He had his hunk of bread in his right hand: he seized the baking dish in his left and held it by the grip of his thumb in the grease. But at this moment it seemed to him that a shadow clouded the doorway.
He turned round, grinning, for he had one of those characters which let their happiness be painted on their faces.
The shadow was cast by Angelique Pitou, drier, sourer, bonier, not bonnier, and more mean than ever.
Formerly, at this sight, Pitou would have dropped the bread and dish and fled.
But he was altered. His helmet and sword had not more changed his aspect than his mind was changed by frequenting the society of the revolutionary lights of the capital.
Far from fleeing, he went up to her and opening his arms he embraced her so that his hands, holding the knife, the bread and the dish, crossed behind her skeleton back.
“It is poor Pitou,” he said in accomplishing this act of nepotism.
She feared that he was trying to stifle her because she had caught him red-handed in plundering her store. Literally, she did not breathe freely until she was released from this perillous clasp.
She was horrified that he did not express any emotion over his prize and at his sitting in the best chair: previously he would have perched himself on the edge of a stool or the broken chair. Thus easily lodged he set to demolishing the baked fowl. In a few minutes the pattern of the dish began to appear clean at the bottom as the rocks and sand on the seashore when the tide goes out.
In her frightful perplexity she endeavored to scream but the ogre smiled so bewitchingly that the scream died away on her prim lips.