Volume Ii Part 16 (2/2)
While Agathe made these reflections, Honorine had gone up hastily to her room; she returned with her bonnet on her head, and said to Agathe:
”Come with me.”
”Where are we going, my dear?”
”Mon Dieu! to Guillot's cottage, to see if there is any way of a.s.sisting those poor people, and at the very least to save some of their furniture. I have a hundred francs I can give them; it's very little, but still it will help them.”
”Oh! my good Honorine, if it were possible, I would love you even more.”
The two friends left the house, followed by Poucette and Claudine, who had ceased to weep because they hoped and divined that the ladies proposed to a.s.sist their dear ones.
In due time they reached the farmer's cottage, where a number of people had already collected. For the announcement of a sale on execution always brings together a mult.i.tude of bargain-hunters and idlers.
A melancholy spectacle was presented to that a.s.semblage, which would have touched their hearts, had there been any persons susceptible to emotion among those who were disputing over the purchase of an old chair.
Guillot's wife sat at the foot of a tree, about forty yards from the house, holding her last-born child at her breast, while the two others stood at her side, hiding their faces against their mother's skirts as if terrified by the sight of all those people. The peasant gazed with tear-dimmed eyes at her hovel and at all the poor furniture that was brought from it, to be offered for sale; then she turned her eyes on her children, and her glance said plainly:
”We have no roof to shelter us; where will they sleep to-night?”
A short distance away, the farmer himself, in despair but striving to retain his courage, watched the officers of the law who had taken their places at a table, and were preparing to begin the sale.
Monsieur Jarnouillard walked about, examining the different articles as they were brought from the house, and muttering with a shrug:
”Mon Dieu! what wretched stuff! I shall never get my money back. The wood is rotten; it will crumble to powder!”
Meanwhile Guillot approached his creditor, hat in hand, and said to him in a suppliant tone:
”Oh! monsieur, are you going to sell my house, too?”
”His house! that's a pretty name for it! He calls this a house--a miserable hovel that will hardly hold together!”
”Such as it is, monsieur, it has sheltered me and my family; it came to me from my father, too, and I was fond of it.”
”What difference does all that make to me? It would have been better for me if it had come from the devil and had been built of hewn stone.
n.o.body'll give anything for your hut.”
”If you don't think anybody'll give anything for it, monsieur, why do you have it sold?”
”Why? and what about the money you owe me? do you imagine I shall get it back from the sale of your furniture? Nice stuff, that is! You have taken me in, my good man; I am sold, trapped is the word.”
On hearing this accusation from the mouth of the man who was robbing him, the farmer proudly raised his head and replied in a firm voice:
”I have never deceived anybody, monsieur! I am an honest man, and everybody in the neighborhood knows it; and if either of us has cheated the other I am not the one, do you understand?”
The usurer lowered his crest and his tone, as such men always do when they are afraid of being unmasked.
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