So the man decided.  “I will go for her,” he replied; “don’t get angry, doctor.”  And the latter left, calling out as he went:  “Be careful, be very careful, you know, for I do not joke when I am angry!” As soon as they were alone the peasant turned to his mother and said in a resigned voice:  “I will go and fetch La Rapet, as the man will have it.  Don’t worry till I get back.”

And he went out in his turn.

La Rapet, old was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sewn her customers into that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and took up her iron to smooth out the linen of the living.  Wrinkled like a last year’s apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal avarice, bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the loins by the constant motion of passing the iron over the linen, one might have said that she had a kind of abnormal and cynical love of a death struggle.  She never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the various kinds of deaths at which she had been present, and she related with the greatest minuteness details which were always similar, just as a sportsman recounts his luck.

When Honore Bontemps entered her cottage, he found her preparing the starch for the collars of the women villagers, and he said:  “Good-evening; I hope you are pretty well, Mother Rapet?”

She turned her head round to look at him, and said:  “As usual, as usual, and you?” “Oh! as for me, I am as well as I could wish, but my mother is not well.”  “Your mother?” “Yes, my mother!” “What is the matter with her?” “She is going to turn up her toes, that’s what’s the matter with her!”

The old woman took her hands out of the water and asked with sudden sympathy:  “Is she as bad as all that?” “The doctor says she will not last till morning.”  “Then she certainly is very bad!” Honore hesitated, for he wanted to make a few preparatory remarks before coming to his proposition; but as he could hit upon nothing, he made up his mind suddenly.

“How much will you ask to stay with her till the end?  You know that I am not rich, and I can not even afford to keep a servant girl.  It is just that which has brought my poor mother to this state—­too much worry and fatigue!  She did the work of ten, in spite of her ninety-two years.  You don’t find any made of that stuff nowadays!”

La Rapet answered gravely:  “There are two prices:  Forty sous by day and three francs by night for the rich, and twenty sous by day and forty by night for the others.  You shall pay me the twenty and forty.”  But the, peasant reflected, for he knew his mother well.  He knew how tenacious of life, how vigorous and unyielding she was, and she might last another week, in spite of the doctor’s opinion; and so he said resolutely:  “No, I would rather you would fix a price for the whole time until the end.  I will take my chance, one way or the other.  The doctor says she will die very soon.  If that happens, so much the better for you, and so much the worse for her, but if she holds out till to-morrow or longer, so much the better for her and so much the worse for you!”