f the child that he was
the day before. She lowered her eyes, and she was the one to blush. A
fortnight passed before she went again to Saint-Nicholas.

IX

About the time that young Jupillon left the boarding-school, a maid in
the service of a kept woman who lived on the floor below mademoiselle
sometimes passed the evening with Germinie at Madame Jupillon's. A
native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which supplies Paris with coupe
drivers and lorettes' waiting-maids, this girl was what is called in
vulgar parlance: "a great _bringue_;" she was an awkward, wild-eyed
creature, with the eyebrows of a water carrier. She soon fell into the
habit of going there every evening. She treated everybody to cakes and
liquors, amused herself by showing off little Jupillon, playing
pat-a-cake with him, sitting on his knee, telling him to his face that
he was a beauty, treating him like a child, playing the wanton with him
and joking him because he was not a man. The boy, happy and proud of
these attentions from the first woman who had ever taken notice of him,
manifested before long his preference for Adele: so was the new-comer
called.

Germinie was passionately jealous. Jealousy was the foundation of her
nature; it was the dregs of her affection and gave it its bitter taste.
Those whom she loved she wished to have entirely to herself, to possess
them absolutely. She demanded that they should love no one but her. She
could not permit them to take from her and bestow upon others the
slightest fragment of their affection: as she had earned it, it no
longer belonged to them; they were no longer entitled to dispose of it.
She detested the people whom her mistress seemed to welcome more
cordially than others, and with whom she was on most intimate terms. By
her ill-humor and her sullen manner she had offended, had almost driven
from the house, two or three of mademoiselle's old friends, whose visits
wounded her; as if the old ladies came there for the purpose of
abstracting something from the rooms, of taking a little of her mistress
from her. People of whom she had once been fond became odious to her:
she did not consider that they were fond enough of her; she hated them
for all the love she wanted from them. Her heart was despotic and
exacting in everything. As it gave all, it demanded all in return. At
the least sign of coldness, at the slightest indication that she had a
rival, she would fly into a rage, tear her hair, p