At last, when alone with her behind closed doors, he would thrash her on the slightest pretext.  The least thing was sufficient to make him raise his hand, and when he had once begun he did not stop, but he would throw into her face the true motive for his anger.  At each blow he would roar:  “There, you beggar!  There, you wretch!  There, you pauper!  What a bright thing I did when I rinsed my mouth with your rascal of a father’s apology for brandy.”

The poor woman lived in continual fear, in a ceaseless trembling of body and soul, in everlasting expectation of outrageous thrashings.

This lasted ten years.  She was so timorous that she would grow pale whenever she spoke to any one, and she thought of nothing but the blows with which she was threatened; and she became thinner, more yellow and drier than a smoked fish.

II

One night, when her husband was at sea, she was suddenly awakened by the wild roaring of the wind!

She sat up in her bed, trembling, but, as she hear nothing more, she lay down again; almost immediately there was a roar in the chimney which shook the entire house; it seemed to cross the heavens like a pack of furious animals snorting and roaring.

Then she arose and rushed to the harbor.  Other women were arriving from all sides, carrying lanterns.  The men also were gathering, and all were watching the foaming crests of the breaking wave.

The storm lasted fifteen hours.  Eleven sailors never returned; Patin was among them.

In the neighborhood of Dieppe the wreck of his bark, the Jeune-Amelie, was found.  The bodies of his sailors were found near Saint-Valery, but his body was never recovered.  As his vessel seemed to have been cut in two, his wife expected and feared his return for a long time, for if there had been a collision he alone might have been picked up and carried afar off.

Little by little she grew accustomed to the thought that she was rid of him, although she would start every time that a neighbor, a beggar or a peddler would enter suddenly.

One afternoon, about four years after the disappearance of her husband, while she was walking along the Rue aux Juifs, she stopped before the house of an old sea captain who had recently died and whose furniture was for sale.  Just at that moment a parrot was at auction.  He had green feathers and a blue head and was watching everybody with a displeased look.  “Three francs!” cried the auctioneer.  “A bird that can talk like a lawyer, three francs!”

A friend of the Patin woman nudged her and said: 

“You ought to buy that, you who are rich.  It would be good company for you.  That bird is worth more than thirty francs.  Anyhow, you can always sell it for twenty or twenty-five!”

Patin’s widow added fifty centimes, and the bird was given her in a little cage, which she carried away.  She took it home, and, as she was opening the wire door in order to give it something to drink, he bit her finger and drew blood.