prepared to raise his arm to ward off his blows: the old fellow used to
frighten him, especially on the evenings when he got drunk. For Daddy la
Feuillette had not come by his nickname for nothing: he used to get
tipsy twice or thrice a month: then he used to talk all over the place,
and laugh, and act the swell, and always in the end he used to give the
boy a good thrashing. His bark was worse than his bite. But the boy
was terrified: his ill-health made him more sensitive than other children:
he was precociously intelligent, and he had inherited a fierce and
unbalanced capacity for feeling from his mother. He was overwhelmed by
his grandfather's brutality, and also by his revolutionary
harangues,--(for the two things went together: it was particularly when
the old man was drunk that he was inclined to hold forth).--His whole
being quivered in response to outside impressions, just as the booth
shook with the passing of the heavy omnibuses. In his crazy imagination
there were mingled, like the humming vibrations of a belfry, his
day-to-day sensations, the wretchedness of his childhood, his deplorable
memories of premature experience, stories of the Commune, scraps of
evening lectures and newspaper feuilletons, speeches at meetings, and
the vague, uneasy, and violent sexual instincts which his parents had
transmitted to him. All these things together formed a monstrous grim
dream-world, from the dense night, the chaos and miasma of which there
darted dazzling rays of hope.

The cobbler used sometimes to drag his apprentice with him to Amelie's
restaurant. There it was that Olivier noticed the little hunchback with
the voice of a lark. Sitting and never talking to the workpeople, he had
had plenty of time to study the boy's sickly face, with its jutting brow
and shy, humiliated expression: he had heard the coarse jokes that had
been thrown at the boy, jokes which were met with silence and a faint
shuddering tremor. During certain revolutionary utterances he had seen