"What do you want?" said Jupillon, impressed, in spite of himself, by Germinie's tone.
"Come!"
And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the people crowded about her, laughing. She heard voices, broken sentences, subdued hooting.
XVII
Jupillon promised Germinie not to go to the ball again. But he was just beginning to make a name for himself at La Brididi, among the low haunts near the barrier, the Boule-Noire, the Reine-Blanche and the Ermitage. He had become one of the dancers who make the guests leave their seats, who keep a whole roomful of people hanging on the soles of their boots as they toss them two inches above their heads, and whom the fair dancers of the locality invite to dance with them and sometimes pay for their refreshment to that end. The ball to him was not a ball simply; it was a stage, an audience, popularity, applause, the flattering murmur of his name among the groups of people, an ovation accorded to saltatory glory in the glare of the reverberators.
On Sunday he did not go to the Boule-Noire; but on the following Thursday he went there again; and Germinie, seeing plainly enough that she could not prevent him from going, decided to follow him and to stay there as long as he did. Sitting at a table in the background, in the least brilliantly lighted corner of the ball-room, she would follow him eagerly with her eyes throughout the whole contra-dance; and when it was at an end, if he held back, she would go and seize him, take him almost by force from the hands and caresses of the women who persisted in trying to pull him back, to detain him by wicked wiles.
As they soon came to know her, the insulting remarks in her neighborhood ceased to be vague and indistinct and muttered under the breath, as at the first ball. The words were thrown in her face, the laughter spoke aloud. She was obliged to pass her three hours amid a chorus of derision that pointed its finger at her, called her by name and cast her age in her face. At every turn she was forced to submit to the appellation of: old woman! which the young hussies spat at her over their shoulders as they passed. But they did at least look at her; often, however, dancing women invited by Jupillon to drink, and brought by him to the table at which Germinie was, would sit with their elbows on the table and their cheeks resting on their hands, drinking the bowl of mulled wine for which she paid, apparently unaware that there was another woman there, crowding into her place as if it were unoccupied, and making no reply when she spoke to them. Germinie could have killed these creatures whom Jupillon forced her to entertain and who despised her so utterly that they did not even notice her presence.
The time arrived, when, having endured all she could endure and being sickened by the humiliation she was forced to swallow, she conceived the idea of dancing herself. She saw no other way to avoid leaving her lover to others, to keep him by her all the evening, and perhaps to bind him more closely to her by her success, if she had any chance of succeeding. Throughout a whole month she worked, in secret, to learn to dance. She rehearsed the figures and the steps. She forced her body into unnatural attitudes, she wore herself out trying to master the contortions and the manipulations of the skirt that she saw were applauded. At the end of the month she made the venture; but everything tended to disconcert her and added to her awkwardness; the hostility that she could feel in the atmosphere, the smiles of astonishment and pity that played about the lips of the spectators when she took her place in the dancers' enclosure. She was so absurd and so laughed at, that she had not the courage to make a second attempt. She buried herself gloomily in her dark corner, only leaving it to hunt up Jupillon and carry him off, with the mute violence of a wife dragging her husband out of the wineshop and leading him home by the arm.
It was soon rumored in the street that Germinie went to these balls, that she never missed one of them. The fruit woman, at whose shop Adèle had already held forth, sent her son "to see;" he returned with a confirmation of the rumor, and told of all the petty annoyances to which Germinie was subjected, but which did not keep her from returning. Thereafter there was no more doubt in the quarter as to the relations between mademoiselle's servant and Jupillon—relations which some charitable souls had hitherto persisted in denying. The scandal burst out, and in a week the poor girl, berated by all the slanderous tongues in the quarter, baptized and saluted by the vilest names in the language of the streets, fell at a blow from the most emphatically expressed esteem to the most brutally advertised contempt.