shop. So he had just come back upstairs again and gone to hide behind the pump outside when he distinctly heard his own front door cracking and people calling his name as they prepared to loot the shop. So it wasn’t all simply a bad dream: while he couldn’t see, he could now hear what was going on, and his ears rang as he followed the progress of the attack. Each blow of the axe struck at his heart. A hinge must have given way, in another five minutes the shop would be theirs. He could see the whole thing in his mind’s eye, real, terrifying images, the plunderers rushing in, breaking open the drawers, emptying the sacks, eating and drinking everything in sight, stripping their living quarters bare and leaving him nothing, not even a stick to go begging with in the neighbouring village. No, he would not let them ruin him completely. Over his dead body! As he stood there, he had been observing a side-window of the house where he could make out the pale, blurred form of his wife in puny silhouette through the glass: no doubt she was watching the attack on the shop with her usual blank expression, like the poor, battered creature she was. Beneath the window was a lean-to shed which was so positioned that it was possible to climb on to it from the manager’s garden by means of the trellis attached to the boundary wall; and from there it was a simple matter to crawl up the tiles as far as the window. He was now obsessed by the thought of returning home in this way, for he bitterly regretted ever having left. Perhaps he would still have time to barricade the shop with furniture; indeed he was busy imagining other forms of heroic defence, like pouring boiling oil or burning paraffin down from above. A desperate struggle was taking place between his fear and his devotion to his stock, and he was panting with the effort of battling against his cowardice. Suddenly, as he heard the axe sink deeper into the door, he made up his mind. Avarice won the day: he and his wife would protect the sacks with their own bodies rather than give up one single loaf of bread.
The jeering started almost at once.
‘Look! Up there! It’s the tomcat himself! After him! After him!’
The mob had just caught sight of Maigrat up on the shed roof. In his desperation he had managed to shin up the trellis with ease, despite his weight, quite oblivious to the sound of breaking wood; and now he was stretched out flat over the tiles, trying to reach the window. But the pitch of the roof was very steep, his stomach impeded his progress, and his nails were breaking off. Nevertheless he would have made it to the top if he had not begun to tremble at the thought of being stoned; for down below the crowd, whom he could no longer see, was still shouting:
‘Catch the cat! Catch the cat!…Let’s thrash him!’
Suddenly both hands lost their grip, and he rolled down the roof like a ball, bounced off the guttering and landed so awkwardly on the boundary wall that he rebounded on to the road beneath and split his skull on the corner of a milestone. Brains spurted out. He was dead. And the pale blur of his wife continued to gaze down from above.
At first there was a stunned silence. Étienne had stopped, and the axe fell from his hands. Maheu, Levaque and the others forgot about the shop, and all eyes turned to look at a slow trickle of blood running down the wall. The shouting had ceased, and a deep hush fell amid the gathering gloom. All at once the jeering started up again. It was the women, now rushing forward and thirsting for blood.
‘So there is a God after all! That’s the end of you, you pig!’
They all stood round the still-warm corpse and shouted insults and laughed at it, calling the shattered skull a dirty gob and flinging all the accumulated resentment of their long starvation in the face of death itself.
‘I owed you sixty francs, you thief! And there’s your payment!’ said La Maheude, in as much of a rage as anyone. ‘You won’t refuse me credit any more, that’s for sure…Wait a minute, though. Let me just fatten you up a bit more.’
And, scratching at the ground with