Whenever the gentry of Fecamp gave a dinner they always had at least one of Madame Toine’s chickens to be in the fashion.

But she was born ill-tempered, and she went through life in a mood of perpetual discontent.  Annoyed at everyone, she seemed to be particularly annoyed at her husband.  She disliked his gaiety, his reputation, his rude health, his embonpoint.  She treated him as a good-for-nothing creature because he earned his money without working, and as a glutton because he ate and drank as much as ten ordinary men; and not a day went by without her declaring spitefully: 

“You’d be better in the stye along with the pigs!  You’re so fat it makes me sick to look at you!”

And she would shout in his face: 

“Wait!  Wait a bit!  We’ll see!  You’ll burst one of these fine days like a sack of corn-you old bloat, you!”

Toine would laugh heartily, patting his corpulent person, and replying: 

“Well, well, old hen, why don’t you fatten up your chickens like that? just try!”

And, rolling his sleeves back from his enormous arm, he said: 

“That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?”

And the customers, doubled up with laughter, would thump the table with their fists and stamp their feet on the floor.

The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat: 

“Wait a bit!  Wait a bit!  You’ll see what’ll happen.  He’ll burst like a sack of grain!”

And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers.

Toine was, in fact, an astonishing sight, he was so fat, so heavy, so red.  He was one of those enormous beings with whom Death seems to be amusing himself—­playing perfidious tricks and pranks, investing with an irresistibly comic air his slow work of destruction.  Instead of manifesting his approach, as with others, in white hairs, in emaciation, in wrinkles, in the gradual collapse which makes the onlookers say:  “Gad! how he has changed!” he took a malicious pleasure in fattening Toine, in making him monstrous and absurd, in tingeing his face with a deep crimson, in giving him the appearance of superhuman health, and the changes he inflicts on all were in the case of Toine laughable, comic, amusing, instead of being painful and distressing to witness.

“Wait a bit!  Wait a bit!” said his wife.  “You’ll see.”

At last Toine had an apoplectic fit, and was paralyzed in consequence.  The giant was put to bed in the little room behind the partition of the drinking-room that he might hear what was said and talk to his friends, for his head was quite clear although his enormous body was helplessly inert.  It was hoped at first that his immense legs would regain some degree of power; but this hope soon disappeared, and Toine spent his days and nights in the bed, which was only made up once a week, with the help of four neighbors who lifted the innkeeper, each holding a limb, while his mattress was turned.