What was she to do?  Her little arms tightened in despair against her bosom.  This desertion seemed to her mournful, passing all bounds, characterized by an injustice and wickedness that enraged her.  She had never known anything so hateful; it struck her that everything was going to vanish; nothing of the old life would ever come back again.  Then she caught sight of her doll seated near her on a chair, with its back against a cushion, and its legs stretched out, its eyes staring at her as though it were a human being.  It was not her mechanical doll, but a large one with a pasteboard head, curly hair, and eyes of enamel, whose fixed look sometimes frightened her.  What with two years’ constant dressing and undressing, the paint had got rubbed off the chin and cheeks, and the limbs, of pink leather stuffed with sawdust, had become limp and wrinkled like old linen.  The doll was just now in its night attire, arrayed only in a bed-gown, with its arms twisted, one in the air and the other hanging downwards.  When Jeanne realized that there was still some one with her, she felt for an instant less unhappy.  She took the doll in her arms and embraced it ardently, while its head swung back, for its neck was broken.  Then she chattered away to it, telling it that it was Jeanne’s best-behaved friend, that it had a good heart, for it never went out and left Jeanne alone.  It was, said she, her treasure, her kitten, her dear little pet.  Trembling with agitation, striving to prevent herself from weeping again, she covered it all over with kisses.

This fit of tenderness gave her some revengeful consolation, and the doll fell over her arm like a bundle of rags.  She rose and looked out, with her forehead against a window-pane.  The rain had ceased falling, and the clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur.  It seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a nightmare—­the reflex of a world of death.  To Jeanne it certainly appeared anything but pretty.  She was now idly dreaming of those she had loved since her birth.  Her oldest sweetheart, the one of her early days at Marseilles, had been a huge cat, which was very heavy; she would clasp it with her little arms, and carry it from one chair to another without provoking its anger in the least; but it had disappeared, and that was the first misfortune she remembered.  She had next had a sparrow, but it died; she had picked it up one morning from the bottom of its cage.  That made two.  She never reckoned the toys which got broken just to grieve her, all kinds of wrongs which had caused her much suffering because she was so sensitive.  One doll in particular, no higher than one’s hand, had driven her to despair by getting its head smashed; she had cherished it to a such a degree that she had buried it by stealth in a corner of the yard; and some time afterwards, overcome by a craving to look on it once more, she had disinterred it, and made herself sick with terror whilst gazing on its blackened and repulsive features.