which costs a great
deal, neither one drop of soup into which fat and salt have to be put,
nor one morsel of bread, which comes from the wheat.

Then he climbed up a ladder into a loft, where he had his straw-bed,
while his son slept below stairs at the end of a kind of niche near the
chimneypiece and the servant shut herself up in a kind of cellar, a black
hole which was formerly used to store the potatoes.

Cesaire and his father scarcely ever talked to each other. From time to
time only, when there was a question of selling a crop or buying a calf,
the young man would ask his father's advice, and, making a
speaking-trumpet of his two hands, he would bawl out his views into his
ear, and old Amable either approved of them or opposed them in a slow,
hollow voice that came from the depths of his stomach.

So one evening Cesaire, approaching him as if about to discuss the
purchase of a horse or a heifer, communicated to him at the top of his
voice his intention to marry Celeste Levesque.

Then the father got angry. Why? On the score of morality? No, certainly.
The virtue of a girl is of slight importance in the country. But his
avarice, his deep, fierce instinct for saving, revolted at the idea that
his son should bring up a child which he had not begotten himself. He had
thought suddenly, in one second, of the soup the little fellow would
swallow before becoming useful on the farm. He had calculated all the
pounds of bread, all the pints of cider that this brat would consume up
to his fourteenth year, and a mad anger broke loose from him against
Cesaire, who had not bestowed a thought on all this.

He replied in an unusually strong voice:

"Have you lost your senses?"

Thereupon Cesaire began to enumerate his reasons, to speak about
Celeste's good qualities, to prove that she would be worth a thousand
times what the child would cost. But the old man doubted these
advantages, while he could have no doubts as to the child's existence;
and he replied with emphatic repetition, without giving any further
explanation:

"I will not have it! I will not have it! As long as I live, this won't be
done!" And at this point they had remained for the last three months
without one or the other giving in, resuming at least once a week the
same discussion, with the same arguments, the same words, the same
gestures and the same fruitlessness.

It was then that Celeste had advised Cesaire to go and ask for the cure's
assistance.