Fruitfulness - Fecondite | Page 6

there erect before his
drawing-table seemed possessed of the sturdy health of a young oak
tree. Tall and slender, he had the broad, lofty, tower-like brow of the
Froments. He wore his thick hair cut quite short, and his beard, which
curled slightly, in a point. But the chief expression of his face rested in
his eyes, which were at once deep and bright, keen and thoughtful, and
almost invariably illumined by a smile. They showed him to be at once
a man of thought and of action, very simple, very gay, and of a kindly
disposition.
"Oh! I," he answered with a laugh, "I behave reasonably."
But Beauchene protested: "No, you don't! The man who already has
four children when he is only twenty-seven can't claim to be reasonable.
And twins too--your Blaise and your Denis to begin with! And then
your boy Ambroise and your little girl Rose. Without counting the
other little girl that you lost at her birth. Including her, you would now
have had five youngsters, you wretched fellow! No, no, I'm the one
who behaves reasonably--I, who have but one child, and, like a prudent,
sensible man, desire no others!"
He often made such jesting remarks as these, through which filtered his
genuine indignation; for he deemed the young couple to be
over-careless of their interests, and declared that the prolificness of his
cousin Marianne was quite scandalous.

Accustomed as Mathieu was to these attacks, which left him perfectly
serene, he went on laughing, without even giving a reply, when a
workman abruptly entered the room--one who was currently called "old
Moineaud," though he was scarcely three-and-forty years of age. Short
and thick-set, he had a bullet head, a bull's neck, and face and hands
scarred and dented by more than a quarter of a century of toil. By
calling he was a fitter, and he had come to submit a difficulty which
had just arisen in the piecing together of a reaping machine. But, his
employer, who was still angrily thinking of over-numerous families,
did not give him time to explain his purpose.
"And you, old Moineaud, how many children have you?" he inquired.
"Seven, Monsieur Beauchene," the workman replied, somewhat taken
aback. "I've lost three."
"So, including them, you would now have ten? Well, that's a nice state
of things! How can you do otherwise than starve?"
Moineaud began to laugh like the gay thriftless Paris workman that he
was. The little ones? Well, they grew up without his even noticing it,
and, indeed, he was really fond of them, so long as they remained at
home. And, besides, they worked as they grew older, and brought a
little money in. However, he preferred to answer his employer with a
jest which set them all laughing.
After he had explained the difficulty with the reaper, the others
followed him to examine the work for themselves. They were already
turning into a passage, when Beauchene, seeing the door of the
women's workshop open, determined to pass that way, so that he might
give his customary look around. It was a long, spacious place, where
the polishers, in smocks of black serge, sat in double rows polishing
and grinding their pieces at little work-boards. Nearly all of them were
young, a few were pretty, but most had low and common faces. An
animal odor and a stench of rancid oil pervaded the place.
The regulations required perfect silence there during work. Yet all the
girls were gossiping. As soon, however, as the master's approach was
signalled the chatter abruptly ceased. There was but one girl who,
having her head turned, and thus seeing nothing of Beauchene, went on
furiously abusing a companion, with whom she had previously started a
dispute. She and the other were sisters, and, as it happened, daughters
of old Moineaud. Euphrasie, the younger one, she who was shouting,

was a skinny creature of seventeen, light-haired, with a long, lean,
pointed face, uncomely and malignant; whereas the elder, Norine,
barely nineteen, was a pretty girl, a blonde like her sister, but having a
milky skin, and withal plump and sturdy, showing real shoulders, arms,
and hips, and one of those bright sunshiny faces, with wild hair and
black eyes, all the freshness of the Parisian hussy, aglow with the
fleeting charm of youth.
Norine was ever quarrelling with Euphrasie, and was pleased to have
her caught in a misdeed; so she allowed her to rattle on. And it
thereupon became necessary for Beauchene to intervene. He habitually
evinced great severity in the women's workshop, for he had hitherto
held the view that an employer who jested with his workgirls was a lost
man. Thus, in spite of the low character of which he was said to give
proof in his walks abroad, there