breast, raised his head, which was crowned by
his red comb, flapped his wings and uttered his shrill crow, which the
other cocks repeated.

Vehicles of all sorts came from neighboring parishes, stopping at
the different houses, and tall Norman women dismounted, wearing dark
dresses, with kerchiefs crossed over the bosom, fastened with silver
brooches a hundred years old.

The men had put on their blue smocks over their new frock-coats or over
their old dress-coats of green-cloth, the two tails of which hung down
below their blouses. When the horses were in the stable there was a
double line of rustic conveyances along the road: carts, cabriolets,
tilburies, wagonettes, traps of every shape and age, tipping forward on
their shafts or else tipping backward with the shafts up in the air.

The carpenter's house was as busy as a bee-hive. The women, in
dressing-jackets and petticoats, with their thin, short hair, which
looked faded and worn, hanging down their backs, were busy dressing the
child, who was standing quietly on a table, while Madame Tellier was
directing the movements of her battalion. They washed her, did her hair,
dressed her, and with the help of a number of pins, they arranged the
folds of her dress and took in the waist, which was too large.

Then, when she was ready, she was told to sit down and not to move, and
the women hurried off to get ready themselves.

The church bell began to ring again, and its tinkle was lost in the air,
like a feeble voice which is soon drowned in space. The candidates
came out of the houses and went toward the parochial building, which
contained the two schools and the mansion house, and which stood quite
at one end of the village, while the church was situated at the other.

The parents, in their very best clothes, followed their children, with
embarrassed looks, and those clumsy movements of a body bent by toil.

The little girls disappeared in a cloud of muslin, which looked like
whipped cream, while the lads, who looked like embryo waiters in a cafe
and whose heads shone with pomatum, walked with their legs apart, so as
not to get any dust or dirt on their black trousers.

It was something for a family, to be proud of, when a large number of
relatives, who had come from a distance, surrounded the child, and the
carpenter's triumph was complete.

Madame Tellier's regiment, with its leader at its head, followed
Constance; her father gave his arm to his sister, her m