When he came down his ladder, next morning, he saw his daughter-in-law looking after the house-keeping.

She cried out to him: 

“Come, daddy, hurry on!  Here’s some good soup.”

And she placed at the end of the table the round black gray pot filled with smoking liquid.  He sat down without giving any answer, seized the hot jar, warmed his hands with it in his customary fashion; and, as it was very cold, even pressed it against his breast, to try to make a little of the living heat of the boiling water enter into him, into his old body stiffened by so many winters.

Then he took his sticks and went out into the fields, covered with ice, till it was time for dinner, for he had seen Celeste’s youngster still asleep in a big soap-box.

He did not take his place in the household.  He lived in the thatched house, as in bygone days, but he seemed not to belong to it any longer, to be no longer interested in anything, to look upon those people, his son, the wife, and the child as strangers whom he did not know, to whom he never spoke.

The winter glided by.  It was long and severe.

Then the early spring made the seeds sprout forth again, and the peasants once more, like laborious ants, passed their days in the fields, toiling from morning till night, under the wind and under the rain, along the furrows of brown earth which brought forth the bread of men.

The year promised well for the newly-married pair.  The crops grew thick and heavy.  There were no slow frosts, and the apples bursting into bloom let fall into the grass their rosy white snow, which promised a hail of fruit for the autumn.

Cesaire toiled hard, rose early and left off work late, in order to save the expense of a laboring man.

His wife said to him sometimes: 

“You’ll make yourself ill in the long run.”

He replied: 

“Certainly not.  I’m a good judge.”

Nevertheless, one evening he came home so fatigued that he had to go to bed without supper.  He rose up next morning at the usual hour, but he could not eat, in spite of his fast on the previous night, and he had to come back to the house in the middle of the afternoon in order to go to bed again.  In the course of the night, he began to cough; he turned round on his straw couch, feverish, with his forehead burning, his tongue dry, and his throat parched by a burning thirst.

However, at daybreak, he went towards his grounds, but, next morning, the doctor had to be sent for, and pronounced him very ill from an inflammation of the chest.

And he no longer quitted the obscure niche which he made use of to sleep in.  He could be heard coughing, panting, and tossing about in the interior of this hole.  In order to see him, to give his medicine, and to apply cupping-glasses, it was necessary to bring a candle towards the entrance.  Then one could see his narrow head with his long matted beard underneath a thick lacework of spiders’ webs, which hung and floated when stirred by the air.  And the hands of the sick man seemed dead under the dingy sheets.