midnight
`` 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 should n'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 . Amidst his bushy beard and the locks of hair which hung over his face in poodle fashion , one could only distinguish the gleam of his brown eyes , the furtive sorrowful glance of a man of vagrant instincts , rendered vicious by wine and a pariah life .