e would take down what was left. She ate nothing
herself. She ended by supplying them with food.

The whole street frightened her no less than the hall and the porter's
lodge. There was a face in every shop that reflected her shame and
commented on her sins. At every step she had to purchase silence by
groveling humility. The dealers she had not been able to repay had her
in their clutches. If she said that anything was too dear, she was
reminded in a bantering way that they were her masters, and that she
must pay the price unless she chose to be denounced. A jest or an
allusion drove the color from her cheeks. She was bound to them,
compelled to trade with them and to allow them to empty her pockets as
if they were accomplices. The successor of Madame Jupillon, who had gone
into the grocery business at Bar-sur Aube,--the new _cremiere_,--gave
her bad milk, and when she suggested that mademoiselle complained about
it, and that she was found fault with every morning, the woman replied:
"Much you care for your mademoiselle!" And at the fish-stall, if she
smelt of a fish, and said: "This has been frozen," the reply would be:
"Bah! tell me next, will you, that I let the moon shine on their gills,
so's to make 'em look fresh! So these are hard days for you, eh, my
duck?" Mademoiselle wanted her to go to the _Halle Centrale_ one day for
her dinner, and she mentioned the fact in the fish-woman's presence.
"Oho! yes, yes, to the _Halle_! I'd like to see you go to the _Halle_!"
And she bestowed a glance upon her in which Germinie saw a threat to
send her account to her mistress. The grocer sold her coffee that smelt
of snuff, rotten prunes, dried rice and old biscuit. If she ventured to
remonstrate, "Nonsense!" he would say; "an old customer like you
wouldn't want to make trouble for me. Don't I tell you I give you good
weight?" And he would coolly give her false weight of the goods that she
ordered, and that he forced her to order.

XLIV

It was a very great trial to Germinie--a trial that she sought,
however--to have to pass through a street where there was a school for
young girls, when she went out before dinner to buy an evening paper for
mademoiselle. She often happened to be at the door when the school was
dismissed; she tried to run away--and stood still.

At first there would be a sound like that made by a swarm of bees, a
buzzing and humming, one of those great outbursts of childish joy that
wake the echoes