"Why the sooner the better—to-night if you can."
"In half-an-hour, then, after supper."
"In half-an-hour."
"That's understood. So long, my lad."
"Good-bye till we meet again, Monsieur le Curé; many thanks."
"Not at all, my lad."
And Césaire Houlbrèque returned home, his heart relieved of a great weight.
He held on lease a little farm, quite small, for they were not rich, his father and he. Alone with a female servant, a little girl of fifteen, who made the soup, looked after the fowls, milked the cows and churned the butter, they lived hardly, though Césaire was a good cultivator. But they did not possess either sufficient lands or sufficient cattle to gain more than the indispensable.
The old man no longer worked. Sad, like all deaf people, crippled with pains, bent double, twisted, he went through the fields leaning on his stick, watching the animals and the men with a hard, distrustful eye. Sometimes, he sat down on the side of a ditch, and remained there without moving for hours, vaguely pondering over the things that had engrossed his whole life, the price of eggs and corn, the sun and the rain which spoil the crops or make them grow. And, worn out by rheumatism, his old limbs still drank in the humidity of the soul, as they had drunk in for the past sixty years, the moisture of the walls of his low thatched house covered over with humid straw.
He came back at the close of the day, took his place at the end of the table, in the kitchen, and when the earthen pot containing the soup had been placed before him, he caught it between his crooked fingers, which seemed to have kept the round form of the jar, and, winter and summer, he warmed his hands, before commencing to eat, so as to lose nothing, not even a particle of the heat that came from the fire, which costs a great deal, neither one drop of soup into which fat and salt have to be put, nor one morsel of bread, which comes from the wheat.