Her nervous terrors, her dark humors, sprang to some extent from this unfortunate state of things, the secret of which she kept very shamefacedly, as became a courtesan mother who is obliged to conceal her plight.

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.