never do anything so foolish.... One does not marry a girl without a
halfpenny; one takes her for one's mistress."

The unhappy girl mastered her feelings, went down the steps of the porch
quite steadily, but feeling utterly crushed, as if by the news of some
terrible disaster, and joined the servant, who was waiting for her, to
accompany her back to Boucau. The effects of what she had heard were to
give her a serious illness and for some time she hovered between life
and death, consumed and wasted by a violent fever; and when after a
fortnight's suffering, she grew convalescent, and looked at herself
in the glass, she recoiled, as if she had been face to face with an
apparition, for there was nothing left of her former self.

Her eyes were dull, her cheeks pale and hollow, and there were white
streaks in her silky, light hair. Why had she not succumbed to her
illness? Why had destiny reserved her for such a trial, and increased her
unhappy lot, that of disappointed hopes, thus? But when that rebellious
feeling was over, she accepted her cross, fell into a state of ardent
devotion and became crystallized in the torpor of an old woman, tried
with all her might to rid her memory of any recollections that had become
incrusted in it, and to put a thick black veil between herself and the
past.

She never walked in the garden now, and never went to Bayonne, and she
would have liked to have choked herself, and to have beaten herself,
when, in spite of her efforts and of her will, she remembered her lost
happiness, and when some sensual feeling and a longing for past pleasures
agitated her body afresh.

That lasted for four years, which finished her and altogether destroyed