To lie! nothing was left for her but that. She felt that it was an
impossibility to draw back from her present position. She did not even
entertain the idea of an attempt to escape from it, it seemed such a
hopeless task, she was so cowardly, so crushed and degraded, and she
felt that she was still so firmly bound to that man by all sorts of
vile, degrading chains, even by the contempt that he no longer tried to
conceal from her!
Sometimes, as she reflected upon her plight, she was dismayed. The
simple ideas and terrors of the peasantry recurred to her mind. And the
superstitions of her youth whispered to her that the man had cast a
spell upon her, that he had perhaps given her enchanted bread to eat.
Otherwise would she have been what she was? Would she have felt, at the
mere sight of him, that thrill of emotion through her whole frame, that
almost brute-like sensation of the approach of a master? Would she have
felt her whole body, her mouth, her arms, her loving and caressing
gestures involuntarily go out to him? Would she have belonged to him so
absolutely? Long and bitterly she dwelt upon all that should have cured
her, rescued her: the man's disdain, his insults, the degrading
concessions he had forced from her; and she was compelled to admit that
there had been nothing too precious for her to sacrifice to him, and
that for him she had swallowed the things she loathed most bitterly. She
tried to imagine the degree of degradation to which her love would
refuse to descend, and she could conceive of none. He could do what he
chose with her, insult her, beat her, and she would remain under his
heel! She could not think of herself as not belonging to him. She could
not think of herself without him. To have that man to love was necessary
to her existence; she derived warmth from him, she lived by him, she
breathed him. There seemed to be no parallel case to hers among the
women of her condition whom she knew. No one of her comrades carried
into a _liaison_ the intensity, the bitterness, the torture, the
enjoyment of suffering that she found in hers. No one of them carried
into it that which was killing her and which she could not dispense
with.
To herself she appeared an extraordinary creature, of an exceptional
nature, with the temperament of animals whom ill-treatment binds the
closer to their masters. There were days when she did not know herself,
and when she wondered if she were still the same woman. As she went over
in her mind all the base deeds to which Jupillon had induced her to
stoop, she could not believe that it was really she who had submitted to
it. Had she, violent and impulsive as she knew herself to be, boiling
over with fiery passions, rebellious and hotheaded, exhibited such
docility and resignation? She had repressed her wrath, forced back the
murderous thoughts that had crowded to her brain so many times! She had
always obeyed, always possessed her soul in patience, always hung her
head! She had forced her nature, her instincts, her pride, her vanity,
and more than all else, her jealousy, the fierce passions of her heart,
to crawl at that man's feet! For the sake of keeping him she had stooped
to share him, to allow him to have mistresses, to receive him from the
hands of others, to seek a part of his cheek on which his cousin had not
kissed him! And now, after all these sacrifices, with which she had
wearied him, she retained her hold upon him by a still more distasteful
sacrifice: she drew him to her by gifts, she opened her purse to him to
induce him to keep appointments with her, she purchased his good-humor
by gratifying his whims and his caprices; she paid this brute, who
haggled over the price of his kisses and demanded _pourboires_ of love!
And she lived from day to day in constant dread of what the miserable
villain would demand of her on the morrow.