XLVII
The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandoned the conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed her head beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution, energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction, of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she was being borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causes suffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a god on the marble of the antique tragedies, and is called “No Chance” on the tattooed brow of the galley-slave—Fatality—was trampling upon her, and Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.
When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her past recurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the links in the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions that had followed her years and grown heavier with them; all the incidents that had succeeded one another in her life, as if by preconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having ever caught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard so much—she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatures who are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of those for whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envy it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dint of yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of brooding over the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession of her disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon the most trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of the persecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and that was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop, an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in which she was cheated—all these things were in her opinion due neither to her own fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Life was in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, in everything, great and small, from her daughter’s death to bad groceries. There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereupon imagined that she was accursed to her fingertips. Accursed! almost damned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when she questioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, in the fire in her blood, in the appetite of her organs, in her passionate weakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of a disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having already delivered her over to the shameful excesses of passion, and destined—she had a presentiment that it was so—to deliver her again in the same way?
And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was the refrain of her thought: “What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had no chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!” She said it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion, every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that she was in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful than she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens in ordinary life. She lived in that state of cowardly unrest wherein the unexpected is dreaded as a possible calamity, wherein a ring at the bell causes alarm, wherein one turns a letter over and over, weighing the mystery it contains, not daring to open it, wherein the news you are about to hear, the mouth that opens to speak to you, cause the perspiration to start upon your temples. She was in that state of suspicion, of shuddering fear, of trembling awe in face of destiny, wherein misfortune sees naught but misfortune, and wherein one would like to check the current of his life so that it should not go forward whither all the endeavors and the attacks of others are forcing it.
At last, by virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supreme disdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems a satire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength, exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer feels the blows, says to the Heaven it defies: “Go on!”
XLVIII
“Where are you going in that rig?” said Germinie one Sunday morning to Adèle, as she passed in grand array along the corridor on the sixth floor, in front of her open door.
“Ah! there you are! I’m going to a swell wedding, my dear! There’s a crowd of us—big Marie, the great bully, you know—Elisa, from 41, the two Badiniers, big and little—and men, too! In the first place, there’s my dealer in sudden death. Yes, and—Oh! didn’t you know—my new flame, the
