For instance, the latter complained that the priest treated them with little or no respect, that they only obtained from him some scraps of Masses, bestowed on them like alms, that they were compelled to send their children to Jonville for the catechism classes and the first Communion, and that all sorts of difficulties were placed in their way with respect to weddings, baptisms, and churchings; whereupon the infuriated Abbé retorted that when folk wished to obtain favours from Heaven their first duty was to provide themselves with a priest of their own. On weekdays, when it was invariably closed, the church of Le Moreux looked like a dismal empty barn; but for half an hour every Sunday Abbé Cognasse swept down on it like a tempest, feared by everybody and terrorising the parish with his capriciousness and his violence. Marc, who was acquainted with the situation, could not think of Férou without feeling much compassionate sympathy. In that well-to-do village of Le Moreux, he, the schoolmaster, alone was unable to satisfy his hunger. The horrible misery which assails so many poor schoolmasters became in his case most tragically acute. He had made his _début_ at Maillebois as an assistant teacher, with a salary of nine hundred francs,[2] when he was twenty-four years of age. And now, after six years' work, exiled to Le Moreux on account of his bitter disposition, he still only received a thousand francs a year, or, allowing for the amount deducted for the pension fund, sixty-five francs a month--that is to say, fifty-two sous a day.[3] Yet he had a wife and three little girls to keep! Black misery reigned in the damp old hovel which served as a school, the food was often such as dogs would have scorned to touch, the girls went about shoeless, the wife did not possess a decent gown. And indebtedness was always increasing, the threatening, deadly indebtedness in which so many humble servants of the State become engulfed, while those at the head of affairs are often wickedly paid six times as much as their services deserve.