...Imagine the grief of the Sabots to find one evening their useful daughter flat on her back in the fields, the ox having wandered off with the plow. The young woman's body had been gnawed open, and a number of babies were crawling around her. Sabot slid on his shoes and ran all the way to Houviers, interrupting Couviard at his game, while Mathilde did what she could to make her daughter comfortable, stuffing the hole with a pillow and bathing the girl's head with mustard water. Too late.

The doctor advised the grandparents to gather up the infants crawling about the fields eating dirt and mice. He would examine them to make sure they had been born healthy. And while the grandparents were catching the babies, tying their ankles together and laying them down in a long, empty trough where cattle had drunk, Doctor Couviard began feeling around inside Jeanne, to see if any babies remained. And indeed, one young lady bit his finger—no surprise to the doctor, though he was amazed to find in Jeanne's body cavity no internal organs, only a great many objects—including a Sèvres porcelain clock the doctor recognized as his own and a number of little pots he had last seen filled with custard at Madame Hussier's.

"So! We have here the corpse of a thieving stuffcakes," the doctor allowed, smiling and shaking his head. "A greedy fatkin!"

Mathilde and Robert Sabot could not stop wringing their hands and shaking their heads when they saw the pile of objects Doctor Couviard was pulling from their daughter's body. They were all for giving them back at once.

"The andirons of Madame the Baker's great-great-grandfather! The embroidery frame of Father Sempier's housekeeper! And here is the pharmacist's boot-scraper!"

There was a large pile of unidentified objects, and Couviard feared there might be wrangles over these. He suggested that the Sabots sell all the objects; they could then use the money to raise the dozen babies writhing in the watering trough.

And so Sabot loaded onto his haywagon flour sacks containing all the objects except Couviard's clock. These he hauled on the little-used "old road" far past Houviers to the town of Anse-le-Marteau, where he sold them to a dealer in second-hand goods. The money he took in coins which he tied in a sock and tucked inside his blouse. When he got home, he gave most of the coins to his baby granddaughters to see what would happen. And sure enough, they swallowed some and stuffed others into their nostrils, ears, and the holes between their legs.

"This is safer than a bank," he said. "Now we must only wait until they give birth, then we can put our hands in their bellies and take out the coins and whatever else they have stuffed inside. We will want for nothing the rest of our lives, though we must continue to farm for appearances' sake."

With the coins he had not given his granddaughters, Sabot invested in a great deal of seed and a dozen plows. He sold his ox and trained the girls to plow, having rented fields from the larger landowner in the fat thumb of whose holdings Sabot's farm was a sliver.

The girls worked hard and did not fight among themselves as long as each was allowed her field. Robert kept them apart and fed them from separate boxes -- hay and apples and dirt -- and built a long shed with twelve stalls and a plank roof so the girls could find shelter from rain. At harvest time, he chained them to trees while he took to market what he did not keep for winter feed. One of the chained girls ate straight down past the roots of trees and buried herself alive, but the others waited patiently, only nibbling pits around themselves which, upon unchaining the girls, Robert filled with turnips, potatoes, and sand -- his root cellars.

Robert no longer worried what people would think of the hungry girls, who were growing even larger and rounder than Jeanne had. With the profits of his farming, and, eventually, the sale of the loot in the bellies of eleven spent granddaughters, he rented more fields and built more feed-boxes and sheds -- enough for 132 great-granddaughters! But he was old by then, and tired of farming and of girls, so he spread word of dowries. With these handsome sums, the girls could actually get husbands, for it seems men who had been frequenting the hungry girls in the forests at night would just as soon marry them by day if there were profit in it. And there was nothing the decent girls of the parish could do but join the convent or go to Paris to work as domestics or whores.

Soon every family in La Bouchoire had a hungry girl for a daughter-in-law, and the same was true in Lamouset, Brosse-les-Bains, and Dix-Poulets. Even in Houviers, where the men were used to girls who wore shoes every day, not all the families turned up their noses at the Sabots. But of course it did not work out completely well, for the girls were thieving gluttons, who upon dying left their husbands with thieving, gluttonous children -- all girls who would require dowries. Then too, not every family in the parish had relied on Doctor Couviard. Most thought themselves too good for an animal man and called on the midwife, Chretienne Lavabo, or the physician, Doctor Nevers; these families did not do well with the hungry brides. Chretienne Lavabo disentombed an ancient Gallic decree declaring a midwife entitled to keep any goods or chattel she pulled from a mother. Dr. Nevers called in the gendarmes, who arrested whole families and accused them of killing the pregnant daughters-in-law by stuffing them with stolen goods. Townspeople were mortified, but in villages like La Bouchoire, they drew a different moral from the events that had passed.

"Couviard's the only decent doctor," they said. And from then on they called on him with all their ailments, especially their births. They gave him whatever he wanted from the bellies of the girls and handsome fees besides. And soon Couviard had two assistants and a pretty dappled mare that pulled a smart yellow gig with red wheel rims....

Though The Hungry Girls and Other Stories is now out of print, you can very likely locate a copy through the links on the Fabularetail page on this site.