secure an untarnished
name throughout Plassans. There was but one method to adopt, namely, to
induce Adelaide to leave of her own accord. Pierre neglected nothing to
accomplish this end. He considered his mother's misconduct a sufficient
excuse for his own hard-heartedness. He punished her as one would
chastise a child. The tables were turned. The poor woman cowered under
the stick which, figuratively, was constantly held over her. She was
scarcely forty-two years old, and already had the stammerings of
terror, and vague, pitiful looks of an old woman in her dotage. Her son
continued to stab her with his piercing glances, hoping that she would
run away when her courage was exhausted. The unfortunate woman suffered
terribly from shame, restrained desire and enforced cowardice, receiving
the blows dealt her with passive resignation, and nevertheless returning
to Macquart with the determination to die on the spot rather than
submit. There were nights when she would have got out of bed, and thrown
herself into the Viorne, if with her weak, nervous, nature she had not
felt the greatest fear of death. On several occasions she thought of
running away and joining her lover on the frontier. It was only
because she did not know whither to go that she remained in the house,
submitting to her son's contemptuous silence and secret brutality.
Pierre divined that she would have left long ago if she had only had a
refuge. He was waiting an opportunity to take a little apartment for her
somewhere, when a fortuitous occurrence, which he had not ventured
to anticipate, abruptly brought about the realisation of his desires.
Information reached the Faubourg that Macquart had just been killed on
the frontier by a shot from a custom-house officer, at the moment when
he was endeavouring to smuggle a load of Geneva watches into France. The
story was true. The smuggler's body was not even brought home, but was
interred in the cemetery of a little mountain village. Adelaide's grief
plunged her into stupor. Her son, who watched her curiously, did not see
her shed a tear. Macquart had made her sole legatee. She inherited
his hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and his carbine, which a
fellow-smuggler, braving the balls of the custom-house officers, loyally
brought back to her. On the following day she retired to the little
house, hung the carbine above the mantelpiece, and lived there estranged
from all the world, solitary and silent.

Pierre was at