“If you count upon that alone, you may as well surrender, and become my
wife at once.”
She turned her head from him with an expression of ineffable disgust.
Rather the icy arms of Death! And still the pulsations of her heart were
apparently counted. Since the end of November her twenty francs had been
exhausted; and to prolong her existence she had had to resort to the
last desperate expedients of extreme poverty. All that she possessed,
all that she could carry from her chamber without being stopped by the
concierge, she had sold, piece by piece, bit after bit, for ten cents,
for five cents, for a roll. Her linen had been sacrificed first; then
the covering of her bed, her curtains, her sheets. The mattress had gone
the way of the rest,--the wool from the inside first, carried off by
handfuls; then the ticking.
Thus, on the 25th of December, she found herself in a chamber as utterly
denuded as if a fire had raged there; while she herself had on her body
but a single petticoat under her thin alpaca dress, without a rag to
cover herself in these wintry nights. Two evenings before, when terror
triumphed over her resolution for a time, she had written her father a
long letter. He had made no reply. Last night she had again written in
these words:--
“I am hungry, and I have no bread. If by tomorrow at noon you have not
come to my assistance, at one o’clock you will have ceased to have a
daughter.”
Tortured by cold and hunger, emaciated, and almost dying, she had waited
for an answer. At noon nothing had come. She gave herself time till four
o’clock. Four o’clock, and no answer.
“I must make an end of it,” she said to herself.
Her preparations had been made. She had told the Cerberus below that she
would be out all the evening; and she had procured a considerable stock
of charcoal. She wrote two letters,--one to her father, the other to M.
de Brevan.
After that she closed hermetically all the openings in her room, kindled
two small fires, and, having commended her soul to God, stretched
herself out on her bed. It was five o’clock.
A dense, bitter vapor spread slowly through the room; and the candle
ceased to give a visible light. Then she felt as if an iron screw were
tightening on her temples. She was suffocating, and felt a desire to
sleep; but in her stomach she suffered intense pains.
Then strange and incoherent thoughts arose deliriously in her head; her
ears were filled with confused noises; her pulse beat with extraordinary
vehemence; nausea nearly convulsed her; and from time to time she
fancied terrific explosions were breaking her skull to pieces.
The candle went out. Maddened by a sensation of dying, she tried to
rise; but she could not. She wanted to cry; but her voice ended in a
rattle in her throat.
Then her ideas became utterly confused. Respiration ceased. It was all
over. She was suffering no longer.