XLIII

But the past and its debts were still there, and whispered to her every hour: “If mademoiselle knew!”

She lived in the constant panic of a guilty woman, trembling with dread from morning till night. There was never a ring at the door that she did not say to herself: “It has come at last!” Letters in a strange handwriting filled her with anxiety. She would feel of the wax with her fingers, bury the letters in her pocket, hesitate about delivering them, and the moment when mademoiselle unfolded the terrible paper and scanned its contents with the inexpressive eye of elderly people was as full of suspense to her as if she were awaiting sentence of death. She felt that her secret and her falsehood were in everybody’s hand. The house had seen her and might speak. The quarter knew her as she was. Of all about her, there was no one but her mistress whose esteem she could still steal.

As she went in and out, the concierge looked at her with a smile and a glance, that said: “I know.” She no longer dared to call him: “My Pipelet.” When she returned home he looked into her basket. “I am so fond of that!” his wife would say, when it contained some tempting morsel. At night she would take down what was left. She ate nothing herself. She ended by supplying them with food.

The whole street frightened her no less than the hall and the porter’s lodge. There was a face in every shop that reflected her shame and commented on her sins. At every step she had to purchase silence by groveling humility. The dealers she had not been able to repay had her in their clutches. If she said that anything was too dear, she was reminded in a bantering way that they were her masters, and that she must pay the price unless she chose to be denounced. A jest or an allusion drove the color from her cheeks. She was bound to them, compelled to trade with them and to allow them to empty her pockets as if they were accomplices. The successor of Madame Jupillon, who had gone into the grocery business at Bar-sur Aube⁠—the new crémière⁠—gave her bad milk, and when she suggested that mademoiselle complained about it, and that she was found fault with every morning, the woman replied: “Much you care for your mademoiselle!” And at the fish-stall, if she smelt of a fish, and said: “This has been frozen,” the reply would be: “Bah! tell me next, will you, that I let the moon shine on their gills, so’s to make ’em look fresh! So these are hard days for you, eh, my duck?” Mademoiselle wanted her to go to the Halle Centrale one day for her dinner, and she mentioned the fact in the fish-woman’s presence. “Oho! yes, yes, to the Halle! I’d like to see you go to the Halle!” And she bestowed a glance upon her in which Germinie saw a threat to send her account to her mistress. The grocer sold her coffee that smelt of snuff, rotten prunes, dried rice and old biscuit. If she ventured to remonstrate, “Nonsense!” he would say; “an old customer like you wouldn’t want to make trouble for me. Don’t I tell you I give you good weight?” And he would coolly give her false weight of the goods that she ordered, and that he forced her to order.