One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a
wine-shop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man
who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.
She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the
door of the wine-shop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her,
her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her
skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling
listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a
milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and
the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passers-by, the
carriages, the street--she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were
far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up
the hill,--a white horse, he was,--stood in front of her, worn out and
motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the
bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog.
It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if
the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and
flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving,
with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening,
desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by
Darkness at a wine-shop door!
At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.
"My money?" she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to
possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes,
no scaffold--nothing!
Jupillon felt that his customary _blague_ was arrested in his throat.
"Your money?" he repeated; "your money ain't lost. But I must have time.
Just now, you see, work ain't very plenty. That shop business of mine
came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months' time, I
promise. Are you pretty well?"
"_Canaille!_ Ah! I've got you now! Ah! you'd sneak away, would you? But
it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber!
sneak! It was you."
Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing against him, forcing
him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing
against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned
toward him thus, she cried: "Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to
you to make you strike me?"
She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply
felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an
instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer
in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put
a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but
blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the
lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,--the
guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the
commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her
misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost
her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of emptying
itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was
bursting.
"Come, strike me!" she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who
tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her
as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to
bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.
"Come, old harridan, don't bother monsieur!" exclaimed a police officer,
grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that
brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie's knees wavered: she
thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of
the street.