"No, it is not our custom. We cannot do it."
Then the young girl, moved by the mother's overwhelmed face, wished to do all she could for the children. They were still looking fixedly at the brioche; she cut it in two and gave it to them.
"Here! this is for you."
Then, taking the pieces back, she asked for an old newspaper:
"Wait, you must share with your brothers and sisters."
And beneath the tender gaze of her parents she finally pushed them out of the room. The poor starving urchins went off, holding the brioche respectfully in their benumbed little hands.
Maheude dragged her children along the road, seeing neither the desert fields, nor the black mud, nor the great livid sky. As she passed through Montsou she resolutely entered Maigrat's shop, and begged so persistently that at last she carried away two loaves, coffee, butter, and even her five-franc piece, for the man also lent money by the week. It was not her that he wanted, it was Catherine; she understood that when he advised her to send her daughter for provisions. They would see about that. Catherine would box his ears if he came too close under her nose.
[CHAPTER III]
Eleven o'clock struck at the little church in the Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement, a brick chapel to which Abbé Joire came to say mass on Sundays. In the school beside it, also of brick, one heard the faltering voices of the children, in spite of windows closed against the outside cold. The wide passages, divided into little gardens, back to back, between the four large blocks of uniform houses, were deserted; and these gardens, devastated by the winter, exhibited the destitution of their marly soil, lumped and spotted by the last vegetables. They were making soup, chimneys were smoking, a woman appeared at distant intervals along the fronts, opened a door and disappeared. From one end to the other, on the pavement, the pipes dripped into tubs, although it was no longer raining, so charged was this grey sky with moistness. And the village, built altogether in the midst of the vast plain, and edged by its black roads as by a mourning border, had no touch of joyousness about it save the regular bands of its red tiles, constantly washed by showers.