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“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.

He kept his spirits, nevertheless; but his gaiety was of a different kind–more timid, more humble; and he lived in a constant, childlike fear of his wife, who grumbled from morning till night:

“Look at him there–the great glutton! the good-for-nothing creature, the old boozer! Serve him right, serve him right!”

He no longer answered her. He contented himself with winking behind the old woman’s back, and turning over on his other side–the only movement of which he was now capable. He called this exercise a “tack to the north” or a “tack to the south.”

His great distraction nowadays was to listen to the conversations in the bar, and to shout through the wall when he recognized a friend’s voice:

“Hallo, my son-in-law! Is that you, Celestin?”

And Celestin Maloisel answered:

“Yes, it’s me, Toine. Are you getting about again yet, old fellow?”

“Not exactly getting about,” answered Toine. “But I haven’t grown thin; my carcass is still good.”

Soon he got into the way of asking his intimates into his room to keep him company, although it grieved him to see that they had to drink without him. It pained him to the quick that his customers should be drinking without him.

“That’s what hurts worst of all,” he would say: “that I cannot drink my Extra-Special any more. I can put up with everything else, but going without drink is the very deuce.”

Then his wife’s screech-owl face would appear at the window, and she would break in with the words: