l luck would have it, the jar of oil was almost
out, and the last cask of wine was also nearly empty. La Souleiade,
having neither vines nor olive trees, produced only a few vegetables and
some fruits--pears, not yet ripe, and trellis grapes, which were to be
their only delicacies. And meat and bread had to be bought every day. So
that from the first day the servant put Pascal and Clotilde on rations,
suppressing the former sweets, creams, and pastry, and reducing the food
to the quantity barely necessary to sustain life. She resumed all
her former authority, treating them like children who were not to be
consulted, even with regard to their wishes or their tastes. It was
she who arranged the menus, who knew better than themselves what they
wanted; but all this like a mother, surrounding them with unceasing
care, performing the miracle of enabling them to live still with comfort
on their scanty resources; occasionally severe with them, for their own
good, as one is severe with a child when it refuses to eat its food. And
it seemed as if this maternal care, this last immolation, the illusory
peace with which she surrounded their love, gave her, too, a little
happiness, and drew her out of the dumb despair into which she had
fallen. Since she had thus watched over them she had begun to look like
her old self, with her little white face, the face of a nun vowed to
chastity; her calm ash-colored eyes, which expressed the resignation of
her thirty years of servitude. When, after the eternal potatoes and the
little cutlet at four sous, undistinguishable among the vegetables, she
was able, on certain days, without compromising her budget, to give them
pancakes, she was triumphant, she laughed to see them laugh.

Pascal and Clotilde thought everything she did was right, which did not
prevent them, however, from jesting about her when she was not present.
The old jests about her avarice were repeated over and over again. They
said that she counted the grains of pepper, so many grains for each
dish, in her passion for economy. When the potatoes had too little oil,
when the cutlets were reduced to a mouthful, they would exchange a quick
glance, stifling their laughter in their napkins, until she had left
the room. Everything was a source of amusement to them, and they laughed
innocently at their misery.

At the end of the first month Pascal thought of Martine's wages. Usually
she took her forty francs herself from the common purse