all about her heavy fists.  Antoine at last decided that she was exactly the woman he wanted.  She would work for both and he would lay down the law at home.  She would be his beast of burden, an obedient, indefatigable animal.  As for her partiality for liqueurs, he regarded this as quite natural.  After well weighing the advantages of such an union, he declared himself to Fine, who was delighted with his proposal.  No man had ever yet ventured to propose to her.  Though she was told that Antoine was the most worthless of vagabonds, she lacked the courage to refuse matrimony.  The very evening of the nuptials the young man took up his abode in his wife’s lodgings in the Rue Civadiere, near the market.  These lodgings, consisting of three rooms, were much more comfortably furnished than his own, and he gave a sigh of satisfaction as he stretched himself out on the two excellent mattresses which covered the bedstead.

Everything went on very well for the first few days.  Fine attended to her various occupations as in the past; Antoine, seized with a sort of marital self-pride which astonished even himself, plaited in one week more baskets than he had ever before done in a month.  On the first Sunday, however, war broke out.  The couple had a goodly sum of money in the house, and they spent it freely.  During the night, when they were both drunk, they beat each other outrageously, without being able to remember on the morrow how it was that the quarrel had commenced.  They had remained on most affectionate terms until about ten o’clock, when Antoine had begun to beat Fine brutally, whereupon the latter, growing exasperated and forgetting her meekness, had given him back as much as she received.  She went to work again bravely on the following day, as though nothing had happened.  But her husband, with sullen rancour, rose late and passed the remainder of the day smoking his pipe in the sunshine.

From that time forward the Macquarts adopted the kind of life which they were destined to lead in the future.  It became, as it were, tacitly understood between them that the wife should toil and moil to keep her husband.  Fine, who had an instinctive liking for work, did not object to this.  She was as patient as a saint, provided she had had no drink, thought it quite natural that her husband should remain idle, and even strove to spare him the most trifling labour.  Her little weakness, aniseed, did not make her vicious, but just.  On the evenings when she had forgotten herself in the company of a bottle of her favourite liqueur, if Antoine tried to pick a quarrel with her, she would set upon him with might and main, reproaching him with his idleness and ingratitude.  The neighbours grew accustomed to the disturbances which periodically broke out in the couple’s room.  The two battered each other conscientiously; the wife slapped like a mother chastising a naughty child; but the husband, treacherous and spiteful as he was, measured his blows, and, on several occasions, very nearly crippled the unfortunate woman.