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By Root 1317 0

sometimes couldn’t see her way clear to paying the laundry bill. She had to do without all sorts of little comforts and items of clothing. That evening, they had quarrelled over a pair of shoes she needed to buy. Roubaud was about to leave and couldn’t find a knife to cut himself a slice of bread. So he had taken a knife from the sideboard drawer. It was the murder weapon. She looked him straight in the eyes as he refused to give her the fifteen francs she wanted for the shoes. He didn’t have the money and he had no idea where he could find it. But she was insistent and asked him again. He refused a second time, becoming more and more exasperated. Suddenly, she pointed to the place under the floor, where the ghostly spoils still lay hidden. There was some money there, she said, and she wanted some of it. Roubaud turned pale; the knife fell with a clatter into the drawer. For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. He came towards her, muttering that the money down there could rot, that he’d sooner cut his hand off than take any of it. He clenched his fists and threatened to beat her if she tried to take the floorboard up or steal a single centime while he was out. He would never touch it! Never! It was dead and buried! Séverine, too, had turned pale. The thought of groping around under the floorboards made her feel faint. They might end up poor, they might be starving, but the money would stay where it was. They never mentioned it again, even when they were really hard up. But every time they chanced to walk on that part of the floor, the burning sensation in their foot got worse. They ended up always walking round it.

Other arguments followed, about La Croix-de-Maufras. Why hadn’t the house been sold? Each accused the other of doing nothing to get things moving. Roubaud still refused to have anything to do with it, whilst Séverine, on the odd occasions she wrote to the Misards, received only vague information in reply; no one had shown any interest in it, the fruit trees had failed and the vegetables wouldn’t grow because there was nobody to water them. In the weeks following the crisis, the Roubauds had lived blissfully free from care. But things were changing; it seemed that all their troubles were about to begin again. The seeds of discontent - the hidden money, the secret lover - had begun to sprout, forcing them apart and setting them against each other. They grew to dislike each other more and more. Their life together was becoming a torment.

What was more, by a singular stroke of ill fortune, they began to have further trouble with their neighbours. A new spate of gossip and argument had broken out. Philomène had recently had a slanging match with Madame Lebleu, who accused her of selling her a chicken that had died of fowl pest. The real reason for their disagreement, however, was that Philomène had now developed a friendship with Séverine. One night, Pecqueux had seen Séverine in Jacques’s arms. Because Pecqueux was Jacques’s fireman, Philomène had overcome her earlier dislike of Séverine, having discovered that she was Jacques’s mistress, and was doing her utmost to be pleasant towards her. She prided herself on being a friend of the most attractive and incontestably the most refined lady at the station and had turned against the cashier’s wife, that old bag as she called her, whose sole aim in life was to make trouble. She blamed her for everything and went around telling everyone that the apartment overlooking the street belonged by rights to the Roubauds and that it was outrageous that it had not been returned to them. So things were not going well for Madame Lebleu. She also risked getting into serious trouble because of her constant spying on Mademoiselle Guichon in the hope of catching her with the stationmaster. She still hadn’t succeeded but she had been foolish enough to get herself caught with her ear glued to their doors. Monsieur Dabadie, furious at this eavesdropping, had told Moulin, the other assistant stationmaster, that if Roubaud wished to reapply for the apartment, he would be happy