hear them: the sensuousness of music
moved her very soul.

In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her passions. Her
evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon
themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her
whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no
end, that delirium of the senses, obsession,--the obsession that nothing
can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable
obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to
the woman's every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it
smoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!

At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant assaults, the
irritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie's
faculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly
hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses.
It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, the
candlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her assumed
impure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything before
her eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at her
kitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longer
belongs to himself: "In five minutes I am going down into the street."
And when the five minutes had passed she would stay where she was.

XLVII

The time came at last in this life of torture when Germinie abandoned
the conflict. Her conscience yielded, her will succumbed, she bowed her
head beneath her destiny. All that remained to her of resolution,
energy, courage, vanished before the feeling, the despairing conviction,
of her powerlessness to save herself from herself. She felt that she was
being borne along on a resistless current, that it was useless, almost
impious, to try to stop. That great power of the world that causes
suffering, the malevolent power that bears the name of a god on the
marble of the antique tragedies, and is called _No Chance_ on the
tattooed brow of the galley-slave--Fatality--was trampling upon her, and
Germinie lowered her head beneath its foot.

When, in her hours of discouragement, the bitter experiences of her past
recurred to her memory, when she followed, from her infancy, the links
in the chain of her deplorable existence, that long line of afflictions
that had followed her years and