d had never met nor seen each other in the country,
they knew each other by name and were drawn together by the fact that
they had acquaintances in common and could compare memories of the same
places. The stout woman was a flattering, affected, fawning creature.
She said: "My love" to everybody, talked in a piping voice, and played
the child with the querulous languor of corpulent persons. She detested
vulgar remarks and would blush and take alarm at trifles. She adored
secrets, twisted everything into a confidential communication, invented
stories and always whispered in your ear. Her life was passed in
gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she
lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much
she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so
pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept
indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for
milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the
newspapers, she wept for the sake of weeping.

Germinie was very soon ensnared and moved to pity by this wheedling,
talkative _cremiere_, who was always in a state of intense emotion,
calling upon others to open their hearts to her, and apparently so
affectionate. After three months hardly anything passed mademoiselle's
doors that did not come from Mere Jupillon. Germinie procured
everything, or almost everything there. She passed hours in the shop.
Once there it was hard work for her to leave; she remained there,
unable to rise from her chair. A sort of instinctive cowardice detained
her. At the door she would stop and talk on, in order to delay her
departure. She felt bound to the _cremiere_ by the invisible charm of
familiar places to which you constantly return, and which end by
embracing you like things that would love you. And then, too, in her
eyes the shop meant Madame Jupillon's three dogs, three wretched curs;
she always had them on her knees, she scolded them and kissed them and
talked to them; and when she was warm with their warmth, she would feel
in the depths of her heart the contentment of a beast rubbing against
her little ones. Again, the shop to her meant all the gossip of the
quarter, the rendezvous of all the scandals,--how this one had failed to
pay her note and that one had received a carriage load of flowers; it
meant a place that was on the watch for everything, even to the lace
_peignoir_