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Updated: June 4, 2025
Other women were arriving from all sides, carrying lanterns. The men also were gathering, and all were watching the foaming crests of the breaking wave. The storm lasted fifteen hours. Eleven sailors never returned; Patin was among them. In the neighborhood of Dieppe the wreck of his bark, the Jeune-Amelie, was found.
Just at that moment a parrot was at auction. He had green feathers and a blue head and was watching everybody with a displeased look. "Three francs!" cried the auctioneer. "A bird that can talk like a lawyer, three francs!" A friend of the Patin woman nudged her and said: "You ought to buy that, you who are rich. It would be good company for you. That bird is worth more than thirty francs.
Three days after the wedding Patin could no longer understand how he had ever imagined Desiree to be different from other women. What a fool he had been to encumber himself with a penniless creature, who had undoubtedly inveigled him with some drug which she had put in his brandy! He would curse all day long, break his pipe with his teeth and maul his crew.
The poor man understood his mistake. What good to have dazzled M. Patin before the whole University by reciting, without hesitation, three verses of Aristophanes, only to become a drudge and a packer? It had to be so. They took leave of Uncle Isidore. "We will reflect over it, Monsieur Gaufre, and will come to see you again."
Patin got so well accustomed to Desiree's face that he thought of it even while at sea, when throwing out his nets, in storms or in calms, on moonlit or dark evenings. He thought of her while holding the tiller in the stern of his boat, while his four companions were slumbering with their heads on their arms.
I am glad to hear that your breast is so much better. You will find both asses' and mares' milk enough in the south of France, where it was much drank when I was there. Guy Patin recommends to a patient to have no doctor but a horse, and no apothecary but an ass. As for your pains and weakness in your limbs, 'je vous en offre autant'; I have never been free from them since my last rheumatism.
The Archbishop has the reliquary opened containing the holy ampulla, which is taken from a little chest of gold; he withdraws from it, by means of a golden needle, a particle which he mingles with the holy chrism on the patin. Meanwhile the choir chants:
Her fear was so great that she hid her head under the sheets, for when Patin was with her as soon as he would open his eyes he would shout those well-known words into her ears. Trembling, rolled into a ball, her back prepared for the thrashing which she already expected, her face buried in the pillows, she murmured: "Good Lord! he is here! Good Lord! he is here! Good Lord! he has come back!"
She said: "Here I am, Patin; what do you want?" But Patin did not answer. Then, at a complete loss, she looked around her, then in the chimney and under the bed and finally sank into a chair, wild with anxiety, convinced that Patin's soul alone was there, near her, and that he had returned in order to torture her. Suddenly she remembered the loft, in order to reach which one had to take a ladder.
For ten years the principal topic of conversation on the Retenue was about the beatings that Patin gave his wife and his manner of cursing at her for the least thing. He could, indeed, curse with a richness of vocabulary in a roundness of tone unequalled by any other man in Fecamp.
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