th
their fists and stamp their feet on the floor.

The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat:

"Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You'll see what'll happen. He'll burst like a
sack of grain!"

And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers.

Toine was, in fact, an astonishing sight, he was so fat, so heavy, so
red. He was one of those enormous beings with whom Death seems to be
amusing himself--playing perfidious tricks and pranks, investing
with an irresistibly comic air his slow work of destruction. Instead of
manifesting his approach, as with others, in white hairs, in emaciation,
in wrinkles, in the gradual collapse which makes the onlookers say: "Gad!
how he has changed!" he took a malicious pleasure in fattening Toine, in
making him monstrous and absurd, in tingeing his face with a deep
crimson, in giving him the appearance of superhuman health, and the
changes he inflicts on all were in the case of Toine laughable, comic,
amusing, instead of being painful and distressing to witness.

"Wait a bit! Wait a bit!" said his wife. "You'll see."

At last Toine had an apoplectic fit, and was paralyzed in consequence.
The giant was put to bed in the little room behind the partition of the
drinking-room that he might hear what was said and talk to his friends,
for his head was quite clear although his enormous body was helplessly
inert. It was hoped at first that his immense legs would regain some
degree of power; but this hope soon disappeared, and Toine spent his days
and nights in the bed, which was only made up once a week, with the help
of four neighbors who lifted the innkeeper, each holding a limb, while
his mattress was turned.

He kept his spirits, nevertheless; but his gaiety was of a different
kind--more timid, more humble; and he lived in a constant, childlike
fear of his wife, who grumbled from morning till night:

"Look at him there--the great glutton! the good-for-nothing
creature, the old boozer! Serve him right, serve him right!"

He no longer answered her. He contented himself with winking behind the
old woman's back, and turning over on his other side--the only
movement of which he was now capable. He called this exercise a "tack to
the north" or a "tack to the south."

His great distraction nowadays was to listen to the conversations in the
bar, and to shout through the wall when he recognized a friend's voice:

"Hallo, my son-in-law! Is that you, Celestin?"

And Celestin Maloisel