Creeping up to the Head-Woodsman I whispered that Joseph was there, in a bad temper, and I proposed that he should draw Huriel aside while I persuaded Brulette to go to bed. Joseph, who was not invited to the wedding, would thus be obliged to go off and sleep at Nohant or at some other house in Chassin. The Head-Woodsman thought the suggestion good, and pretending not to see Joseph, who kept in the background, he talked apart with Huriel, while Brulette went away to see in what part of the house she could stow herself for the night. But my aunt, who had counted on lodging us, did not expect that Brulette would take it into her head to go to bed before three or four in the morning. The young men never go to bed at all on the first night of a wedding, and do their best to keep up the dance for three days and three nights running. If one of them gets tired, he goes into the hayloft and takes a nap. As to the girls and women, they all retire into one room; but generally it is only the old women and the ugly ones who abandon the dance.
So, when Brulette went up to the room where she expected to find a place next to some of her relatives, she came upon a crowd of snorers, among whom not a corner as big as the palm of her hand was vacant; and the few who woke up told her to come again towards morning, when they would be ready to go down and serve the tables. She came back to us and told her difficulty.
"Well, then," said Père Bastien, "you must go and sleep with Thérence. My son and I will spend the night here so that no talk can be made about it."
I declared that in order to avoid giving a pretext for Joseph's jealousy Brulette could easily slip out with me without saying a word; and Père Bastien going up to him and plying him with questions, I took my cousin to the old castle by a back way through my aunt's garden.
When I returned I found the Head-Woodsman, Joseph, and Huriel at table together. They called me, and I sat down to supper with them, eating, drinking, talking, and singing to avoid an explosion of anger which might follow on any talk about Brulette. Joseph, seeing us determined to keep the peace, controlled himself at first, and even seemed gay; but he could not help biting as he caressed, and every joke he made had a sting at the end of it. The Head-Woodsman tried to keep down his bile with a measure of wine, and I think Joseph might willingly have yielded in order to forget himself, if it were not that wine never affected him. He drank four times as much as the rest of us, who had no reason to wish to drown our intelligence, and yet his ideas were all the clearer and his speech, too.
At last, after some particularly spiteful remarks on the slyness of women and the treachery of friends, Huriel, striking his fist on the table and grasping his father's elbow, which for some time past had been nudging him to keep quiet, said in a decided tone:—
"No, father, excuse me, but I cannot stand any more of this, and it is much better to say so openly. I know very well that Joseph's teeth will be as sharp a year hence as they are now, and though I have closed my ears to his sayings up to this time, it is right that they should open now to his unjust remarks and reproaches. Come, Joseph, for the last hour I have seen what you mean; you have wasted a great deal of wit. Talk plain, I'm listening; say what you have on your mind, with the whys and the wherefores. I will answer you frankly."
"Well, so be it; come to an explanation," said the Head-Woodsman, reversing his glass and deciding the situation, as he well knew how to do when it became necessary; "we will have no more drinking if it is not to be in friendship, for it is ill mixing the devil's venom with the good God's wine."
"You surprise me, both of you," said Joseph, who had grown yellow to the whites of his eyes, though he still continued to laugh vindictively. "What the devil are you angry about, and why do you scratch yourselves when nothing is biting you? I have nothing against anybody; only I happen to be in the humor to jeer at everything, and I don't think you are likely to rid me of it."
"Perhaps I could," said Huriel, provoked.