sm, his
old limbs still drank in the humidity of the soul, as they had drunk
in for the past sixty years, the moisture of the walls of his low house
thatched with damp straw.

He came back at the close of the day, took his place at the end of the
table in the kitchen and when the earthen bowl containing the soup had
been placed before him he placed round it his crooked fingers, which
seemed to have kept the round form of the bowl and, winter and summer,
he warmed his hands, before commencing to eat, so as to lose nothing,
not even a particle of the heat that came from the fire, 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