“In that case—if that’s the way things stand, my dear—if you’re so fond of your old lady as that, I have only one piece of advice to give you: you’d better not leave your good lady, d’ye see!”
“That’s my dismissal, is it?” said Germinie, rising.
“Faith! it’s very like it.”
“Well! adieu. That suits me!”
She went straight to the door, and left the room without a word.
LIV
After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman. She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it were—none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery—preference, selection—and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain of conscience and personality—disgust, even disgust—she had lost!
And she wandered about the streets at night, with the furtive, stealthy gait of wild beasts prowling in the shadow in quest of food. As if unsexed, she made the advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage of drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked along, peering on every side, approaching every shadowy corner where impurity might lurk under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along, almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets the thoughtful man’s heart and the physician’s mind at work on the brink of deep abysses of melancholy.
LV
One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a wineshop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.
She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the door of the wineshop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passersby, the carriages, the street—she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up the hill—a white horse, he was—stood in front of her, worn out and motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog. It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving, with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening, desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by Darkness at a wineshop door!
At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.
“My money?” she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes, no scaffold—nothing!
Jupillon felt that his customary blague was arrested in his throat.
“Your money?”
