ence, her touch, her
caresses, everything in her amorous body that spoke of love. Her
preoccupation with Jupillon, the work that kept them constantly
together, the provincial wonderment that she constantly exhibited, the
half-confidences she allowed to come to her lips when the young man had
gone, her gayety, her jests, her healthy good-humor--everything helped
to exasperate Germinie and to arouse a sullen wrath within her;
everything wounded that jealous heart, so jealous that the very animals
caused it a bitter pang by seeming to love someone whom it loved.

She dared not speak to Mere Jupillon and denounce the little one to her,
for fear of betraying herself; but whenever she found herself alone with
Jupillon she vented her feelings in recriminations, complaints and
quarrels. She would remind him of an incident, a word, something he had
done or said, some answer he had made, a trifle forgotten by him but
still bleeding in her heart.

"Are you mad?" Jupillon would say to her; "a slip of a girl!"--"A slip
of a girl, eh? nonsense!--when she has such eyes that all the men stare
at her in the street! I went out with her the other day--I was
ashamed--I don't know how she did it, but we were followed by a
gentleman all the time."--"Well, what if you were? She's a pretty girl,
you know!"--"Pretty! pretty!" And at that word Germinie would hurl
herself, figuratively speaking, at the girl's face, and claw it to
pieces with frantic words.

Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: "Look here! you love
her!"--"Well! what then?" he would retort, highly entertained by these
disputes, by the opportunity to watch the antics of this fierce wrath
which he fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement of
trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half insane under his
sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling wildly about and running her
head against stone walls in the first paroxysms of madness.

As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day, a revolution
took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle
course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly
clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed
and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out
every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to
her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and
she persuaded herself that he had k