friends, while the poor girl was alive, I kept the professional secret
of my trade. But, now that she is under ground, you must know the
truth."

And thereupon we learned things concerning the unhappy creature that
took away our appetites, leaving in our mouths the bitter taste of fruit
cut with a steel knife. And a whole strange, hateful, repugnant,
deplorable existence was revealed to us. The notes she signed, the debts
she has left behind her at all the dealers, have the most unforeseen,
the most amazing, the most incredible basis. She kept men: the
milkwoman's son, for whom she furnished a chamber; another to whom she
carried our wine, chickens, food of all sorts. A secret life of
nocturnal orgies, of nights passed abroad, of fierce nymphomania, that
made her lovers say: "Either she or I will stay on the field!" A
passion, passions with her whole head and heart and all her senses at
once, and complicated by all the wretched creatures' diseases,
consumption which adds frenzy to pleasure, hysteria, the beginning of
insanity. She had two children by the milkwoman's son, one of whom lived
six months. Some years ago, when she told us that she was going on a
visit to her province, it was to lie in. And, with regard to these men,
her passion was so extravagant, so unhealthy, so insane, that she, who
was formerly honesty personified, actually stole from us, took twenty
franc pieces out of rolls of a hundred francs, so that the lovers she
paid might not leave her. Now, after these involuntarily dishonest acts,
these petty crimes extorted from her upright nature, she plunged into
such depths of self-reproach, remorse, melancholy, such black despair,
that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and
unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save
herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments
in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie
wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she
tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how
many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, and
bleeding internally: in the first place the rejection at intervals of
religious ideas by the terrors of a hell of fire and brimstone; then
jealousy, that characteristic jealousy of everything and everybody that
poisoned her life; then, then--then the disgust which these men, after a
time, brutally expressed