The young horse-chestnut trees budded and blossomed, the great cornfields lay round Charville like an emerald sea, everywhere there was the pleasant stir of spring, the smell of fresh-turned earth, the women hoeing and weeding in the fields, above them the larks singing jubilantly. The time of M. Moreau's death came and passed away. There was no news of Fabien. Madame Roulleau began to feel as if all prospered. Every one talked about the early season, the warmth of the spring, but the doctors, it was noticed, made no answer to these congratulations. Monseigneur at the Eveche, the Prefet, and a few of the leading men were aware of the cause of this silence. Certain of the number had it dinned persistently into their ears by M. Deshoulieres whenever he had the chance, or could make it. What healthiness Charville possessed it owed to its situation, to the broad plains around, and the winds that rushed up and carried away the foul, bad exhalations. The town itself was shamefully mismanaged. The narrow streets, the old tumble-down, crowded, picturesque houses went on from year to year untouched, and the population increased and were crammed into the same space as their forefathers occupied with a quarter of their number. The old walls no longer existed, it is true, except in name, and the people had broken through, crossed the river, and spread out a straggling suburb. But all the houses in that part were miserably squalid, and lay low with water standing about them, so that they were, to say the least, no less unhealthy than the habitations in Charville proper. There was always illness. But this year there was something about the illness which caused considerable anxiety to the doctors. Something, in the way in which a fever clung and lingered, and sprang up, and held its ground, even when it was winter, with snow and frost on the ground, and it was not, as Nannon said with indignation, fever weather. It was this impossibility of beating it out which made M. Deshoulieres speak of it with gravity. People laughed at him for it. "Fever? But, monsieur, there is always fever at Charville. It is almost an institution." "Monsieur le Prefet, it is an institution with which we could well dispense." "_Eh bien_, we shall see. It seems to me you are disturbing yourself unnecessarily. Next winter, perhaps, there may be a possibility of accomplishing some of these improvements that you so much desire. My dear monsieur, you do not know how many important matters call for my devotion to them at this moment." M. Deshoulieres had some idea. There was an old underground cave at Charville, where the Prefet proposed establishing his mushroom-beds. It was a scheme with which the wants of the town could not possibly be expected to interfere. He went home terribly disheartened.