ed: it was a dead woman
walking, because she was determined to walk!

At last she reached the great hall, cold and stiff and clean and bare
and horrible, with a circle of wooden benches around the waiting litter.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil led her to a straw chair near a glazed door.
A clerk opened the door, asked Mademoiselle de Varandeuil Germinie's
name and age, and wrote for a quarter of an hour, covering ten or more
sheets of paper with a religious emblem at the top. That done,
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kissed her and turned to go; she saw an
attendant take her under the arms, then she saw no more, but turned and
fled, and, throwing herself upon the cushions of the cab, she burst into
sobs and gave vent to all the tears with which her heart had been
suffocated for an hour past. The driver on his box was amazed to hear
such violent weeping.

LXV

On the visiting day, Thursday, mademoiselle started at half-past twelve
to go and see Germinie. It was her purpose to be at her bedside at the
moment the doors were thrown open, at one o'clock precisely. As she rode
through the streets she had passed through four days before, she
remembered the ghastly ride of Monday. It seemed to her as if she were
incommoding a sick person in the cab, of which she was the only
occupant, and she sat close in the corner in order to make room for the
memory of Germinie. In what condition should she find her? Should she
find her at all? Suppose her bed should be empty?

The cab passed through a narrow street filled with orange carts, and
with women sitting on the sidewalk offering biscuit for sale in baskets.
There was something unspeakably wretched and dismal in this open-air
display of fruit and cakes,--the delicacies of the dying, the _viaticum_
of invalids, craved by feverish mouths, longed for by the
death-agony,--which workingmen's hands, black with toil, purchase as
they pass, to carry to the hospital and offer death a tempting morsel.
Children carried them with sober faces, almost reverentially, and
without touching them, as if they understood.

The cab stopped before the gate of the courtyard. It was five minutes to
one. There was a long line of women crowding about the gate, women with
their working clothes on, sorrowful, depressed and silent. Mademoiselle
de Varandeuil took her place in the line, went forward with the others
and was admitted: they searched her. She inquired for Salle
Sainte-Josephine, and was directe