In the first place, Marthe had been piously brought up by her mother.  Both, being good Catholics, had suffered much from the opinions and behavior of the tanner.  Marthe could never think without a blush of having marched through the street of Troyes in the garb of a goddess.  Her father had forced her to marry Michu, whose bad reputation was then increasing, and she feared him too much to be able to judge him.  Nevertheless, she knew that he loved her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the truest affection for this awe-inspiring man; she had never known him to do anything that was not just; never did he say a brutal word, to her at least; in fact, he endeavored to forestall her every wish.  The poor pariah, believing himself disagreeable to his wife, spent most of his time out of doors.  Marthe and Michu, distrustful of each other, lived in what is called in these days an “armed peace.”  Marthe, who saw no one, suffered keenly from the ostracism which for the last seven years had surrounded her as the daughter of a revolutionary butcher, and the wife of a so-called traitor.  More than once she had overheard the laborers of the adjoining farm (held by a man named Beauvisage, greatly attached to the Simeuse family) say as they passed the pavilion, “That’s where Judas lives!” The singular resemblance between the bailiff’s head and that of the thirteenth apostle, which his conduct appeared to carry out, won him that odious nickname throughout the neighborhood.  It was this distress of mind, added to vague but constant fears for the future, which gave Marthe her thoughtful and subdued air.  Nothing saddens so deeply as unmerited degradation from which there seems no escape.  A painter could have made a fine picture of this family of pariahs in the bosom of their pretty nook in Champagne, where the landscape is generally sad.

“Francois!” called the bailiff, to hasten his son.

Francois Michu, a child of ten, played in the park and forest, and levied his little tithes like a master; he ate the fruits; he chased the game; he at least had neither cares nor troubles.  Of all the family, Francois alone was happy in a home thus isolated from the neighborhood by its position between the park and the forest, and by the still greater moral solitude of universal repulsion.

“Pick up these things,” said his father, pointing to the parapet, “and put them away.  Look at me!  You love your father and your mother, don’t you?” The child flung himself on his father as if to kiss him, but Michu made a movement to shift the gun and pushed him back.  “Very good.  You have sometimes chattered about things that are done here,” continued the father, fixing his eyes, dangerous as those of a wild-cat, on the boy.  “Now remember this; if you tell the least little thing that happens here to Gaucher, or to the Grouage and Bellache people, or even to Marianne who loves us, you will kill your father.  Never tattle again, and I will forgive what you said yesterday.”  The child began to cry.  “Don’t cry; but when any one questions you, say, as the peasants do, ‘I don’t know.’  There are persons roaming about whom I distrust.  Run along!  As for you two,” he added, turning to the women, “you have heard what I said.  Keep a close mouth, both of you.”