felt interest in their welfare, felt there and then an imperious and almost piercing solicitude, the most intense, the most jealous that any human being had ever aroused in his veins, taxed his ingenuity to prolong the conversation in order to hold them back, there, near him, and delay their entrance into the factory from minute to minute.
He racked his brain in order to divert them from their work, to disband this deleterious workshop. He had never before nourished such a desire to dispute a factory its workingmen; to debauch, to liberate, to emancipate the apprentices yoked to a homicidal trade. All his former loves revived and condensed into that supreme attachment.
"In that building there, in front of your nose, is the workroom where the boys empty the cartridges. Back of the shed, the customshouse. In the middle, that species of fort surrounded by bare earth is the powder-house, where we case the powder coming from the broken cartridges. On the other side of the powder-house, the girls' workroom. It's there that my girl works, the red-haired one who is hiding behind the other one. Like they used to do at school, they separate the breeches from the skirts. I don't say that they are altogether wrong … the more because we make amends for it when we come out, don't we. Carrot? Finally, that shed there contains the oven in which we melt in separate ingots the copper and the lead.
"The same shed contains the steam engine which crushes the empty and burned shells. I work at the oven. It is I, Frans Verwinkel, who explode the fulminate of the percussion-caps after having emptied the shells. It is very amusing, and no more difficult
