The old man still went on gulping down the soup, with a hoarse sound in his throat as he swallowed it; however, he did not say a word.
"A nice old gentleman you are, to stay out all night in this way," his son continued. "You've been after the girls, I bet; and it's they who've emptied you so, eh?"
Still there came no reply. Fouan persisted in his dogged silence, making no sound except such as resulted from his greedy gulping.
"Don't you hear that I'm talking to you?" Buteau at last shouted in irritation. "You might at any rate have the politeness to answer me?"
Fouan, however, still kept his blank gaze fixed on the soup. It seemed as though he neither heard nor saw, but was miles away in his isolation. It was as if he wished to imply that he had merely returned to eat, and that, although his belly was in the kitchen, his heart was there no longer. He now energetically began to scrape the bottom of his plate with his spoon, so as to lose nothing of the soup.
At last, Lise, affected by the sight of such keen hunger, interposed.
"Let him alone," she said, "since it pleases him to play the dummy."
"I'm not going to have him playing the fool with me again!" retorted Buteau angrily. "I've had quite sufficient of that already. Let to-day be a lesson to you, you pig-headed old fool! If you give me any more of your nonsense, I shall leave you to starve out on the road!"
Fouan, having now quite finished his soup, rose painfully from his seat, and, still maintaining his unbroken silence—a sepulchral silence that seemed to grow ever more oppressive—turned his back and dragged himself under the staircase to his bed, on which he threw himself without undressing. Somnolence seemed to descend on him like a thunderbolt. He was sound asleep in a moment, wrapped in a leaden slumber. Lise, who stepped up to look at him, came back and told her husband that he looked as though he were dead. Buteau, however, after going to see him, shrugged his shoulders. Dead, indeed! did fellows like him die like that? Only he must have knocked about to be in such a state. When they came to look at him the next morning, he did not appear to have moved, and he slept on throughout the day and the following night, and only awoke once more the second morning, after remaining annihilated, as it were, for thirty-six hours.
"Ah, there you are again at last!" cried Buteau with a snigger. "I was beginning to think that you meant to go on sleeping for ever, and would never want anything more to eat."