bearing of this woman who did not stir.

"What do I want?" said Germinie. She was so filled, so possessed with
the thought of what she wanted that she believed she had asked for
vitriol. "What do I want?"--She passed her hand across her
forehead.--"Ah! I don't know now."

And she left the shop, stumbling as she went.

XXXIII

In the torment of the life she was leading, in which she suffered the
horrors of death and of unsatisfied passion, Germinie, seeking to deaden
her ghastly thoughts, had remembered the glass she had taken from
Adele's hand one morning, which gave her a whole day of oblivion. From
that day she had taken to drink. She had begun with the little morning
draughts to which the maids of kept women are addicted. She had drunk
with this one and with that one. She had drunk with men who came to
breakfast at the creamery; she had drunk with Adele, who drank like a
man and who took a base delight in seeing this virtuous woman's maid
descend as low as herself.

At first she had needed excitement, company, the clinking of glasses,
the encouragement of speech, the inspiration of the challenge, in order
to arouse the desire to drink; but she had soon reached the point where
she drank alone. Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filled
glass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen; that she
had taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy, of which
she would take draught upon draught until she had found that for which
she thirsted--sleep. For what she craved was not the fevered brain, the
happy confusion, the living folly, the delirious, waking dream of
drunkenness; what she needed, what she sought was the negative joy of
sleep, Lethean, dreamless sleep, a leaden sleep falling upon her like
the blow of the sledge upon the ox's head: and she found it in those
compounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward on
the waxed cover of the kitchen table.

To sleep that overpowering sleep, to wallow, by day, in that midnight
darkness, had come to mean to her a truce, deliverance from an existence
that she had not the courage to continue or to end. An overwhelming
longing for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke. The hours of her
life that she passed in possession of her faculties, contemplating
herself, examining her conscience, looking on at her own shame, seemed
to her so execrable! She preferred to kill them. There was nothing in
the world but sl