Like the idiot he was, Marjolin stroked his face with his hands as though trying to find the kisses which the girl had just printed there.  And he was beginning to stammer out that he was afraid, when Cadine continued:  “And, besides, I came to help him; I’ve been feeding the pigeons.”

Florent looked at the poor creatures.  All along the shelves were rows of lidless boxes, in which pigeons, showing their motley plumage, crowded closely on their stiffened legs.  Every now and then a tremor ran along the moving mass; and then the birds settled down again, and nothing was heard but their confused, subdued notes.  Cadine had a saucepan near her; she filled her mouth with the water and tares which it contained, and then, taking up the pigeons one by one, shot the food down their throats with amazing rapidity.  The poor creatures struggled and nearly choked, and finally fell down in the boxes with swimming eyes, intoxicated, as it were, by all the food which they were thus forced to swallow.[*]

     [*] This is the customary mode of fattening pigeons at the
     Paris markets.  The work is usually done by men who make a
     specialty of it, and are called gaveurs.—­Translator.

“Poor creatures!” exclaimed Claude.

“Oh, so much the worse for them,” said Cadine, who had now finished.  “They are much nicer eating when they’ve been well fed.  In a couple of hours or so all those over yonder will be given a dose of salt water.  That makes their flesh white and tender.  Then two hours afterwards they’ll be killed.  If you would like to see the killing, there are some here which are quite ready.  Marjolin will settle their account for them in a jiffy.”

Marjolin carried away a box containing some fifty pigeons, and Claude and Florent followed him.  Squatting upon the ground near one of the water-taps, he placed the box by his side.  Then he laid a framework of slender wooden bars on the top of a kind of zinc trough, and forthwith began to kill the pigeons.  His knife flashed rapidly in his fingers, as he seized the birds by the wings, stunned them by a blow on the head from the knife-handle, and then thrust the point of the blade into their throats.  They quivered for an instant, and ruffled their feathers as Marjolin laid them in a row, with their heads between the wooden bars above the zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop.  He repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he broke the birds’ skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid them down dead on the other.  Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening eyes, squatting there like a huge delighted bull-dog enjoying the sight of slaughtered vermin.  “Tick-tack!  Tick-tack!” whilst his tongue clucked as an accompaniment to the rhythmical movements of his knife.  The pigeons hung down like wisps of silken stuff.