Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timidas well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches. His auntoverwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection;at night she would creep into his room to see if he was soundasleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of herpetty grievances and dislikes.
Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacredspectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had lefta kind of religious horror in her mind.
"That boy is capable of anything," she used to say. One of theboy's pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady's back awar-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.
Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair,and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, hewould creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing bylittle leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which graduallygave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutinyshowed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could nothelp laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as itwas. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the littlefarce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her headsharply, she had found reason to suspect something disrespectfulwas going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because ofhis lowly origin. The only folks she really hated were the rich.
She was furious because the butcher's wife had gone to a weddingin a silk dress.
At the upper end of the _Rue de Rennes_, beside a plot of wasteand, was a stall where an old woman sold dusty ginger-bread andsticks of stale barley-sugar. She had a face the colour of brickdust under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale,steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple offrancs, and on windy days the white dust from houses buildingin the neighbourhood covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nursesand mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones who werecasting sheep's eyes at the sweetstuff:
"Dirty!" they would say dissuasively; "dirty!"But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was past feelinganything. She did not beg. Mademoiselle Servien used to bid hergood-day in passing, address her by name and fall into talk withher before the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at atime. The staple of conversation with them both was the neighbours,accidents that had occurred in the public thoroughfares, casesof coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and trials oflife and the ways of Providence, "which are not always just."Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies. He wasa plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of thepoor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritlessresignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant,as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab facesand no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy andempty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young manlearned more of human conditions than he had ever been taughtat school. His thoughts flew from this woman to that other, whowas so beautiful and whom he loved, and he saw life before himas a whole--a melancholy panorama. He told himself they mustdie both of them, and a hideous old woman, squatted before afew sodden sweetmeats, gave him the same impression of solemnserenity he had experienced at sight of the jewels from the Queenof Egypt's sepulchre.