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Updated: June 24, 2025
Madame Famette, as has been said, has a sieve-like nature with regard to the passing away of wrath, but still her anger is easily roused. "It would be simpler to tell me what you have heard," she says in a very snappish accent. "When I want a lecture I can get it from monsieur le curé."
Madame Famette's sorrow at her daughter's changed looks expands itself in querulous remonstrance on the folly of flirting and on the good-for-nothing qualities of Nicolas Marais. Nicolas has come to inquire for Marie, but Madame Famette has received him so uncourteously that the poor fellow contents himself with hovering about on the chance of meeting Marie alone.
Madame Famette always failed in managing her daughter. Marie smiled and kept down her indignation. "I hardly know that," she said: "old Marais will make Nicolas his heir, and there is no saying how rich a miser is." She crossed the road, caught the donkey by the bridle, and held him ready for her mother to mount.
"I will know the right of it to-day," Madame Famette thinks, and she lashes out at Mouton in an unusual fashion. The first customer at her stall is Madame Houlard, the wife of the tailor and town councillor. "How is Marie?" she says: "the market does not seem itself without Marie Famette."
The blood flew up to her face, and then it left her paler than before. She bent lower lower yet, until she overbalanced and fell like a crushed lily at her mother's feet. "How is Marie Famette?" Monsieur Houlard the tailor asks of Monsieur Guéroult the doctor of Aubette, as he meets him hurrying through the Rue de la Boucherie. "She is better, the poor child! but she must be careful this winter."
Then, seeing Houlard look anxious, the good doctor says, "But she is so far better that I have discontinued my visits: I have given Marie leave to come to Aubette." "That is good news," says Houlard as the doctor shoots past him, and the tailor tells the next person he meets that Marie Famette is as well as ever, and is coming to market as usual.
She is not going to hold her stall ah no, she is not nearly strong enough for such a task but Madame Famette has a severe attack of rheumatism, and Jeanne cannot be trusted to buy the weekly provision of groceries. Marie shrinks as she goes along at the thought of meeting Léon Roussel.
Léon Roussel had begun to be a regular Sunday visitor at the cottage, and now three weeks and more had gone by and he had not come; and a gossip who had walked home from church with her overnight had told Madame Famette that Mam'selle Lesage was going to marry a Monsieur Roussel: whether it was Léon or a Monsieur Roussel of some other place than Aubette her gossip could not affirm; and in this uncertainty the mother's heart was troubled.
"Ah, but look you, Madelaine, Léon is not proud: he never turns a poor man from his door without a morsel to quiet hunger, and he must be clever or his business would not prosper." La Mère Manget shrugs her shoulders. "Will you then not buy turkeys at eleven francs the couple, ma belle dame?" she cries shrilly to a passer-by. While Marie Famette recovers herself, Nicolas answers Mam'selle Lesage.
I heard a week ago, and Houlard had just learned it from the Doctor Guéroult, that Marie Famette is as well and gay as ever. I believe she has come back to the market." No reply. The silence that followed oppressed Marie: a sense of guilt stole over her.
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