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PART I

The humid gray sky seemed to weigh down on the vast brown plain. The odor of autumn, the sad odor of bare, moist lands, of fallen leaves, of dead grass made the stagnant evening air more thick and heavy. The peasants were still at work, scattered through the fields, waiting for the stroke of the Angelus to call them back to the farmhouses, whose thatched roofs were visible here and there through the branches of the leafless trees which protected the apple-gardens against the wind.

At the side of the road, on a heap of clothes, a very small boy seated with his legs apart was playing with a potato, which he now and then let fall on his dress, whilst five women were bending down planting slips of colza in the adjoining plain. With a slow, continuous movement, all along the mounds of earth which the plough had just turned up, they drove in sharp wooden stakes and in the hole thus formed placed the plant, already a little withered, which sank on one side; then they patted down the earth and went on with their work.

A man who was passing, with a whip in his hand, and wearing wooden shoes, stopped near the child, took it up and kissed it. Then one of the women rose up and came across to him. She was a big, red haired girl, with large hips, waist and shoulders, a tall Norman woman, with yellow hair in which there was a blood-red tint.

She said in a resolute voice:

“Why, here you are, Cesaire–well?”

The man, a thin young fellow with a melancholy air, murmured:

“Well, nothing at all–always the same thing.”

“He won’t have it?”

“He won’t have it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you say I ought to do?”

“Go see the cure.”

“I will.”

“Go at once!”

“I will.”

And they stared at each other. He held the child in his arms all the time. He kissed it once more and then put it down again on the woman’s clothes.

In the distance, between two farm-houses, could be seen a plough drawn by a horse and driven by a man. They moved on very gently, the horse, the plough and the laborer, in the dim evening twilight.

The woman went on:

“What did your father say?”

“He said he would not have it.”

“Why wouldn’t he have it?”

The young man pointed toward the child whom he had just put back on the ground, then with a glance he drew her attention to the man drawing the plough yonder there.

And he said emphatically:

“Because ’tis his–this child of yours.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders and in an angry tone said:

“Faith, every one knows it well–that it is Victor’s. And what about it after all? I made a slip. Am I the only woman that did? My mother also made a slip before me, and then yours did the same before she married your dad! Who is it that hasn’t made a slip in the country? I made a slip with Victor because he took advantage of me while I was asleep in the barn, it’s true, and afterward it happened between us when I wasn’t asleep. I certainly would have married him if he weren’t a servant man. Am I a worse woman for that?”

The man said simply:

“As for me, I like you just as you are, with or without the child. It’s only my father that opposes me. All the same, I’ll see about settling the business.”

She answered:

“Go to the cure at once.”

“I’m going to him.”

And he set forth with his heavy peasant’s tread, while the girl, with her hands on her hips, turned round to plant her colza.

In fact, the man who thus went off, Cesaire Houlbreque, the son of deaf old Amable Houlbreque, wanted to marry, in spite of his father, Celeste Levesque, who had a child by Victor Lecoq, a mere laborer on her parents’ farm, who had been turned out of doors for this act.