rling around her,
and she remembered nothing of the day. Thereupon, staggering, feeling
that she was about to fall, she tried to throw herself on her mistress's
bed to sleep; but her dizziness threw her against the night table. From
that she fell to the floor and lay without moving; she simply snored.
But the blow was so violent that during the night she had a miscarriage,
followed by one of those hemorrhages in which the life often ebbs away.
She tried to rise and go out on the landing to call; she tried to stand
up: she could not. She felt that she was gliding on to death, entering
its portals and descending with gentle moderation. At last, summoning
all her strength for a final effort, she dragged herself as far as the
hall door; but it was impossible for her to lift her head to the
keyhole, impossible to cry out. And she would have died where she lay
had not Adele, as she was passing in the morning, heard a groan, and, in
her alarm, fetched a locksmith to open the door, and afterward a midwife
to attend to the dying woman.

When mademoiselle returned a month later, she found Germinie up and
about, but so weak that she was constantly obliged to sit down, and so
pale that she seemed to have no blood left in her body. They told her
that she had had a hemorrhage of which she nearly died: mademoiselle
suspected nothing.

XXXV

Germinie welcomed mademoiselle's return with melting caresses, wet with
tears. Her affectionate manner was like a sick child's; she had the same
clinging gentleness, the imploring expression, the melancholy of timid,
frightened suffering. She sought excuses for touching her mistress with
her white blue-veined hands. She approached her with a sort of trembling
and fervent humility. Very often, as she sat facing her upon a stool,
and looked up at her with eyes like a dog's, she would rise and go and
kiss some part of her dress, then resume her seat, and in a moment begin
again.

There was heart-rending entreaty in these caresses, these kisses of
Germinie's. Death, whose footsteps she had heard approaching her as if
it were a living person; the hours of utter prostration, when, as she
lay in her bed, alone with herself, she had reviewed her whole past
life; the consciousness of the shame of all she had concealed from
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil; the fear of a judgment of God, rising from
the depths of her former religious ideas; all the reproaches, all the
apprehensions that whisper in the