grown heavier with them; all the
incidents that had succeeded one another in her life, as if by
preconcerted arrangement on the part of misery, without her having ever
caught a glimpse of the hand of the Providence of which she had heard so
much--she said to herself that she was one of those miserable creatures
who are destined from their birth to an eternity of misery, one of those
for whom happiness was not made, and who know it only because they envy
it in others. She fed and nourished herself on that thought, and by dint
of yielding to the despair it tended to produce, by dint of brooding
over the unbroken chain of her misfortunes and the endless succession of
her disappointments, she reached the point where she looked upon the
most trifling annoyances of her life and her service as a part of the
persecution of her evil genius. A little money that she loaned and that
was not repaid, a counterfeit coin that was put off upon her in a shop,
an errand that she failed to perform satisfactorily, a purchase in which
she was cheated--all these things were in her opinion due neither to her
own fault nor to chance. It was the sequel of what had gone before. Life
was in a conspiracy against her and persecuted her everywhere, in
everything, great and small, from her daughter's death to bad groceries.
There were days when she broke everything she touched; she thereupon
imagined that she was accursed to her finger-tips. Accursed! almost
damned; she persuaded herself that she was so in very truth, when she
questioned her body, when she probed her feelings. Did she not feel, in
the fire in her blood, in the appetite of her organs, in her passionate
weakness, the spur of the Fatality of Love, the mystery and obsession of
a disease, stronger than her modesty and her reason, having already
delivered her over to the shameful excesses of passion, and
destined--she had a presentiment that it was so--to deliver her again in
the same way?

And so she had one sentence always in her mouth, a sentence that was the
refrain of her thought: "What can you expect? I am unlucky. I have had
no chance. From the beginning nothing ever succeeded with me!" She said
it in the tone of a woman who has abandoned hope. With the persuasion,
every day more firm, that she was born under an unlucky star, that she
was in the power of hatred and vengeance that were more powerful than
she, Germinie had come to be afraid of everything that happens in
ordinary life.