money
to pay for the journey of the whole family.

The parting was a heart-breaking thing to Germinie. She found herself
left alone and without occupation. Not having the child, she knew not
what to love; her heart was weary, and she had such a feeling of the
emptiness of life without the little one, that she turned once more to
religion and transferred her affections to the church.

Three months had passed when she received news of her sister's death.
The husband, who was one of the whining, lachrymose breed of mechanics,
gave her in his letter, mingled with labored, moving phrases, and
threads of pathos, a despairing picture of his position, with the burial
to pay for, attacks of fever that prevented him from working, two young
children, without counting the little girl, and a household with no wife
to heat the soup. Germinie wept over the letter; then her thoughts
turned to living in that house, beside that poor man, among the poor
children, in that horrible Africa; and a vague longing to sacrifice
herself began to awaken within her. Other letters followed, in which,
while thanking her for her assistance, her brother-in-law gave to his
poverty, to his desolate plight, to the misery that enveloped him, a
still more dramatic coloring--the coloring that the common people impart
to trifles, with its memories of the Boulevard du Crime and its
fragments of vile books. Once caught by the _blague_ of this misery,
Germinie could not cut loose from it. She fancied she could hear the
cries of the children calling her. She became completely absorbed,
buried in the project and resolution of going to them. She was haunted
by the idea and by the word Africa, which she turned over and over
incessantly in the depths of her mind, without a word. Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil, noticing her thoughtfulness and melancholy, asked her what
the matter was, but in vain: Germinie did not speak. She was pulled this
way and that, tormented between what seemed to her a duty and what
seemed to her ingratitude, between her mistress and her sisters' blood.
She thought that she could not leave mademoiselle. And again she said to
herself that God did not wish her to abandon her family. She would look
about the apartment and mutter: "And yet I must go!" Then she would fear
that mademoiselle might be sick when she was not there. Another maid! At
that thought she was seized with jealousy and fancied that she could
already see someone stealing her mistress.