GERMINAL
He was about to reply, but then shrugged his shoulders in despair. What was the good of explaining, for she would not understand in her grief? And he went away, for he was suffering too much, and resumed his wild walk outside.
There again he found the settlement apparently waiting for him, the men at the doors, the women at the windows. As soon as he appeared growls ran along, and the crowd increased. The breath of gossip, which had been swelling for four days, was breaking out in a universal malediction. Fists were stretched towards him, mothers spitefully pointed him out to their boys, old men spat as they looked at him. It was the change which follows on the morrow of defeat, the fatal reverse of popularity, an execration exasperated by all the suffering endured without result. He had to pay for famine and death.
Zacharie, who came up with Philomène, hustled Étienne as he went out, grinning maliciously.
"Well, he gets fat. It's filling, then, to live on other people's deaths?"
The Levaque woman had already come to her door with Bouteloup. She spoke of Bébert, her youngster, killed by a bullet, and cried:
"Yes, there are cowards who get children murdered! Let him go and look for mine in the earth if he wants to give it me back!"
She was forgetting her man in prison, for the household was going on since Bouteloup remained; but she thought of him, however, and went on in a shrill voice:
"Get along! rascals may walk about while good people are put away!"
In avoiding her, Étienne tumbled on to Pierronne, who was running up across the gardens. She had regarded her mother's death as a deliverance, for the old woman's violence threatened to get them hanged; nor did she weep over Pierron's little girl, that street-walker Lydie—a good riddance. But she joined in with her neighbours with the idea of gaining reconciliation.
"And my mother, eh, and the little girl? You've been seen; you were hiding yourself behind them when they caught the lead instead of you!"
What was to be done? Strangle Pierronne and the others, and
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