Silvere, however, grew serious, and frankly replied:  “If those wretches robbed us, so much the worse for them.  I don’t want their money.  You see, uncle, it’s not for us to fall on our relatives.  If they’ve done wrong, well, one of these days they’ll be severely punished for it.”

“Ah! what a big simpleton you are!” the uncle cried.  “When we have the upper hand, you’ll see whether I sha’n’t settle my own little affairs myself.  God cares a lot about us indeed!  What a foul family ours is!  Even if I were starving to death, not one of those scoundrels would throw me a dry crust.”

Whenever Macquart touched upon this subject, he proved inexhaustible.  He bared all his bleeding wounds of envy and covetousness.  He grew mad with rage when he came to think that he was the only unlucky one in the family, and was forced to eat potatoes, while the others had meat to their heart’s content.  He would pass all his relations in review, even his grand-nephews, and find some grievance and reason for threatening every one of them.

“Yes, yes,” he repeated bitterly, “they’d leave me to die like a dog.”

Gervaise, without raising her head or ceasing to ply her needle, would sometimes say timidly:  “Still, father, cousin Pascal was very kind to us, last year, when you were ill.”

“He attended you without charging a sou,” continued Fine, coming to her daughter’s aid, “and he often slipped a five-franc piece into my hand to make you some broth.”

“He! he’d have killed me if I hadn’t had a strong constitution!” Macquart retorted.  “Hold your tongues, you fools!  You’d let yourselves be twisted about like children.  They’d all like to see me dead.  When I’m ill again, I beg you not to go and fetch my nephew, for I didn’t feel at all comfortable in his hands.  He’s only a twopenny-halfpenny doctor, and hasn’t got a decent patient in all his practice.”

When once Macquart was fully launched, he could not stop.  “It’s like that little viper, Aristide,” he would say, “a false brother, a traitor.  Are you taken in by his articles in the ‘Independant,’ Silvere?  You would be a fine fool if you were.  They’re not even written in good French; I’ve always maintained that this contraband Republican is in league with his worthy father to humbug us.  You’ll see how he’ll turn his coat.  And his brother, the illustrious Eugene, that big blockhead of whom the Rougons make such a fuss!  Why, they’ve got the impudence to assert that he occupies a good position in Paris!  I know something about his position; he’s employed at the Rue de Jerusalem; he’s a police spy.”

“Who told you so?  You know nothing about it,” interrupted Silvere, whose upright spirit at last felt hurt by his uncle’s lying accusations.

“Ah!  I know nothing about it?  Do you think so?  I tell you he is a police spy.  You’ll be shorn like a lamb one of these days, with your benevolence.  You’re not manly enough.  I don’t want to say anything against your brother Francois; but, if I were in your place, I shouldn’t like the scurvy manner in which he treats you.  He earns a heap of money at Marseilles, and yet he never sends you a paltry twenty-franc pierce for pocket money.  If ever you become poor, I shouldn’t advise you to look to him for anything.”