tient to
whom her back was turned. "There's a man who comes here to see her. He
talked to her an hour yesterday. I heard them say they'd had a child.
She has left her husband. He was like a madman, the man was, when he was
talking to her."

As she spoke, Germinie's face lighted up as if she were still full of
the scene of the day before, still stirred up and feverish with
jealousy, so near death as she was, because she had heard love spoken of
beside her!

Suddenly her expression changed. A woman came toward her bed. She seemed
embarrassed when she saw Mademoiselle de Varandeuil. After a few
moments, she kissed Germinie, and hurriedly withdrew as another woman
came up. The new-comer did the same, kissed Germinie and at once took
her leave. After the women a man came; then another woman. One and all,
after a moment's conversation, leaned over Germinie to kiss her, and
with every kiss Mademoiselle de Varandeuil could hear an indistinct
murmur as of words exchanged; a whispered question from those who
kissed, a hasty reply from her who was kissed.

"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are well taken care of!"

"Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone, "they take excellent
care of me!"

She had lost the animation that she displayed at the beginning of the
visit. The little blood that had mounted to her cheeks remained there in
one spot only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf, like a
wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were. Her features were
concealed beneath the veil of infinite dumb agony. There was nothing
caressing or eloquent in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and
filled with one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior
signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an irresistible power of
concentration, by a last supreme effort of her will, and that her whole
being was clinging in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything to
itself.

The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the
butter woman and the laundress--all her debts, incarnate! The kisses
were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their
claims and to extort money from her death-agony!

LXVI

Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning. She was making a little
package of four jars of Bar preserves, which she intended to carry to
Germinie the next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between the
housekeeper and the concierge in the re