When the widow died she left all her savings, amounting to some ten thousand francs, to her adopted daughter.  For a week Lisa lived alone in the Rue Cuvier; it was there that Gradelle came in search of her.  He had become acquainted with her by often seeing her with her mistress when the latter called on him in the Rue Pirouette; and at the funeral she had struck him as having grown so handsome and sturdy that he had followed the hearse all the way to the cemetery, though he had not intended to do so.  As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, he reflected what a splendid girl she would be for the counter of a pork butcher’s shop.  He thought the matter over, and finally resolved to offer her thirty francs a month, with board and lodging.  When he made this proposal, Lisa asked for twenty-four hours to consider it.  Then she arrived one morning with a little bundle of clothes, and her ten thousand francs concealed in the bosom of her dress.  A month later the whole place belonged to her; she enslaved Gradelle, Quenu, and even the smallest kitchen-boy.  For his part, Quenu would have cut off his fingers to please her.  When she happened to smile, he remained rooted to the floor, laughing with delight as he gazed at her.

Lisa was the eldest daughter of the Macquarts of Plassans, and her father was still alive.[*] But she said that he was abroad, and never wrote to him.  Sometimes she just dropped a hint that her mother, now deceased, had been a hard worker, and that she took after her.  She worked, indeed, very assiduously.  However, she sometimes added that the worthy woman had slaved herself to death in striving to support her family.  Then she would speak of the respective duties of husband and wife in such a practical though modest fashion as to enchant Quenu.  He assured her that he fully shared her ideas.  These were that everyone, man or woman, ought to work for his or her living, that everyone was charged with the duty of achieving personal happiness, that great harm was done by encouraging habits of idleness, and that the presence of so much misery in the world was greatly due to sloth.  This theory of hers was a sweeping condemnation of drunkenness, of all the legendary loafing ways of her father Macquart.  But, though she did not know it, there was much of Macquart’s nature in herself.  She was merely a steady, sensible Macquart with a logical desire for comfort, having grasped the truth of the proverb that as you make your bed so you lie on it.  To sleep in blissful warmth there is no better plan than to prepare oneself a soft and downy couch; and to the preparation of such a couch she gave all her time and all her thoughts.  When no more than six years old she had consented to remain quietly on her chair the whole day through on condition that she should be rewarded with a cake in the evening.

[*] See M. Zola’s novel, The Fortune of the Rougons.—­Translator