eep to make her forget everything--the congested sleep
of intoxication, which lulls its victim with the arms of Death.

In that glass, from which she forced herself to drink, and which she
emptied in a sort of frenzy, her sufferings, her sorrows, all her
horrible present would be drowned and disappear. In a half hour, her
mind would have ceased to think, her life would have ceased to exist;
nothing of her surroundings would have any being for her, there would be
no more time even, so far as she was concerned. "I drink away my
troubles!" she said to a woman who told her that she would wreck her
health by drinking. And as, in the periods of reaction that followed her
debauches, there came to her a more painful feeling of her own shame, a
greater sense of desolation and a fiercer detestation of her mistakes
and her sins, she sought stronger decoctions of alcohol, more fiery
brandy, and even drank pure absinthe, in order to produce a more deathly
lethargy, and to make her more utterly oblivious to everything.

She ended by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness,
from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence,
blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, the
motions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will,
memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of the
confused waking hours of the morning.

XXXIV

Half an hour after the horrible meeting when--her mind having dabbled in
crime as if with her fingers--she had determined to disfigure her rival
with vitriol and had believed that she had done so, Germinie returned to
Rue de Laval with a bottle of brandy procured at the grocer's.

For two weeks she had been mistress of the apartment, free to indulge
her brutish appetite. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, who as a general rule
hardly stirred from her chair, had gone, strangely enough, to pass six
weeks with an old friend in the country; and she decided not to take
Germinie with her for fear of setting a bad example to the other
servants, and arousing their jealousy of a maid who was accustomed to
very light duties and was treated on a different footing from
themselves.

Germinie went into mademoiselle's bedroom and took no more time than was
necessary to throw her shawl and hat on the floor before she began to
drink, with the neck of the bottle between her teeth, pouring down the
liquid hurriedly until everything in the room was whi