ith her mistress
like a sort of companion, of describing people and drawing silhouettes
of them, had eventually developed in her a facility of animated
description, of happy, unconscious characterization, a piquancy and
sometimes an acrimony in her remarks that were most remarkable in the
mouth of a servant. She had progressed so far that she often surprised
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil by her quickness of comprehension, her
promptness at grasping things only half said, her good fortune and
facility in selecting such words as good talkers use. She knew how to
jest. She understood a play upon words. She expressed herself without
_cuirs_,[4] and when there was a discussion concerning orthography at
the creamery, her opinion was listened to with as much deference as that
of the clerk in the registry of deaths at the mayoralty who came there
to breakfast. She had also that background of indiscriminate reading
which women of her class have when they read at all. With the two or
three kept women in whose service she had been, she had passed her
nights devouring novels; since then she had continued to read the
_feuilletons_ cut by her acquaintances from the bottom of newspapers,
and she had gathered from them a vague idea of many things and of some
of the kings of France. She had retained enough of such subjects to make
her desire to talk of them with others. Through a woman in the house who
worked for an author on the street, she often had tickets to the play;
when she came away she could remember the whole play and the names of
the actors she had seen on the programme. She loved to buy ballads and
one sou novels, and read them.

The air, the keen breath of Quartier Breda, full of the _verve_ of the
artist and the studio, of art and vice, had sharpened these tastes of
Germinie's mind and had created in her new needs and demands. Long
before her disorderly life began, she had cut loose from the virtuous
companionship of decent women of her rank and station, from the worthy
creatures who were so uninteresting and stupid. She had quitted the
circle of orderly, dull uprightness, of sleep-inducing conversations
around the tea-table under the auspices of the old servants of
mademoiselle's elderly acquaintances. She had shunned the wearisome
society of maids whom their absorption in their employment and the
fascination of the savings bank rendered unendurably stupid. She had
reached the point where, before accepting the companionship