She waited for an hour – two hours. She waited three hours. Hunger seized her, and a great pain invaded her body. 

“I can’t eat all on my own,” she reasoned. “No, I can’t. I have to do better. My husband certainly wouldn’t like it.”

And she remembered his constant harping on that food was too expensive, and that since he was a boy he had lived on three cents a day, that’s ten dollars a year. Certainly he did not wish to stop her from eating, but he assured her that eating too much wasn’t good for the stomach. He even named people that he’d known very well who had dropped stone dead following a slap-up meal. Surely there was nothing more revolting than eating bread every single day, or eating lard and meat daily. He didn’t even mention milk or butter, which he considered positively poisonous. And she believed him. Her faith in him was like her faith in God.

How could she run the risk of eating alone, of devouring potatoes that he’d counted out earlier? No, never! She’d sooner die. She didn’t forget, she couldn’t forget the day she had wanted a second helping of treacle : Séraphin had grasped her hand as she stretched it towards the pot, saying to her, with piercing eyes, “My girl, you’re not being sensible. One helping is enough. This amount should last the two of us at least two months. Six pots a year, that’s as much as we need”. And the master of the house went and locked the little white stone pot in the cupboard.

This memory plunged her into a kind of dread, as brutal as the remorse of a crime. She resigned herself to waiting, waiting until death rather than eating. She drank a large tumbler of water, and sat down on the doorstep.

With the sun directly overhead the heat was so oppressive that the animals in the paddocks had stopped eating. In the shadow of a maple tree, two horses stood motionless, nose to nose, like a statue. They could hardly move their tails to swat the flies. A little farther off, at the bottom of the pasture where two cedar fences met, three cows lay stricken by the heat of the sun.

Donalda looked at the birch tree whose dome-shaped crown rose above the gable of the barn. Not a leaf stirred.

“This is unbearable,” she sighed. “I could die in this heat.”

And she went back into the kitchen where thousands of fat persistent flies buzzed incessantly. This monotonous noise made the atmosphere even heavier. Donalda didn’t know where to go or what to do.

She stopped for a moment, dazed, in front of the door leading to the upper storey. The house consisted of, on the ground floor, a single room which served as a dining room and lounge. In the middle stood a large square table with enormous feet carved like dogs’ heads, covered with an old oilcloth which had once been red. On this table stood a glass globe which had contained, for perhaps half a century, two locks of hair and a piece of card showing the hypocritical  face of Séraphin’s grandfather, and below, engraved in large letters, “Pity me for the hand of the Lord has smitten me.”

In a corner of this gloomy room which had served as the laying-out room for three generations of Poudriers, was a little stove which was always spotless. But it never gave out any heat: Séraphin never agreed to a fire except for Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day, or when it was bitingly cold. A two- foot wide rug ran from one edge of the wooden floor to the other. Two rocking chairs covered in sheepskins, and a rickety old armchair reupholstered in green plush, seemed to await visitors who were only ever debtors on their way to torment or ruin. There was also a pretty bureau made of mahogany, stolen from old M. Boisy for a debt of two dollars twenty-five, containing documents of the greatest importance – notes, contracts, memos, legal forms, cheques, receipts, bonds. There were always some lined paper, a pen and a pencil. This mahogany bureau was Séraphin’s pride and joy. He always approached it with veneration.

Four windows lit up Poudrier’s sanctuary in the winter. In the summer, far from being opened, the green painted blinds were actually closed. Not a beam of sunlight, not a fly, not a grain of dust was allowed in, protecting the furniture and giving the house an air of austerity and rigidity which never failed to paralyse borrowers. Once, a door had led out to the north side. But in the winter of 1888 Séraphin decided to close it up. For reasons of economy, no doubt, as firewood was a luxury.

A staircase, on the left, led to the upper storey where a narrow corridor ran the length of two large rooms separated by a narrow partition. The first of these rooms had always been the old man’s storehouse, where for twenty years he had piled into it a jumble of clocks, watches, harnesses, lamps, blankets, kitchen utensils, clothes, skins, furs, ploughing equipment, and so on, everything, old and new, left as security.

Here also in this room were three sacks of oats, whose existence Séraphin’s wife had never suspected. In one of these sacks the moneylender hid a large leather purse, which never held less than five hundred to a thousand dollars in banknotes and silver, gold or copper coin. He did not always keep the purse in the same sack. But he always knew absolutely exactly which of the three he had put it in. He would look at it with love, murmuring indistinctly. An indescribable sensation would seize him, flowing through his whole being like a surge of new blood. It was perfect bliss: Séraphin couldn’t help himself. He plunged his cold bony hand into the sack. Slowly, gently, he fumbled, felt, groped amongst the grains, and when he finally touched the leather purse, or even just the cords, his pleasure reached a climax of pure perfection, and his heart beat, melted, and fainted away.

Several times a day he would wallow in this voluptuousness. The mysterious room, an inexhaustible source of delight for Séraphin, remained always, it goes without saying, closed and even padlocked. Only he could penetrate it and give vent to his passion.

The second room called, for some unknown reason, ‘the guest room’, had not been opened since the death of uncle Amable, and probably no living soul had ever enjoyed its sinister hospitality. But in the county very few businessmen, farmers or villagers were not familiar with the large room on the ground floor of the Poudrier residence, for it was there, and there alone, that the loan shark made the poor unfortunates sign up to the worst commitments imaginable.

Five or six times a year, in extreme circumstances, Donalda had been allowed to go in there. But never alone. She knew that this part of the house was always as cold as a cave, even in the summer. What would the poor woman not have given, on this torrid July day, to relax and feel the cool air? She hardly cared that this devil’s sanctuary smelled of candles and shrouds.

All the same, and although an irrepressible force drew her, she did not dare take the two steps that separated her from the greatest pleasure available to her at this moment.

Unable to bear the flies in the kitchen any longer, she went back outside to sit down, closed her eyes, and moistened her lips with a refreshing ave Maria.

Suddenly she heard the noise of a carriage coming down the hill, and the distant rhythm of horseshoes on the pebbles.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked herself.

The carriage brushed the rim of the well to stop close to the barn. Séraphin got out slowly, followed by a thickset red haired man whom Donalda didn’t know, and who talked loudly.

“Would you unharness Branco?” cried Séraphin to his wife. 

The servant-wife asked anxiously and respectfully, “Have you eaten dear?”

“We ate in the village.”

And the two men went off towards the house, while Donalda unharnessed the old horse.