The foliage trembling in the sunshine, the wide fields of ripe grain, the vineyards so golden in September, the tall grass in which the cows stood knee-deep, all passed through her hands as if engulfed by an abyss.

Even fishing rights, a stone quarry and three mills disappeared.

Nana passed over them like an invading army or one of those swarms of locusts whose flight scours a whole province.

The ground was burned up where her little foot had rested.

Farm by farm, field by field, she ate up the man's patrimony very prettily and quite inattentively, just as she would have eaten a box of sweet-meats flung into her lap between mealtimes.
There was no harm in it all; they were only sweets! But at last one evening there only remained a single little wood.