Since the daughter of Cognet, the Rognes road-labourer,—La Cognette, as they called her when she washed up the farm dishes at twelve years of age—had been raised to the honours of servant-mistress, she despotically required that every one should treat her as a lady.
"Oh, it is you, Françoise," she resumed. "You've come for the bull. Well, you must wait. The neatherd is at Cloyes with Monsieur Hourdequin. But he'll be back; he ought to be here now."
And as Jean was making for the kitchen, she took him round the waist and fondled him smilingly, regardless of spectators, hungering, as it were, for love, and not satisfied with having the master.
Françoise, left alone, waited patiently, sitting on a stone bench in front of the manure-pit, which took up a third of the yard. She was listlessly watching a group of fowls, pecking and warming their feet in the broad low layer of manure, which in the cold air began to steam with a slight bluish vapour. At the end of half-an-hour, when Jean re-appeared, finishing a slice of bread and butter, she had not stirred. He sat down near her, and as the cow fidgeted, lashed its tail and lowed, he finally said:
"It's tiresome he doesn't come back."
The girl shrugged her shoulders, as though to say that she was in no hurry. Then, after a fresh silence:
"So, Corporal, they call you Jean, and nothing else?"
"Why, no; Jean Macquart."
"And you don't belong to our part of the country?"
"No, I'm a Provençal, from Plassans, a town over yonder."