The shock was too violent for nerves as weak as hers. The mental upheaval of that week of agony possessed her with an idea that hitherto had only hovered about her—the idea of suicide. She began to listen, with her head in her hands, to the voice that spoke to her of deliverance. She opened her ears to the sweet music of death that we hear in the background of life like the fall of mighty waters in the distance, dying away in space. The temptations that speak to the discouraged heart of the things that put an end to life so quickly and so easily, of the means of quelling suffering with the hand, pursued and solicited her. Her glance rested wistfully upon all the things about her that could cure the disease called life. She accustomed her fingers and her lips to them. She touched them, handled them, drew them near to her. She sought to test her courage upon them and to obtain a foretaste of death. She would remain for hours at her kitchen window with her eyes fixed on the pavements in the courtyard down at the foot of the five flights—pavements that she knew and could have distinguished from others! As the daylight faded she would lean farther out bending almost double over the ill-secured window-bar, hoping always that it would give way and drag her down with it—praying that she might die without having to make the desperate, voluntary leap into space to which she no longer felt equal.
“Why, you’ll fall out!” said mademoiselle one day, grasping her skirt impulsively in her alarm. “What are you looking at down there in the courtyard?”
“Oh! nothing—the pavements.”
“In Heaven’s name, are you crazy? How you frightened me!”
“Oh! people don’t fall that way,” said Germinie in a strange tone. “I tell you, mademoiselle, in order to fall one must have a mighty longing to do it!”
LI
Germinie had not been able to induce Gautruche, who was haunted by a former mistress, to give her the key to his room. When he had not returned she was obliged to await his coming outside, in the cold, dark street.
At first she would walk back and forth in front of the house. She would take twenty steps in one direction and twenty in the other. Then, as if to prolong her period of waiting, she would take a longer turn, and, going farther and farther every time, would end by extending her walk to both ends of the boulevard. Frequently she walked thus for hours, shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness reigned. She followed the line of red-wineshops, the naked arbors, the cabaret trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits, low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls, cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a night’s lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded form, tall, mouldy portes-cochères, hedgerows, within which could be vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy. From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.
Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughterhouse, and a cemetery; Lariboisière, the Abattoir and Montmartre.
The people who passed that way—the workman returning from Paris whistling; the workingwoman, her day’s work ended, hurrying on with her hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the streetwalker in her black cap—would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible shadows of men and by brutally familiar hands.
She tried to go away; she insulted herself inwardly; she called herself a cowardly wretch; she swore to herself that each turn should be the last, that she would go as far as a certain tree, and that was all; if he had not returned, she would go away and put an end to the whole thing. But she did not go; she walked on and on; she waited, more consumed than ever, the longer he delayed, with the mad desire to see him.
At last, as the hours flew by and the boulevard became empty, Germinie, exhausted, overdone with weariness, would approach the houses. She would loiter from shop to shop, she would go mechanically where gas was still burning, and
