"Hyacinthe! Hyacinthe!" droned the little clerk, turning streetwards, and seeming to find infinite amusement in this name, which brought many a funny tale back to his memory.
Hardly five minutes had passed before the Fouans made their tardy appearance, two old folk of slow, prudential gait. The father, once very robust, now seventy years of age, had shrivelled and dwindled down under such hard work, such a keen land-hunger, that his form was bowed as if in a wild impulse to return to that earth which he had coveted and possessed. Nevertheless, in all save the legs, he was still hale and well-knit, with spruce little white mutton-chop whiskers, and the long family nose, which lent an air of keenness to his thin, leathery, deeply-wrinkled face. In his wake, following him as closely as his shadow, came his wife; shorter and stouter, swollen as if by an incipient dropsy, with a drab-coloured face perforated with round eyes, and a round mouth pursed up into an infinity of avaricious wrinkles. A household drudge, endowed with the docile, hard-working stupidity of a beast of burden, she had always stood in awe of the despotic authority of her husband.
"Ah, so it's you!" cried Fanny, getting up. Delhomme, also, had risen from his chair. Behind the old people, Hyacinthe had just lounged in again without a word. Compressing the cigar end to put it out, he thrust the pestiferous stump into a pocket of his blouse.
"So we're here," said Fouan. "There's only Buteau missing. Never in time, never like other people, the beast!"
"I saw him in the market," asserted Hyacinthe in a husky voice due to drink. "He's coming."
Buteau, the younger son, owed his nickname to his pigheadedness, being always up in arms in obstinate defence of his own ideas, which were never those of anybody else. Even when an urchin, he had not been able to get on with his parents; and, later on, having drawn a lucky number in the conscription, he had run away from home to go into service, first at La Borderie, subsequently at La Chamade.
While his father was still grumbling, he skipped cheerfully into the room. In him, the large Fouan nose was flattened out, while the lower part of his face, the maxillaries, projected like the powerful jaws of a carnivorous beast. His temples retreated, all the upper part of his head was contracted, and, behind the boon-companion twinkle of his grey eyes, there lurked deceit and violence. He had inherited the brutish desires and tenacious grip of his father, aggravated by the narrow meanness of his mother. In every quarrel, whenever the two old people heaped reproaches upon his head, he replied: "You shouldn't have made me so!"
"Look here, it's five leagues from La Chamade to Cloyes," replied he to their complaints; "and besides, hang it all, I'm here at the same time as you. Oh, at me again, are you?"
They all disputed, shouted in shrill, high-pitched voices, and argued over their private matters exactly as if they had been at home. The clerks, disturbed, looked at them askance, till the tumult brought in the notary, who re-opened the door of his private office.