And he ate.

The doctor, helping himself, emptied his plate three times, while Madame Caravan, from time to time, speared a big bit on the end of her fork, and swallowed it with a sort of studied inattention.

When a salad dish appeared, full of macaroni, the doctor murmured, ‘Jove, here’s a good thing,’ and Madame Caravan, this time, helped everybody. She even filled the saucers in which the children were messing about, and who, left to themselves, were drinking wine without water, and were already kicking one another under the table.

Monsieur Chenet recalled Rossini’s love for these Italian dishes; then suddenly:

‘Wait! that rhymes; you could begin a bit of poetry:

Nobody was listening. Madame Caravan, become reflective all of a sudden, was thinking of the probable consequence of the event: while her husband rolled up little balls of bread which he then put on the table- cloth and looked at, with the expression of an idiot. As a blazing thirst burned his throat, he lifted steadily to his mouth his glass ready filled with wine; and his wits, already upset by the shock and the grief, became vague, and seemed to him to dance in the sudden dizziness of indigestion which was beginning.

The doctor, for that matter, was drinking like a fish, and visibly getting intoxicated; and Madame Caravan herself was undergoing the reaction which follows all nervous shock; was restless, troubled too, though she only drank water, and felt her head rather muddled.

Monsieur Chenet began to tell stories of deaths which seemed funny to him. For in this Parisian suburb, filled with a population from the provinces, you find this indifference of the peasant for death, whether it be his father’s or his mother’s, this disrespect, this unconscious ferocity, so common in the country and so rare in Paris. He was saying.

‘Look, last week, in the Rue des Puteaux, someone calls me: I go. I find the sick man dead, and, near the bed, the family who are quietly finishing up a bottle of anisette bought the night before to satisfy a caprice of the dying man.’

But Madame Caravan was not listening: she was thinking steadily of the inheritance: and Caravan, his brain empty, understood nothing at all.

Coffee was served, which had been made very strong to keep up their morale. Each cup, laced with brandy, caused a sudden flush to rise to their cheeks, and confused the last ideas of those already vacillating minds.

Then the doctor, suddenly getting possession of the bottle of brandy, poured out the cup-rinser for all the family. And, without speaking, wrapt in the gentle heat of digestion, possessed in spite of themselves by the animal sense of well-being which alcohol after dinner bestows, they let the sugared brandy, which formed a yellowish syrup at the bottom of their cups, trickle slowly down their throats.

The children had gone to sleep and Rosalie put them to bed.

Then Caravan, obeying mechanically the need for forgetting one’s troubles which drives on all the unfortunate, took several more drinks of brandy; and his dull eyes gleamed.

The doctor finally rose to go away; and taking hold of his friend’s arm: ‘Come on, come with me,’ he said. ‘A little fresh air will do you good: when a man has troubles, it’s not good to sit still.’