Prostrated by the excitement and by this last spectacle, Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil took to her bed on returning home, after she had given the
concierge the money for the purchase of a burial lot, and for the
burial. And when she was in bed the things she had seen arose before
her. The horrible dead body was still beside her, the ghastly face
framed by the coffin. That never-to-be-forgotten face was engraved upon
her mind; beneath her closed eyelids she saw it and was afraid of it.
Germinie was there, with the distorted features of one who has been
murdered, with sunken orbits and eyes that seemed to have withdrawn into
their holes! She was there with her mouth still distorted by the
vomiting that accompanied her last breath! She was there with her hair,
her terrible hair, brushed back and standing erect upon her head!
Her hair!--that haunted mademoiselle more persistently than all the
rest. The old maid thought, involuntarily, of things that had come to
her ears when she was a child, of superstitions of the common people
stored away in the background of her memory; she asked herself if she
had not been told that dead people whose hair is like that carry a crime
with them to the grave. And at times it was such hair as that that she
saw upon that head, the hair of crime, standing on end with terror and
stiffened with horror before the justice of Heaven, like the hair of the
condemned man before the scaffold in La Greve!
On Sunday mademoiselle was too ill to leave her bed. On Monday she tried
to rise and dress, in order to attend the funeral; but she was attacked
with faintness, and was obliged to return to her bed.