The roaring and blustering continuing upstairs, I stood a moment in sheer astonishment. "Is that M. Gringuet?" I said at last.
The inn-keeper nodded sullenly, while his wife stared at me. "But what; is the matter with him?" I said.
"The gout. But for that he would have been gone these two days to collect at Le Mesnil."
"Ah!" I answered, beginning to understand. "And the salt is for a bath for his feet, is it?"
The woman nodded.
"Well," I said, as Maignan came in with my saddlebags and laid them on the floor, "he will swear still louder when he gets the bill, I should think."
"Bill?" the housewife answered bitterly, looking up again from her pots. "A tax-gatherer's bill? Go to the dead man and ask for the price of his coffin; or to the babe for a nurse-fee! You will get paid as soon. A tax-gatherer's bill? Be thankful if he does not take the dish with the sop!"
She spoke plainly; yet I found a clearer proof of the slavery in which the man held them in the perfect indifference with which they regarded my arrival—though a guest with two servants must have been a rarity in such a place—and the listless way in which they set about attending to my wants. Keenly remembering that not long before this my enemies had striven to prejudice me in the King's eyes by alleging that, though I filled his coffers, I was grinding the poor into the dust—and even, by my exactions, provoking a rebellion I was in no mood to look with an indulgent eye on those who furnished such calumnies with a show of reason. But it has never been my wont to act hastily; and while I stood in the middle of the kitchen, debating whether I should order the servants to fling the fellow out, and bid him appear before me at Villebon, or should instead have him brought up there and then, the man's coarse voice, which had never ceased to growl and snarl above us, rose on a sudden still louder. Something fell on the floor over our heads and rolled across it; and immediately a young girl, barefoot and short-skirted, scrambled hurriedly and blindly down the ladder and landed among us.
She was sobbing, and a little blood was flowing from a cut in her lip; and she trembled all over. At sight of the blood and her tears the woman seemed to be transported. Snatching up a saucepan, she sprang towards the ladder with a gesture of rage, and in a moment would have ascended if her husband had not followed and dragged her back. The girl also, as soon as she could speak, added her entreaties to his, while Maignan and La Trape looked sharply at me, as if they expected a signal.
All this while, the bully above continued his maledictions. "Send that slut back to me!" he roared. "Do you think that I am going to be left alone in this hole? Send her back, or—" and he added half-a-dozen oaths of a kind to make an honest man's blood boil. In the midst of this, however, and while the woman was still contending with her husband, he suddenly stopped and shrieked in anguish, crying out for the salt-bath.