Meantime, while Jean Patoux dug in his garden, and sang and soliloquized, his two children, Henri and Babette, their school hours being ended, had run off to the market, and were talking vivaciously with a big brown sturdy woman, who was selling poultry at a stall, under a very large patched red umbrella.  She was Martine Doucet, reported to have the worst temper and most vixenish tongue in all the town, though there were some who said her sourness of humour only arose from the hardships of her life, and the many troubles she had been fated to endure.  Her husband, a fine handsome man, earning good weekly wages as a stone-mason, had been killed by a fall from a ladder, while engaged in helping to build one of the new houses on the Boulevards, and her only child Fabien, a boy of ten had, when a baby, tumbled from the cart in which his mother was taking her poultry to market, and though no injury was apparent at the time, had, from the effects of the fall, grown into a poor little twisted mite of humanity with a bent spine, and one useless leg which hung limply from his body, while he could scarcely hobble about on the other, even with the aid of a crutch.  He had a soft, pretty, plaintive face of his own, the little Fabien, and very gentle ways,—­but he was sensitively conscious of his misfortune, and in his own small secret soul he was always praying that he might die while he was yet a child, and not grow up to be a burden to his mother.  Martine, however, adored him; and it was through her intense love for this child of hers that she had, in a strange vengeful sort of mood abandoned God, and flung an open and atheistical defiance in the face of her confessor, who, missing her at mass, had ventured to call upon her and seriously reproach her for neglecting the duties of her religion.  Martine had whirled round upon him,—­a veritable storm in petticoats.

“Religion!” she cried—­“Oh—­he!  What good has it done for me, if you please!  When I said my prayers night and morning, went to mass and confession, and told my rosary every Mary-Feast, what happened?  Was not my man killed and my child crippled?  And then,—­(not to lose faith—­) did I not give the saints every chance of behaving themselves?  For my child’s sake did I not earn good money and pay it to the Church in special masses that he might be cured of his lameness?  And Novenas in plenty, and candles in plenty to the Virgin, and fastings of my own and penitences?  And is the child not as lame as ever?  Look at him!—­the dear angel!—­with never an evil thought or a wicked way,—­and will you try to make me believe there is a good God, when He will not help a poor little creature like that, to be happy, though He is prayed to night and morning for it!  No—­no!  Churches are kept up for priests to make a fat living out of,—­but there is never a God in them that I can see;—­and as for the Christ, who had only to be asked in order to heal the sick, there is not so much as a ghost