Shut up alone in the solitude of her bedroom, Madame Bergeret screamed and sobbed with mingled grief and rage, as she watched the ruin of her home. Her misery took on strange, unheard-of shapes that were agony to her conventional soul and became ever more formidable. Until now M. Bergeret had always handed over to her the whole of his monthly salary, without even keeping back his cigarette money from it. But she no longer received a penny from him, and as she had dressed expensively during the gay time of her liaison with M. Roux, and even more expensively during her troublous times when she was upholding her dignity by constantly visiting her entire circle, she was now beginning to be dunned by her milliner and dressmaker, and Messrs. Achard, a firm of outfitters, who did not regard her as a regular customer, actually issued a writ against her, which on this particular evening struck consternation into the proud heart of the daughter of Pouilly. When she perceived that these unprecedented trials were the unexpected, but fatal, results of her sin, she began to perceive the heinousness of adultery. With this thought came a memory of all she had been taught in her youth about this unparalleled, this unique crime; for, in truth, neither envy, nor avarice, nor cruelty bring such shame to the sinner as this one offence of adultery. As she stood on the hearthrug before stepping into bed, she opened the neck of her nightdress, and dropping her chin, looked down at the shape of her body. Foreshortened in this way beneath the cambric, it looked like a warm white mass of cushions and pillows, lit up by the rays of the lamplight. She knew nothing of the beauty of the simple human form, having merely the dressmaker’s instinct for style, and never asked herself whether these outlines below her eyes were lovely or not. Neither did she find grounds for humiliation or self-glorification in this fleshly envelope; she never even recalled the memory of past pleasures: the only feeling that came was one of troubled anxiety at the sight of the body whose secret impulses had worked such consequences in her home and outside it. She was a being of moral and religious instincts, and sufficiently philosophic to grasp the absolute value of the points in a game of cards: the idea came to her then that an act in itself entirely trivial might be great in the world of ideas. She felt no remorse, because she was devoid of imagination, and having a rational conception of God, felt that she had already been sufficiently punished. But, at the same time, since she followed the ordinary line of thought in morality and conceived that a woman’s honour could only be judged by the common criterion, since she had formed no colossal plan of overthrowing the moral scheme in order to manufacture for herself an outrageous innocence, she could feel no quietness, no satisfaction in life, nor could she enjoy any sense of the inner peace that sustains the mind in tribulation.