great misery imparts to children--he called her to him, and held
her between his knees, doubtless to keep her away from the man in the
cassock.

Pierre--whose heart was oppressed by his reception, and who realised the
utter destitution of this family by the sight of the bare, fireless room,
and the distressed mournfulness of its three inmates--decided all the
same to repeat his question: "Madame, do you know an old workman named
Laveuve in the house?"

The woman--who now trembled at having admitted him, since it seemed to
displease her man--timidly tried to arrange matters. "Laveuve, Laveuve?
no, I don't. But Salvat, you hear? Do you know a Laveuve here?"

Salvat merely shrugged his shoulders; but the little girl could not keep
her tongue still: "I say, mamma Theodore, it's p'raps the Philosopher."

"A former house-painter," continued Pierre, "an old man who is ill and
past work."

Madame Theodore was at once enlightened. "In that case it's him, it's
him. We call him the Philosopher, a nickname folks have given him in the
neighbourhood. But there's nothing to prevent his real name from being
Laveuve."

With one of his fists raised towards the ceiling, Salvat seemed to be
protesting against the abomination of a world and a Providence that
allowed old toilers to die of hunger just like broken-down beasts.
However, he did not speak, but relapsed into the savage, heavy silence,
the bitter meditation in which he had been plunged when the priest
arrived. He was a journeyman engineer, and gazed obstinately at the table
where lay his little leather tool-bag, bulging with something it
contained--something, perhaps, which he had to take back to a work-shop.
He might have been thinking of a long, enforced spell of idleness, of a
vain search for any kind of work during the two previous months of that
terrible winter. Or perhaps it was the coming bloody reprisals of the
starvelings that occupied the fiery reverie which set his large, strange,
vague blue eyes aglow. All at once he noticed that his daughter had taken
up the tool-bag and was trying to open it to see what it might contain.
At this he quivered and at last spoke, his voice kindly, yet bitter with
sudden emotion, which made him turn pale. "Celine, you must leave that
alone. I forbade you to touch my tools," said he; then taking the bag, he
deposited it with great precaution against the wall behind him.

"And so, madame," asked Pierre, "this man Laveuve lives on thi