"Faith everyone knows it well--that it is Victor's. And what about it after all? I made a slip. Am I the only woman that did? My mother also made a slip before me, and then yours did the same before she married your dad! Who is it that hasn't made a slip in the country. I made a slip with Victor, because he took advantage of me while I was asleep in the barn, it's true, and afterwards it happened between us when I wasn't asleep. I certainly would have married him if he weren't a servant-man. Am I a worse woman for that?" The man said simply: "As for me, I like you just as you are, with or without the child. 'Tis only my father that opposes me. All the same, I'll see about settling the business." She answered: "Go to the cure at once." "I'm going to him." And he set forth with his heavy peasant's tread; while the girl, with her hands on her hips, turned round to pick her colza. In fact, the man who thus went off, Cesaire Houlbreque, the son of deaf old Amable Houlbreque, wanted to marry in spite of his father, Celeste Levesque, who had a child by Victor Lecoq, a mere laborer on his parent's farm, turned out of doors for this act. Moreover, the hierarchy of caste does not exist in the fields, and if the laborer is thrifty, he becomes, by taking a farm in his turn, the equal of his former master. So Cesaire Houlbreque went off with his whip under his arm, brooding over his own thoughts, and lifting up one after the other his heavy wooden shoes daubed with clay. Certainly he desired to marry Celeste Levesque. He wanted her with her child, because it was the woman he required. He could not say why: but he knew it, he was sure of it. He had only to look at her to be convinced of it, to feel himself quite jolly, quite stirred up, as it were turned into a pure animal through contentment. He even found a pleasure in kissing the little boy, Victor's little boy, because he had come out of her. And he gazed, without hate, at the distant profile of the man who was driving his plow along on the horizon's edge. But old Amable did not want this marriage. He opposed it with the obstinacy of a deaf man, with a violent obstinacy. Cesaire in vain shouted in his ear, in that ear which still heard a few sounds: "I'll take good care of you, daddy. I tell you she's a good girl and strong, too, and also thrifty." The old man repeated: "As long as I live, I won't see her your wife."