She tried to speak, but nothing came from her throat save hoarse croaks, like the call that the shepherds of her native village sound on their goat-horns of an evening. Then she crossed her two arms, bare to the elbow, over her face, showing the fat, white flesh furrowed with long red scratches, and wiped her eyes with the back of her brown hands. Sobs tore her narrow chest and shook her stomach, abnormally enlarged by the tabes from which she had suffered in her seventh year and which had left her deformed. Then she dropped her arms to her side, hid her hands under her apron, stifled her sobs, and exclaimed peevishly, as soon as she could get the words out:
“I cannot live any longer in this house. I cannot any more. Besides, it isn’t a life at all. I would rather go away than see what I do.”
There was as much rage as misery in her voice, and she looked at M. Bergeret with inflamed eyes.
She was really very indignant at her master’s behaviour, and this not at all because she had always been attached to her mistress. For till quite recently, in the days of her pride and prosperity, Madame Bergeret had overwhelmed her with insult and humiliation and kept her half starved. Neither was it because she knew nothing of her mistress’s lapse from virtue, and believed, with Madame Dellion and the other ladies, that Madame Bergeret was innocent. She knew every detail of her mistress’s liaison with M. Roux, as did the concierge, the bread-woman, and M. Raynaud’s maid. She had discovered the truth long before M. Bergeret knew it. Neither, on the other hand, was it because she approved of the affair; for she strongly censured both M. Roux and Madame Bergeret. For a girl who was mistress of her own person to have a lover seemed a small thing to her, not worth troubling about, when one knows how easily these things happen. She had had a narrow escape herself one night after the fair, when she was close pressed by a lad who wanted to play pranks at the edge of a ditch. She knew that an accident might happen all in a moment. But in a middle-aged married woman with children such conduct was disgusting. She confessed to the bread-woman one morning that really mistress turned her sick. Personally, she had no hankering after this kind of thing, and if there were no one but her to supply the babies, why then, the world might come to an end for all she cared. But if her mistress felt differently, there was always a husband for her to turn to. Euphémie considered that Madame Bergeret had committed a horribly wicked sin, but she could not bring herself to feel that any sin, however serious, should never be forgiven and should always remain unpardoned. During her childhood, before she hired herself out to service, she used to work with her parents in the fields and vineyards. There she had seen the sun scorch up the vine-flowers, the hail beat down all the corn in the fields in a few minutes; yet, the very next year, her father, mother and elder brothers would be out in the fields, training the vine and sowing the furrow. There, amid the eternal patience of nature, she had learnt the lesson that in this world, alternately scorching and freezing, good and bad, there is nothing that is irreparable, and that, as one pardons the earth itself, so one must pardon man and woman.
It was according to this principle that the people at home acted, and after all, they were very likely quite as good as townsfolk. When Robertet’s wife, the buxom Léocadie, gave a pair of braces to her footman to induce him to do what she wanted, she was not so clever that Robertet did not find out the trick. He caught the lovers just in the nick of time, and chastised his wife so thoroughly with a horsewhip that she lost all desire to sin again for ever and ever. Since then Léocadie has been one of the best women in the country: her husband hasn’t that to find fault with her for. M. Robertet is a man of sense and knows how to drive men as well as cattle: why don’t people just do as he did?
Having been often beaten by her respected father, and being, moreover, a simple, untamed being herself, Euphémie fully understood an act of violence. Had M. Bergeret broken the two house brooms on Madame Bergeret’s guilty back, she would have quite approved of his act. One broom, it is true, had lost half its bristles, and the other, older still, had no more hair than the palm of the hand, and served, with the aid of a dishcloth, to wash down the kitchen tiles. But when her master persisted in a mood of prolonged and sullen spite, the peasant girl considered it hateful, unnatural and positively fiendish. What brought home to Euphémie all M. Bergeret’s crimes with still greater force, was that his behaviour made her work difficult and confusing. For since Monsieur refused to take his meals with Madame, he had to be served in one place and she in another, for although M. Bergeret might stubbornly refuse to recognise his wife’s existence, yet she could not sustain even non-existence without sustenance of some sort. “It’s like an inn,” sighed the youthful Euphémie. Then, since M. Bergeret no longer supplied her with housekeeping money, Madame Bergeret used to say to Euphémie: “You must settle with your master.” And in the evening Euphémie would tremblingly carry her book to her master, who would wave her off with an imperious gesture, for he found it difficult to meet the increased expenditure. Thus lived Euphémie, perpetually overwhelmed by difficulties with which she could not cope. In this poisoned air she was losing all her cheerfulness: she was no longer to be heard in the kitchen, mingling the noise of laughter and shouts with the crash of saucepans, with the sizzling of the frying-pan upset on the stove, or with the heavy blows of the knife, as on the chopping-block she minced the meat, together with one of her finger-tips. She no longer revelled in joy, or in noisy grief. She said to herself: “This house is driving me crazy.” She pitied Madame Bergeret, for now she was kindly treated. They used to spend the evening, sitting side by side in the lamp-light, exchanging confidences. It was with her heart full of all these emotions that Euphémie said to M. Bergeret:
“I am going away. You are too wicked. I want to leave.”
And again she shed a flood of tears.
M. Bergeret was by no means vexed at this reproach. He pretended, in fact, not to hear it, for he had too much sense not to be able to make allowances for the rudeness shown by an ignorant girl. He even smiled within himself, for in the secret depths of his heart, beneath layers of wise thoughts and fine sayings, he still retained that primitive instinct which persists even in modern men of the gentlest and sweetest character, and which makes them rejoice whenever they see they are taken for ferocious beings, as if the mere power of injuring and destroying were the motive force of living things, their essential quality and highest merit. This, on reflection, is indeed true, since, as life is supported and nourished only upon murder, the best men must be those who slaughter most. Then again, those who, under the stimulus of racial and food-conquering instincts, deal the hardest knocks, obtain the reputation of magnanimity, and please women, who are naturally interested in securing the strongest mates, and who are mentally incapable of separating the fruitful from the destructive element in man, since these two forces are, in actual fact, indissolubly linked by nature. Hence, when Euphémie in a voice as countrified as a fable by Æsop, told him he was wicked, M. Bergeret, by virtue of his philosophical temperament, felt flattered and fancied he heard a murmur which filled out the gaps in the maid’s simple speech, and said: “Learn, Lucien Bergeret, that you are a wicked man, in the vulgar sense of the word—that is to say, you are able to injure and destroy; in other words, you are in a state of defence, in full possession of life, on the road to victory. In your own way, you must know, you are a giant, a monster, an ogre, a man of terror.”
But, being a sceptical man and never given to accepting men’s opinions unchallenged, he began to ask himself if he were really what Euphémie said. At the first glance into the inner recesses of his nature he concluded that, on the whole, he was not wicked; that, on the contrary, he was full of pity, highly sensitive to the woes of others, and full of sympathy for the wretched; that he loved his fellow-men, and would have gladly satisfied their needs by fulfilling all their desires, whether innocent or guilty, for he refused to trammel his human charity with the nets of any moral system, and for every kind of misery he had compassion at his call. And to him everything that harmed no one was innocent. In this way his heart was kinder than it ought to have been, according to the laws, the morals, and the varying creeds of the nations. Looking at himself in this way, he perceived the truth—that he was not wicked, and the thought caused him some bewilderment. It pained him to recognise in himself those contemptible qualities of mind which do nothing to strengthen the life-force.