At other moments, when her
religious ideas impelled her to thoughts of self-sacrifice, she was all
ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to
go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always
been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief,
whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she
anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have
to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her
imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice with the greater impatience
and ardor. Often the whole scheme fell to the ground in an instant: at a
word, at a gesture from mademoiselle, Germinie would become herself once
more, and would fail to recognize herself. She felt that she was bound
to her mistress absolutely and forever, and she had a thrill of horror
at having so much as thought of detaching her own life from hers. She
struggled thus for two years. Then she learned one fine day, by chance,
that her niece had died a few weeks after her sister: her brother-in-law
had concealed the child's death in order to maintain his hold upon her,
and to lure her to him in Africa, with her few sous. Germinie's
illusions being wholly dispelled by that revelation, she was cured on
the spot. She hardly remembered that she had ever thought of going
away.

VII

About this time a small creamery at the end of the street, with few
customers, changed hands, as a result of the sale of the real estate by
order of court. The shop was renovated and repainted. The front windows
were embellished with inscriptions in yellow letters. Pyramids of
chocolate from the Compagnie Coloniale, and coffee-cups filled with
flowers, alternating with small liqueur glasses, were displayed upon the
shelves. At the door glistened the sign--a copper milk jug divided in
the middle.

The woman who thus endeavored to re-establish the concern, the new
_cremiere_, was a person of about fifty years of age, whose corpulence
passed all bounds, and who still retained some _debris_ of beauty, half
submerged in fat. It was said in the quarter that she had set herself up
in business with the money of an old gentleman, whose servant she had
been until his death, in her native province, near Langres; for it
happened that she was a countrywoman of Germinie, not from the same
village, but from a small place near by; and although she and
mademoiselle's mai