Jeanne thought the severe weather was the cause of her ill-health, and she longed for the warm spring breezes. Sometimes the very idea of food disgusted her, and she could eat nothing; at other times she vomited after every meal, unable to digest the little she did eat. She had violent palpitations of the heart, and she lived in a constant and intolerable state of nervous excitement.
One evening, when the thermometer was sinking still lower, Julien shivered as he left the dinner table (for the dining-room was never sufficiently heated, so careful was he over the wood), and rubbing his hands together:
"It's too cold to sleep alone to-night, isn't it, darling?" he whispered to his wife, with one of his old good-tempered laughs.
Jeanne threw her arms round his neck, but she felt so ill, so nervous, and she had such aching pains that evening, that, with her lips close to his, she begged him to let her sleep alone.
"I feel so ill to-night," she said, "but I am sure to be better to-morrow."
"Just as you please, my dear," he answered. "If you are ill, you must take care of yourself." And he began to talk of something else.
Jeanne went to bed early. Julien, for a wonder, ordered a fire to be lighted in his own room; and when the servant came to tell him that "the fire had burnt up," he kissed his wife on the forehead and said good-night.
The very walls seemed to feel the cold, and made little cracking noises as if they were shivering. Jeanne lay shaking with cold; twice she got up to put more logs on the fire, and to pile her petticoats and dresses on the bed, but nothing seemed to make her any warmer. There were nervous twitchings in her legs, which made her toss and turn restlessly from side to side. Her feet were numbed, her teeth chattered, her hands trembled, her heart beat so slowly that sometimes it seemed to stop altogether; and she gasped for breath as if she could not draw the air into her lungs.
As the cold crept higher and higher up her limbs, she was seized with a terrible fear. She had never felt like this before; life seemed to be gradually slipping away from her, and she thought each breath she drew would be her last.
"I am going to die! I am going to die!" she thought; and, in her terror, she jumped out of bed, and rang for Rosalie.