sole
influence of instinct. They rolled among the vegetables, passed their
days in the open air playing and fighting like good-for-nothing urchins.
They stole provisions from the house and pillaged the few fruit-trees in
the enclosure; they were the plundering, squalling, familiar demons of
this strange abode of lucid insanity. When their mother was absent
for days together, they would make such an uproar, and hit upon such
diabolical devices for annoying people, that the neighbours had to
threaten them with a whipping. Moreover, Adelaide did not inspire them
with much fear; if they were less obnoxious to other people when she was
at home, it was because they made her their victim, shirking school
five or six times a week and doing everything they could to receive some
punishment which would allow them to squall to their hearts' content.
But she never beat them, nor even lost her temper; she lived on very
well, placidly, indolently, in a state of mental abstraction amidst all
the uproar. At last, indeed, this uproar became indispensable to her,
to fill the void in her brain. She smiled complacently when she heard
anyone say, "Her children will beat her some day, and it will serve her
right." To all remarks, her utter indifference seemed to reply, "What
does it matter?" She troubled even less about her property than about
her children. The Fouques' enclosure, during the many years that this
singular existence lasted would have become a piece of waste ground
if the young woman had not luckily entrusted the cultivation of her
vegetables to a clever market-gardener. This man, who was to share the
profits with her, robbed her impudently, though she never noticed it.
This circumstance had its advantages, however; for, in order to steal
the more, the gardener drew as much as possible from the land, which in
the result almost doubled in value.

Pierre, the legitimate son, either from secret instinct or from his
knowledge of the different manner in which he and the others were
regarded by the neighbours, domineered over his brother and sister
from an early age. In their quarrels, although he was much weaker than
Antoine, he always got the better of the contest, beating the other with
all the authority of a master. With regard to Ursule, a poor, puny, wan
little creature, she was handled with equal roughness by both the
boys. Indeed, until they were fifteen or sixteen, the three children
fraternally beat each other without under