while I was asleep in
the barn, it's true, and afterward it happened between us when I wasn't
asleep. I certainly would have married him if he weren't a servant man.
Am I a worse woman for that?"

The man said simply:

"As for me, I like you just as you are, with or without the child. It's
only my father that opposes me. All the same, I'll see about settling
the business."

She answered:

"Go to the cure at once."

"I'm going to him."

And he set forth with his heavy peasant's tread, while the girl, with
her hands on her hips, turned round to plant her colza.

In fact, the man who thus went off, Cesaire Houlbreque, the son of deaf
old Amable Houlbreque, wanted to marry, in spite of his father, Celeste
Levesque, who had a child by Victor Lecoq, a mere laborer on her
parents' farm, who had been turned out of doors for this act.

The hierarchy of caste, however, does not exist in the country, and if
the laborer is thrifty, he becomes, by taking a farm in his turn, the
equal of his former master.

So Cesaire Houlbieque went off, his whip under his arm, brooding over
his own thoughts and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden
shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque.
He wanted her with her child because she was the wife he wanted. He
could not say why, but he knew it, he was sure of it. He had only to
look at her to be convinced of it, to feel quite queer, quite stirred
up, simply stupid with happiness. He even found a pleasure in kissing
the little boy, Victor's little boy, because he belonged to her.

And he gazed, without hate, at the distant outline of the man who was
driving his plough along the horizon.

But old Amable did not want this marriage. He opposed it with the
obstinacy of a deaf man, with a violent obstinacy.

Cesaire in vain shouted in his ear, in that ear which still heard a few
sounds:

"I'll take good care of you, daddy. I tell you she's a good girl and
strong, too, and also thrifty."

The old man repeated:

"As long as I live I won't see her your wife."

And nothing could get the better of him, nothing could make him waver.
One hope only was left to Cesaire. Old Amable was afraid of the cure
through the apprehension of death which he felt drawing nigh; he had not
much fear of God, nor of the Devil, nor of Hell, nor of Purgatory, of
which he had no conception, but he dreaded the priest, who represented
to him burial, as one might fear the doctor