To Germinie all days were alike, equally gloomy and desolate. She had
reached a point at last where she expected nothing from chance and asked
nothing from the unforeseen. Her life seemed to her to be forever
encaged in her despair; it would always be the same implacable thing,
the same straight, monotonous road to misfortune, the same dark path
with death at the end. In all the time to come there was no future for
her.
And yet, in the depths of despair in which she was crouching, thoughts
passed through her mind at times which made her raise her head and look
before her to a point beyond the present. At times the illusion of a
last hope smiled upon her. It seemed to her that she might even yet be
happy, and that if certain things should come to pass, she would be.
Thereupon she imagined that those things did happen. She arranged
incidents and catastrophes. She linked the impossible to the impossible.
She reconstructed the opportunities of her life. And her fevered hope,
setting about the task of creating events according to her desire on the
horizon of the future, soon became intoxicated with the insane vision of
her suppositions.
Then the delirious hope would gradually fade away. She would tell
herself that it was impossible, that nothing of what she dreamed of
could happen, and she would sink back in her chair and think. After a
moment or two she would rise and walk, slowly and uncertainly, to the
fireplace, toy with the coffee-pot on the mantelpiece, and at last
decide to take it: she would learn what the rest of her life was to be.
Her good fortune, her ill fortune, everything that was to happen to her
was there, in that fortune-telling device of the woman of the people, on
the plate on which she was about to pour the coffee-grounds. She drained
the water from the grounds, waited a few minutes, breathed upon them
with the religious breath with which her lips, as a child, touched the
paten at the village church. Then she leaned over them, with her head
thrust forward, terrifying in her immobility, with her eyes fixed
intently upon the black dust scattered in patches over the plate. She
sought what she had seen fortune-tellers find in the granulations and
the almost imperceptible traces left by the coffee as it trickled away.
She fatigued her eyes by gazing at the innumerable little spots, and
deciphered shapes and letters and signs therein. She put aside some
grains with her finger in order to see them more clearly and more
sharply defined. She turned the plate slowly in her hands, this way and
that, questioned its mystery on all sides, and hunted down, within its
circular rim, apparitions, images, rudiments of names, shadowy
initials, resemblances to different people, rough outlines of objects,
omens in embryo, symbols of trifles, which told her that she would be
_victorious_. She wanted to see these things and she compelled herself
to discover them. Under her tense gaze the porcelain became alive with
the visions of her insomnia; her disappointments, her hatreds, the faces
she detested, arose gradually from the magic plate and the designs drawn
thereon by chance. By her side the candle, which she forgot to snuff,
gave forth an intermittent, dying light: it sank lower and lower in the
silence, night came on apace, and Germinie, as if turned to stone in her
agony, always remained rooted there, alone and face to face with her
fear of the future, trying to decipher in the dregs of the coffee the
confused features of her destiny, until she thought she could detect a
cross, beside a woman who resembled Jupillon's cousin--a cross, that is
to say, _a speedy death_.