his offering, ran down the stairs as if he had robbed and pillaged these paupers.
He never forgot, among all the calls in his errands of mercy, the garret in which a brood of children ranging from one to five years old were crying in a packing case stuffed with shavings, a litter too fetid even for a hutch. It seemed, as he listened to their crying and saw their convulsions, that hunger herself was bending over them and that her nails, scraping their wasted bodies, were skinning them as the rake of a greedy gleaner scrapes fallow-land that has already been reaped.
Leaning backward in a comer, at the other end of the garret, as far away as possible from their agony, the father, a widower, a powerful and muscular calker from the Basins, whose flesh and blood misery had not yet succeeded in exhausting, was without doubt meditating the prompt and violent destruction of his useless strength.
With a roar and a vivid gesture that would bear no reply, the wretched man commanded the intruder to relieve him of his presence, but the increasing pitiableness of the children's wailing was as imperious as the father's comminatory attitude, and, spurred on, though almost sure of being killed, but not wishing to survive these innocents, Laurent walked toward the despairing man and offered him a twenty franc piece.
It was more blinding than the sunshine, for the giant could not bear the gleam of it, and turned toward the wall, like a sulky, shame-stricken child, raising his hands to eyes, tormented to the point of tears! And it was so heavy that, when Laurent had slipped it into his other hand, his huge fingers let it drop!
