she kept. For a whole week the terrible threat hung over
Germinie's head. At last the thief was discovered and the threat fell to
the ground. But it had had its effect on the poor girl. It had done all
the injury it could do in that confused brain, where, under the sudden,
overpowering rush of the blood, her reason was wavering and became
overcast at the slightest shock. It had overturned that brain which was
so prompt to go astray in fear or vexation, which lost so quickly the
faculty of good judgment, of discernment, clear-sightedness and
appreciation of its surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which
plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing
presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was
constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end
of which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase:
"Bah! I will kill myself!"

Throughout the week the fever in her brain caused her to experience all
the effects of the things she thought might happen. By day and night she
saw her shame laid bare and made public; she saw her secret, her
cowardice, her wrong-doing, all that she carried about with her
concealed and sewn in her heart--she saw it all uncovered, noised
abroad, disclosed--disclosed to mademoiselle! Her debts on Jupillon's
account, augmented by her debts for drink and for food for Gautruche, by
all that she purchased now on credit, her debt to the concierge and the
shopkeepers would soon become known and ruin her! A cold shiver ran down
her back at the thought: she could feel mademoiselle turning her away!
Throughout the week she constantly imagined herself standing before the
commissioner of police. Seven long days she brooded over that word and
that idea: the Law! the Law as it appears to the imagination of the
lower classes; something terrible, indefinable, inevitable, which is
everywhere, and lurks in everyone's shadow; an omnipotent source of
calamity which appears vaguely in the judge's black gown, between the
police sergeant and the executioner, with the hands of the gendarme and
the arms of the guillotine! She, who was subject to all the instinctive
terrors of the common people, and who often repeated that she would much
rather die than appear before the court--she imagined herself seated in
the dock, between two gendarmes, in a court-room, surrounded by all the
unfamiliar paraphernalia of the Law, her ignorance of which made them