A roar of laughter burst forth from the throats of those present.  Malivoire, excited by his success, went on: 

“There’s nothing for the rheumatics like a chitterling poultice!  It keeps your belly warm, along with a glass of three-six!”

The men uttered shouts, banged the table with their fists, laughed, bending on one side and raising up their bodies again as if they were working a pump.  The women clucked like hens, while the servants wriggled, standing against the walls.  Old Amable was the only one that did not laugh, and, without making any reply, waited till they made room for him.

They found a place for him in the middle of the table, facing his daughter-in-law, and, as soon as he was seated, he began to eat.  It was his son who was paying, after all; it was right he should take his share.  With each ladleful of soup that went into his stomach, with each mouthful of bread or meat crushed between his gums, with each glass of cider or wine that flowed through his gullet he thought he was regaining something of his own property, getting back a little of his money which all those gluttons were devouring, saving in fact a portion of his own means.  And he ate in silence with the obstinacy of a miser who hides his coppers, with the same gloomy persistence with which he formerly performed his daily labors.

But all of a sudden he noticed at the end of the table Celeste’s child on a woman’s lap, and his eye remained fixed on the little boy.  He went on eating, with his glance riveted on the youngster, into whose mouth the woman who minded him every now and then put a little morsel which he nibbled at.  And the old man suffered more from the few mouthfuls sucked by this little chap than from all that the others swallowed.

The meal lasted till evening.  Then every one went back home.

Cesaire raised up old Amable.

“Come, daddy, we must go home,” said he.

And he put the old man’s two sticks in his hands.

Celeste took her child in her arms, and they went on slowly through the pale night whitened by the snow.  The deaf old man, three-fourths tipsy, and even more malicious under the influence of drink, refused to go forward.  Several times he even sat down with the object of making his daughter-in-law catch cold, and he kept whining, without uttering a word, giving vent to a sort of continuous groaning as if he were in pain.

When they reached home he at once climbed up to his loft, while Cesaire made a bed for the child near the deep niche where he was going to lie down with his wife.  But as the newly wedded pair could not sleep immediately, they heard the old man for a long time moving about on his bed of straw, and he even talked aloud several times, whether it was that he was dreaming or that he let his thoughts escape through his mouth, in spite of himself, not being able to keep them back, under the obsession of a fixed idea.