go before I've lighted my
pipe at their wheat-stacks," he cried, striking his fist on the table as
he sat down.

"Mustn't yelp like that before people," said Godain, showing him Pere
Niseron.

"If the old fellow tells, I'll wring his neck," said Catherine.
"He's had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him
virtuous; it's his temperament that keeps him so, that's all."

Strange and noteworthy sight!--that of those lifted heads, that group
of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard stood
sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the drinkers.

Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps the
most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,--a miser without
money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely takes
precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness within
himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,--Godain
represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.

He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not
attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more
so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant workers
like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man's fist,
and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown
spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled
with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at the
boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of
a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among
his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never perspired, he
reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, nervous,
never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though scarcely twenty-seven
years of age, white lines were beginning to show in his rusty black
hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening of which could be
seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must have worn it a month
and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots were mended with old
iron. The original stuff of his trousers was unrecognizable from the
darns and the infinite number of patches. On his head was a horrible
cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the doorway of some bourgeois
house in Ville-aux-Fayes.

Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that
centred in Catherine Tonsard, his