Half an hour after the horrible meeting when--her mind having dabbled in
crime as if with her fingers--she had determined to disfigure her rival
with vitriol and had believed that she had done so, Germinie returned to
Rue de Laval with a bottle of brandy procured at the grocer's.
For two weeks she had been mistress of the apartment, free to indulge
her brutish appetite. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who as a general rule
hardly stirred from her chair, had gone, strangely enough, to pass six
weeks with an old friend in the country; and she decided not to take
Germinie with her for fear of setting a bad example to the other
servants, and arousing their jealousy of a maid who was accustomed to
very light duties and was treated on a different footing from
themselves.
Germinie went into mademoiselle's bedroom and took no more time than was
necessary to throw her shawl and hat on the floor before she began to
drink, with the neck of the bottle between her teeth, pouring down the
liquid hurriedly until everything in the room was whirling around her,
and she remembered nothing of the day. Thereupon, staggering, feeling
that she was about to fall, she tried to throw herself on her mistress's
bed to sleep; but her dizziness threw her against the night table. From
that she fell to the floor and lay without moving; she simply snored.
But the blow was so violent that during the night she had a miscarriage,
followed by one of those hemorrhages in which the life often ebbs away.
She tried to rise and go out on the landing to call; she tried to stand
up: she could not. She felt that she was gliding on to death, entering
its portals and descending with gentle moderation. At last, summoning
all her strength for a final effort, she dragged herself as far as the
hall door; but it was impossible for her to lift her head to the
keyhole, impossible to cry out. And she would have died where she lay
had not Adele, as she was passing in the morning, heard a groan, and, in
her alarm, fetched a locksmith to open the door, and afterward a midwife
to attend to the dying woman.
When mademoiselle returned a month later, she found Germinie up and
about, but so weak that she was constantly obliged to sit down, and so
pale that she seemed to have no blood left in her body. They told her
that she had had a hemorrhage of which she nearly died: mademoiselle
suspected nothing.