iqueurs. She adored aniseed, and very often had to be carried home on
Sunday evenings.

On week days she would toil with the stubbornness of an animal. She had
three or four different occupations; she sold fruit or boiled chestnuts
in the market, according to the season; went out charring for a few
well-to-do people; washed up plates and dishes at houses when parties
were given, and employed her spare time in mending old chairs. She was
more particularly known in the town as a chair-mender. In the South
large numbers of straw-bottomed chairs are used.

Antoine Macquart formed an acquaintance with Fine at the market. When he
went to sell his baskets in the winter he would stand beside the stove
on which she cooled her chestnuts and warm himself. He was astonished
at her courage, he who was frightened of the least work. By degrees he
discerned, beneath the apparent roughness of this strapping creature,
signs of timidity and kindliness. He frequently saw her give handfuls of
chestnuts to the ragged urchins who stood in ecstasy round her smoking
pot. At other times, when the market inspector hustled her, she very
nearly began to cry, apparently forgetting all about her heavy fists.
Antoine at last decided that she was exactly the woman he wanted. She
would work for both and he would lay down the law at home. She would
be his beast of burden, an obedient, indefatigable animal. As for her
partiality for liqueurs, he regarded this as quite natural. After well
weighing the advantages of such an union, he declared himself to Fine,
who was delighted with his proposal. No man had ever yet ventured to
propose to her. Though she was told that Antoine was the most worthless
of vagabonds, she lacked the courage to refuse matrimony. The very
evening of the nuptials the young man took up his abode in his wife's
lodgings in the Rue Civadiere, near the market. These lodgings,
consisting of three rooms, were much more comfortably furnished than his
own, and he gave a sigh of satisfaction as he stretched himself out on
the two excellent mattresses which covered the bedstead.

Everything went on very well for the first few days. Fine attended to
her various occupations as in the past; Antoine, seized with a sort of
marital self-pride which astonished even himself, plaited in one week
more baskets than he had ever before done in a month. On the first
Sunday, however, war broke out. The couple had a goodly sum of money in
the house, and they