And mademoiselle continued in this strain for some moments until the words choked one another in her throat and strangled her. LXIX As a result of this scene, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil kept her bed a week, ill and raging, filled with indignation that shook her whole body, overflowed through her mouth, and tore from her now and again some coarse insult which she would hurl with a shriek of rage at her maid's vile memory. Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed with wrath. Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing else. Debts!--a child!--all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service twenty years! whom she had loaded down with benefits! Drunkenness! she had sunk so low as that! The horror that succeeds a bad dream came to mademoiselle, and all the waves of loathing that flowed from her heart said: "Out upon the dead woman whose life the grave vomited forth and whose filth it cast out!" How she had deceived her! How the wretch had pretended to love her! And to make her appear more ungrateful and more despicable Mademoiselle de Varandeuil recalled her manifestations of affection, her attentions, her jealousies, which seemed a part of her adoration. She saw her bending over her when she was ill. She thought of her caresses. It was all a lie! Her devotion was a lie! The delight with which she kissed her, the love upon her lips, were lies! Mademoiselle told herself over and over again, she persuaded herself that it was so; and yet, little by little, from these reminiscences, from these evocations of the past whose bitterness she sought to make more bitter, from the far-off sweetness of days gone by, there arose within her a first sensation of pity.