Often she would end by saying to Jupillon: "Look here! you love her!"--"Well! what then?" he would retort, highly entertained by these disputes, by the opportunity to watch the antics of this fierce wrath which he fanned with pretended sulkiness, and by the excitement of trifling with the woman, whom he saw to be half insane under his sarcasms and his indifference, stumbling wildly about and running her head against stone walls in the first paroxysms of madness. As a result of these scenes, repeated almost every day, a revolution took place in that excitable, extreme character, which knew no middle course, in that heart in which the most violent passions were constantly clashing. Love, in which poison had long been at work, became decomposed and changed to hate. Germinie began to detest her lover and to seek out every possible pretext for hating him more. And her thoughts recurred to her daughter, to the loss of her child, to the cause of her death, and she persuaded herself that he had killed her. She looked upon him as an assassin. She conceived a horror of him, she avoided him, fled from him as from the evil genius of her life, with the terror that one has of a person who is one's Bane! XXV One morning, after a night passed by her in turning over and over in her mind all her despairing, hate-ridden thoughts, Germinie went to the creamery for her four sous' worth of milk and found in the back-shop three or four maids from the neighborhood engaged in "taking an eye-opener." They were seated at a table, gossiping and sipping liqueurs. "Aha!" said Adele, striking the table with her glass; "you here already, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil?" "What's this?" said Germinie, taking Adele's glass; "I'd like some myself." "Are you so thirsty as all that this morning? Brandy and absinthe, that's all!--my soldier boy's _tap_, you know,--he never drank anything else. It's a little stiff, eh?" "Ah! yes," said Germinie, contracting her lips and winking like a child who is given a glass of liqueur with the dessert at a grand dinner-party. "It's good, all the same." Her spirits rose. "Madame Jupillon, let's have the bottle--I'll pay." And she tossed money on the table. After the third glass, she cried: "I am _tight_!" And she roared with laughter. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had gone out that morning to collect her half-yearly income. When she returned at eleven o'clock, she rang once, twice! no one came. "Ah!" she said to herself, "she must have gone down." She opened the door with her key, went to her bedroom and looked in: the mattress and bedclothes lay in a heap on two chairs, and Germinie was stretched out across the straw under-mattress, sleeping heavily, like a log, in the utterly relaxed condition following a sudden attack of lethargy. At the noise made by mademoiselle, Germinie sprang to her feet and passed her hand over her eyes.--"Yes?" she said, as if some one had called her; her eyes were wandering.