The Wandering Jew — Complete
Well, Mother Bunch fagged on, with three-and-four a week. That is to
say, toiling hard for twelve or fifteen hours every day; she succeeded
in keeping herself alive, in spite of exposure to hunger, cold, and
poverty--so numerous were her privations. Privations? No! The word
privation expresses but weakly that constant and terrible want of all
that is necessary to preserve the existence God gives; namely, wholesome
air and shelter, sufficient and nourishing food and warm clothing.
Mortification would be a better word to describe that total want of all
that is essentially vital, which a justly organized state of society
ought--yes--ought necessarily to bestow on every active, honest
workman and workwoman, since civilization has dispossessed them of all
territorial right, and left them no other patrimony than their hands.
The savage does not enjoy the advantage of civilization; but he has, at
least, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the fish of the
sea, and the fruits of the earth, to feed him, and his native woods for
shelter and for fuel. The civilized man, disinherited of these gifts,
considering the rights of property as sacred, may, in return for his
hard daily labor, which enriches his country, demand wages that will
enable him to live in the enjoyment of health: nothing more, and
nothing less. For is it living, to drag along on the extreme edge which
separates life from the grave, and even there continually struggle
against cold, hunger, and disease? And to show how far the mortification
which society imposes thus inexorably on its millions of honest,
industrious laborers (by its careless disregard of all the questions
which concern the just remuneration of labor), may extend, we will
describe how this poor girl contrived to live on three shillings and
sixpence a week.
Society, perhaps, may then feel its obligation to so many unfortunate
wretches for supporting, with resignation, the horrible existence which
leaves them just sufficient life to feel the worst pangs of humanity.
Yes: to live at such a price is virtue! Yes, society thus organized,
whether it tolerates or imposes so much misery, loses all right to
blame the poor wretches who sell themselves not through debauchery, but
because they are cold and famishing. This poor girl spent her wages as
follows:
Six pounds of bread, second quality........0 8 1/2
Four pails of water................0 2
Lard or dripping (butter being out of the question)0 5
Coarse salt....................0 0 3/4
A bushel of charcoal...............0 4
A quart of dried vegetables............0 3
Three quarts of potatoes..............0 2
Dips........................0 3 1/4
Thread and needles.................0 2 1/2
______
2 7
To save charcoal, Mother Bunch prepared soup only two or three times a
week at most, on a stove that stood on the landing of the fourth story.
On other days she ate it cold. There remained nine or ten pence a week
for clothes and lodging. By rare good fortune, her situation was in one
respect an exception to the lot of many others. Agricola, that he
might not wound her delicacy, had come to a secret arrangement with the
housekeeper, and hired a garret for her, just large enough to hold a
small bed, a chair, and a table; for which the sempstress had to pay
five shillings a year. But Agricola, in fulfilment of his agreement with
the porter, paid the balance, to make up the actual rent of the
garret, which was twelve and sixpence. The poor girl had thus about
eighteenpence a month left for her other expenses. But many workwomen,
whose position is less fortunate than hers, since they have neither
home nor family, buy a piece of bread and some other food to keep them
through the day; and at night patronize the "twopenny rope," one with
another, in a wretched room containing five or six beds, some of which
are always engaged by men, as male lodgers are by far the most abundant.
Yes; and in spite of the disgust that a poor and virtuous girl must feel
at this arrangement, she must submit to it; for a lodging-house keeper
cannot have separate rooms for females. To furnish a room, however
meanly, the poor workwoman must possess three or four shillings in ready
money. But how save this sum, out of weekly earnings of a couple of
florins, which are scarcely sufficient to keep her from starving, and
are still less sufficient to clothe her? No! no! The poor wretch must
resign herself to this repugnant cohabitation; and so, gradually, the
instinct of modesty becomes weakened; the natural sentiment of chastity,
that saved her from the "gay life," becomes extinct; vice appears to be
the only means of improving her intolerable condition; she yields;
and the first "man made of money," who can afford a governess for his
children, cries out against the depravity of the lower orders! And
yet, painful as the condition of the working woman is, it is relatively
fortunate. Should work fail her for one day, two days, what then? Should
sickness come--sickness almost always occasioned by unwholesome food,
want of fresh air, necessary attention, and good rest; sickness, often
so enervating as to render work impossible; though not so dangerous
as to procure the sufferer a bed in an hospital--what becomes of the
hapless wretches then? The mind hesitates, and shrinks from dwelling on
such gloomy pictures.
This inadequacy of wages, one terrible source only of so many evils, and
often of so many vices, is general, especially among women; and, again
this is not private wretchedness, but the wretchedness which afflicts
whole classes, the type of which we endeavor to develop in Mother Bunch.
It exhibits the moral and physical condition of thousands of human
creatures in Paris, obliged to subsist on a scanty four shillings a
week. This poor workwoman, then, notwithstanding the advantages she
unknowingly enjoyed through Agricola's generosity, lived very miserably;
and her health, already shattered, was now wholly undermined by these
constant hardships. Yet, with extreme delicacy, though ignorant of
the little sacrifice already made for her by Agricola, Mother Bunch
pretended she earned more than she really did, in order to avoid offers
of service which it would have pained her to accept, because she knew
the limited means of Frances and her son, and because it would have
wounded her natural delicacy, rendered still more sensitive by so many
sorrows and humiliations.
But, singular as it may appear, this deformed body contained a loving
and generous soul--a mind cultivated even to poetry; and let us add,
that this was owing to the example of Agricola Baudoin, with whom she
had been brought up, and who had naturally the gift. This poor girl was
the first confidant to whom our young mechanic imparted his literary
essays; and when he told her of the charm and extreme relief he found
in poetic reverie, after a day of hard toil, the workwoman, gifted with
strong natural intelligence, felt, in her turn, how great a resource
this would be to her in her lonely and despised condition.
One day, to Agricola's great surprise, who had just read some verses to
her, the sewing-girl, with smiles and blushes, timidly communicated to
him also a poetic composition. Her verses wanted rhythm and harmony,
perhaps; but they were simple and affecting, as a non-envenomed
complaint entrusted to a friendly hearer. From that day Agricola and she
held frequent consultations; they gave each other mutual encouragement:
but with this exception, no one else knew anything of the girl's
poetical essays, whose mild timidity made her often pass for a person of
weak intellect. This soul must have been great and beautiful, for in all
her unlettered strains there was not a word of murmuring respecting her
hard lot: her note was sad, but gentle--desponding, but resigned; it
was especially the language of deep tenderness--of mournful sympathy--of
angelic charity for all poor creatures consigned, like her, to bear
the double burden of poverty and deformity. Yet she often expressed
a sincere free-spoken admiration of beauty, free from all envy or
bitterness; she admired beauty as she admired the sun. But, alas! many
were the verses of hers that Agricola had never seen, and which he was
never to see.
The young mechanic, though not strictly handsome, had an open masculine
face; was as courageous as kind; possessed a noble, glowing, generous
heart, a superior mind, and a frank, pleasing gayety of spirits. The
young girl, brought up with him, loved him as an unfortunate creature
can love, who, dreading cruel ridicule, is obliged to hide her affection
in the depths of her heart, and adopt reserve and deep dissimulation.
She did not seek to combat her love; to what purpose should she do
so? No one would ever know it. Her well known sisterly affection for
Agricola explained the interest she took in all that concerned him; so
that no one was surprised at the extreme grief of the young workwoman,
when, in 1830, Agricola, after fighting intrepidly for the people's
flag, was brought bleeding home to his mother. Dagobert's son, deceived,
like others, on this point, had never suspected, and was destined never
to suspect, this love for him.
Such was the poorly-clad girl who entered the room in which Frances was
preparing her son's supper.
"Is it you, my poor love," said she; "I have not seen you since morning:
have you been ill? Come and kiss me."
The young girl kissed Agricola's mother, and replied: "I was very busy
about some work, mother; I did not wish to lose a moment; I have only
just finished it. I am going down to fetch some charcoal--do you want
anything while I'm out?"
"No, no, my child, thank you. But I am very uneasy. It is half-past
eight, and Agricola is not come home." Then she added, after a sigh: "He
kills himself with work for me. Ah, I am very unhappy, my girl; my sight
is quite going. In a quarter of an hour after I begin working, I cannot
see at all--not even to sew sacks. The idea of being a burden to my son
drives me distracted."
"Oh, don't, ma'am, if Agricola heard you say that--"
"I know the poor boy thinks of nothing but me, and that augments my
vexation. Only I think that rather than leave me, he gives up the
advantages that his fellow-workmen enjoy at Hardy's, his good and worthy
master--instead of living in this dull garret, where it is scarcely
light at noon, he would enjoy, like the other workmen, at very little
expense, a good light room, warm in winter, airy in summer, with a view
of the garden. And he is so fond of trees! not to mention that this
place is so far from his work, that it is quite a toil to him to get to
it."
"Oh, when he embraces you he forgets his fatigue, Mrs. Baudoin," said
Mother Bunch; "besides, he knows how you cling to the house in which he
was born. M. Hardy offered to settle you at Plessy with Agricola, in the
building put up for the workmen."
"Yes, my child; but then I must give up church. I can't do that."
"But--be easy, I hear him," said the hunchback, blushing.
A sonorous, joyous voice was heard singing on the stairs.
"At least, I'll not let him see that I have been crying," said the good
mother, drying her tears. "This is the only moment of rest and ease from
toil he has--I must not make it sad to him."
CHAPTER XXIX. AGRICOLA BAUDOIN.
Our blacksmith poet, a tall young man, about four-and-twenty years of
age, was alert and robust, with ruddy complexion, dark hair and eyes,
and aquiline nose, and an open, expressive countenance. His resemblance
to Dagobert was rendered more striking by the thick brown moustache
which he wore according to the fashion; and a sharp-pointed imperial