"Faith, that's well done," said Jappeloup, "that will put a little water in your wine."
And he pulled the boat rapidly out of Galuchet's reach, for, in his rage, he tried to upset her.
"Ah! the miserable fellow!" cried the carpenter, "confess, that if there are some good beasts, there are many vicious ones. Let him wallow," he said to his companions, who feared that poor Galuchet, because of his fuddled condition, might drown, although the water was not dangerously deep. "If he sinks too far I'll stick my harpoon in his belt and fish him up like a salmon. Bah! if it were anything of value, we might have reason to be anxious, but things that are good for nothing, dead cats and empty bottles, always float."
In a few moments Galuchet jumped up on the bank, shook his fist and vanished.
This ridiculous incident depressed Gilberte. For the first time she detected a serious inconvenience in her father's too great good-nature. His rustic and simple manners, which were those of the people about him and were the expression of a kindly and innocent nature, began to terrify her, as not affording such enlightened and judicious protection as her age and sex demanded.
"I am a poor country girl," she said to herself, "and I can get along very well with peasants; but on the condition that no ill-bred semi-bourgeois undertakes to interfere; for then the peasants become a little too violent in their wrath, and the life I lead does not put me out of reach of a coward's revenge."
Thereupon she thought of Emile as a protector destined for her by heaven; but she asked herself amid what surroundings he himself was compelled to live, and the idea that Monsieur Cardonnet employed people of the Galuchet species caused her a sort of vague alarm with regard to his character and habits.
When Jean Jappeloup returned to Gargilesse that evening, he found Galuchet lying like a dead man in the middle of the road. The poor devil, sobered momentarily by the bath he had taken, had entered a wineshop to dry his clothes, and as he was afraid of his health, he had allowed himself to be persuaded to take a glass of eau-de-vie, which had finished him. He was returning home literally on all fours. Jean had had time to forget his anger, nor was he the man to leave a fellow-man in danger of being trampled upon by horses' feet. He lifted him up, submitted patiently to his threats and insults, and led him, more than half carrying him, to the factory; and Galuchet, who did not recognize him, went in, swearing that he would be revenged on the scoundrel who had tried to drown him.