"Oh! nonsense——there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs left."
The cab started away.
Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and said to Germinie through the window:
"At least, I can go with you?"
"No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone," she replied, writhing on the cushions of the cab.
After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to such medical students as happened to pass through the street that there was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternité.
The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the salle d'accouchement. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were drying.
Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having created. Suddenly a loud cry: "I am dying!" caused her to turn her eyes in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw her arms around the neck of one of the assistant nurses, fall back almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young assistant, with desperate gestures; the assistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell in a dead faint upon the floor.
Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and the half-dead assistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell that hung beside each bed to call for help.
Thereafter La Maternité was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all before it and snatches up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that issues from the cradle—the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie, at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws, agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn from the body. The very disease assumed a ghastly shape and monstrous aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.