“Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in,” said Tonsard.
“See what a position I am in,” replied Pere Niseron; “but I sleep in peace; there are no thorns in my pillow.”
“Let him talk, Tonsard,” whispered his wife, “you know they’re just his notions, poor dear man.”
Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas’s failure, and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud’s advice to the countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.
“The harvest’s coming; well, I vow I’ll not go before I’ve lighted my pipe at their wheat-stacks,” he cried, striking his fist on the table as he sat down.
“Mustn’t yelp like that before people,” said Godain, showing him Pere Niseron.
“If the old fellow tells, I’ll wring his neck,” said Catherine. “He’s had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him virtuous; it’s his temperament that keeps him so, that’s all.”
Strange and noteworthy sight!—that of those lifted heads, that group of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the drinkers.
Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine’s suitor, was perhaps the most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,—a miser without money,—the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,—Godain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.
He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant workers like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man’s fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,—for desire, once at the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.