But at the sight of Buteau, Lise blushed. He looked at her unabashed.

‘How are things since we last met, Lise?’

‘Not too bad, thanks.’

‘That's good, then.’

Meanwhile Palmyre had surreptitiously slipped in through the half-open door. She was crouching down and staying as far away as possible from her terrible grandmother La Grande when a loud noise outside made her straighten up. She could hear furious stammering, shouts, laughter and boos.

‘Those miserable kids are at him again,’ she exclaimed.

She leapt towards the door and, suddenly transformed into a bold raging lioness, she rescued her brother Hilarion from the tormenting of La Trouille, Delphin and Nénesse. The latter had just joined the other two, who were shrieking and yelling at the cripple's heels. Hilarion limped in on his deformed legs, quite out of breath and bewildered. His hare-lip was dribbling and he was stammering, unable to explain what was wrong, looking like an ugly village idiot and frail for his age of twenty-four. He was in a temper, furious because he had not been able to catch the young scamps who were chasing him and knock their heads together. Not for the first time, he had met a volley of snowballs.

‘Oh, what a fibber,’ said La Trouille, all innocence. ‘He bit my finger, look.’

At this Hilarion spluttered helplessly as he tried to explain, while Palmyre calmed him down and petted him as she wiped his face with her handkerchief.

‘That's enough now,’ said Fouan at last. ‘Palmyre, you ought to stop him from following you. Make him sit down at least and keep him quiet!… And you brats shut up! We'll take you back to your parents by your ears if you're not careful.’

But as the cripple still kept babbling on, La Grande, her eyes blazing, picked up her stick and struck the table with it so hard that everyone jumped. Terrified, Palmyre and Hilarion subsided and remained still as mice.

The evening now began. Grouped around the solitary candle, the women sewed and knitted or did needlework without a single glance at what they were making. The men sat behind, slowly smoking as they exchanged a few desultory remarks, while in a corner the children, with suppressed giggles, pinched and pushed each other.

Sometimes they would tell stories: the story of the Black Pig who kept guard over a treasure with a red key in his jaws; or the Beast of Orléans who had a man's face, bat's wings, hair reaching to the ground, two horns and two tails, one to catch and the other to kill you; and this monster had eaten a man from Rouen and left only his hat and his boots. At other times, they would launch into endless tales about wolves, the devouring wolves which ravaged Beauce for centuries. Formerly, when Beauce, which is so bare and treeless at the present time, had still a few coppices left from original forests, countless bands of wolves, impelled by hunger, used to come out in the winter to prey on the flocks. They devoured women and children, and the old people of the district could remember that in times of heavy snow the wolves would come into the towns. In Cloyes you could hear them howling on the Place Saint-Georges; in Rognes they would push their noses under the loose doors of cowsheds and sheep pens. Then, one after the other, the same old stories would be told: the miller ambushed by wolves who put them to flight by striking a match; the little girl who ran for two hours pursued by a she-wolf which ate her up when she fell down just as she reached the door of her home; and still more stories, legends of werewolves, of men changed into beasts leaping out onto the shoulders of belated passers-by or running them to death.

But what made the blood of the girls run cold as they sat round in the pale candlelight, and sent them running off to peer wildly into the darkness, was the story of the famous band of criminals from Orgères called the Roasters, whose exploits still made the district shudder with horror sixty years later. There were hundreds of them, beggars, tramps, deserters and pretended hawkers, men, women and children living from theft, murder and vice. They were descended from the old bands of organized armed bandits, who took advantage of the troubles arising out of the Revolution by systematically attacking isolated houses which they burst into by breaking down the doors with battering rams. At nightfall they would come like wolves out of the forest of Dourdan, the scrubland of La Conie, from the dens where they lurked in the woods; and as dusk fell, terror descended on the farms of Beauce, from Etampes to Châteaudun and from Chartres to Orléans. Amongst their legendary atrocities the one most frequently spoken of in Rognes was the sacking of the Millouard farm, only a score of miles away, in the canton of Orgères. On that night, their celebrated leader, Beau François, who had succeeded May Blossom, had with him his lieutenant, Red Auneau, the Big Dragoon, Breton-dry-arse, Longjumeau, One-thumb Jean and fifty more, all with blackened faces. First, they forced all the workers on the farm, the maids, the carters and the shepherd, down the cellar at bayonet-point; then they ‘roasted’ old Fousset the farmer, whom they had kept separate from the rest. Having stretched his feet out over the glowing embers of the fire, they set light to his beard and all the hair on his body with lighted wisps of straw; then they went back to his feet which they slashed with the point of a knife so that they would cook better. When the old man had been persuaded to reveal the whereabouts of his money, they eventually let him go and made off with an immense amount of loot; Fousset had the strength to crawl to a neighbouring house and did not die until some time later. And the tale invariably ended with the trial and execution in Chartres of the band of the Roasters who had been betrayed by One-eyed Jacques: a mass trial for which it took eighteen months to collect the evidence and in the course of which sixty-four of the accused died in prison from a plague caused by their own filth; a trial which brought one hundred and fifteen prisoners before the assize court (thirty-three of them in absentia), which required the jury to answer seven thousand eight hundred questions and led to twenty-three death sentences. On the night of the execution, the executioners of Chartres and Dreux came to blows underneath the blood-stained scaffold while sharing out the condemned men's effects.

So, in connection with a murder which had just been committed over at Janville, Fouan proceeded to relate for the umpteenth time the dreadful events at Millouard: and he had just reached the point when Red Auneau himself was composing his ballad of lament in gaol when the women were horrified by noises in the street, the sound of footsteps and pushing mingled with oaths.