It is easy now, after these explanations, to understand the anxiety and sadness expressed in the face of Michu's wife.
In the first place, Marthe had been piously brought up by her mother.
Both, being good Catholics, had suffered much from the opinions and behavior of the tanner.

Marthe could never think without a blush of having marched through the street of Troyes in the garb of a goddess.
Her father had forced her to marry Michu, whose bad reputation was then increasing, and she feared him too much to be able to judge him.
Nevertheless, she knew that he loved her, and at the bottom of her heart lay the truest affection for this awe-inspiring man; she had never known him to do anything that was not just; never did he say a brutal word, to her at least; in fact, he endeavored to forestall her every wish.

The poor pariah, believing himself disagreeable to his wife, spent most of his time out of doors.

Marthe and Michu, distrustful of each other, lived in what is called in these days an "armed peace." Marthe, who saw no one, suffered keenly from the ostracism which for the last seven years had surrounded her as the daughter of a revolutionary butcher, and the wife of a so-called traitor.

More than once she had overheard the laborers of the adjoining farm (held by a man named Beauvisage, greatly attached to the Simeuse family) say as they passed the pavilion, "That's where Judas lives!" The singular resemblance between the bailiff's head and that of the thirteenth apostle, which his conduct appeared to carry out, won him that odious nickname throughout the neighborhood.