He held out his plate, docilely, just as he would have gone to bed, if he had been told to, obeying her in everything, without resistance and without reflection, and, therefore, he ate; the doctor helped himself three times, while Madame Caravan, from time to time, fished out a large piece at the end of her fork, and swallowed it with a sort of studied inattention. When a salad bowl full of macaroni was brought in, the doctor said: "By Jove! That is what I am very fond of." And this time, Madame Caravan helped everybody. She even filled the children's saucers, which they had scraped clean, and who, being left to themselves, had been drinking wine without any water, and were now kicking each other under the table. Chenet remembered that Rossini, the composer, had been very fond of that Italian dish, and suddenly he exclaimed:-- "Why! that rhymes, and one could begin some lines like this: _"The Maestro Rossini Was fond of macaroni."_ Nobody listened to him, however. Madame Caravan, who had suddenly grown thoughtful, was thinking of all the probable consequences of the event, while her husband made bread pellets, which he put on the table-cloth, and looked at with a fixed, idiotic stare. As he was devoured by thirst, he was continually raising his glass full of wine to his lips, and the consequences were that his senses, which had already been rather upset by the shock and grief, seemed to dance about vaguely in his head, as if they were going to vanish altogether. Meanwhile, the doctor, who had been drinking away steadily, was getting visibly drunk, and Madame Caravan herself felt the reaction which follows all nervous shocks, and was agitated and excited, and although she had been drinking nothing but water, she felt her head rather confused. By-and-bye, Chenet began to relate stories of deaths, that appeared funny to him. In that suburb of Paris, that is full of people from the provinces, one meets with that indifference towards death were it even a father or mother, which all peasants show; that want of respect, that unconscious ferociousness which is so common in the country, and so rare in Paris, and he said: "Why, I was sent for last week to the _Rue du Puteaux_, and when I went, I found the sick person (and there was the whole family calmly sitting near the bed) finishing a bottle of liquor of aniseed, which had been bought the night before to satisfy the dying man's fancy." But Madame Caravan was not listening; she was continually thinking of the inheritance, and Caravan was incapable of understanding anything.