When the landlord closed his establishment, he would retire with a firm step, with his head raised, as if he were kept yet more erect by inebriation.

"Macquart walks so straight, he's surely dead drunk," people used to say, as they saw him going home.

Usually, when he had had no drink, he walked with a slight stoop and shunned the gaze of curious people with a kind of savage shyness.
Since the death of his father, a journeyman tanner who had left him as sole heritage the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, he had never been known to have either relatives or friends.

The proximity of the frontiers and the neighbouring forests of the Seille had turned this singular, lazy fellow into a combination of smuggler and poacher, one of those suspicious-looking characters of whom passers-by observe: "I shouldn't care to meet that man at midnight in a dark wood." Tall, with a formidable beard and lean face, Macquart was the terror of the good women of the Faubourg of Plassans; they actually accused him of devouring little children raw.

Though he was hardly thirty years old, he looked fifty.