These Fouans had propagated and grown there for centuries, like some sturdy luxuriant vegetation. Serfs in the old times of the Rognes-Bouquevals—of whom not a trace survived save the few half-buried stones of a ruined château—they had been emancipated, it appeared, under Philip the Fair; becoming thenceforward landowners of an acre or so, which they had bought from the lord of the manor when in difficulties, and paid for with tears and blood at ten times the value. Then had set in the long struggle of four hundred years to defend and enlarge the property, in a frenzy of passion transmitted from father to son: odd corners were lost and bought back, the ownership was unremittingly called into question, the inheritances were subject to such a list of dues that they almost ate their own heads off; but in spite of all, both arable and plough-lands grew, bit by bit, in the ever-prevailing, stubborn craving for possession. Generations passed away, the lives of many men enriched the soil; but when the Revolution of '89 set its seal upon his rights, the Fouan of the time, Joseph Casimir, possessed about twenty-six acres, wrested in the course of four centuries from the old seignorial manor.
In '93, this Joseph Casimir was twenty-seven years of age, and on the day when what remained of the manor was declared national property and sold in lots by auction, he yearned to acquire a few acres of it. The Rognes-Bouquevals, ruined and in debt, after letting the last tower of the château crumble into dust, had long since given up to their creditors the right of receiving the revenues of La Borderie, three quarters of which property lay fallow. In particular, adjacent to one of Fouan's bits of land there was a large field, on which he looked with the fierce covetousness of his race. But the harvest had been poor, and in the old pipkin behind his oven he had barely a hundred crowns saved up. Moreover, although it had momentarily occurred to him to borrow off a Cloyes money-lender, a distrustful prudence had stood in the way: he was afraid to touch these lands of the nobility; who knew whether they would not be claimed again later on? So it happened that, divided between desire and apprehension, he had the agony of seeing La Borderie bought at auction, field by field, and for a tenth of its value, by Isidore Hourdequin, a townsman of Châteaudun, formerly employed in the collection of excise duties.
Joseph Casimir Fouan, in his old age, had divided his twenty-six acres equally among his eldest child, Marianne, and his two sons, Louis and Michel; a younger daughter Laure, brought up to dressmaking and employed at Châteaudun, being indemnified in hard cash. But marriage destroyed this equality. While Marianne Fouan, surnamed "La Grande," wedded a neighbour, Antoine Péchard, with about twenty-two acres; Michael Fouan, surnamed "Mouche," encumbered himself with a sweetheart who only expected from her father two and a half acres of vineyard. On the other hand, Louis Fouan, joined in matrimony to Rose Maliverne, the heiress to fifteen acres, had acquired that total of twenty-three acres or so, which, in his turn, he was about to divide among his three children.
La Grande was respected and dreaded in the family, not for her advanced age, but for her fortune. Still very upright, tall, thin, wiry, and large-boned, she had the fleshless head of a bird of prey set on a long, shrivelled, blood-coloured neck. In her, the family nose curved into a formidable beak; she had round fixed eyes, with not a trace of hair under the yellow silk handkerchief she always wore, though she possessed her full complement of teeth, and jaws that might have masticated flints. She never went out without her thornwood stick, which she held on high as she walked, only making use of it to strike animals and human beings. Left a widow at an early age, she had turned her one daughter out of doors, because the wretch had insisted, against her mother's will, on marrying a poor youth, Vincent Bouteroue; and even when this daughter and her husband had died of want, leaving behind them a grand-daughter and a grandson, Palmyre and Hilarion, aged respectively thirty-two and twenty-four, she had refused her forgiveness and let them starve to death, allowing no one so much as to remind her of their existence. Since her goodman's death she presided in person over the cultivation of her land; she had three cows, a pig, and a farm-hand, all fed out of a common trough; and she was obeyed by those about her with the most abject submission.
Fouan, seeing her on her threshold, had drawn near out of respect. She was ten years older than he, and he regarded her sternness, her avarice, her obstinate resolution to possess and to live, with an admiring deference, shared by the whole village.
"I was just wanting to tell you about it, La Grande," said he. "I have made up my mind, and am going up yonder to see about the division."
She made no reply, but tightened her grasp upon the stick which she was flourishing.
"The other night I wanted to ask your advice again, but I knocked and no one answered."
Then she broke out in shrill tones:
"Idiot! Advice, indeed! I gave you advice. The fool, the poltroon you must be to give your property up as long as you can get about. They might have bled me to death, but, under the knife, I would still have refused. To see what belongs to one in the hands of others, to turn one's self out of doors for the benefit of rascally children.—No! No! No!"