for her ugliness, and which drove her deeper
and deeper into sottishness,--caused her one day to have a miscarriage,
and she fell half dead on the floor. Such a frightful tearing away of
the veil we have worn over our eyes is like the examination of a
pocketful of horrible things in a dead body suddenly opened. From what
we have heard I suddenly seem to realize what she must have suffered for
ten years past: the dread of an anonymous letter to us or of a
denunciation from some dealer; and the constant trepidation on the
subject of the money that was demanded of her, and that she could not
pay; and the shame felt by that proud creature, perverted by the vile
Quartier Saint-Georges, because of her intimacy with low wretches whom
she despised; and the lamentable consciousness of the premature senility
caused by drunkenness; and the inhuman exactions and brutality of the
Alphonses of the gutter; and the temptations to suicide which caused me
to pull her away from a window one day, when I found her leaning far
out--and lastly all the tears that we believed to be without cause--all
these things mingled with a very deep and heartfelt affection for us,
and with a vehement, feverish devotion when either of us was ill. And
this woman possessed an energetic character, a force of will, a skill in
mystification, to which nothing can be compared. Yes, yes, all those
frightful secrets kept under lock and key, hidden, buried deep in her
own heart, so that neither our eyes, nor our ears, nor our powers of
observation ever detected aught amiss, even in her hysterical attacks,
when nothing escaped her but groans: a mystery preserved until her
death, and which she must have believed would be buried with her. And of
what did she die? She died, because, all through one rainy winter's
night, eight months ago, at Montmartre, she spied upon the milkwoman's
son, who had turned her away, in order to find out with what woman he
had filled her place; a whole night leaning against a ground-floor
window, as a result of which she was drenched to the bones with deadly
pleurisy!

Poor creature, we forgive her; indeed, a vast compassion for her fills
our hearts, as we reflect upon all that she has suffered. But we have
become suspicious, for our lives, of the whole female sex, and of women
above us as well as of women below us in station. We are terror-stricken
at the double lining of their hearts, at the marvelous faculty, the
science, the consummate g