The father, formerly so sturdy, had, through age – he was seventy years old – hard work and his devouring and dried-up passion for the soil, become so shrunken that his body was now bent as though anxious to return to that soil which he had owned and coveted so fiercely. Nevertheless, apart from his legs, he was still in good shape, trim with his little white whiskers and neat sideboards and the long family nose which gave a sharp look to his wizened, leathery face. His wife, shadowing him closely and never letting him out of her sight, was shorter and seemed to have remained plump; her paunch showed incipient signs of dropsy and her round eyes and mean, round mouth, tightly clenched, with countless tiny pouches and wrinkles, were set in a face the colour of oatmeal. A stupid woman, reduced to a mere submissive and hard-working beast of burden in the family, she had always been afraid of her dictatorial and despotic husband.

‘Ah, there you are then!’ exclaimed Fanny, standing up.

Delhomme had also risen to his feet. And behind the old couple, Jesus Christ had just appeared, swaying and not saying a word. He stubbed out the end of his cigar and stuffed the foul, smoking weed into a pocket of his tunic.

‘So here we are,’ said Fouan. ‘All except Buteau. Never on time, always wanting to be different, that young fellow-me-lad.’

‘I saw him in the market,’ Jesus Christ said in his drink-sodden husky voice. ‘He's on his way.’

Buteau, aged twenty-seven, the youngest of the family, was so called because of his unruly nature, always rebellious and headstrong in his ideas, which were never shared by anyone else. Even as a lad he had never been able to get on with his parents, and later, having escaped military service by the luck of the draw, he had left home and found a job first at La Borderie and then at La Chamade.

His father was still complaining when in he came, lively and cheerful. He had inherited the large Fouan nose, but in his case it was flat; and in the lower part of his face his jawbones jutted out like those of some great carnivorous beast. He had receding temples and the whole of the top of his head was narrow, while behind the cheerful grey eyes you could detect a latent craftiness and violence. He had his father's ruthless greed and sagacity aggravated by his mother's cheeseparing meanness. Every time they quarrelled and his two old parents bitterly admonished him, he would reply: ‘You shouldn't have made me that sort of person.’

‘Look here, it's twelve miles from La Chamade to Cloyes,’ he retorted in reply to their protests. ‘So what? I've arrived at the same time as you… You going to start getting at me again?’

And so they all started quarrelling, bawling at each other in voices used to talking in open spaces, arguing over their business exactly as if they were at home. Hindered in their work, the clerks kept casting sidelong glances at them, when, hearing the uproar, the notary opened his study door and came in again:

‘Is everyone here? Come along in!’

The study overlooked the garden, the narrow strip of land running down to the Loir, whose leafless poplars could be seen in the distance. An ornamental black marble clock stood on the mantelshelf between heaps of files; apart from this, there was only a mahogany desk, a filing cabinet and some chairs.

Maître Baillehache promptly sat down at this desk, like a judge on the bench, while his rustic clients filed in one by one, casting hesitant glances at the seats provided and embarrassed as to how and where they were to sit down.

‘Do sit down!’

So, urged on by the others, Fouan and Rose found themselves sitting in two chairs in the front; Fanny and Delhomme sat down behind them, also side by side; Buteau took a seat by himself in a corner against the wall while only Hyacinthe remained standing in front of the window with his broad shoulders blocking the light. But losing patience the notary called out, addressing him familiarly by his nickname:

‘Do sit down, Jesus Christ.’

He was forced to start the discussion himself:

‘Well now, Père Fouan, you've decided to divide your property between your two sons and daughter?’

The old man made no reply, the others sat still, there was complete silence. However, the notary, being accustomed to such protracted deliberations, was in no hurry either. His practice had been in the family for a long time; the Baillehaches had handed it down from father to son in Cloyes for the last two hundred and fifty years and had learned from their peasant clientèle their calculating slyness and plodding caution, which submerged the slightest discussion in long silences and empty phrases. He had opened a penknife and was paring his nails.

‘Isn't that right? We must assume that you have made up your minds,’ he repeated finally, fixing his eyes on the old man.

The latter turned round and gazed at all the others before he replied, groping for the right words.

‘Yes, that may be so, Monsieur Baillehache. I mentioned it to you at harvest-time and you told me to think it over a bit longer; and I have thought it over and I can see that it'll have to come to that.’

In halting sentences full of parentheses, he explained the reasons. But something he did not say, although it came through in the emotion that he was trying to conceal, was his immense grief, hidden resentment and appalling heartache at giving up this land which he himself had so greedily cultivated, with a passion that can only be described as lust, and had then added to, with an odd patch of land here and there at the cost of the most squalid avarice. A single piece of land would represent months of a bread-and-cheese existence, spending whole winters without a fire and summers drenched in sweat, with no respite from his toil save a few swigs of water. He had adored his land like a woman who will kill you and for whom you will commit murder. No love for wife or children, nothing human: just the Earth! And now he had grown old and, like his father before him, would have to hand over this mistress to his sons, furious at being so powerless.

‘You see, Monsieur Baillehache, one's got to face facts, my legs aren't much good now and my arms aren't much better and blast it, it's the land that suffers… It might have been all right if we could have come to an arrangement with our children.’

He cast a glance towards Buteau and Jesus Christ, who were sitting quite still, staring into the distance, as though miles away from what he was saying.

‘So what could I do? Take on help, strangers who would just strip us of everything? No, farm-hands cost too much, they eat up all your profit, these days… So I just can't go on. Take this last season: out of my twenty acres I hadn't the strength to farm more than a quarter of them, just enough to provide food, wheat for us and grass for our two cows. And it breaks my heart to see all that good land going to waste. Yes, I'd sooner pack it in than see something like that happen.’

His voice broke and he made a violent gesture of grief and resignation. Sitting beside him, crushed by half a century of obedience and work, his wife was listening humbly.

‘The other day,’ he went on, ‘while Rose was making her cheese, she pitched headlong into it.