ept any account. My God! That's what
comes of confidence. Well! here we are--I'll pay--not on her account,
but on my own. And I gave her my best pair of sheets to be buried in!
Ah! if I'd known I'd have given you the kitchen dish-clout,
_mademoiselle how I am duped_!"

And mademoiselle continued in this strain for some moments until the
words choked one another in her throat and strangled her.

LXIX

As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kept her bed a
week, ill and raging, filled with indignation that shook her whole body,
overflowed through her mouth, and tore from her now and again some
coarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid's
vile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of
malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed
with wrath.

Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing
else. Debts!--a child!--all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She
abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have
denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so
that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her
maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service
twenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits! Drunkenness! she
had sunk so low as that! The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to
mademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed from her heart
said: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth and
whose filth it cast out!"

How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! And
to make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, her
jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bending
over her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. It was all a
lie! Her devotion was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her, the
love upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told herself over and over
again, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little,
from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whose
bitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness of
days gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.

She drove away the thoughts that tended to allay her wrath; but
reflection brought them back. Thereupon there came to