The Mysteries of Paris, Volume 2 of 6

The lapidary possessed only a thin mattress and a portion of a blanket appropriated to the old grandmother, who, in her stupid and ferocious selfishness, would not allow any person to share them with her. In the beginning of the winter she had become quite violent, and had even attempted to strangle the youngest child, who had been put to sleep with her. This poor infant was a sickly little creature, of about four years old, now far gone in consumption, and who found it too cold inside the mattress, where she slept with her brothers and sisters. Hereafter we shall explain this mode of sleeping so frequently employed by the very poor, in comparison with whom the very animals are treated luxuriously, for their litter is changed. Such was the picture presented in the humble garret of the poor lapidary, when the eye was enabled to pierce the gloomy penumbra caused by the flickering rays of the candle. By the side of the partition wall, not less damp and cracked than the others, was placed on the floor the mattress on which the idiot grandmother reposed; as she could not bear anything on her head, her white hair was cut very short, and revealed the shape of her head and flat forehead; while her shaggy, gray eyebrows shaded the deep orbits, from which glared a wild, savage, yet crafty look; her pale, hollow, wrinkled cheeks hung upon the bones of the face and the sharp angles of her jaws. Lying upon her side, and almost doubled up, her chin nearly touching her knees, she lay, shivering with cold, beneath the gray rug, too small to cover her all over, and which, as she drew it over her shoulders, exposed her thin, emaciated legs, as well as the wretched old petticoat in which she was clad. An odour most fetid and repulsive issued from this bed.

At a little distance from the mattress of the grandmother, and still extending along the side of the wall, was placed the paillasse which served as a sleeping-place for the five children, who were accommodated after the following manner:

An opening was made at each side of the cloth which covered the straw, and the children were inserted into this bed, or, rather, foul and noisome dunghill, the outer case serving both for sheet and counterpane. Two little girls, one of whom was extremely ill, shivered on one side, and three young boys on the other, all going to bed without undressing, if, indeed, the miserable rags they wore could be termed clothes. Masses of thick, dry, light hair, tangled, ragged, and uncombed, left uncut because their poor mother fancied it helped to keep them warm, half covered their pale, thin, pinched features. One of the boys drew, with his cold, benumbed fingers, the covering over their straw bed up to his chin, in order to defend himself from the cold; while another, fearful of exposing his hands to the influence of the frost, tried to grasp the bed-covering with his teeth, which rattled and shook in his head; while a third strove to huddle up to his brothers in the hopes of gaining a little warmth. The youngest of the two girls, fatally attacked by consumption, leaned her poor little face, which already bore the hue of death, languidly against the chilly bosom of her sister, a girl just one year older, who vainly sought, by pressing her in her arms, to impart comfort and ease to the little sufferer, over whom she watched with the anxious solicitude of a parent.

On another paillasse, also placed on the ground, at the foot of that of the children, the wife of the artisan was extended, groaning in helpless exhaustion from the effects of a slow fever and an internal complaint, which had not permitted her to quit her bed for several months. Madeleine Morel was in her thirty-sixth year; a blue cotton handkerchief, tied round her low forehead, made the bilious pallor of her countenance and sharp, emaciated features still more conspicuous. A dark halo encircled her hollow, sunken eyes, while her lips were split and bleeding from the effects of the fever which consumed her; her dejected, grief-worn physiognomy, and small, insignificant features, indicated one of those gentle but weak natures, without resource or energy, which unable to struggle with misfortunes, yield at once, and know no remedy but vain and ceaseless lamentations and regrets. Weak, spiritless, and of limited capacity, she had remained honest because her husband was so; had she been left to herself, it is probable that ignorance and misfortune might have depraved her mind and driven her to any lengths. She loved her husband and her children, but she had neither the courage nor resolution to restrain giving vent to loud and open complaints respecting their mutual misery; and frequently was the lapidary, whose unflinching labour alone maintained the family, obliged to quit his work to console and pacify the poor valetudinarian. Over and above an old ragged sheet of coarse brown cloth, which partially covered his wife, Morel had, in order to impart a little warmth, laid a few old clothes, so worn out, and patched and pieced, that the pawnbroker had refused to have anything to do with them.

A stove, a saucepan, a damaged earthen stewpan, two or three cracked cups, scattered about on the floor, a bucket, a board to wash on, and a large stone pitcher, placed beneath the angle of the roof near the broken door, which the wind kept continually blowing to and fro, completed the whole of the family possessions.

This picture of squalid misery and desolation was lighted up by the candle, whose flame, agitated by the cold northeasterly wind which found its way through the tiles on the roof, sometimes imparted a pale, unearthly light on the wretched scene, and then, playing on the heaps of diamonds and rubies lying beside the sleeping artisan, caused a thousand scintillating sparks to spring forth and dazzle the eye with their prismatic rays of brightness.

Although the profoundest silence reigned around, seven out of the eight unfortunate dwellers in this attic were awake; and each, from the grandmother to the youngest child, watched the sleeping lapidary with intense emotion, as their only hope, their only resource, and, in their childlike selfishness, they murmured at seeing him thus inactive and relinquishing that labour which they well knew was all they had to depend on; but with different feelings of regret and uneasiness did the lookers-on observe the slumber of the toil-worn man. The mother trembled for her children's meal; the children thought but of themselves; while the idiot neither thought of nor cared for any one. All at once she sat upright in her wretched bed, crossed her long, bony arms, yellow and dry as box-wood, on her shrivelled bosom, and kept watching the candle with twinkling eyes; then, rising slowly and stealthily, she crept along, trailing after her her old ragged coverlet, which clung around her as though it had been her winding-sheet. She was above the middle height, and her hair being so closely shaven made her head appear disproportionately small; a sort of spasmodic movement kept up a constant trembling in her thick, pendulous under-lip, while her whole countenance offered the hideous model of ferocious stupidity. Slowly and cautiously the idiot approached the lapidary's work-table, like a child about to commit some forbidden act. When she reached the candle, she held her two trembling hands over the flame; and such was their skeleton-like condition, that the flickering light shone through them, imparting a pale, livid hue to her features. From her pallet Madeleine Morel watched every movement of the old woman, who, still warming herself over the candle, stooped her head, and with a silly kind of delight watched the sparkling of the diamonds and rubies, which lay glittering on the table. Wholly absorbed in the wondrous contemplation of such bright and beautiful things, the idiot allowed her hands to fall into the flame of the candle, nor did she seem to recollect where they were till the sense of burning recalled her attention, when she manifested her pain and anger by a harsh, screaming cry.

At this sound Morel started, and quickly raised his head. He was about forty years of age, with an open, intelligent, and mild expression of countenance, but yet wearing the sad, dejected look of one who had been the sport of misery and misfortune till they had planted furrows in his cheeks and crushed and broken his spirit. A gray beard of many weeks' growth covered the lower part of his face, which was deeply marked by the smallpox; premature wrinkles furrowed his already bald forehead; while his red and inflamed eyelids showed the overtaxed and sleepless days and nights of toil he so courageously endured. A circumstance, but too common with such of the working class as are doomed by their occupation to remain nearly all day in one position, had warped his figure, and, acting upon a naturally feeble constitution, had produced a contraction of his whole frame. Continually obliged to stoop over his work-table and to lean to the left, in order to keep his grindstone going, the lapidary, in a manner petrified, ossified in the attitude he was frequently obliged to preserve from twelve to fifteen hours a day, had acquired an habitual stoop of the shoulders, and was completely drawn on one side. So his left arm, incessantly exercised by the difficult management of the grindstone, had acquired a considerable muscular development; whilst the right arm, always inert and leaning on the table, the better to present the faces of the diamonds to the action of the grindstone, had wasted to the most extreme attenuation; his wasted limbs, almost paralysed by complete want of exercise, could scarcely support the weary, worn-out body, as though all strength, substance, and vitality had concentrated themselves in the only part called into play when toiling for the subsistence of, with himself, eight human creatures.

And often would poor Morel touchingly observe: "It is not for myself that I care to eat, but to give strength to the arm which turns the mill."

Awaking with a sudden start, the lapidary found himself directly opposite to the poor idiot.

"What ails you? what is the matter, mother?" said Morel; and then added, in a lower tone, for fear of awaking the family, whom he hoped and believed were asleep, "Go back to bed, mother; Madeleine and the children are asleep!"

"No, father," cried the eldest of the little girls, "I am awake; I am trying to warm poor little Adèle."

"And I am too hungry to go to sleep," added one of the boys; "it was not my turn to-night to have supper with Mlle. Rigolette."

"Poor things!" said Morel, sorrowfully; "I thought you were asleep – at least – "

"I was afraid of awaking you, Morel," said the wife, "or I should have begged of you to give me a drink of water; I am devoured with thirst! My feverish fit has come on again!"

"I will directly," said the lapidary; "only let me first get mother back to bed. Come! come! what are you meddling with those stones for? Let them alone, I say!" cried he to the old woman, whose whole attention seemed riveted upon a splendid ruby, the bright scintillations of which had so charmed the poor idiot that she was trying by every possible means to gain possession of it.

"There's a pretty thing! there, there!" replied the woman, pointing with vehement gestures to the prize she so ardently coveted.

"I shall be angry in a few minutes," exclaimed Morel, speaking in a loud voice to terrify his mother-in-law into submission, and gently pushing back the hand she advanced to seize her desired treasure.

"Oh, Morel! Morel!" murmured Madeleine, "I am parching, dying with thirst. How can you be so cruel as to refuse me a little water?"

"But how can I at present? I must not allow mother to meddle with these stones, – perhaps to lose me a diamond, as she did a year ago; and God alone knows the wretchedness and misery it cost us, – ay, may still occasion us. Ah, that unfortunate loss of the diamond, what have we not suffered by it!"

As the poor lapidary uttered these words, he passed his hand over his aching brow with a desponding air, and said to one of the children:

"Felix, give your mother something to drink. You are awake, and can attend to her."

"No, no," exclaimed Madeleine; "he will take cold. I will wait."

"Oh, mother," said the boy, rising, "never mind me. I shall be quite as warm up as I am in this paillasse."

"Come, will you let the things alone?" cried Morel, in a threatening tone, to the idiot woman, who kept bending over the precious stones and trying to seize them, spite of all his efforts to move her from the table.

"Mother," called out Felix, "what shall I do? The water in the pitcher is frozen quite hard."

"Then break the ice," murmured Madeleine.

"It is so thick, I can't," answered the boy.

"Morel!" exclaimed Madeleine, in a querulous and impatient tone, "since there is nothing but water for me to drink, let me at least have a draught of that! You are letting me die with thirst!"

"God of heaven grant me patience!" cried the unfortunate man. "How can I leave your mother to lose and destroy these stones? Pray let me manage her first."

But the lapidary found it no easy matter to get rid of the idiot, who, beginning to feel irritated at the constant opposition she met with, gave utterance to her displeasure in a sort of hideous growl.

"Call her, wife!" said Morel. "She will attend to you sometimes."

"Mother! mother!" called Madeleine, "go to bed, and be good, and then you shall have some of that nice coffee you are so fond of!"

"I want that! and that! There! there!" replied the idiot, making a desperate effort this time to possess herself of a heap of rubies she particularly coveted. Morel firmly, but gently, repulsed her, – all in vain; with pertinacious obstinacy the old woman kept struggling to break from his grasp, and snatch the bright gems, on which she kept her eyes fixed with eager fondness.

"You will never manage her," said Madeleine, "unless you frighten her with the whip; there is no other means of making her quiet."

"I am afraid not," returned Morel; "but, though she has no sense, it yet goes to my heart to be obliged to threaten an old woman, like her, with the whip."

Then, addressing the old woman, who was trying to bite him, and whom he was holding back with one hand, he said, in a loud and terrible voice: "Take care; you'll have the whip on your shoulders if you don't make haste to bed this very instant!"

These menaces were equally vain with his former efforts to subdue her. Morel then took a whip which lay beside his work-table, and, cracking it violently, said: "Get to bed with you directly! Get to bed!"

As the loud noise of the whip saluted the ear of the idiot, she hurried away from the lapidary's work-table, then, suddenly turning around, she uttered low, grumbling sounds between her clenched teeth; while she surveyed her son-in-law with looks of the deepest hatred.

"To bed! to bed, I say!" continued he, still advancing, and feigning to raise his whip with the intention of striking; while the idiot, holding her fist towards her son-in-law, retreated backwards to her wretched couch.

The lapidary, anxious to terminate this painful scene, that he might be at liberty to attend to his sick wife, kept still advancing towards the idiot woman, brandishing and cracking his whip, though without allowing it to touch the unhappy creature, repeatedly exclaiming, "To bed! to bed, – directly! Do you hear?"

The old woman, now thoroughly conquered, and fully believing in the reality of the threats held out, began to howl most hideously; and crawling into her bed, like a dog to his kennel, she kept up a continued series of cries, screams, and yells, while the frightened children, believing their poor old grandmother had actually been beaten, began crying piteously, exclaiming, "Don't beat poor granny, father! Pray don't flog granny!"

It is wholly impossible to describe the fearful effect of these nocturnal horrors, in which were mingled, in one turmoil of sounds, the supplicating cries of the children, the furious yellings of the idiot, and the wailing complaints of the lapidary's sick wife.

To poor Morel such scenes as this were but too frequent. Still, upon the present occasion, his patience and courage seemed utterly to forsake him; and, throwing down the whip upon his work-table, he exclaimed, in bitter despair, "Oh, what a life! what a life!"

"Is it my fault if my mother is an idiot?" asked Madeleine, weeping.

"Is it mine, then?" replied Morel. "All I ask for is peace and quiet enough to allow me to work myself to death for you all. God knows I labour alike night and day! Yet I complain not. And, as long as my strength holds out, I will exert myself to the utmost; but it is quite impossible for me to attend to my business, and be at once a keeper to a mad woman and a nurse to sick people and young children. And Heaven is unjust to put it upon me, – yes, I say unjust! It is too much misery to heap on one man," added Morel, in a tone bordering on distraction. So saying, the heart-broken lapidary threw himself on his stool, and covered his face with his hands.

"Can I help the people at the hospital having refused to receive my mother, because she was not raving mad?" asked Madeleine, in a low, peevish, and complaining voice. "What can I do to alter it? What is the use of your grumbling to me about my mother? and, if you fret ever so much about what neither you nor I can alter, what good will that do?"

"None at all," rejoined the artisan, hastily brushing the large bitter drops despair had driven to his eyes; "none whatever, – you are right; but when everything goes against you, it is difficult to know what to do or say."

"Gracious Father!" cried Madeleine; "what an agony of thirst I am enduring! My lips are parched with the fever which is consuming me, and yet I shiver as though death were on me!"

"Wait one instant, and I will give you some drink!" So saying, Morel took the pitcher which stood beneath the roof, and, after having with difficulty broken the ice which covered the water, he filled a cup with the frozen liquid, and brought it to the bedside of his wife, who stretched forth her impatient hands to receive it; but, after a moment's reflection, he said, "No, no, I must not let you have it cold as this; in your present state of fever it would be dangerous."