rned the key, put in her hand, fumbled under the
hair trinkets and souvenirs, felt in a roll of five louis and took out
one piece, closed the box and rushed into the kitchen. She had the
little coin in her hand and dared not look at it.

XXXIX

Then it was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began to be
visible in her personal appearance, to make her stupid and slovenly. A
sort of drowsiness came over her ideas. She was no longer keen and
prompt of apprehension. What she had read and what she had learned
seemed to escape her. Her memory, which formerly retained everything,
became confused and unreliable. The sharp wit of the Parisian
maid-servant gradually vanished from her conversation, her retorts, her
laughter. Her face, once so animated, was no longer lighted up by gleams
of intelligence. In her whole person you would have said that she had
become once more the stupid peasant girl that she was when she came from
her province, when she went to a stationer's for gingerbread. She seemed
not to understand. As mademoiselle expressed it, she made faces like an
idiot. She was obliged to explain to her, to repeat two or three times
things that Germinie had always grasped on the merest hint. She asked
herself, when she saw how slow and torpid she was, if somebody had not
exchanged her maid for another.--"Why, you're getting to be a perfect
imbecile!" she would sometimes say to her testily. She remembered the
time when Germinie was so useful about finding dates, writing an address
on a card, telling her what day they had put in the wood or broached the
cask of wine,--all of which were things that her old brain could not
remember. Now Germinie remembered nothing. In the evening, when she went
over her accounts with mademoiselle, she could not think what she had
bought in the morning; she would say: "Wait!" but she would simply pass
her hand vaguely across her brow; nothing would come to her mind.
Mademoiselle, to save her tired old eyes, had fallen into the habit of
having Germinie read the newspaper to her; but she got to stumbling so
and reading with so little intelligence, that mademoiselle was compelled
to decline her services with thanks.

As her faculties failed, she abandoned and neglected her body in a like
degree. She gave no thought to her dress, nor to cleanliness even. In
her indifference she retained nothing of a woman's natural solicitude
touching her personal appearance; she did not dress decentl