LV

One evening when she was prowling about Rue du Rocher, as she passed a wineshop at the corner of Rue de Labarde, she noticed the back of a man who was drinking at the bar: it was Jupillon.

She stopped short, turned toward the street with her back against the door of the wineshop, and waited. The light in the shop was behind her, her shoulders against the bars, and there she stood motionless, her skirt gathered up in one hand in front, and her other hand falling listlessly at her side. She resembled a statue of darkness seated on a milestone. In her attitude there was an air of stern determination and the necessary patience to wait there forever. The passersby, the carriages, the street⁠—she saw them all indistinctly and as if they were far away. The tow-horse, waiting to assist in drawing the omnibuses up the hill⁠—a white horse, he was⁠—stood in front of her, worn out and motionless, sleeping on his feet, with his head and forefeet in the bright light from the door: she did not see him. There was a dense fog. It was one of those vile, detestable Parisian nights when it seems as if the water that falls had become mud before falling. The gutter rose and flowed about her feet. She remained thus half an hour without moving, with her back to the light and her face in the shadow, a threatening, desperate, forbidding creature, like a statue of Fatality erected by Darkness at a wineshop door!

At last Jupillon came out. She stood before him with folded arms.

“My money?” she said. Her face was that of a woman who has ceased to possess a conscience, for whom there is no God, no police, no assizes, no scaffold⁠—nothing!

Jupillon felt that his customary blague was arrested in his throat.

“Your money?” he repeated; “your money ain’t lost. But I must have time. Just now, you see, work ain’t very plenty. That shop business of mine came to grief a long while ago, you know. But in three months’ time, I promise. Are you pretty well?”

“Canaille! Ah! I’ve got you now! Ah! you’d sneak away, would you? But it was you, my curse! it was you who made me what I am, brigand! robber! sneak! It was you.”

Germinie hurled these words in his face, pushing against him, forcing him back, pressing her body against his. She seemed to be rubbing against the blows that she invited and provoked, and as she leaned toward him thus, she cried: “Come, strike me! What, then, must I say to you to make you strike me?”

She had ceased to think. She did not know what she wanted; she simply felt that she needed to be struck. There had come upon her an instinctive, irrational desire to be maltreated, bruised, made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass⁠—the guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her misfortunes, how the man before her had abused her and what he had cost her! Her heart collapsed in anticipation at the thought of emptying itself, with shrieks and tears, of everything with which it was bursting.

“Come, strike me!” she repeated, still advancing upon Jupillon, who tried to slink away, and, as he retreated, tossed caressing words to her as you do to a dog that does not recognize you and seems inclined to bite. A crowd was beginning to collect about them.

“Come, old harridan, don’t bother monsieur!” exclaimed a police officer, grasping Germinie by the arm and swinging her around roughly. Under that brutal insult from the hand of the law, Germinie’s knees wavered: she thought she should faint. Then she was afraid, and fled in the middle of the street.