When the two women had taken up their needles, and were ruining their eyesight in order to mend his old shirts, Macquart, taking the best seat, would throw himself back with an air of delicious comfort, and sip and smoke like a man who relishes his laziness.  This was the time when the old rogue generally railed against the wealthy for living on the sweat of the poor man’s brow.  He was superbly indignant with the gentlemen of the new town, who lived so idly, and compelled the poor to keep them in luxury.  The fragments of communistic notions which he culled from the newspapers in the morning became grotesque and monstrous on falling from his lips.  He would talk of a time near at hand when no one would be obliged to work.  He always, however, kept his fiercest animosity for the Rougons.  He never could digest the potatoes he had eaten.

“I saw that vile creature Felicite buying a chicken in the market this morning,” he would say.  “Those robbers of inheritances must eat chicken, forsooth!”

“Aunt Dide,” interposed Silvere, “says that uncle Pierre was very kind to you when you left the army.  Didn’t he spend a large sum of money in lodging and clothing you?”

“A large sum of money!” roared Macquart in exasperation; “your grandmother is mad.  It was those thieves who spread those reports themselves, so as to close my mouth.  I never had anything.”

Fine again foolishly interfered, reminding him that he had received two hundred francs, besides a suit of clothes and a year’s rent.  Antoine thereupon shouted to her to hold her tongue, and continued, with increasing fury:  “Two hundred francs!  A fine thing!  I want my due, ten thousand francs.  Ah! yes, talk of the hole they shoved me into like a dog, and the old frock-coat which Pierre gave me because he was ashamed to wear it any longer himself, it was so dirty and ragged!”

He was not speaking the truth; but, seeing the rage that he was in, nobody ventured to protest any further.  Then, turning towards Silvere:  “It’s very stupid of you to defend them!” he added.  “They robbed your mother, who, good woman, would be alive now if she had had the means of taking care of herself.”

“Oh! you’re not just, uncle,” the young man said; “my mother did not die for want of attention, and I’m certain my father would never have accepted a sou from his wife’s family!”

“Pooh! don’t talk to me! your father would have taken the money just like anybody else.  We were disgracefully plundered, and it’s high time we had our rights.”

Then Macquart, for the hundredth time, began to recount the story of the fifty thousand francs.  His nephew, who knew it by heart, and all the variations with which he embellished it, listened to him rather impatiently.

“If you were a man,” Antoine would say in conclusion, “you would come some day with me, and we would kick up a nice row at the Rougons.  We would not leave without having some money given us.”