“But, dear M. Benassis, my old man was starving, and when he had eaten nothing for a whole fortnight——­”

“Oh, yes, yes.  Now will you listen to me.  If you let your husband eat a single mouthful of bread before I give him leave to take solid food, you will kill him, do you hear?”

“He shall not have anything, sir.  Is he any better?” she asked, following the doctor to the door.

“Why, no.  You have made him worse by feeding him.  Shall I never get it into your stupid heads that you must not stuff people who are being dieted?”

“The peasants are incorrigible,” Benassis went on, speaking to Genestas.  “If a patient has eaten nothing for two or three days, they think he is at death’s door, and they cram him with soup or wine or something.  Here is a wretched woman for you that has all but killed her husband.”

“Kill my husband with a little mite of a sop in wine!”

“Certainly, my good woman.  It amazes me that he is still alive after the mess you cooked for him.  Mind that you do exactly as I have told you.”

“Yes, dear sir, I would far rather die myself than lose him.”

“Oh! as to that I shall soon see.  I shall come again to-morrow evening to bleed him.”

“Let us walk along the side of the stream,” Benassis said to Genestas; “there is only a footpath between this cottage and the next house where I must pay a call.  That man’s little boy will hold our horses.”

“You must admire this lovely valley of ours a little,” he went on; “it is like an English garden, is it not?  The laborer who lives in the cottage which we are going to visit has never got over the death of one of his children.  The eldest boy, he was only a lad, would try to do a man’s work last harvest-tide; it was beyond his strength, and before the autumn was out he died of a decline.  This is the first case of really strong fatherly love that has come under my notice.  As a rule, when their children die, the peasant’s regret is for the loss of a useful chattel, and a part of their stock-in-trade, and the older the child, the heavier their sense of loss.  A grown-up son or daughter is so much capital to the parents.  But this poor fellow really loved that boy of his.  ‘Nothing cam comfort me for my loss,’ he said one day when I came across him out in the fields.  He had forgotten all about his work, and was standing there motionless, leaning on his scythe; he had picked up his hone, it lay in his hand, and he had forgotten to use it.  He has never spoken since of his grief to me, but he has grown sad and silent.  Just now it is one of his little girls who is ill.”

Benassis and his guest reached the little house as they talked.  It stood beside a pathway that led to a bark-mill.  They saw a man about forty years of age, standing under a willow tree, eating bread that had been rubbed with a clove of garlic.

“Well, Gasnier, is the little one doing better?”