his establishment, he would retire with a firm step, with his head
raised, as if he were kept yet more erect by inebriation. "Macquart
walks so straight, he's surely dead drunk," people used to say, as they
saw him going home. Usually, when he had had no drink, he walked with
a slight stoop and shunned the gaze of curious people with a kind of
savage shyness.

Since the death of his father, a journeyman tanner who had left him as
sole heritage the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, he had never
been known to have either relatives or friends. The proximity of the
frontiers and the neighbouring forests of the Seille had turned this
singular, lazy fellow into a combination of smuggler and poacher, one
of those suspicious-looking characters of whom passers-by observe: "I
shouldn't care to meet that man at midnight in a dark wood." Tall, with
a formidable beard and lean face, Macquart was the terror of the
good women of the Faubourg of Plassans; they actually accused him of
devouring little children raw. Though he was hardly thirty years old,
he looked fifty. Amidst his bushy beard and the locks of hair which hung
over his face in poodle fashion, one could only distinguish the gleam
of his brown eyes, the furtive sorrowful glance of a man of vagrant
instincts, rendered vicious by wine and a pariah life. Although no
crimes had actually been brought home to him, no theft or murder was
ever perpetrated in the district without suspicion at once falling upon
him.

And it was this ogre, this brigand, this scoundrel Macquart, whom
Adelaide had chosen! In twenty months she had two children by him, first
a boy and then a girl. There was no question of marriage between
them. Never had the Faubourg beheld such audacious impropriety. The
stupefaction was so great, the idea of Macquart having found a young and