Accustomed as Mathieu was to these attacks, which left him perfectly serene, he went on laughing, without even giving a reply, when a workman abruptly entered the room—­one who was currently called “old Moineaud,” though he was scarcely three-and-forty years of age.  Short and thick-set, he had a bullet head, a bull’s neck, and face and hands scarred and dented by more than a quarter of a century of toil.  By calling he was a fitter, and he had come to submit a difficulty which had just arisen in the piecing together of a reaping machine.  But, his employer, who was still angrily thinking of over-numerous families, did not give him time to explain his purpose.

“And you, old Moineaud, how many children have you?” he inquired.

“Seven, Monsieur Beauchene,” the workman replied, somewhat taken aback.  “I’ve lost three.”

“So, including them, you would now have ten?  Well, that’s a nice state of things!  How can you do otherwise than starve?”

Moineaud began to laugh like the gay thriftless Paris workman that he was.  The little ones?  Well, they grew up without his even noticing it, and, indeed, he was really fond of them, so long as they remained at home.  And, besides, they worked as they grew older, and brought a little money in.  However, he preferred to answer his employer with a jest which set them all laughing.

After he had explained the difficulty with the reaper, the others followed him to examine the work for themselves.  They were already turning into a passage, when Beauchene, seeing the door of the women’s workshop open, determined to pass that way, so that he might give his customary look around.  It was a long, spacious place, where the polishers, in smocks of black serge, sat in double rows polishing and grinding their pieces at little work-boards.  Nearly all of them were young, a few were pretty, but most had low and common faces.  An animal odor and a stench of rancid oil pervaded the place.

The regulations required perfect silence there during work.  Yet all the girls were gossiping.  As soon, however, as the master’s approach was signalled the chatter abruptly ceased.  There was but one girl who, having her head turned, and thus seeing nothing of Beauchene, went on furiously abusing a companion, with whom she had previously started a dispute.  She and the other were sisters, and, as it happened, daughters of old Moineaud.  Euphrasie, the younger one, she who was shouting, was a skinny creature of seventeen, light-haired, with a long, lean, pointed face, uncomely and malignant; whereas the elder, Norine, barely nineteen, was a pretty girl, a blonde like her sister, but having a milky skin, and withal plump and sturdy, showing real shoulders, arms, and hips, and one of those bright sunshiny faces, with wild hair and black eyes, all the freshness of the Parisian hussy, aglow with the fleeting charm of youth.