After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to fall, below
shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate
creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers
whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met
on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman.
She had no need to give herself time for the growth of desire: her
caprice was fierce and sudden, kindled instantly. Pouncing greedily upon
the first comer, she hardly looked at him and could not have recognized
him. Beauty, youth, the physical qualities of a lover, in which the
passion of the most degraded woman seeks to realize a base ideal, as it
were--none of those things tempted her now or touched her. In all men
her eyes saw nothing but man: the individual mattered naught to her. The
last indication of decency and of human feeling in debauchery,--preference,
selection,--and even that which represents all that prostitutes retain
of conscience and personality,--disgust, even disgust,--she had lost!
And she wandered about the streets at night, with the furtive, stealthy
gait of wild beasts prowling in the shadow in quest of food. As if
unsexed, she made the advances, she solicited brutes, she took advantage
of drunkenness, and men yielded to her. She walked along, peering on
every side, approaching every shadowy corner where impurity might lurk
under cover of the darkness and solitude, where hands were waiting to
swoop down upon a shawl. Belated pedestrians saw her by the light of the
street lanterns, an ill-omened, shuddering phantom, gliding along,
almost crawling, bent double, slinking by in the shadow, with that
appearance of illness and insanity and of utter aberration which sets
the thoughtful man's heart and the physician's mind at work on the brink
of deep abysses of melancholy.