“You see, Silvere,” he would say with a sullen rage which was ill-concealed beneath his air of cynical indifference, “more potatoes, always potatoes!  We never eat anything else now.  Meat is only for rich people.  It’s getting quite impossible to make both ends meet with children who have the devil’s appetite and their own too.”

Gervaise and Jean bent over their plates, no longer even daring to cut some bread.  Silvere, who in his dream lived in heaven, did not grasp the situation.  In a calm voice he pronounced these storm-laden words: 

“But you should work, uncle.”

“Ah! yes,” sneered Macquart, stung to the quick.  “You want me to work, eh!  To let those beggars, the rich folk, continue to prey upon me.  I should earn probably twenty sous a day, and ruin my constitution.  It’s worth while, isn’t it?”

“Everyone earns what he can,” the young man replied.  “Twenty sous are twenty sous; and it all helps in a home.  Besides, you’re an old soldier, why don’t you seek some employment?”

Fine would then interpose, with a thoughtlessness of which she soon repented.

“That’s what I’m always telling him,” said she.  “The market inspector wants an assistant; I mentioned my husband to him, and he seems well disposed towards us.”

But Macquart interrupted her with a fulminating glance.  “Eh! hold your tongue,” he growled with suppressed anger.  “Women never know what they’re talking about!  Nobody would have me; my opinions are too well-known.”

Every time he was offered employment he displayed similar irritation.  He did not cease, however, to ask for situations, though he always refused such as were found for him, assigning the most extraordinary reasons.  When pressed upon the point he became terrible.

If Jean were to take up a newspaper after dinner he would at once exclaim:  “You’d better go to bed.  You’ll be getting up late to-morrow, and that’ll be another day lost.  To think of that young rascal coming home with eight francs short last week!  However, I’ve requested his master not give him his money in future; I’ll call for it myself.”

Jean would go to bed to avoid his father’s recriminations.  He had but little sympathy with Silvere; politics bored him, and he thought his cousin “cracked.”  When only the women remained, if they unfortunately started some whispered converse after clearing the table, Macquart would cry:  “Now, you idlers!  Is there nothing that requires mending? we’re all in rags.  Look here, Gervaise, I was at your mistress’s to-day, and I learnt some fine things.  You’re a good-for-nothing, a gad-about.”

Gervaise, now a grown girl of more than twenty, coloured up at thus being scolded in the presence of Silvere, who himself felt uncomfortable.  One evening, having come rather late, when his uncle was not at home, he had found the mother and daughter intoxicated before an empty bottle.  From that time he could never see his cousin without recalling the disgraceful spectacle she had presented, with the maudlin grin and large red patches on her poor, pale, puny face.  He was not less shocked by the nasty stories that circulated with regard to her.  He sometimes looked at her stealthily, with the timid surprise of a schoolboy in the presence of a disreputable character.