He raised his fists, quite maddened as he was by the presence of Mathieu at that moment when his whole life was wrecked. It was terrible indeed that this _bourgeois_ who had made a fortune by turning himself into a peasant should be there at the moment when he so suddenly learnt the death of Antonin, that son whom he had dreamt of turning into a Monsieur by filling his mind with disgust of the soil and sending him to rot of idleness and vice in Paris! It enraged him to find that he had erred, that the earth whom he had slandered, whom he had taxed with decrepitude and barrenness was really a living, youthful, and fruitful spouse to the man who knew how to love her! And nought but ruin remained around him, thanks to his imbecile resolve to limit his family: a foul life had killed his only son, and his only daughter had gone off with a scion of the triumphant farm, while he was now utterly alone, weeping and howling in his deserted mill, that mill which he had likewise disdained and which was crumbling around him with old age. "You hear me!" he shouted. "Thérèse may drag herself at my feet; but I will never, never give her to your thief of a son! You'd like it, wouldn't you? so that folks might mock me all over the district, and so that you might eat me up as you have eaten up all the others!" This finish to it all had doubtless appeared to him, confusedly, in a sudden threatening vision: Antonin being dead, it was Grégoire who would possess the mill, if he should marry Thérèse. And he would possess the moorland also, that enclosure, hitherto left barren with such savage delight, and so passionately coveted by the farm. And doubtless he would cede it to the farm as soon as he should be the master. The thought that Chantebled might yet be increased by the fields which he, Lepailleur, had withheld from it brought the miller's delirious rage to a climax. "Your son, I'll send him to the galleys! And you, if you don't go, I'll throw you out! Be off with you, be off!" Mathieu, who was very pale, slowly retired before this furious madman. But as he went off he calmly said: "You are an unhappy man. I forgive you, for you are in great grief. Besides, I am quite easy, sensible things always end by taking place." Again, a month went by. Then, one rainy morning in October, Madame Lepailleur was found hanging in the mill stable. There were folks at Janville who related that Lepailleur had hung her there. The truth was that she had given signs of melancholia ever since the death of Antonin. Moreover, the life led at the mill was no longer bearable; day by day the husband and wife reproached one another for their son's death and their daughter's flight, battling ragefully together like two abandoned beasts shut up in the same cage. Folks were merely astonished that such a harsh, avaricious woman should have been willing to quit this life without taking her goods and chattels with her.