwound themselves like the ball of red string that madame magloire, the confectioner in the place saint-exupère, kept on her counter in a boxwood case, and which she used to tie up hundreds of little parcels by means of the thread that passed through a hole in the cover. it seemed to madame bergeret that she would never see the end of her worries; she even, under sadness and regret, began to acquire a certain look of spiritual beauty.
one morning she looked at an enlarged photograph of her father, whom she had lost during the first year of her married life, and standing in front of it, she wept, as she thought of the days of her childhood, of the little white cap worn at her first communion, of her sunday walks when she went to270 drink milk at the tuilerie with her cousins, the two demoiselles pouilly of the dictionary, of her mother, still alive, but now an old lady living in her little native town, far away at the other end of france in the département du nord. madame bergeret’s father, victor pouilly, a headmaster and the author of a popular edition of lhomond’s grammar, had entertained a lofty notion of his social dignity in the world and of his intellectual prowess. being overshadowed and patronised by his elder brother, the great pouilly of the dictionary, being also under the thumb of the university authorities, he took it out of everybody else and became prouder and prouder of his name, his grammar, and his gout, which was severe. in his pose he expressed the pouilly dignity, and to his daughter his portrait seemed to say: “my child, i pass over, i purposely pass over everything in your conduct which cannot be considered exactly conventional. you should recognise the fact that all your troubles come from having married beneath you. in vain i flattered myself that i had raised him to our level. this bergeret is an uneducated man, and your original mistake, the source of all your troubles, my daughter, was your marriage.” and madame bergeret gave ear to this speech, while the wisdom and kindness of her father, so clearly stamped on it, sustained her drooping271 courage in a measure. yet, step by step, she began to yield to fate. she ceased to pay denunciatory visits in the town, where, in fact, she had already tired out the curiosity of her friends by the monotonous tenour of her complaints. even at the rector’s house they began to believe that the stories which were told in the town about her liaison with m. roux were not entirely fables. she had allowed herself to be compromised, and she wearied them; they let her plainly see both facts. the only person whose sympathy she still retained was madame dellion, and to this lady she remained a sort of allegorical figure of injured innocence. but although madame dellion, being of higher rank, pitied her, respected her, admired her, she would not receive her. madame bergeret was humiliated and alone, childless, husbandless, homeless, penniless.
one last effort she made to resume her rightful position in the house. it was on the morning after the most miserable and wretched day that she had ever spent. after having endured the insolent demands of mademoiselle rose, the modiste, and of lafolie, the butcher, after having caught marie stealing the three francs seventy-five centimes left by the laundress on the dining-room sideboard, madame bergeret went to bed so full of misery and fear that she could not sleep. her272 overwhelming troubles brought on an attack of romantic fancy, and in the shades of night she saw a vision of marie pouring out a poisonous potion that m. bergeret had prepared for her. with the dawn her fevered terrors fled, and having dressed carefully, she entered m. bergeret’s study with an air of quiet gravity. so little had he expected her that she found the door open.
“lucien! lucien!” said she.
she called upon the innocent names of their three daughters. she begged and implored, while she gave a fair enough description of the wretched state of the house. she promised that for the future she would be good, faithful, economical and good-tempered. but m. bergeret would not answer.
kneeling at his feet, she sobbed and twisted the arms that had once been so imperious in their gestures. he deigned neither to see nor to hear her.
she showed him the spectacle of a pouilly at his feet. but he only took up his hat and went out. then she got up and ran after him, and with outstretched fist and lips drawn back shouted after him from the hall:
“i never loved you. do you hear that? never, not even when i first married you! you are hideous, you are ridiculous and everything else273 that’s horrid. and everyone in the town knows that you are nothing but a ninnyhammer ... yes, a ninnyhammer....”
she had never heard this word save on the lips of pouilly of the dictionary, who had been in his grave for more than twenty years, and now it recurred to her mind suddenly, as though by a miracle. she attached no definite meaning to it, but as it sounded excessively insulting, she shouted down the staircase after him, “ninnyhammer, ninnyhammer!”
it was her last effort as a wife. a fortnight after this interview madame bergeret appeared before her husband and said, this time in quiet, resolute tones, “i cannot remain here any longer. it is your doing entirely. i am going to my mother’s; you must send me marianne and juliette. pauline i will let you have....”
pauline was the eldest; she was like her father, and between them there existed a certain sympathy.
“i hope,” added madame bergeret, “that you will make a suitable allowance for your two daughters who will live with me. for myself i ask nothing.”
when m. bergeret heard these words, when he saw her at the goal whither he had guided her by foresight and firmness, he tried to conceal his joy,274 for fear lest, if he let it be detected, madame bergeret might abandon an arrangement that suited him admirably.
he made no answer, but he bent his head in sign of consent.
the end
