He had saved up this shot for the end. The old man had gone very pale.

‘What money?’ he asked.

‘The money you've invested, of course. All those securities you keep hidden away.’

Buteau only suspected the existence of this nest-egg and was trying to find out definitely. One evening he had thought he had seen his father pull out a little roll of papers from behind a mirror. Next day and on the days following, he had kept watch; but nothing had reappeared. there remained just an empty hole.

Fouan had gone very pale; but all at once his face turned bright red as his anger suddenly brimmed over. He rose to his feet with a furious gesture and screamed:

‘Christ Almighty! So you go through my pockets now, do you? I've not got one penny invested, not a single farthing! I had to spend too much on you, you miserable lot! But in any case, what business is that of yours, aren't I your father? Aren't I the master?’

In this sudden access of authority, he seemed all at once to have grown taller. For years, all of them, wife and children, had trembled under his rule, the harsh and tyrannical rule of a peasant father over his family. If anyone thought he was finished with, they were mistaken.

‘Oh, Father.’ Buteau made an attempt to treat it as a joke.

‘For Christ's sake shut up,’ the old man went on, his hand still raised. ‘Shut up or I'll let you have it.’

His younger son stammered and cowered back in his seat. He had felt the wind of the blow and his childhood fears had returned as he raised his elbow to ward it off.

‘And as for you, Hyacinthe, take that grin off your face! And Fanny, stop staring!… As sure as God's my witness, I'll make you all hop!’

He stood there, dominating and threatening. His wife sat trembling, afraid that one of his blows might miss its target. Their children sat quite still, holding their breath, cowed.

‘Do you hear? I want six hundred francs for my annuity… If not, I'll sell my land. I'll take a life interest on it. Just so that I can blue the lot and you won't get a penny… Are you going to let me have six hundred francs?’

‘Of course, Father, we'll give you anything you want,’ said Fanny quietly.

‘Six hundred francs, I agree,’ said Delhomme.

‘And as for me,’ said Jesus Christ, ‘I want what everyone else wants.’

For Buteau, his teeth clenched in resentment, silence seemed to give consent. And still Fouan stood glaring from one to the other with the harsh look of a master determined not to brook any disobedience. Finally, he sat down:

‘Very well, then, we're agreed.’

Monsieur Baillehache had sunk back into his torpor and was waiting placidly for the storm to subside. He opened his eyes again and gently summed up:

‘Now you've come to an agreement, that's that. Now that I know the terms I'll draw up the deed… On your part, you must have the land surveyed, divide it up and tell the surveyor to send me a note indicating the actual plots. When you've drawn lots for them, all we shall need to do is write down the number which has been drawn against the name of each plot and we can sign.’

He had stood up from his desk to indicate that the meeting was at an end. But they still lingered, discussing and having second thoughts.

Was that really everything? Hadn't anything been forgotten, hadn't they made a bad deal, which there was perhaps still time to go back on?

Three o'clock struck; they had been there almost two hours.

‘Please go now,’ the notary said in the end. ‘There are other people waiting.’

They had to accept his decision; he ushered them out into the main office where numbers of peasants were, in fact, sitting stiffly upright, patiently waiting, whilst the office-boy was watching a dog-fight through the window and the two others were still scratching away with a surly air on official stamped paper.

Outside, the family stood for a moment in the middle of the street.

‘If you like,’ their father said, ‘the survey can be done on Monday, tomorrow.’

They nodded agreement and went down the Rue Grouaise, a few steps apart.

Then, after Fouan and Rose had turned off into the Rue du Temple, towards the church, Fanny and Delhomme went away along the Rue Grande. Buteau had stopped in the Place Saint-Lubin, still wondering whether his father had a hidden nest-egg or not. Jesus Christ, left to his own devices, relit his cigar-end, and lurched into the Jolly Ploughman.

Chapter 3

FOUAN'S house in Rognes was the first one on the road from Cloyes to Bazoches-le-Doyen, which runs through the village. So at seven o'clock on the Monday morning, at daybreak, the old man was just leaving home to go to meet the others, as agreed, in front of the church, when in the doorway of the next house he caught sight of his sister, known as La Grande, already up and about despite her eighty years.

The Fouans had been born and bred here for centuries, like a tough and hardy plant. Former serfs of the Rognes-Bouqueval family, of whom no trace remained except a few half-buried stones of a demolished castle, they must have been freed under Philippe le Bel; and from that time onwards they had become landowners of an acre, or perhaps two, which they bought from the lord of the manor when he was short of cash; and they sweated blood to pay for it at a price ten times its real value. Then the battle had begun, which was to last four long centuries, to defend and enlarge their property, a battle fought with a savage passion passed down from father to son as pieces of land were lost or recovered; a property of derisory proportions, constantly in jeopardy, an inheritance burdened by such onerous taxation that at times it threatened to melt away but whose meadows and arable slowly increased through the Fouans' irresistible hunger for land and their tenacity of purpose, which slowly achieved its goal. Whole generations died in pursuit of their task and the soil grew fat with the sacrifice of many a life; but when the Revolution of 1789 finally established his rights, Joseph-Casimir, the Fouan of the day, owned twenty-one acres wrested from the former manor lands over the space of four centuries.

In 1793 Joseph-Casimir was twenty-seven years old; and on the day when the remainder of the estate was declared to be the property of the nation and sold by auction, he longed to buy more of it. The Rognes-Bouqueval family, having let the last of the castle towers fall down, themselves ruined and crippled by debt, had long since abandoned the tenancies of La Borderie to their creditors, and three-quarters of the land was lying fallow. Above all, adjoining one of the plots, there was a large piece of land which Joseph-Casimir, insatiably covetous like all his family, would have dearly loved to possess.