, they cite the
famous enmity of the brothers, Fouasse and Tupain, and the ringing
battles of the Rouget menage. You must know that every inhabitant in
former days received a surname, which has become to-day the regular name
of the family; for it was difficult to distinguish one's self among the
cross-breedings of the Mahes and the Floches. Rouget assuredly had an
ancestor of fiery blood. As for Fouasse and Tupain, they were called
thus without knowing why, many surnames having lost all rational meaning
in course of time. Well, old Francoise, a wanton of eighty years who
lived forever, had had Fouasse by a Mahe, then becoming a widow, she
remarried with a Floche and brought forth Tupain. Hence the hatred of
the two brothers, made specially lively by the question of inheritance.
At the Rouget's they beat each other to a jelly because Rouget accused
his wife, Marie, of being unfaithful to him for a Floche, the tall
Brisemotte, a strong, dark man, on whom he had already twice thrown
himself with a knife, yelling that he would rip open his belly. Rouget,
a small, nervous man, was a great spitfire.

But that which interested Coqueville most deeply was neither the
tantrums of Rouget nor the differences between Tupain and Fouasse. A
great rumor circulated: Delphin, a Mahe, a rascal of twenty years, dared
to love the beautiful Margot, the daughter of La Queue, the richest of
the Floches and chief man of the country. This La Queue was, in truth, a
considerable personage. They called him La Queue because his father, in
the days of Louis Philippe, had been the last to tie up his hair, with
the obstinacy of old age that clings to the fashions of its youth. Well,
then, La Queue owned one of the two large fishing smacks of Coqueville,
the "Zephir," by far the best, still quite new and seaworthy. The other
big boat, the "Baleine," a rotten old patache, {1} belonged to Rouget,
whose sailors were Delphin and Fouasse, while La Queue took with
him Tupain and Brisemotte. These last had grown weary of laughing
contemptuously at the "Baleine"; a sabot, they said, which would
disappear some fine day under the billows like a handful of mud. So when
La Queue learned that that ragamuffin of a Delphin, the froth of the
"Baleine," allowed himself to go prowling around his daughter, he
delivered two sound whacks at Margot, a trifle merely to warn her that
she should never be the wife of a Mahe. As a result, Margot, furious,
declared that she would