Ever since giving birth to her first child she had been subject to nervous fits which brought on terrible convulsions.  These fits recurred periodically, every two or three months.  The doctors whom she consulted declared they could do nothing for her, that age would weaken the severity of the attacks.  They simply prescribed a dietary regimen of underdone meat and quinine wine.  However, these repeated shocks led to cerebral disorder.  She lived on from day to day like a child, like a fawning animal yielding to its instincts.  When Macquart was on his rounds, she passed her time in lazy, pensive idleness.  All she did for her children was to kiss and play with them.  Then as soon as her lover returned she would disappear.

Behind Macquart’s hovel there was a little yard, separated from the Fouques’ property by a wall.  One morning the neighbours were much astonished to find in this wall a door which had not been there the previous evening.  Before an hour had elapsed, the entire Faubourg had flocked to the neighbouring windows.  The lovers must have worked the whole night to pierce the opening and place the door there.  They could now go freely from one house to the other.  The scandal was revived, everyone felt less pity for Adelaide, who was certainly the disgrace of the suburb; she was reproached more wrathfully for that door, that tacit, brutal admission of her union, than even for her two illegitimate children.  “People should at least study appearances,” the most tolerant women would say.  But Adelaide did not understand what was meant by studying appearances.  She was very happy, very proud of her door; she had assisted Macquart to knock the stones from the wall and had even mixed the mortar so that the work might proceed the quicker; and she came with childish delight to inspect the work by daylight on the morrow—­an act which was deemed a climax of shamelessness by three gossips who observed her contemplating the masonry.  From that date, whenever Macquart reappeared, it was thought, as no one then ever saw the young woman, that she was living with him in the hovel of the Impasse Saint-Mittre.

The smuggler would come very irregularly, almost always unexpectedly, to Plassans.  Nobody ever knew what life the lovers led during the two or three days he spent there at distant intervals.  They used to shut themselves up; the little dwelling seemed uninhabited.  Then, as the gossips had declared that Macquart had simply seduced Adelaide in order to spend her money, they were astonished, after a time, to see him still lead his wonted life, ever up hill and down dale and as badly equipped as previously.  Perhaps the young woman loved him all the more for seeing him at rare intervals, perhaps he had disregarded her entreaties, feeling an irresistible desire for a life of adventure.  The gossips invented a thousand fables, without succeeding in giving any reasonable explanation of a connection which had originated and continued in so strange a