eristic
distrust of the peasant, who is jealous of her own petty affairs and
takes delight in burying a corner of her life away down in her heart, as
the villager hoards his sous in a woolen stocking. Or else she persuaded
herself that it was her ill health, her state of continual suffering
that was responsible for her whims and her habit of dissimulation. And
her mind, in its interested search for motives, stopped at that point,
with the indolence and a little of the selfishness of old people's
minds, who, having an instinctive dread of final results and of the real
characters of their acquaintances, prefer not to be too inquisitive or
to know too much. Who knows? Perhaps all this mystery was nothing but a
paltry matter, unworthy to disturb or to interest her, some petty
woman's quarrel. She went to sleep thereupon, reassured, and ceased to
cudgel her brains.

In truth, how could mademoiselle have guessed Germinie's degradation and
the horror of her secret! In her most poignant suffering, in her wildest
intoxication, the unhappy creature retained the incredible strength
necessary to suppress and keep back everything. From her passionate,
overcharged nature, which found relief so naturally in expansion, never
a word escaped or a syllable that cast a ray of light upon her secret.
Mortification, contempt, disappointment, self-sacrifice, the death of
her child, the treachery of her lover, the dying agony of her love, all
remained voiceless within her, as if she stifled their cries by pressing
her hands upon her heart. Her rare attacks of weakness, when she seemed
to be struggling with pains that strangled her, the fierce, feverish
caresses lavished upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, the sudden paroxysms,
as if she were trying to give birth to something, always ended without
words and found relief in tears.

Even illness, with its resulting weakness and enervation, forced nothing
from her. It could make no impression on that heroic resolution to keep
silent to the end. Hysterical attacks extorted shrieks from her and
nothing but shrieks. When she was a girl she dreamed aloud; she forced
her dreams to cease speaking, she closed the lips of her sleep. As
mademoiselle might have discovered from her breath that she had been
drinking, she ate shallots and garlic, and concealed the fumes of liquor
with their offensive odors. She even trained her intoxication, her
drunken torpor to awake at her mistress's footstep, and remain awake