e's three hundred francs would hardly suffice to pay the
interest on the twenty-three hundred she had borrowed. She knew that she
was in debt, that she should be in debt forever, that she was doomed
forever to privation and embarrassment, to the strictest economy in her
manner of living and her dress. She had hardly any more illusions as to
the Jupillons than as to her own future. She had a presentiment that
her money was lost so far as they were concerned. She had not even based
any hopes on the possibility that this sacrifice would touch the young
man. She had acted on the impulse of the moment. If she had been told to
die to prevent his going, she would have died. The idea of seeing him a
soldier, the idea of the battlefield, the cannon, the wounded, in
presence of which a woman shuts her eyes in terror, had led her to do
something more than die; to sell her life for that man, to consign
herself to everlasting poverty.

XXXII

Disorders of the nervous system frequently result in disarranging the
natural sequence of human joys and sorrows, in destroying their
proportion and equilibrium, and in carrying them to the greatest
possible excess. It seems that, under the influence of this disease of
sensitiveness, the sharpened, refined, spiritualized sensations exceed
their natural measure and limits, reach a point beyond themselves, and,
as it were, make the enjoyment and suffering of the individual infinite.
So the infrequent joys that Germinie still knew were insane joys, from
which she emerged drunk, and with the physical symptoms of
drunkenness.--"Why, my girl," mademoiselle sometimes could not forbear
saying, "anyone would think you were tipsy."--"Mademoiselle makes you
pay dear for a little amusement once in a while!" Germinie would reply.
And when she relapsed into her sorrowful, disappointed, restless
condition, her desolation was more intense, more frantic and delirious
than her gayety.

The moment had arrived when the terrible truth, which she had suspected
before, at last became clear to her. She saw that she had failed to lay
hold of Jupillon by the devotion her love had manifested, by stripping
herself of all she possessed, by all the pecuniary sacrifices which
involved her life in the toils and embarrassment of a debt it was
impossible for her to pay. She felt that he gave her his love
grudgingly, a love to which he imparted all the humiliation of an act of
charity. When she told him that she was a