His inn bore the sign: “The Friends' Meeting-Place”--and old Toine was, indeed, the friend of all. His customers came from Fecamp and Montvilliers, just for the fun of seeing him and hearing him talk; for fat Toine would have made a tombstone laugh. He had a way of chaffing people without offending them, or of winking to express what he didn't say, of slapping his thighs when he was merry in such a way as to make you hold your sides, laughing. And then, merely to see him drink was a curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him, his roguish eyes twinkling, both with the enjoyment of drinking and at the thought of the money he was taking in. His was a double pleasure: first, that of drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash. You should have heard him quarrelling with his wife! It was worth paying for to see them together. They had wrangled all the thirty years they had been married; but Toine was good-humored, while his better-half grew angry. She was a tall peasant woman, who walked with long steps like a stork, and had a head resembling that of an angry screech-owl. She spent her time rearing chickens in a little poultry-yard behind the inn, and she was noted for her success in fattening them for the table. Whenever the gentry of Fecamp gave a dinner they always had at least one of Madame Toine's chickens to be in the fashion. But she was born ill-tempered, and she went through life in a mood of perpetual discontent. Annoyed at everyone, she seemed to be particularly annoyed at her husband. She disliked his gaiety, his reputation, his rude health, his embonpoint. She treated him as a good-for-nothing creature because he earned his money without working, and as a glutton because he ate and drank as much as ten ordinary men; and not a day went by without her declaring spitefully: “You'd be better in the stye along with the pigs! You're so fat it makes me sick to look at you!” And she would shout in his face: “Wait! Wait a bit! We'll see! You'll burst one of these fine days like a sack of corn-you old bloat, you!” Toine would laugh heartily, patting his corpulent person, and replying: “Well, well, old hen, why don't you fatten up your chickens like that? just try!” And, rolling his sleeves back from his enormous arm, he said: “That would make a fine wing now, wouldn't it?” And the customers, doubled up with laughter, would thump the table with their fists and stamp their feet on the floor. The old woman, mad with rage, would repeat: “Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You'll see what'll happen. He'll burst like a sack of grain!” And off she would go, amid the jeers and laughter of the drinkers.