The letter Adèle handed her contained the news of her daughter’s death.
XXIV
As a result of this crisis, Germinie fell into a state of dumb, brutish sorrow. For months she was insensible to everything; for months, completely possessed and absorbed by the thought of the little creature that was no more, she carried her child’s death in her entrails as she had carried her life. Every evening, when she went up to her chamber, she took the poor darling’s little cap and dress from the trunk at the foot of her bed. She would gaze at them and touch them; she would lay them out on the bed; she would sit for hours weeping over them, kissing them, talking to them, saying the things that a mother’s bitter sorrow is wont to say to a little daughter’s ghost.
While weeping for her daughter the unhappy creature wept for herself as well. A voice whispered to her that she was saved had the child lived; that to have that child to love was her Providence; that all that she dreaded in herself would be expended upon that dear head and be sanctified there—her affections, her unreasoning impulses, her ardor, all the passions of her nature. It seemed to her that she had felt her mother’s heart soothing and purifying her woman’s heart. In her daughter she saw a sort of celestial vision that would redeem her and make her whole, a little angel of deliverance as it were, issuing from her errors to fight for her and rescue her from the evil influences which pursued her and by which she sometimes thought that she was possessed.
When she began to recover from the first prostration of despair, when, as the consciousness of life and the perception of objects returned to her, she looked about her with eyes that saw, she was aroused from her grief by a more poignant cause of bitterness of spirit.
Madame Jupillon, who had become too stout and too heavy to do what it was necessary for her to do at the creamery, notwithstanding all the assistance rendered by Germinie, had sent to her province for a niece of hers. She was the embodiment of the blooming youth of the country, a woman in whom there was still something of the child, active and vivacious, with black eyes full of sunlight, lips as round and red as cherries, the summer heat of her province in her complexion, the warmth of perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which her cousin’s vanity was without means of defence. The child’s presence deprived Germinie of all hope of repose. Mere girl as she was, she wounded her every minute in the day by her presence, her touch, her caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of love. Her preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor—everything helped to exasperate Germinie and to arouse a sullen wrath within her; everything wounded that jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals caused it a bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved.
She dared not speak to Mère Jupillon and denounce the little one to her, for fear of betraying herself; but whenever she found herself alone with Jupillon she vented her feelings in recriminations, complaints and quarrels. She would remind him of an incident, a word, something he had done or said, some answer he had made, a trifle forgotten by him but still bleeding in her heart.
“Are you mad?” Jupillon would say to her; “a slip of a girl!”—“A slip of a girl, eh? nonsense!—when she has such eyes that all the men stare at her in the street! I went out with her the other day—I was ashamed—I don’t know how she did it, but we were followed by a gentleman all the time.”—“Well, what if you were? She’s a pretty girl, you know!”—“Pretty! pretty!” And at that word Germinie would hurl herself, figuratively speaking, at the girl’s face, and claw it to pieces with frantic words.
Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: “Look here! you love her!”—“Well! what then?” he would retort, highly entertained by these disputes, by the opportunity to watch the antics of this fierce wrath which he fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement of trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half insane under his sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling wildly about and running her head against stone walls in the first paroxysms of madness.
As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day, a revolution took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked upon him as an assassin. She conceived a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him
