XLIX
Médérie Gautruche was one of the wenching, idling, vagabond workmen who make their whole life a Monday. Filled with the love of wine, his lips forever wet with the last drop, his insides as thoroughly lined with tartar as an old wine cask, he was one of those whom the Burgundians graphically call boyaux rouges.3 Always a little tipsy, tipsy from yesterday when he had drunk nothing today, he looked at life through the sunbeam in his head. He smiled at his fate, he yielded to it with the easy indifference of the drunkard, smiling vaguely from the steps of the wineshop at things in general, at life and the road that stretched away into the darkness. Ennui, care, want, had gained no hold upon him; and if by chance a grave or gloomy thought did come into his mind, he turned his head away, uttered an exclamation that sounded like psitt! which was his way of saying pshaw! and, raising his right arm, caricaturing the gesture of a Spanish dancer, he would toss his melancholy over his shoulder to the devil. He had the superb after-drinking philosophy, the jovial serenity, of the bottle. He knew neither envy nor longing. His dreams served him as a cashbox. For three sous he was sure of a small glass of happiness; for twelve, of a bottle of ideal bliss. Being content with everything, he liked everything, and found food for laughter and entertainment in everything. Nothing in the world seemed sad to him—except a glass of water.
With this drunkard’s expansiveness, with the gayety of his excellent health and his temperament, Gautruche combined the characteristic gayety of his profession, the good humor and the warmheartedness of that free, unfatiguing life, in the open air, between heaven and earth, which seeks distraction in singing, and flings the workmen’s blague at passersby, from its lofty perch upon a ladder. He was a house-painter and did lettering. He was the one man in Paris who would attack a sign without a measure, with no other guide than a cord, without outlining the letters in white; he was the only one who could place each of the letters in position inside of the frame of a placard, and, without losing an instant in aligning them, dash off capitals offhand. He was also renowned for fantastic letters, capricious letters, letters shaded in bronze or gold to imitate those cut in stone. Thus he made fifteen to twenty francs on some days. But as he drank it all up, he was not wealthy, and he always had unpaid scores on the slate at the wineshops.
He was a man brought up in the street. The street had been his mother, his nurse and his school. The street had given him his self-assurance, his ready tongue and his wit. All that the keen mind of a man of the people can pick up upon the pavements of Paris he had picked up. All that falls from the upper to the lower strata of a great city, the strainings and drippings, the crumbs of ideas and information, the things that float in the sensitive atmosphere and the brimming gutters, the contact with the covers of books, bits of feuilletons swallowed between two glasses, odds and ends of plays heard on the boulevard, had endowed him with that accidental intelligence which, though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter’s nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called “lists,” he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of singing. He was amusing, in short, from head to foot. And if you merely looked at him you laughed at him, as at a comic actor.
A man of his cheerful, hearty temperament suited Germinie.
Germinie was not a mere beast of burden with nothing but her work in her head. She was not the servant, who stands like a post, with the frightened face and doltish air of utter stupidity, when masters and mistresses are talking in her presence. She, too, had cast off her shell, fashioned herself and opened her mind to the education of Paris. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, having no occupation, and being interested after the manner of old maids in what was going on in the quarter, had long been in the habit of making Germinie tell her what news she had gleaned, what she knew of the tenants, all the gossip of the house and the street; and this habit of narration, of talking with her mistress like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without cuirs,4 and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading which women of her class have when they read at all. With the two or three kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed her nights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the feuilletons cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers, and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of some of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who worked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play; when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names of the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and one sou novels, and read them.
The air, the keen breath of Quartier Bréda, full of the verve of the artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of Germinie’s mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of mademoiselle’s elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had reached the point where, before accepting the companionship of people, she must satisfy herself that they possessed a degree of intelligence corresponding to her own and were capable of understanding her. And now, when she emerged from her fits of brutishness, when she found her old self and was born again, in diversion and pleasure, she must for her enjoyment have kindred spirits of her own. She wanted men about her who would make her laugh, noisy gayety, the spirituous wit that intoxicated her with the wine that was poured into her glass. And thus it was that she sank to the level of the rascally Bohemia of the common people, uproarious, maddening, intoxicating, like all Bohemias: thus it was that she fell to the lot of a Gautruche.