hope that she might die in hospital like most of her
kind. This abuse did not, however, improve the situation, which was
decidedly becoming bad. Jean soon followed his sister's example. He
waited for pay-day to come round, and then contrived to receive the
money himself. As he was leaving he told one of his friends, who
repeated it to Antoine, that he would no longer keep his lazy father,
and that if the latter should take it into his head to have him brought
back by the gendarmes he would touch neither saw nor plane.

On the morrow, when Antoine, having vainly sought him, found himself
alone and penniless in the house where for twenty years he had been
comfortably kept, he flew into the most frantic rage, kicked the
furniture about, and yelled the vilest imprecations. Then he sank down
exhausted, and began to drag himself about and moan like a convalescent.
The fear of having to earn his bread made him positively ill. When
Silvere came to see him, he complained, with tears, of his children's
ingratitude. Had he not always been a good father to them? Jean and
Gervaise were monsters, who had made him an evil return for all he had
done for them. Now they abandoned him because he was old, and they could
not get anything more out of him!

"But uncle," said Silvere, "you are not yet too old to work!"

Macquart, coughing and stooping, shook his head mournfully, as if to say
that he could not bear the least fatigue for any length of time. Just
as his nephew was about to withdraw, he borrowed ten francs of him. Then
for a month he lived by taking his children's old clothes, one by one,
to a second-hand dealer's, and in the same way, little by little, he
sold all the small articles in the house. Soon nothing remained but
a table, a chair, his bed, and the clothes on his back. He ended by
exchanging the walnut-wood bedstead for a plain strap one. When he had
exhausted all his resources, he cried with rage; and, with the fierce
pallor of a man who is resigned to suicide, he went to look for the
bundle of osier that he had forgotten in some corner for a quarter of
a century past. As he took it up he seemed to be lifting a mountain.
However, he again began to plait baskets and hampers, while denouncing
the human race for their neglect.

It was particularly at this time that he talked of dividing and sharing
the riches of the wealthy. He showed himself terrible. His speeches
kept up a constant conflagration in the tavern, where h