would be so cruel as that!" said
Couillard's wife.

Jeanne picked up the pups, saying she would bring them up by hand; she
tried to give them some milk, but three out of seven died the next day.
Then old Simon went all over the neighborhood trying to find a
foster-mother for the others; he could not get a dog, but he brought
back a cat, asserting that she would do as well. Three more pups were
killed, and the seventh was given to the cat, who took to it directly,
and lay down on her side to suckle it. That it might not exhaust its
foster-mother the pup was weaned a fortnight later, and Jeanne undertook
to feed it herself with a feeding-bottle; she had named it Toto, but the
baron rechristened it, and called it Massacre.

The priest did not go to see Jeanne again. The next Sunday he hurled
curses and threats against the chateau, denouncing it as a plague-spot
which ought to be removed, and going on to anathematize the baron (who
laughed at him) and to make veiled, half-timid allusions to Julien's
latest amour. The vicomte was very vexed at this, but he did not dare
say anything for fear of giving rise to a scandal; and the priest
continued to call down vengeance on their heads, and to foretell the
downfall of God's enemies in every sermon. At last, Julien wrote a
decided, though respectful, letter to the archbishop, and the Abbe
Tolbiac, finding himself threatened with disgrace, ceased his
denunciations. He began to take long solitary walks; often he was to be
met striding along the roads with an ardent, excited look on his face.
Gilberte and Julien were always seeing him when they were out riding,
sometimes in the distance, on the other side of a common, or on the edge
of the cliff, sometimes close at hand, reading his breviary in a narrow
valley they were just about to pass through; they always turned another
way to avoid passing him. Spring had come, enflaming their hearts with
fresh desires, and urging them to seek each other's embraces in any
secluded spot to which their rides might lead them; but the leaves were
only budding, the grass was still damp from the rains of winter, and
they could not, as in the height of summer, hide themselves amidst the
undergrowth of the woods. Lately, they had generally sheltered their
caresses within a movable shepherd's hut which had been left since
autumn, on the very top of the Vaucotte hill. It stood all alone on the
edge of the precipitous descent to the valley, five hundred