"Well!" she said to Germinie, "I hope you are well taken care of!" "Oh! yes," Germinie answered in a peculiar tone, "they take excellent care of me!" She had lost the animation that she displayed at the beginning of the visit. The little blood that had mounted to her cheeks remained there in one spot only. Her face seemed closed; it was cold and deaf, like a wall. Her drawn-in lips were sealed, as it were. Her features were concealed beneath the veil of infinite dumb agony. There was nothing caressing or eloquent in her staring eyes, absorbed as they were and filled with one fixed thought. You would have said that all exterior signs of her ideas were drawn within her by an irresistible power of concentration, by a last supreme effort of her will, and that her whole being was clinging in desperation to a sorrow that drew everything to itself. The visitors she had just received were the grocer, the fish-woman, the butter woman and the laundress--all her debts, incarnate! The kisses were the kisses of her creditors, who came to keep on the scent of their claims and to extort money from her death-agony! LXVI Mademoiselle had just risen on Saturday morning. She was making a little package of four jars of Bar preserves, which she intended to carry to Germinie the next day, when she heard low voices, a colloquy between the housekeeper and the concierge in the reception room. Almost immediately the door opened and the concierge came in. "Sad news, mademoiselle," he said. And he handed her a letter he had in his hand; it bore the stamp of the Lariboisiere hospital: Germinie was dead; she died at seven o'clock that morning. Mademoiselle took the letter; she saw only the letters that said: "Dead! dead!" And they repeated the word: "Dead! dead!" to no purpose, for she could not believe it. As is always the case with a person of whose death one learns abruptly, Germinie appeared to her instinct with life, and her body, which was no more, seemed to stand before her with the awe-inspiring presence of a ghost. Dead! She should never see her more! So there was no longer a Germinie on earth! Dead! She was dead! And the person she should hear henceforth moving about in the kitchen would not be she; somebody else would open the door for her, somebody else would potter about her room in the morning! "Germinie!" she cried at last, in the tone with which she was accustomed to call her; then, collecting her thoughts: "Machine! creature! What's your name?" she cried, savagely, to the bewildered housekeeper. "My dress--I must go there."