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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill IN her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her eyes. The maid's talk stopped, and the remainder of her life, which was that evening upon her lips, went back into her heart. The end of her story wa... More

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill IN her reverie, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had closed her eyes. The maid's talk stopped, and the remainder of her life, which was that evening upon her lips, went back into her heart. The end of her story was this: When little Germinie Lacerteux, not yet fifteen years old, had reached Paris, her sisters, eager to see her earning her own livelihood, and to put her in the way of getting her bread, had placed her in a little cafe on the Boulevard, where she acted both as lady's-maid to the mistress of the cafe and as assistant to the waiters in the heavy work of the establishment. The child, fresh from her village, and dropped here abruptly, felt strange and quite scared in this place, this service. She felt the first instinct of her modesty and her incipient womanhood quiver at the perpetual contact with the waiters, at the community of work, food, and existence with men; and every time that she was allowed out, and went to see her sisters, there were tears, and despair, and scenes in which, without complaining definitely of anything, she showed something like terror at going back, saying that she could not stay there anylonger, that she did not like it, that she would rather go back home. She was answered that her coming had already cost money enough, that she was fanciful, that she was very well off where she was, and so she was sent back to the cafe in tears. She did not dare to tell all that she suffered from her association with these cafe waiters, brazen, jocular, and cynical as they were, fed on the leavings of debauchery, polluted by all the vices to which they ministered, and blending within them all the rottenness of the relics of orgy. At all hours she had to endure the cowardly jests, the cruel mystifications, and the unkindnesses of these men, who were happy a...

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