'Here, Alexandre, come and show my niece our poor old woman's window.'

Alexandre came up to them politely.

'Do you see those three trees?' he said, stretching out his forefinger, as though he were drawing a plan in the air. 'Well, a little below the one to the left, you can see a fountain in the corner of a courtyard. Follow the windows on the ground floor to the right; it is the fifth one.'

Marthe stood there in silence, her lips white and her gaze fixed, in spite of herself, on the window pointed out to her. Uncle Macquart was looking at it as well, but with complaisance manifest in his blinking eyes.

'I see her sometimes of a morning,' he said, 'when the sun is on the other side. She keeps very well, doesn't she, Alexandre? I always tell them so when I go to Plassans. I am very well placed here to keep a watch on her. I couldn't be anywhere better.'

He again gave a snigger of satisfaction.

'The Rougons, you know, my dear, haven't got any stronger heads than the Macquarts have, and I often think, as I sit out here in front of that big house, that the whole lot will, perhaps, join the mother there some day. Thank Heaven, I've no fear about myself. My noddle is firmly fixed on. But I know some of them who are a little shaky. Well, I shall be here to receive them, and I shall see them from my den, and recommend them to Alexandre's kind attention, though they haven't all of them always been particularly kind to me.'

Then with that hideous smile of his that was like a captive wolf's, he added:

'It's very lucky for you all that I am here on the spot at Les Tulettes.'

Marthe could not help trembling. Though she was well aware of her uncle's taste for savage pleasantries, and the pleasure he took in torturing the people to whom he presented his rabbits, she could not help fancying that he was perhaps speaking the truth, and that the rest of the family would indeed be quartered eventually in those gloomy cells. She insisted upon taking her immediate departure in spite of the pressing entreaties of Macquart, who wanted to open another bottle of wine.