Four days later he came again. The old woman
was outside her door cutting up the bread for her
soup.
He went up to her and put his face close to hers,
so that he might smell her breath; and when he smelt
the alcohol he felt pleased.
“I suppose you will give me a glass of the Special?”
he said. And they had three glasses each.
Soon, however, it began to be whispered abroad that
Mother Magloire was in the habit of getting drunk
all by herself. She was picked up in her kitchen,
then in her yard, then in the roads in the neighborhood,
and she was often brought home like a log.
The innkeeper did not go near her any more, and, when
people spoke to him about her, he used to say, putting
on a distressed look:
“It is a great pity that she should have taken
to drink at her age, but when people get old there
is no remedy. It will be the death of her in
the long run.”
And it certainly was the death of her. She died
the next winter. About Christmas time she fell
down, unconscious, in the snow, and was found dead
the next morning.
And when Chicot came in for the farm, he said:
“It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken
to drink she would probably have lived ten years longer.”
Father Boitelle (Antoine) made a specialty of undertaking
dirty jobs all through the countryside. Whenever
there was a ditch or a cesspool to be cleaned out,
a dunghill removed, a sewer cleansed, or any dirt hole
whatever, he way always employed to do it.
He would come with the instruments of his trade, his
sabots covered with dirt, and set to work, complaining
incessantly about his occupation. When people
asked him then why he did this loathsome work, he would
reply resignedly:
“Faith, ’tis for my children, whom I must
support. This brings me in more than anything
else.”
He had, indeed, fourteen children. If any one
asked him what had become of them, he would say with
an air of indifference:
“There are only eight of them left in the house.
One is out at service and five are married.”
When the questioner wanted to know whether they were
well married, he replied vivaciously:
“I did not oppose them. I opposed them
in nothing. They married just as they pleased.
We shouldn’t go against people’s likings,
it turns out badly. I am a night scavenger because
my parents went against my likings. But for that
I would have become a workman like the others.”
Here is the way his parents had thwarted him in his
likings:
