If ever a neighbour cried out to him: "Well, Fouan, you still manage to keep alive!" he would mumble out: "Ah, yes, dying is a wearily long business, but it isn't the want of the will that keeps me from it."
He only spoke the truth, with the stoicism of the peasant, who accepts death without a murmur, and even desires it when he is stripped of everything, and the soil calls him back to her.
But there was still another grief in store for him. Jules cast him off, instigated thereto by Laure. Whenever the girl saw her brother with their grandfather she seemed jealous, and with her eyes fiercely glistening she would call him angrily away. The old man was a nuisance, she said; it was much more amusing for them to play together. If her brother did not at once go off with her, she hung on to his shoulder and pulled him away. Then she made herself so agreeable that the lad forgot the little household services which he had hitherto rendered his grandfather. And by degrees Laure completely won Jules over to her side, like a real woman who has set her mind upon a conquest.
One evening Fouan had gone to wait for Jules in front of the school, feeling so tired that he wished for the lad's hand to help him up the hill. Laure, however, came out with her brother, and when the old man's trembling fingers sought the lad's, she burst out into a sneering laugh.
"There he is boring you again!" said she. "Leave him to see after himself." Then, turning to the other children, she added: "Isn't he a sawny to let himself be plagued in this way?"
Jules blushed at the sound of his schoolfellows' jeers, and, wishing to show what a man he was, he jumped aside, repeating his sister's expression to the old companion of his walks:
"You plague me!"
Dismayed, and with tears filling his troubled eyes, Fouan stumbled as though the ground failed him, like the little hand that had been withdrawn. The jeering laughter increased, and Laure made Jules dance with her round the old man, singing the childish rhyme:
"He shall fall on the ground, and there he shall lie,
And whoever shall help him, shall eat his bread dry!"
Fouan, half fainting, was nearly two hours in getting home, so feebly did he drag his feet along. This was the last blow. The lad ceased bringing him his soup and making his bed, the palliasse of which was now not turned once a month. Without even this urchin to talk to, the old man buried himself in absolute silence, and his isolation became complete. Never did he speak a word about anything to any one.