Short Fiction

The Dead Hand

One evening, about eight months ago, a friend of mine, Louis R., had invited together some college friends. We drank punch, and smoked, and talked about literature and art, telling amusing stories from time to time, as young men do when they come together. Suddenly the door opened wide, and one of my best friends from childhood entered like a hurricane. “Guess where I come from!” he shouted immediately. “Mabille’s, I bet,” one of us replied. “No,” said another, “you are too cheerful; you have just borrowed some money, or buried your uncle, or pawned your watch.” A third said: “You have been drunk, and as you smelt Louis’s punch, you came up to start all over again.”

“You are all wrong. I have come from P⁠⸺ in Normandy, where I have been spending a week, and from which I have brought along a distinguished criminal friend of mine, whom I will introduce, with your permission.” With these words he drew from his pocket a skinned hand. It was a horrible object; black and dried, very long and looking as if it were contracted. The muscles, of extraordinary power, were held in place on the back and palm by a strip of parchment-like skin, while the narrow, yellow nails still remained at the tips of the fingers. The whole hand reeked of crime a mile off.

“Just fancy,” said my friend, “the other day the belongings of an old sorcerer were sold who was very well known all over the countryside. He used to ride to the sabbath every Saturday night on a broomstick, he practised white and black magic, caused the cows to give blue milk and to wear their tails like that of Saint Anthony’s companion. At all events, the old ruffian had a great affection for this hand, which, he said, was that of a celebrated criminal, who was tortured in 1736 for having thrown his legitimate spouse head foremost into a well, and then hung the priest who married them to the spire of his church. After this twofold exploit he went wandering all over the world, and during a short but busy career he had robbed twelve travellers, smoked out some twenty monks in a monastery, and turned a nunnery into a harem.”

“But,” we cried, “what are you going to do with that horrible thing?”

“Why, I’ll use it as a bell handle to frighten away my criditors.”

“My dear fellow,” said Henry Smith, a tall, phlegmatic Englishman, “I believe this hand is simply a piece of Indian meat, preserved by some new method. I should advise you to make soup of it.”

“Don’t joke about it, gentlemen,” said a medical student, who was three sheets in the wind, with the utmost solemnity. “Pierre, if you take my advice, give this piece of human remains a Christian burial, for fear the owner of it may come and demand its return. Besides, this hand may perhaps have acquired bad habits. You know the proverb: ‘Once a thief always a thief.’ ”

“And ‘once a drunkard always a drunkard,’ ” retorted our host, pouring out a huge glass of punch for the student, who drank it off at a gulp, and fell under the table dead drunk. This sally was greeted with loud laughter. And Pierre, raising his glass, saluted the hand: “I drink to your master’s next visit.” Then the conversation turned to other topics, and we separated to go home.

As I was passing his door the next day, I went in. It was about two o’clock, and I found him reading and smoking. “Well, how are you?” I said. “Very well,” he answered.

“And what about your hand?”

“My hand? You must have seen it on my bell, where I put it last night when I came in. By the way, fancy, some idiot, no doubt trying to play a trick on me, came ringing at my door about midnight. I asked who was there, but, as nobody answered, I got back to bed and fell asleep again.”

Just at that moment there was a ring. It was the landlord, a vulgar and most impertinent person. He came in without greeting us, and said to my friend: “I must ask you, Sir, to remove at once that piece of carrion which you have attached to your bell-handle. Otherwise I shall be obliged to ask you to leave.”

“Sir,” replied Pierre very gravely, “you are insulting a hand which is worthy of better treatment. I would have you know that it belonged to a most respectable man.”

The landlord turned on his heel and walked out, just as he had come in. Pierre followed him, unhooked the hand, and attached it to the bell in his bedroom. “It is better there,” he said. “Like the Trappists’ memento mori, this hand will bring me serious thoughts every night as I fall asleep.” An hour later I left him and went home.

I slept badly the following night. I was nervous and restless. Several times I awoke with a start, and once I even fancied that a man had got into my room. I got up and looked in the wardrobes and under the bed. Finally, about six o’clock in the morning, when I was beginning to doze off, a violent knock at my door made me jump out of bed. It was my friend’s servant, half undressed, pale and trembling. “Oh, Sir,” he cried with a sob, “they’ve murdered the poor master.” I dressed in haste and rushed off to Pierre’s.

The house was full of people, arguing and moving about incessantly. Everyone was holding forth, relating the event and commenting upon it from every angle. With great difficulty I reached the bedroom. The door was guarded, but I gave my name, and I was admitted. Four police officers were standing in the centre of the room, notebook in hand, and they were making an examination. From time to time they spoke to each other in whispers and made entries in their notebooks. Two doctors were chatting near the bed on which Pierre was lying unconscious. He was not dead, but he looked awful. His staring eyes, his dilated pupils, seemed to be gazing fixedly with unspeakable terror at something strange and horrible. His fingers were contracted stiffly, and his body was covered up to his chin by a sheet, which I lifted. On his throat were the marks of five fingers which had pressed deeply into his flesh, and his shirt was stained by a few drops of blood. At that moment something struck me. I glanced at the bedroom bell; the skinned hand had disappeared. Doubtless the doctors had taken it away to spare the feelings of the people who came into the patient’s room, for that hand was really dreadful. I did not ask what had become of it.

I now take a cutting from one of the next day’s papers, giving the story of the crime, with all the details the police could procure. This is what it said:

“A horrible outrage was committed yesterday, the victim being a young gentleman, Monsieur Pierre B⁠⸺ a law student, and a member of one of the best families in Normandy. The young man returned home about ten o’clock in the evening, he dismissed his servant, a man named Bonvin, saying he was tired, and that he was going to bed. Towards midnight this man was aroused suddenly by his master’s bell, which was ringing furiously. He was frightened, lit a lamp and waited. The bell stopped for a minute, then rang again with such violence that the servant, frightened out of his wits, rushed out of his room and went to wake up the concierge. The latter ran and notified the police, and about fifteen minutes later they burst in the door.

“A terrible sight met their eyes. The furniture was all upset, and everything indicated that a fearful struggle had taken place between the victim and his aggressor. Young Pierre B⁠⸺ was lying motionless on his back in the middle of the room, his face livid, and his eyes dilated in the most dreadful fashion. His throat bore the deep marks of five fingers. The report of Doctor Bourdeau, who was immediately summoned, states that the aggressor must have been endowed with prodigious strength, and have had an extraordinarily thin and muscular hand, for the fingers had almost met in the flesh, and left five marks like bullet holes in the throat. No motive for the crime can be discovered, nor the identity of the criminal.”

The next day the same newspaper reported:

“M. Pierre B⁠⸺, the victim of the awful outrage which we related yesterday, recovered consciousness after two hours of devoted attention on the part of Doctor Bourdeau. His life is not in danger, but fears are entertained for his sanity. No trace of the guilty party has been found.”

It was true, my poor friend was mad. For seven months I went every day to see him at the hospital, but he did not recover the slightest glimmering of reason. In his delirium strange words escaped him, and like all insane people, he had an obsession, and always fancied a spectre was pursuing him. One day I was sent for in great haste, with a message that he was worse. He was dying when I reached him. He remained very calm for two hours, then all of a sudden, in spite of our efforts, he sat up in bed, and shouted, waving his arms as if in prey to mortal terror: “Take it! Take it! He is strangling me! Help! Help!” He ran twice around the room screaming, then he fell dead, with his face to the ground.

As he was an orphan, it was my duty to follow his remains to the little village of P⁠⸺ in Normandy, where his parents were buried. It was from this village that he came on the evening when he found us drinking punch at Louis R.’s, where he had shown us the skinned hand. His body was enclosed in a leaden coffin, and four days later I was walking sadly, with the old priest who had first taught him to read and write, in the little cemetery where his grave was being dug. The weather was glorious; the blue sky was flooded with light; the birds were singing in the hedgerows, where we had gone so often as children to eat blackberries. I fancied I could see him again creeping along the hedge and slipping in through the little hole which I knew so well, down there at the end of the paupers’ plot. Then we used to return to the house, with our cheeks and lips black with the juice of the fruit we had eaten. I looked at the bramble-bushes; they were covered with berries. I mechanically plucked one and put it into my mouth. The priest had opened his breviary and was murmuring his oremus. At the end of the avenue I could hear the spades of the gravediggers, as they dug his tomb.

Suddenly they called to us, the priest closed his prayerbook, and we went to see what they wanted. They had turned up a coffin. With a stroke of their picks they knocked off the lid, and we saw an unusually tall skeleton, lying on its back, whose empty eyes seemed to be looking at us defiantly. I had a queer sensation, for some unknown reason, and was almost afraid. “Hello!” cried one of the men, “look, the ruffian’s hand is cut off. Here it is.” And he picked up a big, dried-up hand, which was lying beside the body, and handed it to us. “I say,” said the other man laughing, “you would think that he was watching you, and that he was going to spring at your throat and make you give him back his hand.”

“Come along,” said the priest, “leave the dead in peace, and close that coffin again. We will dig a grave somewhere else for poor Monsieur Pierre.”

Everything was finished the next day and I set out for Paris again, after having left fifty francs with the old priest for masses for the repose of the soul of the man whose grave we had disturbed.

Doctor Heraclius Gloss

On the River

Last summer I rented a country cottage on the banks of the Seine, several miles from Paris, and I used to go out to sleep there every night. After a while, I formed the acquaintance of one of my neighbours, a man between thirty and forty years of age, who really was one of the queerest characters I have ever met. He was an old boating-man, crazy on the subject of boats, and was always either in, or on, or by the water. He must have been born in a boat, and probably he will die in one, some day, while taking a last outing.

One evening, as we were walking along the banks of the Seine, I asked him to tell me about some of his nautical experiences. Immediately his face lighted up, and he became eloquent, almost poetical, for his heart was full of an all-absorbing, irresistible, devouring passion⁠—a love for the river.

“Ah!” said he, “how many recollections I have of the river that flows at our feet! You street-dwellers have no idea what the river really is. But let a fisherman pronounce the word. To him it means mystery, the unknown, a land of mirage and phantasmagoria, where odd things that have no real existence are seen at night and strange noises are heard; where one trembles without knowing the reason why, as when passing through a cemetery⁠—and indeed the river is a sinister cemetery without graves.

“Land, for a fisherman, has boundaries, but the river, on moonless nights, appears to him unlimited. A sailor doesn’t feel the same way about the sea. The sea is often cruel, but it roars and foams, it gives us fair warning; the river is silent and treacherous. It flows stealthily, without a murmur, and the eternal gentle motion of the water is more awful to me than the big ocean waves.

“Dreamers believe that the deep hides immense lands of blue, where the drowned roll around among the big fish, in strange forests or in crystal caves. The river has only black depths, where the dead decay in the slime. But it’s beautiful when the sun shines on it, and the waters splash softly on the banks covered with whispering reeds.

“In speaking of the ocean the poet says:

“ ‘O flots, que vous savez de lugubres histoires!
Flots profonds, redoutés des mères à genoux,
Vous vous les racontez en montant les marées,
Et c’est ce qui vous fait ces voix désespérées
Que vous avez, le soir, quand vous venez vers nous.’3

Well, I believe that the stories the slender reeds tell one another in their wee, silvery voices are even more appalling than the ghastly tragedies related by the roaring waves.

“But as you have asked me to relate some of my recollections, I will tell you a strange adventure that happened to me here, about ten years ago.

“Then, as now, I lived in old mother Lafon’s house and one of my best friends, Louis Bernet, who since has given up boating, as well as his happy-go-lucky ways, to become a State Councillor, was camping out in the village of C⁠⸺, two miles away. We used to take dinner together every day, either at his place or at mine.

“One evening, as I was returning home alone, feeling rather tired, and with difficulty rowing the twelve-foot boat that I always took out at night, I stopped to rest a little while near that point over there, formed by reeds, about two hundred yards in front of the railway bridge. The weather was magnificent; the moon was shining very brightly, and the air was soft and still. The calmness of the surroundings tempted me, and I thought how pleasant it would be to fill my pipe here and smoke. No sooner said than done, and, laying hold of the anchor, I dropped it overboard. The boat, which was following the stream, slid to the end of the chain and came to a stop; I settled myself aft on a rug, as comfortably as I could. There was not a sound to be heard nor a movement to be seen, though sometimes I noticed the almost imperceptible rippling of the water on the banks, and watched the highest clumps of reeds, which at times assumed strange shapes that appeared to move.

“The river was perfectly calm, but I was affected by the extraordinary stillness that enveloped me. The frogs and toads, the nocturnal musicians of the swamps, were voiceless. Suddenly, at my right, a frog croaked. I started; it stopped, and all was silent. I resolved to light my pipe for distraction. But, strange to say, though I was an inveterate smoker I failed to enjoy it, and after a few puffs I grew sick and stopped smoking. Then I began to hum an air, but the sound of my voice depressed me.

“At last I lay down in the boat and watched the sky. For a while I remained quiet, but presently the slight pitching of the boat disturbed me. I felt as if it were swaying to and fro from one side of the river to the other, and that an invisible force or being was drawing it slowly to the bottom and then raising it to let it drop again. I was knocked about as if in a storm; I heard strange noises; I jumped up; the water was shining and all was still. Then I knew that my nerves were slightly shaken, and decided to leave the river. I pulled on the chain. The boat moved along, but presently I felt some resistance and pulled harder. The anchor refused to come up; it had caught in something at the bottom and remained stuck. I pulled and tugged but to no avail. With the oars I turned the boat around and forced her upstream, in order to alter the position of the anchor. This was all in vain, however, for the anchor did not yield; so in a rage, I began to shake at the chain, which wouldn’t budge.

“I sat down discouraged, to ponder over my mishap. It was impossible to break the chain or to separate it from the boat, as it was enormous and was riveted to a piece of wood as big as my arm; but as the weather continued fine, I did not doubt but that some fisherman would come along and rescue me. The accident calmed me so much that I managed to remain quiet and smoke my pipe. I had a bottle of rum with me so I drank two or three glasses of it and began to laugh at my situation. It was so warm that it would not have mattered much had I been obliged to spend all night out of doors.

“Suddenly something jarred slightly against the side of the boat. I started, and a cold sweat broke over me from head to foot. The noise was due to a piece of wood drifting along with the current, but it proved sufficient to disturb my mind, and once more I seized the chain and tugged in desperation. I felt the same strange nervousness creep over me. The anchor remained firm. I seated myself again, exhausted.

“Meantime the river was covering itself with a white mist that lay close to the water, so that when I stood up neither the stream, nor my feet, nor the boat, were visible to me; I could distinguish only the ends of the reeds and, a little farther away, the meadow, ashen in the moonlight, with large black patches formed by groups of Italian poplars reaching toward the sky. I was buried up to my waist in something that looked like a blanket of down of a peculiar whiteness; and all kinds of fantastic visions arose before me. I imagined that someone was trying to crawl into the boat, which I could no longer see, and that the river hidden under the thick fog was full of strange creatures that were swimming all around me. I felt a horrible depression steal over me, my temples throbbed, my heart beat wildly, and, losing all control over myself, I was ready to plunge overboard and swim to safety. But this idea suddenly filled me with horror. I imagined myself lost in the dense mist, floundering about aimlessly among the reeds and water-plants, unable to find the banks of the river or the boat; and I felt as if I should certainly be drawn by my feet to the bottom of the dark waters. As I really should have had to swim against the current for at least five hundred yards before reaching a spot where I could safely land, it was nine chances to ten that, being unable to see in the fog, I should drown, although I was a fine swimmer.

“I tried to overcome my dread. I determined not to be afraid, but there was something in me besides my will and that something was fainthearted. I asked myself what there was to fear; my courageous self railed at the other, the timid one; never before had I so fully realised the opposition that exists between the two beings we have in us; the one willing, the other resisting, and each one triumphing in turn. But this foolish and unaccountable fear was growing worse and worse, and was becoming positive terror. I remained motionless, with open eyes and straining ears, waiting. For what? I scarcely knew, but it must have been for something terrible. I believe that had a fish suddenly taken it into its head to jump out of the water, as frequently happens, I should have fallen in a dead faint. However, I managed to keep my senses after a violent effort to control myself. I took my bottle of rum and again raised it to my lips.

“Suddenly I began to shout at the top of my voice, turning successively toward the four points of the horizon. After my throat had become completely paralysed with shouting, I listened. A dog was barking in the distance.

“I drank some more rum and lay down in the bottom of the boat. I remained thus at least one hour, perhaps two, without sleeping, my eyes open, visited by nightmares. I did not dare to sit up, though I had an insane desire to do so; I put it off from second to second, saying: ‘Now then, I’ll get up,’ but I was afraid to move. At last I raised myself with infinite care, as if my life depended on the slightest sound I might make, and peered over the edge of the boat. I was greeted by the most marvellous, stupendous sight that it is possible to imagine. It was a vision of fairyland, one of those phenomena that travellers in distant countries tell us about, but that we are unable to believe.

“The mist, which two hours ago hung over the water, had lifted and settled on the banks of the stream. It formed on each side an unbroken hill, six or seven yards in height, that shone in the moonlight with the dazzling whiteness of snow. Nothing could be seen but the flashing river, moving between the two white mountains, and overhead a full moon that illuminated the milky-blue sky.

“All the hosts of the water had awakened; the frogs were croaking dismally, while from time to time a toad sent its short, monotonous, and gloomy note to the stars. Strange to say, I was no longer frightened; I was surrounded by a landscape so utterly unreal that the strangest freaks of nature would not have surprised me at all.

“How long this situation lasted I am unable to tell, for I finally dozed off to sleep. When I awoke, the moon was gone and the sky was covered with clouds. The water splashed dismally, the wind was blowing, it was cold and completely dark. I finished the rum and lay listening to the rustling of the reeds and the murmur of the river. I tried to see, but failed to distinguish the boat or even my hands, although I held them close to my eyes. The darkness, however, was slowly decreasing. Suddenly I thought I saw a shadow glide past me. I shouted to it and a voice responded: it was a fisherman. I called to him and told him of my plight. He brought his boat alongside mine and both began tugging at the chain. The anchor still would not yield. A cold, rainy day was setting in, one of those days that bring disaster and sadness. I perceived another boat, which we hailed. The owner added his strength to ours, and little by little the anchor gave way. It came up very slowly, laden with considerable weight. Finally a black heap appeared and we dragged it into my boat. It was the body of an old woman, with a big stone tied around her neck!”

At the Church Door

He used to live in a little house near the main road at the entrance to a village. After he married the daughter of a farmer in the district he set up as a wheelwright, and as they both worked hard, they amassed a small fortune. But one thing caused them great sorrow; they had no children. At last a child was born to them, and they called him Jean. They showered kisses upon him, wrapped him up in their affection, and became so fond of him that they could not let an hour pass without seeing him. When he was five years old a circus passed through the village and pitched its tent on the square in front of the Town Hall.

Jean had seen them and had slipped out of the house. After a long search his father discovered him in the midst of the trained goats and dogs. He was sitting on the knee of an old clown and was shouting with laughter.

Three days later, at dinner time, just as they were sitting down to table, the wheelwright and his wife discovered that their son was not in the house. They looked in the garden, and as they did not find him there, the father went to the roadside and shouted with all his might: “Jean!”

Night was falling, and a brownish mist filled the horizon, and everything retreated into the dark and gloomy distance. Three tall fir-trees close by seemed to be weeping. No voice replied, but the air was full of vague moaning. The father listened for a long time, believing that he could hear something, now on his right now on his left, and he plunged wildly into the night, calling incessantly: “Jean! Jean!”

He ran on until daybreak, filling the shadows with his cries, frightening the prowling animals, his heart torn by a terrible anguish, so that at times he thought he was going mad. His wife remained seated at the door, and wept until morning. Their son was never found.

From that time they aged rapidly in their sorrow, which nothing could console. Finally they sold their house and set out to look for their son themselves. They questioned the shepherds on the hills, the passing tradesmen, the peasants in the villages and the authorities in the towns. But it was a long time since their son had been lost. Nobody knew anything, and probably he himself had now forgotten his name and his birthplace. They wept and lost all hope. Very soon their money was exhausted, and they hired themselves out by the day to the farmers and innkeepers, discharging the most humble tasks, living on the leavings of others, sleeping out of doors and suffering from cold. But as they became feeble from overwork, nobody would employ them, and they were compelled to beg along the roads. They accosted travellers with sad faces and supplicating voices, imploring a piece of bread from the harvesters eating their dinner beneath a tree, at midday in the fields. They devoured it in silence, seated on the edge of the ditches. An innkeeper to whom they related their misfortunes, said to them one day:

“I also knew someone who lost a daughter; it was in Paris he found her.”

Immediately they set out for Paris.

When they reached the great city they were frightened by its size and by the crowds in the streets. But they realised that he must be amongst all these people, without knowing how to set about finding him. Then they were afraid they would not recognise him, for they had not seen him for fifteen years. They visited every street and square, stopping wherever they saw a crowd gathered, in the hope of a chance meeting, some prodigious stroke of luck, an act of pity on the part of Fate. They would often wander blindly ahead, clinging to each other, and looking so sad and so poor that people gave them alms without being asked. Every Sunday they spent the day in front of the churches, watching the crowds going in and out, and scanning each face for a distant resemblance. Several times they fancied they recognised him, but they were always mistaken.

At the door of one of the churches to which they returned most frequently there was an old man who sprinkled holy water, and who had become their friend. His own story was also very sad, and their commiseration for him led to a great friendship between them. They finally lived together in a wretched garret at the top of a big house, a great distance out, near the open fields, and sometimes the wheelwright took his new friend’s place at the church, when the old man was ill. One very harsh winter came, the old sprinkler of holy water died, and the parish priest appointed in his place the wheelwright, of whose misfortunes he had heard.

Then he came every morning and seated himself in the same place, on the same chair, wearing out the old stone column against which he leant with the continual rubbing of his back. He gazed fixedly at every man who entered, and he looked forward to Sunday with the impatience of a schoolboy, because that was the day when the church was constantly full of people.

He grew very old, getting weaker and weaker under the damp arches, and every day his hope crumbled away. By this time he knew everyone who came to Mass, their hours, their habits, and he could recognise their steps on the tiled floor. His life had become so narrowed that it was a great event for him when a stranger entered the church. One day two ladies came; one old and the other young. Probably a mother and daughter, he thought. Behind them a young man appeared, who followed them, and when they went out he saluted them. After having offered them holy water he took the arm of the older lady.

“That must be the young lady’s intended,” thought the wheelwright.

For the rest of the day he racked his memory to discover where he once had seen a young man like that. But the one he was thinking of must now be an old man, for he seemed to have known him away back in his youth.

The same man came back frequently to escort the two ladies, and this vague resemblance, remote yet familiar, which he could not identify, obsessed the old man so much that he made his wife come to aid his feeble memory.

One evening, as it was getting dark, the strangers entered together. When they had passed, the husband said:

“Well, do you know who he is?”

His wife was troubled and tried, in turn, to remember. Suddenly she whispered:

“Yes⁠ ⁠… yes⁠ ⁠… but he is darker, taller, stronger, and dressed like a gentlemen, yet, father, he has the same face, you know, as you had when you were young.”

The old man gave a start.

It was true, the young man resembled him, and he resembled his brother who was dead, and his father, whom he remembered while he was still young. They were so deeply stirred that they could not speak. The three people were coming down the aisle and going out. The man touched the sprinkler with his finger, and the old man who was holding it shook so much that the holy water rained upon the ground.

“Jean?” he cried.

The man stopped and looked at him.

“Jean?” he repeated softly.

The two ladies looked at him in astonishment.

Then for the third time he said, sobbing: “Jean?”

The man stooped and looked closely into his face, then a recollection of childhood flashed in his mind, and he replied:

“Father Pierre and mother Jeanne!”

He had forgotten everything, his father’s other name, and that of his own birthplace, but he still remembered these two words, so often repeated: “Father Pierre; mother Jeanne!”

He knelt down with his head on the knees of the old man and wept. Then he kissed his father and mother by turns, while their voices were choked by joy unlimited. The two ladies also cried, for they realised that great happiness had come. They all went home with the young man, who told them his story.

The circus people had kidnapped him, and for three years he had travelled with them through many countries. Then the company broke up, and one day an old lady in a château gave a sum of money to adopt him, because she liked him. As he was intelligent, they sent him to school and college, and, as the old lady had no children, she left her fortune to him. He also had searched for his parents, but as the only thing he could remember was the two names, “father Pierre and mother Jeanne,” he could not discover them. Now he was going to be married, and he introduced his fiancée, who was as good as she was pretty.

When the two old people, in their turn, had related their sorrows and sufferings, they embraced him again, and that night they stayed awake very late, for they were afraid to go to bed lest happiness, which had evaded them so long, should abandon them once more, when they were asleep. But they had exhausted the endurance of misfortune, and lived happily till the end.

Lieutenant Laré’s Marriage

At the very beginning of the campaign Lieutenant Laré took two guns from the Prussians. The general said tersely: “Thanks, Lieutenant,” and gave him the cross of the Legion of Honour. Being as prudent as he was brave, subtle, inventive, and very resourceful, he was placed in charge of some hundred men, and he organised a service of scouts which saved the army several times during retreats.

Like a tidal wave the invaders poured over the entire frontier, wave after wave of men, leaving behind them the scum of pillage. General Carrel’s brigade was separated from its division, and had to retreat continuously, taking part in daily engagements, but preserving its ranks almost intact, thanks to the vigilance and speed of Lieutenant Laré, who seemed to be everywhere at once, outwitting the enemy, disappointing their calculations, leading the Uhlans astray, and killing their outposts.

One morning the general sent for him.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “here is a telegram from General de Lacère, who will be lost if we do not come to his help by tomorrow at dawn. You will start at dusk with three hundred men, whom you will station all along the road. I shall follow two hours later. Reconnoitre the route carefully. I do not want to run into an enemy division.”

It had been freezing hard for a week. At two o’clock it began to snow, by the evening the ground was covered, and heavy snowflakes obscured the closest objects. At six o’clock the detachment set out. Two men by themselves marched ahead to act as scouts. Then came a platoon of ten men commanded by the lieutenant himself. The remainder advanced in two long columns. A couple of hundred yards away on the left and right flanks a few soldiers marched in couples. The snow, which was still falling, powdered them white in the darkening shadows, and, as it did not melt on their uniforms, they were barely distinguishable in the dark from the general pallor of the landscape.

From time to time they halted, and then not a sound could be heard but that imperceptible rustle of falling snow, a vague and sinister sound, which is felt rather than heard. An order was given in whispers, and when the march was resumed they had left behind them a sort of white phantom standing in the snow, growing more and more indistinct until finally it disappeared. These were the living signposts which were to guide the army.

The scouts slowed their pace. Something was looming up in front of them.

“Swing to the right,” said the lieutenant, “that’s the woods of Ronfi; the château is more to the left.”

Soon the command to halt was heard. The detachment stopped and waited for the lieutenant, who, escorted by only ten men, had gone to reconnoitre the chateâu. They advanced, creeping under the trees. Suddenly they stopped dead. A frightful silence hovered about them, then, right beside them a clear, musical little voice broke the silence of the woods, saying:

“Father, we shall lose our way in the snow. We shall never reach Blainville.”

A deeper voice replied:

“Don’t be afraid, my child. I know the country as well as the back of my hand.”

The lieutenant said something, and four men moved off noiselessly, like phantoms.

All at once the piercing cry of a woman rang out in the night. Two prisoners were brought to him, an old man and a little girl, and the lieutenant, still speaking in whispers, cross-examined them.

“Your name?”

“Pierre Bernard.”

“Occupation?”

“Comte de Ronfi’s butler.”

“Is this your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“What does she do?”

“She is a sewing-maid at the chateâu.”

“Where are you going to?”

“We are running away.”

“Why?”

“Twelve Uhlans passed this evening. They shot three guards and hanged the gardener. I got frightened about the child.”

“Where are you going to?”

“Blainville.”

“Why?”

“Because there is a French army there.”

“Do you know the way?”

“Perfectly.”

“All right. Follow us.”

They rejoined the column, and the march across the fields was resumed. The old man walked in silence beside the lieutenant. His daughter marched beside him. Suddenly she stopped.

“Father,” she said, “I am so tired I cannot go any farther.”

She sat down, shaking with the cold, and seemed ready to die. Her father tried to carry her, but he was too old and feeble.

“Lieutenant,” he said, with a sob, “we shall be in your way. France comes first. Leave us.”

The officer had given an order, and several men had gone off, returning with some cut branches. In a moment a stretcher was made, and the whole detachment had come up.

“There is a woman here dying of cold,” said the lieutenant, “who will give a coat to cover her?”

Two hundred coats were taken off.

“Now, who will carry her?”

Every arm was placed at her disposal. The girl was wrapped in the warm military coats, laid gently upon the stretcher, and then lifted on to four robust shoulders. Like an Oriental queen carried by her slaves she was placed in the middle of the detachment, which continued its march, more vigorously, more courageously and more joyfully, warmed by the presence of a woman, the sovereign inspiration to which the ancient blood of France owes so much progress.

After an hour there was another halt, and they all lay down in the snow. Away off in the middle of the plain a huge black shadow was running. It was like a fantastic monster, which stretched out like a snake, then suddenly rolled itself up in a ball, bounded forward wildly, stopped and went on again. Whispered orders circulated amongst the men, and from time to time a little, sharp, metallic noise resounded. The wandering object suddenly came nearer, and twelve Uhlans were seen trotting at full speed, one after the other, having lost their way in the night. A terrible flash suddenly revealed two hundred men lying on the ground in front of them. A brief report died away in the silence of the snow, and all twelve, with their twelve horses, fell.

After a long wait the march was resumed, the old man they had picked up acting as guide. At length a distant voice shouted: “Who goes there?” Another voice nearer at hand gave the password. There was another wait, while the parley proceeded. The snow had ceased to fall. A cold wind swept the sky, behind which innumerable stars glittered. They grew pale and the eastern sky became pink.

A staff-officer came up to receive the detachment, but just as he was asking who was on the stretcher, the latter began to move, two little hands opened the heavy coats, and a charming little face, as pink as the dawn, with eyes more bright than the stars which had disappeared, replied:

“It is I, Sir.”

The delighted soldiers applauded, and carried the girl in triumph right into the middle of the camp where the arms were stored. Soon afterwards General Carrel arrived. At nine o’clock the Prussians attacked. At noon they retreated.

That evening, as Lieutenant Laré was dropping off to sleep on a heap of straw, utterly worn out, the general sent for him. He found him in his tent chatting with the old man whom they had picked up during the night. As soon as he entered the general took him by the hand, and turned to the stranger:

“My dear comte,” said he, “here is the young man of whom you were speaking a while back. He is one of my best officers.”

He smiled, lowered his voice, and repeated:

“The best.”

Then, turning to the astonished lieutenant, he introduced “Comte de Ronfi-Quédissac.”

The old gentleman seized his two hands:

“My dear lieutenant, you have saved my daughter’s life, and there is only one way in which I can thank you.⁠ ⁠… You will come in a few months’ time and tell me⁠ ⁠… whether you like her.⁠ ⁠…”

Exactly one year later to the day, in the Church of St. Thomas Aquinas, Captain Laré was married to Mademoiselle Louise Hortense Geneviève de Ronfi-Quédissac. She brought with her a dowry of six hundred thousand francs, and they say she was the prettiest bride of the year.

Simon’s Father

Noon had just struck. The school-door opened and the youngsters streamed out tumbling over one another in their haste to get out quickly. But instead of promptly dispersing and going home to dinner as was their daily wont, they stopped a few paces off, broke up into knots and set to whispering.

The fact was that that morning Simon, the son of La Blanchotte, had, for the first time, attended school.

They had all of them in their families heard of La Blanchotte; and although in public she was welcome enough, the mothers among themselves treated her with compassion of a somewhat disdainful kind, which the children had caught without in the least knowing why.

As for Simon himself, they did not know him, for he never went abroad, and did not play around with them through the streets of the village or along the banks of the river. So they did not like him much, and it was with a certain delight, mingled with astonishment, that they gathered in groups this morning, repeating to each other this phrase pronounced by a lad of fourteen or fifteen who appeared to know all about it, so sagaciously did he wink: “You know Simon⁠—well, he has no father.”

La Blanchotte’s son appeared in his turn upon the threshold of the school.

He was seven or eight years old, rather pale, very neat, with a timid and almost awkward manner.

He was making his way back to his mother’s house when the various groups of his schoolfellows, perpetually whispering, and watching him with the mischievous and heartless eyes of children bent upon playing a nasty trick, gradually surrounded him and ended by enclosing him altogether. There he stood amongst them, surprised and embarrassed, not understanding what they were going to do to him. But the lad who had brought the news, puffed up with the success he had met with, demanded:

“What is your name?”

He answered: “Simon.”

“Simon what?” retorted the other.

The child, altogether bewildered, repeated: “Simon.”

The lad shouted at him: “You must be named Simon something! That is not a name⁠—Simon indeed!”

And he, on the brink of tears, replied for the third time:

“My name is Simon.”

The urchins began laughing. The lad, triumphantly lifted up his voice: “You can see plainly that he has no father.”

A deep silence ensued. The children were dumbfounded by this extraordinary, impossibly monstrous thing⁠—a boy who had no father; they looked upon him as a phenomenon, an unnatural being, and they felt rising in them the hitherto inexplicable pity of their mothers for La Blanchotte. As for Simon, he had propped himself against a tree to avoid falling, and he stood there as if paralysed by an irreparable disaster. He sought to explain, but he could think of no answer for them, no way to deny this horrible charge that he had no father. At last he shouted at them quite recklessly: “Yes, I have one.”

“Where is he?” demanded the boy.

Simon was silent, he did not know. The children shrieked, tremendously excited. These sons of the soil, more animal than human, experienced the cruel craving which makes the fowls of a farmyard destroy one of their own kind as soon as it is wounded. Simon suddenly spied a little neighbour, the son of a widow, whom he had always seen, as he himself was to be seen, quite alone with his mother.

“And no more have you,” he said, “no more have you a father.”

“Yes,” replied the other, “I have one.”

“Where is he?” rejoined Simon.

“He is dead,” declared the brat with superb dignity, “he is in the cemetery, is my father.”

A murmur of approval rose amid the scapegraces, as if the fact of possessing a father dead in a cemetery made their comrade big enough to crush the other one who had no father at all. And these rogues, whose fathers were for the most part evildoers, drunkards, thieves, and harsh with their wives, hustled each other as they pressed closer and closer to Simon as though they, the legitimate ones, would stifle in their pressure one who was beyond the law.

The lad next Simon suddenly put his tongue out at him with a waggish air and shouted at him:

“No father! No father!”

Simon seized him by the hair with both hands and set to work to kick his legs while he bit his cheek ferociously. A tremendous struggle ensued. The two boys were separated and Simon found himself beaten, torn, bruised, rolled on the ground in the middle of the ring of applauding little vagabonds. As he arose, mechanically brushing his little blouse all covered with dust with his hand, someone shouted at him:

“Go and tell your father.”

He then felt a great sinking in his heart. They were stronger than he, they had beaten him and he had no answer to give them, for he knew it was true that he had no father. Full of pride he tried for some moments to struggle against the tears which were suffocating him. He had a choking fit, and then without cries he began to weep with great sobs which shook him incessantly. Then a ferocious joy broke out among his enemies, and, just like savages in fearful festivals, they took one another by the hand and danced in a circle about him as they repeated in refrain:

“No father! No father!”

But suddenly Simon ceased sobbing. Frenzy overtook him. There were stones under his feet; he picked them up and with all his strength hurled them at his tormentors. Two or three were struck and ran away yelling, and so formidable did he appear that the rest became panic-stricken. Cowards, like a jeering crowd in the presence of an exasperated man, they broke up and fled. Left alone, the little thing without a father set off running toward the fields, for a recollection had been awakened which nerved his soul to a great determination. He made up his mind to drown himself in the river.

He remembered, in fact, that eight days ago a poor devil who begged for his livelihood had thrown himself into the water because he was destitute. Simon had been there when they fished him out again; and the sight of the fellow, who had seemed to him so miserable and ugly, had then impressed him⁠—his pale cheeks, his long drenched beard, and his open eyes being full of calm. The bystanders had said:

“He is dead.”

And someone had added:

“He is quite happy now.”

So Simon wished to drown himself also because he had no father, just as the wretched man did who had no money.

He reached the water and watched it flowing. Some fishes were rising briskly in the clear stream and occasionally made little leaps and caught the flies on the surface. He stopped crying in order to watch them, for their feeding interested him vastly. But, at intervals, as in the lulls of a tempest, when tremendous gusts of wind snap off trees and then die away, this thought would return to him with intense pain:

“I am about to drown myself because I have no father.”

It was very warm and lovely. The pleasant sunshine warmed the grass; the water shone like a mirror; and Simon enjoyed for some minutes the happiness of that languor which follows weeping, desirous even of falling asleep there upon the grass in the warmth of noon.

A little green frog leaped from under his feet. He endeavoured to catch it. It escaped him. He pursued it and lost it three times following. At last he caught it by one of its hind legs and began to laugh as he saw the efforts the creature made to escape. It gathered itself up on its large legs and then with a violent spring suddenly stretched them out as stiff as two bars. Its eyes stared wide open in their round, golden circle, and it beat the air with its front limbs, using them as though they were hands. It reminded him of a toy made with straight slips of wood nailed zigzag one on the other, which by a similar movement regulated the exercise of the little soldiers fastened thereon. Then he thought of his home and of his mother, and overcome by great sorrow he again began to weep. His limbs trembled; and he placed himself on his knees and said his prayers as before going to bed. But he was unable to finish them, for such hurried and violent sobs overtook him that he was completely overwhelmed. He thought no more, he no longer heeded anything around him but was wholly given up to tears.

Suddenly a heavy hand was placed upon his shoulder, and a rough voice asked him:

“What is it that causes you so much grief, my little man?”

Simon turned round. A tall workman, with a black beard and curly hair, was staring at him good-naturedly. He answered with his eyes and throat full of tears:

“They have beaten me because I⁠—I have no father⁠—no father.”

“What!” said the man smiling, “why, everybody has one.”

The child answered painfully amid his spasms of grief:

“But I⁠—I⁠—I have none.”

Then the workman became serious. He had recognized La Blanchotte’s son, and although a recent arrival to the neighbourhood he had a vague idea of her history.

“Well,” said he, “console yourself, my boy, and come with me home to your mother. You’ll have a father.”

And so they started on the way, the big one holding the little one by the hand. The man smiled again, for he was not sorry to see this Blanchotte, who by popular report was one of the prettiest girls in the countryside, and, perhaps, he said to himself at the bottom of his heart, that a lass who had erred once might very well err again.

They arrived in front of a very neat little white house.

“There it is,” exclaimed the child, and he cried: “Mamma.”

A woman appeared, and the workman instantly left off smiling, for he at once perceived that there was no more fooling to be done with the tall pale girl, who stood austerely at her door as though to defend from one man the threshold of that house where she had already been betrayed by another. Intimidated, his cap in his hand, he stammered out:

“See, Madame, I have brought you back your little boy, who was lost near the river.”

But Simon flung his arms about his mother’s neck and told her, as he again began to cry:

“No, mamma, I wished to drown myself, because the others had beaten me⁠—had beaten me⁠—because I have no father.”

A painful blush covered the young woman’s cheeks, and, hurt to the quick, she embraced her child passionately, while the tears coursed down her face. The man, much moved, stood there, not knowing how to get away. But Simon suddenly ran up to him and said:

“Will you be my father?”

A deep silence ensued. La Blanchotte, dumb and tortured with shame, leaned against the wall, her hands upon her heart. The child, seeing that no answer was made him, replied:

“If you do not wish it, I shall return to drown myself.”

The workman took the matter as a jest and answered laughing:

“Why, yes, I wish it, certainly.”

“What is your name,” went on the child, “so that I may tell the others when they wish to know your name?”

“Philip,” answered the man.

Simon was silent a moment so that he might get the name well into his memory; then he stretched out his arms, quite consoled, and said:

“Well, then, Philip, you are my father.”

The workman, lifting him from the ground, kissed him hastily on both cheeks, and then strode away quickly.

When the child returned to school next day he was received with a spiteful laugh, and at the end of school, when the lad was about to begin again, Simon threw these words at his head as he would have done a stone: “My father’s name is Philip.”

Yells of delight burst out from all sides.

“Philip who? Philip what? What on earth is Philip? Where did you pick up your Philip?”

Simon answered nothing; and immovable in faith he defied them with his eye, ready to be martyred rather than fly before them. The schoolmaster came to his rescue and he returned home to his mother.

For about three months, the tall workman, Philip, frequently passed by La Blanchotte’s house, and sometimes made bold to speak to her when he saw her sewing near the window. She answered him civilly, always sedately, never joking with him, nor permitting him to enter her house. Notwithstanding this, being like all men, a bit of a coxcomb, he imagined that she was often rosier than usual when she chatted with him.

But a fallen reputation is so difficult to recover, and always remains so fragile that, in spite of the shy reserve La Blanchotte maintained, they already gossiped in the neighbourhood.

As for Simon, he loved his new father very much, and walked with him nearly every evening when the day’s work was done. He went regularly to school and mixed in a dignified way with his schoolfellows without ever answering them back.

One day, however, the lad who had first attacked him said to him:

“You have lied. You have no father called Philip.”

“Why do you say that?” demanded Simon, much disturbed.

The youth rubbed his hands. He replied: “Because if you had one he would be your mamma’s husband.”

Simon was confused by the truth of this reasoning; nevertheless he retorted:

“He is my father all the same.”

“That may well be,” exclaimed the urchin with a sneer, “but that is not being your father altogether.”

La Blanchotte’s little one bowed his head and went off dreaming in the direction of the forge belonging to old Loizon, where Philip worked.

This forge was entombed in trees. It was very dark there, the red glare of a formidable furnace alone lit up with great flashes five blacksmiths, who hammered upon their anvils with a terrible din. Standing enveloped in flame, they worked like demons, their eyes fixed on the red-hot iron they were pounding; and their dull ideas rising and falling with their hammers.

Simon entered without being noticed and quietly plucked his friend by the sleeve. Philip turned round. All at once the work came to a standstill and the men looked on very attentively. Then, in the midst of this unaccustomed silence, rose Simon’s piping voice.

“Philip, explain to me what La Michaude’s boy has just told me, that you are not altogether my father.”

“And why so?” asked the smith.

The child replied in all innocence:

“Because you are not my mamma’s husband.”

No one laughed. Philip remained standing, leaning his forehead upon the back of his great hands, which held the handle of his hammer upright upon the anvil. He mused. His four companions watched him, and, like a tiny mite among these giants, Simon anxiously waited. Suddenly, one of the smiths, voicing the sentiment of all, said to Philip:

“All the same La Blanchotte is a good and honest girl, stalwart and steady in spite of her misfortune, and one who would make a worthy wife for an honest man.”

“That is true,” remarked the three others.

The smith continued:

“Is it the girl’s fault if she has fallen? She had been promised marriage, and I know more than one who is much respected today and has sinned every bit as much.”

“That is true,” responded the three men in chorus.

He resumed:

“How hard she has toiled, poor thing, to educate her lad all alone, and how much she has wept since she no longer goes out, save to church, God only knows.”

“That is also true,” said the others.

Then no more was heard save the roar of the bellows which fanned the fire of the furnace. Philip hastily bent down towards Simon:

“Go and tell your mamma that I shall come to speak to her.”

Then he pushed the child out by the shoulders. He returned to his work and in unison the five hammers again fell upon their anvils. Thus they wrought the iron until nightfall, strong, powerful, happy, like Vulcans satisfied. But as the great bell of a cathedral resounds upon feast days, above the jingling of the other bells, so Philip’s hammer, dominating the noise of the others, clanged second after second with a deafening uproar. His eye on the fire, he plied his trade vigorously, erect amid the sparks.

The sky was full of stars as he knocked at La Blanchotte’s door. He had his Sunday blouse on, a fresh shirt, and his beard was trimmed. The young woman showed herself upon the threshold and said in a grieved tone:

“It is not right to come this way when night has fallen, Mr. Philip.”

He wished to answer, but stammered and stood confused before her.

She resumed.

“And you understand quite well that it will not do that I should be talked about any more.”

Then he said all at once:

“What does that matter to me, if you will be my wife!”

No voice replied to him, but he believed that he heard in the shadow of the room the sound of a body falling. He entered very quickly; and Simon, who had gone to his bed, distinguished the sound of a kiss and some words that his mother said very softly. Then he suddenly found himself lifted up by the hands of his friend, who, holding him at the length of his herculean arms, exclaimed to him:

“You will tell your schoolfellows that your father is Philip Remy, the blacksmith, and that he will pull the ears of all who do you any harm.”

The next day, when the school was full and lessons were about to begin, little Simon stood up quite pale with trembling lips:

“My father,” said he in a clear voice, “is Philip Remy, the blacksmith, and he has promised to box the ears of all who do me any harm.”

This time no one laughed any longer, for he was very well known, was Philip Remy, the blacksmith, and he was a father of whom they would all have been proud.

A Family Affair

The Neuilly steam-tram had just passed the Porte Maillot, and was going along the broad avenue that terminates at the Seine. The small engine that was attached to the car whistled, to warn any obstacle to get out of its way, let off steam, panted like a person out of breath from running, and its pistons made a rapid noise, like iron legs running. The oppressive heat of the end of a summer day lay over the whole city, and from the road, although there was not a breath of wind stirring, there arose a white, chalky, opaque, suffocating, and warm dust which stuck to the moist skin, filled the eyes, and got into the lungs. People were standing in the doors of their houses in search of a little air.

The windows of the steam-tram were down, and the curtains fluttered in the wind. There were very few passengers inside, because on such warm days people preferred the top or the platforms. The few inside consisted of stout women in strange toilettes, shopkeepers’ wives from the suburbs, who made up for the distinguished looks which they did not possess by ill-assumed dignity; of gentlemen tired of their office, with yellow faces, who stooped with one shoulder higher than the other, in consequence of long hours of work bending over the desk. Their uneasy and melancholy faces also spoke of domestic troubles, of constant want of money, of former hopes that had been finally disappointed. They all belonged to that army of poor, threadbare devils who vegetate economically in mean, plastered houses, with a tiny grass border for a garden, in the midst of the district where rubbish is deposited, on the outskirts of Paris.

Near the door a short, fat man, with a puffy face and a big stomach, dressed in black and wearing a decoration in his buttonhole, was talking to a tall, thin man, attired in a dirty, white linen suit all unbuttoned, and wearing a white Panama hat. The former spoke so slowly and hesitatingly, that occasionally it almost seemed as if he stammered; it was Monsieur Caravan, chief clerk in the Admiralty. The other, who had formerly been surgeon on board a merchant ship, had set up in practice in Courbevoie, where he applied the vague remnants of medical knowledge which he had retained after an adventurous life, to healing the wretched population of that district. His name was Chenet, and he had made the people call him Doctor, and strange rumours were current as to his morality.

Monsieur Caravan had always led the normal life of a man in a government office. Every morning for the last thirty years he had invariably gone the same way to his office, had met the same men going to business at the same time and nearly on the same spot, returned home every evening the same way, and again met the same faces, which he had seen growing old. Every morning, after buying his halfpenny paper at the corner of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he bought his two rolls, and then rushed to his office, like a culprit giving himself up to justice. He got to his desk as quickly as possible, always feeling uneasy, as if expecting a rebuke for some neglect of duty of which he might have been guilty.

Nothing had ever occurred to change the monotonous order of his existence; no event affected him except the work of his office, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the Admiralty or at home, for he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues. His mind, which was in a state of atrophy from his depressing daily work, had no other thoughts, hopes, or dreams than such as related to the office, and there was a constant source of bitterness that spoiled every pleasure that he might have had, and that was the employment of so many commissioners of the navy, “tinmen,” as they were called, because of their silver-lace, as first-class clerks and heads of departments. Every evening at dinner he discussed the matter hotly with his wife, who shared his angry feelings, and proved to their own satisfaction that it was in every way unjust to give jobs in Paris to men who ought properly to have been employed in the navy.

He was old now, and had scarcely noticed how his life was passing, for school had merely been exchanged, without any transition, for the office, and the ushers at whom he had formerly trembled were replaced by his chiefs, of whom he was terribly afraid. When he had to go into the rooms of these official despots, it made him tremble from head to foot, and that constant fear had given him a very awkward manner in their presence, a humble demeanour, and a kind of nervous stammering.

He knew nothing more about Paris than a blind man could know, who was led to the same spot by his dog every day. If he read the account of any uncommon events, or of scandals, in his halfpenny paper, they appeared to him like fantastic tales, which some pressman had made up out of his own head, in order to amuse minor clerks. He did not read the political news, which his paper frequently altered, as the cause which subsidized them might require, for he was not fond of innovations, and when he went through the Avenue of the Champs-Élysées every evening, he looked at the surging crowd of pedestrians, and at the stream of carriages, like a traveller who has lost his way in a strange country.

As he had completed his thirty years of obligatory service that year, on the first of January, he had had the cross of the Legion of Honour bestowed upon him, which, in the semi-military public offices, is a recompense for the long and miserable slavery⁠—the official phrase is, “loyal services”⁠—of unfortunate convicts who are riveted to their desks. That unexpected dignity gave him a high and new idea of his own capacities, and altogether altered him. He immediately left off wearing light trousers and fancy waistcoats, and wore black trousers and long coats, on which his “ribbon,” which was very broad, showed off better. He got shaved every morning, trimmed his nails more carefully, changed his linen every two days, from a legitimate sense of what was proper, and out of respect for the national Order of which he formed a part. In fact, from that day he was another Caravan, scrupulously clean, majestic, and condescending.

At home, he said, “my cross,” at every moment, and he had become so proud of it that he could not bear to see other men wearing any other ribbon in their buttonholes. He got angry when he saw strange orders, which “nobody ought to be allowed to wear in France,” and he bore Chenet a particular grudge, as he met him on a tramcar every evening, wearing a decoration of some sort or another, white, blue, orange, or green.

The conversation of the two men, from the Arc de Triomphe to Neuilly, was always the same. That day as usual, they discussed, first of all, various local abuses, which disgusted them both, and the mayor of Neuilly received his full share of the blame. Then, as invariably happens in the company of a medical man, Caravan began to enlarge on the subject of illness, as, in that manner, he hoped to obtain a little gratuitous advice, or even a consultation if he were careful enough not to give himself away. His mother had been causing him no little anxiety for some time; she had frequent and prolonged fainting fits, and, although she was ninety, she would not take care of herself.

Caravan grew quite tenderhearted when he mentioned her great age, and more than once asked Doctor Chenet, emphasizing the word “doctor,” whether he had often met anyone as old as that. And he rubbed his hands with pleasure; not, perhaps, that he cared very much about seeing the good woman last forever here on earth, but because the long duration of his mother’s life was, as it were, an earnest of old age for himself. Then he continued:

“In my family, we last long, and I am sure that, unless I meet with an accident, I shall not die until I am very old.”

The officer of health looked at him with pity, glancing for a moment at his neighbour’s red face, his short, thick neck, his “corporation,” as Chenet called it, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and the apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official. Lifting the dirty Panama hat which he wore from his head, he said, with a snigger:

“I am not so sure of that, old fellow; your mother is as tough as nails, and I should say that your life is not a very good one.”

This rather upset Caravan, who did not speak again until the tram put them down at their destination. The two friends got out, and Chenet asked his friend to have a glass of vermouth at the Café du Globe, opposite, a place which both of them were in the habit of frequenting. The proprietor, who was a friend of theirs, held out two fingers to them, which they shook across the bottles on the counter, and then they joined three of their friends, who were playing at dominoes, and had been there since midday. They exchanged cordial greetings, with the usual inquiry: “Anything fresh?” Then the three players continued their game, and held out their hands without looking up, when the others wished them “Good night” and went home to dinner.

Caravan lived in a small, two-storied house in Courbevoie, near the meeting of the roads; the ground floor was occupied by a hairdresser. Two bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen where mended chairs wandered from room to room, as they were wanted, formed the whole of their apartments, and Madame Caravan spent nearly her whole time in cleaning them up, while her daughter, Marie-Louise, who was twelve, and her son, Philippe-Auguste, were running about with all the little, dirty, mischievous brats of the neighbourhood, and playing in the gutters.

Caravan had installed his mother, whose avarice was notorious in the neighbourhood, and who was terribly thin, in the room above them. She was always in a bad temper and never passed a day without quarrelling and flying into furious tempers. She used to apostrophise the neighbours standing at their own doors, the vegetable venders, the street-sweepers, and the street-boys, in the most violent language. The latter, to have their revenge, used to follow her at a distance when she went out and call out rude things after her.

A little servant from Normandy, who was incredibly giddy and thoughtless, performed the household work, and slept on the second floor in the same room as the old woman, for fear of anything happening to her in the night.

When Caravan got in, his wife, who suffered from a chronic passion for cleaning, was polishing up the mahogany chairs, that were scattered about the room, with a piece of flannel. She always wore cotton gloves and adorned her head with a cap, ornamented with many coloured ribbons, which was always tilted on one ear, and whenever anyone caught her, polishing, sweeping, or washing, she used to say:

“I am not rich; everything is very simple in my house, but cleanliness is my luxury, and that is worth quite as much as any other.”

As she was gifted with sound, obstinate, practical common sense, she swayed her husband in everything. Every evening during dinner, and afterward, when they were in bed, they talked over the business in the office, and, although she was twenty years younger, he confided everything to her as if she had had the direction, and followed her advice in every matter.

She had never been pretty, and now had grown ugly; in addition to that, she was short and thin, while her careless and tasteless way of dressing herself hid the few, small feminine attributes which might have been brought out if she had possessed any skill in dress. Her petticoats were always awry, and she frequently scratched herself, no matter on what place, totally indifferent as to who might be there, out of a sort of habit which had become almost an unconscious movement. The only ornaments that she allowed herself were silk ribbons, which she had in great profusion, and of various colours mixed together, in the pretentious caps which she wore at home.

As soon as she saw her husband she got up, and said, as she kissed him:

“Did you remember Potin, my dear?”

He fell into a chair, in consternation, for that was the fourth time he had forgotten a commission that he had promised to do for her.

“It is a fatality,” he said; “in spite of my thinking of it all day long, I am sure to forget it in the evening.”

But as he seemed really so very sorry, she merely said, quietly:

“You will think of it tomorrow, I daresay. Anything fresh at the office?”

“Yes, a great piece of news: another tinman has been appointed senior chief clerk.” She became angry.

“To what department?”

“The department of Foreign Supplies.”

“So he succeeds Ramon. That was the very post that I wanted you to have. And what about Ramon?”

“He retires on his pension.”

She grew furious, her cap slid down on her shoulder, and she continued:

“There is nothing more to be done in that hole now. And what is the name of the new commissioner?”

“Bonassot.”

She took up the Naval Year Book, which she always kept close at hand, and looked him up:

“ ‘Bonassot⁠—Toulon. Born in 1851. Student-Commissioner in 1871. Sub-Commissioner in 1875.’

Has he been to sea?” she continued, and at that question Caravan’s looks cleared up, and he laughed until his sides shook.

“Just like Balin⁠—just like Balin, his chief.” Then he added an old office joke, and laughed more than ever:

“It would not even do to send them by water to inspect the Point-du-Four, for they would be sick on the Seine steamboats.”

But she remained as serious as if she had not heard him, and then she said in a low voice, while she scratched her chin:

“If only we had a deputy to fall back upon. When the Chamber hears all that is going on at the Admiralty, the minister will be turned out⁠—”

She was interrupted by a terrible noise on the stairs. Marie-Louise and Philippe-Auguste, who had just come in from the gutter, were giving each other slaps all the way upstairs. Their mother rushed at them furiously, and taking each of them by an arm, she dragged them into the room, shaking them vigorously. But as soon as they saw their father, they rushed up to him. He kissed them affectionately, and taking one of them on each knee, he began to talk to them.

Philippe-Auguste was an ugly, ill-kempt little brat, dirty from head to foot, with the face of an idiot, and Marie-Louise was already like her mother⁠—spoke like her, repeated her words, and even imitated her movements. She also asked him whether there was anything fresh at the office, and he replied merrily:

“Your friend, Ramon, who comes and dines here every Sunday, is going to leave us, little one. There is a new senior head-clerk.”

She looked at her father, and with a precocious child’s pity, she said:

“So somebody has been put over your head again!”

He stopped laughing and did not reply. Then, in order to create a diversion, he said, addressing his wife, who was cleaning the windows:

“How is mamma, up there?”

Madame Caravan left off rubbing, turned round, pulled her cap up, as it had fallen quite on to her back, and said, with trembling lips:

“Ah! yes; let us talk about your mother. She has created a pretty scene. Just think that a short time ago Madame Lebaudin, the hairdresser’s wife, came upstairs to borrow a packet of starch from me, and, as I was not at home, your mother called her a beggar woman, and turned her out; but I gave it to the old woman. She pretended not to hear, as she always does when one tells her unpleasant truths, but she is no more deaf than I am, as you know. It is all a sham, and the proof of it is, that she went up to her own room immediately without saying a word.”

Caravan, taken aback, did not utter a word, and at that moment the little servant came in to announce dinner. In order to let his mother know, he took a broom-handle, which always stood hidden in a corner, and rapped loudly on the ceiling three times, and then they went into the dining room. Madame Caravan, junior, helped the soup, and waited for the old woman. But she did not come, and the soup was getting cold, so they began to eat slowly, and when their plates were empty, they waited again. Then Madame Caravan, who was furious, attacked her husband:

“She does it on purpose, you know that as well as I do. But you always uphold her.”

In great perplexity between the two, he sent up Marie-Louise to fetch her grandmother, and sat motionless, with his eyes down, while his wife tapped her glass angrily with her knife. In about a minute the door flew open suddenly, and the child came in again, out of breath, and very pale, and said quickly:

“Grandmamma has fallen down on the ground.”

Caravan jumped up, threw his table-napkin down, and rushed upstairs, while his wife, who thought it was some trick of her mother-in-law, followed more slowly, shrugging her shoulders, as if to express her doubt. When they got upstairs, however, they found the old woman lying at full length in the middle of the room, and when they turned her over they saw that she was insensible and motionless. Her skin looked more wrinkled and yellow than usual, her eyes were closed, her teeth clenched, and her thin body was stiff.

Caravan kneeled down by her and began to moan:

“My poor mother! my poor mother!” he said. But the other Madame Caravan said:

“Bah! She has only fainted again, that is all, and she has done it to prevent us from dining comfortably, you may be sure of that.”

They put her on the bed, undressed her completely, and Caravan, his wife, and the servant began to rub her, but, in spite of their efforts, she did not recover consciousness, so they sent Rosalie, the servant, to fetch “Doctor” Chenet. He lived a long way off, on the quay going toward Suresnes, and so it was a considerable time before he arrived. He came at last, however, and, after having looked at the old woman, felt her pulse, and auscultated her, he said:

“It is all over.”

Caravan threw himself on the body, sobbing violently. He kissed his mother’s rigid face, and wept so that great tears fell on the dead woman’s face, like drops of water. Naturally, Madame Caravan, junior, showed a decorous amount of grief, uttered feeble moans as she stood behind her husband, and she rubbed her eyes vigorously.

But, suddenly, Caravan raised himself up, with his thin hair in disorder, and, looking very ugly in his grief, said:

“But, are you sure, doctor? Are you quite sure?”

The medical man stooped over the body, and, handling it with professional dexterity, as a shopkeeper might do, when showing off his goods, he said: “See, my dear friend, look at her eye.”

He raised the eyelid and the old woman’s look reappeared under his finger, altogether unaltered, unless, perhaps, the pupil was rather larger, and Caravan felt a severe shock at the sight. Then Monsieur Chenet took her thin arm, forced the fingers open, and said, angrily, as if he had been contradicted:

“Just look at her hand; I never make a mistake, you may be quite sure of that.”

Caravan fell on the bed, and almost bellowed, while his wife, still whimpering, did what was necessary.

She brought the night-table, on which she spread a table-napkin. Then she placed four wax candles on it, which she lighted; then took a sprig of box, which was hanging over the chimney glass, and put it between the candles, into the plate, which she filled with clean water, as she had no holy water. After a moment’s rapid reflection, she threw a pinch of salt into the water, no doubt thinking she was performing some sort of act of consecration by doing that. When she had finished the setting which is supposed to be appropriate to Death, she remained standing motionless, and the medical man, who had been helping her, whispered to her:

“We must take Caravan away.”

She nodded assent, and, going up to her husband, who was still on his knees, sobbing, she raised him up by one arm, while Chenet took him by the other.

They put him into a chair, and his wife kissed his forehead and then began to lecture him. Chenet enforced her words, and preached firmness, courage, and resignation⁠—the very things which are always wanting in such overwhelming misfortune⁠—and then both of them took him by the arms again and led him out.

He was crying like a big child, with convulsive sobs; his arms were hanging down and his legs seemed useless; he went downstairs without knowing what he was doing, and moved his legs mechanically. They put him into the chair which he always occupied at dinner, in front of his empty soup-plate. And there he sat, without moving, with his eyes fixed on his glass, so stupefied with grief that he could not even think.

In a corner, Madame Caravan was talking with the doctor, and asking what the necessary formalities were, as she wanted to obtain practical information. At last, Monsieur Chenet, who appeared to be waiting for something, took up his hat and prepared to go, saying that he had not dined yet; whereupon she exclaimed:

“What! You have not dined? But stop here, doctor; don’t go. You shall have whatever we can give you, for, of course, you will understand that we won’t eat much.” However, he made excuses and refused, but she persisted, and said:

“You really must stop; at times like this people like to have friends near them, and, besides that, perhaps you will be able to persuade my husband to take some nourishment; he must keep up his strength.”

The doctor bowed, and, putting down his hat, said:

“In that case, I will accept your invitation, Madame.”

She gave Rosalie, who seemed to have lost her head, some orders, and then sat down, “to pretend to eat,” as she said, “to keep the ‘doctor’ company.”

The soup was brought in again, and Monsieur Chenet took two helpings. Then there came a dish of tripe, which exhaled a smell of onions, and which Madame Caravan made up her mind to taste.

“It is excellent,” the doctor said, at which she smiled, and, turning to her husband, she said:

“Do take a little, my poor Alfred, only just to get something into your stomach. Remember that you have got to pass the night watching by her!”

He held out his plate, docilely, just as he would have gone to bed if he had been told to, obeying her in everything without resistance and without reflection, and, therefore, he ate. The doctor helped himself three times, while Madame Caravan, from time to time, fished out a large piece on the end of her fork, and swallowed it with a sort of studied inattention.

When a salad bowl full of macaroni was brought in, the doctor said:

“By Jove! That is what I am very fond of.” And this time Madame Caravan helped everybody. She even filled the children’s saucers, which they had scraped clean, and who, being left to themselves, had been drinking wine without any water, and were now kicking each other under the table.

Chenet remembered that Rossini, the composer, had been very fond of that Italian dish, and suddenly he exclaimed:

“Why! that rhymes, and one could begin some lines like this:

‘The Maestro Rossini
Was fond of macaroni.’

Nobody listened to him, however. Madame Caravan, who had suddenly grown thoughtful, was thinking of all the probable consequences of the event, while her husband made bread pellets, which he put on the tablecloth, and looked at with a fixed, idiotic stare. As he was devoured by thirst, he was continually raising his glass to his lips, and the consequence was that his senses, already rather upset by the shock and grief, seemed to dance about vaguely in his head, which was heavy from the laborious process of digestion which had begun.

Meanwhile, the doctor, who had been drinking away steadily, was getting visibly drunk, and Madame Caravan herself felt the reaction which follows all nervous shocks. She was agitated and excited, and although she had been drinking nothing but water, she felt her head rather confused.

By and by, Chenet began to relate stories of deaths, that appeared funny to him. In the suburbs of Paris, which are full of people from the provinces, one meets with the indifference toward death, even of a father or a mother, which all peasants show; a want of respect, an unconscious callousness which is common in the country, and rare in Paris. Said he:

“Why, I was sent for last week to the Rue du Puteaux, and when I went, I found the sick person (and there was the whole family calmly sitting near the bed) finishing a bottle of liqueur of aniseed, which had been bought the night before to satisfy the dying man’s fancy.”

But Madame Caravan was not listening; she was continually thinking of the inheritance, and Caravan was incapable of understanding anything.

Soon Rosalie served coffee, which had been made very strong, to keep up their courage, and as every cup was well dosed with cognac, it made all their faces red, and confused their ideas still more. To make matters still worse, Chenet suddenly seized the brandy bottle and poured out “a drop just to wash their mouths out with,” as he termed it, for each of them. Then, without speaking any more, overcome, in spite of themselves, by that feeling of animal comfort which alcohol affords after dinner, they slowly sipped the sweet cognac, which formed a yellowish syrup at the bottom of their cups.

The children had gone to sleep, and Rosalie carried them off to bed. Then, Caravan, mechanically obeying that wish to forget oneself which possesses all unhappy persons, helped himself to brandy again several times, and his dull eyes grew bright. At last the doctor rose to go, and seizing his friend’s arm, he said:

“Come with me; a little fresh air will do you good. When you are in trouble, you must not stick to one spot.”

The other obeyed mechanically, put on his hat, took his stick, and went out, and both of them went arm-in-arm toward the Seine, in the starlight night.

The air was warm and sweet, for all the gardens in the neighbourhood are full of flowers at that season of the year, and their scent, which is scarcely perceptible during the day, seems to awaken at the approach of night, and mingles with the light breezes which blow upon them in the darkness.

The broad avenue, with its two rows of gaslamps, which extend as far as the Arc de Triomphe, was deserted and silent, but there was the distant roar of Paris, which seemed to have a reddish vapour hanging over it. It was a kind of continual rumbling, which was at times answered by the whistle of a train at full speed, in the distance, travelling to the ocean through the provinces.

The fresh air on the faces of the two men rather overcame them at first, made the doctor lose his equilibrium a little, and increased Caravan’s giddiness, from which he had suffered since dinner. He walked as if he were in a dream; his thoughts were paralysed; although he felt no great grief, for he was in a state of mental torpor that prevented him from suffering, and he even felt a sense of relief which was increased by the warm scent of the night.

When they reached the bridge, they turned to the right and faced the fresh breeze from the river, which rolled along, calm and melancholy, bordered by tall poplar-trees. The stars looked as if they were floating on the water and were moving with the current. A slight, white mist that floated over the opposite banks filled their lungs with a sensation of cold, and Caravan stopped suddenly, for he was struck by that smell from the water, which brought back old memories to his mind. For suddenly, in his mind, he saw his mother again, in Picardy, as he had seen her years before, kneeling in front of their door and washing the heaps of linen, by her side, in the little stream that ran through their garden. He almost fancied that he could hear the sound of the wooden beetle with which she beat the linen, in the calm silence of the country, and her voice, as she called out to him: “Alfred, bring me some soap.” And he smelled the odour of the trickling water, of the mist rising from the wet ground, of the heap of wet linen which he should never forget, the less that it came back to him on the very evening on which his mother died.

He stopped, paralysed by a sudden feeling of anguish. It was like a beam of light illuminating all at once the whole extent of his misfortune, and this meeting with vagrant thoughts plunged him into a black abyss of irremediable despair. He felt heartbroken at that eternal separation. His life seemed cut in half, all his youth gone, swallowed up by that death. All the former life was over and done with, all the recollections of his youthful days would vanish; for the future, there would be nobody to talk to him of what had happened in days gone by, of the people he had known of old, of his own part of the country, and of his past life; that was a part of his existence which was gone forever, and the other might as well end now.

Then the procession of memories came. He saw his mother as she was when younger, wearing well-worn dresses, which he remembered for such a long time that they seemed inseparable from her. He recollected her in various forgotten circumstances, her suppressed appearance, the different tones of her voice, her habits, her manias, her fits of anger, the wrinkles on her face, the movements of her thin fingers, and all her well-known attitudes, which she would never have again, and clutching hold of the doctor, he began to moan and weep. His flabby legs began to tremble, his whole stout body was shaken by his sobs, all he could say was:

“My mother, my poor mother, my poor mother!”

But his companion, who was still drunk, and who intended to finish the evening in certain places of bad repute that he frequented secretly, made him sit down on the grass by the riverside, and left him almost immediately, under the pretext that he had to see a patient.

Caravan went on crying for a long time, and then, when he had got to the end of his tears⁠—when his grief had, so to speak, run out of him⁠—he again felt relief, repose, and sudden tranquillity.

The moon had risen and bathed the horizon in its soft light. The tall poplar-trees had a silvery sheen on them, and the mist on the plain looked like floating snow. The river, in which the stars were no longer reflected, and which looked as if it were covered with mother-of-pearl, flowed on, rippled by the wind. The air was soft and sweet, and Caravan inhaled it almost greedily, thinking that he could perceive a feeling of freshness, of calm and of superhuman consolation pervading him.

He really tried to resist that feeling of comfort and relief, and kept on saying to himself: “My mother, my poor mother!” He tried to make himself cry, from a kind of conscientious feeling, but he could not succeed in doing so any longer, and the sad thoughts which had made him sob so bitterly a short time before had almost passed away. In a few moments he rose to go home, and returned slowly, under the influence of that serene night, with a heart soothed in spite of himself.

When he reached the bridge, he saw the last tramcar, ready to start, and the lights through the windows of the Café du Globe, and felt a longing to tell somebody of the catastrophe that had happened, to excite pity, to make himself interesting. He put on a woeful face, pushed open the door, and went up to the counter, where the landlord always stood. He had counted on creating an effect, and had hoped that everybody would get up and come to him with outstretched hands, and say: “Why, what is the matter with you?” But nobody noticed his disconsolate face, so he rested his two elbows on the counter, and, burying his face in his hands, he murmured: “Good heavens! Good heavens!”

The landlord looked at him and said: “Are you ill, Monsieur Caravan?”

“No, my friend,” he replied, “but my mother has just died.”

“Ah!” the other exclaimed, and as a customer at the other end of the establishment asked for a glass of beer, he replied: “All right, I’m coming,” and he went to attend to him, leaving Caravan almost stupefied at his want of sympathy.

The three domino players were sitting at the same table which they had occupied before dinner, totally absorbed in their game, and Caravan went up to them, in search of pity, but as none of them appeared to notice him, he made up his mind to speak.

“A great misfortune has happened to me since I was here,” he said.

All three raised their heads slightly at the same instant, but kept their eyes fixed on the pieces which they held in their hands.

“What do you say?”

“My mother has just died.”

Whereupon one of them said: “Oh! By Jove!” with that false air of sorrow which indifferent people assume. Another, who could not find anything to say, emitted a sort of sympathetic whistle, shaking his head at the same time, and the third turned to the game again, as if he were saying to himself: “Is that all!”

Caravan had expected some of those expressions that are said to “come from the heart,” and when he saw how his news was received he left the table, indignant at their calmness before a friend’s sorrow, although at that moment he was so dazed with grief that he hardly felt it, and went home.

His wife was waiting for him in her nightgown, sitting in a low chair by the open window, still thinking of the inheritance.

“Undress yourself,” she said; “we will talk when we are in bed.”

He raised his head, and looking at the ceiling, he said:

“But there is nobody up there.”

“I beg your pardon, Rosalie is with her, and you can go and take her place at three o’clock in the morning, when you have had some sleep.”

He only partially undressed, however, so as to be ready for anything that might happen, and after tying a silk handkerchief round his head, he joined his wife, who had just got in between the sheets. For some time they remained side by side, and neither of them spoke. She was thinking.

Even in bed, her nightcap was adorned with a pink bow, and was pushed rather over one ear, as was the way with all the caps that she wore. Presently, she turned toward him and said:

“Do you know whether your mother made a will?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then replied:

“I⁠—I do not think so. No, I am sure that she did not.”

His wife looked at him, and she said, in a low, furious voice:

“I call that infamous; here we have been wearing ourselves out for ten years in looking after her, and have boarded and lodged her! Your sister would not have done so much for her, nor I either, if I had known how I was to be rewarded! Yes, it is a disgrace to her memory! I daresay that you will tell me that she paid us, but one cannot pay one’s children in ready money for what they do; that obligation is recognized after death; at any rate, that is how honourable people act. So I have had all my worry and trouble for nothing! Oh, that is nice! that is very nice!”

Poor Caravan, who felt nearly distracted, kept on saying:

“My dear, my dear, please, please be quiet.”

She grew calmer by degrees, and, resuming her usual voice and manner, she continued:

“We must let your sister know tomorrow.”

He started, and said:

“Of course we must; I had forgotten all about it; I will send her a telegram the first thing in the morning.”

“No,” she replied, like a woman who has foreseen everything; “no, do not send it before ten or eleven o’clock, so that we may have time to turn round before she comes. It does not take more than two hours to get here from Charenton, and we can say that you lost your head from grief. If we let her know in the course of the day, that will be soon enough, and will give us time to look round.”

But Caravan put his hand to his forehead, and in the same timid voice in which he always spoke of his chief, the very thought of whom made him tremble, he said:

“I must let them know at the office.”

“Why?” she replied. “On such occasions like this, it is always excusable to forget. Take my advice, and don’t let him know; your chief will not be able to say anything to you, and you will put him into a nice fix.”

“Oh! yes, I shall, indeed, and he will be in a terrible rage, too, when he notices my absence. Yes, you are right; it is a capital idea, and when I tell him that my mother is dead, he will be obliged to hold his tongue.”

And he rubbed his hands in delight at the joke, when he thought of his chief’s face; while the body of the dead old woman lay upstairs, beside the sleeping servant.

But Madame Caravan grew thoughtful, as if she were preoccupied by something which she did not care to mention. But at last she said:

“Your mother had given you her clock, had she not; the girl playing at cup and ball?”

He thought for a moment, and then replied:

“Yes, yes; she said to me a long time ago, when she first came here: ‘I shall leave the clock to you, if you look after me well.’ ”

Madame Caravan was reassured, and regained her serenity, and said:

“Well, then, you must go and fetch it out of her room, for if we get your sister here, she will prevent us from having it.”

He hesitated: “Do you think so?” That made her angry.

“I certainly think so; as soon as it is in our possession, she will know nothing at all about where it came from; it belongs to us. It is just the same with the chest of drawers with the marble top that is in her room; she gave it to me one day when she was in a good temper. We will bring it down at the same time.”

Caravan, however, seemed incredulous, and said:

“But, my dear, it is a great responsibility!”

She turned on him furiously.

“Oh! Indeed! Will you never alter? You would let your children die of hunger, rather than make a move. Does not that chest of drawers belong to us, since she gave it to me? And if your sister is not satisfied, let her tell me so, me! I don’t care a straw for your sister. Come, get up, and we will bring down what your mother gave us, immediately.”

Trembling and vanquished, he got out of bed, and began to put on his trousers, but she stopped him:

“It is not worth while to dress yourself; your underclothes are quite enough; I mean to go as I am.”

They both left the room in their nightclothes, went upstairs quite noiselessly, opened the door, and went into the room where the four lighted tapers and the plate with the sprig of box alone seemed to be watching the old woman in her rigid repose; for Rosalie, who was lying back in the easy-chair with her legs stretched out, her hands folded in her lap, and her head on one side, was also quite motionless, and snoring with her mouth wide open.

Caravan took the clock, which was one of those grotesque objects that were produced so plentifully under the Empire. A girl in gilt bronze was holding a cup and ball, and the ball formed the pendulum.

“Give that to me,” his wife said, “and take the marble top off the chest of drawers.”

He put the marble on his shoulder with a considerable effort, and they left the room. Caravan had to stoop in the doorway, and trembled as he went downstairs, while his wife walked backward, so as to light him, holding the candlestick in one hand and the clock under her other arm.

When they were in their own room, she heaved a sigh.

“We have got over the worst part of the job,” she said; “so now let us go and fetch the other things.”

But the drawers were full of the old woman’s wearing apparel which they must manage to hide somewhere, and Madame Caravan soon thought of a plan.

“Go and get that wooden box in the passage; it is hardly worth anything and we may just as well put it here.”

And when he had brought it upstairs, the change began. One by one, she took out all the collars, cuffs, chemises, caps, all the well-worn things that had belonged to the poor woman lying there behind them, and arranged them methodically in the wooden box, in such a manner as to deceive Madame Braux, the deceased woman’s other child, who would be coming the next day.

When they had finished, they first of all carried the drawers downstairs, and the remaining portion afterward, each of them holding an end. It was some time before they could make up their minds where it would stand best; but at last they settled upon their own room, opposite the bed, between the two windows. As soon as it was in its place, Madame Caravan filled it with her own things. The clock was placed on the chimneypiece in the dining room. They looked to see what the effect was, and were both delighted with it, agreeing that nothing could be better. Then they got into bed, she blew out the candle, and soon everybody in the house was asleep.

It was broad daylight when Caravan opened his eyes again. His mind was rather confused when he woke up, and he did not clearly remember what had happened for a few minutes; when he did, he felt it painfully, and jumped out of bed, almost ready to cry again.

He very soon went to the room overhead, where Rosalie was still sleeping in the same position as the night before, for she did not wake up once during the whole time. He sent her to do her work, put fresh tapers in the place of those that had burned out, and then he looked at his mother, revolving in his mind those apparently profound thoughts, those religious and philosophical commonplaces, which trouble people of mediocre minds in the face of death.

But he went downstairs as soon as his wife called him. She had written out a list of what had to be done during the morning, which rather frightened him when he saw it.

1. Lodge a declaration of death at the Town Hall.

2. See the coroner.

3. Order the coffin.

4. Give notice to the church.

5. Go to the undertaker.

6. Order the notices of her death at the printer’s.

7. Go to the lawyer.

8. Telegraph the news to all the family.

Besides all this, there were a number of small commissions; so he took his hat and went out. As the news had got abroad, Madame Caravan’s female friends and neighbours soon began to come in, and begged to be allowed to see the body. There had been a scene at the hairdresser’s, on the ground floor, about the matter, between husband and wife, while he was shaving a customer. While busily knitting the woman had said: “Well, there is one less, and one as great a miser as one ever meets with. I certainly was not very fond of her; but, nevertheless, I must go and have a look at her.”

The husband, while lathering his customer’s chin, said:

“That is another queer fancy! Nobody but a woman would think of such a thing. It is not enough for them to worry you during life, but they cannot even leave you in peace when you are dead.”

But his wife, not put out in the least, replied: “I can’t help it; I must go. It has been on me since the morning. If I were not to see her, I should think about it all my life, but when I have had a good look at her, I shall be satisfied.”

The knight of the razor shrugged his shoulders, and remarked in a low voice to the gentleman whose cheek he was scraping:

“Now, what sort of ideas do you think these confounded females have? I should not amuse myself by inspecting a corpse!”

But his wife heard him, and replied very quietly:

“But I do, I do.” And then, putting her knitting down on the counter, she went upstairs, to the first floor, where she met two other neighbours. These had just come, and were discussing the event with Madame Caravan, who was giving them the details. Then the four went together to the mortuary chamber. The women went in softly, and, one after the other, sprinkled the bedclothes with the salted water, kneeled down, made the sign of the cross while they mumbled a prayer, then got up, and, open-mouthed, regarded the corpse for a long time, while the daughter-in-law of the dead woman, with her handkerchief to her face, pretended to be sobbing piteously.

When she turned to walk away, whom should she perceive standing close to the door but Marie-Louise and Philippe-Auguste, who were curiously taking stock of things. Then, forgetting to control her temper, she threw herself upon them with up lifted hand, crying out in a furious voice: “Will you get out of this, you brats.”

Ten minutes later, going upstairs again with another contingent of neighbours, she prayed, wept profusely, performed all her duties, and again caught the children following her upstairs. She boxed their ears soundly, but the next time she paid no heed to them, and at each fresh influx of visitors the two urchins followed in the wake, crowded themselves up in a corner, slavishly imitating everything they saw their mother do.

When afternoon came round the crowds of curious people began to diminish, and soon there were no more visitors. Madame Caravan, returning to her own apartments, began to make the necessary preparations for the funeral ceremony, and the deceased was left by herself.

The window of the room was open. A torrid heat entered along with clouds of dust; the flames of the four candles were flickering in the direction of the corpse, and upon the cloth which covered the face, the closed eyes, the two hands stretched out, small flies alighted, came, went, and buzzed up and down incessantly, being the only companions of the old woman during the next hour.

Marie-Louise and Philippe-Auguste, however, had now left the house, and were running up and down the street. They were soon surrounded by their playmates, and by little girls, especially, who were older, and who were interested in the mysteries of life, and asked questions in the manner of persons of great importance.

“Then your grandmother is dead?”

“Yes, she died yesterday evening.”

“What does a dead person look like?”

Then Marie began to explain, telling all about the candles, the sprig of box and the cadaverous face. It was not long before great curiosity was aroused in the breasts of all the children, and they asked to be allowed to go upstairs to look at the departed.

Then Marie-Louise arranged a party for the first visit, consisting of five girls and two boys⁠—the biggest and the most courageous. She made them take off their shoes so that they might not be discovered. The troop filed into the house and mounted the stairs as stealthily as an army of mice.

Once in the chamber, the little girl, imitating her mother, regulated the ceremony. She solemnly walked in advance of her comrades, went down on her knees, made the sign of the cross, moistened the lips of the corpse with a few drops of water, stood up again, sprinkled the bed, and while the children all crowded together were approaching⁠—frightened and curious, and eager to look at the face and hands of the deceased⁠—she began suddenly to simulate sobbing, and to bury her eyes in her little handkerchief. Then, instantly consoled on thinking of the other children downstairs waiting at the door, she withdrew in haste, returning in a minute with another group, and then a third; for all the little ruffians of the neighbourhood, even to the little beggars in rags, had congregated in order to participate in this new pleasure. Each time she repeated her mother’s grimaces with absolute perfection.

At length, however, she tired of it. Some game or another attracted the children away from the house, and the old grandmother was left alone, forgotten suddenly by everybody.

A dismal gloom pervaded the chamber, and upon the dry and rigid features of the corpse the dying flames of the candles cast occasional gleams of light.

Toward eight o’clock, Caravan ascended to the chamber of death, closed the windows, and renewed the candles. On entering now he was quite composed, evidently accustomed to regard the corpse as though it had been there for a month. He even went the length of declaring that, as yet, there were no signs of decomposition, making this remark just at the moment when he and his wife were about to sit down at table. “Pshaw!” she responded, “she is made of wood; she will keep for a year.”

The soup was eaten without a word being uttered by anyone. The children, who had been free all day, were now worn out by fatigue and were sleeping soundly in their chairs, and nobody ventured to break the silence.

Suddenly the flame of the lamp went down. Madame Caravan immediately turned up the wick, a prolonged, gurgling noise ensued, and the light went out. She had forgotten to buy oil during the day. To send for it now to the grocer’s would keep back the dinner, and everybody began to look for candles. But none were to be found except the night lights which had been placed upon the table upstairs, in the death-chamber.

Madame Caravan, always prompt in her decisions, quickly dispatched Marie-Louise to fetch two, and her return was awaited in total darkness.

The footsteps of the girl who had ascended the stairs were distinctly heard. Then followed silence for a few seconds, and then the child descended precipitately. She threw open the door affrighted, and in a choked voice murmured: “Oh! papa, grandmamma is dressing herself!”

Caravan bounded to his feet with such precipitation that his chair rolled over against another chair. He stammered out: “What! What do you say?”

But Marie-Louise, gasping with emotion, repeated: “Grand⁠—grand⁠—grandmamma is putting on her clothes, and is coming downstairs.”

Caravan rushed boldly up the staircase, followed by his wife, dumbfounded; but he came to a standstill before the door of the room, overcome with terror, not daring to enter. What was he going to see? Madame Caravan, more courageous, turned the handle of the door and stepped forward into the room.

The room seemed to be darker, and in the middle of it, a tall emaciated figure moved about. The old woman stood upright, and in awakening from her lethargic sleep, before even full consciousness had returned to her, in turning upon her side and raising herself on her elbow, she had extinguished three of the candles which burned near the mortuary bed. Then, recovering her strength, she got out of bed and began to look for her things. The absence of her chest of drawers had at first given her some trouble, but, after a little, she had succeeded in finding her things at the bottom of the wooden trunk, and was now quietly dressing. She emptied the dishful of salted water, replaced the box which contained the latter behind the looking-glass, arranged the chairs in their places, and was ready to go downstairs when her son and daughter-in-law appeared.

Caravan rushed forward, seized her by the hands, and embraced her with tears in his eyes, while his wife, who was behind him, repeated in a hypocritical tone of voice: “Oh, what a blessing! Oh, what a blessing!”

But the old woman, not at all moved, without even appearing to understand, as rigid as a statue, and with glazed eyes, simply asked: “Will dinner soon be ready?”

He stammered out, not knowing what he said:

“Oh, yes, mother, we have been waiting for you.”

And with an alacrity unusual in him he took her arm, while Madame Caravan the younger seized the candle and lighted them downstairs, walking backward in front of them, step by step, just as she had done the previous night, in front of her husband, when he was carrying the marble.

On reaching the first floor, she ran against people who were ascending. It was the family from Charenton, Madame Braux, followed by her husband.

The wife, tall and fleshy, with the stomach of a victim of dropsy, opened wide her astonished eyes, ready to take flight. The husband, a shoemaker and socialist, a little hairy man, the perfect image of a monkey, murmured, quite unconcerned: “Well, what next? Is she resurrected?”

As soon as Madame Caravan recognized them, she made despairing signs to them; then speaking aloud, she said: “Mercy! How do you mean! Look there! What a happy surprise!”

But Madame Braux, dumbfounded, understood nothing. She responded in a low voice: “It was your telegram which made us come; we believed it was all over.”

Her husband, who was behind her, pinched her to make her keep silent. He added with a malignant laugh, which his thick beard concealed: “It was very kind of you to invite us here. We set out in posthaste”⁠—a remark which showed clearly the hostility that for a long time had reigned between the households. Then, just as the old woman had arrived at the last steps, he pushed forward quickly and rubbed against her cheeks the hair which covered his face, bawling out in her ear, on account of her deafness: “How well you look, mother; sturdy as usual, hey!”

Madame Braux, in her amazement at seeing the old woman alive whom they all believed to be dead, dared not even embrace her; and her enormous bulk blocked up the passage and hindered the others from advancing. The old woman, uneasy and suspicious, but without speaking, looked at everyone around her. Her little gray eyes, piercing and hard, fixed themselves now on the one and now on the other, full of thoughts which could be read by her embarrassed children.

Caravan, to explain matters, said: “She has been somewhat ill, but she is quite better now⁠—quite well, indeed, are you not, mother?”

Then the good woman, stopping in her walk, responded in a husky voice, as though it came from a distance: “It was catalepsy. I heard you all the while.”

An embarrassing silence followed. They entered the dining room, and in a few minutes sat down to an improvised dinner.

Only Monsieur Braux had retained his self-possession; his gorilla features grinned wickedly, while he let fall some words of double meaning which painfully disconcerted everyone.

But the bell in the hall kept on ringing every second; and Rosalie, who had lost her head, came looking for Caravan, who dashed out, throwing down his napkin. His brother-in-law even asked him whether it was not one of his visiting days, to which he stammered out, “No, a few messages; nothing of importance.”

Next, a packet was brought in, which he began to open without thinking, and the death announcements, with black borders, appeared. Reddening up to the very eyes, Caravan closed the envelope, and pushed it into his waistcoat pocket.

His mother had not seen it! She was looking intently at her clock, which stood on the mantelpiece, and the embarrassment increased in midst of a glacial silence. Turning her wrinkled old witch’s face toward her daughter, the old woman, from whose eyes flashed fierce malice, said:

“On Monday bring me your little girl. I want so much to see her.”

Madame Braux, her features illuminated, exclaimed: “Yes, mother, I will,” while Madame Caravan, the younger, became pale, and seemed to be enduring the most excruciating agony. The two men, however, gradually drifted into conversation, and soon became embroiled in a political discussion. Braux maintained the most revolutionary and communistic doctrines, gesticulating and throwing about his arms, his eyes gleaming in his hairy countenance.

“Property, sir,” he said, “is a robbery perpetrated on the working classes; the land is the common property of every man; hereditary rights are an infamy and a disgrace.” But, hereupon, he suddenly stopped, having all the appearance of a man who has just said something foolish: then, resuming, after a pause, he said in softer tones: “But, I can see quite well that this is not the proper moment to discuss things.”

The door was opened, and “Doctor” Chenet appeared. For a moment he seemed bewildered, but regaining his composure, he approached the old woman, and said:

“Ah, ha! mamma, you are better today. Oh! I never had any doubt but you would come round again; in fact, I said to myself as I was mounting the staircase: ‘I have an idea that I shall find the old woman on her feet once more.’ ” Then he tapped her gently on the back: “Ah! she is as solid as the Pont-Neuf, she will bury us all out: you will see if she does not.”

He sat down, accepted the coffee that was offered him, and soon began to join in the conversation of the two men, backing up Braux, for he himself had been mixed up in the Commune.

Now the old woman, feeling herself fatigued, wished to leave the room, at which Caravan rushed forward. She thereupon looked him in the eyes and said to him:

“You must carry my clock and chest of drawers upstairs again without a moment’s delay.”

“Yes, mamma,” he replied, stammering; “yes, I will do so.”

The old woman then took the arm of her daughter and withdrew from the room. The two Caravans remained rooted to the floor, silent, plunged in the deepest despair, while Braux rubbed his hands and sipped his coffee, gleefully.

Suddenly Madame Caravan, consumed with rage, attacked him, exclaiming: “You are a thief, a scoundrel, a cur. I would spit in your face, if⁠—I would⁠—I⁠—would⁠—” She could find nothing further to say, suffocating as she was with rage, while Braux still sipped his coffee, laughing.

His wife, returning just then, rushed at her sister-in-law, and both⁠—the one with her enormous bulk, the other, epileptic and spare⁠—with angry voices and hands trembling, hurled wild insults at each other.

Chenet and Braux now interposed, and the latter, taking his better half by the shoulders, pushed her out of the door in front of him, shouting:

“Get out, you ass: you make too much noise.” Then the two were heard in the street quarrelling with each other, until they had disappeared in the distance.

Monsieur Chenet also took his departure, leaving the Caravans alone, face to face. The husband fell back in his chair, and with the cold sweat standing out in beads on his temples murmured: “What on earth shall I say at the office?”

Boule de Suif

For several days in succession straggling remnants of the routed army had passed through the town. They were not the regular army, but a disjointed rabble, the men unshaven and dirty, their uniforms in tatters, slouching along without regimental colors, without order⁠—worn out, broken down, incapable of thought or resolution, marching from pure habit and dropping with fatigue the moment they stopped. The majority belonged to the militia, men of peaceful pursuits, retired from business, sinking under the weight of their accoutrements; quick-witted little militiamen as prone to terror as they were to enthusiasm, as ready to attack as they were to fly; and here and there a few red trousers, remnants of a company mowed down in one of the big battles; sombre-coated artillerymen, side by side with these various uniforms of the infantry, and now and then the glittering helmet of a heavily booted dragoon who followed with difficulty the march of the lighter-footed soldiers of the line.

Companies of franc-tireurs, heroically named “Avengers of the Defeat,” “Citizens of the Tomb,” “Companions in Death,” passed in their turn, looking like a horde of bandits.

Their chiefs⁠—formerly drapers or corn-dealers, retired soap-boilers or suet-refiners, temporary heroes, created officers for their money or the length of their moustaches, heaped with arms, flannels, and gold lace⁠—talked loudly, discussed plans of campaign, and gave you to understand that they were the sole support of France in her death-agony; but they were generally in terror of their own soldiers, gallows birds, most of them brave to foolhardiness, all of them given to pillage and debauchery.

Report said that the Prussians were about to enter Rouen. The National Guard, which for two months past had made the most careful reconnoitreings in the neighbouring wood, even to the extent of occasionally shooting their own sentries and putting themselves in battle array if a rabbit stirred in the brushwood, had now retired to their domestic hearths; their arms, their uniforms, all the murderous apparatus with which they had been wont to strike terror to the hearts of all beholders for three leagues round, had vanished.

Finally, the last of the French soldiery crossed the Seine on their way to Pont-Audemer by Saint Sever and Bourg-Achard; and then, last of all, came their despairing general tramping on foot between two orderlies, powerless to attempt any action with these disjointed fragments of his forces, himself utterly dazed and bewildered by the downfall of a people accustomed to victory and now so disastrously beaten in spite of its traditional bravery.

After that a profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the category of arms.

Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the shops were closed, the streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close to the walls.

In this anguish of suspense, men longed for the coming of the enemy.

In the latter part of the day following the departure of the French troops, some Uhlans, appearing from goodness knows where, traversed the city hastily. A little later, a black mass descended from the direction of Sainte-Catherine, while two more invading torrents poured in from the roads from Darnétal and Boisguillaume. The advance guards of the three corps converged at the same moment into the square of the Hotel de Ville, while battalion after battalion of the German army wound in through the adjacent streets, making the pavement ring under their heavy rhythmic tramp.

Orders shouted in strange and guttural tones were echoed back by the apparently dead and deserted houses, while from behind the closed shutters eyes peered furtively at the conquerors, masters by right of might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are unavailing. The same phenomenon occurs each time that the established order of things is overthrown, when public security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind elemental force. The earthquake burying an entire population under its falling houses; the flood that carries away the drowned body of the peasant with the carcasses of his cattle and the beams torn from his rooftree; or the victorious army massacring those who defend their lives, and making prisoners of the rest⁠—pillaging in the name of the sword, and thanking God to the roar of cannon⁠—are so many appalling scourges which overthrow all faith in eternal justice, all the confidence we are taught to place in the protection of Providence and the reason of man.

Small detachments now began knocking at the doors and then disappearing into the houses. It was the occupation after the invasion. It now behooved the vanquished to make themselves agreeable to the victors.

After a while, the first alarms having subsided, a new sense of tranquillity began to establish itself. In many families the Prussian officer shared the family meals. Not infrequently he was a gentleman, and out of politeness expressed his commiseration with France and his repugnance at having to take part in such a war. They were grateful enough to him for this sentiment⁠—besides, who knew when they might not be glad of his protection? By gaining his good offices one might have fewer men to feed. And why offend a person on whom one was utterly dependent? That would not be bravery but temerity, a quality of which the citizens of Rouen could no longer be accused as in the days of those heroic defences by which the city had made itself famous. Above all, they said, with the unassailable urbanity of the Frenchman, it was surely permissible to be on politely familiar terms in private, provided one held aloof from the foreign soldier in public. In the street, therefore, they ignored one another’s existence, but once indoors they were perfectly ready to be friendly, and each evening found the German staying longer at the family fireside.

The town itself gradually regained its wonted aspect. The French inhabitants did not come out much, but the Prussian soldiers swarmed in the streets. For the rest, the blue hussar officers who trailed their mighty implements of death so arrogantly over the pavement did not appear to entertain a vastly deeper grade of contempt for the simple townsfolk than did the officers of the Chasseurs who had drunk in the same cafés the year before. Nevertheless there was a something in the air; something subtle and indefinable, an intolerably unfamiliar atmosphere like a widely diffused odour⁠—the odour of invasion. It filled the private dwellings and the public places, it affected the taste of food, and gave one the impression of being on a journey, far away from home, among barbarous and dangerous tribes.

The conquerors demanded money⁠—a great deal of money. The inhabitants paid and went on paying; for the matter of that, they were rich. But the wealthier a Normandy tradesman becomes, the more keenly he suffers at each sacrifice each time he sees the smallest particle of his fortune pass into the hands of another.

Two or three leagues beyond the town, however, following the course of the river about Croisset, Dieppedalle or Biessard, the sailors and the fishermen would often drag up the swollen corpse of some uniformed German, killed by a knife-thrust or a kick, his head smashed in by a stone, or thrown into the water from some bridge. The slime of the river bed swallowed up many a deed of vengeance, obscure, savage, and legitimate; unknown acts of heroism, silent onslaughts more perilous to the doer than battles in the light of day and without the trumpet blasts of glory.

For hatred of the Alien is always strong enough to arm some intrepid beings who are ready to die for an Idea.

At last, seeing that though the invaders had subjected the city to their inflexible discipline they had not committed any of the horrors with which rumour had accredited them throughout the length of their triumphal progress, the public took courage and the commercial spirit began once more to stir in the hearts of the local tradespeople. Some of them who had grave interests at stake at Havre, then occupied by the French army, purposed trying to reach that port by going overland to Dieppe and there taking ship.

They took advantage of the influence of German officers whose acquaintance they had made, and a passport was obtained from the general in command.

Having therefore engaged a large diligence with four horses for the journey, and ten persons having entered their names at the livery stable office, they resolved to start on the Tuesday morning before daybreak, to avoid all public remark.

For some days already the ground had been hard with frost, and on the Monday, about three o’clock in the afternoon, thick dark clouds coming up from the north brought the snow, which fell without intermission all the evening and during the whole night.

At half past four the travellers were assembled in the courtyard of the Hotel de Normandie, from whence they were to start.

They were all still half asleep, their teeth chattering with cold in spite of their thick wraps. It was difficult to distinguish one from another in the darkness, their heaped-up winter clothing making them look like fat priests in long cassocks. Two of the men, however, recognized each other; they were joined by a third, and they began to talk. “I am taking my wife with me,” said one. “So am I.” “And I too.” The first one added: “We shall not return to Rouen, and if the Prussians come to Havre we shall slip over to England.”

They were all like-minded and all had the same project.

Meanwhile there was no sign of the horses being put in. A small lantern carried by a hostler appeared from time to time out of one dark doorway only to vanish instantly into another. There was a stamping of horses’ hoofs deadened by the straw of the litter, and the voice of a man speaking to the animal and cursing sounded from the depths of the stables. A faint sound of bells gave evidence of harnessing, and became presently a clear and continuous jingle timed by the movement of the beast, now stopping, now going on again with a brisk shake, and accompanied by the dull tramp of hobnailed sabots.

A door closed sharply. All sound ceased. The frozen travellers were silent, standing stiff and motionless. A continuous curtain of white snowflakes glistened as it fell to the ground, blotting out the shape of things, powdering everything with an icy froth; and in the utter stillness of the town, quiet and buried under its winter pall, nothing was audible but this faint, fluttering, and indefinable rustle of falling snow⁠—more a sensation than a sound⁠—the intermingling of ethereal atoms seeming to fill space, to cover the world.

The man reappeared with his lantern, dragging after him by a rope a dejected and unwilling horse. He pushed it against the pole, fixed the traces, and was occupied for a long time in buckling the harness, having only the use of one hand as he carried the lantern in the other. As he turned away to fetch the other horse he caught sight of the motionless group of travellers, by this time white with snow. “Why don’t you get inside the carriage?” he said, “you would at least be under cover.”

It had never occurred to them, and they made a rush for it. The three men packed their wives into the upper end and then got in themselves, after which other distinct and veiled forms took the remaining seats without exchanging a word.

The floor of the vehicle was covered with straw into which the feet sank. The ladies at the end, who had brought little copper charcoal foot-warmers, proceeded to light them, and for some time discussed their merits in subdued tones, repeating to one another things which they had known all their lives.

At last, the diligence having been furnished with six horses instead of four on account of the difficulties of the road, a voice outside asked, “Is everybody here?” A voice from within answered “Yes,” and they started.

The conveyance advanced slowly⁠—slowly⁠—the wheels sinking in the snow; the whole vehicle groaned and creaked, the horses slipped, wheezed, and smoked, and the driver’s gigantic whip cracked incessantly, flying from side to side, twining and untwining like a slender snake, and cutting sharply across one or other of the six humping backs, which would thereupon straighten up with a more violent effort.

Imperceptibly the day grew. The airy flakes which a traveller⁠—a true-born Rouennais⁠—likened to a shower of cotton, had ceased to fall; a dirty grey light filtered through the heavy thick clouds which served to heighten the dazzling whiteness of the landscape, where now a long line of trees crusted with icicles would appear, now a cottage with a hood of snow.

In the light of this melancholy dawn the occupants of the diligence began to examine one another curiously.

Right at the end, in the best seats, opposite to one another, dozed Madame and Monsieur Loiseau, wholesale wine merchant of the Rue Grand Pont.

The former salesman of a master who had become bankrupt, Loiseau had bought up the stock and made his fortune. He sold very bad wine at very low prices to the small country retail dealers, and enjoyed the reputation among his friends and acquaintances of being an unmitigated rogue, a thorough Norman full of trickery and jovial humour.

His character for knavery was so well established that one evening at the Prefecture, Monsieur Tournel, a man of keen and trenchant wit, author of certain fables and songs⁠—a local celebrity⁠—seeing the ladies growing drowsy, proposed a game of “L’oiseau vole.”4 The pun itself flew through the prefect’s reception rooms and afterwards through the town, and for a whole month called up a grin on every face in the province.

Loiseau was himself a noted wag and famous for his jokes both good and bad, and nobody ever mentioned him without adding immediately, “That man, Loiseau, is simply priceless!”

He was of medium height with a balloon-like stomach and a rubicund face framed in grizzled whiskers. His wife⁠—tall, strong, resolute, loud in voice and rapid of decision⁠—represented order and arithmetic in the business, which he enlivened by his jollity and bustling activity.

Beside them, in a more dignified attitude as befitted his superior station, sat Monsieur Carré-Lamadon, a man of weight; an authority on cotton, proprietor of three spinning factories, officer of the Legion of Honour and member of the General Council. All the time of the Empire he had remained leader of a friendly opposition, for the sole purpose of making a better thing out of it when he came round to the cause which he had fought with polite weapons, to use his own expression. Madame Carré-Lamadon, who was much younger than her husband, was the consolation of all officers of good family who might be quartered at the Rouen garrison. She sat there opposite to her husband, very small, very dainty, very pretty, wrapped in her furs, and regarding the lamentable interior of the vehicle with despairing eyes.

Their neighbours, the Count and Countess Hubert de Bréville, bore one of the most ancient and noble names in Normandy. The Count, an elderly gentleman of dignified appearance, did all in his power to accentuate by every artifice of the toilet his natural resemblance to Henri Quatre, who, according to a legend of the utmost glory to the family, had honoured with his royal embraces a Dame de Bréville, whose husband, in consequence, had been made Count and Governor of the province.

A colleague of Monsieur Carré-Lamadon in the General Council, Count Hubert represented the Orléanist faction in the department. The history of his marriage with the daughter of a small tradesman of Nantes had always remained a mystery. But as the Countess had an air of grandeur, understood better than anyone else the art of receiving, passed even for having been beloved by one of the sons of Louis Philippe, the neighbouring nobility bowed down to her, and her salon held the first place in the county, the only one which preserved the traditions of old-fashioned gallantry and to which the entrée was difficult.

The fortune of the Brévilles⁠—all in Government Funds⁠—was reported to yield them an income of five hundred thousand francs.

The six passengers occupied the upper end of the conveyance, the representatives of revenued society, serene in the consciousness of its strength⁠—honest well-to-do people possessed of Religion and Principles.

By some strange chance all the women were seated on the same side, the Countess having two Sisters of Mercy for neighbours, wholly occupied in fingering their long rosaries and mumbling Paters and Aves. One of them was old and so deeply pitted with the smallpox that she looked as if she had received a charge of grapeshot full in the face; the other was very shadowy and frail, with a pretty unhealthy little face, a narrow phthisical chest, consumed by that devouring faith which creates martyrs and ecstatics.

Seated opposite to the two nuns were a man and woman who excited a good deal of attention.

The man, who was well known, was Cornudet, “the Democrat,” the terror of all respectable, law-abiding people. For twenty years he had dipped his great red beard into the beer mugs of all the democratic cafés. In the company of kindred spirits he had managed to run through a comfortable little fortune inherited from his father, a confectioner, and he looked forward with impatience to the Republic, when he should obtain the well-merited reward for so many revolutionary draughts. On the Fourth of September⁠—probably through some practical joke⁠—he understood that he had been appointed prefect, but on attempting to enter upon his duties the clerks, who had remained sole masters of the offices, refused to recognize him, and he was constrained to retire. For the rest, he was a good fellow, inoffensive and serviceable, and had busied himself with incomparable industry in organizing the defence of the town; had had holes dug all over the plain, cut down all the young trees in the neighbouring woods, scattered pitfalls up and down all the high roads, and at the threatened approach of the enemy⁠—satisfied with his preparations⁠—had fallen back with all haste on the town. He now considered that he would be more useful in Havre, where fresh entrenchments would soon become necessary.

The woman, one of the so-called “gay” sisterhood, was noted for her precocious stoutness, which had gained her the nickname of “Boule de Suif”⁠—“ball of fat.” She was a little roly-poly creature, cushioned with fat, with podgy fingers squeezed in at the joints like rows of thick, short sausages; her skin tightly stretched and shiny, her bust enormous, and yet she was attractive and much sought after, her freshness was so pleasant. Her face was like a ruddy apple⁠—a peony rose just burst into bloom⁠—and out of it gazed a pair of magnificent dark eyes overshadowed by long thick lashes that deepened their blackness; and lower down, a charming little mouth, dewy to the kiss, and furnished with a row of tiny milk-white teeth. Over and above all this she was, they said, full of inestimable qualities.

No sooner was her identity recognized than a whisper ran through the ladies in which the words “prostitute” and “public scandal,” were so conspicuously distinct that she raised her head and retaliated by sweeping her companions with such a bold and defiant look that deep silence instantly fell upon them, and they all cast down their eyes with the exception of Loiseau, who watched her with a kindling eye.

However, conversation was soon resumed between the three ladies, whom the presence of this “person” had suddenly rendered friendly⁠—almost intimate. It seemed to them that they must, as it were, raise a rampart of their dignity as spouses between them and this shameless creature who made a traffic of herself; for legalized love always takes a high hand with her unlicensed sister.

The three men too, drawn to one another by a conservative instinct at sight of Cornudet, talked money in a certain tone of contempt for the impecunious. Count Hubert spoke of the damage inflicted on him by the Prussians, of the losses which would result to him from the seizing of cattle and from ruined crops, but with all the assurance of a great landed proprietor, ten times millionaire, whom these ravages might inconvenience for the space of a year at most. Monsieur Carré-Lamadon, of great experience in the cotton industry, had taken the precaution to send six hundred thousand francs across to England as provision against a rainy day. As for Loiseau, he made arrangements to sell all the common wines in his cellars to the French commission of supplies, consequently the Government owed him a formidable sum, which he counted upon receiving at Havre.

The three exchanged rapid and amicable glances. Although differing in position they felt themselves brothers in money, and of the great freemasonry of those who possess, of those who can make the gold jingle when they put their hands in the breeches-pockets.

The diligence went so slowly that by ten o’clock in the morning they had not made four leagues. The men got out three times and climbed the hill on foot. They began to grow anxious, for they were to have lunched at Totes, and now they despaired of reaching that place before night. Everybody was on the lookout for some inn by the way, when the vehicle stuck fast in a snowdrift, and it took two hours to get it out.

Meanwhile the pangs of hunger began to affect them severely both in mind and body, and yet not an inn, not a tavern even, was to be seen; the approach of the Prussians and the passage of the famished French troops had frightened away all trade.

The gentlemen foraged diligently for the provisions in the farms by the roadside; but they failed to obtain so much as a piece of bread, for the mistrustful peasant hid all reserve stores for fear of being pillaged by the soldiers, who, having no food supplied to them, took by force everything they could lay their hands on.

Towards one o’clock Loiseau announced that he felt a very decided void in his stomach. Everybody had been suffering in the same manner for a long time, and the violent longing for food had extinguished conversation.

From time to time someone would yawn, to be almost immediately imitated by another and then each of the rest in turn, and according to their disposition, manners, or social standing, would open their mouth noisily, or modestly cover with the hand the gaping cavity from which the breath issued in a vapour.

Boule de Suif had several times stooped down as if feeling for something under her skirts. She hesitated a moment, looked at her companions, and then composedly resumed her former position. The faces were pale and drawn. Loiseau declared he would give a thousand francs for a ham. His wife made a faint movement as to protest, but restrained herself. It always affected her painfully to hear of money being thrown away, nor could she even understand a joke upon the subject.

“To tell the truth,” said the Count, “I do not feel quite myself either⁠—how could I have omitted to think of bringing provisions?” And everybody reproached themselves with the same neglectfulness.

Cornudet, however, had a flask of rum which he offered round. It was coldly refused. Loiseau alone accepted a mouthful, and handed back the flask with thanks saying, “That’s good! that warms you up and keeps the hunger off a bit.” The alcohol raised his spirits somewhat, and he proposed that they should do the same as on the little ship in the song⁠—eat the fattest of the passengers. This indirect but obvious allusion to Boule de Suif shocked the gentle people. Nobody responded and only Cornudet smiled. The two Sisters of Mercy had ceased to tell their beads and sat motionless, their hands buried in their wide sleeves, their eyes obstinately lowered, doubtless engaged in offering back to Heaven the sacrifice of suffering which it sent them.

At last, at three o’clock, when they were in the middle of an interminable stretch of bare country without a single village in sight, Boule de Suif, stooping hurriedly, drew from under the seat a large basket covered with a white napkin.

Out of it she took, first of all, a little china plate and a delicate silver drinking-cup, and then an immense dish, in which two whole fowls ready carved lay stiffened in their jelly. Other good things were visible in the basket: patties, fruits, pastry⁠—in fact provisions for a three days’ journey in order to be independent of inn cookery. The necks of four bottles protruded from between the parcels of food. She took the wing of a fowl and began to eat it daintily with one of those little rolls which they call “Regence” in Normandy.

Every eye was fixed upon her. As the odour of the food spread through the carriage nostrils began to quiver and mouths to fill with water, while the jaws, just below the ears, contracted painfully. The dislike entertained by the ladies for this abandoned young woman grew savage, almost to the point of longing to murder her or at least to turn her out into the snow, her and her drinking-cup and her basket and her provisions.

Loiseau, however, was devouring the dish of chicken with his eyes. “Madame has been more prudent than we,” he said. “Some people always think of everything.”

She turned her head in his direction. “If you would care for any, Monsieur⁠—? It is not comfortable to fast for so long.”

He bowed. “By Jove!⁠—frankly, I won’t refuse. I can’t stand this any longer⁠—the fortune of war, is it not, madame?” And with a comprehensive look he added: “In moments such as this we are only too glad to find anyone who will oblige us.” He had a newspaper which he spread on his knee to save his trousers, and with the point of a knife which he always carried in his pocket he captured a drumstick all glazed with jelly, tore it with his teeth, and then proceeded to chew it with satisfaction so evident that a deep groan of distress went up from the whole party.

Upon this Boule de Suif in a gentle and humble tone invited the two Sisters to share the collation. They both accepted on the spot, and without raising their eyes began to eat very hurriedly, after stammering a few words of thanks. Nor did Cornudet refuse his neighbour’s offer, and with the Sisters they formed a kind of table by spreading out newspapers on their knees.

The jaws opened and shut without a pause, biting, chewing, gulping ferociously. Loiseau, hard at work in his corner, urged his wife in a low voice to follow his example. She resisted for some time, then, after a pang which gripped her very vitals, she gave in. Whereupon her husband, rounding off his phrases, asked if their “charming fellow-traveller” would permit him to offer a little something to Madame Loiseau.

“Why, yes, certainly, Monsieur,” she answered with a pleasant smile, and handed him the dish.

There was a moment of embarrassment when the first bottle of claret was uncorked⁠—there was but the one drinking-cup. Each one wiped it before passing it to the rest. Cornudet alone, from an impulse of gallantry no doubt, placed his lips on the spot still wet from the lips of his neighbour.

Then it was that, surrounded by people who were eating, suffocated by the fragrant odour of the viands, the Count and Countess de Bréville and Monsieur and Madame Carré-Lamadon suffered the agonies of that torture which has ever been associated with the name of Tantalus. Suddenly the young wife of the cotton manufacturer gave a deep sigh. Every head turned towards her; she was as white as the snow outside, her eyes closed, her head fell forward⁠—she had fainted. Her husband, distraught with fear, implored assistance of the whole company. All lost their heads till the elder of the two Sisters, who supported the unconscious lady, forced Boule de Suif’s drinking-cup between her lips and made her swallow a few drops of wine. The pretty creature stirred, opened her eyes, smiled and then declared in an expiring voice that she felt quite well now. But to prevent her being overcome again in the same manner, the Sister induced her to drink a full cup of wine, adding, “It is simply hunger⁠—nothing else.”

At this Boule de Suif, blushing violently, looked at the four starving passengers and faltered shyly, “Mon Dieu! If I might make so bold as to offer the ladies and gentlemen⁠—” She stopped short, fearing a rude rebuff.

Loiseau, however, at once threw himself into the breach. “Parbleu! under such circumstances we are all companions in misfortune and bound to help each other. Come, ladies, don’t stand on ceremony⁠—take what you can get and be thankful: who knows whether we shall be able to find so much as a house where we can spend the night? At this rate we shall not reach Tôtes till tomorrow afternoon.”

They still hesitated, nobody having the courage to take upon themselves the responsibility of the decisive “Yes.” Finally the Count seized the bull by the horns. Adopting his most grandiose air, he turned with a bow to the embarrassed young woman and said, “We accept your offer with thanks, madame.”

The first step only was difficult. The Rubicon once crossed, they fell to with a will. They emptied the basket, which contained, besides the provisions already mentioned: a pâté de foie gras, a lark pie, a piece of smoked tongue, some pears, a slab of gingerbread, mixed biscuits, and a cup of pickled onions and gherkins in vinegar⁠—for, like all women, Boule de Suif adored pickles.

They could not well eat the young woman’s provisions and not speak to her, so they conversed⁠—stiffly at first, and then, seeing that she showed no signs of presuming, with less reserve. Mesdames de Bréville and Carré-Lamadon, having a great deal of savoir vivre, knew how to make themselves agreeable with tact and delicacy. The Countess, in particular, exhibited the amiable condescension of the extremely highborn lady whom no contact can sully, and was charming. But big Madame Loiseau, who had the soul of a gendarme, remained unmoved, speaking little and eating much.

The conversation naturally turned upon the war. They related horrible deeds committed by the Prussians and examples of the bravery of the French; all these people who were flying rendering full homage to the courage of those who remained behind. Incidents of personal experience soon followed, and Boule de Suif told, with that warmth of colouring which women of her type often employ in expressing their natural feelings, how she had come to leave Rouen.

“I thought at first I should be able to hold out,” she said, “for I had plenty of provisions in my house, and would much rather feed a few soldiers than turn out of my home and go goodness knows where. But when I saw them⁠—these Prussians⁠—it was too much for me. They made my blood boil with rage, and I cried the whole day for shame. Oh, if I had only been a man!⁠—well, there! I watched them from my window⁠—fat pigs that they were with their spiked helmets⁠—and my servant had to hold my hands to prevent me throwing the furniture down on the top of them. Then some of them came to be quartered on me, and I flew at the throat of the first one⁠—they are not harder to strangle than anyone else⁠—and would have finished him too if they had not dragged me off by the hair. Of course I had to lie low after that. So as soon as I found an opportunity I left⁠—and here I am.”

Everybody congratulated her. She rose considerably in the estimation of her companions, who had not shown themselves of such valiant mettle, and listening to her tale, Cornudet smiled the benignant and approving smile of an apostle⁠—as a priest might on hearing a devout person praise the Almighty; democrats with long beards having the monopoly of patriotism as the men of the cassock possess that of religion. He then took up the parable in a didactic tone with the phraseology culled from the notices posted each day on the walls, and finished up with a flourish of eloquence in which he scathingly alluded to “that blackguard Badinguet.”5

But Boule de Suif fired up at this for she was a Bonapartist. She turned upon him with scarlet cheeks and stammering with indignation, “Ah! I should just like to have seen any of you in his place! A nice mess you would have made of it! It is men of your sort that ruined him, poor man. There would be nothing for it but to leave France for good if we were governed by cowards like you!”

Cornudet, nothing daunted, preserved a disdainful and superior smile, but there was a feeling in the air that high words would soon follow, whereupon the Count interposed, and managed, not without difficulty, to quiet the infuriated young woman by asserting authoritatively that every sincere opinion was to be respected. Nevertheless the Countess and the manufacturer’s wife, who nourished in their hearts the unreasoning hatred of all well-bred people for the Republic and at the same time that instinctive weakness of all women for uniformed and despotic governments, felt drawn, in spite of themselves, to this woman of the street who had so much sense of the fitness of things and whose opinions so closely resembled their own.

The basket was empty⁠—this had not been difficult among ten of them⁠—they only regretted it was not larger. The conversation was kept up for some little time longer, although somewhat more coldly after they had finished eating.

The night fell, the darkness grew gradually more profound, and the cold, to which digestion rendered them more sensitive, made even Boule de Suif shiver in spite of her fat. Madame de Bréville thereupon offered her her charcoal foot-warmer, which had been replenished several times since the morning; she accepted with alacrity, for her feet were like ice. Mesdames Carré-Lamadon and Loiseau lent theirs to the two Sisters.

The driver had lit his lanterns, which shed a vivid light over the cloud of vapour that hung over the steaming backs of the horses and over the snow at each side of the road, which seemed to open out under the shifting reflection of the lights.

Inside the conveyance nothing could be distinguished any longer, but there was a sudden movement between Boule de Suif and Cornudet, and Loiseau, peering through the gloom, fancied he saw the man with the beard start back quickly as if he had received a well-directed but noiseless blow.

Tiny points of fire appeared upon the road in front. It was Tôtes. The travellers had been driving for eleven hours, which, with the four half-hours for food and rest to the horses, made thirteen. They entered the town and stopped in front of the Hôtel du Commerce.

The door opened. A familiar sound caused every passenger to tremble⁠—it was the clink of a scabbard on the stones. At the same moment a German voice called out something.

Although the diligence had stopped, nobody attempted to get out, as though they expected to be massacred on setting foot to the ground. The driver then appeared holding up one of the lanterns, which suddenly illumined the vehicle to its farthest corner and revealed the two rows of bewildered faces with their open mouths and startled eyes wide with alarm.

Beside the driver in the full glare of the light stood a German officer, a tall young man excessively slender and blonde, compressed into his uniform like a girl in her stays, and wearing, well over one ear, a flat black wax-cloth cap like the “Boots” of an English hotel. His preposterously long moustache, which was drawn out stiff and straight, and tapered away indefinitely to each side till it finished off in a single thread so thin that it was impossible to say where it ended, seemed to weigh upon the corners of his mouth and form a deep furrow in either cheek.

In Alsatian-French and stern accents he invited the passengers to descend: “Vill you get out, chentlemen and laties?”

The two Sisters were the first to obey with the docility of holy women accustomed to unfaltering submission. The Count and Countess appeared next, followed by the manufacturer and his wife, and after them Loiseau pushing his better half in front of him. As he set foot to the ground he remarked to the officer, more from motives of prudence than politeness, “Good evening, Monsieur,” to which the other with the insolence of the man in possession, vouchsafed no reply but a stare.

Boule de Suif and Cornudet, though the nearest the door, were the last to emerge⁠—grave and haughty in face of the enemy. The buxom young woman struggled hard to command herself and be calm; the democrat tugged at his long rusty beard with a tragic and slightly trembling hand. They sought to preserve their dignity, realizing that in such encounters each one, to a certain extent, represents his country; and the two being similarly disgusted at the servile readiness of their companions, she endeavored to show herself prouder than her fellow travellers who were honest women, while he, feeling that he must set an example, continued in his attitude his mission of resistance begun by digging pitfalls in the high roads.

They all entered the huge kitchen of the inn, and the German, having been presented with the passport signed by the general in command⁠—where each traveller’s name was accompanied by a personal description and a statement as to his or her profession⁠—he proceeded to scrutinize the party for a long time, comparing the persons with the written notices.

Finally, he exclaimed unceremoniously, “That’s all right,” and disappeared.

They breathed again more freely. Hunger having reasserted itself, supper was ordered. It would take half an hour to prepare, so while two servants were apparently busied about it the travellers dispersed to look at their rooms. These were all together down each side of a long passage ending in a door marked “Toilet.”

At last, just as they were sitting down to table, the innkeeper himself appeared. He was a former horse-dealer, a stout asthmatic man with perpetual wheezings and blowings and rattlings of phlegm in his throat. His father had transmitted to him the name of Follenvie.

“Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset?” he said.

Boule de Suif started and turned round. “That is my name.”

“Mademoiselle, the Prussian officer wants to speak to you at once.”

“To me?”

“Yes, if you really are Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset.”

She hesitated, thought for a moment, and then declared roundly: “That may be, but I’m not going.”

There was a movement round about her⁠—everybody was much exercised as to the reason of this summons. The Count came over to her.

“You may do wrong to refuse, madame, for it may entail considerable annoyance not only on yourself but on the rest of your companions. It is a fatal mistake ever to offer resistance to people who are stronger than ourselves. The step can have no possible danger for you⁠—it is probably about some little formality that has been omitted.”

One and all concurred with him, implored and urged and scolded, till they ended by convincing her; for they were all apprehensive of the results of her obstinacy.

“Well, it is only for your sakes that I am doing it!” she said at last. The Countess pressed her hand. “And we are most grateful to you.”

She left the room, and the others agreed to wait for her before beginning the meal. Each one lamented at not having been asked for instead of this hotheaded, violent young woman, and mentally prepared any number of platitudes for the event of being called in their turn.

At the end of ten minutes she returned, crimson with rage, choking, snorting⁠—“Oh, the blackguard; the low blackguard!” she stammered.

They all crowded round her to know what had happened, but she would not say, and the Count becoming insistent, she answered with much dignity, “No, it does not concern anybody! I can’t speak of it.”

They then seated themselves round a great soup tureen from which steamed a smell of cabbage. In spite of this little contretemps the supper was a gay one. The cider, of which the Loiseaus and the two nuns partook from motives of economy, was good. The rest ordered wine and Cornudet called for beer. He had a particular way of uncorking the bottle, of making the liquid froth, of gazing at it while he tilted the glass, which he then held up between his eye and the light to enjoy the color; while he drank, his great beard, which had the tints of his favourite beverage, seemed to quiver fondly, his eyes squinting that he might not lose sight of his tankard for a moment, and altogether he had the appearance of fulfilling the sole function for which he had been born. You would have said that he established in his own mind some connection or affinity between the two great passions that monopolized his life⁠—Ale and Revolution⁠—and most assuredly he never tasted the one without thinking of the other.

Monsieur and Madame Follenvie dined at the farther end of the table. The husband⁠—puffing and blowing like an exploded locomotive⁠—had too much cold on the chest to be able to speak and eat at the same time, but his wife never ceased talking. She described her every impression at the arrival of the Prussians and all they did and all they said, execrating them in the first place because they cost so much, and secondly because she had two sons in the army. She addressed herself chiefly to the Countess, as it flattered her to be able to say she had conversed with a lady of quality.

She presently lowered her voice and proceeded to recount some rather delicate matters, her husband breaking in from time to time with⁠—“You had much better hold your tongue, Madame Follenvie,”⁠—to which she paid not the slightest attention, but went on.

“Well, madame, as I was saying⁠—these men, they do nothing but eat potatoes and pork and pork and potatoes from morning till night. And as for their habits⁠—! Saving your presence, they make dirt everywhere. And you should see them exercising for hours and days together out there in the fields⁠—It’s forward march and backward march, and turn this way and turn that. If they even worked in the fields or mended the roads in their own country! But, no, madame, these soldiers are no good to anybody, and the poor people have to keep them and feed them simply that they may learn how to murder. I know I am only a poor ignorant old woman, but when I see these men wearing themselves out by tramping up and down from morning till night, I cannot help saying to myself, if there are some people who make a lot of useful discoveries, why should others give themselves so much trouble to do harm? After all, isn’t it an abomination to kill anybody, no matter whether they are Prussians, or English, or Poles, or French? If you revenge yourself on someone who has harmed you, that is wicked, for you are punished; but let them shoot down our sons as if they were game, and it is all right, and they give medals to the man who kills the most. No, no, I say, I shall never be able to see any rhyme or reason in that!”

“War is barbarous if one attacks an unoffending neighbour⁠—it is a sacred duty if one defends one’s country,” remarked Cornudet in a declamatory tone.

The old woman drooped her head. “Yes⁠—defending oneself, of course, that is quite another thing; but wouldn’t it be better to kill all these kings who do this for their pleasure?”

Cornudet’s eyes flashed. “Bravo, citizeness!” he cried.

Monsieur Carré-Lamadon was lost in thought. Although he was an ardent admirer of famous military men, the sound common sense of this peasant woman made him reflect upon the wealth which would necessarily accrue to the country if all these unemployed and consequently ruinous hands⁠—so much unproductive force⁠—were available for the great industrial works that would take centuries to complete.

Loiseau meanwhile had left his seat and gone over beside the innkeeper, to whom he began talking in a low voice. The fat man laughed, coughed, and spat, his unwieldy stomach shaking with mirth at his neighbour’s jokes, and he bought six hogsheads of claret from him for the spring when the Prussians would have cleared out.

Supper was scarcely over when, dropping with fatigue, everybody went off to bed.

Loiseau, however, who had noticed certain things, let his wife go to bed and proceeded to glue first his ear and then his eye to the keyhole, endeavouring to penetrate what he called “the mysteries of the corridor.”

After about an hour he heard a rustling, and hurrying to the keyhole, he perceived Boule de Suif looking ampler than ever in a dressing-gown of blue cashmere trimmed with white lace. She had a candle in her hand and was going towards the door at the end of the corridor. Then a door at one side opened cautiously, and when she returned after a few minutes, Cornudet in his shirtsleeves was following her. They were talking in a low voice and presently stood still; Boule de Suif apparently defending the entrance of her room with much energy. Unfortunately Loiseau was unable to hear what they said, but at last, as they raised their voices somewhat, he caught a word or two. Cornudet was insisting eagerly. “Look here,” he said, “you are really very ridiculous⁠—what difference can it make to you?”

And she with an offended air retorted, “No!⁠—let me tell you there are moments when that sort of thing won’t do; and besides⁠—here⁠—it would be a crying shame.”

He obviously did not understand. “Why?”

At this she grew angry. “Why?” and she raised her voice still more, “you don’t see why? and there are Prussians in the house⁠—in the next room for all you know!”

He made no reply. This display of patriotic prudery evidently aroused his failing dignity, for with a brief kiss he made for his own door on tiptoe.

Loiseau, deeply thrilled and amused, executed a double shuffle in the middle of the room, donned his nightcap, slipped into the blankets where the bony figure of his spouse already reposed, and waking her with a kiss he murmured: “Do you love me, darling?”

The whole house sank to silence. But anon there arose from somewhere⁠—it might have been the cellar, it might have been the attics⁠—impossible to determine the direction⁠—a rumbling⁠—sonorous, even, regular, dull, prolonged roar as of a boiler under high steam pressure: Monsieur Follenvie slept.

It had been decided that they should start at eight o’clock the next morning, so they were all assembled in the kitchen by that hour; but the diligence, roofed with snow, stood solitary in the middle of the courtyard without horses or driver. The latter was sought for in vain either in the stables or in the coachhouse. The men of the party then resolved to beat the country round for him, and went out accordingly. They found themselves in the public square with the church at one end, and low-roofed houses down each side in which they caught sight of Prussian soldiers. The first one they came upon was peeling potatoes; farther on another was washing out a barber’s shop; while a third, bearded to the eyes, was soothing a crying child and rocking it to and fro on his knee to quiet it. The big peasant women whose men were all “with the army in the war” were ordering about their docile conquerors and showing them by signs what work they wanted done⁠—chopping wood, grinding coffee, fetching water; one of them was even doing the washing for his hostess, a helpless old crone.

The Count, much astonished, stopped the beadle, who happened to come out of the priest’s house at that moment, and asked the meaning of it all.

“Oh,” replied the old church rat, “these are not at all bad. From what I hear they are not Prussians, either; they come from farther off, but where I can’t say; and they have all left a wife and children at home. I am very sure the women down there are crying for their men, too, and it will all make a nice lot of misery for them as well as for us. We are not so badly off here for the moment, because they do no harm and are working just as if they were in their own homes. You see, Monsieur, the poor always help one another; it is the bigwigs who make the wars.”

Cornudet, indignant at the friendly understanding established between the victors and the vanquished, retired from the scene, preferring to shut himself up in the inn. Loiseau of course must have his joke. “They are re-populating,” he said. Monsieur Carré-Lamadon found a more fitting expression. “They are making reparations.”

But the driver was nowhere to be found. At last he was unearthed in the village café hobnobbing fraternally with the officer’s orderly.

“Did you not have orders to have the diligence ready by eight o’clock?” the Count asked him.

“Oh, yes, but I got another order later on.”

“What?”

“Not to put the horses in at all.”

“Who gave you that order?”

“Why⁠—the Prussian commandant.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know⁠—you had better ask him. I am told not to harness the horses, and so I don’t harness them⁠—there you are.”

“Did he tell you so himself?”

“No, Monsieur, the innkeeper brought me the message from him.”

“When was that?”

“Last night, just as I was going to bed.”

The three men returned much disconcerted. They asked for Monsieur Follenvie, but were informed by the servant that on account of his asthma he never got up before ten o’clock⁠—he had even positively forbidden them to awaken him before then except in case of fire.

Then they asked to see the officer, but that was absolutely impossible, although he lodged at the inn.

Monsieur Follenvie alone was authorized to approach him on nonmilitary matters. So they had to wait. The women returned to their rooms and occupied themselves as best they could.

Cornudet installed himself in the high chimney-corner of the kitchen, where a great fire was burning. He had one of the little coffee-room tables brought to him and a can of beer, and puffed away placidly at his pipe, which enjoyed among the democrats almost equal consideration with himself, as if in serving Cornudet it served the country also. The pipe was a superb meerschaum, admirably coloured, black as the teeth of its owner, but fragrant, curved, shining familiar to his hand, and the natural complement to his physiognomy. He sat there motionless, his eyes fixed alternately on the flame of the hearth and the foam on the top of his tankard, and each time after drinking he passed his bony fingers with a self-satisfied gesture through his long greasy hair, while he absorbed the fringe of froth from his moustache.

Under the pretext of stretching his legs, Loiseau went out and palmed off his wines on the country retail dealers. The Count and the manufacturer talked politics. They forecast the future of France, the one putting his faith in the Orléans, the other in an unknown saviour, a hero who would come to the fore when things were at their very worst⁠—a Du Guesclin, a Joan of Arc perhaps, or even another Napoleon I. Ah, if only the Prince Imperial were not so young! Cornudet listened to them with the smile of a man who could solve the riddle of Fate if he would. His pipe perfumed the whole kitchen with its balmy fragrance.

On the stroke of ten Monsieur Follenvie made his appearance. They instantly attacked him with questions, but he had but one answer which he repeated two or three times without variation. “The officer said to me, ‘Monsieur Follenvie, you will forbid them to harness the horses for these travellers tomorrow morning. They are not to leave till I give my permission. You understand?’ That is all.”

They demanded to see the officer; the Count sent up his card, on which Monsieur Carré-Lamadon added his name and all his titles. The Prussian sent word that he would admit the two men to his presence after he had lunched, that is to say, about one o’clock.

The ladies came down and they all managed to eat a little in spite of their anxiety. Boule de Suif looked quite ill and very much agitated.

They were just finishing coffee when the orderly arrived to fetch the two gentlemen.

Loiseau joined them, but when they proposed to bring Cornudet along to give more solemnity to their proceedings, he declared haughtily that nothing would induce him to enter into any communication whatsoever with the Germans, and he returned to his chimney-corner and ordered another bottle of beer.

The three men went upstairs, and were shown into the best room in the inn, where they were received by the officer lolling in an armchair, his heels on the chimneypiece, smoking a long porcelain pipe, and arrayed in a flamboyant dressing-gown, taken, no doubt, from the abandoned dwelling-house of some bourgeois of inferior taste. He did not rise, he vouchsafed them no greeting of any description, he did not even look at them⁠—a brilliant sample of the victorious military cad.

At last after some moments, waiting he said: “Vat do you vant?”

The Count acted as spokesman.

“We wish to leave, Monsieur.”

“No.”

“May I take the liberty of asking the reason for this refusal?”

“Pecause I do not shoose.”

“With all due respect, Monsieur, I would draw your attention to the fact that your general gave us a permit for Dieppe, and I cannot see that we have done anything to justify your hard measures.”

“I do not shoose⁠—dat’s all⁠—you can co town.”

They all bowed and withdrew.

The afternoon was miserable. They could make nothing of this caprice of the German’s, and the most farfetched ideas tortured their minds. The whole party remained in the kitchen engaging in endless discussions, imagining the most improbable things. Were they to be kept as hostages?⁠—but if so, to what end?⁠—or taken prisoners⁠—or asked a large ransom? This last suggestion threw them into a cold perspiration of fear. The wealthiest were seized with the worst panic and saw themselves forced, if they valued their lives, to empty bags of gold into the rapacious hands of this soldier. They racked their brains for plausible lies to dissemble their riches, to pass themselves off as poor⁠—very poor. Loiseau pulled off his watch-chain and hid it in his pocket. As night fell their apprehensions increased. The lamp was lighted, and as there were still two hours till supper Madame Loiseau proposed a game of thirty-one. It would be some little distraction, at any rate. The plan was accepted; even Cornudet, who had put out his pipe from motives of politeness, taking a hand.

The Count shuffled the cards, dealt, Boule de Suif had thirty-one at the first deal; and very soon the interest in the game allayed the fears that beset their minds. Cornudet, however, observed that the two Loiseaus were in league to cheat.

Just as they were sitting down to the evening meal Monsieur appeared and said in his husky voice: “The Prussian officer wishes to know if Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset has not changed her mind yet?”

Boule de Suif remained standing and turned very pale, then suddenly her face flamed and she fell into such a paroxysm of rage that she could not speak. At last she burst out: “You can tell that scoundrel⁠—that low scum of a Prussian⁠—that I won’t⁠—and I never will⁠—do you hear?⁠—never! never! never!”

The fat innkeeper retired. They instantly surrounded Boule de Suif, questioning, entreating her to disclose the mystery of her visit. At first she refused, but presently she was carried away by her indignation: “What does he want?⁠—what does he want?⁠—he wants me to make love to him!” she shouted.

The general indignation was so violent that nobody was shocked. Cornudet brought his beer glass down on the table with such a bang that it broke. There was a perfect babel of invective against the drunken lout, a hurricane of wrath, a union of all for resistance, as if each had been required to contribute a portion of the sacrifice demanded of her. The Count protested with disgust that these people behaved really as if they were early barbarians. The women, in particular, accorded her the most lively and affectionate sympathy. The nuns, who only appeared at meals, dropped their eyes and said nothing.

The first fury of the storm having abated, they sat down to supper, but there was little conversation and a good deal of thoughtful abstraction.

The ladies retired early; the men, while they smoked, got up a game of écarté, which Monsieur Follenvie was invited to join, as they intended pumping him skilfully as to the means that could be employed for overcoming the officer’s opposition to their departure. Unfortunately, he would absorb himself wholly in his cards, and neither listened to what they said nor gave any answer to their questions, but repeated incessantly, “Play, gentlemen, play!” His attention was so deeply engaged that he forgot to spit, which caused his chest to wheeze from time to time; his wheezing lungs running through the whole gamut of asthma from notes of the profoundest bass to the shrill, hoarse crow of the young cock.

He refused to go to bed when his wife, who was dropping with sleep, came to fetch him. She therefore departed alone, for on her devolved the “day duty,” and she always rose with the sun, while her husband took the “night duty,” and was always ready to sit up all night with friends. He merely called out, “Mind you put my egg flip in front of the fire!” and returned to his cards. When they were convinced that there was nothing to be got out of him, they declared that it was high time to go to bed, and left him.

They were up again pretty early the next day, filled with an indefinite hope, a still keener desire to be gone, and a horror of another day to be got through in this horrible little inn.

Alas! the horses were still in the stable and the coachman remained invisible. For lack of something better to do, they sadly wandered round the diligence.

Lunch was very depressing, and a certain chilliness had sprung up with regard to Boule de Suif, for the night⁠—which brings counsel⁠—had somewhat modified their opinions. They were almost vexed with the girl now for not having gone to the Prussian secretly, and thus prepared a pleasant surprise for her companions in the morning. What could be simpler, and, after all, who could have been any the wiser? She might have saved appearances by telling the officer that she could not bear to see their distress any longer. It could make so very little difference to her one way or another!

But, as yet, nobody confessed to these thoughts. In the afternoon, as they were feeling bored to extinction, the Count proposed a walk round the village. Everybody wrapped up carefully and the little party started, with the exception of Cornudet, who preferred sitting by the fire, and the two Sisters, who passed their days in the church or with the curé.

The cold⁠—grown more intense each day⁠—nipped their noses and ears viciously, and the feet became so painful that every step was anguish; but when they caught sight of the open stretch of country it appeared to them so appallingly lugubrious under its illimitable white covering that they turned back with one accord, their hearts constricted, their spirits below zero. The four ladies walked in front, the three men following a little behind.

Loiseau, who thoroughly took in the situation, suddenly broke out, “How long was this damned wench going to keep them hanging on in this hole?” The Count, courteous as ever, observed that one could not demand so painful a sacrifice of any woman⁠—the offer must come from her. Monsieur Carré-Lamadon remarked that if⁠—as there was every reason to believe⁠—the French made an offensive countermarch by way of Dieppe, the collision could only take place at Tôtes. This reflection greatly alarmed the other two. “Why not escape on foot?” suggested Loiseau. The Count shrugged his shoulders. “How can you think of such a thing in this snow⁠—and with our wives? Besides which, we should instantly be pursued, caught in ten minutes, and brought back prisoners at the mercy of these soldiers.” This was incontestable⁠—there was nothing more to be said.

The ladies talked dress, but a certain constraint seemed to have risen up between them.

All at once, at the end of the street, the officer came in sight, his tall figure, like a wasp in uniform, silhouetted against the dazzling background of snow, and walking with his knees well apart, with that movement peculiar to the military when endeavouring to save their carefully polished boots from the mud.

In passing the ladies he bowed, but only stared contemptuously at the men, who, be it said, had the dignity not to lift their hats, though Loiseau made a faint gesture in that direction.

Boule de Suif blushed up to her eyes, and the three married women felt it a deep humiliation to have encountered this soldier while they were in the company of the young woman he had treated so cavalierly.

The conversation then turned upon him, his general appearance, his face. Madame Carré-Lamadon, who had known a great many officers and was competent to judge of them as a connoisseur, considered this one really not half bad⁠—she even regretted that he was not French, he would have made such a fascinating hussar, and would certainly have been much run after.

Once indoors again, they did not know what to do with themselves. Sharp words were exchanged on the most insignificant pretexts. The silent dinner did not last long, and they shortly afterwards went to bed, hoping to kill time by sleeping.

They came down next morning with jaded faces and exasperation in their hearts. The women scarcely addressed a word to Boule de Suif.

Presently the church bell began to ring; it was for a christening. Boule de Suif had a child out at nurse with some peasants near Yvetot. She did not see it once in a year and never gave it a thought, but the idea of this baby which was going to be baptized filled her heart with sudden and violent tenderness for her own, and nothing would satisfy her but that she should assist at the ceremony.

No sooner was she gone than they all looked at one another and proceeded to draw up their chairs; for everybody felt that things had come to that point that something must be decided upon. Loiseau had an inspiration: that they should propose to the officer to keep Boule de Suif and let the rest go.

Monsieur Follenvie undertook the mission, but returned almost immediately. The German, who had some knowledge of human nature, had simply turned him out of the room. He meant to retain the whole party so long as his desire was unsatisfied.

At this Madame Loiseau’s plebeian tendencies got the better of her. “But surely we are not going to sit down calmly here and die of old age! As that is this harlot’s trade, I don’t see that she has any right to refuse one man more than another. Why, she took anybody she could get in Rouen, down to the very cab drivers. Yes, Madame, the coachman of the Prefecture. I know all about it. He buys his wine at our shop. And now, when it lies with her to get us out of this scrape, she pretends to be particular⁠—the brazen hussy! For my part, I consider the officer has behaved very well! He has probably not had a chance for some time, and there were three here whom, no doubt, he would have preferred; but no⁠—he is content to take the one who is public property. He respects married women. Remember, he is master here. He had only to say ‘I will,’ and he could have taken us by force with his soldiers!”

A little shudder ran through the other two women. Pretty little Madame Carré-Lamadon’s eyes shone and she turned rather pale as though she already felt herself forcibly seized by the officer.

The men, who had been arguing the matter in a corner, now joined them. Loiseau, foaming with rage, was for delivering up “the hussy” bound hand and foot to the enemy. But the Count, coming of three generations of ambassadors, and gifted with the physique of the diplomatist, was on the side of skill as opposed to brute force.

“She must be persuaded,” he said. Whereupon they conspired.

The women drew up closer together, voices were lowered, and the discussion became general, each one offering his or her advice. Nothing was said to shock the proprieties. The ladies, in particular, were most expert in felicitous turns of phrase, charming subtleties of speech for expressing the most ticklish things. A foreigner would have understood nothing, the language was so carefully veiled. But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded under the influence of this equivocal adventure, enjoying themselves tremendously at bottom, thoroughly in their element, dabbling in sensuality with the gusto of an epicurean cook preparing a toothsome delicacy for somebody else.

The story finally appeared to them so funny that they quite recovered their spirits. The Count indulged in some rather risky pleasantries, but so well put that they raised a responsive smile; Loiseau, in his turn, rapped out some decidedly strong jokes which nobody took in bad part, and the brutal proposition expressed by his wife swayed all their minds: “As that is her trade, why refuse one man more than another?” Little Madame Carré-Lamadon seemed even to think that in her place she would refuse this one less readily than another.

They were long in preparing the blockade, as if against an invested fortress. Each one agreed upon the part they would play, the arguments they would bring forward, the manoeuvres they would execute. They arranged the plan of attack, the stratagems to be employed, and the surprises of the assault for forcing this living citadel to receive the enemy within its gates. Cornudet alone held aloof, completely outside the affair.

They were so profoundly occupied with the matter in hand that they never heard Boule de Suif enter the room. But the Count breathed a low warning “Hush!” and they lifted their heads. She was there. The talking ceased abruptly, and a certain feeling of embarrassment prevented them from addressing her at first, till the Countess, more versed than the others in the duplicities of the drawing room, asked how she had enjoyed the christening.

Still full of emotion at what she had witnessed, Boule de Suif described every detail⁠—the peoples’ faces, their attitudes, even the appearance of the church. It was so nice to pray now and then, she added.

Till luncheon, however, the ladies confined themselves merely to being agreeable to her in order to increase her confidence in them and her docility to their counsels. But once seated at the table, the attack began. It first took the form of a desultory conversation on devotion to a cause. Examples from ancient history were cited: Judith and Holofernes, and then, without any apparent connection, Lucretia and Sextus, Cleopatra admitting to her couch all the hostile generals, and reducing them to the servility of slaves. Then began a fantastic history, which had sprung up in the minds of the ignorant millionaires, in which the women of Rome were seen on their way to Capua, to rock Hannibal to sleep in their arms, and his officers along with him, and the phalanxes of the mercenaries. The women were mentioned who had arrested the course of conquerors, made of their bodies a rampart, a means of dominating, a weapon; who had vanquished by their heroic embraces beings hideous or repulsive, and sacrificed their chastity to vengeance or patriotism. They even talked in veiled terms of an Englishwoman of good family who had herself inoculated with a horrible contagious disease, in order to give it to Napoleon, who was saved miraculously by a sudden indisposition at the hour of the fatal meeting.

And all this in so discreet and moderate a manner, with now and then a little burst of warm enthusiasm, admirably calculated to excite emulation. To hear them you would have finally come to the conclusion that woman’s sole mission here below was to perpetually sacrifice her person, to abandon herself continually to the caprices of the warrior.

The two Sisters appeared to be deaf to it all, sunk in profound thought. Boule de Suif said nothing.

They allowed her all the afternoon for reflection, but instead of calling her “Madame,” as they had done up till now, they addressed her simply as “Mademoiselle”⁠—nobody could have said exactly why⁠—as if to send her down a step in the esteem she had gained, and force her to feel the shame of her position.

In the evening just as the soup was being brought to the table Monsieur Follenvie made his appearance again with the same message as before: “The Prussian officer sends to ask Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset if she had not changed her mind.”

“No, Monsieur,” Boule de Suif replied curtly.

At supper the coalition weakened. Loiseau put his foot in it three times. They all racked their brains for fresh instances to the point, and found none, when the Countess, possibly without premeditation and only from a vague desire to render homage to religion, interrogated the older of the two Sisters on the main incidents in the lives of the saints. Now, several of them had committed acts which would be counted crimes in our eyes, but the Church readily pardons such misdeeds when they are accomplished for the glory of God or the benefit of our neighbours. It was a powerful argument, and the Countess took advantage of it. Then by one of those tacit agreements, those veiled complaisances in which everyone who wears ecclesiastical habit excels, or perhaps simply from a happy want of intelligence, a helpful stupidity, the old nun brought formidable support to the conspiracy. They had imagined her timid; she proved herself bold, verbose, violent. She was not troubled by any of the shilly-shallyings of casuistry, her doctrine was like a bar of iron, her faith never wavered, her conscience knew no scruples. She considered Abraham’s sacrifice a very simple affair, for she herself would have instantly killed father or mother at an order from above, and nothing, she averred, could displease the Lord if the intention were commendable. The Countess, taking advantage of the sacred authority of her unexpected ally, drew her on to make an edifying paraphrase, as it were, on the well-known moral maxim: “The end justifies the means.

“Then, Sister,” she inquired, “you think God approves of every pathway that leads to Him, and pardons the deed if the motive be a pure one?”

“Who can doubt it, Madame? An action blamable in itself is often rendered meritorious by the impulse which inspires it.”

And she continued in the same strain, unravelling the intricacies of the will of the Almighty, predicting His decisions, making Him interest Himself in matters which, of a truth, did not concern Him at all.

All this was skillfully and discreetly wrapped up, but each word of the pious woman in the big white cap made a breach in the indignant resistance of the courtesan. The conversation then glancing off slightly, the woman of the pendent rosaries went on to speak of the religious houses of her Order, of her superior, of herself and her fragile little companion, her dear little Sister St. Nicephora. They had been summoned to Havre to nurse the hundreds of soldiers there down with smallpox. She described the condition of these poor wretches, gave details of their disease; and while they were thus stopped upon the road by the whim of this Prussian, many French soldiers might die whom perhaps they could have saved. That was her specialty⁠—nursing soldiers. She had been in the Crimea, in Italy, in Austria; and relating her campaigns, she suddenly revealed herself as one of those Sisters of the fife and drum who seem made for following the camp, picking up the wounded in the thick of battle, and better than any officer for quelling with a word the great hulking undisciplined louts⁠—a regular Sister Rataplan, her ravaged face all pitted with innumerable holes, calling up an image of the devastations of war.

No one spoke after her for fear of spoiling the excellent effect.

Immediately after dinner they hurried to their rooms, not to reappear till pretty late the next morning.

Luncheon passed off quietly. They allowed the seed sown yesterday time to grow and bear fruit.

In the afternoon the Countess proposed a walk, whereupon the Count, following the preconcerted arrangement, took Boule de Suif’s arm and fell behind with her a little. He adopted that familiar, paternal, somewhat contemptuous tone which elderly men affect towards such girls, calling her “my dear child,” treating her from the height of his social position and indisputable respectability.

He came to the point without further preamble. “So you prefer to keep us here exposed like yourself to all the violence which must inevitably follow a check to the Prussian arms, rather than consent to accord one of those favours you have so often dispensed in your time?”

Boule de Suif did not reply.

He then appealed to her kindness of heart, her reason, her sentiment. He knew how to remain “Monsieur le Comte,” yet showing himself at the same time chivalrous, flattering⁠—in a word, altogether amiable. He exalted the sacrifice she would be making for them, touched upon their gratitude, and with a final flash of roguishness, “Besides, my dear, he may think himself lucky⁠—he will not find many such pretty girls as you in his own country!”

Boule de Suif said nothing and rejoined the rest of the party.

When they returned, she went straight to her room and did not come down again. The anxiety was terrible. What was she going to do? How unspeakably mortifying if she still persisted in her refusal!

The dinner-hour arrived, they waited for her in vain. Monsieur Follenvie, entering presently, announced that Mademoiselle Rousset was indisposed, and that there was consequently no need to delay supper any longer. They all pricked up their ears. The Count approached the innkeeper with a whispered “All right?”

“Yes.”

For propriety’s sake he said nothing to his companions, but he made them a slight sign of the head. A great sigh of relief went up from every heart, every face lit up with joy.

“Saperlipopette!” cried Loiseau, “I will stand champagne if there is such a thing in this establishment!”

Madame Loiseau suffered a pang of anguish when the innkeeper returned with four bottles in his hands. Everybody suddenly turned communicative and cheerful, and their hearts overflowed with prurient delight. The Count seemed all at once to become aware that Madame Carré-Lamadon was charming; the manufacturer paid compliments to the Countess. Conversation became lively, sprightly, and full of sparkle.

Suddenly Loiseau, with an anxious expression, raised his arms and shouted: “Silence!” They all stopped talking, surprised and already terrified. Then he listened intently, motioning to them to be silent with his two hands, and raising his eyes to the ceiling. He listened again, and resumed in his natural voice: “It is all right. Don’t worry.”

They did not understand at first, but soon a smile spread over their faces.

A quarter of an hour later he began the same comedy, and repeated it frequently during the evening. He pretended to be questioning someone on the floor above, giving advice in double-meaning phrases which he drew from his repertory as a commercial traveller. At times he would assume an air of sadness, and sigh: “Poor girl”; or he would mutter between his teeth with a furious air: “You swine of a Prussian!”⁠—Sometimes, when least expected, he would shout in resonant tones: “Enough! Enough!” adding, as though speaking to himself, “if only we see her again; if the scoundrel does not kill her!”

Although these jokes were in deplorable taste, they amused everyone and hurt nobody, for, like everything else, indignation is qualified by circumstances, and the atmosphere about them had gradually become charged with obscene thoughts.

By the time they reached dessert the women themselves were indulging in decidedly risky witticisms. Eyes grew bright, tongues were loosened, a good deal of wine had been consumed. The Count, who, even in his cups, retained his characteristic air of diplomatic gravity, made some highly spiced comparisons on the subject of the end of the winter season at the Pole and the joy of icebound mariners at sight of an opening to the south.

Loiseau, now in full swing, rose, and lifting high his glass of champagne, “To our deliverance!” he cried. Everybody started to their feet with acclamation. Even the two Sisters of Mercy, yielding to the solicitations of the ladies, consented to take a sip of the effervescing wine which they had never tasted before. They pronounced it to be very like lemonade, though the taste was finer.

“What a pity there is no piano,” said Loiseau as a crowning point to the situation, “we might have finished up with a quadrille.”

Cornudet had not uttered a word, nor made a sign of joining in the general hilarity; he was apparently plunged in the gravest abstractions, only pulling viciously at his great beard from time to time as if to draw it out longer than before. At last, about midnight, when the company was preparing to separate, Loiseau came stumbling over to him, and digging him in the ribs: “You seem rather down in the mouth this evening, citizen⁠—haven’t said a word.”

Cornudet threw up his head angrily, and sweeping the company with a flashing and terrible look: “I tell you all that what you have done today is infamous!”

He rose, made his way to the door, exclaimed once again, “Infamous!” and vanished.

This somewhat dashed their spirits for the moment. Loiseau, nonplussed at first, soon regained his aplomb and burst into a roar of laughter. “Sour grapes, old man⁠—sour grapes!”

The others not understanding the allusion, he proceeded to relate the “mysteries of the corridor.” This was followed by an uproarious revival of gaiety. The ladies were in a frenzy of delight, the Count and Monsieur Carré-Lamadon laughed till they cried. They could not believe it.

“Do you mean to say he wanted⁠—”

“I tell you I saw it with my own eyes.”

“And she refused?”

“Because the Prussian was in the next room.”

“It is incredible.”

“As true as I stand here!”

The Count nearly choked; the manufacturer held both his sides.

“And you can understand that he does not quite see the joke of the thing this evening⁠—oh, no⁠—not at all!”

And they all three went off again, breathless, choking, sick with laughter.

After that they parted for the night. But Madame Loiseau remarked to her husband when they were alone that that little cat of a Carré-Lamadon had laughed on the wrong side of her mouth all the evening. “You know how it is with these women⁠—they dote upon a uniform, and whether it is French or Prussian matters precious little to them. But, Lord⁠—it seems to me a poor way of looking at things.”

All night the darkness of the corridor seemed full of thrills, of slight noises, scarcely audible, the pattering of bare feet, and creaking that was almost imperceptible. Certainly nobody got to sleep until very late, for it was long before the lights ceased to shine under the doors. Champagne, they say, often has that disturbing effect; it makes one restless and wakeful.

Next morning a brilliant winter sun shone on the dazzling snow. The diligence was by this time ready and waiting before the door, while a flock of white pigeons, muffled in their thick plumage, strutted solemnly in and out among the feet of the six horses, seeking what they might devour.

The driver, enveloped in his sheepskin, sat on the box smoking his pipe, and the radiant travellers were busily laying in provisions for the rest of the journey.

They were only waiting now for Boule de Suif. She appeared.

She looked agitated and downcast as she advanced timidly towards her fellow travellers, who all, with one movement, turned away their heads as if they had not seen her. The Count, with a dignified movement, took his wife by the arm and drew her away from this contaminating contact.

The poor thing stopped short, bewildered; then gathering up her courage she accosted the wife of the manufacturer with a humble “Good morning, Madame.” The other merely replied with an impertinent little nod, accompanied by a stare of outraged virtue. Everybody seemed suddenly extremely busy, and they avoided her as if she had brought the plague in her skirts. They then precipitated themselves into the vehicle, where she arrived the last and by herself, and resumed in silence the seat she had occupied during the first part of the journey.

They affected not to see her, not to recognize her; only Madame Loiseau, glancing round at her with scorn and indignation, said half audibly to her husband, “It’s a good thing that I am not sitting beside her!”

The heavy conveyance jolted off, and the journey recommenced.

No one spoke for the first little while. Boule de Suif did not venture to raise her eyes. She felt incensed at her companions, and at the same time deeply humiliated at having yielded to their persuasions, and let herself be sullied by the kisses of this Prussian into whose arms they had hypocritically thrust her.

The Countess was the first to break the uncomfortable silence. Turning to Madame Carré-Lamadon, she said, “You know Madame d’Etrelles, I think?”

“Oh, yes; she is a great friend of mine.”

“What a charming woman!”

“Fascinating! So truly refined; very cultivated, too, and an artist to the tips of her fingers⁠—she sings delightfully, and draws to perfection.”

The manufacturer was talking to the Count, and through the rattle of the crazy windowpanes one caught a word here and there; shares⁠—dividends⁠—premium⁠—settling day⁠—and the like. Loiseau, who had appropriated an old pack of cards from the inn, thick with the grease of the five years’ rubbing on dirty tables, started a game of bezique with his wife. The two Sisters pulled up the long rosaries hanging at their waists, made the sign of the cross, and suddenly began moving their lips rapidly, faster and faster, hurrying their vague babble as if for a wager; kissing a medal from time to time, crossing themselves again, and then resuming their rapid and monotonous murmur.

Cornudet sat motionless⁠—thinking.

At the end of the three hours’ steady travelling Loiseau gathered up his cards and remarked facetiously, “It’s turning hungry.”

His wife then produced a parcel, which she untied, and brought out a piece of cold veal. This she cut up into thin, firm slices, and both began to eat.

“Supposing we do the same?” said the Countess, and proceeded to unpack the provisions prepared for both couples. In one of those oblong dishes with a china hare upon the cover to indicate that a roast hare lies beneath, was a succulent selection of cold viands⁠—brown slices of juicy venison mingled with other meats. A delicious square of Gruyère cheese wrapped in newspaper still bore imprinted on its dewy surface the words “General News.”

The two Sisters brought out a sausage smelling of garlic, and Cornudet, plunging his hands into the vast pockets of his loose greatcoat, drew up four hard-boiled eggs from one and a big crust of bread from the other. He peeled off the shells and threw them into the straw under his feet, and proceeded to bite into the egg, dropping pieces of the yolk into his long beard, from whence they shone out like stars.

In the hurry and confusion of the morning Boule de Suif had omitted to take thought for the future, and she looked on, furious, choking with mortification, at these people all munching away so placidly. A storm of rage convulsed her, and she opened her mouth to hurl at them the torrent of abuse that rose to her lips, but she could not speak, suffocated by her indignation.

Nobody looked at her, nobody thought of her. She felt herself drowning in the flood of contempt shown towards her by these honest scoundrels who had first sacrificed her and then cast her off like some useless and unclean thing. Then her thoughts reverted to her great basket full of good things which they had so greedily devoured⁠—the two fowls in their glittering coat of jelly, her patties, her pears, her four bottles of claret; and her fury suddenly subsided like the breaking of an overstrung chord and she felt that she was on the verge of tears. She made the most strenuous efforts to overcome it⁠—straightened herself up and choked back her sobs as children do, but the tears would rise. They glittered for a moment on her lashes, and presently two big drops rolled slowly over her cheeks. Others gathered in quick succession like water dripping from a rock and splashed on to the ample curve of her bosom. She sat up very straight, her eyes fixed, her face pale and rigid, hoping that nobody would notice.

But the Countess saw her and nudged her husband. He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, “What can you expect? It is not my fault.” Madame Loiseau gave a silent chuckle of triumph and murmured, “She is crying over her shame.” The two Sisters had resumed their devotions after carefully wrapping up the remnants of their sausages.

Then Cornudet, while digesting his eggs, stretched his long legs under the opposite seat, leaned back, smiled like a man who has just thought of a capital joke, and began to softly whistle the “Marseillaise.”

The faces clouded; the popular air seemed unpleasing to his neighbors; they became nervous⁠—irritable⁠—looking as if they were ready to throw back their heads and howl like dogs at the sound of a barrel organ. He was perfectly aware of this, but did not stop. From time to time he hummed a few of the words:

Amour sacré de la patrie,
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs,
Liberté, liberté chérie,
Combats avec tes défenseurs!

They drove at a much quicker pace today, the snow being harder; and all the way to Dieppe, during the long, dull hours of the journey, through all the jolting and rattling of the conveyance, in the falling shades of evening and later in the profound darkness of the carriage he continued with unabated persistency his vengeful and monotonous whistling; forcing his wearied and exasperated fellow travellers to follow the song from end to end and to remember every word that corresponded to each note.

And Boule de Suif wept on, and at times a sob which she could not repress broke out between two couplets in the darkness.

Les Dimanches d’Un Bourgeois

Suicides

Hardly a day goes by without our reading in some newspaper the following paragraph.

“On Wednesday night the people living in No. 40 Rue de ⸻, were awakened by two shots in succession. They seemed to come from the apartment occupied by M. X. ⸻. The door was broken in and the man was found bathed in his blood, still holding in one hand the revolver with which he had taken his life.

“M. X. ⸻ was fifty-seven years of age, enjoying a comfortable income, and had everything necessary to make him happy. No cause can be found for his action.”

What terrible grief, what unknown suffering, hidden despair, secret wounds drive these presumably happy persons to suicide? We search, we imagine tragedies of love, we suspect financial troubles, and, as we never find anything definite, we apply to these deaths the word “mystery.”

A letter found on the desk of one of these “suicides without cause,” and written during his last night, beside his loaded revolver, has come into our hands. We deem it rather interesting. It reveals none of those great catastrophes which we always expect to find behind these acts of despair; but it shows us the slow succession of the little vexations of life, the disintegration of a lonely existence, whose dreams have disappeared; it gives the reason for these tragic ends, which only nervous and high-strung people can understand.

Here it is:

“It is midnight. When I have finished this letter I shall kill myself. Why? I shall attempt to give the reasons, not for those who may read these lines, but for myself, to kindle my waning courage, to impress upon myself the fatal necessity of this act which could only be deferred.

“I was brought up by simple-minded parents who were unquestioning believers. And I believed as they did.

“My dream lasted a long time. The last veil has just been torn from my eyes.

“During the last few years a strange change has been taking place within me. All the events of Life, which formerly had to me the glow of a beautiful sunset, are now fading away. The true meaning of things has appeared to me in its brutal reality; and the true reason for love has bred in me disgust even for romantic love. ‘We are the eternal toys of foolish and charming illusions, which are always being renewed.’

“On growing older, I had become partly reconciled to the awful mystery of life, to the uselessness of effort; when the emptiness of everything appeared to me in a new light, this evening, after dinner.

“Formerly, I was happy! Everything pleased me: the passing women, the appearance of the streets, the place where I lived; and I even took an interest in the cut of my clothes. But the repetition of the same sights has had the result of filling my heart with weariness and disgust, just as one would feel were one to go every night to the same theatre.

“For the last thirty years I have been rising at the same hour; and, at the same restaurant, for thirty years, I have been eating at the same hours the same dishes brought me by different waiters.

“I have tried travel. The loneliness which one feels in strange places terrified me. I felt so alone, so small on the earth that I quickly started on my homeward journey.

“But here the unchanging expression of my furniture, which has stood for thirty years in the same place, the worn armchairs that I had known when quite new, the smell of my apartment (for, with time, each dwelling takes on a particular odour) each night, these and other things disgust me and make me sick of living thus.

“Everything repeats itself endlessly. The way in which I put my key in the lock, the place where I always find my matches, the first object which meets my eye when I enter the room, make me feel like jumping out of the window and putting an end to those monotonous events from which we can never escape.

“Each day, when I shave, I feel an inordinate desire to cut my throat; and my face, which I see in the little mirror, always the same, with soap on my cheeks, has several times made me cry from sadness.

“Now I even hate to be with people whom I used to meet with pleasure; I know them so well, I can tell just what they are going to say and what I am going to answer. Each brain is like a circus, where the same horse keeps circling around eternally. In spite of our efforts, our detours, the limit is near, and it is rounded out continuously, without any unexpected sallies, and without a door leading to the unknown. We must circle round always, around the same ideas, the same joys, the same pleasures, the same habits, the same beliefs, the same sensations of disgust.

“The fog was terrible this evening. It enfolded the boulevard, where the street lights were dimmed and looked like smoking candles. A heavier weight than usual oppressed me. Perhaps my digestion was bad.

“For good digestion is everything in life. It gives inspiration to the artist, amorous desires to young people, clear ideas to thinkers, the joy of life to everybody, and it also allows one to eat heartily (which is really the greatest pleasure). A sick stomach induces scepticism, unbelief, nightmares, and a desire for death. I have often noticed this fact. Perhaps I would not kill myself, if my digestion had been good this evening.

“When I sat down in the armchair where I have been sitting every day for thirty years, I glanced around me, and just then I was seized by such a terrible distress that I thought I must go mad.

“I tried to think of what I could do to run away from myself. Every occupation struck me as being worse even than inaction. Then I bethought me of putting my papers in order.

“For a long time I have been thinking of clearing out my drawers; for, for the last thirty years, I have been throwing my letters and bills pell-mell into the same desk, and this confusion has often caused me considerable trouble. But I feel such moral and physical laziness at the sole idea of putting anything in order that I have never had the courage to begin this tedious business.

“I therefore opened my desk, intending to choose among my old papers and destroy the majority of them.

“At first I was bewildered by this array of documents, yellowed by age, then I chose one.

“Oh! if you cherish life, never disturb the burial place of old letters!

“And if, perchance, you should, take the contents by the handful, close your eyes that you may not read a word, so that you may not recognize some forgotten handwriting which may plunge you suddenly into a sea of memories; carry these papers to the fire; and when they are in ashes, crush them to an invisible powder, or otherwise you are lost⁠—just as I have been lost for an hour.

“The first letters which I read not did interest me greatly. They were recent, and came from living men whom I still meet quite often, and whose presence does not move me to any great extent. But all at once one envelope made me start. My name was traced on it in a large, bold, handwriting; and suddenly tears came to my eyes. That letter was from my dearest friend, the companion of my youth, the confidant of my hopes; and he appeared before me so clearly, with his pleasant smile and his hand outstretched, that a cold shiver ran down my back. Yes, yes, the dead come back, for I saw him! Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

“With trembling hand and dimmed eyes I reread everything that he told me, and in my poor sobbing heart I felt a wound so painful that I began to groan as a man whose bones are slowly being crushed.

“Then I travelled over my whole life, just as one travels along a river. I recognized people so long forgotten that I no longer knew their names. Their faces alone lived in me. In my mother’s letters I saw again the old servants, the shape of our house and the little insignificant odds and ends which cling to our minds.

“Yes, I suddenly saw again all my mother’s old gowns, the different styles which she adopted and the several ways in which she dressed her hair. She haunted me especially in a silk dress, trimmed with old lace; and I remembered something she said one day when she was wearing this dress. She said: ‘Robert, my child, if you do not stand up straight you will be round-shouldered all your life.’

“Then, opening another drawer, I found myself face to face with memories of tender passions: a dancing-pump, a torn handkerchief, even a garter, locks of hair and dried flowers. Then the sweet romances of my life, whose living heroines are now white-haired, plunged me into the deep melancholy of things. Oh, the young brows where blond locks curl, the caress of the hands, the glance which speaks, the hearts which beat, that smile which promises the lips, those lips which promise the embrace! And the first kiss⁠—that endless kiss which makes you close your eyes, which drowns all thought in the immeasurable joy of approaching possession!

“Taking these old pledges of former love in both my hands, I covered them with furious caresses, and in my soul, torn by these memories, I saw them each again at the hour of surrender; and I suffered a torture more cruel than all the tortures invented in all the fables about hell.

“One last letter remained. It was written by me and dictated fifty years ago by my writing teacher.

“Here it is:

“ ‘My Dear Little Mamma:

“ ‘I am seven years old today. It is the age of understanding. I take advantage of it to thank you for having brought me into this world.

“It is all over. I had gone back to the beginning, and suddenly I turned my glance on what remained to me of life. I saw hideous and lonely old age, and approaching infirmities, and everything over and gone. And nobody near me!

“My revolver is here, on the table. I am loading it.⁠ ⁠… Never reread your old letters!”

And that is how many men come to kill themselves; and we search in vain to discover some great sorrow in their lives.

A Grandmother’s Advice

The old-fashioned château was built on a wooded height. Tall trees surrounded it with dark greenery; and the vast park extended its vistas here over a deep forest and there over an open plain. Some little distance from the front of the mansion stood a huge stone basin in which marble nymphs were bathing. Other basins arranged in order succeeded each other down as far as the foot of the slope, and a spring which had been turned to the purpose sent cascades dancing from one to the other.

From the manor house which preserved the grace of a superannuated coquette down to the grottoes encrusted with shell-work, where slumbered the loves of a bygone age, everything in this antique demesne had retained the physiognomy of former days. Everything seemed to speak still of ancient customs, of the manners of long ago, of faded gallantries, and of the airy graces so dear to our grandmothers.

In a little Louis XV drawing room, whose walls were covered with shepherds paying court to shepherdesses, beautiful ladies in hoop-petticoats, and gallant gentlemen in wigs, a very old woman who seemed dead as soon as she ceased to move was almost lying down in a large easy-chair, while her thin, mummy-like hands hung down, on each side of the chair.

Her eyes were gazing languidly towards the distant horizon as if they sought to follow through the park visions of her youth. Through the open window every now and then came a breath of air laden with the scent of grass and the perfume of flowers. It made her white locks flutter around her wrinkled forehead and old memories, through her brain.

Beside her on a stool covered with tapestry, a young girl with long, fair hair hanging in plaits over her neck, was embroidering an altar-cloth. There was a pensive expression in her eyes, and it was easy to see that, while her agile fingers worked, her brain was busy with thoughts.

But the old lady suddenly turned round her head.

“Berthe,” she said, “read something out of the newspapers for me, so that I may still know sometimes what is happening in the world.”

The young girl took up a newspaper, and cast a rapid glance over it.

“There is a great deal about politics, grandmamma; am I to pass it by?”

“Yes, yes, darling. Are there no accounts of love affairs? Is gallantry, then, dead in France, that they no longer talk about abductions or adventures as they did formerly?”

The girl made a long search through the columns of the newspaper.

“Here is one,” she said. “It is entitled: ‘A Love Drama!’ ”

The old woman smiled through her wrinkles. “Read that for me,” she said.

And Berthe commenced. It was a case of vitriol-throwing. A wife, in order to avenge herself on her husband’s mistress, had burned her face and eyes. She had left the Assize Court acquitted, declared to be innocent, amid the applause of the crowd.

The grandmother moved about excitedly in her chair, and exclaimed:

“This is horrible⁠—why, it is perfectly horrible! See whether you can find anything else to read for me, darling.”

Berthe again made a search; and farther down in police court reports, where she was still looking, she read:

“ ‘Awful Tragedy.’⁠—An ancient virgin had allowed herself to yield to the embraces of a young man. Then, to avenge herself on her lover, whose heart was fickle, and whose allowance was ungenerous, she shot him four times at close range with a revolver. Two bullets had lodged in his chest, one in his shoulder, one in his thigh. The unhappy man would be maimed for life. The lady was acquitted amidst the applause of the crowd, and the newspaper spoke very severely of this seducer of foolish virgins.”

This time the old grandmother appeared quite shocked, and, in a trembling voice, she said:

“Why, you are mad, nowadays. You are mad! The good God has given you love, the only allurement in life. Man has added to this gallantry, the only distraction of our dull hours, and here are you mixing up with it vitriol and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of Spanish wine.”

Berthe did not seem to understand her grandmother’s indignation.

“But grandmamma, this woman avenged herself. Remember she was married, and her husband deceived her.”

The grandmother gave a start.

“What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of today?”

Berthe replied:

“But marriage is sacred, grandmamma.”

The grandmother’s heart, which had its birth in the great age of gallantry, gave a sudden leap.

“It is love that is sacred,” she said. “Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek for metals of the same kind. When we marry, we must bring the same conventions together; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races, and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has so made us. Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts⁠—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into medicines for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”

Berthe opened her eyes widely in astonishment. She murmured:

“Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once.”

The grandmother raised her trembling hands towards Heaven, as if again to invoke the defunct God of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly:

“You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognise society. You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have written verses telling you that people have died of love. In my time verses were written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last lover⁠—unless we kept both of them.”

The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:

“So then women had no honour?”

The old lady was furious: “No honour! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even boasted of it? But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, had lived without a lover, she would have had the entire court laughing at her. And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love only you all their lives? As if, indeed, that could be the case! I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that Society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand? There is only one good thing in life, and that is love, and they want to deprive us of it. Nowadays you are told: ‘You must love one man only.’ It is as if somebody were to force me to eat turkey only all my life long. But that man is to have as many mistresses as there are months in the year!

“He will follow his amorous instincts, which will drive him towards women as butterflies are attracted by every flower. Then I am to go out into the streets with a bottle of vitriol and blind the poor girls who only obeyed their instincts! I am not to revenge myself on him, but on them! I am to make a monster of some poor creature whom God created to please, to love and to be loved. And your present day society, your society of clowns, of bourgeois, of beggars on horseback, will applaud and acquit me. It is infamous, I tell you, that you cannot understand love; and I am glad to die rather than see a world without gallantry, without women who know what love means. You take everything seriously nowadays, the vengeance of low females who kill their lovers brings tears of pity to the eyes of the twelve citizens come together to probe the hearts of criminals. Is that your wisdom? Your logic? Women shoot men, and then complain that men are no longer gallant!”

The young girl seized the wrinkled hands of the old lady in hers, which were trembling:

“Please stop, grandmother!”

And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to bestow on her a great passion, one eternal passion alone, in accordance with the dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her forehead, still quite penetrated by that charming, healthy logic with which the philosophers of gallantry sprinkled salt upon the life of the eighteenth century, murmured:

“Take care, my poor darling! If you believe in such foolishness as this, you will be very unhappy.”

Story of a Farm Girl

A Country Excursion

For five months they had been talking of going to lunch at some country restaurant in the neighbourhood of Paris, on Madame Dufour’s birthday, and as they were looking forward very impatiently to the outing, they had risen very early that morning. Monsieur Dufour had borrowed the milkman’s cart, and drove himself. It was a very neat, two-wheeled conveyance. It had a roof supported by four iron posts to which were attached curtains, which had been raised so that they could see the countryside. The curtain at the back, alone, fluttered in the breeze like a flag. Madame Dufour, resplendent in a wonderful, cherry-coloured silk dress, sat by the side of her husband. The old grandmother and the daughter were accommodated with two chairs, and a yellow-haired youth, of whom, however, nothing was to be seen except his head, lay at the bottom of the trap.

After they had followed the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and passed the fortifications by the Porte Maillot, they began to enjoy the scenery.

When they got to the bridge of Neuilly, Monsieur Dufour said: “Here we are in the country at last!” At that warning, his wife grew sentimental about the beauties of nature. When they got to the crossroads at Courbevoie, they were seized with admiration for the tremendous view. Down there on the right was the spire of Argenteuil church, above it rose the hills of Sannois and the mill of Orgemont, while on the left, the aqueduct of Marly stood out against the clear morning sky. In the distance they could see the terrace of Saint-Germain, and opposite to them, at the end of a low chain of hills, the new fort of Cormeilles. Far in the background, a very long way off, beyond the plains and villages, one could see the sombre green of the forests.

The sun was beginning to burn their faces, the dust got into their eyes, and on either side of the road there stretched an interminable tract of bare, ugly country, which smelled unpleasant. You would have thought that it had been ravaged by a pestilence which had even attacked the buildings, for skeletons of dilapidated and deserted houses, or small cottages left in an unfinished state, as if the contractors had not been paid, reared their four roofless walls on each side.

Here and there tall factory-chimneys rose up from the barren soil, the only vegetation on that putrid land, where the spring breezes wafted an odour of petroleum and slate, mingled with another smell that was even still less agreeable. At last, however, they crossed the Seine a second time. It was delightful on the bridge; the river sparkled in the sun, and they had a feeling of quiet satisfaction and enjoyment in drinking in purer air, not impregnated by the black smoke of factories, nor by the miasma from the dumping-grounds. A man whom they met told them that the name of the place was Bezons; so Monsieur Dufour pulled up, and read the attractive announcement outside an eating-house:

“Restaurant Poulin, fish soups and fried fish, private rooms, arbours, and swings.”

“Well! Madame Dufour, will this suit you? Will you make up your mind at last?”

She read the announcement in her turn, and then looked at the house for a time.

It was a white country inn, built by the roadside, and through the open door she could see the bright zinc of the counter, at which two workmen in their Sunday best were sitting. At last she made up her mind, and said:

“Yes, this will do; and, besides, there is a view.”

So they drove into a large stretch of ground planted with trees, behind the inn, which was only separated from the river by the towing-path, and got out. The husband sprang out first, and held out his arms for his wife. As the step was very high, Madame Dufour, in order to reach him, had to show the lower part of her limbs, whose former slenderness had disappeared in fat. Monsieur Dufour, who was already getting excited by the country air, pinched her calf, and then, taking her in his arms, set her on the ground, as if she had been some enormous bundle. She shook the dust out of the silk dress, and then looked round, to see in what sort of a place she was.

She was a stout woman, of about thirty-six, like a full-blown rose, and delightful to look at. She could hardly breathe, as she was laced too tightly, which forced the heaving mass of her superabundant bosom up to her double chin. Next, the girl put her hand on to her father’s shoulder, and jumped lightly down. The youth with the yellow hair had got down by stepping on the wheel, and he helped Monsieur Dufour to get the grandmother out. Then they unharnessed the horse, which they tied up to a tree, and the carriage fell back, with both shafts in the air. The man and boy took off their coats, washed their hands in a pail of water, and then joined the ladies, who had already taken possession of the swings.

Mademoiselle Dufour was trying to swing herself standing up, but she could not succeed in getting a start. She was a pretty girl of about eighteen; one of those women who suddenly excite your desire when you meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of uneasiness and of excited senses. She was tall, had a small waist and large hips, with a dark skin, very large eyes, and very black hair. Her dress clearly marked the outlines of her firm, full figure, which was accentuated by the motion of her hips as she tried to swing herself higher. Her arms were stretched over her head to hold the rope, so that her bosom rose at every movement she made. Her hat, which a gust of wind had blown off, was hanging behind her, and as the swing gradually rose higher and higher, she showed her delicate limbs up to the knees at each time, and the wind from the perfumed petticoats, more heady than the fumes of wine, blew into the faces of her father and friend, who were looking at her, smiling.

Sitting in the other swing, Madame Dufour kept saying in a monotonous voice:

“Cyprian, come and swing me; do come and swing me, Cyprian!”

At last he complied, and turning up his shirtsleeves, as if he intended to work very hard, with much difficulty he set his wife in motion. She clutched the two ropes, and held her legs out straight, so as not to touch the ground. She enjoyed feeling giddy from the motion of the swing, and her whole figure shook like a jelly on a dish, but as she went higher and higher, she grew too giddy and got frightened. Every time she was coming back, she uttered a shriek, which made all the little urchins come round, and down below, beneath the garden hedge, she vaguely saw a row of mischievous heads, making faces as they laughed.

When a servant girl came out, they ordered lunch.

“Some fried fish, a stewed rabbit, salad, and dessert,” Madame Dufour said, with an important air.

“Bring two quarts of wine, and a bottle of claret,” her husband said.

“We will have lunch on the grass,” the girl added.

The grandmother, who had an affection for cats, had been petting one that belonged to the house, and had been bestowing the most affectionate words on it, for the last ten minutes. The animal, no doubt secretly pleased by her attentions, kept close to the good woman, but just out of reach of her hand, and quietly walked round the trees, against which she rubbed herself, with her tail up, purring with pleasure.

“Hello!” exclaimed the youth with the yellow hair, who was ferreting about, “here are two swell boats!” They all went to look at them, and saw two beautiful skiffs in a wooden boathouse, which were as beautifully finished as if they had been objects of luxury. They were moored side by side, like two tall, slender girls, in their narrow shining length, and aroused in one a wish to drift in them on warm summer mornings and evenings, along flower-covered banks of the river, where the trees dip their branches into the water, where the rushes are continually rustling in the breeze, and where the swift kingfishers dart about like flashes of blue lightning.

The whole family looked at them with great respect.

“They are indeed two swell boats,” Monsieur Dufour repeated gravely, and he examined them closely, commenting on them like a connoisseur. He had been in the habit of rowing in his younger days, he said, and when he had that in his hands⁠—and he went through the action of pulling the oars⁠—he did not care a fig for anybody. He had beaten more than one Englishman formerly at the Joinville regattas, and he made jokes on the word “dames,” used to describe the two things for holding the oars. He grew quite excited at last, and offered to make a bet that in a boat like that he could row six miles an hour, without exerting himself.

“Lunch is ready,” said the servant, appearing at the entrance to the boathouse. They all hurried off, but two young men were already lunching at the best place, which Madame Dufour had chosen in her mind as her seat. No doubt they were the owners of the skiffs, for they were dressed in boating costume. They were stretched out, almost lying on chairs, and were sunburned, and had on flannel trousers and thin cotton jerseys, with short sleeves, which showed their bare arms, which were as strong as blacksmiths’. They were two strong young fellows, who thought a great deal of their vigour, and who showed in all their movements that elasticity and grace of limb which can only be acquired by exercise, and which is so different from the awkwardness with which the same continual work stamps the mechanic.

They exchanged a rapid smile when they saw the mother, and then a look on seeing the daughter.

“Let us give up our place,” one of them said; “it will make us acquainted with them.”

The other got up immediately, and holding his black and red boating-cap in his hand, he politely offered the ladies the only shady place in the garden. With many excuses they accepted, and so that it might be more rural, they sat on the grass, without either tables or chairs.

The two young men took their plates, knives, forks, etc., to a table a little way off, and began to eat again. Their bare arms, which they showed continually, rather embarrassed the young girl, who even pretended to turn her head aside, and not to see them. But Madame Dufour, who was rather bolder, tempted by feminine curiosity, looked at them every moment, and no doubt compared them with the secret unsightliness of her husband. She had squatted herself on the ground with her legs tucked under her, after the manner of tailors, and kept wriggling about continually, under the pretext that ants were crawling about her somewhere. Monsieur Dufour, whom the presence and politeness of the strangers had put into rather a bad temper, was trying to find a comfortable position, which he did not, however, succeed in doing, while the youth with the yellow hair was eating as silently as an ogre.

“It is lovely weather, Monsieur,” the stout lady said to one of the boating-men. She wished to be friendly, because they had given up their place.

“It is, indeed, Madame,” he replied; “do you often go into the country?”

“Oh! Only once or twice a year, to get a little fresh air; and you, Monsieur?”

“I come and sleep here every night.”

“Oh! That must be very nice?”

“Certainly it is, Madame.” And he gave them such a poetical account of his daily life, that in the hearts of these shopkeepers, who were deprived of the meadows, and who longed for country walks, it roused that innate love of nature, which they all felt so strongly the whole year round, behind the counter in their shop.

The girl raised her eyes and looked at the oarsman with emotion, and Monsieur Dufour spoke for the first time.

“It is indeed a happy life,” he said. And then he added: “A little more rabbit, my dear?”

“No, thank you,” she replied, and turning to the young men again, and pointing to their arms, asked: “Do you never feel cold like that?”

They both laughed, and amazed the family by telling of the enormous fatigue they could endure, of bathing while in a state of tremendous perspiration, of rowing in the fog at night, and they struck their chests violently, to show how they sounded.

“Ah! You look very strong,” the husband said, and he did not talk any more of the time when he used to beat the English. The girl was looking at them askance now, and the young fellow with the yellow hair, as he had swallowed some wine the wrong way, and was coughing violently, bespattered Madame Dufour’s cherry-coloured silk dress. Madame got angry, and sent for some water to wash the spots.

Meanwhile it had grown unbearably hot, the sparkling river looked like a blaze of fire and the fumes of the wine were getting into their heads. Monsieur Dufour, who had a violent hiccup, had unbuttoned his waistcoat and the top of his trousers, while his wife, who felt choking, was gradually unfastening her dress. The youth was shaking his yellow mop of hair in a happy frame of mind, and kept helping himself to wine, and as the old grandmother felt drunk, she endeavoured to be very stiff and dignified. As for the girl, she showed nothing except a peculiar brightness in her eyes, while the brown skin on her cheeks became more rosy.

The coffee finished them off; they spoke of singing, and each of them sang, or repeated a couplet, which the others repeated enthusiastically. Then they got up with some difficulty, and while the two women, who were rather dizzy, were getting some fresh air, the two males, who were altogether drunk, were performing gymnastic tricks. Heavy, limp, and with scarlet faces, they hung awkwardly on to the iron rings, without being able to raise themselves, while their shirts were continually threatening to part company with their trousers, and to flap in the wind like flags.

Meanwhile, the two boating-men had got their skiffs into the water. They came back, and politely asked the ladies whether they would like a row.

“Would you like one, Monsieur Dufour?” his wife exclaimed. “Please come!”

He merely gave her a drunken look, without understanding what she said. Then one of the rowers came up, with two fishing-rods in his hand; and the hope of catching a gudgeon, that great aim of the Parisian shopkeeper, made Dufour’s dull eyes gleam. He politely allowed them to do whatever they liked, while he sat in the shade, under the bridge, with his feet dangling over the river, by the side of the young man with the yellow hair, who was sleeping soundly close to him.

One of the boating-men made a martyr of himself, and took the mother.

“Let us go to the little wood on the Ile aux Anglais!” he called out, as he rowed off. The other skiff went slower, for the rower was looking at his companion so intently, that he thought of nothing else. His emotion paralysed his strength, while the girl, who was sitting on the steerer’s seat, gave herself up to the enjoyment of being on the water. She felt disinclined to think, felt a lassitude in her limbs, a complete self-relaxation, as if she were intoxicated. She had become very flushed, and breathed pantingly. The effect of the wine, increased by the extreme heat, made all the trees on the bank seem to bow, as she passed. A vague wish for enjoyment, a fermentation of her blood, seemed to pervade her whole body, and she was also a little agitated by this tête-à-tête on the water, in a place which seemed depopulated by the heat, with this young man, who thought her beautiful, whose looks seemed to caress her skin, and whose eyes were as penetrating and exciting as the sun’s rays.

Their inability to speak increased their emotion, and they looked about them. At last he made an effort and asked her name.

“Henriette,” she said.

“Why! My name is Henri,” he replied. The sound of their voices calmed them, and they looked at the banks. The other skiff had gone ahead of them, and seemed to be waiting for them. The rower called out:

“We will meet you in the wood; we are going as far as Robinson because Madame Dufour is thirsty.” Then he bent over his oars again and rowed off so quickly that he was soon out of sight.

Meanwhile, a continual roar, which they had heard for some time, came nearer, and the river itself seemed to shiver, as if the dull noise were rising from its depths.

“What is that noise?” she asked. It was the noise of the weir, which cut the river in two, at the island. He was explaining it to her, when above the noise of the waterfall they heard the song of a bird, which seemed a long way off.

“Listen!” he said; “the nightingales are singing during the day, so the females must be sitting.”

A nightingale! She had never heard one before, and the idea of listening to one roused visions of poetic tenderness in her heart. A nightingale! That is to say, the invisible witness of the lover’s interview which Juliet invoked on her balcony; that celestial music which is attuned to human kisses; that eternal inspirer of all those languorous romances which open idealized visions to the poor, tender, little hearts of sensitive girls!

She was going to hear a nightingale.

“We must not make a noise,” her companion said, “and then we can go into the wood, and sit down close to it.”

The skiff seemed to glide. They saw the trees on the island, the banks of which were so low that they could look into the depths of the thickets. They stopped, he made the boat fast, Henriette took hold of Henri’s arm, and they went beneath the trees.

“Stoop,” he said, so she bent down, and they went into an inextricable thicket of creepers, leaves, and reed-grass, which formed an impenetrable retreat, and which the young man laughingly called “his private room.”

Just above their heads, perched in one of the trees which hid them, the bird was still singing. He uttered shakes and trills, and then long, vibrating sounds that filled the air and seemed to lose themselves in the distance, across the level country, through that burning silence which hung low upon the whole country round. They did not speak for fear of frightening the bird away. They were sitting close together, and slowly Henri’s arm stole round the girl’s waist and squeezed it gently. She took that daring hand, but without anger, and kept removing it whenever he put it round her; not, however, feeling at all embarrassed by this caress, just as if it had been something quite natural which she was resisting just as naturally.

She was listening to the bird in ecstasy. She felt an infinite longing for happiness, for some sudden demonstration of tenderness, for a revelation of divine poesy. She felt such a softening at her heart, and such a relaxation of her nerves, that she began to cry, without knowing why. The young man was now straining her close to him, and she did not remove his arm; she did not think of it. Suddenly the nightingale stopped, and a voice called out in the distance:

“Henriette!”

“Do not reply,” he said in a low voice, “you will drive the bird away.”

But she had no idea of doing so, and they remained in the same position for some time. Madame Dufour had sat down somewhere or other, for from time to time they heard the stout lady break out into little bursts of laughter.

The girl was still crying; she was filled with delightful feelings, her skin was burning and she felt a strange sensation of tickling. Henri’s head was on her shoulder, and suddenly he kissed her on the lips. She was surprised and angry, and, to avoid him, she threw herself back. But he fell upon her and his whole body covered hers. For a long time he sought her lips, which she refused him, then he pressed her mouth to his. Seized with desire she returned his kiss, holding him to her breast, and she abandoned all resistance, as if crushed by too heavy a weight.

Everything about them was still. The bird began again to sing, sending forth three penetrating notes at first, like a call of love, then, after a momentary silence, it began in weaker tones its slow modulations. A soft breeze crept up, raising a murmur among the leaves, while from the depths of the branches two burning sighs mingled with the song of the nightingale and the gentle breath of the wood.

An intoxication possessed the bird and by degrees its notes came more rapidly like a fire spreading or a passion increasing, and they seemed to be an accompaniment to the kisses which resounded beneath the tree. Then the delirium of his song burst forth. He seemed to swoon on certain notes, to have spasms of melodious emotion. Sometimes he would rest a moment, emitting only two or three slight sounds suddenly terminated on a sharp note. Or he would launch into a frenzy, pouring out his song, with thrills and jerks, like a mad song of love, followed by cries of triumph. Then he stopped, hearing beneath him a sigh so deep that it seemed as though a soul were transported. The sound was prolonged for a while, then it ended in a sob.

They were both very pale when they quitted their grassy retreat. The blue sky looked dull to them, the ardent sun was clouded over to their eyes, they perceived not the solitude and the silence. They walked quickly side by side, without speaking or touching each other, appearing to be irreconcilable enemies, as if disgust had sprung up between their bodies, and hatred between their souls. From time to time Henriette called out: “Mamma!”

They heard a noise in a thicket, and Henri fancied he saw a white dress being quickly pulled down over a fat calf. The stout lady appeared, looking rather confused, and more flushed than ever, her eyes shining and her breast heaving, and perhaps just a little too close to her companion. The latter must have had some strange experience, for his face was wrinkled with smiles that he could not check.

Madame Dufour took his arm tenderly, and they returned to the boats. Henri went on first, still without speaking, by the girl’s side, and he thought he heard a loud kiss being stifled. At last they got back to Bezons.

Monsieur Dufour, who had sobered up, was waiting for them very impatiently, while the youth with the yellow hair was having a mouthful of something to eat before leaving the inn. The carriage was in the yard, with the horse yoked, and the grandmother, who had already got in, was frightened at the thought of being overtaken by night, before they got back to Paris, the outskirts not being safe.

The young men shook hands with them, and the Dufour family drove off.

“Goodbye, until we meet again!” the oarsmen cried, and the answers they got were a sigh and a tear.

Two months later, as Henri was going along the Rue des Martyrs, he saw “Dufour, Ironmonger,” over a door. So he went in, and saw the stout lady sitting at the counter. They recognized each other immediately, and after an interchange of polite greetings, he inquired after them all.

“And how is Mademoiselle Henriette?” he inquired, specially.

“Very well, thank you; she is married.”

“Ah!” Mastering his feelings, he added: “To whom was she married?”

“To that young man who went with us, you know; he has joined us in business.”

“I remember him perfectly.”

He was going out, feeling unhappy, though scarcely knowing why, when Madame called him back.

“And how is your friend?” she asked, rather shyly.

“He is very well, thank you.”

“Please give him our compliments, and beg him to come and call when he is in the neighbourhood.” She blushed, then added: “Tell him it will give me great pleasure.”

“I will be sure to do so. Adieu!”

“I will not say that; come again, very soon.”

The next year, one very hot Sunday, all the details of that memorable adventure suddenly came back to him so clearly that he revisited the “private room” in the wood, and was overwhelmed with astonishment when he went in. She was sitting on the grass, looking very sad, while by her side, again in his shirtsleeves, the young man with the yellow hair was sleeping soundly, like some brute.

She grew so pale when she saw Henri, that at first he thought she was going to faint; then, however, they began to talk quite naturally, as if there had never been anything between them. But when he told her that he was very fond of that spot, and went there very often on Sundays, to dream of old memories, she looked into his eyes for a long time. “I, too, think of it every evening,” she replied.

“Come, my dear,” her husband said, with a yawn; “I think it is time for us to be going.”

In the Spring

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring. As the winter had been very severe the year before, this longing assumed an intoxicating feeling in May; it was like a superabundance of sap.

Well, one morning on waking, I saw from my window the blue sky glowing in the sun above the neighbouring houses. The canaries hanging in the windows were singing loudly, and so were the servants on every floor; a cheerful noise rose up from the streets, and I went out, with my spirits as bright as the day was, to go⁠—I did not exactly know where. Everybody I met seemed to be smiling; an air of happiness appeared to pervade everything, in the warm light of returning spring. One might almost have said that a breeze of love was blowing through the city, and the young women whom I saw in the streets in their morning toilettes, in the depths of whose eyes there lurked a hidden tenderness, and who walked with languid grace, filled my heart with agitation.

Without knowing how or why, I found myself on the banks of the Seine. Steamboats were starting for Suresnes, and suddenly I was seized by an unconquerable wish to have a walk through the woods. The deck of the Mouche6 was crowded with passengers, for the sun in early spring draws you out of the house, in spite of yourself, and everybody moves about, goes and comes, and talks to his neighbour.

I had a female neighbour; a little working-girl, no doubt, who possessed the true Parisian charm; a little head, with light curly hair, which looked like frizzed light, came down to her ears and descended to the nape of her neck, danced in the wind, and then became such fine, such light-coloured down, that one could scarcely see it, but on which one felt an irresistible desire to impress a shower of kisses.

Under my insistent glances, she turned her head towards me, and then immediately looked down, while a slight fold deepened the corner of her mouth, which looked as if she were ready to break out into a smile, and showed there more of that fine, silky, pale down which the sun was gilding a little.

The calm river grew wider; the atmosphere was warm and perfectly still, but a murmur of life seemed to fill all space. My neighbour raised her eyes again, and, this time, as I was still looking at her, she smiled, decidedly. She was charming like that, and in her passing glance, I saw a thousand things, which I had hitherto been ignorant of, for I saw unknown depths, all the charm of tenderness, all the poetry which we dream of, all the happiness for which we continually search. I felt an insane longing to open my arms and to carry her off somewhere, so as to whisper as to whisper the sweet music of words of love into her ears.

I was just going to speak to her, when somebody touched me on the shoulder, and when I turned round in some surprise, I saw an ordinary looking man, who was neither young nor old, and who gazed at me sadly:

“I should like to speak to you,” he said.

I made a grimace, which he no doubt saw, for he added:

“It is a matter of importance.”

I got up, therefore, and followed him to the other end of the boat, and then he said:

“Monsieur, when winter comes, with its cold, wet and snowy weather, your doctor says to you constantly: ‘Keep your feet warm, guard against chills, colds, bronchitis, rheumatism and pleurisy.’

“Then you are very careful, you wear flannel, a heavy overcoat and thick shoes, but all this does not prevent you from passing two months in bed. But when spring returns, with its leaves and flowers, its warm, soft breezes, and its smell of the fields, which cause you vague disquiet and causeless emotion, nobody says to you:

“ ‘Monsieur, beware of love! It is lying in ambush everywhere; it is watching for you at every corner; all its snares are laid, all its weapons are sharpened, all its guiles are prepared! Beware of love.⁠ ⁠… Beware of love. It is more dangerous than colds, bronchitis, or pleurisy! It never forgives, and makes everybody commit irreparable follies.’

“Yes, Monsieur, I say that the French Government ought to put large public notices on the walls, with these words: ‘Return of Spring. French citizens, beware of love!’ just as they put: ‘Beware of paint.’

“However, as the government will not do this, I must do it in its stead, and I say to you: ‘Beware of love,’ for it is just going to seize you, and it is my duty to inform you of it, just as in Russia they inform anyone that his nose is frozen.”

I was much astonished at this individual, and assuming a dignified manner, I said:

“Really, Monsieur, you appear to me to be interfering in a matter which is no business of yours.”

He made an abrupt movement, and replied:

“Ah! Monsieur! Monsieur! If I see that a man is in danger of being drowned at a dangerous spot, ought I to let him perish? So just listen to my story, and you will see why I ventured to speak to you like this.

“It was about this time last year that it occurred. But, first of all, I must tell you that I am a clerk in the Admiralty, where our chiefs, the commissioners, take their gold lace and quill-driving officers seriously, and treat us like foretop men on board a ship⁠—Ah, if all our chiefs were civilians⁠—but let that pass⁠—Well, from my office I could see a small bit of blue sky and the swallows, and I felt inclined to dance among my portfolios.

“My yearning for freedom grew so intense, that, in spite of my repugnance, I went to see my chief, who was a short, bad-tempered man, always in a rage. When I told him that I was not well, he looked at me, and said: ‘I do not believe it, Monsieur, but be off with you! Do you think that any office can go on, with clerks like you?’ I started at once, and went down the Seine. It was a day like this, and I took the Mouche, to go as far as Saint-Cloud. Ah! What a good thing it would have been if my chief had refused me permission to leave the office for the day!

“I seemed to expand in the sun. I loved it all; the steamer, the river, the trees, the houses, my fellow-passengers, everything. I felt inclined to kiss something, no matter what; it was love, laying its snare. Presently, at the Trocadéro, a girl, with a small parcel in her hand, came on board and sat down opposite to me. She was certainly pretty; but it is surprising, Monsieur, how much prettier women seem to us when it is fine, at the beginning of the spring. Then they have an intoxicating charm, something quite peculiar about them. It is just like drinking wine after the cheese.

“I looked at her, and she also looked at me, but only occasionally, like that girl did at you, just now; but at last, by dint of looking at each other constantly, it seemed to me that we knew each other well enough to enter into conversation, and I spoke to her, and she replied. She was decidedly pretty and nice, and she intoxicated me, Monsieur!

“She got out at Saint-Cloud, and I followed her. She went and delivered her parcel, and when she returned, the boat had just started. I walked by her side, and the warmth of the air made us both sigh. ‘It would be very nice in the woods,’ I said. ‘Indeed, it would,’ she replied. ‘Shall we go there for a walk, Mademoiselle?’

“She gave me a quick, upward look, as if to see exactly what I was like, and then, after a little hesitation, she accepted my proposal, and soon we were there, walking side by side. Under the foliage, which was still rather thin, the tall, thick, bright, green grass was inundated by the sun, and full of small insects that also made love to one another, and birds were singing everywhere. My companion began to jump and to run, intoxicated by the air, and the smell of the country, and I ran and jumped behind her. How stupid we are at times, Monsieur!

“Then she wildly sang a thousand things; opera airs, and the song of Musette! The song of Musette! How poetical it seemed to me, then! I almost cried over it. Ah! Those silly songs make us lose our heads; and, believe me, never marry a woman who sings in the country, especially if she sings the song of Musette!

“She soon grew tired, and sat down on a grassy slope, and I sat down at her feet, and took her hands, her little hands, that were so marked with the needle, and that moved me. I said to myself: ‘These are the sacred marks of toil.’ Oh! Monsieur, do you know what those sacred marks of labour mean? They mean all the gossip of the workroom, the whispered blackguardism, the mind soiled by all the filth that is talked; they mean lost chastity, foolish chatter, all the wretchedness of daily bad habits, all the narrowness of ideas which belongs to women of the lower orders, united in the girl whose sacred fingers bear the sacred marks of toil.

“Then we looked into each other’s eyes for a long while. Oh! What power a woman’s eye has! How it agitates us, how it invades our very being, takes possession of us, and dominates us. How profound it seems, how full of infinite promises! People call that looking into each other’s souls! Oh! Monsieur, what humbug! If we could see into each other’s souls, we should be more careful of what we did. However, I was enthusiastic, mad. I tried to take her into my arms, but she said: ‘Paws off!’ Then I knelt down, and opened my heart to her, and poured out all the affection that was suffocating me, on her knees. She seemed surprised at my change of manner, and gave me a sidelong glance, as if to say: ‘Ah! So that is the way women make a fool of you, old fellow! Very well, we will see.’ In love, Monsieur, we are all boobies at a fair, and the women are the dealers.

“No doubt I could have had her, and I saw my own stupidity later, but what I wanted was not a woman’s body; it was love, it was the ideal. I was sentimental, when I ought to have been using my time to a better purpose.

“As soon as she had had enough of my protestations of love, she got up, and we returned to Saint-Cloud, and I did not leave her until we got to Paris; but she looked so sad as we were returning, that at last I asked her what was the matter. ‘I am thinking,’ she replied, ‘that this has been one of those days of which we have but few in life.’ And my heart beat so that it felt as if it would break my ribs.

“I saw her on the following Sunday, and the next Sunday, and every Sunday. I took her to Bougival, Saint-Germain, Maisons-Lafitte, Poissy; to every suburban resort of lovers.

“The little jade, in turn, pretended to love me, until, at last, I altogether lost my head, and three months later I married her.

“What can you expect, Monsieur, when a man is a clerk, living alone, without any relations, or anyone to advise him? One says to oneself: ‘How sweet life would be with a wife!’

“And so one gets married, and she calls you names from morning till night, understands nothing, knows nothing, chatters continually, sings the song of Musette at the top of her voice (oh! that song of Musette, how tired one gets of it!); quarrels with the coal dealer, tells the concierge all her domestic details, confides all the secrets of her bedroom to the neighbour’s servant, discusses her husband with the tradespeople, and has her head so stuffed with stupid stories, idiotic superstitions, extraordinary ideas and monstrous prejudices, that I shed tears of discouragement every time I talk to her.”

He stopped, as he was rather out of breath, and very much moved, and I looked at him, for I felt pity for this poor, artless devil, and I was just going to give him some sort of answer, when the boat stopped. We were at Saint-Cloud.

The little woman who had so taken my fancy, got up in order to land. She passed close to me, and gave me a side glance and a furtive smile; one of those smiles that drive you mad; then she jumped on the landing-stage. I sprang forward to follow her, but my neighbour laid hold of my arm. I shook myself loose, however, whereupon he seized the skirt of my coat, and pulled me back, exclaiming:

“You shall not go! You shall not go!” in such a loud voice, that everybody turned round and laughed, and I remained standing motionless and furious, but without venturing to face scandal and ridicule, and the steamboat started.

The little woman on the landing-stage looked at me as I went off with an air of disappointment, while my persecutor rubbed his hands, and whispered to me:

“Well, I have done you a good turn, you’ll see!”

Paul’s Mistress

The Restaurant Grillon, a small commonwealth of boatmen, was slowly emptying. In front of the door all was tumult⁠—cries and calls⁠—and huge fellows in white jerseys gesticulated with oars on their shoulders.

The ladies in bright spring toilettes stepped aboard the skiffs with care, and seating themselves astern, arranged their dresses, while the landlord of the establishment, a mighty, red-bearded, self-possessed individual of renowned strength, offered his hand to the pretty creatures, and kept the frail crafts steady.

The rowers, bare-armed, with bulging chests, took their places in their turn, playing to the gallery as they did so⁠—a gallery consisting of middle-class people dressed in their Sunday clothes, of workmen and soldiers leaning upon their elbows on the parapet of the bridge, all taking a great interest in the sight.

One by one the boats cast off from the landing stage. The oarsmen bent forward and then threw themselves backward with even swing, and under the impetus of the long curved oars, the swift skiffs glided along the river, grew smaller in the distance, and finally disappeared under the railway bridge, as they descended the stream toward La Grenouillère. One couple only remained behind. The young man, still almost beardless, slender, with a pale countenance, held his mistress, a thin little brunette with the air of a grasshopper, by the waist; and occasionally they gazed into each other’s eyes. The landlord shouted:

“Come, Mr. Paul, make haste,” and they drew near.

Of all the guests of the house, Mr. Paul was the most liked and most respected. He paid well and punctually, while the others hung back for a long time if indeed they did not vanish without paying. Besides which he was a sort of walking advertisement for the establishment, inasmuch as his father was a senator. When a stranger would inquire: “Who on earth is that little chap who thinks so much of his girl?” some habitué would reply, half-aloud, with a mysterious and important air: “Don’t you know? That is Paul Baron, a senator’s son.”

And invariably the other would exclaim:

“Poor devil! He has got it badly.”

Mother Grillon, a good and worthy business woman, described the young man and his companion as “her two turtledoves,” and appeared quite touched by this passion, which was profitable for her business.

The couple advanced at a slow pace. The skiff Madeleine was ready, and at the moment of embarking they kissed each other, which caused the public collected on the bridge to laugh. Mr. Paul took the oars, and rowed away for La Grenouillère.

When they arrived it was just upon three o’clock and the large floating café overflowed with people.

The immense raft, sheltered by a tarpaulin roof, is joined to the charming island of Croissy by two narrow footbridges, one of which leads into the centre of the aquatic establishment, while the other unites with a tiny islet, planted with a tree and called “The Flower Pot,” and thence leads to land near the bath office.

Mr. Paul made fast his boat alongside the establishment, climbed over the railing of the café, and then, grasping his mistress’s hands, assisted her out of the boat. They both seated themselves at the end of a table opposite each other.

On the opposite side of the river along the towing-path, a long string of vehicles was drawn up. Cabs alternated with the fine carriages of the swells; the first, clumsy, with enormous bodies crushing the springs, drawn by broken-down hacks with hanging heads and broken knees; the second, slightly built on light wheels, with horses slender and straight, their heads well up, their bits snowy with foam, and with solemn coachmen in livery, heads erect in high collars, waiting bolt upright, with whips resting on their knees.

The bank was covered with people who came off in families, or in parties, or in couples, or alone. They plucked at the blades of grass, went down to the water, ascended the path, and having reached the spot, stood still awaiting the ferryman. The clumsy punt plied incessantly from bank to bank, discharging its passengers upon the island. The arm of the river (called the Dead Arm) upon which this refreshment wharf lay, seemed asleep, so feeble was the current. Fleets of yawls, of skiffs, of canoes, of podoscaphs, of gigs, of craft of all forms and of all kinds, crept about upon the motionless stream, crossing each other, intermingling, running foul of one another, stopping abruptly under a jerk of the arms only to shoot off afresh under a sudden strain of the muscles and gliding swiftly along like great yellow or red fishes.

Others arrived continually; some from Chatou up the stream; others from Bougival down it; laughter crossed the water from one boat to another, calls, admonitions, or imprecations. The boatmen exposed the bronzed and knotted muscles of their biceps to the heat of the day; and like strange floating flowers, the silk parasols, red, green, blue, or yellow, of the ladies bloomed in the sterns of the boats.

A July sun flamed high in the heavens; the atmosphere seemed full of burning merriment; not a breath of air stirred the leaves of the willows or poplars.

In front, away in the distance, the inevitable Mont-Valérien reared its fortified ramparts, tier above tier, in the intense light; while on the right the divine slopes of Louveciennes, following the bend of the river, disposed themselves in a semicircle, displaying in turn across the rich and shady lawns of large gardens the white walls of country seats.

Upon the outskirts of La Grenouillère a crowd of pedestrians moved about beneath the giant trees which make this corner of the island one of the most delightful parks in the world.

Women and girls with yellow hair and breasts developed beyond all measurement, with exaggerated hips, their complexions plastered with rouge, their eyes daubed with charcoal, their lips bloodred, laced up, rigged out in outrageous dresses, trailed the crying bad taste of their toilettes over the fresh green sward; while beside them young men posed in their fashion-plate garments with light gloves, patent leather boots, canes the size of a thread, and single eyeglasses emphasizing the insipidity of their smiles.

Opposite La Grenouillère the island is narrow, and on its other side, where also a ferryboat plies, bringing people unceasingly across from Croissy, the rapid branch of the river, full of whirlpools and eddies and foam, rushes along with the strength of a torrent. A detachment of pontoon-builders, in the uniform of artillerymen, was encamped upon this bank, and the soldiers seated in a row on a long beam watched the water flowing.

In the floating establishment there was a boisterous and uproarious crowd. The wooden tables upon which the spilt refreshments made little sticky streams were covered with half-empty glasses and surrounded by half-tipsy individuals. The crowd shouted, sang, and brawled. The men, their hats at the backs of their heads, their faces red, with the shining eyes of drunkards, moved about vociferating and evidently looking for the quarrels natural to brutes. The women, seeking their prey for the night, sought for free liquor in the meantime; and the unoccupied space between the tables was dominated by the customary local public, a whole regiment of rowdy boatmen, with their female companions in short flannel skirts.

One of them performed on the piano and appeared to play with his feet as well as his hands; four couples glided through a quadrille, and some young men watched them, polished and correct, men who would have looked respectable, did not their innate viciousness show in spite of everything.

For there you see all the scum of society, all its well-bred debauchery, all the seamy side of Parisian society⁠—a mixture of counter-jumpers, of strolling players, of low journalists, of gentlemen in tutelage, of rotten stockjobbers, of ill-famed debauchees, of old used-up fast men; a doubtful crowd of suspicious characters, half-known, half-sunk, half-recognised, half-criminal, pickpockets, rogues, procurers of women, sharpers with dignified manners, and a bragging air which seems to say: “I shall kill the first man who treats me as a scoundrel.”

The place reeks of folly, and stinks of vulgarity and cheap gallantry. Male and female are just as bad one as the other. There dwells an odour of so-called love, and there one fights for a yes, or for a no, in order to sustain a worm-eaten reputation, which a thrust of the sword or a pistol bullet only destroys further.

Some of the neighbouring inhabitants looked in out of curiosity every Sunday; some young men, very young, appeared there every year to learn how to live, some promenaders lounging about showed themselves there; some greenhorns wandered thither. With good reason is it named La Grenouillère. At the side of the covered wharf where drink was served, and quite close to the Flower Pot, people bathed. Those among the women who possessed the requisite roundness of form came there to display their wares and to get clients. The rest, scornful, although well filled out with wadding, supported by springs, corrected here and altered there, watched their dabbling sisters with disdain.

The swimmers crowded on to a little platform to dive. Straight like vine poles, or round like pumpkins, gnarled like olive branches, bowed over in front, or thrown backward by the size of their stomachs, and invariably ugly, they leaped into the water, splashing it over the drinkers in the café.

Notwithstanding the great trees which overhang the floating-house, and notwithstanding the vicinity of the water, a suffocating heat filled the place. The fumes of the spilt liquors mingled with the effluvia of the bodies and with the strong perfumes with which the skin of the trader in love is saturated and which evaporate in this furnace. But beneath all these diverse scents a slight aroma of poudre de riz lingered, disappearing and reappearing, and perpetually encountered as though some concealed hand had shaken an invisible powder-puff in the air. The show was on the river, where the perpetual coming and going of the boats attracted the eyes. The girls in the boats sprawled upon their seats opposite their strong-wristed males, and scornfully contemplated the dinner-hunting females prowling about the island.

Sometimes when a crew in full swing passed at top speed, the friends who had gone ashore gave vent to shouts, and all the people as if suddenly seized with madness commenced to yell.

At the bend of the river toward Chatou fresh boats continually appeared. They came nearer and grew larger, and as faces became recognisable, the vociferations broke out anew.

A canoe covered with an awning and manned by four women came slowly down the current. She who rowed was petite, thin, faded, in a cabin-boy’s costume, her hair drawn up under an oilskin hat. Opposite her, a lusty blonde, dressed as a man, with a white flannel jacket, lay upon her back at the bottom of the boat, her legs in the air, resting on the seat at each side of the rower. She smoked a cigarette, while at each stroke of the oars, her chest and her stomach quivered, shaken by the stroke. At the back, under the awning, two handsome girls, tall and slender, one dark and the other fair, held each other by the waist as they watched their companions.

A cry arose from La Grenouillère, “There’s Lesbos,” and all at once a furious clamour, a terrifying scramble took place; the glasses were knocked down; people clambered on to the tables; all in a frenzy of noise bawled: “Lesbos! Lesbos! Lesbos!” The shout rolled along, became indistinct, was no longer more than a kind of deafening howl, and then suddenly it seemed to start anew, to rise into space, to cover the plain, to fill the foliage of the great trees, to extend to the distant slopes, and reach even to the sun.

The rower, in the face of this ovation, had quietly stopped. The handsome blonde, stretched out upon the bottom of the boat, turned her head with a careless air, as she raised herself upon her elbows; and the two girls at the back commenced laughing as they saluted the crowd.

Then the hullabaloo redoubled, making the floating establishment tremble. The men took off their hats, the women waved their handkerchiefs, and all voices, shrill or deep, together cried:

“Lesbos.”

It was as if these people, this collection of the corrupt, saluted their chiefs like the warships which fire guns when an admiral passes along the line.

The numerous fleet of boats also saluted the women’s boat, which pushed along more quickly to land farther off.

Mr. Paul, contrary to the others, had drawn a key from his pocket and whistled with all his might. His nervous mistress grew paler, caught him by the arm to make him be quiet, and upon this occasion she looked at him with fury in her eyes. But he appeared exasperated, as though borne away by jealousy of some man or by deep anger, instinctive and ungovernable. He stammered, his lips quivering with indignation:

“It is shameful! They ought to be drowned like puppies with a stone about the neck.”

But Madeleine instantly flew into a rage; her small and shrill voice became a hiss, and she spoke volubly, as though pleading her own cause:

“And what has it to do with you⁠—you indeed? Are they not at liberty to do what they wish since they owe nobody anything? You shut up and mind your own business.”

But he cut her speech short:

“It is the police whom it concerns, and I will have them marched off to St. Lazare; indeed I will.”

She gave a start:

“You?”

“Yes, I! And in the meantime I forbid you to speak to them⁠—you understand, I forbid you to do so.”

Then she shrugged her shoulders and grew calm in a moment:

“My dear, I shall do as I please; if you are not satisfied, be off, and instantly. I am not your wife, am I? Very well then, hold your tongue.”

He made no reply and they stood face to face, their lips tightly closed, breathing quickly.

At the other end of the great wooden café the four women made their entry. The two in men’s costumes marched in front: the one thin like an oldish tomboy, with a yellow tinge on her temples; the other filling out her white flannel garments with her fat, swelling out her wide trousers with her buttocks and swaying about like a fat goose with enormous legs and yielding knees. Their two friends followed them, and the crowd of boatmen thronged about to shake their hands.

The four had hired a small cottage close to the water’s edge, and lived there as two households would have lived.

Their vice was public, recognised, patent to all. People talked of it as a natural thing, which almost excited their sympathy, and whispered in very low tones strange stories of dramas begotten of furious feminine jealousies, of the stealthy visit of well known women and of actresses to the little house close to the water’s edge.

A neighbour, horrified by these scandalous rumours, notified the police, and the inspector, accompanied by a man, had come to make inquiry. The mission was a delicate one; it was impossible, in short, to accuse these women, who did not abandon themselves to prostitution, of any tangible crime. The inspector, very much puzzled, and, indeed, ignorant of the nature of the offences suspected, had asked questions at random, and made a lofty report conclusive of their innocence.

The joke spread as far as Saint Germain. They walked about the Grenouillère establishment with mincing steps like queens; and seemed to glory in their fame, rejoicing in the gaze that was fixed on them, so superior to this crowd, to this mob, to these plebeians.

Madeleine and her lover watched them approach, and the girl’s eyes lit up.

When the first two had reached the end of the table, Madeleine cried:

“Pauline!”

The large woman turned and stopped, continuing all the time to hold the arm of her feminine cabin-boy:

“Good gracious, Madeleine! Do come and talk to me, my dear.”

Paul squeezed his fingers upon his mistress’s wrist, but she said to him, with such an air: “You know, my dear, you can clear out, if you like,” that he said nothing and remained alone.

Then they chatted in low voices, all three of them standing. Many pleasant jests passed their lips, they spoke quickly; and Pauline now and then looked at Paul, by stealth, with a shrewd and malicious smile.

At last, unable to put up with it any longer, he suddenly rose and in a single bound was at their side, trembling in every limb. He seized Madeleine by the shoulders.

“Come, I wish it,” said he; “I have forbidden you to speak to these sluts.”

Whereupon Pauline raised her voice and set to work blackguarding him with her Billingsgate vocabulary. All the bystanders laughed; they drew near him; they raised themselves on tiptoe in order the better to see him. He remained dumb under this downpour of filthy abuse. It appeared to him that the words which came from that mouth and fell upon him defiled him like dirt, and, in presence of the row which was beginning, he fell back, retraced his steps, and rested his elbows on the railing toward the river, turning his back upon the victorious women.

There he stayed watching the water, and sometimes with rapid gesture, as though he could pluck it out, he removed with his nervous fingers the tear which stood in his eye.

The fact was that he was hopelessly in love, without knowing why, notwithstanding his refined instincts, in spite of his reason, in spite, indeed, of his will. He had fallen into this love as one falls into a muddy hole. Of a tender and delicate disposition, he had dreamed of liaisons, exquisite, ideal, and impassioned, and there that little bit of a woman, stupid like all prostitutes, with an exasperating stupidity, not even pretty, but thin and a spitfire, had taken him prisoner, possessing him from head to foot, body and soul. He had submitted to this feminine witchery, mysterious and all powerful, this unknown power, this prodigious domination⁠—arising no one knows whence, but from the demon of the flesh⁠—which casts the most sensible man at the feet of some harlot or other without there being anything in her to explain her fatal and sovereign power.

And there at his back he felt that some infamous thing was brewing. Shouts of laughter cut him to the heart. What should he do? He knew well, but he could not do it.

He steadily watched an angler upon the bank opposite him, and his motionless line.

Suddenly, the worthy man jerked a little silver fish, which wriggled at the end of his line, out of the river. Then he endeavoured to extract his hook, pulled and turned it, but in vain. At last, losing patience, he commenced to tear it out, and all the bleeding gullet of the fish, with a portion of its intestines came out. Paul shuddered, rent to his heartstrings. It seemed to him that the hook was his love, and that if he should pluck it out, all that he had in his breast would come out in the same way at the end of a curved iron, fixed in the depths of his being, to which Madeleine held the line.

A hand was placed upon his shoulder; he started and turned; his mistress was at his side. They did not speak to each other; and like him she rested her elbows upon the railing, and fixed her eyes upon the river.

He tried to speak to her and could find nothing. He could not even disentangle his own emotions; all that he was sensible of was joy at feeling her there close to him, come back again, as well as shameful cowardice, a craving to pardon everything, to allow everything, provided she never left him.

At last, after a few minutes, he asked her in a very gentle voice:

“Would you like to go? It will be nicer in the boat.”

She answered: “Yes, darling.”

And he assisted her into the skiff, pressing her hands, all softened, with some tears still in his eyes. Then she looked at him with a smile and they kissed each other again.

They reascended the river very slowly, skirting the willow-bordered, grass-covered bank, bathed and still in the afternoon warmth. When they had returned to the Restaurant Grillon, it was barely six o’clock. Then leaving their boat they set off on foot towards Bezons, across the fields and along the high poplars which bordered the river. The long grass ready to be mowed was full of flowers. The sinking sun glowed from beneath a sheet of red light, and in the tempered heat of the closing day the floating exhalations from the grass, mingled with the damp scents from the river, filled the air with a soft languor, with a happy light, with an atmosphere of blessing.

A soft weakness overtook his heart, a species of communion with this splendid calm of evening, with this vague and mysterious throb of teeming life, with the keen and melancholy poetry which seems to arise from flowers and things, and reveals itself to the senses at this sweet and pensive time.

Paul felt all that; but for her part she did not understand anything of it. They walked side by side; and, suddenly, tired of being silent, she sang. She sang in her shrill, unmusical voice some street song, some catchy air, which jarred upon the profound and serene harmony of the evening.

Then he looked at her and felt an impassable abyss between them. She beat the grass with her parasol, her head slightly inclined, admiring her feet and singing, dwelling on the notes, attempting trills, and venturing on shakes. Her smooth little brow, of which he was so fond, was at that time absolutely empty! empty! There was nothing therein but this canary music; and the ideas which formed there by chance were like this music. She did not understand anything of him; they were now as separated as if they did not live together. Did his kisses never go any farther than her lips?

Then she raised her eyes to him and laughed again. He was moved to the quick and, extending his arms in a paroxysm of love, he embraced her passionately.

As he was rumpling her dress she finally broke away from him, murmuring by way of compensation as she did so:

“That’s enough. You know I love you, my darling.”

But he clasped her around the waist and, seized by madness, he started to run with her. He kissed her on the cheek, on the temple, on the neck, all the while dancing with joy. They threw themselves down panting at the edge of a thicket, lit up by the rays of the setting sun, and before they had recovered breath they were in one another’s arms without her understanding his transport.

They returned, holding each other by the hand, when, suddenly, through the trees, they perceived on the river the skiff manned by the four women. Fat Pauline also saw them, for she drew herself up and blew kisses to Madeleine. And then she cried:

“Until tonight!”

Madeleine replied: “Until tonight!”

Paul felt as if his heart had suddenly been frozen.

They reentered the house for dinner and installed themselves in one of the arbours, close to the water. They began to eat in silence. When night arrived, the waiter brought a candle enclosed in a glass globe, which gave a feeble and glimmering light; and they heard every moment the bursts of shouting from the boatmen in the large room on the first floor.

Toward dessert, Paul, taking Madeleine’s hand, tenderly said to her:

“I feel very tired, my darling; unless you have any objection, we will go to bed early.”

She, however, understood the ruse, and shot an enigmatical glance at him⁠—that glance of treachery which so readily appears in the depths of a woman’s eyes. Having reflected she answered:

“You can go to bed if you wish, but I have promised to go to the ball at La Grenouillère.”

He smiled in a piteous manner, one of those smiles with which one veils the most horrible suffering, and replied in a coaxing but agonized tone:

“If you were really nice, we should remain here, both of us.”

She indicated no with her head, without opening her mouth.

He insisted:

“I beg of you, my darling.”

Then she roughly broke out:

“You know what I said to you. If you are not satisfied, the door is open. No one wishes to keep you. As for myself, I have promised; I shall go.”

He placed his two elbows upon the table, covered his face with his hands, and remained there pondering sorrowfully.

The boat people came down again, shouting as usual, and set off in their vessels for the ball at La Grenouillère.

Madeleine said to Paul:

“If you are not coming, say so, and I will ask one of these gentlemen to take me.”

Paul rose:

“Let us go!” murmured he.

And they left.

The night was black, the sky full of stars, but the air was heat-laden by oppressive breaths of wind, burdened with emanations, and with living germs, which destroyed the freshness of the night. It offered a heated caress, made one breathe more quickly, gasp a little, so thick and heavy did it seem. The boats started on their way, bearing Venetian lanterns at the prow. It was not possible to distinguish the craft, but only the little coloured lights, swift and dancing up and down like frenzied glowworms, while voices sounded from all sides in the shadows. The young people’s skiff glided gently along. Now and then, when a fast boat passed near them, they could, for a moment, see the white back of the rower, lit up by his lantern.

When they turned the elbow of the river, La Grenouillère appeared to them in the distance. The establishment en fête, was decorated with flags and garlands of coloured lights, in grape-like clusters. On the Seine some great barges moved about slowly, representing domes, pyramids, and elaborate monuments in fires of all colours. Illuminated festoons hung right down to the water, and sometimes a red or blue lantern, at the end of an immense invisible fishing-rod, seemed like a great swinging star.

All this illumination spread a light around the café, lit up the great trees on the bank, from top to bottom, the trunks standing out in pale gray and the leaves in milky green upon the deep black of the fields and the heavens. The orchestra, composed of five suburban artists, flung far its public-house dance-music, poor of its kind and jerky, inciting Madeleine to sing anew.

She wanted to go in at once. Paul wanted first to take a stroll on the island, but he was obliged to give way. The attendance was now more select. The boatmen, almost alone, remained, with here and there some better class people, and young men escorted by girls. The director and organiser of this spree, looking majestic in a jaded black suit, walked about in every direction, bald-headed and worn by his old trade of purveyor of cheap public amusements.

Fat Pauline and her companions were not there; and Paul breathed again.

They danced; couples opposite each other capered in the maddest fashion, throwing their legs in the air, until they were upon a level with the noses of their partners.

The women, whose thighs seemed disjointed, pranced around with flying skirts which revealed their underclothing, wriggling their stomachs and hips, causing their breasts to shake, and spreading the powerful odour of perspiring female bodies.

The men squatted like toads, some making obscene gestures; some twisted and distorted themselves, grimacing and hideous; some turned cartwheels on their hands, or, perhaps, trying to be funny, posed with exaggerated gracefulness.

A fat servant-maid and two waiters served refreshments.

The café boat being only covered with a roof and having no wall whatever to shut it in, this harebrained dance flaunted in the face of the peaceful night and of the firmament powdered with stars.

Suddenly, Mont-Valérien, opposite, appeared, illumined, as if some conflagration had arisen behind it. The radiance spread and deepened upon the sky, describing a large luminous circle of white, wan light. Then something or other red appeared, grew greater, shining with a burning crimson, like that of hot metal upon the anvil. It gradually developed into a round body rising from the earth; and the moon, freeing herself from the horizon, rose slowly into space. As she ascended, the purple tint faded and became yellow, a shining bright yellow, and the satellite grew smaller in proportion as her distance increased.

Paul watched the moon for some time, lost in contemplation, forgetting his mistress; when he returned to himself the latter had vanished.

He sought her, but could not find her. He threw his anxious eye over table after table, going to and fro unceasingly, inquiring for her from one person and then another. No one had seen her. He was tormented with uneasiness, when one of the waiters said to him:

“You are looking for Madame Madeleine, are you not? She left a few moments ago, with Madame Pauline.” And at the same instant, Paul perceived the cabin-boy and the two pretty girls standing at the other end of the café, all three holding each other’s waists and lying in wait for him, whispering to one another. He understood, and, like a madman, dashed off into the island.

He first ran toward Chatou, but having reached the plain, retraced his steps. Then he began to search the dense coppices, occasionally roaming about distractedly, or halting to listen.

The toads all about him poured out their short metallic notes.

From the direction of Bougival, some unknown bird warbled a song which reached him faintly from the distance.

Over the broad fields the moon shed a soft light, resembling powdered wool; it penetrated the foliage, silvered the bark of the poplars, and riddled with its brilliant rays the waving tops of the great trees. The entrancing poetry of this summer night had, in spite of himself, entered into Paul, athwart his infatuated anguish, stirring his heart with ferocious irony, and increasing even to madness his craving for an ideal tenderness, for passionate outpourings on the breast of an adored and faithful woman. He was compelled to stop, choked by hurried and rending sobs.

The convulsion over, he went on.

Suddenly, he received what resembled the stab of a dagger. There, behind that bush, some people were kissing. He ran thither; and found an amorous couple whose faces were united in an endless kiss.

He dared not call, knowing well that She would not respond, and he had a frightful dread of coming upon them suddenly.

The flourishes of the quadrilles, with the earsplitting solos of the cornet, the false shriek of the flute, the shrill squeaking of the violin, irritated his feelings, and increased his suffering. Wild and limping music was floating under the trees, now feeble, now stronger, wafted hither and thither by the breeze.

Suddenly he thought that possibly She had returned. Yes, she had returned! Why not? He had stupidly lost his head, without cause, carried away by his fears, by the inordinate suspicions which had for some time overwhelmed him. Seized by one of those singular calms which will sometimes occur in cases of the greatest despair, he returned toward the ballroom.

With a single glance of the eye, he took in the whole room. He made the round of the tables, and abruptly again found himself face to face with the three women. He must have had a doleful and queer expression of countenance, for all three burst into laughter.

He made off, returned to the island, and threw himself into the coppice panting. He listened again, listened a long time, for his ears were singing. At last, however, he believed he heard farther off a little, sharp laugh, which he recognised at once; and he advanced very quietly, on his knees, removing the branches from his path, his heart beating so rapidly, that he could no longer breathe.

Two voices murmured some words, the meaning of which he did not understand, and then they were silent.

Then, he was possessed by a frightful longing to fly, to save himself, forever, from this furious passion which threatened his existence. He was about to return to Chatou and take the train, resolved never to come back again, never again to see her. But her likeness suddenly rushed in upon him, and he mentally pictured the moment in the morning when she would awake in their warm bed, and would press coaxingly against him, throwing her arms around his neck, her hair dishevelled, and a little entangled on the forehead, her eyes still shut and her lips apart ready to receive the first kiss. The sudden recollection of this morning caress filled him with frantic recollections and the maddest desire.

The couple began to speak again; and he approached, stooping low. Then a faint cry rose from under the branches quite close to him. He advanced again, in spite of himself, irresistibly attracted, without being conscious of anything⁠—and he saw them.

If her companion had only been a man. But that! that! He felt as though he were spellbound by the very infamy of it. And he stood there astounded and overwhelmed, as if he had discovered the mutilated corpse of one dear to him, a crime against nature, a monstrous, disgusting profanation. Then, in an involuntary flash of thought, he remembered the little fish whose entrails he had felt being torn out! But Madeleine murmured: “Pauline!” in the same tone in which she had often called him by name, and he was seized by such a fit of anguish that he turned and fled.

He struck against two trees, fell over a root, set off again, and suddenly found himself near the rapid branch of the river, which was lit up by the moon. The torrent-like current made great eddies where the light played upon it. The high bank dominated the stream like a cliff, leaving a wide obscure zone at its foot where the eddies could be heard swirling in the darkness.

On the other bank, the country seats of Croissy could be plainly seen.

Paul saw all this as though in a dream; he thought of nothing, understood nothing, and all things, even his very existence, appeared vague, far-off, forgotten, and closed.

The river was there. Did he know what he was doing? Did he wish to die? He was mad. He turned, however, toward the island, toward Her, and in the still air of the night, in which the faint and persistent burden of the music was borne up and down, he uttered, in a voice frantic with despair, bitter beyond measure, and superhumanly low, a frightful cry:

“Madeleine!”

His heartrending call shot across the great silence of the sky, and sped over the horizon. Then with a tremendous leap, with the bound of a wild animal, he jumped into the river. The water rushed on, closed over him, and from the place where he had disappeared a series of great circles started, enlarging their brilliant undulations, until they finally reached the other bank. The two women had heard the noise of the plunge. Madeleine drew herself up and exclaimed:

“It is Paul,”⁠—a suspicion having arisen in her soul⁠—“he has drowned himself”; and she rushed toward the bank, where Pauline rejoined her.

A clumsy punt, propelled by two men, turned round and round on the spot. One of the men rowed, the other plunged into the water a great pole and appeared to be looking for something. Pauline cried:

“What are you doing? What is the matter?”

An unknown voice answered:

“It is a man who has just drowned himself.”

The two haggard women, huddling close to each other, followed the manoeuvres of the boat. The music of La Grenouillère continued to sound in the distance, seeming with its cadences to accompany the movements of the sombre fishermen; and the river which now concealed a corpse, whirled round and round, illuminated. The search was prolonged. The horrible suspense made Madeleine shiver all over. At last, after at least half an hour, one of the men announced:

“I have got him.”

And he pulled up his long pole very gently, very gently. Then something large appeared upon the surface. The other boatman left his oars, and by uniting their strength and hauling upon the inert weight, they succeeded in getting it into their boat.

Then they made for land, seeking a place well lighted and low. At the moment they landed, the women also arrived. The moment she saw him, Madeleine fell back with horror. In the moonlight he already appeared green, with his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his clothes full of slime. His fingers, closed and stiff, were hideous. A kind of black and liquid plaster covered his whole body. The face appeared swollen, and from his hair, plastered down by the ooze, there ran a stream of dirty water.

The two men examined him.

“Do you know him?” asked one.

The other, the Croissy ferryman, hesitated:

“Yes, it certainly seems to me that I have seen that head; but you know when a body is in that state one cannot recognize it easily.” And then, suddenly:

“Why, it’s Mr. Paul!”

“Who is Mr. Paul?” inquired his comrade.

The first answered:

“Why, Mr. Paul Baron, the son of the senator, the little chap who was so much in love.”

The other added, philosophically:

“Well, his fun is ended now; it is a pity, all the same, when one is rich!”

Madeleine had fallen on the ground sobbing. Pauline approached the body and asked:

“Is he really quite dead?”

The men shrugged their shoulders.

“Oh! after that length of time, certainly.”

Then one of them asked:

“Was it not at Grillon’s that he lodged?”

“Yes,” answered the other; “we had better take him back there, there will be something to be made out of it.”

They embarked again in their boat and set out, moving off slowly on account of the rapid current. For a long time after they were out of sight of the place where the women remained, the regular splash of the oars in the water could be heard.

Then Pauline took the poor weeping Madeleine in her arms, petted her, embraced her for a long while, and consoled her.

“How can you help it? it is not your fault, is it? It is impossible to prevent men from doing silly things. He did it of his own free will; so much the worse for him, after all!”

And then lifting her up:

“Come, my dear, come and sleep at the house; it is impossible for you to go back to Grillon’s tonight.”

And she embraced her again, saying: “Come, we will cure you.”

Madeleine arose, and weeping all the while but with fainter sobs, laid her head upon Pauline’s shoulder, as though she had found a refuge in a closer and more certain affection, more familiar and more confiding, and she went off slowly.

Madame Tellier’s Establishment

An Adventure in Paris

Is there any stronger feeling than curiosity in a woman? Fancy seeing, knowing, touching what one has dreamed about! What would a woman not do for that? Once a woman’s eager curiosity is roused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing. I am speaking of women who are really women, who are endowed with that triple-bottomed disposition, which appears to be reasonable and cool on the surface, but whose three secret compartments are filled as follows: The first, with female uneasiness, which is always in a state of fluttering; the next, with sly tricks which are coloured with an imitation of good faith, with the sophistical and formidable wiles of apparently devout women; and the last, with all those charming, improper acts, with that delightful deceit, exquisite perfidy, and all those wayward qualities which drive lovers who are stupidly credulous to suicide, but delight others.

The woman whose adventure I am about to relate was a little person from the provinces, who had been insipidly respectable till then. Her life, which was apparently so calm, was spent at home, with a busy husband and two children, whom she brought up like an irreproachable woman. But her heart beat with unsatisfied curiosity and unknown longing. She was continually thinking of Paris, and read the fashionable papers eagerly. The accounts of parties, of the dresses and various entertainments, excited her longing; but, above all, she was strangely agitated by those paragraphs which were full of double meaning, by those veils which were half raised by clever phrases, and which gave her a glimpse of culpable and ravishing delights, and from her home in the provinces she saw Paris in an apotheosis of magnificent and corrupt luxury.

During the long nights, when she dreamed, lulled by the regular snores of a husband, sleeping on his back by her side, with a silk handkerchief tied round his head, she saw in her sleep those well-known men whose names appeared regularly on the first page of the newspapers like stars in the dark sky. She pictured to herself their lives⁠—continual excitement, constant debauches, orgies such as they practised in ancient Rome, which were horribly voluptuous, with refinements of sensuality so complicated, that she could not even imagine them.

The boulevards seemed to her to be a kind of abyss of human passions, and there could be no doubt that the houses there concealed mysteries of prodigious love. But she felt that she was growing old, without having known life, except in those regular, horribly monotonous, everyday occupations which constitute the happiness of the home. She was still pretty, for she was well preserved by a tranquil existence, like winter fruit in a closed cupboard; but she was consumed, agitated and upset by her secret desires. She used to ask herself whether she should die without having experienced any of those damning, intoxicating joys, without having plunged once, just once, into that flood of Parisian voluptuousness.

By dint of much perseverance, she paved the way for a journey to Paris, found a pretext, got some relatives to invite her, and as her husband could not go with her, she went alone. As soon as she arrived, she invented a reason for remaining for some days, or rather for some nights, if necessary, as she told him that she had met some friends who lived a little way out town.

And then she set out on a voyage of discovery. She went up and down the boulevards, without seeing anything except roving and licensed vice. She looked into the large cafés, and read the Agony Column of the Figaro, which every morning seemed to her like a tocsin, a summons to love. But nothing put her on the track of those orgies of actors and actresses; nothing revealed to her those temples of debauchery which opened, she imagined, at some magic word, like the cave in the Arabian Nights, or the catacombs in Rome, where the mysteries of a persecuted religion were secretly celebrated.

Her relatives, who were quite middle-class people, could not introduce her to any of those well-known men, of whose names her head was full; and in despair she was thinking of returning, when chance came to her aid. One day, as she was going along the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, she stopped to look into a shop full of those coloured Japanese knickknacks, which attract the eye by their colour. She was looking at the grotesque little ivories, the tall vases of flaming enamel, and the curious bronzes, when she heard the shopkeeper inside dilating, with many bows, on the value of an enormous, potbellied, comical figure⁠—which was quite unique, he said⁠—to a little, bald-headed, grey-bearded man.

Every moment the shopkeeper repeated his customer’s name, which was a celebrated one, in a voice like a trumpet. The other customers, young women and well-dressed gentlemen, gave a swift and furtive but respectful glance at the celebrated writer, who was looking admiringly at the china figure. They were both equally ugly, as ugly as two brothers who had sprung from the same mother.

“To you the price will be a thousand francs, Monsieur Varin, and that is exactly what it cost me. I should ask anybody else fifteen hundred, but I think a great deal of literary and artistic customers, and have special prices for them. They all come to me, Monsieur Varin. Yesterday, Monsieur Busnach bought a large, antique goblet from me, and the other day I sold two candelabra like this (aren’t they beautiful?) to Monsieur Alexandre Dumas. If Monsieur Zola were to see that Japanese figure he would buy it immediately, Monsieur Varin.”

The author hesitated in perplexity, as he wanted to have the figure, but the price was above him, and he thought no more about being stared at than if he had been alone in the desert. She came in trembling, with her eyes fixed shamelessly upon him, and she did not even ask herself whether he were good-looking, elegant, or young. It was Jean Varin himself, Jean Varin. After a long struggle and painful hesitation, he put the figure down on to the table.

“No, it is too expensive,” he said.

The shopkeeper’s eloquence redoubled. “Oh! Monsieur Varin, too expensive? It is worth two thousand francs, if it is worth a sou.”

But the man of letters replied sadly, still looking at the figure with the enameled eyes: “I do not say it is not: but it is too expensive for me.”

And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said: “What will you charge me for the figure?”

The shopkeeper, in surprise, replied: “Fifteen hundred francs, Madame.”

“I will take it.”

The writer, who had not even noticed her till that moment, turned round suddenly. He looked at her from head to foot, with half-closed eyes, observantly, and then he took in the details, as a connoisseur. She was charming, suddenly animated by the flame which had hitherto been dormant in her. And then, a woman who gives fifteen hundred francs for a knickknack is not to be met with every day.

But she was overcome by a feeling of delightful delicacy, and turning to him, she said in a trembling voice:

“Excuse me, Monsieur; no doubt I have been rather hasty, as perhaps you had not finally made up your mind.”

He, however, only bowed, and said: “Indeed I had, Madame.”

And she, filled with emotion, continued: “Well, Monsieur, if either today, or at any other time, you change your mind, you can have this Japanese figure. I only bought it because you seemed to like it.”

He was visibly flattered, and smiled. “I should much like to find out how you know who I am?” he said.

Then she told him how she admired him, and became quite eloquent as she quoted his works, and while they were talking, he rested his arms on a table and fixed his bright eyes upon her, trying to make out who and what she really was. But the shopkeeper, who was pleased to have that living puff of his goods, called out, from the other end of the shop: “Just look at this, Monsieur Varin; is it not beautiful?”

And then everyone looked round, and she almost trembled with pleasure at being seen talking so intimately with such a well-known man.

At last, however, intoxicated, as it were, by her feelings, she grew bold, like a general who is about to order an assault.

“Monsieur,” she said, “will you do me a great, a very great pleasure? Allow me to offer you this funny Japanese figure, as a souvenir from a woman who admires you passionately, and whom you have seen for ten minutes.”

He refused. She persisted, but still he resisted her offer, very much amused, and laughing heartily. But that only made her more obstinate, and she said: “Very well, then, I shall take it to your house immediately; where do you live?”

He refused to give her his address, but she got it from the shopkeeper, and when she had paid for her purchase, she ran out to take a cab. The writer went after her, as he did not wish to accept a present from a person whom he did not know. He reached her just as she was jumping into a vehicle, and getting in after her, he almost fell on top of her, as the cab gave a jolt. Then he sat down by her side, feeling very much annoyed.

It was no good for him to argue and to beg her; she showed herself intractable, and when they got to the door, she stated her conditions: “I will undertake not to leave this with you,” she said, “if you will promise to do all I want today.” And the whole affair seemed so funny to him that he agreed.

“What do you generally do at this time?” she asked him; and after hesitating for a few moments, he replied: “I generally go for a walk.”

“Very well, then, we will go to the Bois de Boulogne!” she said, in a resolute voice, and they started.

He was obliged to tell her the names of all the well-known women, pure or impure, with every detail about them⁠—their mode of life, their habits, their homes, and their vices; and when it was getting dusk, she said to him: “What do you do every day at this time?”

“I have some absinthe,” he replied, with a laugh.

“Very well, then, Monsieur,” she went on seriously; “let us go and have some absinthe.”

They went into a large café on the boulevard which he frequented, and where he met some of his colleagues, whom he introduced to her. She was half beside herself with pleasure, and kept saying to herself: “At last! At last!”

But time went on, and she asked: “Is it your dinner time?” To which he replied: “Yes.”

“Then, let us go and have dinner.”

When they left Bignon’s after dinner, she wanted to know what he did in the evening, and looking at her fixedly, he replied: “That depends; sometimes I go to the theatre.”

“Very well, then, let us go to the theatre.”

They went to the Vaudeville with a pass, thanks to him, and, to her great pride, the whole house saw her sitting by his side in the balcony stalls.

When the play was over, he gallantly kissed her hand, and said: “It only remains for me to thank you for this delightful day.”

But she interrupted him: “What do you do at this time, every night?”

“Why⁠—why⁠—I go home.”

She began to laugh, a little tremulous laugh: “Very well, Monsieur, let us go to your rooms.”

They did not say anything more. She shivered occasionally, from head to foot, feeling inclined to stay, and inclined to run away, but with a fixed determination, after all, to see it out to the end. She was so excited that she had to hold on to the bannister as she went upstairs, and he went on ahead of her, with a wax match in his hand.

As soon as they were in the room, she undressed herself quickly, and retired without saying a word, and then she waited for him, cowering against the wall. But she was as simple as it was possible for a provincial lawyer’s wife to be, and he was more exacting than a pasha with three tails, and so they did not at all understand each other.

At last, however, he went to sleep. The night passed, and the silence was only disturbed by the ticktack of the clock, while she, lying motionless, thought of her conjugal nights, and by the light of the Chinese lantern, she looked nearly heartbroken at the little fat man lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the bedclothes, like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover. And a thin stream of saliva ran from the corner of his half-opened mouth.

At last daylight appeared through the drawn blinds. She got up and dressed herself without making any noise, and had already half opened the door, when she made the lock creak, and he woke up and rubbed his eyes. He was some moments before he quite came to himself, and then, when he remembered all that had happened, he said:

“What! Are you going already?”

She remained standing, in some confusion, and then said, in a hesitating voice:

“Yes, of course; it is morning.”

Then he sat up, and said: “Look here, I have something to ask you, in my turn.” And as she did not reply, he went on: “You have surprised me most confoundedly since yesterday. Be open, and tell me why you did it all, for upon my word I cannot understand it in the least.”

She went close up to him, blushing like as if she had been a virgin, and said: “I wanted to know⁠—what⁠—what vice⁠—really was, and⁠—well⁠—well, it is not at all funny.”

And she ran out of the room, and downstairs into the street.

A number of sweepers were busy in the streets, brushing the pavements, the roadway, and sweeping everything on one side. With the same regular motion, the motion of mowers in a meadow, they pushed the mud in front of them in a semicircle. She met them in every street, like dancing puppets, walking automatically with a swaying motion, and it seemed to her as if something had been swept out of her; as if her overexcited dreams had been pushed into the gutter, or into the drain. So she went home, out of breath and very cold, and all that she could remember was the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping the streets of Paris in the early morning.

When she got into her room, she threw herself on to her bed, and cried.

A Christmas Eve Festival

I do not remember exactly what year it was.

For a whole month I had been hunting with the concentrated, savage joy that one has in a new passion.

I was in Normandy, at the house of a bachelor relative, Jules de Banneville, alone with him, a servant, a valet and a gamekeeper, in his manorial château.

The castle, an old, grey building surrounded with moaning pines and avenues of oak-trees, in which the wind howled, looked as if it had been deserted for centuries. The antique furniture was the only inhabitant of the spacious rooms and halls now closed, in which the people, whose portraits hung in a corridor as windy as avenues, used to receive their noble neighbours in solemn state.

We had taken shelter in the only habitable room, the kitchen, an immense kitchen, whose dim shadows were lit up when fresh wood was thrown into the vast fireplace. Then, every evening, after a cosy sleep in front of the fire, when our wet boots had steamed for some time, and our dogs, lying curled up between our legs, had dreamt of game and barked in their sleep, we used to go up to our room.

It was the only room that had been floored and plastered all over to keep out the mice. But it remained bare, having been simply whitewashed, with guns, whips, and hunting-horns hanging on the walls. And we used to slip into our beds shivering, in the two corners of that glacial chamber.

A mile away in front of the house precipitous cliffs fell down to the sea, and the powerful breath of the ocean day and night, made the great trees bend and sigh, made the roof and the weathercocks creak, and the whole building groan, as the wind entered through its loose slates, its wide chimneys, and its windows that would not shut.

It had been freezing hard that day and evening had come. We were going to sit down to dinner in front of the big fire where a hare and two partridges that smelt good, were roasting.

“It will be awfully cold going to bed tonight,” said my cousin, looking up.

“Yes, but there will be plenty of ducks tomorrow morning,” I replied indifferently.

The servant had set our plates at one end of the table and those of the servants at the other.

“Gentlemen, do you know it is Christmas Eve?” she asked.

We certainly did not; we never looked at the calendar.

“That accounts for the bells ringing all day,” said my companion. “There is midnight service tonight.”

“Yes, sir; but they also rang because old Fournel is dead.”

Fournel was an old shepherd, well known in the country. He was ninety-six years old and had never known a day’s sickness until a month ago, when he had taken cold by falling into a pool on a dark night. The next day he took to his bed, and had been declining ever since.

“If you like,” said my cousin, turning to me, “we will go and see these poor people after dinner.”

He referred to the old man’s family, consisting of his grandson, fifty-eight years old, and the latter’s wife, one year younger. His children had died years ago. They lived in a miserable hut on the right hand side, at the entrance of the village.

Perhaps it was the thought of Christmas in this solitude which put us in the humour for talking. As we sat alone we told each other stories of old Christmas Eves, of adventures on that joyful night, of past good fortunes, and of the surprises of the morning after, when one awoke to find oneself not alone, and made surprising discoveries.

In this fashion dinner was prolonged. We smoked innumerable pipes, and, seized by that cheerfulness of lonely men, that infectious gaiety which suddenly comes upon intimate friends, we talked without ceasing, searching for those memories, those confidences of the heart, which escape in such moments of expansion.

The servant, who had left us a long time, reappeared and said: “I’m going to Mass, sir.”

“So soon!” exclaimed my cousin.

“It is a quarter to twelve.”

“Let us go to church, too,” said Jules. “Midnight service in the country is very interesting.”

I agreed, and we set off, wrapped in our fur-lined hunting coats.

A biting cold stung our faces and made our eyes water. The sharp air cut one’s lungs and dried up one’s throat. The deep, clear, hard sky was teeming with stars which seemed paler in the frost. They did not shine like fire, but like stars of ice, shining icicles. In the distance on the hard, crisp earth we could hear the peasants’ clogs, and the little village bells ringing everywhere in the neighbourhood, throwing out their slender notes into the cold immensity of the night. The countryside was not asleep. Deceived by the noise cocks were crowing, and as we passed the stables we could hear the cattle moving, disturbed by the sounds of life.

As we neared the village Jules remembered the Fournels. “Here is their cabin,” he said; “let us go in.” He knocked repeatedly, but in vain. A neighbour who was going to church told us they had gone to Mass to pray for the old man.

“We shall see them on our way back,” said my cousin.

The waning moon stood on the edge of the horizon, like a sickle in the midst of innumerable seeds of light scattered into space. From every direction the dark countryside was dotted with dancing lights, all moving towards the pointed spire whose bell rang incessantly. In the farm yards planted with trees, in the shadowy fields these lights glimmered close to the ground. They were the lanterns with which the peasants lit the way for their wives, who were dressed in white bonnets and long black cloaks, and were followed by children whose eyes were still heavy with sleep as they walked hand in hand ahead through the night.

Through the open church door the lighted choir was visible. Around the simple nave stood a row of penny candles, and on the floor of a chapel to the left a plump Christ-child was represented in pink wax, lying on real straw, in the midst of pine branches.

The service began. The peasants bowed their heads, the women praying on their knees, and these simple folk, who had got up in the cold night, gazed deeply moved at this rudely painted image. They clasped their hands, impressed as well as frightened by the modest splendour of this puerile picture.

The cold air made the candles flicker. Jules said to me: “Let us leave. It is better outside.” While the prostrate peasants shivered through their devotions we went along the deserted road, and resumed our conversation. We had talked so long that the service was over when we came back to the village. A small ray of light filtered through the Fournels’ door.

“They are watching their dead. Let us go in and see these poor people,” said Jules. “They will be pleased.”

Some embers were dying out in the fireplace. The dark room, coated with dirt, its mouldy rafters brown with age, was filled with a stiffling smell of grilled blood pudding. In the centre of the large table, beneath which a bread bin had been built, taking up the whole length of it, a candle in a twisted iron candlestick sent up its acrid smoke to the ceiling from a mushroom-shaped wick. There the two Fournels were celebrating Christmas Eve alone. With the gloomy, sad, stupid expression of peasants, they were eating in solemn silence. In one dish, placed between them, was a huge piece of black pudding, giving forth a powerful odour. From time to time they cut a piece off, spread it on their bread and munched it slowly. When the man’s glass was empty, the woman would fill it out of an earthen jar containing cider.

They asked us to be seated and to “join them,” but at our refusal they continued to munch. After a few minutes’ silence Jules said:

“Well, Anthime, so your grandfather is dead!”

“Yes, sir, he died this afternoon.”

The woman snuffed the candle in silence and I for the want of something to say, added:

“He was quite old, was he not?”

“Oh, his time was up,” she answered; “he was no earthly use here.”

An invincible desire to see the corpse of this centenarian took possession of me and I asked to see him.

The two peasants suddenly became agitated and exchanged questioning glances. Jules noticed this and insisted. Then the man with a sly, suspicious look, asked:

“What good would it do you?”

“No good,” said Jules; “but why will you not let us see him?”

“I am willing,” said the man, shrugging his shoulders, “but it is kind of inconvenient just now.”

We conjectured all sorts of things. Neither of them stirred. They sat there with eyes lowered, a sullen expression on their faces seeming to say: “Go away.”

“Come, Anthime, take us to his room,” said Jules with authority.

“It’s no use, sir, he isn’t there any more,” said the man sullenly.

“Where is he?” said Jules.

The woman interrupted, saying:

“You see, sir, we had no other place to put him so we put him in the bin until morning.” And having taken the top of the table off, she leaned over with the candle to light up the inside of the huge box, at the bottom of which we saw something grey, a kind of long package, from one end of which emerged a thin face with tousled grey hair, and from the other two bare feet. It was the old man, all shrivelled up, with closed eyes, rolled up in his shepherd’s cloak, and sleeping his last sleep among crusts of bread as ancient as himself.

His grandchildren had used as a table the bin which held his body!

Jules was indignant, and pale with anger, said:

“You scoundrels! Why did you not leave him in his bed?”

The woman burst into tears and speaking rapidly:

“You see, my good gentlemen, it’s just this way. We have but one bed, and being only three we slept together; but since he’s been so sick we slept on the floor. The floor is awful hard and cold these days, my good gentlemen, so when he died this afternoon we said to ourselves: ‘As long as he is dead he doesn’t feel anything and what’s the use of leaving him in bed? We can leave him in the bin until tomorrow, and get our bed back for this cold night.’ We can’t sleep with a dead man, my good gentlemen!⁠—now can we?”

Jules was exasperated and went out banging the door, and I followed him, laughing until my sides ached.

The Cake

We will call her Madame Anserre though it was not her real name.

She was one of those Parisian comets who leave a sort of trail of fire behind them. She wrote poetry and short stories, was sentimental and ravishingly beautiful. Her circle was small and consisted only of exceptional people⁠—those generally known as the kings of this, that, or the other. To be invited to her receptions stamped one as a person of intelligence; let us say that her invitations were appreciated for this reason. Her husband played the part of an obscure satellite: to be married to a star is no easy role. This husband had, however, a brilliant idea, that of creating a State within a State, of possessing some value in himself although only of secondary importance: he received on the same day as his wife did and had his special set who listened to him and appreciated his qualities, paying much more attention to him than they did to his brilliant companion.

He had devoted himself to agriculture, “armchair” agriculture, just as we have “armchair” generals⁠—all those who are born, live, and die in the comfortable surroundings of the War Office⁠—or “armchair” sailors⁠—look at the Admiralty⁠—or “armchair” colonisers, etc., etc. So he had studied agriculture seriously in its relation to the other sciences, with political economy and with the fine arts; we call everything art, even the horrible railway bridges are “works of art.” He had finally reached the stage when he was known as a clever man, he was quoted in the technical reviews, and his wife had succeeded in getting him appointed a member of a Commission at the Ministry of Agriculture.

He was satisfied with this modest glory. On the pretext of economy he invited his friends the same day his wife received hers, so that they all met each other, or rather they did not⁠—they formed two groups. Madame’s group of artists, academicians and Ministers gathered together in a kind of gallery which was furnished and decorated in Empire style. Monsieur generally retired with his “labourers” into a small room used as a smoking-room which Madame Anserre ironically described as the Salon of Agriculture.

The two camps were quite distinct. Monsieur, without any feeling of jealousy, sometimes ventured into the Academy, when cordial greetings were exchanged; but the Academy disdained intercourse with the Salon of Agriculture; it was indeed rare that one of the kings of science, of philosophy, of this, that, or the other mingled with the “labourers.”

These receptions were quite simple: nothing but tea and brioches were handed round. At first Monsieur had asked for two brioches, one for the Academy and one for the “labourers,” but, Madame having quite rightly suggested that that would be a recognition of two different camps, two receptions, two groups, Monsieur did not press the matter, so there was only one brioche, which Madame Anserre distributed first to the Academy, after which it passed into the Salon of Agriculture.

Now the brioche became a subject of strange and unexpected proceedings in the Academy. Madame Anserre never cut it herself. That task always fell to the lot of one or other of the illustrious guests. This particular function, much sought after and considered a special honour, was a privilege that might last for some time or might soon be over: it might last three months, for instance, but scarcely every longer, and it was noticed that the privilege of “cutting the brioche” carried with it other marks of superiority; it was a form of royalty, or, rather, very accentuated viceroyalty. The officiating cutter spoke with no uncertain voice, with a tone of marked command; and all the hostess’s favours were bestowed upon him, all.

These happy beings were described in intimate circles as “the favourites of the brioche,” and every change of favourite caused a sort of revolution in the Academy. The knife was a sceptre, the cake an emblem, and the elect received the congratulations of other members. The brioche was never cut by the “labourers,” Monsieur himself being always excluded, although he ate his share.

The cake was cut in succession by poets, by painters, and by novelists. A great musician measured out the portions for some time, and was succeeded by an Ambassador. Occasionally a guest of minor importance but distinguished and much sought after, one of those who are called, in different epochs, “real gentleman,” “perfect knight,” or “dandy,” and so forth, took his turn to cut the symbolic cake. Each one, during his short reign, showed the greatest consideration towards the lady’s husband, then when came the hour of his dismissal he passed the knife on to another and mingled again with the crowd of followers and admirers of the “beautiful Madame Anserre.”

This lasted a very long time, but comets do not always shine with the same brilliance. Everything in the world grows old, and it gradually looked as if the eagerness of the cutters were growing weaker; they seemed to hesitate when the cake was held out to them; this office once so much coveted became less sought after; it was held a shorter time and was considered with less pride by the holder. Madame Anserre was prodigal of smiles and amiability, but, alas! the cake was no longer willingly cut. Newcomers seemed to decline the honour, and old favourites reappeared one by one like dethroned kings temporarily replaced in power. Then the elected became very scarce indeed, and for a month, marvelous to relate, Monsieur Anserre cut the cake, then he looked as if he were getting tired of it, and one evening Madame Anserre, the beautiful Madame Anserre, was seen cutting it herself. But she seemed bored and the next day she insisted with such vehemence that the chosen guest dared not refuse.

However, the symbol was too well known; the guests stared at each other furtively with scared, anxious faces. To cut the brioche was nothing, but the privileges that accompanied this distinction now filled the chosen ones with terror, so that the minute the cake-dish appeared, the academicians made a rush for the Salon of Agriculture as it to shelter behind the husband, who was always smiling, and when Madame Anserre, in a state of anxiety, showed herself at the door, carrying the knife in one hand and the brioche in the other, they all gathered round her husband as if they were seeking his protection.

Some years passed and no one cut up the cake, but the old habit persisted and she who was still politely called “the beautiful Madame Anserre” looked out each evening for some devotee to take the knife, and each time the same stampede took place: there was a general flight, cleverly arranged and full of combined and skilful manoeuvres to avoid the offer that was rising to her lips.

But, one evening, a boy⁠—ignorant of the ways of the world and quite unsophisticated⁠—was introduced to the house. He knew nothing about the mystery of the brioche; therefore when it appeared and when the rest had all fled, and when Madame Anserre took the cake from the footman, he remained quietly by her side.

She may have thought that he knew all about it; she smiled and said in a voice full of feeling: “Will you be so kind as to cut this brioche, dear Monsieur?”

Flattered at the honour, he replied: “Certainly, Madame, with the greatest pleasure.”

In the distance⁠—in the corners of the gallery, in the open doorway of the Salon of Agriculture⁠—amazed faces were looking at him. Then, when the spectators saw the newcomer cutting the cake, they quickly came forward. An old poet jokingly slapped the neophyte on the shoulder and whispered: “Bravo, young man!”

The others gazed at him with curiosity and even Monsieur appeared surprised. As for the young man, he was astonished at the consideration he met with; above all, he failed to understand the marked attentions, the conspicuous favour, and the speechless gratitude of the mistress of the house.

Nevertheless, he eventually found out, though no one knew at what moment, in what place the revelation came to him, but when he appeared at the next reception he seemed preoccupied and half ashamed, and looked anxiously round the room. When the bell rang for tea and the footman appeared, Madame Anserre, with a smile, took the dish and looked round for her young friend, but he fled so precipitately that no trace of him could be found. Then she went off to look for him and discovered him at the end of the Salon of “labourers” holding her husband’s arm tightly and consulting him in an agonised manner as to the best method of destroying phylloxera.

“My dear Monsieur, will you be so kind as to cut up this brioche?” she said.

He blushed to the roots of his hair, stammered, and completely lost his head. Thereupon Monsieur Anserre took pity on him and, turning to his wife, said:

“My dear, it would be kind of you not to disturb us. We are discussing agriculture. Let Baptiste cut up the cake.”

Since that day no one has ever cut Madame Anserre’s brioche.

The Log

It was a small drawing room, with thick hangings, and with a faint aromatic smell of scent in the air. A large fire was burning in the grate, and one lamp, covered with a shade of old lace, on the corner of the mantelpiece threw a soft light on to the two persons who were talking.

She, the mistress of the house, was an old lady with white hair, one of those adorable old ladies whose unwrinkled skin is as smooth as the finest paper, and is scented, impregnated with perfume, the delicate essences used in the bath for so many years having penetrated through the epidermis. An old lady who, when one kisses her hand, smells of the delicate perfume which greets the nostrils, when a box of Florentine iris powder is opened.

He was a very old friend, who had never married, a constant friend, a companion in the journey of life, but nothing else.

They had not spoken for about a minute, and were both looking at the fire, dreaming of nothing in particular. It was one of those moments of sympathetic silence between people who have no need to be constantly talking in order to be happy together. Suddenly a large log, a stump covered with burning roots, fell out. It fell over the firedogs on to the drawing room floor, scattering great sparks all round. The old lady sprang up with a little scream, as if to run away, but he kicked the log back on to the hearth and trod out the burning sparks with his boots.

When the disaster was repaired, there was a strong smell of burning. Sitting down opposite to his friend, the man looked at her with a smile, and said, as he pointed to the log:

“That accident recalls the reason I never married.”

She looked at him in astonishment, with the inquisitive gaze of women who wish to know everything, eying him as women do who are no longer young, with intense and malicious curiosity. Then she asked:

“How so?”

“Oh! it is a long story,” he replied; “a rather sad and unpleasant story.

“My old friends were often surprised at the coldness which suddenly sprang up between one of my best friends, whose Christian name was Julien, and myself. They could not understand how two such intimate and inseparable friends as we had been could suddenly become almost strangers to one another. This is why we parted company.

“He and I used to live together at one time. We were never apart, and the friendship that united us seemed so strong that nothing could break it.

“One evening when he came home, he told me that he was going to be married, and it gave me a shock just as if he had robbed me or betrayed me. When a man’s friend marries, all is over between them. The jealous affection of a woman, a suspicious, uneasy, and carnal affection, will not tolerate that sturdy and frank attachment, that attachment of the mind and of the heart, and the mutual confidence which exist between two men.

“However great the love may be that unites them, a man and a woman are always strangers in mind and intellect; they remain belligerents, they belong to different races. There must always be a conqueror and a conquered, a master and a slave; now the one, now the other⁠—they are never equal. They press each other’s hands, hands trembling with amorous passion; but they never press them with a long, strong, loyal pressure, a pressure which seems to open hearts and to lay them bare in a burst of sincere, strong, manly affection. Wise men instead of marrying and bringing into the world, as a consolation for their old age, children who will abandon them, ought to seek a good, staunch friend, and grow old with him in that community of ideas which can exist only between two men.

“Well, my friend Julien married. His wife was pretty, charming, a light, curly-haired, plump, bright little woman, who seemed to worship him. At first I went but rarely to their house, as I was afraid of interfering with their affection, and averse to being in their way. But somehow they attracted me to their house; they were constantly inviting me, and seemed very fond of me. Consequently, by degrees I allowed myself to be allured by the charm of life with them. I often dined with them, and frequently, when I returned home at night, thought that I would do as he had done, and get married, as I found my empty house very dull. They seemed very much in love with one another, and were never apart.

“Well, one evening Julien wrote and asked me to go to dinner, and I went.

“ ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I must go out directly afterwards on business, and I shall not be back until eleven o’clock, but I shall not be later. Can I depend on you to keep Bertha company?’

“The young woman smiled.

“ ‘It was my idea,’ she said, ‘to send for you.’

“I held out my hand to her.

“ ‘You are as nice as ever,’ I said, and I felt a long, friendly pressure of my fingers, but I paid no attention to it. We sat down to dinner, and at eight o’clock Julien went out.

“As soon as he had gone, a kind of strange embarrassment immediately seemed to come over his wife and me. We had never been alone together yet, and in spite of our daily increasing intimacy, this tête-à-tête placed us in a new position. At first I spoke vaguely of those indifferent matters with which one fills up an embarrassing silence, but she did not reply, and remained opposite to me looking down in an undecided manner, as if thinking over some difficult subject. As I was at a loss for more commonplaces, I remained silent. It is surprising how hard it is at times to find anything to say. And then, again, I felt in the air, in my bones, so to speak, something which is impossible for me to express, that mysterious premonition which tells you beforehand of the secret intentions, be they good or evil, of another person with respect to yourself.

“The painful silence lasted some time, and then Bertha said to me:

“ ‘Will you kindly put a log on the fire, for it is going out.’

“So I opened the box where the wood was kept, which was placed just where yours is, took out the largest log, and put it on the top of the others, which were three-parts burned, and then silence reigned in the room again.

“In a few minutes the log was burning so brightly that it scorched our faces, and the young woman raised her eyes to me⁠—eyes that had a strange look to me.

“ ‘It is too hot now,’ she said; ‘let us go and sit on the sofa over there.’

“So we went and sat on the sofa, and then she said suddenly, looking me full in the face:

“ ‘What should you do if a woman were to tell you that she was in love with you?’

“ ‘Upon my word,’ I replied, very much at a loss for an answer, ‘I cannot imagine such a case; but it would very much depend upon the woman.’

“She gave a hard, nervous, vibrating laugh; one of those false laughs which seem as if they would break thin glasses, and then she added: ‘Men are never either audacious or clever.’ And after a moment’s silence, she continued: ‘Have you ever been in love, Monsieur Paul?’ I was obliged to acknowledge that I certainly had been, and she asked me to tell her all about it, whereupon I made up some story or other. She listened to me attentively with frequent signs of approbation or contempt, and then suddenly she said:

“ ‘No, you understand nothing about the subject. It seems to me that real love must unsettle the mind, upset the nerves, and distract the head; that it must⁠—how shall I express it?⁠—be dangerous, even terrible, almost criminal and sacrilegious; that it must be a kind of treason; I mean to say that it is almost bound to break laws, fraternal bonds, sacred obstacles; when love is tranquil, easy, lawful, and without danger, is it really love?’

“I did not know what answer to give her, and this philosophical reflection occurred to me: ‘Oh! female brain, here indeed you show yourself!’

“While speaking, she had assumed a demure, saintly air; and resting on the cushions, she stretched herself out at full length, with her head on my shoulder and her dress pulled up a little, so as to show her red silk stockings, which looked still brighter in the firelight. In a minute or two she continued:

“ ‘I suppose I have frightened you?’ I protested against such a notion, and she leaned against my breast altogether, and without looking at me she said: ‘If I were to tell you that I love you, what would you do?’

“And before I could think of an answer, she had thrown her arms round my neck, had quickly drawn my head down and put her lips to mine.

“My dear friend, I can tell you that I did not feel at all happy! What! deceive Julien?⁠—become the lover of this little, silly, wrongheaded, cunning woman, who was no doubt terribly sensual, and for whom her husband was already not sufficient! To betray him continually, to deceive him, to play at being in love merely because I was attracted by forbidden fruit, danger incurred and friendship betrayed! No, that did not suit me, but what was I to do? To imitate Joseph would be acting a very stupid and, moreover, difficult part, for this woman was maddening in her perfidy, inflamed by audacity, palpitating, and excited. Let the man who has never felt on his lips the warm kiss of a woman who is ready to give herself to him throw the first stone at me!

“Well, a minute more⁠—you understand what I mean? A minute more and⁠—I should have been⁠—no, she would have been⁠—I beg your pardon, he would have been⁠—when a loud noise made us both jump up. The log had fallen into the room, knocking over the fire-irons and the fender, as quick as a hurricane of flame, and was setting fire to the carpet. It came to a stop under an armchair which would certainly have caught fire.

“I jumped up like a madman, and as I was replacing the log on the fire, the door opened hastily, and Julien came in.

“ ‘I have done,’ he said, in evident pleasure. ‘The business was over two hours sooner than I expected!’

“Yes, my dear friend, without that log, I should have been caught in the very act, and you know what the consequences would have been! You may be sure that I took good care never to be caught again in a similar situation; never, never. Soon afterward I saw that Julien was giving me the ‘cold shoulder,’ as they say. His wife was evidently undermining our friendship; by degrees he got rid of me, and we have altogether ceased to meet.

“That is why I have not got married; it ought not to surprise you.”

Words of Love

“Sunday, ⸻

“My dear, big Darling:

“You do not write to me, I never see you, you never come. Have you ceased to love me? But why? What have I done? Pray tell me, my own dear love. I love you so much, so dearly! I should like always to have you near me, to kiss you all day while I call you every tender name that I could think of. I adore you, I adore you, I adore you, my beautiful cock.

“Monday.

“My Dear Friend:

“You will understand absolutely nothing of what I am going to say to you, but that does not matter, and if my letter happens to be read by another woman, it may be profitable to her.

“Had you been deaf and dumb, I should no doubt have loved you for a very long time, and the cause of what has happened is that you can talk; that is all. As the poet says:

“ ‘Tu n’as jamais été dans tes jours les plus rares
Qu’un banal instrument sous mon archet vainqueur
Et comme un air qui sonne au bois creux des guitares,
J’ai fait chanter mon rêve au vide de ton coeur.’

“In love, you see, dreams are always made to sing, but in order that they may do so, they must not be interrupted, and when one talks between two kisses, one always interrupts that frenzied dream which our souls indulge in, that is, unless one utter sublime phrases; and sublime phrases do not come out of the little heads of pretty girls.

“You do not understand me at all, do you? So much the better; I will go on. You are certainly one of the most charming and adorable women I have ever seen.

“Are there any eyes on earth that contain more dreams than yours, more unknown promises, greater depths of love? I do not think so. And when that mouth of yours, with its two curved lips, smiles and shows your beautiful shining teeth, one is tempted to say that from this ravishing mouth will come ineffable music, something inexpressibly delicate, a sweetness which provokes tears.

“It is then that you calmly call me ‘my big sweetheart.’ And suddenly I can see right inside your head, can see your soul, the little soul of a pretty little woman⁠ ⁠… and that embarrasses me, you know; it embarrasses me very much. I would prefer not to see it.

“You still do not understand, do you? I thought you would not.

“Do you remember the first time you came to see me at my house? You stepped inside quickly in a cloud of perfume of violets from your clothes. We looked at each other, for ever so long, without uttering a word, after which we embraced madly⁠ ⁠… then⁠ ⁠… we did not speak until morning.

“But when we separated, our trembling hands and our eyes said many things, things which cannot be expressed in any language. At least, I thought so; and when you went away, you murmured:

“ ‘We shall meet again soon!’

“That was all you said, and you will never guess what delightful dreams you left me, all that I, as it were, caught a glimpse of, all that I fancied I could guess in your thoughts.

“You see, my poor child, for men who are not stupid, who are rather refined and somewhat superior, love is such a complicated instrument that the merest trifle puts it out of order. You women never perceive the ridiculous side of certain things when you love, and you fail to see the grotesqueness of some expressions.

“Why does a word which sounds quite right in the mouth of a small, dark woman seem quite wrong and funny in the mouth of a fat, light-haired woman? Why are the wheedling ways of the one altogether out of place in the other?

“Why is it that certain caresses which are delightful from the one should be wearisome from the other? Why? Because in everything, and especially in love, perfect harmony⁠—absolute agreement in motion, voice, words, and in demonstrations of tenderness, is necessary in the person who moves, speaks, and manifests affection; harmony is necessary in age, in height, in the colour of the hair, and in the style of beauty.

“If a woman of thirty-five, who has arrived at the age of violent tempestuous passion, were to preserve the slightest traces of the roguish playfulness of her love affairs at twenty, were not to understand that she ought to express herself differently, look at her lover differently and kiss him differently, were not to see that she ought to be a Dido and not a Juliet, she would infallibly disgust nine lovers out of ten, even if they could not account to themselves for their estrangement. Do you understand me? No? I hoped so.

“From the time that you gave rein to your tenderness, it was all over for me, my dear friend. Sometimes we would embrace for five minutes, in one interminable kiss, one of those kisses which make lovers close their eyes, lest part of it should escape through their looks, as if to preserve it entire in the clouded soul which it is ravaging. And then, when our lips separated, you would say to me:

“ ‘That was nice, you dear old duck.’

“At such moments, I could have beaten you; for you gave me successively all the names of animals and vegetables which you doubtless found in La Cuisinière bourgeoise, La Parfait jardinier, and Les Éléments d’histoire naturalle à l’usage des classes inférieures. But even that did not matter.

“The caresses of love are brutal, bestial, and if one comes to think of it, grotesque!

“Musset says:

“ ‘Je me souviens encor de ces spasmes terribles,
De ces baisers muets de ces muscles ardents,
De cet être absorbé, blême et serrant les dents.
S’ils ne sont pas divins, ces moments sont horribles.7

“Oh! My poor child, what joking elf, what perverse sprite could have prompted your words⁠ ⁠… afterwards? I have made a collection of them, but out of love for you, I will not show them to you.

“And sometimes you really said things which were quite inopportune. For instance you managed now and then to let out an exalted I love you! on such singular occasions that I was obliged to restrain a strong desire to laugh. There are times when the words I love you! are so out of place that they become indecorous; let me tell you that.

“But you do not understand me, and many other women also will not understand me, but think me stupid, though that matters very little to me. Hungry men eat like gluttons, but people of refinement are disgusted at it and often feel an invincible dislike for a dish, on account of a mere trifle. It is the same with love, as with cookery.

“What I cannot comprehend for example is that certain women who fully understand the irresistible attraction of fine, embroidered silk stockings, the exquisite charm of shades, the witchery of valuable lace concealed in the depths of their most intimate garments, the exciting savour of hidden luxury, of the flimsiest and most delicate underclothing, and all the subtle delicacies of female elegance, never understand the invincible disgust with which words that are out of place, or foolishly tender, inspire us.

“At times coarse and brutal expressions work wonders, as they excite the senses and make the heart beat, and they are allowable at the hours of combat. Is not that word of Cambronne’s sublime?

“Nothing shocks us that comes at the right time; but then, we must also know how to hold our tongue, and to avoid phrases in the manner of Paul de Kock, at certain moments.

“And I embrace you passionately, on the condition that you say nothing.

Marroca

You ask me, my dear friend, to send you my impressions, and an account of my love affairs in this Africa to which I have so long been attracted. You laughed a great deal beforehand at my dusky sweethearts, as you called them, and you could see me returning to France followed by a tall, ebony-coloured woman, with a yellow silk handkerchief round her head, and wearing voluminous bright-coloured clothes.

No doubt the Moorish dames will have their turn, for I have seen several who made me feel very much inclined to fall in love with them. But by way of making a beginning, I came across something better, and very original.

In your last letter to me, you say: “When I know how people love in a country, I know that country well enough to describe it, although I may never have seen it.” Let me tell you, then, that here they love furiously. From the very first moment one feels a sort of trembling ardour, an excitement, a sudden tension of desire, a thrill running down to the very tips of the fingers, which overexcites one’s amorous powers and faculties of physical sensation, from the simple contact of the hands down to that unmentionable need which makes us commit so many follies.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not know whether what you call love of the heart, love of the soul, whether sentimental idealism, Platonic love, in a word, can exist on this earth; I doubt it, myself. But that other love, sensual love, which has something good, a great deal of good in it, is really terrible in this climate. The heat, the burning atmosphere which makes you feverish, the suffocating blasts of wind from the south, waves of fire from the desert which is so near us, that oppressive sirocco which is more destructive and withering than fire, a perpetual conflagration of an entire continent, burned even to its stones by a fierce and devouring sun, inflame the blood, excite the flesh, and make brutes of us.

But to come to my story. I shall not dwell on the beginning of my stay in Algeria. After visiting Bona, Constantine, Biskra, and Setif, I went to Bougie through the defiles of Chabet, by a wonderful road through Kabyle forests, which follows the sea at a height of six hundred feet above it and leads to that wonderful bay of Bougie, which is as beautiful as that of Naples, of Ajaccio, or of Douarnenez, which are the most lovely I know. I except from my comparison that incredible Bay of Oporto, enclosed with red granite, the dwelling place of those fantastic and sanguinary stone giants, called the Calanchas of Piana, on the western coast of Corsica.

Far away in the distance, before one rounds the large inlet where the water is perfectly calm, one sees Bougie. It is built on the steep sides of a high hill covered with trees, and forms a white spot on that green slope; it might almost be taken for the foam of a cascade falling into the sea.

I had no sooner set foot in that small, delightful town, than I knew that I should stay for a long time. In all directions the eye rests on rugged, strangely shaped hilltops, so close together that you can hardly see the open sea, so that the gulf looks like a lake. The milky blue water is wonderfully transparent, and the azure sky, a deep azure, as if it had received two coats of colour, expands its wonderful beauty above it. They seem to be looking at themselves in a glass, a veritable reflection of each other.

Bougie is a town of ruins, and on the quay is such a magnificent ruin that you might imagine you were at the opera. It is the old Saracen Gate, overgrown with ivy, and there are ruins in all directions on the hills round the town, fragments of Roman walls, bits of Saracen monuments, and remains of Arabic buildings.

I had taken a small, Moorish house, in the upper town. You know those dwellings, which have been described so often. They have no windows on the outside; but they are lighted from top to bottom by an inner court. On the first floor, they have a large, cool room, in which one spends the days, and terrace on the roof, on which one spends the nights.

I at once fell in with the custom of all hot countries, that is to say, of taking a siesta after lunch. That is the hottest time in Africa, the time when one can scarcely breathe; when the streets, the fields, and the long, dazzling, white roads are deserted, when everyone is asleep, or at any rate, trying to sleep, attired as scantily as possible.

In my drawing room, which had columns of Arabic architecture, I had placed a large, soft couch, covered with a carpet from Djebel Amour. There, very nearly in the costume of Assan, I sought to rest, but I could not sleep, as I was tortured by continence. There are two forms of torture on this earth which I hope you will never know: the want of water, and the want of women, and I do not know which is the worse. In the desert, men would commit any infamy for the sake of a glass of clean, cold water, and what would one not do in some of the towns of the littoral for a nice fresh, healthy, woman? There is no lack of girls in Africa; on the contrary, they abound, but, to continue my comparison, they are as unwholesome as the muddy water in the pools of Sahara.

Well, one day, when I was feeling more enervated than usual, I was trying in vain to close my eyes. My legs twitched as if they were being pricked, and I tossed about uneasily on my couch. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I got up and went out. It was a terribly hot day, in the middle of July, and the pavement was hot enough to bake bread on. My shirt, which immediately became soaked with perspiration, clung to my body; and all along the horizon there was a slight, white vapour, the burning mist of the sirocco which looked like palpable heat.

I went down to the sea, and circling the port, walked along the shore of the pretty bay where the baths are. The rugged mountain, covered with brushwood, with tall aromatic plants with a powerful perfume, encloses this creek, and all along the water’s edge rise huge brown rocks. There was nobody about, and nothing was stirring; not a sound of bird or of beast was to be heard, the very waves did not lap, and the sea appeared to be asleep in the sun. But in the burning air I thought I heard a noise like the roar of a fire.

Suddenly, behind one of the rocks, which were half covered by the silent water, I heard a slight movement. Turning round, I saw a tall, naked girl, sitting up to her bosom in the water, taking a bath; no doubt she reckoned on being alone at that hot period of the day. Her head was turned toward the sea, and she was moving gently up and down, without seeing me.

Nothing could be more surprising than that picture of a beautiful woman in the water, which was as clear as crystal, under a blaze of light. She was a marvellously beautiful woman, tall, and modelled like a statue. She turned round, uttered a cry, and half swimming, half walking, hid herself altogether behind her rock. I knew she must necessarily come out, so I sat down on the beach and waited. Presently, she just showed her head, which was covered with thick black plaits of hair. She had a rather large mouth, with full lips, large, bold eyes, and her skin, which was tanned by the climate, looked like a piece of old, hard, polished ivory, the lovely skin of a white woman tinted by the Negroes’ sun.

She called out to me: “Go away!” and her full voice, which corresponded to her strong build, had a guttural accent. As I did not move, she added: “It is not right of you to stop there, Monsieur.” Her r’s rolled in her mouth like chariot wheels. I did not move, however, and her head disappeared. Ten minutes passed, and then her hair, then her forehead, and then her eyes reappeared, but slowly and prudently, as if she were playing at hide-and-seek, and were looking to see who was near. This time she was furious, and called out: “You will make me catch a chill, for I shall not come out as long as you are there.” Thereupon, I got up and went away, but not without looking round several times. When she thought I was far enough off, she came out of the water. Bending down and turning her back to me, she disappeared in a cavity of the rock, behind a skirt that was hanging up in front of it.

I went back the next day. She was bathing again, but she had a bathing costume and she began to laugh, and showed her white teeth. A week later we were friends, and in another week we were more than that. Her name was Marroca, and she pronounced it as if there were a dozen r’s in it. She was the daughter of Spanish colonists, and had married a Frenchman, whose name was Pontabèze. He was a civil servant, though I never exactly knew what his functions were. I found out that he was always very busy, and I did not care for anything else.

She then altered her bathing hour, and came to my house every day, to take her siesta there. What a siesta! It could hardly be called resting! She was a splendid girl, of a somewhat animal but superb type. Her eyes were always glowing with passion; her half-open mouth, her sharp teeth, and even her smiles, had something ferociously loving about them; and her curious, long rigid breasts, like pointed pears of flesh, and as supple as though a steel spring controlled them, gave her whole body something of the animal, made her a sort of inferior yet magnificent being, a creature destined for unbridled love, and roused in me the idea of those ancient deities who gave expression to their tenderness on the grass and under the trees.

Never was a woman consumed by such insatiable passion. Her ecstatic ardours, and delirious embraces, in which she clenched her teeth, bit, and quivered convulsively, were followed immediately by lassitude as profound as death. But she would suddenly awake in my arms, eager for further kisses, her bosom swelling with desire.

Her mind, however, was as simple as two and two are four, and a sonorous laugh served her instead of thought.

Instinctively proud of her beauty, she hated the slightest covering, and ran and frisked about my house with daring and unconscious immodesty. When she was at last satiated with love, and worn out by her cries and movements, she used to sleep soundly and peacefully by my side on the couch, while the overwhelming heat brought out minute spots of perspiration on her brown skin and brought out from beneath her arms, thrown backwards under her head, and from all the secret corners of her body, that feminine odour which the male loves.

Sometimes she returned in the evening, when her husband was on duty somewhere, and we used to lie on the terrace, scarcely covered by some fine, gauzy, Oriental fabric. When the full bright moon of the tropics lit up the town and the gulf, with its surrounding frame of hills, we saw on all the other terraces a recumbent army of silent phantoms, who would occasionally get up, change their places, and lie down again, in the languorous warmth of the starry night.

In spite of the brightness of African nights, Marroca would insist upon stripping herself almost naked in the clear rays of the moon; she did not trouble herself much about anybody who might see us, and often, in spite of my fears and entreaties, she uttered long, resounding cries, which made the dogs in the distance howl.

One night, when I was sleeping under the starry sky, she came and kneeled down on my carpet, and putting her lips, which curled slightly, close to my face, she said:

“You must come and sleep at my house.”

I did not understand her, and asked:

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, when my husband has gone away you must come and take his place.”

I could not help laughing, and said: “Why, since you come here?”

And she went on, almost talking into my mouth, sending her hot breath into my throat, and moistening my moustache with her lips:

“I want it as a remembrance.”

Still I did not grasp her meaning. Then she put her arms round my neck and said: “When you are no longer here, I shall think of it and when I kiss my husband I shall fancy it is you.” As she spoke, her r’s rolled their familiar thunder.

I was touched and amused at the same time and replied: “You must be mad. I would much rather stop here.”

As a matter of fact, I have no liking for assignations under the conjugal roof; they are mousetraps, in which the unwary are always caught. But she begged and prayed, and even cried, and at last said: “You shall see how I will love you there.”

And those r’s sounded like the rattle of a drum sounding a charge.

Her wish seemed so strange that I could not explain it to myself; but on thinking it over, I thought I could discern a profound hatred for her husband, the secret vengeance of a woman who takes a pleasure in deceiving him, and who, moreover, wishes to deceive him in his own house, between his own sheets, in his own bed.

“Is your husband very unkind to you?” I asked her. She looked vexed, and said:

“Oh, no, he is very kind.”

“But you are not fond of him?”

She looked at me with astonishment in her large eyes. “Indeed, I am very fond of him, very; but not so fond as I am of you, my darling.”

I could not understand it at all, and while I was trying to get at her meaning, she pressed one of those kisses, whose power she knew so well, on to my lips, and whispered: “But you will come, will come, will you not?”

I resisted, however, and so she got up immediately, and went away; nor did she come back for a week. On the eighth day she came back, stopped gravely on the threshold of my room, and said: “Are you coming to my house tonight? If you refuse, I shall go away.”

Eight days is a very long time, my friend, and in Africa those eight days are as good as a month. “Yes,” I said, and opened my arms, and she threw herself into them.

At night she waited for me in a neighbouring street, and took me to their house, which was very small, and near the harbour. I first of all went through the kitchen, where they had their meals, and then into a very tidy, whitewashed room, with photographs on the walls and paper flowers under a glass case. Marroca seemed beside herself with pleasure, and she jumped about and said: “There, you are at home, now.” And I certainly acted as though I were. I felt rather embarrassed, I admit, and somewhat uneasy.

As I was hesitating, in this strange house, to divest myself of a certain garment, without which a man, when he is taken unawares, looks as awkward as he is ridiculous and incapable of action, she snatched it off, and carried off into another room the cloak of my modesty, along with all my other clothes.

I recovered my courage in the end, and proved it to the best of my ability, with such success that, when two hours had passed, we still had no thoughts of sleep, when suddenly a loud knocking at the door made us start, and a man’s voice called out: “Marroca, it is I.”

She started: “My husband! Here, hide under the bed, quickly.”

I was distractedly looking for my trousers, but she gave me a push, and panted out: “Go on, go on.”

I lay down flat on my stomach, and without a word crept under the bed where I had been so comfortable, while she went into the kitchen. I heard her open a cupboard and then shut it again, and she came back into the room carrying some object which I could not see, but which she quickly put down. Then, as her husband was getting impatient, she said, calmly: “I cannot find the matches.” Suddenly she added: “Oh, here they are; I will come and let you in.”

The man came in, and I could see nothing of him but his feet, which were enormous. If the rest of him was in proportion, he must have been a giant.

I heard kisses, a little pat on her naked flesh, and a laugh, and he said, in a strong Marseilles accent: “I forgot my purse, so I was obliged to come back; you were sound asleep, I suppose.”

He went to the cupboard, and was a long time in finding what he wanted; and as Marroca had thrown herself on to the bed, as if she were tired out, he went up to her, and no doubt tried to caress her, for she flung a volley of angry r’s at him. His feet were so close to me that I felt a stupid, inexplicable longing to catch hold of them, but I restrained myself. When he saw that he could not succeed in his wish, he got angry, and said: “You are not at all nice, tonight. Goodbye, dear.”

I heard another kiss, then the big feet turned, and I saw the nails in the soles of his shoes as he went into the next room, the front door was shut, and I was saved!

I came slowly out of my retreat, feeling rather humiliated and miserable, and while Marroca, who was still undressed, danced a jig round me, shouting with laughter, and clapping her hands, I threw myself heavily into a chair. But I jumped up with a bound, for I had sat down on something cold, and as I was no more dressed than my accomplice was, the contact made me start. I looked round. I had sat down on a small hatchet, used for cutting wood, and as sharp as a knife. How had it got there? I had certainly not seen it when I went in; but Marroca seeing me jump up, nearly choked with laughter, and coughed with both hands on her sides.

I thought her amusement rather out of place; we had risked our lives stupidly, I still felt a cold shiver down my back, and I was rather hurt at her foolish laughter.

“Supposing your husband had seen me?” I said.

“There was no danger of that,” she replied.

“What do you mean? No danger? That is a good joke! If he had stooped down, he would have seen me.”

She did not laugh any more, she only looked at me with her large eyes, which were bright with merriment.

“He would not have stooped.”

“Why?” I persisted. “Just suppose that he had let his hat fall, he would have been sure to pick it up, and then⁠—I was well prepared to defend myself, in this costume!”

She put her two strong, round arms about my neck, and, lowering her voice, as she did when she said “I adorre you,” she whispered:

“Then he would never have got up again.”

I did not understand her, and said: “What do you mean?”

She gave me a cunning wink, and put out her hand towards the chair on which I had sat down, and her outstretched hands, her smile, her half-open lips, her white, sharp, and ferocious teeth, all drew my attention to the little hatchet, the sharp blade of which was glistening. While she put out her hand as if she were going to take it, she put her left arm round me, and drawing me to her, and pressing her thigh against mine, with her right arm she made a motion as if she were cutting off the head of a kneeling man!

This, my friend, is the manner in which people here understand conjugal duties, love, and hospitality!

The Shepherd’s Leap

High cliffs, perpendicular as a wall, skirt the seafront between Dieppe and Havre. In a depression in the cliffs, here and there, one sees a little narrow gulch with steep sides covered with short grass and gorse, which descends from the cultivated tableland toward a shingly beach, where it ends in a depression like the bed of a torrent. Nature made those valleys; the rainstorms created those depressions in which they terminate, wearing away what remained of the cliff, and channeling as far as the sea the bed of the stream.

Sometimes a village lies concealed in these gulches, into which the wind rushes straight from the open sea.

I spent a summer in one of these coast valleys with a peasant, whose house, facing the waves, enabled me to see from my window a huge triangular sweep of blue water framed by the green slopes of the valley, and lighted up in places by white sails passing in the distance in the sunlight.

The road leading towards the sea ran through the further end of the defile, abruptly passed between two chalk cliffs, became a sort of deep gulley before opening on a beautiful carpet of smooth pebbles, rounded and polished by the immemorial caress of the waves.

This steep gorge was called the “Shepherd’s Leap.”

Here is the drama which originated this name.

The story goes that this village was at one time ruled by an austere and violent young priest. He left the seminary filled with hatred toward those who lived according to natural laws, and did not follow the laws of his God. Inflexibly severe on himself, he displayed merciless intolerance toward others. One thing above all stirred him up with rage and disgust⁠—love. If he had lived in cities in the midst of the civilized and the refined, who conceal the brutal dictates of nature behind delicate veils of sentiment and tenderness, if he had heard the confessions of perfumed sinners in some vast cathedral nave, in which their guilt was softened by the grace of their fall and the idealism surrounding material kisses, he would not perhaps have felt those fierce revolts, those inordinate outbursts of anger that took possession of him when he witnessed the vulgar misconduct of some rustic pair in a ditch or in a barn.

He likened them to brutes, these people who knew nothing of love and who simply paired like animals; and he hated them for the coarseness of their souls, for the foul way in which they appeased their instincts, for the repulsive merriment exhibited even by old men when they happened to talk about these unclean pleasures.

Perhaps, too, he was tortured, in spite of himself, by the pangs of appetites which he had refrained from satiating, and secretly troubled by the struggle of his body in its revolt against a spirit despotic and chaste. But everything that had reference to the flesh filled him with indignation, made him furious; and his violent sermons, full of threats and indignant allusions, caused the girls to titter and the young fellows to cast sly glances at them across the church; while the farmers in their blue blouses and their wives in their black mantles, said to each other on their way home from Mass before entering their houses, from the chimney of each of which ascended a thin blue film of smoke:

“He does not joke abont the matter, Mo’sieu’ the Curé!”

On one occasion, and for very slight cause, he flew into such a passion that he lost his reason. He went to see a sick woman. As soon as he reached the farmyard, he saw a crowd of children, those of the house as well and some of their friends, gathered around a dog’s kennel. They were staring curiously at something, standing there motionless, with concentrated, silent attention. The priest walked towards them. It was a dog and her litter of puppies. In front of the kennel five little puppies were swarming around their mother, who was affectionately licking them, and at the moment when the curé stretched forward his head above the heads of the children, a sixth tiny pup was born. All the brats, seized with joy at the sight of it, began to bawl out, clapping their hands: “Here’s another of them! Here’s another of them!”

To them it was a pleasure, a natural pleasure, into which nothing impure entered; they gazed at the birth of the puppies just as they would have looked at apples falling from trees. But the man with the black robe was quivering with indignation, and, losing his head, he lifted up his big blue umbrella and began to beat the youngsters. They retreated at full speed. Then, finding himself left alone with the animal, he proceeded to beat her also. As in her condition she was unable to run way she moaned while she struggled against his attack, and jumping on top of her, he crushed her under his feet, and with a few kicks with his heel finished her off. Then he left the body bleeding in the midst of the newborn animals, whining and helpless and instinctively making efforts to get at the mother’s teats.

He would take long walks, all alone, with a frown on his face. Now, one evening in May, as he was returning from a place some distance away, and going along by the cliff to get back to the village, a fierce shower of rain impeded his progress. He could see no house in sight, only the bare coast on every side riddled by the pelting downpour.

The rough sea dashed against him in masses of foam; and thick black clouds gathering at the horizon redoubled the rain. The wind whistled, blew great guns, battered down the growing crops, and the dripping Abbé; filling his ears with noises, and exciting his heart with its tumult.

He took off his hat, exposing his forehead to the storm, and by degrees approached the descent towards the lowland. But he had such a rattling in his throat that he could not advance farther, and, all of a sudden, he espied near a sheep pasture, a shepherd’s hut, a kind of movable box on wheels that the shepherds can drag in summer from pasture to pasture.

Above a wooden stool, a low door was open, affording a view of the straw inside.

The priest was on the point of entering to take shelter when he saw a loving couple embracing each other in the shadow. Thereupon, he abruptly closed the door and fastened it; then, getting the shafts, he bent his lean back and dragged the hut after him, like a horse. And thus he ran along in his drenched cassock toward the steep incline, the fatal incline, with the young couple he had caught together, who were banging their fists against the door of the hut, believing probably that the whole thing was only the practical joke of a passerby.

When he got to the top of the descent, he let go of the frail structure, which began to roll over the sloping side of the cliff. It then rolled down precipitately, carried along blindly, ever increasing in the speed of its course, leaping, stumbling like an animal, striking the ground with its shafts.

An old beggar, cuddled up in a gap near the cliff, saw it passing, with a rush above his head, and he heard dreadful cries coming from the interior of this wooden box.

Suddenly a wheel fell off from a collision with some stone; and then the hut, falling on one side, began to topple downward like a ball, like a house torn from its foundations, and tumbling down from the top of a mountain; and then, having reached the edge of the last depression it turned over, describing a curve in its fall, and was broken like an egg, at the bottom of the cliff.

The pair of lovers were picked up, bruised, battered, with all their limbs fractured, but still clasped in each other’s arms, but now through terror.

The curé refused to admit their corpses into the church or to pronounce a benediction over their coffins. And on the following Sunday in his sermon he spoke vehemently about the Seventh Commandment, threatening the lovers with an avenging and mysterious arm, and citing the terrible example of the two wretches killed in the midst of their sin.

As he was leaving the church, two gendarmes arrested him.

A coastguard who was in a sentry-box had seen him.

The priest was sentenced to a term of penal servitude.

And the peasant who told me the story added gravely:

“I knew him, Monsieur. He was a rough man, that’s a fact, but he did not like fooling.”

The Bed

On a stifling afternoon during last summer, the large auction rooms seemed asleep, and the auctioneers were knocking down the various lots in a listless manner. In a back room, on the first floor, two or three lots of all silk ecclesiastical vestments were lying in a corner.

They were copes for solemn occasions, and graceful chasubles on which embroidered flowers surrounded symbolic letters on a yellowish ground, which had originally been white. Some secondhand dealers were there, two or three men with dirty beards, and a fat woman with a big stomach, one of those women who deal in secondhand finery and manage illicit love affairs, women who are brokers in old and young human flesh, just as much as they are in new and old clothes.

Presently, a beautiful Louis XV chasuble, as pretty as the dress of a marquise, was put up for sale. It had retained all its colours, and was embroidered with lilies of the valley round the cross, and long blue irises, which came up to the foot of the sacred emblem, and with wreaths of roses in the corners. When I had bought it, I noticed that there was a faint scent about it, as if it were permeated with the remains of incense, or still pervaded by those delicate, sweet scents of bygone years, which we like, the memory of a perfume, the soul of an evaporated essence.

When I got it home, I wished to have a small chair of the same charming period covered with it; and as I was handling it in order to take the necessary measures, I felt some paper beneath my fingers.

When I cut the lining, some letters fell at my feet. They were yellow with age, and the faint ink was the colour of rust; outside the sheets, which were folded in the fashion of long ago, it was addressed in a delicate hand “To Monsieur l’Abbé d’Argence.”

The first three letters merely settled places of meeting, but here is the third:

“My Friend⁠—I am very unwell, ill in fact, and I cannot leave my bed. The rain is beating against my windows, and I lie dreaming comfortably and warmly under my eiderdown coverlet. I have a book of which I am very fond, that seems as if a little of myself were in it. Shall I tell you what it is? No, for you would only scold me. Then, when I have read a little, I think, and will tell you what about.

“They have put behind me pillows which keep me up and I am writing you on the lovely little desk you gave me.

“Having been in bed for three days, I think about my bed, and even in my sleep I meditate on it still. I have come to the conclusion that the bed encircles our whole life; for we are born in it, we live in it and we shall die in it. If, therefore, I had Monsieur de Crébillon’s pen, I should write the history of a bed, and what exciting and terrible, as well as delightful and moving adventures would not such a book contain! What lessons and what subjects for moralising could not one draw from it, for everyone?

“You know my bed, my friend, but you will never guess how many things I have discovered in it within the last three days, and how much more I love it, in consequence. It seems to me to be inhabited, haunted, if I may say so, by a number of people I never thought of, who, nevertheless, have left something of themselves in that couch.

“Ah! I cannot understand people who buy new beds, beds to which no memories or cares are attached. Mine, ours, which is so shabby, and so spacious, must have held many existences in it, from birth to the grave. Think of that, my friend; think of it all; review all those lives, a great part of which was spent between these four posts, surrounded by these hangings embroidered by human figures, which have seen so many things. What have they seen during the three centuries since they were first put up?

“Here is a young woman lying in this bed.

“From time to time she sighs, and then she groans and cries out; her mother is with her, and presently a little creature that makes a noise like a cat mewing, and which is all shriveled and wrinkled, appears. It is a male child to which she has given birth, and the young mother feels happy in spite of her pain; she is nearly suffocated with joy at that first cry, and stretches out her arms, and those around her shed tears of pleasure. For that little morsel of humanity which has come from her means the continuation of the family, the perpetuation of the blood, of the heart, and of the soul of the old people, who are looking on, trembling with excitement.

“And then, here are two lovers, who for the first time are together in that tabernacle of life. They tremble; but transported with delight, they have the delicious sensation of being close together, and by degrees their lips meet. That divine kiss makes them one, that kiss which is the gate of a terrestrial heaven, that kiss which speaks of human delights, which continually promises them, announces them, and precedes them. And their bed is agitated like the tempestuous sea, it bends and murmurs, and itself seems to become animated and joyous, for the maddening mystery of love is being accomplished on it. What is there sweeter, what more perfect in this world than those embraces which make one single being out of two, and which give to both of them at the same moment the same thought, the same expectation, and the same maddening pleasure, a joy which descends upon them like a celestial and devouring fire?

“Do you remember those lines which you read to me last year, from some old poet, I know not whom, perhaps it was gentle Ronsard?

Et quand au lit nous serons
Entrelacés, nous ferons
Les lascifs, selon les guises
Des amants qui librement
Pratiquent folâtrement
Sous les draps cent mignardises.8

I should like to have them embroidered on the top of my bed, where Pyramus and Thisbe are continually looking at me out of their tapestried eyes.

“And think of death, my friend, of all those who have breathed out their last sigh to God in this bed. For it is also the tomb of hopes ended, the door which closes everything, after having been the entrance to the world. What cries, what anguish, what sufferings, what groans; how many arms stretched out toward the past; what appeals to a happiness that has vanished forever; what convulsions, what death-rattles, what gaping lips and distorted eyes, have there not been in this bed from which I am writing to you, during the three centuries that it has sheltered human beings!

“The bed, you must remember, is the symbol of life; I have discovered this within the last three days. There is nothing good except the bed, and are not some of our best moments spent in sleep?

“But then, again, we suffer in bed! it is the refuge of those who are ill and suffering; a place of repose and comfort for worn-out bodies.

“The bed is man himself. Our Lord Jesus proved that he was superhuman by never needing a bed. He was born on straw and died on the Cross, leaving to us weak human creatures our soft bed of repose.

“Many other thoughts have struck me, but I have no time to note them down for you, and then, should I remember them all? Besides that I am so tired that I mean to shake up my pillows, stretch myself out at full length, and sleep a little. But be sure and come to see me at three o’clock tomorrow; perhaps I may be better, and able to prove it to you.

“Goodbye, my friend; here are my hands for you to kiss, and I also offer you my lips.”

Mademoiselle Fifi

Major, Count von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, had nearly finished reading his letters, lying back in a huge, tapestry-covered armchair, with his booted feet on the beautiful marble fireplace, where his spurs had made two holes, which grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been in the château of Uville.

A cup of coffee was smoking on a small, inlaid table, which was stained with liqueurs, burnt by cigars, notched by the penknife of the victorious officer, who occasionally would stop while sharpening a pencil, to cut figures, make a drawing on the charming piece of furniture, just as it took his fancy.

When he had read his letters and run through the German newspapers, which his orderly had brought him, he got up, and after throwing three or four enormous pieces of green wood on to the fire, for these gentlemen were gradually cutting down the park for firewood⁠—he went to the window. The rain was descending in torrents, that Normandy rain, which looked as if it were being poured out by some furious hand, a slanting rain, thick as a curtain, which formed a sort of wall with diagonal stripes, and deluged everything, a regular rain, such as one frequently experiences in the neighbourhood of Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.

For a long time the officer looked at the sodden lawns and at the swollen Andelle beyond, overflowing its banks; and he was drumming a Rhineland waltz on the windowpanes, with his fingers, when a noise made him turn round; it was his second in command, Baron von Kelweinstein, now holding the rank of captain.

The major was a giant, with broad shoulders, and a long, fair-like beard, that spread fan-shaped on his chest. His whole, tall person suggested the idea of a military peacock, a peacock who was carrying his tail spread out from his chin. He had cold, gentle, blue eyes, and one cheek had been slashed by a sabre in the war with Austria; he was said to be a good sort and a brave officer.

The captain, a short, red-faced man, with a big tight-belted stomach, had his fair hair cropped quite close to his head, and in certain lights he almost looked as if he had been rubbed over with phosphorus. He had lost two front teeth one festive night, though he could not quite remember how, and this made his speech so thick that he could not always be understood, and he had a bald patch on the top of his head, tonsured like a monk, with a fringe of curly, bright, golden hair round the circle of bare skin.

The commandant shook hands with him, and gulped down his cup of coffee (the sixth that morning), while he listened to his subordinate’s report of what had occurred; and then they both went to the window, and declared that things were not very lively. The major, who was a quiet man, with a wife at home, put up with everything; but the captain, a regular rake, a frequenter of low resorts, and very partial to women, was mad at having been shut up for three months in the compulsory chastity of that wretched hole.

There was a knock at the door, and when the commandant said: “Come in,” one of their automatons appeared, and his mere presence announced that lunch was ready. In the dining room, they met three junior officers: a lieutenant, Otto von Grossling, and two second lieutenants, Fritz Scheuneburg, and Marquis von Eyrick, a very short, fair-haired man, who was proud and brutal towards his men, harsh towards the conquered, and as explosive as a rifle.

Since their arrival in France, his comrades had called him nothing but Mademoiselle Fifi. They had given him that nickname on account of his dandified style and small waist, which looked as if he wore stays, of his pale face, on which his budding moustache scarcely showed, and on account of the habit he had acquired of employing the French expression, fi, fi donc, which he pronounced with a slight whistle, when he wished to express his sovereign contempt for persons or things.

The dining room of the château d’Uville was a magnificent long room, whose fine old mirrors, that were cracked by pistol bullets, and whose Flemish tapestry, which was cut to ribbons, and hanging in rags in places, from sword-cuts, told too well what Mademoiselle Fifi’s occupation was during his spare time.

There were three family portraits on the walls: a steel-clad knight, a cardinal, and a judge, who were all smoking long porcelain pipes, which had been inserted into holes in the canvas, while in her ancient, faded-gold frame, a noble dame, very tightly laced, proudly exhibited an enormous moustache, drawn with a piece of charcoal. The officers ate their lunch almost in silence in that mutilated room, which looked dull in the rain, and melancholy under its vanquished appearance, although its old, oak floor had become as solid as the stone floor of a tavern.

When they had finished eating, and were smoking and drinking they began, as usual, to talk about the dull life they were leading. The bottles of brandy and liqueurs passed from hand to hand, and all sat back in their chairs and took repeated sips from their glasses, scarcely removing from their mouths the long, bent stems with egg-shaped china bowls, that were painted in a manner to delight a Hottentot.

As soon as their glasses were empty, they filled them again, with a gesture of resigned weariness, but Mademoiselle Fifi broke his each time, and a soldier immediately gave him another. They were enveloped in a thick cloud of strong tobacco smoke, and they seemed to be sunk in a state of drowsy, stupid intoxication, in that dreary drunkenness of men who have nothing to do. Suddenly, the baron, stirred to revolt, sat up, and said: “By heavens! This cannot go on; we must think of something to do.” And on hearing this, lieutenant Otto and second lieutenant Fritz, who preeminently possessed the grave, heavy German countenance, said: “What, captain?”

He thought for a few moments, and then replied: “What? Well, we must get up a spree, if the commandant will allow us.” “What sort of a spree, captain?” the major asked, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “I will arrange all that, commandant,” the baron said. “I will send old ‘Duty’ to Rouen, to bring out some girls here. I know where they can be found. We will have supper here, as all the materials are at hand, and, at least, we shall have a jolly evening.”

Count von Farlsberg shrugged his shoulders with a smile: “You’re mad, my dear fellow.”

But all the other officers got up, and came crowding round their chief, with entreaties: “Do let him, sir! it is terribly dull here.” Finally the major yielded. “Very well,” he replied, and the baron immediately sent for “Duty.” He was an old noncommissioned officer, who had never been seen to smile, but who carried out all the orders of his superiors to the letter, no matter what they might be. He stood there, with an impassive face, while he received the baron’s instructions, and then went out. Five minutes later a large military wagon, with a hooped tarpaulin cover, galloped off as fast as four horses could take it, under the pouring rain. At once a revivifying thrill seemed to run through their minds; they stopped lounging, their faces brightened, and they began to talk.

Although it was raining as hard as ever, the major declared that it was not so dull, and Lieutenant von Grossling said with conviction, that the sky was clearing up, while Mademoiselle Fifi did not seem to be able to keep still. He got up, and sat down again, and his bright eyes seemed to be looking for something to destroy. Suddenly, looking at the lady with the moustache, the young fellow pulled out his revolver, and said: “You shall not see it.” And without leaving his seat he aimed, and with two successive bullets cut out both the eyes of the portrait.

“Let us make a mine!” he then exclaimed, and the conversation was suddenly interrupted, as if they had found some fresh and powerful subject of interest. The mine was his invention, his method of destruction, and his favorite amusement.

When he left the château, the lawful owner, Count Fernand d’Amoys d’Uville, had not had time to carry away or to hide anything, except the plate, which had been stowed away in a hole made in one of the walls, so that, as he was very rich and had good taste, the large drawing room, which opened into the dining room, had looked like the gallery in a museum, before his precipitate flight.

Expensive oil-paintings, water colours, and drawings hung against the walls, while on the tables, on the hanging shelves, and in elegant cabinets, there were a thousand knickknacks; small vases, statuettes, groups in Dresden china, and grotesque Chinese figures, old ivory, and Venetian glass, which filled the large room with their precious and fantastical array.

Scarcely anything was left now; not that the things had been stolen, for the major would not have allowed that, but Mademoiselle Fifi from time to time “made a mine,” and on those occasions all the officers thoroughly enjoyed themselves for five minutes. The little marquis went into the drawing room to get what he wanted, and he brought back a small, delicate and very valuable Chinese teapot, which he filled with gunpowder, and carefully introduced a piece of tinder into the spout. Then he lighted it, and took this infernal machine into the next room; but he came back immediately, and shut the door. The Germans all stood expectantly, their faces full of childish, smiling curiosity, and as soon as the explosion had shaken the château, they all rushed in at once.

Mademoiselle Fifi, who got in first, clapped his hands in delight at the sight of a terra-cotta Venus, whose head had been blown off at last, and each picked up pieces of porcelain, and wondered at the strange shape of the fragments, examining the latest damage, and disputing as to whether some of the havoc was not due to a previous explosion; while the major was looking with a paternal eye at the large drawing room, which had been wrecked in this Neronic fashion, and was strewn with the fragments of works of art. He went out first, and said, with a smile: “This time it was a great success!”

But there was such a cloud of smoke in the dining room, mingled with the tobacco smoke, that they could not breathe, so the commandant opened the window, and all the officers, who had gone into the room for a glass of cognac, went up to it.

The moist air blew into the room, with a scent of flooded country, and a powdering of rain that sprinkled their beards. They looked at the tall trees, which were dripping with the rain, at the broad valley, which was covered with a mist of dark, low-hanging clouds, and at the church spire in the distance, which rose up like a grey point in the beating rain.

The bells had not rung since their arrival. That was the only resistance which the invaders had met with in the neighbourhood. The parish priest had not refused to take in and to feed the Prussian soldiers; he had several times even drunk a bottle of beer or claret with the hostile commandant, who often employed him as a friendly intermediary; but it was no use to ask him for a single stroke of the bells; he would sooner have allowed himself to be shot. That was his way of protesting against the invasion, a peaceful and silent protest, the only one, he said, which was suitable to a priest, who was a man of peace, not war; and everyone, for ten miles around, praised the Abbé Chantavoine’s firmness and heroism, in venturing to proclaim the public mourning by the obstinate silence of his church bells.

The whole village grew enthusiastic over his resistance, and was ready to back up their pastor and to risk anything, as they looked upon that silent protest as the safeguard of the national honour. It seemed to the peasants that thus they had deserved better of their country than Belfort and Strasbourg, that they had set an equally valuable example, and that the name of their little village would become immortalized by that; but with that exception, they refused their Prussian conquerors nothing.

The commandant and his officers laughed among themselves at that inoffensive courage, and as the people in the whole country round showed themselves obliging and compliant towards them, they willingly tolerated their silent patriotism. Only the little Marquis Wilhelm would have liked to make the bell ring. He was very angry at his superior’s politic compliance with the priest’s scruples, and every day he begged the commandant to allow him to sound “ding-dong, ding-dong,” just once, only just once, just by way of a joke. And he asked it like a wheedling woman, in the tender voice of some mistress who wishes to obtain something, but the commandant would not yield, and to console himself Mademoiselle Fifi used to make a “mine” in the château d’Uville.

The five men stood there together for some minutes, inhaling the moist air, and at last, Lieutenant Fritz said, with a thick laugh: “The ladies will certainly not have fine weather for their drive.” Then they separated, each to his own duties, while the captain had plenty to do in seeing about the dinner.

When they met again, as it was growing dark, they began to laugh at seeing each other as dandified and smart as on the day of a grand review. The commandant’s hair did not look so grey as it was in the morning, and the captain had shaved, and had only kept his moustache on, which made him look as if he had a streak of fire under his nose.

In spite of the rain, they left the window open, and one of them went to listen from time to time, and at a quarter past six the baron said he heard a rumbling in the distance. They all rushed down, and soon the wagon drove up at a gallop with its four horses, which were splashed up to their backs, steaming and panting, and five women got out at the bottom of the steps, five handsome girls whom a comrade of the captain, to whom old “Duty” had taken his card, had selected with care.

They had not required much pressing, as they were sure of being well paid, for they had got to know the Prussians in the three months during which they had had to do with them, and so they resigned themselves to the men as they did the state of affairs. “It is all in the day’s work,” they said as they drove along; no doubt to allay some secret scruples of conscience which remained.

They went into the dining room immediately, which looked still more dismal in its dilapidated state, when it was lighted up; while the table, covered with choice dishes, the beautiful china and glass, and the plate, which had been found in the hole in the wall where its owner had hidden it, gave the look of a bandit’s inn, where they were supping after committing a robbery, to the place. The captain was radiant, and took hold of the women as if he were familiar with them; appraising them, kissing them, sniffing them, appraising their value as ladies of pleasure; and when the three young men wanted to appropriate one each, he opposed them authoritatively, reserving to himself the right to apportion them justly, according to their several ranks, so as not to violate the laws of precedence. Therefore, so as to avoid all discussion, jarring, and suspicion of partiality, he placed them all in a line according to height, and addressing the tallest, he said in a voice of command:

“What is your name?” “Pamela,” she replied, raising her voice. And then he said: “Number one, called Pamela, is adjudged to the commandant.” Then, having kissed Blondine, the second, as a sign of proprietorship, he proffered stout Amanda to Lieutenant Otto, Eva La Tomate, to Second Lieutenant Fritz, and Rachel the shortest of them all, a very young, dark girl, with eyes as black as ink, a Jewess, whose snub nose confirmed the rule which allots hooked noses to all her race, to the youngest officer, frail Count Wilhelm von Eyrick.

They were all pretty and plump, without any distinctive features, and all were very much alike in look and person, from their daily practice of love, and their life in common in brothels.

The three younger men wished to carry off their women immediately, under the pretext of finding them brushes and soap; but the captain wisely opposed this, for he said they were quite fit to sit down to dinner, and that those who went up would wish for a change when they came down, and so would disturb the other couples, and his experience in such matters carried the day. They contented themselves with many kisses, kisses of anticipation.

Suddenly Rachel choked, and began to cough until the tears came into her eyes, while smoke came through her nostrils. Under pretence of kissing her, the count had blown a whiff of tobacco into her mouth. She did not fly into a rage, and did not say a word, but she looked at her possessor with latent hatred in her dark eyes.

They sat down to dinner. The commandant seemed delighted; he made Pamela sit on his right, and Blondine on his left, and said, as he unfolded his table napkin: “That was a delightful idea of yours, Captain.”

Lieutenants Otto and Fritz, who were as polite as if they had been with fashionable ladies, rather intimidated their neighbours, but Baron von Kelweingstein gave rein to all his vicious propensities, beamed, made obscene remarks, and seemed on fire with his crown of red hair. He made gallant phrases in French from the other side of the Rhine, and his pothouse compliments sputtered out through the gap made by his broken teeth, reached the girls amid a volley of saliva.

They did not understand him, however, and their intelligence did not seem to be awakened until he uttered nasty words and broad expressions, which were mangled by his accent. Then they all began to shriek with laughter, falling into the laps of their neighbours and repeating the words, which the baron then began to say all wrong, in order that he might have the pleasure of hearing them say dirty things. They gave him as much of that stuff as he wanted, for they were drunk after the first bottle of wine, and, becoming themselves once more, and opening the door to their usual habits, they kissed the moustaches on the right and left of them, pinched the men’s arms, uttered furious cries, drank out of every glass, and sang French couplets, and bits of German songs, which they had picked up in their daily intercourse with the enemy.

Soon the men themselves, intoxicated by that female flesh which was displayed to their sight and touch, grew very amorous, shouted and broke the plates and dishes, while the soldiers behind them waited on them stolidly. The commandant was the only one who put any restraint upon himself.

Mademoiselle Fifi had taken Rachel on to his knees, and, getting deliberately excited, at one moment kissed the little black curls on her neck, inhaling the pleasant warmth of her body, and all the savour of her person, through the slight space there was between her dress and her skin, and at another he pinched her furiously through her dress, and made her scream, for he was seized by a species of ferocity, and tormented by his desire to hurt. He often held her close to him, as if to make her part of himself, and pressed his lips in a long kiss on the Jewess’s rosy mouth, until she lost her breath; but suddenly he bit her until a stream of blood ran down her chin and on to her bodice.

For the second time, she looked him full in the face, and as she bathed the wound, she said: “You will have to pay for that!” But he merely laughed a hard laugh, and said: “I will pay.”

At dessert, champagne was served, and the commandant rose, and in the same voice in which he would have drunk to the health of the Empress Augusta, he drank: “To our ladies!” And a series of toasts began, toasts worthy of the lowest soldiers and of drunkards, mingled with obscene jokes, which were made still more brutal by their ignorance of the language. They got up, one after another, trying to say something witty, forcing themselves to be funny, and the women, who were so drunk that they almost fell off their chairs, with vacant looks and clammy tongues, applauded madly each time.

The captain, who no doubt wished to impart an appearance of gallantry to the orgy, raised his glass again, and said: “To our victories over hearts!” And thereupon Lieutenant Otto, who as a species of bear from the Black Forest, jumped up, inflamed and saturated with drink, and suddenly seized by an excess of alcoholic patriotism, he cried: “To our victories over France!”

Drunk as they were, the women were silent, and Rachel turned round with a shudder, and said: “Look here, I know some Frenchmen, in whose presence you would not dare to say that.” But the little count, still holding her on his knee, began to laugh, for the wine had made him very merry, and said: “Ha! ha! ha! I have never met any of them, myself. As soon as we show ourselves, they run away!” The girl, who was in a terrible rage, shouted into his face: “You are lying, you dirty scoundrel!”

For a moment, he looked at her steadily with his bright eyes upon her, as he had looked at the portrait before he destroyed it with revolver bullets, and then he began to laugh: “Ah! yes, talk about them, my dear! Should we be here now, if they were brave?” And getting excited, he exclaimed: “We are the masters! France belongs to us!”

She jumped off his knees with a bound, and threw herself into her chair, while he rose, held out his glass over the table, and repeated: “France and the French, the woods, the fields, and the houses of France belong to us!”

The others, who were quite drunk, and who were suddenly seized by military enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of brutes, seized their glasses, and shouting: “Long live Prussia!” they emptied them at a draught.

The girls did not protest, for they were reduced to silence, and were afraid. Even Rachel did not say a word, as she had no reply to make, and then, the little marquis put his champagne glass, which had just been refilled, on to the head of the Jewess, and exclaimed: “All the women in France belong to us, also!”

At that, she got up so quickly that the glass upset and poured the amber-coloured wine on to her black hair as if to baptise her, and broke into a hundred fragments, as it fell on to the floor. With trembling lips, she defied the looks of the officer who was still laughing, and she stammered out, in a voice choked with rage: “That⁠ ⁠… that⁠ ⁠… that⁠ ⁠… is not true⁠ ⁠… for you shall certainly not have any French women.”

He sat down again, so as to laugh at his ease, and trying ineffectually to speak with a Parisian accent, he said: “That is good, very good! Then, what did you come here for, my dear?” She was thunderstruck, and made no reply for a moment, for in her agitation she did not understand him at first; but as soon as she grasped his meaning, she said to him indignantly and vehemently: “I! I! I am not a woman; I am only a strumpet, and that is all that Prussians want.”

Almost before she had finished, he slapped her full in the face; but as he was raising his hand again, as if he would strike her, she, almost mad with passion, took up a small dessert knife with a silver blade from the table, and stabbed him in the neck, just above the breast bone. Something that he was going to say was cut short in his throat, and he sat there, with his mouth half open, and a terrible look in his eyes.

All the officers shouted in horror, and leaped up noisily; but throwing her chair between Lieutenant Otto’s legs, who fell down at full length, she ran to the window, opened it before they could seize her, and jumped out into the night and pouring rain.

In two minutes, Mademoiselle Fifi was dead, and Fritz and Otto drew their swords and wanted to kill the women, who threw themselves at their feet and clung to their knees. With some difficulty the major stopped the slaughter, and had the four terrified girls locked up in a room under the care of two soldiers, and then he organised the pursuit of the fugitive, as carefully as if they were about to engage in a skirmish, feeling quite sure that she would be caught. Fifty men, spurred on by threats, were sent to search the park. Two hundred more scoured the woods, and all the houses in the valley.

The table, which had been cleared immediately, now served as a deathbed, and the four officers stood at the windows, rigid and sobered, with the stern faces of soldiers on duty, and tried to pierce through the darkness of the night, amid the steady torrent of rain. Suddenly, a shot was heard, and then another, a long way off; and for four hours they heard from time to time near or distant reports and rallying cries strange words uttered as a call, in guttural voices.

In the morning they all returned. Two soldiers had been killed, and three others wounded by their comrades in the ardour of that chase, and in the confusion of that night pursuit, but they had not caught Rachel.

Then the inhabitants of the district were terrorised, the houses were turned topsy-turvy, the country was scoured and beaten up, over and over again, but the Jewess did not seem to have left a single trace of her passage behind her.

When the general was told of it, he gave orders to hush up the affair, so as not to set a bad example to the army, but he severely censured the commandant, who in turn punished his inferiors. The general had said: “One does not go to war in order to amuse oneself, and to caress prostitutes.” And Count von Farlsberg, in his exasperation, made up his mind to have his revenge on the district, but as he required a pretext for showing severity, he sent for the priest, and ordered him to have the bell tolled at the funeral of the Marquis von Eyrick.

Contrary to all expectation, the priest showed himself humble and most respectful, and when Mademoiselle Fifi’s body left the Château d’Uville on its way to the cemetery, carried by soldiers, preceded, surrounded, and followed by soldiers, who marched with loaded rifles, for the first time, the bell sounded its funereal knell in a lively manner, as if a friendly hand were caressing it. At night it sounded again, and the next day, and every day; it rang as much as anyone could desire. Sometimes even, it would start at night, and sound gently through the darkness, seized by strange joy, awakened, one could not tell why. All the peasants in the neighbourhood declared that it was bewitched, and nobody, except the priest and the sacristan, would now go near the church tower, and they went because a poor girl was living there in grief and solitude, and secretly nourished by those two men.

She remained there until the German troops departed, and then one evening the priest borrowed the baker’s cart, and himself drove his prisoner to Rouen. When they got there, he embraced her, and she quickly went back on foot to the establishment from which she had come, where the proprietress, who thought that she was dead, was very glad to see her.

A short time afterwards, a patriot who had no prejudices, and who liked her because of her bold deed, and who afterwards loved her for herself, married her, and made a lady of her, who was quite as good as many others.

Relics of the Past

My dear Colette⁠—I do not know whether you remember a verse of M. Sainte-Beuve which we have read together, and which has remained fixed in my memory; for me this verse speaks eloquently; and it has very often reassured my poor heart, especially for some time past. Here it is:

“To be born, to live, and die in the same house.”

I am now all alone in this house where I was born, where I have lived, and where I hope to die. It is not gay every day, but it is pleasant; for there I have souvenirs all around me.

My son Henri is a barrister; he comes to see me twice a year. Jeanne is living with her husband at the other end of France, and it is I who go to see her each autumn. So here I am, all, all alone, but surrounded by familiar objects which incessantly speak to me about my own people, the dead, and the living separated from me by distance.

I no longer read much; I am too old for that; but I am constantly thinking, or rather dreaming. I do not dream as I used to do long ago. You may recall to mind any wild fancies, the adventures our brains concocted when we were twenty, and all the horizons of happiness that dawned upon us!

Nothing out of all our dreaming has been realized, or rather it is quite a different thing that has happened, less charming, less poetic, but sufficient for those who know how to accept their lot in this world bravely.

Do you know why we women are so often unhappy? It is because we are taught in our youth to believe too much in happiness! We are never brought up with the idea of fighting, of striving, of suffering. And, at the first shock, our hearts are broken; we look forward, with blind faith, to cascades of fortunate events. What does happen is at best but a partial happiness, and thereupon we burst out sobbing. Happiness, the real happiness that we dream of, I have come to know what that is. It does not consist in the arrival of great bliss, for any great bliss that falls to our share is to be found in the infinite expectation of a succession of joys to which we never attain. Happiness is happy expectation; it is the horizon of hope; it is, therefore, endless illusion; and, old as I am, I create illusions for myself still, in fact, every day I live; only their object is changed, my desires being no longer the same. I have told you that I spend my brightest hours in dreaming. What else should I do?

I have two ways of doing this. I am going to tell you what they are; they may perhaps prove useful to you.

Oh! the first is very simple; it consists in sitting down before my fire in a low armchair made soft for my old bones, and looking back at the things that have been put aside.

One life is so short, especially a life entirely spent in the same spot:

“To be born, to live, and die in the same house.”

The things that bring back the past to our recollection are heaped, pressed together; and, we are old, it sometimes seems no more than ten days since we were young. Yes; everything slips away from us, as if life itself were but a single day: morning, evening, and then comes night⁠—a night without a dawn!

When I gaze into the fire, for hours and hours, the past rises up before me as though it were but yesterday. I no longer think of my present existence; reverie carries me away; once more I pass through all the changes of my life.

And I often am possessed by the illusion that I am a young girl, so many breaths of bygone days are wafted back to me, so many youthful sensations and even impulses, so many throbbings of my young heart⁠—all the passionate ardor of eighteen; and I have clear, as fresh realities, visions of forgotten things. Oh! how vividly, above all, do the memories of my walks as a young girl come back to me! There, in the armchair of mine, before the fire, I saw once more, a few nights since, a sunset on Mont Saint-Michel, and immediately afterwards I was riding on horseback through the forest of Uville with the odors of the damp sand and of the flowers steeped in dew, and the evening star sending its burning reflection through the water and bathing my face in its rays as I galloped through the copse. And all I thought of then, my poetic enthusiasm at the sight of the boundless sea, my keen delight at the rustling of the branches as I passed, my most trivial impressions, every fragment of thought, desire, or feeling, all, all came back to me as if I were there still, as if fifty years had not glided by since then, to chill my blood and moderate my hopes. But my other way of reviving the long ago is much better.

You know, or you do not know, my dear Colette, that we destroy nothing in the house. We have upstairs, under the roof, a large room for cast-off things which we call “the lumber-room.” Everything which is no longer used is thrown there. I often go up there, and gaze around me. Then I find once more a heap of nothings that I had ceased to think about, and that recalled a heap of things to my mind. They are not those beloved articles of furniture which we have known since our childhood and to which are attached recollections of events of joys or sorrows, dates in our history, which, from the fact of being intermingled with our lives, have assumed a kind of personality, a physiognomy, which are the companions of our pleasant or gloomy house, the only companions, alas! that we are sure not to lose, the only ones that will not die, like the others⁠—those whose features, whose loving eyes, whose lips, whose voices, have vanished forever. But I find instead among the medley of worn-out gewgaws those little old insignificant objects which have hung on by our side for forty years without ever having been noticed by us, and which, when we suddenly lay eyes on them again, have somehow the importance, the significance of relics of the past. They produce on my mind the effect of those people⁠—whom we have known for a very long time without ever having seen them as they really are, and who, all of a sudden, some evening, quite unexpectedly, break out into a stream of interminable talk, and tell us all about themselves down to their most hidden secrets, of which we had never even suspected the existence.

And I move about from one object to the other with a little thrill in my heart every time something fixes my attention. I say to myself: “See there! I broke that the night Paul started for Lyons”; or else, “Ah! there is mamma’s little lantern, which she used to carry with her going to her evening devotions on dark winter nights.” There are even things in this room which have no story to tell me, which have come down from my grandparents, things therefore, whose history and adventures are utterly unknown to those who are living today, and whose very owners nobody knows now. Nobody has seen the hands that used to touch them or the eyes that used to gaze at them. These are the things that make me have long, long dreams. They represent to my mind desolate people whose last remaining friend is dead. You, my dear Colette, can scarcely comprehend all this, and you will smile at my simplicity, my childish, sentimental whims. You are a Parisian, and you Parisians do not understand this interior life, those eternal echoes of one’s own heart. You live in the outer world, with all your thoughts in the open. Living alone as I do, I can only speak about myself. When you are answering this letter, tell me a little about yourself, that I may also be able to put myself in your place, as you will be able to put yourself in mine tomorrow.

But you will never completely understand M. de Sainte Beuve’s verse:

“To be born, to live, and to die in one house.”

The Blind Man

Why is the first sunshine so delightful? Why does the light falling upon the earth fill us so with the happiness of living? The sky is all blue, the country all green, the houses all white; and our charmed eyes drink in these living colours, wherewith they fashion joy for our souls. And we feel impulsive desires to dance, to run, to sing, a happy lightness of the spirit, a kind of broadened, liberated tenderness; we feel as if we would like to embrace the sun.

The blind men in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness, remain calm as ever in the midst of this new gaiety of life and, incomprehending, they keep on quieting their dogs who long to gambol.

When they go home, at the end of the day, on the arm of a young brother or little sister, if the child says: “It has been a lovely day!” they will reply: “Yes, I knew very well it was a fine day, Loulou would not keep still.”

I knew one of these men, whose life was one of the most cruel martyrdoms that can be dreamt of.

He was a peasant, the son of a Norman farmer. As long as his father and mother were alive, fairly good care was taken of him; he hardly suffered except from his horrible infirmity; but as soon as the old people were gone, his appalling existence began. Taken in by a sister, he was treated by everyone on the farm as a beggar who ate the bread of others. At every meal his food was grudged him; he was called sluggard and booby; and although his brother-in-law had got possession of his share of the inheritance, his broth was given him with reluctance, and only in just sufficient quantity to keep him from death.

His face was very pale, and his two eyes were large and white like sealing-wafers; he remained impassive under all insults, so walled up in himself that no one knew whether he felt them. And he had never known any affection, his mother having always been a trifle harsh with him, loving him very little; for in the country the useless are nuisances, and peasants would gladly copy the fowls, that kill off the weakly among themselves.

As soon as his soup was swallowed, he would go and sit before the door in summer, beside the fire in winter, and would not move till evening. He made no gesture, no movement; only his eyelids, shaken by a kind of nervous affliction, would occasionally fall over the white spots of his eyes. Had he a spirit, a mind, a clear consciousness of his life? No one wondered.

For a few years things went on like this. But his inability to do anything, as much as his imperturbability, ended by exasperating his relations, and he became a scapegoat, a sort of buffoon-martyr, a kind of prey sacrificed to the natural ferocity and savage merriment of the brutes around him.

They thought of all the cruel jests which his blindness inspired. And, in order to pay themselves for what he ate, they turned his meals into hours of pleasure for the neighbours and of torture for the helpless wretch.

The peasants of the neighbouring houses came to this entertainment; stories of it ran from door to door, and the farm kitchen was full every day. Sometimes a cat or a dog was put on the table, in front of the plate from which he was beginning to take his soup. Instinctively the animal would realise the man’s infirmity and would very softly draw near, eating without a sound, lapping it up delicately; and when a rather noisy splashing of the tongue had aroused the poor wretch’s attention, it would prudently draw away to avoid the random blow from the spoon that followed.

Then there was much laughter, nudging, and stamping from the spectators crowded along the walls. And without saying a word he would begin to eat again, with his right hand, while, with his outstretched left arm, he protected and defended his plate.

Sometimes they made him eat corks, wood, leaves, or even filth, which he could not distinguish.

Then they even wearied of their pleasantries; and the brother-in-law, growing angry at always having to feed him, struck him, and constantly boxed his ears, laughing at his victim’s futile efforts to ward off the blows or return them. This became a new game: the slap game. The ploughboys, the labourer, and the maids were constantly thrusting their hands at his face, and this produced a hurried twitching in his eyelids. He did not know where to hide, and kept his arms constantly extended to avoid their assaults.

At last they forced him to beg. They placed him on the roads on market days, and, as soon as he heard a sound of footsteps or the rattle of a carriage, he would hold out his hat, faltering: “Charity, if you please.”

But the peasant is not free with his money, and, during entire weeks, he did not bring home a halfpenny.

Then their real hatred was unchained, pitiless. And this is how he died:

One winter, the earth was covered with snow, and it froze appallingly hard. His brother-in-law, one morning, led him a long way off to a high road to make him beg for alms. He left him there all day, and when night was come, he told his household that he had not been able to find him. “But there!” he added, “we mustn’t bother, someone will have taken him off because he was cold. Of course he isn’t lost. He’ll come back tomorrow to eat his broth all right.”

The next day he did not come back.

After long hours of waiting, gripped by the cold, feeling that he was dying, the blind man had begun to walk. Unable to make out the road, which was buried under this froth of ice, he had wandered at random, falling into ditches and rising again, always silent, searching for a house.

But the numbness of the snows had gradually taken hold on him, and, his weak limbs unable to carry him farther, he had sat down in the middle of a field. He never got up again.

The white flakes fell steadily and buried him. His stiffened body disappeared under the ceaseless accumulation of the infinite multitude of them; and nothing indicated the spot where the corpse lay.

His relatives made a show of inquiring and searching for him for eight days. They even cried.

The winter was a hard one, and the thaw did not come soon. But one Sunday, on their way to Mass, the farmers noticed a great flock of crows hovering continually over the field, then swooping down like a black shower of rain, in troops, to the same spot, constantly rising from it again and returning to it.

The following week the dark birds were still there. The sky bore a cloud of them, as though they had assembled from every corner of the horizon; and they dropped down with a great clamour to the dazzling snow, making a strange-looking pattern of spots upon it, and obstinately searching in it.

A boy went to see what they were doing, and found the body of the blind man, already half-eaten, torn to shreds. His pale eyes had vanished, pricked out by the long, ravenous beaks.

And I can never feel the vivid gaiety of days of sunshine without a sad remembrance and a melancholy thought of the poor wretch, so robbed of all things in life that his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him.

Magnetism

The dinner was ended and the bachelors were sitting over their cigars and liqueurs, feeling comfortably quiescent as a result of good food and drink, when someone started a discussion of magnetism: Donato’s tricks and Charcot’s experiments. These sceptical, easygoing men who cared nothing about religion, unexpectedly began to tell stories of strange happenings, incredible things that nevertheless had really occurred, so they said; suddenly converted to the mysteries of magnetism which they supported in the name of science, they fell back into superstitious beliefs clinging like a burr to this last remnant of magic.

One of the party⁠—a man full of vigour, a follower of young girls and hunter of women⁠—smiled in his convinced incredulity: as he did not believe in anything, all discussion seemed to him to be futile.

He repeated with a sneer: “Humbug! humbug! humbug! We need not discuss Donato, who is simply a smart juggler. Monsieur Charcot, who is said to be a great scholar, seems to me like a storyteller of the Edgar Poe type who ends in a madhouse through concentrating on queer cases of insanity. He had proved the existence of unexplained and still inexplicable nervous phenomena, he deals with unknown forces that are now being investigated, and as he cannot always understand what he sees he probably remembers the ecclesiastical interpretation of these mysteries. I would like to hear what he himself has to say, quite a different thing to listening to your version of his conclusions.”

The rest of the party rather pitied the unbeliever; they felt as an assembly of monks would do towards a blasphemer. One of them exclaimed: “Still there were miracles in olden times!” to which he replied: “That I deny. Why are there none in our days?”

Then each one mentioned some fact, some weird presentiment, some instance of telegraphic communication from a distance or some case of one being’s secret influence over another. They asserted and maintained that these things had really happened, while the obstinate sceptic repeated: “Humbug! humbug! humbug!” At last he got up, threw away his cigar, and, with hands in his pockets, said: “Well, I will tell you two stories which I will explain afterwards. Here they are:

“In the little village of Étretat all the men, sailors every man of them, go off to the Newfoundland cod fisheries every year. Well, one night the child of one of the fishermen woke up with a start, crying out that ‘his father had died at sea.’ The child fell asleep again, but woke up again, screaming that ‘his father was drowned.’ A month later the news came that the father had, indeed, been swept off the deck by a wave. The widow remembered the child’s dream, everyone declared it to be a miracle, and the affair caused a great sensation. When dates were compared it was found that the accident and the dream coincided pretty closely, so it was concluded that they had happened at the same time on the same night. Here you have a mystery of magnetism.”

The speaker stopped and one of the party, visibly affected, asked:

“And you say you can explain that?”

“Certainly, I discovered the secret. The incident had astonished and even worried me, but you see I disbelieve on principle. Just as others always begin by believing, I begin by doubting, and when I fail to understand I still deny all telepathic communication between two souls, convinced that my own intelligence will find a solution. Well, I turned the matter over in my mind, and after questioning the wives of the absent fishermen I discovered that hardly a week passed without someone, either wife or child, dreaming and announcing that ‘the father had died at sea.’ The terrible, haunting dread of accidents makes them a constant subject of conversation, and fills the thoughts of the women and children. If, by any chance, one of these predictions coincides with a death, at once it is said to be a miracle, for they forget all the dreams, the omens, the sinister forebodings that are not fulfilled. I have myself known fifty cases which were completely forgotten within a week. But if the man had indeed died, the dream was remembered at once and the coincidence attributed to the intervention of the Almighty by some, while others declared it to be due to magnetism.”

One of the party said: “Well, all that is true enough; now for your second story?”

“Oh, the second is rather awkward to tell. It happened to myself and so I don’t place any great value on my own view of the matter. An interested party can never give an impartial opinion. However, here it is:

“Among my acquaintances was a young woman on whom I had never bestowed a thought, at whom I had never even looked with any interest, of whom I had taken no notice, as the saying goes.

“I classed her as an insignificant woman, though she was not bad-looking; I simply knew that she had eyes, a nose, a mouth and some kind of hair, in fact that she was a colourless type. She was one of those beings who only attract passing attention by pure luck: a woman that men do not desire.

“Well, one night as I was writing letters by the fireside before going to bed, I was conscious, in the midst of a riot of ideas, of a series of those mental pictures that sometimes glide through one’s brain in moments of idle dreaming, of a kind of faint breath blowing through me⁠—a slight flutter of the heart⁠—and immediately, without cause, without any logical connection of ideas, I saw as distinctly as if I were touching her the unclothed, full-length vision of the woman to whom I had never given more than a passing thought at any time. And I suddenly discovered in her a hitherto unsuspected attraction, a gentle charm, a languorous fascination. She kindled in me that amorous yearning which makes a man run after a woman. But I soon forgot all about it, I went to bed and fell asleep. Then I dreamed.

“You have probably all dreamt strange dreams in which nothing is impossible, which open every sealed door for you, which reveal unhoped-for joy and provide a master key that uncloses tightly folded arms.

“Which of us in those troubled, exciting, breathless slumbers has not held, embraced, fondled and possessed, with an extraordinary intensity of rapture, the woman who filled his thoughts? And have you ever noticed the exquisite delight these happy dreams give us? The mad intoxication, the throbbing paroxysms; the infinitely caressing, absorbing tenderness that fills your heart for the woman swooning in your arms in that adorable yet brutal illusion that seems so real.

“I felt all this with so fierce a passion that I can never forget. The woman was mine, so much mine that the sweet warmth of her skin clung to my fingers, the smell of her skin clung to my nostrils, the flavour of her kisses to my lips, the sound of her voice to my ears, the soft touch of her arms clung round my body, and the enchantment of her tenderness clung to my whole being long after the delight and disillusion of my awakening.

“I dreamt the same dream three times that night.

“When day dawned I was obsessed by her, she took possession of me, haunting my very soul with such intensity that my every thought was hers.

“At last in despair I dressed and went to see her. As I went up the staircase I trembled all over, my heart beat riotously and my body was filled with yearning.

“I entered the flat. Directly she heard my name she got up and suddenly our eyes met in a long, fixed gaze. I sat down, and stammered out some commonplaces which she apparently did not hear. I knew neither what to say nor what to do. Then, abruptly I seized hold of her and clasped her in my arms, and my dream was realised so quickly, so easily, so feverishly, that I began to doubt whether I was really awake.⁠ ⁠… She was my mistress for two years⁠ ⁠…”

“What do you make of it?” asked a voice.

“I think⁠ ⁠… I think it was just a coincidence! But then, who knows? Perhaps some glance of hers, unnoticed at the time, came back to me that night through one of those mysterious, unconscious promptings which often recall things neglected by our consciousness, unperceived by our minds!”

“Whatever name you like to give it,” said one of the party, “if you do not believe in magnetism after that, old man, you are an ungrateful wretch!”

Guillemot Rock

This is the season for guillemots.

From April until the end of May, before the bathers arrive from Paris, one may observe, at the little watering-place called Étretat, the sudden appearance of certain old gentlemen in top-boots and tight shooting-coats. They spend four or five days at the Hôtel Hanville, disappear, come again three weeks later; then, after a second stay, depart for good.

The following spring, they appear again.

They are the last hunters of the guillemot, the survivors of those of the old days; for thirty or forty years ago there were some twenty of these fanatics, but now they are but a few fanatical sportsmen.

The guillemot is a rare migrant whose habits are strange. For almost the whole of the year it lives in the neighbourhood of Newfoundland, and of the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon; but at the nesting-season a band of emigrants crosses the Atlantic and, every year, comes to lay its eggs and hatch them out on the same spot, the rock called Guillemot Rock, near Étretat. They are never to be found in any other spot than this. They have always come thither, they have always been shot, and they still keep coming back; they always will come back. As soon as the young birds have been raised, they go away again, and disappear for a year.

Why do they never go elsewhere, choose some other point in the long white cliff, which runs unchanged from the Pas de Calais to Le Havre? What force, what unconquerable instinct, what age-long custom impels these birds to return to this spot? What was the manner of their first emigration, or the nature of the tempest which may long since have cast their sires upon this rock? And why have the children, the grandchildren, all the descendants of the first comers always returned thither?

They are not numerous; a hundred at the most, as though a solitary family possessed this tradition, performed this annual pilgrimage.

And every spring, as soon as the little wandering tribe is reinstalled upon its rock, the same hunters reappear in the village. Once, as young men, they were familiar to the inhabitants; today they are old, but still faithful to the regular meeting-place that for the past thirty or forty years they have appointed for their gathering.

For nothing in the world would they fail to keep the appointment.

It was an April evening in one of the last years. Three of the old guillemot-shooters had just arrived; one of them was missing, Monsieur d’Arnelles.

He had written to no one, given no news! But he was not dead, like so many others; it would have been known. At last, weary of waiting, the first comers sat down to table; dinner was nearly over when a carriage rolled into the yard of the hostelry; and soon the late arrival entered.

He sat down, in excellent spirits, rubbing his hands, ate with a good appetite, and, as one of his companions expressed surprise at his wearing a frock-coat, replied calmly:

“Yes, I had not time to change.”

They went to bed as soon as they rose from the table, for, in order to surprise the birds, it is necessary to start well before daybreak.

Nothing is pleasanter than this sport, this early morning expedition.

At three in the morning the sailors wake the sportsmen by throwing gravel at their window panes. In a few minutes all are ready and down on the shingle beach. Although no twilight is yet visible, the stars have paled a little; the sea screams over the pebbles, the breeze is so cold that they shiver a little, despite their thick clothes.

Soon the two boats, pushed out by the men, rush down the slope of rounded pebbles, with a noise as of tearing canvas; then they are swaying upon the first waves. The brown sails are hoisted up the masts, swell slightly, tremble, hesitate, and, bulging once more, round-bellied, sweep the tarred hulls away towards the wide opening down the river, dimly visible in the gloom.

The sky grows clear; the darkness seems to melt away; the coastline appears, still veiled in mist, the long white coastline, straight as a wall. They pass the Manne-Porte, an enormous arch through which a ship could go, double the point of La Courtine, run past the vale of Antifer and the cape of the same name; and suddenly there rushes into sight a beach on which are hundreds of gulls. It is Guillemot Rock.

It is merely a small hump of cliff, and on the narrow ledges of rock the heads of birds are visible, watching the boats.

They are there, motionless, waiting, not daring as yet to fly away. Some, settled upon the extreme edges, look as though they are sitting on their hind parts, upright like bottles, for their legs are so short that, when they walk, they appear to be gliding on wheels, and, when they want to fly away, they are unable to start with a run, and are obliged to let themselves fall like stones, almost on top of the men spying upon them.

They are aware of their weakness and the danger it entails, and do not readily decide to fly.

But the sailors begin to shout and beat the gunwales with the wooden tholepins, and the birds, terrified, one by one launch out into the void, and drop to the very level of the waves; then, their wings beating with swift strokes, they gather way, dart off, and reach the open spaces, unless a hail of shot casts them into the water.

For an hour they are slaughtered thus, one after another being forced to make off; and sometimes the females on their nests, utterly devoted to the business of hatching, refuse to leave, and ever and anon receive a volley which splashes their white plumage with spots of rosy blood, and the bird dies, still faithfully guarding her eggs.

On the first day, Monsieur d’Anelles shot with his customary enthusiasm; but, when they went off home at about ten o’clock, beneath the high and radiant sun which threw great triangles of light into the white clefts in the cliffs, he appeared somewhat distracted, and now and then he seemed lost in thought, unlike his usual self.

As soon as they were back on land, some sort of servant, clad in black, came and whispered with him. He appeared to reflect, to hesitate; then he replied:

“No, tomorrow.”

And, next day, the shooting was resumed. This time Monsieur d’Anelles often missed his birds, though they let themselves fall almost on to the end of his gun-barrel, and his friends, laughing, asked him if he was in love, if any secret trouble were tormenting his heart and brain. At last he admitted it.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I must be off directly, and I find it annoying.”

“What, you’re going away? Why?”

“Oh, urgent business. I can’t stay any longer.”

Then they began to talk of other things.

As soon as lunch was over, the servant in black reappeared. Monsieur d’Anelles ordered him to harness the horses, and the fellow was on the point of going out when the three other sportsmen intervened, insisting on an explanation, with many entreaties and demands that their friend should stay.

At last one of them said:

“But, look here, this business of yours can’t be so very serious, if you’ve already waited two days.”

The fourth, altogether perplexed, reflected, plainly a prey to conflicting ideas, torn between pleasure and duty, unhappy and ill at ease.

After a long period of meditation, he murmured with some hesitation:

“You see⁠ ⁠… you see, I am not alone here; I have my son-in-law with me.”

There were cries and exclamations.

“Your son-in-law?⁠ ⁠… But where is he?”

At that he appeared suddenly confounded, and blushed.

“What? Didn’t you know? Why⁠ ⁠… why⁠ ⁠… he is out in the barn. He’s dead.”

Stupefied silence reigned.

More and more distressed, Monsieur d’Anelles continued:

“I have had the misfortune to lose him; and, as I was taking the body to my home at Briseville, I made a slight detour just to keep our appointment here. But you will realise that I can delay no longer.”

Then one of the sportsmen, bolder than the rest, suggested:

“But⁠ ⁠… since he is dead⁠ ⁠… it seems to me⁠ ⁠… that he might very well wait one more day.”

The two others hesitated no longer.

“You can’t deny that,” they said.

Monsieur d’Arnelles seemed relieved of a great weight, but, still somewhat uneasy, he inquired:

“You⁠ ⁠… you honestly think⁠ ⁠… ?”

As one man, the three others replied:

“Dash it all! dear boy, two days more or less won’t make any difference to him in his condition.”

Thereupon, perfectly at ease, the father-in-law turned round to the undertaker.

“Very well, my good man, let it be the day after tomorrow.”

A Son

The two old friends were walking in the garden all in bloom, where life was stirred by the gay springtime.

One was a senator and the other a member of the French Academy, grave, both of them, full of reason and logic, but solemn⁠—people of note and reputation.

At first they chattered about politics, exchanging thoughts, not upon ideas but men: personalities, which in such matters, always take precedence over reasoned argument. Then they awoke old memories; then they were silent, continuing to walk side by side, both relaxed by the sweetness of the air.

A great cluster of wallflowers sent forth their sweet and delicate perfume. A heap of flowers, of every kind and colour, threw their sweetness into the air, while a laburnum tree, covered with yellow flowers, scattered to the wind its fine powder, a golden smoke which reminded one of honey, and which carried, like the caressing powder of the perfumer, its embalmed seed across space.

The senator stopped, inhaled the fertile cloud that was floating by him, looked at the blossoming tree, resplendent as a sun, from which the pollen was now escaping. And he said:

“When one thinks that these imperceptible atoms, which smell so nice, can bring in to existence in a hundred places, miles from here, plants of their own kind, can start the sap and fibre of the female trees, and produce creatures with roots, which are born from a germ, as we are, mortal as we are, and which will be replaced by other beings of the same essence, just like us!”

Then, standing in front of the radiant laburnum tree, whose vivifying perfume permeated every breath of air, the senator added:

“Ah! my fine fellow, if you were to count your children you would be woefully embarrassed. Here is one who brings them easily into the world, abandons them without remorse and worries little about them afterward.”

The Academician replied: “We do the same, my friend.”

The senator answered: “Yes, I do not deny that; we do abandon them sometimes, but we know it, at least, and that constitutes our superiority.”

The other man shook his head: “No, that is not what I mean; you see, my dear fellow, there is scarcely a man who does not possess some unknown children, those children labeled father unknown, whom he has created, as this tree reproduces itself, almost unconsciously.

“If we had to establish the count of the women we have had, we should be, should we not, as embarrassed as this laburnum tree which you are addressing, if it were called upon to enumerate its descendants?

“From eighteen to forty, counting all our passing encounters and contacts of an hour, it may easily be granted that we have had intimate relations with two or three hundred women. Ah, well! my friend, among this number are you sure that you have not made fruitful at least one, and that you have not, upon the streets or in prison, some blackguard son, who robs and assassinates honest people, that is to say, people like us? or perhaps a daughter, in some house of ill-fame? or perhaps, if she chanced to be abandoned by her mother, a cook in somebody’s kitchen?

“Remember further that nearly all women that we call ‘public’ possess one or two children whose father they do not know, children caught in the hazard of their embraces at ten or twenty francs. In every trade, there is profit and loss. This offspring constitutes the ‘loss’ of their profession. Who were their progenitors? You⁠—I⁠—all of us, respectable men! These are the results of our gay dinner parties, of our amusing evenings, of the hours when our well-fed bodies drive us to chance love encounters.

“Robbers, tramps, all such wretches, in short, are our children. And how much better that is for us than if we were theirs, for they reproduce also, these ruffians!

“Listen: I, for my part, have an ugly story on my conscience, which I would like to tell you. It brings me incessant remorse, and more than that, continual doubt and an unappeasable uncertainty which at times tortures me horribly.

“At the age of twenty-five I had undertaken, with one of my friends, now a conseiller d’État, a journey through Brittany, on foot.

“After fifteen or twenty days of rapid walking, after having visited the Côtes-du-Nord, and a part of Finisterre, we arrived at Douarnenez; from there, in a day’s march, we reached the wild Pointe du Raz, via the Baie des Trépassés, where we slept in some village whose name ends in of. When the morning came a strange fatigue held my comrade in bed. I say ‘bed’ from habit, since our bed was composed simply of two bundles of straw.

“It was impossible to be sick in such a place. I forced him to get up, and we reached Audierne about four or five o’clock in the evening. The next day he was a little better. We set out again, but on the way he was taken with intolerable pains and it was with great difficulty that we were able to reach Pont-Labbé.

“There at least there was an inn. My friend went to bed, and the doctor, whom we called from Quimper, found a high fever, without quite determining the nature of it.

“Do you know Pont-Labbé? No. Well, it is the most characteristic Breton town from Pointe du Raz to Morbihan⁠—a region which contains the essence of Breton morals, and legends, and customs. Today, even, this corner of the country has scarcely changed at all. I say ‘today, even,’ because I return there now every year, alas!

“An old castle bathes the foot of its towers in a sad, dismal pond, peopled by flights of wild birds. Out of it flows a river, deep enough for coasting vessels to come up to the town. In the narrow streets, with the old houses, the men wear wide hats and embroidered waistcoats and four coats, one above the other; the first, about the size of the hand, covers only the shoulder-blades, while the last stops just above the seat of the breeches.

“The girls, who are tall, beautiful, and fresh looking, wear a bodice of thick cloth which forms a breastplate and corset, constraining and leaving scarcely a suspicion of their swelling, martyrized busts. Their headdresses are also strange: over the temples two embroidered bands in colour frame the face, binding the hair, which falls loose behind the head and is then carried up to the crown of the head under a curious bonnet often woven of gold or silver.

“The servant at our inn was eighteen years old at the most, with blue eyes, a pale blue, which were pierced with the two little black dots of the pupils; and with short closely set teeth, which she constantly showed in laughing and which seemed made for biting granite.

“She did not know a word of French, speaking only the Breton patois, as do most of her compatriots.

“Well, my friend was no better, and, although no disease was diagnosed, the doctor forbade his setting out, ordering complete rest. I spent the days with him, the little maid coming in frequently, bringing perhaps my dinner or some drink for him.

“I teased her a little, which seemed to amuse her, but we did not talk, naturally, since we could not understand each other.

“Well, one night, having remained with the sick man very late, when going to my room, I met the girl going to hers. It was just opposite my open door. Then suddenly, without reflecting upon what I was doing, and more by way of a joke than anything, I seized her around the waist, and before she was over her astonishment I had thrown her and shut her in my room. She looked at me, startled, frightened, terrified, not daring to cry out for fear of scandal, and of being driven out by her master at first and her father afterwards.

“I had done this as a joke; but when I saw her there, I was filled by the desire to possess her. There was a long and silent struggle, a struggle of body against body after the fashion of athletes, with arms tense, contracted, twisted; rapid breathing, skin moist with perspiration. Oh! she fought valiantly; and sometimes we would hit a piece of furniture, a partition, or a chair; then, still clutching each other, we would remain motionless for some seconds in fear lest the noise had awakened someone; then we would commence again our desperate battle, I attacking, she resisting. Exhausted, finally, she fell; and I took her brutally, upon the ground, upon the floor.

“As soon as she was released, she ran to the door, drew the bolts, and fled. I scarcely met her during the following days. She would not allow me to go near her. Then, when my comrade was better and we were to continue our journey, on the eve of our departure, she came barefooted, in her chemise, to the room where I had just retired.

“She threw herself into my arms, drew me to her passionately, and, until daylight, embraced me, caressed me, weeping and sobbing, giving me all the assurances of tenderness and despair that a woman can give when she does not know a word of our language.

“A week later I had forgotten this adventure, so common and frequent when one is travelling, the servants of the inns being generally destined to entertain travellers in this manner.

“Thirty years passed without my thinking of, or returning to, Pont-Labbé. Then, in 1876, I happened to go there, in the course of an excursion into Brittany which I had undertaken to get material for a book and to make myself familiar with the landscape.

“Nothing seemed to have changed. The castle still soaked its grey walls in the pond at the entrance of the little town; the inn was there, too, although repaired, remodelled, with a modern air. On entering I was received by two young Breton girls of about eighteen, fresh and pretty, enlaced in their narrow cloth bodices, with their silver headdress and large embroidered ear caps.

“It was about six o’clock in the evening. I sat down to dine and as the host was serving me himself, fate, without doubt, led me to ask him: ‘Did you know the former master of this house? I spent a fortnight here once, thirty years ago. I am speaking of very far-off times.’

“He answered: ‘Those were my parents, sir.’

“Then I told him the occasion of my stopping there, recalling my being detained by the illness of my comrade. He did not allow me to finish:

“ ‘Oh! I remember that perfectly,’ said he; ‘I was fifteen or sixteen then. You slept in the room at the end of the hall and your friend in the one that is now mine, looking on to the street.’

“Then for the first time, a vivid recollection of the pretty maid came back to me. I asked: ‘Do you recall a nice little servant that your father had, who had, if I remember, pretty blue eyes and fine teeth?’

“He replied: ‘Yes, sir; she died in childbirth some time after.’

“And pointing toward the courtyard where a thin lame man was turning over some manure, he added: ‘That is her son.’

“I began to laugh. ‘He is not beautiful, and does not resemble his mother at all. Takes after his father, no doubt.’

“The innkeeper replied: ‘It may be; but they never knew who his father was. She died without telling, and no one here knew she had a lover. It was a tremendous surprise when we found it out. No one would believe it.’

“A kind of disagreeable shiver went over me, one of those painful suggestions that touch the heart, like the approach of a heavy sorrow. I looked at the man in the yard. He came now to draw some water for the horses and carried two pails, limping, making grievous efforts with the leg that was shorter. He was ragged and hideously dirty, with long yellow hair, so matted that it hung in strings down his cheeks.

“The innkeeper added: ‘He is not up to much, and has only been kept here out of charity. Perhaps he would have turned out better if he had been brought up properly. But, you see how it is, sir?

“ ‘No father, no mother, no money! My parents took pity on him as a child, but after all⁠—he was not theirs, you see.’

“I said nothing.

“I went to bed in my old room, and all night I could think of nothing but that frightful stable boy, repeating to myself: ‘What if that were my son! Could I have killed that girl and brought that creature into existence?’

“It was possible, of course. I resolved to speak to this man and to find out exactly the date of his birth. A difference of two months would set my doubts at rest.

“I had him come to me the next day. But he could not speak French either. He seemed not to understand anything. Besides, he was absolutely ignorant of his age, which one of the maids asked him for me. And he stood in front of me like an idiot, rolling his cap in his knotty and disgusting paws, laughing stupidly, with something of the old laugh of the mother in the corners of his mouth and eyes.

“But the host came along, and went to look up the birth certificate of the poor wretch. He entered this life eight months and twenty-six days after my departure from Pont-Labbé, because I recalled perfectly arriving at Lorient on the fifteenth of August. The record said: ‘Father unknown.’ The mother was called Jeanne Karradec.

“Then my heart began to beat rapidly. I could not speak, I felt so choked with emotion. And I looked at that brute, whose long yellow hair seemed a more sordid dung heap than that of beasts. And the wretch, embarrassed by my look, ceased to laugh, turned his head, and tried to get away.

“Every day I would wander along the little river, sadly reflecting. But what was the use? Nothing could give me any certainty. For hours and hours I would weigh all the reasons, good and bad, for and against the chances of my paternity, worrying myself with intricate suppositions, only to return again to the horrible suspicion, then to the conviction, more atrocious still, that this man was my son.

“I could not dine and I retired to my room. It was a long time before I could sleep. Then sleep came, a sleep haunted with insupportable visions. I could see this ninny laughing in my face and calling me ‘Papa.’ Then he would change into a dog and bite me in the calf of my leg. In vain I tried to free myself, he would follow me always, and, instead of barking he would speak, abusing me. Then he would appear before my colleagues at the Academy, called together for the purpose of deciding whether I was his father. And one of them cried: ‘It is indubitable! See how he resembles him!’

“And in fact, I perceived that the monster did resemble me. And I awoke with this idea fixed in my mind, and with a mad desire to see the man again and decide whether he did or did not have features in common with my own.

“I joined him as he was going to Mass (it was on Sunday) and gave him a franc, scanning his face anxiously. He began to laugh in an ignoble fashion, took the money, then, again constrained by my eye, he fled, after having blurted out a word, almost inarticulate, which meant to say ‘Thank you,’ without doubt.

“That day passed for me in the same agony as the preceding. Toward evening I sent for the proprietor and, with great caution, precautions, and finesse, I told him that I had become interested in this poor being so abandoned by everybody and so deprived of everything, and that I wished to do something for him.

“The man replied: ‘Oh, don’t worry about him, sir. He wants nothing; you will only make trouble for yourself. I employ him to clean the stable, and it is all that he can do. For that, I feed him and he sleeps with the horses. He needs nothing more. If you have an old pair of trousers, give them to him, but they will be in pieces in a week.’

“I did not insist, but waited to see.

“The fellow returned that evening, horribly drunk, almost setting fire to the house, striking one of the horses a blow with a pickax, and finally went to sleep in the mud out in the rain, thanks to my generosity. They begged me, the next day, not to give him any more money. Liquor made him furious, and when he had two sous in his pocket he drank it. The innkeeper added: ‘To give him money is to kill him.’ This man had absolutely never had any money, save a few centimes thrown to him by travellers, and he knew no other destination for it but the alehouse.

“Then I passed some hours in my room with an open book which I made a pretence of reading, but without accomplishing anything except to look at this brute. My son! my son! I was trying to discover if he was anything like me. By dint of searching I believed I recognized some similar lines in the brow and about the nose. And I was immediately convinced of a resemblance which only different clothing and the hideous mane of the man disguised.

“I could not stay there very long without being suspected, and I set out with breaking heart, after having left with the innkeeper some money to ease the existence of his stable-boy.

“For six years I have lived with this thought, this horrible uncertainty, this abominable doubt, and each year an irresistible force drags me back to Pont-Labbé. Each year I condemn myself to the torture of seeing this brute wallow in his filth, imagining that he resembles me, and of seeking, always in vain, to be helpful to him. And each year I come back more undecided, more tortured, more anxious.

“I have tried to have him educated, but he is an incurable idiot. I have tried to render life less painful to him, but he is an incurable drunkard and uses all the money that is given him for drink. And he knows very well how to sell his new clothes to get cognac.

“I have tried to arouse pity in his employer for him, that he might treat him more gently, always offering him money. The innkeeper, astonished, finally remarked very wisely: ‘Everything you do for him, sir, will only ruin him. He must be kept like a prisoner. As soon as he has time given him or favours shown, he becomes vicious. If you wish to do good there are plenty of abandoned children. Choose one that will be worth your trouble.’

“What could I say to that?

“And if I should disclose a suspicion of the doubts which torture me, this brute would certainly turn rogue and exploit me, compromise me, ruin me. He would cry out to me: ‘Papa,’ as in my dream.

“And I tell myself that I have killed the mother and ruined this atrophied being, larva of the stable, born and bred on a dunghill, this man who, if he had been brought up as others are, might have been like others.

“And you cannot imagine the strange, confused, intolerable sensation I feel in his presence, as I think that this has come from me, that he belongs to me by that intimate bond which binds father to son, that, thanks to the terrible laws of heredity, he is a part of me in a thousand things, by his blood and his flesh, and that he has the same germs of sickness and the same ferments of passion.

“And I have always an unappeasable and painful desire to see him, and the sight of him makes me suffer horribly; and from my window down there I look at him for hours as he pitchforks and carts away the dung of the beasts, repeating to myself: ‘That is my son!’

“And I feel, sometimes, an intolerable desire to embrace him. But I have never even touched his filthy hand.”

The Academician was silent. And his companion, the politician, murmured: “Yes, indeed; we ought to think a little more about the children who have no father.”

Then a breath of wind came up, and the great tree shook its clusters, and enveloped with a fine, odorous cloud the two old men, who took long draughts of the sweet perfume.

And the senator added: “It is fine to be twenty-five years old, and even to become a father like that.”

Travelling

Saint-Agnès, 6th May.

My Dear Friend,

You asked me to write to you often, and particularly to tell you what I had seen. You also asked me to search through my memories of travel and find some of those short anecdotes which one hears from a peasant met by the way, from some hotelkeeper, or some passing stranger, and which remain in the memory like the key to a country. You believe that a landscape sketched in a few lines, or a short story told in a few words, reveals the true character of a country, makes it live, visibly and dramatically. I shall try to do as you wish. From time to time I will send you letters, in which I shall not mention ourselves, but only the horizon and the people who move on it. Now I begin.

Spring, it seems to me, is a season when one should eat and drink landscapes. It is the season for sensations, as the autumn is the season for thought. In spring the country stirs the body; in autumn it penetrates the mind.

This year I wanted to inhale orange-blossoms, and I set out for the South at the time when everybody comes back from there. I passed through Monaco, the town of pilgrims, the rival of Mecca and Jerusalem, without leaving my money in anybody else’s pocket, and I ascended the high hills beneath a canopy of lemon, orange and olive trees.

Did you ever sleep in a field of orange trees in bloom? The air which one inhales deliciously is a quintessence of perfumes. This powerful and sweet smell, as savoury as a sweetmeat, seems to penetrate one, to impregnate, to intoxicate, to induce languor, to bring about a dreamy and somnolent torpor. It is like opium prepared by fairy hands and not by chemists.

This is a country of gorges. The sides of the mountains are seamed and slashed all over, and in these winding crevices grow veritable forests of lemon trees. At intervals, where the abrupt ravine stops at a sort of ledge, man has fashioned reservoirs which catch the water from the rain storms. They are great holes with smooth walls, which offer no projection to catch the hand of those who fall.

I was walking slowly through one of these rising valleys, looking through the leaves at the bright fruit still remaining on the branches. The narrow gorge made the heavy perfumes of the flowers more penetrating; in there the air seemed dense because of them. I felt tired and wanted to sit down. A few drops of water rolled on the grass, I thought a spring must be near, and I climbed higher to find it. But I reached the edge of one of these huge, deep reservoirs. I sat down cross-legged and remained dreaming in front of the hole, which seemed to be full of ink, so black and stagnant was the water in it. Down below, through the branches, I could see, like splashes, bits of the Mediterranean, blindingly dazzling. But my glance constantly returned to this vast and sombre hole which seemed uninhabited by any form of water life, its surface was so still.

Suddenly a voice made me start. An old gentleman, looking for flowers (for this country is the richest in Europe for botanists), asked me:

“Are you a relative of those poor children?”

I looked at him in astonishment.

“What children?”

Then he seemed embarrassed and answered with a bow:

“I beg your pardon. Seeing you so absorbed in that reservoir I imagined you were thinking of the awful drama which took place there.”

I wanted to know all about it, and I asked him to tell me the story.

It is a very gloomy and heartbreaking story, my dear, and very commonplace, at the same time. It is simply like an incident from the daily papers. I do not know whether my emotion is to be attributed to the dramatic way in which it was told to me, to the mountain background, or to the contrast between the joyous flowers and sunshine and this dark, murderous hole. My heart was torn and my nerves shaken by this story, which may not seem so terribly poignant to you, perhaps, as you read it in your room, without seeing the scene in which the drama is laid.

It was in the spring a few years back. Two little boys often used to play on the edge of this cistern, while their tutor read a book, lying under a tree. Now, one hot afternoon, a piercing cry aroused the man, who was dozing, and the noise of water splashing after a fall caused him to get up immediately. The younger of the two children, aged eleven years, was yelling, standing near the reservoir, whose troubled, rippling surface had closed over the elder, who had just fallen in while running along the stone ledge.

The distracted tutor, without waiting, without thinking, jumped into the depths, and did not appear again, having struck his head against the bottom. At the same moment, the little boy, who had come to the surface, was waving his arms to his brother. Then the child who was on dry land lay down and stretched out, while the other tried to swim, to reach the wall, and soon four little hands seized and held each other, clutching in a convulsive grip. Both felt the keen joy of being restored to life, the thrill of a peril that has passed. The elder tried to climb up, but could not, the wall being steep, and the younger, being too weak, was slowly slipping towards the hole. Then they remained motionless, seized again with terror, and waited.

The smaller boy grasped the hand of the older with all his might, and wept nervously, saying: “I can’t pull you up. I can’t pull you up.” Then, suddenly he began to shout: “Help! Help!” But his piping voice hardly pierced the dome of foliage above their heads. They remained there for a long time, for hours and hours, face to face, these two children, with the same thought, the same fear, the awful dread lest one of them, becoming exhausted, should loosen his weakened grip. And they kept on calling in vain. At length, the elder, who was shaking with cold, said to the younger: “I can’t go on. I am going to fall. Goodbye, little brother.” And the other repeated, with heaving breath: “Not yet, not yet; wait!” Evening came on, quiet evening, its stars reflected in the water. The elder boy, who was fainting, said: “Let go one hand, I want to give you my watch.” He had received it as a present a few days before, and since then it had been the chief care of his heart. He succeeded in getting it, handed it up, and the younger, who was sobbing, placed it on the grass beside him.

It was now completely dark. The two unfortunate creatures were overcome and could scarcely hold out much longer. The bigger boy, feeling that his hour had come, murmured again: “Goodbye, little brother. Kiss papa and mamma.” His paralysed fingers relaxed. He sank and did not come up again.⁠ ⁠…

The younger, who was left alone, began to cry madly: “Paul! Paul!” but his brother never returned. Then he dashed away, falling over stones, shaken by the most terrible anguish that can wring the heart of a child, and arrived in the drawing room where his parents were waiting. He lost his way again when taking them to the reservoir. He could not find the way. Finally he recognised the place. “It is there; yes, it is there.” The cistern had to be emptied, and the owner would not allow this, as he needed the water for his lemon trees. In the end the two bodies were recovered, but not until the next day.

You see, my dear, that this is just a common newspaper story. But if you had seen the hole, you would have been moved to the bottom of your heart at the thought of this child’s agony, hanging on to his brother’s arm, of this interminable struggle on the part of two children accustomed only to laugh and play, and by that simple little detail: the giving over of the watch. I said to myself: “Fate preserve me from ever receiving such a relic!” I do not know of anything more terrible than the memory that clings to a familiar object that one cannot get rid of. Think that every time he touches this sacred watch, the survivor will see the horrible scene again, the cistern, the wall, the calm water, and the distorted face of his brother, still alive but as surely lost as though he were already dead. During his whole life, at every moment that vision will be there, evoked the moment the tip of his finger touches his watch pocket.

I felt sad until evening. I went off, still going higher, leaving the region of orange trees for the regions of olive trees only, and the latter for the pine-tree region. Then I entered a valley of stones, reaching the ruins of an old castle, built, they say, in the tenth century, by a Saracen chief, a wise man, who got baptised for love of a girl.

Mountains everywhere around me, and in front of me the sea, the sea on which there is a scarcely visible patch: Corsica, or rather the shadow of Corsica.

But on the mountain tops reddened by the setting sun, in the vast heavens, and on the sea, on the whole superb horizon I had come to admire, I saw only two poor children, one lying along the edge of a hole filled with black water, the other sunk up to his neck, held together by their hands, weeping face to face, distracted. And all the time I seemed to hear a feeble voice saying: “Goodbye, little brother. I give you my watch.”

This letter will seem very lugubrious to you, my dear friend. Another time I shall try to be more cheerful.

A Corsican Bandit

The road followed a gentle slope through the middle of the forest of Aïtone. Enormous pines spread out in an arch above our heads, making their sad, continuous, moaning complaint, while to our right and our left the thin straight trunks of the trees formed, as it were, a group of organ-pipes from which the monotonous music of the wind in the treetops seemed to issue.

After a three hours’ tramp there was a clearance in the tangled mass of long reeds: here and there a gigantic umbrella-pine, separated from the rest and looking like a huge sunshade, spread out its dull green canopy; then suddenly we reached the border of the forest some three hundred feet above the gorge that led to the wild valley of Niolo.

A few old, deformed trees seemed to have climbed painfully up the two lofty summits that dominated the pass, like pioneers in advance of the multitude crowding behind. As we turned round we saw the whole of the forest stretching out beneath us like an immense bowl of verdure, the edge of which seemed to touch the sky and was composed of bare rocks that formed a high wall all round.

We started off again and reached the gorge ten minutes later. There I saw an amazing sight. There was a valley beyond another forest, such as I had never seen before: ten miles of petrified solitude hollowed out between two mountains seven thousand feet high, and never a field or a tree to be seen. This was Niolo, the house of Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel from which the invader has never been able to eject the mountain-dwellers.

My companion said: “All our bandits take refuge there, too.” We soon reached the bottom of the wild, rugged slit whose beauty no words could express.

Not a blade of grass, not a single plant; granite, nothing but granite. So far as the eye could reach stretched a desert of sparkling granite heated as hot as an oven by the fierce sun that seemed purposely suspended over this gorge of stone. The sight of the crests of the mountains brought one up at a sharp turn, thrilled to the marrow. They looked red and jagged like festoons of coral (for the summits are of porphyry), and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, faded by the proximity of those strange-looking mountains. Lower down, the granite was of sparkling grey, and under our feet it was like grated, crushed powder, we were walking on gleaming dust. To the right a roaring torrent rushed along, scolding, as it followed its long and winding course. You cannot avoid stumbling in the heat, the blinding light of that dry, burning, rugged valley, divided by the turbulent stream hurriedly trying to escape, unable to fertilise the rocks, lost in a furnace that licks it up greedily without ever being refreshed or moistened.

Suddenly on our right we saw a little wooden cross stuck in a heap of stones. A man had been killed there and I said to my companion: “Tell me about your bandits.”

He continued: “I knew the most celebrated, the most terrible one, Sainte-Lucie; I will tell you about him.

“His father was killed in a quarrel by a young man of the same district, so it was said, and Sainte-Lucie was left with an only sister. He was a little chap, weak and fainthearted; he was often ill and had no energy whatever, and he did not declare a vendetta against his father’s assassin. And though his relations came and begged him to avenge his loss, he was deaf to their threats and pleading.

“According to an old Corsican custom, his indignant sister took away his black clothes so that he might not wear mourning for the unavenged dead. To this insult he remained indifferent, and rather than take down his father’s still-loaded gun he shut himself up and never went out, afraid to face the contemptuous glances of his comrades.

“Months went by and he seemed to have entirely forgotten the crime, he went on living with his sister in their own house. Well, a day came when the suspected assassin was to be married, but even this news did not seem to trouble Sainte-Lucie, and the fiancé, probably out of bravado, passed the house of the two orphans on his way to church.

“Seated by the window, the brother and sister were eating little fried cakes when the young man noticed the wedding procession. Seized with a fit of trembling, he got up without saying a word, took down the gun, and left the house. Talking about what happened later, he said: ‘I don’t know what was the matter with me. I felt my blood boiling; I felt it had to be, that, in spite of everything, I could not resist the inevitable, and I went and hid the gun in the thicket on the Corte road.’

“An hour later he came back without the gun, looking tired and sad, as usual. His sister thought he had forgotten all about his father, but at nightfall he disappeared.

“The enemy, with his two groomsmen, was going to Corte that evening. As they were walking along, singing gaily, suddenly Sainte-Lucie rose up in front of them and, staring at the murderer, shouted: ‘The time has come!’ and shot him point-blank through the lungs.

“One of the groomsmen fled; the other, looking at Sainte-Lucie, said: ‘What is the matter with you?’ and as he was going for help Saint-Lucie shouted: ‘If you move another step I will break your leg.’ The other, knowing how cowardly he had always been, said: ‘You dare not!’ and started off, but fell to the ground immediately with a bullet through his leg.

“Sainte-Lucie went up to him and said: ‘I am going to look at the wound; if it is not serious I will leave you here, if mortal I will finish you off.’ He looked at the wound and decided it to be mortal, then slowly reloaded his gun, told the man to say a prayer, and shot him through the head.

“The next day he went up into the mountains.

“And what do you think Sainte-Lucie did afterwards?

“His relations were all arrested: his uncle, the priest who was suspected of inciting him to vengeance, was sent to prison on a charge made by the dead fiancé’s relations, but he escaped and with a gun joined his nephew in the forest.

“One after the other, Sainte-Lucie killed his uncle’s accusers, and plucked out their eyes, to teach others never to swear to anything they had not seen themselves.

“He killed all his enemy’s relatives and their friends, he murdered fourteen policemen, and burnt down the houses of his opponents, and until his death was the most terrible of all the bandits known.”

The sun was disappearing behind Monte Cinto, and the broad shadow of the granite mountain lay over the granite of the valley. We hurried along so as to reach the little village of Albertace⁠—a heap of stones riveted to the granite sides of the wild gorge. I said, thinking of the bandit: “Your vendetta is a dreadful thing!”

My companion replied mildly: “It can’t be helped, a man must do his duty!”

A Dead Woman’s Secret

She had died painlessly, tranquilly, like a woman whose life was irreproachable, and she now lay on her back in bed, with closed eyes, calm features, her long white hair carefully arranged as if she had again made her toilet ten minutes before her death, all her pale physiognomy so composed, now that she had passed away, so resigned that one felt sure a sweet soul had dwelt in that body, that this serene grandmother had spent an untroubled existence, that this virtuous woman had ended her life without any shock, without any remorse.

On his knees, beside the bed, her son, a magistrate of inflexible principles, and her daughter Marguerite, in religion, Sister Eulalie, were weeping distractedly. She had from the time of their infancy armed them with an inflexible code of morality, teaching them a religion without weakness and a sense of duty without any compromise. He, the son, had become a magistrate, and, wielding the weapon of the law, he struck down without pity the feeble and the erring. She, the daughter, quite penetrated with the virtue that had bathed her in this austere family, had become the spouse of God through disgust with men.

They had scarcely known their father; all they knew was that he had made their mother unhappy without learning any further details. The nun passionately kissed one hand of her dead mother, which hung down, a hand of ivory like that of Christ in the large crucifix which lay on the bed. At the opposite side of the prostrate body, the other hand seemed still to grasp the rumpled sheet with that wandering movement which is called the fold of the dying, and the lines had retained little wavy creases as a memento of those last motions which precede the eternal motionlessness. A few light taps at the door caused the two sobbing heads to rise up, and the priest who had just dined, entered the apartment. He was flushed, a little puffed, from the effects of the process of digestion which had just commenced; for he had put a good dash of brandy into his coffee in order to counteract the fatigue caused by the last nights he had remained up and that which he anticipated from the night that was still in store for him. He had put on a look of sadness, that simulated sadness of the priest to whom death is a means of livelihood. He made the sign of the cross, and coming over to them with his professional gesture said:

“Well, my poor children, I have come to help you to pass these mournful hours.”

But Sister Eulalie suddenly rose up.

“Thanks, father, but my brother and I would like to be left alone with her. These are the last moments that we now have for seeing her; so we want to feel ourselves once more, the three of us, just as we were years ago when we⁠—we⁠—we were only children, and our poor⁠—poor mother⁠—”

She was unable to finish with the flood of tears that gushed from her eyes, and the sobs that were choking her.

But the priest bowed, with a more serene look on his face, for he was thinking of his bed. “Just as you please, my children.”

Then, he knelt down, again crossed himself, prayed, rose up, and softly stole away murmuring as he went: “She was a saint.”

They were left alone, the dead woman and her children. A hidden timepiece kept regularly ticking in its dark corner, and through the open window the soft odors of hay and of woods penetrated with faint gleams of moonlight. No sound in the fields outside, save the wandering notes of toads and now and then the humming of some nocturnal insect darting into like a ball, and knocking itself against the wall.

An infinite peace, a divine melancholy, a silent serenity surrounded this dead woman, seemed to emanate from her, to evaporate from her into the atmosphere outside and to calm Nature itself.

Then the magistrate, still on his knees, his head pressed against the bedclothes, in a far-off, heartbroken voice that pierced through the sheets and the coverlet, exclaimed:

“Mamma, mamma, mamma!” And the sister, sinking down on the floor, striking the wood with her forehead fanatically, twisting herself about and quivering like a person in an epileptic fit, groaned: “Jesus, Jesus⁠—mamma⁠—Jesus!”

And both of them shaken by a hurricane of grief panted with a rattling in their throats.

Then the fit gradually subsided, and they now wept in a less violent fashion, like the rainy calm that follows a squall on a storm-beaten sea. Then, after some time, they rose, and fixed their glances on the beloved corpse. And memories, those memories of the past, so sweet, so torturing today, came back to their minds with all those little forgotten details, those little details so intimate and familiar, which make the being who is no more live over again. They recalled circumstances, words, smiles, certain intonations of voice which belonged to one whom they should hear speaking to them again. They saw her once more happy and calm, and phrases she used in ordinary conversation rose to their lips. They even remembered a little movement of the hand peculiar to her, as if she were keeping time when she was saying something of importance.

And they loved her as they had never before loved her. And by the depth of their despair they realized how strongly they had been attached to her, and how desolate they would find themselves now.

She had been their mainstay, their guide, the best part of their youth, of that happy portion of their lives which had vanished; she had been the bond that united them to existence, the mother, the mamma, the creative flesh, the tie that bound them to their ancestors. They would henceforth be solitary, isolated; they would have nothing on earth to look back upon.

The nun said to her brother:

“You know how mamma used always to read over her old letters. They are all there in her drawer. Suppose we read them in our turn, and so revive all her life this night by her side? It would be like a kind of road of the cross, like making the acquaintance of her mother, of grandparents whom we never knew, whose letters are there, and of whom she has so often talked to us, you remember?”

And they drew forth from the drawer a dozen little packets of yellow paper, carefully tied up and placed close to one another. They flung these relics on the bed, and selecting one of them on which the word “Father” was written, they opened and read what was in it.

It consisted of those very old letters which are to be found in old family writing-desks, those letters which have the flavor of another century. The first said, “My darling,” another “My beautiful little girl,” then others “My dear child,” and then again “My dear daughter.” And suddenly the nun began reading aloud, reading for the dead her own history, all her tender souvenirs. And the magistrate listened, while he leaned on the bed, with his eyes on his mother’s face. And the motionless corpse seemed happy.

Sister Eulalie, interrupting herself, said: “We ought to put them into the grave with her, to make a winding-sheet of them, and bury them with her.”

And then she took up another packet, on which the descriptive word did not appear.

And in a loud tone she began: “My adored one, I love you to distraction. Since yesterday I have been suffering like a damned soul burned by the recollection of you. I feel your lips on mine, your eyes under my eyes, your flesh under my flesh. I love you! I love you! You have made me mad! My arms open! I pant with an immense desire to possess you again. My whole body calls out to you, wants you. I have kept in my mouth the taste of your kisses.”

The magistrate rose up; the nun stopped reading. He snatched the letter from her, and sought for the signature. There was none, save under the words, “He who adores you,” the name “Henry.” Their father’s name was René. So then he was not the man.

Then, the son, with rapid fingers, fumbled in the packet of letters took another of them, and read: “I can do without your caresses no longer.”

And, standing up, with the severity of a judge passing sentence, he gazed at the impassive face of the dead woman.

The nun, straight as a statue, with teardrops standing at each corner of her eyes, looked at her brother, waiting to see what he meant to do. Then he crossed the room, slowly reached the window, and looked out thoughtfully into the night.

When he turned back, Sister Eulalie, her eyes now quite dry, still remained standing near the bed, with a downcast look.

He went over to the drawer and flung in the letters which he had picked up from the floor. Then he drew the curtains round the bed.

And when the dawn made the candles on the table look pale, the son rose from his armchair, and without even a parting glance at the mother whom he had separated from them and condemned, he said slowly:

“Now, my sister, let us leave the room.”

Dreams

Five old friends had been dining together, an author, a doctor, and three wealthy bachelors of independent means.

All available topics of conversation had been exhausted, and that feeling of weariness which heralds the breaking up of such a gathering was already settling upon those present. One of the party, who for five minutes had been silently contemplating the lighted Boulevard, with its noise and bustle, suddenly remarked:

“The days seem long when one has nothing to do from morning till night.”

“And the nights also,” added his neighbour. “I hardly sleep at all, amusements bore me and conversation is always the same. I never come across a new idea, and before talking to anybody I always have to struggle with a violent desire to remain quite silent and not listen to anyone. I don’t know what to do in the evenings.”

“I would give anything,” the third idler said, “for some means of spending even two pleasant hours every day.”

The author, who had just thrown his overcoat over his arm, came towards them and said:

“Anybody who could find a new vice and could pass it on to his fellow-creatures, even though it might shorten life by half, would do a far greater service to humanity than anyone who might discover a means of securing perpetual health and youth.”

The doctor began to laugh, and, biting off the end of his cigar, he said:

“Yes, but it is not found so easily as that. Ever since the beginning of the world the problem has been vigorously attacked. Primitive man instantly attained perfection in that line, but we can scarcely equal him.”

One of the three idlers murmured:

“What a pity!”

A moment later he added:

“If only one could sleep, could sleep well, without feeling too warm or too cold, sleep with that exhaustion which comes from an evening of intense fatigue, sleep without dreaming!”

“Why without dreaming?” inquired his neighbour.

“Because dreams are not always pleasant,” the other replied, “because they are always strange, improbable and incoherent, and while asleep we cannot even enjoy the best ones to the full. You must dream while awake.”

“Who prevents you from doing so?” asked the author.

The doctor threw away his cigar.

“My dear fellow, daydreaming requires the exercise of great willpower, and therefore leaves one very tired. Now one of the most delightful things in the world is a real dream⁠—the mind wandering through pleasant visions⁠—but it must come naturally, not under painful stimulation, and it should be accompanied by complete physical comfort. That kind of dream I can offer you, if you will promise not to abuse it.”

The author shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I know all about that; hashish, opium, green jain, the Paradis Artificiels. I have read Baudelaire’s books and I have even tasted his famous drug, which made me very ill.”

The doctor sat down again.

“No, I mean ether, simply ether; and I might add that you literary men ought to use it sometimes.”

The three rich men came nearer, and one of them asked him to explain its effect.

“Let us come down to facts,” the doctor replied; “I am leaving medicine and morality out of the question; I am only concerned at the moment with pleasure. You are indulging every day in excesses which are shortening your lives. I will bring a new sensation to your notice, possibly only for men of intelligence⁠—that is to say, of considerable intelligence⁠—dangerous, like everything which overexcites us, but none the less exquisite. I should add that a certain amount of preparation is required, that is to say, it is necessary to become accustomed to it, in order to experience to the full the singular effects of ether.

“They are different from the effects of hashish, opium and morphine, and they cease as soon as you stop inhaling it, while the other dream-producers continue their action for hours.

“I will try to analyse as clearly as possible the feelings experienced by the use of ether, but so delicate and fleeting are those sensations that it is not an easy task.

“I first tried this remedy when I was suffering from violent neuralgia, and I have perhaps rather abused it since. I had sharp pains in the head and neck, and my skin became unbearably hot and feverish. I took a large flask of ether, and lying down, I began slowly to inhale it. After a few minutes, I thought I heard a vague murmur, which soon became a kind of drone, and it seemed to me that the inside of my body was getting lighter⁠—as light as air⁠—and dissolving in vapour.

“Then came a sort of stupor, a drowsy feeling of comfort, in spite of the pains which were still present, but were no longer acute. They were pains such as one could endure with resignation, and no longer that terrible excruciating agony against which the whole tortured body protests.

“Soon that curious and delightful feeling of buoyancy spread from my body to my limbs, which in turn became light as a feather, as if the flesh and bones had disappeared and had left only the skin to enable me to feel the pleasure of living and resting in such comfort. I then realised that I was no longer in agony, the pain had vanished, melted away. I heard four voices, as if two conversations were going on at the same time, but I could not understand a single word; sometimes there was a confused jumble of sounds; sometimes I could distinguish words; but it was evident that what I heard was nothing but the intensified drumming in my ears. Far from being asleep, I was very much awake; my ideas, my sensations and my thoughts were marvellously clear and strong, aided by a feeling of exhilaration, a curious intoxication arising from a tenfold increase in my mental powers.

“It was not like the dreams produced by hashish, or the morbid illusions of opium; it was a wonderful clearness of thought, a new way of regarding and appreciating the important things in life, with the absolute certainty that this way was the right one.

“And I suddenly remembered the old Biblical idea. It seemed to me that I had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge and that all mysteries were solved, so powerful and irrefutable was this strange new logic. Arguments, reasons and proofs crowded upon me, only to be upset by still stronger ones. My brain became a battlefield of ideas; I saw myself as a superior being, armed with an invincible intelligence, and I experienced a fierce joy in the discovery of my power.

“All this lasted a very long time, while I continued to inhale the ether in my flask. Suddenly I realised that it was empty, and felt most terribly grieved.”

The four men spoke together:

“Doctor, give me a prescription for a pint of ether!”

But the doctor put on his hat and retorted:

“Certainly not! Go and be poisoned by somebody else!”

And he went out.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you feel inclined to try?⁠—

A True Story

A gale was blowing out of doors; the autumn wind moaned and careered round the house, one of those winds which kill the last leaves and carry them off into the clouds.

The shooting-party were finishing their dinner, still in their boots, flushed, animated, and inflamed. They were Normans, of a class between the nobles and the yeomen, half country-squires, half peasants, rich and strong, capable of breaking the horns of the bulls when they catch hold of them at fairs.

All day long they had been shooting over the land of Maître Blondel, the mayor of Éparville, and were now at their meal round the large table, in the sort of half farmhouse, half country-seat owned by their host.

They spoke as ordinary men shout, laughed like wild beasts roaring, and drank like cisterns, their legs outstretched, their elbows on the tablecloth, their eyes shining beneath the flame of the lamps, warmed by a huge fire which cast blood-coloured gleams over the ceiling; they were talking of shooting and of dogs. But they had reached the period when other ideas come into the heads of half-drunk men, and all eyes were turned on a sturdy, plump-cheeked girl who was carrying the great dishes of food in her red hands.

Suddenly a hefty fellow, named Séjour, who, after studying for the Church, had become a veterinary surgeon, and looked after all the animals in the locality, exclaimed:

“By Gad, Blundel, there’s no flies on that filly you’ve got there!”

There was a resounding laugh. Then an old nobleman, Monsieur de Vernetot, who had lost caste through taking to drink, lifted up his voice:

“Once upon a time I had a funny affair with a girl like that. I really must tell you the tale. Whenever I think of it, it reminds me of Mirza, the bitch I sold to the Comte d’Haussonnel: she returned every day as soon as she was unchained, she found it so hard to leave me. In the end I grew angry, and asked the comte to keep her chained up. Well, do you know what the poor beast did? She died of grief.

“But, to return to my maid, here’s the story.

“I was twenty-five at the time, and was living a bachelor life on my Villebon estate. When a man’s young, you know, and has money, and bores himself to tears every evening after dinner, he keeps his eyes open on every side.

“I soon discovered a young thing in service with Déboultot of Canville. You knew Déboultot, Blondel, didn’t you? In short, the hussy took my fancy to such an extent that one day I went off to see her master, and suggested a bit of business to him. He was to let me have his servant, and I was to sell him my black mare, Cocote, which he’d been wanting for close on two years. He gave me his hand, with a ‘Put it there, Monsieur de Varnetot.’ The bargain was struck, the little girl came to my house, and I myself took my mare to Canville and let her go for three hundred crowns.

“At first everything went swimmingly. No one suspected anything; the only thing was that Rose loved me a little too much for my liking. She wasn’t of the common stock, I tell you. There was no ordinary blood in her veins; it must have come from some other girl who went wrong with her master.

“In short, she adored me. It was all coaxing and billing and cooing, and calling me pet names as if I were her little dog; so many pretty loving ways that I began to think rather seriously.

“I said to myself: ‘This musn’t go on, or I’ll let myself be caught.’ But I’m not easily caught, I’m not. I’m not the sort of fellow to be wheedled with a couple of kisses. In fact, my eyes were very much open, when she told me that she was in the family way.

“Crash! Bang! It was as though someone had fired a couple of shots into my chest. And she kissed me, kissed me and laughed and danced, fairly off her head with delight! I said nothing the first day, but I reasoned it out at night. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I thought, ‘but I must avoid the worst and cut her adrift; it’s high time.’ You see, my father and mother were at Barneville, and my sister, who was the wife of the Marquis d’Yspare, at Rollebec, two leagues from Villebon. I couldn’t take any chances.

“But how was I to extricate myself? If she left the house, suspicions would be aroused, and people would talk. If I kept her, the cat would soon be out of the bag; and besides, I could not let her go like that.

“I spoke about it to my uncle, the Baron de Créteuil, an old buck who had had more than one such experience, and asked him for a word of advice. He replied calmly:

“ ‘You must get her married, my boy.’

“I jumped.

“ ‘Get her married, Uncle! But to whom?’

“He quietly shrugged his shoulders:

“ ‘Anyone you like; that’s your business, and not mine. If you’re not a fool, you can always find someone.’

“I thought over this advice for a good week, and ended by saying to myself: ‘My uncle’s quite right.’

“So I began to rack my brains and search for a man; when one evening the justice of the peace, with whom I had been dining, told me:

“ ‘Old Mother Paumelle’s son has just been up to his larks again; he’ll come to a bad end, will that boy. It’s true enough that like father like son.’

“This Mother Paumelle was a sly old thing whose own youth had left something to be desired. For a crown she would assuredly have sold her soul, and her lout of a son into the bargain.

“I went to find her, and, very carefully, I made her understand the situation.

“As I was becoming embarrassed in my explanations, she suddenly asked me:

“ ‘And what are you going to give the girl?’

“She was a cunning old thing, but I was no fool, and had made all my preparations.

“I had just three little bits of land away out near Sasseville, which were let out from my three Villebon farms. The farmers were always complaining that they were a long way off; to make a long story short, I had taken back these three fields, six acres in all, and, as my peasants were making an outcry about it, I let them all off their dues in poultry until the end of each lease. By this means I put the business through all right. Then I bought a strip of land from my neighbour, Monsieur d’Aumonté, and had a cottage built on it, all for fifteen hundred francs. In this way I made a little bit of property which did not cost me much, and I gave it to the girl as a dowry.

“The old woman protested: this was not enough; but I held to it, and we parted without settling anything.

“Early next morning the lad came to see me. I had almost forgotten what he looked like. When I saw him, I was reassured; he wasn’t so bad for a peasant; but he looked a pretty dirty scoundrel.

“He took a detached view of the affair, as though he had come to buy a cow. When we had come to terms, he wanted to see the property, and off we went across the fields. The rascal kept me out there a good three hours; he surveyed the land, measured it, and took up sods and crushed them in his hands, as though he were afraid of being cheated over the goods. The cottage was not yet roofed, and he insisted on slate instead of thatch, because it required less upkeep!

“Then he said to me:

“ ‘But what about the furniture? You’re giving that!’

“ ‘Certainly not,’ I protested; ‘it’s very good of me to give you the farm.’

“ ‘Not half,’ he sniggered; ‘a farm and a baby.’

“I blushed in spite of myself.

“ ‘Come,’ he continued, ‘you’ll give the bed, a table, the dresser, three chairs, and the crockery, or there’s nothing doing.’

“I consented.

“And back we went. He had not yet said a word about the girl. But suddenly he asked, with a cunning, worried air:

“ ‘But if she died, who would the stuff go to?’

“ ‘Why, to you, of course,’ I replied.

“That was all he had wanted to find out that morning. He promptly offered me his hand with a gesture of satisfaction. We were agreed.

“But, oh! I had some trouble to convince Rose, I can tell you. She grovelled at my feet, sobbed and repeated: ‘It’s you who suggest this, you! you!’ She held out for more than a week, in spite of my reasoning and my entreaties. Women are silly things; once love gets into their heads, they can’t understand anything. Common sense means nothing to them: love before all, all for love!

“At last I grew angry and threatened to turn her out. At that she gradually yielded, on condition that I allowed her to come and see me from time to time.

“I myself led her to the altar, paid for the ceremony, and gave the wedding breakfast. I did the thing in style. Then it was: ‘Good night, children!’ I went and spent six months with my brother in Touraine.

“When I returned, I learnt that she had come to the house every week and asked for me. I hadn’t been back an hour when I saw her coming with a brat in her arms. Believe me or not, as you like, but it meant something to me to see that little mite. I believe I even kissed it.

“As for the mother, she was a ruin, a skeleton, a shadow. Thin, and grown old. By God, marriage didn’t suit her!

“ ‘Are you happy?’ I inquired mechanically.

“At that she began to cry like a fountain, hiccuping and sobbing, and exclaimed:

“ ‘I can’t, I can’t do without you, now! I’d rather die! I can’t!’

“She made the devil of a noise. I consoled her as best I could, and led her back to the gate.

“I found out that her husband beat her, and that the old harpy of a mother-in-law made life hard for her.

“Two days later she came back again; she took me in her arms and grovelled on the ground.

“ ‘Kill me, but I won’t go back there any more,’ she implored. Exactly what Mirza would have said if she had spoken!

“All this fuss was beginning to get on my nerves, and I cleared out for another six months. When I returned⁠ ⁠… when I returned, I learnt that she had died three weeks before, after having come back to the house every Sunday⁠ ⁠… still just like Mirza. The child too had died eight days later.

“As for the husband, the cunning rascal, he came into the inheritance. He’s done well for himself since, so it seems; he’s a town councillor now.”

Then Monsieur de Varnetot added with a laugh:

“Anyhow, I made his fortune for him.”

And Monsieur Séjour, the veterinary surgeon, raising a glass of brandy to his lips, gravely concluded the story with:

“Say what you like, but there’s no place in this world for that sort of woman!”

The Burglar

“I tell you, you will not believe it.”

“Well, tell it anyhow.”

“All right, here goes. But first I must tell you that my story is absolutely true in every respect; even if it does sound improbable. The only ones who will not be surprised are the artists, who remember that time of mad pranks, when the habit of practical joking had reached a point where we could not get rid of it even in the most serious circumstances.” The old artist seated himself astride on a chair. We were in the dining room of a hotel at Barbizon.

“Well, we had dined that night at poor Sorieul’s, who is now dead, and who was the worst of us all. There were just three of us, Sorieul, myself, and Le Poittevin, I think, but I am not sure if it was he. I mean, of course, the marine painter, Eugène Le Poittevin, who is also dead, not the landscape painter, who is still alive and full of talent.

“When I say we had dined at Sorieul’s, that means we were tipsy. Le Poittevin alone had kept his head, somewhat light, but still fairly clear. Those were the days when we were young. We had stretched ourselves on the floor of the little room adjoining the studio and were talking extravagantly. Sorieul lay flat on his back, with his feet propped up on a chair, discussing war and the uniforms of the Empire, when, suddenly, he got up, took out of the big wardrobe where he kept his accessories a complete hussar’s uniform and put it on. He then took out a grenadier’s uniform and told Le Poittevin to put it on; but he objected, so we seized him, undressed him, and forced him into an immense uniform in which he was completely lost. I arrayed myself as a cuirassier. After we were ready, Sorieul made us go through a complicated drill. Then he exclaimed: ‘As long as we are troopers let us drink like troopers.’

“We brewed one bowl of punch, drank it, and lit the flame a second time beneath the bowl filled with rum. We were bawling some old camp songs at the top of our voice, when Le Poittevin, who in spite of all the punch had retained his self-control, held up his hand and said: ‘Hush! I am sure I heard someone walking in the studio.’

“ ‘A burglar!’ said Sorieul, staggering to his feet, ‘Good luck!’ And he began the ‘Marseillaise’:

“ ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’

“Then he seized several weapons from the wall and equipped us according to our uniforms. I received a musket and a sabre. Le Poittevin was handed an enormous gun with a bayonet attached. Sorieul, not finding just what he wanted, seized a horse-pistol, stuck it in his belt, and brandishing a battle-axe in one hand, he opened the studio door cautiously. The army advanced into the suspected territory.

“When we were in the middle of the immense room, littered with huge canvases, furniture, and strange, unexpected objects, Sorieul said: ‘I appoint myself general. Let us hold a council of war. You, the cuirassiers, will keep the enemy from retreating⁠—that is, lock the door. You, the grenadiers, will be my escort.’

“I executed my orders and rejoined the troops, who were behind a large screen reconnoitring. Just as I reached it I heard a terrible noise. I rushed up with the candle to investigate the cause of it and this is what I saw. Le Poittevin was piercing the dummy’s breast with his bayonet and Sorieul was splitting his head open with his axe! When the mistake had been discovered the General commanded: ‘Be cautious!’ and operations were resumed.

“We had explored every nook and corner of the studio for the past twenty minutes without success, when Le Poittevin thought he would look in the cupboard. As it was quite deep and very dark, I advanced with the candle and looked in. I drew back stupefied. A man, a real live man this time, stood there looking at me! I quickly recovered myself, however, and locked the cupboard door. We then retired a few paces to hold a council.

“Opinions were divided. Sorieul wanted to smoke the burglar out; Le Poittevin suggested starvation, and I proposed to blow him up with dynamite. Le Poittevin’s idea being finally accepted as the best, we proceeded to bring the punch and pipes into the studio, while Le Poittevin kept guard with his big gun on his shoulder, and settling ourselves in front of the cupboard we drank the prisoner’s health. We had done this repeatedly, when Sorieul suggested that we bring out the prisoner and take a look at him.

“ ‘Hooray!’ cried I. We picked up our weapons and made a mad rush for the cupboard door. It was finally opened, and Sorieul, cocking his pistol, which was not loaded, rushed in first. Le Poittevin and I followed yelling like lunatics and, after a mad scramble in the dark, we at last brought out the burglar. He was a haggard-looking, white-haired old bandit, with shabby, ragged clothes. We bound him hand and foot and dropped him in an armchair. He said nothing.

“ ‘We will try this wretch,’ said Sorieul, whom the punch had made very solemn. I was so far gone that it seemed to me quite a natural thing. Le Poittevin was named for the defence and I for the prosecution. The prisoner was condemned to death by all except his counsel.

“ ‘We will now execute him,’ said Sorieul. ‘Still, this man cannot die without repenting,’ he added, feeling somewhat scrupulous. ‘Let us send for a priest.’

“I objected that it was too late, so he proposed that I officiate and forthwith told the prisoner to confess his sins to me. For the past five minutes the old man was rolling his eyes in terror, wondering what kind of wretches we were and for the first time he spoke. His voice was hollow and husky with drink:

“ ‘You don’t mean it, do you?’

“Sorieul forced him to his knees, and for fear he had not been baptised, poured a glass of rum over his head, saying: ‘Confess your sins; your last hour has come!’

“Terrified, the old ruffian began to shout: ‘Help! Help!’ so loudly that we had to gag him, lest he should wake the neighbours.

“Then he rolled on the floor, kicking and twisting, upsetting the furniture, and smashing the canvases. Finally, Sorieul lost his patience, and shouted: ‘Come, let us end this.’ He pointed his pistol at the old man and pressed the trigger, which fell with a sharp click. Carried away by his example, I fired in my turn. My gun, which was a flintlock, gave out a spark, to my surprise. Then Le Poittevin said gravely:

“ ‘Have we really the right to kill this man?’

“ ‘We have condemned him to death!’ said Sorieul, astounded.

“ ‘Yes, but we have no right to shoot a civilian. Let us take him to the police-station. He must be delivered to the executioner.’

“We agreed with him, and as the old man could not walk we tied him to a board, and Le Poittevin and I carried him, while Sorieul, armed to the teeth, kept guard in the rear. At the gate the guard stopped us. The chief, who knew us and was well acquainted with our manner of joking, thought it was a great lark and laughingly refused to take our prisoner in. Sorieul insisted, but the chief told us very sternly to go home and be quiet. The army resumed its march, and we returned to the studio.

“ ‘What are we going to do with him?’ I asked.

“ ‘The poor man must be awfully tired!’ said Le Poittevin, sympathetically.

“He did look half dead, gagged and tied to the plank, and in my turn I felt a sudden pity for him (the punch, no doubt), and I relieved him of his gag.

“ ‘How do you feel, old man?’ I asked.

“ ‘By Jingo! I have enough of this,’ he groaned.

“Then Sorieul became fatherly. He unbound him and made him take a seat, and treated him as a long-lost friend. The three of us immediately brewed a fresh bowl of punch, and the burglar watched us quietly from his armchair. As soon as it was ready we handed a glass to the prisoner, and we would gladly have held up his head. Toast followed toast. The old man could drink more than the three of us put together; but as daylight appeared, he got up and calmly said: ‘I shall be obliged to leave you; I must get home now.’

“We begged him not to go, but he positively refused to stay any longer. So we shook hands with him, and took him to the door, and Sorieul held the candle to light him through the hall, saying: ‘Look out for the step under the outer door.’ ”

Everybody round the storyteller laughed heartily. He got up, lit his pipe, and added, standing straight before us, “The funniest part of my story is that it really happened.”

A Woman’s Confession

You ask me to tell you about the most vivid recollections of my life. I am very old and have neither children nor relatives, and am therefore free to confide in you. Only promise that you will never reveal my name. As you know, I have been very much loved and have myself often loved in return. I was very beautiful; I may say so now that nothing remains of my beauty. To me love was the life of the soul just as air is the life of the body. I would rather have died than lived without affection, without being the constant subject of someone’s thought. Women often pretend that they only love once with all the strength of their feelings; I have often been so desperately in love that it was impossible to think that it could ever end, but the feeling always died out quite naturally, like a fire that lacks fuel. Today I will tell you my first adventure, a quite innocent one so far as I was concerned, but it led to others. The terrible revenge of that dreadful chemist of Pecq reminds me of the appalling drama I witnessed much against my will.

I had been married a year to a rich man, the Count Hervé de Ker, a member of an old Breton family, whom of course I did not love. Real love requires, at least so it seems to me, both freedom and opposition. Can that which is imposed upon one from the outside, sanctioned by law and blessed by the priest, be love? A legal kiss is never as good as a kiss that is stolen. My husband was tall, elegant, and quite the aristocrat in appearance. But he lacked intelligence. He spoke sharply and expressed opinions calculated to wound his hearers. One felt his mind to be full of ready-made thoughts transmitted by his father and mother, who had themselves got them from their ancestors. He never hesitated a moment, but gave directly his narrow-minded opinions about everything, without embarrassment and without realising that there might be other points of view. You felt that his mind was closed to all outer influences, that it contained none of those ideas that renew and cleanse the mind, like a breath of fresh air passing through a house with open doors and windows.

The country house we occupied was situated in a very lonely part of the country. It was a big, sad-looking building, surrounded by enormous trees with tufts of moss that reminded one of the white beards of old men. The park, a real forest, was enclosed by a deep ditch called a ha-ha; at its extremity, near the moors, were two big ponds full of reeds and floating grass; by the side of a stream which joined the two lakes my husband had built a little hut from which he could shoot wild duck.

In addition to our ordinary staff of servants we had a keeper, a brutish individual who would have died for my husband, and a lady’s maid, one might say a friend, passionately attached to me, whom I had brought back from Spain five years before. She was a foundling and might have been taken for a gipsy with her dark complexion, sombre eyes, and hair dense as a forest, which sprang up in waves from her brow; she was sixteen and looked twenty.

Autumn had just set in, and a great deal of shooting was going on, either over our neighbours’ land or over our own, and I noticed among the guns a young man, the Baron de C⁠⸺, who was always coming to the château. Then his visits ceased and I thought no more about, but perceived that my husband’s manner to me had changed. He seemed taciturn and preoccupied, he never kissed me; and although he rarely came to my room⁠—I insisted upon separate rooms so as to enjoy a little liberty⁠—I often heard in the night a stealthy footstep approach my door, stay a few minutes, and then go away again.

My window being on the ground floor, I often thought I heard someone wandering about round the château in the dark. When I told my husband he looked at me steadily for a second or two, and then said:

“It is nothing, it is the keeper.”

Well, one evening, just as dinner was over, Hervé, who seemed in wonderful spirits, which was most unusual, though his cheerfulness had a touch of cunning about it, said to me:

“Would you like to spend three hours on the lookout for a fox who comes every night and eats the chickens?”

I was surprised and hesitated, but as he was gazing at me with curious obstinacy I finally replied: “Certainly, dear.” I must explain that I hunted both wolf and wild boar as well as any man, so that there was nothing unnatural in the suggestion. But suddenly my husband began to look very excited, and during the whole evening he could not keep still, but was always getting up and sitting down again.

Suddenly, about ten o’clock, he said to me:

“Are you ready?” I got up and as he brought me my gun I asked: “Must I load with bullets or buckshot?” He seemed surprised and said: “Oh, only with shot, that’s quite enough, you may be sure!” Then, after a few seconds, he added in a curious voice: “You may pride yourself on possessing amazing presence of mind!” I laughed, saying: “Me? Why? Presence of mind to kill a fox? Whatever are you thinking about, my friend?” So off we went without a sound, through the park. Everyone in the house was asleep. The full moon turned the dark old building with its shining roof yellow. The pinnaces of the two turrets, one on either side, were splotched with light, and no sound disturbed the deathlike stillness of the clear, sad, sweet, heavy night. There was no movement in the air, not a frog croaked, not an owl called; a dreary listlessness was weighing on everything.

When we reached the trees in the park the air was fresh and I could smell the fallen leaves. My husband never said a word, but he was listening, watching, he seemed to be scenting his prey in the dark, entirely carried away by the passion of the chase. We soon reached the bank of the ponds where the jungle of reeds lay perfectly still, unstirred by any breeze; but there was a faint pulsation of the water, occasional specks ruffled its surface, which spread in hardly perceptible circles, growing wider and wider, like luminous ripples.

When we reached the hut in which we were to wait, my husband made me go in first and then very deliberately loaded his gun, the sharp click of the hammer affecting me in a curious way. He knew I was trembling, and said:

“Perhaps this has been enough for you? If so, go!”

Very surprised, I answered:

“Not at all, I did not come here just to go back again. You are very queer tonight!”

He murmured: “Do as you like,” after which neither of us stirred.

In about half an hour, as nothing happened to disturb the heavy, clear calm of the autumn night, I whispered:

“Are you quite sure it goes this way?”

Hervé started as if I had bitten him, and with his lips to my ears hissed: “I tell you I am quite sure.”

And again there was silence.

I think I must have begun to doze when my husband squeezed my arm and hissed: “Do you see it down there under the trees?” I looked, but could see nothing, then, staring me straight in the eyes, Hervé raised his gun slowly. I was ready to shoot too, when suddenly thirty steps in front of us a man appeared in the full moonlight, he was walking quickly with body bent as if he were in flight.

I was so overcome with astonishment that I gave a loud cry, but before I had time to turn, there was a flash, the report of the gun stunned me, and I saw the man rolling on the ground like a wolf.

Shrill moans fell from my lips and I was alarmed and crazy with horror until an angry hand, Hervé’s, seized me by the throat. First he knocked me down and then he picked me up in his strong arms, and, holding me up in the air, ran towards the body lying on the grass, and threw me upon it with such violence that he might have wanted to break my head.

I felt done for; he was going to kill me; he had just raised his foot to crush my head when he was seized and thrown down before I could make out what had happened.

I sat up quickly and saw Paquita, my maid, kneeling upon him, crouching over him like a wild cat, convulsed with rage, tearing away at his beard and his moustache, and scratching his face.

Then, as if possessed by another idea, she hurriedly got up and threw herself on the dead body, which she took in her arms, kissing it on the eyes and mouth, opening the lips of the dead man with her own lips, seeking for a sign of life and the unfathomable embrace of passionate lovers. My husband, sitting up, looked on. At last he understood and, dropping at my feet, said:

“Oh! forgive me, darling. I suspected you and I have killed this girl’s lover; my keeper deceived me.”

As for me, I was looking on at the unnatural kisses exchanged between the dead and the living, at the sobs of the woman and her wild spasms of despairing love.

From that moment I knew that I should be unfaithful to my husband.

Moonlight

Madame Julie Roubère was expecting her elder sister, Madame Henriette Létoré, who was returning from Switzerland.

The Létorés had been away about five weeks and Madame Henriette’s husband had gone back alone to their estate in Calvados, where his presence was required, and she was coming to spend a few days in Paris with her sister.

Night was falling and Madame Roubère was absentmindedly reading in the little middle-class drawing room in the twilight, looking up at every sound.

At last the bell rang and her sister appeared, wrapped in her travelling-coat. They were immediately locked in a tight embrace, kissing each other again and again.

Then they started to talk, asking after each other’s health, after their respective families, and a thousand other questions, chattering away jerking out hurried, broken sentences, fluttering around each other while Madame Henriette took off her hat.

Night had fallen. Madame Roubère rang for the lamp and as soon as it was brought in she looked at her sister before giving her another hug, but was filled with dismay and astonishment at her appearance, for Madame Létoré had two large locks of white hair over the temples. All the rest was jet-black, but on both sides of her head ran, as it were, two silver streams lost in the surrounding black mass. She was only twenty-four and this change had happened since she left for Switzerland! Stopping short, Madame Roubère gazed at her aghast, on the verge of tears because she thought that some terrible, unknown misfortune must have befallen her sister. She said: “What is the matter, Henriette?”

Smiling a sad, stricken smile, the sister replied:

“Nothing at all, I assure you. Were you looking at my white hair?”

But Madame Roubère impetuously seized her by the shoulders, and with a searching glance repeated: “What is the matter? Tell me. I shall know if you don’t tell the truth.”

Madame Henriette, who had turned deathly pale, returned her sister’s glance with tears in her downcast eyes.

Her sister repeated: “What has happened? What is the matter? You must answer!”

In a subdued voice she murmured: “I have⁠ ⁠… I have a lover,” and, putting her head on her younger sister’s shoulder, she sobbed aloud.

When she was a little quieter and the heaving of her body had died down, she began to unbosom herself as if to cast forth the secret, to empty her distress into a sympathetic heart.

Hand in hand they clung to each other in silence and then sank on to a sofa in a dark corner of the room, and the younger sister, putting her arm round the elder one’s neck and holding her tight, listened to the story.

“Oh! I know that there was no excuse; I don’t understand myself, but I feel quite frantic ever since. Take care, darling, take care; if you only knew how weak we are, how quickly we yield, how soon we fall! It takes so little, so little, a mere nothing, a moment of tenderness, a sudden fit of melancholy, a longing to open your arms wide, to cherish, to fondle someone: we all feel like that sometimes.

“You know my husband, and you know how much I love him; but he is middle-aged and sensible and has no understanding of the tender other emotions that sway a woman’s heart. He is always, always the same, always kind, always smiling, always amiable, always perfect. Oh! how sometimes I have wanted him to clasp me roughly in his arms, to give me one of those slow, sweet kisses in which two beings intermingle, which are like silent avowals! How I have wanted him to be foolish, to be weak, to need me, to need my caresses, and my tears!

“All this is very silly, but we women are like that. We can’t help it.

“And yet I had never the faintest intention of being unfaithful. Now, I have done it, without love, without any reason whatever, without anything, simply because the moon was shining one night on the Lake of Lucerne.

“During the month that we were travelling together, my husband, with his calm indifference, damped all my enthusiasm, and dashed all my hopes. As the four coach-horses galloped down the mountainside at sunrise, the view of the transparent morning haze, the long valleys, the woods, the streams and the villages made me clap my hands with delight and I said: ‘How beautiful, how beautiful it is, my darling, please kiss me!’ He only replied with a smile of chilly kindliness and a slight shrug of the shoulders: ‘Because you like the landscape is no reason why we should kiss each other.’ That cut me to the heart.

“I do think that when people love each other they ought to want to love each other in the presence of things so beautiful that one’s whole being is set ablaze. In fact I was bubbling over with poetry which his presence forced me to suppress. How can I explain it? I was almost like a boiler filled with steam and hermetically sealed.

“One evening (we had been four days at an hotel at Fluelen) Robert, who had a headache, went to bed as soon as dinner was over, and I went for a walk by the lake alone.

“The night was like fairyland. The round moon hung in the middle of the heavens: the crests of the tall mountains, covered with snow, looked as if they were wearing silver crowns, and the rippling water of the lake was alive with little streaks of light. The air was soft and sweet with that penetrating warmth that destroys all power of resistance and fills one with unexpected weakness. Under this influence one’s feelings are hypersensitive and over-responsive; they are aflame in a second, and passionately active! I sat on the grass and gazed at the vast, melancholy, profoundly lovely lake, and was suddenly aware that what I so keenly desired was love. I was in revolt against the gloomy dullness of my life. What! would it never be my lot to wander along a moonbathed bank with a man I loved? Was I never to feel the ecstasy of those soul-stirring, delicious, intoxicating kisses which lovers exchanged in the sweetness of a night that seems to have been made for love? Was I never to be feverishly embraced in longing arms, in the moonlit shadow of a summer’s night? And I burst into tears like a crazy woman! Then a sound came from somewhere behind and I looked up to see a man gazing at me. He recognised me as I turned my head, and, coming forward, said: ‘You are crying, Madame?’

“It was a young barrister who was travelling with his mother and whom we had met occasionally. His eyes had often followed me.

“I was too upset to find any answer, so I got up at once and said I felt ill.

“He talked about our journey, walking by my side, quite naturally and simply. He expressed in words all that I felt: he understood all the things that left me breathless with delight, only much better than I did myself, and then suddenly he recited some of de Musset’s poetry. I gasped for breath; I felt that the mountains themselves, the lake, the moonlight, all were singing of things ineffably sweet.⁠ ⁠…

“And then it happened, I can’t say how or why, in a kind of hallucination. As for him⁠ ⁠… I only saw him again the next day as we were leaving.

“He gave me his card!⁠ ⁠…”

And Madame Létoré fell back into her sister’s arms, moaning piteously.

Then Madame Roubère, dignified and serious, gently said: “You see, my dear, there are times when we are in love, not with any man, but with love itself. That night the moonlight was your real lover.”

A Cock Crowed

Madame Berthe d’Avancelles up to that time had resisted all the prayers of her despairing admirer, Baron Joseph de Croissard. In Paris during the winter he had pursued her ardently, and now he was giving fêtes and shooting parties in her honour at his château at Carville, in Normandy.

Monsieur d’Avancelles, her husband, saw nothing and knew nothing, as usual. It was said that he lived apart from his wife on account of physical weakness, for which Madame d’Avancelles would not pardon him. He was a stout, bald little man, with short arms, legs, neck, nose and everything else, while Madame d’Avancelles, on the contrary, was a tall, dark and determined young woman, who laughed loudly in her husband’s face, while he called her openly “Mrs. Housewife,” and who looked at the broad shoulders, strong build and fair moustaches of her recognized admirer, Baron Joseph de Croissard, with a certain amount of tenderness.

She had not, however, granted him anything as yet. The Baron was ruining himself for her, and there was a constant round of fêtes, hunting parties and new pleasures, to which he invited the neighbouring nobility. All day long the hounds bayed in the woods, as they followed the fox or the wild boar, and every night dazzling fireworks mingled their burning plumes with the stars, while the illuminated windows of the drawing room cast long rays of light on the wide lawns, where shadows were moving to and fro.

It was autumn, the russet-coloured season, and the leaves were whirling about on the grass like flights of birds. One noticed the smell of damp earth in the air, of the naked earth, as one smells the odour of naked flesh, when a woman’s dress falls from her, after a ball.

One evening in the previous spring, during an entertainment, Madame d’Avancelles had said to Monsieur de Croissard, who was worrying her by his importunities: “If I do succumb to you, my friend, it will not be before the fall of the leaf. I have too many things to do this summer to have any time for it.” He had not forgotten that bold and amusing speech, and every day he became more pressing, every day he advanced in his approaches, and gained a step in the heart of the fair, audacious woman, who seemed only to be resisting for form’s sake.

It was the eve of a great wild-boar hunt, and Madame Berthe said to the Baron with a laugh: “Baron, if you kill the brute, I shall have something for you.” And so, at dawn he was up and out, to try to discover where the wild animal had its lair. He accompanied his beaters, settled the places for the relays, and organized everything personally to insure his triumph, and when the horns gave the signal for setting out, he appeared in a closely-fitting coat of scarlet and gold, with his waist drawn in tight, his chest expanded, his eyes radiant, and as fresh and strong as if he had just got out of bed. They set out, and the wild boar started off through the underwood as soon as he was dislodged, followed by the hounds in full cry, while the horses set off at a gallop through the narrow paths of the forest, and the carriages, which followed the chase at a distance, drove noiselessly along the soft roads.

Out of mischief, Madame d’Avancelles kept the Baron by her side, lagging behind at a walk in an interminably long and straight alley, over which four rows of oaks hung, so as to form almost an arch, while he, trembling with love and anxiety, listened with one ear to the young woman’s bantering chatter, while with the other he listened to the blast of the horns and to the cry of the hounds as they receded in the distance.

“So you do not love me any longer?” she observed. “How can you say such things?” he replied. And she continued: “But you seem to be paying more attention to the sport than to me.” He groaned, and said: “Did you not order me to kill the animal myself?” And she replied gravely: “Of course I am counting on that. You must kill it before my eyes.”

Then he trembled in his saddle, spurred his horse until it reared, and, losing all patience, exclaimed: “But, by Jove, Madame, that is impossible if we remain here.” And she retorted laughingly: “But it must be done or⁠ ⁠… so much the worse for you.” Then she spoke tenderly to him, laying her hand on his arm, or stroking his horse’s mane, as if by mistake.

Just then they turned to the right, into a narrow path which was overhung by trees, and suddenly, to avoid a branch which barred their way, she leaned towards him so closely, that he felt her hair tickling his neck, and he suddenly threw his arms brutally round her and, pressing her forehead with his thick moustache, he gave her a furious kiss.

At first she did not move, and remained motionless under that mad caress; then she turned her head with a jerk, and either by accident or design her little lips met his, under their tuft of fair hair, and a moment afterwards, either from confusion or remorse, she struck her horse with her riding-whip, and went off at full gallop, and they rode on like that for a time, without even exchanging a look.

The noise of the hunt came nearer, the thickets seemed to tremble, and suddenly the wild boar broke through the bushes, covered with blood, and trying to shake off the hounds which had fastened upon him, and the Baron, uttering a shout of triumph, exclaimed: “Let him who loves me follow me!” And he disappeared in the copse, as if the wood had swallowed him up.

When she reached an open glade a few minutes later, he was just getting up, covered with mud, his coat torn, and his hands bloody, while the brute was lying stretched out at full length, with the Baron’s hunting knife driven into its shoulder up to the hilt.

The quarry was cut by torchlight on a night that was wild and melancholy. The moon threw a yellow light on the torches, which made the night misty with their resinous smoke. The hounds devoured the wild boar’s stinking entrails, and snarled and fought for them, while the beaters and the gentlemen, standing in a circle round the spoil, blew their horns’ as loud as they could. The flourish of the hunting-horns resounded beyond the woods on that still night and was repeated by the echoes of the distant valleys, awaking the timid stags, rousing the yelping foxes, and disturbing the little grey rabbits in their gambols at the edge of the glades.

The frightened night-birds flew over the eager pack of hounds, while the women, who were moved by all these gentle and violent things, leaned rather heavily on the men’s arms; and turned aside into the pathways, before the hounds had finished their meal. Madame d’Avancelles, feeling languid after that day of fatigue and tenderness, said to the Baron: “Will you take a turn in the park, my friend?” And without replying, but trembling and nervous, he put his arm around her, and immediately they kissed each other. They walked slowly under the almost leafless trees through which the moonbeams filtered, and their love, their desires, their longing for a closer embrace became so vehement, that they almost sank down at the foot of a tree.

The horns were silent, and the tired hounds were sleeping in the kennels. “Let us return,” the young woman said, and they went back.

When they got to the château and before they went in, she said in a weak voice: “I am so tired that I shall go to bed, my friend.” And as he opened his arms for a last kiss, she ran away, saying as a last goodbye: “No.⁠ ⁠… I am going to sleep.⁠ ⁠… Let him who loves me follow me!”

An hour later, when the whole silent château seemed dead, the Baron crept stealthily out of his room, and went and scratched at her door, and as she did not reply, he tried to open it, and found that it was not locked.

She was dreaming as she leaned upon the window-ledge, and he threw himself at her knees, which he kissed madly, through her nightdress. She said nothing, but buried her delicate fingers caressingly in his hair, and suddenly, as if she had formed some great resolution, she whispered with a bold glance: “I shall come back, wait for me.” And stretching out her hand, she pointed with her finger to an indistinct white spot at the end of the room; it was her bed.

Then, in the dark with trembling hands and scarcely knowing what he was doing, he quickly undressed, got into the cool sheets, and stretching himself out comfortably, he almost forgot his love in the pleasure of feeling the linen caress his tired body. She did not return, however, no doubt finding amusement in straining his patience. He closed his eyes with a feeling of exquisite comfort, and reflected peaceably while waiting for what he so ardently desired. But by degrees his limbs grew languid and his thoughts became indistinct and fleeting, until his great fatigue overcame him and he fell asleep.

He slept that unconquerable, heavy sleep of the worn-out hunter, and he slept until daylight; and then, as the window had remained half open, the crowing of a cock suddenly woke him, and the Baron opened his eyes, and feeling a woman’s body against his, finding himself, much to his surprise, in a strange bed, and remembering nothing for a moment, he stammered:

“What? Where am I? What is the matter?”

Then she, who had not been asleep at all, looking at this unkempt man, with red eyes and thick lips, replied in the haughty tone of voice in which she spoke to her husband:

“It is nothing; it is only a cock crowing. Go to sleep again, Monsieur, it has nothing to do with you.”

The Child

After dinner we were talking about an abortion which had recently been committed in the parish. The Baroness grew indignant: “How are such things possible! The girl, seduced by a butcher’s boy, had thrown her child into a pickling vat! Horrible! It had even been proved that the poor little thing was not killed outright.”

The doctor, who was dining at the house that evening, gave us ghastly details with an air of imperturbable calm. Apparently he was amazed at the courage of the wretched mother who, having given birth to the child all alone, had then walked nearly two miles to kill it. “This woman,” he repeated, “has a will of iron! What savage strength she needed to go through the wood at night with her baby crying in her arms! Such moral suffering impresses me. Think of the terror in her soul, of the torture of her heart! How hateful and vile life is! Infamous prejudices, yes, infamous, I say; a false notion of honour which is worse than the crime itself, a whole host of artificial feelings, odious respectability and revolting virtuousness⁠—these are the things that drive to murder and infanticide poor girls who have surrendered to the imperative call of life. What a shame for humanity to have established such morality, and to have made a crime of the natural union of two human beings!”

The Baroness had grown pale with indignation. “Ah, Doctor,” she replied, “so you put vice above virtue, the prostitute above the honest woman! A woman who abandons herself to her shameful instincts is in your eyes the equal of the irreproachable wife who fulfills her duty in the integrity of her conscience!”

The doctor, who had seen many of life’s sores in his long career, stood up and said with emphasis:

“You are talking, Madame, about matters of which you are ignorant, since you have never felt an invincible passion. Let me tell you of a recent adventure, of which I was a witness. Ah, Madame, you should be kind, indulgent, and full of pity, for you do not understand. Wretched, indeed, are those whom perfidious nature has endowed with strong passions. Quiet people, born without violent instincts, live respectably of necessity. Those who are never tortured by frenzied desires have no difficulty in being good. I see cold-blooded little middle-class women, of rigid morals, of moderate intelligence, and limited affections, who cry out indignantly when they hear of the sins of fallen women. You sleep calmly in a peaceful bed haunted by no desperate dreams. Everyone about you is like you, acts like you, and is protected by the instinctive moderation of their senses. You have a slight struggle with the phantoms of temptation, but it is only your mind which sometimes plays with evil thoughts. Your body does not immediately respond to the slightest whisper of a tempting idea.

“In people whom chance has made passionate the senses are invincible. Can you command the winds, or a stormy sea? Can you thwart the forces of nature? No. The senses are also forces of nature, as invincible as wind and sea. They arouse men and sweep them off their feet, impelling them towards pleasure with a desire whose vehemence they cannot resist. Women who are above reproach are women without temperament, and there are many of them. I do not thank them for their virtue, for they have no struggle. But never, I tell you, never will the Messalinas and Catherines of Russia be virtuous. They cannot be. They are born for wild caresses. Their organs are not like yours, their flesh is different, more sensitive, more easily maddened by the contact of another, and their nerves drive, disturb and conquer them when yours have felt nothing whatever. Just try to feed a hawk, on the little seeds which you give to a parrot! Yet, they are both birds with a crooked beak. But their instincts are different.

“Ah, if you only knew the power of the senses! How they keep you on the rack for whole nights, with burning skin and beating heart, your mind tortured by maddening visions! You see, people of inflexible principles are simply cold natures desperately jealous of others, without knowing it. Listen to this story:

“A woman whom I shall call Madame Hélène had a sensual temperament, even when she was a little girl, for her senses were awakened as soon as she was learning to talk. You will argue that her case was pathological. Why? Is it not even more arguable that you are weaklings? When she was twelve years old I was consulted, and I discovered that she was already a woman and constantly torn by sexual desire. Her very appearance showed this. She had thick, pouting lips, as ripe as full-blown flowers, a powerful neck, warm skin, a large nose with rather wide, sensitive nostrils, and great blue eyes whose glance fired the senses of men. Who could calm the blood of this ardent animal? She spent her nights weeping for no discernible reason. She was suffering agonies for want of a man. Finally, when she was fifteen her parents married her. Two years later her husband died of consumption. She had exhausted him. The same fate overtook her second husband eighteen months after. The third held out for four years, and then left her. It was high time.

“When she was left alone she tried to remain virtuous. She shared all your prejudices. One day, however, she sent for me, as she had had nervous attacks which alarmed her. I saw at once that her widowhood was going to kill her, and I told her so. She was a respectable woman, and in spite of the tortures she suffered, she would not take my advice and find a lover. The countryside said she was mad. She used to go out at night and go off on wild excursions to tire out her rebellious body. Then she would fall into fainting fits followed by horrible cramps. She lived alone in her château, near the home of her mother and relatives. I used to go to see her from time to time, at a loss to know what to do against the obstinate will of nature and her own will.

“One evening, about eight o’clock, she called at my house just as I was finishing dinner. No sooner were we alone than she said:

“ ‘I am lost. I am pregnant!’

“I started in my chair.

“ ‘What!’

“ ‘I am pregnant.’

“ ‘You?’

“ ‘Yes, I.’

“Then suddenly, looking me straight in the face, she said in agitated tones:

“ ‘Pregnant by my gardener, Doctor. I felt rather faint while walking in the park. The man, seeing me fall, ran up and caught me in his arms to carry me in. What did I do? I cannot remember. Did I embrace and kiss him? Perhaps. You know my shameful affliction. To make a long story short, he had me. I am guilty, because I gave myself to him again the next day, and on other occasions afterwards. It was useless, I could no longer hold out⁠ ⁠…’

“She stifled a sob, and continued defiantly:

“ ‘I paid him, for I preferred that to the lover whom you advised me to take. He has made me pregnant. I will confess to you without reserve or hesitation. I tried to procure an abortion. I took boiling hot baths. I rode horses that were not properly broken in. I did gymnastic exercises. I took drugs, absinthe, saffron, and others, but I did not succeed. You know my father, my brothers; I am lost. My sister is married to a respectable man. My disgrace will reflect upon them. Then, think of all our friends, our neighbours, our good name⁠ ⁠… my mother⁠ ⁠…’

“She began to sob. I took her hands in mine and began to question her. Then I advised her to go off on a long journey and have her child away from home. She said: ‘Yes⁠ ⁠… Yes⁠ ⁠… Yes⁠ ⁠… all right⁠ ⁠…’ without listening to what I was saying. Then she left.

“I went to see her several times. She was going mad. The idea of this child growing in her womb, of this living shame, had penetrated her brain like a sharp arrow. She thought of it incessantly, and was afraid to go out in the daytime, or see anybody, lest her abominable secret should be discovered. Every night she would undress in front of her wardrobe mirror and examine her misshapen abdomen; then she would throw herself on the ground, stifling her cries by thrusting a towel into her mouth. Twenty times in the night she got out of bed, lit her candle and returned to that large mirror, which showed her the reflection of her deformed naked body. In a frenzy she would strike her belly with her fists, trying to kill the life which threatened hers. The struggle between the two was terrible, but the child did not die. It moved constantly as though it were defending itself. She rolled on the floor in an effort to crush it, and tried to sleep with a weight on her body to choke it. She hated it with the hatred one has for a stubborn enemy that threatens one’s life.

“After these vain struggles, these impotent efforts to get rid of her child, she dashed out madly into the fields, running in a frenzy of misery and fear. One morning she was found, with her feet in a stream, and a look of madness in her eyes. People thought she had had an attack of delirium, but did not notice what was really the matter with her. She was pursued by an obsession, to remove this accursed child from her body.

“One evening her mother said to her laughingly: ‘How stout you are getting, Hélène. If you were married I would think you were going to have a baby.’

“These words must have been like a deadly blow to her. She left immediately, and returned to her own home. What happened then? Probably she looked again at her swollen belly, struck it, bruised it, and knocked it against the corners of the furniture, as she used to do every night. Then she went downstairs in her bare feet to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and took out the big carving-knife. She went upstairs again, lit four candles, and sat down in front of her mirror on a wicker chair. Then, exasperated with hatred of this unknown and redoubtable embryo, desiring to tear it out and kill it at last, to take it in her hands, strangle it and cast it away from her, she felt for the place where it was stirring, and, with a single stroke of the knife, she ripped open her abdomen from top to bottom.

“She performed her task very well, indeed, and very quickly, for she caught hold of this enemy which had hitherto eluded her grasp. She took it by one leg, tore it out and tried to throw it into the fireplace. But it was held by bonds which she had not been able to cut, and perhaps before she had realized what still remained to be done, in order to separate herself and her child, she fell dead on its body, drowned in a pool of blood.

“Do you think she was very wicked, Madame?”

The doctor was silent and waited, but the Baroness made no reply.

The Lock

The four glasses which were standing in front of the diners were still nearly half full, which is a sign, as a general rule, that the guests are quite so. They were beginning to speak without waiting for an answer; no one took any notice of anything except what was going on inside him; voices grew louder, gestures more animated, eyes brighter.

It was a bachelors’ dinner of confirmed old celibates. They had instituted this regular banquet twenty years before, christening it “The Celibate,” and at the time there were fourteen of them, all fully determined never to marry. Now there were only four of them left; three were dead and the other seven were married.

These four stuck firmly to it, and, as far as lay in their power, they scrupulously observed the rules which had been laid down at the beginning of their curious association. They had sworn, hand-in-hand, to turn aside every woman they could from the right path, and their friends’ wives for choice, and more especially those of their most intimate friends. For this reason, as soon as any of them left the society, in order to set up in domestic life for himself, he took care to quarrel definitely with all his former companions.

Besides this, they were pledged at every dinner to relate most minutely their last adventures, which had given rise to this familiar phrase among them: “To lie like an old bachelor.”

They professed, moreover, the most profound contempt for woman, whom they talked of as an animal made solely for their pleasure. Every moment they quoted Schopenhauer, who was their god, and his well-known essay “On Women”; they wished that harems and towers might be reintroduced, and had the ancient maxim: “Mulier, perpetuus infans,” woven into their table-linen, and below it, the line of Alfred de Vigny: “La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure.” So that by dint of despising women they lived only for them, while all their efforts and all their desires were directed toward them. Those of them who had married called them old fops, made fun of them, and⁠—feared them.

When they began to feel the exhilarating effects of the champagne, the tales of their old bachelor experiences began.

On the day in question, these old fellows, for they were old by this time, and the older they grew the more extraordinary strokes of luck in the way of love affairs they had to relate, were quite talkative. For the last month, according to their own accounts, each of them had seduced at least one woman a day. And what women! the youngest, the noblest, the richest, and the most beautiful!

After they had finished their stories, one of them, he who had spoken first and had therefore been obliged to listen to all the others, rose and said:

“Now that we have finished drawing the longbow, I should like to tell you, not my last, but my first adventure⁠—I mean the first adventure of my life, my first fall⁠—for it is a moral fall after all, in the arms of Venus. Oh! I am not going to tell you my first⁠—what shall I call it?⁠—my first appearance; certainly not. The leap over the first ditch (I am speaking figuratively) has nothing interesting about it. It is generally rather a muddy one, and one picks oneself up rather abashed, with one charming illusion the less, with a vague feeling of disappointment and sadness. That realization of love the first time one experiences it is rather repugnant; we had dreamed of it as being so different, so delicate, so refined. It leaves a physical and moral sense of disgust behind it, just as when one has happened to put one’s hand on a toad. You may rub your hand as hard as you like, but the moral feeling remains.

“Yes! one very soon gets quite used to it; there is no doubt about that. For my part, however, I am very sorry it was not in my power to give the Creator the benefit of my advice when He was arranging these little matters. I wonder what I should have done? I am not quite sure, but I think, with the English savant, John Stuart Mill, I should have managed differently; I should have found some more convenient and more poetical combination, yes⁠—more poetical.

“I really think that the Creator showed Himself to be too naturalistic⁠—too⁠—what shall I say? His invention lacks poetry.

“However, what I am going to tell you is about my first woman of the world, the first woman in society I ever made love to. I beg your pardon, I ought to say the first woman of the world that ever triumphed over me. For at first it is we who allow ourselves to be taken, while, later on⁠—it is the⁠ ⁠… same thing!

“She was a friend of my mother, a charming woman in every way. When such women are chaste, it is generally from sheer stupidity, and when they are in love they are furiously so. And then⁠—we are accused of corrupting them! Yes, yes, of course! With them it is always the rabbit that begins and never the sportsman. I know all about it; they don’t seem to lure us, but they do it all the same, and do what they like with us, without it being noticed, and then they actually accuse us of having ruined them, dishonoured them, degraded them, and all the rest of it.

“The woman in question certainly had a great desire to be ‘degraded’ by me. She may have been about thirty-five, while I was scarcely two-and-twenty. I no more thought of seducing her than I did of turning Trappist. Well, one day when I was calling on her, and while I was looking at her dress with considerable astonishment, for she had on a morning wrapper which was open as wide as a church-door when the bells are ringing for Mass, she took my hand and squeezed it⁠—squeezed it, you know, as they will do at such moments⁠—and said, with a deep sigh, one of those sighs, you know, which come right from the bottom of the chest: ‘Oh! don’t look at me like that, child!’ I got as red as a tomato, and felt more nervous than usual, naturally. I was very much inclined to bolt, but she held my hand tightly, and putting it on her well-developed bust, she said: ‘Just feel how my heart beats!’ Of course it was beating, and I began to understand what was the matter, but I did not know what to do. I have changed considerably since then.

“As I remained standing there, with one hand on the soft covering of her heart, while I held my hat in the other, and continued to look at her with a confused, silly smile⁠—a timid frightened smile⁠—she suddenly drew back, and said in an irritated voice:

“ ‘Young man, what are you doing? You are indecent and badly brought up.’

“You may be sure I took my hand away quickly, stopped smiling, and stammering out some excuse, got up and took my leave as if I had lost my head.

“But I was caught, and dreamed of her. I thought her charming, adorable; I fancied that I loved her, that I had always loved her, and I determined to see her again. I decided to be enterprising, to be more than that even.

“When I saw her again she gave me a shy smile. Oh, how that little smile upset me! And she shook hands with a long, significant pressure.

“From that day it seems that I made love to her; at least, she declared afterward that I had ruined her, captured her, dishonoured her, with rare Machiavellism, with consummate cleverness, with the calculations of a mathematician, and the cunning of an Apache Indian.

“But one thing troubled me strangely: where was my triumph to be accomplished? I lived with my family, and on this point my family was most particular. I was not bold enough to venture into a hotel in broad daylight with a woman on my arm, and I did not know whom to ask for advice.

“Now, my fair friend had often said in joke that every young man ought to have a room for himself somewhere or other from home. We lived in Paris, and this was a sort of inspiration. I took a room, and she came. She came one day in November; I should have liked to put off her visit because I had no fire, and I had no fire because the chimney smoked. The very evening before I had spoken to my landlord, a retired shopkeeper, about it, and he had promised that he would come himself with the chimney-expert in a day or two to see what could be done.

“As soon as she came in, I said:

“ ‘There is no fire because my chimney smokes.’

“She did not even appear to hear me, but stammered: ‘That does not matter, I have plenty of fire’; and when I looked surprised, she stopped short in confusion, and went on: ‘I don’t know what I am saying; I am mad. I have lost my head. Oh! what am I doing? Why did I come? How unhappy I am! What a disgrace, what a disgrace!’ And she threw herself sobbing into my arms.

“I thought that she really felt remorse, and swore that I would respect her. Then, however, she sank down at my knees, sighing: ‘But don’t you see that I love you, that you have overcome me, that it seems as though you had thrown a charm over me?’

“Then I thought it was about time to show myself a man. But she trembled, got up, ran, and hid behind a wardrobe, crying out: ‘Oh! don’t look at me; no! no! If only you did not see me, if we were only in the dark! I am ashamed in the light. Cannot you imagine it? What a dreadful dream! Oh! this light, this light!’

“I rushed to the window; I closed the outside shutters, drew the curtains, and hung a coat over a ray of light that peeped in, and then, stretching out my hands so as not to fall over the chairs, with my heart beating, I groped for her, and found her.

“This was a fresh journey for the two of us then, feeling our way, with our hands united, toward the other corner where the alcove was. I don’t suppose we went straight, for first of all I knocked against the mantelpiece and then against a chest of drawers, before finding what we wanted. Then I forgot everything in a frantic ecstasy. It was an hour of folly, madness, superhuman joy, followed by a delicious lassitude, in which we slept in each other’s arms.

“I was half dreaming; but in my dream I fancied that someone was calling me and crying for help; then I received a violent blow, and opened my eyes.

“ ‘Oh‑h!’ The setting sun, magnificent and red, shone full into the room through the door, which was wide open. It seemed to look at us from the verge of the horizon, illuminating us both, especially my companion, who was screaming, struggling, and twisting, and trying with hands and feet to get hold of a corner of a sheet, a curtain or anything else, while in the middle of the room stood my landlord in a morning coat with the concierge by his side, and a chimney-sweep, as black as the devil, who were looking at us with stupid eyes.

“I sprang up in a rage, ready to jump at his throat, and shouted:

“ ‘What the deuce are you doing in my room?’

“The chimney-sweep laughed so that he let his brush fall on to the floor. The concierge seemed to have gone mad, and the landlord stammered:

“ ‘But, Monsieur, it was⁠—it was⁠—about the chimney⁠—the chimney, the chimney which⁠—’

“ ‘Go to the devil!’ I roared. So he took off his hat, which he had kept on in his confusion, and said, in a confused but very civil manner:

“ ‘I beg your pardon, Monsieur; if I had known, I should not have disturbed you; I should not have come. The concierge told me you had gone out. Pray excuse me.’ And they all went out.

“Ever since that time I never draw the curtains, but I am always very careful to lock the door first.”

A Normandy Joke

The procession came in sight in the hollow road shaded by the tall trees which grew on the slopes of the farm. The newly-married couple came first, then the relations, then the guests, and lastly the poor of the neighbourhood, while the village urchins who hovered about like flies, ran in and out of the ranks, or climbed up the trees to see it better.

The bridegroom was a fine young lad, Jean Patu, the richest farmer in the neighbourhood. Above all things, he was an ardent sportsman who seemed to lose all common sense in order to satisfy that passion, who spent large sums on his dogs, his keepers, his ferrets, and his guns. The bride, Rosalie Roussel, had been courted by all the likely young fellows in the district, as they all thought her prepossessing, and they knew that she would have a good dowry, but she had chosen Patu⁠—partly, perhaps, because she liked him better than she did the others, but still more, like a careful Normandy girl, because he had more crown pieces.

When they went in at the wide gateway of the husband’s farm, forty shots resounded without anyone seeing those who fired. The shooters were hidden in the ditches, and the noise seemed to please the men very much, who were sprawling about heavily in their best clothes. Patu left his wife, and running up to a farm servant whom he perceived behind a tree, he seized his gun, and fired a shot himself, kicking his heels about like a colt. Then they went on, beneath the apple trees heavy with fruit, through the high grass and through the herd of calves, who looked at them with their great eyes, got up slowly and remained standing with their muzzles turned toward the wedding party.

The men became serious when they came within measurable distance of the wedding-dinner. Some of them, the rich ones, had on tall, shining silk hats, which seemed altogether out of place there; others had old head-coverings with a long nap, which might have been taken for moleskin, while the humbler among them wore caps. All the women had on shawls, which they wore as loose wraps, holding the ends daintily under their arms. They were red, parti-coloured, flaming shawls, and their brightness seemed to astonish the black fowls on the dungheap, the ducks on the side of the pond, and the pigeons on the thatched roofs. All the green of the countryside, of the grass and the trees, seemed to be accentuated by these flaming colours, and the contrast between them was dazzling in the midday sun.

The extensive farm-buildings seemed to await the party at the end of that archway of apple trees, and a sort of vapour came out of open door and windows, an almost overwhelming smell of eatables, which permeated the vast building, issuing from its openings and even from its very walls. Like a serpent the string of guests extended through the yard; when the foremost of them reached the house, they broke the chain and dispersed, while behind they were still coming in at the open gate. The ditches were now lined with urchins and poor people filled with curiosity. The shots did not cease, but came from every side at once, injecting a cloud of smoke, and that powdery smell which has the same intoxicating effects as absinthe, into the atmosphere.

The women were shaking their dresses outside the door to get rid of the dust, were undoing their cap strings and folding their shawls over their arms. Then they went into the house to lay them aside altogether. The table was laid in the great kitchen, which could hold a hundred people; they sat down to dinner at two o’clock and at eight o’clock they were still eating; the men, in their shirt sleeves, with their waistcoats unbuttoned, and with red faces, were swallowing the food and drink as if they were insatiable. The yellow cider sparkled merrily, clear and golden in the large glasses, by the side of the dark, blood-coloured wine, and between every dish they made the trou, the Normandy trou, with a glass of brandy which inflamed the body, and put foolish notions into the head.

From time to time, one of the guests, being as full as a barrel, would go out to the nearest trees and relieve himself, and then return with redoubled appetite. The farmers’ wives, with scarlet faces and their corsets nearly bursting, did not like to follow their example, until one of them, feeling more uncomfortable than the others, went out. Then all the rest followed her example, and came back more cheerful, and the rough jokes began afresh. Broadsides of doubtful jokes were exchanged across the table, all about the wedding-night, until the whole arsenal of peasant wit was exhausted. For the last hundred years, the same broad jokes had served for similar occasions, and although everyone knew them, they still hit the mark, and made both rows of guests roar with laughter. An old grey-haired man shouted. “Those who are going to Mézidon get on here,” and everyone yelled with laughter.

At the bottom of the table four young fellows, who were neighbours, were preparing some practical jokes for the newly-married couple, and they seemed to have got hold of a good one, by the way they whispered and laughed. Suddenly, one of them taking advantage of a momentary silence, exclaimed: “The poachers will have a good time tonight with this moon! I say, Jean, you will not be looking at the moon, will you?” The bridegroom turned to him quickly and replied: “Only let them come, that’s all!” But the other young fellow began to laugh, and said: “I do not think you will neglect your duty for them!”

The whole table was convulsed with laughter, so that the glasses shook, but the bridegroom became furious at the thought that anybody should profit by his wedding to come and poach on his land, and repeated: “I only say: just let them come!”

Then there was a flood of talk with a double meaning which made the bride blush somewhat, although she was trembling with expectation, and when they had emptied the kegs of brandy they all went to bed. The young couple went into their own room, which was on the ground floor, as most rooms in farmhouses are. As it was very warm, they opened the window and closed the shutters. A small lamp in bad taste, a present from the bride’s father, was burning on the chest of drawers, and the bed stood ready to receive the young people, who did not stand upon all the ceremony which is usual among refined people.

The young woman had already taken off her wreath and her dress, and was in her petticoat, unlacing her boots, while Jean was finishing his cigar, and looking at her out of the corners of his eyes. It was an ardent look, more sensual than tender, for he felt more desire than love for her. Suddenly with a brusque movement, like a man who is going to set to work, he took off his coat. She had already taken off her boots, and was now pulling off her stockings; then she said to him: “Go and hide yourself behind the curtains while I get into bed.”

He seemed as if he were going to refuse, but with a cunning look went and hid himself with the exception of his head. She laughed and tried to cover up his eyes, and they romped in an amorous and happy manner, without shame or embarrassment. At last he did as she asked him, and in a moment she unfastened her petticoat which slipped down her legs, fell at her feet and lay on the floor in a circle. She left it there, stepped over it, naked with the exception of her floating chemise, and slipped into the bed, whose springs creaked beneath her weight. He immediately went up to her, without his shoes and in his trousers, and stooping over his wife sought her lips, which she hid beneath the pillow, when a shot was heard in the distance, in the direction of the forest of Râpées, as he thought.

He raised himself anxiously, and running to the window, with his heart beating, he opened the shutters. The full moon flooded the yard with yellow light, and the silhouettes of the apple trees made black shadows at his feet, while in the distance the fields gleamed, covered with the ripe corn. But as he was leaning out, listening to every sound in the still night, two bare arms were put round his neck, and his wife whispered, trying to pull him back: “Do leave them alone; it has nothing to do with you. Come to bed.”

He turned round, put his arms round her, and drew her toward him, feeling her warm skin through the thin material, and lifting her up in his vigorous arms, he carried her toward their couch, but just as he was laying her on the bed, which yielded beneath her weight, they heard another report, considerably nearer this time. Jean, giving way to his tumultuous rage, swore aloud: “God damn it! They think I shall not go out to see what it is, because of you! Let them wait, and see!” He put on his shoes again, took down his gun, which was always hanging within reach upon the wall, and, as his wife threw herself on her knees in her terror to implore him not to go, he hastily freed himself, ran to the window and jumped into the yard.

She waited one hour, two hours, until daybreak, but her husband did not return. Then she lost her head, aroused the house, related how angry Jean was, and said that he had gone after the poachers, and immediately all the male farm-servants, even the boys, went in search of their master. They found him two leagues from the farm, tied hand and foot, half dead with rage, his gun broken, his trousers turned inside out, three dead hares hanging round his neck, and a placard on his chest, with these words:

“Who goes on the chase, loses his place.”

And later on when he used to tell this story of his wedding-night, he generally added: “Ah! As far as a joke went, it was a good joke. They caught me in a snare, as if I had been a rabbit, the dirty brutes, and they shoved my head into a bag. But if I can only catch them some day, they had better look out for themselves!”

That is how they amuse themselves in Normandy, on a wedding day.

My Uncle Sosthène

My uncle Sosthène was a freethinker, like many others, a freethinker from sheer stupidity. People are very often religious for the same reason. The mere sight of a priest threw him into a violent rage; he would shake his fist and grimace at him, and touch a piece of iron when the priest’s back was turned, forgetting that the latter action showed a belief after all, the belief in the evil eye.

Now when beliefs are unreasonable, one should either have all or none at all. I myself am a freethinker; I revolt at all the dogmas which have invented the fear of death, but I feel no anger toward places of worship, be they Catholic Apostolic, Roman, Protestant, Greek, Russian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Mohammedan. I have a peculiar manner of looking at them and explaining them. A place of worship represents the homage paid by man to the unknown. The more extended our thoughts and our views become, the more the unknown diminishes, and the more places of worship will decay. I, however, instead of incense burners, would fit them up with telescopes, microscopes, and electrical machines; that is all.

My uncle and I differed on nearly every point. He was a patriot, while I was not⁠—for, after all, patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

My uncle was a Freemason, and I used to declare that they are stupider than the pious old ladies. That is my opinion, and I maintain it; if we must have any religion at all, the old one is good enough for me.

Those imbeciles simply imitate priests. Their symbol is a triangle instead of a cross. They have chapels which they call lodges, and a whole lot of different sects: the Scottish rite, the French rite, the Grand Orient, a collection of balderdash that would make a cat laugh.

What is their object? Mutual help to be obtained by tickling the palms of each other’s hands. I see no harm in it, for they put into practice the Christian precept: “Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you.” The only difference consists in the tickling, but it does not seem worth while to make such a fuss about lending a poor devil five francs.

Convents whose duty and business it is to administer alms and help, put the letters “J.M.J.” at the head of their communications. The Masons put three periods in a row after their signature. It is six of one and half a dozen of the other.

My uncle’s reply used to be:

“We are raising up a religion against a religion; Freethought will kill clericalism. Freemasonry is the headquarters of those who are demolishing all deities.”

“Very well, my dear uncle,” I would reply (in my heart I felt inclined to say, “You old idiot!”); “it is just that which I am blaming you for. Instead of destroying, you are organizing competition; it is only a case of lowering the prices. And then, if you only admitted freethinkers among you I could understand it, but you admit anybody. You have a number of Catholics among you, even the leaders of the party. Pius IX is said to have been one of you before he became Pope. If you call a society with such an organization a bulwark against clericalism, I think it is an extremely weak one.”

“My dear boy,” my uncle would reply, with a wink, “our most formidable actions are political; slowly and surely we are everywhere undermining the monarchical spirit.”

Then I broke out: “Yes, you are very clever! If you tell me that freemasonry is an election-machine, I will grant it. I will never deny that it is used as a machine to control candidates of all shades; if you say that it is only used to hoodwink people, to drill them to go to the voting-urn as soldiers are sent under fire, I agree with you; if you declare that it is indispensable to all political ambitions because it changes all its members into electoral agents, I should say to you, ‘That is as clear as daylight.’ But when you tell me that it serves to undermine the monarchical spirit, I can only laugh in your face.

“Just consider that vast and democratic association which had Prince Napoleon for its Grand Master under the Empire; which has the Crown Prince for its Grand Master in Germany, the Czar’s brother in Russia, and to which the Prince of Wales and King Humbert and nearly all the royalists of the globe belong.”

“You are quite right,” my uncle said; “but all these persons are serving our projects without knowing it.”

“And vice versa, what?”

And I added, to myself, “pack of fools!”

It was, however, indeed a sight to see my uncle when he had a freemason to dinner.

On meeting they shook hands in a mysterious manner that was irresistibly funny; one could see that they were going through a series of secret mysterious pressures. When I wished to put my uncle in a rage, I had only to tell him that dogs also have a manner which savours very much of freemasonry, when they greet one another on meeting.

Then my uncle would take his friend into a corner to tell him something important, and at dinner they had a peculiar way of looking at each other, and of drinking to each other, in a manner as if to say: “We belong to it, don’t we?”

And to think that there are millions on the face of the globe who are amused at such monkey tricks! I would sooner be a Jesuit.

Now in our town there really was an old Jesuit who was my uncle’s pet aversion. Every time he met him, or if he only saw him at a distance, he used to say: “Dirty skunk!” And then, taking my arm, he would whisper to me:

“Look here, that fellow will play me a trick some day or other, I feel sure of it.”

My uncle spoke quite truly, and this was how it happened, through my fault moreover.

It was close on Holy Week, and my uncle made up his mind to give a dinner on Good Friday, a real dinner with chitterlings and saveloy sausage. I resisted as much as I could, and said:

“I shall eat meat on that day, but at home, quite by myself. Your manifesto, as you call it, is an idiotic idea. Why should you manifest? What does it matter to you if people do not eat any meat?”

But my uncle would not be persuaded. He asked three of his friends to dine with him at one of the best restaurants in the town, and as he was going to pay the bill, I had certainly, after all, no scruples about manifesting.

At four o’clock we took a conspicuous place in the Café Pénelope, the most frequented restaurant in the town, and my uncle in a loud voice described the menu.

We sat down at six o’clock, and at ten o’clock we had not finished. Five of us had drunk eighteen bottles of fine wines, and four of champagne. Then my uncle proposed what he was in the habit of calling: “The archbishop’s feat.” Each man put six small glasses in front of him, each of them filled with a different liqueur, and then they had all to be emptied at one gulp, one after another, while one of the waiters counted twenty. It was very stupid, but my uncle thought it was very suitable to the occasion.

At eleven o’clock he was as drunk as a fiddler, so we had to take him home in a cab and put him to bed, and one could easily foresee that his anticlerical demonstration would end in a terrible fit of indigestion.

As I was going back to my lodgings, being rather drunk myself, with a cheerful Machiavelian drunkenness which quite satisfied all my sceptical instincts, an idea struck me.

I arranged my necktie, put on a look of great distress, and went and rang loudly at the old Jesuit’s door. As he was deaf he made me wait a longish while, but at length he appeared at his window in a cotton nightcap and asked what I wanted.

I shouted out at the top of my voice:

“Make haste, reverend father, and open the door; a poor, despairing, sick man is in need of your spiritual ministrations.”

The good, kind man put on his trousers as quickly as he could and came down without his cassock. I told him in a breathless voice that my uncle, the freethinker, had been taken suddenly ill. Fearing it was going to be something serious he had been seized with a sudden fear of death, and wished to see a priest and talk to him; to have his advice and comfort, to make up with the Church, and to confess, so as to be able to cross the dreaded threshold at peace with himself; and I added in a mocking tone:

“At any rate, he wishes it, and if it does him no good it can do him no harm.”

The old Jesuit, who was startled, delighted, and almost trembling, said to me:

“Wait a moment, my son, I will come with you.”

But I replied: “Pardon me, Father, if I do not go with you; but my convictions will not allow me to do so. I even refused to come and fetch you, so I beg you not to say that you have seen me, but to declare that you had a presentiment⁠—a sort of revelation of his illness.”

The priest consented, and went off quickly, knocked at my uncle’s door, was soon let in, and I saw the black cassock disappear within that stronghold of Freethought.

I hid under a neighbouring gateway to wait for events. Had he been well, my uncle would have half murdered the Jesuit, but I knew that he would be unable to move an arm, and I asked myself, gleefully, what sort of a scene would take place between these antagonists⁠—what fight, what explanation would be given, and what would be the issue of this situation, which my uncle’s indignation would render more tragic still?

I laughed till I had to hold my sides, and said to myself, half aloud: “Oh! what a joke, what a joke!”

Meanwhile it was getting very cold. I noticed that the Jesuit stayed a long time, and thought: “They are having an explanation, I suppose.”

One, two, three hours passed, and still the reverend Father did not come out. What had happened? Had my uncle died in a fit when he saw him, or had he killed the cassocked gentleman? Perhaps they had mutually devoured each other? This last supposition appeared very unlikely, for I fancied that my uncle was quite incapable of swallowing a grain more nourishment at that moment.

At last the day dawned. I was very uneasy, and not venturing to go into the house myself, I went to one of my friends who lived opposite. I roused him, explained matters to him, much to his amusement and astonishment, and took possession of his window.

At nine o’clock he relieved me and I got a little sleep. At two o’clock I, in my turn, replaced him. We were utterly astonished.

At six o’clock the Jesuit left, with a very happy and satisfied look on his face, and we saw him go away with a quiet step.

Then, timid and ashamed, I went and knocked at my uncle’s door. When the servant opened it I did not dare to ask her any questions, but went upstairs without saying a word.

My uncle was lying pale, exhausted, with weary, sorrowful eyes and heavy arms, on his bed. A little religious picture was fastened to one of the bed-curtains with a pin.

“Why, uncle,” I said, “you in bed still? Are you not well?”

He replied in a feeble voice:

“Oh! my dear boy, I have been very ill; nearly dead.”

“How was that, uncle?”

“I don’t know; it was most surprising. But what is stranger still, is that the Jesuit priest who has just left⁠—you know, that excellent man whom I have made such fun of⁠—had a divine revelation of my state, and came to see me.”

I was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh, and with difficulty said: “Oh, really!”

“Yes, he came. He heard a Voice telling him to get up and come to me, because I was going to die. It was a revelation.”

I pretended to sneeze, so as not to burst out laughing; I felt inclined to roll on the ground with amusement.

In about a minute I managed to say, indignantly: “And you received him, uncle, you? You, a freethinker, a freemason? You did not have him thrown out?”

He seemed confused, and stammered:

“Listen a moment, it is so astonishing⁠—so astonishing and providential! He also spoke to me about my father; he knew him formerly.”

“Your father, uncle? But that is no reason for receiving a Jesuit.”

“I know that, but I was very ill, and he looked after me most devotedly all night long. He was perfect; no doubt he saved my life; those men are all more or less doctors.”

“Oh! he looked after you all night? But you said just now that he had only been gone a very short time.”

“That is quite true; I kept him to breakfast after all his kindness. He had it at a table by my bedside while I drank a cup of tea.”

“And he ate meat?”

My uncle looked vexed, as if I had said something very much out of place, and then added:

“Don’t joke, Gaston; such things are out of place at times. He has shown me more devotion than many a relation would have done and I expect you to respect his convictions.”

This rather upset me, but I answered, nevertheless: “Very well, uncle; and what did you do after breakfast?”

“We played a game of bezique, and then he repeated his breviary while I read a little book which he happened to have in his pocket, and which was not by any means badly written.”

“A religious book, uncle?”

“Yes, and no, or rather⁠—no. It is the history of their missions in Central Africa, and is rather a book of travels and adventures. What these men have done is very good.”

I began to feel that matters were going badly, so I got up. “Well, goodbye, uncle,” I said, “I see you are going to leave freemasonry for religion; you are a renegade.”

He was still rather confused, and stammered:

“Well, but religion is a sort of freemasonry.”

“When is your Jesuit coming back?” I asked.

“I don’t⁠—I don’t know exactly; tomorrow, perhaps; but it is not certain.”

I went out, altogether overwhelmed.

My joke turned out very badly for me! My uncle became radically converted, and if that had been all I should not have cared so much. Clerical or freemason, to me it is all the same; six of one and half a dozen of the other; but the worst of it is that he has just made his will⁠—yes, made his will⁠—and has disinherited me in favor of that holy Jesuit!

A Reckless Passion

The calm, glittering sea was scarcely stirred by the current of the tide. From the pier all Havre was watching the ships come in⁠—visible as they were from a great distance; some⁠—the big steamers⁠—wreathed in smoke, others⁠—the sailing-vessels⁠—tugged along by almost invisible steamboats, raising their bare masts, like stripped trees, to the sky. These monsters hurried from every quarter of the globe to the narrow entrance of the dock that swallowed them up; and they whistled, they groaned, they shrieked, while they spat up jets of steam like someone gasping for breath.

Two young officers were walking on the crowded mole, bowing and being bowed to, with an occasional stop for a chat. Suddenly the taller of the two, Paul d’Henricel, pressed the arm of his friend, Jean Renoldi, and whispered: “Why, here’s Madame Poinçot, take a good look at her, I’ll swear she’s making eyes at you.”

She was walking arm-in-arm with her husband, a rich shipowner. She was about forty, still beautiful, rather stout, but thanks to this fact she had retained the freshness of youth. Among her friends she was known as the Goddess on account of her proud carriage, big black eyes, and her aristocratic manner. No suspicion of anything wrong had ever smirched her life; she was still without reproach. She was quoted as an example of the simple, honourable woman, so upright that no man had dared to covet her. And now for the past month Paul d’Henricel kept on repeating to his friend Renoldi that Madame Poinçot looked upon him with tenderness. “I know I am not mistaken,” he would say. “I see quite clearly, she loves you, loves you passionately, after the fashion of a chaste woman who has never been in love. Forty is a terrible age for virtuous women when their senses are developed; they simply go mad and do mad things. This woman is moved, old man; she is dropping like a wounded bird and will drop into your arms. Just look at her!”

The tall woman, preceded by her two daughters aged twelve and fifteen, was coming towards them and turned suddenly pale when she noticed the officer. She gazed at him longingly, intently, she had eyes for no one around her, neither her children, her husband, nor the crowd. She returned the greeting of the two young men without lowering a glance so charged with passion that some suspicions did at last enter and tenant Renoldi’s mind. D’Henricel murmured: “I was sure of it. Did you notice this time? By gad, she’s a fine woman!”

But Jean Renoldi had no wish for a society intrigue. Caring little for love, he wanted more than anything else a quiet life and was quite content with the occasional amours which fall to the lot of every young man. He was bored by the sentimentality, the attentions, the tenderness exacted by a well-bred woman. He was afraid of the chain, however light, he would have to drag as a result of an adventure of this kind. He said:

“I shall be sick to death of it at the end of four weeks, and politeness will oblige me to wait patiently for six months.” Then again the thought of a rupture filled him with exasperation, with its scenes, its allusions, and the frenzied clinging of the woman who is being abandoned.

He avoided meeting Madame Poinçot.

But one evening he found himself seated beside her at a dinner-party and felt her passionate glance fixed on him the whole time; their hands met and, almost involuntarily, closed over each other. That was already the beginning of a love affair.

He met her again, always in spite of himself. He knew she loved him, and felt a softening towards her, moved by a kind of pitying vanity at the sight of the woman’s intense passion. So he allowed himself to be adored and was merely attentive, hoping that the matter would go no further.

Then she made an appointment with him, to meet and talk without outside interference, so she explained, and fell fainting into his arms. He had no alternative but to become her lover.

This lasted six months. She loved him with an unbridled, reckless love, forgetting everything in the clutches of her frenzied passion. She had given herself up entirely. Body, soul, reputation, position and happiness had all been cast into the red-hot fire of her love as one casts all one’s precious possessions on the altar of sacrifice.

He had had enough of it for some time and keenly regretted his easy conquest, but he was bound and held prisoner. She was always saying: “I have given you everything; what more do you want?” He would have liked to answer: “But I never asked for anything, if only you would take back what you have given me!” Quite indifferent as to whether anyone saw her, whether she was compromised, or her reputation ruined, she would come to see him every evening, growing more and more ardent as time went on. She would throw herself into his arms, press him to her bosom, swoon under feverish kisses which bored him horribly. He would say languidly: “Come, come, be sensible.” She would reply: “I love you!” and fall upon her knees and gaze at him in an attitude of devotion. This invariably ended by exasperating him, but when he tried to make her get up, saying: “Come, sit down. Let us have a chat,” she muttered: “No, leave me alone,” and remained on her knees in a state of ecstasy.

He said to his friend d’Henricel: “You know, I could beat her. I have had enough of it, enough of it. It must end; and that at once!” adding: “What do you advise me to do?” The friend replied: “Break it off.” Renoldi added with a shrug of the shoulders: “It’s easy enough to say that; you think it’s easy to break with a woman who persecutes you with her tenderness, whose only care is to please you, and whose only fault is to have given herself unasked?”

Then one morning they heard that the regiment was to change garrison, and Renoldi danced for joy. He was saved, saved without scenes, without tears! Saved!⁠—The only thing now required was two months’ patience!⁠—Saved!

In the evening she came to him more excited than ever. She had heard the dreadful news, and, without taking her hat off, she caught hold of his hands, pressing them nervously, her eyes fixed on his, her voice shaking but determined: “You are leaving; I know it,” she said; “I bring you the greatest proof of love that a woman can give; I am going to follow you. For you I am leaving my husband, my children, my family. It will be my ruin but I am happy; it seems as if I were giving myself to you over again. It is the last, the greatest sacrifice; I am yours forever!”

He broke out in a cold perspiration and was filled with a dull, furious rage⁠—the anger of weakness. Nevertheless he calmed down, and with a detached air and gentle voice refused her sacrifice, trying to pacify her, to reason with her, to make her see her folly: she listened silently, looking him straight in the face with her dark eyes, a smile of disdain on her lips. When he stopped, all she said was:

“Can you be a coward? Can you be the kind of man who seduces a woman and then deserts her for the first caprice?”

He paled and tried to reason with her again; he pointed out the inevitable consequences of such an action to both of them as long as they lived: how their lives would be ruined; how all doors would be closed to them. She only replied obstinately: “What does it matter when we love each other?”

Suddenly, he burst out: “Well, then, no! I won’t have it. Do you hear? I won’t, I forbid you to follow me,” and, carried away by his long-repressed grievances, he relieved his mind by saying: “Hang it all, you have loved me long enough, entirely against my wishes; it would be the last straw to take you with me. Thank you for nothing!”

She did not say a word, but her ghastly white face looked drawn and haggard as if every nerve had been twisted out of shape, and she left the house without saying goodbye.

That night she poisoned herself and for a week her life was despaired of. In the town, people gossiped: they pitied her, excusing her lapse because of the strength of her passion; for feelings that are heroic through their intensity always obtain forgiveness for the sin that is in them. A woman who kills herself is, so to speak, no longer an adulteress, and soon there was general disapproval of Lieutenant Renoldi’s behaviour in refusing to see her again⁠—a unanimous feeling that he was to blame.

People said he had deserted her, betrayed her and beaten her. The Colonel, full of pity, discreetly took his officer to task, and Paul d’Henricel called his friend and said: “Damn it all, old man, one can’t let a woman die; it’s a dirty trick!” Renoldi in a rage told his friend to shut up, and, d’Henricel having made use of the word “infamy,” a duel was fought in which Renoldi was wounded to everybody’s satisfaction, and confined to his bed for some time.

She heard about it and only loved him the more, believing he had fought the duel on her account, but as she was too ill to leave her room she did not see him before the regiment left.

When he had been in Lille about three months Madame Poinçot’s sister called upon him. After long suffering and an unconquerable feeling of despair, the end was near and she wished to see him for one minute, only one minute, before closing her eyes forever.

Absence and time had softened the young man’s anger; he was touched, moved to tears, and started at once for Havre. She seemed to be sinking fast. They were left alone together, and by the bedside of the dying woman for whose death he was responsible, he broke down completely. He sobbed, kissed her with gentle passionate kisses, such as he had never given her before, and stammered: “No, you shan’t die, you’ll get better, we’ll love each other⁠—we’ll love each other forever!”

“Is it true? You do love me?” she murmured, and he, in his grief, swore, promised to wait until she was better, and, full of pity, kissed the shrunken hands of the poor woman, whose heartbeat was ominous.

The following day he returned to the garrison, and six weeks later she joined him, terribly aged, unrecognisable, and more enamoured than ever.

With a feeling of desperation he took her back, and because they were living together like a legally married couple the very colonel who had been indignant when Renoldi had deserted the woman, was now scandalised at the irregularity of the situation as being incompatible with the good example that officers owe to their regiment. First he gave his junior a warning, and then he put on the screw, and Renoldi resigned.

They went to live on the shore of the Mediterranean, the classic sea of lovers.

Another three years passed by and Renoldi, now broken in, was a complete slave to the persistent tenderness of the white-haired woman. He looked upon himself as done for, gone under. For him there could be no hope, no ambition, no satisfaction, no pleasure in life.

Then, one morning, a card was brought in with the name, “Joseph Poinçot. Shipowner, Havre.” The husband! The husband who had said nothing, who realised that you cannot struggle against a woman’s desperate infatuation. What could he want?

Poinçot waited in the garden, since he would not go into the house. He bowed politely but refused to sit down, even on a bench in the avenue, and began slowly and clearly: “Monsieur, I have not come to reproach you, I know too well how it all happened. I have been the victim⁠—we have been the victims⁠—of a kind of⁠—of fatality. I would never have disturbed you in your retreat had there not been a change in the situation. I have two daughters. One of them, the elder, loves a young man who loves her. But the young man’s family object to the marriage on account of the irregular position of my daughter’s mother. I feel neither anger nor malice, but I adore my children. I have, therefore, come to ask you for my wife; I hope that she will now agree to come back to my home⁠—to her home. For my part, I will pretend to forget everything for⁠—for the sake of my daughters.”

Renoldi felt his heart give a wild leap: he was beside himself with joy, like a condemned man who is granted a reprieve. He stammered: “Why, yes⁠—certainly, Monsieur⁠—I myself⁠—believe me⁠—no doubt⁠—it is right, only too right!” He wanted to take hold of the man’s hands, hug him in his arms, kiss him on both cheeks. He continued: “Do come in. You will be more comfortable in the drawing room. I’ll go and fetch her.”

This time Monsieur Poinçot accepted the invitation. Renoldi rushed up the stairs; then, pausing before his mistress’s door, he calmed down and, looking very solemn, said: “You are wanted downstairs: it is something about your daughter.” She pulled herself up: “My daughters? What? What is it? They are not dead?” He replied: “No. But there is some complication which you alone can clear up.” She did not wait for more but went quickly downstairs.

Then, very excited, he sank back into a chair and waited.

He waited a long, long time, and as angry voices reached him from downstairs he decided to go down.

Very indignant, Madame Poinçot was standing up, ready to leave the room, while her husband was holding her by her dress, explaining: “But can’t you understand you are bringing ruin on your daughters, your daughters, our children!” She replied stubbornly: “I will not go back to your house.”

Renoldi realised what had happened and went in, his hopes dashed, and gasped: “What? She refuses?”

She turned towards him⁠—shamefacedly refraining from using the familiar “thou” in the presence of her legitimate spouse⁠—and said: “Do you know what he is asking me to do? He wants me to go back and live with him!” She sneered contemptuously at the man almost on his knees before her.

Then Renoldi, with the determination of a gambler playing his last stake, began to talk to her, pleading for them all in turn. And when he paused in the effort to find some fresh argument, Monsieur Poinçot, at his wit’s end, murmured⁠—instinctively speaking as he had spoken to her in the past: “Come, come, Delphine, think of your daughters!”

She swept them both into a glance of sovereign contempt and, making her escape, shouted: “You are a pair of wretches.”

Left alone, they gazed at each other, both equally crestfallen, equally stricken. Monsieur Poinçot picked up his hat, which had fallen on the floor, flicked the dust off his knees with his hand, then, while Renoldi was showing him to the door, with a gesture of despair he exclaimed, bowing:

“We are both very unhappy indeed, Monsieur.”

Then he left the house with a slow, heavy step.

Mad?

Am I mad or jealous? I know not which, but I suffer horribly. I committed a crime, it is true, a mad crime, but are not insane jealousy, passionate love, betrayed and lost, and the terrible pain I endure, enough to make anyone commit a crime, without actually being a criminal?

Oh! I have suffered, suffered continually, acutely, terribly. I have loved this woman to madness⁠—and yet, is it true? Did I love her? No, no! She owned me body and soul, I was, and am, her plaything, she ruled me by her smile, her look, the divine form of her body. I fight against the domination of her physical appearance, but the woman contained in that body, I despise, hate and execrate. I always have hated, despised and execrated her, for she is but an impure, perfidious, bestial, filthy creature, the woman of perdition, the treacherous sensual animal, in whom there is no soul; she is the human animal, even less than that, she is but a mass of soft flesh in which dwells infamy!

The first few months of our union were deliciously strange. In her arms I was exhausted by the frenzy of insatiable desire. Her eyes drew my lips as though they could quench my thirst. They were gray at noon, shaded green at twilight, and blue at sunrise. I am not mad. I swear they were of these three colours. In moments of love they were blue as though they had been bruised; the pupils dilated and nervous. Her lips trembled and often the tip of her pink moist tongue could be seen, quivering like that of a snake. Her heavy eyelids would be slowly raised, revealing that ardent, languorous look which used to madden me. When I took her in my arms I used to gaze into her eyes, trembling, seized not only with an unceasing desire to possess her, but also to kill this beast.

When she walked across the room each step resounded in my heart, and when she began to undress, her dress falling from her, and emerged infamous but radiant from the white mass of linen and lace, I felt in all my limbs, in my legs and arms, in my panting chest, an infinite and cowardly weakness.

One day I saw that she was tired of me. I saw it in her eyes on waking. Leaning over her I awaited this first look of hers every morning. I awaited it, filled with hatred, rage, and contempt for this sleeping brute whose slave I was. But when she fixed those pale, limpid blue eyes upon me, that languishing glance, tired with the lassitude of recent caresses, a rapid fire consumed me, exasperating my desires.

When she opened her eyes that day I saw a dull, indifferent look; a look devoid of desire, and I knew then she was tired of me. I saw it, knew it, felt it, and understood immediately that all was over, and each hour and minute proved to me that I was right. When I beckoned her with my arms and lips she shrank from me.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “You are horrid! Will you never leave me alone?”

Then I became jealous, slyly, suspiciously, secretly jealous, like a dog. I knew she would soon be aroused again, that another man would excite her passions. I was insanely jealous; but I am not insane, no indeed! I watched her and waited; not that she had betrayed me, but she was cold and indifferent.

At times she would say:

“Men disgust me!” Alas! it was too true.

Then I became jealous of her own existence, of her indifference, of her nights alone, of her actions, of her thoughts, which I knew to be impure, jealous of all that my imagination suspected; and when she awakened sometimes with that same look of lassitude which used to follow our ardent nights, as though some desire had haunted her mind and stirred her passions, I suffocated with anger, and an irresistible desire to choke her, to break her with my knee, to seize her by the throat, and make her confess the shameful secrets of her heart took hold of me.

Am I insane? No.

One night I saw that she was happy. I felt, in fact I was convinced, that a new passion ruled her. She was trembling as she used to do after my caresses, her eyes shone, she was feverish and her whole being gave out that odour of desire which used to drive me mad.

I feigned ignorance, but I watched her closely. I discovered nothing, however. I waited a week, a month, almost a year. She expanded in the joy of an inexplicable ardour, and was soothed by the happiness of some elusive caress.

At last I guessed. No, I am not insane, I swear I am not. How can I explain this inconceivable, horrible thing? How can I make myself understood? This is how I guessed.

She came in one night from a long ride on horseback and sank exhausted in a seat facing me. An unnatural flush tinted her cheeks, her breast was heaving, her legs trembling, and her eyes were swollen. I was not mistaken, I had seen her look like that; she loved! I almost lost my head, and so as not to look at her I turned to the window. A valet was leading her horse to the stable and she stood and watched the prancing, fiery animal disappear; then she fell asleep almost immediately. I thought and thought all night. My mind wandered through mysteries too deep to conceive. Who can fathom the perversity and strange caprices of a sensual woman? Who can understand their incredible caprices and strange satisfactions of the strangest fancies?

Every morning at dawn she set out at a gallop across the fields and through the woods and dales, and each time she came back languid; as though exhausted by love. At last I understood. It was of the horse I was jealous⁠—of the wind which caressed her face, of the drooping leaves and of the sunbeams which touched her forehead through the branches, of the saddle which carried her and felt the clasp of her thighs! It was all those things which made her so happy and brought her back to me satiated; exhausted! I resolved to be revenged. I became very attentive. Every time she came back from her ride I helped her down and the horse made a vicious rush at me. She would pat him on the neck, kiss his quivering nostrils, without even wiping her lips, and the perfume of her body, warmed as though she had been in bed, mingled in my nostrils with the strong animal smell of the horse.

I waited for chance. She used to take the same path every morning, through a little birch wood, which finally lost itself in the forest. I got up before dawn, took a rope in my hands, and hid my pistols in my breast, as if I were going to fight a duel. I ran to the path she loved so well, I drew the rope across, tied it to two trees, and then hid in the grass.

With my ear to the ground I heard her galloping in the distance, then under the trees like an arch I saw her coming at a furious pace; her cheeks flushed, an insane look in her eyes. She seemed enraptured; transported into another sphere. I was not mistaken! The rapid ride gave her senses a thrill of solitary pleasure.

The animal struck the rope with his forefeet and fell. I caught her in my arms, for I am strong enough to lift an ox, and then I approached the horse, who was watching us, and while he again tried to bite me, I put my pistol close to his ear, and shot him as I would a man.

She turned on me and dealt me two terrific blows across the face with her riding-whip which felled me, and as she rushed at me again, I shot her!

Tell me, Am I insane?

Correspondence

Madame de X to Madame de Z

Étretat, Friday.

My Dear Aunt,

I am slowly making my way down to you. I shall be at Fresnes on the 2nd of September, in time for the opening of the hunting season, which I am anxious not to miss, because I want to tease the menfolk. You are too indulgent, my dear Aunt, when you are alone with them, in allowing them to appear at dinner, on the plea of fatigue, without changing their clothes or shaving after they return.

So they are delighted when I am not there, but I shall be there, and I shall review them at dinnertime like a general; and if I find any one of them a little untidy, however little it is, I will send him to the kitchen to the servants.

Men today have so little consideration and breeding that one must be strict. We are indeed passing through a period of vulgarity. When they quarrel amongst themselves they abuse each other like pickpockets, and even in our presence they behave much worse than the servants. It is especially noticeable at the seaside. The men are there in large numbers, and one can judge them en masse. Oh! How coarse they are! Just think⁠—in a railway carriage, one of them, a gentleman who at first glance seemed all right⁠—thanks to his tailor⁠—had the exquisite taste to take off his boots and put on a pair of down-at-heel felt slippers. Another, an old man, who must have been one of the New Rich (for these have the worst manners), seated opposite to me, carefully placed both his feet on the seat just beside me. Everybody does it.

At the watering-places, vulgarity runs riot. I should add that perhaps my revulsion arises from the fact that I am not used to mixing with the class of people that one meets there; their ways would not shock me so much if I came across them more often.

In the hotel office I was almost knocked over by a young man who reached over my head for his key. Another, coming out from a ball at the Casino, ran against me with such violence, without apologising or raising his hat, that the blow gave me a pain in the chest. They are all like that. See how they greet women on the terrace; they hardly acknowledge them at all. They simply raise their hands to their hats. However, as they are all bald, it is better so.

But one thing which exasperates and offends me more than anything else is the freedom with which they discuss in public the most revolting intrigues, without any kind of precaution. When two men get together, they tell each other the most dreadful stories as coarsely and disgustingly as possible, without troubling in the least to see whether a woman is within earshot. Yesterday on the beach I was compelled to change my place to avoid hearing any more of a smutty anecdote, told in words so brutal that I felt humiliated, as well as indignant at having heard what I did. Should not the most elementary good taste lead them to speak in whispers of these things when near us?

Étretat is, moreover, a hotbed of scandal, and therefore the home of gossips. From five until seven o’clock you can see them wandering in search of titbits of scandal, which they retail from one group to another. As you told me, dear Aunt, tittle-tattle is the hallmark of mean people and petty minds. It is also the consolation of women who are neither loved nor courted. I have only to look to those who are recognised as the worst gossips to be convinced that you were quite right.

The other day I went to a musical evening at the Casino, given by a remarkable artiste, Madame Masson, whose singing is a delight. It gave me the opportunity of applauding the admirable Coquelin and two charming pensioners from the Vaudeville theatre, Monsieur and Madame Meillet. In these circumstances I was able to see all the bathers gathered together on the beach this year. Few of them have any distinction.

The following day I went to Yport to lunch. I noticed a bearded man coming out of a big house like a fortress. It was the painter Jean Paul Laurens. Apparently not satisfied with putting a wall round the figures he paints, he must wall himself in too.

Later on I was sitting on the shingle beside a young man with a gentle, refined face, and quiet manners, who was reading poetry. But he was reading with so much concentration⁠—so much passion, may I say?⁠—that he never even once looked at me. I felt rather shocked and asked the head of the bathing-tents the man’s name, as if it were a matter of no importance. I smiled to myself at this reader of rhymes who seemed⁠—for a man⁠—somewhat behind the times. There’s someone quite unsophisticated, I thought. Well, Aunt, at present I dote on my unknown friend. Just imagine, his name is Sully Prudhomme. I went and sat beside him again to study him in comfort. His face in particular bears the stamp of refinement and tranquillity, and as someone came up to speak I heard his voice, which was gentle and rather timid. It is obvious that this man is not shouting vulgarisms in public, that he is not knocking against women without apologising. He must be a fastidious soul. This winter I will see if I can manage to have him introduced to me.

There is nothing more, my dear Aunt, so I conclude in haste as it is about post time. I kiss your hands and both your cheeks.

Madame de Z to Madame de X

Les Fresnes, Saturday.

My Dear Child,

You say many things that are true enough but that does not prevent you from being wrong. Like you, formerly, I felt very indignant that the impoliteness of men I esteemed showed a want of respect towards me, but with age and reflection, and having passed the period of coquetry, and formed the habit of observing others in a self-detached manner, I have remarked that if men are not always polite, women on the other hand are always unjustifiably bad-mannered.

We think that we may do anything and everything, and at the same time we feel that we have a right to everything, and with a light heart we indulge in all those lapses of elementary good breeding of which you speak so passionately.

On the contrary, I consider that men are full of consideration for women in comparison with the attitude of women towards men. Besides, my darling, men must be, and are, what we make them. In a society where all the women were really gentlewomen, all the men would become gentlemen.

Watch, observe and reflect.

Watch two women meeting in the street; what affectation! What an air of disparagement, what contemptuous glances! With what a boldness they eye each other from head to foot and sit in judgment! If the pavement is a narrow one, do you think either will give way, or apologise? Never. If two men run into each other in a narrow street, they both raise their hats and make way, whereas we women, we rush ahead full tilt and gaze at each other insolently. Watch two women who know each other meeting on the staircase leading to the door of a friend’s flat to which one is going and from which the other is coming. They begin to talk and block up the way. If there happens to be anyone behind them, man or woman, do you think they will put themselves out in the least? Never! Never!

Last winter I waited twenty-two minutes, watch in hand, at the door of a drawing room. Behind me two men were also waiting without showing any sign of impatience, as I did, because they had long been accustomed to our insolent ways.

The other day before leaving Paris I went to dine⁠—as it happens, with your husband⁠—at a restaurant in the Champs Élysées so as to be in the open air. The waiter begged us to wait awhile. I caught sight of an old lady of distinguished appearance who had paid her bill and seemed about to leave. She saw me, eyed me from head to foot, and did not budge. For over fifteen minutes she stayed there, putting on her gloves, glancing at all the tables, observing with detachment all those who were waiting, as I was. Then two young men, who had just finished, saw me, and, hurriedly calling the waiter for their bill, offered me their place at once. I refused to remain seated while they waited for their change⁠—and remember, my dear, that I am no longer pretty like you, but old and white-haired.

There is no doubt that we are the ones who should be taught politeness; the task would be so great that Hercules himself would not succeed.

You talk about Étretat and the people who gossip on that delightful beach. The place is done for for me, although in the past I have enjoyed myself there. There were just a few of us who were on friendly terms, men and women in society⁠—the real thing⁠—and writers, artists and musicians. Nobody tittle-tattled in those days.

As there was no insipid Casino then where people pose, talk scandal under their breath, dance idiotically, and bore themselves to death, we tried to find some way of spending the evenings cheerfully. Well, guess what one of the husbands of the party thought of? To go and dance at one of the neighbouring farms every evening.

We all went off in a band with a hand-organ which the painter Le Poittevin, wearing a cotton nightcap, generally played. Two men carried lanterns and we followed in procession, laughing and chatting like madcaps.

We woke up the farmer, the servants and the men. We even had onion soup (horror!) made for us, we danced under the apple trees to the strains of the “Music-box.” The awakened cocks crowed in the distant outbuildings; the horses moved about in the stables, the fresh country breeze caressed our faces, full of the scent of herbs and grasses and of newly-mown crops.

How long ago all that happened! How long ago! Thirty years ago! I do not want you to come for the opening of the shooting season. Why spoil the pleasure of our friends by insisting on town dress on such an occasion, a day of real country pleasure and violent exercise? That is the way all men are spoilt, my dear.

I embrace you.

A Widow

It was during the hunting season, at the de Banville country seat. The autumn was rainy and dull. The red leaves, instead of crackling under foot, rotted in the hollows beneath the heavy showers.

The almost leafless forest was as humid as a bathroom. When you entered it beneath the huge trees shaken by the winds, a mouldy odour, a vapour from fallen rain, soaking grass and damp earth, enveloped you. And the hunters, bending beneath this continuous downpour, the dogs with their tails hanging and their coats matted, and the young huntswomen in their close-fitting habits drenched with rain, returned each evening depressed in body and spirit.

In the great drawing room, after dinner, they played lotto, but without enthusiasm, while the wind shook the shutters violently, and turned the old weathervanes into spinning-tops. Someone suggested telling stories, in the way we read of in books; but no one could invent anything very amusing. The hunters narrated some of their adventures with the gun, the slaughter of rabbits, for example; and the ladies racked their brains without finding anywhere the imagination of Scheherazade.

They were about to abandon this form of diversion, when a young lady, carelessly playing with the hand of her old, unmarried aunt, noticed a little ring made of blond hair, which she had often seen before but thought nothing about.

Moving it gently about the finger she said, suddenly: “Tell us the story of this ring, Auntie; it looks like the hair of a child⁠—”

The old maid reddened and then grew pale, and in a trembling voice she replied: “It is sad, so sad that I never care to speak about it. All the unhappiness of my life is centred in it. I was young then, but the memory of it remains so painful that I weep whenever I think of it.”

They wished very much to hear the story, but the aunt refused to tell it; finally, they urged so much that she at length consented.

“You have often heard me speak of the Santèze family, now extinct. I knew the last three men of this family. They all died within three months in the same manner. This hair belonged to the last one. He was thirteen years old, when he killed himself for me. That appears very strange to you, doesn’t it?

“They were an extraordinary race, a race of fools, if you will, but of charming fools, of fools for love. All, from father to son, had these violent passions, waves of emotion which drove them to most exalted deeds, to fanatical devotion, and even to crime. It was to them what ardent devotion is to certain souls. Those who become monks are not of the same nature as drawing room favourites. Their relatives used to say: ‘as amorous as a Santèze.’

“To see them was to divine this characteristic. They all had curly hair, growing low upon the brow, curly beards and large eyes, very large, whose rays seemed to penetrate and disturb you, without your knowing just why.

“The grandfather of the one of whom this is the only souvenir, after many adventures, and some duels on account of entanglements with women, when about sixty-five fell passionately in love with the daughter of his farmer. I knew them both. She was blond, pale, distinguished looking, with a soft voice and a sweet look, so sweet that she reminded one of a madonna. The old lord took her home with him, and immediately became so captivated that he could not do without her for a minute. His daughter and his daughter-in-law, who lived in the house, found this perfectly natural, so much was love a tradition of the family. When one was moved by a great passion, nothing surprised them, and, if anyone spoke in their presence of thwarted desires, of disunited lovers, or revenge upon some treachery, they would both say, in the same sad tones: ‘Oh! how he (or she) must have suffered before coming to that!’ Nothing more. They were moved with pity by all dramas of the heart and never spoke slightingly of them, even when they were criminal.

“One autumn, a young man, M. de Gradelle, invited for the hunting, eloped with the young woman.

“M. de Santèze remained calm, as if nothing had happened. But one morning they found him hanging in the kennel in the midst of the dogs.

“His son died in the same fashion, in a hotel in Paris, while on a journey in 1841, after having been deceived by an opera singer.

“He left a child twelve years old, and a widow, the sister of my mother. She came with the little boy to live at my father’s house, on our Bertillon estate. I was then seventeen.

“You could not imagine what an astonishing, precocious child this little Santèze was. One would have said that all the power of tenderness, all the exaltation of his race had fallen upon this one, the last. He was always dreaming and walking alone in a great avenue of elms that led from the house to the woods. I often watched this sentimental youngster from my window, as he walked up and down with his hands behind his back, with bowed head, sometimes stopping to look up, as if he saw and comprehended things beyond his age and experience.

“Often after dinner, on clear nights, he would say to me: ‘Let us go and dream, Cousin.’ And we would go together into the park. He would stop abruptly in the clear spaces, where the white vapour floats, that soft cotton with which the moon decorates the clearings in the woods, and say to me, seizing my hand: ‘Look! Look there! But you do not understand me, I feel it. If you understood me, you would be happy. In order to know, one must love.’ I would laugh and embrace him, this boy, who adored me so much as to die of love.

“Often, too, after dinner, he would seat himself upon my mother’s knee. ‘Come, Aunt,’ he would say to her, ‘tell us some love story.’ And my mother, as a joke, would tell him all the family legends, the passionate adventures of his fathers, for thousands of them were mentioned, true and false. It was their reputation that was the undoing of all these men. They got fancies, and then took pride in living up to the fame of their house.

“The little boy would get excited by these terrible or affecting tales, and sometimes he would clap his hands and cry out: ‘I, too; I, too, know how to love, better than any of them.’

“Then he began to pay me his court, so timidly, with such grave tenderness, that we laughed at it. Each morning I had flowers picked by him, and each evening, before going to his room, he would kiss my hand, murmuring: ‘I love you!’

“I was guilty, very guilty, and I have wept since, unceasingly, doing penance all my life, by remaining an old maid⁠—or rather, an affianced widow, his widow. I amused myself with this childish devotion, even inciting him. I was coquettish, and seductive, as if I were dealing with a grown man, caressing and deceiving. I excited this child. It was a joke to me, and a pleasing diversion to his mother and mine. He was twelve years old! Think of it! Who would have taken seriously this diminutive passion! I kissed him as much as he wished. I even wrote love letters to him that our mothers read. And he responded with letters of fire, that I still have. He thought our love intimacy was a secret, regarding himself as a man. We had forgotten that he was a Santèze!

“This lasted nearly a year. One evening, in the park, he threw himself down at my knees, kissing the hem of my dress, in a furious burst of passion, repeating: ‘I love you! I love you! I love you! I am dying of love for you. If you ever deceive me, understand, if you ever leave me for another, I shall do as my father did⁠—’ And he added in a low voice that gave one the shivers: ‘You know what he did!’

“Then, as I remained dumbfounded, he got up and, stretching himself on tiptoe, for I was much taller than he, he repeated in my ear, my name, my first name, ‘Geneviève!’ in a voice so sweet, so pretty, so tender that I trembled to my very feet.

“I stammered: ‘Let us return to the house!’ He said nothing further, but followed me. As we were going up the steps, he stopped me and said: ‘You know if you abandon me, I shall kill myself.’

“I understood now that I had gone too far, and immediately became more reserved. When he reproached me for it, one day, I answered him: ‘You are now too big for this kind of joking, and too young for serious love. I will wait.’

“I believed myself freed from him.

“He was sent away to school in the autumn. When he returned, the following summer, I had become engaged. He understood at once, and for over a week he looked so preoccupied that I was much disturbed.

“The ninth day, in the morning, I perceived, on rising, a little piece of paper slipped under my door. I seized it and read: ‘You have abandoned me, and you know what I said. You have ordered my death. As I do not wish to be found by anyone but you, come into the park, to the place where last year I said that I loved you, and look up.’

“I felt myself becoming mad. I dressed as quickly as possible, and ran, so that I nearly fell exhausted, to the designated spot. His little school cap was on the ground in the mud. It had rained all night. I raised my eyes and saw something swinging amongst the leaves, for there was a wind blowing, a strong wind.

“After that, I knew nothing of what I did. I must have shouted, fainted, perhaps, and fallen, then got up and run to the house. I came to my senses in bed, with my mother at my side.

“I at first believed that I had dreamed all this in a frightful delirium. I muttered: ‘And he, he⁠—Gontran?’ They did not answer.

“It was all true.

“I dared not look at him again, but I asked for a lock of his blond hair. Here⁠—it⁠—is⁠—” And the old lady held out her hand in a gesture of despair.

Then, she used her handkerchief several times, and dried her eyes, and continued: “I broke off my engagement without saying why⁠—and I⁠—have remained always the⁠—widow of this child thirteen years old.” Then her head fell upon her breast and she wept pensively for a long time.

And, as they dispersed to their rooms for the night, a burly huntsman, whose quiet she had disturbed somewhat, whispered in the ear of his neighbour:

“What a misfortune to be so sentimental! Don’t you think so?”

Rust

During his whole life, he had had only one insatiable passion, love of sport. He went out every day, from morning till night, with the greatest ardour, in summer and winter, spring and autumn, on the marshes, when it was close time on the plains and in the woods. He shot, he hunted, he coursed, he ferreted and trapped both birds and animals; he spoke of nothing but shooting and hunting, he dreamt of it, and continually repeated:

“How miserable any man must be who does not care for sport!”

And now that he was past fifty, he was well, robust, stout and vigorous, though rather bald, and he kept his moustache cut quite short, so that it might not cover his lips, and interfere with his blowing the horn.

He was never called by anything but his first Christian name, Monsieur Hector, but his full name was Baron Hector Gontran de Coutelier, and he lived in a small manor house which he had inherited, in the middle of the woods; and though he knew all the nobility of the department, and met its male representatives out shooting and hunting, he only regularly visited one family, the Courvilles, who were very pleasant neighbours, and had been allied to his race for centuries. In their house he was liked, and taken the greatest care of, and he used to say: “If I were not a sportsman, I should like to be here always.”

Monsieur de Courville had been his friend and comrade from childhood, and lived quietly as a gentleman farmer with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, Monsieur de Darnetot, who did nothing, under the pretext of being absorbed in historical research.

Baron de Coutelier often went and dined with his friends, as much with the object of telling them of the shots he had made, as of anything else. He had long stories about dogs and ferrets, of which he spoke as if they were persons of note, whom he knew very well. He analysed them, and explained their thoughts and intentions:

“When Médor saw that the corncrake was leading him such a dance, he said to himself: ‘Wait a bit, my friend, we will have a joke.’ And then, with a jerk of the head to me, to make me go into the corner of the clover field, he began to quarter the sloping ground, noisily brushing through the clover to drive the bird into a corner from which it could not escape.

“Everything happened as he had foreseen. Suddenly, the corncrake found itself on the edge of the wood, and it could not go any farther without showing itself; the corncrake thought to himself, ‘Caught by Jove’ and crouched down. Médor stood and pointed, looking round at me, but at a sign from me, he drew up to it, flushed the corncrake; bang! down it came, and Médor, as he brought it to me, wagged his tail, as much as to say: ‘How about that, Monsieur Hector?’ ”

Courville, Darnetot, and the two ladies laughed very heartily at those picturesque descriptions into which the Baron threw his whole heart. He grew animated, moved his arms about, and gesticulated with his whole body; and when he described the death of anything he had killed, he gave a formidable laugh, and said:

“Isn’t that a good one?”

As soon as they began to speak about anything else, he stopped listening, and sat by himself, humming a few notes to imitate a hunting horn. And when there was a pause between two sentences on those moments of sudden calm which come between the war of words, a hunting tune was heard, “Ta, ta, ta, ra, ra,” which the Baron sang, puffing his cheek as if he were blowing his horn.

He had only lived for field sports, and was growing old, without thinking about it, or guessing it, when he had a severe attack of rheumatism, and was confined to his bed for two months, and nearly died of grief and boredom.

As he kept no female servant, for an old footman did all the cooking, he could not get any hot poultices, nor could he have any of those little attentions, nor anything that an invalid requires. His gamekeeper was his sick nurse, and as the servant found the time hang just as heavily on his hands as it did on his master’s he slept nearly all day and all night in an easy chair, while the Baron was swearing and flying into a rage between the sheets. The ladies of the De Courville family came to see him occasionally, and those were hours of calm and comfort for him. They prepared his herb tea, attended to the fire, served him his breakfast up daintily, by the side of his bed, and when they were going again, he used to say:

“By Jove! You ought to come here altogether,” which made them laugh heartily.

When he was getting better, and was beginning to go out shooting again, he went to dine with his friends one evening; but he was not at all in his usual spirits. He was tormented by one continual fear⁠—that he might have another attack before shooting began, and when he was taking his leave at night, when the women were wrapping him up in a shawl, and tying a silk handkerchief round his neck, which he allowed to be done for the first time in his life, he said in a disconsolate voice:

“If it begins all over again, I shall be done for.”

As soon as he had gone, Madame Darnetot said to her mother:

“We ought to try and get the Baron married.”

They all raised their hands at the proposal. How was it that they had never thought of it before? And during all the rest of the evening they discussed the widows whom they knew, and their choice fell on a woman of forty, who was still pretty, fairly rich, very good-tempered and in excellent health, whose name was Madame Berthe Vilers, and, accordingly, she was invited to spend a month at the château. She was very bored at home, and was very glad to come; she was lively and active, and Monsieur de Coutelier took her fancy immediately. She amused herself with him as if he had been a living toy, and spent hours in asking him slyly about the sentiments of rabbits and the machinations of foxes, and he gravely distinguished between the various ways of looking at things which different animals had, and ascribed plans and subtle arguments to them, just as he did to men of his acquaintance.

The attention she paid him, delighted him, and one evening, to show his esteem for her, he asked her to go out shooting with him, which he had never done to any woman before, and the invitation appeared so funny to her that she accepted it.

It was quite an amusement for them to fit her out; everybody offered her something, and she came out in a sort of short riding habit, with boots and men’s breeches, a short petticoat, a velvet jacket, which was too tight for her across the chest, and a huntsman’s black velvet cap.

The Baron seemed as excited as if he were going to fire his first shot. He minutely explained to her the direction of the wind, and how different dogs worked. Then he took her into a field, and followed her as anxiously as a nurse does when her charge is trying to walk for the first time.

Médor soon made a point, and stopped with his tail out stiff and one paw up, and the Baron, standing behind his pupil, was trembling like a leaf, and whispered:

“Look out, they are par⁠ ⁠… par⁠ ⁠… partridges.” And almost before he had finished, there was a loud whirr⁠—whirr, and a covey of large birds flew up in the air, with a tremendous noise.

Madame Vilers was startled, shut her eyes, fired off both barrels and staggered at the recoil of the gun; but when she had recovered her self-possession, she saw that the Baron was dancing about like a madman, and that Médor was bringing back the two partridges which she had killed.

From that day, Monsieur de Coutelier was in love with her, and used to say, raising his eyes: “What a woman!” And he used to come every evening now, to talk about shooting.

One day, Monsieur de Courville, who was walking part of the way with him, asked him, suddenly:

“Why don’t you marry her?”

The Baron was altogether taken by surprise, and said:

“What? I? Marry her?⁠ ⁠… Well⁠ ⁠… really⁠ ⁠…”

And he said no more for a while, but then, suddenly shaking hands with his companion, he said: “Goodbye, my friend,” and quickly disappeared in the darkness.

He did not go again for three days, but when he reappeared, he was pale from thinking the matter over, and graver than usual. Taking Monsieur de Courville aside, he said:

“That was a capital idea of yours; try and persuade her to accept me. By Jove, a woman like that, you might say, was made for me. We shall be able to have some sort of sport together, all the year round.”

As Monsieur de Courville felt certain that his friend would not meet with a refusal, he replied:

“Propose to her immediately, my dear fellow, or would you rather that I did it for you?”

But the Baron grew suddenly nervous, and said, with some hesitation:

“No,⁠ ⁠… no.⁠ ⁠… I must go to Paris for⁠ ⁠… for a few days. As soon as I come back, I will give you a definite answer.” No other explanation was forthcoming, and he started the next morning.

He made a long stay. One, two, three weeks passed, but Monsieur de Coutelier did not return, and the Courvilles, who were surprised and uneasy, did not know what to say to their friend, whom they had informed of the Baron’s wishes. Every other day they sent to his house for news of him, but none of his servants had a line.

But one evening, while Madame Vilers was singing, and accompanying herself on the piano, a servant came with a mysterious air, and told Monsieur de Courville that a gentleman wanted to see him. It was the Baron, in a travelling suit, who looked much altered and older, and as soon as he saw his old friend, he seized both his hands, and said in a somewhat tired voice: “I have just returned, my dear friend, and I have come to you immediately; I am thoroughly knocked up.”

Then he hesitated in visible embarrassment, and presently said: “I wished to tell you⁠ ⁠… immediately⁠ ⁠… that⁠ ⁠… that affair⁠ ⁠… you know what I mean⁠ ⁠… must come to nothing.”

Monsieur de Courville looked at him in stupefaction. “Must come to nothing?⁠ ⁠… Why?”

“Oh! Do not ask me, please; it would be too painful for me to tell you; but you may rest assured that I am acting like an honourable man. I cannot⁠ ⁠… I have no right⁠ ⁠… no right, you understand, to marry this lady, and I will wait until she has gone, to come here again; it would be too painful for me to see her. Goodbye.” And he absolutely ran away.

The whole family deliberated and discussed the matter, surmising a thousand things. The conclusion they came to was, that the Baron’s past life concealed some great mystery, that, perhaps, he had natural children, or some love affair of long standing. At any rate, the matter seemed serious, and so as to avoid any difficult complications, they tactfully informed Madame Vilers of the state of affairs, and she returned home just as much of a widow as she had come.

Three months more passed. One evening, when he had dined rather too well, and was rather unsteady on his legs, Monsieur de Coutelier, while he was smoking his pipe with Monsieur de Courville, said to him:

“You would really pity me, if you only knew how continually I am thinking about your friend.”

But the other, who had been rather vexed at the Baron’s behaviour in the circumstances, told him exactly what he thought of him:

“By Jove, my good friend, when a man has any secrets in his existence, like you have, he does not make advances to a woman, immediately, as you did, for you must surely have foreseen the reason why you had to draw back.”

The Baron left off smoking in some confusion.

“Yes, and no; at any rate, I could not have believed what actually happened.”

Whereupon, Monsieur de Courville lost his patience, and replied:

“One ought to foresee everything.”

But Monsieur de Coutelier replied in a low voice, in case anybody should be listening: “I see that I have hurt your feelings, and will tell you everything, so that you may forgive me. You know that for twenty years I have lived only for sport; I care for nothing else, and think about nothing else. Consequently, when I was on the point of undertaking certain obligations with regard to this lady, I felt some scruples of conscience. Since I have given up the habit of⁠ ⁠… of love, there! I have not known whether I was still capable of⁠ ⁠… of⁠ ⁠… you know what I mean⁠ ⁠… Just think! It is exactly sixteen years since⁠ ⁠… I for the last time⁠ ⁠… you understand what I mean. In this neighbourhood, it is not easy to⁠ ⁠… you know. And then, I had other things to do. I prefer to use my gun, and so before entering into an engagement before the Mayor and the Priest to⁠ ⁠… well, I was frightened. I said to myself: ‘Confound it; suppose I missed fire!’ An honourable man always keeps his engagements, and in this case, I was undertaking sacred duties with regard to this lady, and so, to make sure, I decided to go and spend a week in Paris.

“At the end of that time, nothing, absolutely nothing occurred. And it was not for want of trying. I went to the best there was, and they did everything they could. Yes⁠ ⁠… they certainly did their best!⁠ ⁠… And yet⁠ ⁠… they went away with nothing to show⁠ ⁠… nothing⁠ ⁠… nothing⁠ ⁠… I waited⁠ ⁠… I waited for a fortnight, three weeks, continually hoping. In the restaurants, I ate a number of highly seasoned dishes, which upset my stomach, and⁠ ⁠… and it was still the same thing⁠ ⁠… or rather, nothing. You will, therefore, understand, that, in such circumstances, and having assured myself of the fact, the only thing I could do was⁠ ⁠… was⁠ ⁠… to withdraw; and I did so.”

Monsieur de Courville had to struggle very hard not to laugh, and he shook hands with the Baron, saying: “I am very sorry for you,” and accompanied him halfway home.

When he got back, and was alone with his wife, he told her everything, nearly choking with laughter; she, however, did not laugh, but listened very attentively, and when her husband had finished, she said, very seriously:

“The Baron is a fool, my dear; he was frightened, that is all. I will write and ask Berthe to come back here as soon as possible.”

And when Monsieur de Courville observed that their friend had made such long and useless attempts, she merely said:

“Nonsense! When a man loves his wife, you know⁠ ⁠… that sort of thing always comes right in the end.”

And Monsieur de Courville made no reply, as he felt rather embarrassed himself.

The Chair Mender

It was at the end of the dinner opening the hunting season, at the house of Marquis de Bertrans. Eleven hunters, eight young women, and the doctor of the neighbourhood were seated around the large, well-lit table covered with fruits and flowers.

They came to speak of love, and a great discussion arose, the eternal discussion, as to whether one could love truly but once or many times. They cited examples of people who had never had but one serious love; they also cited other examples of others who had loved often, violently. The men, generally, pretended that passion, like a malady, could strike the same person many times, and strike to kill if an obstacle appeared in his path. Although the point of view was not contestable, the women, whose opinion depended upon literature rather than on observation, affirmed that love, true love, great love, could come only once upon a mortal; that it was like a thunderbolt, this love, and that a heart once touched by it remained ever after so vacant, ravaged, and burned out that no other powerful sentiment, even a dream, could again take root.

The Marquis, having loved much, combated this belief in lively fashion:

“I tell you that one can love many times with all one’s strength and all one’s soul. You cite to me people who have killed themselves for love as proof of the impossibility of a second passion. I answer that if they had not been guilty of this foolishness of suicide, which removed them from all chance of another fall, they would have been healed; and they would have recommenced, again and again, until their natural death. It is with lovers as it is with drunkards⁠—once a drunkard always a drunkard, once a lover, always a lover. It is simply a matter of temperament.”

They chose the doctor as arbitrator, an old Paris physician retired to the country, and begged him to give his opinion.

To be exact, he had none. As the Marquis had said, it is an affair of temperament.

“As for myself,” he continued, “I have known of one passion which lasted fifty-five years without a day of respite, and which was terminated only by death.”

The Marquis clapped his hands.

“This is beautiful,” said a lady. “And what a dream to be so loved! What happiness to live fifty-five years enveloped in a deep, living affection! How happy the person must be, how pleased with life, who was adored like that!”

The doctor smiled:

“In fact, Madame,” said he, “you are right on that point. The loved one was a man. You know him, it is Mr. Chouquet, the chemist of the village. And as for the woman, you knew her too, it is the old woman who put cane seats in chairs, and came every year to this house. But how can I make you understand the whole story?”

The enthusiasm of the women fell. On their faces a look of disgust said: “Pooh!”⁠—as if love could only strike those fine and distinguished creatures who were worthy of the interest of fashionable people.

The doctor continued:

“I was called, three months ago, to the bedside of this old woman. She was dying. She had come here in the old carriage that served her for a house, drawn by the nag that you have often seen, and accompanied by her two great black dogs, her friends and guard. The priest was already there. She made us the executors of her will, and in order to unveil the meaning of her testament, she related the story of her life. I have never heard anything more singular or more affecting.

“Her father made chair seats and so did her mother. She had never known a home in any one place upon the earth. As a little girl, she went around ragged, verminous and dirty. They would stop beside the road at the entrance to towns, unharness the horse and let him browse; the dog would go to sleep with his nose in his paws; the little one would play in the grass while the father and mother, under the shade of the elms bordering the roadside, would mend all the old chairs in the neighbourhood.

“No one ever talked in this moving dwelling. After the necessary words to decide who should make the tour of the houses and who should call out the well-known: ‘Chairs to mend!’ they would sit down to plait the straw, face to face or side by side.

“When the child went too far away or struck up an acquaintance with some urchin in the village, the angry voice of the father would call her: ‘You come back here, you brat!’ And these were the only words of tenderness she ever heard.

“When she grew bigger they sent her around to collect the worn-out chairs to be mended. Then she made some acquaintances from place to place among the street children. Then it would be the parents of her new friends who would call brutally to their children: ‘Will you come here, you scamp! Let me catch you talking to that barefoot again!’

“Often the boys would throw stones at her. When ladies gave her a few pence she kept them carefully.

“One day⁠—she was then eleven years old⁠—as they were passing through this place, she met the little Chouquet behind the cemetery, weeping because some comrade had stolen two sous from him. The tears of this little well-to-do citizen, one of those fortunate ones who in her queer noddle she had thought always content and joyous, quite upset her. She went up to him, and when she learned the cause of his trouble, she poured into his hands all her savings, seven sous, which he took quite naturally, drying his tears. Then, mad with joy, she had the audacity to kiss him. As he was counting the money attentively, he allowed her to do it. Seeing that she was not repulsed or beaten, she did the same thing again. She embraced him with all her strength and all her heart. Then she ran away.

“What could have taken place in her miserable head after that? Did she attach herself to this little boy, because she had sacrificed for him her beggar’s fortune, or because she had given to him her first tender kiss? The mystery is the same for the small as for the great.

“For months she dreamed of this corner of the cemetery and of this boy. In the hope of seeing him again, she robbed her parents, keeping back a sou here and there, either from a chair seat or upon the provisions which she was sent to buy.

“When she returned here she had two francs in her pocket, but she only saw the chemist’s son, very clean behind the big coloured bottles of his father’s shop, between a red decanter and a tapeworm. She loved him there still more, charmed, aroused to ecstasy by this glory of coloured water, this apotheosis of shining crystal.

“This picture became an ineffaceable memory, and when she saw him, the following year, playing marbles near the school with his comrades, she threw herself upon him, seized him in her arms, and kissed him with such violence that he began to howl with fear. Then, in order to appease him, she gave him all her money⁠—three francs and twenty centimes, a real treasure which he looked at with bulging eyes.

“He took it and let her caress him as much as she wished.

“During the next four years she turned into his hand all her surplus, which he pocketed with a clear conscience, in exchange for permitted kisses. Once it was thirty sous, sometimes forty, and once only twelve⁠—and she wept with grief and humiliation at this, but it had been a bad year. The last time there was a five-franc piece, a great round piece that made him laugh with content.

“She thought of nothing but him; and he waited her return with a certain impatience, running to meet her, which made the heart of the girl leap with joy.

“Then he disappeared. They had sent him away to college. She found it out by skilful questioning. Then she used her diplomacy to change her parents’ itinerary and make them pass through here during the holidays. She succeeded but only after two years of diplomacy. Then she had been two years without seeing him, and she scarcely recognized him, so much was he changed; he was so large and handsome in his coat with the brass buttons, and so imposing. He pretended not to see her and passed proudly by near her.

“She wept over it for two days, and after that she suffered without ceasing.

“Every year she returned here, passing him without daring to bow, and without his deigning to raise his eyes to her. She loved him passionately. She said to me: ‘Doctor, he is the only man I have seen on earth; I have not known that there are others existing.’

“Her parents died. She continued their trade, but took with her two dogs instead of one, two terrible dogs that no one would dare encounter.

“One day on entering this village, where her heart still remained, she perceived a young woman coming out of the Chouquet shop on the arm of her well-beloved. It was his wife. He was married.

“That evening she threw herself into the pond which is on the Town Hall square. A drunken man got her out and took her to the pharmacy. Chouquet, the son, came down in his dressing-gown, to care for her; and, without appearing to recognize her, loosed her clothing and rubbed her, then said, in a hard voice: ‘Why, you are mad! You must not do such foolish things.’

“That was sufficient to cure her. He had spoken to her! She was happy for a long time.

“He wanted no remuneration for his services, although she insisted upon paying him. And all her life was spent like this. She made chair seats and thought of Chouquet. Every year she saw him behind his large windows. She got into the habit of buying from him all her medical needs. In this way she could see him, speak to him, and still give him a little money.

“As I told you in the beginning, she died this spring. After having related her sad history, she begged me to give to him she had so patiently loved all the savings of her life, because she had worked only for him, she said, fasting even, in order to put aside, and to be sure that he would think of her at least once after she was dead.

“She then gave me two thousand three hundred and twenty-seven francs. I allowed the priest twenty-seven for burial, and carried off the rest when she had drawn her last breath.

“The next day, I took myself to the house of the Chouquets. They had just finished breakfast, sitting opposite each other, large and red, smelling of their pharmaceutical products, important and satisfied.

“They asked me to sit down; they offered me a kirsch which I accepted; then I commenced my discourse in an emotional voice, persuaded that they were going to weep.

“When he understood that he had been loved by this vagabond, this chair mender, this tramp, Chouquet bounced with indignation, as if she had robbed him of his reputation, of the esteem of honest people, of his honour, of something rare that was dearer to him than life.

“His wife, as exasperated as he, kept repeating: ‘The beggar! The beggar! The beggar!’ without being able to find any other word.

“He got up and walked around the table with long strides, his Greek cap tipped over his ear. He muttered: ‘Think of it, Doctor! This is a horrible thing to happen to a man! What is to be done? Oh! if I had known this while she was alive I would have had her arrested and shut up in prison. And she wouldn’t have got out, I can tell you!’

“I was stupefied at the result of my pious errand. I neither knew what to say nor what to do. But I had to end my mission. I said: ‘She has charged me to give you all her savings, which amount to two thousand three hundred francs. As what I have told you seems to be so very disagreeable to you, perhaps it would be better to give this money to the poor.’

“They looked at me, the man and the woman, unable to move from surprise. I drew the money from my pocket, miserable money from all countries, and of every denomination, gold and copper mixed. Then I asked: ‘What do you decide?’

“Madame Chouquet spoke first. She said: ‘Since it was the last wish of this woman⁠—it seems to me that it would be difficult to refuse it.’

“The husband, somewhat confused, answered: ‘We could always buy with that money something for our children.’

“I remarked, dryly: ‘As you wish.’

“He continued: ‘Yes, give it to us, since she told you to do so. We can always find means of using it in some good work.’

“I laid down the money, bowed, and went out.

“The next day Chouquet came to me and said brusquely: ‘She must have left a wagon here, that⁠—that woman. What are you going to do with that wagon?’

“ ‘Nothing,’ said I, ‘take it if you wish.’

“ ‘Exactly. Just what I want. I will make a shed of it for my kitchen-garden.’

“He was going, but I recalled him. ‘She also left an old horse and her two dogs. Do you want them?’

“He stopped, surprised: ‘Ah! no,’ he answered, ‘what could I do with them? Dispose of them as you wish.’

“Then he laughed and extended his hand which I took. What else could I do? In the country it will not do for the doctor and the chemist to be enemies.

“I have kept the dogs. The priest, who has a large yard, took the horse. The wagon serves Chouquet as a shed, and he has bought five railway shares with the money.

“This is the only profound love that I have met in my life.”

The doctor was silent. Then the Marquise, with tears in her eyes, sighed: “Decidedly, it is only women who know how to love.”

An Artifice

The old doctor and his young patient were talking by the side of the fire. There was nothing really the matter with her, except that she had one of those little feminine ailments from which pretty women frequently suffer⁠—slight anaemia, an attack of nerves, and a suspicion of fatigue, probably of that fatigue from which newly-married people often suffer at the end of the first month of their married life, when they have made a love match.

She was lying on the chaise longue and talking. “No, doctor,” she said; “I shall never be able to understand a woman deceiving her husband. Even allowing that she does not love him, that she pays no heed to her vows and promises, how can she give herself to another man? How can she conceal the intrigue from other people’s eyes? How can it be possible to love amid lies and treason?”

The doctor smiled, and replied: “It is perfectly easy, and I can assure you that a woman does not think of all those little subtle details, when she has made up her mind to go astray. I even feel certain that no woman is ripe for true love until she has passed through all the promiscuousness and all the irksomeness of married life, which, according to a celebrated man, is nothing but an exchange of ill tempered words by day and bad smells at night. Nothing is more true, for no woman can love passionately until after she has married.

“As for dissimulation, all women have plenty of it on hand for such occasions. The simplest of them are wonderful tacticians, and extricate themselves from the greatest dilemmas in an extraordinary way.”

The young woman, however, seemed incredulous. “No, doctor,” she said; “one never thinks, until after it has happened, of what one ought to have done in a dangerous affair, and women are certainly more liable than men to lose their head on such occasions.”

The doctor raised his hands: “After it has happened, you say! Now I will tell you something that happened to one of my female patients, in whose mouth, I thought butter would not melt, as the saying is.

“It happened in a provincial town. One night when I was sleeping profoundly, in that deep, first sleep from which it is so difficult to rouse oneself, it seemed to me in my dreams as if the bells in the town were sounding a fire alarm and I woke up with a start. It was my own bell which was ringing wildly, and as my servant did not seem to be answering the door, I in turn pulled the bell at the head of my bed. Soon I heard banging and steps in the silent house, and then Jean came into my room and handed me a letter which said: ‘Madame Lelièvre begs Dr. Siméon to come to her immediately.’

“I thought for a few moments, and then I said to myself: ‘A nervous attack, vapours, nonsense; I am too tired.’

“And so I replied: ‘As Doctor Siméon is not at all well, he must beg Madame Lelièvre to be kind enough to call in his colleague, Monsieur Bonnet.’

“I put the note into an envelope, and went to sleep again, but about half an hour later, the street bell rang again, and Jean came to me and said: ‘There is somebody downstairs⁠—I do not quite know whether it is a man or a woman, as the person is so wrapped up⁠—who wishes to speak to you immediately. He says it is a matter of life and death for two people.’ Whereupon, I sat up in bed and told him to show the person in.

“A kind of black phantom appeared, who raised her veil as soon as Jean had left the room. It was Madame Bertha Lelièvre, quite a young woman, who had been married for three years to a big merchant in the town, who was said to have married the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood.

“She was terribly pale, her face was contracted like the faces of excited people occasionally are, and her hands trembled violently. Twice she tried to speak without being able to utter a sound, but at last she stammered out:

“ ‘Come⁠—quick⁠—quick, doctor⁠—Come⁠—my⁠—my lover has just died in my bedroom.’ She stopped, half suffocated with emotion, and then went on: ‘My husband will⁠—be coming home from the club very soon.’

“I jumped out of bed, without even considering that I was only in my nightshirt, and dressed myself in a few moments. Then I said: ‘Did you come a short time ago?’

“ ‘No,’ she said, standing like a statue petrified with horror. ‘It was my servant⁠—she knows.’ And then, after a short silence, she went on: ‘I was there⁠—by his side.’ And she uttered a sort of cry of horror, and after a fit of choking, which made her gasp, she wept violently, shaking with spasmodic sobs for a minute or two. Then her tears suddenly ceased, as if dried by an internal fire, and with an air of tragic calmness, she said: ‘Let us make haste.’

“I was ready, but I exclaimed: ‘I quite forgot to order my carriage.’

“ ‘I have one,’ she said; ‘it is his, which was waiting for him!’ She wrapped herself up, so as to completely conceal her face, and we started.

“When she was by my side in the darkness of the carriage, she suddenly seized my hand, and crushing it in her delicate fingers she said, with a shaking voice, that proceeded from a distracted heart: ‘Oh! If you only knew, if you only knew what I am suffering! I loved him, I have loved him distractedly, like a mad woman, for the last six months.’

“ ‘Is anyone up in your house?’ I asked.

“ ‘No, nobody except Rose, who knows everything.’

“We stopped at the door. Evidently everybody was asleep, and we went in without making any noise, by means of her latchkey, and walked upstairs on tiptoe. The frightened servant was sitting at the top of the stairs, with a lighted candle by her side, as she was afraid to stop by the dead man. I went into the room, which was turned upside down, as if there had been a struggle in it. The bed, which was tumbled and open, seemed to be waiting for somebody; one of the sheets was thrown on to the floor, and wet napkins, with which they had bathed the young man’s temples, were lying by the side of a wash-hand basin and a glass, while a strong smell of vinegar mingled with Lubin water pervaded the room.

“The dead man, was lying at full length, on his back, in the middle of the room, and I went up to him, looked at him, and touched him. I opened his eyes, and felt his hands, and then, turning to the two women, who were shaking as if they were frozen, I said to them: ‘Help me to lift him on to the bed.’ When we had laid him gently on to it, I listened to his heart, put a looking-glass to his lips, and then said: ‘It is all over; let us make haste and dress him.’ It was a terrible sight!

“I took his limbs one by one, as if they had belonged to some enormous doll, and held them out to the clothes which the women brought, and they put on his socks, drawers, trousers, waistcoat, and lastly the coat; but it was a difficult matter to get the arms into the sleeves.

“When it came to buttoning his boots, the two women kneeled down, while I held the light. As his feet were rather swollen, it was very difficult, and as they could not find a button hook, they had to use their hairpins. When the terrible toilette was over, I looked at our work and said: ‘You ought to arrange his hair a little.’ The girl went and brought her mistress’s large-toothed comb and brush, but as she was trembling, and pulling out his long, tangled hair in doing it, Madame Lelièvre took the comb out of her hand, and arranged his hair as if she were caressing him. She parted it, brushed his beard, rolled his moustaches gently round her fingers, as she had no doubt been in the habit of doing, in the familiarities of their intrigue.

“Suddenly, however, letting go of what she held, she took her dead lover’s inert head in her hands, and looked for a long time in despair at the dead face, which no longer could smile at her. Then, throwing herself on to him, she took him into her arms and kissed him ardently. Her kisses fell like blows on to his closed mouth and eyes, on to his forehead and temples, and then, putting her lips to his ear, as if he could still hear her, and as if she were about to whisper something to him, to make their embraces still more ardent, she said several times, in a heartrending voice: ‘Adieu, my darling!’

“Just then the clock struck twelve, and I started up. ‘Twelve o’clock!’ I exclaimed. ‘That is the time when the club closes. Come, Madame, we have not a moment to lose!’

“She started up, and I said: ‘We must carry him into the drawing room.’ When we had done this, I placed him on a sofa, and lit the chandeliers, and just then the front door was opened and shut noisily. The husband had come back, and I said: ‘Rose, bring me the basin and the towels, and make the room look tidy. Make haste, for heaven’s sake! Monsieur Lelièvre is coming in.’

“I heard his steps on the stairs, and then his hands feeling along the walls. ‘Come here, my dear fellow,’ I said; ‘we have had an accident.’

“And the astonished husband appeared in the door with a cigar in his mouth, and said: ‘What is the matter? What is the meaning of this?’

“ ‘My dear friend,’ I said, going up to him; ‘you find us in a nice fix. I had remained late, chatting with your wife and our friend, who had brought me in his carriage, when he suddenly fainted, and in spite of all we have done, he has remained unconscious for two hours. I did not like to call in strangers, and if you will now help me downstairs with him, I shall be able to attend to him better at his own house.’

“The husband, who was surprised, but quite unsuspicious, took off his hat. Then he took his now inoffensive rival, under the arms. I got between his two legs, as if I had been a horse between the shafts, and we went downstairs, while his wife lit the way for us. When we got outside, I held the body up, so as to deceive the coachman, and said: ‘Come, my friend; it is nothing; you feel better already, I expect. Pluck up your courage, and make an effort. It will soon be over.’ But as I felt that he was slipping out of my hands, I gave him a slap on the shoulder, which sent him forward and made him fall into the carriage; then I got in after him.

“Monsieur Lelièvre, who was rather alarmed, said to me: ‘Do you think it is anything serious?’ To which I replied, ‘No,’ with a smile, as I looked at his wife, who had put her arm into that of her legitimate husband, and was trying to see into the dark carriage.

“I shook hands with them, and told my coachman to start, and during the whole drive the dead man kept falling against me. When we got to his house, I said that he had become unconscious on the way home, and helped to carry him upstairs, where I certified that he was dead, and acted another comedy to his distracted family. At last I got back to bed, not without swearing at lovers.”

The doctor ceased, though he was still smiling, and the young woman, who was in a very nervous state, said: “Why have you told me that terrible story?”

He gave her a gallant bow, and replied:

“So that I may offer you my services, if necessary.”

An Old Man

All the newspapers had carried the advertisement:

The new watering place of Rondelis offers all desired advantages for a long stay and even for permanent residence. Its ferruginous waters, recognized as the best in the world for counteracting all impurities of the blood, seem also to possess particular qualities calculated to prolong human life. This singular circumstance is perhaps due in part to the exceptional situation of the town, which lies surrounded by mountains and in the very center of a pine forest. For several centuries it has been celebrated for numerous cases of extraordinary longevity.

And the public came in droves.

One morning the doctor in charge of the springs was asked to call on a new arrival, Monsieur Daron, who had come to Rondelis only a few days before and had rented a charming villa on the edge of the forest. He was a little old man of eighty-six, still sprightly, wiry, healthy, active, who went to infinite pains to conceal his age.

He asked the doctor to be seated, and immediately questioned him: “Doctor, if I am well, it is thanks to hygienic living. I am not very old, but have reached a certain age, and I keep free of all illness, all indisposition, even the slightest discomfort, by means of hygiene. I am told that the climate of this place is very favorable for the health. I am very willing to believe it, but before establishing myself here I want proof. I am therefore going to ask you to call on me once a week, to give me, very exactly, the following information:

“I wish first of all to have a complete, utterly complete, list of all the inhabitants of the town and surroundings who are more than eighty years old. I also need a few physical and psychological details concerning each. I wish to know their professions, their kinds of life, their habits. Each time one of these people dies, you will inform me, indicating the precise cause of death, as well as the circumstances.”

Then he graciously added: “I hope, Doctor, that we may become good friends,” and he stretched out his wrinkled little hand. The doctor took it, promising his devoted cooperation.

M. Daron had always had a strange fear of death. He had deprived himself of almost all the pleasures because they are dangerous, and whenever anyone expressed surprise that he did not drink wine⁠—wine, that bringer of fancy and gaiety⁠—he replied in a voice containing a note of fear: “I value my life.” And he pronounced My, as if that life, His life, possessed some generally unknown value. He put into that My such a difference between his life and the life of others, that no answer was possible.

Indeed, he had a very particular way of accentuating the possessive pronouns designating all the parts of his person or even things belonging to him. When he said “My eyes, my legs, my arms, my hands,” it was clear that no mistake must be made: those organs did not belong to everyone. But this distinction was particularly noticeable when he spoke of his physician: “My doctor.” One would have said that this doctor was his, only his, destined for him alone, to take care of his illnesses and nobody else’s, and that he was superior to all the doctors in the universe, all, without exception.

He had never considered other men except as kinds of puppets, created as furniture for the natural world. He divided them into two classes: those whom he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those whom he did not greet. Both categories of individuals were to him equally insignificant.

But beginning with the day when the doctor of Rondelis brought him the list of the seventeen inhabitants of the town who were over eighty, he felt awaken in his heart a new interest, an unfamiliar solicitude for these old people whom he was going to see fall by the wayside one after the other.

He had no desire to make their acquaintance, but he had a very clear idea of their persons, and with the doctor, who dined with him every Thursday, he spoke only of them. “Well, doctor, how is Joseph Poinçot today? We left him a little ill last week.” And when the doctor had given him the patient’s bill of health M. Daron proposed modifications in diet, experiments, methods of treatment which he might later apply to himself if they succeeded with the others. The seventeen old people were an experimental field from which much was to be learned.

One evening the doctor came in and announced: “Rosalie Tournel is dead.” M. Daron shuddered and immediately demanded, “What of?” “Of an angina.” The little old man uttered an “ah” of relief. Then he declared: “She was too fat, too big; she must have eaten too much. When I get to be her age, I’ll be more careful.” (He was two years older than Rosalie, but never admitted to being over seventy.)

A few months later, it was the turn of Henry Brissot. M. Daron was very moved. This time it was a man⁠—thin, within three months of his own age, and very prudent. He dared ask for no details, but waited anxiously for the doctor to tell him. “Ah, he died suddenly, just like that? He was very well last week. He must have done something unwise, Doctor.” The doctor, who was enjoying himself, replied, “I believe not. His children tell me he was very careful.”

Then, no longer able to contain himself, M. Daron demanded, with anguish, “But⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… What did he die of, then?”

“Of pleurisy.”

That was joyful news, really joyful. The little old man clapped his dry hands. “I knew it! I told you had had done something unwise. Pleurisy doesn’t come just by itself. He took a breath of fresh air after his dinner, and the cold lodged on his chest. Pleurisy! That is an accident, not an illness. Only crazy men die of pleurisy.”

And he ate his dinner gaily, talking of those who remained. “There are only fifteen now, but they are all strong, aren’t they? All of life is like that, the weakest fall first; people who go beyond thirty have a good chance to reach sixty, those who pass sixty often get to eighty; and those who pass eighty almost always reach the century mark, because they are the most robust, the most careful, the most hardened.”

Still two others disappeared during the year, one of dysentery and the other of a choking fit. M. Daron derived a great deal of amusement from the death of the former, and concluded that he must have eaten something exciting the day before. “Dysentery is the disease of the imprudent; you should have watched over his hygiene, Doctor.” As for the choking fit, it could only have come from a heart condition, hitherto unrecognized.

But one evening the doctor announced the passing of Paul Timonet, a kind of mummy, of whom it had been hoped to make a centenarian, a living advertisement for the watering place. When M. Daron asked, as usual, “What did he die of?” the doctor replied, “Really, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? One always knows. Wasn’t there some organic lesion?”

The doctor shook his head. “No. None.”

“Perhaps some infection of the liver or kidneys?”

“No⁠—they were perfectly sound.”

“Did you observe whether the stomach functioned regularly? A stroke is often caused by bad digestion.”

“There was no stroke.”

M. Daron, very perplexed, became excited. “But he certainly died of something! What is your opinion?”

The doctor raised his arms. “I absolutely do not know. He died because he died, that’s all.”

Then M. Daron, in a voice full of emotion, demanded: “Exactly how old was that one? I can’t remember.”

“Eighty-nine.”

And the little old man, with an air at once incredulous and reassured, cried, “Eighty-nine! So it wasn’t old age!⁠ ⁠…”

A Parricide

Counsel for the defence had pleaded insanity. How else was this strange crime to be accounted for?

One morning, in the reeds near Chaton, two bodies had been found locked in each other’s arms, those of a man and his wife. They were a couple well known in society, wealthy, no longer young, and only married the previous year, the woman having lost her first husband three years before.

They were not known to have any enemies, and they had not been robbed. They had apparently been thrown into the river from the bank, after having been struck, one after the other, with a long iron spike.

The inquest did not lead to any discovery. The watermen who were questioned knew nothing; the affair was on the point of being abandoned, when a young joiner from a neighbouring village, named Georges Louis, known as The Gentleman, gave himself up.

To all interrogation he refused to make any other answer than:

“I had known the man for two years, the woman for six months. They often came to me to have old furniture mended, because I am good at the work.”

And when he was asked: “Why did you kill them?” he would reply obstinately:

“I killed them because I wanted to kill them.”

Nothing more could be got out of him.

The man was doubtless an illegitimate child, formerly put out to nurse in the district and afterwards abandoned. He had no name except Georges Louis, but since, as he grew up, he had shown himself unusually intelligent, with tastes and a natural delicacy quite foreign to his comrades, he had been nicknamed “The Gentleman,” and was never called anything else. He was known to be remarkably clever as a joiner, the profession he had adopted. He even did a little carving in wood. He was also said to have ideas about his station, to be a follower of communistic doctrines, even of nihilism, a great reader of novels of adventure and bloodthirsty romances, an influential elector and a clever speaker at the workingmen’s or peasants’ debating-club.

Counsel for the defence had pleaded insanity.

How, in truth, could it be supposed that this workman should have killed his best clients, clients who were both rich and generous (he admitted this), who in two years had given him work which had brought in three thousand francs (his books testified to it)? There was only one explanation: insanity, the obsession of a man who has slipped out of his class and avenges himself on society as a whole by the murder of two gentlefolk; and counsel made a neat allusion to his nickname of “The Gentleman,” given to this outcast by the whole neighbourhood.

“Consider the irony of the situation!” he exclaimed. “Was it not capable of still more violently exciting this unhappy youth with no father nor mother? He is an ardent republican; nay, he even belongs to that political party whose members the State was once wont to shoot and deport, but which today she welcomes with open arms, the party to whom arson is a first principle and murder a perfectly simple expedient.

“These lamentable doctrines, nowadays acclaimed in debating-societies, have ruined this man. He has listened to men of the republican party, yes! and even women too, demanding the blood of Monsieur Gambetta, the blood of Monsieur Grévy; his diseased brain has succumbed, he has thirsted for blood, the blood of nobility!

“It is not this man, gentlemen, whom you should condemn, it is the Commune!”

Murmurs of approval ran to and fro. It was generally felt that counsel for the defence had won his case. The public prosecutor did not reply.

Then the judge asked the prisoner the customary question:

“Prisoner at the bar, have you nothing to add in your defence?”

The man rose.

He was small in stature, with flaxen hair and grey eyes, steady and bright. A strong, frank, sonorous voice came from the throat of this slender youth, and his very first words altered at once the view that had been formed of him.

He spoke loudly, in a declamatory tone, but so clearly that his slightest words carried to the ends of the large court:

“Your Worship, as I do not wish to go to a madhouse, and even prefer the guillotine, I will tell you all.

“I killed the man and the woman because they were my parents.

“Now hear me and judge me.

“A woman, having given birth to a son, sent him out to nurse. It had been well if she had known to what district her accomplice had carried the little creature, innocent, but condemned to lasting misery, to the shame of illegitimate birth, to worse than that: to death, since he was abandoned, since the nurse, no longer receiving the monthly allowance, might well have left him, as such women often do, to pine away, to suffer from hunger, to perish of neglect.

“The woman who suckled me was honest, more honest, more womanly, greater of soul, a better mother, than my own mother. She brought me up. She was wrong to do her duty. It is better to leave to their death the wretches who are flung out into provincial villages, as rubbish is flung out at the roadside.

“I grew up with the vague impression that I was the bearer of some dishonour. One day the other children called me ‘bastard.’ They did not know the meaning of the word, which one of them had heard at home. Neither did I know its meaning, but I sensed it.

“I was, I can honestly say, one of the most intelligent children in the school. I should have been an honest man, Your Worship, perhaps a remarkable man, if my parents had not committed the crime of abandoning me.

“And it was against me that this crime was committed. I was the victim, they were the guilty ones. I was defenceless, they were pitiless. They ought to have loved me: they cast me out.

“I owed my life to them⁠—but is life a gift? Mine, at any rate, was nothing but a misfortune. After their shameful desertion of me, I owed them nothing but revenge. They committed against me the most inhuman, the most shameful, the most monstrous crime that can be committed against a human being.

“A man insulted strikes; a man robbed takes back his goods by force. A man deceived, tricked, tormented, kills; a man whose face is slapped, kills; a man dishonoured, kills. I was more grievously robbed, deceived, tormented, morally slapped in the face, dishonoured, than all the men whose anger you condone.

“I have avenged myself, I have killed. It was my lawful right. I took their happy lives in exchange for the horrible life which they imposed on me.

“You will call it parricide! Were they my parents, those people to whom I was an abominable burden, a terror, a mark of infamy; to whom my birth was a calamity and my life a threat of shame? They sought their selfish pleasure; they brought forth the child they had not counted on. They suppressed that child. My turn has come to repay them in kind.

“And yet, even at the eleventh hour, I was prepared to love them.

“It is now two years, as I have already told you, since the man, my father, came to my house for the first time. I suspected nothing. He ordered two articles of furniture. I learnt later that he had obtained information from the village priest, under the seal of a secret compact.

“He often came; he gave me work and paid me well. Sometimes he even chatted with me on various subjects. I felt some affection for him.

“At the beginning of this year he brought his wife, my mother. When she came in she was trembling so violently that I thought she was the victim of a nervous disorder. Then she asked for a chair and a glass of water. She said nothing; she stared at my stock with the expression of a lunatic, and to all the questions he put to her she answered nothing but yes and no, quite at random! When she had gone, I thought her not quite right in the head.

“She came back the following month. She was calm, mistress of herself. They remained talking quite a long time that day, and gave me a big order. I saw her again three times without guessing anything; but one day, lo and behold! she began to talk to me about my life, my childhood, and my parents. I answered: ‘My parents, madame, were wretches who abandoned me.’ At that she set her hand to her heart and dropped senseless. I thought at once: ‘This is my mother!’ but was careful not to give myself away. I wanted her to go on coming.

“So I in my turn made inquiries. I learned that they had been married just the previous July, my mother having been only three years a widow. There had been rumours enough that they had been lovers during her first husband’s lifetime, but no proof had been forthcoming. I was the proof, the proof they had first hidden, and hoped ultimately to destroy.

“I waited. She reappeared one evening, accompanied, as always, by my father. She seemed to be in a very agitated state that day, I do not know why. Then, just as she was going, she said to me:

“ ‘I wish you well, because I believe you are an honest lad and a good worker; doubtless you will be thinking of getting married some day; I have come to make it possible for you to choose freely any woman you prefer. I myself married the first time against the desires of my heart, and I know how much suffering it brings. Now I am rich, childless, free, mistress of my fortune. Here is your marriage portion.’

“She held out to me a large envelope.

“I stared fixedly at her, then said:

“ ‘Are you my mother?’

“She drew back three paces and hid her eyes in her hand, so that she could see me no more. He, the man, my father, supported her in his arms and shouted at me:

“ ‘You are mad!’

“ ‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I know very well that you are my parents. I am not to be deceived so easily. Admit it, and I will keep your secret; I will bear no malice, I will remain what I am now, a joiner.’

“He recoiled towards the door, still supporting his wife, who was beginning to sob. I ran and locked the door, put the key in my pocket, and continued:

“ ‘Look at her, then, and continue to deny that she is my mother!’

“At that he lost his self-control and turned very pale, terrified by the thought that the scandal hitherto avoided might suddenly come out; that their position, their good name, their honour would be lost at a blow.

“ ‘You’re a scoundrel,’ he stammered, ‘trying to get money out of us. And yet they tell us to be good to the common people, the louts, to help them and succour them!’

“My mother, bewildered, was repeating over and over again:

“ ‘Let us go. Let us go.’

“Then, as the door was locked, he exclaimed:

“ ‘If you don’t open the door immediately, I’ll have you jailed for blackmail and assault!’

“I had kept my self-control; I opened the door, and saw them disappear in the darkness.

“At that I felt suddenly as though I had just been orphaned, abandoned, cast into the gutter. A dreadful sadness, mingled with rage, hatred, and disgust overwhelmed me. I felt a swollen rush of emotion through my whole being, a rising tide of justice, righteousness, honour, and spurned affection. I set off running in order to catch them up on the bank of the Seine, which they must follow in order to reach Chaton station.

“I overtook them before long. The night became pitch-dark. I slunk along on the grass, so that they did not hear me. My mother was still crying. My father was saying:

“ ‘It is your own fault. Why did you insist on seeing him? It was madness, in our position. We might have done him kindness by stealth, without showing ourselves. Seeing that we could not hope to recognise him, what was the use of these perilous visits?’

“Then I threw myself in their path, a suppliant.

“ ‘Clearly you are my parents,’ I stammered. ‘You have already cast me off once; will you reject me second time?’

“At that, Your Worship, he raised his hand to me, I swear it on my honour, on the law, on the State. He struck me, and as I seized him by his coat-collar, he drew a revolver from his pocket.

“I saw red, I no longer knew what I did. I had my callipers in my pocket; I struck him, struck him with all my force.

“Then the woman began to cry: ‘Help! Murder!’ and tore at my beard. Apparently I killed her too. How can I know what I did at that moment?

“Then, when I saw them both lying on the ground, I threw them into the Seine, without thinking.

“That is all. Now judge me.”

The prisoner sat down again. After this revelation the trial was postponed until the following session. It will soon come on again. If you and I were the jury, what should we do with this parricide?

Pierrot

Madame LeFèvre was a country dame, a widow, one of these half peasants, who wear ribbons and bonnets with lots of trimming, one of those persons who clipped her words and put on great airs in public, concealing the soul of a pretentious animal beneath a comical and bedizened exterior, just as the country-folks hide their coarse red hands in écru silk gloves.

She had a servant, a good simple peasant, called Rose.

The two women lived in a little house with green shutters by the side of the high road in Normandy, in the centre of the country of Caux. As they had a narrow strip of garden in front of the house, they grew some vegetables.

One night someone stole twelve onions. As soon as Rose became aware of the theft, she ran to tell madame, who came downstairs in her woollen petticoat. It was a shame and a disgrace! They had robbed her, Madame Lefèvre! As there were thieves in the country, they might come back.

And the two frightened women examined the foot⁠—tracks, talking, and supposing all sorts of things.

“See, they went that way! They stepped on the wall, they jumped on to the flowerbed.”

And they became apprehensive for the future. How could they sleep in peace now!

The news of the theft spread. The neighbours came, making examinations and discussing the matter in their turn, while the two women explained to each newcomer what they had observed and their opinion.

A farmer who lived near said to them:

“You ought to have a dog.”

That is true, they ought to have a dog, if it were only to give the alarm. Not a big dog. Heavens! what would they do with a big dog? He would eat their heads off. But a little dog, a little puppy who would bark.

As soon as everyone had left, Madame Lefèvre discussed this idea of a dog for some time. On reflection she made a thousand objections, terrified at the idea of a bowl full of soup, for she belonged to that race of parsimonious country women who always carry centimes in their pocket to give alms in public to beggars on the road and to put in the Sunday collection plate.

Rose, who loved animals, gave her opinion and defended it shrewdly. So it was decided that they should have a dog, a very small dog.

They began to look for one, but could find nothing but big dogs, who would devour enough soup to make one shudder. The grocer of Rolleville had one, a tiny one, but he demanded two francs to cover the cost of sending it. Madame Lefèvre declared that she would feed a dog but would not buy one.

The baker, who knew all that occurred, brought in his wagon one morning a strange little yellow animal, almost without paws, with the body of a crocodile, the head of a fox, and a curly tail⁠—a true cockade, as big as all the rest of him. Madame Lefèvre thought this common cur that cost nothing was very handsome. Rose hugged it and asked what its name was.

“Pierrot,” replied the baker.

The dog was installed in an old soap box and they gave it some water which it drank. They then offered it a piece of bread. He ate it. Madame Lefèvre, uneasy, had an idea.

“When he is thoroughly accustomed to the house we can let him run. He can find something to eat, roaming about the country.”

They let him run, in fact, which did not prevent him from being famished. Also he never barked except to beg for food, and then he barked furiously. Anyone might come into the garden, and Pierrot would run up and fawn on each one in turn and not utter a bark.

Madame Lefèvre, however, had become accustomed to the animal. She even went so far as to like it and to give it from time to time pieces of bread soaked in the gravy on her plate.

But she had not once thought of the dog tax, and when they came to collect eight francs⁠—eight francs, madame⁠—for this puppy who never even barked, she almost fainted from the shock.

It was immediately decided that they must get rid of Pierrot. No one wanted him. Everyone declined to take him for ten leagues around. Then they resolved, not knowing what else to do, to make him “piquer du mas.”

“Piquer du mas” means to eat chalk. When one wants to get rid of a dog they make him “piquer du mas.”

In the midst of an immense plain one sees a kind of hut, or rather a very small roof standing above the ground. This is the entrance to the clay pit. A big perpendicular hole is sunk for twenty metres underground and ends in a series of long subterranean tunnels.

Once a year they go down into the quarry at the time they fertilize the ground. The rest of the year it serves as a cemetery for condemned dogs, and as one passes by this hole plaintive howls, furious or despairing barks and lamentable appeals reach one’s ear.

Sportsmen’s dogs and sheepdogs flee in terror from this mournful place, and when one leans over it one perceives a disgusting odour of putrefaction.

Frightful dramas are enacted in the darkness.

When an animal has suffered down there for ten or twelve days, nourished on the foul remains of his predecessors, another animal, larger and more vigorous, is thrown into the hole. There they are, alone, starving, with glittering eyes. They watch each other, follow each other, hesitate in doubt. But hunger impels them; they attack each other, fight desperately for some time, and the stronger eats the weaker, devours him alive.

When it was decided to make Pierrot “piquer du mas” they looked round for an executioner. The labourer who mended the road demanded six sous to take the dog there. That seemed wildly exorbitant to Madame Lefèvre. The neighbour’s hired boy wanted five sous; that was still too much. So Rose having observed that they had better carry it there themselves, as in that way it would not be brutally treated on the way and made to suspect its fate, they resolved to go together at twilight.

They offered the dog that evening a good dish of soup with a piece of butter in it. He swallowed every morsel of it, and as he wagged his tail with delight Rose put him in her apron.

They walked quickly, like thieves, across the plain. They soon perceived the chalk pit and walked up to it. Madame Lefèvre leaned over to hear if any animal was moaning. No, there were none there; Pierrot would be alone. Then Rose, who was crying, kissed the dog and threw him into the chalk pit, and they both leaned over, listening.

First they heard a dull sound, then the sharp, bitter, distracting cry of an animal in pain, then a succession of little mournful cries, then despairing appeals, the cries of a dog who is entreating, his head raised toward the opening of the pit.

He yelped, oh, how he yelped!

They were filled with remorse, with terror, with a wild, inexplicable fear, and ran away from the spot. As Rose went faster Madame Lefèvre cried: “Wait for me, Rose, wait for me!”

At night they were haunted by frightful nightmares.

Madame Lefèvre dreamed she was sitting down at table to eat her soup, but when she uncovered the tureen Pierrot was in it. He jumped out and bit her nose.

She awoke and thought she heard him yelping still. She listened, but she was mistaken.

She fell asleep again and found herself on a high road, an endless road, which she followed. Suddenly in the middle of the road she perceived a basket, a large farmer’s basket, lying there, and this basket frightened her.

She ended by opening it, and Pierrot, concealed in it, seized her hand and would not let go. She ran away in terror with the dog hanging to the end of her arm, which he held between his teeth.

At daybreak she arose, almost beside herself, and ran to the chalk pit.

He was yelping, yelping still; he had yelped all night. She began to sob and called him by all sorts of endearing names. He answered her with all the tender inflections of his dog’s voice.

Then she wanted to see him again, promising herself that she would give him a good home till he died.

She ran to the chalk digger, whose business it was to excavate for chalk, and told him the situation. The man listened, but said nothing. When she had finished he said:

“You want your dog? That will cost four francs.” She gave a jump. All her grief was at an end at once.

“Four francs!” she said. “The idea of it! Four francs!”

“Do you suppose I am going to bring my ropes, my windlass, and set it up, and go down there with my boy and let myself be bitten, perhaps, by your cursed dog for the pleasure of giving it back to you? You should not have thrown it down there.”

She walked away, indignant. Four francs!

As soon as she entered the house she called Rose and told her of the quarryman’s charges. Rose, always resigned, repeated:

“Four francs! That is a good deal of money, madame.” Then she added: “If we could throw him something to eat, the poor dog, so he will not die of hunger.”

Madame Lefèvre approved of this and was quite delighted. So they set out again with a big piece of bread and butter.

They cut it in mouthfuls, which they threw down one after the other, speaking by turns to Pierrot. As soon as the dog finished one piece he yelped for the next.

They returned that evening and the next day and every day. But they made only one more trip.

One morning as they were just letting fall the first mouthful they suddenly heard a tremendous barking in the pit. There were two dogs there. Another had been thrown in, a large dog.

“Pierrot!” cried Rose. And Pierrot yelped and yelped. Then they began to throw down some food. But each time they noticed distinctly a terrible struggle going on, then plaintive cries from Pierrot, who had been bitten by his companion, who ate up everything as he was the stronger.

It was in vain that they specified, saying:

“That is for you, Pierrot.” Pierrot evidently got nothing.

The two women, dumbfounded, looked at each other and Madame Lefèvre said in a sour tone:

“I could not feed all the dogs they throw in there! We must give it up.”

And, suffocating at the thought of all the dogs living at her expense, she went away, even carrying back what remained of the bread, which she ate as she walked along.

Rose followed her, wiping her eyes on the corner of her blue apron.

A Norman

We had just left Rouen, and were going along the road to Jumièges at a brisk trot. The light carriage spun along between the fields, then the horse slowed down to climb the hill of Canteleu.

At that point there is one of the most magnificent views in the world. Behind us Rouen, the town of churches, of Gothic belfries, carved like ornaments of ivory; in front, Saint-Sever, the suburb of factories, which raises its thousand smoking chimneys to the great sky, opposite the thousand sacred spires of the old city.

Here is the steeple of the cathedral, the highest of the human monuments; and down there the “Fire Pump” of “La Foudre,” its rival, almost as tall, which overtops by a metre the highest pyramid of Egypt.

Before us the undulating Seine winds along, sown with islands, bordered on the right by white cliffs, crowned by a forest, and on the left by immense level fields, with another forest on their edge, far away in the distance.

From place to place, great ships were anchored along the banks of the wide river. Three enormous steamers were going out, one after another, toward Havre; and a string of boats consisting of a three master, two schooners, and a brig, were coming up to Rouen, towed by a little tug, which vomited a cloud of black smoke.

My companion, born in the country, did not see this surprising landscape from the same point of view as I. But he smiled continually; he seemed to be laughing to himself. Suddenly he exclaimed: “Ah! you are about to see something funny⁠—the chapel of Father Matthew. That is something really good, my boy.”

I looked at him in astonishment. He continued:

“I am going to give you a flavour of Normandy that will remain in your nose. Father Matthew is the handsomest Norman in the province and his chapel is one of the wonders of the world, no more nor less. But I will give you first a few words of explanation. Father Matthew, or ‘Father Booze’ as they also call him, is an old sergeant-major, returned to his native village. He unites, in admirable proportions, the perfect humbug of the old soldier and the sly malice of the Norman. On his return to these parts, thanks to innumerable protectors and incredible trickeries, he was made the guardian of a miraculous chapel, a chapel protected by the Virgin, and frequented principally by pregnant girls. He baptized the marvelous statue there as: Notre Dame du Gros-Ventre, and he treats it with a certain mocking familiarity which does not exclude respect. He has himself composed and had printed a special prayer for his Good Virgin. This prayer is a masterpiece of unintentional irony, of Norman wit, where ridicule is mixed with fear of the saint, a superstitious fear of secret influence of some kind. He does not believe much in his patron saint; nevertheless, he believes in her a little and treats her gently as a matter of policy.

“Here is the beginning of this extraordinary prayer:

“ ‘Our good Lady, the Virgin Mary, natural Patroness of girl-mothers, in this country and in all the earth, protect your servant who has sinned in a moment of forgetfulness.’

“The supplication terminates thus:

“ ‘Especially, do not forget to speak for me to your sainted Husband, and intercede with God the Father that he may accord me a good husband like your own.’

“This prayer, forbidden by the clergy of the country, is sold by him privately, and is regarded as helpful by those who repeat it with unction. In fact, he speaks of the good Virgin as a valet might of his master, some redoubtable prince, knowing all his little intimate secrets. He knows a host of amusing stories about her which he whispers amongst friends after he has been drinking.

“But you must see for yourself.

“As the revenue furnished by the Patroness did not seem sufficient, he has added to his chief asset, the Virgin, a little trade in saints. He keeps them all, or nearly all. And, as room was lacking in the chapel, he stocked them in the woodshed, from which he gets them whenever the faithful ask for them. He has carved these wonderfully comical statuettes himself, out of wood, and painted them all green, a solid colour, one year when they painted his house. You know the saints heal maladies, but each has his specialty; and one must not run into error or confusion in these things. They are jealous one of the other, like playactors.

“So that they may not make any mistake, the poor old women come and consult Matthew.

“ ‘For bad ears, what saint is best?’ they say.

“ ‘Well, there is Saint Osymus who is good; and there is also Saint Pamphilius, who is not bad,’ he tells them.

“That is not all. When Matthew has time on his hands, he drinks. But he drinks like an artist, one that is sure of himself, so much so that he is tipsy regularly every evening. He is tipsy, but he knows it; he knows it so well that he notes each day the exact degree of his drunkenness. It is his principal occupation. The chapel comes afterward.

“And he has invented⁠—listen to this and prepare for a surprise⁠—he has invented the boozometer. The instrument does not yet exist, but Matthew’s observations are as precise as those of a mathematician. You will hear him say continually:

“ ‘Since Monday, I have not gone above forty-five.’ Or, ‘I was between fifty-two and fifty-eight,’ or ‘I had sixty-six to seventy,’ or, perhaps, ‘Ah! confound it, I believed I was in the fifties, when here I find I was at seventy-five!’

“He never makes a mistake. He says that he has not yet reached the hundredth degree, but, as he admits that his observations cease to be precise after he has passed ninety, one cannot absolutely rely upon this statement.

“When Matthew recognizes that he has passed ninety, you may be sure that he is really tipsy. On these occasions, his wife, Mélie, another marvel, works herself into great anger. She waits for him at the door when he enters, and shrieks: ‘Here you are, you nasty pig, you drunken good-for-nothing.’

“Then Matthew, no longer laughing, plants himself before her, and in severe tone says: ‘Be still, Mélie, this is no time to talk. Wait till tomorrow.’

“If she continues to vociferate, he approaches her, and with trembling voice says: ‘Shut your jaw; I am in the nineties; I can no longer measure; I am going to hurt someone; take care!’

“Then Mélie beats a retreat.

“If she tries the next day to return to the subject, he laughs in her face and answers: ‘Come, come! enough of that; that is all over. So long as I have not reached the hundredth degree, there is no harm done. But if I pass that, I will allow you to correct me, I give you my word!’ ”

We had reached the summit of the hill. The road lay through the wonderful forest of Roumare. The autumn, the marvelous autumn, mixed her gold and purple with the last green leaves, still vivid, as if some drops of sunlight had rained down from the sky into the thickest of the wood.

We crossed Duclair; then, instead of continuing toward Jumièges, my friend turned to the left, and, taking a shortcut, struck into the wood. And soon, from the summit of a green hill, we discovered anew the magnificent valley of the Seine and the tortuous river itself, winding along at our feet.

Upon the right, a little building, with a slate roof and a clock-tower as high as an umbrella, leaned against a pretty house with green shutters, all clothed in honeysuckle and roses.

A loud voice cried out: “Here are some friends!” And Matthew appeared upon the threshold. He was a man of sixty, thin, wearing a pointed beard and long, white mustaches. My companion shook hands with him and introduced me. Matthew made us enter a cool, clean kitchen, which also served as a living-room.

“I, sir,” said Matthew, “have no distinguished apartment. I like better not to get too far from the eatables. The pots and pans, you see, are company.” Then, turning toward my friend, he added:

“Why have you come on Thursday? You know well that it is My Lady’s consultation day. I cannot go out this afternoon.”

Then, running to the door, he uttered a terrible call: “Mé‑li‑ee!” which must have made the sailors raise their heads in the ships going up and down the river, at the bottom of the valley.

Mélie did not answer.

Then Matthew winked maliciously: “She is not pleased with me, you see, because yesterday I was up to ninety.”

My neighbour began to laugh. “Ninety, Matthew! How was that?”

Matthew answered: “I will tell you. I found last year only twenty rasières of cider apples. There were no more, but in order to make good cider these are the best. I made a barrelful and yesterday I tapped it. As for nectar, that is nectar; you will say so, too. I had Polyte here. We took a drink and then another drink without quenching our thirst, for one could drink it till tomorrow. I drank so much, one drink after another, that I felt a coolness in my stomach. I said to Polyte: ‘If we should take a glass of brandy, now, it would heat us up.’ He consented. But brandy, that put a fire in my body, so hot that it was necessary to return to the cider. So there it was! From coolness to heat and from heat to coolness, I perceived that I was in the nineties. Polyte was far beyond a hundred.”

The door opened. Mélie appeared, and immediately, before she said “Good day” to us, exclaimed: “Pigs! You were far beyond the hundred mark, both of you!”

Matthew was angry, but answered: “Say not so, Mélie, say not so; I have never been beyond a hundred.”

They gave us an exquisite breakfast, before the door under two lime-trees, at the side of the little chapel of Notre Dame du Gros-Ventre, with the beautiful landscape before us. And Matthew related to us, with raillery mingled with credulity, some unlikely stories of miracles.

We had drunk much of the adorable cider, pungent and sweet, cool and powerful, which he preferred to all liquids, and were smoking our pipes, sitting astride our chairs, when two good women presented themselves.

They were old, dried, and bent. After bowing, they asked for Saint Blanc. Matthew winked his eye toward us, and said:

“I will go and get him for you.” And he disappeared into his woodshed.

He remained there five minutes, then returned with face filled with consternation. Raising his arms, he declared:

“I don’t know at all where he is. I cannot find him. I am sure that I had him!” Then, making a horn of his hands, he called: “Mélie!”

From the foot of the garden his wife answered: “What is it?”

“Where is Saint Blanc? I can’t find him in the shed!”

Then Mélie threw back this explanation:

“Wasn’t it him you took to stop the hole in the rabbit hutch last week?”

Matthew started. “Good God. Maybe that’s so.”

Then he said to the two women: “Follow me.”

They followed. We almost suffocated with laughter. In fact, Saint Blanc, stuck in the earth like a common stake, stained with mud and filth, was being used to make one corner of the rabbit hutch.

When they perceived him, the two good women fell on their knees, crossed themselves, and began to murmur their oremus. Matthew hurried to them. “Wait,” said he, “you are kneeling in the dirt; I will bring you some straw.”

And he went to find some straw and made them a prayer cushion. Then, seeing that his saint was muddy, and believing, without doubt, that it would be bad for the trade, he added: “I am going to clean him up a bit.”

He took a pail of water and a brush and began to wash the wooden figure vigorously. Meantime the two old women continued to pray.

When he had finished, he said: “Now it is all right.” And then he brought us back for another drink.

As he raised the glass to his lips, he stopped and said, with an air of embarrassment: “Well, indeed, when I put Saint Blanc in the rabbit hutch, I was sure he would never earn me another penny. For two years there had been no demand for him. But the saints, you see, never die.”

He drank and continued:

“Come, let us have another. Amongst friends you must never go less than fifty, and we’re only at thirty-eight.”

The Pardon

She had been brought up in one of those families who live shut up in themselves, and seem to be remote from everything. They pay no attention to political events, although they chat about them at table, and changes in government seem so far, so very far away that they are spoken of only as a matter of history⁠—like the death of Louis XVI, or the landing of Napoleon.

Customs change, fashions succeed each other, but this is hardly perceptible in the family where old traditions are always followed. And if some impossible story arises in the neighbourhood, the scandal of it dies at the threshold of this house.

The father and mother, alone in the evening, sometimes exchange a few words on such a subject, but in an undertone, as if the walls had ears.

With great discretion, the father says: “Do you know about this terrible affair in the Rivoil family?”

And the mother replies: “Who would have believed it? It is frightful!”

The children have no suspicion of anything, but come to the age of living, in their turn, with a bandage over their eyes and minds, without ever suspecting any other kind of existence, without knowing that one does not always think as one speaks, nor speak as one acts, without knowing that it is necessary to live at war with the world, or at least in armed peace, without surmising that the ingenuous are frequently deceived, the sincere trifled with, and the good wronged.

Some go on until death in this blindness of probity, loyalty, and honour; so upright that nothing can open their eyes. Others, undeceived, without realizing why, are weighed down with despair, and die believing that they are the puppets of exceptional fate, the miserable victims of unlucky circumstance or particularly bad men.

The Savignols married their daughter Berthe when she was eighteen. Her husband was a young man from Paris, Georges Baron, whose business was on the Stock Exchange. He was an attractive youth, with a smooth tongue, and he observed all the outward proprieties necessary. But at the bottom of his heart he sneered a little at his guileless parents-in-law, calling them, among his friends, “My dear fossils.”

He belonged to a good family, and the young girl was rich. He took her to live in Paris.

She became one of the numerous race of provincials in Paris. She remained ignorant of the great city, of its elegant people, of its pleasures and its customs, as she had always been ignorant of the perfidy and mystery of life.

Shut up in her own household, she only knew the street she lived in, and when she ventured into another quarter, it seemed to her that she had journeyed far, into an unknown, strange city. She would say in the evening:

“I crossed the boulevards today.”

Two or three times a year, her husband took her to the theatre. These were great events not to be forgotten, which she recalled continually.

Sometimes at table, three months afterwards, she would suddenly burst out laughing and exclaim:

“Do you remember that ridiculous actor who imitated the cock’s crowing?”

All her interests were limited to two allied families, who represented the whole of humanity to her. She designated them by the distinguishing prefix “the,” calling them respectively “the Martinets,” or “the Michelints.”

Her husband lived according to his fancy, coming home at whatever hour he wished, sometimes at daybreak, pretending business, and feeling in no way constrained, so sure was he that no suspicion would ruffle this candid soul.

But one morning she received an anonymous letter. She was dismayed, being too upright to understand the infamous accusations, to scorn this letter, whose author declared himself to be moved by interest in her happiness, by hatred of all evil and love of truth.

But it revealed to her that her husband had had a mistress for two years, a young widow, Mme. Rosset, at whose house he spent all his evenings.

She knew neither how to pretend nor to dissimulate, to spy or to plan any sort of ruse. When he returned for luncheon, she threw him the letter, sobbing, and then fled from the room.

He had time to understand the matter and prepare his answer before he rapped at his wife’s door. She opened it immediately, without looking at him. He smiled, sat down, and drew her to his knee. In a sweet voice, and a little jocosely, he said:

“My dear little one, Mme. Rosset is a friend of mine. I have known her for ten years and like her very much. I may add that I know twenty other families of whom I have not spoken to you, knowing that you care nothing for the world or for forming new friendships. But in order to end, once for all, these infamous lies, I will ask you to dress yourself, after luncheon, and we will go to pay a visit to this young lady, who will become your friend at once, I am sure.”

She embraced her husband eagerly; and, from feminine curiosity, which never sleeps once it has been aroused, she did not refuse to go to see this unknown woman, of whom, in spite of everything, she was still suspicious. She felt by instinct that a known danger is sooner overcome.

They were ushered into a pretty little apartment on the fourth floor of a handsome house, full of bric-a-brac and artistically decorated. After about five minutes’ waiting, in a drawing room where the light was dimmed by draperies, hangings, and curtains tastefully arranged, a door opened and a young woman appeared. She was very dark, small, rather plump, and looked astonished, although she smiled. Georges presented them. “My wife, Madame Julie Rosset.”

The young widow uttered a little cry of astonishment and joy, and came forward with both hands extended. She had not hoped for this happiness, she said, knowing that Madame Baron saw no one. But she was so happy! She was so fond of Georges! (She said “Georges” quite naturally, with sisterly familiarity.) And she had had a great desire to know his young wife, and to love her, too.

At the end of a month these two friends were never apart from each other. They met every day, often twice a day, and nearly always dined together, either at one house or at the other. Georges scarcely ever went out now, no longer alleging business engagements, but he said he loved his own chimney corner.

And when finally an apartment was vacant in the house where Madame Rosset resided, Madame Baron hastened to take it in order to be nearer her new friend.

During two whole years there was a friendship between them without a cloud, a friendship of heart and soul, absolute, tender, devoted, and delightful. Berthe could not speak without mentioning Julie’s name, for to her Julie represented perfection. She was happy with a perfect happiness, calm and secure.

But Madame Rosset fell ill. Berthe never left her. She passed nights of despair; her husband, too, was brokenhearted.

One morning, on coming out from his visit the doctor took Georges and his wife aside, and announced that he found the condition of their friend very grave.

When he had gone out, the young people, stricken down, looked at each other and then began to weep. They both watched at night by the bedside. Every moment Berthe would embrace the sick woman tenderly, while Georges, standing silently at the foot of her couch, would look at them with dogged persistence. The next day she was worse.

Finally, toward evening, she declared herself better, and persuaded her friends to go home to dinner.

They were sitting sadly at table, scarcely eating anything, when the maid brought Georges an envelope. He opened it, turned pale, and rising, said to his wife, in a constrained way: “Excuse me, I must leave you for a moment. I will return in ten minutes. Please don’t go out.” And he ran into his room for his hat.

Berthe waited, tortured by a new fear. But, yielding in all things, she would not go up to her friend’s room again until he had returned.

As he did not reappear, the thought came to her to look in his room to see whether he had taken his gloves, which would show whether he had really gone somewhere.

She saw them there, at first glance. Near them lay a crumpled paper, where he had thrown it.

She recognized it immediately; it was the one that had just been given to Georges.

And a burning temptation took possession of her, the first of her life, to read⁠—to know. Her conscience struggled in revolt, but the itch of an exacerbated and cruel curiosity impelled her hand. She seized the paper, opened it, recognized at once the handwriting as that of Julie, a trembling hand, written in pencil. She read:

“Come alone and embrace me, my poor dear; I am going to die.”

She could not understand it all at once, but stood stupefied, struck especially by the thought of death. Then, suddenly, the familiarity of it seized upon her mind. This came like a great light, illuminating her whole life, showing her the infamous truth, all their treachery, all their perfidy. She saw now their prolonged cunning, their sly looks, her good faith abused, her confidence deceived. She saw them looking into each other’s face, under the shade of her lamp in the evening, reading from the same book, exchanging glances at the end of the pages.

And her heart, stirred with indignation, bruised with suffering, sank into an abyss of despair that had no boundaries.

When she heard steps, she fled and shut herself in her room.

Her husband called her: “Come quickly, Madame Rosset is dying!”

Berthe appeared at her door and said with trembling lip:

“Go alone to her; she has no need of me.”

He looked at her wildly, dazed with grief, and repeated:

“Quick, quick! She is dying!”

Berthe answered: “You would prefer if it were I.”

Then he understood, probably, and left her to herself, going up again to the dying woman.

There he wept without fear, or shame, indifferent to the grief of his wife, who would no longer speak to him, nor look at him, but who lived shut in with her disgust and angry revolt, praying to God morning and evening.

They lived together, nevertheless, eating together face to face, mute and hopeless.

After a time, he recovered his calm, but she would not pardon him. And so life continued hard for them both.

For a whole year they lived thus, strangers one to the other. Berthe almost became mad.

Then one morning, having set out at dawn, she returned about eight o’clock, carrying in both hands an enormous bouquet of roses, of white roses, all white.

She sent word to her husband that she would like to speak to him. He came in disturbed, troubled.

“Let us go out together,” she said to him. “Take these flowers, they are too heavy for me.”

He took the bouquet and followed his wife. A carriage awaited them, which started as soon as they were seated.

It stopped before the gate of a cemetery. Then Berthe, her eyes full of tears, said to Georges: “Take me to her grave.”

He trembled, without knowing why, but walked on in front, holding the flowers in his arms. Finally he stopped before a shaft of white marble and pointed to it without a word.

She took the bouquet from him, and, kneeling, placed it at the foot of the grave. Then she sank into an unfamiliar prayer of supplication.

Her husband stood behind her, weeping, haunted by memories.

She arose and put out her hands to him.

“If you wish, we will be friends,” she said.

The Relic

To the Abbé Louis d’Ennemare, at Soissons.

My Dear Abbé:

“My marriage with your cousin is broken off in the stupidest manner, on account of a stupid trick which I almost involuntarily played my intended, in my embarrassment, and I turn to you, my old schoolfellow, for you may be able to help me out of the difficulty. If you can, I shall be grateful to you until I die.

“You know Gilberte, or rather you think you know her, for do we ever understand women? All their opinions, their ideas, their creeds, are a surprise to us. They are all full of twists and turns, of the unforeseen, of unintelligible arguments, or defective logic and of obstinate ideas, which seem final, but which they alter because a little bird came and perched on the window ledge.

“I need not tell you that your cousin is very religious, as she was brought up by the White or Black Sisters at Nancy. You know that better than I do, but what you perhaps do not know, is, that she is just as excitable about other matters as she is about religion. Her head flies away, just like a leaf being whirled away by the wind; and she is a woman, or rather a girl, more so than many are, for she is moved, or made angry in a moment, starting off at a gallop after affection, just as she does after hatred, and returning in the same manner; and she is as pretty⁠ ⁠… as you know, and more charming than I can say⁠ ⁠… and in a way you can never know.

“Well, we became engaged, and I adored her, as I adore her still, and she appeared to love me.

“One evening, I received a telegram summoning me to Cologne for a consultation, which might be followed by a serious and difficult operation, and as I had to start the next morning, I went to wish Gilberte goodbye, and tell her why I could not dine with them on Wednesday, but on Friday, the day of my return. Ah! Take care of Fridays, for I assure you they are unlucky!

“When I spoke of going away, I saw that her eyes filled with tears, but when I said I should be back very soon, she clapped her hands, and said:

“ ‘I am very glad you are going, then! You must bring me back something; a mere trifle, just a souvenir, but a souvenir that you have chosen for me. You must find out what I should like best, do you hear? And then I shall see whether you have any imagination.’

“She thought for a few moments, and then added:

“ ‘I forbid you to spend more than twenty francs on it. I want it for the intention, and for the remembrance of your penetration, and not for its intrinsic value.’

“And then, after another moment’s silence she said, in low voice, and with downcast eyes:

“ ‘If it costs you nothing in money, and if it is something very ingenious and pretty, I will⁠ ⁠… I will kiss you.’

“The next day, I was in Cologne. It was the case of a terrible accident, which had thrown a whole family into despair, and a difficult amputation was necessary. They put me up; I might say, they almost locked me up, and I saw nobody but people in tears, who almost deafened me with their lamentaions; I operated on a dying man who nearly died under my hands, and with whom I remained two nights, and then, when I saw that there was a chance for his recovery, I drove to the station. I had, however, made a mistake in the trains, and I had an hour to wait, and so I wandered about the streets, still thinking of my poor patient, when a man accosted me. I do not know German, and he was totally ignorant of French, but at last I made out that he was offering me some relics. I thought of Gilberte, for I knew her fanatical devotion, and here was my present ready to hand, so I followed the man into a shop where religious objects were for sale, and I bought a small piece of a bone of one of the eleven thousand virgins.

“The pretended relic was enclosed in a charming, old silver box, and that determined my choice, and putting my purchase into my pocket, I went to the railway station, and so to Paris.

“As soon as I got home, I wished to examine my purchase again, and on taking hold of it, I found that the box was open, and the relic lost! It was no good to hunt in my pocket, and to turn it inside out; the small bit of bone, which was no bigger than half a pin, had disappeared.

“You know, my dear little Abbé, that my faith is not very great, but, as my friend, you are magnanimous enough to put up with my indifference, and to leave me alone, and to wait for the future, so you say. But I absolutely disbelieve in the relics of secondhand dealers in piety, and you share my doubts in that respect. Therefore, the loss of that bit of sheep’s carcass did not grieve me, and I easily procured a similar fragment, which I carefully fastened inside my jewel, and then I went to see my intended.

“As soon as she saw me, she ran up to me, smiling and anxious, and said to me:

“ ‘What have you brought me?’

“I pretended to have forgotten, but she did not believe me, and I made her beg me, and beseech me, even. But when I saw that she was devoured by curiosity, I gave her the sacred silver box. She appeared overjoyed.

“ ‘A relic! Oh! A relic!’

“And she kissed the box passionately, so that I was ashamed of my deception. She was not quite satisfied, however, and her uneasiness soon turned to terrible fear, and looking straight into my eyes, she said:

“ ‘Are you sure that it is authentic?’

“ ‘Absolutely certain.’

“ ‘How can you be so certain?’

“I was caught, for to say that I had bought it through a man in the streets, would be my destruction. What was I to say? A wild idea struck me, and I said, in a low, mysterious voice:

“ ‘I stole it for you.’

“She looked at me with astonishment and delight in her large eyes.

“ ‘Oh! You stole it? Where?’

“ ‘In the cathedral; in the very shrine of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.’

“Her heart beat with pleasure, and she murmured:

“ ‘Oh! Did you really do that⁠ ⁠… for me? Tell me⁠ ⁠… all about it!’

“There was no escape, I could not go back. I made up a fanciful story, with precise details. I had given the custodian of the building a hundred francs to be allowed to go about the building by myself; the shrine was being repaired, but I happened to be there just when the workmen and clergy were at lunch; by removing a small panel, I had been enabled to seize a small piece of bone (oh! so small), among a quantity of others (I said a quantity, as I thought of the amount that the remains of the skeletons of eleven thousand virgins must produce). Then I went to a goldsmith’s and bought a casket worthy of the relic; and I was not sorry to let her know that the silver box cost me five hundred francs.

“But she did not think of that; she listened to me, trembling; in an ecstasy, and whispering:

“ ‘How I love you!’ she threw herself into my arms.

“Just note this: I had committed sacrilege for her sake. I had committed a theft; I had violated a shrine; violated and stolen holy relics, and for that she adored me, thought me loving, tender, divine. Such is woman, my dear Abbé.

“For two months I was the best of fiancés. In her room, she had made a kind of magnificent chapel in which to keep this bit of mutton chop, which, as she thought, had made me commit that love-crime, and she worked up her religious enthusiasm in front of it every morning and evening. I had asked her to keep the matter secret, for fear, as I said, that I might be arrested, condemned and given over to Germany, and she kept her promise.

“Well, at the beginning of the summer, she was seized with an irresistible wish to see the scene of my exploit, and she begged her father so persistently (without telling him her secret reason), that he took her to Cologne, but without telling me of their trip, according to his daughter’s wish.

“I need not tell you that I had not seen the interior of the cathedral. I do not know where the tomb (if there be a tomb) of the Eleven Thousand Virgins is, and then, it appears that it is unapproachable, alas!

“A week afterwards, I received ten lines, breaking off our engagement, and then an explanatory letter from her father, whom she had, somewhat late, taken into her confidence.

“At the sight of the shrine, she had suddenly seen through my trickery and my lie, and had also found out that I was innocent of any other crime. Having asked the keeper of the relics whether any robbery had been committed, the man began to laugh, and pointed out to them how impossible such a crime was, but from the moment I had not burgled a sacred edifice, and plunged my profane hand into venerable relics, I was no longer worthy of my fair-haired and delicate betrothed.

“I was forbidden the house; I begged and prayed in vain, nothing could move the fair devotee, and I grew ill from grief. Well, last week, her cousin, Madame d’Arville, who is yours also, sent word to me that she should like to see me, and when I called, she told me on what conditions I might obtain my pardon, and here they are. I must bring her a relic, a real, authentic relic, certified to be such by Our Holy Father, the Pope, of some virgin and martyr, and I am going mad with worry and trouble.

“I will go to Rome, if needful, but I cannot call on the Pope unexpectedly, and tell him my stupid adventure; and, besides, I doubt whether they let private individuals have relics. Could not you give me an introduction to some cardinal, or only to some French prelate, who possesses some remains of a female saint? Or perhaps you may have the precious object she wants in your collection?

“Help me out of my difficulty, my dear Abbé, and I promise you that I will be converted ten years sooner than I otherwise should be!

“Madame d’Arville, who takes the matter seriously, said to me the other day:

“ ‘Poor Gilberte will never marry.’

“My dear old schoolfellow, will you allow your cousin to die the victim of stupid deception on my part? Pray prevent her from being the eleventh thousand and one virgin.

“Pardon me, I am unworthy, but I embrace you, and love you with all my heart.

In the Moonlight

The Abbé Marignan well deserved to be named after that famous battle. He was a tall, thin, fanatical priest, always in a state of exaltation, but never unjust. All his beliefs were fixed, and they never wavered. He sincerely believed that he understood God, that he penetrated His designs, His wishes, His intentions.

As he walked up and down the garden path of his little country presbytery a question sometimes arose in his mind: “Why did God do that?” Then, imagining himself in God’s place, he searched obstinately, and he nearly always found the reason. He was not the man to murmur in transports of pious humility, “O Lord, thy designs are inscrutable!” What he said was: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reason for what he does, or to divine it if I do not.”

Everything in nature seemed to him created with an absolute and admirable logic. The “why” and the “wherefore” always balanced. The dawns were made to rejoice you on waking, the days to ripen the harvests, the rains to water them, the evenings to prepare for sleeping, and the nights dark for sleep.

The four seasons answered perfectly all the requirements of agriculture; and to him the suspicion could never have come that nature has no intention, and that everything that lives has accustomed itself, on the contrary, to the harsh necessities of different periods, of climates, and of matter.

But he hated women; he hated them unconsciously, and despised them by instinct. He often repeated the words of Christ, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” and he would add, “One would almost say that God himself was ill-pleased with that particular work of his hands.” Woman for him was indeed the “child twelve times impure” of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her damnable work; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously disturbing. And even more than her fatal body, he hated her loving soul.

He had often felt women’s tenderness dwell in him, and though he knew himself to be unassailable, he grew exasperated at this need of loving which quivers continually in their hearts.

To his mind, God had only created woman to tempt man and to test him. Man should not approach her without defensive precautions, and such fears as one has of an ambush. Woman, indeed, was just like a trap, with her arms extended and her lips open toward a man.

He had toleration only for nuns, rendered harmless by their vows, but he treated them harshly notwithstanding, because, ever at the bottom of their locked hearts, their chastened hearts, he perceived the eternal tenderness that constantly went out even to him, although he was a priest. He felt that tenderness in their eyes more filled with the ecstasies of piety than those of the monks, in their ecstasies touched with sex, in their loving yearning for Christ, which made him indignant, because it was woman’s love, carnal love. He felt that accursed tenderness even in their submissiveness, in the softness of their voices as they spoke to him, in their downcast eyes, and in their tears of resignation when he harshly reproved them. And he would shake the skirts of his cassock on coming out of a convent, and would stride off rapidly, as if in flight from danger.

He had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house near by. He was bent on making her a sister of charity. She was pretty and harebrained, and a great tease. When the abbé sermonized, she laughed; when he was angry at her, she kissed him vehemently, pressing him to her heart, while he would seek involuntarily to free himself from her embrace, though it made him taste a certain sweet joy, awaking deep within him that sensation of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.

Often he talked to her of God, of his God, walking beside her along the footpaths through the fields. She hardly listened, but looked at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy of living which could be seen in her eyes. Sometimes she rushed forward to catch some flying creature, and, bringing it back, would cry: “Look, uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And this desire to “kiss flies” or bunches of lilac, worried, irritated, and revolted the priest, who saw, also in that, the ineradicable tenderness which ever springs in the hearts of women.

One day the sacristan’s wife, who kept house for the Abbé Marignan, told him, very cautiously, that his niece had a lover!

He experienced a dreadful emotion, and stood choking, with the soap all over his face, for he was shaving.

When he found himself able to think and speak once more, he cried: “It is not true; you are lying, Mélanie!”

But the peasant woman placed her hand on her heart: “May our Lord judge me if I am lying, Monsieur le Curé. I tell you she goes to him every evening as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other beside the river. You have only to go there between ten o’clock and midnight, and see for yourself.”

He ceased scraping his chin and began to pace the room rapidly, as he always did in his hours of serious meditation. When he tried to begin his shaving again, he cut himself three times from nose to ear.

All day long, he remained silent, filled with indignation and rage. To his priestly zeal against the mighty power of love was added the moral indignation of a father, of a teacher, of a keeper of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, outwitted by a child. He felt the egotistical sorrow that parents feel when their daughter announces that she has chosen a husband without them and in spite of their advice.

After his dinner, he tried to read a little, but he could not attune himself to it; and he grew more and more exasperated. When it struck ten, he took his walking-stick, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he had to go out at night to visit the sick. Smilingly he regarded the enormous cudgel, holding it in his strong, countryman’s fist and cutting threatening circles with it in the air. Then, suddenly, he raised it, and grinding his teeth, he brought it down upon a chair, the back of which split in two, and fell to the ground.

He opened his door to go out; but he stopped upon the threshold, surprised by such a splendid moonlight as one seldom sees.

Endowed as he was with an exalted spirit, such a spirit as must have belonged to those dreamer-poets, the Fathers of the Church, he felt himself suddenly softened and moved by the grand and serene beauty of the pale night.

In his little garden, bathed in the soft brilliance, his fruit-trees, all in a row, were outlining upon the walk the shadows of their slender wooden limbs scarcely clothed with green; while the giant honeysuckle climbing up the wall of the house exhaled delicious breaths as sweet as sugar, which hovered through the warm, clear night like a perfumed soul.

He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine, and he walked slowly, delighted, surprised, almost forgetting his niece.

As he stepped into the open country he stopped to contemplate the whole plain, inundated by this caressing radiance, and drowned in the tender and languishing charm of the serene night. In chorus the frogs threw into the air their short, metallic notes, and to the seduction of the moonlight, distant nightingales added that fitful music of theirs which brings no thoughts but dreams, that light and vibrant music which seems attuned to kisses.

The abbé continued his walk, his courage failing, he knew not why. He felt, as it were, enfeebled, and suddenly exhausted; he had a great desire to sit down, to stop there and contemplate and admire God in all His works.

Below him, following the twists of the little river, wound a great line of poplars. Around and above the banks, wrapping all the tortuous watercourse in a kind of light, transparent wadding, hung suspended a fine mist, a white vapour, which the moon-rays crossed, and silvered, and caused to gleam.

The priest paused again, penetrated to the depths of his soul by a strong and growing emotion. And a doubt, a vague uneasiness, seized on him; he felt that one of those questions he sometimes put to himself was now arising within him.

Why had God done this? Since the night is destined for sleep, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why, then, make it more charming than the day, sweeter than dawns and sunsets? And this slow, seductive star, more poetical than the sun, and so discreet that it seems designed to light up things too delicate, too mysterious, for the great luminary⁠—why had it come to brighten all the shades?

Why did not the sweetest of all songsters go to rest like the others? Why set himself to singing in the disturbing shadows? Why this half-veil over the world? Why these quiverings of the heart, this emotion of the soul, this languor of the body? Why this display of seductions which mankind never sees, since men are asleep in their beds? For whom was this sublime spectacle intended, this flood of poetry poured from heaven to earth? The abbé did not understand it at all.

But then, down there along the edge of the pasture appeared two shadows walking side by side under the arched roof of the trees all soaked in glittering mist.

The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck; from time to time he kissed her on the forehead. They suddenly animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped them like a divine frame made expressly for them. They seemed, these two, a single being, the being for whom this calm and silent night was destined; and they approached the priest like a living answer, the answer vouchsafed by his Master to his question.

He stood stock-still, overwhelmed, and with a beating heart. He fancied he was witnessing some Bible story, such as the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the accomplishment of the will of the Lord in one of those great scenes talked of in holy writ. Through his head ran the verses of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the calls of the body, all the passionate poetry of that poem burning with tenderness and love. And he said to himself, “God perhaps has made such nights as this to clothe with ideals the loves of men.”

He withdrew before the embracing couple, who went on arm in arm. And yet it was his niece; and now he wondered if he would not disobey the Lord. For does not God permit love, since He surrounds it visibly with splendour such as this?

And he fled, in distraction, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a temple where he had no right to enter.

Fear

We went on deck after dinner. There was not a ripple on the whole Mediterranean, whose smooth surface shone like silver under the great moon. The big steamer glided along, throwing up a curling column of thick black smoke toward the starlit sky and in our wake the white water churned up by the screw and the rapid movement of the huge ship, foamed and twisted, gleaming with such phosphorus as though it were nothing but bubbling moonlight.

Our party consisted of six or eight men, all of whom were gazing admiringly and in rapt silence at the distant shores of Africa, whither we were bound. The captain, who was smoking an after-dinner cigar with us, suddenly took up the conversation where it had been left off during dinner.

“Yes,” he said, “that day I was badly frightened. My ship stayed on the rocks six hours beaten by the sea. Luckily, we were picked up toward evening by an English collier that saw our plight.”

Then a tall man with sunburned face and dignified bearing, one of those men who have been in strange lands and have braved terrible dangers and whose eyes seem to have retained in their depths something of the fantastic sights they have seen, spoke for the first time:

“Captain, you say that you were frightened. I do not believe it. You use a wrong word and the sensation you felt was not that of fear. An energetic man never feels afraid before actual danger. He may be anxious, he may be restless, but fear is something entirely different.”

Laughingly, the captain replied:

“Well, by Jove, I can tell you I was frightened.”

Then the man with the sunburned face said in a slow voice:

“Allow me to explain my meaning. Fear (and the bravest men can experience it) is sometimes terrible, a dreadful sensation; it can be compared to the decomposition of the soul, and is a frightful spasm of the heart and mind, the mere recollection of which sends shudders through our frame. But, if a man is courageous, that never happens in the face of certain death, nor in the face of any known form of peril; it only occurs in certain abnormal instances, when a person is labouring under some strange influence, or when in the face of vague and unknowable dangers. Real fear is like a reminiscence of the fantastic terrors of past ages. A man who believes in ghosts and who imagines that he sees one, must experience the sensation of fear in all its atrocious horror.

“As for myself, I got an idea of what it must be like, in broad daylight, about ten years ago, and I experienced the full sensation of it last winter, during a night in December.

“I’ve taken many chances in my life and have had any number of adventures that were desperate enough. I’ve had may duels, I’ve been attacked and almost beaten to death by robbers. In America, once, I was sentenced to be hanged as a rebel, while another time I was thrown overboard by mutineers off the Chinese coast. Each time I thought that my last hour had come, and I made up my mind quickly to face the inevitable. I scarcely felt any emotion or regret.

“But fear is something very different.

“I have had a presentiment of it in Africa, although it is the offspring of the North; the sun makes it vanish like mist. You know, gentlemen, that the Orientals place little value on life; if one of them has to die, he makes up his mind at once; their nights are as free and void of legends as their souls are void of the morbid anxieties which haunt the brains of northern men. A panic may occur in the East, but fear is unknown there!

“Well, this is what happened to me in that weird country of Africa:

“I was crossing the downs that lie to the south of Ouargla. It is one of the strangest places in the world. Of course you all know the smooth, flat sand of ocean beaches? Well, just imagine the ocean changed into sand during a hurricane; imagine a silent storm with motionless waves of yellow dust, as high as mountains, as irregular, varying, and tumultuous as real breakers, but larger and streaked like watered silk. The blazing southern sun sheds its full glare on this raging but silent and motionless sea. You have to climb up one side of these golden waves and slide down the other, without respite or protection of any kind from the sun. The horses groan and sink up to their knees in the soft sand and slide down the other side of these astounding hills.

“Our little party consisted of a friend and myself, with an escort of eight spahis and four camels, with their keepers. We spoke not a word, for we were well-nigh exhausted and our parched throats were as dry as the desert that stretched in front of us. Suddenly one of the men gave a sort of startled cry; we all stopped and remained motionless in our saddles from sheer amazement at a startling and unaccountable phenomenon known to all travellers in those wild regions.

“From somewhere in the immediate vicinity, we were unable to determine the exact location, came the sound of a beating drum, the mysterious drum of the downs. The sound was perfectly distinct. Sometimes it would increase or decrease in volume and then it would stop altogether, only to begin again after a little while.

“The Arabs, scared to death, exchanged terrified glances. One of them uttered in his own tongue: ‘Death is upon us.’ And all of a sudden my friend, who was as dear as a brother to me, toppled from his horse, stricken with sunstroke.

“And during the two mortal hours in which I tried everything I knew to save him, that drum filled my ears with its strange, monotonous, intermittent beatings. And I felt fear, genuine, horrible fear, creep over me at the sight of the corpse of my beloved friend in that dreadful African hole scorched by the sun and enclosed by four sand hills and where, at a distance of at least two hundred miles from any French village, the echo brought us the sound of a rapidly beating drum.

“That day I realized what it was to feel fear; I realized it even more fully another time⁠ ⁠…”

The captain interrupted the speaker to inquire:

“Excuse me, sir, but what was the drum, after all?”

The traveller resumed:

“I really cannot tell you. Nobody knows. Officers who have often heard the sound attribute it to the multiplied and magnified echo of sheets of sand hurled by the wind against clumps of dry grass; for it has been noticed that the phenomenon always takes place in the neighbourhood of small plants that the heat of the sun has rendered as dry as parchment.

“According to that, the drum would only be a sort of sound mirage. But I only learned that later.

“Now I will relate my second experience.

“It was last winter and I was in a forest in the northeastern part of France. Night came two hours before its time, so dark was the sky. My guide was a peasant, who walked alongside of me in the narrow path, under a dome of pine-trees that shook and groaned under the furious wind. Between the treetops I could see the clouds hurrying past like a scattered army and they looked as if they were fleeing from some unknown horror. At times, under a dreadful gale of wind, the whole forest would bend in one direction and utter a moan of distress. In spite of my heavy clothing and rapid motion, the cold was beginning to penetrate me to the marrow.

“We were to put up over night at a forester’s home, and we were rapidly approaching the cottage. I had planned to spend a few days in the forest for the shooting.

“From time to time the guide would raise his eyes and mutter: ‘Bad weather, this.’ Then he spoke to me of the people who were to be our hosts. The old man had killed a poacher two years ago, and since then he had grown morose, as if he were haunted by the recollection of his deed. His two married sons lived with him.

“The darkness was terrible. I could not distinguish a thing and the sighing trees filled the night with incessant rumours. At last I saw a light, and after a little while my companion knocked on a door. Several shrill women’s cries answered from within. Then a tremulous man’s voice demanded: ‘Who goes there?’ My guide gave his name. We were admitted and I was confronted by a scene that I shall never forget.

“An old, white-haired man, with staring eyes, was standing in the middle of the kitchen, his fingers closed in a convulsive clasp around a loaded rifle, while two sturdy young men with axes were guarding the door. Two women, their faces buried in their hands, were crouching in a dark corner of the room.

“When we explained that we wished to remain over night, the old man stood the rifle against the wall and ordered the women to prepare our sleeping quarters. But, as they made no move to carry out his command, he turned to me abruptly and said:

“ ‘You see, monsieur, I killed a man two years ago this very night. Last year he came back and called me, and I expect him tonight.’

“Then, in a voice that made me smile, he added:

“ ‘We don’t feel very comfortable, you understand.’

“I reassured him as best I could, although, in my heart, I was glad to have come that very night, so that I might witness the manifestation of that superstitious terror. I told stories and succeeded in quieting almost everyone present.

“Near the hearth an old and half-blind dog was dozing with his nose between his paws. He looked for all the world like some people I’ve seen.

“Outside the storm was raging with great violence and the little house shook under the furious wind. Through a narrow window set near the door I could see the trees sway and the lightning flash through the black clouds.

“In spite of my efforts to cheer them, I could feel that these people experienced a mysterious dread and each time that I ceased talking, they would strain their ears to catch any unwonted sound.

“Tired of witnessing such stupid fears, I was about to ask to be shown to my bed, when suddenly the old forester leaped to his feet, rushed for his gun and shouted wildly: ‘There he is now! I can hear him!’ The women fell on their knees and hid their faces and the two sons clutched their axes.

“I was going to try to quiet them once more, when, all at once, the sleeping dog awoke. He lifted his head, looked at the fire with his dim eyes and let out one of those mournful howls that so often startle travellers in the country at night.

“We all watched him. He arose and stood perfectly still on his four paws, as if haunted by some vision, and then he directed another howl at something invisible to us, unknown, but which must have been ghastly to look upon, for he bristled from end to end.

“The old man, turning as white as a sheet, yelled: ‘He smells him! he smells him! He was with me when I killed him!’ And both women, crazed with fear, began to moan in accompaniment to the dog.

“In spite of myself, a shudder ran down my spine. The vision that the animal saw at that time and place, and among those terrified people, was horrible beyond description.

“For one whole hour the dog howled without moving; he howled as if in the throes of a nightmare, and fear, horrible, stealthy fear, was slowly taking possession of me; fear of what? How can I tell? It was fear, and that’s all I know.

“We remained motionless and terror-stricken, with strained ears, throbbing hearts and trembling limbs, momentarily expecting some dreadful thing to happen. The dog began to wander about the room sniffing the walls. He was driving us mad! All of a sudden, the peasant who acted as my guide jumped up in a sort of paroxysm of frenzied terror, seized the animal by the throat, opened a little door leading into the yard and hurled it into the darkness outside.

“The dog stopped howling at once and we remained in a dead silence that was more terrifying than the noise.

“Suddenly we all gave a start; some creature was creeping along the outer wall, going in the direction of the woods; it passed the door and seemed to feel it with a hesitating hand; for two minutes, which almost made lunatics of us, we heard no sound; then the creeping creature returned and scratched slightly on the door as a child might do with its nail, and then, all of a sudden, a head appeared at the window. It was a white head and it had flaming eyes like a wild beast. And a murmur came from its lips, an indistinct sound that resembled a plaintive moan.

“A minute afterwards a terrific explosion shook the kitchen. The old forester had shot at the thing. Quick as a flash the two sons rushed to the window and barricaded it with a massive kitchen table and sideboard.

“And I swear to you that that shot, which was so absolutely unexpected, froze my blood in my veins and made me feel as if I were going to give up the ghost.

“We stayed in the kitchen until daybreak, for we were powerless to move or utter a sound, so completely unnerved were we.

“We did not dare open the door till a narrow ray of light pierced through the shutters.

“At the foot of the wall, near the door, lay the old dog, his jaw broken by a bullet.

“He had got out of the yard by digging a hole under the fence.”

The man with the sunburned face paused; then he added:

“That night I ran no danger whatever, but I would rather live over all the real perils I have faced than go through another minute like the one I passed when the old keeper shot at the bearded head peering through the cottage window.”

In the Country

The two cottages stood side by side at the foot of a hill near a little seaside resort. The two peasants laboured hard on the fertile soil to rear their little ones, of whom each family had four.

Before the adjoining doors a whole troop of brats swarmed from morning till night. The two eldest were six years old, and the youngest were about fifteen months; the marriages, and afterwards the births, having taken place nearly simultaneously in both families.

The two mothers could hardly distinguish their own offspring among the lot, and as for the fathers, they mixed them up completely. The eight names danced in their heads; they were always getting them mixed up; and when they wished to call one child, the men often called three names before getting the right one.

The first of the two cottages, as you came up from the watering-place, Rolleport, was occupied by the Tuvaches, who had three girls and one boy; the other house sheltered the Vallins, who had one girl and three boys.

They all subsisted frugally on soup, potatoes and fresh air. At seven o’clock in the morning, then at noon, then at six o’clock in the evening, the housewives got their broods together to give them their food, as the gooseherds collect their flocks. The children were seated, according to age, before the wooden table, polished by fifty years of use; the mouths of the youngest hardly reaching the level of the table. Before them was placed a bowl filled with bread, soaked in the water in which the potatoes had been boiled, half a cabbage and three onions; and the whole line ate until their hunger was appeased. The mother herself fed the smallest.

A little meat in the pot on Sundays was a feast for all; and the father on this day sat longer over the meal, repeating: “I wish we could have this every day.”

One afternoon, in the month of August, a phaeton unexpectedly stopped in front of the cottages, and a young woman, who was driving the horses, said to the gentleman sitting at her side:

“Oh, look at all those children, Henri! How pretty they are, tumbling about in the dust, like that!”

The man did not answer, accustomed to these outbursts of admiration, which were a pain and almost a reproach to him. The young woman continued:

“I must hug them! Oh, how I should like to have one of them⁠—that one there⁠—the little tiny one!”

Springing down from the carriage, she ran toward the children, took one of the two youngest⁠—a Tuvache child⁠—and lifting him up in her arms, she kissed him passionately on his dirty cheeks, on his tousled hair daubed with earth, and on his little hands, with which he fought vigorously to get away from the caresses, which displeased him.

Then she got into the carriage again, and drove off at a lively trot. But she returned the following week, and seating herself on the ground, took the youngster in her arms, stuffed him with cakes, gave sweets to all the others, and played with them like a young girl, while the husband waited patiently in the carriage.

She returned again; made the acquaintance of the parents, and reappeared every day with her pockets full of dainties and pennies.

Her name was Madame Henri d’Hubières.

One morning, on arriving, her husband alighted with her, and without stopping to talk to the children, who now knew her well, she entered the farmer’s cottage.

They were busy chopping wood for the fire. They rose to their feet in surprise, brought forward chairs, and waited expectantly.

Then the woman, in a broken, trembling voice, began:

“My good people, I have come to see you, because I should like⁠—I should like to take⁠—your little boy with me⁠—”

The country people, too bewildered to think, did not answer.

She recovered her breath, and continued: “We are alone, my husband and I. We would keep it. Are you willing?”

The peasant woman began to understand. She asked:

“You want to take Charlot from us? Oh, no, indeed!”

Then M. d’Hubières intervened:

“My wife has not made her meaning clear. We wish to adopt him, but he will come back to see you. If he turns out well, as there is every reason to expect, he will be our heir. If we, by any chance, should have children, he will share equally with them; but if he should not reward our care, we should give him, when he comes of age, a sum of twenty thousand francs, which will be deposited immediately in his name, with a lawyer. As we have thought also of you, we will pay you, until your death, a pension of one hundred francs a month. Do you understand me?”

The woman had risen to her feet, furious.

“You want me to sell you Charlot? Oh, no, that’s not the sort of thing to ask of a mother! Oh, no! That would be an abomination!”

The man, grave and deliberate, said nothing; but approved of what his wife said by a continued nodding of his head.

Madame d’Hubières, in dismay, began to weep; turning to her husband, with a voice full of tears, the voice of a child used to having all its wishes gratified, she stammered:

“They will not do it, Henri, they will not do it.”

Then he made a last attempt: “But, my friends, think of the child’s future, of his happiness, of⁠—”

The peasant woman, however, exasperated, cut him short:

“We know all about that! We’ve heard all that before! Get out of here, and don’t let me see you again⁠—the idea of wanting to take away a child like that!”

Madame d’Hubières remembered that there were two quite young children, and she asked, through her tears, with the tenacity of a wilful and spoiled woman:

“But is the other little one not yours?”

Father Tuvache answered: “No, it is our neighbours’. You can go to them if you wish.” And he went back into his house, whence could be heard the indignant voice of his wife.

The Vallins were at table, slowly eating slices of bread which they parsimoniously spread with a little rancid butter on a plate between the two.

M. d’Hubières recommenced his proposals, but with more insinuations, more oratorical precautions, more shrewdness.

The two country people shook their heads, in sign of refusal, but when they learned that they were to have a hundred francs a month, they considered the matter, consulting one another by glances, much disturbed. They kept silent for a long time, tortured, hesitating. At last the woman asked: “What do you say to it, father?” In a weighty tone he said: “I say that it’s not to be despised.”

Madame d’Hubières, trembling with anguish, spoke of the future of their child, of his happiness, and of the money which he could give them later.

The peasant asked: “This pension of twelve hundred francs, will it be promised before a lawyer?”

M. d’Hubières responded: “Why, certainly, beginning with tomorrow.”

The woman, who was thinking it over, continued:

“A hundred francs a month is not enough to pay for depriving us of the child. That child would be working in a few years; we must have a hundred and twenty francs.”

Tapping her foot with impatience, Madame d’Hubières granted it at once, and, as she wished to carry off the child with her, she gave a hundred francs extra, as a present, while her husband drew up a paper. And the young woman, radiant, carried off the howling brat, as one carries away a wished-for knickknack from a shop.

The Tuvaches, from their door, watched her departure, silent, serious, perhaps regretting their refusal.

Nothing more was heard of little Jean Vallin. The parents went to the lawyer every month to collect their hundred and twenty francs. They had quarrelled with their neighbours, because Mother Tuvache grossly insulted them, continually, repeating from door to door that one must be unnatural to sell one’s child; that it was horrible, disgusting bribery. Sometimes she would take her Charlot in her arms, ostentatiously exclaiming, as if he understood:

“I didn’t sell you, I didn’t! I didn’t sell you, my little one! I’m not rich, but I don’t sell my children!”

And this went on for years and years. Every day coarse jeers were shouted outside the door so that they could be heard in the neighbouring house. Mother Tuvache finally believed herself superior to the whole countryside because she had not sold Charlot. Those who spoke of her used to say:

“I know, of course, that it was a tempting offer; yet, she behaved like a real mother.”

She was cited as a model and Charlot, who was nearly eighteen, brought up with this idea, which was constantly repeated, thought himself superior to his comrades because he had not been sold.

The Vallins lived comfortably, thanks to the pension. That was the cause of the unappeasable fury of the Tuvaches, who had remained miserably poor. Their eldest went away to serve his time in the army; Charlot alone remained to labour with his old father, to support the mother and two younger sisters.

He had reached twenty-one years when, one morning, a brilliant carriage stopped before the two cottages. A young gentleman, with a gold watch-chain, got out, giving his hand to an aged, white-haired lady. The old lady said to him: “It is there, my child, at the second house.” And he entered the house of the Vallins as if he were at home.

The old mother was washing her aprons; the infirm father was asleep in the chimney-corner. Both raised their heads, and the young man said:

“Good morning, papa; good morning, mamma!”

They both stood up, frightened! In a flutter, the peasant woman dropped her soap into the water, and stammered:

“Is it you, my child? Is it you, my child?”

He took her in his arms and hugged her, repeating: “Good morning, mamma,” while the old man, all trembling, said, in the calm tone which he never lost: “Here you are, back again, Jean,” as if he had just seen him a month ago.

When they had recognized each other again, the parents wished to take their boy out in the neighbourhood, and show him. They took him to the mayor, to the deputy, to the priest, and to the schoolmaster.

Charlot, standing on the threshold of his cottage, watched him pass.

In the evening, at supper, he said to the old people: “You must have been stupid to let the Vallins’ boy be taken.”

The mother answered, obstinately: “I wouldn’t sell my child.”

The father remained silent. The son continued:

“It is unfortunate to be sacrificed like that.”

Then Father Tuvache, in an angry tone, said:

“Are you going to reproach us for having kept you?” And the young man said, brutally:

“Yes, I reproach you for having been such fools. Parents like you cause the misfortune of children. You deserve that I should leave you.”

The old woman wept over her plate. She moaned, as she swallowed the spoonfuls of soup, half of which she spilled: “One may kill oneself to bring up children!”

Then the boy said, roughly: “I’d rather not have been born than be what I am. When I saw the other fellow, my heart stood still. I said to myself: ‘See what I should have been now!’ ” He got up: “See here, I feel that I would do better not to stay here, because I would throw it in your faces from morning till night, and I would make your life miserable. I’ll never forgive you for that!”

The two old people were silent, downcast, in tears.

He continued: “No, the thought of that would be too much. I’d rather look for a living somewhere else.”

He opened the door. The sound of voices entered. The Vallins were celebrating the return of their child.

Then Charlot stamped with rage, and, turning to his parents, he shouted:

“You silly yokels!”

And he disappeared into the night.

A Million

It was a modest clerk’s household. The husband, who was employed in a Government office, was conventional and painstaking, and he always was very careful in the discharge of his duties. His name was Léopold Bonnin. He was a mediocre young man who held the right opinions about everything. He had been brought up a Christian, but he was inclined to be less religious since the country had begun to move in the direction of the separation of Church and State. He would say in loud tones at the office: “I am a believer, a true believer, but I believe in God, not in the clergy.” His greatest claim was that he was an honest man. He would strike his chest as he said so. And he was an honest man, in the most humdrum sense of the word. He arrived punctually at his office and left as punctually. He never idled and was always very straight in “money matters.” He had married the daughter of one of his poor colleagues, whose sister, however, was worth a million, having been married for love. She had had no children, which was a deep disappointment for her, and, consequently, she had no one to whom she could leave her money except her niece. This legacy was the constant preoccupation of the family. It haunted the house, and even the office. It was known that “the Bonnins would come in for a million.”

The young couple were also childless, a fact which did not distress them in the least, as they were perfectly satisfied with their humdrum, narrow life. Their home was well-kept, clean and thrifty; they were both very placid and moderate in all things, and they firmly believed that a child would upset their lives, and interfere with their habits.

They would not have endeavoured to remain without heirs; but, since Heaven had not blessed them in that particular respect, they thought it was no doubt for the best.

The wealthy aunt, however, was not to be consoled, and was profuse with practical advice. Years ago, she had vainly tried a number of methods recommended by clairvoyants and her women friends, and since she had reached the age where all thought of offspring had to be abandoned, she had heard of many more, which she supposed to be unfailing, and which she persisted in revealing to her niece. Every now and then she would inquire: “Well, have you tried what I told you about the other day?”

Finally she died. The young people experienced a delighted relief which they sought to conceal from themselves as well as from the outside world. Often one’s conscience is garbed in black while the soul sings with joy.

They were notified that a will had been deposited with a lawyer, and they went to the latter’s office immediately after leaving the church.

The aunt, faithful to her lifelong idea, had bequeathed her fortune to their firstborn child, with the provision that the income was to be used by the parents until their decease. Should the young couple have no offspring within three years, the money was to go to the poor and needy.

They were completely overwhelmed. The husband collapsed and stayed away from the office for a week. When he recovered, he resolved with sudden energy to become a parent.

He persisted in his endeavours for six months, until he was but the shadow of his former self. He remembered all the hints his aunt had given and put them into practice conscientiously, but without results. His desperate determination lent him a factitious strength, which, however, proved almost fatal.

He became hopelessly anaemic. His physician stood in dread of tuberculosis, and terrified him to such an extent that he forthwith resumed his peaceful habits, even more peaceful than before, and began a restorative treatment.

Broad rumours had begun to float around the office. All the clerks had heard about the disappointing will, and they made much fun over what they termed the “million franc deal.”

Some ventured to give Bonnin facetious advice; while others dared to offer themselves for the accomplishment of the distressing clause. One tall fellow, especially, who had the reputation of being quite a roué and whose many affairs were notorious throughout the office, teased him constantly with veiled allusions, broad hints and the boast that he, Morel, could make him, Bonnin, inherit in about twenty minutes.

However, one day, Léopold Bonnin became suddenly infuriated, and jumping out of his chair, his quill behind his ear, he shouted: “Sir, you are a cur; if I did not respect myself, I would spit in your face.”

Witnesses were despatched to the antagonists, and for days the whole department was in an uproar. They were to be found everywhere, in and out of the offices, meeting in the halls to discuss some important point and to exchange their views of the affair. Finally a document was drawn up by the four delegates and accepted by the interested parties, who gravely shook hands and mumbled a few words of apology in the presence of the department chief.

During the month that followed, the two men bowed ceremoniously and with affected courtesy, as became adversaries who had met on the field of honour. But one day, they happened to collide against each other in the hall, outside of the office, whereupon Monsieur Bonnin inquired with dignity: “I trust I did not hurt you?” And Monsieur Morel replied: “Not in the least.”

After that encounter, they saw fit to speak a few words whenever they met. And little by little they became more friendly, appreciated one another and grew to be inseparable.

But Léopold was unhappy. His wife kept taunting him with allusions, torturing him with thinly veiled sarcasm.

And the days were flitting by. One year had already elapsed since the aunt’s demise. The inheritance seemed lost to them.

When sitting down to dinner Madame Bonnin would remark: “We have not very much to eat; it would be different if we were well off.”

Or, when Léopold was ready to start for the office, his wife would hand him his walking-stick and observe: “If we had an income of fifty thousand francs, you would not have to kill yourself working, you poor quill-driver.”

When Madame Bonnin went out on a rainy day, she would invariably murmur: “If we had a carriage, I would not be compelled to ruin my clothes on a day like this.”

In fact, at all times, she seemed to blame her husband, rendering him alone responsible for the state of affairs and the loss of the fortune.

Finally, growing desperate, he took her to a well-known physician, who, after a lengthy consultation, expressed no opinion and declared he could discover nothing unusual; that similar cases were of frequent occurrence; that it was the same with bodies as with minds; that, after having seen so many couples separated through incompatibility of temper, it was not surprising to find some who were childless because of physical incompatibility. The consultation cost forty francs.

A year went by, and war was declared between the pair, incessant, bitter war, almost ferocious hatred. And Madame Bonnin never stopped saying over and over again: “Isn’t it dreadful to lose a fortune because one happens to have married a fool!” or “to think that if I had married another man, today I would have an income of forty thousand francs!” or again: “Some people are always in the way. They spoil everything.”

In the evening, after dinner, the tension became well-nigh insufferable. One night, fearing a terrible scene, and not knowing how to ward it off, Léopold brought his friend, Frédéric Morel, with whom he had almost had a duel, home with him. Soon Morel became the friend of the house, the counsellor of husband and wife.

The expiration of the delay stipulated in the will was drawing near; only six months more and the fortune would go to the poor and needy. And little by little Léopold’s attitude toward his wife changed. He, too, became aggressive, taunting, would make obscure insinuations, mentioning in a mysterious way wives of clerks who had built up their husbands’ careers.

Every little while he would bring up some story of promotion that had fallen to the luck of some obscure clerk. “Little Ravinot, who was only a temporary clerk, five years ago, has been made assistant chief clerk.” Then Madame Bonnin would reply: “It certainly is not you who could accomplish anything like that.”

Léopold would shrug his shoulders.

“As if he did more than anyone else! He has a bright wife, that is all. She captivated the head of the department and now gets everything she wants. In this life we have to look out that we are not fooled by circumstances.”

What did he really mean? What did she infer? What occurred? Each of them had a calendar on which the days which separated them from the fatal term were marked; and every week they were overcome by a sort of madness, a desperate rage, a wild exasperation, so that they felt capable of committing a crime if necessary.

And then one morning Madame Bonnin, with shining eyes and a radiant face, laid her hands on her husband’s shoulders, looked at him intently, joyfully, and whispered: “I believe that I am pregnant.” He experienced such a shock that he almost collapsed; and suddenly clasping his wife in his arms, he drew her down on his knee, kissed her like a beloved child and, overwhelmed by emotion, sobbed aloud.

Two months later, doubt was no longer possible. He went with her to a physician and had the latter make out a certificate which he handed to the executor of the will. The lawyer stated that, inasmuch as the child existed, whether born or unborn, he could do nothing but bow to circumstances, and would postpone the execution of the will until the birth of the heir.

A boy was born, whom they christened Dieudonné, in remembrance of the practice in royal households.

They were very rich.

One evening, when M. Bonnin came home⁠—his friend Frédéric Morel was to dine with them⁠—his wife remarked casually: “I have just requested our friend Frédéric never to enter this house again. He insulted me.” Léopold looked at her for a second with a light of gratitude in his eyes, and then he opened his arms; she flew to him and they kissed each other tenderly, like the good, united, upright little couple that they were.

And it is worth while to hear Madame Bonnin talk about women who have transgressed for love, and those whom a great passion has led to adultery.

The Will

I knew that tall young fellow, René de Bourneval. He was an agreeable companion, though rather melancholy, and disillusioned about everything, very sceptical, with a scepticism which was direct and devastating, and especially skilful in exposing social hypocrisies in a biting phrase. He often used to say:

“There are no honest men, or, at least, they only appear so in comparison with swine.”

He had two brothers, whom he shunned, the Messieurs de Courcils. I thought they were by another father, on account of the difference in the name. I had frequently heard that something strange had happened in the family, but no details were given.

As I took a great liking to him, we soon became intimate, and one evening, when I had been dining with him alone, I asked him by chance: “Are you by your mother’s first or second marriage?” He grew rather pale; then he flushed, and did not speak for a few moments; he was visibly embarrassed. Then he smiled in that melancholy and gentle manner peculiar to him, and said:

“My dear friend, if it will not bore you, I can tell you some very strange details about my life. I know you to be a sensible man, so I am not afraid that our friendship will suffer by my revelations, and if it did, I should not care about having you for my friend any longer.

“My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor, timid, little woman, whom her husband had married for the sake of her fortune. Her whole life was a martyrdom. Of an affectionate, timorous and sensitive nature, she was constantly ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those boors called country gentlemen. A month after their marriage he was living with a servant, and besides that, the wives and daughters of his tenants were his mistresses, which did not prevent him from having two children by his wife, three, if you count me. My mother said nothing, and lived in that noisy house like one of those little mice which slip under the furniture. Self-effacing, retiring and nervous, she looked at people with bright, uneasy, restless eyes, the eyes of some terrified creature which can never shake off its fear. And yet she was pretty, very pretty and fair, a grey blonde, as if her hair had lost its colour through her constant fears.

“Among Monsieur de Courcils’s friends who constantly came to the château there was an ex-cavalry officer, a widower, a man to be feared, a man at the same time tender and violent, and capable of the most energetic resolution, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear. He was a tall, thin man, with a heavy black mustache, and I am very like him. He was a man who had read a great deal, and whose ideas were not like those of most of his class. His great-grandmother had been a friend of J. J. Rousseau, and it seemed as if he had inherited something from this connection of his ancestor’s. He knew the Contrat Social and the Nouvelle Héloïse by heart, and, indeed, all those philosophical books which led the way to the overthrow of our old usage, prejudices, superannuated laws, and imbecile morality.

“It seemed that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their intrigue was carried on so secretly that no one guessed it. The poor, neglected, unhappy woman must have clung to him desperately, and in her intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinking, theories of free thought, audacious ideas of independent love. But as she was so timid that she never ventured to speak aloud, it was all driven back, condensed, and compressed in her heart, which never opened itself.

“My two brothers were very cruel to her, like their father, and never gave her a caress. Used to seeing her count for nothing in the house, they treated her rather like a servant, and so I was the only one of her sons who really loved her, and whom she loved.

“I was eighteen at the time she died. I must add, in order that you may understand what follows, that a trustee had been appointed to look after my father’s affairs, that a decision in favour of my mother had been pronounced, dividing the property they held in common. Thanks to the workings of the law and the intelligent devotion of a lawyer to her interests, she had preserved the right to make her will in favour of anyone she pleased.

“We were told that there was a will lying at the lawyer’s, and were invited to be present at the reading of it. I can remember it, as if it were yesterday. It was a grand, dramatic, yet burlesque and surprising scene, brought about by the posthumous revolt of the dead woman, by a cry for liberty from the depths of her tomb, on the part of a martyred woman who had been crushed by our customs during her life, and who, from her grave, uttered a despairing appeal for independence.

“The man who thought that he was my father, a stout, ruddy-faced man who looked like a butcher, and my brothers, two great fellows of twenty and twenty-two, were waiting quietly in their chairs. Monsieur de Bourneval, who had been invited to be present, came in and stood behind me. He was very pale, and bit his mustache, which was turning grey. No doubt he was prepared for what was going to happen. The lawyer double-locked the door, and began to read the will, after opening in our presence the envelope, which was sealed with red wax, and whose contents he did not know.”

My friend stopped suddenly and got up, and from his writing-table took an old paper, unfolded it, kissed it and continued:

“This is the will of my beloved mother:

“I, the undersigned, Anne-Catherine-Geneviève-Mathilde de Croixluce, the legitimate wife of Léopold-Joseph Gontran de Courcils, sound in body and mind, here express my last wishes:

“I first of all ask God, and then my dear son René, to pardon me for the act I am about to commit. I believe that my child’s heart is great enough to understand me, and to forgive me. I have suffered my whole life long. I was married for mercenary reasons, then despised, misunderstood, oppressed, and constantly deceived by my husband.

“I forgive him, but I owe him nothing.

“My eldest sons never loved me, never petted me, scarcely treated me as a mother. During my whole life I was everything that I ought to have been to them, and I owe them nothing more after my death. The ties of blood cannot exist without daily and constant affection. An ungrateful son is less than a stranger; he is a culprit, for he has no right to be indifferent toward his mother.

“I have always trembled before men, before their unjust laws, their inhuman customs, their shameful prejudices. Before God, I have no longer any fear. Dead, I fling aside disgraceful hypocrisy; I dare to speak my thoughts, and to avow and to sign the secret of my heart.

“I therefore leave that part of my fortune of which the law allows me to dispose, as a deposit with my dear lover Pierre-Gennes-Simon de Bourneval, to revert afterward to our dear son René.

“(This wish is, moreover, formulated more precisely in a notarial deed.)

“And I declare before the Supreme Judge who hears me, that I should have cursed Heaven and my own existence, if I had not met my lover’s deep, devoted, tender, unshaken affection, if I had not felt in his arms that the Creator made His creatures to love, sustain, and console each other, and to weep together in the hours of sadness.

“Monsieur de Courcils is the father of my two eldest sons; René alone owes his life to Monsieur de Bourneval. I pray to the Master of men and of their destinies to place father and son above social prejudices, to make them love each other until they die, and to love me also in my coffin.

“These are my last thoughts, and my last wish.

“Monsieur de Courcils had risen, and he cried:

“ ‘It is the will of a mad woman.’

“Then Monsieur de Bourneval stepped forward and said in a loud penetrating voice: ‘I, Simon de Bourneval, solemnly declare that this writing contains nothing but the strict truth, and I am ready to prove it by letters which I possess.’

“On hearing that, Monsieur de Courcils went up to him, and I thought that they were going to collar each other. There they stood, both of them tall, one stout and the other thin, both trembling. My mother’s husband stammered out:

“ ‘You are a worthless wretch!’

“And the other replied in a loud, dry voice:

“ ‘We will meet elsewhere, Monsieur. I should have slapped your ugly face, and challenged you long since, if I had not, before all else, thought of the peace of mind, during her lifetime, of that poor woman whom you made to suffer so much.’

“Then, turning to me, he said:

“ ‘You are my son; will you come with me? I have no right to take you away, but I shall assume it, if you will allow me.’ I shook his hand without replying, and we went out together; I was certainly three parts mad.

“Two days later Monsieur de Bourneval killed Monsieur de Courcils in a duel. My brothers, fearing the terrible scandal, held their tongues. I offered them, and they accepted, half the fortune which my mother had left me. I took my real father’s name, renouncing that which the law gave me, but which was not really mine. Monsieur de Bourneval has been dead for five years, and I am still mourning for him.”

He rose from his chair, took a few steps, and, standing in front of me, said:

“I hold that my mother’s will was one of the most beautiful and loyal, one of the greatest acts that a woman could accomplish. Do you not agree with me?”

I held out my two hands:

“Most certainly I do, my friend.”

The Wolf

This is what the old Marquis d’Arville told us after a dinner in honour of Saint-Hubert, at the house of Baron des Ravels. They had run down a stag that day. The Marquis was the only one of the guests who had not taken part in the chase. He never hunted.

During the whole of the long repast, they had talked of scarcely anything but the massacre of animals. Even the ladies interested themselves in the sanguinary and often unlikely stories, while the speakers mimicked the attacks and combats between man and beast, raising their arms and speaking in thunderous tones.

M. d’Arville talked well, with a certain poetical flourish that was full of effect. He must have repeated this story often, he told it so smoothly, never halting at a choice of words in which to clothe an image.

“Gentlemen, I never hunt, nor did my father, nor my grandfather, nor my great-grandfather. The last named was the son of a man who hunted more than all of you. He died in 1764. I will tell you how. He was named Jean, and was married, and became the father of the man who was my great-grandfather. He lived with his younger brother, François d’Arville, in our castle, in the midst of a deep forest in Lorraine.

“François d’Arville always remained a bachelor out of his love for hunting. They both hunted from one end of the year to the other without cessation or weariness. They loved nothing else, understood nothing else, talked only of this, and lived for this alone.

“They were possessed by this terrible, inexorable passion. It consumed them, having taken entire control of them, leaving no place for anything else. They had given orders that they were never to be disturbed when they were hunting, for any reason whatsoever. My great-grandfather was born while his father was following a fox, but Jean d’Arville did not interrupt his sport, and swore that the little beggar might have waited until after the death-cry! His brother François showed himself still more hotheaded than he. The first thing on rising, he would go to see the dogs, then the horses; then he would shoot some birds about the place, until it was time to set out hunting larger game.

“They were called in the country Monsieur le Marquis and Monsieur le Cadet: noblemen then did not act as do the interlopers of our time, who wish to establish in their titles a descending scale of rank, for the son of a marquis is no more a count, or the son of a viscount a baron, than the son of a general is a colonel by birth. But the petty vanity of our time finds profit in this arrangement.

“To return to my ancestors:

“They were, it appears, immoderately large, bony, hairy, violent, and vigorous. The younger one was even taller than the elder, and had such a voice that, according to a legend of which he was very proud, all the leaves of the forest moved when he shouted. When they were mounted, ready for the chase, it must have been a superb sight to see these two giants astride their great horses.

“Toward the middle of the winter of that year, 1764, the cold was excessive and the wolves became ferocious.

“They even attacked belated peasants, roamed around houses at night, howled from sunset to sunrise, and ravaged the barns.

“Very soon a rumour was circulated. It was said that a colossal wolf, of grayish-white colour, which had eaten two children, devoured the arm of a woman, strangled all the watchdogs of the country, was now coming without fear into the enclosures and smelling around the doors. Many inhabitants affirmed that they had felt his breath, which made the lights flicker. Shortly a panic ran through all the province. No one dared to go out after nightfall. The very shadows seemed haunted by the image of this beast.

“The brothers d’Arville resolved to find and slay him. So they called together all the gentlemen of the country for a big hunt.

“It was in vain. They beat the forests and scoured the thickets to no purpose; they saw nothing of him. They killed wolves, but not that one. And each night after the hunt, the beast, as if to avenge himself, attacked some traveller, or devoured some cattle, always far from the place where they had sought him.

“Finally, one night he found a way into the pigsty of the d’Arville castle and ate two beauties of the best breed.

“The two brothers were furious, interpreting the attack as one of bravado on the part of the monster⁠—a direct injury, a defiance. Therefore, taking all their best-trained hounds, accustomed to follow the most redoubtable quarry, they set out to run down the beast, their hearts filled with rage.

“From dawn until the sun descended behind the great leafless trees, they beat about the forests with no result.

“At last, both of them, angry and disheartened, turned their horses’ steps into a bypath bordered by brushwood, marvelling at the power of this wolf to baffle their knowledge, and suddenly seized with a mysterious fear.

“The elder said:

“ ‘This can be no ordinary beast. It almost looks as if he can reason like a man.’

“The younger replied:

“ ‘Perhaps we should get our cousin, the Bishop, to bless a bullet for him, or ask a priest to pronounce some words to help us.’

“Then they were silent.

“Jean continued: ‘Look at the sun; how red it is. The great wolf will do mischief tonight.’

“He had scarcely finished speaking when his horse reared. François’s horse started to run at the same time. A large bush covered with dead leaves rose before them, and a colossal beast, grayish-white, sprang out, scampering away through the wood.

“Both gave a grunt of satisfaction, and bending to the necks of their heavy horses, they urged them on with the weight of their bodies, driving them forward with such speed, exciting them, hastening them with voice and spur, that these strong riders seemed to carry the weight of their beasts between their knees, carrying them along as if they were flying.

“Thus they rode, at full speed, crashing through thickets, crossing ravines, climbing up the sides of hills, and plunging into gorges, sounding the horn with loud blasts, to arouse the people and the dogs of the neighbourhood.

“But suddenly, in the course of this breakneck ride, my ancestor struck his forehead against a large branch and fractured his skull. He fell to the ground as if dead, while his frightened horse disappeared into the shadows that were enveloping the woods.

“The younger d’Arville stopped short, sprang to the ground, seized his brother in his arms, and saw that his brains were coming out of the wound with his blood.

“He sat down beside him, took his disfigured and gory head upon his knees, looking earnestly at the lifeless face. Little by little a fear crept over him, a strange fear that he had never before felt, fear of the shadows, of the solitude, of the lonely woods, and also of the chimerical wolf, which had now avenged itself by killing his brother.

“The shadows deepened, the branches of the trees crackled in the sharp cold. François arose shivering, incapable of remaining there any longer, and already feeling his strength fail. There was nothing to be heard, neither the voice of the dogs nor the sound of the horns; all within this invisible horizon was mute. And in this gloomy silence and the chill of evening there was something strange and frightful.

“With his powerful hands he seized Jean’s huge body and laid it across the saddle to take it home; then he resumed his way slowly, his mind troubled by horrible, extraordinary images, as if he were intoxicated.

“Suddenly, along the path darkened by the night, a great form passed. It was the wolf. A violent fit of terror seized upon the hunter; something cold, like a stream of water, seemed to glide down his back, and he made the sign of the cross, like a monk haunted by devils, so dismayed was he by the reappearance of the frightful wanderer. Then, his eyes falling upon the inert body before him, his fear was quickly changed to anger, and he trembled with inordinate rage.

“He pricked his horse and darted after him.

“He followed him through copses, ravines, and great forests, traversing woods that he no longer recognized, his eyes fixed upon a white spot, which was ever flying from him as night covered the earth.

“His horse also seemed moved by an unknown force and ardour. He galloped on with neck extended, crashing over small trees and rocks, with the body of the dead man stretched across him on the saddle. Brambles caught in his hair; his head, where it struck the enormous tree trunks, spattered them with blood; his spurs tore off pieces of bark.

“Suddenly the animal and its rider came out of the forest, and rushed into a valley as the moon appeared above the hills. This valley was stony and shut in by enormous rocks, with no other outlet; and the wolf, caught in a corner, turned around.

“François gave a shout of joy and revenge which the echoes repeated like a roll of thunder. He leaped from his horse, knife in hand.

“The bristling beast, with rounded back, was awaiting him, his eyes shining like two stars. But before joining battle, the strong hunter, grasping his brother, seated him upon a rock, supporting his head, which was now but a mass of blood, with stones, and cried aloud to him, as to one deaf: ‘Look, Jean! Look here!’

“Then he threw himself upon the monster. He felt himself strong enough to overthrow a mountain, to crush the rocks in his hands. The beast tried to bite, and to rip up his stomach; but the man had seized it by the throat, without even making use of his weapon, and was strangling it gently, listening to its breath stopping in its throat, and its heart ceasing to beat. And he laughed with mad joy, clutching it more and more strongly with a terrible hold, and crying out in his delirium: ‘Look, Jean! Look!’ All resistance ceased. The body of the wolf was limp. He was dead.

“Then François, taking him in his arms, threw him down at the feet of his elder brother, crying out in expectant voice: ‘Here, here, Jean, dear, here he is!’

“Then he placed upon the saddle the two bodies, the one above the other, and started on his way.

“He returned to the castle laughing and weeping, like Gargantua at the birth of Pantagruel, shouting in triumph and stamping with delight in relating the death of the beast, and moaning and tearing at his beard in telling the death of his brother.

“Often, later, when he recalled that day, he would declare, with tears in his eyes: ‘If only poor Jean had seen me strangle the beast, he would have died happy, I am sure!’

“The widow of my ancestor inspired in her son a horror of hunting, which was transmitted from father to son down to myself.”

The Marquis d’Arville was silent. Someone asked: “That is a legendary tale, is it not?”

And the narrator replied:

“I swear to you it is true from beginning to end.”

Then a lady, in a sweet little voice, declared:

“Well, it is beautiful to have passions like that.”

The Kiss

My little darling: so you are crying from morning until night and from night until morning, because your husband leaves you; you do not know what to do and so you ask your old aunt for advice; you must consider her quite an expert. I don’t know as much as you think I do, and yet I am not entirely ignorant of the art of loving, or, rather, of making one’s self loved, in which you are a little lacking. I can admit that at my age.

You say that you are all attention, love, kisses and caresses for him. Perhaps that is the very trouble; I think you kiss him too much.

My dear, we have in our hands the most terrible power in the world: love.

Man is gifted with physical strength, and he exercises force. Woman is gifted with charm, and she rules with caresses. It is our weapon, formidable and invincible, but we should know how to use it.

We are the mistresses of the world you know. To tell the history of Love from the beginning of the world would be to tell the history of man himself. Everything springs from it, the arts, great events, customs, wars, the overthrow of empires.

In the Bible you find Delila, Judith; in fables we find Omphale, Helen; in history the Sabines, Cleopatra, and many others.

Therefore we reign supreme, all-powerful. But, like kings, we must make use of delicate diplomacy.

Love, my dear, is made up of imperceptible sensations. We know that it is as strong as death, but also as frail as glass. The slightest shock breaks it, our power crumbles, and we are never able to build it up again.

We have the power of making ourselves adored, but we lack one tiny thing, understanding of the various shades of caresses, the subtle feeling for what is excessive in the manifestations of our tender feelings. When we are embraced we lose the sentiment of delicacy, while the man over whom we rule remains master of himself, capable of judging the foolishness of certain words. Take care, my dear; that is the defect in our armour. It is our Achilles’ heel.

Do you know whence comes our real power? From the kiss, the kiss alone! When we know how to offer and give up our lips we can become queens.

The kiss is only a preface, however, but a charming preface. More charming than the realization itself. A preface which can always be read over again, whereas one cannot always read over the book.

Yes, the meeting of lips is the most perfect, the most divine sensation given to human beings, the supreme limit of happiness. It is in the kiss alone that one sometimes seems to feel this union of souls after which we strive, the intermingling of swooning hearts, as it were.

Do you remember the verses of Sully-Prudhomme:

Les caresses ne sont que d’inquiets transports,
Infructueux essais du pauvre Amour qui tente
L’impossible union des âmes par le corps.9

One caress alone gives this deep sensation of two beings welded into one⁠—it is the kiss. No violent delirium of complete possession equals this trembling approach of the lips, this first moist and fresh contact, and then the long, lingering, motionless rapture.

Therefore, my dear, the kiss is our strongest weapon, but we must take care not to dull it. Do not forget that its value is only relative, purely conventional. It continually changes according to circumstances, the state of expectancy and the ecstasy of the mind. I will call attention to one example.

Another poet, François Coppée, has written a line which we all remember, a line which we find delightful, which moves our very hearts.

After describing the expectancy of a lover, waiting in a room one winter’s evening, his anxiety, his nervous impatience, the terrible fear of not seeing her, he describes the arrival of the beloved woman, who at last enters hurriedly, out of breath, bringing with her a breath of winter, and he exclaims:

Oh! les premiers baisers à travers la voilette!10

Is that not a line of exquisite sentiment, a delicate and charming observation, a perfect truth? All those who have hastened to a clandestine meeting, whom passion has thrown into the arms of a man, well do they know these first delicious kisses through the veil; and they tremble at the memory of them. And yet their sole charm lies in the circumstances, from being late, from the anxious expectancy, but from the purely⁠—or, rather, impurely, if you prefer⁠—sensual point of view, they are detestable.

Think! Outside it is cold. The young woman has walked quickly; the veil is moist from her cold breath. Little drops of water shine in the lace. The lover seizes her and presses his burning lips to her liquid breath. The moist veil, which discolors and carries the dreadful odor of chemical dye, penetrates into the young man’s mouth, moistens his mustache. He does not taste the lips of his beloved, he tastes the dye of this lace moistened with cold breath. And yet, like the poet, we would all exclaim:

Oh! les premiers baisers à travers la voilette!

Therefore, the value of this caress being entirely a matter of convention, we must be careful not to abuse it.

Well, my dear, I have several times noticed that you are very clumsy. However, you are not alone in that fault; the majority of women lose their authority by abusing the kiss with untimely kisses. When they feel that their husband or their lover is a little tired, at those times when the heart as well as the body needs rest, instead of understanding what is going on within him, they persist in giving inopportune caresses, tire him by the obstinacy of begging lips and give caresses lavished with neither rhyme nor reason.

Trust my experience. First, never kiss your husband in public, in the train, at the restaurant. It is bad taste; do not give in to your desires. He would feel ridiculous and would never forgive you.

Beware of useless kisses lavished in intimacy. I am sure that you abuse them. For instance, I remember one day that you did something quite shocking. Probably you do not remember it.

All three of us were together in the drawing room, and, as you did not stand on ceremony before me, your husband was holding you on his knees and kissing you at great length on the neck, the lips and throat. Suddenly you exclaimed: “Oh! the fire!” You had been paying no attention to it, and it was almost out. A few lingering embers were glowing on the hearth. Then he rose, ran to the woodbox, from which he dragged two enormous logs with great difficulty, when you came to him with begging lips, murmuring:

“Kiss me!” He turned his head with difficulty and tried to hold up the logs at the same time. Then you gently and slowly placed your mouth on that of the poor fellow, who remained with his neck out of joint, his sides twisted, his arms almost dropping off, trembling with fatigue and tired from his desperate effort. And you kept drawing out this torturing kiss, without seeing or understanding. Then when you freed him, you began to grumble: “How badly you kiss!” No wonder!

Oh, take care of that! We all have this foolish habit, this stupid and inconsiderate impulse to choose the most inconvenient moments. When he is carrying a glass of water, when he is putting on his shoes, when he is tying his cravat⁠—in short, when he finds himself in any uncomfortable position⁠—then is the time which we choose for a caress which makes him stop for a whole minute in the middle of what he is doing, with the sole desire of getting rid of us!

Do not think that this criticism is insignificant. Love, my dear, is a delicate thing. The least little thing offends it: everything depends on the tact of our caresses. An ill-placed kiss may do any amount of harm.

Try following my advice.

That Pig, Morin

Madame Baptiste

When I went into the waiting-room at the station at Loubain, the first thing I did was to look at the clock, and I found that I had two hours and ten minutes to wait for the Paris express.

I felt suddenly tired, as if I had walked twenty miles. Then I looked about me, as if I could find some means of killing the time on the station walls. At last I went out again, and halted outside the gates of the station, racking my brains to find something to do. The street, which was a kind of boulevard planted with stunted laburnum-trees, between two rows of houses of unequal shape and different styles of architecture, houses such as one sees in only small towns, ascended a slight hill, and at the extreme end of it there were some trees, as if it ended in a park.

From time to time a cat crossed the street, and jumped over the gutters, carefully. A cur sniffed impatiently at every tree, and hunted for fragments from the kitchens, but I did not see a single human being. I felt listless and disheartened. What could I do with myself? I was already thinking of the inevitable and interminable visit to the small café at the railway station, where I should have to sit over a glass of undrinkable beer, and an unreadable local newspaper, when I saw a funeral procession coming out of a side street into the one in which I was, and the sight of the hearse was a relief to me. It would, at any rate, give me something to do for ten minutes.

Suddenly, however, my attention was redoubled. The corpse was followed by only eight gentlemen, one of whom was weeping, while the others were chatting together. But there was no priest, and I thought to myself: “This is a non-religious funeral,” but then I reflected that a town like Loubain must contain at least a hundred freethinkers, who would have made a point of making a manifestation. What could it be, then? The rapid pace of the procession clearly proved that the body was to be buried without ceremony, and, consequently, without the intervention of religion.

My idle curiosity played with the most complicated suppositions, and, as the hearse passed, a strange idea struck me, namely, to follow it with the eight gentlemen. That would take up my time for an hour, at least, and I, accordingly, walked with the others, with a sad look on my face, and on seeing this, the two last turned round in surprise, and then spoke to each other in a low voice.

No doubt, they were asking each other whether I belonged to the town, and then they consulted the two in front of them, who stared at me in turn. The close attention they paid me annoyed me, and to put an end to it, I went up to them, and after bowing, said:

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for interrupting your conversation, but seeing a civil funeral, I have followed it, although I did not know the deceased gentleman whom you are accompanying.”

“It is a woman,” one of them said.

I was much surprised at hearing this, and asked:

“But it is a civil funeral, is it not?”

The other gentleman, who evidently wished to tell me all about it, then said: “Yes and no. The clergy have refused to allow us the use of the church.”

On hearing that, I uttered a prolonged A‑h! of astonishment. I could not understand it at all, but my obliging neighbour continued:

“It is rather a long story. This young woman committed suicide, and that is the reason why she cannot be buried with any religious ceremony. The gentleman who is walking first, and who is crying, is her husband.”

I replied, with some hestitation:

“You surprise and interest me very much, Monsieur. Shall I be indiscreet if I ask you to tell me the facts of the case? If I am troubling you, consider these words unsaid.”

The gentleman took my arm familiarly.

“Not at all, not at all. Let us stop a little behind the others, and I will tell you, although it is a very sad story. We have plenty of time before getting to the cemetery, whose trees you see up yonder, for it is a stiff pull up this hill.”

And he began:

“This young woman, Madame Paul Hamot, was the daughter of Monsieur Fontanelle, a wealthy merchant in the neighbourhood. When she was a mere child of eleven, she had a terrible adventure; a footman violated her. She nearly died, in consequence, for she was injured by this wretch, whose brutality betrayed him. A terrible criminal case was the result, and as it was proved that for three months the poor young martyr had been the victim of that brute’s disgraceful practices, he was sentenced to penal servitude for life.

“The little girl grew up, stigmatised by her disgrace, isolated, without any companions, and grown-up people would scarcely kiss her, for they thought they would soil their lips if they touched her forehead. She became a sort of monster, a phenomenon to all the town. People said to each other in a whisper: ‘You know little Fontanelle,’ and everybody turned away in the streets when she passed. Her parents could not even get a maid to take her out for a walk, and the other servants held aloof from her, as if contact with her would poison everybody who came near her.

“It was pitiable to see the poor child on the playground where the kids amuse themselves every afternoon. She remained all alone, standing beside her maid, and looking at the other children amusing themselves. Sometimes, yielding to an irresistible desire to mix with the other children, she advanced, timidly, with nervous gestures, and mingled with a group, with furtive steps, as if conscious of her own infamy. And immediately the mothers, aunts, and nurses used to come running from every seat, taking the children entrusted to their care by the hand and dragging them brutally away.

“Little Fontanelle would remain isolated, wretched, without understanding what it meant, and then would begin to cry, heartbroken with grief, and run and hide her head in her nurse’s lap, sobbing.

“As she grew up, it was worse still. They kept the girls from her, as if she were stricken with the plague. Remember that she had nothing to learn, nothing; that she no longer had the right to the symbolical wreath of orange-flowers; that almost before she could read, she had penetrated that redoubtable mystery which mothers scarcely allow their daughters to guess, trembling as they enlighten them on the night of their marriage.

“When she went through the streets, always accompanied by a governess⁠—as if her parents feared some fresh, terrible adventure⁠—with her eyes cast down under the load of that mysterious disgrace which she felt was always weighing upon her, the other girls, who were not nearly so innocent as people thought, whispered and giggled as they looked at her knowingly, and immediately turned their heads absently if she happened to look at them. People scarcely greeted her; only a few men bowed to her, and the mothers pretended not to see her, while some young blackguards called her ‘Madame Baptiste,’ after the name of the footman who had outraged and ruined her.

“Nobody knew the secret torture of her mind, for she hardly ever spoke and never laughed; her parents themselves appeared uncomfortable in her presence, as if they bore her a constant grudge for some irreparable fault.

“An honest man would not willingly give his hand to a liberated convict, would he, even if that convict were his own son? And Monsieur and Madame Fontanelle looked on their daughter as they would have done on a son who had just been released from the hulks. She was pretty and pale, tall, slender, distinguished-looking, and she would have pleased me very much, Monsieur, but for that unfortunate affair.

“Well, when a new subprefect was appointed here eighteen months ago, he brought his private secretary with him. He was a queer sort of fellow, who had lived in the Latin Quarter, it appears. He saw Mademoiselle Fontanelle, and fell in love with her, and when told of what occurred, he merely said: ‘Bah! That is just a guarantee for the future, and I would rather it should have happened before I married her, than afterward. I shall sleep tranquilly with that woman.’

“He paid his addresses to her, asked for her hand, and married her, and then, not being deficient in boldness, he paid wedding-calls, as if nothing had happened. Some people returned them, others did not, but at last the affair began to be forgotten and she took her proper place in society.

“She adored her husband as if he had been a god, for you must remember that he had restored her to honour and to social life, that he had braved public opinion, faced insults, and, in a word, performed a courageous act, such as few men would accomplish, and she felt the most exalted and unceasing love for him.

“When she became pregnant, and it was known, the most particular people and the greatest sticklers opened their doors to her, as if she had been definitely purified by maternity.

“It is funny, but true, and thus everything was going on as well as possible, when, the other day, occurred the feast of the patron saint of our town. The prefect, surrounded by his staff and the authorities, presided at the musical competition, and when he had finished his speech, the distribution of medals began, which Paul Hamot, his private secretary, handed to those who were entitled to them.

“As you know, there are always jealousies and rivalries, which make people forget all propriety. All the ladies of the town were there on the platform, and, in his proper turn, the bandmaster from the village of Mourmillon came up. This band was only to receive a second-class medal, for you cannot give first-class medals to everybody, can you? But when the private secretary handed him his badge, the man threw it in his face and exclaimed:

“ ‘You may keep your medal for Baptiste. You owe him a first-class one, also, just as you do me.’

“There were a number of people there who began to laugh. The common herd are neither charitable nor refined, and every eye was turned toward that poor lady. Have you ever seen a woman going mad, Monsieur? Well, we were present at the sight! She got up, and fell back on her chair three times in succession, as if she wished to make her escape, but saw that she could not make her way through the crowd. Then another voice in the crowd exclaimed:

“ ‘Oh! Oh! Madame Baptiste!’

“And a great uproar, partly laughter and partly indignation, arose. The word was repeated over and over again; people stood on tiptoe to see the unhappy woman’s face; husbands lifted their wives up in their arms so that they might see her, and people asked:

“ ‘Which is she? The one in blue?’

“The boys crowed like cocks and laughter was heard all over the place.

“She did not move now on her state chair, just as if she had been put there for the crowd to look at. She could not move, nor disappear, nor hide her face. Her eyelids blinked quickly, as if a vivid light were shining in her face, and she panted like a horse that is going up a steep hill, so that it almost broke one’s heart to see it. Meanwhile, however, Monsieur Hamot had seized the ruffian by the throat, and they were rolling on the ground together, amid a scene of indescribable confusion, and the ceremony was interrupted.

“An hour later, as the Hamots were returning home, the young woman, who had not uttered a word since the insult, but who was trembling as if all her nerves had been set in motion by springs, suddenly sprang on the parapet of the bridge, and threw herself into the river, before her husband could prevent it. The water is very deep under the arches, and it was two hours before her body was recovered. Of course, she was dead.”

The narrator stopped, and then added:

“It was, perhaps, the best thing she could do in her position. There are some things which cannot be wiped out, and now you understand why the clergy refused to have her taken into church. Ah! If it had been a religious funeral, the whole town would have been present, but you can understand that her suicide, added to the other affair, made families abstain from attending her funeral. And then, it is not an easy matter, here, to attend a funeral which is performed without religious rites.”

We passed through the cemetery gates, and I waited, much moved by what I had heard, until the coffin had been lowered into the grave before I went up to the poor husband, who was sobbing violently, to press his hand vigorously. He looked at me in surprise through his tears, and said:

“Thank you, Monsieur.”

I was not sorry that I had followed the funeral.

My Wife

It was at the close of a dinner party consisting of men, married men, old friends, who sometimes met together without their wives, like bachelors, as in former days. They had eaten for a long while, and had drunk a great deal, talked on every subject and renewed happy memories of days gone by, those glowing memories that cause the lips to smile and the heart to tremble in spite of oneself.

Someone said:

“Do you remember, George, our excursion to Saint-Germain with those two young girls from Montmartre?”

“Certainly! Of course I do.”

And they brought up details, this and that, a thousand little things, the thoughts of which gave them pleasure even now.

They happened to speak about marriage, and everyone said in a serious voice: “Oh! if I had it to do over again!⁠ ⁠…” George Duportin added: “It is strange how easily you drop into it. You make up your mind never to take a wife, and then in the spring you go away into the country; the weather is warm; the summer promises well; everything is in bloom; you meet a young girl at a friend’s house⁠ ⁠… presto! it is done. You come home married.”

Pierre Létoile cried out: “Just so! that’s my story, only in my case the circumstances were peculiar⁠ ⁠…”

His friend interrupted him: “As for you, you have nothing to complain of. You surely have the most charming wife in the world, she is pretty, amiable, in fact, perfect; certainly you are the happiest of us all.”

The former replied:

“I’m not responsible for that.”

“Why not?”

“It is true that I have a perfect wife, but I married her in spite of myself.”

“Nonsense.”

“Yes⁠—This is the story: I was thirty years old, and I thought no more of marrying than of hanging myself. Young girls always seemed to me insipid, and I was exceedingly fond of pleasure.

“In the month of May I was invited to the wedding of my cousin Simon d’Erabel, in Normandy. It was a real Norman wedding. The people sat down at table at five o’clock in the afternoon; and at eleven o’clock they were still eating. On this occasion my partner was a Miss Dumoulin, the daughter of a retired colonel, a blonde young woman with a military air, well-built, fearless and loquacious. She monopolized me completely all day long, took me walking in the park, made me dance whether I wanted to or not, and bored me.

“I said to myself: ‘I’ll bear it today, but tomorrow I’ll escape. I’ve had enough.’

“About eleven o’clock at night the women retired to their rooms and the men remained to smoke while drinking, or to drink while smoking if you prefer.

“Through the open window could be seen the rustic ball. Country lads and lasses skipped in a circle while they sang in a loud voice the tune of a wild dance feebly accompanied by two violinists and a clarinettist who used the top of a large kitchen table as a platform. The tumultuous song of the country people sometimes completely drowned the sound of the instruments; and the feeble music, torn to pieces by their uncontrolled voices, seemed to fall from the sky in shreds, in small fragments of scattered notes. From two huge casks surrounded by flaming torches there poured drink for the crowd. Two men were busy rinsing the glasses, or bowls, in a tub so as to have them ready as quickly as possible to place under the faucets from which ran the red thread of wine or the golden thread of pure cider; and the thirsty dancers, the sedate elderly people, the perspiring girls, came there extending their arms to take, in their turn, whatever kind of cup they could find, and throwing back their heads took copious draughts of whichever drink they preferred. On one table was bread, butter, cheeses and sausages. Everybody swallowed a mouthful from time to time; and on the starlit field this healthy and energetic fête was a pleasure to behold and made me want to drink to the health of those huge casks, and eat hard bread with butter and a raw onion.

“A foolish desire took possession of me to take part in their festivities and I left my companions.

“I must acknowledge that I was then somewhat tipsy, and soon became quite drunk.

“I seized the hand of a strong peasant girl who was out of breath, and I made her skip around wildly until I was breathless. After drinking some more wine I seized another jolly girl and, to refresh myself, I swallowed a full bowl of cider, and I began to jump about like one possessed.

“I was supple, the lads were delighted, and watched me as they tried to imitate me; all the girls wanted to dance with me and they skipped about heavily, with cow-like grace.

“At last after many dances and glass after glass of wine and cider, I became so tipsy about two o’clock in the morning, that I could hardly stand up.

“I was conscious of my condition and I wanted to go to my bedroom. The château was asleep, silent, and sombre.

“I had no matches and everyone had gone to bed. As soon as I was inside the vestibule I was seized with dizziness: I had great difficulty in finding the banister; at last I came across it by chance, as I was groping about, and I sat down on the first step of the staircase trying to collect my ideas.

“My bedroom was on the second floor, the third door to the left. Happily I had not forgotten that. Confident that I remembered correctly, I got up again, but not without difficulty, and I began to go upstairs, step by step, my hands glued to the iron railing to prevent myself from falling, and trying my best not to make any noise.

“Three or four times my foot missed the following step, and I fell on my knees, but thanks to the strength of my arms and my great determination, I avoided rolling downstairs.

“At last I reached the second story, and ventured down the corridor, groping along the walls. Here was one door: I counted ‘One’; but a sudden dizziness made me let go the wall and turn round in an erratic circle that threw me against the other partition. I tried to return in a straight line. The passage was long and difficult, but at last I came up against the side wall and I once more carefully felt my way along it until I came to another door. To make certain that I was not mistaken, I again counted aloud: ‘Two’; and I continued walking. After some time I found the third, and I said: ‘Three, that’s mine,’ and as I turned the key in the lock the door opened. In spite of my confusion I thought, ‘as the door opens it must be my room,’ and I advanced in the darkness after closing the door softly.

“I came up against something soft, my couch, and I stretched myself out on it.

“In my condition I did not try to find my night table, my candlestick, or my matches. It would have taken me two hours or so. It would have taken me as long again to undress, and perhaps even then I would not have succeeded, so I did not attempt it.

“I took off my shoes, unbuttoned my vest which felt uncomfortably tight, and loosening my trousers, slept most soundly.

“I must have been sleeping a long while, when I was suddenly awakened by a penetrating voice calling out quite near me: ‘What, you lazy girl, still asleep? Do you know that it is ten o’clock?’

“A woman’s voice replied: ‘Already! I was so tired yesterday.’

“Half asleep, I asked myself what this conversation meant.

“Where was I? What had I done?

“My mind wandered, as it was still wrapped in a thick cloud. The first voice replied: ‘I will open your curtains.’

“And I heard steps approaching. I sat up completely bewildered. Then a hand was placed upon my head. I made a quick movement. The voice demanded emphatically: ‘Who’s there?’ I took good care not to answer. Two angry hands caught hold of me. In my turn I seized someone, and a terrible struggle began. We fought, overturning the furniture and striking against the walls.

“The woman’s voice cried out in a frightened tone: ‘Help, help!’

“The servants, the neighbours, and the frightened ladies all hurried to the scene. They opened the shutters, and drew back the curtains. I was grappling with Colonel Dumoulin!

“I had slept beside his daughter’s bed.

“As soon as we had been separated I fled to my room, stupefied with fright. I locked myself in and sat down, placing my feet on a chair, for my shoes were in the young woman’s room.

“I heard a great commotion throughout the château, doors opening and shutting, whispering, and rapid steps.

“After half an hour someone knocked at my door. I cried, ‘Who’s there?’ It was my uncle, the father of the young man who had been married the previous evening, and I let him in.

“He was pale and furiously angry, and he was very severe with me. ‘You have conducted yourself in my house like a cad, do you hear?’ Then in a softer tone he added: ‘What a damned idiot you are to let them catch you there at ten o’clock in the morning! You slept like a log in that room instead of going as soon after as possible.

“I exclaimed: ‘But uncle, I assure you that there was nothing amiss, I mistook my door because I was tipsy.’

“He shrugged his shoulders: ‘Go along, don’t tell me any such nonsense.’ I raised my hand. ‘I swear to you on my honour.’ My uncle continued: ‘Yes, that’s all right, you are in duty bound to say that.’

“I became angry in my turn, and I told him all about my mishap. He gazed at me in astonishment, not knowing what he ought to believe.

“Then he went out to confer with the colonel. I also learned that a kind of court composed of mothers had been formed, and that the different phases of the situation had been submitted to them.

“An hour later he returned, sat down with the air of a judge, and began: ‘Whichever way it is, I see only one way out of it for you and that is to marry Miss Dumoulin.’

“I was so frightened that I jumped up.

“ ‘Do that! never in the world!’

“He gravely asked: ‘What do you intend to do then?’

“I artlessly replied: ‘Well⁠—I shall leave as soon as my boots are returned.’ My uncle replied: ‘No joking if you please. The colonel has resolved to blow out your brains as soon as he sees you, and you may be sure it is not a vain threat. I suggested a duel, but he replied: “No, I tell you I will blow his brains out.”

“ ‘Let us now look at this question from another standpoint.

“ ‘Either you ruined this child⁠—so much the worse for you, my boy, young girls should not be treated thus⁠—or else you made a mistake because you were tipsy, as you say. Then so much the worse for you. You should not have placed yourself in such a foolish position. Whichever way it is the young girl has lost her reputation, for the explanations of a drunkard are never believed. In this case she is the real victim, the only victim. Think it over.’

“And he departed while I cried after him: ‘Say what you like, I won’t marry her.’

“After this I remained alone for an hour.

“Then my aunt came in her turn. She was weeping. She tried every way of reasoning with me. No one believed in my mistake. No one could believe that this young girl had forgotten to lock her door in a house full of people. The colonel had struck her and she had been sobbing all the morning. It was a terrible scandal that could not be effaced.

“And my good aunt added: ‘All the same, ask her hand in marriage; perhaps you may find means of escape while discussing the marriage contract.’ This view comforted me. And I consented to write my offer. An hour later I left for Paris.

“The next day I was advised that my suit had been accepted. So, in three weeks’ time, as I could not find an excuse, or evade it in any way, the banns were published, the invitations sent out, the contract signed, and one Monday morning I found myself in the chancel of a lighted church, by the side of a weeping young girl, having previously sworn to the mayor that I consented to take her as my companion⁠—until the death of one of us.

“I had not seen her since, and I glanced sideways at her with a certain hostile astonishment. Well, she was not ugly; no, not in the least ugly. I said to myself, ‘There’s a woman who will not be very amusing every day.’

“She did not look at me once until evening, and never addressed a word to me.

“Toward the middle of the night I entered the nuptial chamber intending to tell her what I had decided to do, for I was master now.

“I found her seated in an armchair, dressed in her day clothes, her eyes red, and face pale. She arose as soon as I entered and came toward me with a serious air.

“ ‘Sir,’ said she to me, ‘I am willing to do what you order me. I will kill myself if you wish.’

“She looked so pretty in this heroic part, the daughter of the colonel, that I embraced her as I had a right to, and soon saw that I had not been cheated.

“I have been married five years, and I have never regretted it in the least.”

Pierre Létoile stopped speaking. His companions laughed. One of them said: “Marriage is a lottery; one should never choose numbers, those drawn at haphazard are the best.”

And the other added in conclusion: “Yes, but do not forget that it was the Providence that watches over drunkards, who chose for Pierre.”

The Snipe

For forty years old Baron des Ravots had been the champion sportsman of his province. But a stroke of paralysis had kept him in his chair for the last five or six years. He could now only shoot pigeons from the window of his drawing room or from the top of the great flight of steps in front of his house. He spent the rest of his time in reading.

He was a good-natured business man, who had much of the literary spirit of the past century. He loved anecdotes, little risqué anecdotes, true stories of events that happened in his neighbourhood. As soon as a friend came to see him he would ask:

“Well, anything new?”

And he knew how to cross-examine like a lawyer.

On sunny days he had his large armchair, which was like a bed, wheeled to the hall door. A servant behind him held his guns, loaded them and handed them to his master. Another valet, hidden in the bushes, let fly a pigeon from time to time at irregular intervals, so that the baron should be unprepared and be always on the watch.

And from morning till night he fired at the birds, much annoyed if he were taken by surprise and laughing till he cried when the animal fell straight to the earth or turned over in some comical and unexpected manner. He would turn to the man who was loading the gun and say, almost choking with laughter:

“Did that get him, Joseph? Did you see how he fell?” Joseph invariably replied:

“Oh, Monsieur le Baron never misses them.”

In autumn, when the shooting season opened, he invited his friends as he had done formerly, and loved to hear them firing in the distance. He counted the shots and was pleased when they followed each other rapidly. And in the evening he made each guest give a faithful account of his day. They remained three hours at table telling about their sport.

They were strange and improbable adventures in which the loquacious temper of the sportsmen delighted. Some of them were already historical stories and were repeated regularly. The story of a rabbit that little Vicomte de Bourril had missed in his hall convulsed them with laughter each year anew. Every five minutes a fresh speaker would say:

“I heard birr! birr! and a magnificent covey rose at ten paces from me. I aimed. Bang! Bang! and I saw a shower, a veritable shower of birds. There were seven of them!”

And they all went into raptures, amazed, but reciprocally credulous.

But there was an old custom in the house called “The Story of the Snipe.”

Whenever this queen of birds was in season the same ceremony took place at each dinner. As they loved this incomparable bird, each guest ate one every evening, but the heads were all left in the dish.

Then the baron, acting the part of a bishop, had a plate brought to him containing a little fat, and he carefully anointed the precious heads, holding them by the tip of their slender, needle-like beaks. A lighted candle was placed beside him and everyone was silent in an anxiety of expectation.

Then he took one of the heads thus prepared, stuck a pin through it and stuck the pin on a cork, keeping the whole contrivance steady by means of little crossed sticks, and carefully balanced this object on the neck of a bottle like a sort of turnstile.

All the guests counted simultaneously in a loud tone:

“One⁠—two⁠—three.”

And the baron with a flip of his finger made this toy whirl round.

The guest at whom the long beak pointed when the head stopped became the possessor of all the heads, a feast fit for a king, which made his neighbours look envious.

He took them one by one and toasted them over the candle. The grease sputtered, the roasting flesh smoked and the lucky winner ate the head, holding it by the beak and uttering exclamations of enjoyment.

And at each head the diners, raising their glasses, drank to his health.

When he had finished the last head he was obliged, at the baron’s orders, to tell an anecdote to compensate the disappointed ones.

Here are some of the stories.

The Mad Woman

That reminds me of a terrible story of the Franco-Prussian war (said Monsieur d’Endolin). You know my house in the faubourg de Cormeil. I was living there when the Prussians came, and I had for a neighbour a kind of mad woman, who had lost her senses in consequence of a series of misfortunes, as at the age of twenty-five she had lost her father, her husband and her newly born child, all in the space of a month.

When death has once entered a house, it almost invariably returns immediately, as if it knew the way, and the young woman, overwhelmed with grief, took to her bed and was delirious for six weeks. Then, a species of calm lassitude succeeded that violent crisis, and she remained motionless, eating next to nothing, and only moving her eyes. Every time they tried to make her get up, she screamed as if they were about to kill her, and so they ended by leaving her continually in bed, and only taking her out to wash her, to change her linen and to turn her mattress.

An old servant remained with her, who gave her something to drink, or a little cold meat, from time to time. What was happening in that anguished mind? No one ever knew, for she never spoke again. Was she thinking of the dead? Was she dreaming sadly, without any precise recollection of anything that had happened? Or was her stunned memory as still as stagnant water? For fifteen years she remained thus inert and secluded.

The war broke out, and in the beginning of December the Germans came to Cormeil. I can remember it as if it were but yesterday. It was freezing hard enough to split the stones, and I, myself, was lying back in an armchair, being unable to move on account of the gout, when I heard their heavy and regular tread; I could see them pass, from my window.

They marched past interminably, with that peculiar motion of a puppet on wires which is peculiar to them. Then the officers billeted their men on the inhabitants, and I had seventeen of them. My neighbour, the mad woman, had a dozen, one of whom was a major, a regular, violent, surly swashbuckler.

During the first few days everything went on swimmingly. The officer next door had been told that the lady was ill, and he did not pay any attention to that in the least, but soon this woman, whom they never saw, irritated him. He asked what her illness was, and was told that she had been in bed for fifteen years, in consequence of terrible grief. No doubt he did not believe it, and thought that the poor mad creature would not leave her bed out of pride, so that she might not come near the Prussians, nor speak to them, nor even see them.

He insisted upon her receiving him, and he was shown into the room, and said to her roughly: “I must beg you to get up, Madame, and to come downstairs so that we may all see you,” but she merely turned her vague eyes on him, without replying, and so he continued: “I do not intend to tolerate any insolence, and if you do not get up of your own accord, I can easily find means to make you walk without any assistance.”

But she did not give any signs of having heard him, and remained quite motionless, and then he got furious, as he took that calm silence for a mark of supreme contempt, and so he added: “If you do not come downstairs tomorrow⁠ ⁠…” And then he left the room.

The next day the terrified old servant tried to dress her, but the mad woman began to scream violently, and resisted with all her might. The officer ran upstairs quickly, and the servant threw herself at his feet and cried: “She will not come down, monsieur, she will not. Forgive her, for she is so unhappy.”

The soldier was embarrassed, as in spite of his anger, he did not venture to order his soldiers to drag her out, but suddenly he began to laugh, and gave some orders in German, and soon a party of soldiers was seen coming out supporting a mattress as if they were carrying a wounded man. On that bed, which had not been unmade, the mad woman, who was still silent, was lying quietly, for she was quite indifferent to anything that went on, as long as they let her lie. Behind her, a soldier was carrying a bundle of feminine attire, and the officer said, rubbing his hands: “We will just see whether you cannot dress yourself alone, and take a little walk.”

And then the procession went off in the direction of the forest of Imauville; in two hours the soldiers came back alone, and nothing more was seen of the mad woman. What had they done with her? Where had they taken her to? No one ever knew.

The snow was falling was falling day and night, and enveloped the plain and the woods in a shroud of frozen foam, and the wolves came and howled at our very doors.

The thought of that poor lost woman haunted me, and I made several applications to the Prussian authorities in order to obtain some information, and was nearly shot for doing so. When spring returned, the army of occupation withdrew, but my neighbour’s house remained closed; the grass grew thick in the garden walks. The old servant had died during the winter, and nobody troubled any longer about that affair; I alone thought about it constantly. What had they done with the woman? Had she escaped through the forest? Had somebody found her, and taken her to a hospital, without being able to obtain any information from her? Nothing happened to relieve my doubts; but, by degrees, time assuaged my anxiety.

Well, in the following autumn the woodcock were very plentiful, and as I had some respite from my gout, I dragged myself as far as the forest. I had already killed four or five of the long-billed birds, when I knocked over one which fell into a ditch full of branches, and I was obliged to get into it, in order to pick it up, and I found that it had fallen beside a human skull, and immediately the recollection of the mad woman struck me, like a blow in the chest. Many other people had perhaps died in the wood during that disastrous year. I do not know why, yet I was sure, sure, I tell you, that I had stumbled upon the head of that wretched maniac.

And suddenly I understood, I guessed everything. They had abandoned her on that mattress in the cold, deserted wood; and, faithful to her obsession, she had allowed herself to perish under that thick and light counterpane of snow, without moving an arm or a leg.

Then the wolves had devoured her, and the birds had built their nests with the wool from her torn bed. I took charge of her remains, and I only pray that our sons may never see war again.

Artfulness

“Women?

“Well, what then? Women?

“Well, there are no such schemers in the world for landing you into trouble on every opportunity, with or without a reason, often for the sole pleasure of playing you. They cheat with incredible simplicity, amazing audacity, and invincible cunning. They cheat from morning to night, every one of them, the best of them, the most straightforward, the most sensible.

“Let us grant that they are sometimes almost driven to it. Man is always giving way to idiotic fits of obstinacy and tyrannical desires. In the home a husband is always insisting upon his own ridiculous way. He is full of crazes which his wife encourages while she turns them to account. She makes him believe that a thing costs so much because he would make a fuss if it were worth more. She always manages to extricate herself cleverly by methods so simple and wily that we cannot believe our senses when we do happen to notice what is happening. We say to ourselves, spellbound: ‘Why did we not notice this before?’ ”

The man who spoke was an ex-minister of the Empire, the Count of L⁠⸺, a real rake, and very intelligent. A group of young men were listening to him.

He continued: “I was victimised by an ordinary little bourgeoise in a most brazen and amusing manner. I will tell you about it that you may profit thereby.

“I was then at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I used to go for a long walk in the Champs Élysées every morning. It was May, and as I walked I inhaled greedily the sweet odour of the budding leaves.

“I soon noticed that I met an adorable little woman every day, one of those surprising, graceful creatures with the stamp of Paris upon them. Pretty? Yes and no. A good figure? No, better than that. I admit that her waist was too small, her shoulders too straight, her chest too curved, but I prefer these exquisite human dolls with their graceful curves to the big carcass of the Venus de Milo.

“Besides, they trip along in a way peculiar to themselves; the mere sight of their fluttering movements fills the very marrow of your bones with desire. She seemed to look at me as we passed each other. But these women are apparently capable of anything; one never knows.⁠ ⁠… One morning I saw her sitting on a bench holding an open book. I promptly sat down beside her, and five minutes later we were friends. Then, every day, after the smiling greeting: ‘Good morning, Madame’⁠—‘Good morning, Monsieur,’ we chatted. She told me she was the wife of a clerk, that her life was sad, that her pleasures were few and that cares were numerous, and a thousand other things. I told her who I was, partly through thoughtlessness and partly perhaps through vanity: she made a very good pretence at being surprised. The following day she came to the Ministry to see me, and returned so often that the ushers soon got to know her and whispered to each other ‘Madame Léon’ (the name they had given her) whenever they saw her; Léon happens to be my Christian name.

“For three months I saw her every morning without growing tired of her for a second, so thoroughly skilled was she in the art of varying and intensifying her demonstrations of affection. But one day I noticed that her eyes were haggard and shining with suppressed tears, that she could scarcely speak, she was so preoccupied.

“I begged, I implored her to tell me the cause of her distress, and she ended by stammering: ‘I am⁠—I am enceinte,’ with a shiver of apprehension. And she burst out sobbing. Oh! I made a horrible face, and I doubtless turned pale as men do at news of that kind. You cannot conceive what a shock it is to hear you are to be a father when you don’t expect it. But you will all know in time. All I could say was: ‘But⁠—but⁠—you are married, aren’t you?’ She answered: ‘Yes, but my husband has been in Italy for two months and will not return for some time.’

“I was determined at any cost to get out of my responsibility, and said: ‘You must join him immediately.’

“She blushed to her eyebrows and, looking down, replied: ‘Yes⁠—but⁠—,’ not daring or not wishing to finish the sentence.

“I had understood, and discreetly handed her an envelope containing the expenses of the journey.

“A week later she wrote to me from Genoa, the following week I received a letter from Florence, then from Leghorn, Rome, Naples. She said: ‘I am quite well, my dear love, but I am hideous. I am not going to let you see me till it is all over; you would cease to love me. My husband suspects nothing. As his business will keep him in this country for a long time still, I will only come back to France after my confinement.’ And after about eight months I received from Venice these few words: ‘It is a boy.’

“Some time after, she suddenly entered my study one morning, fresher and prettier than ever, and threw herself into my arms.

“And our old relations of intimacy were resumed.

“I left the Ministry and she came to my house in the Rue de Grenelle. She often talked to me about the child, but I paid very little attention: it did not concern me. Occasionally I gave her a considerable sum of money, saying: ‘Invest that for him.’

“Two more years passed by and she became more and more determined to give me news of the youngster, ‘of Léon.’ Sometimes she would say with tears in her eyes: ‘You don’t care about him; you won’t even see him; if you knew how miserable you make me!’

“Finally she worried me to such an extent that I promised to go the next morning to the Champs Élysées when she was taking him for his walk.

“But as I was leaving the house I was stopped by a feeling of dread. Man is weak and foolish; there was no knowing what might happen. Supposing I were to love this little mite, this small being who owed his life to me! my son!

“My hat was on my head, and my gloves were in my hands. I threw the gloves on my desk, and my hat on a chair: ‘No, I will certainly not go, it is wiser not.’

“The door opened and my brother entered the room, holding out an anonymous letter received that morning.

“ ‘Warn your brother, the Count of L⁠⸺, that the little woman of the Rue Cassette is making game of him in the most shameless manner. Tell him to make inquiries about her.’

“I had never said a word to anybody about this long-standing intrigue. I was surprised, and told my brother the whole story from beginning to end. I added: ‘Personally, I don’t want to be bothered, but it would be kind of you to find out what you can.’

“When my brother had gone, I said to myself: ‘How can she be deceiving me? She has other lovers? What do I care? She is young, fresh and pretty: I ask no more. She seems to love me and, after all, does not cost me much. Really, I don’t understand what it’s all about.’

“My brother soon returned. The police had given him accurate information about the husband: ‘A clerk at the Home Office, correct and well reported upon, with the correct official views, but married to a very pretty woman whose expenses seemed rather high for her modest position.’ That was all.

“Now, my brother having sought for her at her house and having learned that she had gone out, succeeded in making the concierge gossip, with the assistance of a large tip.

“ ‘Madame D. is an excellent woman, and her husband a most worthy man; they are neither rich nor proud, but they are generous.’

“For the sake of saying something, my brother asked: ‘How old is the little boy now?’

“ ‘But she has no little boy, sir.’

“ ‘What? Little Léon?’

“ ‘No, sir, you are making a mistake.’

“ ‘I mean the child she had when she was in Italy, about two years ago.’

“ ‘She has never been to Italy, sir, she has never once left this house during the five years she has been living here.’

“Surprised, my brother continued his questions, carrying his investigations as far as possible. No child! No journey! I was astounded, but was far from understanding what would come of it.

“ ‘I want,’ said I, ‘to have a clear conscience on the subject. I will beg her to come and see me tomorrow. You must see her for me. If she has played a trick upon me, you will hand over to her this ten thousand francs and I will never see her again. In fact I am beginning to have enough of her.’

“Would you believe it? The night before, I was distressed because I had a child by that woman, and now I was ashamed, hurt and irritable because there was no child. I found myself free from all obligations and from all anxiety, and yet I felt indignant. The next day my brother awaited her in my study. She came in quickly, as usual, rushing towards him with arms outstretched, and stopped dead when she saw who it was.

“He bowed and apologised.

“ ‘I beg your pardon, Madame, for being here instead of my brother; but he has authorised me to ask you for an explanation, which it would have been painful for him to do himself.’

“Then, looking her straight in the face, he said abruptly: ‘We know you have not had a child by him.’

“After the first moment of surprise, she recovered her composure, took a seat, and gazed smilingly at the man who was sitting in judgment on her.

“ ‘No; I have no child.’

“ ‘We also know that you have never been to Italy.’

“This time she laughed outright:

“ ‘No, I have never been in Italy.’

“Aghast, my brother continued:

“ ‘The Count has requested me to hand you this money and to tell you that the affair is ended.’

“At that she became serious, calmly put the money into her pocket, and said ingenuously: ‘So⁠—I shall never see the Count again?’

“ ‘No, Madame.’

“She seemed upset and added quietly: ‘It can’t be helped, I was very fond of him.’

“Seeing that she had decided to make the best of things as they were, my brother smilingly asked her:

“ ‘Now, tell me why you invented this long and complicated falsehood of the journey and the child.’

“She looked at my brother, amazed, as if he had asked a very stupid question, and replied:

“ ‘Well, you are queer! Do you think a poor little insignificant bourgeoise like me could have kept the Count of L⁠⸺, a minister, a great nobleman, a popular man in society, wealthy and attractive, for three years if she had not given him something to think about? Now it’s over. It can’t be helped, it could not last forever. Nevertheless I have been successful for three years. Do not forget to remember me kindly to him.’

“She got up to go. My brother went on with his questions:

“ ‘But⁠—the child? You had one to show him?’

“ ‘Certainly, my sister’s child. She lent it to me. I bet it was she who warned you.’

“ ‘Good! And the letters from Italy?’

“She sat down again to laugh with comfort.

“ ‘Oh! the letters, well, that’s a real poem. The Count was not at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for nothing.’

“ ‘But⁠—the rest.’

“ ‘The rest is my secret. I am not going to compromise anyone.’ And bowing to him with a slightly mocking smile, she made her exit, like an actress whose part is ended, without showing any feeling.”

And the Count of L⁠⸺ added by way of moral: “Don’t put your trust in birds of that feather.”

The Legend of Mont Saint-Michel

I had first seen it from Cancale, this fairy castle planted in the sea. I had seen it dimly, like a gray shadow rising in the foggy sky. I saw it again from Avranches at sunset. The immense stretch of sand was red, the horizon was red, the whole boundless bay was red; alone, the Abbey, growing out there in the distance like a fantastic manor, like a dream palace, incredibly strange and beautiful this alone remained almost black in the purple of the dying day.

The following morning at dawn I went towards it across the sands. My eyes fastened on this gigantic jewel, as big as a mountain, cut like a cameo, and as dainty as lace. The nearer I approached the greater my admiration grew, for perhaps nothing in the world is more wonderful or more perfect.

As surprised as if I had discovered the habitation of a god, I wandered through those halls supported by frail or massive columns, through those corridors open to the sky, raising my eyes in wonder to those spires which looked like rockets starting for the sky, and to that incredible crowd of towers, of gargoyles, of slender and charming ornaments, fire works of stone, granite lace, a masterpiece of colossal and delicate architecture.

As I was looking up in ecstasy, a Lower Normandy peasant came up to me and told me the story of the great quarrel between Saint Michel and the Devil.

A sceptical genius has said: “God made man in His image; man has returned the compliment.”

This saying is an eternal truth, and it would be very curious to write the history of the local divinity on every continent, as well as the history of the patron saints in each one of our provinces. The Negro has his ferocious man-eating idols; the polygamous Muhammadan fills his paradise with women; the Greeks, like a practical people, have deified all the passions.

Every village in France is under the influence of some protecting saint, modified according to the characteristics of the inhabitants.

Saint Michel watches over Lower Normandy, Saint Michel, the radiant and victorious angel, the sword-carrier, the hero of Heaven, the victorious, the conqueror of Satan.

But this is how the Lower Normandy peasant, cunning, underhand, and tricky, understands and tells of the struggle between the great Saint and the Devil:⁠—

To escape from the malice of his neighbour the Demon, Saint Michel built himself, in the open ocean, this habitation worthy of an archangel; and only such a saint could build a residence of such magnificence.

But, as he still feared the approaches of the Evil One, he surrounded his domain with quicksands, more treacherous even than the sea.

The Devil lived in a humble cottage on the hill; but he owned all the pastures surrounded by the sea, the rich lands where grow the finest crops, the prosperous valleys, and all the fertile hills of the country; but the Saint ruled only over the sands. So Satan was rich, whereas Saint Michel was as poor as a beggar.

After a few years of fasting the Saint grew tired of this state of affairs, and began to think of some compromise with the Devil; but the matter was by no means easy, as Satan kept a good hold on his crops.

He thought the thing over for about six months; then one morning he set out for land. The Demon was eating his soup in front of his door when he saw the Saint; he immediately rushed toward him, kissed the hem of his sleeve, invited him in, and offered him refreshments.

Saint Michel drank a bowl of milk and then began: “I have come here to propose to you a good bargain.”

The Devil, candid and trustful, answered: “Very well.”

“Here it is. Give me all your lands.”

Satan, growing alarmed, tried to speak: “But⁠—”

The Saint continued: “Listen first. Give me all your lands. I will take care of all the work, the plowing, the sowing, the fertilizing, everything, and we will share the crops equally. Do you agree?”

The Devil, who was naturally lazy, accepted. He only asked in addition for a few of those delicious red mullet which are caught around the lonely hill. Saint Michel promised the fish.

They shook hands and spat on one side to show that it was a bargain, and the Saint continued: “Here, so that you will have nothing to complain of, choose whatever you prefer: that part of the harvest which will be above ground, or in the ground.” Satan cried out: “I choose all that will be above ground.”

“It’s a bargain!” said the Saint. And he went away.

Six months later, all over the immense domain of the Devil, one could see nothing but carrots, turnips, onions, salsify, all the plants whose juicy roots are good and savoury, and whose useless leaves are good for nothing but for feeding animals.

Satan got nothing and wished to break the contract, calling Saint Michel a swindler.

But the Saint, who had developed quite a taste for agriculture, went back to see the Devil, and said: “Really, I hadn’t thought of that at all; it was just an accident; no fault of mine. And to make things fair with you, this year I’ll let you take everything that is under the ground.”

“Very well,” answered Satan.

The following spring, all the Evil Spirit’s lands were covered with heavy corn, oats as big as beans, linseed, magnificent colzas, red clover, peas, cabbage, artichokes, everything that blossoms into grains or fruit in the sunlight.

Once more Satan received nothing, and this time he completely lost his temper. He took back his fields and remained deaf to all the new overtures of his neighbour.

A whole year rolled by. From the top of his lonely manor, Saint Michel looked at the distant and fertile lands, and watched the Devil direct the work, take in his crops, and thresh the corn. And he grew angry, exasperated at his powerlessness. As he was no longer able to deceive Satan, he decided to wreak vengeance on him, and he went out to invite him to dinner for the following Monday.

“You have been very unfortunate in your dealings with me,” he said; “I know it; but I don’t want any ill feeling between us, and I expect you to dine with me. I’ll give you some good things to eat.”

Satan, who was as greedy as he was lazy, accepted eagerly. On the day which had been decided on, he donned his finest clothes and set out for the mount.

Saint Michel sat him down to a magnificent meal. First there was a vol-au-vent, full of cocks’ crests and kidneys, with meatballs, then two big red mullet with cream sauce, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts soaked in wine, some salt-marsh lamb as tender as possible, vegetables which melted in the mouth, and nice warm galette which was brought on smoking and gave out a delicious odour of butter.

They drank pure cider, sparkling and sweet, and powerful red wine, and after each course more room was made with some old apple brandy.

The Devil drank and ate to his heart’s content; in fact, he took so much that he found himself uncomfortable.

Then Saint Michel arose in anger, and cried, in a voice like thunder: “What! before me, rascal! you dare⁠—before me⁠—”

Satan, terrified, ran away, and the Saint, seizing a stick, pursued him. They ran around through the halls, turning around the pillars, running up the staircases, galloping along the cornices, jumping from gargoyle to gargoyle. The poor Demon, who was terribly ill, was running about madly and soiling the Saint’s home. At last he found himself at the top of the last terrace, from which could be seen the immense bay, with its distant cities, sands, and pastures. He could no longer escape, and the Saint came up behind him and gave him a furious kick, which shot him through space like a cannonball.

He shot through the air like a javelin and fell down heavily in front of the town of Mortain. His horns and claws stuck deep into the rock, which keeps through eternity the traces of this fall of Satan’s.

He stood up again, limping, crippled until the end of time, and as he looked at the fatal Abbey in the distance, standing out against the setting sun, he understood well that he would always be vanquished in this unequal struggle; and he went away limping, heading for distant countries, leaving to his enemy his fields, his hills, his valleys, and his pastures.

And this is how Saint Michel, the patron saint of Normandy, vanquished the Devil.

Another people would have dreamed of this battle in an entirely different manner.

Minuet

Great misfortunes do not affect me very much, said Jean Bridelle, an old bachelor who passed for a sceptic. I have seen war at quite close quarters; I walked across corpses without any feeling of pity. The great brutal facts of nature, or of humanity, may call forth cries of horror or indignation, but do not cause us that tightening of the heart, that shudder that goes down your spine at sight of certain little heartrending episodes.

The greatest sorrow that anyone can experience is certainly the loss of a child, to a mother; and the loss of his mother, to a man. It is intense, terrible, it rends your heart and upsets your mind; but one is healed of these shocks, just as large, bleeding wounds become healed. Certain meetings, certain things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a whole world of painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of disenchantment, from which it takes a long time to free ourselves.

I have always present to my mind two or three things that others would surely not have noticed, but which penetrated my being like fine, sharp, incurable stings.

You might not perhaps understand the emotion that I retained from these hasty impressions. I will tell you one of them. It is very old, but as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday. It may be that my imagination alone is responsible for my emotion.

I am fifty. I was young then and studying law. I was rather sad, somewhat of a dreamer, full of a pessimistic philosophy and did not care much for noisy cafés, boisterous companions, or stupid girls. I rose early and one of my chief enjoyments was to walk alone about eight o’clock in the morning in the nursery garden of the Luxembourg.

You people never knew that nursery garden. It was like a forgotten garden of the last century, as pretty as the gentle smile of an old lady. Thick hedges divided the narrow regular paths, peaceful paths between two walls of carefully trimmed foliage. The gardener’s great shears were pruning unceasingly these leafy partitions, and here and there one came across beds of flowers, lines of little trees looking like schoolboys out for a walk, companies of magnificent rose bushes, or regiments of fruit trees.

An entire corner of this charming spot was inhabited by bees. Their straw hives skilfully arranged at distances on boards had their entrances⁠—as large as the opening of a thimble⁠—turned towards the sun, and all along the paths one encountered these humming and gilded flies, the true masters of this peaceful spot, the real promenaders of these quiet paths.

I came there almost every morning. I sat down on a bench and read. Sometimes I let my book fall on my knees, to dream, to listen to the life of Paris around me, and to enjoy the infinite repose of these old-fashioned hedges.

But I soon perceived that I was not the only one to frequent this spot as soon as the gates were opened, and I occasionally met face to face, at a turn in the path, a strange little old man.

He wore shoes with silver buckles, knee-breeches, a snuff-coloured frock coat, a lace jabot, and an outlandish grey hat with wide brim and long-haired surface that might have come out of the ark.

He was thin, very thin, angular, grimacing and smiling. His bright eyes were restless beneath his eyelids which blinked continuously. He always carried in his hand a superb cane with a gold knob, which must have been for him some glorious souvenir.

This good man astonished me at first, then caused me the intensest interest. I watched him through the leafy walls, I followed him at a distance, stopping at a turn in the hedge so as not to be seen.

And one morning when he thought he was quite alone, he began to make the most remarkable motions. First he would give some little springs, then make a bow; then, with his slim legs, he would give a lively spring in the air, clapping his feet as he did so, and then turn round cleverly, skipping and frisking about in a comical manner, smiling as if he had an audience, making elegant gestures, and curving his arms, twisting his poor little puppet-like body, bowing pathetic and ridiculous little greetings into the empty air. He was dancing.

I stood petrified with amazement, asking myself which of us was crazy, he or I.

He stopped suddenly, advanced as actors do on the stage, then bowed and retreated with gracious smiles, and kissing his hand as actors do, his trembling hand, to the two rows of trimmed bushes.

Then he continued his walk with a solemn demeanour.

After that I never lost sight of him, and each morning he began anew his incredible exercises.

I was wildly anxious to speak to him. I decided to risk it, and one day, after greeting him, I said:

“It is a beautiful day, monsieur.”

He bowed.

“Yes, sir, the weather is just as it used to be.”

A week later we were friends and I knew his history. He had been a dancing master at the opera, in the time of Louis XV. His beautiful cane was a present from the Comte de Clermont. And when we spoke about dancing he never stopping talking.

One day he said to me:

“I married La Castris, monsieur. I will introduce you to her if you wish it, but she does not get here till later. This garden, you see, is our delight and our life. It is all that remains of former days. It seems as though we could not exist if we did not have it. It is old and distingué, is it not? I seem to breathe an air here that has not changed since I was young. My wife and I pass all our afternoons here, but I come in the morning because I get up early.”

As soon as I had finished luncheon I returned to the Luxembourg, and presently perceived my friend offering his arm ceremoniously to a very old little lady dressed in black, to whom he introduced me. It was La Castris, the great dancer, beloved by princes, beloved by the king, beloved by all that century of gallantry that seems to have left behind it in the world an atmosphere of love.

We sat down on a bench. It was the month of May. An odour of flowers floated in the neat paths; a hot sun glided its rays between the branches and covered us with patches of light. The black dress of La Castris seemed to be saturated with sunlight.

The garden was empty. We heard the rattling of vehicles in the distance.

“Tell me,” I said to the old dancer, “what was the minuet?”

He gave a start.

“The minuet, monsieur, is the queen of dances, and the dance of queens, do you understand? Since there is no longer any royalty, there is no longer any minuet.”

And he began in a pompous manner a long dithyrambic eulogy which I could not understand. I wanted to have the steps, the movements, the positions, explained to me. He became confused, was amazed at his inability to make me understand, became nervous and worried.

Then suddenly, turning to his old companion, who had remained silent and serious, he said:

“Élise, would you like⁠—say⁠—would you like, it would be very nice of you, would you like to show this gentleman what it was?”

She turned her eyes uneasily in all directions, then rose without saying a word and took her position opposite him.

Then I witnessed an unforgettable thing.

They advanced and retreated with childlike grimaces, smiling, balancing, bowing, skipping about like two automaton dolls moved by some old mechanical contrivance, somewhat damaged, but made by a clever workman according to the fashion of his time.

And I looked at them, my heart filled with extraordinary emotions, my soul touched with an indescribable melancholy. I seemed to see before me a pathetic and comical apparition, the out-of-date ghost of a former century.

They suddenly stopped. They had finished all the figures of the dance. For some seconds they stood opposite each other, smiling in an astonishing manner. Then they fell on each other’s necks sobbing.

I left for the provinces three days later. I never saw them again. When I returned to Paris, two years later, the nursery had been destroyed. What became of them, deprived of the dear garden of former days, with its mazes, its odour of the past, and the graceful windings of its hedges?

Are they dead? Are they wandering among modern streets like hopeless exiles? Are they dancing⁠—pale spectres⁠—a fantastic minuet in the moonlight, amid the cypresses of a cemetery, along the pathways bordered by graves?

Their memory haunts me, obsesses me, torments me, remains with me like a wound. Why? I do not know.

No doubt you think that very absurd?

Mother and Daughter

“The Comtesse Samoris.”

“That lady in black over there?”

“The very one. She’s wearing mourning for her daughter, whom she killed.”

“Come now! You don’t mean that seriously?”

“Oh! it is a very simple story, without any crime in it, any violence.”

“Then what really happened?”

“Almost nothing. Many courtesans were born to be virtuous women, they say; and many women called virtuous were born to be courtesans⁠—is that not so? Now, Madame Samoris, who was born a courtesan, had a daughter born a virtuous woman, that’s all.”

“I don’t quite understand you.”

“I’ll explain what I mean. The Comtesse Samoris is one of those tinsel foreign women hundreds of whom are rained down every year on Paris. A Hungarian or Wallachian countess, or I know not what, she appeared one winter in apartments she had taken in the Champs Élysées, that quarter for adventurers and adventuresses, and opened her drawing room to the first comer or to anyone that turned up.

“I went there. Why? you will say. I really can’t tell you. I went there, as everyone goes to such places because the women are facile and the men are dishonest. You know that set composed of filibusters with varied decorations, all noble, all titled, all unknown at the embassies, with the exception of those who are spies. All talk of their honor without the slightest occasion for doing so, boast of their ancestors, tell you about their lives, braggarts, liars, sharpers, as dangerous as the false cards they have up their sleeves, as delusive as their name⁠—in short, the aristocracy of the bagnio.

“I adore these people. They are interesting to study, interesting to know, amusing to understand, often clever, never commonplace like public functionaries. Their wives are always pretty, with a slight flavor of foreign roguery, with the mystery of their existence, half of it perhaps spent in a house of correction. They have, as a rule, magnificent eyes and incredible hair. I adore them also.

“Madame Samoris is the type of these adventuresses, elegant, mature, and still beautiful. Charming feline creatures, you feel that they are vicious to the marrow of their bones. You find them very amusing when you visit them; they give card-parties; they have dances and suppers; in short, they offer you all the pleasures of social life.

“And she had a daughter⁠—a tall, fine-looking girl, always ready for entertainments, always full of laughter and reckless gayety⁠—a true adventuress’s daughter⁠—but, at the same time, an innocent, unsophisticated, artless girl, who saw nothing, knew nothing, understood nothing of all the things that happened in her father’s house.”

“How do you know about him?”

“How do I know? That’s the funniest part of the business! One morning, there was a ring at my door, and my valet came up to tell me that M. Joseph Bonenthal wanted to speak to me. I said directly: ‘And who is this gentleman?’ My valet replied: ‘I don’t know, monsieur; perhaps ’tis someone that wants employment.’ And so it was. The man wanted me to take him as a servant. I asked him where he had been last. He answered: ‘With the Comtesse Samoris.’ ‘Ah!’ said I, ‘but my house is not a bit like hers.’ ‘I know that well, monsieur,’ he said, ‘and that’s the very reason I want to take service with monsieur. I’ve had enough of these people: a man may stay a little while with them, but he won’t remain long with them.’ I required an additional man servant at the time, and so I took him.

“A month later, Mademoiselle Yveline Samoris died mysteriously, and here are all the details of her death I could gather from Joseph, who got them from his sweetheart, the Comtesse’s chambermaid:

“It was a ball-night, and two newly-arrived guests were chatting behind a door. Mademoiselle Yveline, who had just been dancing, leaned against this door to get a little air.

“They did not see her approaching; but she heard what they were saying. And this was what they said:

“ ‘But who is the father of the girl?’

“ ‘A Russian, it appears, Count Rouvaloff. He never comes near the mother now.’

“ ‘And who is the reigning prince today?’

“ ‘That English prince standing near the window; Madame Samoris adores him. But her adoration of anyone never lasts longer than a month or six weeks. Nevertheless, as you see, she has a large circle of admirers. All are called⁠—and nearly all are chosen. That kind of thing costs a good deal, but⁠—hang it, what can you expect?’

“ ‘And where did she get this name of Samoris?’

“ ‘From the only man perhaps that she ever loved⁠—a Jewish banker from Berlin who goes by the name of Samuel Morris.’

“ ‘Good. Thanks. Now that I know all about her, and see her sort, I’m off!’

“What a start there was in the brain of the young girl endowed with all the instincts of a virtuous woman! What despair overwhelmed that simple soul! What mental tortures quenched her endless gayety, her delightful laughter, her exulting satisfaction with life! What a conflict took place in that youthful heart up to the moment when the last guest had left! Those were things that Joseph could not tell me. But, the same night, Yveline abruptly entered her mother’s room just as the Comtesse was getting into bed, sent out the waiting-maid, who was close to the door, and, standing erect and pale, and with great staring eyes, she said:

“ ‘Mamma, listen to what I heard a little while ago during the ball.’

“And she repeated word for word the conversation just as I told it to you.

“The Comtesse was so stupefied that she did not know what to say in reply, at first. When she recovered her self-possession, she denied everything, and called God to witness that there was no truth in the story.

“The young girl went away, distracted but not convinced. And she watched her mother.

“I remember distinctly the strange alteration that then took place in her. She was always grave and melancholy. She used to fix on us her great earnest eyes as if she wanted to read what was at the bottom of our hearts. We did not know what to think of her, and we used to maintain that she was looking out for a husband.

“One evening her doubts were dispelled. She caught her mother with a lover. Thereupon she said coldly, like a man of business laying down the terms of an agreement:

“ ‘Here is what I have determined to do, mamma: We will both go away to some little town⁠—or rather into the country. We will live there quietly as well as we can. Your jewelry alone may be called a fortune. If you wish to marry some honest man, so much the better; still better will it be if I can find one. If you don’t consent to do this, I will kill myself.’

“This time, the Comtesse ordered her daughter to go to bed, and never to administer again this lecture so unbecoming in the mouth of a child towards her mother.

“Yveline’s answer to this was: ‘I give you a month to reflect. If, at the end of that month, we have not changed our way of living, I will kill myself, since there is no other honorable issue left to my life.’

“Then she took herself off.

“At the end of a month, the Comtesse Samoris was giving balls and suppers just the same as ever. Yveline then, under the pretext that she had a bad toothache purchased a few drops of chloroform from a neighboring chemist. The next day she purchased more; and, every time she went out, she managed to procure small doses of the narcotic. She filled a bottle with it.

“One morning she was found in bed, lifeless, and already quite cold, with a cotton mask over her face.

“Her coffin was covered with flowers, the church was hung in white. There was a large crowd at the funeral ceremony.

“Ah! well, if I had known⁠—but you never can know⁠—I would have married that girl, for she was infernally pretty.”

“And what became of the mother?”

“Oh! she shed a lot of tears over it. She has only begun to receive visits again for the past week.”

“And what explanation is given of the girl’s death?”

“Oh! ’tis pretended that it was an accident caused by a new stove, the mechanism of which got out of order. As a good many such accidents have happened, the thing looks probable enough.”

A Christmas Tale

Doctor Bonenfant was searching his memory, saying, half aloud: “A Christmas story⁠—some remembrance of Christmas?”

Suddenly he cried: “Yes, I have one, and a strange one too; it is a fantastic story. I have seen a miracle! yes, ladies, a miracle, and on Christmas night.”

You are astonished to hear me speak thus, a man who does not believe in much. Nevertheless, I have seen a miracle! I have seen it, I tell you, seen with my own eyes, that is what I call seeing.

Was I very much surprised, you ask? Not at all; because if I do not believe in your beliefs, I believe in faith, and I know that it can remove mountains. I could cite many examples; but I might make you indignant, and I should run the chance of lessening the effect of my story.

In the first place, I must confess that, if I have not been convinced and converted by what I have seen, I have at least been strongly moved; and I am going to strive to tell it to you naively, as if I had the credulity of an Auvergnat.

I was then a country doctor, living in the town of Rolleville, in the centre of Normandy. The winter that year was terrible. By the end of November the snow came after a week of frost. One could see from afar the great snow clouds coming from the north, and then the white flakes began to fall. In one night the whole plain was buried. Farms, isolated in their square enclosures, behind their curtains of great trees powdered with hoarfrost, seemed to sleep under the accumulation of this thick, light covering.

No noise was heard in the still countryside. The crows alone in large flocks outlined long festoons in the sky, seeking their livelihood to no purpose, swooping down upon the pale fields and picking at the snow with their great beaks. There was nothing to be heard but the vague, continuous rustle of this white powder as it persistently fell. This lasted for eight full days and then stopped. The earth had on its back a mantle five feet in thickness. And, during the next three weeks, a sky as clear as blue crystal by day spread itself out over this smooth, white mass, hard and glistening with frost, and at night all studded with stars, that looked as if they were made of hoarfrost.

The plain, the hedges, the elms of the enclosures, all seemed dead, killed by the cold. Neither man nor beast went out. Only the chimneys of the cottages, clothed in a white shift, revealed concealed life by the fine threads of smoke which mounted straight into the frosty air. From time to time one heard the trees crack, as if their wooden limbs were breaking under the bark; and sometimes a great branch would detach itself and fall, the resistless cold petrifying the sap and breaking the fibres. Dwellings set here and there in fields seemed a hundred miles away from one another. One lived as one could. I alone endeavoured to go to my nearest patients, constantly exposing myself to the danger of remaining buried in some hole.

I soon perceived that a mysterious terror had spread over the country. Such a plague, they thought, was not natural. They pretended that they heard voices at night, sharp whistling and passing cries. These cries and the whistling came, without doubt, from migratory birds which travelled at twilight and flew in flocks toward the south. But it was impossible to make frightened people listen to reason. Fear had taken possession of their minds, and they were expecting some extraordinary event.

The forge of old Vatinel was situated at the end of the hamlet of Épivent, on the main road, now invisible and deserted. As the people needed bread, the blacksmith resolved to go to the village. He remained some hours chattering with the inhabitants of the six houses which formed the centre of the district, took his bread and his news and a little of the fear which had spread over the region and set out before night.

Suddenly, in skirting a hedge, he believed he saw an egg on the snow; yes, an egg was lying there, all white like the rest of the world. He bent over it, and in fact it was an egg. Where did it come from? What hen could have gone out there and laid an egg in that spot? The smith was astonished; he could not understand it; but he picked it up and took it to his wife.

“See, wife, here is an egg that I found on the road.”

The woman shook her head:

“An egg on the road? In this kind of weather! You must be drunk, surely.”

“No, no, woman, it certainly was at the foot of the hedge, and not frozen but still warm. Take it; I put it in my bosom so that it wouldn’t cool off. You shall have it for your dinner.”

The egg was soon shining in the iron pot where the soup was simmering, and the smith began to relate what he had heard around the country. The woman listened, pale with excitement.

“Of course I have heard some whistling,” said she, “but it seemed to come from the chimney.”

They sat down to table, ate their soup first and then, while the husband was spreading the butter on his bread, the woman took the egg and examined it with suspicious eye.

“And if there should be something in this egg,” said she.

“What could there be in it?”

“How do I know?”

“Go ahead and eat it. Don’t be a fool.”

She opened the egg. It was like all eggs, and very fresh. She started to eat it but hesitated, tasting, then leaving, then tasting it again. The husband said:

“Well, how does that egg taste?”

She did not answer, but finished swallowing it. Then, suddenly, she stared at her husband, with fixed, haggard, terrified eyes, raised her arms, turned and twisted them, convulsed from head to foot, and rolled on the floor, sending forth horrible shrieks. All night she struggled in these frightful spasms, trembling with fright, deformed by hideous convulsions. The smith, unable to restrain her, was obliged to bind her. And she screamed without ceasing, untiringly:

“I have it in my body! I have it in my body!”

I was called the next day. I ordered all the sedatives known, but without effect. She was mad. Then, with incredible swiftness, in spite of the obstacle of deep snow, the news, the strange news ran from farm to farm: “The smith’s wife is possessed!” And they came from everywhere around, not daring to go into the house; from a safe distance they listened to the cries of the frightened woman, whose voice was so strong that one could scarcely believe it belonged to a human creature.

The village priest was sent for. He was a simple old man. He came in surplice, as if to administer comfort to the dying, and pronounced with extended hands some formulae of exorcism, while four men held the foaming, writhing woman on the bed. But the spirit was not driven out.

Christmas came without any change in the weather. On Christmas Eve morning the priest came for me.

“I wish,” said he, “to have this unfortunate woman at Mass, tonight. Perhaps God will work a miracle in her favour at the same hour that he was born of a woman.”

I replied: “I approve heartily. If she can be touched by the sacred service (and nothing could be more likely to move her), she can be saved without other remedies.”

The old priest murmured: “You are not a believer, Doctor, but you will help me, will you not?” I promised him my help.

The evening came, and then the night. The bell of the church was ringing, throwing its plaintive voice across the dreary waste, the vast extent of white, frozen snow. Some black figures were wending their way slowly in groups, obedient to the call from the bell. The full moon shone with a strong, pale light on the horizon, rendering more visible the desolation of the fields. I had taken four robust men with me, and with them repaired to the forge.

The possessed woman was bound to her bed, and was shouting continually. They clothed her properly, in spite of her violent resistance, and carried her out. The church, illuminated but cold, was now full of people, the choir chanted their monotonous notes; the serpent hummed; the little bell of the acolyte tinkled, regulating the movements of the faithful.

I had shut the woman and her guards into the kitchen of the parish house and awaited the moment that I believed favourable.

I chose the time immediately following communion. All the peasants, men and women, had received their God, to soften His rigour. A great silence prevailed while the priest finished the divine mystery. Upon my order, the door opened and the four men brought in the mad woman.

When she saw the lights, the crowd on their knees, the choir illuminated, and the gilded tabernacle, she struggled with such vigour that she almost escaped from us, and she gave forth cries so piercing that a shiver of fright ran through the church. All bowed their heads; some fled. She had no longer the form of a woman, as she writhed and twisted in our grasp, her countenance drawn, her eyes mad. They dragged her up to the steps of the choir, and then she was firmly held squatting on the floor.

The priest arose; he was waiting. When there was a moment of quiet, he took in his hands the monstrance, bound with bands of gold, in the middle of which was the white wafer, and, advancing some steps, extended both arms above his head and presented it to the frightened stare of the maniac. She continued to howl, with eyes fixed upon the shining object. And the priest remained so motionless that he looked like a statue.

This lasted a long, long time. The woman seemed seized with fear, fascinated; she looked fixedly at the monstrance; she was still seized with terrible shivering fits, but they did not last so long, and she cried out incessantly, but with a less piercing voice. And this lasted again for some time.

It looked as if she could no longer lower her eyes; as if they were riveted on the Host; she did nothing but groan; her rigid body relaxed, and she sank down exhausted. The crowd was prostrate, with foreheads pressed to the ground.

The possessed woman was now lowering her eyelids rapidly, then raising them again, as if powerless to endure the sight of her God. She was silent. And then I suddenly perceived that her eyes were closed. She was sleeping like a somnambulist, hypnotized⁠—pardon! conquered by the prolonged contemplation of the monstrance with its shining rays of gold, overcome by Christ victorious.

They carried her out, inert, while the priest went up to the altar. The congregation, thrown into wonderment, intoned a Te Deum of gratitude.

The smith’s wife slept for forty hours uninterruptedly, then she awoke without any remembrance either of the possession or of the deliverance. That, ladies, is the miracle which I witnessed.

Doctor Bonenfant remained silent, then he added, in rather vexed tones:

“I could not refuse to swear to it in writing.”

Christmas Eve

“Christmas Eve! Oh! no, I shall never celebrate that again!” Stout Henri Templier said that in a furious voice, as if someone had proposed some crime to him, while the others laughed and said:

“What are you flying into a rage about?”

“Because a Christmas-Eve supper played me the dirtiest trick in the world, and ever since I have felt an insurmountable horror for that night of imbecile gaiety.”

“Tell us what it is?”

“You want to know what it was? Very well, then, listen.

“You remember how cold it was two years ago at Christmas; cold enough to kill poor people in the streets. The Seine was freezing; the pavements froze one’s feet through the soles of one’s boots, and everybody seemed nearly dead.

“I had a big piece of work on, and so I refused every invitation to supper, as I preferred to spend the night at my writing table. I dined alone and then began to work. But about ten o’clock I grew restless at the thought of the gay life all over Paris, at the noise in the streets which reached me in spite of everything, at my neighbours’ preparations for supper, which I heard through the walls. I hardly knew any longer what I was doing; I was writing nonsense, and at last I came to the conclusion that I had better give up all hope of producing any good work that night.

“I walked up and down my room; I sat down and got up again. I was certainly under the mysterious influence of the enjoyment outside, and I resigned myself to it. So I rang for my servant, and said to her:

“ ‘Angela, go and get a good supper for two; some oysters, a cold partridge, some crayfish, ham and some cakes. Put out two bottles of champagne, lay the table and go to bed.’

“She obeyed in some surprise, and when all was ready, I put on my overcoat and went out. A great question was to be solved: ‘With whom was I going to celebrate Christmas Eve?’ My female friends had all been invited elsewhere, and if I had wished to have one, I ought to have seen about it beforehand, so I thought that I would do a good action at the same time, and I said to myself:

“ ‘Paris is full of poor and beautiful girls who will have nothing on their table tonight, and who are on the lookout for some generous fellow. I will act the part of Providence to one of them this evening; and I will find one if I have to go into every pleasure resort, and have to question them and hunt for one till I find one to my choice.’ And I started off on my search.

“I certainly found many poor girls, who were on the lookout for some adventure, but they were ugly enough to give any man a fit of indigestion, or thin enough to freeze as they stood, if they had stopped, and you all know that I have a weakness for plump women. The more flesh they have, the better I like them, and a female colossus would drive me out of my senses with pleasure.

“Suddenly, opposite the Théâtre des Variétés, I saw a face to my liking. A good head, and then two protuberances, a very beautiful bosom, and below that, a surprising stomach, the stomach of a fat goose. I trembled with pleasure, and said:

“ ‘By Jove! What a fine girl!’

“It only remained for me to see her face. A woman’s face is the dessert, while the rest is⁠ ⁠… the joint.

“I hastened on, and overtook her, and turned round suddenly under a gas lamp. She was charming, quite young, dark, with large, black eyes, and I immediately made my proposal, which she accepted without any hesitation, and a quarter of an hour later, we were sitting at supper in my lodgings. ‘Oh! how comfortable it is here,’ she said as she came in, and she looked about her with evident satisfaction at having found a supper and a bed, on that bitter night. She was superb; so beautiful that she astonished me, and so stout that she fairly captivated me.

“She took off her cloak and hat, sat down and began to eat; but she seemed in low spirits, and sometimes her pale face twitched as if she were suffering from some hidden sorrow.

“ ‘Have you anything troubling you?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Bah! Don’t let us think of troubles!’

“And she began to drink. She emptied her champagne glass at a draught, filled it again, and emptied it again, without stopping, and soon a little colour came into her cheeks, and she began to laugh.

“I adored her already, kissed her continually, and discovered that she was neither stupid, nor common, nor coarse as ordinary streetwalkers are. I asked her for some details about her life, but she replied:

“ ‘Young man, that is no business of yours!’ Alas! an hour later.⁠ ⁠…

“At last it was time to go to bed, and while I was clearing the table, which had been laid in front of the fire, she undressed herself quickly, and got in. My neighbours were making a terrible din, singing and laughing like lunatics, and so I said to myself:

“ ‘I was quite right to go out and bring in this beautiful girl; I should never have been able to do any work.’

“At that moment, however, a deep groan made me look round, and I said:

“ ‘What is the matter with you, my dear?’

“She did not reply, but continued to utter painful sighs, as if she were suffering horribly, and I continued:

“ ‘Do you feel ill?’ And suddenly she uttered a cry, a heartrending cry, and I rushed up to the bed, with a candle in my hand.

“Her face was distorted with pain, and she was wringing her hands, panting and uttering long, deep groans, which sounded like a rattle in the throat, and which are so painful to hear, and I asked her in consternation:

“ ‘What is the matter with you? Do tell me what is the matter.’ She did not reply, but began to scream.

“ ‘Oh! my stomach! my stomach!’ she said. I pulled up the bedclothes, and I saw⁠ ⁠… My friends, she was in labour.

“Then I lost my head, and I ran and knocked at the wall with my fists, shouting: ‘Help! help!’

“My door was opened almost immediately, and a crowd of people came in, men in evening dress, women in low necks, pierrots, Turks, Musketeers, and this invasion startled me so, that I could not explain myself, and they, who had thought that some accident had happened, or that a crime had been committed, could not understand what was the matter. At last, however, I managed to say:

“ ‘This⁠ ⁠… this⁠ ⁠… woman⁠ ⁠… is being confined.’

“Then they looked at her, and gave their opinion, and a Friar, especially, declared that he knew all about it, and wished to assist nature, but as they were all as drunk as pigs, I was afraid that they would kill her, and I rushed downstairs without my hat, to fetch an old doctor, who lived in the next street. When I came back with him, the whole house was up; the gas on the stairs had been relighted, the lodgers from every floor were in my room, while four boatmen were finishing my champagne and lobsters.

“As soon as they saw me they raised a loud shout, and a milkmaid presented me with a horrible little wrinkled specimen of humanity, that was mewing like a cat, and said to me:

“ ‘It is a girl.’

“The doctor examined the woman, declared that she was in a dangerous state, as the event had occurred immediately after supper, and he took his leave, saying he would immediately send a sick nurse and a wet nurse, and an hour later, the two women came, bringing all that was requisite with them.

“ ‘I spent the night in an armchair, too distracted to be able to think of the consequences, and almost as soon as it was light, the doctor came again. He found his patient very ill, and said to me:

“ ‘Your wife, Monsieur⁠ ⁠…’

“ ‘She is not my wife,’ I interrupted him.

“ ‘Very well then, your mistress; it does not matter to me.’

“He told me what must be done for her, what her diet must be, and then wrote a prescription.

“What was I to do? Could I send the poor creature to the hospital? I should have been looked upon as a brute in the house and in all the neighbourhood, and so I kept her in my rooms, and she had my bed for six weeks.

“I sent the child to some peasants at Poissy to be taken care of, and she still costs me fifty francs a month, for as I had paid at first, I shall be obliged to go on paying as long as I live, and later on, she will believe that I am her father. But to crown my misfortunes, when the girl had recovered⁠ ⁠… I found that she was in love with me, madly in love with me, the baggage!”

“Well?”

“Well, she had grown as thin as a homeless cat, and I turned the skeleton out of doors, but she watches for me in the streets, hides herself, so that she may see me pass, stops me in the evening when I go out, in order to kiss my hand, and, in fact, worries me enough to drive me mad; and that is why I never keep Christmas Eve now.”

The Substitute

“Madame Bonderoi?”

“Yes, Madame Bonderoi.”

“Impossible.”

“I tell you it is.”

“Madame Bonderoi, the old lady in a lace cap, the devout, the holy, the honourable Madame Bonderoi, whose little false curls look as if they were glued round her head.”

“That is the very woman.”

“Oh! Come, you must be mad.”

“I swear to you that it is Madame Bonderoi.”

“Then please give me the details.”

“Here they are: During the life of Monsieur Bonderoi, the lawyer, people said that she utilized his clerks for her own particular service. She is one of these respectable middle-class women, with secret vices and inflexible principles, of whom there are so many. She liked good-looking young fellows, and I should like to know what is more natural than that? Do not we all like pretty girls?

“As soon as old Bonderoi was dead, his widow began to live the peaceful and irreproachable life of a woman with a fair, fixed income. She went to church assiduously, and spoke disdainfully of her neighbours, and gave no chance to anyone to speak ill of her, and when she grew old she became the little wizened, sour-faced mischievous woman whom you know. Well, this adventure, which you would scarcely believe, happened last Thursday.

“My friend, Jean d’Anglemare, is, as you know, a captain in a dragoon regiment, which is quartered in the barracks in the Rue de la Rivette. When he got to his quarters the other morning, he found that two men of his squadron had had a terrible quarrel. The rules about military honour are very severe, and so a duel took place between them. After the duel they became reconciled, and when their officer questioned them, they told him what their quarrel had been about. They had fought on Madame Bonderoi’s account.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, my dear fellow, about Madame Bonderoi. But I will let trooper Siballe speak:”

“ ‘This is how it was, Captain. About a year and a half ago, I was strolling along the promenade between six and seven o’clock in the evening, when a woman came up and spoke to me, and said, just as if she had been asking her way: “Soldier, would you like to earn ten francs a week, honestly?” I answered heartily: “At your service, Madame.” And so she said: “Come and see me at twelve o’clock tomorrow morning. I am Madame Bonderoi, and my address is No. 6, Rue de la Tranchée.”

“ ‘ “You may rely upon my being there, Madame.” And then she went away, looking very pleased, and added: “I am very much obliged to you, soldier.”

“ ‘ “I am obliged to you, Madame,” I replied. But I plagued my head about the matter, until the time came, all the same.

“ ‘At twelve o’clock, exactly, I rang the bell, and she let me in herself. She had a lot of ribbons on her head.

“ ‘ “We must make haste,” she said; “as my servant might come in.”

“ ‘ “I am quite willing to make haste,” I replied, “but what am I to do?”

“ ‘But she only laughed, and replied: “Don’t you understand, you great stupid?”

“ ‘I was no nearer her meaning, I give you my word of honour, Captain, but she came and sat down by me, and said:

“ ‘ “If you mention this to anyone, I will have you put in prison, so swear that you will never open your lips about it.”

“ ‘I swore whatever she liked, though I did not at all understand what she meant. My forehead was covered with perspiration, so I took my pocket-handkerchief out of my helmet. She took it and wiped my brow with it; then she kissed me, and whispered: “Then you will?”

“ ‘ “I will do anything you like, Madame,” I replied; “as that is what I came for.”

“ ‘Then she made herself clearly understood by her actions, and when I saw what it was, I put my helmet on a chair and showed her that in the dragoons a man never retreats, Captain.

“ ‘Not that I cared much about it, for she was certainly not in her prime, but it is no good being too particular in such a matter, as francs are scarce, and then I have relations whom I like to help. I said to myself: “There will be five francs for my father, out of that.”

“ ‘When I had finished my allotted task, Captain, I got ready to go, though she wanted me to stop longer, but I said to her:

“ ‘ “To everyone their due, Madame. A small glass of brandy costs two sous, and two glasses cost four.”

“ ‘She understood my meaning, and put a gold ten-franc piece into my hand. I do not like that coin. It is so small that it gets lost in your pockets, and if they open at the seams one is apt to find it in one’s boots, or not to find it at all, and so, while I was looking at it, she was looking at me. She got red in the face, as she had misunderstood my looks, and said: “Is not that enough?”

“ ‘ “I did not mean that, Madame,” I replied; “but if it is all the same to you, I would rather have two five-franc pieces.” And she gave them to me and I took my leave.

“ ‘This has been going on for a year and a half, Captain. I go every Tuesday evening, when you give me leave to go out of barracks; she prefers that, as her servant has gone to bed then, but last week I was not well, and I had to go into the infirmary. When Tuesday came I could not get out, and I was very vexed, because of the ten francs which I had been receiving every week, and I said to myself:

“ ‘ “If anybody goes there, I shall be done for; and she will be sure to take an artilleryman,” and that made me very angry. So I sent for Paumelle, who comes from my part of the country, and I told him how matters stood:

“ ‘ “There will be five francs for you, and five for me,” I said. He agreed, and went, as I had given him full instructions. She opened the door as soon as he knocked, and let him in, and as she did not look at his face, she did not perceive that it was not I, for you know, Captain, one dragoon is very like another with a helmet on.

“ ‘Suddenly, however, she noticed the change, and she asked, angrily: “Who are you? What do you want? I do not know you.”

“ ‘Then Paumelle explained matters; he told her that I was not well, and that I had sent him as my substitute; so she looked at him, made him also swear to keep the matter secret, and then she accepted him, as you may suppose, for Paumelle is not a bad-looking fellow, either. But when he came back, Captain, he would not give me my five francs. If they had been for myself, I should not have said a word, but they were for my father, and on that score I would stand no nonsense, and said to him:

“ ‘ “You are not particular in what you do, for a dragoon; you are a discredit to your uniform.”

“ ‘He raised his fist, Captain, saying that fatigue duty like that was worth double. Of course, everybody has his own ideas, and he ought not to have accepted it. You know the rest.’

“Captain d’Anglemare laughed until he cried as he told me the story, but he also made me promise to keep the matter a secret, just as he had promised the two soldiers. So, above all, do not betray me, but promise to keep it to yourself.”

“Oh! You may be quite easy about that. But how was it all arranged in the end?”

“How? It is a joke in a thousand! Mother Bonderoi keeps her two dragoons, and reserves his own particular day for each of them, and in that way, everybody is satisfied.”

“Oh! That is capital! Really capital!”

“And the aged parents have their crust of bread, and thus morality is satisfied.”

On Horseback

The poor people lived miserably on the husband’s salary. Since their marriage two children had been born, and their previous lack of means had developed into that frightened, timid, shamefaced poverty peculiar to families of good position who try to keep up appearances in spite of everything.

Hector de Gribelin had been brought up in the country, in the paternal manor, by an old Abbé who acted as his tutor. They were not rich, but pulled the devil by the tail and kept up their position. When he was twenty he had gone into the ministry of marine, as a clerk at fifteen hundred francs a year. He had landed there like all those who have not been prepared in early years for the harsh struggle for life, those who see this world through a haze, knowing neither how to get on nor how to meet difficulties, people in whom no special aptitudes or talents have been developed from childhood, no keen energy for the struggle; in whose hands neither a weapon nor a tool has been placed. His first three years at the office were horrible.

He had renewed acquaintance with some friends of his family, old people, behind the times and poor like himself, who lived in select streets, the depressing streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and he had made a circle of friends.

Unfamiliar with modern life, humble but proud, these needy aristocrats lived on the top floors of sleepy old houses. From top to bottom these houses were inhabited by titled tenants, but money was as scarce on the second as on the top floor. Their eternal prejudices, preoccupation with their rank, the dread of descending in the scale, haunted these erstwhile brilliant families, ruined by the inaction of their men folk. It was in these circles that Hector de Gribelin met and married a titled but penniless young girl like himself. Two children had been born to them in four years and for the past four years the household, harassed by poverty, had known no other distractions than a walk on Sunday to the Champs-Élysées, and a few evenings at the theatre, one or two each winter, thanks to free tickets received from a friend.

But, as spring approached, his chief entrusted him with some extra work and he received the extra compensation of three hundred francs. Coming home that night he said to his wife:

“My dear Henriette, we ought to do something with this money; a little outing in the country for the children, for instance.”

They had a lengthy discussion, and finally decided on a family picnic.

“We have had so very few outings,” said Hector, “that we may as well do things right. We will hire a break for you and the little ones, and I will hire a horse; it will do me good.”

They talked of nothing else all week. Each night, when he came home from his office he would dance his elder son up and down on his knee and say:

“This is the way papa will ride next Sunday.” And the boy would ride chairs all day screaming:

“This is papa on horseback.” Even the servant looked at the master in wonder, as she thought of his riding beside the carriage on horseback, and at every meal she heard him tell of his feats in horsemanship when he was home. Oh, he had been well trained. Once he felt a horse between his legs, he was afraid of nothing, absolutely nothing.

He would say to his wife, rubbing his hands: “If they could give me a frisky animal I would like it all the better. You will see how I ride, and, if you like, we can come back by the Champs-Élysées when everybody is coming home. We shall cut quite a figure, and I should not be sorry to meet someone from the office; there is nothing like it to inspire respect.”

On the appointed day the carriage and the horse arrived together at the door, and Hector came down immediately, to look the horse over. He had had straps sewn to his trousers, and was playing with a riding-whip purchased the day before. He raised and felt, one after the other, the animals four legs, felt its neck, its ribs, its hocks, tested its back with his hands, opened its mouth, and told its age, and as the family was coming out at that moment, he discoursed on horses in general and that one in particular, which he declared to be an excellent animal.

When everyone was comfortably placed in the carriage, Hector examined the saddle, and mounting with a spring, dropped on the horse with such force that he immediately set up a dance which almost threw his rider. Hector became flustered and tried to calm him, saying: “Come, old fellow, be quiet.” And when they both had calmed down a little he asked:

“Is everybody ready?”

Everybody said they were and the party proceeded. All eyes were turned on Hector, who affected the English seat and leaped up and down on his saddle in an exaggerated manner. He often looked as if he were going to fall forward on the horse’s mane, but he kept his eyes fixed ahead of him, contracting his brow and looking very pale. His wife and the servant each held one of the boys on their lap and every minute they would say:

“Look at papa!” And the boys, excited by the movement, the fresh air, and their delight, uttered piercing screams.

The horse, frightened at so much noise, started off at a gallop and while Hector tried to stop him his hat fell off. The driver had to come down and pick it up, and having recovered it, Hector shouted to his wife:

“Make the children stop screaming, will you? They will make the horse run away.”

They lunched on the grass in the woods of Vésinet, having brought their food in baskets. Although the driver looked after the horses, Hector went every minute to see if his horse wanted anything. He patted it and fed it with bread, cake, and sugar.

“He is a great trotter,” he said to his wife. “He shook me at first, but you saw how quick I subdued him. He knows his master now.”

They came back by the Champs-Élysées as agreed. The huge avenue was crowded with carriages and the sidewalks lined with so many pedestrians, that they looked like two long black ribbons unrolling from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde. A sun shower was falling on the crowd, making the varnish of the carriages, the steel of the harness and the door handles glitter. The whole mass seemed to be seized by a frenzy of motion, an intoxication of life. In the distance the Obelisk arose in a golden mist. As soon as they passed the Arc de Triomphe Hector’s horse was suddenly possessed by a new ardour. It dashed at a rapid trot between the carriages in the direction of the stables, and the rider’s efforts to stop him were unavailing. The carriage containing his family was far behind. In front of the Palais de l’Industrie, the horse turned to the right at a gallop. An old woman was at that moment leisurely crossing the street, and Hector, who was unable to stop the horse, shouted: “Hey there, hey!” But the old woman was deaf, perhaps, for she slowly kept on until the horse struck her with such force that she turned a triple somersault and landed ten feet away. Several people shouted: “Stop him.”

Hector was distracted and held on desperately to the horse’s mane, crying: “Help, help!” A terrible shock sent him over the horse’s head like a bomb, and he landed in the arms of a policeman who was running toward him. An angry crowd gathered. An old gentleman wearing a decoration was especially angry.

“Confound it, sir!” he said, “if you cannot ride a horse why do you not stay at home instead of running over people!”

Four men appeared carrying the old woman, who to all appearances was dead, with her yellow face, and her bonnet awry and covered with dust.

“Take this woman to a chemist’s,” said the old gentlemen, “and let us go to the station-house.”

A crowd followed Hector, who walked between two policemen, while a third led his horse. At that moment the carriage appeared, and his wife, taking in the situation at a glance, ran toward him; the servant and the children came behind crying. He explained that his horse had knocked a woman down, but it was nothing, he would be home very soon. And his frightened family went away.

At the station-house, the explanation was brief. He gave his name, his place of employment, and awaited news of the injured woman. A policeman came back with the information that the woman’s name was Mme. Simon, and that she was a charwoman sixty-five years old. She had regained consciousness, but she suffered internally, she claimed. When Hector found that she was not dead, he recovered his spirits and promised to defray the expenses of her illness. He went to the drugstore where they had taken the old woman. An immense crowd blocked the doorway. The old woman was whining and groaning pitifully. Two doctors were examining her.

“There are no bones broken,” they said, “but we are afraid she is hurt internally.”

“Do you suffer much?” asked Hector.

“Oh, yes.”

“Where?”

“I feel as if my inside was on fire.”

“Then you are the cause of the accident?” said a doctor approaching.

“Yes, sir,” said Hector.

“This woman must go to a convalescent home. I know one where they will take her for six francs a day; shall I arrange this for you?”

Hector thanked him gratefully and went home relieved. He found his wife in tears, and he comforted her, saying:

“Don’t worry, she is much better already. I sent her to a convalescent home, and in three days she will be all right.”

After his work the next day he went to see Mme. Simon. She was eating some beef soup which she seemed to relish.

“Well,” said Hector, “how do you feel?”

“No better,” she answered. “I feel as good as dead. I don’t feel any better.”

The doctor advised waiting; complications might arise. He waited three days, then went to see the old woman again. Her skin was clear, her eyes bright, but as soon as she saw Hector she commenced to whine:

“I can’t move any more; l’ll be like this for the rest of my days!”

Hector felt a shiver running up and down his back. He asked for the doctor and inquired about the patient.

“I am puzzled,” the doctor said. “Every time we try to lift her up, or even change the position of her chair, she utters heartrending screams; still, I am forced to believe her. I cannot say that she shams until I have seen her walk.”

The old woman listened attentively; a sly look on her face. A week passed, then two, then a month, and still Mme. Simon did not leave her chair. Her appetite was excellent, she gained flesh and joked with the other patients. She seemed to accept her lot as a well-earned rest after fifty years of labour as a charwoman.

Hector came every day and found her the same; always repeating:

“I can’t move, I can’t!”

When Hector came home, his wife would ask with anxiety:

“How is Mme. Simon?”

“Just the same; absolutely no change,” answered Hector dejectedly.

They dismissed the servant, whose wages became too much of a strain, and economized more than ever. The money received from his chief had been spent. Then Hector called four doctors to hold a consultation on Mme. Simon. She let them press and poke her, while she watched them slyly.

“We must make her walk,” said one of the doctors.

“I can’t, gentlemen; I can’t!”

They took hold of her and dragged her a few steps, but she freed herself, and sank to the floor emitting such piercing screams, that they carried her back to her chair very gently.

They reserved their opinion, but concluded, however, that she was incapacitated for work.

When Hector brought the news to his wife, she collapsed.

“We had much better take her here, it would cost us less.”

“In our own house! What are you thinking of?”

“What else can we do, dear? I am sure it is no fault of mine!”

The Wooden Shoes

The old priest was mumbling the last words of his sermon over the white caps of the peasant women, and the rough or greasy heads of the men. The large baskets of the farmers’ wives who had come from a distance to attend Mass were on the ground beside them, and the heavy heat of a July day caused them all to exhale a smell like that of cattle, or of a flock of sheep, and the cocks could be heard crowing through the large open door, as well as the lowing of the cows in a neighbouring field. From time to time a breath of wind, charged with the perfume of the fields, swept in through the main entrance, fluttered the ribbons in the women’s hats, and made the little yellow candle flames on the altar tremble.

“As God wishes. Amen!” the priest said. Then he ceased, opened a book, and, as he did every week, began to give notice to his flock of all the small parish events for the following week. He was an old man with white hair who had been in the parish for over forty years, and from the pulpit was in the habit of discoursing familiarly to them all; so he went on: “I recommend Désiré Vallin, who is very ill, to your prayers, and also La Paumelle, who is recovering very slowly from her confinement.”

He had forgotten the rest, and so he looked for the slips of paper which were put away in a breviary. At last he found two and continued: “I will not have the lads and the girls come into the church yard in the evening, as they do; otherwise I shall inform the rural policeman. Monsieur Césaire Omont would like to find a respectable girl as servant.” He thought for a few moments, and then added: “That is all, my brethren, and I wish that all of you may find the Divine mercy.” And he came down from the pulpit, to finish Mass.

When the Malandains had returned to their thatched cottage, which was the last in the village of La Sablière, on the road to Fourville, the father, a thin, wrinkled old peasant, sat down at the table, while his wife took the saucepan off the fire, and Adélaïde, the daughter, took the glasses and plates out of the sideboard. Then the father said: “I think that place at Maître Omont’s ought to be a good one, as he is a widower and his daughter-in-law does not like him. He is all alone and has money. I think it would be a good thing to send Adélaïde there.”

His wife put the black saucepan on to the table, took the lid off, and while the steam, which smelled strongly of cabbage, rose into the air she pondered on the suggestion. Presently the old man continued: “He has got some money, that is certain, but anyone going there ought to be very sharp, and Adélaïde is not that at all.”

His wife replied: “I might go and see, all the same,” and turning to her daughter, a strapping, silly looking girl with yellow hair and fat, red cheeks like apples, she said: “Do you hear, you great silly? You are to go to Maître Omont’s and offer yourself as his servant, and you will do whatever he tells you.”

The girl began to laugh in a foolish manner, without replying, and then the three began their dinner. In a few minutes, the father continued: “Listen to me, girl, and try not to make a mistake about what I am going to say to you.” And slowly and minutely he laid down for her her line of conduct, anticipating the minutest details, and preparing her for the conquest of an old widower who was on unfriendly terms with his family. The mother ceased eating to listen to him, and she sat there, with her fork in her hand, looking at her husband and her daughter by turns, and following every word with concentrated and silent attention, while Adélaïde remained listless, docile, and stupid, with vague and wandering eyes.

As soon as their meal was over, her mother made her put her cap on, and they both started off to see Monsieur Césaire Omont. He lived in a small, brick house adjoining his tenants’ cottages, for he had retired, and was living by subdividing and letting his land.

He was about fifty-five years old, and was stout, jovial, and rough-mannered, as rich men often are. He laughed and shouted loud enough to make the walls fall down, drank brandy and cider by the glassful, and was said to be still of an amorous disposition, in spite of his age. He liked to walk about his fields with his hands behind his back, digging his wooden shoes into the fat soil, looking at the sprouting corn or the flowering colza with the eye of a retired farmer, at his ease, who likes to see the crops but does not trouble himself about them any longer. People used to say of him: “There is a Mr. Merry-man, who does not get up in a good temper every day.”

He received the two women, as he was finishing his coffee, with his fat stomach against the table, and turning round said: “What do you want?”

The mother was spokeswoman. “This is our girl Adélaïde, and I have come to ask you to take her as servant, as Monsieur le Curé told us you wanted one.”

Maître Omont looked at the girl, and then he said roughly: “How old is the great she-goat?”

“Twenty last Michaelmas-Day, Monsieur Omont.”

“That is settled, she will have fifteen francs a month and her food. I shall expect her tomorrow, to make my soup in the morning.” And he dismissed the two women.

The next day Adélaïde entered upon her duties, and began to work hard, without saying a word, as she was in the habit of doing at home. About nine o’clock, as she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, Monsieur Omont called her: “Adélaïde!”

She came immediately saying: “Here I am, sir.” As soon as she was opposite him, with her red and neglected hands, and her troubled looks, he said, “Now just listen to me, so that there may be no mistake between us. You are my servant, but nothing else; you understand what I mean. We shall keep our shoes apart.”

“Yes, master.”

“Each in our own place, my girl, you in your kitchen, I in my dining room; and with that exception, everything will be for you just as it is for me. Is that settled?”

“Yes, master.”

“Very well; that is all right, and now go to your work.”

And she went out, to attend to her duties, and at midday she served up her master’s dinner in the little sitting-room with the flowered paper on the walls, and then, when the soup was on the table, she went to tell him. “Dinner is ready, master.”

He went in and sat down, looked round, unfolded his table napkin, hesitated for a moment and then in a voice of thunder he shouted: “Adélaïde!”

She rushed in, terribly frightened, for he had shouted as if he meant to murder her.

“Well, in heaven’s name, where is your place?”

“But, master!”

“I do not like to eat alone,” he roared; “you will sit there, or go to the devil, if you don’t choose to do so. Go and get your plate and glass.”

She brought them in, feeling very frightened, and stammered: “Here I am, master,” and then sat down opposite to him. He grew jovial; clinked glasses with her, rapped the table, and told her stories to which she listened with downcast eyes, without daring to say a word, and from time to time she got up to fetch some bread, cider, or plates. When she brought in the coffee she only put one cup before him, and then he grew angry again, and growled: “Well, what about yourself?”

“I never take any, master.”

“Why not?”

“Because I do not like it.”

Then he burst out afresh: “I am not fond of having my coffee by myself, confound it! If you will not take it here, you can go to the devil. Go and get a cup, and make haste about it.”

So she went and fetched a cup, sat down again, tasted the black liquor and made faces over it, but swallowed it to the last drop, under her master’s furious looks. Then he made her also drink her first glass of brandy as an extra drop, the second as a livener, and the third as a kick behind, and then he told her to go and wash up her plates and dishes, adding, that she was “a good sort of girl.”

It was the same at supper, after which she had to play dominoes with him. Then he sent her to bed, saying that he should come upstairs soon. So she went to her room, a garret under the roof, and after saying her prayers, undressed and got into bed. But very soon she sprang up in a fright, for a furious shout had shaken the house. “Adélaïde!” She opened her door, and replied from her attic: “Here I am, master.”

“Where are you?”

“In bed, of course, master.”

Then he roared out: “Will you come downstairs, in heaven’s name? I do not like to sleep alone, and, by God, if you object, you can just get to the devil out of this.”

Then in her terror she replied from upstairs: “I will come, master.” She looked for her candle, and he soon heard her small clogs pattering down the stairs. When she had got to the bottom steps, he seized her by the arm, and as soon as she had left her light wooden shoes by the side of her master’s heavy boots, he pushed her into his room, growling out: “Quicker than that, confound it!”

And without knowing what she was saying she answered: “Here I am, here I am, master.”

Six months later, when she went to see her parents one Sunday, her father looked at her curiously, and then said: “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

She remained thunderstruck, and looked at her waist, and then said: “No, I do not think so.”

Then he asked her, for he wanted to know everything: “Just tell me, didn’t you mix your clogs together, one night?”

“Yes, I mixed them the first night, and then every other night.”

“Well, then, you are pregnant, you great fool!”

On hearing that, she began to sob, and stammered: “How could I know? How was I to know?” Old Malandain looked at her knowingly, and appeared very pleased, and then he asked: “What did you not know?” And amid tears she replied: “How was I to know how children were made?” And when her mother came back, the man said, without any anger: “There, she is pregnant, now.”

But the woman was furious, her finer instinct revolted, and she called her daughter, who was in tears, every name she could think of⁠—a “trollop” and a “strumpet.” Then, however, the old man made her hold her tongue, and as he took up his cap to go and talk the matter over with Master Césaire Omont, he remarked: “She is actually more stupid than I thought she was; she did not even know what he was doing, the fool!”

On the next Sunday, after the sermon, the old Curé published the banns between Monsieur Onufre-Césaire Omont and Céleste-Adélaïde Malandain.

Monsieur Jocaste

Madame, do you recollect our great quarrel one evening in the little Japanese drawing room, about the father who committed incest? Do you recollect how indignant you were, the violent words you flung at me, and how angry you became, and do you also remember all I said in defence of that man? You blamed me. I appeal against you.

No one in the world, you declared, no one could uphold the infamous deed which I defended. Today I am going to tell this tale to the public.

Perhaps someone might be found who, although not excusing the brutal deed, would understand that one cannot struggle against certain fatalities that seem to be horrible fantasies of all-powerful nature.

When sixteen years old she had been married to a hard-hearted old man, a business man who married her for her money. She was a darling blonde creature, gay and dreamy at the same time, and yearning for an ideal happiness. Disillusion fell on her heart and broke it. Suddenly she understood life⁠—no future, the destruction of her hopes, and one wish alone took possession of her soul, and that was to have a child to claim her love.

But she did not have one. Two years passed. She fell in love with a young man twenty-three years old, who was wildly in love with her. For some time she firmly resisted his advances. He was called Pierre Martel.

But one winter’s evening they found themselves alone, at her house. He had come to drink a cup of tea. Then they sat down near the fire, on a low seat. They scarcely spoke. They were passionately in love with each other, stung with desire their lips thirsted wildly for other lips, their arms trembled with a desire to open and embrace someone.

The lamp, draped with lace, shed a cosy light in the silent drawing room.

Although they were both embarrassed they occasionally exchanged a few words, but when their eyes met their hearts trembled.

How can acquired sentiments withstand the violence of instinct? How can the appearance of reserve withstand the irresistible desires of nature?

It happened that their fingers touched. And that was enough. They were overcome by passion. They embraced, and she yielded.

She became pregnant. By her husband, or by her lover. How did she know? Doubtless by her lover.

Then she became very much frightened and felt sure that she would die in her confinement, and she insisted on the man who was the cause of her being in this condition to swear over and over again to watch over the child during its whole life, to refuse it nothing, to be everything to it, yes, everything, and, if necessary, even to commit a crime in order to insure its happiness.

She carried this to an absurd extent. She became more and more worked up as her confinement drew near.

She died giving birth to a girl.

The young man was in the depths of despair, in fact his despair was so great that he could not hide it; perhaps the husband suspected something; perhaps he knew that he could not have been the father of the girl! He forbade the house to the man who thought himself the real father, hid the child from him, and had it brought up in seclusion.

Many years passed.

Pierre Martel forgot all about it, as one forgets everything. He became rich, but he could not love anyone now, and he had not married. His life was ordinary; that of a happy, quiet man. He had never heard a word about the husband he had deceived, nor about the young girl he thought was his.

Well, one morning he received a letter from a comparative stranger, who happened to mention the death of his old rival, and he was somewhat disturbed, and filled with remorse. What had become of this child, his child? Could he do nothing for her? He inquired about her. She had been brought up by an aunt, and she was poor, miserably poor.

He wanted to see her and to help her. He called on the only relation of the orphan.

Even his name awoke no memory. He was forty years old and still looked like a young man. He was received, but he did not dare to say that he had known her mother, fearing it would give rise to suspicion later on.

Well, as soon as she entered the little sitting-room where he anxiously awaited her coming, he trembled for he was all but overcome by surprise. It was she, the other woman! the woman who was dead!

She was the same age, had the same eyes, the same hair, the same figure, the same smile, the same voice. The illusion was so real that it maddened him; all the tumultuous love of days gone by sprang up from the depths of his heart. She likewise was both gay and unaffected. At once they became friends and shook hands.

On returning home he found that the old wound had been opened again, and he wept desperately; he held his head in his hands and wept for the woman who had died, haunted by memories and by the familiar words she used to say; he was plunged in despair from which there was no escape.

He visited the house in which the young girl resided. He could no longer live without her, without her merry talk, the rustle of her gown, the intonation of her voice. And now in his thoughts and in his heart he confounded the two women, the one gone before and the living one, forgetting distance, the time that had elapsed, and death; always loving that one in this one, and this one in memory of the other, not trying to understand why, to know why, never even asking himself if she could be his daughter.

Occasionally, when he noticed the discomfort in which the woman lived, whom he adored with this double passion, which he, himself, could not understand, he felt terribly about it.

What could he do? Could he offer money? How could he do it? What right had he? Could he play the role of guardian? He seemed scarcely older than she; everyone would take him for her lover. Should he get a husband for her? This thought suddenly surged up in his soul and frightened him. Then he became calmer. Who would ask her hand in marriage? She had nothing, not a cent.

Her aunt noticed how often he came; and saw quite plainly that he was in love with this child. And what was he waiting for? Did he know?

One evening they were alone. They were talking softly side by side on the sofa in the little sitting-room. Suddenly he took her hand in a paternal manner. He held it, and his heart and senses were awakened against his will, he did not dare to reject the hand which she had given him, and yet he felt himself growing weaker as he held it. Suddenly she threw herself in his arms. For she loved him ardently as her mother had done, just as though she had inherited this fatal passion.

Completely beside himself, he put his lips to her blonde hair and, as she raised her head to escape, their mouths met.

People become mad at times. They were so now.

When he reached the street he walked straight ahead, not knowing what he would do.

I recollect, madam, your indignant exclamation: “He had no choice but to commit suicide!”

I answered you: “And as for her? Should he have killed her also?”

The child loved him to distraction, madly, with the fatal and hereditary passion which had thrown her, a virgin, ignorant and distracted, on the breast of this man. She had acted in this manner owing to the irresistible intoxication of her entire being, which made her lose control of herself, which made her give herself, carried away by tumultuous instinct, and throw herself into the arms of her lover.

If he were to kill himself what would become of her?⁠ ⁠… She would die!⁠ ⁠… She would die dishonoured, in despair, suffering terrible tortures.

What should he do?

Leave her, give her a marriage portion, marry her to someone else?⁠ ⁠… In that case she would die; she would die from grief, without accepting his money or another husband, for she had given herself to him. He had ruined her life, destroyed every possibility of happiness for her; he had condemned her to everlasting misery, to everlasting despair, to everlasting fire, to everlasting solitude, or to death.

Besides he loved her himself also! He revolted at the thought that he loved her extravagantly. She was his own daughter, be it so. The hazard of impregnation, a contact of a second had made⁠—of that being allied to him by no legal bond⁠—his daughter, whom he cherished as he had her mother, and even more, as though he were possessed of two passions.

Besides was she really his daughter? What did that matter anyhow? Who would know it?

Ardent memories brought back the vow made to the dying woman. “He had promised to give his entire life to the child, to commit a crime if necessary to insure her happiness.”

And he loved her so that he plunged headlong into this abominable and pleasing crime, tortured by pain, and ravaged by desire.

Who will know about it? the other man, the father, being dead!

“So be it!” said he; “this secret sin may break my heart. As she does not suspect it, I alone will carry its weight.”

He asked for her hand, and he married her.

I don’t know if they were happy, but I should have done as he did, madam.

Beside a Dead Man

He was dying rapidly, as people die who have tuberculosis. Every day I saw him sit down, at about two o’clock, under the hotel windows, facing the calm sea, on a bench on the terrace. For some time he would remain motionless in the warmth of the sun, gazing at the Mediterranean with mournful eyes. Sometimes he would glance towards the lofty mountain, with its misty heights, that encloses Mentone; then, with a very deliberate movement, he would cross his long legs, so thin that they looked like two bones, about which the cloth of his trousers flapped loosely, and he would open a book, always the same one.

Then he would stir no more, but would read, read with all his eyes and mind; the whole of his poor expiring body looked to be reading; his whole soul would bury itself in the book, losing itself and disappearing in it, until the hour when the cooler air made him cough a little. Then he would rise and go indoors.

He was a tall German with a fair beard; he lunched and dined in his own room, and spoke to no one.

A vague feeling of curiosity drew me towards him. I sat down one day beside him, having brought with me, for the sake of appearances, a volume of de Musset’s poetry.

I began to glance through “Rolla.”

“Do you know German, monsieur?” said my neighbour, suddenly, in good French.

“Not a word of it, monsieur.”

“I am sorry. Since chance has placed us side by side, I would have lent you, I would have shown you a priceless treasure: the book I have here.”

“What is it?”

“It is a copy of my master Schopenhauer, annotated by his own hand. All the margins, as you see, are covered with his writing.”

I took the book with respect and contemplated these shapes, incomprehensible to me, but revealing the immortal mind of the greatest destroyer of dreams who has ever passed through the world.

And the lines of de Musset broke forth in my memory:

“Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire
Voltige-t-il encor sur tes os decharnes?”11

Involuntarily I compared the childish, religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineradicable.

One may protest and lose one’s temper, one may be indignant or loftily disdainful, but Schopenhauer has stamped humanity with the seal of his contempt and disenchantment.

A disillusioned hedonist, he has overturned beliefs, hopes, poetry, and idle fancies, has destroyed the aspirations and laid waste the trust of souls, has killed love, has abolished the idealised worship of woman, has exploded the illusions of the heart, and has accomplished the most gigantic labour of scepticism that has ever been achieved. His mocking spirit has traversed all things, and drained them all dry. And, even today, those who execrate him bear in their spirits, despite themselves, fragments of his mind.

“So you were a personal friend of Schopenhauer’s?” I said to the German.

He smiled sadly.

“Till his death, monsieur.”

And he spoke to me of him, telling me of the almost supernatural impression which that strange being made on all who came near him.

He told me of the old demolisher’s interview with a French politician, a doctrinaire republican, who was eager to see the man and found him in a noisy beerhouse, seated in the midst of his disciples, dry, wrinkled, smiling his unforgettable smile, rending and tearing ideas and beliefs with a single sentence, as a dog with one bite tears to ribbons the stuffs he is playing with.

He repeated to me the remark of the Frenchman, as he went away bewildered and scared, exclaiming: “It was like spending an hour with the devil.”

Then he added:

“He had, in truth, monsieur, a terrifying smile which frightened us, even after his death. It is an almost unknown anecdote, and I will tell it you if it interests you.”

And he began, in a tired voice, occasionally interrupted by violent fits of coughing:

“Schopenhauer had just died, and it was decided that we should watch by the deathbed in turns, two and two, till morning.

“He lay in a large, very plain room, vast and sombre. Two candles burned on the night table.

“It was midnight when I took up my watch, with one of our comrades. The two friends whom we were replacing walked out, and we went in and sat down at the foot of the bed.

“The face had not altered at all. It was laughing. The hollow crease we knew so well ran past the corner of the lips, and we fancied that he was about to open his eyes, move, and speak. His mind, or rather his thoughts, enveloped us; we felt ourselves to be more than ever in the atmosphere of his genius, invaded and possessed by him. His domination seemed to us even more sovereign now that he was dead. A mystery mingled with the power of that incomparable mind.

“The bodies of such men vanish, but the men themselves remain; and, on the night which follows the stopping of their hearts, I assure you, monsieur, they are terrifying.

“Softly we spoke together of him, recalling speeches and formula of his, and those amazing maxims which are like rays of light thrown, in a few words, on the darkness of the unknown Life.

“ ‘He looks as though he were going to speak,’ said my companion.

“And we gazed, with an uneasiness bordering on terror, at the motionless, still smiling countenance.

“Little by little we felt more ill at ease, oppressed, almost swooning.

“ ‘I don’t know what is the matter with me,’ I stammered, ‘but I can assure you that I am not well.’

“Then we perceived that the body had begun to smell.

“Thereupon my friend proposed that we should go into the next room, leaving the door open, and I consented.

“I took one of the candles burning on the night table and left the other, and we went and sat at the other end of the room, in such a position that we could see from it the bed and the dead man, full in the light.

“But he still obsessed us; it was as though his immaterial, detached, free nature, all-powerful and dominant, were prowling all round us. And occasionally, too, the filthy odour of the decomposing body reached us, soaking right through us, as it were, vague and sickening.

“Suddenly a shiver ran through our bones; a sound, a tiny sound had come from the room of the dead man. Our eyes were instantly turned upon him, and we saw, yes, monsieur, we saw as plainly as possible, both of us, something white run over the bedclothes, drop down on to the carpet, and disappear under a chair.

“We were on our feet before we had time to think, wild with senseless terror, on the point of flight. Then we looked at each other. We were horribly pale. Our hearts were beating furiously enough to move the folds of our coats. I was the first to speak.

“ ‘Did you see?’

“ ‘Yes, I saw.’

“ ‘Is he not dead?’

“ ‘But if he is beginning to putrefy!’

“ ‘What shall we do?’

“My companion replied, hesitating:

“ ‘We must go and see.’

“I took our candle and went in first, and my eyes roved all round the big room with its dark corners. There was no more movement, and I went to the bed. But I stood paralysed with amazement and terror: Schopenhauer was no longer smiling! He was grimacing in a horrible way, his mouth tight shut, with deep hollows in the cheeks.

“ ‘He is not dead!’ I stammered.

“But the awful smell rose to my nostrils, choking me. I did not stir, but gazed fixedly at him, terror-struck, as though in the presence of a ghost.

“Then my companion, taking the other candle, bent down. Then he touched my arm without speaking. I followed his gaze, and saw on the ground, under the chair at the bedside, quite white on the dark carpet, open as though to bite, Schopenhauer’s false teeth.

“The process of decomposition, loosening the jaws, had caused them to spring out of his mouth.

“I was really afraid that day, monsieur.”

And, as the sun was drawing close to the sparkling sea, the consumptive German rose, bowed to me, and went into the hotel.

Two Friends

Paris was blockaded, famished, at the last gasp. Sparrows were getting scarce on the roofs, and the sewers were depleted of their rats. People were eating anything.

As he was strolling sadly along the outer boulevard on a fine January morning, with his hands in the pockets of his military trousers, and his stomach empty, Monsieur Morissot, a watchmaker by profession, and a man of his ease when he had the chance, came face to face with a brother in arms whom he recognized as a friend, and stopped. It was Monsieur Sauvage, an acquaintance he had met on the river.

Before the war Morissot had been in the habit of starting out at dawn every Sunday, rod in hand, and a tin box on his back. He would take the train to Argenteuil, get out at Colombes, then go on foot as far as the Island of Marante. The moment he reached this place of his dreams he would begin to fish, and fish till nightfall. Every Sunday he met there a little round and jovial man, Monsieur Sauvage, a draper of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, also an ardent fisherman. They would often pass half the day side by side, rod in hand, feet dangling above the stream, and in this manner had become fast friends. Some days they did not talk, other days they did. But they understood each other admirably without words, for their taste and feelings were identical.

On spring mornings, about ten o’clock, when the young sun was raising a faint mist above the quiet-flowing river, and blessing the backs of those two passionate fishermen with the pleasant warmth of a new season, Morissot would sometimes say to his neighbour: “I say, isn’t it heavenly?” and Monsieur Sauvage would reply: “Couldn’t be jollier!” which was quite enough to make them understand and like each other.

In autumn, as the day was declining, when the sky, reddened by the glow of the setting sun, and crimson clouds were reflected in the water, the whole river stained with colour, the horizon flaming, when our two friends looked as red at fire, and the trees, already russet and shivering as the touch of winter, were turned to gold, Monsieur Sauvage would look smilingly at Morissot, and remark: “What a sight!” and Morissot, not taking his eyes off his float, would reply ecstatically: “It beats the boulevard, eh?”

As soon as they recognized each other, they shook hands heartily, quite moved at meeting again in such different circumstances. With a sigh Monsieur Sauvage murmured: “Nice state of things!” Morissot, very gloomy, groaned: “And what weather! Today’s the first fine day this year!”

The sky was indeed quite blue and full of light.

They moved on, side by side, ruminative, sad. Morissot pursued his thought: “And fishing, eh? What jolly times we used to have!”

“When shall we go fishing again?” asked Monsieur Sauvage.

They entered a little café, took an absinthe together, and started off once more, strolling along the pavement.

Suddenly Morissot halted: “Another absinthe?” he said.

“I’m with you!” responded Monsieur Sauvage. And in they went to another wine-shop. They came out rather lightheaded, affected as people are by alcohol on empty stomachs. The day was mild, and a soft breeze caressed their faces.

Monsieur Sauvage, whose lightheadedness was completed by the fresh air, stopped short: “I say⁠—suppose we go!”

“What d’you mean?”

“Fishing!”

“Where?”

“Why, at our island. The French outposts are close to Colombes. I know Colonel Dumoulin; he’ll be sure to let us pass.”

Morissot answered, quivering with eagerness: “All right; I’m on!” And they parted, to get their fishing gear.

An hour later they were marching along the high road. They came presently to the villa occupied by the Colonel, who, much amused by their whim, gave them leave. And furnished with his permit, they set off again.

They soon passed the outposts, and, traversing the abandoned village of Colombes, found them selves at the edge of the little vineyard fields that run down to the Seine. It was about eleven o’clock.

The village of Argenteuil, opposite, seemed quite deserted. The heights of Orgemont and Sannois commanded the whole countryside; the great plain stretching to Nanterre was empty, utterly empty of all but its naked cherry-trees and its grey earth.

Monsieur Sauvage jerking his thumb towards the heights, muttered: “The Prussians are up there!” And disquietude stole into the hearts of the two friends, looking at that deserted country. The Prussians! They had never seen any, but they had felt them there for months, all round Paris, bringing ruin to France, bringing famine; pillaging, massacring; invisible, yet invincible. And a sort of superstitious terror was added to their hatred for this unknown and victorious race.

Morissot stammered: “I say⁠—suppose we were to meet some?”

With that Parisian jocularity which nothing can repress Monsieur Sauvage replied: “We’d give ’em some fried fish.”

None the less, daunted by the silence all round, they hesitated to go farther.

At last Monsieur Sauvage took the plunge. “Come on! But be careful!”

They got down into a vineyard, where they crept along, all eyes and ears, bent double, taking cover behind every bush.

There was still a strip of open ground to cross before they could get to the riverside; they took it at the double, and the moment they reached the bank plumped down amongst some dry rushes.

Morissot glued his ear to the ground for any sound of footsteps. Nothing! They were alone, utterly alone.

They plucked up spirit again, and began to fish.

In front of them the Island of Marante, uninhabited, hid them from the far bank. The little island restaurant was closed, and looked as if it had been abandoned for years.

Monsieur Sauvage caught the first gudgeon, Morissot the second, and every minute they kept pulling in their lines with a little silvery creature wriggling at the end. Truly a miraculous draught of fishes!

They placed their spoil carefully in a very fine-meshed net suspended in the water at their feet, and were filled by the delicious joy that visits those who know once more a pleasure of which they have been deprived too long.

The good sun warmed their shoulders; they heard nothing, thought of nothing, were lost to the world. They fished.

But suddenly a dull boom, which seemed to come from underground, made the earth tremble. The bombardment had begun again.

Morissot turned his head. Away above the bank he could see on the left the great silhouette of Mont Valérien, showing a white plume in its cap, a puff of smoke just belched forth. Then a second spurt of smoke shot up from the fort’s summit, and some seconds afterwards was heard the roar of the gun.

Then more and more. Every minute the hill breathed out death, sending forth clouds of white smoke, which rose slowly to the calm heaven, and made a crown of cloud.

Monsieur Sauvage shrugged his shoulders. “At it again!” he said.

Morissot, who was anxiously watching the bobbing of his float, was seized with the sudden fury of a man of peace against these maniacs battering at each other, and he growled out: “Idiots I call them, killing each other like that!”

“Worse than the beasts!” said Monsieur Sauvage.

And Morissot, busy with a fish, added: “It’ll always be like that, in my opinion, so long as we have governments.”

Monsieur Sauvage cut him short. “The Republic would never have declared war⁠—”

Morissot broke in: “Under a monarchy you get war against your neighbours; under a republic⁠—war amongst yourselves.”

And they began tranquilly discussing and unravelling momentous political problems with the sweet reasonableness of peaceable, ignorant men, who agreed at any rate on one point, that Man would never be free.

And Mont Valérien thundered without ceasing, shattering with its shells the homes of France, pounding out life, crushing human beings, putting an end to many a dream, to many an expected joy, to many a hope of happiness; opening everywhere, too, in the hearts of wives, of girls, of mothers, wounds that would never heal.

“Such is life!” declared Monsieur Sauvage.

“You mean ‘such is death,’ ” said Morissot, and laughed.

They both gave a sudden start; there was surely someone coming up behind them. Turning their eyes they saw, standing close to their very elbows, four men, four big bearded men, dressed in a sort of servant’s livery, with flat caps on their heads, pointing rifles at them.

The rods fell from their hands and floated off downstream.

In a few seconds they were seized, bound, thrown into a boat, and taken over to the island.

Behind the house that they had thought deserted they perceived some twenty German soldiers.

A sort of hairy giant, smoking a great porcelain pipe, and sitting astride of a chair, said in excellent French: “Well, gentlemen, what luck fishing?”

Whereupon a soldier laid at his officer’s feet the net full of fish, which he had carefully brought along.

The Prussian smiled. “I see⁠—not bad. But we’ve other fish to fry. Now listen to me, and keep cool. I regard you two as spies sent to watch me. I take you, and I shoot you. You were pretending to fish, the better to disguise your plans. You’ve fallen into my hands; so much the worse for you. That’s war. But, seeing that you passed through your outposts, you must assuredly have been given the password to get back again. Give it me, and I’ll let you go.”

Livid, side by side, the two friends were silent, but their hands kept jerking with little nervous movements.

The officer continued: “No one will ever know; it will be all right; you can go home quite easy in your minds. If you refuse, it’s death⁠—instant death. Choose.”

They remained motionless, without a word.

The Prussian, calm as ever, stretched out his hands towards the water, and said: “Think! In five minutes you’ll be at the bottom of that river. In five minutes. You’ve got families, I suppose?”

Mont Valérien went on thundering. The two fishermen stood there silent.

The German gave an order in his own language. Then he moved his chair so as not to be too near his prisoners. Twelve men came forward, took their stand twenty paces away, and grounded arms.

The officer said: “I give you one minute; not a second more.”

And, getting up abruptly, he approached the two Frenchmen, took Morissot by the arm, and, drawing him aside, whispered: “Quick, that password. Your friend need never know. It will only look as if I’d relented.” Morissot made no answer.

Then the Prussian took Monsieur Sauvage apart, and asked him the same question.

Monsieur Sauvage did not reply.

Once again they were side by side. The officer gave a word of command. The soldiers raised their rifles.

At that moment Morissot’s glance alighted on the net full of gudgeons lying on the grass a few paces from him. The sunshine was falling on that glittering heap of fishes, still full of life. His spirit sank. In spite of all effort his eyes filled with tears.

“Goodbye, Monsieur Sauvage!” he stammered out.

Monsieur Sauvage answered: “Goodbye, Monsieur Morissot.”

They grasped each other’s hands, shaken from head to foot by a trembling that they could not control.

“Fire!” cried the officer.

Twelve shots rang out as one.

Monsieur Sauvage fell forward like a log. Morissot, the taller, wavered, spun around, and came down across his comrade, his face upturned to the sky; blood spurted from his tunic, torn across the chest.

The German gave another order. His men dispersed. They came back with ropes and stones, which they fastened to the feet of the two dead friends, whom they carried to the river bank. And Mont Valérien never ceased rumbling, crowned now with piled-up clouds of smoke.

Two of the soldiers took Morissot by the head and heels, two others laid hold of Monsieur Sauvage in the same manner. The bodies, swung violently to and fro, were hurled forward, described a curve, then plunged upright into the river, where the stones dragged them down feet first.

The water splashed up, foamed, and rippled, then fell calm again, and tiny waves rolled out towards the banks.

A few bloodstains floated away.

The officer, calm as ever, said quietly: “Now it is the fishes’ turn!” and went back towards the house.

But suddenly catching sight of the net full of gudgeons on the grass, he took it up, looked it over, smiled, and called out: “Wilhelm!”

A soldier in a white apron came running up. The Prussian threw him the spoil of the two dead fishermen.

“Get these little things fried at once while they’re still alive. They will be delicious.”

And he went back to his pipe.

At Sea

The following lines recently appeared in the press:

“Boulogne-sur-Mer, January 22.

“From our correspondent.

“A frightful disaster has occurred which throws into consternation our maritime population, so grievously afflicted for the last two years. The fishing boat, commanded by Captain Javel, entering into port, was carried to the west, and broken upon the rocks of the breakwater near the pier. In spite of the efforts of the lifeboat, and of lifelines shot out to them, four men and a cabin boy perished. The bad weather continues. Further wrecks are feared.”

Who is this Captain Javel? Is he the brother of the one-armed Javel? If this poor man tossed by the waves, and dead perhaps, under the debris of his boat cut in pieces, is the one I think he is, he witnessed, eighteen years ago, another drama, terrible and simple as are all the formidable dramas of the sea.

Javel senior was then master of a smack. The smack is the fishing boat par excellence. Solid, fearing no kind of weather, with round body, rolled incessantly by the waves, like a cork, always lashed by the harsh, salty winds of the Channel, it travels the sea indefatigably, with sail filled, carrying in its wake a net which reaches the bottom of the ocean, detaching all the sleeping creatures from the rocks, the flat fishes glued to the sand, the heavy crabs with their hooked claws, and the lobster with his pointed mustaches.

When the breeze is fresh and the waves choppy, the boat puts about to fish. A rope is fastened to the end of a great wooden shank tipped with iron, which is let down by means of two cables slipping over two spools at the extreme end of the craft. And the boat, driving under wind and current, drags after her this apparatus, which ravages and devastates the bottom of the sea.

Javel had on board his younger brother, four men, and a cabin boy. He had set out from Boulogne in fair weather to cast the nets. Then, suddenly, the wind arose and a squall drove the boat before the wind. It reached the coast of England; but a tremendous sea was beating against the cliffs and the shore so that it was impossible to enter port. The little boat put to sea again and returned to the coast of France. The storm continued to make the piers unapproachable, enveloping with foam, noise and danger every place of refuge.

The fishing boat set out again, running along the tops of the billows, tossed about, shaken up, streaming, buffeted by mountains of water, but game in spite of all, accustomed to heavy weather, which sometimes kept it wandering for five or six days between the two countries, unable to land in the one or the other.

Finally, the hurricane ceased, when they came out into open sea, and although the sea was still high, the Old Man ordered them to cast the net. Then the great fishing tackle was thrown overboard, and two men at one side and two at the other began to unwind from windlasses the cable which held it. Suddenly it touched the bottom, but a high wave tipped the boat forward. Javel junior, who was in the prow directing the casting of the net, tottered and found his arm caught between the cable, slackened an instant by the motion, and the wood on which it was turning. He made a desperate effort with his other hand to lift the cable, but the net was dragging again and the taut cable would not yield.

Rigid with pain, he called. Everyone ran to him. His brother left the helm. They threw their full force upon the rope, forcing it away from the arm it was grinding. It was in vain. “We must cut it,” said a sailor, and he drew from his pocket a large knife which could, in two blows, save young Javel’s arm. But to cut was to lose the net, and the net meant money, much money⁠—fifteen hundred francs; it belonged to the elder Javel, who was keen on his property.

In anguish he cried out: “No, don’t cut; I’ll luff the ship.” And he ran to the wheel, putting the helm about. The boat scarcely obeyed, paralyzed by the net, which counteracted its power, and driven besides by the force of the leeway and the wind.

Young Javel fell to his knees with set teeth and haggard eyes. He said nothing. His brother returned, still anxious about the sailor’s knife.

“Wait! wait!” he said, “don’t cut; we must cast anchor.”

The anchor was thrown overboard, all the chain paid out, and they then tried to take a turn around the capstan with the cables in order to loosen them from the weight of the net. The cables finally relaxed, and they released the arm, which hung inert under a sleeve of bloody woolen cloth.

Young Javel seemed to have lost his mind. They removed his jersey, and then saw something horrible; a mass of bruised flesh, from which the blood was gushing, as if it were forced by a pump. The man himself looked at his arm and murmured: “Done for.”

Then, as the haemorrhage made a pool on the deck of the boat, the sailors cried: “He’ll lose all his blood. We must bind the artery!”

They then took some twine, thick, black, tarred twine, and, twisting it around the limb above the wound, bound it with all their strength. Little by little the jets of blood stopped, and finally ceased altogether.

Young Javel arose, his arm hanging by his side. He took it by the other hand, raised it, turned it, shook it. Everything was broken; the bones were crushed completely; only the muscles held it to his body. He looked at it thoughtfully, with sad eyes. Then he seated himself on a folded sail, and his comrades came around him, advising him to soak it continually to prevent gangrene.

They put a bucket near him and every moment he would dip into it with a glass and bathe the horrible wound by letting a thin stream of clear water fall upon it.

“You would be better down below,” said his brother. He went down, but after an hour he came up again, feeling better not to be alone. And then, he preferred the open air. He sat down again upon the sail and continued bathing his arm.

The fishing was good. The huge fish with white bodies were lying beside him, shaken by the spasms of death. He looked at them without ceasing to sprinkle the mangled flesh.

When they started to return to Boulogne, another gale of wind began to blow. The little boat resumed its mad course, bounding, and tumbling, shaking the poor wounded man.

Night came on. The weather was heavy until daybreak. At sunrise, they could see England again, but as the sea was a little less rough, they turned toward France, beating against the wind.

Toward evening, young Javel called his comrades and showed them black traces and the hideous signs of decay around that part of his arm which was no longer joined to his body.

The sailors looked at it, giving advice: “That must be gangrene,” said one.

“It must have salt water on it,” said another.

Then they brought salt water and poured it on the wound. The wounded man became livid, grinding his teeth, and twisting with pain; but he uttered no cry.

When the burning grew less, he said to his brother: “Give me your knife.” The brother gave it to him.

“Hold this arm up for me, and pull it.”

His brother did as he was asked.

Then he began to cut. He cut gently, with caution, severing the last tendons with the blade as sharp as a razor. Soon he had only a stump. He heaved a deep sigh and said: “That had to be done. Otherwise, it would be all up.”

He seemed relieved and breathed energetically. He continued to pour water on the part of his arm remaining to him.

The night was still bad and they could not land. When the day appeared, young Javel took his severed arm and examined it carefully. Putrefaction had begun. His comrades came also and examined it, passing it from hand to hand, touching it, turning it over, and smelling it.

His brother said: “It’s about time to throw that into the sea.”

Young Javel was angry; he replied: “No, oh! no! I will not. It is mine, isn’t it? Since it is my arm⁠—” He took it and held it between his legs.

“It won’t grow any less putrid,” said the elder.

Then an idea came to the wounded man. In order to keep the fish when they remained a long time at sea, they had with them barrels of salt. “Couldn’t I put it in there in the brine?” he asked.

“That’s so,” declared the others.

Then they emptied one of the barrels, already full of fish from the last few days, and, at the bottom, they deposited the arm. Then they turned salt upon it and replaced the fishes, one by one.

One of the sailors made a little joke: “Take care we don’t happen to sell it at the fish market.”

And everybody laughed except the Javel brothers.

The wind still blew. They beat about in sight of Boulogne until the next day at ten o’clock. The wounded man still poured water on his arm. From time to time he would get up and walk from one end of the boat to the other. His brother, who was at the wheel, shook his head and followed him with his eye.

Finally, they came into port.

The doctor examined the wound and declared it was doing well. He dressed it properly and ordered rest. But Javel could not go to bed without having his arm again, and went quickly back to the dock to find the barrel, which he had marked with a cross.

They emptied it in front of him, and he found his arm well preserved in the salt, wrinkled and in good condition. He wrapped it in a napkin brought for this purpose, and took it home.

His wife and children examined carefully this fragment of their father, touching the fingers, taking up the grains of salt that had lodged under the nails. Then they sent for the carpenter, who measured it for a little coffin.

The next day the complete crew of the fishing smack followed the funeral of the severed arm. The two brothers, side by side, conducted the ceremony. The parish beadle held the coffin under his arm.

Javel junior gave up going to sea. He obtained a small position in port, and, later, whenever he spoke of the accident, he would say to his auditor, in a low tone: “If my brother had been willing to cut the net, I should still have my arm, for certain. But he was thinking of his valuable property.”

The Necklace

She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself besides be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education.

Her tastes were simple because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her; for women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family. Their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.

She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her. The sight of the little Breton girl who came to do the work in her little house aroused heartbroken regrets and hopeless dreams in her mind. She imagined silent antechambers, heavy with Oriental tapestries, lit by torches in lofty bronze sockets, with two tall footmen in knee-breeches sleeping in large armchairs, overcome by the heavy warmth of the stove. She imagined vast saloons hung with antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture supporting priceless ornaments, and small, charming, perfumed rooms, created just for little parties of intimate friends, men who were famous and sought after, whose homage roused every other woman’s envious longings.

When she sat down for dinner at the round table covered with a three-days-old cloth, opposite her husband, who took the cover off the soup tureen, exclaiming delightedly: “Aha! Scotch broth! There’s nothing better,” she imagined delicate meals, gleaming silver, tapestries peopling the walls with folk of a past age and strange birds in faery forests; she imagined delicate food served in marvellous dishes, murmured gallantries, listened to with an inscrutable smile as one trifled with the rosy flesh of trout or wings of asparagus chicken.

She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she loved; she felt that she was made for them. She had longed so eagerly to charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after.

She had a rich friend, an old school friend whom she refused to visit, because she suffered so keenly when she returned home. She would weep whole days, with grief, regret, despair, and misery.

One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a large envelope in his hand.

“Here’s something for you,” he said.

Swiftly she tore the paper and drew out a printed card on which were these words:

“The Minister of Education and Madame Ramponneau request the pleasure of the company of Monsieur and Madame Loisel at the Ministry on the evening of Monday, January the 18th.”

Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she flung the invitation petulantly across the table, murmuring:

“What do you want me to do with this?”

“Why, darling, I thought you’d be pleased. You never go out, and this is a great occasion. I had tremendous trouble to get it. Everyone wants one; it’s very select, and very few go to the clerks. You’ll see all the really big people there.”

She looked at him out of furious eyes, and said impatiently:

“And what do you suppose I am to wear at such an affair?”

He had not thought about it; he stammered:

“Why, the dress you go to the theatre in. It looks very nice, to me.⁠ ⁠…”

He stopped, stupefied and utterly at a loss when he saw that his wife was beginning to cry. Two large tears ran slowly down from the corners of her eyes towards the corners of her mouth.

“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?” he faltered.

But with a violent effort she overcame her grief and replied in a calm voice, wiping her wet cheeks:

“Nothing. Only I haven’t a dress and so I can’t go to this party. Give your invitation to some friend of yours whose wife will be turned out better than I shall.”

He was heartbroken.

“Look here, Mathilde,” he persisted. “What would be the cost of a suitable dress, which you could use on other occasions as well, something very simple?”

She thought for several seconds, reckoning up prices and also wondering for how large a sum she could ask without bringing upon herself an immediate refusal and an exclamation of horror from the careful-minded clerk.

At last she replied with some hesitation:

“I don’t know exactly, but I think I could do it on four hundred francs.”

He grew slightly pale, for this was exactly the amount he had been saving for a gun, intending to get a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre with some friends who went lark-shooting there on Sundays.

Nevertheless he said: “Very well. I’ll give you four hundred francs. But try and get a really nice dress with the money.”

The day of the party drew near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy and anxious. Her dress was ready, however. One evening her husband said to her:

“What’s the matter with you? You’ve been very odd for the last three days.”

“I’m utterly miserable at not having any jewels, not a single stone, to wear,” she replied. “I shall look absolutely no one. I would almost rather not go to the party.”

“Wear flowers,” he said. “They’re very smart at this time of year. For ten francs you could get two or three gorgeous roses.”

She was not convinced.

“No⁠ ⁠… there’s nothing so humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot of rich women.”

“How stupid you are!” exclaimed her husband. “Go and see Madame Forestier and ask her to lend you some jewels. You know her quite well enough for that.”

She uttered a cry of delight.

“That’s true. I never thought of it.”

Next day she went to see her friend and told her her trouble.

Madame Forestier went to her dressing-table, took up a large box, brought it to Madame Loisel, opened it, and said:

“Choose, my dear.”

First she saw some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross in gold and gems, of exquisite workmanship. She tried the effect of the jewels before the mirror, hesitating, unable to make up her mind to leave them, to give them up. She kept on asking:

“Haven’t you anything else?”

“Yes. Look for yourself. I don’t know what you would like best.”

Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin case, a superb diamond necklace; her heart began to beat covetously. Her hands trembled as she lifted it. She fastened it round her neck, upon her high dress, and remained in ecstasy at sight of herself.

Then, with hesitation, she asked in anguish:

“Could you lend me this, just this alone?”

“Yes, of course.”

She flung herself on her friend’s breast, embraced her frenziedly, and went away with her treasure.

The day of the party arrived. Madame Loisel was a success. She was the prettiest woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling, and quite above herself with happiness. All the men stared at her, inquired her name, and asked to be introduced to her. All the undersecretaries of state were eager to waltz with her. The Minister noticed her.

She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her feminine heart.

She left about four o’clock in the morning. Since midnight her husband had been dozing in a deserted little room, in company with three other men whose wives were having a good time.

He threw over her shoulders the garments he had brought for them to go home in, modest everyday clothes, whose poorness clashed with the beauty of the ball dress. She was conscious of this and was anxious to hurry away, so that she would not be noticed by the other women putting on their costly furs.

Loisel restrained her.

“Wait a little. You’ll catch cold in the open. I’m going to fetch a cab.”

But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the staircase. When they were out in the street they could not find a cab; they began to look for one, shouting at the drivers whom they saw passing in the distance.

They walked down towards the Seine, desperate and shivering. At last they found on the quay one of those old night-prowling carriages which are only to be seen in Paris after dark, as though they were ashamed of their shabbiness in the daylight.

It brought them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they walked up to their own apartment. It was the end, for her. As for him, he was thinking that he must be at the office at ten.

She took off the garments in which she had wrapped her shoulders, so as to see herself in all her glory before the mirror. But suddenly she uttered a cry. The necklace was no longer round her neck!

“What’s the matter with you?” asked her husband, already half undressed.

She turned towards him in the utmost distress.

“I⁠ ⁠… I⁠ ⁠… I’ve no longer got Madame Forestier’s necklace.⁠ ⁠…”

He started with astonishment.

“What!⁠ ⁠… Impossible!”

They searched in the folds of her dress, in the folds of the coat, in the pockets, everywhere. They could not find it.

“Are you sure that you still had it on when you came away from the ball?” he asked.

“Yes, I touched it in the hall at the Ministry.”

“But if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it fall.”

“Yes. Probably we should. Did you take the number of the cab?”

“No. You didn’t notice it, did you?”

“No.”

They stared at one another, dumbfounded. At last Loisel put on his clothes again.

“I’ll go over all the ground we walked,” he said, “and see if I can’t find it.”

And he went out. She remained in her evening clothes, lacking strength to get into bed, huddled on a chair, without volition or power of thought.

Her husband returned about seven. He had found nothing.

He went to the police station, to the newspapers, to offer a reward, to the cab companies, everywhere that a ray of hope impelled him.

She waited all day long, in the same state of bewilderment at this fearful catastrophe.

Loisel came home at night, his face lined and pale; he had discovered nothing.

“You must write to your friend,” he said, “and tell her that you’ve broken the clasp of her necklace and are getting it mended. That will give us time to look about us.”

She wrote at his dictation.

By the end of a week they had lost all hope.

Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:

“We must see about replacing the diamonds.”

Next day they took the box which had held the necklace and went to the jewellers whose name was inside. He consulted his books.

“It was not I who sold this necklace, madame; I must have merely supplied the clasp.”

Then they went from jeweller to jeweller, searching for another necklace like the first, consulting their memories, both ill with remorse and anguish of mind.

In a shop at the Palais-Royal they found a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they were looking for. It was worth forty thousand francs. They were allowed to have it for thirty-six thousand.

They begged the jeweller not to sell it for three days. And they arranged matters on the understanding that it would be taken back for thirty-four thousand francs, if the first one were found before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs left to him by his father. He intended to borrow the rest.

He did borrow it, getting a thousand from one man, five hundred from another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes of hand, entered into ruinous agreements, did business with usurers and the whole race of moneylenders. He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his existence, risked his signature without even knowing if he could honour it, and, appalled at the agonising face of the future, at the black misery about to fall upon him, at the prospect of every possible physical privation and moral torture, he went to get the necklace and put down upon the jeweller’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

When Madame Loisel took back the necklace to Madame Forestier, the latter said to her in a chilly voice: “You ought to have brought it back sooner; I might have needed it.”

She did not, as her friend had feared, open the case. If she had noticed the substitution, what would she have thought? What would she have said? Would she not have taken her for a thief?

Madame Loisel came to know the ghastly life of abject poverty. Right from the start she played her part heroically. This fearful debt must be paid off. She would pay it. The servant was under dismissed. They changed their apartment; they took a garret under the roof.

She came to know the heavy work of the house, the hateful duties of the kitchen. She washed the plates, wearing out her pink nails on the coarse pottery and the bottoms of pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts and dishcloths, and hung them out to dry on a string; every morning she took the dustbin down into the street and carried up the water, stopping on each landing to get her breath. And, clad like a poor woman, she went to the fruiterer, to the grocer, to the butcher, a basket on her arm, haggling, insulted, fighting for every wretched halfpenny of her money.

Every month notes had to be paid off, others to be renewed, time to be gained.

Her husband worked in the evenings at putting straight a merchant’s accounts, and often at night he did copying at twopence halfpenny a page.

And this life lasted ten years.

At the end of ten years everything was paid off, everything, the usurer’s charges and the accumulation of superimposed interest.

Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become like all the other strong, hard, coarse women of poor households. Her hair was badly done, her skirts were awry, her hands were red. She spoke in a shrill voice, and the water slopped all over the floor when she scrubbed it. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had been so beautiful and so much admired.

What would have happened if she had never lost those jewels? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or to save!

One Sunday, as she had gone for a walk along the Champs-Élysées to freshen herself after the labours of the week, she caught sight suddenly of a woman who was taking a child out for a walk. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still attractive.

Madame Loisel was conscious of some emotion. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now that she had paid, she would tell her all. Why not?

She went up to her.

“Good morning, Jeanne.”

The other did not recognise her, and was surprised at being thus familiarly addressed by a poor woman.

“But⁠ ⁠… madame⁠ ⁠…” she stammered. “I don’t know⁠ ⁠… you must be making a mistake.”

“No⁠ ⁠… I am Mathilde Loisel.”

Her friend uttered a cry.

“Oh!⁠ ⁠… my poor Mathilde, how you have changed!⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, I’ve had some hard times since I saw you last; and many sorrows⁠ ⁠… and all on your account.”

“On my account!⁠ ⁠… How was that?”

“You remember the diamond necklace you lent me for the ball at the Ministry?”

“Yes. Well?”

“Well, I lost it.”

“How could you? Why, you brought it back.”

“I brought you another one just like it. And for the last ten years we have been paying for it. You realise it wasn’t easy for us; we had no money⁠ ⁠… Well, it’s paid for at last, and I’m mighty glad.”

Madame Forestier had halted.

“You say you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?”

“Yes. You hadn’t noticed it? They were very much alike.”

And she smiled in proud and innocent happiness.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her two hands.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was worth at the very most only five hundred francs!⁠ ⁠…”

The Awakening

During the three years that she had been married, she had not left the Val de Ciré, where her husband possessed two cotton-mills. She led a quiet life, and, although without children, she was quite happy in her house among the trees, which the work-people called the “château.”

Although Monsieur Vasseur was considerably older than she was, he was very kind. She loved him, and no guilty thought had ever entered her mind.

Her mother came and spent every summer at Ciré, and then returned to Paris for the winter, as soon as the leaves began to fall.

Jeanne coughed a little every autumn, for the narrow valley through which the river wound was very foggy for five months in the year. First of all, slight mists hung over the meadows, making all the low-lying ground look like a large pond, out of which the roofs of the houses rose. Then a white vapour, which rose like a tide, enveloped everything, turning the valley into a phantom land, through which men moved like ghosts, without recognizing each other ten yards off, and the trees, wreathed in mist and dripping with moisture, rose up through it.

But the people who went along the neighbouring hills, and looked down upon the deep, white depression of the valley, saw the two huge chimneys of Monsieur Vasseur’s factories rising above the mist below. Day and night they vomited forth two long trails of black smoke, the sole indication that people were living in the hollow, which looked as if it were filled with a cloud of cotton.

That year, when October came, the medical men advised the young woman to go and spend the winter in Paris with her mother, as the air of the valley was dangerous for her weak chest, and she went. For a month or so, she thought continually of the house which she had left, the home to which she seemed rooted, the well-known furniture and quiet ways of which she loved so much. But by degrees she grew accustomed to her new life, and got to like entertainments, dinner and evening parties, and balls.

Till then she had retained her girlish manners, had been undecided and rather sluggish, walked languidly, and had a tired smile, but now she became animated and merry, and was always ready for pleasure. Men paid her marked attentions, and she was amused at their talk and made fun of their gallantries, as she felt sure that she could resist them, for she was rather disgusted with love from what she had learned of it in marriage.

The idea of giving up her body to the coarse caresses of such bearded creatures made her laugh with pity and give a slight shudder of repugnance.

She asked herself how women could consent to degrading contacts with strangers, the more so as they were already obliged to endure them with their legitimate husbands. She would have loved her husband much more if they had lived together like two friends, and had restricted themselves to chaste kisses, which are the caresses of the soul.

But she was much amused by their compliments, by the desire which showed itself in their eyes, a desire she did not share, by declarations of love whispered into her ear as they were returning to the drawing room after some grand dinner, by words murmured so low that she almost had to guess them, words which left her blood quite cool, and her heart untouched, while gratifying her unconscious coquetry, kindling a flame of pleasure within her, making her lips open, her eyes grow bright, and her woman’s heart, to which homage was due, quiver with delight.

She was fond of those tête-à-tête in the dusk when a man grows pressing, hesitates, trembles and falls on his knees. It was a delicious and new pleasure to her to know that they felt a passion which left her quite unmoved, able to say no by a shake of the head and by pursing her lips, able to withdraw her hands, to get up and calmly ring for lights, and to see the man who had been trembling at her feet get up, confused and furious when he heard the footman coming.

She often uttered a hard laugh, which froze the most burning words, and said harsh things, which fell like a jet of icy water on the most ardent protestations, while the intonations of her voice were enough to make any man who really loved her kill himself. There were two especially who made obstinate love to her.

They did not at all resemble one another. One of them, Paul Péronel, was tall, a man of the world, gallant and enterprising, one who was accustomed to successful love affairs, knew how to wait, and when to seize his opportunity.

The other, Monsieur d’Avancelle, quivered when he came near her, scarcely ventured to express his love, but followed her like a shadow, and gave utterance to his hopeless desire by distracted looks, and the assiduity of his attentions to her. She called the former “Captain Fracasse,” and the latter “Faithful Sheep,” and in the end made him a kind of servant and treated him as if he had been her slave.

She would have been much amused if anybody had told her that she would love him, and yet she did love him, after a singular fashion. As she saw him continually, she had grown accustomed to his voice, to his gestures, and to his manner, just as one grows accustomed to those with whom one meets continually. Often his face haunted her in her dreams, and she saw him as he really was; gentle, delicate in all his actions, humble, but passionately in love. She would awake full of these dreams, fancying that she still heard him and felt him near her, until one night (most likely she was feverish) she saw herself alone with him in a small wood, where they were both sitting on the grass. He was saying charming things to her, while he pressed and kissed her hands. She could feel the warmth of his skin and of his breath and she was stroking his hair in a very natural manner.

We are quite different in our dreams to what we are in real life. She felt full of love for him, full of calm and deep love, and was happy in stroking his forehead and in holding him against her. Gradually he put his arms around her, kissed her eyes and her cheeks without her attempting to get away from him; their lips met, and she yielded. It was a moment of intense and superhuman happiness, ideal yet sensual, maddening and unforgettable, such ecstasies are unknown in real life. She awoke thrilled and confused, and she could not go asleep again, she felt so obsessed and possessed by him.

When she saw him again, unconscious of the agitation that he had caused her, she felt that she grew red, and while he was telling her of his love, she was continually recalling to mind their previous meeting, without being able to get rid of the recollection of their delicious embrace in her dream.

She loved him, loved him with a strange tenderness, refined but sensual, chiefly from the remembrance of her dream, although she dreaded the accomplishment of the desires which had arisen in her mind.

At last he perceived it, and then she told him everything, even to the dread of his kisses, and she made him swear that he would respect her, and he did so. They spent long hours of transcendental love together, during which their souls alone embraced, and when they separated, they were enervated, weak, and feverish.

Sometimes their lips met, and with closed eyes they revelled in that long, yet chaste caress. She felt, however, that he could not resist much longer, and as she did not wish to yield, she wrote and told her husband that she wanted to come to him, and to return to her tranquil, solitary life. But in reply, he wrote her a very kind letter, and strongly advised her not to return in the middle of the winter, and so expose herself to the sudden change of climate, and to the icy mists of the valley, and she was thunderstruck and angry with that confiding man, who did not guess, who did not understand, the struggles of her heart.

February was a warm, bright month, and although she now avoided being alone with Monsieur d’Avancelle, she sometimes accepted his invitation to drive round the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with him, when it was dusk.

On one of those evenings, it was so warm that it seemed as if the sap in every tree and plant were rising. Their cab was going at a slow pace; it was growing dusk, and they were sitting close together, holding each other’s hands, and she said to herself:

“It is all over, I am lost!” for she felt her desires rising in her again, the imperious demand for that supreme embrace which she had undergone in her dream. Every moment their lips sought each other, clung together, and separated, only to meet again immediately.

He did not venture to go into the house with her, but left her at the door; more in love with her than ever, and half fainting.

Monsieur Paul Péronel was waiting for her in the little drawing room, without a light, and when he shook hands with her, he felt how feverish she was. He began to talk in a low, tender voice, lulling her tired mind with the charm of amorous words.

She listened to him without replying, for she was thinking of the other; she fancied she was listening to the other, and thought she felt him leaning against her, in a kind of hallucination. She saw only him, and did not remember that any other man existed on earth, and when her ears trembled at those three syllables: “I love you,” it was he, the other man, who uttered them, who kissed her hands, who strained her to his breast, like the other had done shortly before in the cab. It was he who pressed victorious kisses on her lips, it was he whom she held in her arms and embraced, to whom she was calling, with all the longings of her heart, with all the overwrought ardour of her body.

When she awoke from her dream, she uttered a terrible cry. Paul Péronel was kneeling by her and was thanking her passionately, while he covered her dishevelled hair with kisses, and she almost screamed out: “Go away! go away! go away!”

And as he did not understand what she meant, and tried to put his arm round her waist again, she writhed, as she stammered out:

“You are a wretch, and I hate you! Go away! go away!” And he got up in great surprise, took up his hat, and went.

The next day she returned to Val de Ciré, and her husband, who had not expected her for some time, blamed her for her whim.

“I could not live away from you any longer,” she said.

He found her altered in character and sadder than formerly, but when he said to her: “What is the matter with you? You seem unhappy. What do you want?” she replied:

“Nothing. Happiness exists only in our dreams in this world.”

Avancelle came to see her the next summer, and she received him without any emotion and without regret, for she suddenly perceived that she had never loved him, except in a dream, from which Paul Péronel had brutally roused her.

But the young man, who still adored her, thought as he returned to Paris:

“Women are really very strange, complicated, and inexplicable beings.”

Father Judas

The whole of this district was amazing, marked with a character of almost religious grandeur and sinister desolation.

In the centre of a quiet ring of bare hills, where nothing grew but whins and a rare, freakish oak twisted by the wind, there lay a vast wild tarn, in whose black and stagnant waters shivered thousands of reeds.

A solitary house stood on the banks of this gloomy lake, a small low house inhabited by an old boatman, Father Joseph, who lived on the proceeds of his fishing. Every week he carried his fish down to the neighbouring villages, and returned with the simple provisions necessary to his existence.

I had the whim to visit this hermit, and he offered to go and raise his nets for me.

I accepted.

His boat was a worm-eaten old tub. Thin and bony, he rowed with a quiet monotonous movement which soothed my spirit, already caught up in the melancholy of the enclosing sky.

Amid this ancient landscape, sitting in this primitive boat, steered by this man from another age, I imagined myself transported to one of the early epochs of the world.

He raised his nets, and threw the fish down at his feet with the gestures of a biblical fisherman. Then he consented to take me to the end of the marsh, and suddenly I saw, on the other bank, a ruin, a gutted hovel, on the wall of which was a cross, a huge red cross: under the last gleams of the setting sun it looked as if it were traced in blood.

“What is that?” I asked.

Instantly the man crossed himself, and answered:

“That is where Judas died.”

I was not surprised; I felt as though I might have expected this strange reply.

But I persisted:

“Judas? What Judas?”

He added: “The Wandering Jew, sir.”

I begged him to tell me this legend.

But it was better than a legend, it was a piece of history, of almost contemporary history, for Father Joseph had known the man.

Once upon a time the hut was occupied by a tall woman, a beggar of sorts, who lived on public charity.

From whom she had got this hovel, Father Joseph no longer remembered. One night an old man with a white beard, so old that he looked a centenarian twice over, and could hardly drag one foot after the other, passed by and asked this poor old woman for alms.

She answered:

“Sit down, Father, all here is for all the world, for it comes from all the world.”

He sat down on a stone in front of the house. He shared the woman’s bread, her bed of leaves, and her house.

He never left her. He had finished his travels.

Father Joseph added:

“It was our Lady the Virgin who permitted that, sir, seeing that a woman had opened her door to Judas.”

For this old vagabond was the Wandering Jew.

The countryside did not know this at once, but soon suspected it from the fact that he was always walking, the habit was so strong in him.

Another thing had roused their suspicions. The woman who sheltered the unknown man in her house passed for a Jewess, since she had never been seen at church.

For ten leagues around no one called her anything but “the Jewess.”

When the little children of the district saw her coming to beg, they cried out:

“Mother, mother, it’s the Jewess!”

She and the old man began to wander round the neighbourhood, holding their hands out at every door, babbling entreaties after every passerby. They were seen at all hours of the day, on lonely paths, in village streets, or eating a piece of bread in the shade of a solitary tree, in the fierce heat of noon.

And they began to call the beggar “Father Judas.”

One day he brought back in his sack two little live pigs which had been given him at a farm because he had cured the farmer of a sickness.

And soon he stopped begging, wholly occupied in leading his pigs about in search of food, guiding them along the tarn, under the solitary oak-trees, and in the little valleys near by. The woman, on the contrary, wandered ceaselessly in quest of alms, but joined him again every evening.

No more than she he went to church, and had never been seen to make the sign of the cross at the wayside shrines. All this caused a deal of gossip.

One night his companion was taken ill with a fever, and began to shake like a rag in the wind. He went to the town to get medicine, then shut himself up with her, and for six days no one saw him.

But the curé, having heard that “the Jewess” was about to pass away, came to bring the dying woman the consolations of his religion, and to offer her the last sacrament. Was she a Jewess? He did not know. In any event, he wished to try and save her soul.

He had scarcely knocked at the door when Father Judas appeared on the threshold, panting, his eyes blazing, all his long white beard quivering like running water: he screamed words of blasphemy in an unknown tongue, stretching out his thin arms to hinder the priest’s entry.

The curé tried to speak, offered him money and assistance, but the old man continued to revile him, making the gesture of stoning him.

And the priest retreated, pursued by the beggar’s curses.

Next day, Father Judas’s companion died. He buried her himself in front of the doorway. They were so poor that no one interfered with them.

Once more the man was seen leading his pigs along the tarn and on the hillsides. And several times he began begging for food again. But now he got next to nothing, so many stories were going round about him. And everyone knew in what a fashion he had welcomed the curé.

He disappeared. It was during Holy Week. No uneasiness was felt.

But on Easter Monday some boys and girls who had gone for a walk up to the tarn, heard a great noise in the hut. The door was shut; the boys broke it open and the two pigs escaped, leaping like deer. They were never seen again.

They all entered, and saw on the ground a few old rags, the beggar’s hat, some bones, some dried blood and remains of flesh in the hollow of a skull.

His pigs had eaten him.

And Father Joseph added:

“It had happened on Good Friday, at three in the afternoon.”

I asked him: “How do you know?”

He replied: “It cannot be doubted.”

I did not try to make him understand how natural it was for the famished beasts to eat their suffering master if he had died suddenly in his hut.

As for the cross on the wall, it appeared one morning, and no one knew what hand had painted it that strange colour.

After that, none doubted that the Wandering Jew had died in that place.

I believed it myself for an hour.

Feminine Men

How often we hear people say, “That man is charming, but he is a woman, a regular girl.” They are alluding to the feminine men, the bane of our country.

For all we men in France are feminine, that is, fickle, fanciful, innocently treacherous, without consistency in our convictions or our will, violent and weak, as women are.

But the most irritating of the species is assuredly the Parisian and the boulevardier, in whom the appearance of intelligence is more marked, and who combines in himself all the attractions and all the faults of charming harlots to an exaggerated degree in virtue of his masculine temperament.

Our Chamber of Deputies is full of feminine men. They form the greater number of the amiable opportunists whom one might call “The Charmers.” It is they who control by soft words and deceitful promises, who know how to shake hands in such a manner as to win hearts, how to say “My dear friend” in a certain tactful way to the people they know the least, to change their minds without suspecting it, to be carried away by each new idea, to be sincere in their weathercock convictions, to let themselves be deceived as they deceive others, to forget the next morning what they affirmed the day before.

The newspapers are full of male prostitutes. That is probably where one finds them most, but it is also where they are most needed. Certain papers, like the Journal des Débats and the Gazette de France, are exceptions.

Assuredly, every good journalist must be something of a prostitute⁠—that is, at the command of the public, supple in following unconsciously the shades of public opinion, wavering and varying, sceptical and credulous, wicked and devout, a braggart and a true man, enthusiastic and ironical, and always convinced while believing in nothing.

Foreigners, our antitypes, as Mme. Abel called them, the stubborn English and the heavy Germans, regard us with a certain amazement mingled with contempt, and will continue so to regard us till the end of time. They consider us frivolous. It is not that, we are feminine. And that is why people love us in spite of our faults, why they come back to us despite the evil spoken of us; these are lovers’ quarrels!⁠ ⁠…

The effeminate man, as one meets him in this world, is so charming that he captivates you after five minutes’ chat. His smile seems made for you; you cannot believe that his voice does not assume specially tender intonations on your account. When he leaves you it seems as if you had known him for twenty years. One is quite ready to lend him money if he asks for it. He has enchanted you, like a woman.

If he does not act quite straight with you, you cannot bear any malice, he is so nice when you next meet him. If he asks your pardon you long to ask pardon of him. Does he tell lies? You cannot believe it. Does he put you off indefinitely with promises that he does not keep? You lay as much store by his promises as though he had moved heaven and earth to render you a service.

When he admires anything he goes into such raptures that he convinces you. He once adored Victor Hugo, whom he now treats as a back number. He pretends that he fought for Zola, whom he has abandoned for Barbey d’Aurevilly. And when he admires, he permits no qualifications, he would slap your face for a word. But when he becomes scornful, his contempt is unbounded and allows of no protest.

In short, he understands nothing.

Listen to two girls talking.

“Then you are angry with Julia?” “I should say so. I slapped her face.” “What had she done?” “She told Pauline that I was broke thirteen months out of twelve, and Pauline told Gontran⁠—you understand.” “You were living together in the Rue Clanzel?” “We lived together four years in the Rue Bréda; we quarrelled about a pair of stockings that she said I had worn⁠—it wasn’t true⁠—silk stockings that she had bought at Mother Martin’s. Then I gave her a pounding and she left me at once. I met her six months ago and she asked me to come and live with her, as she has rented a flat that is twice too large.”

One goes on one’s way and hears no more. But on the following Sunday as one is on the way to Saint Germain two young women get into the same railway carriage. One recognizes one of them at once, it is Julia’s enemy. The other is⁠—Julia!

And there are endearments, caresses, plans. “Tell me, Julia⁠—listen, Julia,” etc.

The man of the species has his friendships of this kind. For three months he cannot bear to leave his old Jack, his dear Jack. There is no one but Jack in the world. He is the only one who has any intelligence, any sense, any talent. He alone is somebody in Paris. One meets them everywhere together, they dine together, walk about in company, and every evening see each other home, walking back and forth without being able to part.

Three months later, if Jack is mentioned:

“There is a cad, a bounder, a scoundrel for you. I know him well, you may be sure. And he is not even honest, and ill-bred,” etc., etc.

Three months later, and they are living together.

But one morning one hears that they have fought a duel, then embraced each other, amid tears, on the duelling ground.

For the rest, they are the dearest friends in the world, furious with each other half the year, abusing and loving each other by turns, squeezing each other’s hands till they almost crush the bones, and ready to run each other through the body for a misunderstanding.

For the relations of these feminine men are uncertain. Their temper is governed by fits and starts, their enthusiasms unexpected, their affection subject to sudden revulsions, their excitement is liable to eclipse. One day they love you, the next day they will hardly look at you, for they have, in fact, a harlot’s nature, a harlot’s charm, a harlot’s temperament, and all their sentiments are like the affections of harlots.

They treat their friends as kept women treat their pet dogs.

Their friends are like the little doggie which they hug, feed with sugar, and allow to sleep on the pillow, but which they would throw out of a window in a moment of impatience; which they swing round, holding it by the tail, squeeze in their arms till they almost strangle it, and plunge, without any reason, in a pail of cold water.

Then, what a strange thing it is when a feminine man falls in love with a real harlot! He beats her, she scratches him, they execrate each other, cannot bear the sight of each other and yet cannot part, linked together by no one knows what mysterious bonds of the heart. She deceives him, he knows it, sobs and forgives her. He sleeps in the bed which another man is paying for, and firmly believes his conduct is irreproachable. He despises and adores her without seeing that she would be justified in despising him. They are both atrociously unhappy and yet cannot separate. They cast invectives, reproaches and abominable accusations at each other from morning till night, and when they have reached the climax and are vibrating with rage and hatred, they fall into each other’s arms and kiss each other ardently, their souls and bodies of strumpets united.

The feminine man is brave and a coward at the same time. He has, more than another, the exalted sentiment of honour, but is lacking in the sense of simple honesty, and, circumstances favouring him, he would defalcate and commit infamies which do not trouble his conscience, for he obeys without questioning the oscillations of his ideas, which are always impulsive.

To him it seems permissible and almost right to cheat a shopkeeper. He considers it honourable not to pay his debts, unless they are gambling debts⁠—that is, somewhat shady. He dupes people whenever the laws of society admit of his doing so. When he is short of money he borrows in all ways, not always being scrupulous as to tricking the lenders, but he would, with sincere indignation, run his sword through anyone who would even suspect him of lacking in delicacy.

Mademoiselle Cocotte

We were about to leave the asylum when I noticed in a corner of the courtyard a tall, thin man, obstinately going through the motions of calling an imaginary dog. He would call out, in sweet, tender tones: “Cocotte, my little Cocotte, come here, Cocotte, come here, my beauty,” striking his leg, as one does to attract the attention of an animal. I said to the doctor:

“What is the matter with him?”

He replied:

“Oh, that is not an interesting case. He is a coachman called François, who went mad after drowning his dog.”

I insisted:

“Do tell me his story. The most simple and humble things sometimes strike most to our hearts.”

And here is the adventure of this man, which became known through a groom, his comrade.

In the suburbs of Paris lived a rich, middle-class family. They lived in a fashionable villa in the midst of a park, on the bank of the Seine. Their coachman was this François, a country boy, a little awkward, with a good heart, but simple and easily duped.

When he was returning one evening to his master’s house, a dog began to follow him. At first he took no notice of it, but the persistence of the beast walking at his heels caused him finally to turn around. He looked to see if he knew this dog. No, he had never seen it before.

The dog was frightfully thin and had great hanging dugs. She trotted behind the man with a woeful, famished look, her tail between her legs, her ears close to her head, and stopped when he stopped, starting again when he started.

He tried to drive away this skeleton of a beast: “Get out! Go away! Go, now! Hou! Hou!” She would run away a few steps and then sit down waiting; then, when the coachman started on again, she followed behind him.

He pretended to pick up stones. The animal fled a little way with a great shaking of the flabby dugs, but followed again as soon as the man turned his back.

Then the coachman took pity and called her. The dog approached timidly, her back bent in a circle, and all the ribs showing under the skin. The man stroked these protruding bones and, moved by the misery of the beast, said: “Come along, then!” Immediately she wagged her tail; she felt that she was welcome, adopted; and instead of staying at her new master’s heels, she began to run ahead of him.

He installed her on some straw in his stable, then ran to the kitchen in search of bread. When she had eaten her fill, she went to sleep, curled up in a ring.

The next day the coachman told his master, who allowed him to keep the animal. She was a good beast, intelligent and faithful, affectionate and gentle.

But soon they discovered in her a terrible fault. She was inflamed with love from one end of the year to the other. In a short time she had made the acquaintance of every dog about the country, and they roamed about the place day and night. With the indifference of a harlot, she shared her favours with them, feigning to like each one best, dragging behind her a veritable pack composed of many different models of the barking race, some as large as a fist, others as tall as an ass. She took them on interminable walks along the roads, and when she stopped to rest in the shade, they made a circle about her and looked at her with tongues hanging out.

The people of the country considered her a phenomenon; they had never seen anything like it. The veterinary could not understand it.

When she returned to the stable in the evening, the crowd of dogs besieged the house. They wormed their way through every crevice in the hedge which enclosed the park, devastated the flower beds, broke down the flowers, dug holes in the clumps of plants, exasperating the gardener. They would howl the whole night about the building where their friend lodged, and nothing could persuade them to go away.

In the daytime, they even entered the house. It was an invasion, a plague, a calamity. At every moment the people of the house met on the staircase, and even in the rooms, little yellow pug dogs with bushy tails, hunting dogs, bulldogs, wandering Pomeranians with dirty skins, homeless vagabonds, and enormous Newfoundland dogs, which frightened the children.

All the unknown dogs for ten miles around came, from one knew not where, and lived, no one knew how, and then disappeared.

Nevertheless, François adored Cocotte. He had called her Cocotte, without malice, although she well deserved the name. And he repeated over and over again: “That dog is human. It only lacks speech.”

He had a magnificent collar in red leather made for her, which bore these words, engraved on a copper plate: “Mademoiselle Cocotte, the property of François, the coachman.”

She became enormous. She was now as fat as she had once been thin, her body puffed out, under it still hung the long, swaying dugs. She had fattened suddenly and walked with difficulty, her paws wide apart, after the fashion of people that are too stout, her mouth open for breath, and she became exhausted as soon as she tried to run.

She showed a phenomenal fecundity, producing, four times a year, a litter of little animals, belonging to all varieties of the canine race. François, after having chosen the one he would leave her “to take the milk,” would pick up the others in his stable apron and pitilessly throw them into the river.

Soon the cook joined her complaints to those of the gardener. She found dogs under her kitchen range, in the cupboards, and in the coal bin, and they stole everything they could see.

The master lost his patience and ordered François to get rid of Cocotte. The man was inconsolable, and tried to place her somewhere. No one wanted her. Then he resolved to lose her, and put her in charge of a car driver who was to leave her in the country the other side of Paris, near Joinville-le-Pont.

That same evening Cocotte was back.

It became necessary to take stern measures. For the sum of five francs, they persuaded the guard on a train to Havre to take her. He was to let her loose when they arrived.

At the end of three days, she appeared again in her stable, harassed, emaciated, torn and exhausted.

The master took pity on her, and did not insist.

But the dogs soon returned in greater numbers than ever, and were more provoking. And as a great dinner was being given one evening, a truffled fowl was carried off by a dog, under the nose of the cook, who did not dare to take it away.

This time the master was angry, and calling François, said to him hotly: “If you don’t drown this beast before tomorrow morning, I shall fire you out, do you understand?”

The man was thunderstruck, but he went up to his room to pack his trunk, preferring to leave his job. Then he thought that he would not be likely to get in anywhere else, dragging this unwelcome beast behind him; he remembered that he was in a good house, well paid and well fed; and he said to himself that it was not worth while giving up all this for a dog. He thought of his own interests and ended by resolving to get rid of Cocotte at dawn the next day.

However, he slept badly. At daybreak he was up; and, taking a strong rope, he went in search of the dog. She arose slowly, shook herself, stretched her limbs, and came to greet her master. Then his courage failed and he began to stroke her tenderly, smoothing her long ears, kissing her on the muzzle, lavishing upon her all the loving names that he could think of.

A neighbouring clock struck six; he could delay no longer. He opened the door; “Come,” said he. The beast wagged her tail, understanding only that she was going out.

They reached the bank and he chose a place where the water seemed deepest. Then he tied one end of the cord to the beautiful leather collar, and taking a great stone, attached it to the other end. Then he seized Cocotte in his arms and kissed her furiously, as one does when taking leave of a person. Then he held her tight around the neck, fondling her and calling her “My pretty Cocotte, my little Cocotte,” and she responded as best she could, growling with pleasure.

Ten times he tried to throw her in, and each time his courage failed him.

Then, abruptly, he decided to do it, and, with all his force, hurled her as far as possible. She tried at first to swim, as she did when taking a bath, but her head, dragged by the stone, went under again and again. She threw her master a look of despair, a human look, battling, as a person does when drowning. Then, the whole front part of the body sank while the hind paws kicked madly out of the water; then they disappeared also.

For five minutes bubbles of air came to the surface, as if the river had begun to boil. And François, haggard, and at his wits’ end, with palpitating heart, believed he saw Cocotte writhing in the slime. And he said to himself, with the simplicity of a peasant: “What does she think of me now, the poor beast?”

He almost became mad. He was sick for a month, and each night saw the dog again. He felt her licking his hands; he heard her bark.

They had to call a physician. Finally he grew better; and his master and mistress took him to their estate at Biessard, near Rouen.

There he was still on the bank of the Seine. He began to go bathing. Every morning he went down with the groom to swim across the river.

One day, as they were amusing themselves splashing in the water, François suddenly cried out to his companion:

“Look at what is coming towards us. I am going to make you taste a cutlet.”

It was an enormous carcass, swelled and stripped of its hair, its paws moving forward in the air, following the current.

François approached it, and continued to joke:

“By God, it is rather high! What a catch, my boy, there is plenty of meat on it!”

And he turned around it, keeping at a distance from the great, putrefying body.

Then, suddenly, he was silent, and looked at it in strange fashion. He approached it again, this time as if he were going to touch it. He carefully examined the collar, then put out his hand and grasped the neck, twirled it around, drew it towards him, and read upon the green copper that still adhered to the discoloured leather: “Mademoiselle Cocotte, the property of François, the coachman.” The dead dog had found her master, sixty miles from their home!

He uttered a fearful cry, and began to swim with all his might towards the bank, shouting all the way. And when he reached the land, he ran off wildly, stark naked, through the country. He was mad!

The Jewels

Monsieur Lantin having met the young woman at a soirée, at the home of the assistant of his department, had fallen head over ears in love with her. She was the daughter of a country tax collector who had died some years previously. She had come to live in Paris, with her mother, who visited a few families in the neighbourhood in the hope of finding a husband for the young lady. They were poor and honest, gentle and quiet.

The young girl was a perfect type of the virtuous woman to whom every sensible young man dreams of one day entrusting his life. Her simple beauty had the charm of angelic modesty, and the imperceptible smile which constantly hovered about her lips seemed to be the reflection of her soul. Everybody sang her praises. People were never tired of saying: “Happy the man who wins her. He could not find a better wife.”

M. Lantin, at the time Chief Clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, with a yearly salary of three thousand five hundred francs, proposed for her hand and married her.

He was unspeakably happy with her; she governed his household so cleverly and economically that they seemed to live in luxury. She was full of attentions for her husband, spoiling and coaxing him, and the charm of her person was so great that six years after their marriage M. Lantin discovered that he loved his wife even more than during the first days when he knew her.

He found fault with only two of her tastes: her love for the theatre, and for false jewelry. Her friends (she was acquainted with some petty officials’ wives) frequently procured for her a box at the theatre for popular plays, and even for the first nights; and she dragged her husband, whether he liked it or not, to these amusements, which tired him excessively after his day’s work.

So he begged his wife to go to the theatre with some lady of her acquaintance, who would bring her home afterwards. It was a long time before she gave in, as she thought this arrangement was not quite respectable. But finally, to please him, she consented, and he was very grateful.

Now, this love for the theatre soon aroused in her the desire to adorn her person. True, her costumes remained quite simple, and always in good taste, but unpretentious; and her tender grace, her irresistible, humble, smiling charm, seemed to be enhanced by the simplicity of her dresses. But she soon began to ornament her ears with huge rhinestones, which glittered and sparkled like real diamonds. She wore strings of false pearls, bracelets of imitation gold, and combs ornamented with glass made up to look like real stones.

Her husband, who was rather shocked by this love of show, frequently used to say:

“My dear, as you cannot afford to buy real gems, you ought to appear adorned with your beauty and modesty alone, those are the rarest ornaments of your sex.”

But she would smile sweetly, and say:

“What can I do? I like it. It is my only weakness. I know you are right but we cannot change our natures. I should love to have jewelry.”

Then she would roll the pearl necklaces around her fingers, and make the cut glass flash, saying:

“Look, are they not lovely? One would swear they were real.”

He would then answer, smilingly:

“You have the tastes of a gipsy, my dear.”

Often in the evening, when they were enjoying a tête-à-tête by the fireside, she would place on the tea table the leather box containing the “trash,” as M. Lantin called it. She would examine the false gems with a passionate attention as though she were tasting a deep and secret joy; and she often insisted on passing a necklace around her husband’s neck, and then, laughing heartily, she would exclaim: “How funny you look!” Then she would throw herself into his arms and kiss him passionately.

One evening in winter when she went to the opera, she returned chilled through and through. The next morning she coughed, and eight days later she died of inflammation of the lungs.

Lantin nearly followed her to the grave. His despair was so great that his hair became white in one month. He wept from morning to night, his heart torn with intolerable grief, and his mind haunted by the remembrance, the smile, the voice⁠—by every charm of his dead wife.

Time did not assuage his grief. Often during office hours, while his colleagues were discussing the topics of the day, his face would begin to twitch, his eyes would suddenly fill with tears, and with distorted features he would begin to sob. He had kept his wife’s room untouched, and here he would seclude himself daily and think of her, while all the furniture, even her clothes, remained as they were the last day she was alive.

But life soon became a struggle. His income, which in the hands of his wife had covered all household expenses, was now no longer sufficient for his own immediate wants; and he wondered how she could have managed to buy such excellent wines, and such rare delicacies, things which he could no longer procure with his modest resources.

He incurred some debts and he pursued money as people do who are reduced to expedients. One morning, finding himself without a cent in his pocket, a whole week before the end of the month, he resolved to sell something, and, immediately, the thought occurred to him of disposing of his wife’s paste jewels. He cherished in his heart a sort of rancour against the false gems, which had always irritated him in the past. The very sight of them spoiled somewhat the memory of his lost darling.

He searched for a long time in the heap of glittering things, for to the last days of her life she had continued obstinately to make purchases, bringing home new gems almost every evening. He decided to sell the heavy necklace which she seemed to prefer, and which, he thought, ought to be worth about six or seven francs; for although paste, it was, nevertheless, of very fine workmanship.

He put it in his pocket and started out for the Ministry, following the Boulevards in search of a jeweler’s shop. He entered the first one he saw; feeling a little ashamed to expose his poverty, and also to offer such a worthless article for sale.

“Sir,” said he to the merchant, “I would like to know what this is worth.”

The man took the necklace, examined it, turned it over, weighed it, used his magnifying glass, called his clerk and made some remarks in an undertone; then he put the ornament back on the counter, and looked at it from a distance to judge of the effect.

M. Lantin was annoyed by all this ritual and was on the point of saying: “Oh! I know well enough it is not worth anything,” when the jeweler said: “Sir, that necklace is worth from twelve to fifteen thousand francs; but I could not buy it unless you tell me exactly where it comes from.”

The widower opened his eyes wide and remained gaping, unable to grasp the merchant’s meaning. Finally he stammered: “You say⁠—are you sure?” The other replied dryly: “You can look elsewhere and see if anyone will offer you more. I consider it worth fifteen thousand at the most. Come back here if you cannot do better.”

M. Lantin, gaping with astonishment, took up the necklace and went out, in obedience to a vague desire to be alone and to think.

Once outside, he felt inclined to laugh, and said to himself: “The idiot! Had I only taken him at his word! That jeweler cannot distinguish real diamonds from paste.”

A few minutes after, he entered another store in the Rue de la Paix. As soon as the proprietor glanced at the necklace, he cried out:

“Ah, parbleu! I know it well; it was bought here.”

M. Lantin was disturbed, and asked:

“How much is it worth?”

“Well, I sold it for twenty-five thousand francs. I am willing to take it back for eighteen thousand when you inform me, according to our legal formality, how it comes to be in your possession.”

This time M. Lantin sat down, paralysed with astonishment. He replied:

“But⁠—but⁠—examine it well. Until this moment I was under the impression that it was paste.”

Said the jeweler:

“What is your name, sir?”

“Lantin⁠—I am a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior. I live at No. 16 Rue des Martyrs.”

The merchant opened his books, looked through them and said: “That necklace was sent to Mme. Lantin’s address, 16 Rue des Martyrs, July 20, 1876.”

The two men looked into each other’s eyes⁠—the widower speechless with astonishment, the jeweler scenting a thief. The latter broke the silence by saying:

“Will you leave this necklace here for twenty-four hours? I will give you a receipt.”

“Certainly,” answered M. Lantin, hastily. Then, putting the ticket in his pocket, he went out.

He crossed the street, walked up it again, saw that he had taken the wrong way, went down again to the Tuileries Gardens, crossed the Seine, noticed he had again gone wrong, and returned to the Champs Élysées, his mind a complete blank. He tried to argue it out, to understand. His wife could not afford to purchase such a costly ornament. Certainly not. But, then, it must have been a present!⁠—a present!⁠—a present from whom? Why was it given her?

He stopped and remained standing in the middle of the avenue. A horrible doubt entered his mind⁠—she? Then all the other gems must have been presents, too! The earth seemed to tremble beneath him⁠—the tree before him was falling⁠—throwing up his arms, he fell to the ground, unconscious. He recovered his senses in a pharmacy into which the passersby had taken him.

He told them to take him home, where he shut himself up in his room. He wept until nightfall, biting a handkerchief so as not to shriek. Finally, overcome with grief and fatigue, he threw himself on the bed, where he slept heavily.

A ray of sunlight awoke him and he arose and prepared to go to the office. It was hard to work after such a shock. He sent a letter to his chief requesting to be excused. Then he remembered that he had to return to the jeweler’s. He was filled with shame, and remained sunk in thought for a long time, but he could not leave the necklace with that man. So he dressed and went out.

It was a lovely day; a clear blue sky spread over the smiling city. Strollers with nothing to do were walking about with their hands in their pockets.

Observing them, Lantin said to himself: “The rich, indeed, are happy. With money it is possible to forget even the deepest sorrow. One can go where one pleases; one can travel and forget. Oh! if I were only rich!”

He began to feel hungry, but his pocket was empty. He again remembered the necklace. Eighteen thousand francs! Eighteen thousand francs! What a sum!

He soon arrived in the Rue de la Paix, and walked up and down opposite the jeweler’s. Eighteen thousand francs! Twenty times he almost went in, but shame kept him back. He was hungry, however⁠—very hungry, and had not a cent in his pocket. He decided quickly, ran across the street in order not to have time for reflection, and entered the shop.

As soon as he saw him the proprietor came forward, and politely offered him a chair; even the clerks came and looked in his direction, with a knowing smile about their eyes and lips.

“I have made inquiries,” said the jeweler, “and if you are still resolved to dispose of the gems, I am ready to pay you the price I offered.”

“Certainly,” stammered M. Lantin.

Whereupon the proprietor took from a drawer eighteen large bills, counted and handed them to Lantin, who signed a receipt and with a trembling hand put the money into his pocket.

As he was about to leave the store, he turned toward the merchant, who still wore the same smile, and lowering his eyes, said:

“I have⁠—I have other gems which I have inherited from the same person. Will you buy them also?”

The merchant bowed: “Certainly, sir.”

One of the clerks retired, unable to contain his laughter. Another blew his nose violently.

Lantin, impassive, blushing and serious, replied: “I will bring them to you.”

He took a cab to go and fetch the jewels. An hour later, when he returned to the shop, he had not yet breakfasted. They began to examine each item separately, estimating the value of every one. Almost all of them had been bought there. Lantin now began to argue about the valuations, lost his temper, and insisted upon seeing the records of the sales. He became more domineering as the figures increased.

The large diamond earrings were worth twenty thousand francs; the bracelets, thirty-five thousand; the rings, brooches and medallions, sixteen thousand; a set of emeralds and sapphires, fourteen thousand; a gold chain with solitaire pendant, in the form of a necklace, forty thousand⁠—making a total sum of one hundred and ninety-six thousand francs.

The jeweler remarked jokingly:

“These come from someone who invested all her savings in precious stones.”

M. Lantin replied, seriously:

“It is as good a way as any other of investing one’s money.”

And he went off after having arranged with the purchaser to have another expert’s opinion the next day.

When he got to the street he looked at the Colonne Vendôme and felt tempted to climb it, as if it were a greasy pole. He felt so happy he could have played leapfrog with the statue of the Emperor, perched up there in the sky.

He lunched at Voisin’s and drank wine at twenty francs a bottle. Then he hired a carriage and drove around the Bois, and as he scanned the various turnouts with a contemptuous air he could hardly refrain from crying out to the passersby:

“I, too, am rich!⁠—I am worth two hundred thousand francs.”

Suddenly he thought of the Ministry. He drove up to the office, and deliberately entered the office of his chief, saying:

“Sir, I have come to resign my position. I have just inherited three hundred thousand francs.”

He shook hands with his former colleagues and confided to them some of his projects for his new life; then he went off to dine at the Café Anglais.

Finding himself beside a gentleman of aristocratic bearing, he could not resist the desire to inform him, with some pride, that he had just inherited a fortune of four hundred thousand francs.

For the first time in his life he was not bored at the theatre, and spent the rest of the night with some women.

Six months afterwards he married again. His second wife was a very virtuous woman, but very cantankerous. She made him suffer a great deal.

Saint Anthony

He was called Saint Anthony, because his name was Anthony, and also, perhaps, because he was a good fellow, jovial, a lover of practical jokes, a tremendous eater and a heavy drinker and a great man for the servant girls, although he was sixty years old.

He was a big peasant of the district of Caux, with a red face, large chest and stomach, and perched on two long legs that seemed too slight for the bulk of his body.

He was a widower and lived alone with his two menservants and a maid on his farm, which he ran with shrewd economy. He was careful of his own interests, understood business and the raising of cattle, and farming. His two sons and his three daughters, who had married well, were living in the neighbourhood and came to dine with their father once a month. His vigour of body was famous in all the countryside. “He is as strong as Saint Anthony,” had become a kind of proverb.

At the time of the Prussian invasion Saint Anthony, at the wine shop, promised to eat an army, for he was a braggart, like a true Norman, and a bit of a coward and a blusterer. He banged his fist on the wooden table, making the cups and the brandy glasses dance, and cried with the exaggerated truculence of the good fellow, his face flushed and a sly look in his eye: “I shall have to eat some of them, nom de Dieu!” He reckoned that the Prussians would not come as far as Tanneville, but when he heard they were at Rautôt he never went out of the house, and constantly watched the road from the little window of his kitchen, expecting at any moment to see the bayonets go by.

One morning, as he was eating his midday meal with the servants, the door opened and the mayor of the commune, Maître Chicot, appeared, followed by a soldier wearing a black helmet with a copper spike. Saint Anthony bounded to his feet and all his household looked at him, expecting to see him slash the Prussian. But he merely shook hands with the mayor, who said:

“Here is one for you, Saint Anthony. They came last night. Don’t do anything foolish, above all things, for they talk of shooting and burning everything if there is the slightest unpleasantness. I have given you warning. Give him something to eat; he looks like a good fellow. Good day. I am going to call on the rest. There are enough for all.” And he went out.

Old Anthony, who had turned pale, looked at the Prussian. He was a big, young fellow, plump and fair-skinned, with blue eyes, fair hair, and hair on his face to his cheek bones, who looked stupid, timid and good humoured. The shrewd Norman read him at once, and, reassured, he made him a sign to sit down. Then he said: “Will you have some soup?”

The stranger did not understand. Anthony then became bolder, and pushing a plateful of soup right under his nose, he said: “Here, swallow that, you big pig!”

The soldier answered “Ya,” and began to eat greedily, while the farmer, triumphant, feeling he had regained his reputation, winked his eye at the servants, who were making strange grimaces, what with their terror and their desire to laugh.

When the Prussian had devoured his plateful, Saint Anthony gave him another, which disappeared in like manner; but he flinched at the third which the farmer tried to insist on his eating, saying: “Come, put that into your stomach; we will fatten you or we’ll know the reason why, you pig!”

The soldier, understanding only that they wanted to make him eat all his soup, laughed in a contented manner, making a sign to show that he could not hold any more.

Then Saint Anthony, become quite familiar, tapped him on the stomach, saying: “My, there is plenty in my pig’s belly!” But suddenly he began to writhe with laughter, unable to speak. An idea had struck him which made him choke with mirth. “That’s it, that’s it, Saint Anthony and his pig. There’s my pig!” And the three servants burst out laughing in their turn.

The old fellow was so pleased that he had the brandy brought in, good stuff, fil en dix, and treated everyone. They clinked glasses with the Prussian, who clacked his tongue by way of flattery to show that he enjoyed it. And Saint Anthony exclaimed in his face: “Eh, is not that superfine? You don’t get anything like that in your home, pig!”

From that time Father Anthony never went out without his Prussian. He had got what he wanted. This was his vengeance, the vengeance of an old humbug. And the whole countryside, which was in terror, laughed to split its sides at Saint Anthony’s joke. Truly, there was no one like him when it came to humour. No one but he would have thought of a thing like that. He was a born joker!

He went to see his neighbours every day, arm in arm with his German, whom he introduced in a jovial manner, tapping him on the shoulder: “See, here is my pig; look and see if he is not growing fat, the animal!”

And the peasants would beam with smiles. “He is so comical, that fellow, Antoine!”

“I will sell him to you, Césaire, for thirty francs.”

“I will take him, Antoine, and I invite you to eat some black pudding.”

“What I want is his feet.”

“Feel his belly; you will see that it is all fat.”

And they all winked at each other, but dared not laugh too loud, for fear the Prussian might finally suspect they were laughing at him. Anthony, alone growing bolder every day, pinched his thighs, exclaiming, “Nothing but fat”; tapped his hips, shouting, “That is all bacon”; lifted him up in his arms like those of an old Colossus who could have lifted an anvil, declaring, “He weighs six hundred and no waste.”

He had got into the habit of making people offer his “pig” something to eat wherever they went together. This was the chief pleasure, the great diversion every day. “Give him whatever you please, he will swallow everything.” And they offered the man bread and butter, potatoes, cold meat, chitterlings, which caused the remark, “Some of your own, and choice ones.”

The soldier, stupid and gentle, ate from politeness, charmed at these attentions, making himself ill rather than refuse, and he was actually growing fat and his uniform becoming tight for him. This delighted Saint Anthony, who said: “You know, my pig, that we shall have to have another cage made for you.”

They had, however, become the best friends in the world, and when the old fellow went to attend to his business in the neighbourhood the Prussian accompanied him for the simple pleasure of being with him.

The weather was severe; it was freezing hard. The terrible winter of 1870 seemed to bring all the plagues upon France at the same time.

Father Antoine, who made provision beforehand, and took advantage of every opportunity, foreseeing that manure would be scarce for the spring farming, bought from a neighbour who happened to be in need of money all that he had, and it was agreed that he should go every evening with his cart to get a load.

So every day at twilight he set out for the farm of Haules, half a league distant, always accompanied by his “pig.” And each time it was great fun to feed the animal. All the neighbours ran over there as they would go to High Mass on Sunday.

But the soldier began to suspect something, and when they laughed too loud he would roll his eyes uneasily, and sometimes they lighted up with anger.

One evening when he had eaten his fill he refused to swallow another morsel, and attempted to rise to leave the table. But Saint Anthony stopped him by a turn of the wrist and, placing his two powerful hands on his shoulders, he sat him down again so roughly that the chair smashed under him.

A wild burst of laughter broke forth, and Anthony, beaming, picked up his pig, acted as though he were dressing his wounds, and exclaimed: “Since you will not eat, you shall drink, nom de Dieu!” And they went to the tavern to get some brandy.

The soldier rolled his wicked eyes, but he drank, nevertheless; he drank as long as they wanted him, and Saint Anthony kept up with him, to the great delight of his companions.

The Norman, red as a tomato, his eyes ablaze, filled up the glasses and clinked, saying: “Here’s to you!” And the Prussian, without speaking a word, poured down one after another glassfuls of cognac.

It was a contest, a battle, a revenge! Who would drink the most, by God! They could neither of them stand any more when the bottle was emptied. But neither was conquered. They had tied, that was all. They would have to begin again the next day.

They went out staggering and started for home, walking beside the dung-cart, which was drawn along slowly by two horses.

Snow began to fall and the moonless night was sadly lighted by this dead whiteness on the plain. The men began to feel the cold, and this aggravated their intoxication. Saint Anthony, annoyed at not being the victor, amused himself by shoving his companion so as to make him fall over into the ditch. The other would dodge backwards, and each time he did he uttered some German expression in an angry tone, which made the peasant roar with laughter. Finally the Prussian lost his temper, and just as Anthony was rolling towards him he responded with such a terrific blow with his fist that the colossus staggered.

Then, excited by the brandy, the old man seized the young one round the waist, shook him for a few moments as he would have done with a little child, and pitched him at random to the other side of the road. Then, satisfied with this piece of work, he crossed his arms and began to laugh afresh.

But the soldier picked himself up quickly, his head bare, his helmet having rolled off, and drawing his sword he rushed over to Father Anthony.

When he saw him coming the peasant seized his whip by the top of the handle, his big hollywood whip, straight, strong and supple as the sinew of an ox.

The Prussian approached, his head down, making a lunge with his sword, sure of killing his adversary. But the old fellow, squarely hitting the blade, the point of which would have pierced his stomach, turned it aside, and with the butt end of the whip struck the soldier a sharp blow on the temple and he fell to the ground.

Then he gazed aghast, stupefied with amazement, at the body, twitching convulsively at first and then lying prone and motionless. He bent over it, turned it on its back, and gazed at it for some time. The man’s eyes were closed, and blood trickled from a wound at the side of his forehead. Although it was night, Father Anthony could distinguish the bloodstain on the white snow.

He remained there, at his wit’s end, while his cart continued slowly on its way.

What was he to do? He would be shot! They would burn his farm, ruin his district! What should he do? What should he do? How could he hide the body, conceal the fact of his death, deceive the Prussians? He heard voices in the distance, amid the utter stillness of the snow. All at once he roused himself, and picking up the helmet he placed it on his victim’s head. Then, seizing him round the body, he lifted him up in his arms, and thus running with him, he overtook his team, and threw the body on top of the manure. Once in his own house he would think up some plan.

He walked slowly, racking his brain, but without result. He saw, he felt, that he was lost. He entered his courtyard. A light was shining in one of the attic windows; his servant was not asleep. He hastily backed his wagon to the edge of the manure hollow. He thought that by overturning the manure the body lying on top of it would fall into the ditch and be buried beneath it, and he dumped the cart.

As he had foreseen, the man was buried beneath the manure. Anthony evened it down with his fork, which he stuck in the ground beside it. He called his stableman, told him to put up the horses, and went to his room.

He went to bed, still thinking of what he had best do, but no ideas came to him. His apprehension increased in the quiet of his room. They would shoot him! He was bathed in perspiration from fear, his teeth chattered, he rose shivering, not being able to stay in bed.

He went downstairs to the kitchen, took the bottle of brandy from the sideboard and carried it upstairs. He drank two large glasses, one after another, adding a fresh intoxication to the late one, without quieting his mental anguish. He had done a pretty stroke of work, by God! Idiot that he was!

He paced up and down, trying to think of some stratagem, some explanations, some cunning trick, and from time to time he rinsed his mouth with a swallow of fil en dix to give him courage.

But no ideas came to him, not one.

Towards midnight his watch dog, a kind of half wolf called “Dévorant,” began to howl frantically. Father Anthony shuddered to the marrow of his bones, and each time the beast began his long and lugubrious wail the old man’s skin turned to gooseflesh.

He had sunk into a chair, his legs weak, stupefied, done up, waiting anxiously for Dévorant to set up another howl, and starting convulsively from nervousness caused by terror.

The clock downstairs struck five. The dog was still howling. The peasant was almost insane. He rose to go and let the dog loose, so that he should not hear him. He went downstairs, opened the hall door, and stepped out into the darkness. The snow was still falling. The earth was all white, the farm buildings standing out like black patches. He approached the kennel. The dog was dragging at his chain. He unfastened it. Dévorant gave a bound, then stopped short, his hair bristling, his legs rigid, his muzzle in the air, his nose pointed towards the manure heap.

Saint Anthony, trembling from head to foot, faltered:

“What’s the matter with you, you dirty hound?” and he walked a few steps forward, gazing at the indistinct outlines, the sombre shadow of the courtyard.

Then he saw a form, the form of a man sitting on the manure heap!

He gazed at it, paralyzed by fear, and breathing hard. But all at once he saw, close by, the handle of the manure fork which was sticking in the ground. He snatched it up and in one of those transports of fear that will make the greatest coward brave he rushed forward to see what it was.

It was he, his Prussian, come to life, covered with filth from his bed of manure, which had kept him warm. He had sat down mechanically, and remained there in the snow which sprinkled down, all covered with dirt and blood as he was, and still stupid from drinking, dazed by the blow and exhausted from his wound.

He perceived Anthony, and too sodden to understand anything, he made an attempt to rise. But the moment the old man recognized him, he foamed with rage like a wild animal.

“Ah, pig! pig!” he sputtered. “You are not dead! You are going to denounce me now⁠—wait⁠—wait!”

And rushing on the German with all the strength of his arms he flung the raised fork like a lance and buried the four prongs full length in his breast.

The soldier fell over on his back, uttering a long death moan, while the old peasant, drawing the fork out of his breast, plunged it over and over again into his abdomen, his stomach, his throat, like a madman, piercing the body from head to foot, as it still quivered, and the blood gushed out in streams.

Finally he stopped, exhausted by the violence of his labours, swallowing great mouthfuls of air, calmed down by the completion of the murder.

As the cocks were beginning to crow in the poultry yard and it was near daybreak, he set to work to bury the man.

He dug a hole in the manure till he reached the earth, dug down further, working wildly, in a frenzy of strength with frantic motions of his arms and body.

When the pit was deep enough he rolled the corpse into it with the fork, covered it with earth, which he stamped down for some time, and then put back the manure, and he smiled as he saw the thick snow finishing his work and covering up its traces with a white sheet.

He then stuck the fork in the manure and went into the house. His bottle, still half full of brandy, stood on the table. He emptied it at a draught, threw himself on his bed and slept heavily.

He woke up sober, his mind calm and clear, capable of judgment and forethought.

At the end of an hour he was going about the country making inquiries everywhere for his soldier. He went to see the Prussian officer to find out why they had taken away his man.

As everyone knew what good friends they were, no one suspected him. He even directed the search, declaring that the Prussian went to see the girls every evening.

An old retired gendarme who had an inn in the next village, and a pretty daughter, was arrested and shot.

An Apparition

We were speaking of sequestration apropos of a recent lawsuit. It was at the close of an evening amongst friends, at an old house in the Rue de Grenelle, and each of us had a story to tell, a story alleged to be true. Then, the old Marquis de la Tour Samuel, who was eighty-two, rose, and, leaning on the mantelpiece, said, in somewhat shaky tones:

“I also know something strange, so strange that it has been an obsession all my life. It is now fifty-six years since the incident occurred, and yet not a month has passed in which I have not seen it again in a dream. The mark, the imprint of fear, if you can understand me, has remained with me ever since that day. For ten minutes I experienced such horrible fright that, ever since, a sort of constant terror is in my soul. Unexpected noises make me shudder to the bottom of my soul and objects half-seen in the gloom of night inspire me with a mad desire to take flight. In short, at night I am afraid.

“Ah, no! I would not have admitted that before having reached my present age! Now I can say anything. At eighty-two years of age, I do not feel compelled to be brave in the presence of imaginary dangers. I have never receded before real danger.

“The affair upset me so completely, and caused me such deep and mysterious and terrible distress, that I never spoke of it to anyone. I have kept it down in the depths of my being, in those depths where painful secrets are kept, the shameful secrets and all the unconfessed weaknesses of our lives. I will now tell it to you exactly as it happened, without any attempt at explanation. There is no doubt it can be explained, unless I was mad at the time. But I was not mad, and I will prove it. You may think what you like. Here are the simple facts:

“It was in 1827, in the month of July. I was stationed at Rouen. One day, as I was walking along the quay, I met a man whom I thought I recognized, without being able to recall exactly who he was. Instinctively, I made a movement to stop; the stranger perceived it, looked at me, and fell into my arms.

“He was a friend of my youth to whom I had been deeply attached. For five years I had not seen him, and he seemed to have aged half a century. His hair was quite white, and he walked with a stoop as though completely worn out. He understood my surprise, and told me his life. A misfortune had shattered it.

“Having fallen madly in love with a young girl, he had married her, but, after a year of superhuman happiness and of passionate love, she died suddenly of heart failure, of love, very probably. He had left his château on the very day of her burial and had come to live in his house at Rouen. There he lived, desperate and solitary, consumed by grief, and so miserable that he thought only of suicide.

“ ‘Now that I have found you again,’ said he, ‘I will ask you to render me an important service, to go to my old home and get for me, from the desk of my bedroom⁠—our bedroom⁠—some papers which I greatly need. I cannot send a servant or a lawyer, as complete discretion and absolute silence are necessary. As for myself, nothing on earth would induce me to reenter that house. I will give you the key of the room, which I myself locked on leaving, and the key of my desk⁠—also a note to my gardener, telling him to open the château for you. But come and breakfast with me tomorrow, and we will arrange all that.’

“I promised to do him the slight favour he asked. For that matter, it was nothing of a trip, his property being but a few miles distant from Rouen and easily reached in an hour on horseback.

“At ten o’clock the following day I was at his house, and we breakfasted alone together, but he scarcely spoke.

“He begged me to pardon him; the thought of the visit I was about to make to that room, the scene of his dead happiness, overwhelmed him, he said. He, indeed, seemed singularly agitated and preoccupied, as though some mysterious struggle were taking place in his soul.

“At last, he explained to me exactly what I had to do. It was very simple. I was to take two packages of letters and a roll of papers from the first drawer on the right of the desk of which I had the key. He added, ‘I need not beg you to refrain from glancing at them.’

“I was wounded at that remark, and told him so somewhat sharply. He stammered, ‘Forgive me, I suffer so,’ and he began to weep.

“I took leave of him about one o’clock to accomplish my mission.

“The weather was glorious, and I cantered over the fields, listening to the songs of the larks and the rhythmical striking of my sword against my boot. Then I entered the forest and walked my horse. Branches of trees caressed my face as I passed, and, now and then, I caught a leaf with my teeth, and chewed it greedily, from that sheer joy of living which inexplicably fills one with a sense of tumultuous, impalpable happiness, a sort of intoxication of strength.

“As I approached the château, I looked in my pocket for the letter I had for the gardener, and was astonished at finding it sealed. I was so surprised and irritated that I was about to turn back without having fulfilled my promise but thought that I should thereby display undue susceptibility. My friend might easily have closed the envelope without noticing that he did so, in his troubled state of mind.

“The manor seemed to have been abandoned for twenty years. The gate was open and in such a state of decay that one wondered how it stood upright; the paths were overgrown with grass, and the flower beds were no longer distinguishable from the lawn.

“The noise I made by tapping loudly on a shutter brought an old man from a side door, who seemed stunned with astonishment at seeing me. On receiving my letter, he read it, reread it, turned it over and over, looked me up and down, put the paper in his pocket, and finally asked:

“ ‘Well! what is it you want?’

“I replied shortly: ‘You ought to know, since you have just read your master’s orders. I wish to enter the château.’

“He seemed overcome. ‘Then you are going into⁠ ⁠… into her room?’

“I began to lose patience: ‘See here! Do you propose to cross-examine me?’

“He stammered in confusion: ‘No⁠—sir⁠—but it is because⁠—that is, it has not been opened since⁠—since the⁠—death. If you will be kind enough to wait for five minutes, I will go to⁠—to see if⁠—’

“I interrupted him, angrily: ‘Look here, what are you driving at? You cannot enter the room, since I have the key!’

“He had no more to say. ‘Then, sir, I will show you the way.’

“ ‘Show me the staircase and leave me. I’ll find my way without you.’

“ ‘But⁠—sir⁠—indeed⁠—’

“This time I became really angry: ‘Now be quiet or you’ll know the reason why.’ I pushed him aside, and went into the house.

“I first went through the kitchen; then two rooms occupied by the servant and his wife; next, by a wide hall, I reached the stairs, which I mounted, and recognized the door indicated by my friend.

“I easily opened it and entered. The apartment was so dark that, at first, I could distinguish nothing. I stopped short, my nostrils penetrated by the disagreeable, mouldy odour of unoccupied rooms, of dead rooms. Then, as my eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness, I saw plainly enough, a large and disordered bedroom, the bed without sheets, but still retaining its mattresses and pillows, on one of which was a deep impression of an elbow or a head, as though someone had recently rested there.

“The chairs all seemed out of place. I noticed that a door, doubtless that of a closet, had remained half open.

“I first went to the window, which I opened to let in the light; but the fastenings of the shutters had grown so rusty that I could not move them. I even tried to break them with my sword, but without success. As I was growing irritated over my useless efforts, and could now see fairly well in the semi-obscurity, I renounced the idea of getting more light and went over to the writing-table.

“I sat down in an armchair, let down the lid of the desk and opened the drawer that had been indicated. It was full to the top. I needed only three packages, which I knew how to recognize, and began searching for them.

“I was straining my eyes in the effort to read the superscriptions, when I seemed to hear, or rather feel, something rustle behind me. I paid no attention, believing that a draught from the window was moving some drapery. But, in a minute or so, another movement, almost imperceptible, sent a strangely disagreeable little shiver over my skin. It was so stupid to be affected, even slightly, that self-respect prevented my turning around. I had then found the second packet I needed and was about to lay my hand on the third when a long and painful sigh, uttered just over my shoulder, made me bound like a madman from my seat and land several feet away. As I jumped I had turned about, my hand on the hilt of my sword, and, truly, had I not felt it at my side, I should have taken to my heels like a coward.

“A tall woman, dressed in white, stood gazing at me from the back of the chair where I had been sitting an instant before.

“Such a shudder ran through all my limbs that I nearly fell backward. No one can understand unless he has felt it, that frightful, unreasoning terror! The mind becomes vague; the heart ceases to beat; the entire body grows as limp as a sponge, as if one’s life were ebbing away.

“I do not believe in ghosts, nevertheless I completely gave way to a hideous fear of the dead; and I suffered more in those few moments than in all the rest of my life, from the irresistible anguish of supernatural fright. If she had not spoken, I should have died, perhaps! But she spoke, she spoke in a sweet, sad voice, that set my nerves vibrating. I dare not say that I became master of myself and recovered my reason. No! I was so frightened that I scarcely knew what I was doing; but a certain innate pride, a remnant of soldierly instinct, made me, almost in spite of myself, maintain a creditable countenance. I was posing to myself, I suppose, and to her, whoever she was, woman or ghost. Afterwards I realized all this, for I assure you that, at the time of the apparition, I thought of nothing. I was afraid.

“She said: ‘Oh! sir, you can render me a great service.’

“I tried to reply, but it was impossible for me to pronounce a word. Only a vague sound came from my throat.

“She continued: ‘Will you? You can save me, cure me. I suffer frightfully. I suffer, oh! how I suffer!’ and she slowly seated herself in my armchair.

“ ‘Will you?’ she said, looking at me.

“I replied ‘Yes’ by a nod, my voice still being paralysed.

“Then she held out to me a tortoiseshell comb, and murmured:

“ ‘Comb my hair, oh! comb my hair; that will cure me; it must be combed. Look at my head⁠—how I suffer; and my hair hurts me so!’

“Her hair, unbound, very long and very black, it seemed to me, hung over the back of the chair and touched the floor.

“Why did I receive that comb with a shudder, and why did I take in my hands the long, black hair which gave to my skin a gruesome, cold sensation, as though I were handling snakes? I cannot tell.

“That sensation has remained in my fingers and I still tremble when I think of it.

“I combed her hair. I handled, I know not how, those icy locks. I twisted, knotted, and loosened them. She sighed and bowed her head, seeming to be happy. Suddenly she said: ‘Thank you!’ snatched the comb from my hands, and fled by the door that I had noticed ajar.

“Left alone, I experienced for several seconds the frightened agitation of one who awakens from a nightmare. At length I regained my full senses; I ran to the window, and with a mighty effort burst open the shutters, letting a flood of light into the room. Immediately I sprang to the door by which she had departed. I found it closed and immovable!

“Then a mad desire to flee came on me like a panic, the panic which soldiers know in battle. I seized the three packets of letters on the open desk; ran from the room, dashed down the stairs four steps at a time, found myself outside, I know not how, and seeing my horse a few steps off, leaped into the saddle and galloped away.

“I stopped only when I reached Rouen and my own house. Throwing the bridle to my orderly, I fled to my room, where I shut myself in to think.

“For an hour I anxiously wondered whether I had not been the victim of a hallucination. Surely I had had one of those incomprehensible nervous shocks, one of those mental frights which give rise to miracles, to which the Supernatural owes its power.

“I was about to believe I had seen a vision, had a hallucination, when I approached the window. My eyes fell, by chance, upon my breast. My military cape was covered with hairs; the long hairs of a woman, which had got caught in the buttons! One by one, with trembling fingers, I plucked them off and threw them away.

“I then called my orderly. I was too disturbed, too upset to go and see my friend that day, and I also wished to reflect more fully upon what I ought to tell him. I sent him his letters, for which he gave the soldier a receipt. He asked after me most particularly. He was told I was ill, that I had had sunstroke or something. He seemed to be exceedingly anxious. Next morning at dawn I went to him, determined to tell him the truth. He had gone out the evening before and had not yet returned. I called again during the day; my friend was still absent. I waited for a week. He did not appear. Then I notified the authorities. A search was instituted, but not the slightest trace of his whereabouts or manner of disappearance was discovered.

“A minute inspection was made of the abandoned château. Nothing of a suspicious character was discovered. There was no indication that a woman had been concealed there.

“The inquiry led to nothing, and the search was stopped, and for fifty-six years I have heard nothing; I know no more than before.”

Walter Schnaffs’ Adventure

Since his entrance into France, with the army of the invasion, Walter Schnaffs judged himself the most unfortunate of men. He was stout, walked with difficulty, puffed much, and suffered frightfully with his feet, which were very broad and fat. Outwardly, he seemed peaceful and benevolent, neither brave nor bloodthirsty, the father of four children whom he adored, and married to a young, blond woman whose caresses and cares and tenderness he desperately regretted every evening. He loved to rise late and go to bed early, to eat slowly of good things and drink beer in cafés. He felt that all that was sweet in existence disappeared with this life; and he had at heart a terrible fear and hatred, both instinctive and reasonable, of cannons, guns, revolvers, and swords, and especially of bayonets, feeling himself incapable of maneuvering rapidly enough to defend his great body with such a weapon.

And, when night had come and he had lain down to sleep upon the earth, wrapped in his blanket by the side of his comrades, who were snoring, he thought long of his home, left behind him in Germany, and of the dangers sown all along the route. “If I should be killed what would become of the little ones?” he thought. “Who would feed them and bring them up?” At that very moment they were not rich, in spite of the debts he had contracted before he started, in order to leave them a little money. And sometimes Walter Schnaffs wept.

At the beginning of a battle he felt his knees growing so weak that he would have fallen had he not known that the whole army would pass over his body. The whistling of the bullets made his hair stand on end. For some months he lived thus, in terror and in anguish.

His army corps was advancing toward Normandy. One day he was sent out to reconnoitre with a small detachment which was simply to explore a part of the country and report immediately. All seemed calm in the country; nothing indicated a prepared resistance.

The Prussians were descending quietly into a little valley divided by deep ravines, when a violent fusillade stopped them short, laying low one in twenty of their men; and a company of sharpshooters, coming out suddenly from a little wood, plunged forward with their bayonets fixed.

Walter Schnaffs remained motionless at first, so surprised and dismayed that he did not even think of fleeing. Then a foolish desire to run away seized him; but he thought immediately that he could run only like a tortoise in comparison with the thin Frenchmen, who were coming on in leaps and bounds, like a troop of goats. Then, perceiving but six steps before him a large ditch full of brushwood covered with dead leaves, he jumped in with both feet, without even thinking how deep it was, as one might jump from a bridge into a river. He went like a dart, through a thick layer of creepers and sharp twigs, which tore his face and hands as he fell, and found himself seated heavily on a bed of stones. Raising his eyes, he could see the sky through the hole that he had made. This hole might lead to his discovery, and he dragged himself along cautiously, on all fours, at the bottom of this ditch, under a roof of enlaced branches, going with all speed possible as far as he could from the combat. Then he stopped and seated himself, crouching like a hare in the midst of the tall dry grass.

For some time longer he heard the reports of the guns and the cries of the wounded, then the clamour of the struggle grew feebler and finally ceased. All became still and calm.

Suddenly something moved near him. He had a fearful shock. It was a little bird, which, standing upon a branch, had shaken the dry leaves. For nearly an hour, the man’s heart beat with heavy, rapid strokes.

Night came on, filling the ravine with shadows. The soldier began to think. What was he going to do? What would become of him? Should he rejoin his regiment? But how? But how? And where? Was it necessary to begin over again the life of anguish, of fear, of fatigue and suffering that he had led since the beginning of the war? No! He would never have the courage. He would never have the energy necessary to support the marches and confront the dangers of each minute.

But what was to be done? He could not remain in this ravine and conceal himself there until the end of hostilities. Certainly not. If he were not obliged to eat, this prospect might not have deterred him; but he must eat and eat every day.

Thus he found himself alone, under arms, in uniform, in the enemy’s territory, far from those able to defend him. Cold shivers ran through his body. Suddenly he thought: “If only I were a prisoner!” And his heart trembled with the desire, a violent, immoderate desire to be made prisoner by the French. He would be safely lodged and fed, under shelter from bullets and swords, without possible apprehension, in a good prison well guarded. A prisoner! What a dream!

His resolution was made immediately: “I will go and give myself up as a prisoner.” He got up resolved to execute his project without a minute’s delay. But he remained there, suddenly assailed by cowardly reflections and new fears.

Where should he go to give himself up? And how? On which side? And frightful images of death invaded his soul. He might run some terrible dangers in venturing out alone through the country in his metal-pointed helmet. If he should meet some country people? These peasants, seeing a Prussian soldier lost, a defenceless Prussian, would kill him like a stray dog! They would murder him, with their forks, their pickaxes, their scythes, their shovels! They would reduce him to pulp and make mincemeat of him with the savagery of exasperated conquerors.

And if he should meet some sharpshooters? These madmen, without law or discipline, would shoot him to amuse themselves, to pass away an hour, for the fun of seeing his face. And he could already imagine himself against a wall, facing a dozen gun barrels, whose little round, black holes seemed to be looking at him.

And if he should meet the French army? The advance guard would take him for a spy, for some brave and hardy rogue of a trooper sent out alone to reconnoitre, and would shoot him down at once. And he could already hear the irregular reports of the guns of soldiers concealed in the woods, while he, standing in the middle of a field, would be riddled with bullets like a strainer, and he could feel them entering his flesh. He sat down again in despair. His situation appeared to be hopeless.

Night had now come, night still and dark. He no longer moved and started at every unknown and slight noise which passed in the shadows. A rabbit, bobbing up and down on the edge of his burrow, almost put Walter Schnaffs to flight. The cries of the screech-owl tore his soul, rending it with sudden fear, as painful as wounds. He stared with his big eyes, trying to penetrate the shadows; and he imagined every moment that he heard someone walking near him.

After interminable hours and the anguish of the damned, he perceived through his ceiling of branches that the sky was becoming bright. Then immense relief came to him; his members relaxed in sudden repose; his heart was easy; his eyes closed. He fell asleep.

When he awoke, the sun seemed to him to be nearly in the middle of the sky; it should, therefore, be midday. No noise troubled the dull peace of the fields; and Walter Schnaffs perceived that he was seized with acute hunger. He yawned, his mouth watering at the thought of sausage, the good military sausage, and he got a pain in his stomach.

He stood up, took some steps, felt that his legs were feeble, and sat down again to think. For three or four hours more he argued for and against, changing his mind every moment, unhappy, drawn this way and that by the most contradictory arguments.

One idea seemed to him logical and practical: that was to watch until some villager passed, alone, without arms or dangerous tools, to run up to him and deliver himself into his hands, making him understand that he was giving himself up. Then he removed his helmet, the point of which might betray him, and put his head out of his hole with infinite precautions.

No single human being was in sight. Down there, to the right, a little village sent to the sky the smoke from its roofs, the smoke from its kitchens! To the left, he perceived at the end of an avenue of trees, a great castle flanked with turrets. He waited until evening, suffering frightfully, seeing nothing but flocks of crows, and hearing nothing but the dull rumbling of his stomach.

Again the night fell upon him. He stretched himself out at the bottom of his retreat and fell into a feverish sleep, haunted by nightmares, the sleep of a famished man. The dawn again rose upon him. He again set himself to watch, but the countryside was as empty as the day before. And a new fear entered the mind of Walter Schnaffs⁠—the fear of dying of hunger. He saw himself stretched at the bottom of that hole, on his back, his eyes closed. Then some animals, small animals of every sort, would come and begin to eat his dead body, attacking him everywhere simultaneously, slipping in under his garments to bite his cold flesh. And a great raven would pick his eyes out with its sharp beak.

Then he became mad, imagining that he was swooning from weakness and could no longer walk. And he prepared to start toward the village, resolved to dare all, to defy all; but he perceived three peasants going to the fields with their forks on their shoulders, and he plunged back into his hiding-place.

When evening darkened the plain again, he got out slowly from the ditch, and started on the way, crouching, fearful, his heart beating, towards the far-off castle, preferring to enter that rather than the village, which seemed to him as dangerous as a den of tigers.

The lower windows were brilliantly lighted, one of them being open; and a strong odour of food, cooked food, came from it, entering Walter Schnaffs’ nostrils and penetrating to the depths of his body, causing his body to become tense and his breath to come in gasps. It drew him irresistibly, inspiring his heart with desperate audacity. And suddenly, without thinking, he appeared at the window with his helmet on his head.

Eight servants were dining around a big table. Suddenly a maid sat still with her mouth open, letting her glass fall, her eyes staring. Then, every glance followed hers.

They perceived the enemy! My God! The Prussians are attacking the castle!

At first this was a single cry, made up of eight cries in eight different tones, a cry of horrible fear, then there was a tumultuous moving, a hustling, a melee, a general flight for the farthest door. Chairs fell, men knocked over the women to get ahead of them. In two seconds the room was empty, abandoned, with a table covered with eatables in front of Walter Schnaffs, who stood still in amazement outside the window.

After some moments of hesitation, he jumped over the windowsill, and advanced towards the plates. His keen hunger made him tremble like one in a fever; but terror still held him and paralyzed him. He listened. The whole house seemed to tremble; doors opened and shut, and rapid steps sounded on the floor above. The uneasy Prussian strained his ears to catch these confused noises; then he heard heavy sounds as if bodies were falling in the soft earth at the foot of the walls, human bodies jumping from the first story.

Then all movement, all agitation ceased, and the great castle became silent as a tomb.

Walter Schnaffs seated himself before a plate still intact, and began to eat. He ate with great mouthfuls as if he feared being interrupted too soon, before he had devoured enough. He threw the pieces with both hands into his mouth, opened like a trap; huge pieces of food descended into his stomach, one after the other, straining his throat in passing. Sometimes he interrupted himself, feeling ready to burst, like an overfilled pipe. He took the cider pitcher and poured its contents down his throat, as one washes out a stopped-up conduit.

He emptied all the plates, all the dishes, and all the bottles; then, full of liquid and eatables, besotted, red, shaking with hiccups, his mouth greasy, his mind troubled, he unbuttoned his uniform in order to breathe, incapable of taking another step. His eyes closed, his ideas became vague; he dropped his heavy head in his crossed arms on the table, and sweetly lost all consciousness of his surroundings.

The waning crescent lighted the horizon vaguely through the trees of the park. It was the cold hour which precedes the day. Sometimes a ray of the moon glittered like a point of steel among the shadows of the thicket.

The quiet castle appeared like a great, black silhouette against the clear sky. Two windows alone on the ground floor were still brilliantly lighted. Suddenly, a voice of thunder cried:

“Forward! To the assault! Come on, boys!”

Then, in an instant, the doors, shutters, even the windows, were broken down by the rush of men who dashed forward, breaking and overturning all in their way, invading the house. In an instant, fifty men, armed to the teeth, bounded into the kitchen where Walter Schnaffs was peacefully sleeping; and, presenting to his breast their loaded guns, they seized him, rolled him over, threw him down, and bound him hand and foot.

He was breathless with astonishment, too dazed to understand, beaten, battered and mad with terror.

Suddenly a fat military-looking man, covered with gold lace, planted his foot upon his body, calling out vociferously:

“You are my prisoner! Surrender!”

The Prussian understood only the single word “prisoner,” and groaned: “Ja, ja, ja!”

He was taken up, bound to a chair, and examined with a lively curiosity by his conquerors, who were puffing like porpoises. Many of them sat down, overcome by emotion and fatigue.

He smiled; he could smile now, sure at last of being a prisoner!

An officer entered and announced:

“Colonel, the enemy is put to flight. Many of them appear to have been wounded. We are now masters of the place.”

The fat officer, wiping his brow, shouted: “Victory!” And, drawing a little notebook from his pocket, he wrote:

“After a desperate struggle, the Prussians had to beat a retreat, taking their dead and wounded with them, estimated at about fifty men. Several remain in our hands.”

The young officer inquired: “Colonel, what measures are to be taken?”

The colonel replied: “We shall fall back in order to avoid a resumption of the offensive with artillery and superior forces.” And he gave the order to depart.

The column reformed in the shadow under the wall of the castle, and set off, surrounding, with great care, Walter Schnaffs, bound, and guarded by six warriors with revolvers in hand. Scouts were sent out to reconnoitre the route. They advanced with great care, halting from time to time. At daylight, they arrived at the Subprefect’s, in La Roche-Oysel, whose national guard had accomplished this feat of arms.

The people of the town, anxious and excited, awaited them. When they saw the prisoner’s helmet fearful shouts arose. Women lifted up their hands, old people wept, a grandfather threw his crutch at the Prussian and wounded the nose of one of his guards. The colonel shouted: “Look out for the safety of the prisoner!”

Finally, they came to the town hall. The prison was opened, and Walter Schnaffs was thrown in, freed from his fetters. Two hundred men, in arms, mounted guard on the building.

Then, in spite of the symptoms of indigestion which had been troubling him for some time, the Prussian, mad with joy, began to dance, to dance madly, raising his arms and legs and uttering frenzied cries, until he fell exhausted against the wall. He was a prisoner! He was saved.

And thus it was that the castle of Champignet was retaken from the enemy after only six hours of occupation.

Colonel Ratier, cloth merchant, who accomplished this feat at the head of the National Guards of La Roche-Oysel, was decorated for it.

Queen Hortense

They called her Queen Hortense in Argenteuil. No one ever knew why. Perhaps because she spoke firmly, like an officer giving orders. Perhaps because she was large, bony, and imperious. Perhaps because she governed a multitude of domestic animals, hens, dogs, cats, canaries, and parrots⁠—those animals so dear to old maids. But she neither spoiled these familiar subjects, nor addressed them with loving words, those tender puerilities which seem to slip from the lips of a woman to the velvety coat of a purring cat. She governed her beasts with authority. She ruled.

She was an old maid, one of those old maids with harsh voice, and awkward gesture, whose soul seems hard. She had always had young servants, because youth more easily adapts itself to strong wills. She never allowed contradiction from any person, nor argument, nor would she tolerate hesitation, or indifference, or idleness, or fatigue. No one ever heard her complain, or regret what was, or envy others. “To each one his share,” she would say, with fatalistic conviction. She never went to church, cared nothing for the priests, scarcely believed in God, and called all religious things “stuff for mourners.”

For thirty years she had lived in her little house, with its tiny garden in front, extending along the street, never modifying her way of living, changing only her maids, and that mercilessly, when they became twenty-one years old.

She replaced, without tears and without regrets, her dogs or cats or birds, when they died of old age, or by accident, and she buried the dead animals in a flowerbed, heaping the earth above them with a small spade and treading it down with perfect indifference.

She had in the town a few acquaintances, the families of clerks, whose men travelled to Paris every day. From time to time, they would invite her to spend the evening and drink a cup of tea with them. She inevitably fell asleep on these occasions, and they were obliged to wake her up so that she could go home. She never allowed anyone to accompany her, having no fear by night or day. She seemed to have no love for children.

She occupied her time with a thousand masculine cares, carpentry, gardening, cutting or sawing wood, repairing her old house, even doing mason’s work when it was necessary.

She had some relatives who came to see her twice a year. Her two sisters, Madame Cimme and Madame Columbel, were married, one to an herbalist, the other to a man with small private means. Madame Cimme had no children; Madame Columbel had three: Henri, Pauline, and Joseph. Henri was twenty-one, Pauline, seventeen, and Joseph only three, having come when one would have thought the mother past the age. No tenderness united this old maid to her kinsfolk.

In the spring of 1882, Queen Hortense became suddenly ill. The neighbours went for a doctor, whom she drove away. When the priest presented himself she got out of bed, half naked, and put him out. The little maid, weeping, made herb tea for her.

After three days in bed, the situation became so grave that the carpenter living next door, on the advice of the doctor, who had returned to the house on his own authority, took it upon himself to summon the two families.

They arrived by the same train, about ten o’clock in the morning; the Columbels having brought their little Joseph.

When they arrived at the garden gate, they saw the maid seated on a chair against the wall, weeping. The dog lay asleep on the mat before the front door, under a broiling sun; two cats, that looked dead, lay stretched out on the windowsills, with eyes closed and paws and tails extended at full length. A great clucking hen was promenading before the door, at the head of a flock of chicks covered with yellow down, and in a large cage hung against the wall, covered with chickweed, were several birds, singing themselves hoarse in the light of this hot spring morning.

Two others, inseparable, in a little cage in the form of a cottage, remained quiet, side by side on their perch.

M. Cimme, a large, wheezy personage, who always entered a room first, pushing aside men and women when it was necessary, remarked to the maid: “Well, Céleste! Is it so bad as that?”

The little maid sobbed through her tears:

“She doesn’t know me any more. The doctor says it is the end.”

They all looked at one another.

Madame Cimme and Madame Columbel embraced each other instantly, without saying a word.

They resembled each other very much, always wearing their hair parted in the middle, and shawls of red cashmere, as bright as hot coals.

Cimme turned toward his brother-in-law, a pale man, yellow and thin, tormented by indigestion, who limped badly, and said to him in a serious tone:

“Gad! It was time!”

But no one dared to go into the room of the dying woman, situated on the ground floor. Cimme himself let the others go before him. Columbel was the first to make up his mind; he entered, balancing himself like the mast of a ship, making a noise on the floor with the ferrule of his walking-stick.

The two women ventured to follow, and M. Cimme brought up the line.

Little Joseph remained outside, drawn by the sight of the dog.

A ray of sunlight fell on the bed, just lighting up the hands which moved nervously, opening and shutting without ceasing. The fingers moved as if a thought animated them, as if they would signify something, indicate some idea, obey some intelligence. The rest of the body remained motionless under the sheet. The angular figure gave no start. The eyes remained closed.

The relatives arranged themselves in a semicircle and, without saying a word, watched the heaving breast and the short breathing. The little maid had followed them, still shedding tears.

Finally, Cimme asked: “What did the doctor say exactly?”

The servant stammered: “He said we must leave her alone, that nothing more could be done.”

Suddenly the lips of the old maid began to move. She seemed to pronounce some silent words, concealed in her dying brain, and her hands quickened their singular movement.

Then she spoke in a little, thin voice, quite unlike her own, a voice that seemed to come from far off, perhaps from the bottom of that heart always closed.

Cimme walked upon tiptoe, finding this spectacle painful. Columbel, whose lame leg was growing tired, sat down.

The two women remained standing.

Queen Hortense muttered something quickly, which they were unable to understand. She pronounced some names, called tenderly some imaginary persons:

“Come here, my little Philippe, kiss your mother. You love mamma, don’t you, my child? You, Rose, you will watch your little sister while I am out. Above all, don’t leave her alone, do you hear? And I forbid you to touch matches.”

She was silent some seconds; then, in a loud tone, as if she was calling, she said: “Henriette!” She waited a little and continued: “Tell your father to come and speak to me before going to his office.” Then suddenly: “I am not very well today, dear; promise me you will not return late; you will tell your chief that I am ill. You know it is dangerous to leave the children alone when I am in bed. I am going to make you a dish of rice and sugar for dinner. The little ones like it so much. Claire will be so pleased!”

She began to laugh, a youthful and noisy laugh, as she had never laughed before. “Look at Jean,” she said, “how funny he looks. He has smeared himself with jam, the dirty little thing! Look! my dear, how funny he looks!”

Columbel, who kept changing the position of his lame leg every moment, murmured: “She is dreaming that she has children and a husband; the end is near.”

The two sisters did not move, but seemed surprised and stunned.

The little maid said: “Will you take off your hats and your shawls, and go into the other room?”

They went out without having said a word. And Columbel followed them limping, leaving the dying woman alone again.

When they were relieved of their outer garments, the women seated themselves. Then one of the cats left the window, stretched herself, jumped into the room, then upon the knees of Madame Cimme, who began to caress her.

They heard from the next room the voice of the dying woman, living, without doubt, in this last hour, the life she had wished for, pouring out her dreams at the very moment when all would be finished for her.

Cimme, in the garden, played with little Joseph and the dog, enjoying himself, with all the gaiety of a fat man in the country, without a thought for the dying woman.

But suddenly he entered, and addressed the maid: “I say, my girl, are you going to give us some lunch? What are you going to eat, ladies?”

They decided upon an omelet of fine herbs, a piece of fillet with new potatoes, cheese, and a cup of coffee.

And as Madame Columbel was fumbling in her pocket for her purse Cimme stopped her, and turning to the maid said, “You must have some money?” and she answered: “Yes, sir.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen francs.”

“That’s enough. Make haste, now, my girl, because I am getting hungry.”

Madame Cimme, looking out at the climbing flowers bathed in the sunlight, and at two pigeons making love on the roof opposite, said, with a heartbroken air: “It is unfortunate to have come for so sad an event. It would be nice in the country, today.”

Her sister sighed without answering, and Columbel murmured, moved perhaps by the thought of a walk:

“My leg plagues me awfully.”

Little Joseph and the dog made a terrible noise, one shouting with joy and the other barking violently. They played at hide-and-seek around the three flowerbeds, running after each other like mad.

The dying woman continued to call her children, chatting with each, imagining that she was dressing them, that she caressed them, that she was teaching them to read: “Come, Simon, repeat, A, B, C, D. You do not say it well; see, D, D, D, do you hear? Repeat, now⁠ ⁠…”

Cimme declared: “It is extraordinary the things one talks about at such times.”

Then said Madame Columbel: “It would be better, perhaps, to go in there.”

But Cimme dissuaded her from it:

“Why go in, since we are not able to do anything for her? Besides we are as well off here.”

No one insisted. Madame observed the two green birds called inseparable. She remarked pleasantly upon this singular fidelity, and blamed men for not imitating these little creatures. Cimme looked at his wife and laughed, singing with a bantering air, “Tra-la-la, Tra-la-la,” as if to say he could tell some things about his own fidelity.

Columbel, taken with cramps in his stomach, struck the floor with his cane. The other cat entered, its tail in the air. They did not sit down at table until one o’clock.

When he had tasted the wine, Columbel, who could drink only choice Bordeaux, called the servant:

“I say, is there nothing better than this in the cellar?”

“Yes, sir; there is some of the wine that was served when you used to come here.”

“Oh, well, go and bring three bottles.”

They tasted this wine, which seemed excellent. Not that it was of a remarkable vintage, but it had been fifteen years in the cellar. Cimme declared it was real wine for invalids.

Columbel, seized with a desire to possess this Bordeaux, asked of the maid: “How much is left of it, my girl?”

“Oh, nearly all, sir; Mademoiselle never drank any of it. It is at the bottom of the cellar.”

Then Columbel turned toward his brother-in-law: “If you wish, Cimme, I will take this wine in exchange for something else; it agrees with my stomach wonderfully.”

The hen, in her turn, had entered with her troop of chicks; the two women amused themselves by throwing crumbs to them. Joseph and the dog were sent back into the garden, as they had eaten enough.

Queen Hortense spoke continually, but in a whisper now, so that it was no longer possible to distinguish the words.

When they had finished the coffee, they all went in to learn the condition of the sick woman. She seemed calm.

They went out and seated themselves in a circle in the garden, to digest their food.

Presently the dog began to run around the chairs with all speed, carrying something in his mouth. The child ran wildly after him. Both disappeared into the house. Cimme fell asleep, with his stomach in the sun.

The dying woman began to speak loudly again. Then suddenly she shouted.

The two women and Columbel hastened in to see what had happened. Cimme awakened but did not move, as he did not care for such things.

The dying woman was sitting up, staring with haggard eyes. Her dog, to escape the pursuit of little Joseph, had jumped upon the bed, and across the dying woman. Entrenched behind the pillow, he was peeping at his comrade with eyes glistening, ready to jump again at the least movement. He held in his mouth one of the slippers of his mistress, all torn by his teeth, as he had been playing with it for an hour.

The child, intimidated by the woman rising so suddenly before him, stood motionless before the bed.

The hen, which had also entered, had jumped upon a chair, frightened by the noise, and was desperately calling to her chicks, which were peeping, frightened, from under the four legs of the chair.

Queen Hortense cried out in piercing tones: “No, no, I do not wish to die! I don’t want to! Who will bring up my children? Who will care for them? Who will love them? No I won’t!⁠ ⁠… I am not⁠ ⁠…”

She fell back. All was over.

The dog, much excited, jumped into the room and skipped about.

Columbel ran to the window and called his brother-in-law: “Come quickly! come quickly! I believe she is gone.”

Then Cimme got up and resolutely went into the room, muttering: “It did not take so long as I thought it would.”

On the Journey

A Surprise

My brother and I were brought up by our uncle, the abbé Loisel⁠—the curé Loisel, as we called him. Our parents died when we were small, and he had taken us into his rectory and raised us.

For eighteen years he had had the parish of Join-le-Sault, not far from Yvetot. It was a small village, set in the very middle of the Norman plateau known as the pays de Caux, dotted with farms whose orchards rose up here and there amidst the fields.

The village, apart from the farm cottages scattered over the plain, consisted of a mere six houses fronting on both sides of the main road, with the church at one end and the new town hall at the other.

My brother and I passed our childhood playing in the cemetery. The place was sheltered from the wind, and there my uncle gave us our lessons, the three of us sitting side by side on the one stone tomb, that of my uncle’s predecessor, whose wealthy family had seen to it that he was buried sumptuously.

To train our memories, my uncle made us learn by heart the names of the deceased that were painted on the black wooden crosses; and to train us in observation as well he made us begin our odd recitation now from one end of the graveyard, now from the other, or sometimes from the middle. He would point abruptly to a grave, and say, “The one in the third row, with the cross leaning to the left: whose is that?” When a burial took place, we made haste to learn what was to be painted on the wooden symbol, and we often went to the carpenter’s shop, to see the epitaph before it was placed on the tomb. My uncle would ask, “Do you know the new one?” And we would reply in unison, “Yes, uncle,” and immediately begin to recite: “Here lies Joséphine Rosalie Gertrude Malandain, widow of Theodore Magloire Césaire, deceased at the age of seventy-two years, mourned by her family: a faithful daughter, faithful wife and faithful mother. Her soul is in heaven.”

My uncle was a tall, big-boned priest, square-built in his ideas as in his frame. His soul itself seemed hard and definite, like an answer in a catechism. He often spoke to us of God in thundering voice, always uttering the word as violently as though he were firing a pistol. His God was not God the good and just, but simply God. He seemed to think of Him as a burglar thinks of a policeman, or a prisoner of the judge.

He brought us up harshly, teaching us to tremble rather than to love.

When one of us was fourteen and the other fifteen, he sent us to board, at a special reduced rate, at the seminary in Yvetot. This was a large, dreary building, full of curés, whose pupils were almost without exception destined for the priesthood. I can never think of the place even now without a shudder. It smelled of prayers the way a fish-market smells of fish. Oh! That dreary school, with its eternal religious ceremonies, its freezing Mass every morning, its periods of meditation, its gospel-recitations, and the reading from pious books during meals! Oh! Those dreary days passed within those cloistering walls, where nothing was spoken of but God⁠—the explosive God of my uncle.

We lived there in narrow, contemplative, unnatural piety⁠—and also in a truly meritorious state of filth, for I well remember that the boys were made to wash their feet but three times a year, the night before each vacation. As for baths, they were as unknown as the name of Victor Hugo. Our masters apparently held them in the greatest contempt.

My brother and I graduated the same year, and with a few sous in our pockets we woke up one morning to find ourselves in Paris, working at eighteen hundred francs a year in a government office, thanks to the influence, exercised on our behalf, of the Archbishop of Rouen.

For a while we continued to be very good boys, my brother and I, living together in the little lodging we had rented, like two night-birds torn from their nest and cast out into the dazzling sunlight, blinded and bewildered.

But little by little the Paris air, new comrades, and the theaters took away a little of our numbness. Certain new desires, different from heavenly joys, began to awaken within us, and, on a certain evening⁠—the same evening⁠—after long hesitation and uneasiness and the fears of a soldier before his first battle, we allowed ourselves to⁠—how shall I put it⁠—allowed ourselves to be seduced by two little neighbors, two shopgirls, who worked and lived together.

Soon an exchange took place between our two establishments, a division. My brother took the girls’ flat and kept one of them to live with him. The other came to live with me. Mine was named Louise. She was twenty-two, perhaps. A good girl, fresh, gay and round⁠—especially round in a certain place. She moved in with me like a little wife taking possession of a man and of everything connected with that man. She organized the household, made everything neat, cooked, kept careful account of expenses, and in addition introduced me to many pleasant things with which I was unfamiliar.

My brother was also very happy. The four of us always had dinner together, one day in his rooms, the next day in mine, and there was never a cloud or a care.

For time to time I received a letter from my uncle, who continued to think that I was living with my brother, and who gave me news of the village, of his maid, of recent deaths, of the crops and harvests⁠—all mixed in with bits of advice on the dangers of life and the turpitudes of the world.

These letters arrived in the morning, by the eight o’clock mail. The concierge slipped them under the door, giving a knock with her broom handle to attract our attention. Louise would get out of bed, pick up the blue envelope, and sit down beside me and read me the letter from the “curé Loisel,” as she also came to call him.

For six months we were happy.

Then, one night, about one o’clock in the morning, a violent peal of the doorbell made us jump. We hadn’t been asleep⁠—far from it⁠—at that particular moment. Louise said, “What can that be?” And I answered, “I haven’t any idea. Probably a mistake.” And we stopped what we were doing and lay there pressed closely one against the other, our ears strained to catch any sound, very much on edge.

And then there was a second peal of the bell, and then a third, and then a fourth long peal filled our room with so much noise that we both sat up. This was no mistake: whoever it was, wanted us. I quickly pulled on my drawers and slippers and ran to the vestibule door, fearing some disaster. But before opening, I called, “Who is there? What do you want?”

A voice, a loud voice, the voice of my uncle, replied: “It’s me, Jean. Open your door, I don’t want to sleep on the stairs!”

I thought I would go crazy. But what was there to do? I rushed back into the bedroom and in a trembling voice said to Louise, “It’s my uncle. Hide!” Then I opened the outer door and the curé Loisel almost knocked me down with his carpetbag.

“What were you up to, you scamp? Why didn’t you open?”

I stammered that I had been asleep.

“Asleep at first, perhaps, but just now after you spoke to me⁠—what were you up to then?”

I stammered that I had left my key in my trousers, and to prevent further discussion I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him violently on both cheeks.

That calmed him, and he explained his presence. “I’m here for four days, scapegrace,” he announced. “I wanted to take a look at the hellhole of Paris, to give myself an idea of what the real hell is like.” He gave a laugh like a roaring storm, then continued: “Put me up any way you can. We can lay one of your mattresses on the floor. But where’s your brother? Asleep? Wake him up! Wake him up!”

I felt that I was rapidly losing my wits, but managed to say, “Jacques isn’t home yet. He had a lot of extra work, night work, at the office.”

My uncle accepted that, rubbed his hands, and asked me how my work was going. Then he made for the door of my bedroom. I almost seized him by the collar. “No, no, this way, uncle.” An idea came to me. “You must be hungry after your trip. Come and have a bite of something.”

He smiled. “You’re right. I am hungry. I wouldn’t mind a snack.” And I pushed him into the dining room.

Dinner had been at our house that night, and the cupboard was full. I took out a piece of cold beef, and the curé lit into it heartily. I kept urging him to eat, kept filling his glass and reminding him of wonderful meals we had had in Normandy, to stimulate his appetite. When he had finished he pushed away his plate and said, “That’s that: I’ve had all I can manage.” But I had other things in reserve⁠—I knew the good man’s weakness⁠—and I brought out a chicken paté, a potato salad, a pot of cream, and some excellent wine that was left over from dinner. He almost fell over backwards in astonishment at my scale of living, pulled his plate toward him, and began all over again. It was getting late, and as he kept eating I kept trying to think of a way out, but nothing practical occurred to me.

Finally he got up from the table, and I felt my knees weaken. I tried to keep him where we were. “Here, uncle⁠—some brandy. It’s old, it’s good.” But he declared, “No, this time I’m really through. Let’s see the rest of your quarters.”

I well knew that there was no holding him back, and shivers ran up and down my spine. What would happen? What kind of a scene and scandal? What violence, perhaps?

I followed him, filled with a wild desire to open the window and throw myself into the street. I followed him stupidly, not daring to say a word to restrain him, knowing myself lost, almost fainting with anguish, yet nevertheless hoping that some chance would come to my aid.

He entered the bedroom. One last hope lifted my heart: Louise, sweet thing, had drawn the bed curtains, and not a thing in the room betrayed the presence of a woman. Her dresses, her collars and cuffs, her stockings, her shoes, her gloves, her pins and rings⁠—everything had disappeared. I stammered: “Let’s not go to bed now, uncle. The sun is almost up.”

“You’re a good boy to be willing to sit talking with an old man,” he answered. “But I could do with an hour or two of sleep.”

And he approached the bed, candle in hand. I waited, breathless, frantic. With one gesture he pulled the curtains open! It was a warm June night, and Louise and I had taken off the blankets, and on the bed was only a sheet, which Louise, in her desperation, had pulled over her head. Doubtless to make herself feel more securely hidden, she had rolled herself into a ball, and pressed tight against the sheet her⁠—her contours were clearly visible.

I could hardly stand up.

My uncle turned to me, grinning so widely that I almost collapsed with astonishment. “So!” he cried, merrily. “Joking, were you! You didn’t want to wake your brother. Well⁠—I’ll wake him, and you’ll see how.” And I saw his hand, his big peasant’s hand, upraised; and as he choked with laughter it fell, with a terrific sound, on the⁠—contours before him.

There was a terrible cry in the bed; and then a furious tempest under the sheet. It heaved, billowed and shook: the poor girl couldn’t get out, so tightly had she rolled herself in.

Finally a leg appeared at one end, an arm at the other, then the head, then the bosom, naked and panting; and Louise, furious, sat up and looked at us with eyes shining like lanterns.

My uncle, speechless, started back, his mouth open, as though he had seen the devil himself. He was breathing like an ox.

I considered the situation too serious to cope with, and rushed madly out.

I didn’t return for two days. Louise had gone, leaving the key with the concierge. I never saw her again.

My uncle? He disinherited me in favor of my brother, who, warned by Louise, swore that he had refused to continue living with me because of my dissolute behavior, which he was unwilling to countenance.

I will never marry. Women are too dangerous.

Old Milon

For the past month the great sun had been casting its broiling heat over the fields. Nature is unfolding radiantly beneath this shower of fire; as far as the eye can reach, the earth is green. To the ends of the horizon, the sky is blue. The Norman farms scattered over the plain look, from the distance, like little woods, enclosed in their girdle of slender beeches. From near at hand, when the worm-eaten gate is opened, it is as though one were looking at a giant garden, for all the aged apple trees, bony of limb like country folk, are in flower. The rows of black, crooked, twisted old trunks in the farmyard display their dazzling white and pink domes under the sky. The sweet perfume of their blossoming mingles with the rich stenches of the open cowshed and the steam of the fermenting dungheap overrun with hens.

It is noon. The family is at dinner in the shade of the pear-tree by the door: the father, the mother, the four children, the two servants, and the three hired men. There is little speech. The soup is eaten, then the cover is taken off the dish full of potatoes cooked in fat.

From time to time a maid rises and goes down to the cellar to refill the pitcher of cider.

The man, a big fellow of forty, gazes at a vine, still bare of leaves, which grows up the front of his house, and runs, writhing like a snake, under the shutters, the whole length of the wall.

“The old man’s vine is budding early this year,” he remarks at last. “Maybe it will bear.”

The woman also turns round and looks at it, without speaking.

The vine is planted on the exact spot where the old man was shot.

It was during the war of 1870. The Prussians were occupying the entire district. General Faidherbe, with the Northern army, was putting up a stout resistance.

The Prussian staff was quartered at this farm. The old peasant who owned it, old Milon, Pierre Milon, had taken them in and installed them as comfortably as he could.

For a month the German advance-guard had remained in the village, reconnoitring. The French remained immovable ten leagues away; yet every night Uhlans kept disappearing.

All the detachments of scouts, those who were sent out on picket duty, when only two or three men set out together, never returned.

They were found dead in the morning, in a field, beside a farmyard, or in a ditch. Their horses lay at the roadside, with their throats cut with a sabre.

These murders all appeared to be committed by the same men, who could not be discovered.

The whole district was under a reign of terror. Peasants were shot on mere denunciation, and women imprisoned; an attempt was made to frighten the children into revealing the truth. Nothing was discovered.

But one morning old Milon was seen lying in his stable, with a slash cut across his face.

Two disembowelled Uhlans were found three kilometres from the farm. One still held his bloodstained weapon in his hand. He had fought, had defended himself.

A council of war was immediately established in the open, in front of the farm, and the old man was brought in.

He was sixty-eight. He was small, thin, and slightly crooked, with big hands like the claws of a crab. His faded, thin hair, light as a duckling’s down, concealed none of the flesh on his skull. The brown, creased skin on his neck showed veins which were lost under the jaws and reappeared at the temples. He was known throughout the neighbourhood as a miser and a hard man in business.

He was made to stand, between four soldiers, in front of the kitchen table, which had been carried out of doors. Five officers and the colonel sat facing him.

The colonel began speaking, in French:

“Father Milon, since we have been here, we have had nothing but praise for you. You have always been obliging, and even zealous, in our service. But today a terrible charge rests upon you, and the matter must be cleared up. How did you get the wound in your face?”

The peasant did not reply.

“Your silence condemns you, Milon,” continued the colonel. “But I will have an answer from you, do you hear? Do you know who killed the Uhlans who were found this morning near the Calvary?”

“It was me,” said the old man in a clear voice.

Amazed, the colonel remained silent for a second, staring fixedly at the prisoner. Old Milon remained impassive, with his besotted peasant expression, his eyes lowered as though he were talking to his priest. One thing only revealed his inner distress; again and again he kept swallowing his saliva, with a visible effort, as though his throat were tightly constricted.

The man’s family, his son Jean, his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, stood ten paces back, in frightened consternation.

“Do you also know who killed all the scouts in our army corps, who have been found every morning, in the district, for the past month?” went on the colonel.

“It was me,” replied the old man, with the same brutish impassivity.

“You killed all of them?”

“Yes, all of them; it was me.”

“You alone?”

“Me alone.”

“Tell me how you set about it.”

This time the man seemed affected; the necessity of speaking at some length visibly embarrassed him.

“How do I know?” he stammered. “I just did it like it happened.”

“I warn you that you will have to tell me everything,” said the colonel. “So you will do well to make up your mind to it at once. How did you begin?”

The man flung an uneasy glance to his anxious family behind him. He hesitated for another instant, then suddenly made up his mind.

“I was coming home one night, maybe ten o’clock, the day after you got here. You and your men, you’d taken more than fifty crowns’ worth of my forage, with a cow and two sheep. I said to myself: ‘So many times as they take twenty crowns’ worth of stuff, so many times I’ll pay them out for it.’ And I’d other things on my mind, too; I’ll tell you about them later. And then I saw one of your troopers smoking his pipe in my ditch, behind my barn. I went and got down my scythe, and came up very softly behind him; he never heard a sound. And I cut off his head with one blow, with a single blow, like an ear of corn; he never so much as said ‘Oh!’ You’ve only to look in the pond: you’ll find him there in a coal sack, with a stone off the wall.

“I had my scheme. I took all his things, from boots to cap, and hid them in the cement-kiln in Martin wood, behind the yard.”

The old man was silent. The astounded officers gazed at one another. The questioning went on again; and this is what they learnt:

Once the murder had been done, the man had lived this idea: “Kill Prussians!” He hated them with the cunning, desperate hatred of a peasant at once avaricious and patriotic. He had his scheme, as he said. He waited for a few days.

He was left free to come and go, enter and depart at his will, so humble, submissive, and obliging had he shown himself to the conquerors. Every night he saw the vedettes go out; and he went out himself, one night, having heard the name of the village for which the troopers were bound, and having learnt, thanks to the constant presence of the soldiers, the few words of German he needed.

He walked out of his own farmyard, slipped into the wood, reached the cement-kiln, walked to the far end of the long gallery, and, finding the dead man’s clothes on the ground, he put them on.

Then he went prowling through the fields, crawling along, following the embankments so as to conceal himself, stopping to listen at the faintest sound, restless as a poacher.

When he judged that the time had come, he went near the road and hid in a hedge. He waited again. At last, at about midnight, he heard a horse’s hoof ring out on the hard road. He set his ear to the ground, to make sure that only one horseman was approaching; then made ready.

The Uhlan came up at a fast trot, carrying dispatches. His eyes were on the lookout, and his ears alert. When he was no more than ten paces distant, old Milon crawled across the road, groaning: “Hilfe! Hilfe! Help, help!” The horseman stopped, recognised a dismounted German, imagined that he was wounded, got off his horse, and went up to him, without suspecting anything. As he bent over the stranger, he received the long curved blade of the sabre clean through the stomach. He fell, without a death struggle, only quivering with a few final tremors.

Then the Norman, radiant with an old peasant’s silent pleasure, rose and, to please himself, cut the throat of the corpse. Then he dragged it to the ditch and threw it in.

The horse was quietly waiting for its master. Old Milon got into the saddle and galloped off across the plain.

An hour later he perceived two more Uhlans side by side, returning to their camp. He went straight towards them, again shouting: “Hilfe! Hilfe!” The Prussians let him come on, recognising the uniform, without any distrust. And the old man dashed between them like a cannonball, felling both, one with his sabre, the other with a revolver.

Then he cut the throats of the horses, German horses! Then he went quietly back to the cement-kiln and hid a horse at the end of the dark gallery. He took off his uniform, put on his mean clothes again, and, getting into bed, slept till morning.

For the next four days he did not go out, as he was waiting for the end of the inquiry which had been opened; but on the fifth day he went out again and killed two more soldiers by the same stratagem.

Thenceforward he never stopped. Every night he wandered away, prowling about at random, killing Prussians first in one place, then elsewhere, galloping over the deserted fields, in the moonlight, a lost Uhlan, a hunter of men. Then, his task over, leaving the bodies lying in the roads behind him, the old horseman returned to hide his horse and uniform in the cement-kiln.

At about midday he would go out, with an unconcerned air, to take oats and water to his mount, which remained in the underground passage. He fed the beast without stint, for he demanded a great deal of work from it.

But, on the previous night, one of the men he had attacked had been on his guard, and had slashed the old peasant’s face with his sabre.

Even so, he had killed both men! He had once more returned, hidden his horse, and put on his humble clothes again; but while walking home, he had been overtaken by faintness and had crawled to the stable, unable to reach the house.

He was found there, bleeding, in the straw.

When he had ended his tale, he suddenly raised his head and stared proudly at the Prussian officers.

“Have you nothing more to say?” asked the colonel, pulling his moustache.

“No, nothing more; the score is paid: I’ve killed sixteen of them, not one more and not one less.”

“You know that you are going to die?”

“I never asked you for mercy.”

“Have you been in the army?”

“Yes. I’ve been to the wars, in my time. And besides, it was you that killed my father, who was a soldier under the first Emperor. Not counting that you killed my youngest son, François, last month, near Evreux. I owed you for that, and I’ve paid. We’re quits.”

The officers looked at one another.

The old man continued:

“Eight for my father, eight for my son, we’re quits. I never sought a quarrel with you! I don’t know you! I don’t even know where you come from. And here you are at my house, ordering people about as though you were at home. I had my revenge on the others. I don’t regret it.”

And, drawing up his crippled body, the old man folded his arms in the attitude of a humble hero.

For a long time the Prussians whispered together. A captain, who had also lost his son, the month before, defended the greathearted old peasant.

Then the colonel rose and went up to old Milon, saying, in a low voice:

“Listen, gaffer, there may be a way of saving your life, if you⁠ ⁠…”

But the man was not listening. His eyes were fixed upon the conquering officer, and, while the wind stirred the wisps of hair on his head, he made a frightful grimace which distorted his thin face, all seamed as it was by the sabre-gash, and, swelling his chest, he spat, with all his might, full in the Prussian’s face.

The furious colonel raised his hand, and for a second time the peasant spat in his face.

All the officers had risen and were shouting orders at the same time.

In less than a minute the old man, still quite impassive, was put against the wall and shot, smiling to Jean, his eldest son, his daughter-in-law, and the two little children, who stood watching, distracted with horror.

The Accursed Bread

Friend Joseph

For a whole winter in Paris they had been great friends and after losing sight of each other, as is usual, on leaving college, they met again in society when they were both old and grey; the one a bachelor, the other a married man.

Monsieur de Méroul spent six months in Paris and six months in his little château at Tourbeville. Having married the daughter of a neighbouring squire, he had lived a quiet peaceful life, indolently, the life of a man who has nothing to do. He was calm, methodical by nature; he had no sudden flashes of intelligence, or fits of independence, he spent his time quietly regretting the past, deploring the habits and institutions of the day, and continually repeating to his wife, who raised her eyes and occasionally her hands in sign of complete agreement: “What a government we’ve got, to be sure!”

Intellectually, Monsieur and Madame de Méroul were as much alike as if they had been brother and sister. She knew, by tradition, that first and foremost, the Pope and the King must be respected. And she loved and respected them from the bottom of her heart⁠—not knowing them⁠—with romantic fervour, hereditary devotion, and the tenderness of a woman of good birth. She was kindness itself. She had no children and never ceased to regret the fact.

When Monsieur de Méroul met his old friend Joseph Mourador at a ball, he was filled with unaffected joy at the meeting, for they had been great friends in their youth. After the first ejaculations of surprise on the changes age had wrought in their appearance, each one wanted to know what kind of life the other had led. Joseph Mourador, a Southerner, was a District Councillor. Frank of aspect, he talked quickly and without reserve, saying exactly what he thought without any consideration for the feelings of others. He was a Republican, one of those good-natured Republicans who make a virtue of being casual, and who stand for that freedom of speech which borders on brutality.

He visited his friend’s house, where, in spite of his advanced ideas, he was very popular on account of his easy cordiality. Madame de Méroul would exclaim: “What a pity! Such a charming man!” Monsieur de Méroul would say to his friend, seriously and confidentially: “You have no idea of the harm you are doing to our country.” Nevertheless he loved him, for nothing is stronger than the ties of childhood renewed in old age. Joseph Mourador bantered the husband and wife and called them “my dear slowcoaches,” and sometimes he would hold forth against old-fashioned people, against prejudice, and against tradition.

When he was engaged in this flow of democratic eloquence the couple, ill at ease, would keep silent out of politeness and good manners; then the husband would try to change the conversation so as to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. Joseph Mourador never went to formal receptions at the De Mérouls’.

Then summer came, when the Mérouls’ greatest pleasure was to have their friends on a visit to their country-house at Tourbeville. They were actuated by a simple friendly feeling, the pleasure of kindly disposed folk, country landowners. They would go to the nearest station to meet their guests and bring them back in the carriage, on the lookout for compliments about the country, its luxuriant vegetation, the departmental roads, the cleanliness of the peasants’ houses, the size of the cattle to be seen in the fields, in fact everything within sight.

They would call attention to the remarkable speed with which their horse trotted, remarkable for an animal employed in the fields part of the year; and they would anxiously await the newcomer’s opinion on their family estate, sensitive to the least word, and grateful for the slightest kindly appreciation.

Joseph Mourador had received an invitation and had written to announce his arrival.

Husband and wife had gone to meet the train, delighted to welcome him to their home. As soon as he caught sight of them, Joseph Mourador leaped from the carriage with an enthusiasm that increased their pleasure; he shook hands with them, congratulating them, and overwhelming them with compliments.

All the way home he was charming: he was surprised at the height of the trees, the richness of the crops, and the speed of the horse. When he set foot on the threshold of the house, Monsieur de Méroul said with a certain friendly solemnity: “You are at home, now,” and Joseph Mourador replied: “Thanks, my friend, I was expecting to be so. Anyhow I never stand on ceremony with my friends. That’s not my idea of hospitality.”

Then he went upstairs to his room to dress as a peasant, so he said, and came down in a blue linen suit, with a straw boater, yellow shoes, in fact in the getup of a Parisian on the spree. He seemed more vulgar, more jovial, more familiar, having apparently put on with his country clothes the free and easy manner which he considered the right thing. His new manners rather shocked Monsieur and Madame de Méroul, who were always serious and correct even in the country, as if compelled by the particle preceding their name to keep up a certain formality even in the friendliest intercourse.

After lunch they visited the farms, and the Parisian quite staggered the respectful peasants by his tone of hail-fellow-well-met. In the evening the priest came to dinner, an old, fat priest⁠—a regular Sunday guest⁠—who had been especially invited in honour of the new arrival.

As soon as he saw him, Joseph made a face, later he watched him with astonishment as if he were a rare creature of some peculiar race that he had never been able to observe at close quarters. During the meal he told some free and easy anecdotes permissible among friends but which to the Mérouls seemed out of place in the presence of a priest. He did not say “Monsieur l’Abbé” but simply “Monsieur”; and he made the priest uncomfortable by discussing the different superstitions current throughout the world. He said: “Your God is a God to be respected, but also one to be discussed. My god is called Reason and has always been the enemy of your God.”

The Mérouls, distressed, tried to change the conversation. The priest left very early.

The husband said very gently: “Perhaps you went a little too far with the priest.”

But Joseph burst out at once: “Well, that’s a good one, that is! As if I should put myself out for a sky-pilot! Moreover, you will be kind enough not to inflict his presence upon me at meals. You others can make as much use of him as you like, Sundays and weekdays, but don’t serve him up to your friends, hang it!”

“But, my dear fellow, think of his holy⁠—”

Joseph Mourador interrupted him: “Yes, I know, they must be treated like the Queen of the May! Everybody knows that, my dear man! Let them respect my convictions and I will respect theirs!”

That was all for that day.

When Madame Méroul went into the drawing room the next morning, she noticed in the middle of the table three newspapers that gave her a shock: the Voltaire, the République Française, and Justice. At the same time Joseph Mourador, still in blue, appeared at the door reading the Intransigeant attentively. He exclaimed: “There’s a great article by Rochefort in this! He is an amazing chap!” He read it out loud, emphasising the points, and was so full of enthusiasm that he did not notice his friend come into the room.

Monsieur de Méroul brought the Gaulois for himself and the Clairon for his wife.

The fiery prose of the great writer who was overturning the Empire, recited with violence, sung with a southern accent, rang through the peaceful drawing room, shaking the old curtains with their straight folds, seeming to fling itself in a storm of leaping, impudent, ironical and destructive words against the walls, the big tapestry chairs and the solemn furniture that had never been moved from its place for over a century.

Monsieur standing and Madame seated listened with amazement, so shocked that they were unable to make any protest.

Mourador made his last point like setting off fireworks, and declared with triumph: “Well? That’s slashing enough?”

Then he caught sight of the two papers his friend was carrying, and he in his turn was filled with surprise. With long strides he crossed the room and asked indignantly: “What are you going to do with those papers?”

Monsieur de Méroul replied hesitatingly: “But⁠—these are my⁠—my papers!”

“Your papers⁠—come, come, you’re making fun of me! You are going to read mine. They will broaden your ideas. As for your papers⁠—there, that’s how I treat them!”

Before his astonished host could prevent it, he had seized the two papers and thrown them out of the window. Then he gravely handed Justice to Madame de Méroul, the Voltaire to her husband, and sank into an armchair to finish the Intransigeant.

Out of politeness the couple made a pretence of reading some of the news, then returned the Republican papers to their friend, handling them very gingerly as if they were poisoned. He laughed and declared: “One week of this regime and you will be converted to my ideas.”

True enough, at the end of the week he was running the house. He had closed the door against the priest, whom Madame de Méroul secretly went to see; he would not allow the Gaulois and the Clairon to be brought to the house, but a servant went to the post office to fetch them every day and they were promptly hidden under the sofa cushions the minute Joseph appeared. He arranged everything according to his wishes, was always charming and good-natured; in fact, an all-powerful, jovial tyrant.

Other friends were expected, religious friends with Legitimist political opinions, but the hosts saw that a meeting with their old friend was impossible, and not knowing what to do, one evening they told him that they were obliged to go away on business for a few days, and begged him to stay on alone. He was not at all worried, and answered:

“Very well, I don’t mind. I will wait here as long as you like. I have already said that there should be no formality between friends. Hang it all! You are quite right to go and attend to your business affairs. I would never be offended at that; on the contrary, it makes me feel quite at home. Off you go, my friends, I will wait for you!”

Monsieur and Madame de Méroul left the following day. He is still waiting for their return.

The Mother of Monsters

I was reminded of this horrible story and this horrible woman on the seafront the other day, as I stood watching⁠—at a watering-place much frequented by the wealthy⁠—a lady well known in Paris, a young, elegant, and charming girl, loved and respected by all who know her.

My story is now many years old, but it is impossible to forget such things.

I had been invited by a friend to make a long stay with him in a small country town. In order to do the honours of the district, he took me about all over the place; made me see the most celebrated views, the manor houses and castles, the local industries, the ruins; he showed me the monuments, the churches, the old carved doors, the trees of specially large size or uncommon shape, the oak of St. Andrew and the Roqueboise yew.

When, with exclamations of gratified enthusiasm, I had inspected all the curiosities in the district, my friend confessed, with every sign of acute distress, that there was nothing more to visit. I breathed again. I should be able, at last, to enjoy a little rest under the shade of the trees. But suddenly he exclaimed:

“Why, no, there is one more. There’s the mother of monsters.”

“And who,” I asked, “is the mother of monsters?”

He answered: “She is a horrible woman, a perfect demon, a creature who every year deliberately produces deformed, hideous, frightful children, veritable monsters, and sells them to peepshow men.

“The men who follow this ghastly trade come from time to time to discover whether she has brought forth any fresh abortion, and if they like the look of the object, they pay the mother and take it away with them.

“She has eleven of these offspring. She is rich.

“You think I’m joking, making it all up, exaggerating. No, my friend, I’m only telling you the truth, the literal truth.

“Come and see this woman. I’ll tell you afterwards how she became a monster-factory.”

He took me off to the outskirts of the town.

She lived in a nice little house by the side of the road. It was pretty and well kept. The garden was full of flowers, and smelt delicious. Anyone would have taken it for the home of a retired lawyer.

A servant showed us into a little parlour, and the wretched creature appeared.

She was about forty, tall, hard-featured, but well built, vigorous, and wealthy, the true type of robust peasantry, half animal and half woman.

She was aware of the disapproval in which she was held, and seemed to receive us with malignant humility.

“What do the gentlemen want?” she inquired.

My friend replied: “We have been told that your last child is just like any other child, and not in the least like his brothers. I wanted to verify this. Is it true?”

She gave us a sly glance of anger and answered:

“Oh, no, sir, oh dear no! He’s even uglier, mebbe, than the others. I’ve no luck, no luck at all, they’re all that way, sir, all like that, it’s something cruel; how can the good Lord be so hard on a poor woman left all alone in the world!”

She spoke rapidly, keeping her eyes lowered, with a hypocritical air, like a sacred wild beast. She softened the harsh tone of her voice, and it was amazing to hear these tearful high-pitched words issuing from that great bony body, with its coarse angular strength, made for violent gesture and wolfish howling.

“We should like to see your child,” my friend asked.

She appeared to blush. Had I perhaps been mistaken? After some moments of silence she said, in a louder voice: “What would be the use of that?”

She had raised her head, and gave us a swift, burning glance.

“Why don’t you wish to show him to us?” answered my friend. “There are many people to whom you show him. You know whom I mean.”

She started up, letting loose the full fury of her voice.

“So that’s what you’ve come for, is it? Just to insult me? Because my bairns are like animals, eh? Well, you’ll not see them, no, no, no, you shan’t. Get out of here. I know you all, the whole pack of you, bullying me about like this!”

She advanced towards us, her hands on her hips. At the brutal sound of her voice, a sort of moan, or rather a mew, a wretched lunatic screech, issued from the next room. I shivered to the marrow. We drew back before her.

In a severe tone my friend warned her:

“Have a care, She-devil”⁠—the people all called her She-devil⁠—“have a care, one of these days this will bring you bad luck.”

She trembled with rage, waving her arms, mad with fury, and yelling:

“Get out of here, you! What’ll bring me bad luck? Get out of here, you pack of unbelieving dogs, you!”

She almost flew at our throats; we fled, our hearts contracted with horror.

When we were outside the door, my friend asked:

“Well, you’ve seen her; what do you say to her?”

I answered: “Tell me the history of the brute.”

And this is what he told me, as we walked slowly back along the white high road, bordered on either side by the ripe corn that rippled like a quiet sea under the caress of a small gentle wind.

The girl had once been a servant on a farm, a splendid worker, well-behaved and careful. She was not known to have a lover, and was not suspected of any weakness.

She fell, as they all do, one harvest night among the heaps of corn, under a stormy sky, when the still, heavy air is hot like a furnace, and the brown bodies of the lads and girls are drenched with sweat.

Feeling soon after that she was pregnant, she was tormented with shame and fear. Desirous at all costs of hiding her misfortune, she forcibly compressed her belly by a method she invented, a horrible corset made of wood and ropes. The more the growing child swelled her body, the more she tightened the instrument of torture, suffering agony, but bearing her pain with courage, always smiling and active, letting no one see or suspect anything.

She crippled the little creature inside her, held tightly in that terrible machine; she crushed him, deformed him, made a monster of him. The skull was squeezed almost flat and ran to a point, with the two great eyes jutting right out from the forehead. The limbs, crushed against the body, were twisted like the stem of a vine, and grew to an inordinate length, with the fingers and toes like spiders’ legs.

The trunk remained quite small and round like a nut.

She gave birth to it in the open fields one spring morning.

When the women weeders, who had run to her help, saw the beast which was appearing, they fled shrieking. And the story ran round the neighbourhood that she had brought a demon into the world. It was then that she got the name “She-Devil.”

She lost her place. She lived on charity, and perhaps on secret love, for she was a fine-looking girl, and not all men are afraid of hell.

She brought up her monster, which, by the way, she hated with a savage hatred, and which she would perhaps have strangled had not the curé, foreseeing the likelihood of such a crime, terrified her with threats of the law.

At last one day some passing showmen heard tell of the frightful abortion, and asked to see it, intending to take it away if they liked it. They did like it, and paid the mother five hundred francs down for it. Ashamed at first, she did not want to let them see a beast of this sort; but when she discovered that it was worth money, that these people wanted it, she began to bargain, to dispute it penny by penny, inflaming them with the tale of her child’s deformities, raising her prices with peasant tenacity.

In order not to be cheated, she made a contract with them. And they agreed to pay her four hundred francs a year as well, as though they had taken this beast into their service.

The unhoped-for good fortune crazed the mother, and after that she never lost the desire to give birth to another phenomenon, so that she would have a fixed income like the upper classes.

As she was very fertile, she succeeded in her ambition, and apparently became expert at varying the shapes of her monsters according to the pressure they were made to undergo during the period of her pregnancy.

She had them long and short, some like crabs and others like lizards. Several died, whereat she was deeply distressed.

The law attempted to intervene, but nothing could be proved. So she was left to manufacture her marvels in peace.

She now has eleven of them alive, which bring her in from five to six thousand francs, year in and year out. One only is not yet placed, the one she would not show us. But she will not keep it long, for she is known now to all the circus proprietors in the world, who come from time to time to see whether she has anything new.

She even arranges auctions between them, when the creature in question is worth it.

My friend was silent. A profound disgust surged in my heart, a furious anger, and regret that I had not strangled the brute when I had her in my hands.

“Then who is the father?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” he replied. “He or they have a certain modesty. He, or they, remain concealed. Perhaps they share in the spoils.”

I had thought no more of that far-off adventure until the other day, at a fashionable watering-place, when I saw a charming elegant lady, the most skilful of coquettes, surrounded by several men who have the highest regard for her.

I walked along the front, arm in arm with my friend, the local doctor. Ten minutes later I noticed a nurse looking after three children who were rolling about on the sand.

A pathetic little pair of crutches lay on the ground. Then I saw that the three children were deformed, hunchbacked and lame; hideous little creatures.

The doctor said to me: “Those are the offspring of the charming lady you met just now.”

I felt a profound pity for her and for them.

“The poor mother!” I cried. “How does she still manage to laugh?”

“Don’t pity her, my dear fellow,” replied my friend. “It’s the poor children who are to be pitied. That’s the result of keeping the figure graceful right up to the last day. Those monsters are manufactured by corsets. She knows perfectly well that she’s risking her life at that game. What does she care, so long as she remains pretty and seductive?”

And I remembered the other, the peasant woman, the She-Devil, who sold hers.

The Orphan

Mademoiselle Source had adopted the boy under very sad circumstances. At the time, she was thirty-six years old, and her deformity (when a little girl she had slipped from her nurse’s knee into the fire, and her face had been horribly burnt and was a terrible sight) had determined her not to marry, for she did not want to be married for her money.

A neighbour, who was with child when she became a widow, died in her confinement, leaving no money at all. Mademoiselle Source looked after the baby, put it out to nurse, brought it up, sent it to school, and then took the boy home when he was fourteen that she might have someone to love her in the empty house, someone to look after her and to sweeten her old age.

She lived on a little country estate four miles from Rennes, and had given up keeping a servant, because her expenses had more than doubled since she had adopted the orphan, her income of three thousand francs not being sufficient for three people.

She did her own cooking and housework and sent the youngster, who looked after the garden, to do the errands. He was gentle, shy, quiet, and affectionate, and she felt a deep joy⁠—quite a new experience for her⁠—when he kissed her without being astonished at or afraid of her ugliness. He called her Auntie and treated her like a mother.

In the evenings they both sat by the fireside while she prepared something nice for him: hot wine and toasted bread, which made an enjoyable light supper before going to bed. She often took him on her knee and fondled him, murmuring words of passionate tenderness. She used to call him “my little flower, my cherub, my darling angel, my precious jewel,” to all of which he was gently submissive, laying his head on the old maid’s shoulder.

Although nearly fifteen now, he was still little and frail, and looked rather unhealthy. Sometimes Mademoiselle Source would take him into town to see the only two relations she had left⁠—distant cousins who were married and lived in one of the suburbs. The two women had a grievance against her for adopting the child, on account of her money, but they welcomed her nevertheless, still hoping for their share⁠—in all probability one-third⁠—if the inheritance were equally divided.

She was very, very happy, her time being fully occupied with her child; she bought him books to develop his mind, and he became a great reader.

He no longer sat on her knee in the evenings to fondle her, but would rush to his chair by the fire and get his book. The light from the lamp, placed on the table just above his head, was reflected on his curly hair and part of his forehead; he never moved, never raised his eyes, but went on reading, entirely absorbed in the adventures in print.

Seated on the opposite side of the fire, she would gaze at him with a fixed, loving gaze, surprised at his concentration, feeling jealous, and often ready to cry about it. Every now and then she would say: “You will overtire yourself, my treasure!” hoping that he would raise his head and come and kiss her, but he never answered; he never heard her; he had not understood; he was oblivious of everything except the book he was reading.

For two years he simply devoured a great number of books, and there was a change in his character. He began to ask Mademoiselle Source for money, which she gave him, but as his demands kept growing she ended by refusing to give any more, for she was energetic and methodical, and could be sensible when necessary.

After much pleading he did obtain a considerable sum one evening, but when a few days later he begged for more, she was quite determined, and, indeed, she never yielded to his pleadings again.

He was apparently reconciled to do without and returned to his former ways, sitting quietly for hours with downcast eyes, lost in daydreaming. He never talked to Mademoiselle Source, and only replied to short, sharp sentences. However, he was charming and considerate to her, but never kissed her.

He occasionally made her feel frightened as they sat opposite each other by the fireside, silent and still. She wanted to rouse him, to say something, anything, to him, to break the silence which was as terrifying as the gloom of a forest. But he never seemed to hear her, and she trembled with terror⁠—as poor weak women will⁠—when she received no reply after speaking five or six times.

What was the matter? What was passing in that impenetrable mind? After some two or three hours spent in this way, she felt she must be going mad, she wanted to go away, to escape from the house, not only to avoid this everlasting dumb tête-à-tête, but to avoid, too, a vague unknown danger that she felt threatening her. She would often weep in her loneliness. What was the matter with him? She had only to express a wish and he carried it out without a murmur. If she wanted anything in town, he would go off and fetch it at once. She certainly had no ground for complaint! And yet⁠—

A year passed by, and it struck her that there was another change in the young man. How had she noticed this, felt it, guessed it? No matter! She knew she was not mistaken, but she could not have put into words the change that had occurred in that strange youth’s unknown thoughts. To her it seemed that where he had been beset with hesitation, he was now quite resolute; this idea struck her one evening when she caught him staring at her curiously, with an expression she had never seen before.

After that he watched her continually until she felt as if she must hide herself to avoid the cold glance always fixed upon her. For whole evenings he would stare at her, only turning away his eyes when, reduced to helplessness, she said: “Don’t look at me like that, my child!” Then he would lower his head. But as soon as her back was turned she felt his eye upon her again. Wherever she went, he followed her with his tenacious gaze. Sometimes in the garden she would suddenly catch sight of him crouched among the shrubs as if he were hiding; or else when she was seated out of doors mending stockings, and he was digging in the vegetable garden, he would slyly and persistently watch her all the time he was at work. It was no use asking him: “What is the matter, my dear? You are so changed these last three years, I can’t recognise you. I implore you to tell me what’s wrong, what is filling your thoughts.”

He invariably answered, in a quiet, tired voice: “But nothing’s the matter, Auntie!” And when she insisted with: “Oh! my child, answer me, answer me when I speak to you. If you could know how you make me suffer, you would always answer, and you would not look at me in that way. Are you in trouble? Tell me, I will comfort you⁠—” he would go off wearily, muttering: “But I assure you nothing’s wrong with me.”

He had not grown much and still looked like a child though his features were those of a man. They were, however, hard and looked unfinished. He seemed somehow incomplete, unpleasant to the eye, only a sketch, so to speak, and as alarming as a mystery. He was quite closed to outer influences, impenetrable, a prey to some constant mental ferment, both active and dangerous.

Mademoiselle Source could not help feeling all this, and her anguish of mind prevented her from sleeping. She was assailed by appalling terror and horrible nightmares. She locked herself in her room and barricaded the door, tortured by a panic fear. Of what was she afraid?

She had no idea.

She was afraid of everything, the night, the walls, the shadows projected by the moon through the white curtains at the windows, and, above all, she was afraid of him.

Why?

What had she to fear? Did she know of anything? She could not go on living like that. She knew she was menaced by some misfortune, some appalling misfortune.

One morning, secretly, she went to town to see her relatives and breathlessly told them what she felt. The two women thought she was going mad and tried to reassure her. She said to them: “If you only knew how he looks at me from morning till night! He never takes his eyes off me! Sometimes I want to shout for help, call in the neighbours, I am so afraid! But what could I say to them? He does nothing but stare at me.”

The cousins said: “Does he ever treat you roughly, does he answer you rudely?”

She replied: “No, never; he does everything I wish, he works well and is very steady now; but I am beside myself with fright. He has some idea in his head, I know it, I know it. I won’t stay any longer in the country alone with him.”

The scared relatives told her that everyone would be surprised, that no one would understand, and advised her to put aside her fears and give up her plans, but they did not discourage her from coming to live in town, in the hope that the removal would secure all her property for the two of them. They even promised to help her to sell her house and to find another one near them.

Mademoiselle Source went back home but she was in such a state of nerves that she started at the least sound and her hands trembled at the merest trifle.

She visited her relatives again twice, now quite determined not to remain in her lonely country home, and at last she found a suitable little house in the suburb, which she secretly bought.

The contract was signed on a Tuesday morning, and the rest of the day was spent in arranging for the removal. Mademoiselle Source caught the eight o’clock p.m. coach which passed about a mile and a half from the house, and stopped at the spot where the driver usually set her down. As he whipped up his horses he shouted: “Good night, Mademoiselle Source, good night!” and she replied as she was moving away: “Good night, Father Joseph.”

At seven o’clock the next morning, the village postman noticed a big pool of fresh blood on the crossroad not far from the highway, and said to himself: “Halloa! Some drunken lout’s nose has been bleeding.” But a few steps farther on he picked up a fine cambric handkerchief stained with blood, and as he neared the ditch he thought he could see some strange object lying there.

Mademoiselle Source was lying at the bottom of the ditch with her throat cut. An hour later, the gendarmes, the magistrate and others in authority gathered round the corpse, all giving their opinion as to what had happened. The two relations, called as witnesses, came and told them of the old maid’s fears and of the arrangements she had just made.

The orphan was arrested. Since his adopted mother’s death he had done nothing but weep, plunged, at least to all appearances, in the deepest woe. He was able to prove that he had spent the evening up to eleven o’clock in a café; he had been seen by ten people who had been there until he left. As the coach-driver declared that he had set the murdered woman down between half past nine and ten o’clock, the crime could only have been committed on the road leading from the highway to the house, not later than ten o’clock. The prisoner was acquitted.

By a will drawn up years before and left with a notary of Rennes, he was made sole legatee, and got all the property.

For a long time the country folk kept him at a distance, still suspecting him of the murder. His house, the dead woman’s house, was looked upon as bearing a curse, and everybody avoided him in the street. But he was so companionable, so friendly, that the horrible suspicion about him was gradually forgotten. He was generous, considerate, and would chat at will with the humblest of his neighbours.

The notary, Maître Rameau, was one of the first to revise his opinions about him, being captivated by the young man’s bright conversation. One evening when dining with the Collector of Taxes he declared that “a man with his gift of words⁠—always good-humoured⁠—cannot have such a dreadful crime on his conscience.” Impressed by the argument, the guests thought the matter over. They remembered the long conversations held by this man, who would stop them at the corner of the road and make them listen to him, who forced them into his house as they passed by, who made a better joke than the Lieutenant of the Armed Police Force himself, and was so infectiously cheerful that one could not help laughing when with him in spite of the repugnance he inspired.

Once more all doors were opened to him. He is now mayor of his commune.

Old Boniface’s Crime

As Boniface the postman left the post office he discovered that his round that day would not take as long as usual, and felt a sharp pleasure in the knowledge. His task was the rural delivery outside the town of Vireville, and when he returned at night, with long weary strides, his legs had often more than forty kilometres behind them.

So his delivery would be quickly done! He could even loiter a little on the way and get home by about three in the afternoon. What luck!

He left the town by the Sennemare road and began his duties. It was June, the green and flowery month, the month when the meadows were looking their best.

Dressed in a blue blouse, and wearing a black cap with red braid, the postman took the narrow paths across fields of colza, oats, or wheat. The crops were shoulder-high, and his head, passing along above the ears, appeared to float on a calm green sea rippled gently by a little wind.

He entered the farms through wooden gates set in the hedgerows shaded by double rows of beeches, and greeting the peasant by name: “Good morning, Monsieur Chicot,” he would offer him his paper, the Petit Normand. The farmer would wipe his hand on the seat of his breeches, take the sheet of paper, and slip it into his pocket to read at his leisure after the midday meal. The dog, kennelled in a barrel, at the foot of a leaning apple tree, would bark furiously and tug at his chain, and the postman, without turning round, would set off again with his military gait, his long legs taking great strides, his left hand in his sack, his right swinging with a quick ceaseless gesture the stick that kept him company on his round.

He delivered his letters and circulars at the hamlet of Sennemare, and then went on across the fields to deliver his mail to the tax-collector, who lived in a little house half a mile from the village.

He was a new collector, Monsieur Chapatis, who had arrived the previous week and was but recently married.

He took in a Paris paper, and sometimes postman Boniface, when he had the time to spare, would glance at it before handing it over to its destined owner.

Accordingly he opened his sack, took out the newspaper, slipped off the band, unfolded it, and began to read it as he walked. The first page was of no interest to him; politics left him cold; he never looked at the financial news, but the news items enthralled him.

Today they were particularly rich in excitement. He was so strongly affected by the story of a crime committed in a gamekeeper’s cottage that he stopped in the middle of a patch of clover to read it slowly through again. The details were appalling. A woodcutter, passing the keeper’s cottage one morning, noticed a little blood on the doorstep, as though someone’s nose had been bleeding. “He killed a rabbit last night,” thought the woodcutter, but, drawing nearer, he observed that the door was ajar and that the lock had been smashed.

Then, seized with terror, he ran to the village to inform the mayor; the latter brought with him the constable and the schoolmaster as reinforcements, and the four men went back together. They found the keeper lying in front of the fireplace with his throat cut, his wife under the bed, strangled, and their little six-year-old daughter suffocated between two mattresses.

Boniface the postman was so deeply affected at the thought of this murder, the horrible details of which came home to him one by one, that he felt a weakness in his legs, and said out loud:

“Good Lord, there are some villains in this world!”

Then he slipped the journal back into its paper belt and set off again, his mind reeling with visions of the crime. Shortly, he reached Monsieur Chapatis’ dwelling; he opened the gate of the little garden and approached the house. It was a low building, consisting merely of a ground-floor surmounted by a mansard roof. It was at least five hundred yards from the nearest neighbouring house.

The postman mounted the two steps up to the entrance, set his hand to the knob, attempted to open the door, and found it locked. Then he saw that the shutters had not been opened, and that no one had left the house that day.

He was seized with a feeling of uneasiness, for ever since his arrival Monsieur Chapatis had been in the habit of rising early. Boniface pulled out his watch. It was only ten past seven, so that he was nearly an hour ahead of his usual time. Still, the tax-collector should have been up and about.

So he went round the building, walking with circumspection, as though he were in danger. He observed nothing suspicious, except a man’s footprints in a strawberry-bed.

But suddenly he paused, motionless, transfixed with horror, as he passed in front of a window. Groans were coming from inside the house.

He went towards it and, straddling across a border of thyme, set his ear to the penthouse-shed to hear the better; the sound of groans was unmistakable. He could hear plainly long sighs of pain, something like a death-rattle, the sound of a struggle. Then the groans became louder and more frequent, grew even more frenzied, and became screams.

Boniface, no longer in any doubt that a crime was being committed at that very moment in the tax-collector’s house, rushed off as fast as his legs could carry him. He fled back through the little garden and dashed across the meadows and cornfields. He ran breathlessly, shaking his sack so that it banged against his back, and arrived, exhausted, panting, and desperate, at the door of the police station.

Inspector Malautour was mending a broken chair with tin-tacks and a hammer. Constable Rantieux was gripping the broken piece of furniture between his legs and holding a nail at the edge of the break; the inspector, chewing his moustache, his eyes round and moist with concentration, hit his subordinate’s fingers at every stroke.

As soon as he saw them the postman cried out:

“Come quick, somebody’s murdering the tax-collector! Come quick, quick!”

The two men ceased their work and looked up, with the dumbfounded air of men suddenly and amazingly interrupted.

Boniface, seeing that their surprise was greater than their haste, said again:

“Quick! Quick! Thieves are in the house, I heard screams, there’s barely time!”

The inspector set down his hammer and asked:

“Who was it who informed you of this deed?”

The postman replied:

“I was going to deliver the paper and two letters when I noticed that the door was shut and that the tax-collector had not yet got up. I walked round the house to try and find out the reason, and heard someone groaning as though he were being strangled or had had his throat cut, so I came away to fetch you as fast as I could go. There’s barely time.”

The inspector drew himself up to his full height and said:

“You did not render assistance in person?”

“I was afraid that I was not present in sufficient strength,” replied the frightened postman.

At that the police official was convinced, and said:

“A moment, while I put my coat on, and I’ll follow you.”

He went into the police station, followed by his subordinate carrying back the chair.

They reappeared almost immediately and all three set off with vigorous strides for the scene of the crime.

Arriving near the house, they carefully slowed their pace, and the inspector drew his revolver. Very softly they penetrated into the garden and approached the wall of the house. There were no new signs indicating that the malefactors had departed. The door was still shut, the windows still closed.

“We’ve got them,” murmured the inspector.

Old Boniface, quivering with excitement, made him go round to the other side and, pointing to a lean-to shed, said:

“It’s in there.”

The inspector went forward alone, and set his ear to the boards. The two others waited, ready for anything, their eyes fixed upon him.

For a long time he remained motionless, listening. In order to apply his ear closer to the wooden shutter, he had taken off his cocked hat and was holding it in his right hand.

What was he hearing? His impassive face revealed nothing, but suddenly the tips of his moustache turned up, his cheeks were creased as though in silent laughter, and once more straddling across the box-tree border, he came back towards the two men, who stared at him amazed.

Then he signed to them to follow him on tiptoe and, having reached the entrance, bade Boniface slip the paper and letters under the door.

The postman, dumbfounded, obeyed meekly.

“And now off we go,” said the inspector.

But as soon as they had passed through the gate, he turned to Boniface, showed the whites of his eyes, gleaming with merriment, and spoke in a bantering tone, with a knowing flicker of his eyelids:

“You’re a sly dog, you are.”

“What do you mean?” replied the old man. “I heard it, I swear I heard it.”

But the policeman, unable to restrain himself any longer, burst into a roar of laughter. He laughed as if he would choke, bent double, his hands across his belly, his eyes filled with tears, the flesh on each side of his nose distorted into a frightful grimace. The two others stared at him in bewilderment.

But as he could neither speak nor stop laughing nor make them understand what was affecting him, he made a gesture, a quite vulgar and scandalous gesture.

As he still failed to make himself understood, he repeated the movement several times, nodding towards the house, still shuttered.

Suddenly his man understood, in his turn, and burst into formidable transports of merriment.

The old man stood stupidly between the other two, who rolled in agonies of mirth.

At last the inspector grew calm; he gave the old man a vigorous chaffing poke in the stomach, and exclaimed:

“Ah, you sly dog, you and your jokes! I shan’t forget old Boniface’s crime in a hurry.”

The postman, his large eyes wide open, said once more:

“I swear I heard it.”

The inspector began to laugh again. His constable had sat down on the grass at the roadside to have his laugh out in comfort.

“Ah, you heard it, did you? And is that how you murder your wife, eh, you dirty dog?”

“My wife?” He reflected at some length, then replied:

“My wife.⁠ ⁠… Yes, she hollers when I knock her about⁠ ⁠… but if she does, what’s a bit of noise, anyway? Was Monsieur Chapatis beating his?”

At that the inspector, in a delirium of mirth, turned him round like a puppet with his hands on his shoulders, and whispered into his ear something at which the postman was struck dumb with amazement.

At last the old man murmured thoughtfully:

“No.⁠ ⁠… Not like that.⁠ ⁠… Not like that.⁠ ⁠… Not a bit like that.⁠ ⁠… Mine doesn’t say anything.⁠ ⁠… I’d never have believed it⁠ ⁠… is it possible?⁠ ⁠… Anyone would have sworn that a murder was taking place.”

And filled with shame, confusion, and bewilderment, he went on his way across the fields, while the constable and the inspector, still laughing and shouting pungent barrack jests after him, watched his black cap recede into the distance above the quiet waves of the corn.

The Greenhouse

M. and Mme. Lerebour were the same age. But Monsieur seemed the younger, although he was the more infirm. They lived near Mantes in a pretty country place they had built, after making a fortune selling printed calicoes.

The house was surrounded by a fine garden containing a poultry-run, Chinese kiosks, and a little greenhouse at the far end of the grounds. M. Lerebour was short, fat, and jovial, with the manners of a convivial shopkeeper. His wife, thin, wilful, and always discontented, had not succeeded in conquering her husband’s good humour. She dyed her hair, and sometimes read novels which put dreams into her head, although she affected to despise books of that sort. She was declared to be a passionate woman, without ever having done anything to justify the opinion. But her husband sometimes said: “My wife’s hot stuff!” with a certain significant air which gave rise to conjectures.

But for some years she had been behaving unkindly to M. Lerebour, always irritable and harsh, as though she were tormented by a secret sorrow she could not confess. A sort of misunderstanding resulted. They hardly spoke to one another, and Madame, whose name was Palmyre, was constantly loading Monsieur, whose name was Gustave, with disagreeable remarks, wounding illusions, and sharp words, without apparent reason.

He bowed under it, worried, but still gay, blessed with such a fund of contentment that he could shoulder these intimate bickerings. Yet he wondered what unknown cause could be making his wife grow more and more bitter, for he felt sure that her irritation had a cause which was not only hidden, but so difficult to discover that all his efforts were wasted.

He often asked her:

“Look here, dear, do tell me what grievance you have against me. I can feel you are concealing something.”

“No, nothing, absolutely nothing,” she invariably replied. “And anyhow, if I had any reason for being unhappy, it would be your business to guess it. I don’t like men who never realise anything, men who are so slack and incapable that you have to go and help them understand the smallest trifle.”

“I see you don’t mean to tell me,” he would murmur, discouraged, and would go off, searching for the mystery.

The nights especially became very painful for him; for they still shared the same bed, as in happy and simple homes. At these times there were no vexations with which she did not harass him. She would choose the moment when they were lying side by side to load him with her cruelest sneers and insults. Principally, she reproached him for growing fat:

“You take up all the room, you’re getting so fat. And you perspire in the back like melted lard. Do you suppose I like it!”

She made him get up on the slightest pretexts, sending him downstairs to get a newspaper she had forgotten, or the bottle of orange-flower water, which he could not find because she had hidden it. And she would exclaim in a furious and sarcastic tone:

“But you ought to know where to find it, you great booby!”

And when he had prowled for an hour all over the sleeping house and returned empty-handed, all the thanks he would get was:

“Come on, get back into bed; a little walking will make you thinner; you’re getting as flabby as a sponge.”

She was always waking him up, saying she had cramp in the stomach and insisting on his rubbing her with flannel soaked in eau de cologne. And he would do his best to cure her, miserable at seeing her ill, and would suggest rousing Céleste, their maid. Then she would lose her temper, and shout:

“Is the dolt quite off his head! It’s all over, I’m all right now! Go to sleep again, you great ninny!”

“You’re quite sure you’re all right?” he would ask.

“Yes, keep quiet, and let me go to sleep,” she flung at him harshly. “Don’t bother me any more. You’re no good at anything, you can’t even rub a woman.”

“But⁠ ⁠… darling⁠ ⁠…” he would begin, desperately.

“No buts,” she would interrupt in exasperation. “That’s enough, isn’t it? Now do shut up⁠ ⁠…” and she would turn to the wall.

One night she shook him so abruptly that he started with fright and found himself sitting up with a rapidity unusual for him.

“What?⁠ ⁠… What is it?⁠ ⁠…” he stammered.

She was holding him by the arm and pinching hard enough to make him cry out.

“I heard a noise in the house,” she whispered in his ear.

Accustomed to Mme. Lerebour’s frequent alarms, he was not excessively uneasy, and asked calmly:

“What sort of noise, darling?”

She was trembling as though out of her wits, and replied:

“A noise⁠ ⁠… well, a noise⁠ ⁠… a noise of footsteps.⁠ ⁠… There is someone about.”

He was incredulous:

“Someone about? Do you think so? No; you must be mistaken. Who do you think it could be?”

She shook with rage:

“Who?⁠ ⁠… Who?⁠ ⁠… Why, thieves, you fool!”

He calmly snuggled under the sheets again.

“No, darling, there’s no one. You must have been dreaming.”

At this she threw back the coverlet and jumped out of bed, exasperated.

“So you’re as cowardly as you are useless! At all events, I won’t let myself be murdered in my bed on account of your cowardice.”

And snatching up the tongs from the fireplace, she settled herself at the bolted door in an attitude of combat.

Stirred by this example of valour, and perhaps ashamed, he rose sulkily and, without taking off his cotton nightcap, he took the shovel and placed himself opposite his better half.

For twenty minutes they waited in the deepest silence. No fresh sound disturbed the repose of the house. Then Madame, furious, went back to bed, declaring:

“But I was certain there was someone.”

To avoid any quarrel, he made no allusion during the day to her panic.

But the following night, Mme. Lerebour woke her husband with even more violence than on the previous night, and, gasping, faltered:

“Gustave, Gustave, someone has just opened the garden gate.”

Astonished at this persistence, he thought his wife a prey to somnambulism, and he was on the point of trying to break this dangerous slumber, when he fancied he really did hear a faint noise under the walls of the house.

He rose, ran to the window, and saw, yes, really saw a white shadow hurrying across a path.

“There is someone,” he murmured, with a sickening qualm.

Then he regained his senses, pulled himself together, and, suddenly exalted by the formidable fury of a landowner whose property is not being respected, said:

“Wait, wait, and you shall see.”

He rushed to the writing-table, opened it, grabbed his revolver, and dashed towards the stairs.

His frantic wife followed, screaming:

“Gustave, Gustave, don’t desert me, don’t leave me alone, Gustave! Gustave!”

But he paid no attention to her; his hand was already on the garden gate.

Thereupon she hastily went back upstairs and barricaded herself in the conjugal apartment.

She waited five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. A wild panic attacked her. Without any doubt they had killed him, had seized him, garrotted him, and strangled him. She would have preferred to hear the six revolver shots ring out, to know that he was fighting, defending himself. But the utter silence, the terrifying silence of the country was too much for her.

She rang for Céleste. Céleste did not come, did not reply. She rang again, swooning, on the point of losing consciousness. The entire house remained dumb.

She pressed her burning brow against the windowpane, trying to penetrate the darkness outside. She could make out nothing but the blacker shadows of the copses beside the grey lines of the paths.

A clock struck half past twelve. Her husband had been gone three-quarters of an hour. She would never see him again! She would certainly never see him again! She fell on her knees, sobbing.

Two faint knocks on the door of the room made her leap up. M. Lerebour was calling:

“Open the door, Palmyre, it’s me.”

She ran to it and opened it, then stood in front of him, her hands on her hips, her eyes still filled with tears.

“Where have you been, you beast! Leaving me like this to die of fear all by myself! You take no more thought for me than if I didn’t exist.⁠ ⁠…”

He had closed the door, and was laughing, laughing like a madman, his two cheeks split by his wide-open mouth, his hands on his paunch, his eyes moist.

Mme. Lerebour, utterly bewildered, was silent.

He faltered:

“It was⁠ ⁠… it was⁠ ⁠… Céleste, who had a⁠ ⁠… a⁠ ⁠… an appointment in the greenhouse.⁠ ⁠… If you only knew what⁠ ⁠… what⁠ ⁠… what I saw⁠ ⁠…”

She had gone white, choking with indignation:

“What?⁠ ⁠… You mean to say⁠ ⁠… Céleste⁠ ⁠… in my house⁠ ⁠… my⁠ ⁠… my⁠ ⁠… my house⁠ ⁠… in my⁠ ⁠… my⁠ ⁠… in my greenhouse! And you never killed the man, her accomplice! You had a revolver and never killed him.⁠ ⁠… In my house⁠ ⁠… my house.⁠ ⁠…”

She sat down, at the end of her strength.

He cut a caper, snapped his fingers, clicked his tongue, and stammered, still laughing:

“If you knew⁠ ⁠… if you knew⁠ ⁠…”

Suddenly, he kissed her.

She pushed him away, and, in a voice strangled with rage, said:

“I will not have that girl stay another day in the house, do you hear? Not one day⁠ ⁠… not one hour. When she comes in, we’ll throw her out.⁠ ⁠…”

M. Lerebour had grasped his wife by the waist and was planting rows of kisses on her neck, noisy kisses, as in the past. She fell silent again, dumbfounded and bewildered. And, holding her in his arms, he led her gently to the bed.⁠ ⁠…

At about half past nine next morning, Céleste, surprised at not having yet seen her master and mistress, who always rose early, came and knocked gently at their door.

They were in bed, and were chatting gaily side by side. She stood still in amazement, and asked:

“Madame, the coffee.”

“Bring it here, my girl,” said Mme. Lerebour in a very gentle voice; “we are rather tired; we slept very badly.”

The maid had barely withdrawn when M. Lerebour burst out laughing again, tickling his wife and repeating:

“If you knew! Oh! if you knew!”

But she took his hands:

“Now do keep quiet, darling; if you laugh as much as that, you’ll do yourself harm.”

And she kissed him, gently, on the eyes.

Mme. Lerebour has no more bad tempers. Sometimes, on clear nights, the two of them creep furtively past the thickets and flowerbeds to the little greenhouse at the far end of the garden. And they stay there, huddled close together against the panes as though they were gazing at some strange, absorbing thing inside.

They have raised Céleste’s wages.

M. Lerebour has grown thinner.

Denis

Monsieur Marambot opened the letter which his servant Denis gave him and smiled.

For twenty years Denis had been a servant in this house. He was a short, stout, jovial man, who was known throughout the countryside as a model servant. He asked:

“Is monsieur pleased? Has monsieur received good news?”

M. Marambot was not rich. He was an old village chemist, a bachelor, who lived on an income acquired with difficulty by selling drugs to the farmers. He answered:

“Yes, my boy. Old man Malois is afraid of the lawsuit with which I am threatening him. I shall get my money tomorrow. Five thousand francs will not hurt the account of an old bachelor.”

M. Marambot rubbed his hands with satisfaction. He was a man of quiet temperament, more sad than gay, incapable of any prolonged effort, careless in business.

He could undoubtedly have amassed a greater income had he taken advantage of the deaths of colleagues established in more important centres, by taking their places and carrying on their business. But the trouble of moving and the thought of all the preparations had always stopped him. After thinking the matter over for a few days, he would just say:

“Bah! I’ll wait until the next time. I’ll not lose anything by the delay. I may even find something better.”

Denis, on the contrary, was always urging his master to new enterprises. Of an energetic temperament, he would continually repeat:

“Oh! If I had only had the capital to start out with, I could have made a fortune! One thousand francs would do me.”

M. Marambot would smile without answering and would go out in his little garden, where, his hands behind his back, he would walk about dreaming.

All day long, Denis sang the joyful refrains of the folk-songs of the district. He even showed an unusual activity, for he cleaned all the windows of the house, energetically rubbing the glass, and singing at the top of his voice.

M. Marambot, surprised at his zeal, said to him several times, smiling:

“My boy, if you work like that there will be nothing left for you to do tomorrow.”

The following day, at about nine o’clock in the morning, the postman gave Denis four letters for his master, one of them very heavy. M. Marambot immediately shut himself up in his room until late in the afternoon. He then handed his servant four letters for the mail. One of them was addressed to M. Malois; it was undoubtedly a receipt for the money.

Denis asked his master no questions; he appeared to be as sad and gloomy that day as he had seemed joyful the day before.

Night came. M. Marambot went to bed as usual and slept.

He was awakened by a strange noise. He sat up in his bed and listened. Suddenly the door opened and Denis appeared, holding in one hand a candle and in the other a carving knife, his eyes staring, his face contracted as though moved by some deep emotion; he was as pale as a ghost.

In his astonishment M. Marambot thought that he was sleepwalking, and he was going to get out of bed and assist him when the servant blew out the light and rushed for the bed. His master stretched out his hands to receive the shock which knocked him over on his back; he was trying to seize the hands of his servant, whom he now thought to be crazy, in order to avoid the blows which the latter was aiming at him.

He was struck by the knife; once in the shoulder, once in the forehead and the third time in the chest. He fought wildly, waving his arms around in the darkness, kicking and crying:

“Denis! Are you mad? Listen, Denis!”

But the latter, gasping for breath, kept up his furious attack, always striking, always repulsed, sometimes with a kick, sometimes with a punch, and rushing forward again furiously.

M. Marambot was wounded twice more, once in the leg and once in the stomach. But, suddenly, a thought flashed across his mind, and he began to shriek:

“Stop, stop, Denis, I have not yet received my money!”

The man immediately ceased, and his master could hear his laboured breathing in the darkness. M. Marambot then went on:

“I have received nothing. M. Malois takes back what he said, the lawsuit will take place; that is why you carried the letters to the mail. Just read those on my desk.”

With a final effort, he reached for his matches and lit the candle.

He was covered with blood. His sheets, his curtains, and even the walls, were spattered with red. Denis, standing in the middle of the room, was also bloody from head to foot.

When he saw the blood M. Marambot thought himself dead, and fell unconscious.

At break of day he revived. It was some time, however, before he regained his senses, and was able to understand or remember. But, suddenly, the memory of the attack and of his wounds returned to him, and he was filled with such terror that he closed his eyes in order not to see anything. After a few minutes he grew calmer and began to think. He had not died immediately, therefore he might still recover. He felt weak, very weak; but he had no real pain, although he noticed an uncomfortable smarting sensation in several parts of his body. He also felt icy cold, and all wet, and as though wrapped up in bandages. He thought that this dampness came from the blood which he had lost; and he shivered at the dreadful thought of this red liquid which had come from his veins and covered his bed. The idea of seeing this terrible spectacle again so upset him that he kept his eyes closed with all his strength, as though they might open in spite of himself.

What had become of Denis? He had probably escaped.

But what could he, Marambot, do now? Get up? Call for help? But if he should make the slightest motions, his wounds would undoubtedly open up again and he would die from loss of blood.

Suddenly he heard the door of his room open. His heart almost stopped. It was certainly Denis who was coming to finish him up. He held his breath in order to make the murderer think that he had been successful.

He felt his sheet being lifted up, and then someone feeling his stomach. A sharp pain near his hip made him start. He was being very gently washed with cold water. Therefore, someone must have discovered the misdeed and he was being cared for. A wild joy seized him; but prudently, he did not wish to show that he was conscious. He opened one eye, just one, with the greatest precaution.

He recognised Denis standing beside him, Denis himself! Mercy! He hastily closed his eye again.

Denis. What could he be doing? What did he want? What awful scheme could he now be carrying out?

What was he doing? Well, he was washing him in order to hide the traces of his crime! And he would now bury him in the garden, under ten feet of earth, so that no one could discover him! Or perhaps in the wine cellar under the bottles of old wine! And M. Marambot began to tremble like a leaf. He kept saying to himself: “I am lost, lost!” He closed his eyes in order not to see the knife as it descended for the final stroke. It did not come. Denis was now lifting him up and bandaging him. Then he began carefully to dress the wound on his leg, as his master had taught him to do when he was a pharmacist.

There was no longer any doubt. His servant, after wishing to kill him, was trying to save him. Then M. Marambot, in a dying voice, gave him the practical piece of advice:

“Wash the wounds in a diluted solution of carbolic acid!”

Denis answered:

“This is what I am doing, monsieur.”

M. Marambot opened both his eyes. There was no sign of blood either on the bed, on the walls, or on the murderer. The wounded man was stretched out on clean white sheets.

The two men looked at each other.

Finally M. Marambot said calmly:

“You have been guilty of a great crime.”

Denis answered:

“I am trying to make up for it, monsieur. If you will not tell on me, I will serve you as faithfully as in the past.”

This was no time to anger his servant. M. Marambot murmured as he closed his eyes:

“I swear not to tell on you.”

Denis saved his master. He spent days and nights without sleep, never leaving the sick room, preparing drugs, broths, potions, feeling his pulse, anxiously counting the beats, attending him with the skill of a trained nurse and the devotions of a son.

He continually asked:

“Well, monsieur, how do you feel?”

M. Marambot would answer in a weak voice:

“A little better, my boy, thank you.”

And when the sick man would wake up at night, he would often see his servant seated in an armchair weeping silently.

Never had the old chemist been so cared for, so fondled, so spoiled. At first he had said to himself: “As soon as I am well I shall get rid of this rascal.”

He was now convalescing, and from day to day he would put off dismissing his murderer. He thought that no one would ever show him such care and attention, for he held this man through fear; and he warned him that he had left a document with a lawyer denouncing him to the law if any new accident should occur.

This precaution seemed to guarantee him against any future attack; and he then asked himself if it would not be wiser to keep this man near him, in order to watch him closely.

Just as formerly, when he would hesitate about taking some larger place of business, he could not make up his mind to any decision.

“There is plenty of time,” he would say to himself.

Denis continued to show himself an admirable servant. M. Marambot was well. He kept him.

One morning, just as he was finishing breakfast, he suddenly heard a great noise in the kitchen. He hastened in there. Denis was struggling with two gendarmes. An officer was taking notes on his pad.

As soon as he saw his master, the servant began to sob, exclaiming:

“You told on me, monsieur, that’s not right, after what you had promised me. You have broken your word of honour, Monsieur Marambot; that’s not right, that’s not right!”

M. Marambot, bewildered and distressed at being suspected, lifted his hand.

“I swear to you before God, my boy, that I did not tell on you. I haven’t the slightest idea how the police could have found out about your attack on me.”

The officer started:

“You say that he attacked you, M. Marambot?”

The bewildered chemist answered:

“Yes⁠—but I did not tell on him⁠—I haven’t said a word⁠—I swear it⁠—he has served me excellently from that time on⁠—”

The officer pronounced severely:

“I will take down your testimony. The law will take notice of this new action, of which it was ignorant, Monsieur Marambot. I was commissioned to arrest your servant for the theft of two ducks surreptitiously taken by him from M. Duhamel of which act there are witnesses. I shall make a note of your information.”

Then, turning toward his men, he ordered:

“Come on, let us start!”

The two gendarmes dragged Denis out.

The lawyer used the plea of insanity, contrasting the two misdeeds in order to strengthen his argument. He had clearly proved that the theft of the two ducks came from the same mental condition as the eight knife-wounds in the body of Marambot. He had cunningly analyzed all the phases of this transitory condition of mental aberration, which could, doubtless, be cured by a few months’ treatment in a reputable sanatorium. He had spoken in enthusiastic terms of the continued devotion of this faithful servant, of the care with which he had surrounded his master, wounded by him in a moment of alienation.

Touched by this memory, M. Marambot felt the tears rising to his eyes.

The lawyer noticed it, opened his arms with a broad gesture, spreading out the long black sleeves of his robe like the wings of a bat, and exclaimed:

“Look, look, gentlemen of the jury, look at those tears. What more can I say for my client? What speech, what argument, what reasoning would be worth these tears of his master? They speak louder than I do, louder than the law; they cry: ‘Mercy, for the poor wandering mind of a while ago!’ They implore, they pardon, they bless!”

He was silent and sat down.

Then the judge, turning to Marambot, whose testimony had been excellent for his servant, asked him:

“But, monsieur, even admitting that you consider this man insane, that does not explain why you should have kept him. He was none the less dangerous.”

Marambot, wiping his eyes, answered:

“Well, your honour, what can you expect? Nowadays it’s so hard to find good servants⁠—I could never have found a better one.”

Denis was acquitted and put in a sanatorium at his master’s expense.

He?

My dear friend, you can hardly believe it? I can see why. You think I have gone mad? It may be so, but not for the reasons which you suppose.

Yes, I am going to get married. That’s true.

My ideas and my convictions have not changed at all. I look upon all legalized cohabitation as utterly stupid, for I am certain that nine husbands out of ten are cuckolds; and they get no more than their deserts for having been idiotic enough to fetter their lives and renounce their freedom in love, the only happy and good thing in the world, and for having clipped the wings of fancy which continually drives us on toward all women. You know what I mean. More than ever I feel that I am incapable of loving one woman alone, because I shall always adore all the others too much. I should like to have a thousand arms, a thousand mouths, and a thousand-temperaments, to be able to strain an army of these charming creatures in my embrace at the same moment.

And yet I am going to get married!

I may add that I know very little of the girl who is going to become my wife tomorrow; I have only seen her four or five times. I know that she is not distasteful to me, and that is enough for my purpose. She is small, fair, and stout; so of course the day after tomorrow I shall ardently wish for a tall, dark, thin, woman.

She is not rich, and belongs to the middle classes. She is a girl such as you may find by the gross, well adapted for matrimony, without any apparent faults, and with no particularly striking qualities. People say of her: “Mlle. Lajolle is a very nice girl,” and tomorrow they will say: “What a very nice woman Madame Raymon is.” She belongs, in a word, to that immense number of girls who make very good wives for us till the moment comes when we discover that we happen to prefer all other women to that particular woman we have married.

“Well,” you will say to me, “what on earth do you get married for?”

I hardly like to tell you the strange and seemingly improbable reason that urged me on to this mad action. I am getting married in order not to be alone.

I don’t know how to tell you or to make you understand me, but my state of mind is so wretched that you will pity me and despise me.

I do not want to be alone any longer at night; I want to feel that there is someone close to me touching me, a being who can speak and say something, no matter what it be.

I wish to be able to awaken somebody by my side, so that I may be able to ask some sudden question, a stupid question even, if I feel inclined, so that I may hear a human voice, to have somebody living in my house and feel that there is some waking soul close to me, someone whose reason is at work⁠—so that when I hastily light the candle I may see some human face by my side⁠—because⁠—because⁠—I am ashamed to confess it⁠—because when I am alone, I am afraid.

Oh! you don’t understand me yet.

I am not afraid of any danger; if a man were to come into the room I should kill him without trembling. I am not afraid of ghosts, nor do I believe in the supernatural. I am not afraid of dead people, for I believe in the total annihilation of every being that disappears from the face of this earth.

Well⁠—yes, well, then⁠ ⁠… I am afraid of myself, afraid of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible fear, afraid of the spasms of my terrified mind.

You may laugh, if you like. It is terrible and incurable. I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar objects, which are animated, as far as I am concerned, by a kind of animal life. Above all, I am afraid of my own dreadful thoughts, of my reason, which seems as if it were about to leave me, driven away by a mysterious and invisible anguish.

At first I feel a vague uneasiness in my mind which causes a cold shiver to run all over me. I look round, and of course nothing is to be seen, and I wish there were something there, no matter what, as long as it were something tangible: I am frightened, merely because I cannot understand my own terror.

If I speak, I am afraid of my own voice. If I walk, I am afraid of I know not what, behind the door, behind the curtains, in the cupboard, or under my bed, and yet all the time I know there is nothing anywhere, and I turn round suddenly because I am afraid of what is behind me, although there is nothing there, and I know it.

I get agitated; I feel that my fear increases, and so I shut myself up in my own room, get into bed, and hide under the clothes, and there, cowering down, rolled into a ball, I close my eyes in despair and remain thus for a long time, remembering that my candle is alight on the table by my bedside, and that I ought to put it out, and yet⁠—I dare not do it!

It is very terrible, is it not, to be like that?

Formerly I felt nothing of all that; I came home quite comfortably, and went up and down in my rooms without anything disturbing my calmness of mind. Had anyone told me that I should be attacked by a malady⁠—for I can call it nothing else⁠—of most improbable fear, such a stupid and terrible malady as it is, I should have laughed outright. I was certainly never afraid of opening the door in the dark; I used to go to bed slowly without locking it, and never got up in the middle of the night to make sure that everything was firmly closed.

It began last year in a very strange manner, on a damp autumn evening. When my servant had left the room, after I had dined, I asked myself what I was going to do. I walked up and down my room for some time, feeling tired without any reason for it, unable to work, and without enough energy to read. A fine rain was falling, and I felt unhappy, a prey to one of those fits of casual despondency which make us feel inclined to cry, or to talk, no matter to whom, so as to shake off our depressing thoughts.

I felt that I was alone and that my rooms seemed to me to be more empty that they had ever been before. I was surrounded by a sensation of infinite and overwhelming solitude. What was I to do? I sat down, but then a kind of nervous impatience seized my legs, so that I got up and began to walk about again. I was feverish, for I noticed my hands, which I had clasped behind me, as one often does when walking slowly, almost seemed to burn one another. Then suddenly a cold shiver ran down my back, and I thought the damp air might have penetrated into my room, so I lit the fire for the first time that year, and sat down again and looked at the flames. But soon I felt that I could not possibly remain quiet. So I got up again and determined to go out, to pull myself together, and to seek a friend to bear me company. I went out. I looked up three friends who were not at home, then I went on to the boulevards to try and meet some acquaintance or other there.

It was wretched everywhere. The wet pavement glistened in the gaslight, and a moist warmth, that kind of warmth that chills you with sudden shivers, the oppressive heat of impalpable rain, lay heavily over the streets and seemed to obscure the light from the lamps.

I went on slowly, saying to myself, “I shall not find a soul to talk to.”

I glanced into several cafés from the Madeleine as far as the Faubourg Poissonnière, and saw many unhappy-looking individuals sitting at the tables, who did not seem even to have enough energy left to finish the refreshments they had ordered.

For a long time I wandered aimlessly up and down, and about midnight I started off for home; I was very calm and very tired. My concierge, who goes to bed before eleven o’clock, opened the door at once, which was quite unusual for him, and I thought that another lodger had no doubt just come in.

When I go out I always turn the key twice. Now I found it merely closed, which surprised me; but I supposed that some letters had been brought up for me in the course of the evening.

I went in, and found my fire still burning so that it lighted up the room a little. I took up a candle to light it at the fire when looking in front of me I noticed somebody sitting in my armchair by the fire, warming his feet, with his back toward me.

I was not in the slightest degree frightened. I thought very naturally that some friend or other had come to see me. No doubt the concierge, who knew I had gone out, had said I was coming back and had lent him his own key. In a moment I remembered all the circumstances of my return, how the street door had been opened immediately and that my own door was only latched and not locked.

I could see nothing of my friend but his head. He had evidently gone to sleep while waiting for me, so I went up to him to rouse him. I saw him quite clearly; his right arm was hanging down and his feet were crossed, while his head, which was somewhat inclined to the left of the armchair, seemed to indicate that he was asleep. “Who can it be?” I asked myself. I could not see clearly, as the room was rather dark, so I put out my hand to touch him on the shoulder, and it came in contact with the back of the chair. There was nobody there; the armchair was empty.

Merciful heaven, what a start I gave! For a moment I drew back as if some terrible danger had suddenly appeared in my way; then I turned round again feeling there was somebody behind me, then, impelled by some imperious desire to look at the armchair again, I turned round once more. I remained standing up panting with fear, so upset that I could not collect my thoughts, and ready to drop.

But I am naturally a cool man, and soon recovered myself. I thought: “It is a mere hallucination, that is all,” and I immediately began to reflect about this phenomenon. Thoughts fly very quickly at such moments.

I had been suffering from an hallucination, that was an incontestable fact. My mind had been perfectly lucid and had acted regularly and logically, so there was nothing the matter with the brain. It was only my eyes that had been deceived; they had had a vision, one of those visions which lead simple folk to believe in miracles. It was a nervous accident to the optical apparatus, nothing more; the eyes were rather overwrought, perhaps.

I lit my candle, and when I stooped down to the fire in so doing, I noticed that I was trembling, and I raised myself up with a jump, as if somebody had touched me from behind.

I was not comfortable by any means.

I walked up and down a little, and hummed a tune or two. Then I double-locked my door, and felt rather reassured; now, at any rate, nobody could come in.

I sat down again, and thought over my adventure for a long time; then I went to bed, and put out my light.

For some minutes all went well; I lay quietly on my back. Then an irresistible desire seized me to look round the room, and I turned on to my side.

My fire was nearly out and the few glowing embers threw a faint light on to the floor by the chair, where I fancied I saw the man sitting again.

I quickly struck a match, but I had been mistaken, for there was nothing there; I got up, however, and hid the chair behind my bed, and tried to get to sleep as the room was now dark. But I had not been asleep for more than five minutes when in my dream I saw all the scene which I had witnessed as clearly as if it were reality. I woke up with a start, and, having lit the candle, sat up in bed, without venturing even to try and go to sleep again.

Twice, however, sleep overcame me for a few moments in spite of myself, and twice I saw the same thing again, till I fancied I was going mad. When day broke, however, I thought that I was cured, and slept peacefully till noon.

It was all past and gone. I had been feverish, had had nightmare; or something. I had been ill, in a word, but yet I thought that I was a great fool.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly that evening; I went and dined at a restaurant; afterward I went to the theatre, and then started home. But as I got near the house I was seized by a strange feeling of uneasiness once more; I was afraid of seeing him again. I was not afraid of him, not afraid of his presence, in which I did not believe; but I was afraid of being deceived again; I was afraid of some fresh hallucination, afraid lest fear should take possession of me.

For more than an hour I wandered up and down the pavement; then I thought that I was really too foolish, and returned home. I panted so that I could scarcely get upstairs, and remained standing on the landing outside my door for more than ten minutes; then suddenly I took courage and pulled myself together. I inserted my key into the lock, and went in with a candle in my hand. I kicked open my half-open bedroom door, and gave a frightened look toward the fireplace; there was nothing there. A‑h!

What a relief and what a delight! What a deliverance! I walked up and down briskly and boldly, but I was not altogether reassured, and kept turning round with a jump; the very shadows in the corners disquieted me.

I slept badly, and was constantly disturbed by imaginary noises, but I did not see him; no, that was all over.

Since that time I have been afraid of being alone at night. I feel that the spectre is there, close to me, around me; but it has not appeared to me again. And supposing it did, what would it matter, since I do not believe in it and know that it is nothing?

It still worries me, however, because I am constantly thinking of it: his right arm hanging down and his head inclined to the left like a man who was asleep⁠—Enough of that, in Heaven’s name! I don’t want to think about it!

Why, however, am I so persistently possessed with this idea? His feet were close to the fire!

He haunts me; it is very stupid, but so it is. Who and what is he? I know that he does not exist except in my cowardly imagination, in my fears, and in my anguish! There⁠—enough of that!

Yes, it is all very well for me to reason with myself, to brace myself up; I cannot remain alone at home, because I know he is there. I know I shall not see him again; he will not show himself again; that is all over. But he is there all the same in my thoughts. He remains invisible, but that does not prevent his being there. He is behind the doors, in the closed wardrobe, under the bed, in every dark corner. If I open the door or the wardrobe, if I take the candle to look under the bed and throw a light on the dark places, he is there no longer, but I feel that he is behind me. I turn round, certain that I shall not see him, that I shall never see him again; but he is, none the less, behind me.

It is very stupid, it is dreadful; but what am I to do? I cannot help it.

But if there were two of us in the place, I feel certain that he would not be there any longer, for he is there just because I am alone, simply and solely because I am alone!

The Window

I made the acquaintance of Mme. de Jadelle at Paris this winter. She pleased me exceedingly at once. But you know her as well as I⁠ ⁠… no⁠ ⁠… pardon⁠ ⁠… almost as well as I.⁠ ⁠… You know her to be at once whimsical and romantic. Frank in manner and emotionally impressionable, wilful, unconventional, fearless, adventurous, audacious, contemptuous of all prejudice, and, in spite of that, sentimental, fastidious, easily offended, sensitive and modest.

She was a widow. I adore widows, because I am indolent. I was thinking of marrying her, and I paid court to her. The better I knew her, the better she pleased me; and I decided that the moment had come to venture my request. I was in love with her, and I was on the verge of being too much in love. When a man marries, he ought not to be too much in love with his wife, because that makes a blundering fool of him: he loses his self-possession, and becomes both stupid and crude. He must hold on to his self-control. If he loses his head the first night, he runs a great risk of having it antlered a year later.

So one day I presented myself at her house in a pair of light gloves and said to her:

“Madame, I am so happy as to love you, and I come to ask you whether I may hope to please you⁠—to do which I will use all my best endeavours⁠—and to give you my name.”

She answered placidly:

“As you like! I really don’t know whether you will please me sooner or later, but I ask nothing better than to put it to the test. As a man, I rather like you. It remains to discover what you are like in disposition and character, what sort of habits you have. Most marriages become stormy or immoral, because parties thereto did not know each other well enough when they married. The merest trifle, a deep-rooted obsession, a tenacious opinion on some point of ethics, religion or anything else, an annoying gesture, a bad habit, the least fault or even a disagreeable trait, is enough to make two irreconcilable enemies, implacably bitter and chained together until death, of the tenderest and most passionate lovers.

“I shall never marry unless I know intimately, in every crack and cranny of his nature, the man whose life I am about to share. I want to study him at leisure, and at close quarters, for months.

“This is what I suggest: You shall come to spend the summer with me on my estate at Lauville, and there in that quiet place we shall see whether we are fitted to live side by side.⁠ ⁠…

“I see you laughing. You’re thinking an evil thought. Oh, my dear man, if I were not sure of myself, I shouldn’t make the suggestion to you. I have such scorn and loathing for love, as you men understand it, that I should never be tempted to lose my head. Do you accept?”

I kissed her hand.

“When do we start, madame?”

“May the tenth. Is it a bargain?”

“It’s a bargain.”

A month later, I was installed in her house. She really was a singular woman. She studied me from morning till evening. As she adores horses, we spent hours riding in the woods every day, talking about everything under the sun, for she was bent on probing my most intimate thoughts as earnestly as she strove to observe my smallest actions.

As for me, I became madly in love with her and I troubled myself not a whit about the harmony of our natures. I soon became aware that even my slumbers were subject to surveillance. Someone slept in a little room next mine, never entering it until late at night, and with infinite precautions. At last I became impatient of this incessant spying. I wanted to hasten the issue, and one evening I became urgent. She dealt with me in such a way that I refrained from all further attempts; but I was seized with a violent desire to make her pay, somehow or other, for the surveillance to which I was subjected, and I pondered on ways and means.

You know Césarine, her maid, a pretty girl from Granville, where all the girls are beautiful⁠—but as fair as her mistress is dark.

One afternoon I drew the maid into my room, slipped five francs into her hand, and said to her:

“My dear child, I’m not going to ask you to do anything wrong, but I want to treat your mistress as she is treating me.”

The little maid smiled mockingly. I went on:

“I know I’m watched day and night. I’m watched eating, drinking, dressing, shaving, and putting on my socks, I know it.”

The young girl got out:

“Well, you see, sir⁠ ⁠…” She stopped. I continued:

“You sleep in the room next mine to listen if I snore, or if I dream aloud, don’t deny it.”

She began to laugh outright, and said:

“Well, you see, sir⁠ ⁠…” then stopped again.

I warmed to my theme:

“Well, you realise, my girl, that it’s not just that everything should be known about me and I know nothing about the lady who will be my wife. I love her with all my soul. She is my ideal in looks, mind and heart; so far as that goes, I’m the happiest of men. However, there are some things I would give a lot to know.⁠ ⁠…”

Césarine decided to thrust my banknote into her pocket. I understood that she had come to terms.

“Listen, my girl, we men, we think a lot of certain⁠ ⁠… certain⁠ ⁠… physical details, which don’t prevent a woman from being charming, but can alter her value in our eyes. I’m not asking you to speak ill of your mistress, nor even to confess her secret faults, if she has any. Only answer frankly four or five questions I’m going to put to you. You know Mme. de Jadelle as well as you know yourself, since you dress and undress her every day. Well, now, tell me this: Is she as plump as she seems to be?”

The little maid did not answer.

I went on:

“Come, my child, you’re not ignorant that some women put wadding, you know, wadding where, where⁠ ⁠… well, wadding in the place where babies are fed, and on the place where you sit down. Tell me, does she pad?”

Césarine had lowered her gaze. She said timidly:

“Ask all your questions, sir. I’ll answer them all at once.”

“Well, my girl, some women have knock-knees, too, so badly that they rub against each other with every step they take. Others have them so widely separated that their legs are like the arches of a bridge. You can see the countryside through them. Both fashions are very pretty. Tell me what your mistress’s legs are like.”

The little maid did not answer.

I continued:

“Some women have such a fine breast that it forms a deep fold underneath. Some have plump arms and a thin figure. Some are well shaped in front and have no shape at all behind; others are well shaped behind and have no shape in front. All these fashions are very pretty, very pretty; but I would dearly like to know how your mistress is shaped. Tell me frankly and I will give you still more money.”

Césarine looked at me searchingly and, laughing heartily, said:

“Except that she’s black, sir, madame is shaped just like me.” Then she ran away.

I was sold.

This time I felt a fool, and I determined that I would at least avenge myself on this impertinent maid.

An hour later, I cautiously entered the little room, where she listened to my slumbers, and unscrewed the bolts.

She arrived about midnight at her observation post. I followed her at once. When she saw me, she made as if to cry out; but I shut her mouth with my hand and convinced myself with very little trouble that, unless she was lying, Mme. de Jadelle must be very well made indeed.

I even took a great delight in this process of verification, which, moreover, pushed a little farther, did not seem any less pleasing to Césarine.

She was, upon my word, a ravishing specimen of the Bas-Normande race, at once sturdy and slender. She was innocent of certain delicate refinements that Henry IV would have scorned. I very soon taught her them, and as I adore perfumes, I made her a present that same evening of a flask of amber lavender.

We were soon more attached than I would have believed possible, almost friends. She became an exquisite mistress, naturally intelligent, made for the pleasures of love. In Paris she would have been a notable courtesan.

The delights she afforded me enabled me to wait patiently for the end of Mme. de Jadelle’s test. My behaviour became quite irreproachable, I was pliant, docile, complaisant.

As for my betrothed, she must have found me quite delightful, and I was aware from certain signs that I was soon to be fully accepted. I was certainly one of the happiest men in the world, placidly waiting for the lawful kiss of a woman I adored in the arms of a young and beautiful girl of whom I was uncommonly fond.

This, madame, is where you must turn away a little. I have come to the delicate point.

One evening, as we were coming back from our ride, Mme. de Jadelle complained bitterly that the grooms had not given her mount certain attentions upon which she insisted. She even repeated several times: “They’d better take care, they’d better take care. I know how to catch them out.”

I passed a quiet night, in my bed. I woke up early, full of life and energy. And I dressed.

I had formed the habit of going every morning to smoke a cigarette on a turret of the château that had a spiral staircase, lit by a large window at the height of the first floor.

I was advancing silently, my feet in felt-soled morocco slippers, to ascend the first steps, when I saw Césarine leaning out of the window looking out.

I did not see the whole of Césarine but only one-half of Césarine, the lower half of her. I preferred this half! I might have preferred the upper half of Mme. de Jadelle. The half presented to me was delightful so, clad in a little white petticoat that hardly covered it.

I approached so softly that the young girl heard nothing. I kneeled down; with infinite caution I took hold of the two edges of the petticoat and lifted it quickly. Immediately I recognised, round, fresh, plump and smooth, my mistress’s secret face, and I pressed on it⁠—pardon, madame⁠—I pressed on it a tender kiss, the kiss of a lover who dares do anything.

I was surprised. There was a fragrance of verbena. But I had no time to think about it. I received a terrific blow, or rather a push in the face, that almost broke my nose. I heard a cry that made my hair stand on end. The woman turned round⁠—it was Mme. de Jadelle.

She beat the air with her hands like a woman on the verge of fainting; for a few moments she stood gasping, lifted her hand as if to thrash me, then fled.

Ten minutes later, a dumbfounded Césarine brought me a letter. I read: “Mme. de Jadelle hopes that M. de Brives will relieve her of his company at once.”

I went.

Well, I am still disconsolate. I have tried by every means and every explanation to win pardon for my error. All my endeavours have been in vain.

Since that moment, do you know, I cherish in⁠ ⁠… in my heart⁠ ⁠… a faint fragrance of verbena that fills me with a wild longing to savour its sweetness again.

The Donkey

There was not a breath of air stirring; a heavy mist was lying over the river. It was like a layer of dull white cotton placed on the water. The banks themselves were indistinct, hidden behind strange fogs. But day was breaking and the hill was becoming visible. At its foot, in the dawning light of day, the plaster houses began to appear like white spots. Cocks were crowing in the barnyard.

On the other side of the river, hidden behind the fogs just opposite Frette, a slight noise from time to time broke the dead silence of the quiet morning. At times it was an indistinct plashing, like the cautious advance of a boat, then again a sharp noise like the rattle of an oar and then the sound of something dropping in the water. Then silence.

Sometimes whispered words, coming perhaps from a distance, perhaps from quite near, pierced through these opaque mists. They passed by like wild birds which have slept in the rushes and which fly away at the first light of day, crossing the mist and uttering a low and timid sound which wakes their brothers along the shores.

Suddenly along the bank, near the village, a barely perceptible shadow appeared on the water. Then it grew, became more distinct and, coming out of the foggy curtain which hung over the river, a flatboat, manned by two men, pushed up on the grass.

The one who was rowing rose and took a pailful of fish from the bottom of the boat, then he threw the dripping net over his shoulder. His companion, who had not made a motion, exclaimed: “Say, Mailloche, get your gun and see if we can’t land some rabbit along the shore.”

The other one answered: “All right. I’ll be with you in a minute.” Then he disappeared, in order to hide their catch.

The man who had stayed in the boat slowly filled his pipe and lighted it. His name was Labouise, but he was called Chicot, and was in partnership with Maillochon, commonly called Mailloche, practising the doubtful and undefined profession of junk-gatherers along the shore.

They were a low order of sailors and they navigated regularly only in the months of famine. The rest of the time they acted as junk-gatherers. Rowing about on the river day and night, watching for any prey, dead or alive, poachers on the water and nocturnal hunters, sometimes hunting deer in the Saint-Germain forests, sometimes looking for drowned people and searching their clothes, picking up floating rags and empty bottles; thus did Labouise and Maillochon live easily.

At times they would set out on foot about noon and stroll along straight ahead. They would dine in some inn on the shore and leave again side by side. They would remain away for a couple of days; then one morning they would be seen rowing about in the tub which they called their boat.

At Joinville or at Nogent some boatman would be looking for his boat, which had disappeared one night, probably stolen, while twenty or thirty miles from there, on the Oise, some shopkeeper would be rubbing his hands, congratulating himself on the bargain he had made when he bought a boat the day before for fifty francs, which two men offered him as they were passing.

Maillochon reappeared with his gun wrapped up in rags. He was a man of forty or fifty, tall and thin, with the restless eye of people who are worried by legitimate troubles, the eyes of hunted animals. His open shirt showed his hairy chest, but he seemed never to have had any more hair on his face than a short brush of a mustache and a few stiff hairs under his lower lip. He was bald around the temples. When he took off the dirty cap that he wore his scalp seemed to be covered with a fluffy down, like the body of a plucked chicken, ready for the spit.

Chicot, on the contrary, was red, fat, short and hairy. He looked like a raw beefsteak hidden in a fireman’s cap. He continually kept his left eye closed, as if he were aiming at something or at somebody, and when people jokingly cried to him: “Open your eye, Labouise!” he would answer quietly: “Never fear, kid, I open it when there’s cause to.”

He had a habit of calling everyone kid, even his scavenger companion.

He took up the oars again, and once more the boat disappeared in the heavy mist, which was now turned snowy white in the pink-tinted sky.

“What kind of lead did you take, Maillochon?” Labouise asked.

“Very small, number nine; that’s the best for rabbits.”

They were approaching the other shore so slowly, so quietly that no noise betrayed them. This bank belongs to the Saint-Germain forest and is the boundary line for rabbit hunting. It is covered with burrows hidden under the roots of trees, and the creatures at daybreak frisk about, running in and out of the holes.

Maillochon was kneeling in the bow, watching, his gun hidden on the floor. Suddenly he seized it, aimed, and the report echoed for some time throughout the quiet country.

Labouise, in a few strokes, touched the beach, and his companion, jumping to the ground, picked up a little gray rabbit, not yet dead.

Then the boat once more disappeared into the fog in order to get to the other side, where it could keep away from the game keepers.

The two men seemed to be riding easily on the water. The weapon had disappeared under the board which served as a hiding place and the rabbit was stuffed into Chicot’s loose shirt.

After about a quarter of an hour Labouise asked: “Well, kid, shall we get one more?”

“That will suit me,” Maillochon answered.

The boat started swiftly down the current. The mist, which was hiding both shores, was beginning to rise. The trees could be barely perceived, as through a veil, and the little clouds of fog were floating up from the water. When they drew near the island, the end of which is opposite Herblay, the two men slackened their pace and began to watch. Soon a second rabbit was killed.

Then they went down until they were halfway to Conflans. Here they stopped their boat, tied it to a tree and went to sleep in the bottom of it.

From time to time Labouise would sit up and look over the horizon with his open eye. The last of the morning mist had disappeared and the large summer sun was climbing in the blue sky.

On the other side of the river the vineyard-covered hill stretched out in a semicircle. One house stood out alone at the summit. Everything was silent.

Something was moving slowly along the towpath, advancing with difficulty. It was a woman dragging a donkey. The stubborn, stiff-jointed beast occasionally stretched out a leg in answer to its companion’s efforts, and it proceeded thus, with outstretched neck and ears lying flat, so slowly that one could not tell when it would ever be out of sight.

The woman, bent double, was pulling, turning round occasionally to strike the donkey with a stick.

As soon as he saw her, Labouise exclaimed: “Hey, Mailloche!”

Mailloche answered: “What’s the matter?”

“Want to have some fun?”

“Of course!”

“Then hurry, kid; we’re going to have a laugh.”

Chicot took the oars. When he had crossed the river he stopped opposite the woman and called: “Hey, sister!”

The woman stopped dragging her donkey and looked.

Labouise continued: “What are you doing⁠—going to the locomotive show?”

The woman made no reply. Chicot continued: “That nag must have won a prize at the races. Where are you taking him at that speed?”

At last the woman answered: “I’m going to Macquart, at Champioux, to have him killed. He’s worthless.”

Labouise answered: “You’re right. How much do you think Macquart will give you for him?”

The woman wiped her forehead on the back of her hand and hesitated, saying: “How do I know? Perhaps three francs, perhaps four.”

Chicot exclaimed: “I’ll give you five francs and your errand’s done! How’s that?”

The woman considered the matter for a second and then exclaimed: “Done!”

The two men landed. Labouise grasped the animal by the bridle. Maillochon asked in surprise: “What do you expect to do with that carcass?”

Chicot this time opened his other eye in order to express his gaiety. His whole red face was grinning with joy. He chuckled: “Don’t worry, kid. I’ve got my idea.”

He gave five francs to the woman, who then sat down by the road to see what was going to happen. Then Laboise, in great humour, got the gun and held it out to Maillochon, saying: “Each one in turn; we’re going after big game, kid. Don’t get so near or you’ll kill it right off! You must make the pleasure last a little.”

He placed his companion about forty paces from the victim. The ass, feeling itself free, was trying to get a little of the tall grass, but it was so exhausted that it swayed on its legs as if it were about to fall.

Maillochon aimed slowly and said: “A little pepper for the ears; watch, Chicot!” And he fired.

The tiny shot struck the donkey’s long ears and he began to shake them in order to get rid of the stinging sensation. The two men were doubled up with laughter and stamped their feet with joy. The woman, indignant, rushed forward; she did not want her donkey to be tortured, and she offered to return the five francs. Labouise threatened her with a thrashing and pretended to roll up his sleeves. He had paid, hadn’t he? Well, then, he would take a shot at her skirts, just to show that it didn’t hurt. She went away, threatening to call the police. They could hear her protesting indignantly and cursing as she went her way.

Maillochon held out the gun to his comrade, saying: “It’s your turn, Chicot.”

Labouise aimed and fired. The donkey received the charge in his thighs, but the shot was so small and came from such a distance that he thought he was being stung by flies, for he began to thrash himself with his tail.

Labouise sat down to laugh more comfortably, while Maillochon reloaded the weapon, so happy that he seemed to sneeze into the barrel. He stepped forward a few paces, and, aiming at the same place that his friend had shot at, he fired again. This time the beast started, tried to kick and turned its head. At last a little blood was running. It had been wounded and felt a sharp pain, for it tried to run away with a slow, limping, jerky gallop.

Both men darted after the beast, Maillochon with a long stride, Labouise with the short breathless trot of a little man. But the donkey, tired out, had stopped, and, with a bewildered look, was watching his two murderers approach. Suddenly he stretched his neck and began to bray.

Labouise, out of breath, had taken the gun. This time he walked right up close, as he did not wish to begin the chase over again.

When the poor beast had finished its mournful cry, like a last call for help, the man called: “Hey, Mailloche! Come here, kid; I’m going to give him some medicine.” And while the other man was forcing the animal’s mouth open, Chicot stuck the barrel of his gun down its throat, as if he were trying to make it drink a potion. Then he said: “Look out, kid, here she goes!”

He pressed the trigger. The donkey stumbled back a few steps, fell down, tried to get up again and finally lay on its side and closed its eyes. The whole body was trembling, its legs were kicking as if it were trying to run. A stream of blood was oozing through its teeth. Soon it stopped moving. It was dead.

The two men stopped laughing. It was over too quickly; they had not had their money’s worth. Maillochon asked: “Well, what are we going to do now?”

Labouise answered: “Don’t worry, kid. Get the thing on the boat; we’re going to have some fun when night comes.”

They went and got the boat. The animal’s body was placed on the bottom, covered with fresh grass, and the two men stretched out on it and went to sleep.

Toward noon Labouise drew a bottle of wine, some bread and butter and raw onions from a hiding place in their muddy, worm-eaten boat, and they began to eat.

When the meal was over they once more stretched out on the dead donkey and slept. At nightfall Labouise awoke and shook his comrade, who was snoring like a buzz-saw. “Come on, kid,” he ordered.

Maillochon began to row. As they had plenty of time they went up the Seine slowly. They coasted along the reaches covered with water-lilies, and the heavy, mud-covered boat slipped over the lily pads and bent the flowers, which stood up again as soon as they had passed.

When they reached the wall of the Éperon, which separates the Saint-Germain forest from the Maisons-Laffitte Park, Labouise stopped his companion and explained his idea to him. Maillochon was moved by a prolonged, silent laugh.

They threw into the water the grass which had covered the body, took the animal by the feet and hid it behind some bushes. Then they got into their boat again and went to Maisons-Laffitte.

The night was perfectly black when they reached the wine shop of old man Jules. As soon as the dealer saw them he came up, shook hands with them and sat down at their table. They began to talk of one thing and another. By eleven o’clock the last customer had left and old man Jules winked at Labouise and asked: “Well, have you got any?”

Labouise made a motion with his head and answered: “Perhaps so, perhaps not!”

The dealer insisted: “Perhaps you’ve got nothing but gray ones?”

Chicot dug his hands into his flannel shirt, drew out the ears of a rabbit and declared: “Three francs a pair!”

Then began a long discussion about the price. Two francs sixty-five and the two rabbits were delivered. As the two men were getting up to go, old man Jules, who had been watching them, exclaimed: “You have something else, but you won’t say what.”

Labouise answered: “Possibly, but it is not for you; you’re too stingy.”

The man, growing eager, kept asking: “What is it? Something big? Perhaps we might make a deal.”

Labouise, who seemed perplexed, pretended to consult Maillochon with a glance. Then he answered in a slow voice: “This is how it is. We were in the bushes at Éperon when something passed right near us, to the left, at the end of the wall. Mailloche takes a shot and it drops. We skipped on account of the game people. I can’t tell you what it is, because I don’t know. But it’s big enough. But what is it? If I told you I’d be lying, and you know, kid, between us everything’s aboveboard.”

Anxiously the man asked: “Think it’s a deer?”

Labouise answered: “Might be and then again it might not! Deer?⁠—uh! uh!⁠—might be a little big for that! Mind you, I don’t say it’s a doe, because I don’t know, but it might be.”

Still the dealer insisted: “Perhaps it’s a buck?” Labouise stretched out his hand, exclaiming: “No, it’s not that! It’s not a buck. I should have seen the horns. No, it’s not a buck!”

“Why didn’t you bring it with you?” asked the man.

“Because, kid, from now on I sell on the spot. Plenty of people will buy. All you have to do is to take a walk over there, find the thing and take it. No risk for me.”

The innkeeper, growing suspicious, exclaimed: “Supposing he wasn’t there!”

Labouise once more raised his hand and said: “He’s there, I swear!⁠—first bush to the left. What it is, I don’t know. But it’s not a buck, I’m positive. It’s for you to find out what it is. Twenty francs, cash down!”

Still the man hesitated: “Couldn’t you bring it?”

Maillochon then became spokesman:

“Then there is no bargain. If it is a buck, it will be fifty francs, if it is a doe, twenty-five; that’s our price.”

The dealer decided: “It’s a bargain for twenty francs!”

And they shook hands over the deal.

Then he took out four big five-francs pieces from the cash drawer, and the two friends pocketed the money. Labouise arose, emptied his glass and left. As he was disappearing in the shadows he turned round to explain: “It isn’t a buck. I don’t know what it is! but it’s there. I’ll give you back your money if you find nothing!”

And he disappeared in the darkness. Maillochon, who was following him, kept punching him in the back to express his delight.

André’s Disease

The lawyer’s house looked on to the Square. Behind it, there was a nice, well-kept garden, extending to the Passage des Piques, which was almost always deserted, and from which it was separated by a wall.

At the bottom of that garden Maître Moreau’s wife had promised, for the first time, to meet Captain Sommerive, who had been making love to her for a long time.

Her husband had gone to Paris for a week, so she was quite free for the time being. The Captain had begged so hard, and had used such loving words; she was certain that he loved her so ardently, and she felt so isolated, so misunderstood, so neglected amid all the law business which seemed to be her husband’s sole pleasure, that she had given away her heart without even asking herself whether she would give anything else some day.

Then, after some months of Platonic love, of pressing of hands, of quick kisses stolen behind a door, the Captain had declared that he would ask permission to exchange, and leave the town immediately, if she would not grant him a meeting, a real meeting in the shadow of the trees, during her husband’s absence. So she had yielded to his importunity, as she had promised.

Just then she was waiting, close against the wall, with a beating heart, trembling at the slightest sound, and when she heard somebody climbing up the wall, she very nearly ran away.

Suppose it were not he, but a thief? But no; someone called out softly, “Mathilde!” and when she replied, “Étienne!” a man jumped on to the path with a crash.

It was he! What a kiss!

For a long time they remained in each other’s arms, with united lips. But suddenly a fine rain began to fall, and the drops from the leaves fell on to her neck and made her start. Whereupon he said:

“Mathilde, my adored one, my darling, my angel, let us go indoors. It is twelve o’clock, we can have nothing to fear; please let us go in.”

“No, dearest; I am too frightened. Who knows what might happen?”

But he held her in his arms, and whispered in her ear:

“Your servants sleep on the third floor, looking on to the Square, and your room, on the first, looks on to the garden, so nobody can hear us. I love you so that I wish to love you entirely, from head to foot.” And he embraced her vehemently, maddening her with his kisses.

She resisted still, frightened and even ashamed. But he put his arms round her, lifted her up, and carried her off through the rain, which was by this time descending in torrents.

The door was open; they groped their way upstairs; and when they were in the room she bolted the door while he lit a match.

Then she fell, half fainting, into a chair, while he kneeled down beside her and slowly he undressed her, beginning with her shoes and stockings in order to kiss her feet.

At last, she said, panting:

“No! no! Étienne, please let me remain a virtuous woman; I should be too angry with you afterwards; and after all, it is so horrid, so common. Cannot we love each other with a spiritual love only? Oh! Étienne!”

With the skill of a lady’s maid and the speed of a man in a hurry, he unbuttoned, untied, unhooked and unlaced without stopping, and when she tried to get up and run away, she suddenly emerged from her dress, her petticoat and her underclothes as naked as a hand thrust from a muff. In her fright she ran to the bed in order to hide herself behind the curtains; but it was a dangerous place of refuge, and he followed her. But in haste he took off his sword too quickly, and it fell on to the floor with a crash. And then a prolonged, shrill child’s cry came from the next room, the door of which had remained open.

“You have awakened André,” she whispered, “and he won’t be able to go to sleep again.”

Her son was only fifteen months old and slept in a room opening out of hers, so that she might be able to watch over him all the time.

The Captain exclaimed ardently:

“What does it matter, Mathilde? How I love you; you must come to me, Mathilde.”

But she struggled and resisted in her fright.

“No! no! Just listen how he is crying; he will wake up the nurse, and what should we do if she were to come? We should be lost.

“Just listen to me, Étienne. When he screams at night his father always takes him into our bed, and he is quiet immediately; it is the only means of keeping him still. Do let me take him.”

The child roared, uttering shrill screams, which pierced the thickest walls and could be heard by passersby in the streets.

In his consternation the Captain got up, and Mathilde jumped out and took the child into her bed, when he was quiet at once.

Étienne sat astride on a chair, and rolled a cigarette, and in about five minutes André went to sleep again.

“I will take him back,” his mother said; and she took him back very carefully to his cradle.

When she returned, the Captain was waiting for her with open arms, and put his arms round her in a transport of love, while she, embracing him more closely, said, stammering:

“Oh! Étienne, my darling, if you only knew how I love you; how⁠—”

André began to cry again, and he, in a rage, exclaimed:

“Confound it all, won’t the little brat be quiet?”

No, the little brat would not be quiet, but howled all the louder, on the contrary.

She thought she heard a noise downstairs; no doubt the nurse was coming, so she jumped up and took the child into bed, and he grew quiet directly.

Three times she put him back, and three times she had to fetch him again, and an hour before daybreak the Captain had to go, swearing like the proverbial trooper; and, to calm his impatience, Mathilde promised to receive him again the next night. Of course he came, more impatient and ardent than ever, excited by the delay.

He took care to lay his sword carefully on the arms of a chair, he took off his boots like a thief, and spoke so low that Mathilde could hardly hear him. At last, he was just going to be really happy when the floor, or some piece of furniture, or perhaps the bed itself, creaked; it sounded as if something had broken; and in a moment a cry, feeble at first, but which grew louder, every moment, made itself heard. André was awake again.

He yapped like a fox, and there was not the slightest doubt that if he went on like that the whole house would awake; so his mother, not knowing what to do, got up and brought him. The Captain was more furious than ever, but did not move, and very carefully he put out his hand, took a small piece of the child’s flesh between his two fingers, no matter where it was, the thighs or elsewhere, and pinched it. The little one struggled and screamed in a deafening manner, but his tormentor pinched everywhere, furiously and more vigorously. He took a piece of flesh and twisted and turned it, and then let go, only to take hold of another piece, and then another and another.

The child screamed like a chicken having its throat cut, or a dog being mercilessly beaten. His mother caressed him, kissed him, and tried to stifle his cries by her tenderness; but André grew purple, as if he were going into convulsions, and kicked and struggled with his little arms and legs in an alarming manner.

The Captain said, softly:

“Try to take him back to his cradle; perhaps he will be quiet.”

And Mathilde went into the other room with the child in her arms. As soon as he was out of his mother’s bed he cried less loudly, and when he was in his own he was quiet, with the exception of a few broken sobs. The rest of the night was quiet and the Captain was happy.

The next night the Captain came again. As he happened to speak rather loudly, André awoke again and began to scream. His mother went and fetched him immediately, but the Captain pinched so hard and long that the child was nearly suffocated by its cries, its eyes turned in its head and it foamed at the mouth. As soon as it was back in its cradle it was quiet, and in four days André did not cry any more to come into his mother’s bed.

On Saturday evening the lawyer returned, and took his place again at the domestic hearth and in the conjugal chamber. As he was tired with his journey he went to bed early; but he had not long lain down when he said to his wife:

“Why, how is it that André is not crying? Just go and fetch him, Mathilde; I like to feel that he is between us.”

She got up and brought the child, but as soon as he saw that he was in that bed, in which he had been so fond of sleeping a few days before, he wriggled and screamed so violently in his fright that she had to take him back to his cradle.

M. Moreau could not get over his surprise. “What a very funny thing! What is the matter with him this evening? I suppose he is sleepy?”

“He has been like that all the time that you were away; I have never been able to have him in bed with me once.”

In the morning the child woke up and began to laugh and play with his toys.

The lawyer, who was an affectionate man, got up, kissed his offspring, and took him into his arms to carry him to their bed. André laughed, with that vacant laugh of little creatures whose ideas are still vague. He suddenly saw the bed and his mother in it, and his happy little face puckered up, till suddenly he began to scream furiously, and struggled as if he were going to be put to the torture.

In his astonishment his father said:

“There must be something the matter with the child,” and mechanically he lifted up his little nightshirt.

He uttered a prolonged “O‑o‑h!” of astonishment. The child’s calves, thighs, and buttocks were covered with blue spots as big as halfpennies.

“Just look, Mathilde!” the father exclaimed; “this is horrible!” And the mother rushed forward in a fright. It was horrible; no doubt the beginning of some sort of leprosy, of one of those strange affections of the skin which doctors are often at a loss to account for. The parents looked at one another in consternation.

“We must send for the doctor,” the father said.

But Mathilde, pale as death, was looking at her child, who was spotted like a leopard. Then suddenly uttering a violent cry as if she had seen something that filled her with horror, she exclaimed:

“Oh! the wretch!”

M. Moreau, surprised asked: “What? Whom are you speaking about? What wretch?”

She reddened up to the roots of her hair and stammered: “Nothing⁠ ⁠… it is⁠ ⁠… you see, I guess⁠ ⁠… It must be⁠ ⁠… Don’t let us get the doctor. It is surely that miserable nurse who pinches the little one to make him stop when he cries.” The notary, very angry, went to the nurse and nearly beat her. She denied the charges, but was discharged. Her conduct was denounced to the municipal authorities, and she could never get another situation.

The Moustache

Château de Solles, Monday, July 30, 1883.

My Dear Lucy:

I have no news. We live in the drawing room, looking out at the rain. We cannot go out in this frightful weather, so we have theatricals. My dear, how stupid these drawing room plays are nowadays! Everything is forced, coarse, heavy. The jokes are like cannon balls, smashing everything in their passage. No wit, nothing natural, no good humour, no elegance. These literary men, in truth, know nothing of society. They are perfectly ignorant of how people think and talk in our set. I do not mind if they despise our customs, our conventions, and our manners, but I do not forgive them for not knowing them. When they want to be humorous they make puns that would entertain a sergeants’ mess; when they try to be jolly, they give us jokes that they must have picked up on the outer boulevards, in those beer houses artists are supposed to frequent, where one has heard the same students’ jokes for fifty years.

So we have taken to theatricals. As we are only two women, my husband takes the part of a soubrette, and, in order to do that, he has shaved off his moustache. You cannot imagine, my dear Lucy, how it changes him! I no longer recognize him⁠—by day or at night. If he did not let it grow again I think I should no longer love him; he looks so horrid like this.

In fact, a man without a moustache is no longer a man. I do not care much for a beard; it almost always makes a man look untidy. But a moustache, oh, a moustache is indispensable to a manly face. No, you would never believe how pleasant these little hair bristles on the upper lip are to look at and⁠ ⁠… in other ways. I have thought over the matter a great deal, but hardly dare to write my thoughts. I would like to whisper them to you. Words look so different on paper and the subject is so difficult, so delicate, so dangerous that it requires infinite skill to tackle it.

Well, when my husband appeared, shaven, I understood at once that I never could fall in love with a strolling actor nor a preacher, even if it were Father Didon, the most charming of all! Later when I was alone with him (my husband) it was worse still. Oh, my dear Lucy, never let yourself be kissed by a man without a moustache; their kisses have no flavour, none whatever! They no longer have the charm, the mellowness and the snap⁠—yes, the snap⁠—of a real kiss. The moustache is the spice.

Imagine placing to your lips a piece of dry⁠—or moist⁠—parchment. That is the kiss of the man without a moustache. It is not worth while.

Whence comes this charm of the moustache, will you tell me? Do I know myself? It tickles your face, you feel it approaching your mouth and it sends a little shiver through you down to the tips of your toes.

And on your neck! Have you ever felt a moustache on your neck? It intoxicates you, makes you feel creepy, goes to the tips of your fingers. You wriggle, shake your shoulders, toss back your head. You wish to get away and at the same time to remain there; it is delightful, but irritating. But how good it is!

And then⁠ ⁠… really I am afraid to say it! A husband who loves you, absolutely, I mean, knows a lot of little corners to be kissed, places one never could think of alone. These kisses, without a moustache, also lose much of their flavour. In fact they become indecent. Can you explain this? I think I know why. A lip without a moustache is like a body without clothing; and one must wear clothes, very few, if you like, but still some clothing. The Creator (I dare not use any other word in speaking of such things) took care to cover all the parts of our body that were made for love. A shaven lip makes me think of trees that have been felled around a fountain where one hoped to quench one’s thirst and rest.

I recall a sentence (uttered by a politician) which has been running in my mind for three months. My husband, who keeps up with the newspapers, read me one evening a very singular speech by our Minister of Agriculture, who was called M. Méline. He may have been superseded by this time. I do not know.

I was paying no attention, but the name Méline struck me. It recalled, I do not exactly know why, the Scènes de la vie de bohème. I thought it was about some grisette. That shows how scraps of the speech entered my mind. This M. Méline was making this statement to the people of Amiens, I believe, and I have ever since been trying to understand what he meant: “There is no patriotism without agriculture!” Well, I have just discovered his meaning, and I affirm in my turn that there is no love without a moustache. When you say it that way it sounds comical, does it not?

There is no love without a moustache!

“There is no patriotism without agriculture,” said M. Méline, and he was right, that minister; I now understand why.

From a very different point of view the moustache is essential. It gives character to the face. It makes a man look gentle, tender, violent, a monster, a rake, enterprising! The hairy man, who does not shave off his whiskers, never has a refined look, for his features are concealed, and the shape of the jaw and the chin betrays a great deal to those who understand.

The man with a moustache retains his own peculiar expression and his refinement at the same time.

And how many different varieties of moustaches there are! Sometimes they are twisted, curled, coquettish. Those seem to be chiefly devoted to women.

Sometimes they are pointed, sharp as needles, and threatening. That kind prefers wine, horses and war.

Sometimes they are enormous, overhanging, frightful. These big ones generally conceal a fine disposition, a kindliness that borders on weakness and a gentleness that savours of timidity.

But what I adore above all in the moustache is that it is French, altogether French. It came from our ancestors, the Gauls, and has remained the insignia of our national character.

It is boastful, gallant and brave. It sips wine gracefully and knows how to laugh with refinement, while the broad-bearded jaws are clumsy in everything they do.

I recall something that made me cry my heart out, and also⁠—I see it now⁠—made me love a moustache on a man’s face.

It was during the war, when I was living with my father. I was a young girl then. One day there was a skirmish near the château. I had heard the firing of the cannon and of the artillery all the morning, and that evening a German colonel came and quartered himself in our house. He left the following day. My father was informed that there were a number of dead in the fields. He had them brought to our place so that they might be buried together. They were laid all along the great avenue of pines as fast as they brought them in, on both sides of the avenue, and as they began to smell, their bodies were covered with earth until the deep trench could be dug. Thus one saw only their heads, which seemed to protrude from the earth and were almost as yellow, with their closed eyes.

I wanted to see them. But when I saw those two rows of frightful faces, I thought I should faint. However, I began to look at them, one by one, trying to guess what kind of men these had been.

The uniforms were concealed beneath the earth, and yet immediately, yes, immediately, my dear, I recognized the Frenchmen by their moustache!

Some of them had shaved on the very day of the battle, as though they wished to be elegant up to the last; others seemed to have a week’s growth, but all wore the French moustache, very plain, the proud moustache that seems to say: “Do not take me for my bearded friend, dear; I am a brother.”

And I cried, oh, I cried a great deal more than I should if I had not recognized them, the poor dead fellows.

It was wrong of me to tell you this. Now I am sad and cannot chatter any longer. Well, goodbye, dear Lucy. I send you a hearty kiss. Long live the moustache!

Timbuktu

The boulevard, that river of life, swarmed with people in the golden dust of the setting sun. The whole sky was a blinding red; and, behind the Madeleine, an immense blazing cloud flung along the great avenue an oblique shower of fire, quivering like the vapour above a brazier.

The gay, throbbing crowd went by under this flaming mist, and seemed transfigured. Faces were gilded, black hats and clothes took on purple gleams; the varnish on their shoes darted flames across the asphalt pavement.

In front of the cafés a throng of men were drinking gleaming, coloured beverages, which looked like precious stones melted into the crystal.

In this crowd of people with their thin and sombre clothes, sat two officers in full uniform, and the dazzling brilliance of their gold lace made every eye glance at them. They were talking gaily and aimlessly, in the midst of all this radiant vibrant life, in the glowing splendour of the evening; and they were watching the throng, the sauntering men and the hurrying women who left behind them a divine and disquieting perfume.

Suddenly an enormous Negro, dressed in black, potbellied, bedizened with trinkets on his waistcoat of ticking, his face shining as though it had been polished with blacking, passed in front of them with an air of triumph. He laughed at the passersby, he laughed at the newspaper-vendors, he laughed at the blazing sky, he laughed at the whole of Paris. He was so tall that his head overtopped all others; and, behind him, all the loungers turned round to stare at his back.

But suddenly he caught sight of the officers, and, jostling through the crowd of drinkers, he rushed up to them. As soon as he was in front of their table, he fixed his gleaming, delighted eyes upon them, and the corners of his mouth rose to his ears, disclosing his white teeth, bright as a crescent moon in a black sky. The two men, bewildered, stared at this ebony giant, unable to make head or tail of his merriment.

And he cried out, in a voice which drew a burst of laughter from every table:

“Mawnin’, Lieutenant.”

One of the officers was a battalion-commander, the other a colonel. The former said:

“I don’t know you, sir. I am quite unable to imagine what you want of me.”

The Negro replied:

“Me like you much, Lieutenant Védié, siege of Bézi, we hunt much grapes.”

The officer, quite at a loss, stared fixedly at the fellow, groping in the depths of his memory; and exclaimed abruptly:

“Timbuktu!”

The Negro, radiant, smacked his thigh, uttered a laugh of unbelievable violence, and roared:

“Ya, ya, my lieutenant, remember Timbuktu, ya, mawnin’!”

The major gave him his hand, laughing heartily himself. Then Timbuktu became serious again. He took the officer’s hand and, so swiftly that the other could not prevent him, he kissed it, according to the custom of the Negroes and the Arabs. The embarrassed officer said to him in a severe voice:

“Come, Timbuktu, we are not in Africa. Sit down there and tell me how it is that I find you here.”

Timbuktu stretched his paunch, and, speaking so fast that he stammered, announced:

“Make much money, very much, big rest’rant, good eat, Prussians, me, steal much, very much, F’ench cooking, me get hund’ed thousand f’ancs. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

And he writhed with laughter, bellowing with a gleam of mad merriment in his eyes.

When the officer, who understood his strange language, had questioned him for some time, he said to him:

“Well, goodbye, Timbuktu; see you again soon.”

The Negro promptly rose, shook, this time, the outstretched hand, and, still laughing, exclaimed:

“Mawnin’, mawnin’, Lieutenant!”

And he departed, so happy that he gesticulated as he walked, and the crowd took him for a lunatic.

“Who was that brute?” inquired the colonel.

“A good lad and a good soldier,” replied the major. “I will tell you what I know about him; it is funny enough.

“You know that at the beginning of the war of 1870 I was shut up in Bézières, the place the Negro calls Bézi. We were not besieged, but blockaded. The Prussian lines surrounded us on every side, out of range of cannon-shot, and not firing on us, but gradually starving us out.

“I was a lieutenant at the time. Our garrison was composed of troops of every sort, the remnants of decimated regiments, fugitives and marauders separated from their army corps. We even had eleven Turcos, who arrived one evening, no one knows how or whence. They had turned up at the gates of the town, worn out, ragged, starving, and drunk. They were entrusted to me.

“I very soon realised that they detested every form of discipline; they were always getting out of the town, and were always drunk. I tried the police station, even a dose of prison; nothing did any good. My men would disappear for whole days, as though they had burrowed underground, and then would reappear so tipsy that they could not stand. They had no money. Where did they drink? And how, and by what means?

“The problem began to fascinate me, especially as these savages interested me, with their perpetual laugh and their natures of overgrown, naughty boys.

“I noticed at last that they obeyed blindly the biggest of the lot; the one you have just seen. He ruled them absolutely as he chose, and prepared their mysterious enterprises with the undisputed authority of an omnipotent chief. I made him come and see me, and questioned him. Our conversation lasted a good three hours, so much trouble it took me to comprehend his surprising rigmarole. As for him, poor devil, he made the most extraordinary efforts to be understood, invented words, gesticulated, perspired with the effort, wiped his brow, panted, stopped, and abruptly began again when he fancied he had discovered a new means of explaining himself.

“Eventually I gathered that he was the son of a great chief, a sort of Negro king in the neighbourhood of Timbuktu. I asked him his name. He answered something like ‘Chavaharibouhalikhranafotapolara.’ I thought it simpler to give him the name of his country: ‘Timbuktu.’ And a week later the entire garrison knew him by no other name.

“But we were consumed by a frantic desire to know how this African ex-prince managed to get hold of drink. I discovered it in strange fashion.

“I was on the ramparts one morning, scanning the horizon, when I saw something moving in a vineyard. It was getting near the vintage season, and the grapes were ripe, but I never thought of that. I imagined that a spy was approaching the town, and I organised an entire expedition to seize the prowler. I took command myself, after getting permission from the general.

“I had sent out, through three different gates, three little bands which were to meet near the suspected vineyard and surround it. In order to cut off the spy’s retreat, one of the detachments had to march for a good hour. A man who remained on the watch upon the walls indicated to me by signs that the fellow I had noticed had not left the field. We went on our way in complete silence, crawling, almost lying flat in the ruts. At last we reached the appointed spot; swiftly I deployed my men, who dashed into the vineyard and found⁠ ⁠… Timbuktu, going on all fours through the middle of vines, and eating the grapes, or rather lapping them up like a dog lapping soup, taking them straight off the plants in large mouthfuls, tearing down the bunches with his teeth.

“I tried to make him stand up; it was not to be dreamed of, and I realised then why he was crawling thus on his hands and knees. Set on his legs, he tottered for a few seconds, threw out his arms, and fell flat on his nose. I have never seen a man so drunk as he was.

“He was carried home on two vine-poles. He never stopped laughing all the way back, and waved his arms and legs.

“That was the whole mystery. My rascals drank from the grape itself. Then, when they were so tight that they could not move, they went to sleep where they were.

“As for Timbuktu, his love of the vine passed all belief and measure. He lived among them like the thrushes, which, by the way, he hated with the hatred of a jealous rival. He repeated constantly:

“ ‘Th’ushes eat all the g’apes, d’unkards!’

“One evening I was sent for. Something was seen approaching us across the plain. I had not brought my spyglass, and could make out very little. It was like a great serpent uncoiling, a convoy, I don’t know what.

“I sent some men forward to meet this strange caravan, which soon made its triumphal entry. Timbuktu and nine of his comrades were carrying, upon a kind of altar made of rustic chairs, eight severed heads, bleeding and grimacing. The tenth Turco was leading a horse, to whose tail a second was attached, and six more animals followed, secured in the same fashion.

“This is what I learned. Setting off to the vineyards, my Africans had suddenly noticed a Prussian detachment drawing near to a village. Instead of fleeing, they hid; then, when the officers had dismounted in front of an inn, in search of refreshments, the gallant eleven charged, put to flight the Uhlans, who thought they were seriously attacked, and killed the two sentries, in addition to the colonel and the five officers with him.

“That day I embraced Timbuktu. But I noticed that he found difficulty in walking. I thought he was wounded; he burst out laughing, and told me:

“ ‘Me, p’ovisions for count’y.’

“For Timbuktu had no idea of going to war for glory; he did it for profit. Everything he found, everything which appeared to him to have any value, everything, especially, which sparkled, he thrust into his pocket. And what a pocket! It was a gulf which began at his hip and ended at his ankle. He had picked up a piece of army slang, and called it his ‘deep,’ and deep it was, in very truth!

“He had consequently stripped off the gilt from the Prussian uniforms, the brass from their helmets, the buttons, etc., and thrown the whole collection into his ‘deep,’ which was full to overflowing.

“Every day he cast into it every shining object which caught his eye, pieces of tin or silver coins; the outline of his figure became remarkably quaint.

“He was determined to carry it all back to the land of ostriches, whose brother this king’s son seemed to be in his devouring passion for acquiring glittering articles. If he had not had his ‘deep,’ what would he have done? Doubtless he would have swallowed them.

“Every morning his pocket was empty. He must have had a central dump where his riches were heaped together. But where was it? I was never able to find out.

“The general, informed of Timbuktu’s great feat, ordered the bodies which had been left in the neighbouring village to be buried at once, so that it might not be discovered that they had been decapitated. The Prussians returned thither the next day. The mayor and seven prominent residents were shot on the spot by way of reprisals, for having given away the presence of the Germans.

“Winter had come. We were worn out and desperate. We fought now every day. The famished men could no longer march. Only the eight Turcos (three had been killed) remained fat and glossy, vigorous and always ready for a fight.

“Timbuktu was positively growing fatter. One day he said to me:

“ ‘You, much hung’y, me good meat.’

“And, as a matter of fact, he did bring me an excellent steak. But of what? We had no more cows, sheep, goats, donkeys, or pigs. It was impossible to get horseflesh. I thought of all this after I had eaten the meat. It was then that a horrible thought came to me. These Negroes had been born very near the district where men are eaten! And every day so many soldiers were slain in the town. I questioned Timbuktu. He refused to answer. I did not insist, but from that time onward I refused his presents.

“He adored me. One night we were caught in a snowstorm out at the advanced pickets. We were sitting on the ground. I cast looks of pity on the poor Negroes shivering under the white, frozen dust. As I was very cold myself, I began to cough. I instantly felt something fall on me, like a large, warm covering. It was Timbuktu’s coat which he was throwing over my shoulders.

“I rose and, giving him back his garment, said:

“ ‘Keep that, my lad; you need it more than I do.’

“ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘for you, Lieutenant; me not need, me warm, warm.’

“And he looked at me with entreaty in his eyes.

“ ‘Come now, obey me,’ I went on. ‘Keep your coat; I wish you to.’

“Thereupon the Negro rose, drew his sabre, which he knew how to make as sharp as a scythe, and holding in his other hand the wide cloak which I would not take, declared:

“ ‘If you not keep coat, me cut; nobody have coat.’

“He would have done it. I gave in.

“Eight days later we had capitulated. Some of us had been able to escape. The rest were about to march out of the town and surrender to the victors.

“I directed my steps towards the Place d’Armes, where we were to muster, when I stopped, bewildered with amazement, in front of a gigantic Negro clad in white duck, and wearing a straw hat. It was Timbuktu. He looked radiant, and was walking to and fro with his hands in his pockets, in front of a small shop in whose window were displayed two plates and two glasses.

“ ‘What are you doing?’ I said to him.

“ ‘Me not gone,’ he replied. ‘Me good cook, me make eat colonel, Alge’ia; me eat P’ussians, steal much, much.’

“There were ten degrees of frost. I shivered at sight of this duck-clad Negro. Then he took my arm and made me go inside. I noticed an enormous sign, which he was going to hang up at his door as soon as we were gone, for he had some traces of shame.

“And I read, traced by the hand of some accomplice, the following announcement:

M. Timbuktu’s Military Kitchen

Late Cook to H.M. The Emperor

Parisian Artist⁠—Moderate Prices

“In spite of the despair gnawing at my heart, I could not help laughing, and I left my Negro to his new profession.

“Was it not better than having him taken prisoner?

“You have just seen that the rascal has succeeded.

“Today Bézières belongs to Germany. The Restaurant Timbuktu is the beginning of our revenge.”

My Uncle Jules

A poor old man with white hair begged us for alms. My companion, Joseph Davranche, gave him five francs. Noticing my surprised look, he said:

“That poor unfortunate reminds me of a story which I shall tell you, the memory of which continually pursues me. Here it is:

“My family, which came originally from Havre, was not rich. We just managed to make both ends meet. My father worked hard, came home late from the office, and earned very little. I had two sisters.

“My mother suffered a good deal from our reduced circumstances, and she often had harsh words for her husband, veiled and sly reproaches. The poor man then made a gesture which used to distress me. He would pass his open hand over his forehead, as if to wipe away perspiration which did not exist, and he would answer nothing. I felt his helpless suffering. We economized on everything and never would accept an invitation to dinner, so as not to have to return the courtesy. All our provisions were bought at reduced prices, whatever was left over in the shops. My sisters made their own gowns, and long discussions would arise on the price of a piece of braid worth fifteen centimes a yard. Our meals usually consisted of soup and beef prepared with every kind of sauce. They say it is wholesome and nourishing, but I should have preferred a change.

“I used to go through terrible scenes on account of lost buttons and torn trousers.

“Every Sunday, dressed in our best, we would take our walk along the pier. My father, in a frock coat, high hat and kid gloves, would offer his arm to my mother, decked out and beribboned like a ship on a holiday. My sisters, who were always ready first, would await the signal for leaving; but at the last minute someone always found a spot on my father’s frock coat, and it had to be wiped away quickly with a rag moistened with benzine.

“My father, in his shirt sleeves, his silk hat on his head, would await the completion of the operation, while my mother would make haste, putting on her spectacles, and taking off her gloves in order not to spoil them.

“Then we set out ceremoniously. My sisters marched on ahead, arm in arm. They were of marriageable age and had to be shown off. I walked on the left of my mother and my father on her right. I remember the pompous air of my poor parents in these Sunday walks, their stern expression, their stiff walk. They moved slowly, with a serious expression, their bodies straight, their legs stiff, as if something of extreme importance depended upon their appearance.

“Every Sunday, when the big steamers were returning from unknown and distant countries, my father would invariably utter the same words:

“ ‘What a surprise it would be if Jules were on that one! Eh?’

“My Uncle Jules, my father’s brother, was the only hope of the family, after being its only fear. I had heard about him since childhood, and it seemed to me that I should recognize him immediately, knowing as much about him as I did. I knew every detail of his life up to the day of his departure for America, although this period of his life was spoken of only in hushed tones.

“It seems that he had led a bad life, that is to say, he had squandered a little money, which action, in a poor family, is one of the greatest crimes. With rich people a man who amuses himself only sows his wild oats. He is what is generally called a sport. But among needy families a boy who forces his parents to break into the capital becomes a good-for-nothing, a rascal, a scamp. And this distinction is just, although the action be the same, for consequences alone determine the seriousness of the act.

“Well, Uncle Jules had visibly diminished the inheritance on which my father had counted, after he had swallowed his own to the last penny. Then, according to the custom of the times, he had been shipped off to America on a freighter going from Havre to New York.

“Once there, my uncle began to sell something or other, and he soon wrote that he was making a little money and that he shortly hoped to be able to indemnify my father for the harm he had done him. This letter caused a profound emotion in the family. Jules, who up to that time had not been worth his salt, suddenly became a good man, a kindhearted fellow, true and honest like all the Davranches.

“One of the captains told us that he had rented a large shop and was doing an important business.

“Two years later a second letter came, saying:

“ ‘My dear Philippe, I am writing to tell you not to worry about my health, which is excellent. Business is good. I leave tomorrow for a long trip to South America. I may be away for several years without sending you any news. If I shouldn’t write, don’t worry. When my fortune is made I shall return to Havre. I hope that it will not be too long, and that we shall all live happily together.⁠ ⁠…’

“This letter became the gospel of the family. It was read on the slightest provocation, and it was shown to everybody.

“For ten years nothing was heard from Uncle Jules; but as time went on my father’s hope grew, and my mother, also, often said:

“ ‘When that good Jules is here, our position will be different. There is one who knew how to get along!’

“And every Sunday, while watching the big steamers approaching from the horizon, pouring out a stream of smoke, my father would repeat his eternal question:

“ ‘What a surprise it would be if Jules were on that one! Eh?’

“We almost expected to see him waving his handkerchief and crying:

“ ‘Hey! Philippe!’

“Thousands of schemes had been planned on the strength of this expected return; we were even to buy a little house with my uncle’s money⁠—a little place in the country near Ingouville. In fact, I wouldn’t swear that my father had not already begun negotiations.

“The elder of my sisters was then twenty-eight, the other twenty-six. They were not yet married, and that was a great grief to everyone.

“At last a suitor presented himself for the younger one. He was a clerk, not rich, but honorable. I have always been morally certain that Uncle Jules’ letter, which was shown him one evening, had swept away the young man’s hesitation and definitely decided him.

“He was eagerly accepted, and it was decided that after the wedding the whole family should take a trip to Jersey.

“Jersey is the ideal trip for poor people. It is not far; one crosses a strip of sea in a steamer and lands on foreign soil, as this little island belongs to England. Thus, a Frenchman, in a two hours’ sail, can observe a neighbouring people at home and study their customs.

“This trip to Jersey completely absorbed our ideas, was our sole anticipation, the constant thought of our minds.

“At last we left. I see it as plainly as if it had happened yesterday. The boat was getting up steam against the quay at Granville; my father, bewildered, was superintending the loading of our three pieces of baggage; my mother, nervous, had taken the arm of my unmarried sister, who seemed lost since the departure of the other one, like the last chicken of a brood; behind us came the bride and groom, who always stayed behind, a thing that often made me turn round.

“The whistle sounded. We got on board, and the vessel, leaving the pier, forged ahead through a sea as flat as a marble table. We watched the coast disappear in the distance, happy and proud, like all who do not travel much.

“My father was swelling out his chest in the breeze, beneath his frock coat, which had that morning been very carefully cleaned; and he spread around him that odour of benzine which always made me recognize Sunday. Suddenly he noticed two elegantly dressed ladies to whom two gentlemen were offering oysters. An old, ragged sailor was opening them with his knife and passing them to the gentlemen, who would then offer them to the ladies. They ate them in a dainty manner, holding the shell on a fine handkerchief and advancing their mouths a little in order not to spot their dresses. Then they would drink the liquid with a rapid little motion and throw the shell overboard.

“My father was probably pleased with this delicate manner of eating oysters on a moving ship. He considered it good form, refined, and, going up to my mother and sisters, he asked:

“ ‘Would you like me to offer you some oysters?’

“My mother hesitated on account of the expense, but my two sisters immediately accepted. My mother said in a provoked manner:

“ ‘I am afraid that they will hurt my stomach. Offer the children some, but not too much, it would make them sick.’ Then, turning toward me, she added:

“ ‘As for Joseph, he doesn’t need any. Boys shouldn’t be spoiled.’

“However, I remained beside my mother, finding this discrimination unjust. I watched my father as he pompously conducted my two sisters and his son-in-law toward the ragged old sailor.

“The two ladies had just left, and my father showed my sisters how to eat them without spilling the liquor. He even tried to give them an example, and seized an oyster. He attempted to imitate the ladies, and immediately spilled all the liquid over his coat. I heard my mother mutter:

“ ‘He would do far better to keep quiet.’

“But, suddenly, my father appeared to be worried; he retreated a few steps, stared at his family gathered around the old shell opener, and quickly came toward us. He seemed very pale, with a peculiar look. In a low voice he said to my mother:

“ ‘It’s extraordinary how that man opening the oysters looks like Jules.’

“Astonished, my mother asked:

“ ‘What Jules?’

“My father continued:

“ ‘Why, my brother. If I did not know that he was well off in America, I should think it was he.’

“Bewildered, my mother stammered:

“ ‘You are mad! As long as you know that it is not he, why do you say such foolish things?’

“But my father insisted:

“ ‘Go on over and see, Clarisse! I would rather have you see with your own eyes.’

“She arose and walked to her daughters. I, too, was watching the man. He was old, dirty, wrinkled, and did not lift his eyes from his work.

“My mother returned. I noticed that she was trembling. She exclaimed quickly:

“ ‘I believe that it is he. Why don’t you ask the captain? But be very careful that we don’t have this rogue on our hands again!’

“My father walked away, but I followed him. I felt strangely moved.

“The captain, a tall, thin man, with blond whiskers, was walking along the bridge with an important air as if he were commanding the Indian mail steamer.

“My father addressed him ceremoniously, and questioned him about his profession, adding many compliments:

“ ‘What might be the importance of Jersey? What did it produce? What was the population? The customs? The nature of the soil?’ etc., etc.

“ ‘You have there an old shell opener who seems quite interesting. Do you know anything about him?’

“The captain, whom this conversation began to weary, answered dryly:

“ ‘He is some old French tramp whom I found last year in America, and I brought him back. It seems that he has some relatives in Havre, but that he doesn’t wish to return to them because he owes them money. His name is Jules⁠—Jules Darmanche or Darvanche or something like that. It seems that he was once rich over there, but you can see what’s left of him now.’

“My father turned ashy pale and muttered, his throat contracted, his eyes haggard:

“ ‘Ah! ah! very well, very well. I’m not in the least surprised. Thank you very much, captain.’

“He went away, and the astonished sailor watched him disappear. He returned to my mother so upset that she said to him:

“ ‘Sit down; someone will notice that something is the matter.’

“He sank down on a bench and stammered:

“ ‘It’s he! It’s he!’

“Then he asked:

“ ‘What are we going to do?’

“She answered quickly:

“ ‘We must get the children out of the way. Since Joseph knows everything, he can go and get them. We must take good care that our son-in-law doesn’t find out.’

“My father seemed absolutely bewildered. He murmured:

“ ‘What a catastrophe!’

“Suddenly growing furious, my mother exclaimed:

“ ‘I always thought that that thief never would do anything, and that he would drop down on us again! As if one could expect anything from a Davranche!’

“My father passed his hand over his forehead, as he always did when his wife reproached him. She added:

“ ‘Give Joseph some money so that he can pay for the oysters. All that it needed to cap the climax would be to be recognized by that beggar. That would be very pleasant! Let’s go down to the other end of the boat, and take care that that man doesn’t come near us!’

“They gave me five francs and walked away.

“Astonished, my sisters were awaiting their father. I said that mamma had felt a sudden attack of seasickness, and I asked the shell opener:

“ ‘How much do we owe you, monsieur?’

“I felt like laughing: he was my uncle! He answered:

“ ‘Two francs fifty.’

“I held out my five francs and he returned the change. I looked at his hand; it was a poor, wrinkled, sailor’s hand, and I looked at his face, an unhappy old face. I said to myself:

“ ‘That is my uncle, the brother of my father, my uncle!’

“I gave him a tip of one franc. He thanked me:

“ ‘God bless you, my young sir!’

“He spoke like a poor man receiving alms. I couldn’t help thinking that he must have begged over there! My sisters looked at me, surprised at my generosity. When I returned the two francs to my father, my mother asked me in surprise:

“ ‘Was there three francs’ worth? That is impossible.’

“I answered in a firm voice:

“ ‘I gave ten sous as a tip.’

“My mother started, and, staring at me, she exclaimed:

“ ‘You must be crazy! Give ten sous to that man, to that vagabond⁠—’

“She stopped at a look from my father, who was pointing at his son-in-law. Then everybody was silent.

“Before us, on the distant horizon, a purple shadow seemed to rise out of the sea. It was Jersey.

“As we approached the breakwater a violent desire seized me once more to see my Uncle Jules, to be near him, to say to him something consoling, something tender. But as no one was eating any more oysters, he had disappeared, having probably gone below to the dirty hold which was the home of the poor wretch.”

Hydrophobia?

My dear Geneviève, you ask me to tell you about my honeymoon. How do you think I dare? Sly wretch that you are, never to tell me anything, upon my word, not even the least hint. Just think, you’ve been married for eighteen months, you pretend to be my best friend, you never kept anything from me before, and you hadn’t the kindness to warn me. If you’d only given me a hint, if you’d put me on my guard about it, if you’d let the least suspicion penetrate to my mind, the very least, you would have saved me from making such a fool of myself that I still blush about it, and my husband will laugh about it till the day he dies, and no one but you is to blame for it.

I have made myself frightfully ridiculous forever, I have made one of those mistakes one never forgets, through your fault, your fault, you bad girl.⁠ ⁠… Oh, if I’d only known!

Well, I’m growing bolder as I write and I think I’ll tell you the whole story. But promise me you won’t laugh too much.

Don’t expect a comedy. It’s a drama.

You remember my wedding. I had to leave the same evening for my honeymoon. I was certainly not much like Paulette, whose story Gyp has so amusingly related in her witty novel, Autour du Mariage. And if my mother had said to me, as Madame d’Hautretan said to her daughter: “Your husband will take you in his arms⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠…” I should assuredly not have replied as Paulette did, shouting with laughter: “Don’t go too far, mamma⁠ ⁠… I know all that as well as you do.⁠ ⁠…”

I knew nothing at all, and mamma, poor mamma who is frightened of the least thing, had not even dared to approach this delicate subject.

Well, at five o’clock in the evening, after the luncheon, they announced that the carriage was waiting for me. The guests had gone, I was ready. I can remember still the sound of the trunks being brought down the staircase, and the nasal voice of papa, who did not want to show that he was crying. As he embraced me, the poor man said: “Be brave,” as though I were going to have a tooth out. As for mamma, she was a fountain. My husband was hurrying me away to escape these difficult farewells; I was in tears myself although I was very happy. I can’t explain that, but it’s none the less true. Suddenly I felt something tugging at my gown. It was Bijou, quite forgotten since the morning. The poor beast was saying goodbye to me after his fashion. It went to my heart a little, and I was wild to kiss my dog. I snatched him up (you know he’s the size of my fist) and began to cover him with kisses. I adore caressing animals. It pleases me so much, and somehow thrills me, it’s quite heavenly.

As for Bijou, he was like a mad thing, he pawed me, licked me and nibbled me as he does when he’s very happy. Suddenly he took hold of my nose with his teeth and I felt him hurt me. I gave a little cry and put the dog on the ground. He had given me a real bite in play. I was bleeding. Everybody was very distressed. They brought water, vinegar and bandages, and my husband wanted to look after me himself. It was nothing, however, two tiny holes like the pricks made by a needle. In five minutes the blood had stopped and I set off.

We had decided to travel in Normandy for about six weeks.

We reached Dieppe in the evening. When I say “evening” I mean midnight.

You know how I love the sea. I declared to my husband that I would not go to bed without having seen it. He seemed very amazed. I laughed and asked him:

“Are you sleepy?”

He answered:

“No, my dear, but surely you understand that I am longing to be alone with you.”

I was surprised.

“Alone with me? But we’ve been alone in the train all the way from Paris.”

He smiled.

“Yes⁠ ⁠… but⁠ ⁠… in the train, it’s not the same thing as being alone in our room.”

I would not give in:

“Well, we shall be alone on the seashore, and that’s that.”

That certainly did not please him. However, he said:

“Very well, since you wish it.”

It was a glorious night, one of those nights that fill the imaginative with vast dim ideas, felt rather than thought, a night to make one long to open one’s arms, spread one’s wings, embrace the whole sky⁠—I don’t know. But it seems as if one might be just on the verge of understanding strange mysteries.

There is a Dream in the air, and Romance that pierces the heart, and happiness that does not belong to this earth, a sort of divine intoxication born of stars, and moon, and moving silvered water. Life holds no better moments. They make one’s life seem different, touched to beauty, delicately rare; they are like a revelation of what might be⁠ ⁠… or what will be.

My husband, however, seemed impatient to return. “Are you cold?” I asked him. “No. Then look at that little boat over there: it seems asleep on the water. We couldn’t find a lovelier place than this, could we? I would gladly stay here until daylight. Tell me, wouldn’t you like us to wait for the dawn?”

He thought that I was making fun of him, and he dragged me back to the hotel almost by force. If I had only known! Oh, the wretch!

When we were alone I felt ashamed, awkward, without knowing why, I assure you. At last I sent him away into the drawing room and I got into bed. Oh, my dear, how can I tell you? But here it is. He must have taken my utter innocence for malice, my utter simplicity for depravity, my trustful and artless freedom for deliberate coquetry, and he did not trouble himself to be as delicately discreet and kind as he ought to have been to make such mysteries explicable, understandable and acceptable to an unsuspecting and absolutely unprepared mind.

And, all at once, I thought that he had lost his head. Then I was overcome with fear and I asked him if he wanted to kill me. When you are terror-stricken, you don’t reason, you don’t think at all, you just go mad. In an instant, I imagined the most frightful things. I thought of the news items in the newspapers, of mysterious crimes, of all the stories whispered about young girls who have married wicked men. Did I know this man? I struggled, repulsed him, mad with fear. I even tore out a handful of his hair, and one side of his moustache; the effort freed me, and I leaped up, shouting “Help.” I ran to the door, drew back the bolts and rushed out on to the staircase, almost naked.

Other doors opened. Men in nightshirts appeared, with lights in their hands. I fell into the arms of one of them, and implored him to protect me. He threw himself on my husband.

I don’t know what happened after that. They fought and shouted; then they laughed; I’ve never heard such laughter. The whole house laughed, from cellar to attic. I heard loud bursts of merriment in the corridors, and in the bedrooms above. The scullions were laughing in the garrets, and the porter writhed on his mattress in the hall.

Think of it, in a hotel!

When it was all over, I was left alone again with my husband, who gave me some brief explanations, much as he might have explained a chemical experiment before trying it. He was by no means pleased. I wept until it grew light, and we went away as soon as the hotel doors were opened.

That’s not all.

Next day, we arrived at Pourville, which is still only the beginnings of a seaside town. My husband overwhelmed me with little attentions and kindnesses. After his first annoyance he seemed altogether delighted. Ashamed and miserable as I was over the previous day’s adventure, I made myself as agreeable as anyone could, and as docile. But you can’t imagine the horror, the disgust, the hatred almost, with which Henry inspired me since I had learned the monstrous secret that is so carefully hidden from young girls. I felt desperate, so sad I wanted to die, disgusted with everything, tormented by longing to return to my poor parents. The following day, we arrived at Étretat. All the visitors were in a state of great excitement: a young woman, bitten by a little dog, had just died⁠—mad. A terrible shiver ran down my spine when I heard them talking about it at the hotel table. It suddenly struck me that my nose was paining me, and, I felt queer sensations all along my limbs.

I did not sleep that night: I had quite forgotten my husband. Suppose I too was going to die mad. The next day I asked the head waiter for details. He told me the most frightful story. I spent the day walking on the cliff. I said nothing, I was thinking. Madness! What a horrible death! Henry asked me: “What’s the matter? You seem sad.” “Nothing, nothing,” I answered. I stared distractedly at the sea, without seeing it at all: I stared at the farm and the fields, but I could not have said what I was looking at. Not for anything in the world would I have confessed to the thought that was torturing me. I had pains, genuine pains in my nose. I insisted on going back.

As soon as we returned to the hotel, I shut myself in my room to examine the wound. There was nothing to be seen now. There was no mistake about it, however, it was hurting me.

I wrote to my mother at once, a short letter that she must have thought very strange. I demanded an immediate reply to certain unimportant questions. After I had signed it, I added: “Above all, don’t forget to give me news of Bijou.”

The next day I could not eat, but I refused to see a doctor. I spent the day sitting on the beach watching the bathers in the water. They arrived, some fat, some thin, and all ugly in their frightful costumes; but I hardly had the heart to laugh. I was thinking: “They’re happy, those people. They haven’t been bitten. They’ll live, they will. They’re not living in fear of anything. They can amuse themselves in any way they like. How peaceful they are!”

I kept lifting my hand to my nose to feel it. Was it swelling up? As soon as I got back to the hotel, I shut myself in my room to look at it in the glass. Oh, if it had changed colour I should have died on the spot.

That evening, I felt suddenly something like affection for my husband, an affection born of despair. I felt that he was kind, I leaned on his arm. Twenty times I was on the verge of telling him my dreadful secret, but I held my tongue.

He took the most abominable advantage of my self-abandon and my utter exhaustion of spirit. I had not strength enough to resist him, nor even the will. I would have endured anything, suffered anything. The next day, I had a letter from mother. She answered my questions, but did not mention Bijou. I thought at once: “He’s dead and they’re hiding it from me.” Then I wanted to run to the telegraph office to send a wire. A thought stopped me: “If he is really dead, they won’t tell me.” So I resigned myself to another two days of agony. And I wrote again. I asked them to send me the dog to amuse me, because I was a little bored.

In the afternoon I was seized with a trembling fit. I could not lift a full glass without spilling half the contents. My mind was in a lamentable state. Towards dusk I escaped from my husband and hurried to the church. I prayed for a long time.

On the way back I felt fresh pains in my nose and I went into a chemist’s whose shop was lit up. I told him that a friend of mine had been bitten and I asked his advice. But I forgot everything as soon as he said it, my mind was so troubled. I remembered only one thing: “Purgings are often recommended.” I bought several bottles of goodness knows what, on the pretext of giving them to my friend.

The dogs I met filled me with horror and a wild desire to take to my heels and run away. Several times I thought that I felt an impulse to bite them too.

I had a horribly restless night. My husband profited thereby. First thing in the morning, I received a reply from my mother. Bijou, she said, was quite well. But it would be too risky to send him alone by rail like that. So they would not send him to me. He was dead!

I could not sleep again. As for Henry, he snored. He woke up several times. I was exhausted.

The following day, I bathed in the sea. I almost fainted on going into the water, I felt so terribly cold. I was still more distraught by this sensation of bitter cold. My legs shook dreadfully, but the worst pain of all was in my nose.

Someone happened to introduce the local medical inspector to me, a charming man. I led up to my subject very subtly. Then I told him that a few days ago my young dog had bitten me, and I asked him what would have to be done if inflammation set in. He began to laugh and answered:

“In your case, madame, I could think of only one course, which would be to operate on you.”

And as I did not understand, he added:

“And that would be your husband’s business.”

I was no farther on and no wiser when I left him.

Henry seemed very gay, and very happy this evening. We went to the Casino in the evening, but he did not wait for the end of the show before suggesting to me that we should go home. Nothing interested me any more now: I fell in with his wish.

But I could not rest in bed, my nerves were exhausted and on edge. Nor was he any the readier for sleep. He embraced me, caressed me, and was as gentle and tender as if he had at last guessed how I was suffering. I endured his caresses without even realising what he was doing, without thinking about it at all.

But all at once a sudden spasm seized me, the most extraordinary and awful spasm. I uttered one frightful cry, and repulsing my husband, who was holding me closely, I leaped out of bed and threw myself on my face near the door. It was madness, a dreadful madness. I was lost.

Henry, utterly distracted, lifted me up and begged me to tell him what was the matter. But I would not speak. I was resigned now. I waited for death. I knew that after a few hours’ respite, another spasm would seize me, then another, until the last one, which would be fatal.

I let him carry me back to bed. Towards daybreak, my husband’s irritating obsessions brought on a fresh attack, which lasted longer than the first. I felt a wild impulse to rend, bite, scream; it was terrible, but less disagreeable than I would have believed.

Towards eight o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep for the first time for four nights.

At eleven o’clock, a beloved voice woke me. It was mamma: my letter had alarmed her, and she had come hurrying to see me. She held a large hamper in her hand and suddenly I heard barks coming from it. I snatched it, quite distraught, and wild with hope. I opened it, and Bijou jumped on to the bed; he caressed me, and frisked about, and rolled on my pillow, quite mad with joy.

Well, my darling, believe me or not, as you like⁠ ⁠… I only understood next day.

What tricks our imagination can play us! To think what I imagined! Tell me, isn’t it too stupid?⁠ ⁠…

I have never, you understand, don’t you, confessed to anyone the tortures I suffered during those four days. Suppose my husband had known. He makes enough fun of me already over our Dieppe adventure. For the matter of that, his jests don’t trouble me much. I am used to them. One gets used to everything in this life.⁠ ⁠…

Caresses

No, my friend, do not think any more of it. What you ask of me revolts and disgusts me. It is as if God⁠—for I believe in God⁠—had wanted to spoil every good thing that He made by attaching some horrible thing to it. He had given us love, the divinest thing the world ever knew, but, finding it too lovely and too fine for us, He imagined our senses, shameful, vile, revolting, brutal senses, senses that He seems to have fashioned in malicious jest and linked with the excretions of our bodies; He has conceived them in such a way that we cannot think of it without blushing, can only speak of it in hushed voices. The dreadful thing they do is wrapped in shame. It hides away, disgusts our souls, offends our eyes; despised by morality, hounded down by law, it consummates itself in darkness, as if it were a criminal.

Never speak to me of it, never!

I do not know whether I love you, but I know that your nearness pleases me, that your glance is sweet to me and your voice caresses my heart. From the day you had of me the frailness you desire, you would become hateful to me. The delicate bond that holds us to each other would be broken. An infamous abyss would lie between us.

Let us stay as we are. And⁠ ⁠… love me if you will, I will let you.

Madame, will you allow me also to speak to you with brutal frankness, without polite euphemisms, as I would speak to a friend who was anxious to take on himself a lifelong vow?

Neither do I know whether I love you. I should be sure of it only after the thing that so revolts you.

Have you forgotten Musset’s poem:

Je me souviens encor de ces spasmes terribles,
De ces baisers muets, de ces muscles ardents,
De cet être absorbé, blême et serrant les dents.
S’ils ne sont pas divins, ces moments sont horribles.12

We experience that sense of horror and overwhelming disgust only when the madness of our blood has led us into casual adventures. But when a woman is the being we have chosen, entirely charming and infinitely desirable, as you are for me, the caress of love becomes the sharpest, most complete and supremest pleasure.

This caress, madame, is the proof of love. If our passion dies after that fierce embrace, we have been deceiving ourselves. If it grows, we love.

A philosopher, who did not practise his doctrines, has put us on our guard against this snare of nature’s. Nature desires new life, he says, and to compel us to create it, has set the double bait of love and pleasure round the snare. And he adds: “As soon as we have let ourselves be taken, as soon as the momentary madness has left us, we are filled with a profound sadness, understanding the trick that has deceived us, seeing, feeling, touching the secret hidden cause that has driven us in spite of ourselves.”

That is often true, very often. Then we go away, in utter revulsion. Nature has conquered us, has thrown us against our will into arms that were opened for us because she willed them to open.

Yes, I know the cold savage kisses pressed on strange lips, the fixed burning gaze into eyes that one has never seen before and will never see again, and all that I can’t tell, all that sears our mind with a bitter grief.

But if this hazy cloud of affection that we call love has closed round two human beings, if they never cease to think long of each other, and, when they are separated, to remember one another, all the time, day and night, hiding in their hearts the beloved’s features and his smile and the sound of his voice; if they have been obsessed, possessed by the absent form whose image never leaves them, is it not natural that arms open at last, that lips meet and bodies touch?

Have you never wanted to kiss anyone? Tell me whether lips do not call to lips, whether the bright glance that seems to pierce our veins does not rouse fierce and irresistible desires.

True, you say, that is the snare, the shameful snare. What matter?⁠—I know it, I fall in it and I love it. Nature gives us the caress of love to hide her cunning, to force us⁠—against our will⁠—to perpetuate the human race. Let us therefore will the caress, make it ours, refine it, change it, idealise it, if you like. Let us too deceive Nature, the arch deceiver. Let us do more than she has willed, more than she could or dared teach us. Think that the caress of love is a precious thing taken from the earth in its rough state, and let us take it and work over it and perfect it, careless of the original design, the hidden will of the being you call God. And since it is thought that idealises everything, let us idealise this thing, madame, even in all its terrible brutality, all its most impure forms, its most monstrous imaginings.

Let us love the caress that thrills as we love the heady vine, ripe fruit fragrant on the palate, and all the sharp pleasures of the body. Let us love flesh because it is beautiful, because it is white and firm, and round and sweet, delicious to lips and hands.

When artists seek the rarest and purest form for the chalice where art must drink to ecstasy they choose the curve of the breasts, whose bud is like a rose.

And in a learned book, called the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, I read this definition of a woman’s bosom, which might have been imagined by M. Joseph Prudhomme turned medical man:

“The breast in woman may be considered as at one and the same time an object of use and of pleasure.”

Let us suppress, if you like it so, the usefulness and keep only the pleasure. Would it have been given this adorable form that calls aloud to be caressed, if it had been designed only to nourish babies?

Yes, madame, leave the moralists to preach modesty, and the doctors caution; leave poets, deceivers that are themselves always deceived, to sing the chaste union of souls and bodiless happiness; leave ugly woman to their duty and rational men to their futile needs; leave doctrinaires to their doctrines, priests to their commandments, and as for us, let us prize more than anything in the world the caress of love, that intoxicates and maddens us, makes us faint and exhausted, and gives us new life, that is sweeter than perfume, lighter than the light wind, sharper than wounds, swift and devouring, that makes men pray and weep and groan and shout and commit any crime and any heroic deed.

Let us love it, with no placid normal legal love; but violently, furiously, beyond all bounds of reason. Let us seek it as men seek gold and diamonds, for it is more precious than they, being beyond price and fleeting. Let us pursue it without faltering, let us die for it and through it.

And let me tell you, madame, a truth that you will not find, I think, in any book; the only happy women on this earth are those to whom no caresses are lacking. These live without anxiety, without torturing thoughts, desiring nothing save the next kiss, that shall be as delightful and satisfying as the last one was.

The other women, in whose lives caresses are few, or unsatisfying or raw, live tormented by a thousand wretched anxieties, by the friction of greed or vanity, and by all the things of life that turn to sorrow.

But women whose lives are filled with caresses, need nothing, desire nothing, regret nothing. They live in a dream, content and smiling, hardly ruffled by what for others would be irreparable disasters, since the caress of love pays all, cures all things, comforts for all.

I could say much more than this.⁠ ⁠…

These two letters, written on Japanese rice paper, were found in a little Russian leather pocketbook under a prie-Dieu at the Madeleine, on Sunday, yesterday, after one o’clock Mass, by

A Duel

The war was over; the Germans were occupying France; the country lay quivering like a beaten wrestler fallen beneath the conqueror’s knee.

From frenzied, famished, desperate Paris the first trains were departing, going to new frontiers, slowly traversing the countryside and the villages. The first travellers gazed through the windows at the ruined fields and burnt hamlets. At the doors of the houses left standing, Prussian soldiers, wearing their black, brass-spiked helmets, were smoking their pipes, straddling across their chairs. Others were working or talking, as though they were part of the family. When the train went through town, whole regiments could be seen drilling in the squares, and despite the din of the wheels, the hoarse words of command occasionally reached the travellers’ ears.

M. Dubuis, who had been a member of the national guard of Paris throughout the duration of the siege, was on his way to Switzerland to join his wife and children, prudently sent abroad before the invasion.

Hunger and hardships had no whit diminished the rich and peaceable merchant’s stout paunch. He had endured the terrible events with miserable resignation and bitter phrases about the cruelty of man. Now that he was nearing the frontier, the war ended, he was seeing Prussians for the first time, although he had done his duty on the ramparts and mounted guard on many a cold night.

With angry terror he watched these armed and bearded men installed as though in their own homes on the soil of France, and felt in his heart a sort of fever of impotent patriotism, and with it that deep need and new instinct for prudence which has never left us since.

In his compartment two Englishmen, come to see things, stared with their calm, inquisitive eyes. They were both stout also, and chatted in their own language, occasionally looking through their guidebook, which they read out loud, trying to recognise the places mentioned in it.

Suddenly the train slowed and stopped at the station of a little town, and a Prussian officer mounted the double step of the carriage with a noisy clattering of his sabre. He was tall, tightly buttoned into his uniform, and bearded to the eyes. His ruddy skin looked as though it were on fire, and his long moustaches, of a paler tone, streamed out on either side of his face, bisecting it.

The English pair promptly began to stare at him with smiles of satisfied curiosity, while M. Dubuis pretended to read a paper. He sat huddled in his corner, like a thief in the presence of a policeman.