In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she suffered the
horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden
her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from
Adele's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. From
that day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morning
draughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunk
with this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came to
breakfast at the creamery; she had drunk with Adele, who drank like a
man and who took a base delight in seeing this virtuous woman's maid
descend as low as herself.
At first she had needed excitement, company, the clinking of glasses,
the encouragement of speech, the inspiration of the challenge, in order
to arouse the desire to drink; but she had soon reached the point where
she drank alone. Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filled
glass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen; that she
had taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy, of which
she would take draught upon draught until she had found that for which
she thirsted--sleep. For what she craved was not the fevered brain, the
happy confusion, the living folly, the delirious, waking dream of
drunkenness; what she needed, what she sought was the negative joy of
sleep, Lethean, dreamless sleep, a leaden sleep falling upon her like
the blow of the sledge upon the ox's head: and she found it in those
compounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward on
the waxed cover of the kitchen table.
To sleep that overpowering sleep, to wallow, by day, in that midnight
darkness, had come to mean to her a truce, deliverance from an existence
that she had not the courage to continue or to end. An overwhelming
longing for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke. The hours of her
life that she passed in possession of her faculties, contemplating
herself, examining her conscience, looking on at her own shame, seemed
to her so execrable! She preferred to kill them. There was nothing in
the world but sleep to make her forget everything--the congested sleep
of intoxication, which lulls its victim with the arms of Death.
In that glass, from which she forced herself to drink, and which she
emptied in a sort of frenzy, her sufferings, her sorrows, all her
horrible present would be drowned and disappear. In a half hour, her
mind would have ceased to think, her life would have ceased to exist;
nothing of her surroundings would have any being for her, there would be
no more time even, so far as she was concerned. "I drink away my
troubles!" she said to a woman who told her that she would wreck her
health by drinking. And as, in the periods of reaction that followed her
debauches, there came to her a more painful feeling of her own shame, a
greater sense of desolation and a fiercer detestation of her mistakes
and her sins, she sought stronger decoctions of alcohol, more fiery
brandy, and even drank pure absinthe, in order to produce a more deathly
lethargy, and to make her more utterly oblivious to everything.
She ended by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness,
from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence,
blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, the
motions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will,
memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of the
confused waking hours of the morning.