'Thank you for her. I will go with you,' Marc replied.
On the following day they repaired together to Madame Férou's sordid lodging, whence her landlord threatened to expel her as she was in arrears with her rent. Her eldest daughter was now near her death; and when the Froments arrived she herself and her two younger girls were sobbing in heartrending fashion amid the fearful disorder of the place. For a moment Marc and Geneviève remained standing there, amazed and unable to understand the situation.
'You haven't heard it, you haven't heard it, have you?' Madame Férou at last exclaimed. 'Well, it's done now; they are going to kill him. Ah! he guessed it; he said that those brigands would end by having his skin.'
She went on speaking in a disjointed fashion amid her sobs, and Marc was thus able to extract from her the distressful story. Férou, as was inevitable, had turned out a very bad soldier, and unfavourably noted by his superiors, treated with the utmost harshness as a revolutionary, he had carried a quarrel with his corporal so far as to rush on the latter and kick and pommel him. For this he had been court-martialled, and they were now about to send him to a military bagnio in Algeria, where he would be drafted into one of those disciplinary companies, among which the abominable tortures of the old ages are still practised.
'He will never come back, they will murder him!' his wife continued in a fury. 'He wrote to bid me good-bye; he knows that he will soon be killed.... And what shall I do? What will become of my poor children? Ah! the brigands, the brigands!'
Marc listened, sorely grieved, unable to think of a word of consolation, whereas Geneviève began to show signs of impatience. 'But, my dear Madame Férou,' she exclaimed, 'why should they kill your husband? The officers of our army are not in the habit of killing their men. You increase your own distress by your unjust thoughts.'
'They are brigands, I tell you!' the unhappy woman repeated with growing violence. 'What! my poor Férou starved for eight years, discharging the most ungrateful duties, and he is taken for another two years and treated like a brute beast, simply because he spoke like a sensible man! And now what was bound to happen has happened; he is sent to the galleys, where they'll end by murdering him after dragging him from agony to agony! No, no, I won't have it! I'll go and tell them that they are all a band of brigands—brigands!'
Marc endeavoured to calm her. He, all kindliness and equity, was shocked by such excessive social iniquity. But what could those on whom it recoiled, the wife and children, do, crushed as they were beneath the millstone of tragic fate? 'Be reasonable,' said he. 'We will try to do something; we will not forsake you.'
But Geneviève had become icy cold. That wretched home where the mother was wringing her hands, where the poor puny girls were sobbing and lamenting, no longer inspired her with any pity. She no longer even saw the eldest daughter, wrapped in the shreds of a blanket and looking so ghastly as she gazed at the scene with dilated, expressionless eyes, unable even to weep, such was her weakness. Erect and rigid, still carrying the little parcel formed of the stuff for Louise's new frock, the young woman slowly said: 'You must place yourself in the hands of God. Cease to offend Him, for He might punish you still more.'
A laugh of terrible scorn came from Madame Férou: 'Oh! God is too busy with the rich to pay attention to the poor!' she cried. 'It was in His name that we were reduced to this misery, it is in His name that they are going to murder my poor husband!'