came terrible.

"It is not possible!" she cried. "When I think that my daughters are
going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs! What! A satin
pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than two hundred
francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think she was a lady! No,
you are mistaken! Why, in the first place, the other was hideous, and
this one is not so bad-looking! She really is not bad-looking! It can't
be she!"

"I tell you that it is she. You will see."

At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,
blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression.
At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than her
husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress.

"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady, who gazed at
my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that beggar brat! Oh! I should
like to kick her stomach in for her!"

She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment, her
hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open, her fists
clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back on the bed once more. The
man paced to and fro and paid no attention to his female.

After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the female
Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms, as he had done
a moment before:--

"And shall I tell you another thing?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He answered in a low, curt voice:--

"My fortune is made."

The woman stared at him with the look that signifies: "Is the person who
is addressing me on the point of going mad?"

He went on:--

"Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of
the parish of
die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have
had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! I am not joking
any longer, I don't find it comic any more, I've had enough of puns,
good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! I want to eat till I am full,
I want to drink my fill! to gormandize! to sleep! to do nothing! I want
to have my turn, so I do, come now! before I die! I want to be a bit of
a millionnaire!"

He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--

"Like other people."

"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.

He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice like
a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--

"What do I mean by that? Listen!"

"Hush!" mu