d: "Honore, you cannot leave your
mother in this state; she may die at any moment." And the peasant, in
great distress, replied: "But I must get in my wheat, for it has been
lying on the ground a long time, and the weather is just right for it;
what do you say about it, mother?" And the dying old woman, still
tormented by her Norman avariciousness, replied yes with her eyes and her
forehead, and thus urged her son to get in his wheat, and to leave her to
die alone.

But the doctor got angry, and, stamping his foot, he said: "You are no
better than a brute, do you hear, and I will not allow you to do it, do
you understand? And if you must get in your wheat today, go and fetch
Rapet's wife and make her look after your mother; I will have it, do you
understand me? And if you do not obey me, I will let you die like a dog,
when you are ill in your turn; do you hear?"

The peasant, a tall, thin fellow with slow movements, who was tormented
by indecision, by his fear of the doctor and his fierce love of saving,
hesitated, calculated, and stammered out: "How much does La Rapet charge
for attending sick people?" "How should I know?" the doctor cried. "That
depends upon how long she is needed. Settle it with her, by Heaven! But I
want her to be here within an hour, do you hear?"

So the man decided. "I will go for her," he replied; "don't get angry,
doctor." And the latter left, calling out as he went: "Be careful, be
very careful, you know, for I do not joke when I am angry!" As soon as
they were alone the peasant turned to his mother and said in a resigned
voice: "I will go and fetch La Rapet, as the man will have it. Don't
worry till I get back."

And he went out in his turn.

La Rapet, old was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of
the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sewn her customers into
that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and took
up her iron to smooth out the linen of the living. Wrinkled like a last
year's apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal avarice,
bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the loins by the
constant motion of passing the iron over the linen, one might have said
that she had a kind of abnormal and cynical love of a death struggle. She
never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the
various kinds of deaths at which she had been present, and she related
with the greatest minuteness details which we