The thing struck her as a ridiculous accident,
which made her appear small in her own eyes and would, had it been
known, have led people to chaff her.
"A poor joke, eh?" she said. "Bad luck, too, certainly."
She was necessarily very sharp set when she thought her last hour had
come. There was no end to her surprise, too; her sexual economy seemed
to her to have got out of order; it produced children then even when
one did not want them and when one employed it for quite other purposes!
Nature drove her to exasperation; this appearance of serious motherhood
in a career of pleasure, this gift of life amid all the deaths she was
spreading around, exasperated her. Why could one not dispose of oneself
as fancy dictated, without all this fuss? And whence had this brat come?
She could not even suggest a father. Ah, dear heaven, the man who made
him would have a splendid notion had he kept him in his own hands, for
nobody asked for him; he was in everybody's way, and he would certainly
not have much happiness in life!
Meanwhile Zoe described the catastrophe.
"Madame was seized with colic toward four o'clock. When she didn't come
back out of the dressing room I went in and found her lying stretched on
the floor in a faint.
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