“Yes, it is. I will not have her beat you! She woke me up, she was shouting so. She had better not try it on again, or I will strike her!”
Then, she seized him by the wrists, and spoke to him as to a disobedient animal. He submitted at once, and stuttered, crying like a little boy:
“It hurts you very much, does it not? Where is the sore place, that I may kiss it?”
And, having found her cheek in the dark, he kissed it, wetting it with his tears, as he repeated:
“It is well, now, it is well, now.”
Meanwhile, Monsieur Josserand, left alone, had laid down his pen, his heart was so full of grief. At the end of a few minutes, he got up gently to go and listen at the doors. Madame Josserand was snoring. No sounds of crying issued from his daughters’ room. All was dark and peaceful. Then he returned, feeling slightly relieved. He saw to the lamp which was smoking, and mechanically resumed his writing. Two big tears, unfelt by him, dropped on to the wrappers, in the solemn silence of the slumbering house.
CHAPTER III.
So soon as the fish was served, skate of doubtful freshness with black butter, which that bungler Adèle had drowned in a flood of vinegar, Hortense and Berthe, seated on the right and left of uncle Bachelard, incited him to drink, filling his glass one after the other, and repeating:
“It’s your saint’s-day, drink now, drink! Here’s your health, uncle!”
They had plotted together to make him give them twenty francs. Every year, their provident mother placed them thus on either side of her brother, abandoning him to them. But it was a difficult task, and required all the greediness of two girls prompted by dreams of Louis XV. shoes and five button gloves. To get him to give the twenty francs, it was necessary to make the uncle completely drunk. He was ferociously miserly whenever he found himself amongst his relations, though out of doors he squandered in crapulous boozes the eighty thousand francs he made each year out of his commission business. Fortunately, that evening, he was already half fuddled when he arrived, having passed the afternoon with the wife of a dyer of the Faubourg Montmartre, who kept a stock of Marseilles vermouth expressly for him.