“Do you suffer much?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Where is the pain?”

“I feel as if my stomach were on fire.”

A doctor approached.

“Are you the gentleman who caused the accident?”

“I am.”

“This woman ought to be sent to a home.  I know one where they would take her at six francs a day.  Would you like me to send her there?”

Hector was delighted at the idea, thanked him and returned home much relieved.

His wife, dissolved in tears, was awaiting him.  He reassured her.

“It’s all right.  This Madame Simon is better already and will be quite well in two or three days.  I have sent her to a home.  It’s all right.”

When he left his office the next day he went to inquire for Madame Simon.  He found her eating rich soup with an air of great satisfaction.

“Well?” said he.

“Oh, sir,” she replied, “I’m just the same.  I feel sort of crushed—­not a bit better.”

The doctor declared they must wait and see; some complication or other might arise.

Hector waited three days, then he returned.  The old woman, fresh-faced and clear-eyed, began to whine when she saw him: 

“I can’t move, sir; I can’t move a bit.  I shall be like this for the rest of my days.”

A shudder passed through Hector’s frame.  He asked for the doctor, who merely shrugged his shoulders and said: 

“What can I do?  I can’t tell what’s wrong with her.  She shrieks when they try to raise her.  They can’t even move her chair from one place to another without her uttering the most distressing cries.  I am bound to believe what she tells me; I can’t look into her inside.  So long as I have no chance of seeing her walk I am not justified in supposing her to be telling lies about herself.”

The old woman listened, motionless, a malicious gleam in her eyes.

A week passed, then a fortnight, then a month.  Madame Simon did not leave her armchair.  She ate from morning to night, grew fat, chatted gaily with the other patients and seemed to enjoy her immobility as if it were the rest to which she was entitled after fifty years of going up and down stairs, of turning mattresses, of carrying coal from one story to another, of sweeping and dusting.

Hector, at his wits’ end, came to see her every day.  Every day he found her calm and serene, declaring: 

“I can’t move, sir; I shall never be able to move again.”

Every evening Madame de Gribelin, devoured with anxiety, said: 

“How is Madame Simon?”

And every time he replied with a resignation born of despair: 

“Just the same; no change whatever.”

They dismissed the servant, whose wages they could no longer afford.  They economized more rigidly than ever.  The whole of the extra pay had been swallowed up.

Then Hector summoned four noted doctors, who met in consultation over the old woman.  She let them examine her, feel her, sound her, watching them the while with a cunning eye.