One morning she did not come down. Mademoiselle climbed to the sixth floor, turned into a narrow corridor in which the air was heavy with the odors from servants' water-closets and at last reached Germinie's door, No. 21. Germinie apologized for having compelled her to come up. It was impossible for her to put her feet out of the bed. She had terrible pains in her bowels and they were badly swollen. She begged mademoiselle to sit down a moment and, to make room for her, removed the candlestick that stood on the chair at the head of her bed.
Mademoiselle sat down and remained a few moments, looking about the wretched room,—one of those where the doctor has to lay his hat on the bed, and where there is barely room to die! It was a small attic room, without a chimney, with a scuttle window in the sloping roof, which admitted the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Old trunks, clothes bags, a foot-bath, and the little iron bedstead on which Germinie's niece had slept, were heaped up in a corner under the sloping roof. The bed, one chair, a little disabled washstand with a broken pitcher, comprised the whole of the furniture. Above the bed, in an imitation violet-wood frame, hung a daguerreotype of a man.
The doctor came during the day. "Aha! peritonitis," he said, when mademoiselle described Germinie's condition.
He went up to see the sick woman. "I am afraid," he said, when he came down, "that there's an abscess in the intestine communicating with an abscess in the bladder. It's a serious case, very serious. You must tell her not to move about much in her bed, to turn over with great care. She might die suddenly in horrible agony. I suggested to her to go to Lariboisière,—she agreed at once. She seemed to have no repugnance at all. But I don't know how she will bear the journey. However, she has such an unlimited stock of energy; I have never seen anything like it. To-morrow morning you shall have the order of admission."
When mademoiselle went up to Germinie's room again, she found her smiling in her bed, gay as a lark at the idea of going away.
"It's a matter of six weeks at most, mademoiselle," said she.
LXIV
At two o'clock the next day the doctor brought the order for her admission to Lariboisière. The invalid was ready to start. Mademoiselle suggested that they should send to the hospital for a litter. "Oh! no," said Germinie, hastily, "I should think I was dead." She was thinking of her debts; she must show herself to her creditors on the street, alive, and on her feet to the last!
She got out of bed. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil assisted her to put on her petticoat and her dress. As soon as she left her bed, all signs of life disappeared from her face, the flush from her complexion: it seemed as if earth suddenly took the place of blood under her skin. She went down the steep servants' stairway, clinging to the baluster, and reached her mistress's apartments. She sat down in an arm-chair near the window in the dining-room. She insisted upon putting on her stockings without assistance, and as she pulled them on with her poor trembling hands, the fingers striking against one another, she afforded a glimpse of her legs, which were so thin as to make one shudder. The housekeeper, meanwhile, was putting together in a bundle a little linen, a glass, a cup, and a pewter plate, which she wished to carry with her. When that was done, Germinie looked about her for a moment; she cast one last glance around the room, a glance that seemed to long to take everything away with her. Then, as her eyes rested on the door through which the housekeeper had just gone out, she said to mademoiselle: "At all events I leave a good woman with you."