Chapter X: Part 10

'Well, you see, you find me in the midst of a debauch. It is the only pleasure I get, my friend, and I'm sure that it will not offend God.'

Thereupon he put his pipe in his mouth again, and puffed away freely, only taking it out at times to make a short remark. For instance, the priest of Verchemont worried him. That priest was a happy man, possessing a really fine garden with a good and fruitful soil; but he never so much as touched a garden tool. And next the Abbé complained to Lazare about his potatoes, which had been falling off for the last two years, though the soil, he said, was exactly suited to them.

'Don't let me disturb you,' Lazare replied. 'Please go on with what you were doing.'

The Abbé then resumed his digging.

'Yes, indeed, I must get on,' he said. 'The youngsters will be here for the catechism class presently, and I want to get this bed finished before they come.'

Lazare had seated himself on a slab of granite, some ancient tombstone, placed against the low wall of the churchyard. He watched Abbé Horteur struggling with the stones and listened to him while he talked on in a shrill voice that suggested a child's; and, as the young fellow watched and listened, he wished that he could be as poor and as simple-minded as the priest, with a brain as empty and a body as tranquil. The mere fact that the Bishop had allowed Abbé Horteur to grow old in that wretched cure showed how innocent and guileless the good man had the reputation of being. Besides, he was one of those who never complain, and whose ambition is satisfied so long as they have bread to eat and water to drink.

'It isn't very cheerful living amongst all these tombs,' the young man remarked, thinking aloud.

The priest stopped digging in surprise.

'What! not cheerful?'

'Well, you have got death perpetually before your eyes. I should think you must dream about it at nights.'

The priest took his pipe out of his mouth and spat upon the ground.

'No, indeed, I never dream about it at all. We are all in the hands of God.'

Then, he began to dig again, driving his spade into the ground with a blow of his heel. His faith kept him free from fear, and his imagination never strayed beyond what was revealed in the catechism. Good folks died and went to heaven. Nothing could be simpler and more encouraging. He smiled in a convinced sort of way; that stolid, unwavering theory of salvation sufficed for his narrow brain.

From that time forward Lazare visited the priest almost every morning in his garden, He would sit down on the old tombstone and forget his thoughts as he watched the Abbé cultivating his vegetables; he even gained a temporary tranquillity by the contemplation of the other's blind faith which enabled him to live in the midst of death without disquiet. Why couldn't he himself, he thought, become a simple child again, like that old man? In the depths of his heart he harboured some lurking hope that his dead faith might be fanned into life again by his converse with the guileless, simple-minded priest, whose tranquil ignorance had such a charm for him. He began to bring a pipe with him, and the pair of them smoked together while they chatted about the slugs that devoured the salad plants, or the manure that was too expensive, for it was seldom that the priest spoke of God. With his spirit of tolerance and long experience he reserved the Divinity for his own personal salvation. Other people looked after their affairs in their way and he looked after his in his fashion. After thirty years of unavailing preaching and warning he now strictly confined himself to the observance of his ministerial duties. It was very kind of that young man, he thought, to come and see him every day, and as, with his tolerant and charitable disposition, he did not want to cavil with him nor to inveigh against the theories which he must have brought back from Paris, he preferred to keep on talking with him about the garden; and thus Lazare, with his head buzzing with all the priest's simple gossip, sometimes thought that he was really on the point of relapsing into that happy age of ignorance when fear is unknown.

But though the mornings thus glided away, Lazare every night, up in his room, still brooded over the memory of his mother, without being able to summon up enough courage to put out his candle. His faith was dead. One day, as he sat smoking with Abbé Horteur, the latter hastily put his pipe out of sight on hearing the sound of footsteps behind the pear-trees. It was Pauline, who had come to look for her cousin.

'The Doctor is in the house,' said she, 'and I have asked him to stay to lunch. You'll come in soon, won't you?'

She was smiling, for she had caught sight of the Abbé's pipe beneath his blouse. The priest quickly pulled it out again, with that cheerful laugh to which he was addicted whenever he was discovered smoking.

'It's very silly of me,' he said. 'People would think I had been committing a crime. See! I am going to light it again before you!'

'I tell you what, your reverence!' Pauline exclaimed gaily; 'come and lunch with us and the Doctor, and you can smoke your pipe afterwards.'

The priest was delighted, and immediately replied:

'Well yes, I accept. I will follow you directly. I must just put my cassock on. And I will bring my pipe with me; I promise I will.'

It was the first luncheon, since Madame Chanteau's death, at which the dining-room had re-echoed with the sound of laughter. Abbé Horteur smoked his pipe after dessert, and this made them all merry, but he evinced such genial humour over this indulgence that it at once seemed quite natural. Chanteau, who had eaten heartily, grew quite lively under the cheering influence of this fresh stir of life in the house. Doctor Cazenove told stories about savages, while Pauline beamed with pleasure at hearing all the noise, hoping that it might perhaps draw Lazare from his moody despondency.

After that luncheon, Pauline determined to revert to the Saturday dinners, which had been broken off by her aunt's death. The Abbé and the Doctor came regularly to these repasts, and the family life was resumed on its old lines once more. They jested together, and the widower would clap his hands on his legs and protest that, if it wasn't for that confounded gout, he would get up and dance, so jovial did he feel. It was only Lazare who still remained in an unsettled state; his gaiety was forced, and he often shook with a sudden shudder while he was noisily chattering.

One Saturday evening, in the middle of dinner, Abbé Horteur was summoned to the bedside of a dying man. He did not even wait to empty his glass, but set off at once, without paying any heed to the Doctor, who had visited the man before coming to dine and had told the Abbé he would find him already dead. The priest had shown himself so weak in intellect that evening that as soon as his back was turned Chanteau remarked:

'There are times when there seems to be very little in him.'

'I would willingly change places with him,' Lazare roughly rejoined. 'He is much happier than we are.'

The Doctor laughed.

'That may be so. Matthew and Minouche are also happier than we are. Ah! I recognise in that remark of yours the young man of to-day, who has nibbled at the sciences and filled himself with discontent because they have not enabled him to satisfy his old ideas of the absolute, ideas which he sucked in with his mother's milk. At the very first attempt you want to discover every truth in the sciences, whereas we can barely decipher them, when, maybe, the inquiry will go on for ever. Then you begin to say that there is nothing in them, and you try to fall back upon your old faith, which will have nothing more to do with you, and so you drop into pessimism. Yes! pessimism is the disease of the end of the century. You are a set of Werthers turned upside down!'

This was the Doctor's favourite subject, and he grew quite animated over it. Lazare, on his side, exaggerated his denial of all certainty, and his belief in final and universal evil.

'How can we live,' he asked, 'when at every moment things give way beneath our feet?'

The old man yielded to an impulse of youthful passion as he retorted:

'Why, just go on living! Isn't life itself sufficient? Happiness consists in action.'

Then he abruptly addressed himself to Pauline, who was listening with a smile on her face.

'Come now!' he said, 'tell us what you do to be always cheerful!'

'Oh!' she replied, in a joking tone, 'I try to forget all about myself, for fear lest I should grow melancholy, and I think about others; that occupies my mind, and makes me bear my troubles patiently.'

This reply seemed to irritate Lazare, who, prompted by a spirit of malicious contradiction, asserted that women ought to be religious; and he pretended that he could not understand why Pauline had ceased to fulfil her duties for so long a time. Thereupon the girl gave her reasons in her tranquil manner.

'It is very easily explained,' she said. 'Confession proved very distasteful to me and hurt my feelings, and it affects many women, I think, in the same way. Then, again, I can't bring myself to believe things that seem contrary to reason. And, that being so, why should I tell a lie by pretending that I do believe them? And, besides, the unknown in no way disquiets me; it can only be a logical outcome of life, and it seems to me best to await it as tranquilly as possible.'

'Hush! Here's the Abbé!' interrupted Chanteau, whom this conversation was beginning to bore.

The man was dead, and the Abbé placidly finished his dinner, after which they each drank a little glass of chartreuse.

Pauline had now assumed the management of the household. All the purchases and every detail of the establishment came under her inspection, and a big bunch of keys dangled from her waist. She took over the control as a matter of course, and Véronique showed no sign of displeasure at it. The servant had been very morose, however, since Madame Chanteau's death, and almost appeared to be in a state of stupor. Her affection for the dead woman seemed to revive, and she once more began to treat Pauline with suspicious surliness. It was to no purpose that the latter spoke softly and soothingly to her; she took offence at a word, and could often be heard muttering and grumbling to herself in the kitchen. And whenever, after intervals of obstinate silence, she indulged in those muttered soliloquies, she always appeared to be overwhelmed by stupefaction at Madame Chanteau's death. Had she known that her mistress was going to die, she moaned to herself? If she had had any notion of such a thing, she would never have thought of saying what she had said. Justice before everything! It wasn't right to kill people, even if they had their faults. But she washed her hands of it all, she growled; it would be so much the worse for the person who was the real cause of the misfortune. Still, this assurance did not seem to calm her, for she went on growling and struggling against imaginary transgressions.

'What's the matter that you are perpetually worrying yourself like this?' Pauline asked her one day. 'We both did all we could; but we can do nothing against death.'

Véronique shook her head.

'Ah! people don't usually die like that. Madame Chanteau was what she was, but she took me in when I was quite a little girl, and I could cut my tongue out if I thought that anything I ever said had aught to do with her death. Don't let us talk about it any more; it would end badly.'

No further reference had been made by Pauline and Lazare to their marriage. Chanteau, who was desirous of bringing the matter to a conclusion, now that the main obstacle to it had disappeared, had ventured to allude to it one day when Pauline came and sat near him with her sewing to keep him company. He felt a keen desire to retain her beside him and a great horror of again falling into the hands of Véronique should his niece ever leave him. Pauline, however, gave him to understand that nothing could be settled until the completion of the period of mourning. It was not a feeling of propriety alone that prompted her to make that vague reply, but she was also looking to time to answer a question which she dared not attempt to answer herself. The suddenness of her aunt's death, that terrible blow from which neither she nor her cousin had yet recovered, had brought about a kind of truce between their wounded affections, from which they were gradually awaking, only to suffer the more on finding themselves, amidst their irreparable loss, face to face with their own distressful story: Louise driven out of the house; their love shattered, and, perhaps, the whole course of their existences modified. What was to be done now? Did they still love each other? Was their marriage possible or advisable? Questions like these floated through their minds, amidst the stupor in which they were left by the sudden blow that had fallen upon them, and neither the one nor the other seemed anxious to force on a solution.

With Pauline, however, the recollection of the insult offered to her had lost much of its bitterness. She had long ago forgiven Lazare, and was quite ready to place her hand in his whenever he should show repentance. She had not the least jealous desire to see him humiliate himself before her; her only thought was for him, so that she might give him back his promise if he no longer loved her. Her whole anguish lay in that doubt: did he still love Louise?--or had he forgotten her and returned to the old affections of his early youth? However, as she thus thought of giving Lazare up rather than make him unhappy her heart sank, for, though she trusted she would have the courage to do so, if necessary, she hoped she would die soon afterwards.

Ever since her aunt's death an impulse of generosity had moved her to bring about a reconciliation between herself and Louise. Chanteau might write to Louise, and she herself would just add a line to say that she had forgotten what had happened. They all felt so lonely and dull that the other's presence would distract them from their gloomy thoughts. Since the terrible shock of her aunt's death, all that had happened previously seemed very far away, and Pauline had often regretted that she had behaved so violently. Yet, whenever she thought of speaking to her uncle on the subject, a feeling of repugnance held her back. Wouldn't it mean imperilling the future, tempting Lazare, and perhaps losing him altogether? However, perhaps she might still have found courage and pride enough to subject him to this risk, if her sense of justice had not risen in revolt against it. It was the treason alone that seemed to her so unpardonable. And then, again, was she not capable of restoring happiness and life to the house? Why call in a stranger, when she was conscious that she herself was brimming over with willing devotion and affection? Without being aware of it, there was a touch of pride in her abnegation, and she was a little jealous in her devotion. She yearned to be her relatives' one and only solace.

From this time all Pauline's endeavours were turned in that direction. She laid herself out in every way, to make those about her cheerful and happy. Never before had she shown herself so persistently cheerful and kindly. Every morning she came down with a bright smile and fixed determination to conceal her own griefs in order that she might do nothing to add to those of others. Her gentle amiability seemed to set all troubles at defiance, and she possessed a sweet evenness of disposition which disarmed all feeling against her. She was now in perfect health again, strong and sound as a young tree, and the happiness that she spread around her was the emanation of her own healthy brightness. The arrival of each fresh day delighted her, and she found a pleasure in doing what she had done the day before, perfectly contented and quiet in mind, and looking forward to the morrow without any touch of feverish expectation. Though Véronique went on muttering in her kitchen, and indulged in strange and inexplicable caprices, a fresh burst of life was driving all mournfulness from the house; the merry laughter of former days rang through the rooms and echoed up the staircase. Chanteau himself seemed particularly delighted by the change, for the gloominess of the house had always weighed on him. Existence, in his case, had really become abominable, yet he clung to it with the desperate clutch of a sick man who holds dearly to life, though it be but pain to him. Every day that he managed to live seemed to be a victory achieved, and his niece appeared to him to brighten and warm the house like a beam of sunlight, beneath whose rays death could not lay its chilly touch upon him.

Pauline, however, had one source of trouble. Lazare seemed proof against all her attempts to console him, and she grew distressed as she saw him falling again into a sombre mood. Lurking behind his grief for his mother, there was a revival of his terror of death. Now that the lapse of time was beginning to mitigate his original sorrow, this terror of death asserted all its old sway over him, heightened by the fear of hereditary disease. He felt sure that he too would succumb to some derangement of his heart, and he brooded over the certainty of a speedy and tragic end. He was constantly listening to the sounds of life within him, observing, in a state of nervous excitement, the working of his stomach, kidneys, and liver; but it was particularly his heart-beats which absorbed him. If he laid his elbow upon the table, he heard his heart beating in his elbow; if he rested his neck against the back of a chair, he heard it throbbing there; if he sat down, if he went to bed, he heard it beating in his thighs, his sides, his stomach; and ever and ever its throbbing seemed to him to be telling out his life like a clock that is running down. Dazed by this constant study of his organism, he perpetually alarmed himself with the fear that he was on the point of breaking down. All his organs were worn out, he fancied, and his heart, which disease had distended to a monstrous size, was about to rend his frame in pieces by its hammer-like beating.

In this way Lazare's mental sufferings went on increasing. For many years, every night as he lay down in bed the thought of death had frozen him to the marrow, and now he dared not go to sleep, racked as he was with the fear of never awaking. Sleep was hateful to him, and he experienced all the horror of dying as he felt himself growing drowsy, falling into the unconsciousness of slumber. His sudden waking gave him still a greater shock, dragging him out of black darkness, as though some giant hand had clutched him by the hair and hurled him back into life again, shivering and stammering with horror of the mysterious unknown through which he had passed. He clasped his hands convulsively, more desperate and panic-stricken than ever at the thought that he must die. He suffered such torture every night that he preferred not to go to bed. He found that he could lie down on the sofa and sleep in the daytime in perfect peace, and it was probably that heavy slumber during the day which made his nights so terrible. By degrees he gave over going to bed at night at all, preferring his long siestas of the afternoon, and afterwards only dozing off towards daybreak, when the fear of darkness was driven away.

He had, however, intervals of calmness, and at times he would remain free from his haunting fears of death for two or three nights in succession. One day Pauline found an almanack in his room, dotted over with red ink. She asked him the meaning of the marks.

'What have you marked it for like this? Why are all those days dotted?'

'I haven't marked anything,' he stammered. 'I know nothing about it.'

Then his cousin said gaily: 'I thought it was only girls who trusted to their diaries things that they wouldn't tell anyone else. If you have been thinking about us on all the days you have marked, it is very nice of you indeed. Ah! I see you have secrets now!'

However, as she saw him become more and more disturbed, she was good-natured enough to press him no further. On the young man's pale brow she saw the shadow which she knew so well, the shadow left by that secret trouble which she seemed powerless to alleviate.

For some time past he had also been astonishing her by fresh eccentricities. Possessed by a firm conviction that his end was close at hand, he never left a room, or closed a book, or used anything without thinking that it was the last time he would do so, and that he would never again see the thing he had used, the book he had closed, or the room he had left; and he had thus contracted a habit of bidding continual farewells, yielding to a morbid craving to take up and handle different objects that he might see them once more. With all this were mingled certain ideas of symmetry. He would take three steps to the right and then as many to the left, and touch the different articles of furniture on either side of a window or door the same number of times. And beneath this there lurked the superstitious fancy that a certain number of touchings, some five or seven, for instance, distributed in a particular fashion, would prevent the farewell from being a final one. In spite of his keen intelligence and his denial of the supernatural, he carried out these foolish superstitious practices with animal-like docility, though trying to hide them as though they were some shameful failing. This was the revenge taken by the deranged nervous system of this pessimist and positivist, who declared that he believed only in what was actually known. He was becoming quite a nuisance, though.

'Why are you pacing up and down like that?' Pauline cried at times. 'That's three times you've gone up to that cupboard and touched the key. It won't run off!'

In the evening it seemed as though he would never be able to get away from the dining-room. He arranged all the chairs in a certain order, tapped the door a particular number of times, and then entered the room again to lay his hands, first the right and then the left, on his grandfather's masterpiece. Pauline, who waited for him at the foot of the stairs, at last broke out into a peal of laughter.

'What idiotic behaviour for a man of twenty-four! Where is the sense, I should like to know, in touching things in that way?'

But after a time she ceased to make a jest of him, for she felt much distressed by his disquietude. One morning she surprised him kissing--seven times in succession--the framework of the bed on which his mother had died. The sight filled her with alarm, and she began to guess the torments which embittered his existence. When she saw him turn pale as he came upon a reference to the twentieth century in a newspaper, she gave him a compassionate glance which made him turn his head aside. He recognised that she understood him, and he rushed off and hid himself in his own room, all shame and confusion. Over and over again did he upbraid himself as a coward, and swear that he would resist the influence of this weakness. He would argue with himself and bring himself to look death in the face, and then in a spirit of bravado, instead of passing the night awake on his couch, he would quickly undress and jump into bed. Death, he would then say to himself, might come and would be welcome; he would await it there as deliverance. But immediately the throbbing of his heart drove all his oaths away, an icy breath seemed to freeze his bones, and he frantically stretched out his hands as he broke into a despairing cry of 'O God! God!' It was these terrible backslidings which filled him with shame and despair. His cousin's tender pity, too, only served to overwhelm him. The days grew so heavy that as he saw them begin he scarcely dared to hope that they would ever end. In this gradual decay of his vitality, his cheerfulness had been the first to depart, and now physical strength seemed to be failing him in its turn.

Pauline, however, in the pride of her self-devotion, was determined to gain the victory. She recognised the source of her cousin's disease, and tried to impart to him some of her own courage by giving him a love of life. But her compassionate kindliness seemed to receive a continual check. At first she made open attacks upon him with her old jests and jokes about 'that silly, stupid pessimism.' 'What!' she said, 'was it she now who had to chant the praises of the great Saint Schopenhauer, while he, like all the humbugging pessimists, was quite willing to see the world blown to pieces, but refused to be blown up himself?' These jests wrung a constrained smile from the young man, but he seemed to suffer from them so much that she did not persist in them. She next tried the effect of such caressing consolations as might be lavished upon a child, and encompassed him with cheerful amiability and placid laughter. She always let him see her beaming with happiness and revelling in, the pleasantness of life. The house seemed full of sunshine. There was nothing more required of him than to take advantage of it and let his life flow quietly on, but this he could not do; the happiness that was offered to him only made his feeling of horror at what was to come hereafter all the keener. Then Pauline tried stratagem, and racked her brain to promote enthusiasm in something or other which might have the effect of making him forget himself. But his idleness had become a sort of disease; he had no inclination for anything whatever, and found even reading too great an exertion, so that he spent his whole time in gnawing at himself.

For a moment Pauline had a glimpse of hope. They had gone one day for a short walk on the sands, when Lazare, as they reached the ruins of the stockades, a few of the beams of which were still standing upright, began to explain a new system of protective works which, he assured her, could not fail to prove successful. The collapse of the former ones had been caused by the weakness of the supporting timbers. It would only be necessary to double their thickness and to give a greater inclination to the central beams. His voice vibrated and his eyes lighted up with all his old enthusiasm as he spoke, and his cousin besought him to take up the task again and make another effort. The village was gradually being destroyed; every high tide swept away a further portion of it; and there could be no doubt that, if he went to see the Prefect, he would succeed in obtaining the subvention, while she herself would be only too glad to make further advances in order to assist such a noble work. She was so anxious to spur him into action that she would willingly have sacrificed the remains of her fortune to bring about that end. But he only shrugged his shoulders. What would be the good of it, he asked? He turned pale as the thought struck him that, if he were to commence the work, he would be dead before he could finish it; and, to hide the perturbation which this reflection caused him, he began to inveigh against the Bonneville fishermen.

'A pack of grinning idiots, who jeered at me when that wolfish sea swept everything away! No! no! they may do things for themselves now! I won't give them another chance of laughing at my "bits of sticks," as they called them.'

Pauline tried to soothe him. The poor folk were in a terrible state of wretchedness. Since the sea had carried off the Houtelards' house, the most solidly built of all the village, together with three others, cottages of the poorer fishermen, their misery had increased. Houtelard, who had once been the rich man of the district, had now taken up his quarters in an old barn, some twenty yards behind his former dwelling; but the others, who had no such refuge, were housing themselves in clumsy huts made out of the shells of old boats. They were living in a miserable state of nudity and promiscuousness; the women and children were wallowing in vice and vermin. All that was bestowed upon them in charity went in drink. The wretched creatures sold all the food that was given them, with their clothes, pots, and pans, and what little furniture they had left, in order to buy drams of the terrible 'calvados,' which stretched them on the ground across their doorways like so many corpses. Pauline was the only one who still continued to say a word for them. Abbé Horteur had given them up, and Chanteau talked of sending in his resignation, being unwilling to remain any longer the Mayor of such a drove of swine. Lazare, too, when his cousin tried to excite his pity on behalf of that little colony of drunkards, beaten down by the fierceness of the elements, only repeated his father's eternal refrain:

'No one compels them to remain here. All that they have to do is to go elsewhere. Only a pack of idiots would come and stick themselves right under the waves.'

This was the general feeling of the neighbourhood, and everyone looked upon the Bonneville folk as obstinate fools. The villagers, on the other hand, were mistrustfully unwilling to go elsewhere. They had been born there, they said, and why should they have to leave the place? The same sort of thing had been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there was nothing for them to do anywhere else. Prouane, when he was exceptionally tipsy, always concluded by saying that wherever they might go they would always be devoured by something or other.

Pauline used to smile at this and nod her head in approval, for happiness, in her opinion, depended neither upon people nor circumstances, but on the more or less reasonable way in which people conformed themselves to their circumstances. She redoubled her care and attention, and distributed still larger doles and alms than before. At last she was able to induce Lazare to associate himself with her in her charities; she hoped that she might thereby rouse him from his gloomy broodings, and lead him to forget his own troubles by awaking in him pity for those of others. Every Saturday afternoon he remained at home with her, and from four o'clock till six they received the young folk from the village, the ragged draggle-tail urchins whom their parents sent up to get what they could out of Mademoiselle Pauline. It was an invasion of snivelling little lads and dirty little girls.

One Saturday it was raining, and Pauline could not distribute her alms on the terrace, as was her custom. Lazare had to fetch a bench and place it in the kitchen.

'Good gracious, sir!' Véronique exclaimed. 'Surely Mademoiselle Pauline isn't going to bring all that dirty lot in here? It's a nice idea, indeed; if they do come, I won't answer for the state of the soup.'

At that moment the girl entered the kitchen with her bag of silver and her medicine-chest. She merrily replied to Véronique's indignant outburst:

'Oh! a turn of your broom will make things all right again; and, besides, it's raining so heavily that they will have had a good washing before they come in, poor little things!'

And, indeed, the cheeks of the first to enter were quite bright and rosy from the downpour. They were so soaked that pools of water trickled from their ragged clothes on to the tiles of the kitchen-floor, thereby increasing the servant's wrath, which was by no means diminished when Pauline told her to light a faggot of wood to dry them a little. The bench was carried near the fire, and was soon occupied by a shivering row of impudent, leering brats, who cast greedy eyes at what was lying about--some half-emptied wine-bottles, the remains of a joint, and a bunch of carrots lying on a block.

'Children indeed!' Véronique went on growling. 'Children that are grown up and ought to be earning their own living. They'll go on pretending to be children till they're five-and-twenty, if only you'll let them!'

But Pauline bade her be silent.

'There! have you done now? Talking like that won't fill their mouths or help them to grow up.'

The girl sat down at the table, with her money and the other articles she intended to distribute in front of her; and she was just about to call the children to her in turn, when Lazare, who had remained standing, caught sight of Houtelard's boy amongst the other youngsters, and shouted out:

'Didn't I forbid you to come here again, you young vulture? Your parents ought to be ashamed of themselves for sending you here, for they are quite able to feed you, whereas there are so many others who are dying of hunger.'

Houtelard's son, an overgrown lad of fifteen, with a timid and sad expression, began to cry.

'They beat me if I don't come,' he said. 'The missis got hold of the rope and father drove me out.'

He turned up his sleeve to show a big violet bruise on his arm which had been caused by a blow from a piece of knotted rope. The 'missis' was the old servant whom the lad's father had married, and who was gradually killing the boy by her ill-treatment. Since the loss of their house, their harshness and miserly filthiness had increased, and now their home was a perfect pigsty, where they tortured the lad, as if to revenge themselves for their misfortunes on him.

'Put an arnica compress on his arm,' said Pauline softly to Lazare.

Then she herself gave the lad a five-franc piece. 'Here! give them this so that they shan't beat you any more, and tell them that if they strike you again, and if there are any bruises on your body next Saturday, they will never get another sou out of me.'

All along the bench the other children, cheered by the warming blaze, were now tittering and digging each other in the ribs with their elbows. One tiny little thing had stolen a carrot and was munching it furtively.

'Come here, Cuche!' said Pauline. 'Have you told your mother that I hope to get her admitted very soon into the Hospital for Incurables at Bayeux?'

Cuche's wife, a miserable abandoned woman, had broken her leg in July, and had remained infirm ever since.

'Yes, I told her,' the lad replied in a hoarse voice; 'but she says she won't go.'

He had grown into a strong young fellow, and was now nearly seventeen years old. With his hands hanging at his sides, he swayed about in an awkward manner.

'What! She won't go!' cried Lazare. 'And you won't come, either; for I told you to come up this week and help a little in the garden, and I'm still waiting for you.'

The lad still swayed himself about. 'I haven't had any time,' he replied.

At this Pauline, seeing her cousin about to lose his temper, interposed and said to the lad:

'Sit down again now, and we will speak about it presently. Just reflect a little or you will make me angry too.'

It was next the turn of the Gonins' little girl. She was thirteen years old, and still had a pretty rosy face beneath a mop of fair hair. Without waiting to be questioned, she poured out a flood of prattle, telling them how her father's paralysis was ascending to his arms and even his tongue, and that he could now only grunt like an animal. Cousin Cuche, the sailor who had deserted his wife and installed himself in Gonin's house, had made a violent attack upon the old man that very morning, in the hope of finishing him off.

'Mother sets on him too. She gets up at night and empties bowls of cold water over father, because he snores so loud and disturbs her. If you could only see what a state they have left him in, Mademoiselle Pauline! He is quite naked, and he wants some sheets very badly, for all his skin is getting grazed and peeling off!'

'There! That will do; hold your tongue!' said Lazare, interrupting her chatter; while Pauline, moved to pity, sent Véronique off to look out a pair of sheets.

Lazare considered the girl much too wide-awake for her age, and he believed that, although she did perhaps sometimes ward off a blow meant for her father, she treated him in the long run no better than the others did. Moreover, he felt quite sure that whatever was given to her, whether it was money, or meat, or bed-linen, instead of being of any service to the infirm old man, would only serve for the gratification of his wife and cousin Cuche.

He began to question her sternly, for he had seen her gadding about with several lads of the neighbourhood. However, Pauline laid her hand upon his arm, for the other children, even the youngest amongst them, were sniggering and smiling with all the impudence of precocious vice. How was it possible to arrest that spreading rottenness when the men and women set so bad an example? When Pauline had given the girl a pair of sheets and a bottle of wine, she whispered to her for a moment or two, trying to frighten her as to the consequences which might result from misbehaviour. Warnings of this kind were the only ones that might hold her in check.

Meantime Lazare, wishing to hasten the distribution, the length of which was beginning to disgust and irritate him, called up Prouane's daughter.

'Your father and mother were tipsy again last night,' he said, 'and I hear that you were worse than either of them.'

'Oh! no, sir! I had a very bad headache.'

He placed before her a plate in which were a few pieces of raw meat.

'Eat that!'

She was devoured with scrofula again, and her nervous disorders had reappeared. Drunkenness increased her precocious infirmities, for she had acquired the habit of drinking with her parents. When she had swallowed three lumps of the meat, she stopped and made a grimace of disgust.

'I've had enough; I can't eat any more.'

But Pauline had taken up a bottle.

'Very well,' she said! 'if you don't eat the meat, you shan't have your glass of quinine wine.'

On hearing this, the girl fixed her glistening eyes on the glass, which Pauline filled, and overcame her repugnance against the meat. Then she seized the glass and tossed its contents down her throat with all a drunkard's knowing readiness. But she did not then retire; she begged Pauline to let her take the bottle away with her, saying that it interfered too much with what she had to do to come up to the house every day; and she promised to take the bottle to bed with her, and to keep it so securely hidden that her father and mother would never be able to find it and drink the wine. Pauline, however, refused to let her have it.

'You'd swallow every drop of it before you got to the bottom of the hill,' said Lazare. 'It's yourself that we suspect now, you little wine-cask!'

One by one the children left the bench to receive money, or bread, or meat. Some of them, after receiving their share of the distribution, seemed inclined to linger before the blazing fire, but Véronique, who had just noticed that half her carrots had been devoured, drove them off pitilessly into the rain. 'Had anyone ever seen anything like it before?' she cried. 'Carrots, too, that still had all the earth sticking to them!'

Soon there was no one left but young Cuche, who looked very depressed in the expectation of receiving a severe lecture from Pauline. She called him to her, spoke to him for a long time in low tones, and finished by giving him his loaf and the hundred sous which he received from her every Saturday. Then he went off, with his clumsy swaying, having duly promised to work, but having no intention whatever of doing anything of the kind.

The servant was just giving a sigh of relief when she suddenly exclaimed:

'Hallo! they haven't all gone yet, then! There's one of them over there in the corner still!'

It was the Tourmals' little girl, the little abortion of the high roads, who, notwithstanding her ten years, was still quite a dwarf. It was only in shamelessness and effrontery that she seemed to grow, and she groaned more miserably and seemed more wretched than ever, trained for the profession of begging from her cradle, just as some infants have their bones manipulated in order that they may become acrobats. She crouched between the dresser and the fireplace, as though she had stowed herself in that corner for fear of being surprised in some wrong-doing.

'What are you up to there?' Pauline asked her.

'I am warming myself.'

Véronique cast an anxious glance round her kitchen. On previous Saturdays, even when the children had assembled on the terrace, various little articles had disappeared. That day, however, everything seemed in its place, and the little girl, who had hurriedly risen to her feet, began to deafen them with her shrill voice:

'Father is in the hospital, and grandfather has hurt himself at his work, and mother hasn't a gown to go out in. Please have pity upon us, kind young lady---'

'Do you want to split our ears, you little liar?' Lazare cried angrily. 'Your father is in gaol for smuggling, and when your grandfather sprained his wrist he was robbing the oyster-beds at Roqueboise, and, if your mother hasn't got a dress, she must manage to go out stealing in her chemise, for she is charged with having strangled five fowls belonging to the innkeeper at Verchemont. Do you think you can befool us with your lies about matters that we know more of than you do yourself?'

The child did not even appear to have heard him. She went on immediately with all her impudent coolness:

'Have pity upon us, kind young lady! My father and grandfather are both ill, and my mother dare not leave them. God Almighty will bless you for it.'

'There! that will do! Now go away and don't tell any more lies!' Pauline said to her, giving her a piece of money to get rid of her.

She did not want telling twice, but hurried from the kitchen and through the yard as quickly as her little legs would carry her. Just at that moment the servant uttered a cry:

'Ah! the cup that was on the dresser! She's gone off with your cup, Mademoiselle Pauline!'

Then she bolted off in pursuit of the young thief, and a couple of minutes afterwards dragged her back into the kitchen with all the stern ferocity of a gendarme. It was as much as they could do to search the child, for she struggled and bit and scratched and screamed as though they were trying to murder her. The cup was not in her pocket, but they discovered it next to her skin, hidden away in the rag which served her as a chemise. Thereupon ceasing to weep, she impudently asserted that she did not know it was there, that it must have dropped into her clothes while she was sitting on the floor.

'His reverence was quite right when he said she would rob you!' Véronique exclaimed. 'If I were you I would send for the police.'

Lazare, too, began to speak about sending her to prison, provoked as he was by the demeanour of the girl, who perked herself up like a young viper whose tail had been trodden upon. He felt inclined to smack her.

'Hand back the money that was given to you!' he cried. 'Where is it?'

The child had already raised the coin to her lips in order to swallow it, when Pauline set her free, saying:

'Well, you may keep it this time, but you can tell them at home that it is the last they will get. In future I shall come myself to see what you are in need of. Now, be off with you!'

They could hear the girl's naked feet splashing through the puddles, and then all became silent. Véronique pushed the bench aside and stooped down to sponge away the pools of water that had trickled from the children's rags. Her kitchen was in a fine state, she grumbled; it reeked of all that filth to such a degree that she would have to keep all the windows and doors open. Pauline, who seemed very grave, gathered up her money and drugs without saying a word, while Lazare, with an air of disgust and _ennui_, went out to wash his hands at the yard tap.

It was great grief to Pauline to see that her cousin took but little interest in her young friends from the village. Though he was willing to help her on the Saturday afternoons, it was only out of mere complaisance; his heart was not in the work. Whereas neither poverty nor vice repelled her, their hideousness depressed and annoyed Lazare. She could remain cheerful and tranquil in her love for others, whereas he could not cease to think of himself without finding fresh reasons for gloomy broodings. Little by little, those disorderly, ill-behaved children, in whom all the sins of grown-up men and women were already fermenting, began to cause him real suffering. The sight of them proved like an additional blight to his existence, and when he left them he felt hopeless, weary, full of hatred and disgust of the human species. The hours that were spent in good works only hardened him, made him deny the utility of almsgiving and jeer at charity. He protested that it would be far more sensible to crush that nest of pernicious vermin under foot than to help the young ones to grow up. Pauline listened to this, surprised by his violence, and pained to find how different were their views.

That Saturday, when they were alone again, the young man revealed all his suffering by a single remark.

'I feel as though I had just come out of a sewer,' said he. Then he added: 'How can you care for such horrible monsters?'

'I care for them for their own good and not for mine,' the girl replied. 'You yourself would pick up a mangy dog in the road.'

Lazare made a gesture of protest. 'A dog isn't a man,' he said.

'To help for the sake of helping, is not that something?' Pauline resumed. 'It is vexing that they don't improve in conduct, for, if they did, perhaps they would suffer less. But I am content when they have got food and warmth; that is one trouble less for them, at any rate. Why should you want them to recompense us for what we do for them?'

Then she concluded sadly:

'My poor boy, I see that all this only bores you, and it will be better for you not to come and help me in future. I don't want to harden your heart and make you more uncharitable than you already are.'

Thus Lazare eluded all her attempts, and she felt heart-broken at finding how utterly powerless she was to free him from his fear and _ennui_. When she saw him so nervous and despondent, she could scarcely believe that it was the result merely of his secret trouble; she imagined there must be other causes for his sadness, and the idea of Louise recurred to her. She felt sure that he must still be thinking about the girl, and suffered from not seeing her. A cold chill came upon her at this thought, and she tried to recover her old feeling of proud self-sacrifice, telling herself that she was quite capable of spreading sufficient brightness and joy about her to make them all happy.

One evening Lazare made a remark that hurt her cruelly.

'How lonely it is here!' he said, with a yawn.

She looked at him. Had he got Louise in his mind? But she had not the courage to question him. Her kindliness struggled within her, and life became a torture again.

There was another shock awaiting Lazare. His old dog, Matthew, was far from well. The poor animal, who had completed his fourteenth year in the previous March, was getting more and more paralysed in his hind-quarters. His attacks left him so stiff that he could scarcely crawl along; and he would lie out in the yard, stretching himself in the sun, and watching the members of the family with his melancholy eyes. It was the old dog's eyes, now dimmed by a bluish cloudiness, blank like those of a blind man, that especially wrought upon Lazare's feelings. The poor animal, however, could still see, and used to drag himself along, lay his big head on his master's knee, and look up at him fixedly with a sad expression that seemed to say that he understood all. His beauty had departed. His curly white coat had turned yellowish, and his nose, once so black, was becoming white. His dirtiness, and a kind of expression of shame that hung about him--for they dared not wash him any more on account of his great age--rendered him yet more pitiable. All his playfulness had vanished; he never now rolled on his back, or circled round after his tail, or showed any impulses of pity for Minouche's kittens when Véronique carried them off to drown in the sea. He now spent his days in drowsing like an old man, and he had so much difficulty in getting up on his legs again, and dragged his poor soft feet so heavily, that often one of the household, moved to pity at the sight, stooped to support him for a moment or two in order that he might be able to walk a little.

He grew weaker every day from loss of blood. They had sent for a veterinary surgeon, who burst out laughing on seeing him. What! were they making a fuss about a dog like that? The best thing they could do was to put him out of the way at once. It was all very well to try and keep a human being alive as long as possible, but what was the good of allowing a dying animal to linger on in pain? At this they quickly bustled the vet out of the house, after paying him his fee of six francs.

One Saturday Matthew lost so much blood that it was found necessary to shut him up in the coach-house. A stream of big red drops trickled after him. Doctor Cazenove, who bad arrived rather early, offered to go and see the dog, who was treated quite as a member of the family. They found him lying down, in a state of great weakness, but with his head raised very high, and the light of life still shining in his eyes. The Doctor made a long examination of him, with all the care and thoughtfulness which he displayed at the bedside of his human patients. At last he said:

'That abundant loss of blood denotes a cancerous degeneration of the kidneys. There is no hope for him, but he may linger for a few days yet, unless some sudden hæmorrhage carries him off.'