ne of her neighbors throw
her arms around the neck of one of the assistant nurses, fall back
almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly
still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on
the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who
sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young assistant, with
desperate gestures; the assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell
in a dead faint upon the floor.

Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and
the half-dead assistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to
consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who
were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell
that hung beside each bed to call for help.

Thereafter La Maternite was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal
epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those
cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole
rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the
closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the
plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all
before it and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that
issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie,
at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the
milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws,
agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by
hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the
application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the
victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with
them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they
were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn
from the body. The very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous
aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused
by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.

For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing
her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all
these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was
determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her
child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energ