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 Mere 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
as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that one has of a
person who is one's Bane!