THE SOIL.

(LA TERRE.)

A REALISTIC NOVEL.

BY

ÉMILE ZOLA.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE DESIGNED BY H. GRAY.

LONDON:

VIZETELLY & Co. 16 HENRIETTA STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.

1888.

Hold your tongue or I strike. Am I not the master? P. 27.

[CONTENTS]

[THE SOIL.]

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

That morning Jean, with a seed-bag of blue linen tied round his waist, held its mouth open with his left hand, while with his right, at every three steps, he drew forth a handful of corn, and flung it broadcast. The rich soil clung to his heavy shoes, which left holes in the ground, as his body lurched regularly from side to side; and each time he threw you saw, amid the ever-flying yellow seed, the gleam of two red stripes on the sleeve of the old regimental jacket he was wearing out. He strode forward in solitary state; and behind him, to bury the grain, there slowly came a harrow, to which were harnessed two horses, driven by a waggoner, who cracked his whip over their ears in long, regular sweeps.

The patch of ground, scarcely an acre and a quarter in extent, was of such little importance that Monsieur Hourdequin, the master of La Borderie, had not cared to send the drill-plough, which was in use elsewhere. Jean, then journeying due north over the field, had the farm-buildings exactly in front of him, a mile and a quarter off. On reaching the end of the furrow, he raised his eyes with a vacant look as he paused for a moment to take breath.

Before him were the low farm walls, and a patch of old slate, isolated on the outskirts of the plain of La Beauce, which stretched towards Chartres. Under a dull, late October sky lay ten leagues of arable land, where, at that time of year, great ploughed squares of bare, rich, yellow soil alternated with green expanses of lucern and clover; there was here not a slope, not a tree; the plain extended into the dim distance, curving down beyond the horizon, which was level as at sea. Westward, a small wood just edged the sky with a band of russet. In the centre a road—the road from Châteaudun to Orleans—of chalk-like whiteness, stretched four leagues straight ahead, displaying as it went a geometrical row of telegraph-posts. Nothing else but three or four wooden mills on log foundations, with their sails at rest; some villages forming islets of stone; and a distant steeple emerging from a depression in the landscape, the church itself being hidden among the gentle undulations of the wheat-fields.

Jean turned and lurched back again due south, his left hand holding the seed-bag, and his right slashing the air with an unbroken sheet of grain. He now had in front of him, quite near, and cutting trench-like through the plain, the narrow valley of the Aigre, beyond which the district of La Beauce resumed its unconfined course on to Orleans. Meadows and shady places could only be inferred from a range of tall poplars, the yellowish tops of which rose out of the dell, looking, as they just cleared the edge, like short bushes. Of the little village of Rognes, built upon the declivity, a few roofs only were in view, near the church, which raised on high its grey stone steeple, the dwelling-place of ancient families of ravens. And eastward, beyond the valley of the Loir,—where Cloyes, the chief town of the canton[1] nestled at two leagues' distance,—the far-off hills of Le Perche were visible, tinged with violet in the slate-grey light. There the old Dunois, now become the arrondissement of Châteaudun, lay between Le Perche and La Beauce, on the very frontier of the latter, at a spot which has obtained the name of Beauce the "Lousy," the soil there being less fertile. When Jean got to the end of the field, he stopped again, and glanced down along the stream of the Aigre, rippling bright and clear through the meadows, side by side with the road to Cloyes, which on that Saturday was furrowed by the carts of peasants going to market; then he turned up again.

And still, with the same step, with the same gesture, he set out north and returned south, wrapped in a living dust-cloud of seed; while, behind him the whip cracked and the harrow buried the germs, at the same quiet, contemplative rate. Heavy rains had retarded the autumn sowing; the season's manuring had been done in August, and the deep-lying fallows, duly cleared of weeds, had long been ready for a fresh yield of corn, after the clover and oats of the triennial rotation. Now the farmers were urged on by fear of coming frost, which threatened after the storms. The weather had suddenly turned cold and gloomy: there was no breath of wind, and but a dull light was distributed over all this ocean of land. Seed was being sown on all sides; there was a sower to the left, three hundred yards away; another farther off to the right; others, and yet others, lost to sight in the receding vista of the level fields. They formed little black silhouettes, mere strokes which became slimmer and slimmer, till they vanished in the distance. All made the same gesture, as they strewed the seed, which the mind's eye still saw encircling them, as with a wave of life. It was like a quiver passing over the plain, even into the dim distance, where the scattered sowers could no longer be seen.

Jean was coming down for the last time when he perceived, approaching from Rognes, a large red and white cow, the halter of which was held by a young girl, almost a child. The little peasant-girl and the animal were coming along the path which skirted the valley at the top of the plateau; and, with his back turned to them, he had gone up and finished the field, when a sound of running, mingled with stifled cries, made him look round, just as he was untying his seed-bag to depart. It was the cow running away, galloping over a field of lucern, and followed by the girl, who was exhausting her strength in trying to keep it back. Fearing an accident, he shouted:

"Leave go; why don't thee?"

But she did nothing of the kind, only panting and abusing her cow in angry, frightened tones.

"Coliche! Would you, then, Coliche? Ah, you foul brute! Ah, you cursed beast!"

So far, running and leaping to the full extent of her little legs, she had managed to follow. But she stumbled, fell once, then rose only to fall again farther on; and from that point, the animal growing frantic, she was dragged along. Then she began to shriek, while her body left a furrow in the lucern.

"Leave go, in God's name!" Jean continued shouting. "Leave go, why don't thee?"

He shouted thus mechanically, out of fright; for he also had started running, grasping, at length, the situation. The rope had evidently got entangled round her waist, and was being more closely twined at each fresh effort. Fortunately he took a short cut across a ploughed field, and made for the cow with such speed that the frightened and perplexed animal stopped dead. Jean was already undoing the rope, and seating the girl upon the grass.

"Thou hast broken nothing?" he asked.

No; she had not so much as swooned. She stood up, felt herself all over, and coolly lifted her petticoats up to her thighs, to look at her knees, which smarted. Meanwhile, she was still so breathless that she could not speak.

"See, it's there it hurts me," she said at last. "All the same, I'm alive and kicking; there's nothing the matter. Oh! I was frightened. Over on the road there I was a regular jelly!"

And, examining the circle of red on her strained wrist, she moistened it with spittle and applied her lips to it; then, comforted and restored, she added with a deep sigh:

"She's not vicious, Coliche. Only since yesterday she has plagued us to death, because she's in heat. I'm taking her to the bull at La Borderie."

"At La Borderie?" repeated Jean. "That's capital; I'm going back there; I'll go with thee."

He still used the second person singular, treating her as a little urchin, so slight was she for her fourteen years of age. She, raising her chin, looked seriously at the big, ruddy, crop-haired, full-faced, regular-featured young fellow, whose twenty-nine years made him in her eyes an old man.

"Hullo! I know you. You are Corporal, the carpenter who stopped as farm-hand with Monsieur Hourdequin."

Hearing the nickname, which the peasants had given him, the young fellow smiled; and he contemplated her in turn, surprised to find her almost a woman so soon, with her little bust firm and taking shape, her oval face, her deep, black eyes; and full lips, fresh and rosy as ripening fruit. She was clad in a grey skirt and black woollen bodice; on her head there was a round cap; and she had a very dark skin, scorched and burnished by the sun.

"Why, thou'rt old Mouche's youngest!" cried he. "I didn't call thee to mind. Isn't that so? Thy sister was keeping company with Buteau last spring, when he worked with me at La Borderie?"

She replied simply:

"Yes, I'm Françoise. My sister Lise went with cousin Buteau, and is now six months with child. He's bolted; he's down Orgères way, at the farm of La Chamade."

"That's it," concluded Jean; "I have seen them together."

And they remained an instant mute, face to face; he smiling at having one evening surprised the two lovers behind a mill, she still sucking her bruised wrist, as if the moisture of her lips allayed its smarting; whilst, in an adjoining field, the cow quietly plucked tufts of lucern. The waggoner and the harrow had gone off by a roundabout way, to reach the road. Two ravens, which kept wheeling round and round the steeple, were heard to caw. The three notes of the angelus rang through the still air.

"Hullo! Twelve o'clock already!" cried Jean. "Let's make haste!"

Then, noticing La Coliche in the field: "Eh, but thy cow is doing damage! Suppose any one saw her! Wait a bit, I'll make it lively for her!"

"Nay, let be," said Françoise, stopping him. "The plot is ours. Our folk own the whole bank as far as Rognes. We reach from here up to yonder; the next to that is uncle Fouan's; then comes aunt Grande's."

While indicating the patches she had led the cow back into the path. And not till then, when she again held her, fearlessly, by the rope, did she think of thanking the young fellow.

"Anyhow, I owe you a pretty debt of gratitude! Thanks, you know, thanks, very much!"

They had started walking along the narrow road which skirted the valley before cutting through the fields. The final peal of the angelus had just died away, the ravens alone kept on cawing. They trudged on behind the cow tugging at her rope, neither of the two conversing, for they had relapsed into the silence of rustics who travel for leagues, side by side, without exchanging a word. On their right their glance fell on a drill-plough, the horses of which turned close by them; the ploughman bade them good-day, and they answered him in the same sober tone. Down on their left, along the road to Cloyes, carts continued to file by, the market not opening till one o'clock. These vehicles jolted heavily along on their two wheels, like jumping insects, so diminished in the distance as to leave merely the white specks of the women's caps distinguishable.

"There's uncle Fouan and aunt Rose over there, on their way to the notary's," said Françoise, gazing at a conveyance the size of a nutshell, which sped along nearly a mile off.

She had a sailor's eye, the long sight of those bred in the country, trained in details, and capable of identifying man or beast even when they were but little moving specks afar off.

"Oh, yes; I've been told so," resumed Jean. "So it's settled that the old man divides his property among his daughter and two sons?"

"It's settled. They've all agreed to meet to-day at Monsieur Baillehache's."

She again watched the cart in its course, and then resumed:

"We don't care one way or the other; it won't make us any fatter or thinner. Only, on account of Buteau, sister thinks he'll marry her, perhaps, when he gets his share. He says one can't start housekeeping on nothing."

Jean laughed.

"Me and Buteau were pals, hang him! Oh, he don't think twice about telling girls lies! And he must have 'em, by hook or by crook; he gets at 'em by foul means, if they won't by fair."

"He's a pig, that's flat!" declared Françoise, peremptorily. "People have no business to play dirty tricks like that, putting their cousins in the family-way and then leaving 'em in the lurch."

But suddenly, in a fit of rage, she exclaimed:

"You wait, Coliche! I'll make you dance! There she is at it again; she's mad, the brute, when she gets that way."

She had violently jerked the cow back. At that spot the road left the edge of the plateau, and the cart disappeared from view, while they both continued their walk on the level, now having in front of them, and on either side, only the endless expanse of arable land. Between the fallows and the artificial meadows the path ran flat and bushless, terminating at the farm, which you might have thought within reach of the hand, but which kept receding under the ashen-grey sky. They had relapsed into silence again, no longer opening their mouths, as if impressed by the contemplative gloominess of La Beauce, so sad and yet so fruitful.

When they arrived, the large square yard of La Borderie, shut in on three sides by cow-sheds, sheep-cots, and barns, was deserted. But there immediately appeared upon the kitchen door-step a short, bold, pretty-looking young woman.

"How's this, Jean, you're not eating this morning?"

"I'm just going to, Madame Jacqueline."

Since the daughter of Cognet, the Rognes road-labourer,—La Cognette, as they called her when she washed up the farm dishes at twelve years of age—had been raised to the honours of servant-mistress, she despotically required that every one should treat her as a lady.

"Oh, it is you, Françoise," she resumed. "You've come for the bull. Well, you must wait. The neatherd is at Cloyes with Monsieur Hourdequin. But he'll be back; he ought to be here now."

And as Jean was making for the kitchen, she took him round the waist and fondled him smilingly, regardless of spectators, hungering, as it were, for love, and not satisfied with having the master.

Françoise, left alone, waited patiently, sitting on a stone bench in front of the manure-pit, which took up a third of the yard. She was listlessly watching a group of fowls, pecking and warming their feet in the broad low layer of manure, which in the cold air began to steam with a slight bluish vapour. At the end of half-an-hour, when Jean re-appeared, finishing a slice of bread and butter, she had not stirred. He sat down near her, and as the cow fidgeted, lashed its tail and lowed, he finally said:

"It's tiresome he doesn't come back."

The girl shrugged her shoulders, as though to say that she was in no hurry. Then, after a fresh silence:

"So, Corporal, they call you Jean, and nothing else?"

"Why, no; Jean Macquart."

"And you don't belong to our part of the country?"

"No, I'm a Provençal, from Plassans, a town over yonder."

She had raised her eyes to examine him, surprised that any one could come from so far off.

"After Solferino," continued he, "eighteen months since, I came back from Italy with my discharge, and a fellow-soldier brought me here. Then, d'ye see, my old trade of carpenter no longer suited me, and, what with one thing and another, I stopped at the farm."

"Ah!" said she, simply, without taking her big, black eyes off him, "it's curious, all the same."

At that moment, as La Coliche gave a prolonged, despairing low of desire, a hoarse murmur came from the cow-house, the door of which was shut.

"Hullo!" cried Jean, "that brute of a Cæsar has heard her. Hark! he's talking inside there. Oh, he knows his business. You can't bring one of 'em into the yard but he smells her out, and knows what he's wanted for."

Then, breaking off:

"I say, the neatherd must have stopped with Monsieur Hourdequin. If thee liked, I would bring thee the bull, and thee needn't come back again. We could manage it all right by ourselves."

"Not half a bad idea," said Françoise, getting up.

As he opened the door of the cow-house, he paused to ask:

"Must thy animal be tied up?"

"Tied up? No, no! not worth while. She is quite ready; she won't so much as stir."

When the door was opened you saw, in two rows on either side of the central path, the thirty farm cows, some lying in the litter, others crunching the beets in their manger; and, from the corner where he stood, one of the bulls, a black Dutch, spotted with white, stretched out his head in anticipation of his task.

As soon as he was untied, he slowly emerged. Then stopping short, as though surprised by the fresh air and sunlight, he remained motionless for a minute, bracing himself up, his sinewy tail swinging, his neck inflated, his muzzle outstretched to sniff. La Coliche, without stirring, turned towards him her large, fixed eyes, and lowed more softly. Then he advanced, pressed against her, and laid his head on her hind-quarters, abruptly and roughly; with his tongue, which was hanging out, he put her tail aside, and licked her as far as the thighs; she letting him do as he pleased, and keeping quite still, save for a slight quivering of her skin. Jean and Françoise waited gravely, their arms hanging beside them.

When Cæsar was ready, he got upon La Coliche with a jerk, and with such weighty force as to shake the ground. She had not given way, and he compressed her flanks with his two feet. But she, a strapping animal from the Cotentin, was so tall, so broad for him, who was of a smaller breed, that he could not reach. He was conscious of it, and made a vain effort to raise himself and to bring her nearer.

"He is too small," said Françoise.

"Yes, a little," said Jean. "But that don't matter; he'll do it all the same."

She shook her head in doubt; and, as Cæsar still fumbled about, and seemed to be getting exhausted, she came to a resolution.

"No, he must be helped," she said. "If he goes wrong, it'll be waste of time."

Calmly and carefully, as if bent on a serious piece of work, she had drawn near. Her intentness made the pupils of her eyes retreat, left her red lips half open, and kept her features motionless. Raising her arm with a sweep she aided the animal in his efforts, and he, gathering up his strength, speedily accomplished his purpose. It was done. Firmly, with the impassive fertility of land which is sown with seed the cow had unflinchingly received the fruitful stream of the male. Indeed, she had not even trembled at the shock; and he had already dropped again to the ground, shaking the earth once more.

Françoise having withdrawn her hand, remained with her arm in the air. Finally she lowered it, saying:

"That's all right."

"Yes, and neatly done," replied Jean, with an air of conviction, mingled with a good workman's satisfaction at seeing work well and expeditiously performed.

It did not occur to him to indulge in any of the spicy remarks with which the farm-servants used to chaff the girls who brought their cows for this purpose. The child seemed to consider it all so simple and necessary that there was, indeed, nothing to laugh at fairly. It was Nature.

However, Jacqueline had been standing at the door again for an instant or so, and with a chuckle which was habitual to her, she cried jestingly:

"Eh! poke your nose everywhere! So you hold the candle now!"

Jean having burst into a horse-laugh, Françoise suddenly flushed all over, quite confused; and to hide her embarrassment—while Cæsar returned of his own accord into the cow-house, and La Coliche munched a stalk of oats which had grown in the manure-pit—she dived into her pockets, fumbled about, eventually produced her handkerchief, untied the corner of it, in which she had wrapped up the two-franc fee, and said:

"Here! There's the money! And good day to you!"

She set out with her cow, and Jean took his bag again and followed her, telling Jacqueline that he was going to the Poteau field, according to the instructions issued by Monsieur Hourdequin, for the day.

"Good!" she replied. "The harrow ought to be there."

Then as the young man came up with the girl, and they went off in single file down the narrow path, she called out to them again, in her coarse, bantering voice:

"No danger, eh? If you lose yourselves together the chit knows her way about."

Behind them the farmyard was again deserted. Neither had laughed this time. They walked on slowly, and the only sound was that of their shoes striking against the stones. All that Jean noticed of Françoise was the nape of her child-like neck, over which curled some short black hair under her round cap. At last, after going some fifty paces:

"She does wrong to chaff others about the men," said Françoise, sedately. "I might have answered her——"

And turning towards the young fellow with a mischievous upward glance:

"It's true, isn't it, that she is false to Monsieur Hourdequin, just as if she were already his wife? You know as much about that, maybe, as most people."

His eyes fell, and he looked sheepish. "Lord! she does as she likes; it's her affair," he answered.

Françoise had turned her back and was pursuing her road.

"That's true enough. I was only in fun, because you're old enough to be my father, and because it's of no consequence one way or the other. But there's one thing, since Buteau played that dirty trick on my sister, I've taken an oath that I'd rather be cut in two than have a lover."

Jean bent his head, and they spoke no more. The little Poteau field lay at the bottom of the path, half way to Rognes. When the young fellow got there he stopped. The harrow was waiting for him, and a sack of seed had been emptied out into a furrow. He filled his bag, saying:

"Good-bye, then!"

"Good-bye," replied Françoise. "Thanks again!"

But, in sudden apprehension, he drew himself up and called out:

"I say! suppose La Coliche began again; shall I go with you all the way?"

She was already some distance off, but she turned round, and through the deep stillness of the country air came the sound of her calm, steady voice:

"No, no! There's no need, it's all right! She's got quite as much as she can carry!"

Jean, with his seed-bag at his waist, had started down the piece of plough land, with his ceaseless gesture of throwing the grain; he raised his eyes and looked at Françoise diminishing in height among the fields, looking quite small behind her lazy cow, which was swinging heavily from side to side. When he turned up again, he ceased to see her; but, as he came back, there she was again, but smaller still, so slim as to seem like some new kind of dandelion, with her slight figure and her white cap. Thrice she dwindled thus; then, when he once more looked for her, she had apparently turned down by the church.

Two o'clock struck. The sky remained grey, dull, and cold, as if the sun were buried under spadefuls of ashes for weary months, till the spring-time returned. The dreariness of the clouds was relieved by one lighter patch towards Orleans, as if the sun were shining somewhere in that direction, leagues away; and against that glimmering patch the steeple of Rognes stood out, the village itself sloping down from view into the fold made by the valley of the Aigre. But on the north, towards Chartres, the level line of the horizon clearly separated the leaden uniformity of the waste sky from the endless vista of La Beauce, like an ink-stroke across a monochrome sketch. Since the mid-day meal, the number of sowers seemed to have increased. Now each patch of the little farm-lands had one to itself; they multiplied and teemed like black laborious ants roused to activity by some heavy piece of work, and straining every nerve over a mighty task, giant-like in size as compared with their littleness. And still you might descry, even in the most remote, the one persistent never-varying gesture; still did the pertinacious insect-like sowers wrestle with the vast earth, and become eventually the victors over space and life.

Till night-fall Jean sowed. After the Poteau field there were the Rigoles and the Quatre-Chemins. To and fro, to and fro, he paced the fields, with long, rhythmical steps, till the corn in his bag came to an end; while, in his wake, the seed strewed all the soil.

[CHAPTER II.]

The house of Maître Baillehache, notary at Cloyes, was situated in the Rue Grouaise, on the left hand going to Châteaudun. A little white, one-storey house it was, at the corner of which a bracket was riveted for the rope of the single lantern which lighted this broad, paved street, deserted during the week, but on Saturday nights crowded with a living tide of peasants coming to market. From afar might be seen the gleam of the two professional escutcheons against the chalk-like wall of the low buildings; and, behind, a narrow garden stretched down to the Loir.

On that Saturday, in the room which served as an office, and which looked out upon the street to the right of the entrance hall, the youngest clerk, a pale, wizened boy of fifteen, had drawn up one of the muslin curtains to see the people pass. The other two clerks—one old, corpulent, and very dirty; one younger, scraggy, and a hopeless victim to liver complaint—were writing at a double desk of ebonised deal, there being no other furniture except seven or eight chairs and a cast-iron stove, which was never lit till December, even if it snowed a month before. Rows of pigeon-holes decorated the walls, with greenish pasteboard boxes, broken at the corners and full to repletion with bundles of yellow papers, and the room was pervaded with an unwholesome smell of ink gone bad and dust-eaten documents.

However, seated side by side, two peasants, man and wife, were waiting in deep respect, like statues of Patience. So many papers, and, more than all, the gentlemen who wrote so fast, with their pens all scratching away at once, sobered them by evoking vague visions of law-suits and money. The woman, aged thirty-four, very dark, with a countenance which would have been pleasant but for a large nose, had her horny, toil-worn hands crossed over her black cloth, velvet-edged body, and was scanning every corner with her keen eyes, evidently musing on the many title-deeds which reposed here. In the meanwhile the man, five years older, red-haired and stolid, in black trousers and a long, bran-new blue linen blouse, held his round felt hat on his knees, with not a spark of intelligence illuminating his broad, clean-shaven, terra-cotta-like face, which was perforated with two large eyes of porcelain blue, having a fixed stare that reminded one of a somnolent ox.

A door opened, and Maître Baillehache, who had just breakfasted with his brother-in-law, farmer Hourdequin, made his appearance; ruddy and fresh-complexioned despite his fifty-five years, with thick lips and crow's feet, which gave him a perpetually amused expression. He carried a double eye-glass, and had a lunatic habit of always pulling at his long, grizzled whiskers.

"Ah! it's you, Delhomme," said he. "So, old Fouan has consented to divide the property?"

The reply came from the woman.

"Yes, sure, Monsieur Baillehache. We have all made an appointment, so that we may come to an agreement, and that you may tell us how we are to proceed."

"Good, good, Fanny; we'll see about it. It's hardly more than one o'clock, we must wait for the others."

The notary stopped an instant to chat, asking about the price of corn, which had fallen during the last two months, and showing Delhomme the friendly consideration due to a farmer who owned fifty acres of land, and kept a servant and three cows. Then he returned to his inner room.

The clerks had not raised their heads, but were scratching away with their pens more vigorously than ever; and, once more, the Delhommes waited motionless. Fanny had been a lucky girl to marry a respectable, rich lover without even getting into the family-way beforehand, she whose only expectations had been some seven or eight acres of land from old Fouan. Her husband, however, had not repented of his bargain, for he could not anywhere have found a more active or intelligent housekeeper. Hence he followed her lead in everything, being of a narrow mind, but so steady and straightforward as to be frequently selected as an umpire by the Rognes people.

At that moment the little clerk, who was looking out into the street, stifled a laugh behind his hand, and murmured to his old, corpulent, and very dirty neighbour: "Here's Hyacinthe the saint coming!"

Fanny bent down quickly to whisper to her husband: "Now, leave everything to me. I am fond enough of papa and mamma, but I won't have them rob us; and keep a sharp eye on Buteau and that rascal Hyacinthe."

She referred to her two brothers, having seen one of them approach as she looked out of the window: Hyacinthe, the elder, whom the whole neighbourhood knew as an idler and a drunkard, and who, at the close of his military service, after going through the Algerian campaigns, had taken to a vagabond life, refusing all regular work, and subsisting by poaching and pillage, as if he were still extortioner-in-ordinary among a terrified people of Bedouins.

A tall, strapping fellow came in, rejoicing in the brawny strength of his forty years; he had curly hair, and a pointed, long, unkempt beard, with the face of a saint laid waste, a saint sodden with strong drink, addicted to forcing girls, and to robbing folks on the highway. He had already got tipsy at Cloyes since the morning, and wore muddy trousers, a filthily-stained blouse, and a ragged cap stuck on the back of his neck. He was smoking a damp, black, pestilential halfpenny cigar. Yet, in the depths of his fine liquid eyes lurked a spirit of fun free from ill-feeling, the open-heartedness of good-natured blackguardism.

"So father and mother haven't turned up yet?" he asked.

When the thin, jaundiced clerk responded testily by a shake of the head, he stared for an instant at the wall, while his cigar smouldered in his hand. He had not so much as glanced at his sister and his brother-in-law, who, themselves, did not appear to have seen him enter. Then, without a word, he left the room, and went to hang about on the pavement.

"Hyacinthe! Hyacinthe!" droned the little clerk, turning streetwards, and seeming to find infinite amusement in this name, which brought many a funny tale back to his memory.

Hardly five minutes had passed before the Fouans made their tardy appearance, two old folk of slow, prudential gait. The father, once very robust, now seventy years of age, had shrivelled and dwindled down under such hard work, such a keen land-hunger, that his form was bowed as if in a wild impulse to return to that earth which he had coveted and possessed. Nevertheless, in all save the legs, he was still hale and well-knit, with spruce little white mutton-chop whiskers, and the long family nose, which lent an air of keenness to his thin, leathery, deeply-wrinkled face. In his wake, following him as closely as his shadow, came his wife; shorter and stouter, swollen as if by an incipient dropsy, with a drab-coloured face perforated with round eyes, and a round mouth pursed up into an infinity of avaricious wrinkles. A household drudge, endowed with the docile, hard-working stupidity of a beast of burden, she had always stood in awe of the despotic authority of her husband.

"Ah, so it's you!" cried Fanny, getting up. Delhomme, also, had risen from his chair. Behind the old people, Hyacinthe had just lounged in again without a word. Compressing the cigar end to put it out, he thrust the pestiferous stump into a pocket of his blouse.

"So we're here," said Fouan. "There's only Buteau missing. Never in time, never like other people, the beast!"

"I saw him in the market," asserted Hyacinthe in a husky voice due to drink. "He's coming."

Buteau, the younger son, owed his nickname to his pigheadedness, being always up in arms in obstinate defence of his own ideas, which were never those of anybody else. Even when an urchin, he had not been able to get on with his parents; and, later on, having drawn a lucky number in the conscription, he had run away from home to go into service, first at La Borderie, subsequently at La Chamade.

While his father was still grumbling, he skipped cheerfully into the room. In him, the large Fouan nose was flattened out, while the lower part of his face, the maxillaries, projected like the powerful jaws of a carnivorous beast. His temples retreated, all the upper part of his head was contracted, and, behind the boon-companion twinkle of his grey eyes, there lurked deceit and violence. He had inherited the brutish desires and tenacious grip of his father, aggravated by the narrow meanness of his mother. In every quarrel, whenever the two old people heaped reproaches upon his head, he replied: "You shouldn't have made me so!"

"Look here, it's five leagues from La Chamade to Cloyes," replied he to their complaints; "and besides, hang it all, I'm here at the same time as you. Oh, at me again, are you?"

They all disputed, shouted in shrill, high-pitched voices, and argued over their private matters exactly as if they had been at home. The clerks, disturbed, looked at them askance, till the tumult brought in the notary, who re-opened the door of his private office.

"You are all assembled? Then come in!"

This private office looked on to the garden, a narrow strip of ground running down to the Loir, the leafless poplars along which were visible in the distance. On the mantelpiece, between some packets of papers, there was a black marble clock; the furniture simply comprised the mahogany writing-table, a set of pasteboard boxes, and some chairs. Monsieur Baillehache at once installed himself at his writing-table, like a judge on the bench, while the peasants who had entered in a file hesitated and squinted at the chairs, feeling embarrassed as to where and how they were to sit down.

"Come, seat yourselves!" said the notary.

Then Fouan and Rose were pushed forward by the rest on to the two front chairs; Fanny and Delhomme got behind, also side by side; Buteau established himself in an isolated corner against the wall; while Hyacinthe alone remained standing, in front of the window, blocking out the light with his broad shoulders. The notary, out of patience, addressed him familiarly.

"Sit down, do, Hyacinthe!"

He had to broach the subject himself.

"So, Fouan, you have made up your mind to divide your property before your death, between your two sons and your daughter?"

The old man made no reply. The rest were as if frozen to stone; there was deep silence.

On his part, the notary, accustomed to such sluggishness, did not hurry himself. His office had been in his family two hundred and fifty years. Baillehache, son, had succeeded Baillehache, father, at Cloyes, the line being of ancient Beauceron extraction, and they had contracted from their rustic connection that ponderous reflectiveness, that artful circumspection, which protract the most trivial debates with long pauses and irrelevant talk. Having taken up a penknife the notary began paring his nails.

"Haven't you? It would appear that you have made up your mind," he repeated at length, looking hard at the old man.

The latter turned, looked round at everybody, and then said, hesitatingly:

"Yes; that may be so, Monsieur Baillehache. I spoke to you about it at harvest-time. You told me to think it over; and I have thought it over, and I can see that it will have to come to that."

He explained the why and wherefore, in faltering phrases, interspersed with constant digressions. But there was one thing which he said nothing about, but which was obvious from the repressed emotion which choked his utterance—and that was the infinite distress, the smothered rancour, the rending asunder, as it were, of his whole frame, which he felt in parting with the property so eagerly coveted before his father's death, cultivated later on with the violent avidity of lust, and then added to, bit by bit, at the cost of the most sordid avarice. Such-and-such a plot represented months of bread and cheese, tireless winters, summers of scorching toil, with no other sustenance than a few gulps of water. He had loved the soil as it were a woman who kills, and for whose sake men are slain. No spouse, nor child, nor any human being; but the soil! However, being now stricken in years, he must hand his mistress over to his sons, as his father, maddened by his own impotence, had handed her over to him.

"You see, Monsieur Baillehache, one has to look at things as they are. My legs are not what they used to be; my arms are hardly better; and, of course, the land suffers accordingly. Things might still have gone on if one could have come to an understanding with one's children."

He glanced at Buteau and Hyacinthe, who made no sign, however; their eyes were looking into vacancy, as though they were a hundred miles away from him and his words.

"Well, am I to be expected to take strange people under our roof, to pick and steal? No, servants now-a-days cost too much; they eat one out of house and home. As for me, I am used up. This year, look you, I have hardly had the strength to cultivate a quarter of the nineteen setiers[2] I possess; just enough to provide corn for ourselves and fodder for the two cows. So, you understand, it's breaking my heart to see good land spoiled by lying idle. I had rather let everything go than look on at such sinful waste."

His voice faltered; his gestures were those of resigned anguish. Near him listened his submissive wife, crushed by more than half a century of obedience and toil.

"The other day," he continued, "Rose, while making her cheeses, fell into them head first. It wears me out only to jog to market. And then, we can't take the land away with us when we go. It must be given up—given up. After all, we have done enough work, and we want to die in peace. Don't we, Rose?"

"That's true enough; true as we sit here," said the old woman.

There fell a new and prolonged silence. The notary finished trimming his nails, and at last he put the knife back on his desk, saying:

"Yes, those are very good reasons; one is frequently forced to resolve on a deed of gift. I should add that it saves expense, for the legacy duties are heavier than those on the transference of property."

Buteau, despite his affectation of indifference, could not help exclaiming:

"Then it's true, Monsieur Baillehache?"

"Most certainly. You will save some hundreds of francs."

There was a flutter among the others; even Delhomme's countenance brightened, while the parents also shared in the general satisfaction. The moment they knew it was cheaper, the thing was as good as done.

"It remains for me to make the usual observations," continued the notary. "Many thoughtful persons condemn such transfers of property, and regard them as immoral, in that they tend to sever family ties. Deplorable instances might, in fact, be mentioned, children having sometimes behaved very badly, when their parents had stripped themselves of all."

The two sons and the daughter listened to him, open-mouthed, with trembling eyelids and quivering cheeks.

"Let papa keep everything himself, if those are his ideas," brusquely interrupted the very susceptible Fanny.

"We have always been dutiful," said Buteau.

"And we're not afraid of work," added Hyacinthe.

With a wave of his hand Maître Baillehache restored calm.

"Pray, let me finish! I know you are good children, and honest workers; and, in your case, there is not the slightest danger of your parents ever repenting of their resolution."

He spoke without a tinge of irony, repeating the conciliatory phrases which five-and-twenty years of professional practice had made smooth upon his tongue. However, the mother, although seeming not to understand, glanced with her small eyes from her daughter to her two sons. She had brought them up, without any show of fondness, amid the chill parsimony which reproaches the little ones with diminishing the household savings. She had a grudge against the younger son for having run away from home just when he was capable of earning wages; the daughter she had never been able to get on with, encountering in her a strain too like her own, a robust activity made haughty and unyielding by the intermingled intelligence of the father; and her gaze only softened as it rested upon the elder son, the ruffian who took neither after her nor after her husband—the ill weed sprung none knew whence, and, perhaps, excused and favoured on that account.

Fouan also had looked at his children, one after the other, with an uneasy mistrust of the uses they might make of his property. The laziness of the drunkard was not so keen an anguish to him as the covetous yearning of the two others for possession. However, he bent his trembling head. What was the good of kicking against the pricks?

"The partition being thus resolved upon," resumed the notary, "the question becomes one of terms. Are you agreed upon the allowance which is to be paid?"

Everybody suddenly relapsed into mute rigidity. Their sun-burnt faces assumed a stony look, an air of impenetrable gravity, like that of diplomatists entering on the appraisement of an empire. Then they threw out tentative glances one to another, but nobody spoke. At last the father once more explained matters.

"No, Monsieur Baillehache, we have not entered on the subject; we were waiting till we met all together, here. But it's quite simple, isn't it? I have nineteen setiers, or, as people now say, nine hectares and a half (about twenty-three acres). So that, if I rented them out, it would come to nine hundred and fifty francs, at a hundred francs per hectare (two and a half acres)."

Buteau, the least patient, leapt from his chair.

"What! A hundred francs per hectare! Do you take us for fools, papa?"

And a preliminary discussion began on the question of figures. There was a setier of vineyard; that, certainly, would let for fifty francs. But would that price ever be got for the twelve setiers of plough-land, still less for the six setiers of natural meadow-land, the fields along the Aigre, the hay of which was worth nothing? The plough-land itself was hardly of good quality, especially at the end which edged the plateau, for the arable layer got thinner and thinner as it neared the valley.

"Come, come, papa," said Fanny, reproachfully, "you mustn't take an unfair advantage of us."

"It's worth a hundred francs a hectare," repeated the old man stubbornly, slapping his thigh. "I could let it out to-morrow at a hundred francs if I wanted to. And what's it worth to you, now? Just let's hear what it's worth to you?"

"It's worth sixty francs," said Buteau, but Fouan, greatly put out, sustained his price, and launched into fervent eulogy of his land—such fine land as it was, yielding wheat of itself—when Delhomme, silent till then, declared in his blunt, honest way: "It's worth eighty francs, not a copper more, and not a copper less."

The old man immediately calmed down.

"All right, say eighty. I don't mind making a sacrifice for my children."

Rose, twitching at a corner of his blouse, expressed in one word the outraged instincts of her mean nature—"No!"

Hyacinthe held himself aloof. Land had been no object to him since the five years he had spent in Algeria. He had but one aim: to get his share at once, whatever it might be, and to turn it into money. Accordingly, he went on swinging to and fro with an air of amused superiority.

"I said eighty," cried Fouan, "and eighty it is. I have always been a man of my word; I swear it. Nine hectares and a half, look you, come to seven hundred and sixty francs, or, in round numbers, eight hundred. Well, the allowance shall be eight hundred francs, that's fair enough?"

Buteau burst into a violent fit of laughter, while Fanny protested by a shake of the head, as if dumbfounded. Monsieur Baillehache, who, since the discussion began, had been looking vacantly into the garden, again turned to his clients and seemed to listen, tugging in his lunatic way at his whiskers, and dreamily digesting the excellent meal he had just made.

This time the old man was right, it was fair. But the children, heated and possessed by the one idea of concluding the bargain on the lowest possible terms, grew absolutely ferocious, and haggled and cursed with the bad faith of yokels buying a pig.

"Eight hundred francs!" sneered Buteau. "Seems you want to live like gentle folks——Oh, indeed! Eight hundred francs, when you might live on four! Why not say at once that you want to gorge till you burst?"

Fouan had not yet lost his temper, considering the higgling natural, and simply facing the expected storm, himself excited, but making straight for the goal he had in view.

"Stop a bit! that's not all. Till the day of our death we keep the house and garden, of course. Then, as we shall no longer get anything from the crops, or have our two cows, we want every year a cask of wine and a hundred faggots; and every week eight quarts of milk, a dozen eggs, and three cheeses."

"Oh, papa!" groaned Fanny in piteous consternation. "Oh, papa!"

As for Buteau, he had done with discussion. He had sprung to his feet, and was striding brusquely to and fro; he had even jammed his cap on his head as if he were about to go. Hyacinthe also had likewise got up from his chair, disquieted by the idea that this fuss might prevent the partition after all. Delhomme alone remained impassive, with his finger laid against his nose, in an attitude of deep thought and extreme boredom.

At this point Maître Baillehache felt it necessary to help matters forward a little. Rousing himself up, and fidgeting more energetically with his whiskers:

"You know, my friends," said he, "that wine, faggots, cheese, and eggs are customary."

But he was cut short by a volley of bitter phrases.

"Eggs with chickens inside, perhaps!"

"We don't drink our wine, do we? We sell it!"

"It's jolly convenient not to do a blasted thing and be made warm and comfortable, while your children are toiling and moiling!"

The notary, who had heard the same thing often enough before, continued unmoved:

"All that is no argument. Come, come, Hyacinthe, sit down, will you? You're keeping out the light; you're a perfect nuisance! So that's settled, isn't it, all of you? You will pay the dues in kind, because otherwise you would become a by-word. We have, therefore, only to discuss the amount of the allowance."

Delhomme at length indicated that he had something to say. Everybody having resumed his place, he began slowly, amid general attention:

"Excuse me; what the father asks seems fair: he might be allowed eight hundred francs on the ground that he could let the property for eight hundred francs—only we don't reckon like that on our side. He is not letting us the land, but giving it to us, and what we have to calculate is: how much do he and his wife require to live on? That is all. How much do they require to live on?"

"That is, certainly," chimed in the notary, "the usual basis of calculation."

Another endless dispute set in. The two old folks' lives were dissected, exposed, and discussed, need by need. Bread, vegetables, and meat were weighed out; clothing appraised, linen and woollen, to the utmost farthing; even such trivial luxuries as the father's tobacco—cut down, after interminable recriminations, from two sous a day to one—were not beneath notice. When people were beyond work, they ought to reduce their expenditure. The mother, again; could she not do without her black coffee? It was like their twelve-year-old dog, who ate, and ate, and made no return; he ought to have had a bullet put through his head long ago! The calculation was no sooner finished than it was begun all over again, on the chance of finding some other item to suppress: two shirts or six handkerchiefs in the year. And thus, by cutting closer and closer, by pinching and scraping in the paltriest matters, they got down to five hundred and fifty odd francs, which left the children in a state of uncontrollable agitation, for they had set their hearts upon not giving more than five hundred.

Fanny, however, was growing tired. She was not a bad sort, having more of the milk of human kindness than the men, and not yet having had her heart or her skin hardened by rough life in the open air. Accordingly she spoke of making an end of it, and resigned herself to some concessions. Hyacinthe, for his part, shrugged his shoulders, in a most liberal, not to say maudlin mood; ready to offer, out of his own share, any little balance which, be it remarked, he would never have paid.

"Come," asked the daughter, "shall we let it go at five hundred and fifty?"

"Right you are!" answered he. "The old 'uns must have a little pleasant time!"

The mother turned to her elder son with a smiling and yet almost tearful look of affection, while the father continued his contention with the younger. He had only given way step by step, disputing every reduction, and making a stubborn stand on certain items. But, beneath his ostensibly cool pertinacity, his wrath rose high within him as he confronted the mad desire of his own flesh and blood to fatten on his flesh, and to drain his blood dry while he was yet alive. He forgot that he had thus fed upon his own father. His hands had begun to tremble; and he growled out:

"Ah, the rascals! To think that one has brought 'em up, and then they turn round and take the bread out of one's mouth! On my word, I'm sick of it. I'd rather be already rotting under ground. So there's no getting you to behave decently; you won't give more than five hundred and fifty?"

He was about to accept the sum, when his wife again twitched his blouse and whispered:

"No, no!"

"And that's not all," resumed Buteau, after a little hesitation. "How about the money you have saved up? If you've any money of your own you don't want ours, do you?"

He looked steadily at his father, having reserved this shot for the last. The old man had grown very pale.

"What money?" he asked.

"Why, the money invested; the money you hold bonds for."

Buteau, who only suspected the hoard, wanted to make sure. One evening, he had thought he saw his father take a little roll of papers from behind a looking-glass. The next day and the days following he had been on the watch, but nothing had turned up; the empty cavity alone remained.

Fouan's pallor now suddenly changed to a deep red as his torrent of wrath at length burst forth. He rose up, and shouted with a furious gesture:

"Great heaven! You go rummaging in my pockets now. I haven't a sou, a copper invested; you've cost too much for that, you brute. But, in any case, is it any business of yours? Am I not the master, the father?"

He seemed to grow taller in the re-assertion of his authority. For years everybody, wife and children alike, had quailed before him, under his rude despotism as chief of the family. If they fancied all that at an end, they made a mistake.

"Oh, papa!" began Buteau, with an attempt at a snigger.

"Hold your tongue, in God's name!" resumed the old man, with his hand still uplifted. "Hold your tongue, or I strike!"

The younger son stammered, and shrank into himself on his chair. He had felt the blow approaching and had raised his elbow to ward it off, seized once more with the terrors of infancy.

"And you, Hyacinthe, leave off smirking! And you, Fanny, look me in the face, if you dare! True as the sun's shining, I'll make it lively for some of you; see if I don't!"

He stood, threateningly, over them all. The mother shivered, as if apprehensive of stray buffets. The children neither stirred nor breathed, they were conquered and submissive.

"Understand, the allowance shall be six hundred francs; or else I shall sell my land and invest in an annuity. Yes, an annuity! All shall be spent, and you sha'n't come into a copper. Will you give the six hundred francs?"

"Why, papa," murmured Fanny, "we will give whatever you ask."

"Six hundred francs. Right!" said Delhomme.

"What suits the rest, suits me," declared Hyacinthe.

Buteau, setting his teeth viciously, gave the consent of silence. Fouan still held them in check, with the stern look of one accustomed to obedience. Finally, he sat down again, saying: "Good! Then we are agreed."

Maître Baillehache had begun to doze again, unconcernedly awaiting the issue of the quarrel. Now, opening his eyes, he brought the interview to a peaceful close.

"Well, then, as you're agreed, that's enough! Now I know the terms, I will draw up the deed. For your part, get the surveying done, portion out the lots, and tell the surveyor to forward me a note containing the description of the lots. Then, when you've drawn your numbers, all we shall have to do will be to write the number drawn against each name, and sign."

He had risen from his arm-chair to see them out. But they, hesitating, and reflecting, would not stir. Was it really over? Was nothing forgotten? Had they not made a bad bargain, which there was yet time, perhaps, to cancel?

Four o'clock struck; they had been there nearly three hours.

"Aren't you going?" said the notary to them at last. "There are others waiting."

He precipitated their decision by hustling them into the next room, where, indeed, a number of patient rustics were sitting still and rigid upon their chairs, while the small clerk watched a dog-fight out of the window, and the two others still drove their pens, sulkily and scratchily, over stamped paper.

Once outside, the family stood for a moment stock-still in the middle of the street.

"If you like," declared the father, "the measuring shall take place on the day after to-morrow—Monday."

They nodded assent, and went down the Rue Grouaise in scattered file.

Then, old Fouan and Rose, having turned down the Rue du Temple, towards the church, Fanny and Delhomme went off through the Rue Grande. Buteau had stopped on the Place Saint-Lubin, wondering if his father had a hidden hoard or not; and Hyacinthe, left by himself, relighted his cigar-end, and went into the Jolly Ploughman café.

[CHAPTER III.]

The Fouans house was the first in Rognes, on the high-road from Cloyes to Bazoches-le-Doyen, which passes through the village. On Monday, the old man was going out at seven o'clock in the morning to keep the appointment in front of the church, when, in the next doorway, he perceived his sister, "La Grande," who was already astir, despite her eighty years.

These Fouans had propagated and grown there for centuries, like some sturdy luxuriant vegetation. Serfs in the old times of the Rognes-Bouquevals—of whom not a trace survived save the few half-buried stones of a ruined château—they had been emancipated, it appeared, under Philip the Fair; becoming thenceforward landowners of an acre or so, which they had bought from the lord of the manor when in difficulties, and paid for with tears and blood at ten times the value. Then had set in the long struggle of four hundred years to defend and enlarge the property, in a frenzy of passion transmitted from father to son: odd corners were lost and bought back, the ownership was unremittingly called into question, the inheritances were subject to such a list of dues that they almost ate their own heads off; but in spite of all, both arable and plough-lands grew, bit by bit, in the ever-prevailing, stubborn craving for possession. Generations passed away, the lives of many men enriched the soil; but when the Revolution of '89 set its seal upon his rights, the Fouan of the time, Joseph Casimir, possessed about twenty-six acres, wrested in the course of four centuries from the old seignorial manor.

In '93, this Joseph Casimir was twenty-seven years of age, and on the day when what remained of the manor was declared national property and sold in lots by auction, he yearned to acquire a few acres of it. The Rognes-Bouquevals, ruined and in debt, after letting the last tower of the château crumble into dust, had long since given up to their creditors the right of receiving the revenues of La Borderie, three quarters of which property lay fallow. In particular, adjacent to one of Fouan's bits of land there was a large field, on which he looked with the fierce covetousness of his race. But the harvest had been poor, and in the old pipkin behind his oven he had barely a hundred crowns saved up. Moreover, although it had momentarily occurred to him to borrow off a Cloyes money-lender, a distrustful prudence had stood in the way: he was afraid to touch these lands of the nobility; who knew whether they would not be claimed again later on? So it happened that, divided between desire and apprehension, he had the agony of seeing La Borderie bought at auction, field by field, and for a tenth of its value, by Isidore Hourdequin, a townsman of Châteaudun, formerly employed in the collection of excise duties.

Joseph Casimir Fouan, in his old age, had divided his twenty-six acres equally among his eldest child, Marianne, and his two sons, Louis and Michel; a younger daughter Laure, brought up to dressmaking and employed at Châteaudun, being indemnified in hard cash. But marriage destroyed this equality. While Marianne Fouan, surnamed "La Grande," wedded a neighbour, Antoine Péchard, with about twenty-two acres; Michael Fouan, surnamed "Mouche," encumbered himself with a sweetheart who only expected from her father two and a half acres of vineyard. On the other hand, Louis Fouan, joined in matrimony to Rose Maliverne, the heiress to fifteen acres, had acquired that total of twenty-three acres or so, which, in his turn, he was about to divide among his three children.

La Grande was respected and dreaded in the family, not for her advanced age, but for her fortune. Still very upright, tall, thin, wiry, and large-boned, she had the fleshless head of a bird of prey set on a long, shrivelled, blood-coloured neck. In her, the family nose curved into a formidable beak; she had round fixed eyes, with not a trace of hair under the yellow silk handkerchief she always wore, though she possessed her full complement of teeth, and jaws that might have masticated flints. She never went out without her thornwood stick, which she held on high as she walked, only making use of it to strike animals and human beings. Left a widow at an early age, she had turned her one daughter out of doors, because the wretch had insisted, against her mother's will, on marrying a poor youth, Vincent Bouteroue; and even when this daughter and her husband had died of want, leaving behind them a grand-daughter and a grandson, Palmyre and Hilarion, aged respectively thirty-two and twenty-four, she had refused her forgiveness and let them starve to death, allowing no one so much as to remind her of their existence. Since her goodman's death she presided in person over the cultivation of her land; she had three cows, a pig, and a farm-hand, all fed out of a common trough; and she was obeyed by those about her with the most abject submission.

Fouan, seeing her on her threshold, had drawn near out of respect. She was ten years older than he, and he regarded her sternness, her avarice, her obstinate resolution to possess and to live, with an admiring deference, shared by the whole village.

"I was just wanting to tell you about it, La Grande," said he. "I have made up my mind, and am going up yonder to see about the division."

She made no reply, but tightened her grasp upon the stick which she was flourishing.

"The other night I wanted to ask your advice again, but I knocked and no one answered."

Then she broke out in shrill tones:

"Idiot! Advice, indeed! I gave you advice. The fool, the poltroon you must be to give your property up as long as you can get about. They might have bled me to death, but, under the knife, I would still have refused. To see what belongs to one in the hands of others, to turn one's self out of doors for the benefit of rascally children.—No! No! No!"

"But," put in Fouan, "if you're incapable of farming, and the land suffers accordingly."

"Well, let it suffer. Rather than lose half an acre of it, I would go and watch the thistles grow every morning."

She drew herself up grimly, in her featherless, old vulture-like way, and, drumming on his shoulder with her stick, as if to impress her words upon him more deeply, she resumed:

"Listen, and mark me. When you have nothing and they have everything, your children will refuse you a mouthful of bread. You'll end with a beggar's wallet, like a road-tramp. And when that happens, don't come knocking at my door, for I give you fair warning, it'll be the worse for you. Would you like to know what I shall do, eh? Would you?"

He waited submissively, as behoved a younger brother; and she returned indoors, banging the door behind her and screaming:

"I shall do that! Die in a ditch!"

Fouan stood for an instant motionless before the closed door. Then, with a gesture of resigned decision, he went up the path leading to the Place de l'Eglise. On that very spot stood the old family residence of the Fouans, which, in the division of property, had fallen to his brother Michel, called Mouche; his own house, lower down along the road, had come to him from his wife Rose. Mouche, who had long been a widower, lived alone with his two daughters, Lise and Françoise, embittered by disappointments, still humiliated by his lowly marriage, and accusing his brother and sister, after forty years, of having cheated him when the allotments were drawn for. He was for ever telling the tale how the worst lot had been left for him at the bottom of the hat; and, in the course of time, this seemed to have become true, for he proved so excellent at excuses and such a sluggard at work that his share lost half its value in his hands. "The man makes the land," as folks say in La Beauce.

That morning Mouche also was on the watch at his door when his brother came round the corner of the square. The division roused his spleen, reviving old grudges, although he had nothing to expect from it. However, to demonstrate his utter indifference, he, too, turned his back and shut the door with a slam.

Fouan had suddenly caught sight of Delhomme and Hyacinthe, who were waiting twenty yards apart from each other. He made for the former, while the latter made for him. The three, without speaking, scanned the path which skirted the edge of the plateau.

"There he is," said Hyacinthe, at last. "He" was Grosbois, the local surveyor, a peasant from Magnolles, a little village near Cloyes. His knowledge of reading and writing had ruined him. When summoned from Orgères to Beaugency, on surveying business, he used to leave to his wife the management of his property, and he had contracted during his constant pilgrimages such drunken habits that he was now never sober. Very stout, very sturdy for his sixty years, he had a broad red face budding all over into purple pimples; and, despite the early hour, he was, on the day in question, in a state of abominable intoxication, the result of a merry-making held the night before by some Montigny vine-growers in honour of a divided inheritance. But that mattered nothing: the tipsier he was, the clearer his brain. He never measured incorrectly, and never added up incorrectly. He was held in deference and honour, advisedly, for he had the reputation of being extremely spiteful.

"All here, eh?" said he. "Then come along."

A dirty, bedraggled urchin of twelve was in attendance, carrying the chain under his arm and the stand and the staves over his shoulder, while with his free hand he swung the square, which was in an old burst cardboard case.

They all set out without waiting for Buteau, whom they had just descried in the distance, standing still before the largest field of the holding. That field, some five acres in extent, was immediately adjacent to the one along which La Coliche had dragged Françoise a few days before. Buteau, thinking it useless to proceed further, had stopped there in a brown study. When the others arrived, they saw him stoop down, take up a handful of earth, and gradually filter it through his fingers, as though to estimate its weight and flavour.

"There," resumed Grosbois, taking a greasy memorandum-book from his pocket: "I have already drawn up an accurate little plan of each lot, as you asked me to do, Fouan. It now devolves upon us to divide the whole into three portions; and that, my children, we will do together, eh? Just tell me how you intend it to be done."

The day had worn on. A ripping wind was driving continuous masses of thick clouds across the pale sky; and La Beauce lay sullen and gloomy, lashed by the keen air. Yet not one of them seemed conscious of that breeze from the offing, which inflated their blouses and threatened to carry off their hats. Not one of the five, in holiday attire, as befitted the gravity of the occasion, spoke a word. As they stood on the confines of the field, amid the boundless expanse, their lineaments had a dreamy, frozen fixedness, the musing expression of mariners who live alone in large open spaces. La Beauce, flat and fertile, easily tilled but demanding continuous effort, has made the Beauceron calm and reflective, without passion save for the land itself.

"It'll all have to be divided into three," said Buteau at length.

Grosbois shook his head, and a discussion set in. An apostle of progress, by virtue of his connection with large farms, he occasionally went so far as to set himself up against his smaller clients, by condemning extreme subdivision. Would not the labour and cost of transport from place to place become a ruinous thing, when there were only odds and ends of land left that might be covered by a handkerchief? Was it farming at all, with paltry garden-plots on which it was impossible either to improve the system of crops or to introduce machinery? No: the only sensible thing to do was to make a mutual arrangement, not to adopt the murderous course of chopping a field up like so much pastry. If one of them would be content with the plough-land, another might manage with the meadows; the portions could eventually be equalised, and the distribution decided by lot.

Buteau, with the natural liveliness of youth, adopted a jocose tone. "And, with only some meadow-land, what shall I have to eat? Grass, I suppose? No, no; I want some of everything, hay for cow and horse, corn and grape for myself."

Fouan, who was listening, nodded assent. For generations, such had been the mode of partition; and fresh acquisitions, by marriage or otherwise, had subsequently swollen the plots anew.

Delhomme, passing rich with his fifty acres or so, had broader views; but he was in a conciliatory mood, and had indeed only come, in his wife's interest, to see that she was not cheated in the measurements. As for Hyacinthe, he had gone off in pursuit of a flight of larks, with his hands crammed full of pebbles. Whenever one of the birds, distressed by the wind, stopped still a couple of seconds in mid-air with quivering wings, he felled it to the ground with the skill of a savage. Three fell, and he thrust them bleeding into his pocket.

"Come, stop your talk, and let's have it cut up into three!" said the lively Buteau, addressing the surveyor familiarly; "and not into six, mind, for you seem to me this morning to have both Chartres and Orleans in your eye at once."

Grosbois, feeling hurt, drew himself up with much dignity.

"When you've had as much to drink as I have, young shaver, see whether you can keep your eyes open at all. Which of you clever people would like to take the square instead of me?"

As no one ventured to take up the challenge, he called out harshly and triumphantly to the boy, who was rapt with admiration of Hyacinthe's pebble-shooting. The square duly installed on its stand, the stakes were being set up, when a new dispute arose over the method of dividing the field. The surveyor, supported by Fouan and Delhomme, wanted to divide the five acres into three strips parallel with the Aigre valley; while Buteau insisted on the strips being taken perpendicular to the valley, on the plea that the arable layer got thinner and thinner as it neared the slope. In this way every one would have his share of the worse end; whereas, in the other case, the third lot would be altogether of inferior quality.

But Fouan grew heated; swore that the depth was the same everywhere, and reminded them that the former partition between himself, Mouche, and La Grande had been made in the direction he indicated; in proof of which, Mouche's five acres lay adjacent to the third of the proposed lots. Delhomme, on his side, made a decisive remark: even admitting that the one lot was inferior, the owner would be benefited as soon as the authorities decided to open the road that was to skirt the field at that point.

"Oh, yes; I daresay!" cried Buteau. "The celebrated road from Rognes to Châteaudun, by way of La Borderie! And a jolly long time you'll have to wait for it!"

His importunity being, nevertheless, disregarded, he entered a protest from between his clenched teeth.

Hyacinthe himself had drawn near, and they were all absorbed in watching Grosbois trace out the lines of division. They kept a sharp eye on him, as if they suspected him of trying by unfair means to make one share half-an-inch bigger than the others. Three times did Delhomme put his eye to the slit in the square, to make quite sure that the line fairly intersected the stave. Hyacinthe swore at the "d——d youngster" because he did not hold the chain right. But Buteau, in particular, followed the process step by step, counting the feet, and going over the calculations again in his own way with trembling lips. With this consuming desire to possess, with the joy he felt at getting at last a grip of the land, his bitterness and sullen rage at not being able to keep the whole grew and grew. Those five acres, all of one piece, made such a fine field. He had insisted on the division, so that no one might have what he couldn't get; and yet the wholesale destruction drove him distracted. He again tried to find frivolous causes of quarrel.

Fouan, standing in a listless attitude, had been looking on at the dismemberment of his property without a word.

"It's finished!" said Grosbois. "And look at it how you will, you won't find a pound difference between the lots."

There were still, on the plateau, ten acres of plough-land divided into a dozen plots, none of which were much more than an acre in size. Indeed, one was only about a rood, and the surveyor having inquired, with a sneer, whether that also was to be sub-divided, a fresh dispute arose.

Buteau, with his instinctive gesture, had stooped down and taken up a handful of earth, which he raised to his face as if to try its flavour. A complacent wrinkling of his nose seemed to pronounce it better than all the rest; and, after gently filtering it through his fingers, he said that if they left the lot to him it was all right, otherwise he insisted on a division. Delhomme and Hyacinthe angrily refused, and likewise wanted their share. Yes, yes! A third of a rood each; that was the only fair way. By sub-dividing every plot, they were sure that none of the three could have anything which the other two lacked.

"Come on to the vineyard," said Fouan, and as they turned towards the church, he threw a last glance over the vast plain, pausing for an instant to look at the distant buildings of La Borderie. Then, with a cry of inconsolable regret, alluding to the old lost opportunity of buying up the national property:

"Ah!" said he, "if father had only chosen, Grosbois, you would now be measuring all that!"

The two sons and the son-in-law turned sharply round, and there was a new halt and a lingering look at the seven hundred and fifty acres of the farm spread out before them.

"Ugh!" grunted Buteau, as he set off again: "Much good it does us, that story! It's always our fate to be the prey of the townsfolk."

Ten o'clock struck. The main part of the work was over. But they hastened their steps, for the wind had fallen, and a heavy dark cloud had just discharged itself of a premonitory shower. The various Rognes vineyards were situated beyond the church, on the hill-side which sloped down to the Aigre. In former times, the château had stood there with its grounds; and it was barely more than a century since the peasantry, encouraged by the success of the Montigny vineyards, near Cloyes, had decided to plant vines on this declivity, though it was specially adapted for the purpose by its Southern aspect and the steepness of its slope. The wine it yielded was thin but of a pleasantly acid taste, and resembled the minor Orléanais vintages. Each owner only secured a few casks, Delhomme, the wealthiest, possessing some seven acres of vine-land; the rest of the country-side was entirely given up to cereals and plants for fodder.

They turned down behind the church, skirted the old ruined presbytery which had been turned into a lodging for the rural constable, and gained the narrow chequered patches. As they crossed a piece of stony ground, covered with shrubs, a shrill voice cried through a gap:

"Father, it's raining! and I've brought out my geese."

It was the voice of "La Trouille,"[3] Hyacinthe's daughter, a girl of twelve, thin and wiry like a holly branch, with fair towzled hair. Her large mouth had a twist to the left, her green eyes stared so boldly that she might have been taken for a boy, and her dress consisted of an old blouse of her father's, tied round her waist with some string. The reason everybody called her La Trouille—although she bore, by right, the fair name of Olympe—was that Hyacinthe, who used to yell at her from morning till night, could never say a word to her without adding:

"Just wait, you dirty troll, and I'll make it hot for you!"

He had begotten this wilding of a drab, whom he had picked up in a ditch after a fair, and whom he had installed in his den, to the great scandal of all Rognes. For nearly three years the household had been at sixes-and-sevens, and one harvest evening the baggage went off the way she came, in company with another man. The child, then scarcely weaned, had grown apace after the manner of ill weeds; and, as soon as she could walk, she got the meals ready for her father, whom she both dreaded and worshipped. Her chief passion, however, was for geese. At first she had only had two, male and female, stolen when quite young from behind a farm hedge. Then, thanks to her maternal care, the flock had increased, and she now possessed twenty birds, which she fed by pillage.

When La Trouille made her appearance, with her brazen, goat-like look, driving the geese before her with a stick, Hyacinthe flew into a temper.

"Be sure you're back for dinner, or else you'll catch it! And mind you keep the house carefully locked up, you dirty troll, for fear of robbers!"

Buteau sniggered, and even Delhomme and the others could not help laughing, they were so tickled at the idea of Hyacinthe being robbed. His house was a sight; an old cellar consisting of three walls crumbled to their original clay, a regular fox-hole, amid heaps of fallen stones and under a cluster of old lime-trees. It was all that remained of the château; and when our poaching friend, falling out with his father, had ensconced himself in this stony corner belonging to the village, he had had to close up the cellar by building a fourth wall of rough stones, in which he left two openings for window and door. The place was overgrown with brambles, and a large sweet briar hid the window. The country folk called it the Château.

A new deluge poured down. Luckily the acre or so of vineyard was close by, and the division into three was effected straightforwardly, without any new ground for a quarrel arising. There now only remained seven or eight acres of meadow down by the river side; but at this moment the rain became so heavy, and fell in such torrents, that the surveyor, passing the gate of a residence, suggested that they should go in.

"What if we took shelter for a minute at Monsieur Charles's?"

Fouan had come to a standstill, wavering, full of respect for his brother-in-law and sister, who had made their fortune, and lived in a retired way in this middle-class residence.

"No, no," he muttered; "they breakfast at twelve. It would disturb their arrangements."

But Monsieur Charles put in an appearance on his stone steps under the verandah, taking an interest in the fall of rain, and, on recognising them, he called out:

"Come in, come in, do!"

Then, as they were all dripping wet, he bade them go round and enter by the kitchen, where he joined them. He was a fine man of sixty-five summers, close-shaven, with heavy eyelids over his lack-lustre eyes, and the solemn, sallow face of a retired magistrate. He was clad in deep-blue swan-skin flannel, with furred shoes, and an ecclesiastical skull-cap, which he wore with the dignified air of one whose life had been spent in duties of delicacy and authority.

When, at the age of twenty-five, Laure Fouan, then a dressmaker in a shop at Châteaudun, married Charles Badeuil, the latter kept a little café in the Rue d'Angoulême. The young pair, ambitious, and eager to make a rapid fortune, soon left there for Chartres. But, at first, nothing succeeded with them; all they put their hands to came to grief. They vainly tried another eating-house, a restaurant, even a salt-fish shop; and they despaired of ever having a copper to call their own, when Monsieur Charles, being of an enterprising nature, had the idea of buying one of the "licensed houses" in the Rue aux Juifs, which had greatly declined, owing to an unsatisfactory staff and notorious uncleanliness. He took in the situation at a glance: the requirements of Chartres, and the void to be supplied in a large town which lacked a respectable establishment, abreast of modern progress as regards safety and comfort. Indeed, before two years had passed, Number 19, re-decorated, fitted with curtains and mirrors, and provided with a highly select staff, became so very favourably known that the number of women had to be increased to six. All the officers, all the public functionaries—in short, society in general—went nowhere else. This success was kept up, thanks to the strong right arm of Monsieur Charles and his unflagging paternal administration; while Madame Charles proved herself extraordinarily active, keeping her eye on everything, letting nothing go to waste, and yet shrewd enough to overlook, when necessary, the petty larcenies of rich customers.

In less than twenty-five years the Badeuils saved three hundred thousand francs, and they then thought of fulfilling the dream of their lives: an idyllic old age, face to face with nature, amid trees, flowers, and birds. But they were kept two years longer by their inability to find a purchaser for Number 19 at the high price they valued it. And what a heartrending thing it was! An establishment furnished by themselves on the best scale, bringing in a larger income than a farm, and yet about to pass, perforce, into strange hands, in which, possibly, it would degenerate. On his settling in Chartres a daughter had been born to Monsieur Charles, by name Estelle, whom he sent to the nuns of the Visitation, at Châteaudun, when he moved into the Rue aux Juifs. In this devout, rigidly moral boarding school, he left the young girl till the age of twenty, to further purify her purity; sending her some distance off for her holidays, and keeping her in ignorance of the business in which he made his money. He only took her away on the day he wedded her to Hector Vaucogne, a young fellow employed on the local excise staff, whose excellent natural gifts were marred by extraordinary laziness. Estelle was close on thirty, and had a daughter, Elodie, aged seven, when, being at length acquainted with the facts by hearing that her father's business was in the market, she went to him of her own accord and asked him to give her the preference. Why should so safe and flourishing a business go out of the family? All was duly arranged. The Vaucognes took the place over, and the Badeuils, before a month had elapsed, had the fond satisfaction of ascertaining that their daughter, although brought up to other ideas, had turned out a first-rate manageress, which, happily, compensated for their son-in-law's supineness and lack of administrative power. They had lived in retirement at Rognes for five years, and had the supervision of their grand-daughter, Elodie, who, in her turn, had been sent to the nuns of the Visitation at Châteaudun, there to be religiously trained in principles of the strictest morality.

When Monsieur Charles came into the kitchen, where a maid was whipping some eggs, while she kept her eye upon a pan of larks fizzing in butter, they all of them, even old Fouan and Delhomme, uncovered their heads, and seemed extremely flattered at shaking hands with him.

"Bless me!" said Grosbois, to make himself agreeable, "What a charming property this is of yours! And to think that you picked it up for a mere song. Oh, you artful dog, you!"

The other puffed himself out like a turkey-cock.

"A bargain, a windfall. We took a fancy to it, and, besides, Madame Charles had set her heart on ending her days in her own part of the country. As for me, where the heart is engaged I have always been indulgent."

Roseblanche, as the property had been christened, was the "folly" of a townsman of Cloyes, who had just laid out upon it nearly fifty thousand francs, when a fit of apoplexy struck him down before the paint was dry on the walls. The house, very trim, and situated on the slope of the plateau, stood in a garden of some seven acres, which reached down to the Aigre. In that out-of-the-way spot, on the confines of sombre Beauce, no purchaser could be found, and Monsieur Charles had got the place for twenty thousand francs. There he blissfully satisfied all his tastes, fishing the stream for superb trout and eels, making beloved collections of rose-trees and carnations, and keeping a large aviary full of wood warblers, which no one but himself tended. There the fond old pair ran through an income of twelve thousand francs, in a state of perfect happiness, which they looked upon as the rightful recompense of their thirty years of toil.

"Eh?" added Monsieur Charles. "At least people know who we are, here."

"Undoubtedly you are known," replied the surveyor. "Your money is sufficient recommendation."

All the rest assented.

"True; quite true."

Then Monsieur Charles bade the servant bring some glasses, he himself going into the cellar to fetch up two bottles of wine. With their noses turned towards the frying-pan, in which the larks were browning, they all sniffed the savoury smell, and solemnly drank, rolling the wine round in their mouths.

"Gracious! It don't come from this part of the country, I know! Capital!"

"Another drop. Your health!"

"Yours!"

As they laid down their glasses, Madame Charles, an estimable-looking matron of sixty-two, with snowy frontlets, made her appearance. In her the thick, large-nosed visage of the Fouans was of a pale, pink hue; hers was the calm, sweet, monastic complexion of an aged nun who had led a sequestered life. Clinging to her with awkward shyness followed Elodie, who was spending a two days' holiday at Rognes. Preyed upon by chlorosis, and over-tall for a girl of twelve, her flabby ugliness, and her thin, blanched hair bespoke an impoverished system; and she had been, moreover, kept in such restraint during her course of training for spotless maidenhood that she was half an imbecile.

"Ha! you here!" said Madame Charles, shaking hands with her brother and nephew, slowly and impressively, in token of the distance between them. Then, turning round, and giving no further heed to such fellows, she added:

"Come in, come in, Monsieur Patoir; the animal is here."

Patoir was the Cloyes veterinary—short, stout, full-blooded, and purple; with the aspect of a trooper, and wearing heavy moustaches. He had just driven up in a mud-splashed gig through the pelting rain.

"This poor darling," she went on, taking out of a warm oven a basket in which an old cat lay in the throes of death; "this poor darling was seized yesterday with a shivering fit, and it was then I wrote to you. Ah! he's not young; he is nearly fifteen. We had him ten years at Chartres, but last year my daughter had to get rid of him, and I brought him here because he misbehaved himself in every corner of the shop."

"Shop" was for Elodie's benefit, she being told that her parents kept a confectionery business, amid such a press of work, that they could not receive her there. The country-folk, however, did not even smile, for the expression was current in Rognes, where people said that "even Hourdequin's farm was not so profitable as Monsieur Charles's shop." The men stared at the shrivelled, old, yellow, mangy, miserable cat; the old cat who had purred in all the beds in the Rue aux Juifs, the cat stroked and fondled by the plump hands of five or six generations of women. Long had he been pampered and petted, the spoiled darling of the saloon and retiring-rooms, licking up unconsidered trifles of pomade, drinking the water in the toilet-glasses, a mute, abstracted spectator of what went on, seeing everything with his slender pupils set in gold.

"Monsieur Patoir, pray cure him," concluded Madame Charles.

The veterinary distended his eyelids, and screwed up his nose and mouth, all his bluff, coarse, bull-dog physiognomy being set in motion. And he cried:

"What? You've brought me all this way for that! I'll cure him for you! Tie a stone round his neck and chuck him into the water!"

Elodie burst into tears, and Madame Charles became purple in the face with indignation.

"Why, he stinks, this pet of yours! Keeping a horrid thing like that, to give the house cholera! Chuck the beast into the water!"

Nevertheless, the old lady being really angry, he eventually sat down at the table and grumblingly wrote out a prescription.

"Oh! all right, if you enjoy being plague-stricken. So long as I'm paid, what on earth can it matter to me? Look here; get this down his throat, a spoonful at a time, every hour; and here's another mixture for two baths, one this evening, the other to-morrow."

For the last instant or so Monsieur Charles had been restless feeling disconsolate at seeing the larks burn, while the maid, tired of beating up the omelette, stood idly by. So he briskly gave Patoir his six francs 'consulting fee, and urged the others to empty their glasses.

"Anyhow, the breakfast's got to be eaten. Ah! see you again soon. The rain has given over."

They left reluctantly, and the veterinary, getting into his rickety old trap, said once more:

"A cat that isn't worth the cord to chuck him into the water with! Well, that's just how it is, when people are well off!"

But all of them, even Buteau, who had grown pale with sullen envy, shook their heads in protest; and Delhomme the wise declared:

"Say what you will, people who have managed to put by an income of twelve thousand francs can't be either idlers or fools."

The veterinary had whipped up his horse, and the others made for the Aigre, through pathways now converted into torrents. They had got to the seven or eight acres of meadow that were to be divided, when the rain came down again in a perfect deluge. But this time they stuck obstinately to the task, being desperately hungry, and anxious to get it over. Only one dispute delayed them, with reference to the third lot, which was treeless, whereas a copse happened to be distributed between the other two. However, all now seemed settled and sanctioned. The surveyor promised them he would forward the memoranda to the notary, to enable him to draw up the deed; and it was agreed to defer the drawing of the lots till the following Sunday, when it should take place at ten o'clock, at the father's house.

As they returned into Rognes, Hyacinthe jerked out an oath:

"Wait, wait, you dirty troll, and I'll make it pretty hot for you!"

By the grassy wayside, La Trouille was leisurely driving her geese under the muttering downpour. At the head of the dripping, delighted flock, walked the gander, and when he turned his big yellow beak to the right, all the other big yellow beaks went to the right too. The child, taking fright at her father's words, sped home to see to the dinner, followed by a file of long-necks, which were all stretched out in the rear of the outstretched neck of the gander.

[CHAPTER IV.]

The following Sunday happened to fall just on All Saints' Day, the first of November; and, on the stroke of nine, the Abbé Godard, who was priest of Bazoches-le-Doyen, with subordinate charge of the ancient parish of Rognes, reached the top of the slope which led down to the little bridge over the Aigre. Rognes, more important in days of yore, but now reduced to a population of barely three hundred souls, had had no priest of its own for years, and seemed completely indifferent to the fact, insomuch that the municipal council had lodged the rural constable in the half-ruined parsonage.

So, every Sunday, the Abbé Godard walked the two miles between Bazoches-le-Doyen and Rognes. Being stout and dumpy, with a neck red at the nape and so swollen at the throat as to tilt his head backward, he compelled himself to this exercise for the sake of his health. On this particular Sunday, finding himself late, he was puffing terribly, with his mouth wide open in his apoplectic face, the fat of which half smothered his small snub nose and tiny grey eyes; and, despite the livid, snow-laden sky, and the premature frost which had followed the storms of the week, he was swinging his hat in his hand, having bared the thick tangles of his grizzled, carroty hair.

The road made an abrupt descent, and on the left bank of the Aigre, before reaching the stone bridge, there were only a few houses, a sort of suburb, through which the Abbé rushed tempestuously. He did not even cast a glance, either up or down stream, on the slow, limpid river winding through the meadows amid clumps of willows and poplars. On the right bank began the village proper, a double row of frontages edging the high road, while others climbed at random up the slope; and just past the bridge one found the municipal offices and the school, an old barn raised a floor higher and white-washed. For an instant the Abbé hesitated, and then craned his neck into the empty entrance-hall of the school. When he turned round, he cast a searching glance into two taverns facing him: the one having a neat shop-front, filled with flasks, and surmounted by a little yellow wooden sign bearing the inscription: Macqueron, grocer, in green letters; the other merely having its door decorated with a holly-branch, and displaying in black upon a roughly-whitened wall the words: Lengaigne. Tobacco. The priest was making up his mind to enter a steep lane between these two houses, a short ascent leading straight to the front of the church, when he caught sight of an old peasant and stopped.

"Aha! so it's you, Fouan. I'm in a hurry, but I wanted to see you. Tell me, what's doing? It's out of the question for your son, Buteau, to leave Lise in the plight she's in, with her figure unmistakably on the increase. She is one of the 'Handmaidens of the Virgin.' It's a disgrace, a disgrace!"

The old man listened, with an air of deferential politeness.

"Why, your reverence, what do you expect me to do, if Buteau holds out? And, besides, the lad's right, so far as that goes; he can't marry at his age on nothing."

"But there's a baby!"

"To be sure there is. Only the baby's not yet born, and one can never tell. That's just where it is: a baby's not an encouraging thing when you can't afford a shift for its back."

He made these remarks sagely, as became an old man who knew life. Then he added, in the same measured tone:

"Besides, an arrangement may, perhaps, be made. I am dividing my property. The lots will be drawn for presently, after mass. Then, when Buteau gets his share, he will, I hope, see about marrying his cousin."

"Good!" said the priest. "That's enough. Fouan, I rely upon you."

The pealing of a bell curtailed his speech, and he asked, apprehensively:

"That's the second bell, isn't it?"

"No, your reverence, the third."

"Good gracious! that brute of a Bécu at it again! Ringing without waiting for me!"

He cursed, and ran violently up the pathway. At the top he all but had a fit; he was puffing away like a blacksmith's bellows.

The bell rang on, while the ravens it had disturbed flew cawing round the steeple, a fifteenth-century spire, which bore witness to the ancient importance of Rognes. In front of the wide, open door a group of peasants were waiting, among whom the innkeeper, Lengaigne, a freethinker, was smoking his pipe. Farther on, against the churchyard wall, farmer Hourdequin, the mayor—a well-built man, with strongly-marked features—chatted with his assessor, the grocer Macqueron. When the priest had passed by with a salute, they all followed him, excepting Lengaigne, who ostentatiously turned his back, pulling at his pipe.

Inside the church, to the right of the porch, there was a man hanging on to a rope, which he still went on pulling.

"That'll do, Bécu!" said the Abbé Godard, beside himself. "I've told you twenty times to wait for me before you ring the third time."

The rural constable, who was also the bell-ringer, fell to his feet, aghast at his own disobedience. He was a little man of fifty, with the square, bronzed physiognomy of an old soldier, grey moustache and goatee, and a rigid neck, seeming as if he were continually choked by a tight collar. Already very tipsy, he stood to attention, without venturing to excuse himself.

Moreover, the priest had already made off, and was crossing the nave, with a glance at the seats. There was a scanty attendance. On the left, he as yet saw only Delhomme, present in his capacity of municipal councillor. On the right, the women's side, there were at the most a dozen. He recognised Cœlina Macqueron, shrivelled, sinewy, and overbearing; Flore Lengaigne, buxom, mild, and good-humoured; and Bécu's good woman, a lanky, very dirty, dark brunette. But what put the finishing touch to his wrath was the behaviour of the "Handmaidens of the Virgin" in the front row. Françoise was there between two of her friends—the Macquerons' daughter, Berthe, a handsome brunette, brought up as a lady at Cloyes, and the Lengaignes' daughter, Suzanne, a fair, plain, bold-faced hussy, whom her parents were about to apprentice to a dressmaker at Châteaudun. All the three were indulging in unseemly laughter. And, beside them, poor Lise, plump and cheerful, faced the altar, exposing her scandalous condition to public comment.

Finally, the Abbé Godard was going into the sacristy, when he came across Delphin and Nénesse pushing each other about in play, whereas they were supposed to be getting the wine vases ready for mass. The first-named, Bécu's son, aged eleven, was a sun-burnt youngster, already well-knit, and just leaving school to become a ploughman; while Ernest, Delhomme's eldest, of the same age, fair, slim, and given to loafing, always carried a looking-glass in his pocket.

"Now, then, you mischievous imps," cried the priest, "do you think you're in a cow-shed?"

And turning towards a tall, thin, young man, whose sallow face bristled with a few light hairs, and who was arranging some books on the shelf of a cupboard, he added:

"Really, Monsieur Lequeu, you might keep them quiet when I am out of the way!"

This was the schoolmaster, a peasant's son, whose education had taught him to hate those of his own station. He resorted to violence with his boys, treating them like brute beasts, and cloaked Republican ideas under a scrupulously formal demeanour towards the priest and the mayor. He sang well in the choir, and even looked after the sacred books; but he had refused point-blank to ring the bell, in spite of custom, such a task being unworthy of a free man.

"I am not entrusted with maintaining order in church," he responded, dryly. "At my place, though, wouldn't I just box their ears!"

And as the Abbé, without answering, hastily shuffled into his alb and stole, he went on:

"Low mass, isn't it?"

"Yes, to be sure, and be quick! I've got to be at Bazoches by half-past ten for high mass."

M. Lequeu, who had taken an old missal from the cupboard, closed the latter and went out to place the book on the altar.

"Make haste, make haste," repeated the priest, hurrying Delphin and Nénesse.

And, still perspiring, still panting, with the chalice in his hand, he went back into the church and began the mass, at which the two urchins officiated with sly, quizzical side-looks. The church had but one aisle, with a vaulted, oak-panelled roof, falling to pieces through the obstinate refusal of the municipal council to allow any funds. The rain dripped through the broken slates of the roofing, deep stains marked the advanced state of decay of the woodwork, and beyond the choir, shut off by a railing, a greenish leakage aloft disfigured the fresco of the apsis, cutting the figure of an Eternal Father, worshipped by angels, atwain.

When the priest turned, open armed, towards the congregation, he calmed down a bit on observing that some people had come in—the mayor, his assessor, some municipal councillors, old Fouan, and Clou the farrier, who played the trombone when there was a musical service. Lequeu had remained, with a stately air, in the front row. Bécu, although drunk, stood bolt upright in the background. On the women's side, especially, the seats had filled up, Fanny, Rose, La Grande, and others had come, so that the "Handmaidens of the Virgin," now poring over their books in an exemplary way, had had to crowd closer together. What particularly flattered the priest was to perceive Monsieur and Madame Charles, with their grand-daughter Elodie; he in a black frock-coat, she in a green silk dress, both of them solemn and splendiferous, setting a good example.

Nevertheless, he hurried over his mass, mangling the Latin and maiming the rites. In his address, not going into the pulpit, but sitting on a chair in the middle of the choir, he made a miserable exhibition of himself, lost the thread of his discourse, and gave up as hopeless the task of ever finding it again. Eloquence was not his strong point; he stumbled over his words, and hum'd and ha'd without ever being able to finish his sentences, which explained why his lordship the Bishop had overlooked him for twenty-five years in his little cure of Bazoches-le-Doyen. The rest of the service was vamped; the bell-ringing, during the elevation of the Host, sounded like electric signals gone mad, and the priest dismissed the congregation with an "Ite missa est," as smart as the crack of a whip.

The church was barely empty when the Abbé Godard re-appeared, with his hat hastily put on wrong side foremost. Before the door stood a group of women—Cœlina, Flore, and old mother Bécu—all much annoyed at having been raced along at that pace. It was making very light of them to give them no more on a high holiday.

"I say, your reverence," asked Cœlina, in her shrill voice, as she stopped him: "You've got a spite against us, packing us off just like a bundle of rags."

"Why, it's like this," he replied; "my own people are waiting for me. I can't be both at Bazoches and at Rognes. Get a priest of your own if you want high masses."

This was always a sore point between Rognes and the Abbé, the villagers insisting on special attention, and he strictly confining himself to what he was obliged to do for a village which refused to repair its church, and where, moreover, constant scandals discouraged him. Indicating the "Handmaidens of the Virgin," who were leaving together, he resumed:

"And, besides, is it decent to go through ceremonies with young folks who have no respect whatever for God's commandments?"

"You don't mean that for my girl, I hope?" asked Cœlina, between her teeth.

"Nor for mine, I'm sure?" added Flore.

Then he lost all patience and burst out:

"I mean it for those it concerns. It's as plain as a pike-staff. White dresses, indeed. A pretty thing! I never have a procession here without one of them being in the family way. No, no; you'd tire out God Almighty himself."

He left them; and Bécu's wife, who had remained silent, had to make peace between the two mothers, who, in considerable excitement, were heaping reproaches on each other on their daughters' account. But her peace-making was of such a bitterly insinuating character that the quarrel rose higher.

Oh yes! They would see how Berthe would turn out, with her velvet bodices and her piano! And Suzanne, what a first-rate idea to send her to the milliner's at Châteaudun, so that she might go the pace with the best of them!

The Abbé Godard was rushing off, when he came full upon Monsieur and Madame Charles. A broad, beaming smile overspread his face, and his hat performed a sweeping obeisance. Monsieur bowed majestically. Madame made her best curtsey. It was fated that the priest should never get off, for no sooner had he cleared the square than he was brought up by another chance encounter. This was with a tall woman of thirty, who looked quite fifty, with thin hair and a flat, flabby, bran-yellow face. Broken down and worn out by excessive exertion, she was staggering under the weight of a faggot of brushwood.

"Palmyre," he asked, "why didn't you come to mass on All Saints' Day? It's disgraceful."

"No doubt, your reverence," she groaned, "but what's to be done? My brother is cold, and we are freezing at home. So I've been picking up these along the hedges."

"La Grande is still as hard as ever, then?"

"Rather! She'd die before she'd chuck us a crust or a log."

In a dolorous voice she repeated her own and her brother's story: how their grandmother had turned them out of doors, how she had had to take refuge with her brother in an old deserted stable. Poor Hilarion, bandy and hare-lipped, lacked intelligence; indeed, despite his twenty years of age, he was so idiotic that no one would give him employment. And so she was bringing herself to death's door in working for him, tending him with the impassioned care and untiring tenderness of a mother.

As the Abbé Godard listened to her, his coarse, perspiring face assumed a look of the purest kindness, his little angry eyes grew beautiful with charity, his large mouth took a sweetly sad expression. This formidable scold, always being whirled to and fro by gusts of wrath, was passionately devoted to the wretched, and gave them everything—his money, linen, and clothes. To such a point that in all La Beauce you would not find a priest with a rustier or a more extensively darned cassock.

He fumbled anxiously in his pockets, and slipped a five-franc piece into Palmyre's hand.

"Here! Put it away; I've none for anybody else. I shall have to talk again to La Grande, since she's so wicked."

This time he got clear off. Luckily, as he was puffing and blowing up the slope on the other side of the Aigre, the Bazoches butcher, on his way back, gave him a lift in his cart; and he all but vanished as he gained the level of the plain, jolting along with the dancing silhouette of his three-cornered hat alone standing out against the leaden sky.

Meantime the church square had emptied, and Fouan and Rose had just gone down home, where they found Grosbois already waiting. A little before ten, Delhomme and Hyacinthe arrived in their turn; but Buteau was waited for in vain till twelve.

The eccentric rascal never could be punctual. Doubtless he had stopped on the road somewhere to breakfast. It was proposed to go on without him; then, a vague fear inspired by his hot-headedness led to the decision that the lots should not be drawn for till two o'clock, after breakfast. Grosbois, accepting a bit of bacon and a glass of wine from the Fouans, finished up one bottle, started on another, and relapsed into his usual state of intoxication.

Two o'clock, and still no Buteau appeared. So Hyacinthe, languishing for debauch, like the rest of the village, that Sunday feast-day, went lounging past Macqueron's. This succeeded: the door was flung open, and Bécu appeared shouting:

"Come along, you rascally baggage, and let me treat you to a glass."

Bécu had got stiffer still, assuming more and more dignity as his intoxication increased. A drunken, old-soldierly fellowship, a secret affection, drew him towards the poacher; but he avoided recognising him when he was on duty with his badge on his arm, being always on the point of catching him flagrante delicto, and struggling between duty and inclination. In the tavern, however, when he was tipsy, he stood him treat like a brother.

"Take a hand at piquet, eh?" said he; "and, by God, if the Bedouins bore us, we'll slit their ears for 'em!"

They installed themselves at a table, and played cards boisterously, while quart after quart of wine was served them.

Macqueron, with his fat, moustachioed face, sat huddled up in a corner, twiddling his thumbs. Since he had been gaining money by speculating in the light wines of Montigny, he had fallen into idle ways—hunting, fishing, and playing the gentleman; though he remained filthy and ragged, while his daughter Berthe flounced to and fro in silk. If his wife had heeded him they would have shut up shop, giving up both the grocery and the refreshment business; for he was growing conceited, and had dim ambitions, as yet unrecognised by himself. But she was ferociously eager for gain, and he, although concerning himself personally about nothing, was content to let her go on serving tipple, just to annoy his neighbour Lengaigne, who kept the tobacco shop, and also dealt in drink. 'Twas a long-standing rivalry, ever smouldering, and ever ready to burst into a blaze.

Yet sometimes they were at peace for weeks together; and, as it happened, Lengaigne then came in with his son Victor, a tall, awkward youth, who was to draw for the conscription the next year. Lengaigne himself, a lanky, frozen-looking man, with a little owl's head set upon broad, brawny shoulders, had remained a peasant and tilled the soil, while his wife weighed out the tobacco and drew the wine. He derived a special importance from the fact that he was barber and hair-cutter to the whole village, an avocation which he had brought back from his regiment, and which he plied either at his shop, amid the eaters and drinkers, or else, if his customers preferred it, at their own homes.

"Well, this beard of yours, is it to be done to-day, my boy?" he asked, from the door.

"Bless me! Right you are, I told you to come," cried Macqueron. "This very moment, if you like."

He reached an old shaving-dish from its hook, and took some soap and warm water, while the other drew from his pocket a razor the size of a cutlass, which he set about sharpening on a strop fixed to the case. A squeaky voice now issued from the adjacent grocery department:

"I say," cried Cœlina, "are you going to mess the tables which people drink at? Well, then, you sha'n't! I won't have hair found in the glasses at my house."

This was an attack on the cleanliness of the rival tavern, where customers ate more hair than they drank genuine wine, she said.

"Sell your salt and pepper, and hold your row!" replied Macqueron, annoyed by this public curtain-lecture. Hyacinthe and Bécu tittered.

"An extinguisher for the good lady that!" They ordered of her a fresh quart of wine, which she brought in speechless fury. Then they shuffled the cards, and dashed them violently on to the table, as if to exasperate each other. Trump, trump, and trump!

Lengaigne had already lathered his customer, and was holding him by the nose, when Lequeu, the schoolmaster, pushed the door open.

"Good-day, everybody!"

He stood silently in front of the stove, warming his loins, while young Victor, stationed behind the players, became absorbed in watching their game.

"By the by," resumed Macqueron, taking advantage of a moment when Lengaigne was wiping the lather off the razor on to his shoulder, "just now, before mass, Monsieur Hourdequin spoke to me again about the road. Things must be settled some way or another."

The road in question was the famous one direct from Rognes to Châteaudun, which was to shorten the distance by about two leagues, for vehicles were now forced to pass through Cloyes. Of course, the farm was much interested in this new route, and to carry the point the mayor relied greatly on his assessor—himself interested in a speedy settlement. There was a question of facilitating the approach of vehicles to the church, which could now only be reached by goat-paths, and the projected line of route followed the steep lane that wound its narrow way between the two taverns. Only broaden that, and level down the ascent a bit, and the grocer's grounds—which would be by the road-side, and of easy access—would increase tenfold in value.

"Yes," he continued, "it would seem that the Government, before giving us any help, is waiting for us to vote something. That's so, isn't it? You are in it."

Lengaigne, who was a municipal councillor, but who had not as much as a square inch of garden behind his house, replied:

"I don't care a curse! What the deuce has your road to do with me?"

Then, making an attack on the other cheek, which he rasped as with a nutmeg-grater, he fell foul of the farm. These latter-day gentlefolks were even worse than the nobles of old. Why, they had kept everything to themselves in the distribution of the land, made laws merely for their own advantage, and they lived only on the distress of poor folks. The others listened, constrained, yet inwardly pleased by his temerity, for they had the peasant's immemorial, unconquerable hatred of the landowner.

"It's a good thing we are among ourselves," muttered Macqueron, glancing uneasily at the schoolmaster. "I am on the Government side. So is our deputy, Monsieur de Chédeville, who is, they say, a friend of the Emperor's."

Lengaigne began furiously shaking his razor.

"And that's another pretty rogue of a fellow! Oughtn't a rich man like him, possessing more than two thousand acres of land over there towards Orgères, oughtn't he to make you a present of your road, instead of trying to wring coppers out of the village? The low beast!"

The grocer, alarmed this time, protested. "No, no. He's very straightforward, and not proud. But for him you wouldn't have had your tobacco-counter. What would you say if he took it away from you again?"

Abruptly calming down, Lengaigne went on scraping the other's chin. He had lost his temper and gone too far; his wife was right in saying that his ideas would play him false. At that moment a quarrel was heard to threaten between Bécu and Hyacinthe. The former was in an ill-tempered, pugnacious state of drunkenness, while the other, on the contrary, grim and overbearing though he was when sober, grew more and more maudlin with every glass of wine, subsiding into the genial meekness of a tipsy apostle. Add to this their radical difference of opinion: the poacher being a Republican—a Red, as people said—who boasted of having made the gentlefolks dance the rigadoon at Cloyes in '48; and the rural constable being a wild Bonapartist and worshipping the Emperor, with whom he pretended to be acquainted.

"I swear it! We had partaken of a red herring salad together, when he said to me: 'Not a word. I am the Emperor.' I knew him at a glance, because of his likeness on the five-franc pieces."

"Maybe! Anyhow, he's a low fellow, who beats his wife and never loved his mother!"

"Hold your tongue, in God's name! or I'll break your jaw for you!"

The quart bottle which Bécu was brandishing had to be taken from him; whilst Hyacinthe, with tearful eyes, sat awaiting the blow in cheerful resignation. Then they resumed their game, like brothers. Trump, trump, and trump!

Macqueron, rendered uneasy by the assumed indifference of the schoolmaster, finished by asking him:

"And you, Monsieur Lequeu, what do you say?"

Lequeu, who was warming his slender, sallow hands against the stove-pipe, smiled the bitter smile of a superior person who is compelled by his position to remain silent.

"I say nothing," he answered. "It's none of my business."

Macqueron soused his face in a basin of water, and while spluttering and wiping himself dry, replied:

"Well, mark my words! I mean to do something. If the road's voted, by God, I'll let 'em have my ground for nothing."

This declaration stupefied the audience. Even Hyacinthe and Bécu looked up, despite their intoxication. There was a pause. They gazed at Macqueron as if he had suddenly gone mad; and he, spurred on by the effect produced, yet with his hands trembling at the engagement he was taking, added:

"There'll be something like half an acre. The man who goes back on his word is a scoundrel! I've sworn it!"

Lengaigne departed with his son Victor, exasperated and disgusted by his neighbour's munificence. Land didn't cost him much, the way he robbed people.

Macqueron, despite the cold, now took his gun, and went out to see if he could come across a rabbit he had noticed in his vineyard the day before. In the tavern there only remained Lequeu—who spent his Sundays there without taking anything to drink—and the two gamblers, who were poring over their cards. Hours elapsed, while other peasants came and went.

Towards five o'clock the door was roughly pushed open, and Buteau appeared, followed by Jean. Immediately he saw Hyacinthe, he cried:

"I'd have wagered five francs. Don't you care a damn for anybody? We're waiting for you."

The drunkard, slobbering and merry, replied:

"That's a good 'un! I'm waiting for you. You've kept us hanging about since morning, and I think it cool of you to complain."

Buteau had stopped at La Borderie, where Jacqueline, whom, at the age of fifteen, he had knocked head over heels in the hay, had kept him to eat some hot buttered toast with Jean. Farmer Hourdequin having gone to breakfast at Cloyes after mass, the two sparks had kept it up pretty late, and had only just reached the village in each other's company.

Meantime, Bécu yelled out that he would pay for the five quarts, but that the game was to stand over; while Hyacinthe, reluctantly unfixing himself from his chair, followed his brother, chuckling to himself, with his eyes swimming in mildness.

"Wait there," said Buteau to Jean, "and in half an hour come and pick me up. You know you dine with me at father's."

When the two brothers had entered the sitting-room of the Fouans' house, they found the company assembled in full. The father was standing up with bent head. The mother, seated near the table in the middle, was mechanically knitting. Opposite her was Grosbois, who had eaten and drunk so much as to be in a state of doze, with his eyes half-open; while, farther off, Fanny and Delhomme were waiting patiently on two low chairs. There were some unwonted articles in the smoky room, with its shabby old furniture and its utensils worn by scrubbing: a blank sheet of paper, an ink-bottle, and a pen stood on the table beside the surveyor's hat—a monumental, rusty-black hat with which he had trudged through rain and sunshine for ten years past. Night was falling, and through the narrow window came an expiring, murky glimmer, in which the flat brim and urn-like body of the hat loomed strangely.

Grosbois, always ready for business in spite of his intoxication, woke up and stammered out:

"Now we're right. I told you the deed was ready. I called yesterday at Monsieur Baillehache's, and he showed it me. Only the numbers of the lots are left blank after your names. So we will draw, and the notary need then only write in the lots and you can sign on Saturday at his place."

He roused himself and raised his voice: "Come, I will get the tickets ready."

Fouan's children abruptly approached, making no secret of their distrust. They watched Grosbois, and kept a sharp eye on his slightest movements, as on those of a conjuror capable of juggling away the shares. First he had cut the sheet of paper into three with his drink-sodden, shaking fingers; now he was writing the figures 1, 2, 3, and enormous, strongly-marked figures they were. The others watched his pen over his shoulders, the parents themselves nodding their satisfaction on seeing the impossibility of deception. The tickets were slowly folded up and thrown into the hat. A solemn stillness reigned.

At the expiration of two long minutes Grosbois exclaimed:

"Well, you must make up your minds. Who begins?"

No one stirred. The night deepened, and the hat seemed to grow larger in the gloom.

"By order of seniority, eh?" proposed the surveyor. "You begin, Hyacinthe, you're the eldest."

Hyacinthe, the amiable, came forward, but he lost his balance, and all but fell sprawling. He had violently shoved his fist into the hat as though with the purpose of extracting a mass of rock from it. When he had secured one of the tickets, he had to go to the window to see.

"Two!" cried he, evidently finding something exceedingly humorous in the figure, for he choked with laughter.

"Your turn, Fanny," now called Grosbois.

When Fanny had got her hand to the bottom, she did not hurry. She fumbled about, stirred the papers round, and seemed to weigh them one after the other.

"Picking and choosing's not allowed," said Buteau, savagely. He was suffocating with passion, and had turned pale on ascertaining the number drawn by his brother.

"Eh? Why not?" replied Fanny. "I'm not looking; surely I may feel."

"Get on," murmured the father; "there's nothing to choose between 'em; one's as heavy as the other."

At last she made up her mind, and ran to the window.

"One!"

"Well, then, Buteau has number three," resumed Fouan. "Draw it, my boy."

In the growing darkness they had not seen how the face of the young man changed. He burst out in wrath:

"Never, never!"

"What?"

"If you think I'm going to assent to this, you're wrong! The third lot, eh? The bad one! I told you over and over again that I wanted a different division. But you pooh-pooh'd me! Besides, can't I see through your trickery? Oughtn't the youngest to have drawn first? No, I won't draw, since there's been cheating!"

The parents gazed at his wild movements as he gesticulated and stamped about.

"My poor boy, you're going crazy," said Rose.

"Oh, yes, mamma, I know well enough you never liked me. You'd strip the skin off my back to give it to my brother. You'd all of you eat me alive."

Fouan sternly interrupted him. "Enough of this folly! Will you draw?"

"It'll have to be done all over again."

At this there was a general protest. Hyacinthe and Fanny clutched their papers as if a forcible attempt were being made upon them. Delhomme declared that the drawing had been fair, and Grosbois, much aggrieved, threatened to leave if his honesty were called in question.

"Then papa shall add a thousand francs to my share out of his hoard," said Buteau.

The old man, taken aback for an instant, stammered. Then he drew himself up and advanced threateningly.

"What's that you say? So you're anxious to get me assassinated, you brute? Raze the house to the ground and you won't find a copper. Take that paper, or, by God, you shall have nothing at all!"

Buteau, with a hardened and obstinate brow, did not quail before his father's raised fist.

"No!"

An awkward silence again fell. The huge hat was now an encumbrance and obstruction, with this solitary scrap of paper, which nobody would touch, inside it. The surveyor, to cut things short, advised the old man to draw it out himself. He did so, gravely, and went to the light to read it, as if the number were still unknown.

"Three! You've the third lot, d'ye hear? The deed is ready, and it's quite certain that Monsieur Baillehache won't alter it, for once done can't be undone. As you're sleeping here, I give you the night to think it over in. So that's done with. Let's say no more about it."

Buteau, wrapped in shadow, made no reply. The others noisily assented, while the mother at last made up her mind to light a candle so as to lay the cloth.

At that moment Jean, who was coming to meet his comrade, espied two intertwined shadows watching, from the dark deserted road, the progress of events at the Fouans. Feathery snow-flakes were beginning to flutter across the slate-grey sky.

"Oh, Monsieur Jean," said a soft voice, "how you frightened us!"

Then he recognised Françoise's long face and thick lips. She was nestling against her sister Lise, and had one arm round her waist, while she leant her head on her shoulder. The two sisters adored each other, and were always seen about like this, hanging on each other's neck. Lise taller, and of pleasant aspect, despite her large features and the incipient development of her whole plump person, bore her misfortune with equanimity.

"You were spying, eh?" Jean inquired gaily.

"Why, what's going on in there has an interest for me," replied Lise, freely and openly. "It's a point whether it will make Buteau come to a decision."

Françoise, with her other arm, had now caressingly encircled her sister's swollen figure.

"What a shame, the brute! When he's got some land, p'raps he'll be looking out for some one better off."

But Jean gave them hope. The drawing of the lots must have come to an end, and the rest was matter of arrangement. When he told them he was to sup at the old folks' house, Françoise added, as she turned away: "Well, we shall see you presently; we're going to the evening meeting."

He watched them disappear in the darkness. The snow was thickening and embroidering their mingled dresses with fine white down.

[CHAPTER V.]

At seven o'clock, after dinner, the Fouans, Buteau, and Jean went to share the cow-house with the two cows which Rose had decided to sell. The animals, fastened up at the farther end, near the trough, kept the closed shed warm with the powerful exhalation from their bodies and their litter; whereas the kitchen, containing only three meagre, smouldering logs, left there after the cooking, was already chilled by the early November frost. So, in the winter, the evening meeting was held in the cow-house, on the trampled earth, snugly and warmly, with no other preparation than carrying in a small round table and a dozen old chairs. Each neighbour brought a candle in rotation. Tall shadows flickered over the bare, dust-begrimed walls, reaching up to the cobwebs on the beams; and from the rear came the warm breath of the cattle, that lay and chewed the cud.

La Grande was the first to arrive, with a piece of knitting. She never brought a candle, presuming on her great age, and she was held in such awe that her brother dared not remind her of the custom. She forthwith took the best place, drew the candlestick towards her, and kept it to herself, on the score of her failing eyes. She had rested the stick, which never left her, against her chair. Glittering flakes of snow were melting on the bristles which stuck up over her fleshless, bird-like head.

"It's coming down?" asked Rose.

"It is," she replied in her curt tones. And setting straightway to work with her knitting, she compressed her thin lips, never prodigal of speech, and cast a searching glance at Jean and Buteau.

The others made their appearance behind her. First Fanny, her son, Nénesse—Delhomme never came to the meetings—then, almost immediately, Lise and Françoise, who laughingly shook off the snow which covered them. The sight of Buteau made the former faintly blush. He looked at her unmoved.

"Been all right, Lise, since we last met?"

"Pretty well, thanks."

"Glad to hear it."

Palmyre, meanwhile, had stolen in through the half-open door, and she was shrinkingly placing herself as far as possible from her grandmother, the redoubtable La Grande, when a tumult outside made her start up. Furious stammerings, tears, laughter, and yells were heard.

"Those rascally children are at him again!" cried she.

She had made a spring forward, and opened the door again. With a bold rush, and growling like a lioness, she rescued her brother Hilarion from the mischievous clutches of La Trouille, Delphin, and Nénesse. The last-named had just joined the other two, who were hanging round the cripple and yelling. Hilarion, breathless and scared, shambled in on his twisted legs. His hare's lip made him dribble at the mouth. He stuttered unintelligibly, was decrepit-looking for his age, and brutishly hideous like the cretin that he was.

He was in a very spiteful mood, quite furious at not being able to catch and clout the urchins who were teasing him. Once more he complained that he had been pelted with a volley of snow-balls.

"Oh! what a story!" said La Trouille, with an air of surpassing innocence. "He's bitten my thumb; look!"

At this Hilarion all but choked in his struggle to get his words out; while Palmyre soothed him, and, wiping his face with her handkerchief, called him her darling boy.

"There, that'll do," said Fouan at length. "You ought to be pretty well able to prevent his catching you. Sit him down, anyhow, and let him keep quiet. Silence, you brute, or you'll be sent back home with a flea in your ear."

As the cripple continued to stutter, with the intention of putting himself in the right, La Grande, with her eyes flashing fire, seized her stick and brought it down on the table so sharply as to make every one jump. Palmyre and Hilarion collapsed in affright and stirred no more.

Then the evening began. The women, gathered round the single candle, knitted, spun, or did needlework, that they never so much as looked at. The men, stolid and taciturn, smoked in the rear, while the children pushed and pinched each other in a corner, amid suppressed giggling.

Sometimes they told stories: that of the Black Pig which guarded a treasure with a red key in its mouth; or that of the Orleans beast, which had a man's face and bat's wings, with hair down to the ground, two horns, and two tails (one to lay hold with and the other to kill with), which monster had devoured a Rouen traveller, of whom nothing remained but his hat and boots.

At other times they told tales about the wolves which, for centuries, had devastated La Beauce. In days of old, when La Beauce, now stripped and bare, had a few clumps of trees left out of its primeval forests, countless packs of wolves, urged by hunger, issued forth in winter time to prey upon the flocks. Women and children were devoured, and the old country-folk remembered how, in heavy falls of snow, the wolves would enter the towns. At Cloyes, they would be heard howling in the Place Saint-Georges; at Rognes, they would sniff round the imperfectly closed doors of the cow-houses and sheep-pens. Then came a succession of hackneyed anecdotes: of the miller surprised by five large wolves, and putting them to flight by lighting a match; of the little girl chased for two leagues by a she-wolf, and eaten up just at her own door, where she tripped and fell; legends upon legends of wer-wolves, men changed to animals, who leaped upon the necks of belated travellers, and ran them to death.

But what froze the blood of the girls gathered round the slim candle, what made them take wildly to flight and scan the darkness apprehensively as they left the house, was the villany of the Chauffeurs,[4] the notorious Orgères band of sixty years ago, at the thought of which the whole country-side still trembled.

There were hundreds of them, tramps, beggars, deserters, spurious pedlars—men, women, and children, all living by robbery, murder, and debauchery. They were the descendants of the old armed and disciplined troops of brigands, and, taking advantage of the revolutionary disturbances, they laid formal siege to lonely houses, into which they burst like bomb-shells, breaking the doors in with battering-rams. When night came on, they issued forth like wolves from the forest of Dourdan and the copses of La Conie, the wooded lairs wherein they lurked; and, with the darkening shadows, terror fell upon the farmers of La Beauce, from Etampes to Châteaudun, and from Chartres to Orleans.

Of their many legendary atrocities, the one which was most popular at Rognes was the pillage of the Millouard farm, only a few leagues distant, in the Canton of Orgères. Beau-François, their noted chief, the successor of Fleur d'Epine, had with him that night his lieutenant, Rouge d'Auneau, Grand-Dragon, Breton-le-cul-sec, Lonjumeau, Sans-Pouce, and fifty others, all with blackened faces. First, they bayonetted into the cellar the farm people, the servants, the waggoners, and the shepherd. Then they "warmed" old Fousset, the farmer, whom they had kept by himself. Having stretched his feet over the glowing coals of the fireplace, they set his beard and all the hair on his body on fire with burning straw. Then they reverted to his feet, which they notched with the point of a knife for the flames to penetrate the better. At length the old man, having decided to reveal where his money was, they let him go and carried off considerable booty. Fousset, who had strength enough to drag himself to a neighbouring house, did not die till later on. The tale invariably concluded with the trial and execution of the Chauffeurs at Chartres, after they had been betrayed by Borgne-le-Jouy. Eighteen long months were devoted to preparing the case against the prisoners, and in the meanwhile sixty-four of the latter died in prison of a plague brought on by their filthy habits. Still the trial before the Assize Court dealt with a hundred and fifteen accused, thirty-three of whom were contumacious; seven thousand eight hundred questions were submitted to the jury, and finally there were twenty-three condemnations to death. On the night after the execution, the headsmen of Chartres and Dreux had a fight over the criminals' clothes, beneath the scaffold still red with blood.

Fouan, in alluding to a murder Janville way, thus once more recounted the abominations done at the Millouard farm; and he had got as far as the song of complaint composed in prison by Rouge d'Auneau, when the women were alarmed by strange noises in the road—footsteps, struggles, and oaths. They grew pale, and listened in terrified expectation of seeing a gang of blackened men come in like bomb-shells. Buteau, however, bravely went and opened the door.

"Who goes there?"

He at last perceived Bécu and Hyacinthe, who, at the conclusion of a quarrel with Macqueron, had just left the tavern, carrying with them the cards and a candle to finish their game elsewhere. They were so tipsy, and the company had been so frightened, that every one began to laugh.

"Come in, anyhow, and mind you behave yourself," said Rose, smiling at her tall vagabond son. "Your children are here, you can take them back with you."

Hyacinthe and Bécu sat down on the ground near the cows, placed the candle between them, and went on with their game. "Trump, trump, and trump!" The conversation had changed; the others were now talking of the youths in the neighbourhood who had to draw in February for the conscription—Victor Lengaigne and two others. The women had grown grave, and spoke slowly and sadly.

"It's no joke," resumed Rose: "no joke for any one."

"War, war!" murmured Fouan. "Oh, the harm it does! It's simply destruction to culture. When the youths leave us, our best hands go, as is easily seen when work-time comes. And when they come back, why, they're altered, and their heart is no longer with the plough. Cholera even is better than war!"

Fanny left off knitting.

"I won't have Nénesse go," she declared. "Monsieur Baillehache explained a sort of lottery dodge to us. Several people club together, each of them lodging in his hands a sum of money, and those who have unlucky numbers are bought off."

"People must be well off to do that," said La Grande, drily.

Bécu had caught a stray word or so between two tricks.

"War! Heart alive!" said he. "There's nothing like it for making men! When you've not been in it, you can't know. There's nothing like taking shot and steel as they come! How about yonder, among the blackamoors?"

He winked his left eye, while Hyacinthe simpered knowingly. They had both served in Algeria, the rural constable in the early days of the conquest, the other more recently, at the time of the late revolts. Accordingly, in spite of the difference in period, they had some reminiscences in common; of Bedouins' ears cut off and strung into chaplets; of oily-skinned Bedouin women seized behind hedges and corked up in every orifice. Hyacinthe, in particular, had a tale, which set the bellies of the peasants shaking with tempestuous laughter, a tale of a big lemon-coloured cow of a woman whom they had set a-running quite naked, with a pipe stuck in her.

"Zounds!" resumed Bécu, addressing Fanny: "You want Nénesse to grow up a girl, then? However, Delphin shall wear regimentals in no time, I promise you!"

The children had left off playing, and Delphin raised his hard bullet-like head, already even redolent of the soil.

"Sha'n't!" he said, bluntly and stubbornly.

"Hallo!" rejoined his father, "what's that? I shall have to teach you what bravery is, my traitor Frenchman."

"I won't go away; I'll stop at home."

The rural constable raised his hand, but was checked by Buteau.

"Let the child alone! He's right. Is he wanted? There are others. Why on earth should we be supposed to come into this world just to leave home and go and get our heads broken, on account of a lot of nonsense we don't care a copper about? I've never left the neighbourhood, and I'm none the worse for it."

He had, in fact, drawn a lucky number, and was a regular stay-at-home, attached to the land, and only acquainted with Orleans and Chartres, never having seen an inch beyond the flat horizon of La Beauce. He seemed to plume himself on having thus grown in his own soil, with the limited, lush energy of a tree. He had risen to his feet and the women were gazing at him.

"When they come back from serving their term, they're all so thin!" ventured Lise, in an undertone.

"And you, did you go far, corporal?" asked old Rose.

Jean was smoking in silence, like a contemplative young man who preferred listening. He slowly took his pipe out of his mouth.

"Yes, pretty far, one might say. But not to the Crimea. I was about to start when Sebastopol was taken. Later on, though, I was in Italy."

"And what's Italy like?"

The question seemed to perplex him. He hesitated, and ransacked his memory.

"Why, Italy's like home. There's farming there, and woods with rivers. It's the same everywhere."

"Then you fought?"

"Fought? Rather."

He had again begun to pull at his pipe, and did not hurry himself. Françoise, who had looked up, remained with her mouth half open, expecting a story. And, indeed, all of them were interested; La Grande herself thumped the table afresh to silence Hilarion, who was grunting, La Trouille having devised a little diversion by slyly sticking a pin into his arm.

"At Solferino 'twas warm work; yet, gracious! how it rained! I hadn't a dry thread on me; the water was running down my back and trickling into my shoes. Wet through we were, and no mistake!"

Everybody still waited, but he said no more about the battle. That was all he had seen of it. After a minute's silence, however, he resumed in his matter-of-course way:

"Goodness me! War isn't so bad as people think. The lot falls upon one, doesn't it? and one must do one's duty. I left the service because I liked other things better. But it may have its advantages for those who are sick of their trade, and who feel furious when the foe comes and tramples on us in France."

"It's a beastly thing, all the same," wound up old Fouan. "Each man ought to defend his own homestead, and nothing more."

A fresh silence fell. It was very warm, with a damp animal warmth, accentuated by the strong smell of the litter. One of the two cows got up and relieved herself, and the dung splashed down softly and rhythmically. From the gloom of the rafters came the melancholy chirp of a cricket, and along the walls the lissom fingers of the women, plying their knitting-needles, played in shadow to and fro, looking amid the darkness like gigantic spiders.

Palmyre, taking the snuffers to trim the candle with, snuffed it so low as to extinguish it. A tumult followed. The girls laughed, the children stuck their pin into poor Hilarion's buttocks; and the meeting would have been quite upset if the candle brought by Hyacinthe and Bécu, who were nodding over their cards, had not served to re-kindle the other one, despite its long wick, which had swollen at the top into a kind of red mushroom. Conscience-stricken at her awkwardness, Palmyre quaked like a naughty child in terror of the lash.

"Come," said Fouan, "who will read us a bit of this, to finish the evening? Corporal, you ought to read print very well, now!"

He had been to fetch a greasy little book, one of the books of Bonapartist propaganda with which the Empire had flooded the country-side. It had come out of a pedlar's pack, and was a violent onslaught upon the old monarchy: a dramatised history of the peasant before and since the Revolution, with the lament-like title of "The Misfortune and Triumph of Jacques Bonhomme."

Jean had taken the book, and instantly, without waiting to be pressed, he began to read in a colourless, stumbling, schoolboy tone, heedless of punctuation. They listened to him devoutly.

He started with the free Gaul reduced to slavery by the Romans, and then vanquished by the Franks, who transformed slaves into serfs, by establishing the feudal system. Then began the protracted martyrdom of Jacques Bonhomme, tiller of the soil, slave-driven and worked to death, century after century. Many towns-people revolted, founding corporations and acquiring the right of citizenship, but the enthralled peasantry, isolated and dispossessed of everything, only managed to free themselves at a later period, buying their manhood and their liberty for money. And what a delusive liberty it was! They were overwhelmed by exorbitant and ruinous taxes; their rights of ownership were ceaselessly called into question, and the soil was burdened with so many charges as to leave one merely flints to feed upon! Next began the terrible enumeration of the impositions that lay so heavy on the poor peasant No one could draw up a full and accurate list, the taxes poured in so abundantly from king, bishop, and baron all at once. Three beasts of prey tore at the same carcase. The king had the poll-tax and tallage, the bishop the tithes, the baron laid a tax on everything, and turned everything into gold. The peasant had nothing left him to call his own—neither earth, water, fire, nor even the air he breathed. He paid for this, and he paid for that; paid to live, paid to die; paid for his contracts, flocks, business, and pleasure. Paid for having the rain-water from the ditches diverted on to his grounds; paid for the highway dust kicked up by his sheep in the drought of summer. Who ever could not pay was obliged to give his body and his time, taxable and taskable without limit; forced to till the soil, to garner and reap, to trim the vines, clean out the château moat, make and repair the roads. Then there were the dues in kind; and the manor mill, oven, and wine-press, where he was forced to leave a quarter of his crop; and the imposition of watch and ward, which survived in money even after the demolition of the feudal keeps; and the imposition of shelter and purveyance, which, whenever the king or baron passed by, sacked the cottages, dragged mattresses and coverlets from beds, and drove the owner out of his house—lucky not to have his doors and windows torn from their fastenings if he were at all dilatory in turning out. But the most execrated imposition, the remembrance of which still rankled in the hamlets, was the salt-tax; with public store-houses for salt, and every family rated at a certain quantity, which they were, willy-nilly, compelled to purchase of the king; and the system of collection was so iniquitous and despotic that it roused France to rebellion and drowned her in blood.

"My father," interrupted Fouan, "saw the time when salt was ninepence a pound. Truly, times were hard."

Hyacinthe sniggered in his sleeve, and endeavoured to lay stress upon those indelicate rights to which the little book merely made a modest allusion.

"And how about the bridal rights, eh? My word! The baron popped his legs into the bride's bed on the wedding night; and——"

They silenced him. The girls, even Lise, notwithstanding her rotundity of form, had reddened deeply; while La Trouille and the two brats, with their eyes turned downwards, were stuffing their fists into their mouths to restrain their laughter. Hilarion drank in every word open-mouthed, as if he understood it all.

Jean went on. He had now got to the administration of justice, the three-fold justice of king, bishop, and lord, which racked the poor folk toiling on the glebe. There was common law, there was statute law, and, above all, there was the arbitrary right of might. No safeguard, no appeal against the all-powerful sword. Even in the ages which followed, when equity put in a protest, judgeships were bought, and justice was sold. Worse still was the recruiting system: a blood-tax which, for a long time, was only levied upon the inferior rural classes. They fled into the woods, but were driven thence in chains, with musket-stocks, and enrolled like galley-slaves. Promotion was denied them. A younger son, nobly born, dealt in regiments as in goods he had paid for; sold the smaller posts to the highest bidder, and drove the rest of his human cattle to the shambles. Lastly came the hunting rights, rights of dove-cot and warren, which even now, although abolished, have left a fierce resentment in the peasant's heart. The chase was an hereditary madness: an old feudal prerogative authorising the lord to hunt here and everywhere, and punishing with death the vassal audacious enough to hunt over his own ground. It was the caging under the open sky of the free beast and bird for the pleasure of one man. It was the grouping of fields into hunting-captaincies ravaged by game, without it being lawful for the peasant to bring down so much as a sparrow.

"That's intelligible," muttered Bécu, who would have fired at a poacher as soon as at a rabbit.

Hyacinthe had pricked up his ears, now that the hunting question was dealt with, and he slily whistled, as if to say that game belonged to those who knew how to kill it.

"Ah! dear me!" said Rose, simply, fetching a deep sigh.

They all felt the need of similar relief. The reading was gradually bearing heavy upon them, with the oppressive weight of a ghost story. Nor did they always understand, which doubled their uneasiness. Things having gone on like that in olden times, might easily become the same again.

"Go on, poor Jacques Bonhomme," read Jean in his drawling, schoolboy way: "shedding your sweat and blood; you are not yet through your troubles."

And the peasant's Calvary was set forth. Everything was a source of suffering to him: mankind, the elements, his own self. Under the feudal system, when the nobles sallied forth to seek their prey, it was he who was hunted, tracked down, and made booty of. Every private war between lord and lord ruined if it did not slay him; his hut was burnt, his field laid waste. Later on came the "great companies,"—the worst of all the scourges that ever made our country districts desolate,—bands of adventurers at the beck and call of any one who would pay them; now for France, now against her, marking their passage with fire and sword, and leaving only bare earth behind them. The towns, thanks to their walls, might hold out, but the villages were swept away in that murderous madness which pervaded the centuries from end to end. There were centuries steeped in blood—centuries during which our unfortified districts never ceased to moan with pain: women were violated, children crushed to death, men hanged. Then, when war gave over, the king's tax collectors made provision for the continued torture of the poor; for the number and the magnitude of the taxes were nothing in comparison to the wonderful and fearful method of their collection. Villain-tax and salt-tax were farmed out; injustice presided over the distribution of all the impositions; armed troops extorted payment of treasury-dues in the same way as one might raise a contribution of war. Insomuch that scarcely any of the money ever reached the State coffers, being appropriated on its way, and dwindling more and more at every fresh pair of pilfering hands it passed through. Then famine interposed. The tyrannical folly of the law, causing the stagnation of commerce and preventing the free sale of grain, produced terrible dearths every ten years or so, whenever the season was too hot or the rains were too prolonged,—dearths which seemed chastisements of Heaven. A storm flushing the rivers, a dry spring, the smallest cloud, the slightest sunbeam that marred the crops laid thousands of human beings low, involving agonies of starvation, a sudden and general rise of prices, and periods of awful anguish, during which men browsed like brute beasts on the grass of the ditches. After war and famine, fatal epidemics set in, and killed those whom the sword and hunger had spared. Corruption ever sprang forth anew from ignorance and uncleanliness: there was the great Black Death, whose gigantic spectre looms above the old time, mowing down with its sickle the wan, melancholy dwellers in the country districts.

Then his burden being greater than he could bear, Jacques Bonhomme revolted. Behind him lay centuries of terrified submission, his shoulders inured to the last, his spirit so crushed that he felt not his own degradation. It was possible to beat and beat him; to famish him, and rob him of all he had, without rousing him from the timid stupor into which he had sunk, pondering confused thoughts that signified nothing even to himself. But some last injustice, some last anguish, made him suddenly spring at his master's throat like a maddened, over-beaten domestic animal. So for ever, from century to century, the same exasperation bursts forth, and the Jacquerie arms the tillers of the soil with pitchfork and bill-hook, as soon as they have nothing left them but to die. There were the Christian "Bagandes" of Gaul, the "Pastoureaux" of the Crusades, and in later times the "Croquants" and "Nu-pieds" who fell upon the nobles and royal soldiers. After four hundred years the cry of the Jacques, in their pain and wrath, was again to sweep over the desolate fields, and make the masters quake in their castle strongholds. What if they once more became angry, they who had numbers on their side? What if they claimed their share of worldly joy? And the vision of old sweeps by: sturdy, half-clad, tattered hordes, mad with brutality and lust, spreading ruin and destruction, as they too had been ruined and destroyed, and violating in their turn the wives of others.

"Calm thyself, dweller in the fields," pursued Jean, in his placid, sedulous style, "for thy hour of triumph will soon strike from the clock of history."

Buteau had brusquely shrugged his shoulders. A pretty piece of work, revolting. To be laid hold of by gendarmes. Oh, yes! All the others, moreover, since the little book had begun to relate their forefathers' risings, had listened with downcast eyes, not venturing on the least gesture, but full of mistrust although at home. These were things no one ought to talk about openly; no one need know what they thought on the subject. Hyacinthe, having tried to interrupt, announcing that he would shortly be at the throats of more than one, Bécu violently declared that all Republicans were pigs, and Fouan had to silence them, solemnly, with the subdued gravity of an old man who knows a thing or two but won't speak. La Grande, while the other women seemed to become more interested than ever in their knitting, observed: "What one has one keeps"—a remark which did not appear to have any connection with what was being read. Françoise alone, her work dropping on her lap, gazed at Corporal, amazed at his reading so long without making a mistake.

"Ah, dear me! Dear me!" repeated Rose, sighing more deeply.

The style of the book changed. It became lyrical, and magniloquently celebrated the Revolution. 'Twas then, in the apotheosis of '89, that Jacques Bonhomme triumphed. After the taking of the Bastille, while the peasants burned the châteaux, the night of the 4th of August legalised the conquests of centuries by recognising the freedom of man and the equality of civil rights. "In one night, the ploughman had become the equal of the lord who, by virtue of his parchments, had drunk the peasant's sweat and devoured the fruits of his toilsome nights." Abolition of serfdom, of all the privileges of the nobles, of the ecclesiastical and manorial courts of justice; the re-purchase of vested rights, the equalisation of taxation, the admission of every citizen to all civil or military offices—so the list went on. The evils of the old life seemed to vanish one by one. It was the hosanna of a new golden age dawning for the ploughman, who was made the subject of a whole pageful of eulogy, and hailed as king and foster-father of the world. He only was of importance: down on your knees before his holy plough! The horrors of '93 were stigmatised in burning words, and the book wound up with a high-flown panegyric on Napoleon, the child of the Revolution, who had succeeded in "extricating it from the grooves of License, to ensure the happiness of the rural districts."

"That's true!" from Bécu, as Jean turned to the last page.

"Yes, that's true," said old Fouan. "We had fine times of it, I can tell you, when I was young. I saw Napoleon once, at Chartres. I was twenty. We were free; we had land; it was first-rate! I mind how my father once said that he sowed coppers and reaped crowns. Then we had Louis XVIII., Charles X., and Louis Philippe. Things still went on; we had enough to eat, and couldn't complain. And now we've got Napoleon III., and things weren't so bad, either, up to last year. Only——"

He meant to break off, but the words forced their way.

"Only, what the odds does it make to Rose and me, their liberty and their equality? Are we any the fatter for it, after toiling and moiling for fifty years?"

Then, in a few slow and hesitating words, he unwittingly summed up the whole of this tale. The soil so long tilled for the lord's benefit by the cudgelled and naked slave, whose skin was not even his own—the soil, fertilised by his efforts, passionately loved and desired during close constant intimacy, like another man's wife, whom one tends, embraces, but must not possess—the soil, after centuries of such longing torment, at length taken full possession of, becoming one's own, a love-dalliance and life-spring. This desire of ages, this hope constantly delayed, explained the peasant's love for his field, his passion for land, for the utmost quantity possible, for the loamy soil, palpable to the touch, and poiseable in the palm of the hand. And yet the indifference and ingratitude of this earth! Worship it as you would, it never warmed nor produced one grain the more. Too much rain rotted the seeds, hail ravaged the green wheat, a thunderstorm laid the stalks low, two months' drought shrivelled the ears: and what with devouring insects, nipping frosts, cattle plagues, and leprosies of noxious weeds, everything conspired to bring ruin; the struggle was a daily one, every mistake a danger, one's faculties were ever at full stretch. Surely he had never hung back; had worked body and soul, and had maddened to find his toil insufficient. He had withered his sinews, had withheld nothing of himself from this soil that, after having barely fed him, left him wretched, unsated, ashamed of his senile impotence, to seek the arms of another, without so much as a pitying thought for those poor bones of his that would soon be earth.

"And that's where it is!" went on the old fellow. "In youth we're always hard at it; and, having contrived with great difficulty to make both ends meet, we find ourselves old, and have to quit. Isn't it so, Rose?"

The mother bent her trembling head. Great heaven, yes! She, too, had worked harder than a man, for certain. Rising before the rest of the household, getting the meals, sweeping, scouring, wearing herself out over a thousand duties—the cows, the pigs, the baking—and always the last in bed. She must have had a strong constitution not to have broken down altogether, and her only reward was to have lived her life. One got nothing but wrinkles, and one was lucky if, after pinching and screwing, after going to bed in the dark and putting up with bread and water, one saved just enough to keep the wolf from the door in one's old age.

"All the same," resumed Fouan, "we mustn't complain. I've heard tell there are districts where the land gives a deal more trouble. Thus, in Le Perche, there's nought but flintstones. In La Beauce, the ground is still soft, and only wants good, steady work. But it's spoiling. It's certainly less fertile than formerly, and fields that once gave crops of seven quarters now yield little more than five. And for a year past the prices have been going down. They say that corn is coming in from savage parts. There's some mischief brewing—a crisis, as they say. Is misfortune ever at an end? This universal suffrage, now, it don't bring meat to the pot, does it? The land tax weighs us down, they keep on taking our children away to fight. It's not a bit of use having revolutions, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, and a peasant always remains a peasant."

The methodical Jean had been waiting to finish his reading. Silence being re-established, he went on softly:

"Happy husbandman, forsake not the village for the town; where everything—milk, meat, vegetables—must be bought, and where you would always spend more than necessary, because of the opportunities offered. Have you not fresh air and sunshine, healthy toil, and honest joys in the village? Rural life is peerless; far from gilded pomp, you enjoy true happiness; in proof thereof, do not the town artisans go for jaunts into the country, just as the tradesman's one dream is to seek retirement near you, culling flowers, eating fruit off the tree, and gambolling on the sward. Be sure, Jacques Bonhomme, that money is but a chimera. If your bosom be at peace, your fortune is made."

Jean's voice faltered. He was fain to repress his emotion, this big, tender-hearted, town-bred fellow, whose soul was touched by these pictures of rustic bliss. The others remained gloomy; the women bending over their needles, the men stolid and moody. Was the book making game of them? Money was the only desirable thing, and they were starving in penury. As the young fellow found this silence—heavy with suffering and spleen—rather oppressive, he ventured on a sage reflection:

"Anyhow, things would, perhaps, be better with education. People were wretched in former times because they knew nothing. Now-a-days we know a little, and times are certainly easier. So the thing is to be taught thoroughly, and have schools of agriculture."

Fouan, an old fogey averse to new-fangled ways, interrupted him violently:

"Come, hang you and your science! The more a man knows the worse he gets on. I tell you the land gave a better yield fifty years ago! It gets angry at being worried so, and never gives more than it chooses, the beggar! Hasn't Monsieur Hourdequin run through his own weight in silver, pottering about with new inventions? No, no; a peasant is bound to remain a peasant, that's flat!"

Ten o'clock was striking, and after this conclusive remark, as weighty as the chop of an axe, Rose got up to fetch a pot of chestnuts, which she had left in the hot ashes in the kitchen. This was the usual treat on All Hallow E'en. She even brought two quarts of white wine to make the festival complete. Thenceforward stories were forgotten, the fun grew fast and furious, and nails and teeth alike were busy extracting the steaming boiled chestnuts from their husks.

La Grande at once pocketed her share, as she was slower at eating than the others. Bécu and Hyacinthe gulped theirs down, skin and all, pitching them into their mouths from a distance; while Palmyre, grown bold, cleaned hers with extreme care, and stuffed Hilarion with them, as if he were a fowl. As for the children, they "made pudding." La Trouille dug one tooth into the chestnut, and then squeezed it so as to cause a thin stream to spurt out, which Delphin and Nénesse licked up. This being very nice, Lise and Françoise decided to do the same. Then the candle was snuffed for the last time, and glasses were clinked to the good fellowship of all present. The heat had increased; a ruddy vapour rose from the liquid manure; the cricket chirped more loudly in the great shifting shadows of the rafters; and, so that the cows might join in the festivities, they were given some husks, which they munched with a subdued and measured noise.

Finally, at half-past ten, the party broke up. First of all Fanny led Nénesse away. Then Hyacinthe and Bécu went out quarrelling, the outer cold bringing on a relapse of intoxication; and La Trouille and Delphin were soon heard sustaining their respective parents, prodding them and restoring them to the right path, as if they were restive animals forgetful of the way to the stables. Every time the door swung to, an icy gust blew in from the snow-white road. La Grande did not hurry at all, as she twisted her handkerchief round her neck and pulled on her mittens. Not a glance did she vouchsafe towards Palmyre and Hilarion, who slunk timidly away, shivering in their rags; but, eventually betaking herself back to her home, which was adjacent, she slammed the door violently after her. There only remained Françoise and Lise.

"I say, Corporal," asked Fouan, "you'll see them on their way as you go back to the farm, won't you? It's on your way."

Jean nodded assent, while the two girls were wrapping their shawls round their heads.

Buteau had got up and was pacing to and fro in the cow-house, grim, restless, and pre-occupied. Since the reading he had been silent, as if engrossed by the book's tales about the laboriously acquired land. Why not have the whole? A division had become intolerable to him. And there were other things besides confusedly jostling each other within his thick skull: wrath, pride, a dogged resolve to keep to his word, the exasperated craving of the man who would like, and yet will not, for fear of being taken advantage of. However, he abruptly came to a decision.

"I am going up to bed. Good-bye!" he said.

"How good-bye?"

"I shall start for La Chamade before daybreak. Good-bye, in case I don't see you again."

His father and mother, shoulder to shoulder, had planted themselves in front of him.

"Well, and your share?" said Fouan. "Do you accept it?"

Buteau walked as far as the door, then, turning round:

"No!" he replied.

The old peasant trembled in every limb. He drew himself up to his full height, and his ancient authority flashed forth for the last time.

"Very good. You are a wicked son. I shall give your brother and sister their shares, and shall let them farm yours; and when I die, I shall arrange for them to keep it. You shall have nothing. Be off with you!"

Buteau did not flinch from his rigid attitude. Then Rose, in her turn, tried to soothe him.

"Why, you are just as much cared for as the others, silly! You're only quarrelling with your bread and butter. Accept!"

"No!" And then off he went, going up to bed.

Outside, Lise and Françoise, aghast at the scene, walked a few steps in silence. They had again taken one another's waist, and their figures mingled, looking quite black against the snow which glimmered through the night. Jean, who followed them, also in silence, presently heard them crying. He then tried to cheer them up.

"Come, come, he'll think better of it; he'll say yes to-morrow."

"Ah, you don't know him!" cried Lise. "He'd be cut to pieces sooner than give way. No, no, it's all over!"

Then, despairingly, she added:

"What shall I do with his child?"

"Well, it'll have to come any way," murmured Françoise.

This made them laugh. But their spirits were too low, and they began to cry again.

When Jean had seen them to their door he made the best of his way across the plain. It had left off snowing; the sky was once more clear and bright; a wide, star-spangled, frosty sky it was, shedding a crystalline blue light; and La Beauce extended afar, quite white, and level and still like a sea of ice. Not a breath came from the distant horizon; he heard nothing but the tramp of his own thick shoes on the hard soil. 'Twas a deep calm, the peacefulness of the cold. All that Jean had read was whirling in his brain. He took off his cap to cool himself, feeling an oppression behind his ears, and wishing to escape from thought. The idea of that girl with child and her sister annoyed him too. The tramp of his thick shoes still rang out. Then a shooting-star started down the sky, furrowing it with fire in its silent flight.

Over there, the farm of La Borderie was vanishing from sight, hardly forming as much as a bump on the white expanse of snow; and as soon as Jean had entered the cross-path, he remembered the field he had sown in the vicinity some days before. Looking to the left, he recognised it under the winding-sheet that covered it. The layer of snow, of the lightness and purity of ermine, was a thin one, leaving the crests of the furrows apparent, and but imperfectly veiling the earth's benumbed limbs. How soundly must the seeds be sleeping! How deep a rest in those icy flanks until the warm morn, when the Spring sun would again awaken them to life!

[PART II.]

CHAPTER I.

It was four o'clock; the dawn was barely breaking: the pink dawn of early May. Under the glimmering sky the buildings of La Borderie still slept, half in gloom: three long buildings on three sides of the vast square yard, the sheep-cot at the end, the barns on the right, the cow-house, stable, and dwelling-house on the left. Closing the fourth side, the cart-entrance was shut, and secured by an iron bar. On the manure-pit a big solitary yellow cock sounded the reveille in brilliant, clarion tones. A second cock made answer, then a third, and thus the call was caught up and passed on from farm to farm throughout the length and breadth of La Beauce.

On that night, as on most other nights, Hourdequin had joined Jacqueline in her bedroom, a little servant's room that he had allowed her to embellish with flowered wall-paper, chintz curtains, and mahogany furniture. Despite her growing power, she had encountered violent opposition whenever she had made an attempt to share with him the room formerly occupied by his deceased wife, the conjugal chamber which he protected out of some remnant of respect. She was much hurt at this, understanding that she would never be the real mistress until she slept in the old oak bedstead with red cotton hangings.

Jacqueline awoke at early dawn and lay on her back, with her eyelids wide open, while the farmer was still snoring beside her. Amid the exciting warmth of the bed, her black eyes were still dreamy, and her nude, slim, girlish form was throbbing. Nevertheless, she hesitated; then, making up her mind, she lightly stepped across her master—moving so lightly and so deftly that he did not feel her—and noiselessly slipped on a petticoat with hands feverish with her sudden desire. However, as she happened to knock against a chair, he, in his turn, opened his eyes.

"Why, you're dressing! Where are you going?"

"I'm anxious about the bread, and am going to look at it."

Hourdequin dozed off again, mumbling, astonished at the excuse and with his brain at work amid his drowsiness. What an odd notion. The bread didn't need her at that time in the morning. And, goaded by a sharp suspicion, he all at once became wide awake. Amazed at seeing her no longer there, he gazed wanderingly round this servant's room, at his slippers, his pipe, and his razor. What! another freak of passion of that baggage for some farm hand? During the couple of minutes he needed to recover himself, he took a retrospect of the past.

His father, Isidore Hourdequin, was the descendant of an old peasant family of Cloyes, refined and raised to the middle classes in the sixteenth century. All of them had held posts in the salt-revenue: one had been granary-keeper at Chartres; another, controller at Châteaudun; and Isidore possessed some sixty thousand francs when, at twenty-six years of age, on being deprived of his office by the Revolution, he conceived the idea of making a fortune out of the thefts of those scoundrelly republicans who offered the national property for sale. He had an admirable knowledge of the district, he sniffed round, made calculations, and at last paid thirty thousand francs—a bare fifth of the true value—for the three hundred and seventy acres of La Borderie, which was all that remained of the ancient demesne of the Rognes-Bouquevals. Not a single peasant had dared to risk his crowns; only townsfolk, pettifoggers, and financiers derived profit from the Revolutionary proceedings. Besides, it was purely a speculation, for Isidore had no intention of encumbering himself with a farm. He reckoned confidently on selling it at its full value when the disturbances were over, and thus getting his money back five-fold. But the Directory came on, and the depreciation of property continued; so that he could not sell to the expected advantage. His land held him in its grasp, and he became its prisoner; insomuch that, obstinately unwilling to let any of it go, he resolved to farm it himself, in the hope of thus at last realising his dreams of fortune. About this time he married the daughter of a neighbouring farmer who brought him a hundred and twenty acres, so that he now owned some five hundred; and it was thus that this townsman, sprung three centuries previously from a peasant stock, returned to tillage. To tillage on a large scale, however; to the landed aristocracy that had replaced the old all-powerful feudalism.

Alexander Hourdequin, his only son, was born in 1804. He had commenced his studies, discreditably enough, at the college of Châteaudun. He had a passion for land, and decided to return home and help his father, disappointing another dream of the latter, who, finding his fortune advance but slowly, would have liked to sell everything off and start his son in some liberal profession. The young man was twenty-seven, when, on the death of his father, he became master of La Borderie. He was a champion of new methods; his first care, in marrying, was to look out, not for property but for money, for, according to him, if the farm stagnated, the fault lay in lack of capital. The dower he desired, amounting to fifty thousand francs, was brought him by a sister of the notary, Baillehache, a ripe damsel, his senior by five years, extremely ugly, but good-tempered. Then began a long struggle between the farmer and his property; at first a prudent one, but gradually made feverish by mistakes: a struggle renewed every season, every day, which, without making him rich, enabled him to lead the broad life of a big full-blooded man, resolved to deny himself no gratification. For several years things went from bad to worse. His wife had presented him with two children: a boy who had enlisted out of distaste for farming, and who had been made a captain after Solferino; and a delicate, charming girl, the apple of his eye, and the heiress of La Borderie, now that his ungrateful son had become a soldier of fortune. But he lost his wife, and, two months later, his daughter. This was a terrible shock. The captain had left off coming to La Borderie save once a year, and the father all at once found himself alone in the world, without a future, without the stimulus of working for his progeny. But bleed as the wound might internally, he remained outwardly erect, violent, and overbearing. Before the peasantry, who sneered at his machines, and longed for the fall of this middle-class man that presumed to dabble in their occupation, he stood firm. Besides, what could he do? He was ever the closer prisoner of his land. The accumulated labour, and the capital sunk, shut him in more tightly every day, and left him no possible outlet but through disaster.

Hourdequin, square shouldered, broad and florid in face, retaining no other token of middle-class refinement than his small hands, had always been despotically virile towards his female servants. Even in his wife's time he had ravished them all, as a mere matter-of-course, a thing of no further importance. If those daughters of poor peasants that take to dressmaking occasionally avoid a fall, not one of those that take service in farms escape man: servant or master. Madame Hourdequin was still alive when Jacqueline was engaged, out of charity, at La Borderie. Cognet, an old drunkard, used to beat her black and blue; and she was so wizened and scraggy that the bones of her body showed through her rags. Moreover, she was of such reputed ugliness that children used to hoot at her. She would have been taken for under twelve, though in reality she was then nearly eighteen. She helped the servant, and was employed in menial work—in washing up, sweeping the yard, and keeping the live-stock clean—and she became more and more grimy, as if dirt were a delight to her. After the death of the mistress, however, she seemed to get a bit cleaner. All the servants used to turn her up in the straw: not a man came to the farm without doing what he chose with her; and one day, as she went down with her master into the cellar, he also, though previously disdainful, tried to see what the ill-favoured slattern was like. But she resisted furiously, and scratched and bit him so effectually that he was obliged to let her go.

From that moment her fortune was made. She resisted for six months, and then yielded herself up, a little bit at a time. From the yard she rose to the kitchen as servant proper; next she engaged a girl as help; then, grown quite the lady, she had a maid of her own. Now the little scullion had become a stylish, pretty-looking girl, extremely dark, with a firm breast and strong supple limbs, such as develop in those previously made unduly thin by hardship. She became coquettish and extravagant, smothering herself with all sorts of scents, but retaining withal a leaven of uncleanliness. The people of Rognes, the neighbouring farmers, were none the less amazed at the intrigue. Was it actually possible that a man of substance should take a fancy to a wench like that, neither beautiful nor plump—in short, "La Cognette," the daughter of that drunkard Cognet, who might have been seen for the last twenty years breaking stones on the public highway! A fine papa-in-law! And a pretty piece of goods she was! The peasants did not even comprehend that this "piece of goods" was their vengeance, the revenge of the village upon the farm, of the wretched tiller of the soil upon the enriched townsman who had become a large landholder. Hourdequin, at his critical age of fifty-five, gradually became the slave of his fleshly desires, feeling physical need of Jacqueline, as one has the physical needs of hunger and thirst. When she chose to be especially agreeable, she would twine round him cat-like, and satiate him with unscrupulous, brazen shamelessness, such as courtezans do not venture upon; and for one of those hours he humbled himself and begged of her still to stay after quarrels and terrible spasms of resolution, in which he threatened to kick her out of doors.

Only the evening before he had all but struck her, at the close of a stormy attempt she had made to sleep in the bed where his wife had died; and she had refused his embraces all night, beating him away each time he approached; for, though she constantly indulged herself with the farm servants, she kept him on short commons, whetting his passion by abstinence so as to augment her power over him. And thus that morning, in that moist room, in that tumbled bed where her presence still breathed, anger and desire again seized hold of him. He had long had scent of her many infidelities, and now he leapt out of bed, crying aloud: "The strumpet! If I only catch her!"

He dressed rapidly and went down stairs.

Jacqueline had flitted through the silent house in the first faint glimmer of dawn. As she crossed the yard she gave a start on seeing the old shepherd, Soulas, already up. But her desire was so strong that she paid no heed. So much the worse! She slipped past the stable, accommodating fifteen horses, where four of the farm waggoners slept, and made for the garret at the end where Jean had his bed—some straw and a coverlet, but no sheets. Embracing him in his sleep, closing his mouth with a kiss to stifle his cry of surprise, palpitating and out of breath, she whispered:

"It's me, you big stupid! Don't be alarmed. Quick, quick; let's make haste!"

But he took fright. He wouldn't, there, in his own bed, for fear of a surprise. The ladder of the loft was near there, however, so they climbed up, leaving the trap-door open, and fell amid the hay.

"Oh, you big stupid! you big stupid!" repeated Jacqueline in ecstacy, with her coo in the throat, which seemed to rise from her loins.

It was near upon two years since Jean Macquart had come to the farm. On leaving the army he had fallen in, at Bazoches-le-Doyen, with a fellow-soldier—a cabinetmaker like himself—at the house of whose father, a small village contractor and builder employing two or three hands, he had resumed his calling. But his heart was no longer in his work. Seven years of service had put his hand out of practice, and had so set him against the saw and plane that he seemed a different being. Formerly, at Plassans, he stayed hard at work on his wood, without aptitude for book-learning, just knowing the three R's, but yet very reflective and very painstaking, resolved on making himself independent of his horrible family. Old Macquart kept him in leading-strings, appropriated his mistresses under his very eyes, and went every Saturday to the door of his workshop to rob him of his wages. Accordingly, when ill-usage and over-work had killed his mother, he followed the example of his sister Gervaise—who had just run off to Paris with a lover—and decamped, so as not to have to keep his vagabond father. Now he hardly knew himself again; not that he had grown lazy in his turn, but life in the army had enlarged his mind. Politics, for instance, which had once bored him, now absorbed him and led him to reason upon equality and fraternity; so that, what with habits of mouching, troublesome and indolent sentinel work, a sleepy life in barracks, and the wild rough-and-tumble of war, he had so changed that the tools dropped from his hands; he dreamt of his campaign in Italy; and a yearning for rest, a longing to stretch himself on the grass and forget everything, benumbed his efforts.

One morning his master installed him at La Borderie, to make some repairs. There was a good month's work, rooms to floor, doors and windows to be set right almost everywhere. Jean blissfully dragged the work on for six weeks. Meanwhile his master died, and the son, a married man, went off to set up shop in his wife's part of the country. Left at La Borderie, where rotting wood was always coming to light and needing attention, the cabinetmaker did several jobs on his own account; then, as the harvest was beginning, he lent a hand and stayed six weeks longer; so that, noting his zeal, and how kindly he took to agriculture, the farmer ended by keeping him altogether. In less than a year, the ex-artisan became a capital farm servant, carting, ploughing, sowing, reaping, and seeming to satisfy his desire for peace in the restfulness of agriculture. Away with saw and plane! His interest was somewhere else! He seemed born for a field life, with his sober, deliberate way, his love of systematic work, his ox-like temperament inherited from his mother. He started on his new career delightedly with a relish for the country that peasants never know, a relish due to odds and ends of sentimental reading, and to notions of simplicity, virtue, and perfect bliss, such as are found in moral tales for children.

To tell the truth, another cause had kept him, and made him happy at the farm. While he was mending the doors, La Cognette had made a display of her charms amid his shavings. The temptation had, indeed, come from her, for she was attracted by the big fellow's sturdy limbs, and judged him, by his regular massive features, to be a man of virility. He yielded; and then continued as he had begun, dreading that he might be deemed a fool, and tormented, moreover, by a craving for the licentious hussy, who knew so well how to raise men's passions. At heart his native honesty made protest. It was dishonourable to dally with the sweetheart of M. Hourdequin, to whom he owed a debt of gratitude. Of course he adduced justifications: she wasn't the master's wife, but only his Poll, and as she played him false here, there, and everywhere, he might as well profit by it as let others do so. However, such excuses did not prevent his uneasiness from increasing in proportion as he saw the farmer grow more and more fascinated. No doubt it would not end well.

Among the hay Jean and Jacqueline were restraining their breath, when the former, whose ears were on the alert, heard the frame of the ladder creak. He leapt up, and, at the risk of his life, dropped down the opening that was used for throwing fodder down. Hourdequin's head just then appeared on the other side, on a level with the trap-door. He saw at the same glance the shadow of the retreating man, and the woman, still supine, with her legs in the air. Such a fury seized hold of him, that it never occurred to him to descend in pursuit of the gallant; but, with a buffet that would have felled an ox, he overturned Jacqueline, who was now getting up on to her knees again.

"Strumpet!" he shouted.

With a shriek of rage, she denied the evidence.

"It's false!"

He had to exercise all his powers of self-restraint to refrain from kicking her into a jelly.

"I saw it! Confess it's true, or I'll kill you."

"No, no, no! It's not true."

Then, when at length she had got upon her feet again, she grew insolent and irritating, resolved to bring her power into full play.

"Besides, what's it got to do with you?" she asked. "Am I your wife? As you don't choose that I should sleep in your bed, I'm free to lie where I like."

She spoke with her dove-like coo, as if in lascivious raillery.

"Come, move out of the way! Let me go down. I'll leave this evening."

"This instant!"

"No, this evening. Wait and think it over."

He was left quivering and beyond himself, not knowing on whom to vent his wrath. Though he no longer had the courage to turn her into the street forthwith, how gladly would he have kicked her gallant out of doors. But how was he to catch him now? He had gone straight up into the loft, guided by the open doors, without examining the beds; and when he got down again the four waggoners from the stable were dressing, as was Jean, in his garret. Which of the five had it been? One as likely as the other, and, perhaps, the whole lot, one after the other. Nevertheless, he hoped the man would betray himself. Then he gave his morning orders, sent nobody into the fields, and did not go out himself, but rambled about the farm with clenched fists, scowling and hankering after somebody to knock down.

After the seven o'clock breakfast, this exasperated review of the master's set the whole household in a tremble. At La Borderie there were five hands for the five ploughs, three threshers, two cow-herds or yard-men, a shepherd, and a little swine-herd; in all, twelve servants, without counting the house-maid. Hourdequin began in the kitchen by abusing the latter, because she hadn't put the baking-shovels back in their places on the ceiling. Then he prowled into the two barns, one for oats, the other for wheat, the latter being of immense size, as large as a church, with doors five yards high; and he picked a quarrel with the threshers, whose flails, he said, cut up the straw too much. Then he went through the cow-house, and became furious at finding the thirty cows in good order, the central passage scoured, and the troughs clean. He did not know on what ground to fall foul of the cow-herds, till, glancing outside at the cisterns, which were also under their charge, he noticed that a discharge-pipe was stopped up by some sparrows' nests. As in all the Beauce farms, the rain-water from the slate roofs was here sedulously collected and conducted off by a complicated system of gutters. So he asked, roughly, if they meant to let him die of thirst for the benefit of the sparrows. But the storm finally burst on the waggoners. Although the litters of the fifteen horses in the stable were clean, he began by bawling out that it was disgusting to leave them in such filth. Then, ashamed of his own injustice, and the more exasperated, while paying a visit to the four sheds at the four corners of the farm buildings, where the implements were kept, he was delighted to find a plough with its handles broken. Then he regularly stormed. Did the five beggars amuse themselves by breaking his stock on purpose? He'd send the whole five of them about their business; yes, the whole five of them! He'd have no invidious distinctions! While he swore at them, his flashing eyes looked them through, expecting some paleness or quiver that would reveal the traitor. Nobody flinched, however, and he left them with a wild gesture of despair.

On ending his inspection at the sheep-fold, it occurred to Hourdequin to cross-question the shepherd Soulas. This old fellow of sixty-five had been half-a-century at the farm, and had saved nothing by it, having been preyed upon by his wife, a drunkard and a drab, whom he had just had the happiness of laying beneath the sod. He was in dread lest his old age should presently entail his dismissal, and was hurriedly saving up the few coppers requisite to rescue him from want. Possibly the master might help him; but, then, there was no saying which might die first. And did they give money for tobacco and a nip? Besides, he had made an enemy of Jacqueline, whom he loathed with the jealous hatred of an old servant disgusted by the rapid advancement of such an upstart. Whenever she gave him orders, he was beside himself with rage, remembering how he had seen her in rags and filth. She would assuredly have dismissed him, if she had felt herself strong enough to do so; and this made him prudent. He wanted to keep his place, and shunned all conflict, no matter how sure he might be of his master's support.

The sheep-fold occupied the entire building at the end of the yard, a gallery eighty yards long, in which the eight hundred sheep of the farm were only separated by hurdles. On one side, the ewes, in various groups; on the other, the lambs; and farther on, the rams. Every two months the males, reared for sale, were castrated; while the females were kept to renew the flock of mothers, the oldest of which were sold off every year. The younger were served, at fixed times, by the rams, dishleys crossed with merinos, of superb strain, and stupid gentle aspect, with the heavy head and large rounded nose seen in men addicted to vice. Those entering the sheep-fold were choked by a strong smell, the ammoniacal exhalation from the litter: stale straw on which fresh straw was laid for three months running, the racks being fitted with hangers, so as to raise them as the manure-heap ascended. There was ventilation: the windows being wide, and the floor of the loft above being formed of movable oaken beams, which were taken away as the fodder got less. It was said, however, that this living heat, this soft, warm, fermenting heap, was necessary to the proper growth of the sheep.

Hourdequin, pushing open one of the doors, caught sight of Jacqueline escaping by another. She, also, had thought uneasily of Soulas, feeling sure she had been watched with Jean; but the old man had remained impassive, seeming not to understand why she made herself so agreeable, contrary to her custom. The sight of the young woman leaving the sheep-fold, where she never went, aggravated the farmer's feverish uncertainty.

"Well, Soulas," asked he, "any news this morning?"

The shepherd, very tall and thin, with a long face intersected by wrinkles, and looking as though carved with a bill-hook out of a knot of oak, replied slowly:

"No, Monsieur Hourdequin, nothing whatever, except that the shearers are coming and will soon be at work."

The master chatted for a moment, so as not to seem to be questioning him. The sheep, who had been fed indoors since the first frosts of November, were to be let loose again towards mid-May, when the clover would be ready for them. As for the cows, they were seldom pastured until after the harvest. Yet this land of La Beauce, dry and devoid of natural herbage as it was, yielded good meat; and it was only through routine and laziness that the breeding of oxen was unknown there. Five or six pigs, even, were all that each farm fattened, for its own consumption.

Hourdequin with his hot hand stroked the soft and bright-eyed ewes who had run up with raised heads; while the lambs, pent up a little way off, surged against the hurdles, bleating.

"And so, Soulas, you saw nothing this morning?" he asked again, looking the shepherd full in the face.

The old fellow had seen, but what availed it to speak? His deceased wife, tippler and drab, had familiarised him with the vices of women and the folly of men. Very possibly La Cognette, although betrayed, would still hold her own, and then he would be made the scapegoat, so that an awkward witness might be got out of the way.

"Saw nothing, nothing at all!" he repeated, with dull eyes and stolid face.

When Hourdequin re-crossed the yard he noticed Jacqueline standing there, nervously straining her ears, in fear of what was being said in the sheep-fold. She was pretending to be busy with her poultry: six hundred head of hens, ducks, and pigeons, who were fluttering, chattering, and scratching on the manure-heap, amid a constant hurly-burly. She even relieved her feelings a bit by boxing the ears of the swine-herd, who had upset a bucket of water he was carrying to the pigs. But a single glance at the farmer reassured her. He knew nothing; the old man had held his tongue. Her insolence thus grew greater.

For instance, at the mid-day repast, she displayed a provoking gaiety. As the heavy work had not yet begun, they now only had four meals: bread-and-milk at seven, sopped toast at twelve, bread and cheese at four, soup and bacon at eight. They fed in the kitchen, a vast room, in which stretched a table flanked by two forms. Modern progress was only represented by a cast-iron stove, which took up a corner of the immense hearth. At the end the black mouth of the oven yawned; and along the smoky walls saucepans gleamed and old-fashioned utensils stood in neat rows. As the maid, a stout, plain girl, had baked that morning, a pleasant scent of hot bread rose from the open pan.

"So your stomach's not in working order to-day?" asked Jacqueline audaciously of Hourdequin, who came in last.

Since the death of his wife and daughter he sat at the same table as his servants, as in the good old times, so that he might not have to eat alone. He took a chair at one end, while the servant-mistress did the same at the other. There were fourteen of them, and the maid did the helping.

The farmer having sat down without replying, La Cognette talked of seeing to the food. This consisted of slices of toasted bread broken into a soup-tureen, moistened with wine, and sweetened with ripopée, an old Beauce word for treacle. She asked for a second spoonful of this; pretended to spoil the men, and vented jests that set the table in a roar. Each of her phrases had a double meaning, reminding them that she was leaving that night. There were bickerings and partings, and those who would never have another chance would regret not having dipped their fingers in the gravy for the last time. The shepherd ate on in his chuckle-headed way, while the master, impassive, also seemed not to understand. Jean, to avoid betraying himself, was obliged to laugh with the others, despite his uneasiness; for, to be sure, he deemed himself scarcely straightforward in all this.

After the meal, Hourdequin issued his orders for the afternoon. Out of doors, there were only a few little jobs to finish: the oats to be rolled, and the ploughing of the fallows to be completed, pending the time for cutting the lucern and clover. So he kept two men, Jean and another, to clean the hay-loft. He himself, now plunged into despondency, with his ears buzzing from the reaction of his blood, and very wretched, set out on the prowl, not knowing what occupation to try, to get rid of his vexation. The shearers having installed themselves under one of the sheds, in a corner of the yard, he took up his stand in front of them and watched them.

There were five sallow spindled-shanked fellows, squatting on the ground, with large shears of shining steel. The shepherd passed the ewes over, ranging them on the ground like so many skin bottles, with their four feet tied together, and only just able to lift their heads and bleat. As soon as a shearer caught hold of one of them she became silent, and abandoned herself, blown out like a balloon by the thickness of her wool, which sweat and dust had coated with a hard black crust. Under the rapid shears, the animal came out from the fleece like a bare hand out of a dark glove, all pink and fresh, clad in the gleaming snowy inner wool. Held between the knees of a tall wizened man, one mother, set on her back, with her thighs apart, and her head erect and rigid, made exposure of her belly, which had the hidden whiteness, the quivering skin of an undressed person. The shearers earned three sous per head, and a good workman could shear twenty sheep a day.

Hourdequin, absorbed, was thinking that wool had fallen to eight sous a pound, and that he'd have to make haste and sell, or else it would get too dry, and lose in weight. The year before, congestion of the spleen had decimated the flocks of La Beauce. Everything was going from bad to worse; it meant ruin, bankruptcy, for grain had been falling more and more heavily every month. Once more a prey to agricultural worries, and feeling stifled in the yard, he left the farm and went to take a glance at his fields. His quarrels with La Cognette always ended thus. After swearing and clenching his fists, he gave way, oppressed by suffering, which was only relieved by the contemplation of the infinite green expanses of his wheat and oats.

Ah, how he loved that land of his! With a passion untainted by the keen avarice of the peasant; a sentimental, almost an intellectual, passion; for he felt her to be the common mother, who had given him his life and nourishment—to whom he would return. At first, when quite young, after being brought up upon her, his distaste for college, his impulse to burn his books and stop at the farm, had simply sprung from his free habits, his gay gallops over ploughed fields, his intoxicating open-air life amid the breezes of the plain. But later on, upon succeeding his father, he had loved the land like a lover; his love had ripened, as if he had thenceforward taken her in lawful wedlock to make her fruitful. That tenderness had grown and grown, until he now devoted to her his time, his money, his whole life, as to a good and fertile wife, whose caprices, whose treason even, he would condone. Many a time he flew into a rage when she proved shrewish, when, too damp or too dry, she consumed the seed without yielding a harvest. Then, he began to doubt, and at length accused himself as if he were an impotent or unskilful bridegroom: the fault must have been his if a child had not been born to her. Since then he had been haunted by new methods, had plunged into every innovation, regretting that he had been so lazy at college, and that he had not studied at one of those agricultural schools that he and his father used to make fun of. How many futile attempts; how many experiments ending in failure! And the machines that his servants put out of order; the chemical manure adulterated by the dealers! La Borderie had swallowed up his whole fortune, it now hardly brought him in bread and cheese, and he was expecting the agricultural crisis to finish him off. No matter; he would remain the prisoner of his own soil, and would bury his bones within it, after having kept it for wife up to the very last.

On that day, as soon as he got out of doors, he remembered his son, the captain. The two of them together might have achieved something fine! But he dismissed from his thoughts the memory of the fool who preferred trailing a sword! He had no child now; he would end his days in solitude. Then his neighbours came into his mind, more especially the Coquarts, some landowners who cultivated their farm of Saint-Juste—father, mother, three sons, and two daughters; and who succeeded scarcely better than he did. At La Chamade, the farmer, being near the end of his lease, had left off manuring, letting the property go to rack and ruin. So it was. There was calamity everywhere. One had to work one's self to death, and not complain. Little by little, a soothing calm rose from the broad green fields he was skirting. Some light showers, in April, had brought on the fodder-crops beautifully. The purple clover transported him with delight; he forgot everything else. Then as he was taking a short cut across some ploughed land, to have a look at the work of his two waggoners, the soil clung to his feet; he felt that it was rich and fertile, and it seemed to clasp and hold him back; taking him once more wholly to itself, while the virility, the vigour, the hey-day of his thirty years returned to him. Was not this the only wife for a man? Of what consequence were the whole set of Cognettes, plates out of which every one ate, and with which one might be well content, provided they were clean enough? This excuse, so consonant with his low craving for the baggage, crowned his gaiety. He walked for three hours, and jested with a girl—the servant of those very Coquarts—who was returning from Cloyes on a donkey, and showing her legs.

When Hourdequin went back to La Borderie, he noticed Jacqueline saying good-bye to the farm cats. There were always a troop of them; but whether a dozen, fifteen, or twenty, nobody precisely knew, for the she-cats used to litter in various odd nests of straw, and re-appear with trains of five or six kittens. Next, she went up to the kennels of Emperor and Massacre, the shepherd's two dogs; but they detested her, and growled.

The dinner, in spite of the farewells taken of the animals, went off just as on other days. The master ate and conversed as usual. And at the close of the day nothing more was said about anybody's departure. They all went to sleep, and darkness enwrapped the silent farm.

That very night, too, Jacqueline slept in the room of the late Madame Hourdequin: the state chamber, with its large bed in the depths of an alcove with red hangings. In this room there stood a wardrobe, a small round table, and an arm-chair of the Voltaire style; while above a little mahogany writing-table there hung some medals, framed under glass, and won by the farmer at agricultural competitions. When La Cognette in her chemise, had mounted on to the conjugal couch, she stretched herself upon it, with her turtle-dove chuckle, spreading out her arms and legs as if to take possession of the entire bed.

On the morrow, when she fell on Jean's neck, he repulsed her. Things having now taken a serious turn, it wasn't proper, and he wouldn't consent any more.

[CHAPTER II.]

One evening, some days later, Jean was walking back from Cloyes when, a mile or so before reaching Rognes, he was astonished by the mode of progress of a peasant's cart which was going along, ahead of him. It seemed empty. No one sat on the driver's seat, and the horse, left to its own devices, was leisurely jogging back to its stable, being evidently well acquainted with the road. Accordingly, the young man quickly caught it up. He stopped it, and raised himself on tip-toe to look into the vehicle. A man was lying at the bottom—a short, fat old man of sixty, who had fallen backwards, and whose face was so purple that it appeared black.

Such was Jean's surprise that he began to talk aloud:

"Hallo, there! Is he asleep or drunk? Why, if it isn't old Mouche, the father of those two down yonder. Heavens! I think he's kicked the bucket! Well, well, here's a start!"

But, although laid low by a fit of apoplexy, Mouche still breathed, in a short and laboured way. So Jean raised his head and straightened him out; and then sat himself down in front and whipped up the horse, driving the dying man home at a round trot, for fear that he might slip through his fingers.

Just as he turned into the church-square, he perceived Françoise standing before her door. The sight of the young fellow in their cart, driving Coco, dumbfounded her.

"What's up?" she asked.

"Your father's not well."

"Where is he?"

"There. Look!"

She climbed up on the wheel and looked. For a moment she stood there, without seeming to understand, and staring stupidly at that purple face, half of which had been, as it were, wrenched downwards. The night was falling, and a great livid cloud, which turned the sky yellow, lit up the dying man as with the glow of a conflagration.

Then all at once, she burst into sobs, and ran out of sight to prepare her sister.

"Lise! Lise! Oh, my God!"

Jean, on remaining alone, hesitated. Still the old man could not be left lying in the cart. The basement of the house was three steps below ground, on the side of the square; and to descend into that dark hole seemed to him inconvenient. Then he bethought himself that, on the roadway side, to the left, another door opened level into the yard. It was a good-sized yard, enclosed by a quickset hedge; the turbid water of a pool took up two-thirds of it, and two-thirds of an acre of kitchen and fruit garden extended in the rear. Jean left Coco to himself, and the horse, of his own accord, entered and drew up before his stable, near the shed in which were the two cows.

Françoise and Lise ran up with tears and lamentations. The latter, confined four months previously, and now taken by surprise while suckling her infant, had, in her affright, kept him in her arms; and he howled too. Françoise again got on one wheel, while Lise climbed up on the other. Their lamentations grew deafening; and meantime Mouche, at the bottom of the cart, still kept up his laboured wheezing.

"Papa, answer; won't you? Say what's the matter. Oh, dear! what is the matter? Oh, dear! oh, dear! It's in your head, then, since you can't even speak? Papa, papa, do speak; do answer!"

"Come down. He'd better be got out of the trap," said Jean, sagely.

They gave no help, but only screamed the louder. Luckily a neighbour, Madame Frimat, came upon the scene, attracted by the noise. She was a tall, withered, bony old woman, who for two years had been nursing her paralytic husband, supporting him by cultivating in person, with the doggedness of a beast of burden, the single acre or so that they possessed. She was not at all put out, seeming to think the misadventure a matter of course, and she lent a helping hand as a man would have done. Jean took Mouche by the shoulders, and pulled him up until La Frimat was able to catch hold of his legs. Then they carried him into the house.

"Where's he to be put?" asked the old woman.

The two girls, who were following, had lost their wits, and did not know. Their father's room was a small one upstairs, partitioned off from the grain-loft, and it was almost out of the question to carry him up there. Downstairs there was the kitchen, and the large double-bedded room which he had given up to them. In the kitchen it was as dark as pitch. With their arms stiff with exertion, the young man and the old woman waited, not daring to take another step forward for fear of knocking against some piece of furniture.

"Come, something must be settled, anyhow."

Françoise at last lit a candle, and just then the wife of the rural constable, Madame Bécu came in; she had smelt disaster in the air, or had been warned by that occult agency which is wont to carry news through a village in no time.

"Why! what's amiss with the poor fellow?" said she. "Ah! I see; his blood has turned. Quick! Set him on a chair."

But Madame Frimat was of a different opinion. The idea of seating a man who could not hold himself upright! The thing to do was to stretch him on one of his daughters' beds. The discussion was growing keen, when Fanny came in with Nénesse. She had heard about it while buying some vermicelli at Macqueron's, and had come to see what there was to be seen; being at the same time somewhat affected on her cousins' account.

"Perhaps," she declared, "it's best to sit him down, so that the blood may run back."

And so Mouche was huddled on to a chair near the table, on which the candle was burning. His chin drooped upon his chest, his arms and legs hung limp. His left eye had been drawn open by the displacement of that side of his face, and one corner of his twisted mouth wheezed more than the other. Silence fell. Death was taking possession of the damp room, with its floor of trodden earth, its stained walls, and its large gloomy fireplace.

Jean still waited in perplexity, while the two girls and the three women dangled round the old fellow, looking at him.

"Hadn't I better go and fetch the doctor?" the young man ventured to ask.

Madame Bécu nodded her head, but no one else made any reply. If it were to be nothing after all, why incur the expense of a visit? And if it were really the end, what good could the doctor do?

"Vulnerary's a capital thing," said La Frimat.

"I've got some camphorated spirits," murmured Fanny.

"That's a good thing too," declared Madame Bécu.

Lise and Françoise, now in a state of stupor, listened and took no steps at all. The one was nursing her baby, Jules; the other was holding a glass full of water which her father would not drink. Fanny, however, bustled Nénesse, who was held spell-bound by the contorted visage of the dying man.

"Run home and tell them to give you the little bottle of camphorated spirits on the left in the wardrobe. D'ye hear? In the wardrobe on the left. And call at grandfather Fouan's, and at your aunt La Grande's. Tell them that uncle Mouche is taken very bad. Run, run quick!"

The urchin having bounded out of sight, the women continued their dissertations on the case. La Bécu knew a gentleman who had been saved by having the soles of his feet tickled for three hours. La Frimat, remembering that she had some linden-flowers left out of the pennyworth bought the previous winter for her good man, went and fetched it. She was coming back with the little bag, and Lise was lighting a fire, after handing her child to Françoise, when Nénesse re-appeared.

"Grandpapa Fouan had gone to bed. La Grande said that if uncle Mouche hadn't drunk so much he wouldn't have made himself so sick."

Fanny examined the bottle he handed her, and then cried:

"You fool! I told you on the left. You've brought me the Eau de Cologne."

"That's a good thing, too," said La Bécu.

They forced the old man to take a cup of linden-flower tea, by inserting the spoon between his clenched teeth. Then they rubbed his head with Eau de Cologne. And yet he didn't get any better: it was most discouraging. His face had become blacker still. They were obliged to hitch him up on the chair, for he was sinking down, and on the point of tumbling flat on the floor.

"Oh!" muttered Nénesse, who had gone to the door again, "it's going to rain like I don't know what. The sky's a funny sort of colour."

"Yes," said Jean, "I saw a villainous cloud gathering." And, as if brought back to his first idea: "It's no odds. I'll go and fetch the doctor if you like."

Lise and Françoise looked at each other, frightened and anxious. At last the second came to a resolution in the generous impulse of her youth.

"Yes, yes, Corporal. Go to Cloyes and fetch Monsieur Finet. It sha'n't be said that we didn't do our duty."

Coco, in the midst of the bustle, had not even been unharnessed, and Jean had only to jump into the cart. They heard the clink of iron, and the rumble of the wheels. Then La Frimat mentioned the priest; but the others signified by a gesture that enough trouble was already being taken in the matter. And Nénesse having proposed to walk the two miles or so to Bazoches-le-Doyen, his mother lost her temper. A likely thing that she was going to let him trot off on so threatening a night, with that dreadful rust-coloured sky! Besides, as the old man neither heard nor answered, one might as well knock up the priest to minister to a mile-stone.

Ten o'clock struck from the cuckoo-clock of painted wood. Here was a surprise! To think that they had been there more than two hours without effecting anything. But not one of them seemed inclined to stir, they were fascinated by the sight, and resolved to see it out. A ten-pound loaf lay on the bread-box, with a knife. First the girls, racked with hunger despite their anguish, mechanically cut themselves slices of bread, which they unconsciously ate, quite dry. Then the three women followed their example. The bread diminished, and one or the other of them was always cutting and munching. No other candle had been lighted; they omitted even to snuff the one that was burning; and it was not lively, sitting in that poor, gloomy, bare, peasant room, and listening to the death-rattle of the form huddled together near the table.

All at once, half an hour after Jean's departure Mouche tumbled over and fell headlong to the floor. He no longer breathed; he was dead!

"What did I tell you? Only you insisted on sending for the doctor," remarked La Bécu, tartly.

Françoise and Lise, stupefied for a moment, burst out into fresh tears. With an instinctive impulse they had thrown themselves into each other's arms in their tender, sisterly adoration; and in broken phrases they repeated: "Oh, dear! We have only each other now. It's all over; there are only the two of us. What will become of us! Oh, dear!"

But the corpse could not be left on the floor. In a trice La Frimat and La Bécu did everything necessary. As they dared not carry the body, they went and drew a mattress off a bed, brought it, and stretched Mouche out upon it, covering him up to the chin with a sheet. Meanwhile Fanny lit the candles in two other candlesticks, and placed them on the floor in lieu of wax tapers on either side of the head. For the moment all was well, except that Mouche's left eye, although closed three times by one of the women with her thumb, persisted in opening again, and seemed to be looking at everybody from out of the distorted purple face, which contrasted so sharply with the whiteness of the linen.

Lise had determined to put Jules to bed, and the wake began. Three times did Fanny and La Bécu say they were going, as La Frimat had offered to stay the night with the young ones; but they did not go, continuing to talk in low tones, and glancing askance from time to time at the corpse, while Nénesse, who had got possession of the bottle of Eau de Cologne, finished it up by drenching his hands and hair with its contents.

As twelve o'clock struck, La Bécu raised her voice.

"And how about Monsieur Finet, I should like to know! Plenty of time he gives people to die in! More than two hours bringing him here from Cloyes!"

The door leading to the yard was open, and just then a great gust came in, and blew out the candles on either side of the corpse. This terrified them all, and as they re-lit the candles, the tempestuous blast returned with greater fury, while a prolonged howling arose and swelled in the dark depths of the country-side. It might have been the gallop of a devastating army approaching, so loudly did the branches crash, so deep was the wail of the riven fields. They had run to the doorway, and saw a coppery cloud whirl wildly across the livid sky. Suddenly there was a rattle, as it were, of musketry, and a rain of bullets fell lashing and rebounding at their feet.

A cry of ruin and desolation burst from their lips.

"Hail! Hail!"

Pale and aghast at the scourge above them, they stood there watching. It lasted barely six minutes. There were no thunder-claps; but great bluish flashes seemed incessantly to run along the ground in broad phosphoric furrows. The night was not now so gloomy: the hail stones lit it up with numberless pale streaks as if jets of glass had fallen. The noise became deafening: like a discharge of grape shot, like a train rushing at full speed over an endlessly thundering metal bridge. The wind blew furiously, and the obliquely falling stones slashed everything, accumulated and covered the soil with a layer of white.

"Hail! Oh, dear! What a misfortune! Look, look! Exactly like hen's eggs!"

They dared not venture into the yard to pick any up. The violence of the hurricane continued to increase; all the window-panes were broken; and the momentum was such that one hailstone cracked a jug, while others rolled as far as the dead man's mattress.

"There wouldn't be five to the pound," said Madame Bécu, poising them in her hand.

Fanny and La Frimat made a gesture of despair.

"Everything ruined! A massacre!"

It was over. The disastrous roar was heard rapidly passing away, and a death-like silence fell. The sky, in the rear of the cloud, had become as black as ink. A fine close rain streamed noiselessly down. Nothing was now distinguishable on the ground but the thick layer of hailstones: a gleaming sheet that had, as it were, a light of its own, the shimmer of infinite millions of night-lights.

Nénesse having rushed out of doors, returned with a perfect iceberg, an irregular jagged mass bigger than his fist: and La Frimat, who could no longer keep still, was unable to resist the temptation to go and see how things were.

"I'm going to fetch my lantern; I must know what the damage is," she said.

Fanny controlled herself a few minutes longer, prolonging her lamentations. Oh, what a piece of work! What destruction among the vegetables and fruit-trees! The wheat, oats, and barley were not high enough to have suffered much. But the vines! Ah, the vines! And, standing at the door, she peered into the thick, impenetrable night, and quivered in a fever of uncertainty, trying to estimate the mischief, exaggerating it, and imagining that she saw the land riddled with shot and its life oozing from the wounds.

"Hey! my pets," she said at last: "I'll borrow one of your lanterns and run over as far as our vines."

Then she lit one of the two lanterns and disappeared with Nénesse.

La Bécu, who had no land, didn't at heart care a fig. She fetched sighs and apostrophised Heaven, merely out of a habit she had of feebly moaning and melting into tears on all occasions. Nevertheless, curiosity continually took her to the door; and a lively interest fixed her there once for all as soon as she noticed that the village was starred all over with luminous points. Through a gap in the yard, between the cow-house and a shed, the eye could command the whole of Rognes. Doubtless, the hail-storm had awoke the peasants, and they were all seized with the same impatience to take a look at their fields, all too anxious to wait till daylight.

And indeed the lanterns came forth one by one, multiplying and flitting lightly to and fro, in so dense an opacity, that the arms that held them were merely conjectural. But La Bécu, always on the watch, knew the site of every house, and succeeded in putting a name to every lantern.

"There, now! That one's lit in La Grande's house, and that one's coming out of the Fouans', and over yonder it's Macqueron, and next door it's Lengaigne. Bless me, poor souls! it's heart-breaking. Well, so much the worse! I'm off to join them!"

Lise and Françoise remained alone with their father's corpse. The downpour of the rain continued; little moist breezes skimmed along the ground and guttered the candles. The door ought to have been shut, but neither of them thought of it, being themselves absorbed and agitated by the drama outside, despite the mourning in the house. It wasn't enough, then, to have Death at home? The good God was smashing up everything; one didn't so much as know if there would be a bit of bread left to eat.

"Poor father," murmured Françoise; "what a stew he would have been in! Better that he can't see it."

And, as her sister took up the second lantern, she added:

"Where are you going?"

"I'm thinking of the peas and beans. I'll be back directly."

Lise crossed the yard, through the driving rain, and went into the kitchen-garden. There was only Françoise left with the old man, and even she was standing at the doorway, keenly agitated by the flitting of the lantern to and fro. She thought she could hear complaints and sobs. Her heart was wrung.

"Hey! What is it?" she cried. "What's the matter?"

No voice replied, but the lantern ran to and fro more quickly, as if distracted.

"Tell me, are the beans cut down? And the peas, are they hurt? Gracious! And the fruit and salad stock?"

An exclamation of grief, which now distinctly reached her ears, decided her. She caught up her skirts and ran through the rain to join her sister. The dead man remained, deserted, in the empty kitchen, lying rigid under the sheet, between the two dull, smoky wicks. His left eye, still obstinately open, stared at the old joists of the ceiling.

What a ravage had laid that stretch of land desolate! What a lamentation arose from the scene of disaster, half visible in the flickering gleam of the lanterns. Lise and Françoise carried theirs hither and thither, though it was so wet with rain that scarcely any light passed through the panes; and they brought it close to the beds, confusedly distinguishing, in the narrow ring of light, the beans and peas cut down short, the lettuces so chopped and hacked that it was futile even to think of utilising the leaves. The trees, especially, had suffered. The smaller branches and the fruit had been cut off as with knives. The very trunks were splintered and bruised, and the sap was escaping through the holes in the bark. Farther on, among the vines, matters were worse: the lanterns swarmed and leaped, as if maddened, amid groans and oaths. The stocks seemed to have been mown down, and bunches of blossom bestrewed the soil in company with shattered branches and spurs. Not only was the season's crop ruined, but the stems, stripped bare, would decay and die. No one felt the rain. A dog was howling murder, and women were bursting into tears, as on the brink of a grave. Macqueron and Lengaigne, in spite of their rivalry, were lighting each other, visiting each other's ground, and joining in ejaculations of dismay, as each new vision of ruin, wan and short-lived, met their gaze, and then faded again into shadow behind them. Although old Fouan now had no land of his own, he wanted to look on, waxing wroth. By degrees they all flew into a temper. To actually lose the fruit of a year's work in a quarter of an hour! Could it be possible? What had they done to be so punished? There was no security or justice; unreasoning scourges and caprices slew the world. La Grande, in a fury, abruptly picked up some pebbles, and flung them into the air to pierce the heaven she could not discern. And she blasphemously screamed out:

"Hey, up there! Can't you manage to leave us in peace?"

On the mattress in the kitchen, the deserted Mouche was still staring fixedly at the ceiling with his one eye, when two vehicles drew up at the door. Jean had at length brought Monsieur Finet, after waiting for him at his house during nearly three hours; and had returned in the cart, while the doctor had ordered out his gig.

The medical man, tall and thin, with a face jaundiced by stifled ambition, entered roughly. In his heart he loathed this peasant connection, which he held responsible for his mediocrity.

"What, no one here? Things have mended, then."

But perceiving the corpse: "No, too late! Didn't I tell you? I didn't want to come! It's always the same old game: they call me in when they're dead."

This useless summons in the middle of the night annoyed him; and Lise and Françoise, just then returning, put the finishing touch to his exasperation by apprising him that they had waited a couple of hours before sending for him.

"It's you that have killed him, sure enough. Eau de Cologne and linden-flower tea for a fit of apoplexy! How idiotic! And, what's more, no one keeping him company. It's pretty certain he won't see salvation."

"It's because of the hail, sir," stammered Lise, in tears.

Monsieur Finet became interested, and calmed down. Dear, dear! So there's been a hail-storm? By dint of living among the peasantry he had eventually caught their passions. Jean, also, had drawn near; and they both uttered exclamations of amazement, for, in coming from Cloyes, they had not seen a single hailstone. Some spared, and others, half a mile or so off, turned topsy-turvy! Really, what a piece of ill luck to have one's land in the damaged part of the country! Then, as Fanny returned, bringing back the lantern, La Bécu and La Frimat following her, and all the three launching out into grievous and interminable details of the harrowing things they had seen,—the doctor gravely declared:

"It's a calamity, a great calamity. There's no greater calamity for country-folk."

A muffled sound, a kind of bubbling noise, interrupted him. It came from the corpse, lying forgotten between the two candles. They all became silent, and the women crossed themselves.

[CHAPTER III.]

A month passed by. Old Fouan, appointed guardian to Françoise, who was entering on her fifteenth year, induced the two girls—his ward and Lise, who was the elder by ten years—to let all their land, excepting a strip of meadow, to cousin Delhomme, so that it might be properly cultivated and kept.

Now that the two girls were left alone in the house, without father or mother, they would have had to engage a servant, which would have been ruinous, on account of the increasing price of manual labour. Delhomme, moreover, was simply doing them a service, as he undertook to cancel the lease as soon as either of them married, and a division of the inheritance became necessary.

Lise and Françoise also sold their cousin their horse, which had now become useless, but they kept the two cows, La Coliche and La Rousse, as well as the donkey, Gédéon. Of course they likewise kept their patch of kitchen garden, which it became the province of the elder girl to keep in order, while the younger one looked after the live stock. To be sure, that made plenty of work; but they were hale and hearty, thank God! and would soon get through with it.

The first few weeks were very burdensome, for there was the damage of the hail-storm to be repaired, the soil to be tilled, the vegetables to be replanted. This it was that induced Jean to lend a helping hand. An intimacy had sprung up between him and the girls since the day he had brought their dying father home. The day after the burial he called and inquired after them. Next he came and chatted, growing gradually familiar and obliging, insomuch that one afternoon he took the spade out of Lise's hands to finish the digging of a bed. Thenceforth he devoted to them, in a friendly way, the time that was not taken up by his work at the farm. He belonged to the house, to that old patriarchal house of the Fouans, built three centuries back by an ancestor, and honoured by the whole family with a sort of worship. When Mouche used to complain of having had the worst lot in the distribution of the property, accusing his brother and sister of having swindled him, they answered: "And how about the house? Hadn't he got the house?"

A poor, dilapidated house it was, settling down on its foundations, cracked and rickety, patched up everywhere with odds and ends of plank and plaster. It had obviously been originally constructed of rough stones and clay; subsequently, two walls had been rebuilt with mortar; and finally, towards the beginning of the century, the owners had reluctantly replaced the thatch with a roofing of small slates, now rotten. Thus it had lasted, and thus it still held out; sunk a yard deep in the earth, as all houses were built in the olden time, doubtless for the purpose of ensuring greater warmth. The inconvenience of it was that, in heavy storms, they were flooded with water; and it was of no avail to sweep the hardened soil that composed the cellar-like floor; there was always a remnant of mud in the corners.

The house had been planned, however, with particular artfulness, its back being turned towards the far-stretching northern plain of La Beauce, whence blew the terrible winter winds. On that side, in the kitchen, the only opening was a narrow window, barricaded by a shutter, on a level with the street; while on the southern side, one found the other windows and the door. The place suggested one of those fisher-huts on the sea-shore, which do not expose a single chink to the ocean waves. The winds of La Beauce had battered the house aslant, so that it bent forward like an old broken-backed hag.

Jean was soon familiar with every corner of it. He helped to clean up the room of the deceased; that corner cut off from the granary by a mere plank partition, and containing nothing but an old chest full of straw serving as a bed, with a chair and a table. Downstairs he did not go beyond the kitchen, for he shrank from following the two sisters into their own room, where, as the door was always on the swing, one could see the double-bedded alcove, the large walnut wardrobe, and a superbly-carved round table, doubtless a relic formerly stolen from the château. There existed yet another room behind this, but it was so damp that the father had preferred to sleep upstairs. They were reluctant even to store potatoes in it, for they began immediately to germinate. They lived in the kitchen, a huge smoky room where, for three centuries, many generations of Fouans had succeeded each other. It was redolent of sustained toil and stinted food, of the constant efforts of people who, while working themselves to death, had just managed not to starve, never having a halfpenny more in December than they had in January. A door that opened flush into the cow-house brought the cattle into companionship with the occupants, and when that door was shut, the animals could still be seen and watched through a pane of glass let into the wall. Next there came the stable, where Gédéon now remained by himself; then a shed and a wood-house; and there was no need to go out of doors, for you entered every place in succession. Outside, the rains replenished the pond, which furnished them with water for the cattle and for domestic use. Every morning they had to go down to the Aigre to bring up drinking-water.

Jean felt happy there, without troubling his head to inquire what the attraction was. Lise, who gave him a good welcome, was as gay and buxom as ever. Nevertheless, she was already looking older than twenty-five; indeed, she was growing very plain, more especially since her confinement. But she had good stout arms, and applied herself to her work with such zest—bustling about, shouting, and laughing—that it was delightful to look at her. Jean treated her as a grown-up woman, and did not thee and thou her as he did Françoise, whose fifteen years made her seem to him quite a mere child. The younger girl, whose good looks out-of-door life and hard work had not yet had time enough to spoil, retained her pretty, long face, with its slight, headstrong forehead, its dark, pensive eyes, and its thick lips, shaded by a precocious down. Although deemed a child, she was a woman also; and apt to conceive, as her sister used to say, without being tickled very closely. It was Lise who had brought her up, their mother being dead; and thence came their great fondness, active and noisy on the part of the elder sister, and passionate and restrained on that of the younger one.

Françoise was reputed to have a strong will of her own. Injustice exasperated her. When she had said: "This is mine, and that is yours," she would have gone to the scaffold rather than retract; and, putting everything else aside, she adored Lise, from a notion that such adoration was Lise's due. Withal, she was tractable and very good, free from bad thoughts, and only tormented by her early womanhood, which made her nerveless, slightly dainty, and lazy. One day she also began to address Jean in the second person singular, he being quite a middle-aged and kindly-natured friend, who was wont to draw her out, and sometimes tease her; telling falsehoods of malice aforethought, and defending injustice for the fun of seeing her choke with rage.

One Sunday afternoon in June, the heat already being intense, Lise was engaged in the kitchen garden, hoeing some peas and nipping them round. She had placed Jules under a plum-tree, where he had dozed off to sleep. The sun was beating straight down upon her, and she was puffing as she bent forward to pull up some weeds, when a voice came from behind the hedge:

"What, what! No rest even on Sunday?"

She had recognised the voice, and drew herself up, with red arms and a flushed face, but laughing through it all.

"No, indeed! The work doesn't do itself on a Sunday any more than on a week-day!"

It was Jean. He skirted the hedge, and came in through the yard.

"Let that alone; I'll soon polish off your work!"

However, she refused. She would soon have finished. And then, if she didn't do that, she would be doing something else. There was never a chance of being idle. Although she got up at four o'clock in the morning, and sat sewing till late in the evening by candlelight, she never got to the end of it all.

So as not to oppose her, Jean sat himself in the shade of the neighbouring plum-tree, being careful not to sit upon Jules. He watched Lise, stooping double again, and every now and then pulling down her petticoat, which kept working up behind and showing her fat legs; and then with her head close to the ground, she worked away with her arms without any fear of the rush of blood that swelled her neck.

"Lucky for you," he said, "that you're sturdily built!"

She took some pride in that, and laughed complacently without getting up. He laughed too, conscientiously admiring her, thinking her as strong and energetic as a man. No improper desire was suggested to him by her attitude, by her tense calves, by this woman on all fours, sweating and smelling like an animal in heat. He was simply thinking that with limbs like that one could get through a rare lot of work. It was quite certain that, in a household, a woman of that build would be worth as much as her husband.

No doubt some association of ideas worked in him, for he involuntarily blurted out a piece of news which he had resolved to keep to himself.

"I saw Buteau the day before yesterday."

Lise slowly rose up. But she had no time to question him, for Françoise—who had heard Jean's voice, and who, with her arms bare and white with milk, was now coming from the dairy at the further end of the cow-house—flew at once into quite a temper.

"Oh, you've seen him? The cad!"

Her antipathy had increased. She could never now hear her cousin mentioned without being stirred by one of her gusts of honest indignation, as if she had had a personal injury to avenge.

"Certainly he's a cad," declared Lise calmly; "but it don't do any good to say so at this time of day."

She had stuck her arms a-kimbo, and now in a serious voice she asked:

"And what's Buteau got to say for himself?"

"Why, nothing," replied Jean, with some embarrassment, sorry that he hadn't kept a quiet tongue in his head. "We spoke of his affairs, on account of his father giving out everywhere that he'll disinherit him. Buteau says there's no hurry about that, for the old man's hearty enough, and that, anyway, he don't care a curse."

"Does he know that Hyacinthe and Fanny have signed the deed, whether or no, and that they're both in possession of their shares?"

"Yes, he knows; and he knows, too, that old Fouan has let his son-in-law, Delhomme, the share that he, Buteau, wouldn't have. He knows, also, that Monsieur Baillehache was in such a fury that he took an oath he'd never again have the lots drawn for before seeing the papers signed. Oh, yes; he knows that it's all over."

"Ah! And he said nothing?"

"No, he said nothing."

Lise stooped down in silence, walked on a bit, pulling up some weeds and showing nothing save the full rotundity of her behind; then she turned her neck round, and added, with her head down: "It comes to this, Corporal, if you want to know, I shall have to keep Jules, and that'll be the end of it."

Jean, who had heretofore held out some hopes, nodded.

"Faith! you're perhaps right."

He glanced at Jules, whom he had forgotten. The brat still slept, swathed in his long-clothes, with his little motionless face bathed in light. That was the awkward part of it, that urchin! Otherwise, why shouldn't he have married Lise, now she was free? The idea came to him all at once, then and there, as he watched her working. Perhaps he loved her. Perhaps it was the pleasure of seeing her that brought him so much to the house. None the less was he surprised, not having desired her, not even having jested with her, as he had jested with Françoise, for instance. And, pat, as he raised his head, he saw the latter standing rigid and furious in the sunshine, with her eyes so strangely ablaze with passion that he was enlivened even in the agitation of his new discovery. Just then the sound of a trumpet, a strange topsy-turvy roll-call, rang out; and Lise, leaving her peas, exclaimed:

"Why, here comes Lambourdieu! I want to order a hood of him."

On the road, on the other side of the hedge, there appeared a dumpy little man, blowing a trumpet, and walking ahead of a long vehicle drawn by a grey horse. It was Lambourdieu, a shopkeeper from Cloyes, who had added, bit by bit, millinery, drapery, shoemaking, and even ironmongery to his novelty business. He went from village to village, within a radius of five or six leagues, with a regular bazaar. The peasants had ended by buying everything from him, from their saucepans to their wedding clothes. His vehicle was made to open out and turn back, displaying rows of drawers, and enough goods to stock a whole shop.

When Lambourdieu had taken the order for the hood, he added:

"In the meantime you don't happen to want a fine silk handkerchief?"

So saying he drew out of a box some gorgeous red gold-patterned handkerchiefs, and swished them up and down in the sunlight.

"There you are! Three francs each! It's giving them away. Five francs for the pair!"

Lise and Françoise, to whom they had been handed over the hawthorn hedge, on which Jules's napkins were drying, hankered after them. But they were sensible girls; they had no need of them, and why spend money? They were indeed handing them back, when Jean suddenly made up his mind to take Lise, baby and all. So, in order to precipitate matters, he called out to the young woman:

"No, no! Keep it. I offer it you! Oh, you wouldn't pain me by refusing: it's out of pure friendship, to be sure!"

He had said nothing to Françoise, and as she still held out her handkerchief to the dealer, he glanced at her, and felt a pang of grief as he fancied he saw her cheek pale and her lips quiver with pain.

"You, too, stupid! Keep it. Nay, I insist. None of that self-will of yours!"

He struggled with the two sisters who laughingly defended themselves. Lambourdieu had already held out his hand, across the hedge, for his five francs. And away he went. The horse behind him started off with the long vehicle, and the hoarse flourishes of the trumpet died away as the road wound out of sight.

Jean had all at once taken it into his head to push matters on with Lise, and pop the question. But an accident prevented this. The stable-door had no doubt been badly fastened, for suddenly they saw the donkey, Gédéon, valiantly chewing some carrot tops in the kitchen garden. This donkey, big, sturdy, and russet-coloured, with a large grey cross on his spine, was full of artfulness, and quite a wag in his way. He was very good at lifting latches with his mouth, was wont to fetch bread out of the kitchen, and by the style in which he wagged his long ears when he was reproached with his vices, it was obvious that he understood. As soon as he saw himself discovered he put on an indifferent, easy air; then, on being threatened and waved off, he moved away; only, instead of going back into the yard, he trotted along the walks to the bottom of the garden. Then a regular pursuit set in; and when Françoise had at length caught him, he drew himself together and huddled his head and legs against his body, as if to increase his weight, and make slower progress. He was impervious to everything, whether in the shape of kicks or blandishments. Indeed, Jean had to intervene, and hustle him from behind with his man's strength; for Gédéon, since he had been under the management of the two women, had conceived the most hearty contempt for them. Jules had awoke at the noise and was now howling. The opportunity for popping the question was altogether lost, and Jean had to leave without speaking.

A week went by. A great shyness had come upon the young man, who had now lost heart. Not that the transaction seemed to him disadvantageous; contrariwise, he had, on reflection, become more deeply conscious of its advantages. Each side could not do otherwise than gain. If he had nothing, she was encumbered with her infant. That equalised matters. This was no sordid calculation on his part. He argued as much for her happiness as for his own. Then, again, marriage, by taking him away from the farm, would rid him of Jacqueline, who still worried him, and to whom he still yielded out of fleshly weakness. So at last he made up his mind, and waited for an opportunity to declare himself, conning the words he meant to say, for even regimental life had left him somewhat a ninny with women.

At last, one day at about four o'clock, he slipped away from the farm and went to Rognes, resolved to speak. This was the time when Françoise led her cows to evening pasture, and he had chosen it so as to be alone with Lise. But he was dismayed, at the outset, by a great annoyance. La Frimat was established there in her character of obliging neighbour, helping the younger woman to scald the linen in the kitchen.

The sisters had scoured it on the evening before, and since the morning the ash liquor, scented with orris root, had been boiling in a cauldron hanging from the pot-hook over a clear, poplar wood fire. With bare arms, and her skirts tucked up, Lise, with the aid of a yellow earthen jug, was drawing the water off and wetting the linen, with which the bucking-tub was filled—the sheets at the bottom, then the house-cloths, then the body linen, and, at the top of all, some other sheets. La Frimat was not of much use; but she stopped to gossip, allowing herself that recreation, and contenting herself, every now and then, with removing and emptying into the cauldron the pail which stood under the tub to catch the lye, that kept draining away.

Jean waited patiently, hoping she would leave. She did not do so, however; but went on talking of her poor paralytic husband, who could now only move one hand. It was a great affliction. They had never been well off; but, when he could still work, he rented land which he turned to account, whereas now she had a world of trouble to cultivate by herself the patch that was their own. She struggled her hardest; collecting horse dung from the roads as manure, for they kept no animals; tending her salad stock, beans, and peas, plant by plant; and watering even her three plum and two apricot trees. The result was that she made an enormous profit out of the ground; and started every Saturday for the Cloyes market, staggering under the burden of two tremendous baskets, without reckoning the heavy vegetables which a neighbour conveyed for her in his cart. She rarely returned without two or three five-franc pieces, particularly in the fruit season. Her constant grievance was the lack of manure. Neither the horse dung, nor the sweepings from the few rabbits and hens she kept, made a sufficient supply. She had come at length to utilising the excrements of her old man and herself, that human manure so much despised, which provokes disgust even in the country. This had got abroad, and people chaffed her about it, and dubbed her Mother Caca—a nickname which did her a deal of harm at the market; she had seen shopkeepers' wives turn with aversion and disgust from her superb carrots and cabbages. Despite her great mildness, this set her beside herself with fury.

"Come, now, tell me—you, Corporal—is it reasonable? Isn't it permissible to use all that the good God has put in our way? And then to go and say that the dung of animals is cleaner! No; it's jealousy! Folks have a spite against me in Rognes, because the vegetables grow more vigorously on my ground. Tell me, Corporal, does it disgust you?"

Jean replied, in embarrassment: "Well, I don't find it exactly appetising. One ain't used to it. I daresay though, that it's only fancy."

This frankness threw the old woman into despair. Though she was not habitually a tale-bearer, she could not restrain her bitterness.

"Oh, that's it, is it? They've already set you against me. Ah, if you only knew how spiteful they are, if you had any idea of what they say about you!"

Then she let loose the gossip of Rognes about the young man. To begin with, they had execrated him because he was an artisan, and sawed and planed wood, instead of tilling the ground. Then, when he had taken to the plough, they had taxed him with taking the bread out of other people's mouths, by coming into a district that wasn't his own. Did any one know where he came from? Hadn't he done some evil deed at home, that he didn't even dare to go back there? Then they spied upon his intercourse with La Cognette, and asserted that some fine night the two of them would administer a bowl of devil's broth to Hourdequin, and rob him.

"Oh, the blackguards!" muttered Jean, who became pale with indignation.

Lise, who was drawing a jugful of boiling lye from the cauldron, started laughing at the mention of La Cognette, a name she sometimes twitted him with in jest.

"And since I've begun, I'd better make an end of it," pursued La Frimat. "Well, there's no kind of abomination they don't talk about, since you began visiting here. Last week—wasn't it?—you presented them both with silk neckerchiefs, which they were seen wearing on Sunday at mass. The filthy beasts say that you go to bed with the two of them!"

This settled matters. Trembling, but resolute, Jean got up and said:

"Listen, my good woman. I will make reply in your presence, which shall not stand in my way. I will ask Lise if she will consent to my marrying her. You hear me ask, Lise? and if you say yes, you will make me very happy."

She was just then emptying her jug into the bucking-tub. She did not hurry, but finished carefully watering the linen. Then, with her arms bare and moist with steam, becoming quite grave, she looked him in the face.

"So you're in earnest?"

"Thoroughly in earnest."

She did not seem surprised. It was natural. Only she did not answer yes or no; there was evidently something on her mind which annoyed her.

"You needn't say no on account of La Cognette," resumed he, "because La Cognette——"

She cut him short with a gesture. She was well aware that all the larking at the farm was of no consequence.

"There is also the fact that I've absolutely nothing but my skin to bring you; whereas, you own this house and some land."

Again she waved her arm, as if to say that in her position, with a child, she agreed with him in thinking that things were evenly balanced.

"No, no! it's not that," she declared at length. "Only there's Buteau."

"But since he refuses?"

"That's certain. And now there's no sentiment in the matter, for he's behaved too badly. But, all the same, Buteau must be consulted."

Jean reflected for a good minute. Then, very sensibly, he replied:

"As you please. It's due to the child."

La Frimat, who was gravely emptying the pail of drainings into the cauldron, thought herself called upon to approve the step—albeit favourable to Jean, the honest fellow; he surely was neither pig-headed nor brutal—and she was delivering herself to this effect, when Françoise was heard outside, returning with the two cows.

"I say, Lise," she cried, "come and look. La Coliche has hurt her foot."

They all went out, and Lise, at the sight of the limping animal, with her left fore-foot bruised and bleeding, flew into a sharp passion—one of those surly bursts with which she used to sweep down upon her sister when the latter was little, and happened to be in fault.

"Another of your pieces of neglect, eh? You, no doubt, dropped off to sleep on the grass, the same as you did the other day?"

"I assure you I didn't. I don't know what she can have done. I tied her to the stake, and she must have caught her foot in the cord."

"Hold your tongue, liar and good-for-nothing! You'll get killing my cow some day."

Françoise's black eyes flashed fire. She was very pale, and indignantly stammered out:

"Your cow, your cow! You might, at least, say our cow."

"Our cow, indeed? A chit like you with a cow!"

"Yes, half of all that's here is mine. I've a right to take half and destroy it if it amuses me to do so!"

The two sisters stood facing each other, hostile and threatening. It was the first painful quarrel in the course of their long fondness. This question of meum and tuum left them both smarting: the one exasperated by the rebellion of her younger sister, the other obstinate and violent under a sense of injustice. The elder gave way, and went back into the kitchen, so as to restrain herself from boxing her sister's ears. When Françoise, having housed her cows, re-appeared, and went to the pan to cut herself a slice of bread, there was an awkward silence.

Lise, however, had calmed down. The sight of her sister's sullen resistance was now an annoyance to her, and she was the first to speak, thinking to make an end of it by an unexpected piece of news.

"Do you know," she asked, "Jean wants to marry me, and has proposed?"

Françoise, who was standing by the window eating her bread, remained indifferent, and did not even turn round.

"What odds does that make to me?"

"The odds it makes to you," replied Lise, "are that you'd have him for a brother-in-law, and I want to know if you'd like him?"

Françoise shrugged her shoulders.

"Like or dislike, him or Buteau, what's the good? So long as I don't have to sleep with him. Only, if you want to know, the whole thing is hardly decent."

And she went outside to finish her bread in the yard.

Jean, feeling rather uncomfortable, affected to laugh, as at the whims of a spoilt child; while La Frimat declared that in her young days a wench like that would have been whipped till the blood came. As for Lise, she remained a moment silent and serious, absorbed once more in her washing. Then she wound up by saying:

"Well, Corporal, we'll leave it like that. I don't say no, and I don't say yes. The hay-making is come: I shall see our people; I'll make inquiries, and find out how things stand. And then we'll settle something. Will that do?"

"That'll do!"

He held out his hand, and shook the one she gave him. From her whole person, steeped in warm steam, there exuded a true housewifely scent: a scent of wood-ash perfumed with orris.

[CHAPTER IV.]

For the last two days Jean had been driving the mowing-machine over the few acres of meadow belonging to La Borderie, on the banks of the Aigre. From daybreak till night the regular click of the blades had been heard, and that morning he was getting to the end. The last swaths were falling into line behind the wheels, forming a layer of fine, soft, pale-green herbage. The farm having no hay-making machine, he had been commissioned to engage two haymakers: Palmyre, who worked to the utmost of her strength and harder than a man; and Françoise, who had got herself engaged out of caprice, finding amusement in the occupation. Both of them had come with him at five o'clock, and, with their long forks, had laid out the mulons: little heaps of half-dried grass which had been gathered together over night, by way of protecting it from the night-dews. The sun had risen in a clear glowing sky cooled by a breeze. It was the very weather to make good hay in.

After breakfast, when Jean returned with his haymakers, the hay of the first acre mowed was finished. He felt it and found it dry and crisp.

"I say," cried he, "we'll give it just another turn, and to-night we'll begin the stacking."

Françoise, in a grey linen dress, had knotted over her head a blue handkerchief, one edge of which flapped on her neck, while two corners fluttered loosely over her cheeks, and shaded her face from the sun's brilliant rays. With a swing of her fork she took the grass and flung it up, while the wind blew out of it a kind of golden dust. As the blades fluttered, a strong subtle scent arose from them: the warm scent of cut grass and withered flowers. She had grown very hot, walking on amid the continuous fluttering, which put her in high spirits.

"Ah, my child," said Palmyre, in her doleful voice, "it's easy to see you're young. When night comes, you'll feel your arms stiff."

They were not alone, for all Rognes was mowing and making hay in the meadows around them. Delhomme had got there before daybreak, for the grass, when wet with dew, is tender to cut, like spongy bread; whereas it toughens in proportion as the sun grows hotter. At that moment, one distinctly heard its resistant whir under the scythe, which, held by Delhomme, swept restlessly to and fro. Nearer, in fact contiguous with the grass of the farm, there were two bits of land, belonging one to Macqueron and the other to Lengaigne. In the first, Berthe, in a genteel dress with little flounces, and a straw hat, had come in attendance on the haymakers, by way of recreation, but she was already tired, and remained leaning on her fork in the shade of a willow. In the other field, Victor, who was mowing for his father, had just sat down, and, with his anvil between his knees, was beating at his scythe. For ten minutes nothing had been distinguishable, amid the deep thrilling silence of the air, save the persistent hurried taps of the hammer on the steel.

Just then Françoise came near to Berthe.

"You've had enough of it, eh?" asked the former.

"More or less. I'm beginning to feel tired. You see, when one isn't used to it."

Then they chatted, whispering about Suzanne, Victor's sister, whom the Lengaignes had sent to a dressmaking establishment at Châteaudun, and who, after six months, had fled to Chartres to live "gay." It was said she had run off with a notary's clerk; and all the girls in Rognes whispered the scandal and speculated on the details. Living gay to them meant orgies of gooseberry syrup and Seltzer water, in the midst of a seething crowd of men, dozens of whom waited to court you, in Indian file, in the back shops of wine-sellers.

"Yes, my dear, that's how it is. Isn't she going it?"

Françoise, being younger, stared in stupefaction.

"Nice kind of amusement!" she said at last. "But unless she comes back the Lengaignes will be all alone, as Victor has been drawn for the conscription."

Berthe, who espoused her father's quarrel, shrugged her shoulders. A lot Lengaigne cared. His only regret was that the child hadn't stopped at home to be turned up, and so bring some custom to his shop. Hadn't an uncle of hers, an old man of forty, had her already, before she went to Châteaudun, one day when they were peeling carrots together. And, in a lower whisper, Berthe gave the exact words and circumstances. Françoise, bending double, was suffocated with laughter, it seemed so funny to her.

"Gracious goodness! How stupid to do things like that!"

Then resuming her work she withdrew, raising forkfuls of grass and shaking them in the sun. The persistent hammering on the steel was still heard. Some minutes later, as she came near to where the young man was sitting, she spoke to him.

"So you're going to be a soldier?"

"Oh, in October. Plenty of time yet; there's no hurry."

She struggled against her desire to question him about his sister, but she spoke of her despite herself.

"Is it true what they say, that Suzanne is now at Chartres?"

He, completely indifferent, made answer:

"I suppose so! She seems to enjoy it."

Then, in the distance, seeing Lequeu, the schoolmaster, who was seemingly strolling down by chance, he resumed:

"Hullo! There's somebody after the Macqueron girl. What did I tell you? He's stopping and poking his face into her hair. Get along with you, you old nincompoop! You may sniff round her, but you'll never get anything but the smell!"

Françoise began laughing again, and Victor pursued the family vendetta by falling foul of Berthe. No doubt the schoolmaster wasn't worth much: a bully who cuffed children, a sly-boots whose opinions nobody knew, capable of toadying the girl to get her father's money. But, then, Berthe was no better than she should be, with all her fine town-bred airs. It was no use her wearing flounced skirts and velvet bodices, and stuffing out her behind with table-napkins; the underneath was none the better. Quite the reverse, indeed, for she was up to snuff; she'd learnt more by being brought up at the Châteaudun school than by stopping at home to mind the cows. No fear of her getting herself let in for a child; she preferred to ruin her constitution in solitude.

"How do you mean?" asked Françoise, who did not understand.

He made a gesture, whereupon she became serious, and said, unreservedly:

"That's how it is, then, that she's always saying dirty things, and rubbing herself up against you."

Victor had begun beating his blade again; and, tapping between each phrase, he went on saying some very improper things about Berthe.

These set Françoise off into another fit of mirth; and she only calmed down, and went on hay-making, on seeing her sister Lise on the road coming towards the meadow. Lise went up to Jean, and explained that she had settled to go and see her uncle about Buteau. For the last three days that step had been agreed upon between them, and she promised to come back and tell him the answer. When she went off, Victor was still tapping, and Françoise, Palmyre, and the other women were still flinging the grass in the dazzling light of the vast bright sky. Lequeu was very obligingly giving a lesson to Berthe, thrusting, raising, and lowering her fork as stiffly as a soldier at drill. Afar off, the mowers advanced unceasingly, with a constant, steady motion, swinging on their loins, and with their scythes perpetually sweeping to and fro.

For an instant Delhomme stopped and stood upright, towering above the others. From the cow-horn, full of water, that hung at his belt, he had taken his hone, and was sharpening his scythe with a bold, rapid gesture. Then he bent his back again, and the sharpened steel was heard whizzing still more keenly and bitingly over the meadow.

Lise had arrived at the Fouans' house. At first she was afraid there was no one at home, the place seemed so dead. Rose had parted with her two cows; the old man had just sold his horse; there were no signs of animals, no work, nothing stirring in the empty buildings and yard. Nevertheless the door yielded to her touch; and on entering the common room, which was gloomy and silent amid all the mirth out-of-doors, Lise found old Fouan standing up and finishing a bit of bread and cheese, while his wife was idly seated and looking at him.

"Good morning to you, aunt. Everything going on satisfactorily?"

"Why, yes!" answered the old woman, brightening up at the visit. "Now we are gentlefolks, we have only to take a holiday all day long."

Lise tried to make herself agreeable to her uncle too. "And the appetite's all right, it seems?" said she.

"Oh!" he answered, "it isn't that I'm hungry. Only it's something to do if one eats a bit now and then, it helps to pass the day."

He seemed so dull that Rose started off into an enthusiastic account of their happiness in not having to do any work. True enough, they had earned it well: it was not a bit too soon to see others running about while they lived on their income. Getting up late, twiddling their thumbs, not caring a pin for wind and weather, not having a single care—ah! it was a thorough change for them; it was perfectly heavenly. He, roused and exhilarated, joined in and improved upon her account. And yet, under all the forced joy, under the feverish exaggeration of their talk, there was plainly perceptible the profound tedium, the torture of idleness, that had racked these two old folks ever since their arms, suddenly becoming inert, had begun to get out of order by disuse, like old machinery thrown aside as waste iron.

At length Lise ventured on the subject of her visit.

"Uncle, they tell me that the other day you had a talk with Buteau."

"Buteau is a thorough beast!" cried Fouan, suddenly infuriated, and not giving her time to finish. "If he wasn't as pig-headed as a carroty-haired donkey, should I ever have had that bother with Fanny?"

This first disagreement with his children he had so far kept to himself, but, in his bitterness of heart, the allusion had now escaped him.

On entrusting Delhomme with Buteau's share, he had intended to rent it out at eighty francs a hectare, while Delhomme purposed simply paying a double allowance: two hundred francs for his own share, and two hundred for the other. That was fair, and the old man was the more angry because he had been in the wrong.

"What bother?" asked Lise. "Don't the Delhommes pay you?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Rose. "Every three months, at the stroke of twelve, the money is there on the table. Only there are ways and ways of paying, aren't there? And my old man, being sensitive, would like people to behave at least decently. Whereas, since this worry about Buteau's share, Fanny comes to us with the same air as she would go to the process-server, as if she were being cheated."

"Yes," added the old man, "they do pay, and that's about all. I don't think that enough. There's a certain consideration due. Their money don't pay off everything, does it? We're mere creditors now, nothing more. And yet we're wrong to grumble. If they'd all of them pay."

He broke off, and an awkward silence fell. This allusion to Hyacinthe, who hadn't handed in a copper, but was mortgaging his share bit by bit, and getting drunk on the proceeds, wrung the heart of his mother, who was always impelled to defend that darling scamp of hers. She dreaded lest this other sore point should be laid bare, and so she hastily resumed:

"Don't go fretting yourself about trifles! What's the odds so long as we're happy? Enough's as good as a feast."

She had never opposed her husband like this before, and he looked at her fixedly.

"Your tongue runs too fast, old woman. I don't mind being happy, but I won't be worried."

She shrank into herself again, huddling lazily together on her chair while he finished his bread, rolling the last mouthful over and over to prolong the recreation. The dull room sank to sleep.

"I wanted to know," went on Lise, "what Buteau means to do with regard to me and his child? I haven't worried him much hitherto, but it's time to settle one way or the other."

The two old people uttered not a word. She then questioned the father pointedly.

"As you saw him, he must have mentioned me. What did he say?"

"Nothing. He never opened his lips on the subject. And, in fact, there's nothing to be said. The priest's pestering me to arrange things, as if anything could be arranged so long as the fellow refuses to accept his share."

Lise pondered in great perplexity.

"You think he'll accept some day?"

"It's still possible."

"And you think he'd marry me?"

"There's a chance of it."

"Then you'd recommend me to wait?"

"Why, that depends on yourself. Everybody acts as they feel."

She was silent, unwilling to speak of Jean's proposal, and not knowing how to get a definite answer. Finally she made a last effort.

"You can well understand that I'm sick of not knowing what to expect after all this time. I want a yes or a no. Suppose, uncle, you went and asked Buteau? Do!"

Fouan shrugged his shoulders.

"To begin with, I'll never speak to the skunk again. And then, my girl, how simple you are! Why make a stubborn fool like that say no, who'd always say no afterwards. Leave him free to say yes some day, if it's to his interest."

"To be sure!" concluded Rose, simply, once more the echo of her husband.