a yellow copper candlestick. By its flickering light the dirty paper
on the walls could be seen, covered with caricatures from _Charivari_,
torn from the paper and pasted on the wall.

"Well, you're a love!" Gautruche would exclaim, as he saw her place a
cold fowl and two bottles of wine on the table. "For I must tell you all
I've had in my stomach to-day--a plate of wretched soup--that's all. Ah!
it must have taken a stout master-at-arms to put that fellow's eyes
out!"

And he would begin to eat. Germinie would sit with her elbows on the
table, watching him and drinking, and her glance would grow dark.

* * * * *

"Pshaw! all the negresses are dead,"[6] Gautruche would say at last, as
he drained the bottles one by one. "Put the children to bed!"

* * * * *

Thereupon terrible, fierce, abhorrent outbursts of passion would ensue
between those two strange creatures, savage ardor followed by savage
satiety, frantic storms of lust, caresses that were impregnated with the
fierce brutality of wine, kisses that seemed to seek the blood beneath
the skin, like the tongue of a wild beast, and at the end, utter
exhaustion that swallowed them up and left their bodies like corpses.

Germinie plunged into these debauches with--what shall I say?--delirium,
madness, desperation, a sort of supreme frenzy. Her ungovernable
passions turned against themselves, and, going beyond their natural
appetites, forced themselves to suffer. Satiety exhausted them without
extinguishing them; and, overpassing the widest limits of excess, they
excited themselves to self-torture. In the poor creature's paroxysms of
excitement, her brain, her nerves, the imagination of her maddened body,
no longer sought pleasure in pleasure, but something sharper, keener,
and more violent: pain in pleasure. And the words "to die" constantly
escaped from her compressed lips, as if she were invoking death in an
undertone and seeking to embrace it in the agonies of love.

Sometimes, in the night, she would suddenly sit up on the edge of the
bed, rest her bare feet on the cold floor, and remain there, wild-eyed,
listening to the things that breathe in a sleeping-chamber. And little
by little the obscurity of the place and hour seemed to envelop her. She
seemed to herself to fall and writhe helplessly in the blind
unconsciousness of the night. Her will became as naught. All sorts of
bla