in
her presence.

Thus she led, as it were, two lives. She was like two women, and by dint
of energy, adroitness and feminine diplomacy, with a self-assurance that
never failed her even in the mental confusion caused by drink, she
succeeded in separating those two existences, in living them both
without mingling them, in never allowing the two women that lived in her
to be confounded with each other, in continuing to be, with Mademoiselle
de Varandeuil, the virtuous, respectable girl she had been, in emerging
from her orgies without carrying away the taste of them, in displaying,
when she left her lover, a sort of old-maidish modesty, shocked by the
scandalous courses of other maids. She never uttered a word or bore
herself in a way to arouse a suspicion of her clandestine life; nothing
about her conveyed a hint as to the way her nights were passed. When she
placed her foot upon the door-mat outside Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's
apartments, when she approached her, when she stood before her, she
adopted the tone and the attitude, even to a certain way of holding the
dress, which relieve a woman from so much as a suspicion of having aught
to do with men. She talked freely upon all subjects, as if she had
nothing to blush for. She spoke with bitterness of the misdoings and
shame of others, as if she were herself beyond reproach. She joked with
her mistress about love, in a jovial, unembarrassed, indifferent tone;
to hear her you would have thought she was talking of an old
acquaintance of whom she had lost sight. And in the eyes of all those
who saw her only as Mademoiselle de Varandeuil did and at her home,
there was a certain atmosphere of chastity about her thirty-five years,
the odor of stern, unimpeachable virtue, peculiar to middle-aged
maid-servants and plain women.

And yet all this falsehood in the matter of appearances was not
hypocrisy in Germinie. It did not arise from downright duplicity, from
corrupt striving for effect: it was her affection for mademoiselle that
made her what she was with her. She was determined at any price to save
her the grief of seeing her as she was, of going to the bottom of her
character. She deceived her solely in order to retain her
affection,--with a sort of respect; and a feeling of veneration, almost
of piety, stole into the ghastly comedy she was playing, like the
feeling a girl has who lies to her mother in order not to rend her
heart.

XXXVII

To lie! nothing wa