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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Original Short Stories of Maupassant,
+Volume 10, by Guy de Maupassant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Original Short Stories, Volume 10 (of 13)
+
+Author: Guy de Maupassant
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #3086]
+Last Updated: February 23, 2018
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAUPASSANT SHORT STORIES ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+ORIGINAL SHORT STORIES, VOLUME 10 (of 13)
+
+
+By Guy De Maupassant
+
+
+Translated by:
+
+     ALBERT M. C. McMASTER, B.A.
+     A. E. HENDERSON, B.A.
+     MME. QUESADA and Others
+
+
+
+VOLUME X.
+
+     THE CHRISTENING
+     THE FARMER'S WIFE
+     THE DEVIL
+     THE SNIPE
+     THE WILL
+     WALTER SCHNAFF'S ADVENTURE
+     AT SEA
+     MINUET
+     THE SON
+     THAT PIG OF A MORIN
+     SAINT ANTHONY
+     LASTING LOVE
+     PIERROT
+     A NORMANDY JOKE
+     FATHER MATTHEW
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTENING
+
+“Well doctor, a little brandy?”
+
+“With pleasure.”
+
+The old ship's surgeon, holding out his glass, watched it as it slowly
+filled with the golden liquid. Then, holding it in front of his eyes, he
+let the light from the lamp stream through it, smelled it, tasted a few
+drops and smacked his lips with relish. Then he said:
+
+“Ah! the charming poison! Or rather the seductive murderer, the
+delightful destroyer of peoples!
+
+“You people do not know it the way I do. You may have read that admirable
+book entitled L'Assommoir, but you have not, as I have, seen alcohol
+exterminate a whole tribe of savages, a little kingdom of
+negroes--alcohol calmly unloaded by the barrel by red-bearded
+English seamen.
+
+“Right near here, in a little village in Brittany near Pont-l'Abbe, I
+once witnessed a strange and terrible tragedy caused by alcohol. I was
+spending my vacation in a little country house left me by my father. You
+know this flat coast where the wind whistles day and night, where one
+sees, standing or prone, these giant rocks which in the olden times were
+regarded as guardians, and which still retain something majestic and
+imposing about them. I always expect to see them come to life and start
+to walk across the country with the slow and ponderous tread of giants,
+or to unfold enormous granite wings and fly toward the paradise of the
+Druids.
+
+“Everywhere is the sea, always ready on the slightest provocation to rise
+in its anger and shake its foamy mane at those bold enough to brave its
+wrath.
+
+“And the men who travel on this terrible sea, which, with one motion of
+its green back, can overturn and swallow up their frail barks--they
+go out in the little boats, day and night, hardy, weary and drunk. They
+are often drunk. They have a saying which says: 'When the bottle is full
+you see the reef, but when it is empty you see it no more.'
+
+“Go into one of their huts; you will never find the father there. If you
+ask the woman what has become of her husband, she will stretch her arms
+out over the dark ocean which rumbles and roars along the coast. He
+remained, there one night, when he had had too much to drink; so did her
+oldest son. She has four more big, strong, fair-haired boys. Soon it will
+be their time.
+
+“As I said, I was living in a little house near Pont-l'Abbe. I was there
+alone with my servant, an old sailor, and with a native family which took
+care of the grounds in my absence. It consisted of three persons, two
+sisters and a man, who had married one of them, and who attended to the
+garden.
+
+“A short time before Christmas my gardener's wife presented him with a
+boy. The husband asked me to stand as god-father. I could hardly deny the
+request, and so he borrowed ten francs from me for the cost of the
+christening, as he said.
+
+“The second day of January was chosen as the date of the ceremony. For a
+week the earth had been covered by an enormous white carpet of snow,
+which made this flat, low country seem vast and limitless. The ocean
+appeared to be black in contrast with this white plain; one could see it
+rolling, raging and tossing its waves as though wishing to annihilate its
+pale neighbor, which appeared to be dead, it was so calm, quiet and cold.
+
+“At nine o'clock the father, Kerandec, came to my door with his
+sister-in-law, the big Kermagan, and the nurse, who carried the infant
+wrapped up in a blanket. We started for the church. The weather was so
+cold that it seemed to dry up the skin and crack it open. I was thinking
+of the poor little creature who was being carried on ahead of us, and I
+said to myself that this Breton race must surely be of iron, if their
+children were able, as soon as they were born, to stand such an outing.
+
+“We came to the church, but the door was closed; the priest was late.
+
+“Then the nurse sat down on one of the steps and began to undress the
+child. At first I thought there must have been some slight accident, but
+I saw that they were leaving the poor little fellow naked completely
+naked, in the icy air. Furious at such imprudence, I protested:
+
+“'Why, you are crazy! You will kill the child!'
+
+“The woman answered quietly: 'Oh, no, sir; he must wait naked before the
+Lord.'
+
+“The father and the aunt looked on undisturbed. It was the custom. If it
+were not adhered to misfortune was sure to attend the little one.
+
+“I scolded, threatened and pleaded. I used force to try to cover the
+frail creature. All was in vain. The nurse ran away from me through the
+snow, and the body of the little one turned purple. I was about to leave
+these brutes when I saw the priest coming across the country, followed.
+by the sexton and a young boy. I ran towards him and gave vent to my
+indignation. He showed no surprise nor did he quicken his pace in the
+least. He answered:
+
+“'What can you expect, sir? It's the custom. They all do it, and it's of
+no use trying to stop them.'
+
+“'But at least hurry up!' I cried.
+
+“He answered: 'But I can't go any faster.'
+
+“He entered the vestry, while we remained outside on the church steps. I
+was suffering. But what about the poor little creature who was howling
+from the effects of the biting cold.
+
+“At last the door opened. He went into the church. But the poor child had
+to remain naked throughout the ceremony. It was interminable. The priest
+stammered over the Latin words and mispronounced them horribly. He walked
+slowly and with a ponderous tread. His white surplice chilled my heart.
+It seemed as though, in the name of a pitiless and barbarous god, he had
+wrapped himself in another kind of snow in order to torture this little
+piece of humanity that suffered so from the cold.
+
+“Finally the christening was finished according to the rites and I saw
+the nurse once more take the frozen, moaning child and wrap it up in the
+blanket.
+
+“The priest said to me: 'Do you wish to sign the register?'
+
+“Turning to my gardener, I said: 'Hurry up and get home quickly so that
+you can warm that child.' I gave him some advice so as to ward off, if
+not too late, a bad attack of pneumonia. He promised to follow my
+instructions and left with his sister-in-law and the nurse. I followed
+the priest into the vestry, and when I had signed he demanded five francs
+for expenses.
+
+“As I had already given the father ten francs, I refused to pay twice.
+The priest threatened to destroy the paper and to annul the ceremony. I,
+in turn, threatened him with the district attorney. The dispute was long,
+and I finally paid five francs.
+
+“As soon as I reached home I went down to Kerandec's to find out whether
+everything was all right. Neither father, nor sister-in-law, nor nurse
+had yet returned. The mother, who had remained alone, was in bed,
+shivering with cold and starving, for she had had nothing to eat since
+the day before.
+
+“'Where the deuce can they have gone?' I asked. She answered without
+surprise or anger, 'They're going to drink something to celebrate: It was
+the custom. Then I thought, of my ten francs which were to pay the church
+and would doubtless pay for the alcohol.
+
+“I sent some broth to the mother and ordered a good fire to be built in
+the room. I was uneasy and furious and promised myself to drive out these
+brutes, wondering with terror what was going to happen to the poor
+infant.
+
+“It was already six, and they had not yet returned. I told my servant to
+wait for them and I went to bed. I soon fell asleep and slept like a top.
+At daybreak I was awakened by my servant, who was bringing me my hot
+water.
+
+“As soon as my eyes were open I asked: 'How about Kerandec?'
+
+“The man hesitated and then stammered: 'Oh! he came back, all right,
+after midnight, and so drunk that he couldn't walk, and so were Kermagan
+and the nurse. I guess they must have slept in a ditch, for the little
+one died and they never even noticed it.'
+
+“I jumped up out of bed, crying:
+
+“'What! The child is dead?'
+
+“'Yes, sir. They brought it back to Mother Kerandec. When she saw it she
+began to cry, and now they are making her drink to console her.'
+
+“'What's that? They are making her drink!'
+
+“'Yes, sir. I only found it out this morning. As Kerandec had no more
+brandy or money, he took some wood alcohol, which monsieur gave him for
+the lamp, and all four of them are now drinking that. The mother is
+feeling pretty sick now.'
+
+“I had hastily put on some clothes, and seizing a stick, with the
+intention of applying it to the backs of these human beasts, I hastened
+towards the gardener's house.
+
+“The mother was raving drunk beside the blue body of her dead baby.
+Kerandec, the nurse, and the Kermagan woman were snoring on the floor. I
+had to take care of the mother, who died towards noon.”
+
+The old doctor was silent. He took up the brandy-bottle and poured out
+another glass. He held it up to the lamp, and the light streaming through
+it imparted to the liquid the amber color of molten topaz. With one gulp
+he swallowed the treacherous drink.
+
+
+
+
+THE FARMER'S WIFE
+
+Said the Baron Rene du Treilles to me:
+
+“Will you come and open the hunting season with me at my farm at
+Marinville? I shall be delighted if you will, my dear boy. In the first
+place, I am all alone. It is rather a difficult ground to get at, and the
+place I live in is so primitive that I can invite only my most intimate
+friends.”
+
+I accepted his invitation, and on Saturday we set off on the train going
+to Normandy. We alighted at a station called Almivare, and Baron Rene,
+pointing to a carryall drawn by a timid horse and driven by a big
+countryman with white hair, said:
+
+“Here is our equipage, my dear boy.”
+
+The driver extended his hand to his landlord, and the baron pressed it
+warmly, asking:
+
+“Well, Maitre Lebrument, how are you?”
+
+“Always the same, M'sieu le Baron.”
+
+We jumped into this swinging hencoop perched on two enormous wheels, and
+the young horse, after a violent swerve, started into a gallop, pitching
+us into the air like balls. Every fall backward on the wooden bench gave
+me the most dreadful pain.
+
+The peasant kept repeating in his calm, monotonous voice:
+
+“There, there! All right all right, Moutard, all right!”
+
+But Moutard scarcely heard, and kept capering along like a goat.
+
+Our two dogs behind us, in the empty part of the hencoop, were standing
+up and sniffing the air of the plains, where they scented game.
+
+The baron gazed with a sad eye into the distance at the vast Norman
+landscape, undulating and melancholy, like an immense English park, where
+the farmyards, surrounded by two or four rows of trees and full of
+dwarfed apple trees which hid the houses, gave a vista as far as the eye
+could see of forest trees, copses and shrubbery such as landscape
+gardeners look for in laying out the boundaries of princely estates.
+
+And Rene du Treilles suddenly exclaimed:
+
+“I love this soil; I have my very roots in it.”
+
+He was a pure Norman, tall and strong, with a slight paunch, and of the
+old race of adventurers who went to found kingdoms on the shores of every
+ocean. He was about fifty years of age, ten years less perhaps than the
+farmer who was driving us.
+
+The latter was a lean peasant, all skin and bone, one of those men who
+live a hundred years.
+
+After two hours' travelling over stony roads, across that green and
+monotonous plain, the vehicle entered one of those orchard farmyards and
+drew up before in old structure falling into decay, where an old
+maid-servant stood waiting beside a young fellow, who took charge of the
+horse.
+
+We entered the farmhouse. The smoky kitchen was high and spacious. The
+copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the hearth. A
+cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived an odor
+of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old
+farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor
+of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the
+smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons,
+the odor of time, and of things that have passed away.
+
+I went out to have a look at the farmyard. It was very large, full of
+apple trees, dwarfed and crooked, and laden with fruit which fell on the
+grass around them. In this farmyard the Norman smell of apples was as
+strong as that of the bloom of orange trees on the shores of the south of
+France.
+
+Four rows of beeches surrounded this inclosure. They were so tall that
+they seemed to touch the clouds at this hour of nightfall, and their
+summits, through which the night winds passed, swayed and sang a
+mournful, interminable song.
+
+I reentered the house.
+
+The baron was warming his feet at the fire, and was listening to the
+farmer's talk about country matters. He talked about marriages, births
+and deaths, then about the fall in the price of grain and the latest news
+about cattle. The “Veularde” (as he called a cow that had been bought at
+the fair of Veules) had calved in the middle of June. The cider had not
+been first-class last year. Apricots were almost disappearing from the
+country.
+
+Then we had dinner. It was a good rustic meal, simple and abundant, long
+and tranquil. And while we were dining I noticed the special kind of
+friendly familiarity which had struck me from the start between the baron
+and the peasant.
+
+Outside, the beeches continued sighing in the night wind, and our two
+dogs, shut up in a shed, were whining and howling in an uncanny fashion.
+The fire was dying out in the big fireplace. The maid-servant had gone to
+bed. Maitre Lebrument said in his turn:
+
+“If you don't mind, M'sieu le Baron, I'm going to bed. I am not used to
+staying up late.”
+
+The baron extended his hand toward him and said: “Go, my friend,” in so
+cordial a tone that I said, as soon as the man had disappeared:
+
+“He is devoted to you, this farmer?”
+
+“Better than that, my dear fellow! It is a drama, an old drama, simple
+and very sad, that attaches him to me. Here is the story:
+
+“You know that my father was colonel in a cavalry regiment. His orderly
+was this young fellow, now an old man, the son of a farmer. When my
+father retired from the army he took this former soldier, then about
+forty; as his servant. I was at that time about thirty. We were living in
+our old chateau of Valrenne, near Caudebec-en-Caux.
+
+“At this period my mother's chambermaid was one of the prettiest girls
+you could see, fair-haired, slender and sprightly in manner, a genuine
+soubrette of the old type that no longer exists. To-day these creatures
+spring up into hussies before their time. Paris, with the aid of the
+railways, attracts them, calls them, takes hold of them, as soon as they
+are budding into womanhood, these little sluts who in old times remained
+simple maid-servants. Every man passing by, as recruiting sergeants did
+formerly, looking for recruits, with conscripts, entices and ruins them
+--these foolish lassies--and we have now only the scum of the
+female sex for servant maids, all that is dull, nasty, common and
+ill-formed, too ugly, even for gallantry.
+
+“Well, this girl was charming, and I often gave her a kiss in dark
+corners; nothing more, I swear to you! She was virtuous, besides; and I
+had some respect for my mother's house, which is more than can be said of
+the blackguards of the present day.
+
+“Now, it happened that my man-servant, the ex-soldier, the old farmer you
+have just seen, fell madly in love with this girl, perfectly daft. The
+first thing we noticed was that he forgot everything, he paid no
+attention to anything.
+
+“My father said incessantly:
+
+“'See here, Jean, what's the matter with you? Are you ill?'
+
+“He replied:
+
+“'No, no, M'sieu le Baron. There's nothing the matter with me.'
+
+“He grew thin; he broke glasses and let plates fall when waiting on the
+table. We thought he must have been attacked by some nervous affection,
+and sent for the doctor, who thought he could detect symptoms of spinal
+disease. Then my father, full of anxiety about his faithful man-servant,
+decided to place him in a private hospital. When the poor fellow heard of
+my father's intentions he made a clean breast of it.
+
+“'M'sieu le Baron'
+
+“'Well, my boy?'
+
+“'You see, the thing I want is not physic.'
+
+“'Ha! what is it, then?'
+
+“'It's marriage!'
+
+“My father turned round and stared at him in astonishment.
+
+“'What's that you say, eh?'
+
+“'It's marriage.”
+
+“'Marriage! So, then, you jackass, you're to love.'
+
+“'That's how it is, M'sieu le Baron.'
+
+“And my father began to laugh so immoderately that my mother called out
+through the wall of the next room:
+
+“'What in the world is the matter with you, Gontran?'
+
+“He replied:
+
+“'Come here, Catherine.'
+
+“And when she came in he told her, with tears in his eyes from sheer
+laughter, that his idiot of a servant-man was lovesick.
+
+“But my mother, instead of laughing, was deeply affected.
+
+“'Who is it that you have fallen in love with, my poor fellow?' she
+asked.
+
+“He answered without hesitation:
+
+“'With Louise, Madame le Baronne.'
+
+“My mother said with the utmost gravity: 'We must try to arrange this
+matter the best way we can.'
+
+“So Louise was sent for and questioned by my mother; and she said in
+reply that she knew all about Jean's liking for her, that in fact Jean
+had spoken to her about it several times, but that she did not want him.
+She refused to say why.
+
+“And two months elapsed during which my father and mother never ceased to
+urge this girl to marry Jean. As she declared she was not in love with
+any other man, she could not give any serious reason for her refusal. My
+father at last overcame her resistance by means of a big present of
+money, and started the pair of them on a farm--this very farm. I did
+not see them for three years, and then I learned that Louise had died of
+consumption. But my father and mother died, too, in their turn, and it
+was two years more before I found myself face to face with Jean.
+
+“At last one autumn day about the end of October the idea came into my
+head to go hunting on this part of my estate, which my father had told me
+was full of game.
+
+“So one evening, one wet evening, I arrived at this house. I was shocked
+to find my father's old servant with perfectly white hair, though he was
+not more than forty-five or forty-six years of age. I made him dine with
+me, at the very table where we are now sitting. It was raining hard. We
+could hear the rain battering at the roof, the walls, and the windows,
+flowing in a perfect deluge into the farmyard; and my dog was howling in
+the shed where the other dogs are howling to-night.
+
+“All of a sudden, when the servant-maid had gone to bed, the man said in
+a timid voice:
+
+“'M'sieu le Baron.'
+
+“'What is it, my dear Jean?'
+
+“'I have something to tell you.'
+
+“'Tell it, my dear Jean.'
+
+“'You remember Louise, my wife.'
+
+“'Certainly, I remember her.'
+
+“'Well, she left me a message for you.'
+
+“'What was it?'
+
+“'A--a--well, it was what you might call a confession.'
+
+“'Ha--and what was it about?'
+
+“'It was--it was--I'd rather, all the same, tell you nothing
+about it--but I must--I must. Well, it's this--it wasn't
+consumption she died of at all. It was grief--well, that's the long
+and short of it. As soon as she came to live here after we were married,
+she grew thin; she changed so that you wouldn't know her, M'sieu le
+Baron. She was just as I was before I married her, but it was just the
+opposite, just the opposite.
+
+“'I sent for the doctor. He said it was her liver that was affected--he
+said it was what he called a “hepatic” complaint--I don't know these
+big words, M'sieu le Baron. Then I bought medicine for her, heaps on
+heaps of bottles that cost about three hundred francs. But she'd take
+none of them; she wouldn't have them; she said: “It's no use, my poor
+Jean; it wouldn't do me any good.” I saw well that she had some hidden
+trouble; and then I found her one time crying, and I didn't know what to
+do, no, I didn't know what to do. I bought her caps, and dresses, and
+hair oil, and earrings. Nothing did her any good. And I saw that she was
+going to die. And so one night at the end of November, one snowy night,
+after she had been in bed the whole day, she told me to send for the
+cure. So I went for him. As soon as he came--'
+
+“'Jean,' she said, 'I am going to make a confession to you. I owe it to
+you, Jean. I have never been false to you, never! never, before or after
+you married me. M'sieu le Cure is there, and can tell you so; he knows my
+soul. Well, listen, Jean. If I am dying, it is because I was not able to
+console myself for leaving the chateau, because I was too fond of the
+young Baron Monsieur Rene, too fond of him, mind you, Jean, there was no
+harm in it! This is the thing that's killing me. When I could see him no
+more I felt that I should die. If I could only have seen him, I might
+have lived, only seen him, nothing more. I wish you'd tell him some day,
+by and by, when I am no longer here. You will tell him, swear you, will,
+Jean--swear it--in the presence of M'sieu le Cure! It will console me to
+know that he will know it one day, that this was the cause of my death!
+Swear it!'
+
+“'Well, I gave her my promise, M'sieu It Baron, and on the faith of an
+honest man I have kept my word.'
+
+“And then he ceased speaking, his eyes filling with tears.
+
+“Good God! my dear boy, you can't form any idea of the emotion that
+filled me when I heard this poor devil, whose wife I had killed without
+suspecting it, telling me this story on that wet night in this very
+kitchen.
+
+“I exclaimed: 'Ah! my poor Jean! my poor Jean!'
+
+“He murmured: 'Well, that's all, M'sieu le Baron. I could not help it,
+one way or the other--and now it's all over!'
+
+“I caught his hand across the table, and I began to weep.
+
+“He asked, 'Will you come and see her grave?' I nodded assent, for I
+couldn't speak. He rose, lighted a lantern, and we walked through the
+blinding rain by the light of the lantern.
+
+“He opened a gate, and I saw some crosses of black wood.
+
+“Suddenly he stopped before a marble slab and said: 'There it is,' and he
+flashed the lantern close to it so that I could read the inscription:
+
+           “'TO LOUISE HORTENSE MARINET,
+        “'Wife of Jean-Francois Lebrument, Farmer,
+      “'SHE WAS A FAITHFUL WIFE. GOD REST HER SOUL.'
+
+“We fell on our knees in the damp grass, he and I, with the lantern
+between us, and I saw the rain beating on the white marble slab. And I
+thought of the heart of her sleeping there in her grave. Ah! poor heart!
+poor heart! Since then I come here every year. And I don't know why, but
+I feel as if I were guilty of some crime in the presence of this man who
+always looks as if he forgave me.”
+
+
+
+
+THE DEVIL
+
+The peasant and the doctor stood on opposite sides of the bed, beside the
+old, dying woman. She was calm and resigned and her mind quite clear as
+she looked at them and listened to their conversation. She was going to
+die, and she did not rebel at it, for her time was come, as she was
+ninety-two.
+
+The July sun streamed in at the window and the open door and cast its hot
+flames on the uneven brown clay floor, which had been stamped down by
+four generations of clodhoppers. The smell of the fields came in also,
+driven by the sharp wind and parched by the noontide heat. The
+grass-hoppers chirped themselves hoarse, and filled the country with
+their shrill noise, which was like that of the wooden toys which are sold
+to children at fair time.
+
+The doctor raised his voice and said: “Honore, you cannot leave your
+mother in this state; she may die at any moment.” And the peasant, in
+great distress, replied: “But I must get in my wheat, for it has been
+lying on the ground a long time, and the weather is just right for it;
+what do you say about it, mother?” And the dying old woman, still
+tormented by her Norman avariciousness, replied yes with her eyes and her
+forehead, and thus urged her son to get in his wheat, and to leave her to
+die alone.
+
+But the doctor got angry, and, stamping his foot, he said: “You are no
+better than a brute, do you hear, and I will not allow you to do it, do
+you understand? And if you must get in your wheat today, go and fetch
+Rapet's wife and make her look after your mother; I will have it, do you
+understand me? And if you do not obey me, I will let you die like a dog,
+when you are ill in your turn; do you hear?”
+
+The peasant, a tall, thin fellow with slow movements, who was tormented
+by indecision, by his fear of the doctor and his fierce love of saving,
+hesitated, calculated, and stammered out: “How much does La Rapet charge
+for attending sick people?” “How should I know?” the doctor cried. “That
+depends upon how long she is needed. Settle it with her, by Heaven! But I
+want her to be here within an hour, do you hear?”
+
+So the man decided. “I will go for her,” he replied; “don't get angry,
+doctor.” And the latter left, calling out as he went: “Be careful, be
+very careful, you know, for I do not joke when I am angry!” As soon as
+they were alone the peasant turned to his mother and said in a resigned
+voice: “I will go and fetch La Rapet, as the man will have it. Don't
+worry till I get back.”
+
+And he went out in his turn.
+
+La Rapet, old was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of
+the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sewn her customers into
+that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and took
+up her iron to smooth out the linen of the living. Wrinkled like a last
+year's apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal avarice,
+bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the loins by the
+constant motion of passing the iron over the linen, one might have said
+that she had a kind of abnormal and cynical love of a death struggle. She
+never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the
+various kinds of deaths at which she had been present, and she related
+with the greatest minuteness details which were always similar, just as a
+sportsman recounts his luck.
+
+When Honore Bontemps entered her cottage, he found her preparing the
+starch for the collars of the women villagers, and he said:
+“Good-evening; I hope you are pretty well, Mother Rapet?”
+
+She turned her head round to look at him, and said: “As usual, as usual,
+and you?” “Oh! as for me, I am as well as I could wish, but my mother is
+not well.” “Your mother?” “Yes, my mother!” “What is the matter with
+her?” “She is going to turn up her toes, that's what's the matter with
+her!”
+
+The old woman took her hands out of the water and asked with sudden
+sympathy: “Is she as bad as all that?” “The doctor says she will not last
+till morning.” “Then she certainly is very bad!” Honore hesitated, for he
+wanted to make a few preparatory remarks before coming to his
+proposition; but as he could hit upon nothing, he made up his mind
+suddenly.
+
+“How much will you ask to stay with her till the end? You know that I am
+not rich, and I can not even afford to keep a servant girl. It is just
+that which has brought my poor mother to this state--too much worry
+and fatigue! She did the work of ten, in spite of her ninety-two years.
+You don't find any made of that stuff nowadays!”
+
+La Rapet answered gravely: “There are two prices: Forty sous by day and
+three francs by night for the rich, and twenty sous by day and forty by
+night for the others. You shall pay me the twenty and forty.” But the
+peasant reflected, for he knew his mother well. He knew how tenacious of
+life, how vigorous and unyielding she was, and she might last another
+week, in spite of the doctor's opinion; and so he said resolutely: “No, I
+would rather you would fix a price for the whole time until the end. I
+will take my chance, one way or the other. The doctor says she will die
+very soon. If that happens, so much the better for you, and so much the
+worse for her, but if she holds out till to-morrow or longer, so much the
+better for her and so much the worse for you!”
+
+The nurse looked at the man in astonishment, for she had never treated a
+death as a speculation, and she hesitated, tempted by the idea of the
+possible gain, but she suspected that he wanted to play her a trick. “I
+can say nothing until I have seen your mother,” she replied.
+
+“Then come with me and see her.”
+
+She washed her hands, and went with him immediately.
+
+They did not speak on the road; she walked with short, hasty steps, while
+he strode on with his long legs, as if he were crossing a brook at every
+step.
+
+The cows lying down in the fields, overcome by the heat, raised their
+heads heavily and lowed feebly at the two passers-by, as if to ask them
+for some green grass.
+
+When they got near the house, Honore Bontemps murmured: “Suppose it is
+all over?” And his unconscious wish that it might be so showed itself in
+the sound of his voice.
+
+But the old woman was not dead. She was lying on her back, on her
+wretched bed, her hands covered with a purple cotton counterpane,
+horribly thin, knotty hands, like the claws of strange animals, like
+crabs, half closed by rheumatism, fatigue and the work of nearly a
+century which she had accomplished.
+
+La Rapet went up to the bed and looked at the dying woman, felt her
+pulse, tapped her on the chest, listened to her breathing, and asked her
+questions, so as to hear her speak; and then, having looked at her for
+some time, she went out of the room, followed by Honore. Her decided
+opinion was that the old woman would not last till night. He asked:
+“Well?” And the sick-nurse replied: “Well, she may last two days, perhaps
+three. You will have to give me six francs, everything included.”
+
+“Six francs! six francs!” he shouted. “Are you out of your mind? I tell
+you she cannot last more than five or six hours!” And they disputed
+angrily for some time, but as the nurse said she must go home, as the
+time was going by, and as his wheat would not come to the farmyard of its
+own accord, he finally agreed to her terms.
+
+“Very well, then, that is settled; six francs, including everything,
+until the corpse is taken out.”
+
+And he went away, with long strides, to his wheat which was lying on the
+ground under the hot sun which ripens the grain, while the sick-nurse
+went in again to the house.
+
+She had brought some work with her, for she worked without ceasing by the
+side of the dead and dying, sometimes for herself, sometimes for the
+family which employed her as seamstress and paid her rather more in that
+capacity. Suddenly, she asked: “Have you received the last sacraments,
+Mother Bontemps?”
+
+The old peasant woman shook her head, and La Rapet, who was very devout,
+got up quickly:
+
+“Good heavens, is it possible? I will go and fetch the cure”; and she
+rushed off to the parsonage so quickly that the urchins in the street
+thought some accident had happened, when they saw her running.
+
+The priest came immediately in his surplice, preceded by a choir boy who
+rang a bell to announce the passage of the Host through the parched and
+quiet country. Some men who were working at a distance took off their
+large hats and remained motionless until the white vestment had
+disappeared behind some farm buildings; the women who were making up the
+sheaves stood up to make the sign of the cross; the frightened black hens
+ran away along the ditch until they reached a well-known hole, through
+which they suddenly disappeared, while a foal which was tied in a meadow
+took fright at the sight of the surplice and began to gallop round and
+round, kicking out every now and then. The acolyte, in his red cassock,
+walked quickly, and the priest, with his head inclined toward one
+shoulder and his square biretta on his head, followed him, muttering some
+prayers; while last of all came La Rapet, bent almost double as if she
+wished to prostrate herself, as she walked with folded hands as they do
+in church.
+
+Honore saw them pass in the distance, and he asked: “Where is our priest
+going?” His man, who was more intelligent, replied: “He is taking the
+sacrament to your mother, of course!”
+
+The peasant was not surprised, and said: “That may be,” and went on with
+his work.
+
+Mother Bontemps confessed, received absolution and communion, and the
+priest took his departure, leaving the two women alone in the suffocating
+room, while La Rapet began to look at the dying woman, and to ask herself
+whether it could last much longer.
+
+The day was on the wane, and gusts of cooler air began to blow, causing a
+view of Epinal, which was fastened to the wall by two pins, to flap up
+and down; the scanty window curtains, which had formerly been white, but
+were now yellow and covered with fly-specks, looked as if they were going
+to fly off, as if they were struggling to get away, like the old woman's
+soul.
+
+Lying motionless, with her eyes open, she seemed to await with
+indifference that death which was so near and which yet delayed its
+coming. Her short breathing whistled in her constricted throat. It would
+stop altogether soon, and there would be one woman less in the world; no
+one would regret her.
+
+At nightfall Honore returned, and when he went up to the bed and saw that
+his mother was still alive, he asked: “How is she?” just as he had done
+formerly when she had been ailing, and then he sent La Rapet away, saying
+to her: “To-morrow morning at five o'clock, without fail.” And she
+replied: “To-morrow, at five o'clock.”
+
+She came at daybreak, and found Honore eating his soup, which he had made
+himself before going to work, and the sick-nurse asked him: “Well, is
+your mother dead?” “She is rather better, on the contrary,” he replied,
+with a sly look out of the corner of his eyes. And he went out.
+
+La Rapet, seized with anxiety, went up to the dying woman, who remained
+in the same state, lethargic and impassive, with her eyes open and her
+hands clutching the counterpane. The nurse perceived that this might go
+on thus for two days, four days, eight days, and her avaricious mind was
+seized with fear, while she was furious at the sly fellow who had tricked
+her, and at the woman who would not die.
+
+Nevertheless, she began to work, and waited, looking intently at the
+wrinkled face of Mother Bontemps. When Honore returned to breakfast he
+seemed quite satisfied and even in a bantering humor. He was decidedly
+getting in his wheat under very favorable circumstances.
+
+La Rapet was becoming exasperated; every minute now seemed to her so much
+time and money stolen from her. She felt a mad inclination to take this
+old woman, this, headstrong old fool, this obstinate old wretch, and to
+stop that short, rapid breath, which was robbing her of her time and
+money, by squeezing her throat a little. But then she reflected on the
+danger of doing so, and other thoughts came into her head; so she went up
+to the bed and said: “Have you ever seen the Devil?” Mother Bontemps
+murmured: “No.”
+
+Then the sick-nurse began to talk and to tell her tales which were likely
+to terrify the weak mind of the dying woman. Some minutes before one dies
+the Devil appears, she said, to all who are in the death throes. He has a
+broom in his hand, a saucepan on his head, and he utters loud cries. When
+anybody sees him, all is over, and that person has only a few moments
+longer to live. She then enumerated all those to whom the Devil had
+appeared that year: Josephine Loisel, Eulalie Ratier, Sophie Padaknau,
+Seraphine Grospied.
+
+Mother Bontemps, who had at last become disturbed in mind, moved about,
+wrung her hands, and tried to turn her head to look toward the end of the
+room. Suddenly La Rapet disappeared at the foot of the bed. She took a
+sheet out of the cupboard and wrapped herself up in it; she put the iron
+saucepan on her head, so that its three short bent feet rose up like
+horns, and she took a broom in her right hand and a tin pail in her left,
+which she threw up suddenly, so that it might fall to the ground noisily.
+
+When it came down, it certainly made a terrible noise. Then, climbing
+upon a chair, the nurse lifted up the curtain which hung at the bottom of
+the bed, and showed herself, gesticulating and uttering shrill cries into
+the iron saucepan which covered her face, while she menaced the old
+peasant woman, who was nearly dead, with her broom.
+
+Terrified, with an insane expression on her face, the dying woman made a
+superhuman effort to get up and escape; she even got her shoulders and
+chest out of bed; then she fell back with a deep sigh. All was over, and
+La Rapet calmly put everything back into its place; the broom into the
+corner by the cupboard the sheet inside it, the saucepan on the hearth,
+the pail on the floor, and the chair against the wall. Then, with
+professional movements, she closed the dead woman's large eyes, put a
+plate on the bed and poured some holy water into it, placing in it the
+twig of boxwood that had been nailed to the chest of drawers, and
+kneeling down, she fervently repeated the prayers for the dead, which she
+knew by heart, as a matter of business.
+
+And when Honore returned in the evening he found her praying, and he
+calculated immediately that she had made twenty sows out of him, for she
+had only spent three days and one night there, which made five francs
+altogether, instead of the six which he owed her.
+
+
+
+
+THE SNIPE
+
+Old Baron des Ravots had for forty years 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 his high doorsteps.
+
+He spent his time in reading.
+
+He was a good-natured business man, who had much of the literary spirit
+of a former century. He worshipped anecdotes, those little risque
+anecdotes, and also true stories of events that happened in his
+neighborhood. As soon as a friend came to see him he asked:
+
+“Well, anything new?”
+
+And he knew how to worm out information like an examining lawyer.
+
+On sunny days he had his large reclining chair, similar to a bed, wheeled
+to the hall door. A man 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 romancing spirit
+of the sportsmen delighted. Some of them were memorable stories and were
+repeated regularly. The story of a rabbit that little Vicomte de Bourril
+had missed in his vestibule 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. Pif! paf! 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 worshipped 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 beak. 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 placed this object on the neck of a
+bottle in the manner of a tourniquet.
+
+All the guests counted simultaneously in a loud tone--
+
+“One-two-three.”
+
+And the baron with a fillip of the finger made this toy whirl round.
+
+The guest to 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
+neighbors look askance.
+
+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 WILL
+
+I knew that tall young fellow, Rene de Bourneval. He was an agreeable
+man, though rather melancholy and seemed prejudiced against everything,
+was very skeptical, and he could with a word tear down social hypocrisy.
+He would often say:
+
+“There are no honorable men, or, at least, they are only relatively so
+when compared with those lower than themselves.”
+
+He had two brothers, whom he never saw, the Messieurs de Courcils. I
+always supposed they were by another father, on account of the difference
+in the name. I had frequently heard that the family had a strange
+history, but did not know the details. As I took a great liking to Rene
+we soon became intimate friends, and one evening, when I had been dining
+with him alone, I asked him, by chance: “Are you a son of the first or
+second marriage?” He grew rather pale, and then flushed, and did not
+speak for a few moments; he was visibly embarrassed. Then he smiled in
+the melancholy, gentle manner, which was peculiar to him, and said:
+
+“My dear friend, if it will not weary you, I can give you some very
+strange particulars about my life. I know that you are a sensible man, so
+I do not fear that our friendship will suffer by my I revelations; and
+should it suffer, I should not care about having you for my friend any
+longer.
+
+“My mother, Madame de Courcils, was a poor little, timid woman, whom her
+husband had married for the sake of her fortune, and her whole life was
+one of martyrdom. Of a loving, timid, sensitive disposition, she was
+constantly being 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 a licentious life and carrying on liaisons with the wives
+and daughters of his tenants. This did not prevent him from having three
+children by his wife, that is, if you count me in. My mother said
+nothing, and lived in that noisy house like a little mouse. Set aside,
+unnoticed, nervous, she looked at people with her 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 pale
+blonde, as if her hair had lost its color through her constant fear.
+
+“Among the friends of Monsieur de Courcils who constantly came to her
+chateau, there was an ex-cavalry officer, a widower, a man who was
+feared, who was at the same time tender and violent, capable of the most
+determined resolves, Monsieur de Bourneval, whose name I bear. He was a
+tall, thin man, with a heavy black mustache. I am very like him. He was a
+man who had read a great deal, and his ideas were not like those of most
+of his class. His great-grandmother had been a friend of J. J.
+Rousseau's, and one might have said that he had inherited something of
+this ancestral connection. He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle
+Heloise by heart, and all those philosophical books which prepared in
+advance the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated laws
+and imbecile morality.
+
+“It seems that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their liaison
+was carried on so secretly that no one guessed at its existence. The
+poor, neglected, unhappy woman must have clung to him in despair, and in
+her intimacy with him must have imbibed all his ways of thinking,
+theories of free thought, audacious ideas of independent love; but being
+so timid she never ventured to speak out, and it was all driven back,
+condensed, shut up in her heart.
+
+“My two brothers were very hard towards her, like their father, and never
+gave her a caress, and, accustomed to seeing her count for nothing in the
+house, they treated her rather like a servant. I was the only one of her
+sons who really loved her and whom she loved.
+
+“When she died I was seventeen, and I must add, in order that you may
+understand what follows, that a lawsuit between my father and mother had
+been decided in my mother's favor, giving her the bulk of the property,
+and, thanks to the tricks of the law, and the intelligent devotion of a
+lawyer to her interests, the right to make her will in favor of whom she
+pleased.
+
+“We were told that there was a will at the lawyer's office and were
+invited to be present at the reading of it. I can remember it, as if it
+were yesterday. It was an imposing scene, dramatic, burlesque and
+surprising, occasioned by the posthumous revolt of that dead woman, by
+the cry for liberty, by the demands of that martyred one who had been
+crushed by our oppression during her lifetime and who, from her closed
+tomb, uttered a despairing appeal for independence.
+
+“The man who believed 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 gray. No doubt he was
+prepared for what was going to happen. The lawyer double-locked the door
+and began to read the will, after having opened, in our presence, the
+envelope, sealed with red wax, of the contents of which he was ignorant.”
+
+My friend stopped talking abruptly, and rising, took from his
+writing-table an old paper, unfolded it, kissed it and then continued:
+“This is the will of my beloved mother:
+
+   “'I, the undersigned, Anne Catherine-Genevieve-Mathilde de
+   Croixluce, the legitimate wife of Leopold-Joseph Gontran de Councils
+   sound in body and mind, here express my last wishes.
+
+   “I first of all ask God, and then my dear son Rene 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 out of calculation, then
+   despised, misunderstood, oppressed and constantly deceived by my
+   husband.
+
+   “'I forgive him, but I owe him nothing.
+
+   “'My elder sons never loved me, never petted me, scarcely treated me
+   as a mother, but during my whole life I did my duty towards 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 towards 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, in trust to my dear lover, Pierre-Germer-Simon de
+   Bourneval, to revert afterwards to our dear son Rene.
+
+   “'(This bequest is specified more precisely in a deed drawn
+   up by a notary.)
+
+   “'And I declare before the Supreme Judge who hears me, that I should
+   have cursed heaven and my own existence, if I had not found the
+   deep, devoted, tender, unshaken affection of my lover; 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; Rene,
+   alone, owes his life to Monsieur de Bourneval. I pray 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.
+
+   “'MATHILDE DE CROIXLUCE.'”
+
+“Monsieur de Courcils had risen and he cried:
+
+“'It is the will of a madwoman.'
+
+“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 attack 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 already
+slapped your ugly face and challenged you long since if I had not, before
+everything else, thought of the peace of mind during her lifetime of that
+poor woman whom you caused to suffer so greatly.'
+
+“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 are willing
+to come with 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, to avoid a 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 died three years
+later and I am still inconsolable.”
+
+He rose from his chair, walked up and down the room, and, standing in
+front of me, said:
+
+“Well, I say that my mother's will was one of the most beautiful, the
+most loyal, as well as one of the grandest acts that a woman could
+perform. Do you not think so?”
+
+I held out both hands to him, saying:
+
+“I most certainly do, my friend.”
+
+
+
+
+WALTER SCHNAFFS' ADVENTURE
+
+Ever since he entered France with the invading army Walter Schnaffs had
+considered himself the most unfortunate of men. He was large, had
+difficulty in walking, was short of breath and suffered frightfully with
+his feet, which were very flat and very fat. But he was a peaceful,
+benevolent man, not warlike or sanguinary, the father of four children
+whom he adored, and married to a little blonde whose little tendernesses,
+attentions and kisses he recalled with despair every evening. He liked to
+rise late and retire early, to eat good things in a leisurely manner and
+to drink beer in the saloon. He reflected, besides, that all that is
+sweet in existence vanishes with life, and he maintained in his heart a
+fearful hatred, instinctive as well as logical, for cannon, rifles,
+revolvers and swords, but especially for bayonets, feeling that he was
+unable to dodge this dangerous weapon rapidly enough to protect his big
+paunch.
+
+And when night fell and he lay on the ground, wrapped in his cape beside
+his comrades who were snoring, he thought long and deeply about those he
+had left behind and of the dangers in his path. “If he were killed what
+would become of the little ones? Who would provide for them and bring
+them up?” Just at present they were not rich, although he had borrowed
+when he left so as to leave them some money. And Walter Schnaffs wept
+when he thought of all this.
+
+At the beginning of a battle his legs became so weak that he would have
+fallen if he had not reflected that the entire army would pass over his
+body. The whistling of the bullets gave him gooseflesh.
+
+For months he had lived thus in terror and anguish.
+
+His company was marching on Normandy, and one day he was sent to
+reconnoitre with a small detachment, simply to explore a portion of the
+territory and to return at once. All seemed quiet in the country; nothing
+indicated an armed resistance.
+
+But as the Prussians were quietly descending into a little valley
+traversed by deep ravines a sharp fusillade made them halt suddenly,
+killing twenty of their men, and a company of sharpshooters, suddenly
+emerging from a little wood as large as your hand, darted forward with
+bayonets at the end of their rifles.
+
+Walter Schnaffs remained motionless at first, so surprised and bewildered
+that he did not even think of making his escape. Then he was seized with
+a wild desire to run away, but he remembered at once that he ran like a
+tortoise compared with those thin Frenchmen, who came bounding along like
+a lot of goats. Perceiving a large ditch full of brushwood covered with
+dead leaves about six paces in front of him, he sprang into it with both
+feet together, without stopping to think of its depth, just as one jumps
+from a bridge into the river.
+
+He fell like an arrow through a thick layer of vines and thorny brambles
+that tore his face and hands and landed heavily in a sitting posture on a
+bed of stones. Raising his eyes, he saw the sky through the hole he had
+made in falling through. This aperture might betray him, and he crawled
+along carefully on hands and knees at the bottom of this ditch beneath
+the covering of interlacing branches, going as fast as he could and
+getting away from the scene of the skirmish. Presently he stopped and sat
+down, crouched like a hare amid the tall dry grass.
+
+He heard firing and cries and groans going on for some time. Then the
+noise of fighting grew fainter and ceased. All was quiet and silent.
+
+Suddenly something stirred, beside him. He was frightfully startled. It
+was a little bird which had perched on a branch and was moving the dead
+leaves. For almost an hour Walter Schnaffs' heart beat loud and rapidly.
+
+Night fell, filling the ravine with its shadows. The soldier began to
+think. What was he to do? What was to become of him? Should he rejoin the
+army? But how? By what road? And he began over again the horrible life of
+anguish, of terror, of fatigue and suffering that he had led since the
+commencement of the war. No! He no longer had the courage! He would not
+have the energy necessary to endure long marches and to face the dangers
+to which one was exposed at every moment.
+
+But what should he do? He could not stay in this ravine in concealment
+until the end of hostilities. No, indeed! If it were not for having to
+eat, this prospect would not have daunted him greatly. But he had to eat,
+to eat every day.
+
+And here he was, alone, armed and in uniform, on the enemy's territory,
+far from those who would protect him. A shiver ran over him.
+
+All at once he thought: “If I were only a prisoner!” And his heart
+quivered with a longing, an intense desire to be taken prisoner by the
+French. A prisoner, he would be saved, fed, housed, sheltered from
+bullets and swords, without any apprehension whatever, in a good,
+well-kept prison. A prisoner! What a dream:
+
+His resolution was formed at once.
+
+“I will constitute myself a prisoner.”
+
+He rose, determined to put this plan into execution without a moment's
+delay. But he stood motionless, suddenly a prey to disturbing reflections
+and fresh terrors.
+
+Where would he make himself a prisoner and how? In What direction? And
+frightful pictures, pictures of death came into his mind.
+
+He would run terrible danger in venturing alone through the country with
+his pointed helmet.
+
+Supposing he should meet some peasants. These peasants seeing a Prussian
+who had lost his way, an unprotected Prussian, would kill him as if he
+were a stray dog! They would murder him with their forks, their picks,
+their scythes and their shovels. They would make a stew of him, a pie,
+with the frenzy of exasperated, conquered enemies.
+
+If he should meet the sharpshooters! These sharpshooters, madmen without
+law or discipline, would shoot him just for amusement to pass an hour; it
+would make them laugh to see his head. And he fancied he was already
+leaning against a wall in-front of four rifles whose little black
+apertures seemed to be gazing at him.
+
+Supposing he should meet the French army itself. The vanguard would take
+him for a scout, for some bold and sly trooper who had set off alone to
+reconnoitre, and they would fire at him. And he could already hear, in
+imagination, the irregular shots of soldiers lying in the brush, while he
+himself, standing in the middle of the field, was sinking to the earth,
+riddled like a sieve with bullets which he felt piercing his flesh.
+
+He sat down again in despair. His situation seemed hopeless.
+
+It was quite a dark, black and silent night. He no longer budged,
+trembling at all the slight and unfamiliar sounds that occur at night.
+The sound of a rabbit crouching at the edge of his burrow almost made him
+run. The cry of an owl caused him positive anguish, giving him a nervous
+shock that pained like a wound. He opened his big eyes as wide as
+possible to try and see through the darkness, and he imagined every
+moment that he heard someone walking close beside him.
+
+After interminable hours in which he suffered the tortures of the damned,
+he noticed through his leafy cover that the sky was becoming bright. He
+at once felt an intense relief. His limbs stretched out, suddenly
+relaxed, his heart quieted down, his eyes closed; he fell asleep.
+
+When he awoke the sun appeared to be almost at the meridian. It must be
+noon. No sound disturbed the gloomy silence. Walter Schnaffs noticed that
+he was exceedingly hungry.
+
+He yawned, his mouth watering at the thought of sausage, the good sausage
+the soldiers have, and he felt a gnawing at his stomach.
+
+He rose from the ground, walked a few steps, found that his legs were
+weak and sat down to reflect. For two or three hours he again considered
+the pros and cons, changing his mind every moment, baffled, unhappy, torn
+by the most conflicting motives.
+
+Finally he had an idea that seemed logical and practical. It was to watch
+for a villager passing by alone, unarmed and with no dangerous tools of
+his trade, and to run to him and give himself up, making him understand
+that he was surrendering.
+
+He took off his helmet, the point of which might betray him, and put his
+head out of his hiding place with the utmost caution.
+
+No solitary pedestrian could be perceived on the horizon. Yonder, to the
+right, smoke rose from the chimney of a little village, smoke from
+kitchen fires! And yonder, to the left, he saw at the end of an avenue of
+trees a large turreted chateau. He waited till evening, suffering
+frightfully from hunger, seeing nothing but flights of crows, hearing
+nothing but the silent expostulation of his empty stomach.
+
+And darkness once more fell on him.
+
+He stretched himself out in his retreat and slept a feverish sleep,
+haunted by nightmares, the sleep of a starving man.
+
+Dawn again broke above his head and he began to make his observations.
+But the landscape was deserted as on the previous day, and a new fear
+came into Walter Schnaffs' mind--the fear of death by hunger! He
+pictured himself lying at full length on his back at the bottom of his
+hiding place, with his two eyes closed, and animals, little creatures of
+all kinds, approached and began to feed on his dead body, attacking it
+all over at once, gliding beneath his clothing to bite his cold flesh,
+and a big crow pecked out his eyes with its sharp beak.
+
+He almost became crazy, thinking he was going to faint and would not be
+able to walk. And he was just preparing to rush off to the village,
+determined to dare anything, to brave everything, when he perceived three
+peasants walking to the fields with their forks across their shoulders,
+and he dived back into his hiding place.
+
+But as soon as it grew dark he slowly emerged from the ditch and started
+off, stooping and fearful, with beating heart, towards the distant
+chateau, preferring to go there rather than to the village, which seemed
+to him as formidable as a den of tigers.
+
+The lower windows were brilliantly lighted. One of them was open and from
+it escaped a strong odor of roast meat, an odor which suddenly penetrated
+to the olfactories and to the stomach of Walter Schnaffs, tickling his
+nerves, making him breathe quickly, attracting him irresistibly and
+inspiring his heart with the boldness of desperation.
+
+And abruptly, without reflection, he placed himself, helmet on head, in
+front of the window.
+
+Eight servants were at dinner around a large table. But suddenly one of
+the maids sat there, her mouth agape, her eyes fixed and letting fall her
+glass. They all followed the direction of her gaze.
+
+They saw the enemy!
+
+Good God! The Prussians were attacking the chateau!
+
+There was a shriek, only one shriek made up of eight shrieks uttered in
+eight different keys, a terrific screaming of terror, then a tumultuous
+rising from their seats, a jostling, a scrimmage and a wild rush to the
+door at the farther end. Chairs fell over, the men knocked the women down
+and walked over them. In two seconds the room was empty, deserted, and
+the table, covered with eatables, stood in front of Walter Schnaffs, lost
+in amazement and still standing at the window.
+
+After some moments of hesitation he climbed in at the window and
+approached the table. His fierce hunger caused him to tremble as if he
+were in a fever, but fear still held him back, numbed him. He listened.
+The entire house seemed to shudder. Doors closed, quick steps ran along
+the floor above. The uneasy Prussian listened eagerly to these confused
+sounds. Then he heard dull sounds, as though bodies were falling to the
+ground at the foot of the walls, human beings jumping from the first
+floor.
+
+Then all motion, all disturbance ceased, and the great chateau became as
+silent as the grave.
+
+Walter Schnaffs sat down before a clean plate and began to eat. He took
+great mouthfuls, as if he feared he might be interrupted before he had
+swallowed enough. He shovelled the food into his mouth, open like a trap,
+with both hands, and chunks of food went into his stomach, swelling out
+his throat as it passed down. Now and then he stopped, almost ready to
+burst like a stopped-up pipe. Then he would take the cider jug and wash
+down his esophagus as one washes out a clogged rain pipe.
+
+He emptied all the plates, all the dishes and all the bottles. Then,
+intoxicated with drink and food, besotted, red in the face, shaken by
+hiccoughs, his mind clouded and his speech thick, he unbuttoned his
+uniform in order to breathe or he could not have taken a step. His eyes
+closed, his mind became torpid; he leaned his heavy forehead on his
+folded arms on the table and gradually lost all consciousness of things
+and events.
+
+The last quarter of the moon above the trees in the park shed a faint
+light on the landscape. It was the chill hour that precedes the dawn.
+
+Numerous silent shadows glided among the trees and occasionally a blade
+of steel gleamed in the shadow as a ray of moonlight struck it.
+
+The quiet chateau stood there in dark outline. Only two windows were
+still lighted up on the ground floor.
+
+Suddenly a voice thundered:
+
+“Forward! nom d'un nom! To the breach, my lads!”
+
+And in an instant the doors, shutters and window panes fell in beneath a
+wave of men who rushed in, breaking, destroying everything, and took the
+house by storm. In a moment fifty soldiers, armed to the teeth, bounded
+into the kitchen, where Walter Schnaffs was peacefully sleeping, and
+placing to his breast fifty loaded rifles, they overturned him, rolled
+him on the floor, seized him and tied his head and feet together.
+
+He gasped in amazement, too besotted to understand, perplexed, bruised
+and wild with fear.
+
+Suddenly a big soldier, covered with gold lace, put his foot on his
+stomach, shouting:
+
+“You are my prisoner. Surrender!”
+
+The Prussian heard only the one word “prisoner” and he sighed, “Ya, ya,
+ya.”
+
+He was raised from the floor, tied in a chair and examined with lively
+curiosity by his victors, who were blowing like whales. Several of them
+sat down, done up with excitement and fatigue.
+
+He smiled, actually smiled, secure now that he was at last a prisoner.
+
+Another officer came into the room and said:
+
+“Colonel, the enemy has escaped; several seem to have been wounded. We
+are in possession.”
+
+The big officer, who was wiping his forehead, exclaimed: “Victory!”
+
+And he wrote in a little business memorandum book which he took from his
+pocket:
+
+“After a desperate encounter the Prussians were obliged to beat a
+retreat, carrying with them their dead and wounded, the number of whom is
+estimated at fifty men. Several were taken prisoners.”
+
+The young officer inquired:
+
+“What steps shall I take, colonel?”
+
+“We will retire in good order,” replied the colonel, “to avoid having to
+return and make another attack with artillery and a larger force of men.”
+
+And he gave the command to set out.
+
+The column drew up in line in the darkness beneath the walls of the
+chateau and filed out, a guard of six soldiers with revolvers in their
+hands surrounding Walter Schnaffs, who was firmly bound.
+
+Scouts were sent ahead to reconnoitre. They advanced cautiously, halting
+from time to time.
+
+At daybreak they arrived at the district of La Roche-Oysel, whose
+national guard had accomplished this feat of arms.
+
+The uneasy and excited inhabitants were expecting them. When they saw the
+prisoner's helmet tremendous shouts arose. The women raised their 10 arms
+in wonder, the old people wept. An old grandfather threw his crutch at
+the Prussian and struck the nose of one of their own defenders.
+
+The colonel roared:
+
+“See that the prisoner is secure!”
+
+At length they reached the town hall. The prison was opened and Walter
+Schnaffs, freed from his bonds, cast into it. Two hundred armed men
+mounted guard outside the building.
+
+Then, in spite of the indigestion that had been troubling him for some
+time, the Prussian, wild with joy, began to dance about, to dance
+frantically, throwing out his arms and legs and uttering wild shouts
+until he fell down exhausted beside the wall.
+
+He was a prisoner-saved!
+
+That was how the Chateau de Charnpignet was taken from the enemy after
+only six hours of occupation.
+
+Colonel Ratier, a cloth merchant, who had led the assault at the head of
+a body of the national guard of La Roche-Oysel, was decorated with an
+order.
+
+
+
+
+AT SEA
+
+The following paragraphs recently appeared in the papers:
+
+“Boulogne-Sur-Mer, January 22.--Our correspondent writes:
+
+“A fearful accident has thrown our sea-faring population, which has
+suffered so much in the last two years, into the greatest consternation.
+The fishing smack commanded by Captain Javel, on entering the harbor was
+wrecked on the rocks of the harbor breakwater.
+
+“In spite of the efforts of the life boat and the shooting of life lines
+from the shore four sailors and the cabin boy were lost.
+
+“The rough weather continues. Fresh disasters are anticipated.”
+
+Who is this Captain Javel? Is he the brother of the one-armed man?
+
+If the poor man tossed about in the waves and dead, perhaps, beneath his
+wrecked boat, is the one I am thinking of, he took part, just eighteen
+years ago, in another tragedy, terrible and simple as are all these
+fearful tragedies of the sea.
+
+Javel, senior, was then master of a trawling smack.
+
+The trawling smack is the ideal fishing boat. So solidly built that it
+fears no weather, with a round bottom, tossed about unceasingly on the
+waves like a cork, always on top, always thrashed by the harsh salt winds
+of the English Channel, it ploughs the sea unweariedly with bellying
+sail, dragging along at its side a huge trawling net, which scours the
+depths of the ocean, and detaches and gathers in all the animals asleep
+in the rocks, the flat fish glued to the sand, the heavy crabs with their
+curved claws, and the lobsters with their pointed mustaches.
+
+When the breeze is fresh and the sea choppy, the boat starts in to trawl.
+The net is fastened all along a big log of wood clamped with iron and is
+let down by two ropes on pulleys at either end of the boat. And the boat,
+driven by the wind and the tide, draws along this apparatus which
+ransacks and plunders the depths of the sea.
+
+Javel had on board his younger brother, four sailors and a cabin boy. He
+had set sail from Boulogne on a beautiful day to go trawling.
+
+But presently a wind sprang up, and a hurricane obliged the smack to run
+to shore. She gained the English coast, but the high sea broke against
+the rocks and dashed on the beach, making it impossible to go into port,
+filling all the harbor entrances with foam and noise and danger.
+
+The smack started off again, riding on the waves, tossed, shaken,
+dripping, buffeted by masses of water, but game in spite of everything;
+accustomed to this boisterous weather, which sometimes kept it roving
+between the two neighboring countries without its being able to make port
+in either.
+
+At length the hurricane calmed down just as they were in the open, and
+although the sea was still high the captain gave orders to cast the net.
+
+So it was lifted overboard, and two men in the bows and two in the stern
+began to unwind the ropes that held it. It suddenly touched bottom, but a
+big wave made the boat heel, and Javel, junior, who was in the bows
+directing the lowering of the net, staggered, and his arm was caught in
+the rope which the shock had slipped from the pulley for an instant. He
+made a desperate effort to raise the rope with the other hand, but the
+net was down and the taut rope did not give.
+
+The man cried out in agony. They all ran to his aid. His brother left the
+rudder. They all seized the rope, trying to free the arm it was bruising.
+But in vain. “We must cut it,” said a sailor, and he took from his pocket
+a big knife, which, with two strokes, could save young Javel's arm.
+
+But if the rope were cut the trawling net would be lost, and this net was
+worth money, a great deal of money, fifteen hundred francs. And it
+belonged to Javel, senior, who was tenacious of his property.
+
+“No, do not cut, wait, I will luff,” he cried, in great distress. And he
+ran to the helm and turned the rudder. But the boat scarcely obeyed it,
+being impeded by the net which kept it from going forward, and prevented
+also by the force of the tide and the wind.
+
+Javel, junior, had sunk on his knees, his teeth clenched, his eyes
+haggard. He did not utter a word. His brother came back to him, in dread
+of the sailor's knife.
+
+“Wait, wait,” he said. “We will let down the anchor.”
+
+They cast anchor, and then began to turn the capstan to loosen the
+moorings of the net. They loosened them at length and disengaged the
+imprisoned arm, in its bloody woolen sleeve.
+
+Young Javel seemed like an idiot. They took off his jersey and saw a
+horrible sight, a mass of flesh from which the blood spurted as if from a
+pump. Then the young man looked at his arm and murmured: “Foutu” (done
+for).
+
+Then, as the blood was making a pool on the deck of the boat, one of the
+sailors cried: “He will bleed to death, we must bind the vein.”
+
+So they took a cord, a thick, brown, tarry cord, and twisting it around
+the arm above the wound, tightened it with all their might. The blood
+ceased to spurt by slow degrees, and, presently, stopped altogether.
+
+Young Javel rose, his arm hanging at his side. He took hold of it with
+the other hand, raised it, turned it over, shook it. It was all mashed,
+the bones broken, the muscles alone holding it together. He looked at it
+sadly, reflectively. Then he sat down on a folded sail and his comrades
+advised him to keep wetting the arm constantly to prevent it from
+mortifying.
+
+They placed a pail of water beside him, and every few minutes he dipped a
+glass into it and bathed the frightful wound, letting the clear water
+trickle on to it.
+
+“You would be better in the cabin,” said his brother. He went down, but
+came up again in an hour, not caring to be alone. And, besides, he
+preferred the fresh air. He sat down again on his sail and began to bathe
+his arm.
+
+They made a good haul. The broad fish with their white bellies lay beside
+him, quivering in the throes of death; he looked at them as he continued
+to bathe his crushed flesh.
+
+As they were about to return to Boulogne the wind sprang up anew, and the
+little boat resumed its mad course, bounding and tumbling about, shaking
+up the poor wounded man.
+
+Night came on. The sea ran high until dawn. As the sun rose the English
+coast was again visible, but, as the weather had abated a little, they
+turned back towards the French coast, tacking as they went.
+
+Towards evening Javel, junior, called his comrades and showed them some
+black spots, all the horrible tokens of mortification in the portion of
+the arm below the broken bones.
+
+The sailors examined it, giving their opinion.
+
+“That might be the 'Black,'” thought one.
+
+“He should put salt water on it,” said another.
+
+They brought some salt water and poured it on the wound. The injured man
+became livid, ground his teeth and writhed a little, but did not exclaim.
+
+Then, as soon as the smarting had abated, he said to his brother:
+
+“Give me your knife.”
+
+The brother handed it to him.
+
+“Hold my arm up, quite straight, and pull it.”
+
+They did as he asked them.
+
+Then he began to cut off his arm. He cut gently, carefully, severing al
+the tendons with this blade that was sharp as a razor. And, presently,
+there was only a stump left. He gave a deep sigh and said:
+
+“It had to be done. It was done for.”
+
+He seemed relieved and breathed loud. He then began again to pour water
+on the stump of arm that remained.
+
+The sea was still rough and they could not make the shore.
+
+When the day broke, Javel, junior, took the severed portion of his arm
+and examined it for a long time. Gangrene had set in. His comrades also
+examined it and handed it from one to the other, feeling it, turning it
+over, and sniffing at it.
+
+“You must throw that into the sea at once,” said his brother.
+
+But Javel, junior, got angry.
+
+“Oh, no! Oh, no! I don't want to. It belongs to me, does it not, as it is
+my arm?”
+
+And he took and placed it between his feet.
+
+“It will putrefy, just the same,” said the older brother. Then an idea
+came to the injured man. In order to preserve the fish when the boat was
+long at sea, they packed it in salt, in barrels. He asked:
+
+“Why can I not put it in pickle?”
+
+“Why, that's a fact,” exclaimed the others.
+
+Then they emptied one of the barrels, which was full from the haul of the
+last few days; and right at the bottom of the barrel they laid the
+detached arm. They covered it with salt, and then put back the fish one
+by one.
+
+One of the sailors said by way of joke:
+
+“I hope we do not sell it at auction.”
+
+And everyone laughed, except the two Javels.
+
+The wind was still boisterous. They tacked within sight of Boulogne until
+the following morning at ten o'clock. Young Javel continued to bathe his
+wound. From time to time he rose and walked from one end to the other of
+the boat.
+
+His brother, who was at the tiller, followed him with glances, and shook
+his head.
+
+At last they ran into harbor.
+
+The doctor examined the wound and pronounced it to be in good condition.
+He dressed it properly and ordered the patient to rest. But Javel would
+not go to bed until he got back his severed arm, and he returned at once
+to the dock to look for the barrel which he had marked with a cross.
+
+It was emptied before him and he seized the arm, which was well preserved
+in the pickle, had shrunk and was freshened. He wrapped it up in a towel
+he had brought for the purpose and took it home.
+
+His wife and children looked for a long time at this fragment of their
+father, feeling the fingers, and removing the grains of salt that were
+under the nails. Then they sent for a carpenter to make a little coffin.
+
+The next day the entire crew of the trawling smack followed the funeral
+of the detached arm. The two brothers, side by side, led the procession;
+the parish beadle carried the corpse under his arm.
+
+Javel, junior, gave up the sea. He obtained a small position on the dock,
+and when he subsequently talked about his accident, he would say
+confidentially to his auditors:
+
+“If my brother had been willing to cut away the net, I should still have
+my arm, that is sure. But he was thinking only of his property.”
+
+
+
+
+MINUET
+
+Great misfortunes do not affect me very much, said John 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. She was very old, but as
+lively as a young girl. 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 cafes, 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 in habited by bees. Their
+straw hives skillfully 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-colored frock
+coat, a lace jabot, and an outlandish gray 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, 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 demeanor.
+
+After that I never lost sight of him, and each morning he began anew his
+outlandish 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 distingue,
+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 odor 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:
+
+“Elise, 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 eyes uneasily in all directions, then rose without saying a
+word and took her position opposite him.
+
+Then I witnessed an unheard-of thing.
+
+They advanced and retreated with childlike grimaces, smiling, swinging
+each other, 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 odor 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--grotesque 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?
+
+
+
+
+THE SON
+
+The two old friends were walking in the garden in bloom, where spring was
+bringing everything to life.
+
+One was a senator, the other a member of the French Academy, both serious
+men, full of very logical but solemn arguments, men of note and
+reputation.
+
+They talked first of politics, exchanging opinions; not on ideas, but on
+men, personalities in this regard taking the predominance over ability.
+Then they recalled some memories. Then they walked along in silence,
+enervated by the warmth of the air.
+
+A large bed of wallflowers breathed out a delicate sweetness. A mass of
+flowers of all species and color flung their fragrance to the breeze,
+while a cytisus covered with yellow clusters scattered its fine pollen
+abroad, a golden cloud, with an odor of honey that bore its balmy seed
+across space, similar to the sachet-powders of perfumers.
+
+The senator stopped, breathed in the cloud of floating pollen, looked at
+the fertile shrub, yellow as the sun, whose seed was floating in the air,
+and said:
+
+“When one considers that these imperceptible fragrant atoms will create
+existences at a hundred leagues from here, will send a thrill through the
+fibres and sap of female trees and produce beings with roots, growing
+from a germ, just as we do, mortal like ourselves, and who will be
+replaced by other beings of the same order, like ourselves again!”
+
+And, standing in front of the brilliant cytisus, whose live pollen was
+shaken off by each breath of air, the senator added:
+
+“Ah, old fellow, if you had to keep count of all your children you would
+be mightily embarrassed. Here is one who generates freely, and then lets
+them go without a pang and troubles himself no more about them.”
+
+“We do the same, my friend,” said the academician.
+
+“Yes, I do not deny it; we let them go sometimes,” resumed the senator,
+“but we are aware that we do, and that constitutes our superiority.”
+
+“No, that is not what I mean,” said the other, shaking his head. “You
+see, my friend, that there is scarcely a man who has not some children
+that he does not know, children--'father unknown'--whom he has
+generated almost unconsciously, just as this tree reproduces.
+
+“If we had to keep account of our amours, we should be just as
+embarrassed as this cytisus which you apostrophized would be in counting
+up his descendants, should we not?
+
+“From eighteen to forty years, in fact, counting in every chance cursory
+acquaintanceship, we may well say that we have been intimate with two or
+three hundred women.
+
+“Well, then, my friend, among this number can you be sure that you have
+not had children by at least one of them, and that you have not in the
+streets, or in the bagnio, some blackguard of a son who steals from and
+murders decent people, i.e., ourselves; or else a daughter in some
+disreputable place, or, if she has the good fortune to be deserted by her
+mother, as cook in some family?
+
+“Consider, also, that almost all those whom we call 'prostitutes' have
+one or two children of whose paternal parentage they are ignorant,
+generated by chance at the price of ten or twenty francs. In every
+business there is profit and loss. These wildings constitute the 'loss'
+in their profession. Who generated them? You--I--we all did,
+the men called 'gentlemen'! They are the consequences of our jovial
+little dinners, of our gay evenings, of those hours when our comfortable
+physical being impels us to chance liaisons.
+
+“Thieves, marauders, all these wretches, in fact, are our children. And
+that is better for us than if we were their children, for those
+scoundrels generate also!
+
+“I have in my mind a very horrible story that I will relate to you. It
+has caused me incessant remorse, and, further than that, a continual
+doubt, a disquieting uncertainty, that, at times, torments me
+frightfully.
+
+“When I was twenty-five I undertook a walking tour through Brittany with
+one of my friends, now a member of the cabinet.
+
+“After walking steadily for fifteen or twenty days and visiting the
+Cotes-du-Nord and part of Finistere we reached Douarnenez. From there we
+went without halting to the wild promontory of Raz by the bay of Les
+Trepaases, and passed the night in a village whose name ends in 'of.' The
+next morning a strange lassitude kept my friend in bed; I say bed from
+habit, for our couch consisted simply of two bundles of straw.
+
+“It would never do to be ill in this place. So I made him get up, and we
+reached Andierne about four or five o'clock in the evening.
+
+“The following day he felt a little better, and we set out again. But on
+the road he was seized with intolerable pain, and we could scarcely get
+as far as Pont Labbe.
+
+“Here, at least, there was an inn. My friend went to bed, and the doctor,
+who had been sent for from Quimper, announced that he had a high fever,
+without being able to determine its nature.
+
+“Do you know Pont Labbe? No? Well, then, it is the most Breton of all
+this Breton Brittany, which extends from the promontory of Raz to the
+Morbihan, of this land which contains the essence of the Breton manners,
+legends and customs. Even to-day this corner of the country has scarcely
+changed. I say 'even to-day,' for I now go there every year, alas!
+
+“An old chateau laves the walls of its towers in a great melancholy pond,
+melancholy and frequented by flights of wild birds. It has an outlet in a
+river on which boats can navigate as far as the town. In the narrow
+streets with their old-time houses the men wear big hats, embroidered
+waistcoats and four coats, one on top of the other; the inside one, as
+large as your hand, barely covering the shoulder-blades, and the outside
+one coming to just above the seat of the trousers.
+
+“The girls, tall, handsome and fresh have their bosoms crushed in a cloth
+bodice which makes an armor, compresses them, not allowing one even to
+guess at their robust and tortured neck. They also wear a strange
+headdress. On their temples two bands embroidered in colors frame their
+face, inclosing the hair, which falls in a shower at the back of their
+heads, and is then turned up and gathered on top of the head under a
+singular cap, often woven with gold or silver thread.
+
+“The servant at our inn was eighteen at most, with very blue eyes, a pale
+blue with two tiny black pupils, short teeth close together, which she
+showed continually when she laughed, and which seemed strong enough to
+grind granite.
+
+“She did not know a word of French, speaking only Breton, as did most of
+her companions.
+
+“As my friend did not improve much, and although he had no definite
+malady, the doctor forbade him to continue his journey yet, ordering
+complete rest. I spent my days with him, and the little maid would come
+in incessantly, bringing either my dinner or some herb tea.
+
+“I teased her a little, which seemed to amuse her, but we did not chat,
+of course, as we could not understand each other.
+
+“But one night, after I had stayed quite late with my friend and was
+going back to my room, I passed the girl, who was going to her room. It
+was just opposite my open door, and, without reflection, and more for fun
+than anything else, I abruptly seized her round the waist, and before she
+recovered from her astonishment I had thrown her down and locked her in
+my room. She looked at me, amazed, excited, terrified, not daring to cry
+out for fear of a scandal and of being probably driven out, first by her
+employers and then, perhaps, by her father.
+
+“I did it as a joke at first. She defended herself bravely, and at the
+first chance she ran to the door, drew back the bolt and fled.
+
+“I scarcely saw her for several days. She would not let me come near her.
+But when my friend was cured and we were to get out on our travels again
+I saw her coming into my room about midnight the night before our
+departure, just after I had retired.
+
+“She threw herself into my arms and embraced me passionately, 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 inn servants being generally destined to amuse
+travellers in this way.
+
+“I was thirty before I thought of it again, or returned to Pont Labbe.
+
+“But in 1876 I revisited it by chance during a trip into Brittany, which
+I made in order to look up some data for a book and to become permeated
+with the atmosphere of the different places.
+
+“Nothing seemed changed. The chateau still laved its gray wall in the
+pond outside the little town; the inn was the same, though it had been
+repaired, renovated and looked more modern. As I entered it I was
+received by two young Breton girls of eighteen, fresh and pretty, bound
+up in their tight cloth bodices, with their silver caps and wide
+embroidered bands on their ears.
+
+“It was about six o'clock in the evening. I sat down to dinner, and as
+the host was assiduous in waiting on me himself, fate, no doubt, impelled
+me to say:
+
+“'Did you know the former proprietors of this house? I spent about ten
+days here thirty years ago. I am talking old times.'
+
+“'Those were my parents, monsieur,' he replied.
+
+“Then I told him why we had stayed over at that time, how my comrade had
+been delayed by illness. He did not let me finish.
+
+“'Oh, I recollect perfectly. I was about fifteen or sixteen. You slept in
+the room at the end and your friend in the one I have taken for myself,
+overlooking the street.'
+
+“It was only then that the recollection of the little maid came vividly
+to my mind. I asked: 'Do you remember a pretty little servant who was
+then in your father's employ, and who had, if my memory does not deceive
+me, pretty eyes and fresh-looking teeth?'
+
+“'Yes, monsieur; she died in childbirth some time after.'
+
+“And, pointing to the courtyard where a thin, lame man was stirring up
+the manure, he added:
+
+“'That is her son.'
+
+“I began to laugh:
+
+“'He is not handsome and does not look much like his mother. No doubt he
+looks like his father.'
+
+“'That is very possible,' replied the innkeeper; 'but we never knew whose
+child it was. She died without telling any one, and no one here knew of
+her having a beau. Every one was hugely astonished when they heard she
+was enceinte, and no one would believe it.'
+
+“A sort of unpleasant chill came over me, one of those painful surface
+wounds that affect us like the shadow of an impending sorrow. And I
+looked at the man in the yard. He had just drawn water for the horses and
+was carrying two buckets, limping as he walked, with a painful effort of
+his shorter leg. His clothes were ragged, he was hideously dirty, with
+long yellow hair, so tangled that it looked like strands of rope falling
+down at either side of his face.
+
+“'He is not worth much,' continued the innkeeper; 'we have kept him for
+charity's sake. Perhaps he would have turned out better if he had been
+brought up like other folks. But what could one do, monsieur? No father,
+no mother, no money! My parents took pity on him, but he was not their
+child, you understand.'
+
+“I said nothing.
+
+“I slept in my old room, and all night long I thought of this frightful
+stableman, saying to myself: 'Supposing it is my own son? Could I have
+caused that girl's death and procreated this being? It was quite
+possible!'
+
+“I resolved to speak to this man and to find out the exact date of his
+birth. A variation of two months would set my doubts at rest.
+
+“I sent for him the next day. But he could not speak French. He looked as
+if he could not understand anything, being absolutely ignorant of his
+age, which I had inquired of him through one of the maids. He stood
+before me like an idiot, twirling his hat in 'his knotted, disgusting
+hands, laughing stupidly, with something of his mother's laugh in the
+corners of his mouth and of his eyes.
+
+“The landlord, appearing on the scene, went to look for the birth
+certificate of this wretched being. He was born eight months and
+twenty-six days after my stay at Pont Labbe, for I recollect perfectly
+that we reached Lorient on the fifteenth of August. The certificate
+contained this description: 'Father unknown.' The mother called herself
+Jeanne Kerradec.
+
+“Then my heart began to beat rapidly. I could not utter a word, for I
+felt as if I were choking. I looked at this animal whose long yellow hair
+reminded me of a straw heap, and the beggar, embarrassed by my gaze,
+stopped laughing, turned his head aside, and wanted to get away.
+
+“All day long I wandered beside the little river, giving way to painful
+reflections. But what was the use of reflection? I could be sure of
+nothing. For hours and hours I weighed all the pros and cons in favor of
+or against the probability of my being the father, growing nervous over
+inexplicable suppositions, only to return incessantly to the same
+horrible uncertainty, then to the still more atrocious conviction that
+this man was my son.
+
+“I could eat no dinner, and went to my room.
+
+“I lay awake for a long time, and when I finally fell asleep I was
+haunted by horrible visions. I saw this laborer laughing in my face and
+calling me 'papa.' Then he changed into a dog and bit the calves of my
+legs, and no matter how fast I ran he still followed me, and instead of
+barking, talked and reviled me. Then he appeared before my colleagues at
+the Academy, who had assembled to decide whether I was really his father;
+and one of them cried out: 'There can be no doubt about it! See how he
+resembles him.' And, indeed, I could see that this monster looked like
+me. And I awoke with this idea fixed in my mind and with an insane desire
+to see the man again and assure myself whether or not we had similar
+features.
+
+“I joined him as he was going to mass (it was Sunday) and I gave him five
+francs as I gazed at him anxiously. He began to laugh in an idiotic
+manner, took the money, and then, embarrassed afresh at my gaze, he ran
+off, after stammering an almost inarticulate word that, no doubt, meant
+'thank you.'
+
+“My day passed in the same distress of mind as on the previous night. I
+sent for the landlord, and, with the greatest caution, skill and tact, I
+told him that I was interested in this poor creature, so abandoned by
+every one and deprived of everything, and I wished to do something for
+him.
+
+“But the man replied: 'Oh, do not think of it, monsieur; he is of no
+account; you will only cause yourself annoyance. I employ him to clean
+out the stable, and that is all he can do. I give him his board and let
+him sleep with the horses. He needs nothing more. If you have an old pair
+of trousers, you might give them to him, but they will be in rags in a
+week.'
+
+“I did not insist, intending to think it over.
+
+“The poor wretch came home that evening frightfully drunk, came near
+setting fire to the house, killed a horse by hitting it with a pickaxe,
+and ended up by lying down to sleep in the mud in the midst of the
+pouring rain, thanks to my donation.
+
+“They begged me next day not to give him any more money. Brandy drove him
+crazy, and as soon as he had two sous in his pocket he would spend it in
+drink. The landlord added: 'Giving him money is like trying to kill him.'
+The man had never, never in his life had more than a few centimes, thrown
+to him by travellers, and he knew of no destination for this metal but
+the wine shop.
+
+“I spent several hours in my room with an open book before me which I
+pretended to read, but in reality looking at this animal, my son! my son!
+trying to discover if he looked anything like me. After careful scrutiny
+I seemed to recognize a similarity in the lines of the forehead and the
+root of the nose, and I was soon convinced that there was a resemblance,
+concealed by the difference in garb and the man's hideous head of hair.
+
+“I could not stay here any longer without arousing suspicion, and I went
+away, my heart crushed, leaving with the innkeeper some money to soften
+the existence of his servant.
+
+“For six years now I have lived with this idea in my mind, this horrible
+uncertainty, this abominable suspicion. And each year an irresistible
+force takes me back to Pont Labbe. Every year I condemn myself to the
+torture of seeing this animal raking the manure, imagining that he
+resembles me, and endeavoring, always vainly, to render him some
+assistance. And each year I return more uncertain, more tormented, more
+worried.
+
+“I tried to have him taught, but he is a hopeless idiot. I tried to make
+his life less hard. He is an irreclaimable drunkard, and spends in drink
+all the money one gives him, and knows enough to sell his new clothes in
+order to get brandy.
+
+“I tried to awaken his master's sympathy, so that he should look after
+him, offering to pay him for doing so. The innkeeper, finally surprised,
+said, very wisely: 'All that you do for him, monsieur, will only help to
+destroy him. He must be kept like a prisoner. As soon as he has any spare
+time, or any comfort, he becomes wicked. If you wish to do good, there is
+no lack of abandoned children, but select one who will appreciate your
+attention.'
+
+“What could I say?
+
+“If I allowed the slightest suspicion of the doubts that tortured me to
+escape, this idiot would assuredly become cunning, in order to blackmail
+me, to compromise me and ruin me. He would call out 'papa,' as in my
+dream.
+
+“And I said to myself that I had killed the mother and lost this
+atrophied creature, this larva of the stable, born and raised amid the
+manure, this man who, if brought up like others, would have been like
+others.
+
+“And you cannot imagine what a strange, embarrassed and intolerable
+feeling comes over me when he stands before me and I reflect that he came
+from myself, that he belongs to me through the intimate bond that links
+father and son, that, thanks to the terrible law of heredity, he is my
+own self in a thousand ways, in his blood and his flesh, and that he has
+even the same germs of disease, the same leaven of emotions.
+
+“I have an incessant restless, distressing longing to see him, and the
+sight of him causes me intense suffering, as I look down from my window
+and watch him for hours removing and carting the horse manure, saying to
+myself: 'That is my son.'
+
+“And I sometimes feel an irresistible longing to embrace him. I have
+never even touched his dirty hand.”
+
+The academician was silent. His companion, a tactful man, murmured: “Yes,
+indeed, we ought to take a closer interest in children who have no
+father.”
+
+A gust of wind passing through the tree shook its yellow clusters,
+enveloping in a fragrant and delicate mist the two old men, who inhaled
+in the fragrance with deep breaths.
+
+The senator added: “It is good to be twenty-five and even to have
+children like that.”
+
+
+
+
+THAT PIG OF A MORIN
+
+“Here, my friend,” I said to Labarbe, “you have just repeated those five
+words, that pig of a Morin. Why on earth do I never hear Morin's name
+mentioned without his being called a pig?”
+
+Labarbe, who is a deputy, looked at me with his owl-like eyes and said:
+“Do you mean to say that you do not know Morin's story and you come from
+La Rochelle?” I was obliged to declare that I did not know Morin's story,
+so Labarbe rubbed his hands and began his recital.
+
+“You knew Morin, did you not, and you remember his large linen-draper's
+shop on the Quai de la Rochelle?”
+
+“Yes, perfectly.”
+
+“Well, then. You must know that in 1862 or '63 Morin went to spend a
+fortnight in Paris for pleasure; or for his pleasures, but under the
+pretext of renewing his stock, and you also know what a fortnight in
+Paris means to a country shopkeeper; it fires his blood. The theatre
+every evening, women's dresses rustling up against you and continual
+excitement; one goes almost mad with it. One sees nothing but dancers in
+tights, actresses in very low dresses, round legs, fat shoulders, all
+nearly within reach of one's hands, without daring, or being able, to
+touch them, and one scarcely tastes food. When one leaves the city one's
+heart is still all in a flutter and one's mind still exhilarated by a
+sort of longing for kisses which tickles one's lips.
+
+“Morin was in that condition when he took his ticket for La Rochelle by
+the eight-forty night express. As he was walking up and down the
+waiting-room at the station he stopped suddenly in front of a young lady
+who was kissing an old one. She had her veil up, and Morin murmured with
+delight: 'By Jove what a pretty woman!'
+
+“When she had said 'good-by' to the old lady she went into the
+waiting-room, and Morin followed her; then she went on the platform and
+Morin still followed her; then she got into an empty carriage, and he
+again followed her. There were very few travellers on the express. The
+engine whistled and the train started. They were alone. Morin devoured
+her with his eyes. She appeared to be about nineteen or twenty and was
+fair, tall, with a bold look. She wrapped a railway rug round her and
+stretched herself on the seat to sleep.
+
+“Morin asked himself: 'I wonder who she is?' And a thousand conjectures,
+a thousand projects went through his head. He said to himself: 'So many
+adventures are told as happening on railway journeys that this may be one
+that is going to present itself to me. Who knows? A piece of good luck
+like that happens very suddenly, and perhaps I need only be a little
+venturesome. Was it not Danton who said: 'Audacity, more audacity and
+always audacity'? If it was not Danton it was Mirabeau, but that does not
+matter. But then I have no audacity, and that is the difficulty. Oh! If
+one only knew, if one could only read people's minds! I will bet that
+every day one passes by magnificent opportunities without knowing it,
+though a gesture would be enough to let me know her mind.'
+
+“Then he imagined to himself combinations which conducted him to triumph.
+He pictured some chivalrous deed or merely some slight service which he
+rendered her, a lively, gallant conversation which ended in a
+declaration.
+
+“But he could find no opening, had no pretext, and he waited for some
+fortunate circumstance, with his heart beating and his mind topsy-turvy.
+The night passed and the pretty girl still slept, while Morin was
+meditating his own fall. The day broke and soon the first ray of sunlight
+appeared in the sky, a long, clear ray which shone on the face of the
+sleeping girl and woke her. She sat up, looked at the country, then at
+Morin and smiled. She smiled like a happy woman, with an engaging and
+bright look, and Morin trembled. Certainly that smile was intended for
+him; it was discreet invitation, the signal which he was waiting for.
+That smile meant to say: 'How stupid, what a ninny, what a dolt, what a
+donkey you are, to have sat there on your seat like a post all night!
+
+“'Just look at me, am I not charming? And you have sat like that for the
+whole night, when you have been alone with a pretty woman, you great
+simpleton!'
+
+“She was still smiling as she looked at him; she even began to laugh; and
+he lost his head trying to find something suitable to say, no matter
+what. But he could think of nothing, nothing, and then, seized with a
+coward's courage, he said to himself:
+
+“'So much the worse, I will risk everything,' and suddenly, without the
+slightest warning, he went toward her, his arms extended, his lips
+protruding, and, seizing her in his arms, he kissed her.
+
+“She sprang up immediately with a bound, crying out: 'Help! help!' and
+screaming with terror; and then she opened the carriage door and waved
+her arm out, mad with terror and trying to jump out, while Morin, who was
+almost distracted and feeling sure that she would throw herself out, held
+her by the skirt and stammered: 'Oh, madame! oh, madame!'
+
+“The train slackened speed and then stopped. Two guards rushed up at the
+young woman's frantic signals. She threw herself into their arms,
+stammering: 'That man wanted--wanted--to--to--' And then she fainted.
+
+“They were at Mauze station, and the gendarme on duty arrested Morin.
+When the victim of his indiscreet admiration had regained her
+consciousness, she made her charge against him, and the police drew it
+up. The poor linen draper did not reach home till night, with a
+prosecution hanging over him for an outrage to morals in a public place.”
+ II
+
+“At that time I was editor of the Fanal des Charentes, and I used to meet
+Morin every day at the Cafe du Commerce, and the day after his adventure.
+he came to see me, as he did not know what to do. I did not hide my
+opinion from him, but said to him: 'You are no better than a pig. No
+decent man behaves like that.'
+
+“He cried. His wife had given him a beating, and he foresaw his trade
+ruined, his name dragged through the mire and dishonored, his friends
+scandalized and taking no notice of him. In the end he excited my pity,
+and I sent for my colleague, Rivet, a jocular but very sensible little
+man, to give us his advice.
+
+“He advised me to see the public prosecutor, who was a friend of mine,
+and so I sent Morin home and went to call on the magistrate. He told me
+that the woman who had been insulted was a young lady, Mademoiselle
+Henriette Bonnel, who had just received her certificate as governess in
+Paris and spent her holidays with her uncle and aunt, who were very
+respectable tradespeople in Mauze. What made Morin's case all the more
+serious was that the uncle had lodged a complaint, but the public
+official had consented to let the matter drop if this complaint were
+withdrawn, so we must try and get him to do this.
+
+“I went back to Morin's and found him in bed, ill with excitement and
+distress. His wife, a tall raw-boned woman with a beard, was abusing him
+continually, and she showed me into the room, shouting at me: 'So you
+have come to see that pig of a Morin. Well, there he is, the darling!'
+And she planted herself in front of the bed, with her hands on her hips.
+I told him how matters stood, and he begged me to go and see the girl's
+uncle and aunt. It was a delicate mission, but I undertook it, and the
+poor devil never ceased repeating: 'I assure you I did not even kiss her;
+no, not even that. I will take my oath to it!'
+
+“I replied: 'It is all the same; you are nothing but a pig.' And I took a
+thousand francs which he gave me to employ as I thought best, but as I
+did not care to venture to her uncle's house alone, I begged Rivet to go
+with me, which he agreed to do on condition that we went immediately, for
+he had some urgent business at La Rochelle that afternoon. So two hours
+later we rang at the door of a pretty country house. An attractive girl
+came and opened the door to us assuredly the young lady in question, and
+I said to Rivet in a low voice: 'Confound it! I begin to understand
+Morin!'
+
+“The uncle, Monsieur Tonnelet, subscribed to the Fanal, and was a fervent
+political coreligionist of ours. He received us with open arms and
+congratulated us and wished us joy; he was delighted at having the two
+editors in his house, and Rivet whispered to me: 'I think we shall be
+able to arrange the matter of that pig of a Morin for him.'
+
+“The niece had left the room and I introduced the delicate subject. I
+waved the spectre of scandal before his eyes; I accentuated the
+inevitable depreciation which the young lady would suffer if such an
+affair became known, for nobody would believe in a simple kiss, and the
+good man seemed undecided, but he could not make up his mind about
+anything without his wife, who would not be in until late that evening.
+But suddenly he uttered an exclamation of triumph: 'Look here, I have an
+excellent idea; I will keep you here to dine and sleep, and when my wife
+comes home I hope we shall be able to arrange matters:
+
+“Rivet resisted at first, but the wish to extricate that pig of a Morin
+decided him, and we accepted the invitation, and the uncle got up
+radiant, called his niece and proposed that we should take a stroll in
+his grounds, saying: 'We will leave serious matters until the morning.'
+Rivet and he began to talk politics, while I soon found myself lagging a
+little behind with 'the girl who was really charming--charming--and with
+the greatest precaution I began to speak to her about her adventure and
+try to make her my ally. She did not, however, appear the least confused,
+and listened to me like a person who was enjoying the whole thing very
+much.
+
+“I said to her: 'Just think, mademoiselle, how unpleasant it will be for
+you. You will have to appear in court, to encounter malicious looks, to
+speak before everybody and to recount that unfortunate occurrence in the
+railway carriage in public. Do you not think, between ourselves, that it
+would have been much better for you to have put that dirty scoundrel back
+in his place without calling for assistance, and merely to change your
+carriage?' She began to laugh and replied: 'What you say is quite true,
+but what could I do? I was frightened, and when one is frightened one
+does not stop to reason with one's self. As soon as I realized the
+situation I was very sorry, that I had called out, but then it was too
+late. You must also remember that the idiot threw himself upon me like a
+madman, without saying a word and looking like a lunatic. I did not even
+know what he wanted of me.'
+
+“She looked me full in the face without being nervous or intimidated and
+I said to myself: 'She is a queer sort of girl, that: I can quite see how
+that pig Morin came to make a mistake,' and I went on jokingly: 'Come,
+mademoiselle, confess that he was excusable, for, after all, a man cannot
+find himself opposite such a pretty girl as you are without feeling a
+natural desire to kiss her.'
+
+“She laughed more than ever and showed her teeth and said: 'Between the
+desire and the act, monsieur, there is room for respect.' It was an odd
+expression to use, although it was not very clear, and I asked abruptly:
+'Well, now, suppose I were to kiss you, what would you do?' She stopped
+to look at me from head to foot and then said calmly: 'Oh, you? That is
+quite another matter.'
+
+“I knew perfectly well, by Jove, that it was not the same thing at all,
+as everybody in the neighborhood called me 'Handsome Labarbe'--I was
+thirty years old in those days--but I asked her: 'And why, pray?'
+She shrugged her shoulders and replied: 'Well! because you are not so
+stupid as he is.' And then she added, looking at me slyly: 'Nor so ugly,
+either: And before she could make a movement to avoid me I had implanted
+a hearty kiss on her cheek. She sprang aside, but it was too late, and
+then she said: 'Well, you are not very bashful, either! But don't do that
+sort of thing again.'
+
+“I put on a humble look and said in a low voice: 'Oh, mademoiselle! as
+for me, if I long for one thing more than another it is to be summoned
+before a magistrate for the same reason as Morin.'
+
+“'Why?' she asked. And, looking steadily at her, I replied: 'Because you
+are one of the most beautiful creatures living; because it would be an
+honor and a glory for me to have wished to offer you violence, and
+because people would have said, after seeing you: “Well, Labarbe has
+richly deserved what he has got, but he is a lucky fellow, all the
+same.”'
+
+“She began to laugh heartily again and said: 'How funny you are!' And she
+had not finished the word 'funny' before I had her in my arms and was
+kissing her ardently wherever I could find a place, on her forehead, on
+her eyes, on her lips occasionally, on her cheeks, all over her head,
+some part of which she was obliged to leave exposed, in spite of herself,
+to defend the others; but at last she managed to release herself,
+blushing and angry. 'You are very unmannerly, monsieur,' she said, 'and I
+am sorry I listened to you.'
+
+“I took her hand in some confusion and stammered out: 'I beg your pardon.
+I beg your pardon, mademoiselle. I have offended you; I have acted like a
+brute! Do not be angry with me for what I have done. If you knew--'
+I vainly sought for some excuse, and in a few moments she said: 'There is
+nothing for me to know, monsieur.' But I had found something to say, and
+I cried: 'Mademoiselle, I love you!'
+
+“She was really surprised and raised her eyes to look at me, and I went
+on: 'Yes, mademoiselle, and pray listen to me. I do not know Morin, and I
+do not care anything about him. It does not matter to me the least if he
+is committed for trial and locked up meanwhile. I saw you here last year,
+and I was so taken with you that the thought of you has never left me
+since, and it does not matter to me whether you believe me or not. I
+thought you adorable, and the remembrance of you took such a hold on me
+that I longed to see you again, and so I made use of that fool Morin as a
+pretext, and here I am. Circumstances have made me exceed the due limits
+of respect, and I can only beg you to pardon me.'
+
+“She looked at me to see if I was in earnest and was ready to smile
+again. Then she murmured: 'You humbug!' But I raised my hand and said in
+a sincere voice (and I really believe that I was sincere): 'I swear to
+you that I am speaking the truth,' and she replied quite simply: 'Don't
+talk nonsense!'
+
+“We were alone, quite alone, as Rivet and her uncle had disappeared down
+a sidewalk, and I made her a real declaration of love, while I squeezed
+and kissed her hands, and she listened to it as to something new and
+agreeable, without exactly knowing how much of it she was to believe,
+while in the end I felt agitated, and at last really myself believed what
+I said. I was pale, anxious and trembling, and I gently put my arm round
+her waist and spoke to her softly, whispering into the little curls over
+her ears. She seemed in a trance, so absorbed in thought was she.
+
+“Then her hand touched mine, and she pressed it, and I gently squeezed
+her waist with a trembling, and gradually firmer, grasp. She did not move
+now, and I touched her cheek with my lips, and suddenly without seeking
+them my lips met hers. It was a long, long kiss, and it would have lasted
+longer still if I had not heard a hm! hm! just behind me, at which she
+made her escape through the bushes, and turning round I saw Rivet coming
+toward me, and, standing in the middle of the path, he said without even
+smiling: 'So that is the way you settle the affair of that pig of a
+Morin.' And I replied conceitedly: 'One does what one can, my dear
+fellow. But what about the uncle? How have you got on with him? I will
+answer for the niece.' 'I have not been so fortunate with him,' he
+replied.
+
+“Whereupon I took his arm and we went indoors.”
+ III
+
+“Dinner made me lose my head altogether. I sat beside her, and my hand
+continually met hers under the tablecloth, my foot touched hers and our
+glances met.
+
+“After dinner we took a walk by moonlight, and I whispered all the tender
+things I could think of to her. I held her close to me, kissed her every
+moment, while her uncle and Rivet were arguing as they walked in front of
+us. They went in, and soon a messenger brought a telegram from her aunt,
+saying that she would not return until the next morning at seven o'clock
+by the first train.
+
+“'Very well, Henriette,' her uncle said, 'go and show the gentlemen their
+rooms.' She showed Rivet his first, and he whispered to me: 'There was no
+danger of her taking us into yours first.' Then she took me to my room,
+and as soon as she was alone with me I took her in my arms again and
+tried to arouse her emotion, but when she saw the danger she escaped out
+of the room, and I retired very much put out and excited and feeling
+rather foolish, for I knew that I should not sleep much, and I was
+wondering how I could have committed such a mistake, when there was a
+gentle knock at my door, and on my asking who was there a low voice
+replied: 'I.'
+
+“I dressed myself quickly and opened the door, and she came in. 'I forgot
+to ask you what you take in the morning,' she said; 'chocolate, tea or
+coffee?' I put my arms round her impetuously and said, devouring her with
+kisses: 'I will take--I will take--'
+
+“But she freed herself from my arms, blew out my candle and disappeared
+and left me alone in the dark, furious, trying to find some matches, and
+not able to do so. At last I got some and I went into the passage,
+feeling half mad, with my candlestick in my hand.
+
+“What was I about to do? I did not stop to reason, I only wanted to find
+her, and I would. I went a few steps without reflecting, but then I
+suddenly thought: 'Suppose I should walk into the uncle's room what
+should I say?' And I stood still, with my head a void and my heart
+beating. But in a few moments I thought of an answer: 'Of course, I shall
+say that I was looking for Rivet's room to speak to him about an
+important matter,' and I began to inspect all the doors, trying to find
+hers, and at last I took hold of a handle at a venture, turned it and
+went in. There was Henriette, sitting on her bed and looking at me in
+tears. So I gently turned the key, and going up to her on tiptoe I said:
+'I forgot to ask you for something to read, mademoiselle.'
+
+“I was stealthily returning to my room when a rough hand seized me and a
+voice--it was Rivet's--whispered in my ear: 'So you have not
+yet quite settled that affair of Morin's?'
+
+“At seven o'clock the next morning Henriette herself brought me a cup of
+chocolate. I never have drunk anything like it, soft, velvety, perfumed,
+delicious. I could hardly take away my lips from the cup, and she had
+hardly left the room when Rivet came in. He seemed nervous and irritable,
+like a man who had not slept, and he said to me crossly:
+
+“'If you go on like this you will end by spoiling the affair of that pig
+of a Morin!'
+
+“At eight o'clock the aunt arrived. Our discussion was very short, for
+they withdrew their complaint, and I left five hundred francs for the
+poor of the town. They wanted to keep us for the day, and they arranged
+an excursion to go and see some ruins. Henriette made signs to me to
+stay, behind her parents' back, and I accepted, but Rivet was determined
+to go, and though I took him aside and begged and prayed him to do this
+for me, he appeared quite exasperated and kept saying to me: 'I have had
+enough of that pig of a Morin's affair, do you hear?'
+
+“Of course I was obliged to leave also, and it was one of the hardest
+moments of my life. I could have gone on arranging that business as long
+as I lived, and when we were in the railway carriage, after shaking hands
+with her in silence, I said to Rivet: 'You are a mere brute!' And he
+replied: 'My dear fellow, you were beginning to annoy me confoundedly.'
+
+“On getting to the Fanal office, I saw a crowd waiting for us, and as
+soon as they saw us they all exclaimed: 'Well, have you settled the
+affair of that pig of a Morin?' All La Rochelle was excited about it, and
+Rivet, who had got over his ill-humor on the journey, had great
+difficulty in keeping himself from laughing as he said: 'Yes, we have
+managed it, thanks to Labarbe: And we went to Morin's.
+
+“He was sitting in an easy-chair with mustard plasters on his legs and
+cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery. He was coughing with
+the short cough of a dying man, without any one knowing how he had caught
+it, and his wife looked at him like a tigress ready to eat him, and as
+soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees
+shake, so I said to him immediately: 'It is all settled, you dirty scamp,
+but don't do such a thing again.'
+
+“He got up, choking, took my hands and kissed them as if they had
+belonged to a prince, cried, nearly fainted, embraced Rivet and even
+kissed Madame Morin, who gave him such a push as to send him staggering
+back into his chair; but he never got over the blow; his mind had been
+too much upset. In all the country round, moreover, he was called nothing
+but 'that pig of a Morin,' and that epithet went through him like a
+sword-thrust every time he heard it. When a street boy called after him
+'Pig!' he turned his head instinctively. His friends also overwhelmed him
+with horrible jokes and used to ask him, whenever they were eating ham,
+'Is it a bit of yourself?' He died two years later.
+
+“As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in
+1875, I called on the new notary at Fousserre, Monsieur Belloncle, to
+solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome and evidently wealthy lady
+received me. 'You do not know me again?' she said. And I stammered out:
+'Why--no--madame.' 'Henriette Bonnel.' 'Ah!' And I felt myself
+turning pale, while she seemed perfectly at her ease and looked at me
+with a smile.
+
+“As soon as she had left me alone with her husband he took both my hands,
+and, squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: 'I have been
+intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has
+very often talked to me about you. I know--yes, I know under what
+painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how
+perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you showed
+yourself in the affair--' He hesitated and then said in a lower
+tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse, 'in the affair
+of that pig of a Morin.'”
+
+
+
+
+SAINT ANTHONY
+
+They called him 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 gay fellow, 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 legs that seemed too slight for the
+bulk of his body.
+
+He was a widower and lived alone with his two men servants and a maid on
+his farm, which he conducted 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 neighborhood and came to dine with their father once a
+month. His vigor 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, 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 assumed
+wrath of a good fellow, with a flushed face 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 Rautot 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 luncheon with the servants the door
+opened and the mayor of the commune, Maitre Chicot, appeared, followed by
+a soldier wearing a black copper-pointed helmet. Saint Anthony bounded to
+his feet and his servants all 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 talked 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.
+
+Father Anthony, who had turned pale, looked at the Prussian. He was a
+big, young fellow with plump, white skin, blue eyes, fair hair, unshaven
+to his cheek bones, who looked stupid, timid and good. The shrewd Norman
+read him at once, and, reassured, he made him a sign to sit down. Then he
+said: “Will you take 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,
+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 soup, Saint Anthony gave him another
+plateful, 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; 'twill fatten you or it is your own fault, eh, 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 every one. 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
+rogue. 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 humor. No one but he would have thought of a thing like that.
+He was a born joker!
+
+He went to see his neighbors 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 reckless
+fellow, Antoine!”
+
+“I will sell him to you, Cesaire, for three pistoles” (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 him on the back, shouting, “That is all bacon”; lifted
+him up in his arms as an old Colossus that 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 neighborhood 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 scourges on France at one 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 neighbor 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 a
+festival, feeding the animal. All the neighbors ran over there as they
+would go to high mass on Sunday.
+
+But the soldier began to suspect something, be mistrustful, 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
+wine shop to get some brandy.
+
+The soldier rolled his eyes, which had a wicked expression, but he drank,
+nevertheless; he drank as long as they wanted him, and Saint Anthony held
+his head 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, nom d'un
+nom! They could neither of them stand any more when the liter was
+emptied. But neither was conquered. They were 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 pugilist 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 in a hurry, 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 holly wood 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 dark, 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 maid 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, nom de Dieu,
+idiot!
+
+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 cross wolf called “Devorant,”
+ 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 goose flesh.
+
+He had sunk into a chair, his legs weak, stupefied, done up, waiting
+anxiously for “Devorant” 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. “Devorant”
+ 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 leis 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 his arduous work, swallowing great
+mouthfuls of air, calmed down at 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
+thought.
+
+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 research, 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.
+
+
+
+
+LASTING LOVE
+
+It was the end of the dinner that opened the shooting season. The Marquis
+de Bertrans with his guests sat around a brightly lighted table, covered
+with fruit and flowers. The conversation drifted to love. Immediately
+there arose an animated discussion, the same eternal discussion as to
+whether it were possible to love more than once. Examples were given of
+persons who had loved once; these were offset by those who had loved
+violently many times. The men agreed that passion, like sickness, may
+attack the same person several times, unless it strikes to kill. This
+conclusion seemed quite incontestable. The women, however, who based
+their opinion on poetry rather than on practical observation, maintained
+that love, the great passion, may come only once to mortals. It resembles
+lightning, they said, this love. A heart once touched by it becomes
+forever such a waste, so ruined, so consumed, that no other strong
+sentiment can take root there, not even a dream. The marquis, who had
+indulged in many love affairs, disputed this belief.
+
+“I tell you it is possible to love several times with all one's heart and
+soul. You quote examples of persons who have killed themselves for love,
+to prove the impossibility of a second passion. I wager that if they had
+not foolishly committed suicide, and so destroyed the possibility of a
+second experience, they would have found a new love, and still another,
+and so on till death. It is with love as with drink. He who has once
+indulged is forever a slave. It is a thing of temperament.”
+
+They chose the old doctor as umpire. He thought it was as the marquis had
+said, a thing of temperament.
+
+“As for me,” he said, “I once knew of a love which lasted fifty-five
+years without one day's respite, and which ended only with death.” The
+wife of the marquis clasped her hands.
+
+“That is beautiful! Ah, what a dream to be loved in such a way! What
+bliss to live for fifty-five years enveloped in an intense, unwavering
+affection! How this happy being must have blessed his life to be so
+adored!”
+
+The doctor smiled.
+
+“You are not mistaken, madame, on this point the loved one was a man. You
+even know him; it is Monsieur Chouquet, the chemist. As to the woman, you
+also know her, the old chair-mender, who came every year to the chateau.”
+ The enthusiasm of the women fell. Some expressed their contempt with
+“Pouah!” for the loves of common people did not interest them. The doctor
+continued: “Three months ago I was called to the deathbed of the old
+chair-mender. The priest had preceded me. She wished to make us the
+executors of her will. In order that we might understand her conduct, she
+told us the story of her life. It is most singular and touching: Her
+father and mother were both chair-menders. She had never lived in a
+house. As a little child she wandered about with them, dirty, unkempt,
+hungry. They visited many towns, leaving their horse, wagon and dog just
+outside the limits, where the child played in the grass alone until her
+parents had repaired all the broken chairs in the place. They seldom
+spoke, except to cry, 'Chairs! Chairs! Chair-mender!'
+
+“When the little one strayed too far away, she would be called back by
+the harsh, angry voice of her father. She never heard a word of
+affection. When she grew older, she fetched and carried the broken
+chairs. Then it was she made friends with the children in the street, but
+their parents always called them away and scolded them for speaking to
+the barefooted child. Often the boys threw stones at her. Once a kind
+woman gave her a few pennies. She saved them most carefully.
+
+“One day--she was then eleven years old--as she was walking through
+a country town she met, behind the cemetery, little Chouquet, weeping
+bitterly, because one of his playmates had stolen two precious liards
+(mills). The tears of the small bourgeois, one of those much-envied
+mortals, who, she imagined, never knew trouble, completely upset her. She
+approached him and, as soon as she learned the cause of his grief, she
+put into his hands all her savings. He took them without hesitation and
+dried his eyes. Wild with joy, she kissed him. He was busy counting his
+money, and did not object. Seeing that she was not repulsed, she threw
+her arms round him and gave him a hug--then she ran away.
+
+“What was going on in her poor little head? Was it because she had
+sacrificed all her fortune that she became madly fond of this youngster,
+or was it because she had given him the first tender kiss? The mystery is
+alike for children and for those of riper years. For months she dreamed
+of that corner near the cemetery and of the little chap. She stole a sou
+here and, there from her parents on the chair money or groceries she was
+sent to buy. When she returned to the spot near the cemetery she had two
+francs in her pocket, but he was not there. Passing his father's drug
+store, she caught sight of him behind the counter. He was sitting between
+a large red globe and a blue one. She only loved him the more, quite
+carried away at the sight of the brilliant-colored globes. She cherished
+the recollection of it forever in her heart. The following year she met
+him near the school playing marbles. She rushed up to him, threw her
+arms round him, and kissed him so passionately that he screamed, in fear.
+To quiet him, she gave him all her money. Three francs and twenty
+centimes! A real gold mine, at which he gazed with staring eyes.
+
+“After this he allowed her to kiss him as much as she wished. During the
+next four years she put into his hands all her savings, which he pocketed
+conscientiously in exchange for kisses. At one time it was thirty sons,
+at another two francs. Again, she only had twelve sous. She wept with
+grief and shame, explaining brokenly that it had been a poor year. The
+next time she brought five francs, in one whole piece, which made her
+laugh with joy. She no longer thought of any one but the boy, and he
+watched for her with impatience; sometimes he would run to meet her. This
+made her heart thump with joy. Suddenly he disappeared. He had gone to
+boarding school. She found this out by careful investigation. Then she
+used great diplomacy to persuade her parents to change their route and
+pass by this way again during vacation. After a year of scheming she
+succeeded. She had not seen him for two years, and scarcely recognized
+him, he was so changed, had grown taller, better looking and was imposing
+in his uniform, with its brass buttons. He pretended not to see her, and
+passed by without a glance. She wept for two days and from that time
+loved and suffered unceasingly.
+
+“Every year he came home and she passed him, not daring to lift her eyes.
+He never condescended to turn his head toward her. She loved him madly,
+hopelessly. She said to me:
+
+“'He is the only man whom I have ever seen. I don't even know if another
+exists.' Her parents died. She continued their work.
+
+“One day, on entering the village, where her heart always remained, she
+saw Chouquet coming out of his pharmacy with a young lady leaning on his
+arm. She was his wife. That night the chair-mender threw herself into the
+river. A drunkard passing the spot pulled her out and took her to the
+drug store. Young Chouquet came down in his dressing gown to revive her.
+Without seeming to know who she was he undressed her and rubbed her; then
+he said to her, in a harsh voice:
+
+“'You are mad! People must not do stupid things like that.' His voice
+brought her to life again. He had spoken to her! She was happy for a long
+time. He refused remuneration for his trouble, although she insisted.
+
+“All her life passed in this way. She worked, thinking always of him. She
+began to buy medicines at his pharmacy; this gave her a chance to talk to
+him and to see him closely. In this way, she was still able to give him
+money.
+
+“As I said before, she died this spring. When she had closed her pathetic
+story she entreated me to take her earnings to the man she loved. She had
+worked only that she might leave him something to remind him of her after
+her death. I gave the priest fifty francs for her funeral expenses. The
+next morning I went to see the Chouquets. They were finishing breakfast,
+sitting opposite each other, fat and red, important and self-satisfied.
+They welcomed me and offered me some coffee, which I accepted. Then I
+began my story in a trembling voice, sure that they would be softened,
+even to tears. As soon as Chouquet understood that he had been loved by
+'that vagabond! that chair-mender! that wanderer!' he swore with
+indignation as though his reputation had been sullied, the respect of
+decent people lost, his personal honor, something precious and dearer to
+him than life, gone. His exasperated wife kept repeating: 'That beggar!
+That beggar!'
+
+“Seeming unable to find words suitable to the enormity, he stood up and
+began striding about. He muttered: 'Can you understand anything so
+horrible, doctor? Oh, if I had only known it while she was alive, I
+should have had her thrown into prison. I promise you she would not have
+escaped.'
+
+“I was dumfounded; I hardly knew what to think or say, but I had to
+finish my mission. 'She commissioned me,' I said, 'to give you her
+savings, which amount to three thousand five hundred francs. As what I
+have just told you seems to be very disagreeable, perhaps you would
+prefer to give this money to the poor.'
+
+“They looked at me, that man and woman,' speechless with amazement. I
+took the few thousand francs from out of my pocket. Wretched-looking
+money from every country. Pennies and gold pieces all mixed together.
+Then I asked:
+
+“'What is your decision?'
+
+“Madame Chouquet spoke first. 'Well, since it is the dying woman's wish,
+it seems to me impossible to refuse it.'
+
+“Her husband said, in a shamefaced manner: 'We could buy something for
+our children with it.'
+
+“I answered dryly: 'As you wish.'
+
+“He replied: 'Well, give it to us anyhow, since she commissioned you to
+do so; we will find a way to put it to some good purpose.'
+
+“I gave them the money, bowed and left.
+
+“The next day Chouquet came to me and said brusquely:
+
+“'That woman left her wagon here--what have you done with it?'
+
+“'Nothing; take it if you wish.'
+
+“'It's just what I wanted,' he added, and walked off. I called him back
+and said:
+
+“'She also left her old horse and two dogs. Don't you need them?'
+
+“He stared at me surprised: 'Well, no! Really, what would I do with
+them?'
+
+“'Dispose of them as you like.'
+
+“He laughed and held out his hand to me. I shook it. What could I do? The
+doctor and the druggist in a country village must not be at enmity. I
+have kept the dogs. The priest took the old horse. The wagon is useful to
+Chouquet, and with the money he has bought railroad stock. That is the
+only deep, sincere love that I have ever known in all my life.”
+
+The doctor looked up. The marquise, whose eyes were full of tears, sighed
+and said:
+
+“There is no denying the fact, only women know how to love.”
+
+
+
+
+PIERROT
+
+Mme. Lefevre was a country dame, a widow, one of these half peasants,
+with ribbons and bonnets with trimming on them, 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 ecru 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 woolen
+petticoat. It was a shame and a disgrace! They had robbed her, Mme.
+Lefevre! 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 into the
+garden!”
+
+And they became apprehensive for the future. How could they sleep in
+peace now!
+
+The news of the theft spread. The neighbor 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 (in Normandy they say
+“quin”), a little puppy who would bark.
+
+As soon as everyone had left, Mme. Lefevre 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. Mme. Lefevre declared that she would feed a “quin,” 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. Mme. Lefevre 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. Mme.
+Lefevre, 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.
+
+Mme. Lefevre, 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. Every one 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 passed by this hole plaintive howls, furious or despairing
+barks and lamentable appeals reach one's ear.
+
+Sportsmen's dogs and sheep dogs flee in terror from this mournful place,
+and when one leans over it one perceives a disgusting odor 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 laborer who mended the road demanded six sous to take
+the dog there. That seemed wildly exorbitant to Mme. Lefevre. The
+neighbor'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. Mme. Lefevre 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 Mme. Lefevre cried:
+“Wait for me, Rose, wait for me!”
+
+At night they were haunted by frightful nightmares.
+
+Mme. Lefevre 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. “You would die 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.”
+
+Mme. Lefevre 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 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, dumfounded, looked at each other and Mme. Lefevre 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 NORMANDY JOKE
+
+It was a wedding procession that was coming along the road between the
+tall trees that bounded the farms and cast their shadow on the road. At
+the head were the bride and groom, then the family, then the invited
+guests, and last of all the poor of the neighborhood. The village urchins
+who hovered about the narrow road like flies ran in and out of the ranks
+or climbed up the trees to see it better.
+
+The bridegroom was a good-looking young fellow, Jean Patu, the richest
+farmer in the neighborhood, but he was above all things, an ardent
+sportsman who seemed to take leave of his senses in order to satisfy that
+passion, and 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, for they all thought her handsome
+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.
+
+As they entered the white gateway of the husband's farm, forty shots
+resounded without their seeing those who fired, as they were hidden in
+the ditches. The noise seemed to please the men, who were slouching along
+heavily in their best clothes, and Patu left his wife, and running up to
+a farm servant whom he perceived behind a tree, took his gun and fired a
+shot himself, as frisky as a young colt. Then they went on, beneath the
+apple trees which were heavy with fruit, through the high grass and
+through the midst of the 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 humblest among them wore caps. All the women had on shawls,
+which they wore loosely on their back, holding the tips ceremoniously
+under their arms. They were red, parti-colored, flaming shawls, and their
+brightness seemed to astonish the black fowls on the dung-heap, the ducks
+on the side of the pond and the pigeons on the thatched roofs.
+
+The extensive farm buildings seemed to be waiting there at the end of
+that archway of apple trees, and a sort of vapor came out of open door
+and windows and an almost overpowering odor of eatables was exhaled from
+the vast building, from all its openings and from its very walls. The
+string of guests extended through the yard; but when the foremost of them
+reached the house, they broke the chain and dispersed, while those behind
+were still coming in at the open gate. The ditches were now lined with
+urchins and curious poor people, and the firing did not cease, but came
+from every side at once, and a cloud of smoke, and that odor which has
+the same intoxicating effect as absinthe, blended with the atmosphere.
+The women were shaking their dresses outside the door, to get rid of the
+dust, were undoing their cap-strings and pulling their shawls over their
+arms, and then they went into the house to lay them aside altogether for
+the time. The table was laid in the great kitchen that would hold a
+hundred persons; they sat down to dinner at two o'clock; and at eight
+o'clock they were still eating, and the men, in their shirt-sleeves, with
+their waistcoats unbuttoned and with red faces, were swallowing down the
+food and drink as if they had been whirlpools. The cider sparkled
+merrily, clear and golden in the large glasses, by the side of the dark,
+blood-colored wine, and between every dish they made a “hole,” the
+Normandy hole, with a glass of brandy which inflamed the body and put
+foolish notions into the head. Low jokes were exchanged across the table
+until the whole arsenal of peasant wit was exhausted. For the last
+hundred years the same broad stories had served for similar occasions,
+and, although every one knew them, they still hit the mark and made both
+rows of guests roar with laughter.
+
+At one end of the table four young fellows, who were neighbors, 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, and suddenly one of them, profiting by a moment of silence,
+exclaimed: “The poachers will have a good time to-night, 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 pay much attention to them!”
+
+The whole table was convulsed with laughter, so that the glasses shook,
+but the bridegroom became furious at the thought that anybody would
+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.
+
+The young woman had already taken off her wreath and her dress, and she
+was in her petticoat, unlacing her boots, while Jean was finishing his
+cigar and looking at her out of the corners of his eyes. Suddenly, with a
+brusque movement, like a man who is about to set to work, he took off his
+coat. She had already taken off her boots, and was now pulling off her
+stockings, and then she said to him: “Go and hide yourself behind the
+curtains while I get into bed.”
+
+He seemed as if he were about to refuse; but at last he did as she asked
+him, and in a moment she unfastened her petticoat, which slipped down,
+fell at her feet and lay on the ground. She left it there, stepped over
+it in her loose chemise and slipped into the bed, whose springs creaked
+beneath her weight. He immediately went up to the bed, and, stooping over
+his wife, he sought her lips, which she hid beneath the pillow, when a
+shot was heard in the distance, in the direction of the forest of Rapees,
+as he thought.
+
+He raised himself anxiously, with his heart beating, and running to the
+window, he opened the shutters. The full moon flooded the yard with
+yellow light, and the reflection of the apple trees made black shadows at
+their 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, but
+just as he was laying her on the 'bed, which yielded beneath her weight,
+they heard another report, considerably nearer this time, and Jean,
+giving way to his tumultuous rage, swore aloud: “Damn it! They will think
+I do not go out and see what it is because of you! Wait, wait a few
+minutes!” He put on his shoes again, took down his gun, which was always
+hanging within reach against the wall, and, as his wife threw herself on
+her knees in her terror, imploring 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, and with three
+dead hares hanging round his neck, and a placard on his chest with these
+words: “Who goes on the chase loses his place.”
+
+In later years, when he used to tell this story of his wedding night, he
+usually 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.
+
+
+
+
+FATHER MATTHEW
+
+We had just left Rouen and were galloping along the road to Jumieges. The
+light carriage flew along across the level country. Presently the horse
+slackened his pace to walk up the hill of Cantelen.
+
+One sees there one of the most magnificent views in the world. Behind us
+lay Rouen, the city of churches, with its Gothic belfries, sculptured
+like ivory trinkets; before us Saint Sever, the manufacturing suburb,
+whose thousands of smoking chimneys rise amid the expanse of sky,
+opposite the thousand sacred steeples of the old city.
+
+On the one hand the spire of the cathedral, the highest of human
+monuments, on the other the engine of the power-house, its rival, and
+almost as high, and a metre higher than the tallest pyramid in Egypt.
+
+Before us wound the Seine, with its scattered islands and bordered by
+white banks, covered with a forest on the right and on the left immense
+meadows, bounded by another forest yonder in the distance.
+
+Here and there large ships lay at anchor along the banks of the wide
+river. Three enormous steam boats were starting out, one behind the
+other, for Havre, and a chain of boats, a bark, two schooners and a brig,
+were going upstream to Rouen, drawn by a little tug that emitted a cloud
+of black smoke.
+
+My companion, a native of the country, did not glance at this wonderful
+landscape, but he smiled continually; he seemed to be amused at his
+thoughts. Suddenly he cried:
+
+“Ah, you will soon see something comical--Father Matthew's chapel.
+That is a sweet morsel, my boy.”
+
+I looked at him in surprise. He continued:
+
+“I will give you a whiff of Normandy that will stay by you. Father
+Matthew is the handsomest Norman in the province and his chapel is one of
+the wonders of the world, nothing more nor less. But I will first give
+you a few words of explanation.
+
+“Father Matthew, who is also called Father 'La Boisson,' is an old
+sergeant-major who has come back to his native land. He combines in
+admirable proportions, making a perfect whole, the humbug of the old
+soldier and the sly roguery of the Norman. On his return to Normandy,
+thanks to influence and incredible cleverness, he was made doorkeeper of
+a votive chapel, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin and frequented chiefly
+by young women who have gone astray.... He composed and had painted a
+special prayer to his 'Good Virgin.' This prayer is a masterpiece of
+unintentional irony, of Norman wit, in which jest is blended with fear of
+the saint and with the superstitious fear of the secret influence of
+something. He has not much faith in his protectress, but he believes in
+her a little through prudence, and he is considerate of her through
+policy.
+
+“This is how this wonderful prayer begins:
+
+“'Our good Madame Virgin Mary, natural protectress of girl mothers in
+this land and all over the world, protect your servant who erred in a
+moment of forgetfulness...'
+
+“It ends thus:
+
+“'Do not forget me, especially when you are with your holy spouse, and
+intercede with God the Father that he may grant me a good husband, like
+your own.'
+
+“This prayer, which was suppressed by the clergy of the district, is sold
+by him privately, and is said to be very efficacious for those who recite
+it with unction.
+
+“In fact he talks of the good Virgin as the valet de chambre of a
+redoubted prince might talk of his master who confided in him all his
+little private secrets. He knows a number of amusing anecdotes at his
+expense which he tells confidentially among friends as they sit over
+their glasses.
+
+“But you will see for yourself.
+
+“As the fees coming from the Virgin did not appear sufficient to him, he
+added to the main figure a little business in saints. He has them all, or
+nearly all. There was not room enough in the chapel, so he stored them in
+the wood-shed and brings them forth as soon as the faithful ask for them.
+He carved these little wooden statues himself--they are comical in
+the extreme--and painted them all bright green one year when they
+were painting his house. You know that saints cure diseases, but each
+saint has his specialty, and you must not confound them or make any
+blunders. They are as jealous of each other as mountebanks.
+
+“In order that they may make no mistake, the old women come and consult
+Matthew.
+
+“'For diseases of the ear which saint is the best?'
+
+“'Why, Saint Osyme is good and Saint Pamphilius is not bad.' But that is
+not all.
+
+“As Matthew has some time to spare, he drinks; but he drinks like a
+professional, with conviction, so much so that he is intoxicated
+regularly every evening. He is drunk, but he is aware of it. He is so
+well aware of it that he notices each day his exact degree of
+intoxication. That is his chief occupation; the chapel is a secondary
+matter.
+
+“And he has invented--listen and catch on--he has invented the
+'Saoulometre.'
+
+“There is no such instrument, but Matthew's observations are as precise
+as those of a mathematician. You may hear him repeating incessantly:
+'Since Monday I have had more than forty-five,' or else 'I was between
+fifty-two and fifty-eight,' or else 'I had at least sixty-six to
+seventy,' or 'Hullo, cheat, I thought I was in the fifties and here I
+find I had had seventy-five!'
+
+“He never makes a mistake.
+
+“He declares that he never reached his limit, but as he acknowledges that
+his observations cease to be exact when he has passed ninety, one cannot
+depend absolutely on the truth of that statement.
+
+“When Matthew acknowledges that he has passed ninety, you may rest
+assured that he is blind drunk.
+
+“On these occasions his wife, Melie, another marvel, flies into a fury.
+She waits for him at the door of the house, and as he enters she roars at
+him:
+
+“'So there you are, slut, hog, giggling sot!'
+
+“Then Matthew, who is not laughing any longer, plants himself opposite
+her and says in a severe tone:
+
+“'Be still, Melie; this is no time to talk; wait till to-morrow.'
+
+“If she keeps on shouting at him, he goes up to her and says in a shaky
+voice:
+
+“'Don't bawl any more. I have had about ninety; I am not counting any
+more. Look out, I am going to hit you!'
+
+“Then Melie beats a retreat.
+
+“If, on the following day, she reverts to the subject, he laughs in her
+face and says:
+
+“'Come, come! We have said enough. It is past. As long as I have not
+reached my limit there is no harm done. But if I go, past that I will
+allow you to correct me, my word on it!'”
+
+We had reached the top of the hill. The road entered the delightful
+forest of Roumare.
+
+Autumn, marvellous autumn, blended its gold and purple with the remaining
+traces of verdure. We passed through Duclair. Then, instead of going on
+to Jumieges, my friend turned to the left and, taking a crosscut, drove
+in among the trees.
+
+And presently from the top of a high hill we saw again the magnificent
+valley of the Seine and the winding river beneath us.
+
+At our right a very small slate-covered building, with a bell tower as
+large as a sunshade, adjoined a pretty house with green Venetian blinds,
+and all covered with honeysuckle and roses.
+
+“Here are some friends!” cried a big voice, and Matthew appeared on the
+threshold. He was a man about sixty, thin and with a goatee and long,
+white mustache.
+
+My friend shook him by the hand and introduced me, and Matthew took us
+into a clean kitchen, which served also as a dining-room. He said:
+
+“I have no elegant apartment, monsieur. I do not like to get too far away
+from the food. The saucepans, you see, keep me company.” Then, turning to
+my friend:
+
+“Why did you come on Thursday? You know quite well that this is the day I
+consult my Guardian Saint. I cannot go out this afternoon.”
+
+And running to the door, he uttered a terrific roar: “Melie!” which must
+have startled the sailors in the ships along the stream in the valley
+below.
+
+Melie did not reply.
+
+Then Matthew winked his eye knowingly.
+
+“She is not pleased with me, you see, because yesterday I was in the
+nineties.”
+
+My friend began to laugh. “In the nineties, Matthew! How did you manage
+it?”
+
+“I will tell you,” said Matthew. “Last year I found only twenty rasieres
+(an old dry measure) of apricots. There are no more, but those are the
+only things to make cider of. So I made some, and yesterday I tapped the
+barrel. Talk of nectar! That was nectar. You shall tell me what you think
+of it. Polyte was here, and we sat down and drank a glass and another
+without being satisfied (one could go on drinking it until to-morrow),
+and at last, with glass after glass, I felt a chill at my stomach. I said
+to Polyte: 'Supposing we drink a glass of cognac to warm ourselves?' He
+agreed. But this cognac, it sets you on fire, so that we had to go back
+to the cider. But by going from chills to heat and heat to chills, I saw
+that I was in the nineties. Polyte was not far from his limit.”
+
+The door opened and Melie appeared. At once, before bidding us good-day,
+she cried:
+
+“Great hog, you have both of you reached your limit!”
+
+“Don't say that, Melie; don't say that,” said Matthew, getting angry. “I
+have never reached my limit.”
+
+They gave us a delicious luncheon outside beneath two lime trees, beside
+the little chapel and overlooking the vast landscape. And Matthew told
+us, with a mixture of humor and unexpected credulity, incredible stories
+of miracles.
+
+We had drunk a good deal of delicious cider, sparkling and sweet, fresh
+and intoxicating, which he preferred to all other drinks, and were
+smoking our pipes astride our chairs when two women appeared.
+
+They were old, dried up and bent. After greeting us they asked for Saint
+Blanc. Matthew winked at us as he replied:
+
+“I will get him for you.” And he disappeared in his wood shed. He
+remained there fully five minutes. Then he came back with an expression
+of consternation. He raised his hands.
+
+“I don't know where he is. I cannot find him. I am quite sure that I had
+him.” Then making a speaking trumpet of his hands, he roared once more:
+
+“Meli-e-a!”
+
+“What's the matter?” replied his wife from the end of the garden.
+
+“Where's Saint Blanc? I cannot find him in the wood shed.”
+
+Then Melie explained it this way:
+
+“Was not that the one you took last week to stop up a hole in the rabbit
+hutch?”
+
+Matthew gave a start.
+
+“By thunder, that may be!” Then turning to the women, he said:
+
+“Follow me.”
+
+They followed him. We did the same, almost choking with suppressed
+laughter.
+
+Saint Blanc was indeed stuck into the earth like an ordinary stake,
+covered with mud and dirt, and forming a corner for the rabbit hutch.
+
+As soon as they perceived him, the two women fell on their knees, crossed
+themselves and began to murmur an “Oremus.” But Matthew darted toward
+them.
+
+“Wait,” he said, “you are in the mud; I will get you a bundle of straw.”
+
+He went to fetch the straw and made them a priedieu. Then, looking at his
+muddy saint and doubtless afraid of bringing discredit on his business,
+he added:
+
+“I will clean him off a little for you.”
+
+He took a pail of water and a brush and began to scrub the wooden image
+vigorously, while the two old women kept on praying.
+
+When he had finished he said:
+
+“Now he is all right.” And he took us back to the house to drink another
+glass.
+
+As he was carrying the glass to his lips he stopped and said in a rather
+confused manner:
+
+“All the same, when I put Saint Blanc out with the rabbits I thought he
+would not make any more money. For two years no one had asked for him.
+But the saints, you see, they are never out of date.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Original Short Stories of Maupassant,
+Volume 10, by Guy de Maupassant
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAUPASSANT SHORT STORIES ***
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