Four days later he came again.  The old woman was outside her door cutting up the bread for her soup.

He went up to her and put his face close to hers, so that he might smell her breath; and when he smelt the alcohol he felt pleased.

“I suppose you will give me a glass of the Special?” he said.  And they had three glasses each.

Soon, however, it began to be whispered abroad that Mother Magloire was in the habit of getting drunk all by herself.  She was picked up in her kitchen, then in her yard, then in the roads in the neighborhood, and she was often brought home like a log.

The innkeeper did not go near her any more, and, when people spoke to him about her, he used to say, putting on a distressed look: 

“It is a great pity that she should have taken to drink at her age, but when people get old there is no remedy.  It will be the death of her in the long run.”

And it certainly was the death of her.  She died the next winter.  About Christmas time she fell down, unconscious, in the snow, and was found dead the next morning.

And when Chicot came in for the farm, he said: 

“It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken to drink she would probably have lived ten years longer.”

BOITELLE

Father Boitelle (Antoine) made a specialty of undertaking dirty jobs all through the countryside.  Whenever there was a ditch or a cesspool to be cleaned out, a dunghill removed, a sewer cleansed, or any dirt hole whatever, he way always employed to do it.

He would come with the instruments of his trade, his sabots covered with dirt, and set to work, complaining incessantly about his occupation.  When people asked him then why he did this loathsome work, he would reply resignedly: 

“Faith, ’tis for my children, whom I must support.  This brings me in more than anything else.”

He had, indeed, fourteen children.  If any one asked him what had become of them, he would say with an air of indifference: 

“There are only eight of them left in the house.  One is out at service and five are married.”

When the questioner wanted to know whether they were well married, he replied vivaciously: 

“I did not oppose them.  I opposed them in nothing.  They married just as they pleased.  We shouldn’t go against people’s likings, it turns out badly.  I am a night scavenger because my parents went against my likings.  But for that I would have become a workman like the others.”

Here is the way his parents had thwarted him in his likings: