XLVI

The love which she lacked, and which it was her determination to deny herself, became the torment of her life, incessant, abominable torture. She had to defend herself against the fevers of her body and the irritations from without, against the easily aroused emotions and the indolent cowardice of her flesh, against all the solicitations of nature by which she was assailed. She had to contend with the heat of the day, with the suggestions of the darkness, with the moist warmth of stormy weather, with the breath of her past and her memories, with the pictures suddenly thrown upon the background of her mind, with the voices that whispered caressingly in her ear, with the emotions that sent a thrill of tenderness into her every limb.

Weeks, months, years, the frightful temptation endured, and she did not yield or take another lover. Fearful of herself, she avoided man and fled from his sight. She continued her domestic, unsocial habits, always closeted with mademoiselle, or else above in her own room. On Sundays she did not leave the house. She had ceased to consort with the other maids in the house, and, in order to occupy her time and forget herself, she plunged into vast undertakings in the way of sewing, or buried herself in sleep. When musicians came into the courtyard she closed the windows in order not to hear them: the sensuousness of music moved her very soul.

In spite of everything, she could not calm or cool her passions. Her evil thoughts rekindled themselves, lived and flourished upon themselves. At every moment the fixed idea of desire arose from her whole being, became throughout her body the fierce torment that knows no end, that delirium of the senses, obsession⁠—the obsession that nothing can dispel and that constantly returns, the shameless, implacable obsession, swarming with images, the obsession that brings love close to the woman’s every sense, that touches with it her closed eyes, forces it smoking into her brain and pours it, hot as fire, into her arteries!

At length, the nervous exhaustion caused by these constant assaults, the irritation of this painful continence, began to disturb Germinie’s faculties. She fancied that she could see her temptations: a ghastly hallucination brought the realization of her dreams near to her senses. It happened that at certain moments the things she saw in her room, the candlesticks, the legs of the chairs, everything about her assumed impure appearances and shapes. Obscenity arose from everything before her eyes and approached her. At such times she would look at her kitchen clock, and would say, like a condemned man whose body no longer belongs to himself: “In five minutes I am going down into the street.” And when the five minutes had passed she would stay where she was.