Madame Bergeret had a horror of silence and solitude, and now that M. Bergeret never spoke to her and lived apart from her, her room was as terrifying as a tomb to her mind. She never entered it without turning white. Her daughters would, at least, have supplied the noise and movement needed if she were to remain sane; but when an epidemic of typhus broke out in the autumn she sent them to visit their aunt, Mademoiselle ZoÉ Bergeret, at Arcachon. There they had spent the winter, and there their father meant to leave them, in the present state of his affairs. Madame Bergeret was a domesticated woman, with a housewifely mind. To her, adultery had been nothing more than a mere extension of wedded life, a gleam from her hearth-fire. She had been driven to it by a matronly pride in her position far more than by the wanton promptings of the flesh. She had always intended that her slight lapse with young M. Roux should remain a secret, homely habit, just a taste of adultery that would merely involve, imply, and confirm that state of matrimony which is held in honour by the world, as well as sanctified by the Church, and which secures a woman in a position of personal safety and social dignity. Madame Bergeret was a Christian wife and knew that marriage is a sacrament whose lofty and lasting results cannot be effaced by any fault such as she had committed, for serious though it might be, it was yet a pardonable and excusable lapse. Without being in a position to estimate her offence with great moral perspicuity, she felt instinctively that it was trifling and simple, being neither malicious, nor inspired by that deep passion which alone can dignify error with the splendour of crime and hurl the guilty woman into the abyss. She not only felt that she was no great criminal, but also that she had never had the chance of being one. Yet now she had to stand watching the entirely unforeseen results of such a trifling episode, as to her terror they slowly and gloomily unfolded themselves before her. She suffered cruel pangs at finding herself alone and fallen within her own house, at having lost the sovereignty of her home, and at having been despoiled, as it were, of her cares of kitchen and store-cupboard. Suffering was not good for her and brought no purification in its train; it merely awoke in her paltry mind, at one moment the instinct of revolt, and at another, a passion for self-humiliation. Every day, about three o’clock in the afternoon, she went out and paid visits at her friends’ houses. On these expeditions she walked with great strides, a grim, stiff figure with bright eyes, flaming cheeks and gaudy dress. She called on all the lower-middle-class ladies of the town, on Madame Torquet, the dean’s wife; on Madame Leterrier, the rector’s wife; on Madame Ossian Colot, the wife of the prison governor, and on Madame Surcouf, the recorder’s wife. She was not received by the society ladies, nor by the wives of the great capitalists. Wherever she went, she poured out a flood of complaints against M. Bergeret, and charged her husband with every variety of fantastic crime that occurred to her feeble imagination, focussed on the one point only. Her usual accusations were that he had separated her from her daughters, had left her penniless, and finally had deserted his home to run about in cafÉs and, most probably, in less reputable resorts. Wherever she went, she gained sympathy and became an object of the tenderest interest. The pity she aroused grew, spread, and rose in volume. Even Madame Dellion, the ironmaster’s wife, although she was prevented from asking her to call, because they belonged to different sets, yet sent a message to her that she pitied her with all her heart, and felt the deepest disgust at M. Bergeret’s shameful behaviour. In this way Madame Bergeret went about the town every day, fortifying her hungry soul with the social respect and fair reputation that it craved. But as she mounted her own staircase in the evening, her heart sank within her. Her weak knees would hardly sustain her and she forgot her pride, her longing for vengeance, forgot even the abuse and frivolous scandal that she had spread through the town. To escape from loneliness she longed sincerely to be on good terms with M. Bergeret once more. In such a shallow soul as hers this desire was absolutely sincere and arose quite naturally. Yet it was a vain and useless thought, for M. Bergeret went on ignoring the existence of his wife.

This particular evening Madame Bergeret said as she went into the kitchen:

“Go and ask your master, EuphÉmie, how he would like his eggs to be cooked.”

It was quite a new departure on her side to submit the bill of fare to the master of the house. For of old, in the days of her lofty innocence, she had habitually forced him to partake of dishes which he disliked and which upset the delicate digestion of the sedentary student. EuphÉmie’s mind was not of wide range, but it was impartial and unwavering, and she protested to Madame Bergeret, as she had done several times before on similar occasions, that it was absolutely useless for her mistress to ask Monsieur anything. He never answered a word, because he was in a “contrairy” mood. But Madame, turning her face away and dropping her eyelids as a sign of determination, repeated the order she had just given.

“EuphÉmie,” she said, “do as I tell you. Go and ask your master how he would like the eggs cooked, and don’t forget to tell him that they are new-laid and come from TrÉcul’s.”

M. Bergeret was sitting in his study at work on the Virgilius nauticus, which a publisher had commissioned him to prepare as an extra embellishment of a learned edition of the Æneid, at which three generations of philologists had been working for more than thirty years, and the first sheets of which were already through the press. And now, slip by slip, the professor sat compiling this special lexicon for it. He conceived a sort of veneration for himself as he worked at it, and congratulated himself in these words:

“Here am I, a land-lubber who has never sailed on anything more important than the Sunday steamboat which carries the townsfolk up the river to drink sparkling wine on the slopes of TuilliÈres in summer time; here am I, a good Frenchman, who has never seen the sea except at Villers; here am I, Lucien Bergeret, acting as the interpreter of Virgil, the seaman. Here I sit in my study explaining the nautical terms used by a poet who is accurate, learned and exact, in spite of all his rhetoric, who is a mathematician, a mechanician, a geometrician, a well-informed Italian, who was trained in seafaring matters by the sailors who basked in the sun on the sea-shores of Naples and Misenum, who had, maybe, his own galley, and under the clear stars of Helen’s twin-brothers, ploughed the blue furrows of the sea between Naples and Athens. Thanks to the excellence of my philological methods I am able to reach this point of perfection, but my pupil, M. Goubin, would be as fully equipped for the task as I.”

M. Bergeret took the greatest pleasure in this work, for it kept his mind occupied without any accompanying sense of anxiety or excitement. It filled him with real satisfaction to trace on thin sheets of pasteboard his delicate, regular letters, types and symbols as they were of the mental accuracy demanded in the study of philology. All his senses joined and shared in this spiritual satisfaction, so true is it that the pleasures which man can enjoy are more varied than is commonly supposed. Just now M. Bergeret was revelling in the peaceful joy of writing thus:

“Servius believes that Virgil wrote Attolli malos[11] in mistake for Attolli vela, [12] and the reason which he gives for this rendering is that cum navigarent, non est dubium quod olli erexerant arbores.[13] Ascencius takes the same side as Servius, being either forgetful or ignorant of the fact that, on certain occasions, ships at sea are dismasted. When the state of the sea was such that the masts....”

M. Bergeret had reached this point in his work when EuphÉmie opened the study door with the noise that always accompanied her slightest movement, and repeated the considerate message sent by Madame Bergeret to her husband:

“Madame wants to know how you would like your eggs cooked?”

M. Bergeret’s only reply was a gentle request to EuphÉmie to withdraw. He went on writing:

“ran the risk of breaking, it was customary to lower them, by lifting them out of the well in which their heels were inserted....”

EuphÉmie stood fixed against the door, while M. Bergeret finished his slip.

“The masts were then stored abaft either on a crossbar or a bridge.”

“Sir, Madame told me to say that the eggs come from TrÉcul’s.”

“Una omnes fecere pedem.”[14]

Filled with a sense of sadness M. Bergeret laid down his pen, for he was suddenly overwhelmed with a perception of the uselessness of his work. Unfortunately for his own happiness, he was intelligent enough to recognise his own mediocrity, and, at times, it would actually appear to him in visible shape, like a thin, little, clumsy figure dancing about on his table between the inkstand and the file. He knew it well and hated it, for he would fain have seen his personality come to him under the guise of a lissom nymph. Yet it always appeared to him in its true form, as a lanky, unlovely figure. It shocked him to see it, for he had delicate perceptions and a taste for dainty conceits.

“Monsieur Bergeret,” he said to himself, “you are a professor of some distinction, an intelligent provincial, a university man with a tendency to the florid, an average scholar shackled by the barren quests of philology, a stranger to the true science of language, which can be plumbed only by men of broad, unbiassed and trenchant views. Monsieur Bergeret, you are not a scholar, for you are incapable of grasping or classifying the facts of language. Michel BrÉal will never mention your poor, little, humble name. You will die without fame, and your ears will never know the sweet accents of men’s praise.”

“Sir ... Sir,” put in EuphÉmie in urgent tones, “do answer me. I have no time to hang about. I have my work to do. Madame wants to know how you’d like your eggs done. I got them at TrÉcul’s and they were laid this morning.”

Without so much as turning his head, M. Bergeret answered the girl in a tone of relentless gentleness:

“I want you to go and never again to enter my study—at any rate, not until I call you.”

Then the professor returned to his day-dream: “How happy is Torquet, our dean! How happy is Leterrier, our rector! No distrust of themselves, no rash misgivings to interrupt the smooth course of their equable lives! They are like that old fellow Mesange, who was so beloved by the immortal goddesses that he survived three generations and attained to the CollÈge de France and the Institute without having learnt anything new since the holy days of his innocent childhood. He carried with him to his grave the same amount of Greek as he had at the age of fifteen. He died at the close of this century, still revolving in his little head the mythological fancies that the poets of the First Empire had turned into verse beside his cradle. But I—how comes it that I have such a cruel sense of my own inadequacy and of the laughable folly of all I undertake? For I have a mind as weak as that Greek scholar’s, who had a bird’s brain as well as a bird’s name; I am fully as incapable as Torquet the dean, and Leterrier, the rector, of either system or initiative. I am, in fact, but a foolish, melancholy juggler with words. May it not be a sign of mental supereminence and a mark of my superiority in the realm of abstract thought? This Virgilius nauticus, which I use as the touchstone of my powers, is it really my own work and the fruit of my mind? No, it is a task foisted on my poverty by a grasping bookseller in league with a pack of pseudo-scholars who, on the pretext of freeing French scholarship from German tutelage, are bringing back the trivial methods of former times, and forcing me to take part in the philological pastimes of 1820. May the responsibility for it rest on them and not on me! It was no zeal for knowledge, but the thirst for gain, that induced me to undertake this Virgilius nauticus, at which I have now been working for three years and which will bring me in five hundred francs: to wit, two hundred and fifty francs on delivery of the manuscript, and two hundred and fifty francs on the day of publication of the volume containing this article. I determined to slake my horrible thirst for gold! I have failed, not in brain power, but in force of character. That’s a very different matter!”

In this way did M. Bergeret marshal the flock of his wandering thoughts. All this time EuphÉmie had not moved, but at last, for the third time, she spoke to her master:

“Sir.... Sir....”

But at this attempt her voice stuck in her throat, strangled by sobs.

When M. Bergeret at last glanced at her, he could see the tears rolling down her round, red, shining cheeks.

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.

With praiseworthy thoroughness, he next set himself to inquire whether he had not thrown off his kindly temper and his peaceable disposition in certain matters, and particularly in this affair of Madame Bergeret. He saw at once that on this special occasion he had acted in opposition to his general principles and habitual sentiments, and that on this point his conduct presented several marked singularities of which he noted down the strangest.

“Chief singularities: I feign to consider her a criminal, and I act as if I had really fallen into this vulgar error. And all the time that her conscience condemns her for having committed adultery with my pupil, M. Roux, I myself regard her adultery as an innocent act, since it has harmed no one. Hence Madame Bergeret’s morality is higher than mine, for, although she believes herself guilty, she forgives herself, while I, who do not consider her guilty at all, refuse to forgive her. My judgment of her is immoral, but merciful; my conduct, however, is moral, but cruel. What I condemn so pitilessly is not her act, which I consider to be merely ridiculous and unseemly: it is herself that I condemn, as being guilty, not of what she has done, but of what she is. The girl EuphÉmie is in the right: I am wicked!”

He patted himself on the back, and revolving these new considerations, said again to himself:

“I am wicked because I act. I knew, before this experience happened to me, that there is no such thing as an innocent action, for to act is to injure or destroy. As soon as I began to act, I became a malefactor.”

He had an excellent excuse for speaking thus to himself, since all this time he had been performing a systematic, continuous, and consistent act, in making Madame Bergeret’s life unbearable to her, by depriving her of all the comforts needed by her homely common nature, her domesticated character, and her gregarious mind. In a word, he was engaged in driving from his house a disobedient and troublesome wife who had done him good service by being unfaithful to him.

The opportunity she gave he seized gladly, doing his work with wonderful vigour, considering the weak character he showed in ordinary affairs. For, although M. Bergeret was usually vacillating in purpose and without a will of his own, at this crisis he was driven on by desire, by an invincible Lust. For it is desire, far stronger than will, that, having created the world, now upholds it. In this undertaking of his, M. Bergeret was sustained by unutterable desire, by a masterful Lust to see Madame Bergeret no more. And this untempered, transparent desire had the happy force of a great love, for it was ruffled by no feeling of hatred.

All this time EuphÉmie stood waiting for her master to answer her, or, at any rate, to hurl furious words at her. For on this point she agreed with Madame Bergeret, and considered silence far more cruel than insult and invective.

At last M. Bergeret broke the silence. He said in a quiet voice: “I discharge you. You will leave this house in a week’s time.”

EuphÉmie’s sole response was a plaintive, animal cry. For a moment she stood motionless. Then, thunderstruck, heart-broken and wretched, she returned to her kitchen and gazed at the saucepans, now dented like battle-armour by her valiant hands. She looked at the chair which had lost its seat—without causing her any inconvenience, however, for the poor girl hardly ever sat down; at the cistern whose waters had often swamped the house at night by overflowing from a tap left full on; at the sink with its wastepipe perpetually choked; at the table notched by the chopping-knife; at the cast-iron stove all eaten away by the fire; at the black coal-hole; at the shelves adorned with paper-lace; at the blacking-box and the bottle of brass-polish. And standing in the midst of all these witnesses of her weary life, she wept.

On the next day—that is, as they used to say, l’en demain, which happened to be market-day—M. Bergeret set out early to call on Deniseau, who kept a registry office for country servants in the Place Saint-ExupÈre. In the waiting-room he found a score of country girls waiting, some young, some old, some short, ruddy and chubby-cheeked, others tall, yellow and wizened, all differing in face and figure, but all alike in one respect—that is, in the anxious fixity of their gaze, for they all saw their own fate in the person of every caller who happened to open the door. For a moment M. Bergeret stood looking at the group of girls who waited to be hired. Then he passed on into the office adorned with calendars, where Deniseau sat at a table covered with dirty registers and old horse-shoes that served as paper-weights.

He told the man that he required a servant, and apparently he wanted one with quite unusual qualities, for after ten minutes’ conversation he came out in very low spirits. Then, as he crossed the waiting-room a second time, he caught sight of a woman in a dark corner whom he had not noticed the first time. It was a long, thin shape that he beheld, ageless and sexless, crowned by a bald, bony head, with a forehead set like an enormous sphere on a short nose that seemed nothing but nostril. Through her open mouth her great horse-teeth were visible in all their nakedness, and under her drooping lip there was no chin to speak of. She stayed in her corner, neither moving nor looking, perhaps realising that she would not easily find anyone to hire her, and that others would be taken in preference to her. Yet she seemed quite satisfied with herself and quite easy in her mind. She was dressed like the women of the low-lying, agueish lands, and to her wide-brimmed, knitted hat clung pieces of straw.

For a long time M. Bergeret stood looking at her with saturnine admiration. Then, pointing her out to Deniseau, he said: “The one over there will suit me.”

“Marie?” asked the man in a tone of surprise.

“Marie,” answered M. Bergeret.