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1





MASTER
TALES
THE ODD NUMBER
THIRTEEN TALES
BY
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
TRANSLATED BY
JONATHAN STURGES
WITH INTRODUCTION BY
HENRY JAMES

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON


°»*'»»lUIiM»;


-V5
N
X
.-■:,
The Odd Number


Copyright, 1889, by HARPER & BROTHERs.


The Odd Number





rlf . ..
", r.'A'i
CONTENTS.

■
Introduction vii
I. v- Happiness 3
II. v A Coward 19
III. The Wolf . 39
IV. The Necklace 53
V. The Piece of String 73 .
VI. La Mere Sauvage 91
VII. MnoNi.Tr.HT 109
VIII. The Confession 123
IX. On thf. Journey 137
X. The Beggar 153
XI. A Ghost 167
XII. Little Soldier 185
XIII. The Wreck 203





INTRODUCTION.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
It is so embarrassing to speak of the
writers of one country to the readers of an-
other that I sometimes wonder at the com-
placency with which the delicate task is en-
tered upon. These are cases in which the
difficult art of criticism becomes doubly diffi-
cult, inasmuch as they compel the critic to
forfeit what I may call his natural advan-
tages. The first of these natural advan-
tages is that those who read him shall help
him by taking a great many things for grant-
ed; shall allow him his general point of
view and his terms—terms which he is not
obliged to define. The relation of the Amer-
ican reader to the French writer, for in-
stance, is, on the contrary, so indirect that it
gives him who proposes to mediate between


VUl INTRODUCTION.
them a great deal more to do. Here he has
in a manner to define his terms and estab-
lish his point of view.
The first simplification he is prompted to
effect is therefore to ask the reader to make
the effort to approach the author as nearly
as possible in the supposed spirit of one of
his own (one of the author's) fellow-country-
men. If the author be French, remember
that, as it is to Frenchmen he addresses him-
self, it is profitless to read him without a
certain displacement of tradition. If he be
German, reflect in the same way that it was
far from his business to write in such a
manner as would conciliate most the habits
and prejudices of the English-speaking mind.
There are doubtless many people all ready
to regard themselves as injured by a sug-
gestion that they should for the hour, and
even in the decent privacy of the imagina-
tion, comport themselves as creatures of
alien (by which we usually understand in-
ferior) race. To them it is only to be an-
swered that they had better never touch a
foreign book on any terms, but lead a con-
tented life in the homogeneous medium of
the dear old mother-speech. That life, by
compensation, they will of course endeavor
to make as rich as possible; and there is


INTRODUCTION. IX
one question they will always be able to ask
without getting an immediate answer, so
that the little inquiry will retain more or
less its triumphant air. "Why should we
concern ourselves so much about French
literature, when those who produce it con-
cern themselves so little about ours?"
That strong argument will always be in
order, especially among those who do not
really know how little the French are, as
they say, preoccupied with English and
American work; and on some occasions it
will be supported by the further inquiry:
"Is not the very perfection of French litera-
ture to-day an exemplary consequence of
the fact that its principal exponents stay
at home and mind their business — shut
their doors and ' take care of' (soigner) their
form? They don't waste time," it will be
added, "in superficial excursions, nor have
they any confidence in the lessons that are
to be learned beyond the frontier. Watch
them a little and you will see plenty of ex-
amples of that want of confidence. They
accept their own order of things as their
limit, and in that order they dig, as we
know, very deep. To speak only of fiction,
there are multitudes of tales by English and
American writers which profess to deal with


X INTRODUCTION.
French and with Italian life, yet probably
not one of which, unless it be George
Eliot's 'Romola,' has any verisimilitude or
any value for Frenchmen or for Italians.
Few indeed are the works of fiction which
they on their side have dedicated to the
portraiture of the Anglo-Saxon world; and
great, doubtless, do they deem the artistic
naivete of a race which can content itself
with that sort of stuff as a substitute for
thoroughness." Thus, it will be seen, the
very " perfection " of French literature (which
a hundred observers will also of course con-
test) may, oddly enough, be offered as a rea-
son for having nothing to do with it.
These are the embroilments of a flirtation
—an expression which is really the only
proper one to apply to our interest in the
"sort of stuff" which has enabled such a
writer as M. Guy de Maupassant, whose
name I have prefixed to these remarks, to
be possible. To a serious and well-regu-
lated union with such a writer the Ameri-
can public must, in the nature of things,
shrink from pretending; but nothing need
prevent it—not even the sense of danger
(often, it must be said, much rather an
incentive), from enjoying those desultory
snatches of intercourse which represent, in


INTRODUCTION. XI
the world of books, the broken opportuni-
ties of Rosina or Juliet. These young ladies,
it is true, eventually went much further, and
the situation of the Anglo - Saxon reader,
when craning over the creaking fourth or
fifth floor balcony of a translation, must be
understood as that to which the romance of
curiosity would have been restricted if the
Guardian and the Nurse — in other words
public opinion—had succeeded in keeping
the affair within limits. M. de Maupassant
is an Almaviva who strums his guitar with
the expectation of raising the street, and he
performs most skilfully under those windows
from which the flower of attention at any
price is flung down to him. If he is a cap-
ital specimen of the foreign writer with
whom the critic has most trouble, there
could at the same time be no better exhibi-
tion of the force which sets this inquiring,
admiring spirit in motion.
The only excuse the critic has for braving
the embarrassments I have mentioned is
that he wishes to perform a work of recom-
mendation, and indeed there is no profit in
talking, in English, of M. de Maupassant
unless it be in the sense of recommending
him. One should never go out of one's
way to differ, and translation, interpretation,
f
\
1


Xll INTRODUCTION.
the business of adjusting to another medium,
are a going out of one's way. Silence is
the best disapproval, and to take people up,
with an earnest grip, only to put them down,
is to add to the vain gesticulation of the
human scene. That reader will therefore
be most intelligent who, if he does not leave
M. de Maupassant quite alone, makes him
a present, as it were, of the conditions. My
purpose was to enumerate these, but I shall
not accomplish it properly if I fail to recog-
nize that they are manifold.
The first of them to be mentioned is
doubtless that he came into the literary
world, as he himself has related, under the
protection of the great Flaubert. This was
but a dozen years ago, for Guy de Mau-
passant belongs, among the distinguished
Frenchmen of his period, to the new gener-
ation. His celebrity has been gathered in
a short career, and his experience, which, in
certain ways, suggests the helping hand of
time, in a rapid life, inasmuch as he was
born in 1850. These things go fast in
France, and there is already a newer gener-
ation still, with its dates and its notabilities;
but we need scarcely yet open a parenthesis
for the so-called dbcadmts: they have pro-
duced no talent that seems particularly alive


INTRODUCTION. Xlll
—to do so would indeed be a disloyalty to
their name. Besides the link of the same
literary ideal, -Gustave Flaubert had with
his young pupil a strong community of lo-
cal sense—the sap of the rich old Norman
country was in the veins of both. It is not
too much to say that there is a large ele-
ment in Maupassant that the reader will
care for in proportion as he has a kindly
impression of the large, bountiful Norman
land, with its abbeys and its nestling farms,
its scented hedges and hard white roads,
where the Sunday blouse of the rustic is
picked out in color, its succulent domestic
life, and its canny and humorous peasantry.
There is something in the accumulated her-
itage of such a province which may well
have fed the imagination of an artist whose
vision was to be altogether of this life.
That is another of M. de Maupassant's
conditions: what is clearest to him is the
immitigability of our mortal predicament,
with its occasional beguilements and its in-
numerable woes. Flaubert would have been
sorry to blur this sharpness, and indeed he
ministered to it in helping to place his young
friend in possession of a style which com-
pletely reflects it. Guy de Maupassant,
from his own account (in the preface to


INTRODUCTION. XV
The turn of his mind has helped him to
do this, an extraordinary perceptive appara-
tus of the personal, material, immediate sort.
M. de Maupassant takes his stand on every-
thing that solicits the sentient creature who
lives in his senses; gives the impression
of the active, independent observer who is
ashamed of none of his faculties, describes
what he sees, renders, with a rare reproduc-
tion of tone, what he hears, and is more anx-
ious to see and to hear than to make sure,
in advance, of propping up some particular
theory of things. He has indeed a theory
to the effect that they are pretty bad, but
practically the air of truth in the given case
is almost never sacrificed to it. His strong,
hard, cynical, slightly cruel humor can scarce-
ly be called a theory; what one may say of
this rather is that his drollery is a direct ema-
nation from the facts, and especially from the
rural facts, which he knows with extraordi-
nary knowledge. His most brilliantly clever
tales deal with the life, pervaded, for the
most part, by a strong smell of the barn-yard
and the wine-shop, of the Norman cottage
and market-place. Such a little picture as
“La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”) is a
pure gem, so caught in the fact are the whim-
sicalities of the thick-witted rustic world.


XVI INTRODUCTION.
For the last ten years M. de Maupassant
has contributed an almost weekly Tiouvelle to
some Parisian sheet which has allowed him
a luxurious liberty. They have been very
unequal, too numerous, and occasionally bad
enough to be by an inferior hand (an inevi-
table accident, in copious production); but
they have contained an immense element of
delightful work. Taken all together, they
are full of life (of life as the author con-
ceives it, of course—he is far from having
taken its measure in all directions), and be-
tween the lines of them we seem to read of
that partly pleasant and wholly modern in-
vention, a roving existence in which, for art,
no impression is wasted, M. de Maupassant
travels, explores, navigates, shoots, goes up
in balloons, and writes. He treats of the
north and of the south, evidently makes
"copy" of everything that happens to him,
and, in the interest of such copy and such
happenings,ranges from Etretat to the depths
of Algeria. Lately he has given signs of
adding a new cord to his bow—a silver cord,
of intenser vibration. His two last novels,
"1'ierre et Jean" and "Fort comme la
More," deal with shades of feeling and
delicacies of experience to which he had
shown himself rather a stranger. They are


INTRODUCTION. XV11
the work of an older man, and of a man who
has achieved the feat of keeping his talent
fresh when other elements have turned stale.
In default of other convictions it may still,
for the artist, be an adequate working faith
to turn out something fine. Guy de Mau-
passant is a striking illustration of this curi-
ous truth and of the practical advantage of
having a first-rate ability. Such a gift may
produce surprises in the mere exercise of its
natural health. The dogmatist is never safe
with it.
LONDON A*s*st 6, 1889. i- -}


v


1.
HAPPINESS.





HAPPINESS.
It was tea-time before the appearance
of the lamps. The villa commanded the
sea; the sun, which had disappeared, had
left the sky all rosy from his passing—rub-
bed, as it were, with gold - dust; and the
Mediterranean, without a ripple, without a
shudder, smooth, still shining under the dy-
ing day, seemed like a huge and polished
metal plate.
Far off to the right the jagged mount-
ains outlined their black profile on the
paled purple of the west.
We talked of love, we discussed that old
subject, we said again the things which we
had said already very often. The sweet
melancholy of the twilight made our words
'


4 THE ODD NUMBER.
slower, caused a tenderness to waver in
our souls; and that word, "love," which
came back ceaselessly, now pronounced by
a strong man's voice, now uttered by the
frail-toned voice of a woman, seemed to fill
the little salon, to flutter there like a bird,
to hover there like a spirit.
Can one remain in love for several years
in succession?
"Yes," maintained some.
"No," affirmed others.
We distinguished cases, we established
limitations, we cited examples; and all, men
and women, filled with rising and troubling
memories, which they could not quote, and
which mounted to their lips, seemed moved,
and talked of that common, that sovereign
thing, the tender and mysterious union of
two beings, with a profound emotion and an
ardent interest.
But all of a sudden some one, whose eyes
had been fixed upon the distance, cried out:
"Oh! Look down there; what is it?"
On the sea, at the bottom of the horizon,
loomed up a mass, gray, enormous and con-
fused.


HAPPINESS. S
The women had risen from their seats,
and without understanding, looked at this
surprising thing which they had never seen
before.
Some one said:
"It is Corsica! You see it so two or
three times a year, in certain exceptional
conditions of the atmosphere, when the air
is perfectly clear, and it is not concealed
by those mists of sea-fog which always veil
the distances."
We distinguished vaguely the mountain
ridges, we thought we recognized the snow
of their summits. And every one remained
surprised, troubled, almost terrified, by this
sudden apparition of a world, by this phan-
tom risen from the sea. Maybe that those
who, like Columbus, went away across un-
discovered oceans had such strange visions
as this.
Then said an old gentleman who had not
yet spoken:
"See here: I knew in that island which
raises itself before us, as if in person to an-
swer what we said, and to recall to me a sin-
gular memory—I knew, I say, an admirable
^


THE ODD NUMBER.
case of love which was true, of love which,
improbably enough, was happy.
"Here it is—
"Five years ago I made a journey in Cor-
sica. That savage island is more unknown
and more distant from us than America, even
though you see it sometimes from the very
coasts of France, as we have done to-day.
"Imagine a world which is still chaos,
imagine a storm of mountains separated by
narrow ravines where torrents roll; not a
single plain, but immense waves of granite,
and giant undulations of earth covered with
brushwood or with high forests of chestnut-
trees and pines. It is a virgin soil, unculti-
vated, desert, although you sometimes make
out a village, like a heap of rocks, on the
summit of a mountain. No culture, no in-
dustries, no art. One never meets here
with a morsel of carved wood, or a bit of
sculptured stone, never the least reminder
that the ancestors of these people had any
taste, whether rude or refined, for gracious
and beautiful things. It is this which strikes


HAPPINESS. 7
you the most in their superb and hard coun-
try: their hereditary indifference to that
search for seductive forms which is called Art.
"Italy, where every palace, full of master-
pieces, is a masterpiece itself; Italy, where
marble, wood, bronze, iron, metals, and pre-
cious stones attest man's genius, where the
smallest old things which lie about in the
ancient houses reveal that divine care for
grace — Italy is for us the sacred country
which we love, because she shows to us and
proves to us the struggle, the grandeur, the
power, and the triumph of the intelligence
which creates.
"And, face to face with her, the savage
Corsica has remained exactly as in her ear-
liest days. A man lives there in his rude
house, indifferent to everything which does
not concern his own bare existence or his
family feuds. And he has retained the vices
and the virtues of savage races; he is vio-
lent, malignant, sanguinary without a thought
of remorse, but also hospitable, generous, de-
voted, simple, opening his door to passers-by,
and giving his faithful friendship in return for
the least sign of sympathy.
S


8 THE ODD NUMBER.
"So, for a month, I had been wandering
over this magnificent island with the sensa-
tion that I was at the end of the world. No
more inns, no taverns, no roads. You gain
by mule-paths hamlets hanging up, as it
were, on a mountain-side, and commanding
tortuous abysses whence of an evening you
hear rising the steady sound, the dull and
deep voice, of the torrent. You knock at
the doors of the houses. You ask a shel-
ter for the night and something to live on
till the morrow. And you sit down at the
humble board, and you sleep under the hum-
ble roof, and in the morning you press the
extended hand of your host, who has guided
you as far as the outskirts of the village.
"Now, one night, after ten hours' walking,
I reached a little dwelling quite by itself at
the bottom of a narrow valley which was
about to throw itself into the sea a league
farther on. The two steep slopes of the
mountain, covered with brush, with fallen
rocks, and with great trees, shut in this lam-
entably sad ravine like two sombre walls.
"Around the cottage were some vines, a
little garden, and, farther off, several large


HAPPINESS. 9
chestnut-trees—enough to live on; in fact, a
fortune for this poor country.
"The woman who received me was old,
severe, and neat — exceptionally so. The
nan, seated on a straw chair, rose to salute
me, then sat down again without saying a
word. His companion said to me:
"' Excuse him; he is deaf now. He is
eighty-two years old.'
"She spoke the French of France. I was
surprised.
"I asked her:
"' You are not of Corsica?'
"She answered:
"' No; we are from the Continent. But
we have lived here now fifty years.'
"A feeling of anguish and of fear seized
me at the thought of those fifty years passed
in this gloomy hole, so far from the cities
where human beings dwell. An old shep-
herd returned, and we began to eat the only
dish there was for dinner, a thick soup in
which potatoes, lard, and cabbages had been
boiled together.
"When the short repast was finished, I
went and sat down before the door, my heart


IO THE ODD NUMBER.
pinched by the melancholy of the mournful
landscape, wrung by that distress which
sometimes seizes travellers on certain sad
evenings, in certain desolate places. It
seems that everything is near its ending—
existence, and the universe itself. You per-
ceive sharply the dreadful misery of life, the
isolation of every one, the nothingness of all
things, and the black loneliness of the heart
which nurses itself and deceives itself with
dreams until the hour of death.
"The old woman rejoined me, and, tort-
ured by that curiosity which ever lives at the
bottom of the most resigned of souls:
"' So you come from France ?' said she.
"' Yes; I'm travelling for pleasure.'
"' You are from Paris, perhaps?'
"' No, I am from Nancy.'
"It seemed to me that an extraordinary
emotion agitated her. How I saw, or rather
how I felt it, I do not know.
"She repeated, in a slow voice:
"' You are from Nancy?'
"The man appeared in the door, impassi-
ble, like all the deaf.
"She resumed:


HAPPINESS. 11
"'It doesn't make any difference. He
can't hear.'
"Then, at the end of several seconds:
"' So you know people at Nancy?'
"' Oh yes, nearly everybody.'
"' The family of Sainte-Allaize?'
"' Yes, very well; they were friends of my
father.'
"' What are you called?'
"I told her my name. She regarded me
fixedly, then said, in that low voice which is
roused by memories:
"'Yes, yes; I remember well. And the
Brisemares, what has become of them?'
"' They are all dead.'
"' Ah! And the Sirmonts, do you know
them?'
"Yes, the last of the family is a general.'
"Then she said, trembling with emotion,
with anguish, with I do not know what, feel-
ing confused, powerful, and holy, with I do
not know how great a need to confess, to tell
all, to talk of those things which she had
hitherto kept shut in the bottom of her heart,
and to speak of those people whose name
distracted her soul:



12 THE ODD NUMBER.
"' Yes, Henri de Sirmont. I know him
well. He is my brother.'
"And I lifted my eyes at her, aghast with
surprise. And all of a sudden my memory
of it came back.
"It had caused, once, a great scandal
among the nobility of Lorraine. A young
girl, beautiful and rich, Suzanne de Sir-
mont, had run away with an under-officer in
the regiment of hussars commanded by her
father.
"He was a handsome fellow, the son of a
peasant, but he carried his blue dolman very
well, this soldier who had captivated his
colonel's daughter. She had seen him, no-
ticed him, fallen in love with him, doubt-
less while watching the squadrons filing by.
But how she had got speech of him, how
they had managed to see one another, to
hear from one another; how she had dared
to let him understand she loved him—that
was never known.
"Nothing was divined, nothing suspected.
One night when the soldier had just finished
his time of service, they disappeared to-
gether. Her people looked for them in vain.
*


HAPPINESS. 13
They never received tidings, and they con-
sidered her as dead.
"So I found her in this sinister valley.
"Then in my turn I took up the word:
"' Yes, I remember well. You are. Made-
moiselle Suzanne.'
"She made the sign 'yes,' with her head.
Tears fell from her eyes. Then with a look
showing me the old man motionless on the
threshold of his hut, she said:
'"That is he.'
"And I understood that she loved him
yet, that she still saw him with her bewitch-
ed eyes.
"I asked:
"' Have you at least been happy?'
"She answered with a voice which came
from her heart:
"' Oh yes! very happy. He has made me
very happy. I have never regretted.'
"I looked at her, sad, surprised, astound- 1
ed by the sovereign strength of love! That
rich young lady had followed this man, this
peasant. She was become herself a peasant
woman. She had made for herself a life
without charm, without luxury, without del-


14 THE ODD NUMBER.
icacy of any kind, she had stooped to simple
customs. And she loved him yet . She was
become the wife of a rustic, in a cap, in a
cloth skirt. Seated on a straw-bottomed
chair, she ate from an earthen-ware dish, at
a wooden table, a soup of potatoes and of
cabbages with lard. She slept on a mat-
tress by his side.
"She had never thought of anything but
of him. She had never regretted her jewels,
nor her fine dresses, nor the elegancies of
life, nor the perfumed warmth of the cham-
bers hung with tapestry, nor the softness of
the down-beds where the body sinks in for
repose. She had never had need of any-
thing but him; provided he was there, she
desired nothing.
"Still young, she had abandoned life and
the world and those who had brought her
up, and who had loved her. She had come,
alone with him, into this savage valley. And
he had been everything to her, all that one
desires, all that one dreams of, all that one
waits for without ceasing, all that one hopes
for without end. He had filled her life with
happiness from the one end to the other.


HAPPINESS. 15
"She could not have been more happy.
"And all the night, listening to the hoarse
breathing of the old soldier stretched on his
pallet beside her who had followed him so
far, I thought of this strange and simple
adventure, of this happiness so complete,
made of so very little.
"And I went away at sunrise, after having
pressed the hands of that aged pair."
The story-teller was silent. A woman
said:
"All the same, she had ideals which were
too easily satisfied, needs which were too
primitive, requirements which were too sim-
ple. She could only have been a fool."
Another said, in a low, slow voice, "What
matter! she was happy."
And down there at the end of the horizon,
Corsica was sinking into the night, return-
ing gently into the sea, blotting out her
great shadow, which had appeared as if in
person to tell the story of those two humble
lovers who were sheltered by her coasts.


v


II.
A COWARD.





A COWARD.
Irt society they called him "the hand-
some Signoles." His name was Viscount
Gontran Joseph de Signoles.
An orphan and the possessor of a suffi-
cient fortune, as the saying goes, he cut a
dash. He had a fine figure and bearing,
enough conversation to make people credit
him with cleverness, a certain natural grace,
an air of nobility and of pride, a gallant
mustache, and a gentle eye—a thing which
pleases women.
In the drawing-rooms he was in great re-
quest, much sought after as a partner for the
waltz; and he inspired among men that smil-
ing hatred which they always cherish for oth-
ers of an energetic figure. He passed a


20 THE ODD NUMBER.
happy and tranquil life, in a comfort of
mind which was most complete. It was
known that he was a good fencer, and as a
pistol-shot even better.
"If ever I fight a duel," said he, " I shall
choose pistols. With that weapon I am
sure of killing my man."
Now, one night, having accompanied two
young ladies, his friends, escorted by their
husbands, to the theatre, he invited them
all after the play to take an ice at Tortoni's.
They had been there for several minutes,
when he perceived that a gentleman seated
at a neighboring table was staring obsti-
nately at one of his companions. She
seemed put out, uneasy, lowered her head.
At last she said to her husband:
"There is a man who is looking me out of
countenance. I do not know him; do you?"
The husband, who had seen nothing,
raised his eyes, but declared:
"No, not at all."
The young lady continued, half smiling,
half vexed
"It is very unpleasant; that man is spoil-
ing my ice."
^


A COWARD. 21
Her husband shrugged his shoulders:
"Bast! don't pay any attention to it. If
we had to occupy ourselves about every in-
solent fellow that we meet we should never
have done."
But the viscount had risen brusquely. He
could not allow that this stranger should
spoil an ice which he had offered. It was
to him that this insult was addressed, be-
cause it was through him and on his ac-
count that his friends had entered this cafe\
So the matter concerned him only.
He advanced towards the man and said
to him:
"You have, sir, a manner of looking at
those ladies which I cannot tolerate. I beg
of you to be so kind as to cease from this
insistence."
The other answered:
"You are going to mind your own busi-
ness, curse you."
The viscount said, with close - pressed
teeth:
"Take care, sir, you will force me to pass
bounds."
The gentleman answered but one word, a


22 THE ODD NUMBER.
foul word, which rang from one end of the
cafe" to the other, and, like a metal spring,
caused every guest to execute a sudden
movement. All those whose backs were
turned wheeled round; all the others raised
their heads; three waiters pivoted upon
their heels like tops; the two ladies at the
desk gave a jump, then turned round their
whole bodies from the waists up, as if they
had been two automata obedient to the
same crank.
A great silence made itself felt. Then,
on a sudden, a dry sound cracked in the
air. The viscount had slapped his adver-
sary's face. Every one rose to interfere.
Cards were exchanged between the two.
When the viscount had reached home he
paced his room for several minutes with
great, quick strides. He was too much agi-
tated to reflect at all. One single idea was
hovering over his mind—"a duel "—without
arousing in him as yet an emotion of any
sort. He had done that which he ought to
have done; he had shown himself to be that


A COWARD. 23
which he ought to be. People would talk
about it, they would praise him, they would
congratulate him. He repeated in a loud
voice, speaking as one speaks when one's
thoughts are very much troubled:
"What a brute the fellow was!"
Then he sat down and began to reflect.
He must find seconds, the first thing in the
morning. Whom should he choose? He
thought over those men of his acquaintance
who had the best positions, who were the
most celebrated. He finally selected the
Marquis de la Tour-Noire, and the Colonel
Bourdin, a nobleman and a soldier. Very
good indeed! Their names would sound well
in the papers. He perceived that he was
thirsty, and he drank, one after another,
three glasses of water; then he began again
to walk up and down the room. He felt him-
self full of energy. If he blustered a little,
if he showed himself resolute at all points,
if he demanded rigorous and dangerous
conditions, if he insisted on a serious duel,
very serious, terrible, his opponent would
probably withdraw and make apologies.
He picked up the card which he had


24 THE ODD NUMBER.
pulled out of his pocket and thrown on the
table, and he reread it with a single glance.
He had already done so at the cafe' and
in the cab, by the glimmer of every street
lamp, on his way home. "Georges Lamil,
51 Rue Moncey." Nothing more.
He examined these assembled letters,
which seemed to him mysterious, and full
of a confused meaning. Georges Lamil?
Who was this man? What had he been
about? Why had he stared at that woman
in such a way? Was it not revolting that
a stranger, an unknown, should so come
and trouble your life, all on a sudden,
simply because he had been pleased to fix
his eyes insolently upon a woman that you
knew? And the viscount repeated yet again,
in a loud voice:
"What a brute!"
Then he remained motionless, upright,
thinking, his look ever planted on the card.
A rage awoke in him against this piece of
paper, an anger full of hate in which was
mixed a strange, uneasy feeling. It was
stupid, this whole affair! He took a little
penknife which lay open to his hand, and
v


A COWARD. 25
pricked it into the middle of the printed
name, as if he had poniarded some one.
However, they must fight! He consid-
ered himself as indeed the insulted party.
And, having thus the right, should he choose
the pistol or the sword? With the sword
he risked less; but with the pistol he had
the chance of making his adversary with-
draw. It is very rare that a duel with swords
proves mortal, a mutual prudence preventing
the combatants from engaging near enough
for the point of a rapier to enter very deep.
With the pistol he risked his life seriously;
but he might also come out of the affair with
all the honors of the situation, and without
going so far as an actual meeting.
He said:
"I must be firm. He will be afraid."
The sound of his voice made him trem-
ble, and he looked about him. He felt him-
self very nervous. He drank another glass
of water, then began to undress himself to
go to bed.
As soon as he was in bed, he blew out
the light and shut his eyes.
He thought:
V


26 THE ODD NUMBER.
"I've got all day to-morrow to attend to my
affairs. I 'd better sleep first so as to be calm."
He was very warm under the bedclothes,
but he could not manage to doze off. He
turned and twisted, remained five minutes
on his back, then placed himself on his left
side, then rolled over to his right.
He was still thirsty. He got up again to
drink. Then an anxiety seized him:
"Shall I be afraid?"
Why did his heart fall to beating so mad-
ly at each of the well-known noises of his
chamber? When the clock was about to
strike, the little grinding sound of the spring
which stands erect, caused him to give a
start; and for several seconds after that he
was obliged to open his mouth to breathe,
he remained so much oppressed.
He set himself to reasoning with himself
upon the possibility of this thing:
"Shall I be afraid?"
No, certainly not, he would not be afraid,
because he was resolute to go to the end,
because he had his will firmly fixed to fight
and not to tremble. But he felt so deeply
troubled that he asked himself:
^


A COWARD. 27
"Can a man be afraid in spite of him?"
And this doubt invaded him, this uneasi-
ness, this dread. If some force stronger
than his will, if some commanding, and irre-
sistible power should conquer him, what
would happen? Yes, what could happen?
He should certainly appear upon the field,
since he willed to do it. But if he trembled?
But if he fainted? And he thought of his
situation, of his reputation, of his name.
And a curious necessity seized him on a
sudden to get up again and look at himself
in the mirror. He relit his candle. When
he perceived his face reflected in the pol-
ished glass he hardly recognized himself,
and it seemed to him that he had never
seen this man before. His eyes appeared
enormous; and he was pale, surely he was
pale, very pale.
He remained upright before the mirror.
He put out his tongue as if to test the
state of his health, and all on a sudden this
thought entered into him after the fashion
of a bullet:
"The day after to-morrow, at this time, I
shall perhaps be dead."
"
N.


28 THE ODD NUMBER.
And his heart began again to beat furi-
ously.
"The day after to-morrow, at this time, I
shall perhaps be dead. This person before
me, this 'I' which I see in this glass, will
exist no longer. What! here I am, I am
looking at myself, I feel myself to live, and
in twenty-four hours I shall be laid to rest
upon this couch, dead, my eyes shut, cold,
inanimate, gone."
He turned towards his bed and he dis-
tinctly saw himself extended on the back in
the same sheets which he had just left.
He had the hollow face which dead men
have, and that slackness to the hands which
will never stir more.
So he grew afraid of his bed, and, in or-
der not to look at it again, he passed into
his smoking-room. He took a cigar mechan-
ically, lit it, and again began to walk the
room. He was cold; he went towards the
bell to wake his valet; but he stopped, his
hand lifted towards the bell-rope:
"That fellow will see that I am afraid."
And he did not ring, he made the fire
himself. When his hands touched anything
^


A COWARD. 29
they trembled slightly, with a nervous shak-
ing. His head wandered; his troubled
thoughts became fugitive, sudden, melan-
choly; an intoxication seized on his spirit
as if he had been drunk.
And ceaselessly he asked himself:
"What shall I do? What will become of
me?"
His whole body vibrated, jerky tremblings
ran over it; he got up, and approaching the
window, he opened the curtains.
The day was coming, a day of summer.
The rosy sky made rosy the city, the roofs,
and the walls. A great fall of tenuous light,
like a caress from the rising sun, enveloped
the awakened world; and, with this glimmer,
a hope gay, rapid, brutal, seized on the heart
of the viscount! Was he mad to let himself
be so struck down by fear, before anything
had even been decided, before his seconds
had seen those of this Georges Lamil, be-
fore he yet knew if he was going to fight
at all?
He made his toilet, dressed himself, and
left the house with a firm step.


30 THE ODD NUMBER.
He repeated to himself, while walking:
"I must be decided, very decided. I
must prove that I am not afraid."
His seconds, the marquis and the colonel,
put themselves at his disposition, and after
having pressed his hands energetically, dis-
cussed the conditions of the meeting.
The colonel asked:
"You want a serious duel?"
The viscount answered:
"Very serious."
The marquis took up the word.
"You insist on pistols?"
"Yes."
"Do you leave us free to settle the rest?"
The viscount articulated with a dry, jerky
voice:
"Twenty paces, firing at the word, lifting
the arm instead of lowering it. Exchange
of shots until some one is badly wounded."
The colonel declared, in a satisfied tone:
"Those are excellent conditions. You
are a good shot; the chances are all in your
favor."
And they separated. The viscount re-
turned home to wait for them. His agita-


A COWARD. 31
tion, which had been temporarily calmed,
was now increasing with every moment. He
felt along his arms, along his legs, in his
chest, a kind of quivering, a kind of contin-
uous vibration; he could not stay in one
place, neither sitting down nor standing up.
He had no longer a trace of moisture in his
mouth, and he made at every instant a noisy
movement of the tongue as if to unglue it
from his palate.
He tried to take his breakfast, but he
could not eat. Then he thought of drinking
in order to give himself courage, and had a
decanter of rum brought him, from which he
gulped down, one after the other, six little
glasses.
A warmth, like a burn, seized on him.
It was followed as soon by a giddiness of
the soul. He thought:
"I know the way. Now it will go all
right."
But at the end of an hour he had emptied
the decanter, and his state of agitation was
become again intolerable. He felt a wild
necessity to roll upon the ground, to cry, to
bite. Evening fell,


32 THE ODD NUMBER.
The sound of the door-bell caused him
such a feeling of suffocation that he had not
the strength to rise to meet his seconds.
He did not even dare to talk to them any
longer—to say "How do you do?" to pro-
nounce a single word, for fear lest they di-
vine all from the alteration in his voice.
The colonel said:
"Everything is settled according to the
conditions which you fixed. Your opponent
at first insisted on the privileges of the of-
fended party, but he yielded almost imme-
diately, and has agreed to everything. His
seconds are two officers.
The viscount said:
"Thank you."
The marquis resumed:
"Excuse us if we only just run in and
out, but we've still a thousand things to do.
We must have a good doctor, because the
duel is not to stop till after some one is
badly hit, and you know there's no trifling
with bullets. A place must be appointed near
some house where we can carry the wound-
ed one of the two, if it is necessary, etc.; it
will take us quite two or three hours more."


A COWARD. 33
The viscount articulated a second time:
"Thank you."
The colonel asked:
"You're all right? You're calm?"
"Yes, quite calm, thanks."
The two men retired.
When he felt himself alone again, it
seemed to him that he was going mad. His
servant having lit the lamps, he sat down
before his table to write some letters. Af-
ter tracing at the top of a page, "This is
my Will," he got up again and drew off,
feeling incapable of putting two ideas to-
gether, of taking a single resolution, of de-
ciding anything at all.
And so he was going to fight a duel! He
could no longer escape that. What could
be passing within him? He wanted to fight,
he had that intention and that resolution
firmly fixed; and he felt very plainly that,
notwithstanding all the effort of his mind
and all the tension of his will, he would not
be able to retain strength enough to go as
far as the place of the encounter. He tried
3


34 THE ODD NUMBER.
to fancy the combat, his own attitude, and
the bearing of his adversary.
From time to time, his teeth struck against
one another in his mouth with a little dry
noise. He tried to read, and took up de
Chiteauvillard's duelling code. Then he
asked himself:
"My adversary, has he frequented the
shooting - galleries? Is he well known?
What's his class? How can I find out?"
He remembered the book by Baron de
Vaux upon pistol-shooters, and he searched
through it from one end to the other.
Georges Lamil was not mentioned. But,
however, if the man had not been a good
shot, he would not have accepted immedi-
ately that dangerous weapon and those con-
ditions, which were mortal.
His pistol-case by Gastinne Renette lay
on a little round table. As he passed he
opened it and took out one of the pistols,
then placed himself as if to shoot, and
raised his arm; but he trembled from head
to foot, and the barrel shook in all direc-
tions.
Then he said:


A COWARD. 35
"It is impossible. I cannot fight like
this."
At the end of the barrel he regarded that
little hole, black and deep, which spits out
death; he thought of dishonor, of the whis-
pers in the clubs, of the laughter in the
drawing-rooms, of the disdain of women, of
the allusions in the papers, of the insults
which would be thrown at him by cowards.
He went on staring at the pistol, and
raising the hammer, he suddenly saw a
priming glitter beneath it like a little red
flame. The pistol had been left loaded, by
chance, by oversight. And he experienced
from that a confused inexplicable joy.
If in the presence of the other he had not
the calm and noble bearing which is fit, he
would be lost forever. He would be spot-
ted, marked with a sign of infamy, hunted
from society. And he should not have that
calm and bold bearing; he knew it, he felt
it. And yet he was really brave, because he
wanted to fight! He was brave, because—.
The thought which just grazed him did not
even complete itself in his spirit, but, open-
ing his mouth wide, he brusquely thrust the


36 THE ODD NUMBER.
pistol-barrel into the very bottom of his
throat and pressed upon the trigger. . . .
When his valet ran in, attracted by the
report, he found him dead, on his back. A
jet of blood had spattered the white paper
on the table and made a great red stain be-
low the four words:
"This is my Will."
"


III."
THE WOLF.
V





THE WOLF.
Here is what the old Marquis d'Arville
told us towards the end of St. Hubert's
dinner at the house of the Baron des Ra-
vels.
We had killed a stag that day. The mar-
quis was the only one of the guests who had
not taken any part in this chase; for he nev-
er hunted.
All through that long repast we had
talked about hardly anything but the slaugh-
ter of animals. The ladies themselves were
interested in tales sanguinary and often un-
likely, and the orators imitated the attacks
and the combats of men against beasts,
raised their arms, romanced in a thunder-
ing voice.


40 THE ODD NUMBER.
M. d'Arville talked well, with a certain
poetry of style somewhat high-sounding, but
full of effect. He must have repeated this
story often, for he told it fluently, not hesi-
tating on words, choosing them with skill to
produce a picture—
Gentlemen, I have never hunted, neither
did my father, nor my grandfather, nor my
great-grandfather. This last was the son
of a man who hunted more than all of you
put together. He died in 1764. I will tell
you how.
His name was Jean. He was married,
father of that child who became my ances-
tor, and he lived with his younger brother,
Francois d'Arville, in our castle in Lorraine,
in the middle of the forest.
Francois d'Arville had remained a bach-
elor for love of the chase.
They both hunted from one end of the
year to the other, without repose, without
stopping, without fatigue. They loved only
that, understood nothing else, talked only
of that, lived only for that.
They had at heart that one passion, which
was terrible and inexorable. It consumed


THE WOLF. 41
them, having entirely invaded them, leaving
place for no other.
They had given orders that they should
not be interrupted in the chase, for any rea-
son whatever. My great-grandfather was
born while his father was following a fox.
and Jean d'Arville did not stop his pur-
suit, but he swore: "Name of a name, that
rascal there might have waited till after the
view-halloo!"
His brother Francois showed himself still
more infatuated. On rising he went to see
the dogs, then the horses, then he shot little
birds about the castle until the moment for
departing to hunt down some great beast.
In the country-side they were called M. le
Marquis and M. le Cadet, the nobles then
not doing at all like the chance nobility of
our time, which wishes to establish an he-
reditary hierarchy in titles; for the son of a
marquis is no more a count, nor the son of
a viscount a baron, than the son of a gen-
eral is a colonel by birth. But the mean
vanity of to-day finds profit in that arrange-
ment.
I return to my ancestors.


42 THE ODD NUMBER.
They were, it seems, immeasurably tall,
bony, hairy, violent, and vigorous. The
younger, still taller than the older, had a
voice so strong that, according to a legend
of which he was proud, all the leaves of the
forests shook when he shouted.
And when they both mounted to go off
to the hunt, that must have been a superb
spectacle to see those two giants straddling
their huge horses.
Now towards the midwinter of that year,
1764, the frosts were excessive, and the
wolves became ferocious.
They even attacked belated peasants,
roamed at night about the houses, howled
from sunset to sunrise, and depopulated the
stables.
And soon a rumor began to circulate.
People talked of a colossal wolf, with gray
fur, almost white, who had eaten two chil-
dren, gnawed off a woman's arm, strangled
all the dogs of the garde du pays, and pen-
etrated without fear into the farm-yards to
come snuffling under the doors. The peo-
ple in the houses affirmed that they had felt
his breath, and that it made the flame of the


THE WOLF. 43
lights flicker. And soon a panic ran through
all the province. No one dared go out any
more after night-fall. The shades seemed
haunted by the image of the beast.
The brothers d'Arville resolved to find
and kill him, and several times they assem-
bled all the gentlemen of the country to a
great hunting.
In vain. They might beat the forests and
search the coverts, they never met him.
They killed wolves, but not that one. And
every night after a battue, the beast, as if to
avenge himself, attacked some traveller or
devoured some one's cattle, always far from
the place where they had looked for him.
Finally one night he penetrated into the
pig-pen of the Chateau d'Arville and ate
the two finest pigs.
The brothers were inflamed with anger,
considering this attack as a bravado of
the monster, an insult direct, a defiance.
They took their strong blood-hounds used
to pursue formidable beasts, and they set
off to hunt, their hearts swollen with fury.
From dawn until the hour when the em-
purpled sun descended behind the great


44 THE ODD NUMBER.
naked trees, they beat the thickets without
finding anything.
At last, furious and disconsolate, both were
returning, walking their horses along an allec
bordered with brambles, and they marvelled
that their woodcraft should be crossed so
by this wolf, and they were seized suddenly
with a sort of mysterious fear.
The elder said:
"That beast there is not an ordinary one.
You would say it thought like a man."
The younger answered:
"Perhaps we should have a bullet bless-
ed by our cousin, the bishop, or pray some
priest to pronounce the words which are
needed."
Then they were silent.
Jean continued:
"Look how red the sun is. The great
wolf will do some harm to-night."
He had hardly finished speaking when
his horse reared; that of Francois began to
kick. A large thicket covered with dead
leaves opened before them, and a colossal
beast, quite gray, sprang up and ran off
across the wood.


THE WOLF. 45
Both uttered a kind of groan of joy, and
bending over the necks of their heavy
horses, they threw them forward with an
impulse from all their body, hurling them
on at such a pace, exciting them, hurrying
them away, maddening them so with the
voice, with gesture, and with spur that the
strong riders seemed rather to be carrying
the heavy beasts between their thighs and
to bear them off as if they were flying.
Thus they went, ventre a terre, bursting the
thickets, cleaving the beds of streams, climb-
ing the hill-sides, descending the gorges, and
blowing on the horn with full lungs to at-
tract their people and their dogs.
And now, suddenly, in that mad race, my
ancestor struck his forehead against an enor-
mous branch which split his skull; and he
fell stark dead on the ground, while his
frightened horse took himself off, disap-
pearing in the shade which enveloped the
woods.
The cadet of Arville stopped short, leaped
to the earth, seized his brother in his arms,
and he saw that the brains ran from the
wound with the blood.


46 THE ODD NUMBER.
Then he sat down beside the body, rested
the head, disfigured and red, on his knees,
and waited, contemplating that immobile
face of the elder brother. Little by little a
fear invaded him, a strange fear which he
had never felt before, the fear of the dark,
the fear of solitude, the fear of the deserted
wood, and the fear also of the fantastic
wolf who had just killed his brother to
avenge himself upon them both.
The shadows thickened, the acute cold
made the trees crack. Frangois got up,
shivering, unable to remain there longer,
feeling himself almost growing faint. Noth-
ing was to be heard, neither the voice of the
dogs nor the sound of the horns—all was
silent along the invisible horizon; and this
mournful silence of the frozen night had
something about it frightening and strange.
He seized in his colossal hands the great
body of Jean, straightened it and laid it
across the saddle to carry it back to the
chateau; then he went on his way softly,
his mind troubled as if he were drunken,
pursued by horrible and surprising images.
And abruptly, in the path which the night


THE WOLF. 47
was invading, a great shape passed. It was
the beast. A shock of terror shook the
hunter; something cold, like a drop of water,
glided along his reins, and, like a monk
haunted of the devil, he made a great sign
of the cross, dismayed at this abrupt return
of the frightful prowler. But his eyes fell
back upon the inert body laid before him,
and suddenly, passing abruptly from fear to
anger, he shook with an inordinate rage.
Then he spurred his horse and rushed
after the wolf.
He. followed it by the copses, the ravines,
and the tall trees, traversing woods which
he no longer knew, his eyes fixed on the
white speck which fled before him through
the night now fallen upon the earth.
His horse also seemed animated by a
force and an ardor hitherto unknown. It
galloped, with out-stretched neck, straight
on, hurling against the trees, against the
rocks, the head and the feet of the dead
man thrown across the saddle. The briers
tore out the hair; the brow, beating the
huge trunks, spattered them with blood;
the spurs tore their ragged coats of bark.


48 THE ODD NUMBER.
And suddenly the beast and the horseman
issued from the forest and rushed into a
valley, just as the moon appeared above the
mountains. This valley was stony, closed
by enormous rocks, without possible issue;
and the wolf was cornered and turned round.
Frangois then uttered a yell of joy which
the echoes repeated like a rolling of thun-
der, and he leaped from his horse, his cut-
lass in his hand.
The beast, with bristling hair, the back
arched, awaited him; its eyes glistened like
two stars. But, before offering battle, the
strong hunter, seizing his brother, seated
him on a rock, and, supporting with stones
his head, which was no more than a blot of
blood, he shouted in the ears as if he was
talking to a deaf man, " Look, Jean; look at
this!"
Then he threw himself upon the monster.
He felt himself strong enough to overturn
a mountain, to bruise stones in his hands.
The beast tried to bite him, seeking to
strike in at his stomach; but he had seized
it by the neck, without even using his weap-
on, and he strangled it gently, listening to


THE WOLF. 49
the stoppage of the breathings in its.throat
and the beatings of its heart. And he laugh-
ed, rejoicing madly, pressing closer and closer
his formidable embrace, crying in a delirium
of joy, " Look, Jean, look!" All resistance
ceased; the body of the wolf became lax.
He was dead.
Then Francois, taking him up in his arms,
carried him off and went and threw him at
the feet of the elder brother, repeating, in a
tender voice, " There, there, there, my little
Jean, see him!"
Then he replaced on the saddle the two
bodies one upon the other; and he went his
way.
He returned to the chateau, laughing and
crying, like Gargantua at the birth of Panta-
gruel, uttering shouts of triumph and stamp-
ing with joy in relating the death of the
beast, and moaning and tearing his beard in
telling that of his brother.
And often, later, when he talked again of
that day, he said, with tears in his eyes, " If
only that poor Jean could have seen me
strangle the other, he would have died con-
tent, I am sure of it!"
4


50 THE ODD NUMBER.
The widow of my ancestor inspired her
orphan son with that horror of the chase
which has transmitted itself from father to
son as far down as myself.
The Marquis d'Arville was silent. Some
one asked:
"That story is a legend, isn't it?"
And the story-teller answered:
"I swear to you that it is true from one
end to the other."
Then a lady declared, in a little, soft voice:
"All the same, it is fine to have passions
like that."


Iv.
THE NECKLACE.





THE NECKLACE.
She was one of those pretty and charm-
ing girls who are sometimes, as if by a mis-
take of destiny, born in a family of clerks.
She had no dowry, no expectations, no means
of being known, understood, loved, wedded,
by any rich and distinguished man; and she
let herself be married to a little clerk at the
Ministry of Public Instruction.
She dressed plainly because she could not
dress well, but she was as unhappy as though
she had really fallen from her proper station;
since with women there is neither caste nor
rank; and beauty, grace, and charm act in-
stead of family and birth. Natural fineness,
instinct for what is elegant, suppleness of
wit, are the sole hierarchy, and make from


54 THE ODD NUMBER.
women of the people the equals of the very
greatest ladies.
She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself
born for all the delicacies ana all the luxu-
ries. She suffered from the poverty of her
dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls,
from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness
of the curtains. All those things, of which
another woman of her rank would never even
have been conscious, tortured her and made
her angry. The sight of the little Breton
peasant who did her humble house - work
aroused in her regrets which were despair-
ing, and distracted dreams. She thought of
the silent antechambers hung with Oriental
tapestry, lit by tall bronze candelabra, and
of the two great footmen in knee-breeches
who sleep in the big arm-chairs, made drow-
sy by the heavy warmth of the hot-air stove.
She thought of the long salons fitted up with
ancient silk, of the delicate furniture carry-
ing priceless curiosities, and of the coquet-
tish perfumed boudoirs made for talks at
five o'clock with intimate friends, with men
famous and sought after, whom all women
envy and whose attention they all desire.


THE NECKLACE. . 55
When she sat down to dinner, before the
round table covered with a table-cloth three
days old, opposite her husband, who uncov-
ered the soup-tureen and declared with an
enchanted air, “Ah, the good pot-au-feu / I
don't know anything better than that,” she
thought of dainty dinners, of shining silver-
ware, of tapestry which peopled the walls
with ancient personages and with strange
birds flying in the midst of a fairy for-
est; and she thought of delicious dishes
served on marvellous plates, and of the
whispered gallantries which you listen to
with a sphinx-like smile, while you are eat-
ing the pink flesh of a trout or the wings of
a quail.
She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing.
And she loved nothing but that; she felt
made for that. She would so have liked to
please, to be envied, to be charming, to be
sought after.
She had a friend, a former school-mate at
the convent, who was rich, and whom she did
not like to go and see any more, because
she suffered so much when she came back.
But, one evening, her husband returned


56 THE ODD NUMBER.
home with a triumphant air, and holding a
large envelope in his hand.
"There," said he, "here is something for
you."
She tore the paper sharply, and drew out
a printed card which bore these words:
"The Minister of Public Instruction and
Mme. Georges Ramponneau request the
honor of M. and Mme. Loisel's company at
the palace of the Ministry on Monday even-
ing, January 18th."
Instead of being delighted, as her hus-
band hoped, she threw the invitation on the
table with disdain, murmuring:
"What do you want me to do with that?"
"But, my dear, I thought you would be
glad. You never go out, and this is such
a fine opportunity. I had awful trouble to
get it. Every one wants to go; it is very
select, and they are not giving many invi-
tations to clerks. The whole official world
will be there."
She looked at him with an irritated eye,
and she said, impatiently:


THE NECKLACE. 57
"And what do you want me to put on my
back?"
He had not thought of that; he stam-
mered:
"Why, the dress you go to the theatre
in. It looks very well, to me."
He stopped, distracted, seeing that his
wife was crying. Two great tears descended
slowly from the corners of her eyes towards
the corners of her mouth. He stuttered:
"What's the matter? What's the mat-
ter?"
But, by a violent effort, she had conquer-
ed her grief, and she replied, with a calm
voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:
"Nothing. Only I have no dress, and
therefore I can't go to this ball. Give your
card to some colleague whose wife is better
equipped than I."
He was in despair. He resumed:
"Come, let us see, Mathilde. How much
would it cost, a suitable dress, which you
could use on other occasions, something
very simple?"
She reflected several seconds, making her
calculations and wondering also what sum


58 THE ODD NUMBER.
she could ask without drawing on herself
an immediate refusal and a frightened ex-
clamation from the economical clerk.
Finally, she replied, hesitatingly:
"I don't know exactly, but I think I
could manage it with four hundred francs."
He had grown a little pale, because he
was laying aside just that amount to buy
a gun and treat himself to a little shooting
next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with
several friends who went to shoot larks
down there, of a Sunday.
But he said:
"All right. I will give you four hundred
francs. And try to have a pretty dress."
The day of the ball drew near, and Mme.
Loisel seemed sad, uneasy, anxious. Her
dress was ready, however. Her husband
said to her one evening:
"What is the matter? Come, you've been
so queer these last three days."
And she answered:
"It annoys me not to have a single jewel,
not a single stone, nothing to put on. I


THE NECKLACE. 59
shall look like distress. I should almost
rather not go at all."
He resumed:
"You might wear natural flowers. It's
very stylish at this time of the year. For
ten francs you can get two or three mag-
nificent roses."
She was not convinced.
"No; there's nothing more humiliating
than to look poor among other women who
are rich."
But her husband cried:
"How stupid you are! Go look up your
friend Mme. Forestier, and ask her to lend
you some jewels. You're quite thick enough
with her to do that."
She uttered a cry of joy:
"It's true. I never thought of it."
The next day she went to her friend and
told of her distress.
Mme. Forestier went to a wardrobe with a
glass door, took out a large jewel-box, brought
it back, opened it, and said to Mme. Loisel:
"Choose, my dear."
She saw first of all some bracelets, then a
pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross, gold
V


60 THE ODD NUMBER.
and precious stones of admirable workman-
ship. She tried on the ornaments before
the glass, hesitated, could not make up her
mind to part with them, to give them back.
She kept asking:
"Haven't you any more?"
"Why, yes. Look. I don't know what
you like."
All of a sudden she discovered, in a black
satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds"
and her heart began to beat with an immod-
erate desire. Her hands trembled as she
took it. She fastened it around her throat,
outside her high-necked dress, and remain-
ed lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.
Then she asked, hesitating, filled with an-
guish:
"Can you lend me that, only that?"
"Why, yes, certainly."
She sprang upon the neck of her friend,
kissed her passionately, then fled with her
treasure.
The day of the ball arrived. Mme. Loisel
made a great success. She was prettier than


THE NECKLACE. 61
them all, elegant, gracious, smiling, and crazy
with joy. All the men looked at her, ask-
ed her name, endeavored to be introduced.
All the attache's of the Cabinet wanted to
waltz with her. She was remarked by the
minister himself.
She danced with intoxication, with pas-
sion, made drunk by pleasure, forgetting all,
in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of
her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness
composed of all this homage, of all this ad-
miration, of all these awakened desires, and
of that sense of complete victory which is
so sweet to woman's heart.
She went away about four o'clock in the
morning. Her husband had been sleeping
since midnight, in a little deserted anteroom,
with three other gentlemen whose wives
were having a very good time.
He threw over her shoulders the wraps
which he had brought, modest wraps of com-
mon life, whose poverty contrasted with the
elegance of the ball dress. She felt this and
wanted to escape so as not to be remarked
by the other women, who were enveloping
themselves in costly furs.


6t THE ODD NUMBER.
Loisel held her back.
"Wait a bit. You will catch cold outside.
I will go and call a cab."
But she did not listen to him, and rap-
idly descended the stairs. When they were
in the street they did not find a carriage;
and they began to look for one, shouting af-
ter the cabmen whom they saw passing by
at a distance.
They went down towards the Seine, in de-
spair, shivering with cold. At last they found
on the quay one of those ancient noctam-
bulant coupes which, exactly as if they were
ashamed to show their misery during the
day, are never seen round Paris until after
nightfall.
It took them to their door in the Rue des
Martyrs, and once more, sadly, they climbed
up homeward. All was ended, for her. And
as to him, he reflected that he must be at
the Ministry at ten o'clock.
She removed the wraps, which covered
her shoulders, before the glass, so as once
more to see herself in all her glory. But
suddenly she uttered a cry. She had no
longer the necklace around her neck!


THE NECKLACE. 63
Her husband, already half-undressed, de-
manded:
"What is the matter with you?"
She turned madly towards him:
"I have—I have—I've lost Mme. Fores-
tier's necklace."
He stood up, distracted.
"What!—how ?—Impossible!"
And they looked in the folds of her dress,
in the folds of her cloak, in her pockets, ev-
erywhere. They did not find it.
He asked:
"You're sure you had it on when you left
the ball?"
"Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the pal-
ace."
"But if you had lost it in the street we
should have heard it fall. It must be in the
cab."
"Yes. Probably. Did you take his num-
ber f"
"No. And you, didn't you notice it?"
"No."
They looked, thunderstruck, at one anoth-
er. At last Loisel put on his clothes.
"I shall go back on foot," said he," over


64 THE ODD NUMBER.
the whole route which we have taken, to se&
if I can't find it."
And he went out. She sat waiting on a
chair in her ball dress, without strength to
go to bed, overwhelmed, without fire, without
a thought.
Her husband came back about seven
o'clock. He had found nothing.
He went to Police Headquarters, to the
newspaper offices, to offer a reward; he went
to the cab companies—everywhere, in fact,
whither he was urged by the least suspicion
of hope.
She waited all day, in the same condition
of mad fear before this terrible calamity.
Loisel returned at night with a hollow,
pale face; he had discovered nothing.
"You must write to your friend," said he,
"that you have broken the clasp of her
necklace and that you are having it mend-
ed. That will give us time to turn round."
She wrote at his dictation.
At the end of a week they had lost all
hope.
>S


THE NECKLACE. 65
And Loisel, who had aged five years, de-
clared:
"We must consider how to replace that
ornament."
The next day they took the box which
had contained it, and they went to the jew.
eller whose name was found within. He
consulted his books.
"It was not I, madame, who sold that
necklace; I must simply have furnished the
case."
Then they went from jeweller to.jeweller,
searching for a necklace like the other, con-
sulting their memories, sick both of them
with chagrin and with anguish.
They found, in a shop at the Palais_ Roy-
al, a string of diamonds which seemed to
them exactly like the one they looked for.
It was worth forty thousand francs. They
could have it for thirty-six.
So they begged the jeweller not to sell
it for three days yet. And they made a
bargain that he should buy it back for
thirty-four thousand francs, in case they
found the other one before the end of Feb
ruary.
5


66 THE ODD NUMBER.
Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs
which his father had left him. He would
borrow the rest.
He did borrow, asking a thousand francs
of one, five hundred of another, five louis
here, three louis there. He gave notes, took
up ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers,
and all the race of lenders. He compro-
mised all the rest of his life, risked his sig-
nature without even knowing if he could
meet it; and, frightened by the pains yet to
come, by the black misery which was about
to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the
physical privations and of all the moral tort-
ures which he was to suffer, he went to
get the new necklace, putting down upon
the merchant's counter thirty-six thousand
francs.
When Mme. Loisel took back the neck-
lace, Mme. Forestier said to her, with a chilly
manner:
"You should have returned it sooner, I
might have needed it."
She did not open the case, as her friend
had so much feared. If she had detected the
substitution, what would she have thought,


THE NECKLACE. 67
what would she have said? Would she not
have taken Mme. Loisel for a thief?
Mme. Loisel now knew the horrible ex-
istence of the needy. She took her part,
moreover, all on a sudden, with heroism.
That dreadful debt must be paid. She
would pay it. They dismissed their serv-
ant; they changed their lodgings; they rent-
ed a garret under the roof.
She came to know what heavy house-
work meant and the odious cares of the
kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her
rosy nails on the greasy pots and pans.
She washed the dirty linen, the shirts, and
the dish-cloths, which she dried upon a
line; she carried the slops down to the
street every morning, and carried up the
water, stopping for breath at every landing.
And, dressed like a woman of the people, she
went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher,
her basket on her arm, bargaining, insulted,
defending her miserable money sou by sou.
Each month they had to meet some notes,
renew others, obtain more time.
Her husband worked in the evening mak-
ing a fair copy of some tradesman's accounts,
*


68 THE ODD NUMBER.
and late at night he often copied manuscript
for five sous a page.
And this life lasted ten years.
At the end of ten years they had paid
everything, everything, with the rates of
usury, and the accumulations of the com-
pound interest.
Mme. Loisel looked old now. She had
become the woman of impoverished house-
holds—strong and hard and rough. With
frowsy hair, skirts askew, and red hands, she
talked loud while washing the floor with great
swishes of water. But sometimes, when her
husband was at the office, she sat down near
the window, and she thought of that gay
evening of long ago, of that ball where she
had been so beautiful and so feted.
What would have happened if she had
not lost that necklace? Who knows? who
knows? How life is strange and changeful!
How little a thing is needed for us to be
lost or to be saved!
But, one Sunday, having gone to take a
walk in the Champs Elysees to refresh her-


THE NECKLACE. 69
self from the labors of the week, she sud-
denly perceived a woman who was leading
a child. It was Mme. Forestier, still young,
still beautiful, still charming.
Mme. Loisel felt moved. Was she going
to speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now
that she had paid, she was going to tell her
all about it. Why not?
She went up.
"Good-day, Jeanne."
The other, astonished to be familiarly ad-
dressed by this plain good-wife, did not rec-
ognize her at all, and stammered:
"But—madame!—I do not know— You
must have mistaken."
"No. I am Mathilde Loisel."
Her friend uttered a cry.
"Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are
changed!"
"Yes, I have had days hard enough, since
I have seen you, days wretched enough—
and that because of you!"
"Of me! How so?"
"Do you remember that diamond neck-
lace which you lent me to wear at the min-
isterial ball f"


•JO THE ODD NUMBER.
"Yes. Well?"
"Well,Ilostit."
"What do you mean? You brought it
back."
"I brought you back another just like it
And for this we have been ten years paying.
You can understand that it was not easy for
us, us who had nothing. At last it is ended,
and I am very glad."
Mine. Forestier had stopped.
"You say that you bought a necklace of
diamonds to replace mine?"
"Yes. You never noticed it, then! They
were very like."
And she smiled with a joy which was proud
and naive at once.
Mme. Forestier, strongly moved, took her
two hands.
"Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my neck-
lace was paste. It was worth at most five
hundred francs!"


V.
THE PIECE OF STRING.





THE PIECE OF STRING.
It was market-day, and over all the roads
round Goderville the peasants and theirwives
were coming towards the town. The men
walked easily, lurching the whole body for.
ward at every step. Their long legs were
twisted and deformed by the slow, painful
labors of the country:—by bending over to
plough, which is what also makes their left
shoulders too high and their figures crook-
ed; and by reaping corn, which obliges them
for steadiness' sake to spread their knees
too wide. Their starched blue blouses, shin-
ing as though varnished, ornamented at col-
lar and cuffs with little patterns of white
stitch-work, and blown up big around their
bony bodies, seemed exactly like balloons
'


74 THE ODD NUMBER.
about to soar, but putting forth a head, two
arms, and two feet.
Some of these fellows dragged a cow or
a calf at the end of a rope. And just behind
the animal, beating it over the back with a
leaf-covered branch to hasten its pace, went
their wives, carrying large baskets from
which came forth the heads of chickens or
the heads of ducks. These women walked
with steps far shorter and quicker than the
men; their figures, withered and upright, were
adorned with scanty little shawls pinned over
their flat bosoms; and they enveloped their
heads each in a white cloth, close fastened
round the hair and surmounted by a cap.
Now a char-a-banc passed by, drawn by a
jerky-paced nag. It shook up strangely the
two men on the seat. And the woman at the
bottom of the cart held fast to its sides to
lessen the hard joltings.
In the market-place at Goderville was a
great crowd, a mingled multitude of men
and beasts. The horns of cattle, the high
and long-napped hats of wealthy peasants,
the head-dresses of the women, came to the
surface of that sea. And voices clamorous,


THE PIECE OF STRING. 75
sharp, shrill, made a continuous and savage
din. Above it a huge burst of laughter from
the sturdy lungs of a merry yokel would some-
times sound, and sometimes a long bellow
from a cow tied fast to the wall of a house.
It all smelled of the stable, of milk, of hay,
and of perspiration, giving off that half-hu-
man, half-animal odor which is peculiar to
the men of the fields.
Maitre Hauchecorne, of Brdaute, had just
arrived at Goderville, and was taking his way
towards the square, when he perceived on
the ground a little piece of string. Mai-
tre Hauchecorne, economical, like all true
Normans, reflected that everything was worth
picking up which could be of any use; and
he stooped down—but painfully, because he
suffered from rheumatism. He took the bit
of thin cord from the ground, and was care-
fully preparing to roll it up when he saw
Maitre Malandain, the harness-maker, on his
door-step, looking at him. They had once
had a quarrel about a halter, and they had re-
mained angry, bearing malice on both sides.
Maitre Hauchecorne was overcome with a
sort of shame at being seen by his enemy
U
'



j6 rat. ODD NUMBER.
looking in the dirt so for a bit of string. He
quickly hid his find beneath his blouse; then
in the pocket of his breeches; then pretend-
ed to be still looking for something on the
ground which he did not discover; and at
last went off towards the market-place, with
his head bent forward, and a body almost
doubled in two by rheumatic pains.
He lost himself immediately in the crowd,
which was clamorous, slow, and agitated by
interminable bargains. The peasants exam-
ined the cows, went off, came back, always
in great perplexity and fear of being cheat-
ed, never quite daring to decide, spying at
the eye of the seller, trying ceaselessly to
discover the tricks of the man and the de-
fect in the beast.
The women, having placed their great
baskets at their feet, had pulled out the
poultry, which lay upon the ground, tied
by the legs, with eyes scared, with combs
scarlet.
They listened to propositions, maintain-
ing their prices, with a dry manner, with an
impassible face; or, suddenly, perhaps, de-
ciding to take the lower price which was


THE PIECE OF STRING. 77
offered, they cried out to the customer, who
was departing slowly:
"All right, I'll let you have them, Mait'
Anthime."
Then, little by little, the square became
empty, and when the Angelus struck mid-
day those who lived at a distance poured
into the inns.
At Jourdain's the great room was filled
with eaters, just as the vast court was filled
with vehicles of every sort—wagons, gigs,
char-a-bancs, tilburys, tilt-carts which have
no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced
together, raising their shafts to heaven like
two arms, or it may be with their nose in
the dirt and their rear in the air.
Just opposite to where the diners were at
table the huge fireplace, full of clear flame,
threw a lively heat on the backs of those who
sat along the right. Three spits were turn-
ing, loaded with chickens, with pigeons, and
with joints of mutton; and a delectable odor
of roast meat, and of gravy gushing over crisp
brown skin, took wing from the hearth, kin-
dled merriment, caused mouths to water.
All the aristocracy of the plough were eat-


78 THE ODD NUMBER.
ing there, at Mait' Jourdain's, the innkeep-
er's, a dealer in horses also, and a sharp
fellow who had made a pretty penny in his
day.
The dishes were passed round, were emp-
tied, with jugs of yellow cider. Every one
told of his affairs, of his purchases and his
sales. They asked news about the crops.
The weather was good for green stuffs, but
a little wet for wheat.
All of a sudden the drum rolled in the
court before the house. Every one, except
some of the most indifferent, was on his feet
at once, and ran to the door, to the windows,
with his mouth still full and his napkin in
his hand.
When the public crier had finished his
tattoo he called forth in a jerky voice, mak-
ing his pauses out of time:
"Be it known to the inhabitants of Go-
derville, and in general to all—persons pres-
ent at the market, that there has been lost
this morning, on the Beuzeville road, be-
tween—nine and ten o'clock, a pocket-book
of black leather, containing five hundred
francs and business papers. You are re-


THE PIECE OF STRING. 79
quested to return it—to the mayor's office,
at once, or to Maitre Fortun6 Houlbreque,
of Manneville. There will be twenty francs
reward."
Then the man departed. They heard
once more at a distance the dull beatings
on the drum and the faint voice of the crier.
Then they began to talk of this event,
reckoning up the chances which Maitre
Houlbreque had of finding or of not finding
his pocket-book again.
And the meal went on.
They were finishing their coffee when the
corporal of gendarmes appeared on the
threshold.
He asked:
"Is Maitre Hauchecorne, of Breaute',
here?"
Maitre Hauchecorne, seated at the other
end of the table, answered:
"Here I am."
And the corporal resumed:
"Maitre Hauchecorne, will you have the
kindness to come with me to the mayor's
office? M. le Maire would like to speak to
you."


80 THE ODD NUMBER.
The peasant, surprised and uneasy, gulp-
ed down his little glass of cognac, got up,
and, even worse bent over than in the morn-
ing, since the first steps after a rest were
always particularly difficult, started off, re-
peating:
"Here I am, here I am."
And he followed the corporal.
The mayor was waiting for him, seated
in an arm-chair. He was the notary of the
place, a tall, grave man of pompous speech.
"Maitre Hauchecorne," said he, "this
morning, on the Beuzeville road, you were
seen to pick up the pocket-book lost by
Maitre Houlbreque, of Manneville."
The countryman, speechless, regarded
the mayor, frightened already by this sus-
picion which rested on him he knew not
why.
"I, I picked up that pocket-book?"
"Yes, you."
"I swear I didn't even know nothing
about it at all."
"You were seen."
"They saw me, me? Who is that who
saw me?"


THE PIECE OF STRING. 81
"M. Malandain, the harness-maker."
Then the old man remembered, under-
stood, and, reddening with anger:
"Ah! he saw me, did he, the rascal? He
saw me picking up this string here, M'sieu'
le Maire."
And, fumbling at the bottom of his pock-
et, he pulled out of it the little end of
string.
But the mayor incredulously shook his
head:
"You will not make me believe, Maitre
Hauchecorne, that M. Malandain, who is a
man worthy of credit, has mistaken this
string for a pocket-book."
The peasant, furious, raised his hand and
spit as if to attest his good faith, repeating:
"For all that, it is the truth of the good
God, the blessed truth, M'sieu' le Maire.
There! on my soul and my salvation I re-
peat it."
The mayor continued:
"After having picked up the thing in ques-
tion, you even looked for some time in the
mud to see if a piece of money had not drop-
ped out of it"
'
6


82 THE ODD NUMBER.
The good man was suffocated with indig-
nation and with fear:
"If they can say !—if they can say ....
such lies as that to slander an honest man!
If they can say !—"
He might protest, he was not believed.
He was confronted with M. Malandain,
who repeated and sustained his testimony.
They abused one another for an hour. At
his own request Maitre Hauchecorne was
searched. Nothing was found upon him.
At last, the mayor, much perplexed, sent
him away, warning him that he would inform
the public prosecutor, and ask for orders.
The news had spread. When he left the
mayor's office, the old man was surrounded,
interrogated with a curiosity which was seri-
ous or mocking as the case might be, but
into which no indignation entered. And he
began to tell the story of the string. They
did not believe him. They laughed.
He passed on, button-holed by every one,
himself button-holing his acquaintances, be-
ginning over and over again his tale and his
protestations, showing his pockets turned in-
side out to prove that he had nothing.
■


THE PIECE OF STRING. 83
They said to him:
"You old rogue, val"
And he grew angry, exasperated, feverish,
in despair at not being believed, and always
telling his story.
The night came. It was time to go home.
He set out with three of his neighbors, to
whom he pointed out the place where he
had picked up the end of string; and all
the way he talked of his adventure.
That evening he made the round in the
village of Breaute', so as to tell every one.
He met only unbelievers.
He was ill of it all night long.
The next day, about one in the afternoon,
Marius Paumelle, a farm hand of Maitre Bre-
ton, the market-gardener at Ymauville, re-
turned the pocket-book and its contents to
Maitre Houlbreque, of Manneville.
This man said, indeed, that he had found
it on the road; but not knowing how to read,
he had carried it home and given it to his
master.
The news spread to the environs. Maitre
Hauchecorne was informed. He put him-
self at once upon the go, and began to relate


84 THE ODD NUMBER.
his story as completed by the denouement.
He triumphed.
"What grieved me," said he, "was not
the thing itself, do you understand; but
it was the lies. There's nothing does you
so much harm as being in disgrace for
lying."
All day he talked of his adventure, he
told it on the roads to the people who pass-
ed; at the cabaret to the people who drank;
and the next Sunday, when they came out of
church. He even stopped strangers to tell
them about it. He was easy, now, and yet
something worried him without his knowing
exactly what it was. People had a joking
manner while they listened. They did not
seem convinced. He seemed to feel their
tittle-tattle behind his back.
On Tuesday of the next week he went to
market at Goderville, prompted entirely by
the need of telling his story.
Malandain, standing on his door-step, be-
gan to laugh as he saw him pass. Why?
He accosted a farmer of Criquetot, who
did not let him finish, and, giving him a punch
in the pit of his stomach, cried in his face:


THE PIECE OF STRING. 85
"Oh you great rogue, vat" Then turned
his heel upon him.
Maitre Hauchecorne remained speechless,
and grew more and more uneasy. Why had
they called him "great rogue?"
When seated at table in Jourdain's tavern
he began again to explain the whole affair.
A horse-dealer of Montivilliers shouted at
him:
"Get out, get out you old scamp; I know
all about your string!"
Hauchecorne stammered:
"But since they found it again, the pock-
et-book!"
But the other continued:
"Hold your tongue, daddy; there's one
who finds it and there's another who re-
turns it. And no one the wiser."
The peasant was choked. He under-
stood at last. They accused him of having
had the pocket-book brought back by an
accomplice, by a confederate.
He tried to protest. The whole table
began to laugh.
He could not finish his dinner, and went
away amid a chorus of jeers.
*


86 THE ODD NUMBER.
He went home, ashamed and indignant,
choked with rage, with confusion, the more
cast-down since from his Norman cunning,
he was, perhaps, capable of having done what
they accused him of, and even of boasting
of it as a good trick. His innocence dimly
seemed to him impossible to prove, his craft-
iness being so well known. And he felt
himself struck to the heart by the injustice
of the suspicion.
Then he began anew to tell of his ad-
venture, lengthening his recital every day,
each time adding new proofs, more energetic
protestations, and more solemn oaths which
he thought of, which he prepared in his
hours of solitude, his mind being entirely
occupied by the story of the string. The
more complicated his defence, the more art-
ful his arguments, the less he was believed.
"Those are liars' proofs," they said be-
hind his back.
He felt this; it preyed upon his heart,
lie exhausted himself in useless efforts.
He was visibly wasting away.
The jokers now made him tell the story
of "The Piece of String" to amuse them,


THE PIECE OF STRING. 87
just as you make a soldier who has been
on a campaign tell his story of the battle.
His mind, struck at the root, grew weak.
About the end of December he took to
his bed.
He died early in January, and, in the de-
lirium of the death-agony, he protested his
innocence, repeating:
"A little bit of string —a little bit of
string—see, here it Is, M'sieu' le Maire."





VI.
LA MERE SAUVAGE.





LA MERE SAUVAGE.
I had not been at Virelogne for fifteen
years. I went back there in the autumn,
to shoot with my friend Serval, who had at
last rebuilt his chateau, which had been de-
stroyed by the Prussians.
I loved that district very much. It is
one of those corners of the world which
have a sensuous charm for the eyes. You
love it with a bodily love. We, whom the
country seduces, we keep tender memories
for certain springs, for certain woods, for
certain pools, for certain hills, seen very
often, and which have stirred us like joy-
ful events. Sometimes our thoughts turn
back towards a corner in a forest, or the
end of a bank, or an orchard powdered with
V


92 THE ODD OTMBER.
flowers, seen but a single time, on some gay
day; yet remaining in our hearts like the
images of certain women met in the street
on a spring morning, with bright transparent
dresses; and leaving in soul and body an
unappeased desire which is not to be for-
gotten, a feeling that you have just rubbed
elbows with happiness.
At Virelogne I loved the whole country-
side, dotted with little woods, and crossed by
brooks which flashed in the sun and looked
like veins, carrying blood to the earth. You
fished in them for crawfish, trout, and eels!
Divine happiness! You could bathe in
places, and you often found snipe among the
high grass which grew along the borders of
these slender watercourses.
I was walking, lightly as a goat, watching
my two dogs ranging before me. Serval, a
hundred metres to my right, was beating a
field of lucern. I turned the thicket which
forms the boundary of the wood of Sandres,
and I saw a cottage in ruins.
All of a sudden, I remembered it as I had
seen it the last time, in 1869, neat, covered
with vines, with chickens before the door.


LA MfcRE SAUVAGE. 93
What sadder than a dead house, with its
skeleton standing upright, bare and sinister?
I also remembered that in it, one very
tiring day, the good woman had given me a
glass of wine to drink, and that Serval had
then told me the history of its inhabitants.
The father, an old poacher, had been killed
by the gendarmes. The son, whom I had
once seen, was a tall, dry fellow who also
passed for a ferocious destroyer of game.
People called them "les Sauvage."
Was that a name or a nickname?
I hailed Serval. He came up with his
long strides like a crane.
I asked him:
"What's become of those people i"
And he told me this story:
When war was declared, the son Sauvage,
who was then thirty-three years old, enlisted,
leaving his mother alone in the house. Peo-
ple did not pity the old woman very much,
because she had money; they knew it.
But she remained quite alone in that iso-
lated dwelling so far from the village, on the


94 THE ODD NUMBER.
edge of the wood. She was not afraid, how>
ever, being of the same strain as her men-
folk; a hardy old woman, tall and thin, who
laughed seldom, and with whom one never
jested. The women of the fields laugh but
little in any case; that is men's business,
that! But they themselves have sad and
narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy,
gloomy life. The peasants learn a little
boisterous merriment at the tavern, but their
helpmates remain grave, with countenances
which are always severe. The muscles of
their faces have never learned the move-
ments of the laugh.
La Mere Sauvage continued her ordinary
existence in her cottage, which was soon
covered by the snows. She came to the
village once a week, to get bread and a lit-
tle meat; then she returned into her house.
As there was talk of wolves, she went out
with a gun upon her back—her son's gun,
rusty, and with the butt worn by the rubbing
of the hand; and she was strange to see, the
tall " Sauvage," a little bent, going with slow
strides over the snow, the muzzle of the
piece extending beyond the black head-dress,


LA MERE SAUVAGE. 95
which pressed close to her head and im-
prisoned her white hair, which no one had
ever seen.
One day a Prussian force arrived. It
was billeted upon the inhabitants, accord-
ing to the property and resources of each.
Four were allotted to the old woman, who
was known to be rich.
They were four great boys with blond
skin, with blond beards, with blue eyes,
who had remained stout notwithstanding
the fatigues which they had endured already,
and who also, though in a conquered coun-
try, had remained kind and gentle. Alone
with this aged woman, they showed them-
selves full of consideration, sparing her, as
much as they could, all expenses and fatigue.
They would be seen, all four of them, mak-
ing their toilet round the well, of a morning,
in their shirt-sleeves, splashing with great
swishes of water, under the crude daylight
of the snowy weather, their pink-white North-
man's flesh, while La Mere Sauvage went
and came, making ready the soup. Then
they would be seen cleaning the kitchen,
rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling


96 THE ODD NUMBER.
potatoes, doing up all the house-work, like
four good sons about their mother.
But the old woman thought always of her
own, so tall and thin, with his hooked nose
and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache
which made a roll of black hairs upon his
lip. She asked each day of each of the sol-
diers who were installed beside her hearth:
"Do you know where the French March-
ing Regiment No. 23 was sent? My boy
is in it"
They answered, "No, not know, not know
at all." And, understanding her pain and
her uneasiness (they, who had mothers too,
there at home), they rendered her a thou-
sand little services. She loved them well,
moreover, her four enemies, since the peasan-
try feels no patriotic hatred; that belongs
to the upper class alone. The humble, those
who pay the most, because they are poor,
and because every new burden crushes them
down; those who are killed in masses, who
make the true cannon's-meat, because they
are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most
cruelly the atrocious miseries of war, because
they are the feeblest, and offer least resist-
;


la mere sauvage. 97
ance—they hardly understand at all those
bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of hon-
or, or those pretended political combinations
which in six months exhaust two nations,
the conqueror with the conquered.
They said on the country-side, in speak-
ing of the Germans of La Mere Sauvage:
"There are four who have found a soft
place."
Now, one morning, when the old woman
was alone in the house, she perceived far
off on the plain a man coming towards her
dwelling. Soon she recognized him; it
was the postman charged to distribute the
letters. He gave her a folded paper, and
she drew out of her case the spectacles
which she used for sewing; then she read:
"Madame Sauvage,—The present letter
is to tell you sad news. Your boy Victor was
killed yesterday by a shell which near cut
him in two. I was just by, seeing that we
stood next each other in the company, and
he would talk to me about you to let you
know on the same day if anything happened
to him.
7


98 THE ODD NUMBER.
■ I took his watch, which was in his pock-
et, to bring it back to you when the war is
done.
"I salute you very friendly.
"CiSAIRE Rivot,
"Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23."
The letter was dated three weeks back.
She did not cry at all. She remained mo-
tionless, so seized and stupefied that she did
not even surfer as yet. She thought: "Via
Victor who is killed now." Then little by
little the tears mounted to her eyes, and the
sorrow caught her heart. The ideas came
to her, one by one, dreadful, torturing. She
would never kiss him again, her child, her
big boy, never again! The gendarmes had
killed the father, the Prussians had killed
the son. He had been cut in two by a can-
non-ball. She seemed to see the thing, the
horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes
open, while he chewed the corner of his big
mustache as he always did in moments of
anger.
What had they done with his body after-
wards? If they had only let her have her


LA MERE SAUVAGE. 99
boy back as they had given her back her
husband—with the bullet in the middle of
his forehead!
But she heard a noise of voices. It was
the Prussians returning from the village. She
hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and
she received them quietly, with her ordinary
face, having had time to wipe her eyes.
They were laughing, all four, delighted,
since they brought with them a fine rabbit—
stolen, doubtless—and they made signs to
the old woman that there was to be some-
thing good to eat.
She set herself to work at once to prepare
breakfast; but when it came to killing the
rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was
not the first. One of the soldiers struck it
down with a blow of his fist behind the ears.
The beast once dead, she separated the
red body from the skin; but the sight of
the blood which she was touching, and which
covered her hands, of the warm blood which
she felt cooling and coagulating, made her
tremble from head to foot; and she kept
seeing her big boy cut in two, and quite red
also, like this still palpitating animal.


IOO THE ODD NUMBER.
She set herself at table with the Prus-
sians, but she could not eat, not even a
mouthful. They devoured the rabbit with-
out troubling themselves about her. She
looked at them askance, without speaking,
ripening a thought, and with a face so im-
passible that they perceived nothing.
All of a sudden, she said: "I don't even
know your names, and here's a whole month
that we've been together." They under-
stood, not without difficulty, what she want-
ed, and told their names. That was not
sufficient; she had them written for her on
a paper, with the addresses of their fami-
lies, and, resting her spectacles on her great
nose, she considered that strange handwrit-
ing, then folded the sheet and put it in her
pocket, on top of the letter which told her
of the death of her son.
When the meal was ended, she said to the
men:
"I am going to work for you."
And she began to carry up hay into the
loft where they slept.
They were astonished at her taking all
this trouble; she explained to them that


LA MSRE sauvage. ioi
thus they would not be so cold; and they
helped her. They heaped the trusses of
hay as high as the straw roof; and in that
manner they made a sort of great cham-
ber with four walls of fodder, warm and
perfumed, where they should sleep splen-
didly.
At dinner, one of them was worried to see
that La Mere Sauvage still ate nothing. She
told him that she had the cramps. Then she
kindled a good fire to warm herself up, and
the four Germans mounted to their lodging-
place by the ladder which served them every
night for this purpose.
As soon as they closed the trap, the old
woman removed the ladder, then opened
the outside door noiselessly, and went back
to look for more bundles of straw, with
which she filled her kitchen. She went bare-
foot in the snow, so softly that no sound was
heard. From time to time she listened to
the sonorous and unequal snorings of the
four soldiers who were fast asleep.
When she judged her preparations to be
sufficient, she threw one of the bundles into
the fireplace, and when it was alight she


102 THE ODD NUMBER.
scattered it over all the others. Then she
went outside again and looked.
In a few seconds the whole interior of
the cottage was illumined with a violent
brightness and became a dreadful brasier, a
gigantic fiery furnace, whose brilliance spout-
ed out of the narrow window and threw a
glittering beam upon the snow.
Then a great cry issued from the summit
of the house; it was a clamor of human
shriekings, heart-rending calls of anguish
and of fear. At last, the trap having fallen
in, a whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft,
pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like
the immense flame of a torch; and all the
cottage flared.
Nothing more was heard therein but the
crackling of the fire, the crackling sound of
the walls, the falling of the rafters. All of
a sudden the roof fell in, and the burn-
ing carcass of the dwelling hurled a great
plume of sparks into the air, amid a cloud
of smoke.
The country, all white, lit up by the fire,
shone like a cloth of silver tinted with red.
A bell, far off, began to toll.


LA MERE SAUVAGE. I03
The old "Sauvage" remained standing
before her ruined dwelling, armed with her
gun, her son's gun, for fear lest one of those
men might escape.
When she saw that it was ended, she
threw her weapon into the brasier. A loud
report rang back.
People were coming, the peasants, the
Prussians.
They found the woman seated on the
trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.
A German officer, who spoke French like
a son of France, demanded of her:
"Where are your soldiers?"
She extended her thin arm towards the
red heap of fire which was gradually going
out, and she answered with a strong voice:
"There!"
They crowded round her. The Prussian
asked:
"How did it take fire?"
She said: **
"It was I who set it on fire."
They did not believe her, they thought
that the sudden disaster had made her
crazy. So, while all pressed round and
'


104 THE ODD XUMEEJL
listened, she told the thing from one end to
the other, from the arrival of the letter to
the last cry of the men who were burned
with her house. She did not forget a detail
of all which she had felt, nor of all which
she had done.
When she had finished, she drew two
pieces of paper from her pocket, and, to dis-
tinguish them by the last glimmers of the
fire, she again adjusted her spectacles; then
she said, showing one: "That, that is the
death of Victor." Showing the other, she
added, indicating the red ruins with a bend
of the head: "That, that is their names,
so that you can write home." She calmly
held the white sheet out to the officer, who
held her by the shoulders, and she con-
tinued:
"You must write how it happened, and
you must say to their mothers that it was I
who did that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage!
Do not forget."
The officer shouted some orders in Ger-
man. They seized her, they threw her
against the walls of her house, still hot.
Then twelve men drew quickly up before
^


LA MERE SAUVAGE. 105
her, at twenty paces. She did not move.
She had understood; she waited.
An order rang out, followed instantly by
a long report. A belated shot went off by
itself, after the others.
The old woman did not fall. She sank
as though they had mowed off her legs.
The Prussian officer approached. She
was almost cut in two, and in her withered
hand she held her letter bathed with blood.
My friend Serval added:
"It was by way of reprisal that the Ger-
mans destroyed the chateau of the district,
which belonged to me."
As for me, I thought of the mothers of
those four gentle fellows burned in that
house; and of the atrocious heroism of that
other mother shot against the wall.
And I picked up a little stone, still black-
ened by the flames.





VIL
MOONLIGHT.





MOONLIGHT.
The Abb6 Marignan, as soldier of the
Church, bore his fighting title well. He was
a tall, thin priest, very fanatical, of an ec-
static but upright soul. All his beliefs
were fixed, without ever a wavering. He
thought that he understood God thoroughly,
that he penetrated His designs, His wishes,
His intentions.
When he promenaded with great strides
in the garden walk of his little country par-
sonage, sometimes a question rose in his
mind : "Why did God make that?" And
in fancy taking the place of God, he search-
ed obstinately, and nearly always he found
the reason. It is not he who would have
murmured in a transport of pious humility,


IIO THE ODD NUMBER.
"O Lord, thy ways are past finding out!"
He said to himself, "I am the servant of
God; I ought to know the reason of what
He does, or to divine it if I do not."
Everything in nature seemed to him cre-
ated with an absolute and admirable logic.
The "wherefore" and the "because" were
always balanced. The dawns were made to
render glad your waking, the days to ripen
the harvests, the rains to water them, the
evenings to prepare for sleeping, and the
nights dark for sleep.
The four seasons corresponded perfectly
to all the needs of agriculture; and to him
the suspicion could never have come that
nature has no intentions, and that all which
lives has bent itself, on the contrary, to the
hard conditions of different periods, of cli-
mates, and of matter.
Only he did hate women; he hated them
unconscionably, and he despised them by
instinct. He often repeated the words of
Christ, "Woman, what have I to do with
thee?" and he added, " One would almost
say that God himself was ill-pleased with
that particular work of his hands." Woman


MOONLIGHT. Ill
was indeed for him the "child twelve times
unclean" of whom the poet speaks. She
was the temptress who had ensnared the
first man, and who still continued her work
of damnation; she was the being who is fee-
ble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And
even more than her body of perdition, he
hated her loving soul.
He had often felt women's tenderness at-
tach itself to him, and though he knew him-
self to be unassailable, he grew exasperated
at that need of loving which quivered always
in their hearts.
God, to his mind, had only created woman
to tempt man and to prove him. You should
not approach her without those precautions
for defence which you would take, and those
fears which you would cherish, near a trap.
She was, indeed, just like a trap, with her
arms extended and her lips open towards a
man.
He had indulgence only for nuns, ren-
dered harmless by their vow; but he treat-
ed them harshly notwithstanding, because,
ever living at the bottom of their chained-
up hearts, of their chastened hearts, he per-


tI2 TH8 ODD NUMBER.
ceived that eternal tenderness which con-
stantly went out to him, although he was a
priest.
He was conscious of it in their looks
more moist with piety than the looks of
monks, in their ecstasies, in their transports
of love towards the Christ, which angered
him because it was women's love; and he
was also conscious of it, of that accursed
tenderness, in their very docility, in the soft-
ness of their voices when they spoke to
him, in their lowered eyes, and in the meek-
ness of their tears when he reproved them
roughly.
And he shook his cassock on issuing
from the doors of the convent, and he went
off with long strides, as though he had fled
before some danger.
He had a niece who lived with her moth-
er in a little house near by. He was bent
on making her a sister of charity.
She was pretty, and hare-brained, and a
great tease. When the abb6 sermonized,
she laughed; when he was angry at her, she
kissed him vehemently, pressing him to her
heart, while he would seek involuntarily to
"


MOONLIGHT. 113
free himself from this embrace, which, not-
withstanding, made him taste a certain sweet
joy, awaking deep within him that sensation
of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.
Often he talked to her of God, of his
God, walking beside her along the foot-paths
through the fields. She hardly listened, and
looked at the sky, the grass, the flowers
with a joy of living which could be seen in
her eyes. Sometimes she rushed forward
to catch some flying creature, and bringing
it back, would cry: "Look, my uncle, how
pretty it is; I should like to kiss it." And
this necessity to " kiss flies," or lilac berries,
worried, irritated, and revolted the priest,
who saw, even in that, the ineradicable ten-
derness which ever springs at the hearts of
women.
And now one day the sacristan's wife,
who kept house for the Abbe' Marignan,
told him, very cautiously, that his niece had
a lover!
He experienced a dreadful emotion, and
he stood choked, with the soap all over
his face, being in the act of shaving.
When he found himself able to think and
k
8


114 THE ODD NUMBER.
speak once more, he cried: "It is not true;
you are lying, M61anie!"
But the peasant woman put her hand on
her heart: "May our Lord judge me if I am
lying, Monsieur le Cure\ I tell you she goes
to him every evening as soon as your sister
is in bed. They meet each other beside the
river. You have only to go there between
ten o'clock and midnight, and see for your-
self."
He ceased scratching his chin, and he
commenced to walk the room violently, as he
always did in his hours of gravest thought.
When he tried to begin his shaving again,
he cut himself three times from nose to ear.
All day long, he remained silent, swollen
with anger and with rage. To his priestly
zeal against the mighty power of love was
added the moral indignation of a father, of
a teacher, of a keeper of souls, who has been
deceived, robbed, played with by a child.
He had that egotistical choking sensation
such as parents feel when their daughter
anounces that she has chosen a husband
without them and in spite of their advjce.
After his dinner, he tried to read a lit-


MOONLIGHT. 115
tie, but he could not bring himself so far;
and he grew angrier and angrier. When it
struck ten, he took his cane, a formidable
oaken club which he always carried when
he had to go out at night to visit the sick.
And he smilingly regarded the enormous
cudgel, holding it in his solid, countryman's
fist and cutting threatening circles with it in
the air. Then, suddenly he raised it, and
grinding his teeth, he brought it down upon
a chair, the back of which, split in two, fell
heavily to the ground.
He opened his door to go out; but he stop-
ped upon the threshold, surprised by such a
splendor of moonlight as you seldom see.
And since he was endowed with an ex-
alted spirit, such a spirit as must have be-
longed to those dreamer-poets, the Fathers
of the Church, he felt himself suddenly dis-
tracted, moved by the grand and serene
beauty of the pale-faced night.
In his little garden, quite bathed with the
soft brilliance, his fruit-trees, all arow, were
outlining in shadow upon the walk, their
slender limbs of wood scarce clothed by
verdure; while the giant honeysuckle climb-
w


Il6 THE ODD NUMBER.
ing on the house wall, exhaled delicious,
sugared breaths, and seemed to cause to
hover through the warm clear night a per-
fumed soul.
He began to breathe deep, drinking the
air as drunkards drink their wine, and he
walked slowly, being ravished, astounded,
and almost oblivious of his niece.
As soon as he came into the open coun-
try he stopped to contemplate the whole
plain, so inundated by this caressing radi-
ance, so drowned in the tender and languish-
ing charm of the serene nights. At every
instant the frogs threw into space their short
metallic notes, and the distant nightingales
mingled with the seduction of the moonlight
that fitful music of theirs which brings no
thoughts but dreams, that light and vibrant
melody of theirs which is composed for
kisses.
The abbe continued his course, his cour-
age failing, he knew not why. He felt, as
it were, enfeebled, and suddenly exhausted;
he had a great desire to sit down, to pause
here, to praise God in all His works.
Down there, following the bends of the
v


MOONLIGHT. . 117
little river, wound a great line of poplars.
On and about the banks, wrapping all the
tortuous watercourse with a kind of light,
transparent wadding, hung suspended a fine
mist, a white vapor, which the moon-rays
crossed, and silvered, and caused to gleam.
The priest paused yet again, penetrated
to the bottom of his soul by a strong and
growing emotion.
And a doubt, a vague uneasiness, seized
on him; he perceived that one of those
questions which he sometimes put to him-
self, was now being born. 7
Why had God done this? Since the
night is destined for sleep, for unconscious-
ness, for repose, for forgetfulness of every-
thing, why, then, make it more charming
than the day, sweeter than the dawns and
the sunsets? And this slow seductive star,
more poetical than the sun, and so discreet
that it seems designed to light up things too
delicate, too mysterious, for the great lumi-
nary,—why was it come to brighten all the
shades?
Why did not the cleverest of all song-
sters go to rest like the others? And why


Il8 THE ODD NUMBER.
did he set himself to singing in the vaguely
troubling dark?
Why this half-veil over the world? Why
these quiverings of the heart, this emotion
of the soul, this languor of the body?
Why this display of seductions which man-
kind never sees, being asleep in bed? For
whom was intended this sublime spectacle,
this flood of poetry poured from heaven to
earth?
And the abbe did not understand at all.
But now, see, down there along the edge
of the field appeared two shadows walking
side by side under the arched roof of the
trees all soaked in glittering mist.
The man was the taller, and had his arm
about his mistress's neck, and from time to
time he kissed her on the forehead. They
animated suddenly the lifeless landscape,
which enveloped them like a divine frame
made expressly for this. They seemed, these
two, like one being, the being for whom was
destined this calm and silent night; and
they came on towards the priest like a living
answer, the answer vouchsafed by his Mas-
ter to his question.
"


MOONLIGHT. 119
He stood stock-still, quite overwhelm-
ed, and with a beating heart. And he
thought to see here some Bible story, like
the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the accomplish-
ment of the will of the Lord in one of those
great scenes talked of in the holy books.
Through his head began to hum the versi-
cles of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries,
the calls of the body, all the passionate
poetry of that poem which burns with ten-
derness and love.
And he said to himself, "God perhaps
has made such nights as this to clothe with
the ideal the loves of men."
He withdrew before this couple who went
ever arm in arm. For all that, it was really
his niece; but now he asked himself if he
had not been about to disobey God. And
does not God indeed permit love, since He
surrounds it visibly with splendor such as
this?
And he fled, in a maze, almost ashamed,
as if he had penetrated into a temple where
he had not the right to go.
'





VIII.
THE CONFESSION.


|


THE CONFESSION.
Marguerite de Therelles was dying.
Although but fifty-six, she seemed like sev-
enty-five at least. She panted, paler than
the sheets, shaken by dreadful shiverings,
her face convulsed, her eyes haggard, as if
she had seen some horrible thing.
Her eldest sister, Suzanne, six years old-
er, sobbed on her knees beside the bed. A
little table drawn close to the couch of the
dying woman, and covered with a napkin,
bore two lighted candles, the priest being
momentarily expected to give extreme unc-
tion and the communion, which should be
the last.
The apartment had that sinister aspect,
that air of hopeless farewells, which belongs
V


124 THE ODD NUMBER.
to the chambers of the dying. Medicine
bottles stood about on the furniture, linen
lay in the corners, pushed aside by foot or
broom. The disordered chairs themselves
seemed affrighted, as if they had run, in all
the senses of the word. Death, the formi-
dable, was there, hidden, waiting.
The story of the two sisters was very
touching. It was quoted far and wide; it
had made many eyes to weep.
Suzanne, the elder, had once been madly
in love with a young man, who had also been
in love with her. They were engaged, and
were only waiting the day fixed for the con-
tract, when Henry de Lampierre suddenly
died.
The despair of the young girl was dread-
ful, and she vowed that she would never
marry. She kept her word. She put on
widow's weeds, which she never took off.
Then her sister, her little sister Margue-
rite, who was only twelve years old, came
one morning to throw herself into the arms
of the elder, and said: "Big Sister, I do not
want thee to be unhappy. I do not want
thee to cry all thy life. I will never leave


THE CONFESSION. 125
thee, never, never! I—I, too, shall never
marry. I shall stay with thee always, always,
always!"
Suzanne, touched by the devotion of the
child, kissed her, but did not believe.
Yet the little one, also, kept her word,
and despite the entreaties of her parents,
despite the supplications of the elder, she
never married. She was pretty, very pretty;
she refused many a young man who seemed
to love her truly; and she never left her sis-
ter more.
They lived together all the days of their
life, without ever being separated a single
time. They went side by side, inseparably
united. But Marguerite seemed always sad,
oppressed, more melancholy than the elder,
as though perhaps her sublime sacrifice had
broken her spirit. She aged more quickly,
had white hair from the age of thirty, and
often suffering, seemed afflicted by some se-
cret, gnawing trouble.
Now she was to be the first to die.
Since yesterday she was no longer able to


126 THE ODD NUMBER.
speak. She had only said, at the first glim-
mers of day-dawn:
"Go fetch Monsieur le Cure, the moment
has come."
And she had remained since then upon
her back, shaken with spasms, her lips agi-
tated as though dreadful words were mount-
ing from her heart without power of issue,
her look mad with fear, terrible to see.
Her sister, torn by sorrow, wept wildly, her
forehead resting on the edge of the bed, and
kept repeating:
"Margot, my poor Margot, my little
one!"
She had always called her, "Little One,"
just as the younger had always called her
"Big Sister."
Steps were heard on the stairs. The door
opened. A choir-boy appeared, followed by
an old priest in a surplice. As soon as she
perceived him, the dying woman, with one
shudder, sat up, opened her lips, stammered
two or three words, and began to scratch
the sheet with her nails as if she had wished
to make a hole.
The Abb6 Simon approached, took her
*


THE CONFESSION. I27
hand, kissed her brow, and with a soft
voice:
"God pardon thee, my child; have cour-
age, the moment is now come, speak."
Then Marguerite, shivering from head to
foot, shaking her whole couch with nervous
movements, stammered:
"Sit down, Big Sister . . . listen."
The priest bent down towards Suzanne,
who was still flung upon the bed's foot. He
raised her, placed her in an arm-chair, and
taking a hand of each of the sisters in one
of his own, he pronounced:
"Lord, my God! Endue them with
strength, cast Thy mercy upon them."
And Marguerite began to speak. The
words issued from her throat one by one,
raucous, with sharp pauses, as though very
feeble.
"Pardon, pardon, Big Sister; oh, forgive!
If thou knewest how I have had fear of this
moment all my life . . ."
Suzanne stammered through her tears:
"Forgive thee what, Little One? Thou
s


128 THE ODD NUMBER.
*
hast given all to me, sacrificed everything;
thou art an angel. . ."
But Marguerite interrupted her:
"Hush, hush! Let me speak ... do not
stop me. It is dreadful... let me tell all...
to the very end, without flinching. Listen.
Thou rememberest... thou rememberest...
Henry . . ."
Suzanne trembled and looked at her sis-
ter. The younger continued:
"Thou must hear all, to understand. I
was twelve years old, only twelve years old;
thou rememberest well, is it not so? And I
was spoiled, I did everything that I liked!
Thou rememberest, surely, how they spoiled
me? Listen. The first time that he came
he had varnished boots. He got down from
his horse at the great steps, and he begged
pardon for his costume, but he came to bring
some news to papa. Thou rememberest, is
it not so? Don't speak—listen. When I saw
him I was completely carried away, I found
him so very beautiful; and I remained stand-
ing in a corner of the salon all the time that he
was talking. Children are strange... and ter-
rible. . Oh yes... I have dreamed of all that.


THE CONFESSION. 129
"He came back again... several times...
I looked at him with all my eyes, with all my
soul... I was large of my age ... and very
much more knowing than any one thought.
He came back often ... I thought only of
him. I said, very low:
"' Henry ... Henry de Lampierre!'
"Then they said that he was going to
marry thee. It was a sorrow; oh, Big Sis-
ter, a sorrow... a sorrow! I cried for three
nights without sleeping. He came back ev-
ery day, in the afternoon, after his lunch ...
thou rememberest, is it not so? Say noth-
ing ... listen. Thou madest him cakes which
he liked ... with meal, with butter and milk.
Oh, I know well how. I could make them
yet if it were needed. He ate them at one
mouthful, and ... and then he drank a glass
of wine, and then he said, ' It is delicious.'
Thou rememberest how he would say that?
"I was jealous, jealous! The moment of
thy marriage approached. There were only
two weeks more. I became crazy. I said
to myself: 'He shall not marry Suzanne,
no, I will not have it! It is I whom he will
marry when I am grown up. I shall never
9


130 THE ODD NUMBER.
find any one whom I love so much.' But
one night, ten days before the contract, thou
tookest a walk with him in front of the cha-
teau by moonlight... and there... under the
fir, under the great fir... he kissed thee...
kissed ... holding thee in his two arms ... so
long. Thou rememberest, is it not so? It
was probably the first time ... yes ... Thou
wast so pale when thou earnest back to the
salon.
"I had seen you two; I was there, in the
shrubbery. I was angry! If I could I should
have killed you both!
"I said to myself: 'He shall not marry
Suzanne, never! He shall marry no one.
I should be too unhappy.' And all of a sud-
den I began to hate him dreadfully.
"Then, dost thou know what I did? Lis-
ten. I had seen the gardener making little
balls to kill strange dogs. He pounded up
a bottle with a stone and put the powdered
glass in a little ball of meat.
"I took a little medicine bottle that mam-
ma had; I broke it small with a hammer,
and I hid the glass in my pocket. It was
a shining powder ... The next day, as soon
^


THE CONFESSION. 131
as you had made the little cakes ... I split
them with a knife and I put in the glass...
He ate three of them... I too, I ate one...
I threw the other six into the pond. The two
swans died three days after . . . Dost thou
remember? Oh, say nothing... listen, listen.
I, I alone did not die... but I have always
been sick. Listen... He died—thou know-
est well... listen... that, that is nothing. It
is afterwards, later ... always ... the worst
... listen.
"My life, all my life ... what torture! I
said to myself: 'I will never leave my sister.
And at the hour of death I will tell her all...'
There! And ever since, I have always
thought of that moment when I should tell
thee all. Now it is come. It is terrible.
Oh . . . Big Sister!
"I have always thought, morning and even-
ing, by night and by day,' Some time I must
tell her that ..." I waited . . . What
agony!. .. It is done. Say nothing. Now
I am afraid... am afraid... oh, I am afraid.
If I am going to see him again, soon, when
I am dead. See him again . . . think of it!
The first! Before thou! I shall not dare.



132 THE ODD NUMBER.
I must... I am going to die ... I want you
to forgive me. I want it... I cannot go ofl
to meet him without that. Oh, tell her to
forgive me, Monsieur le Cure, tell her ... I
implore you to do it. I cannot die without
that. . ."
She was silent, and remained panting, al-
ways scratching the sheet with her withered
nails.
Suzanne had hidden her face in her hands,
and did not move. She was thinking of
him whom she might have loved so long!
What a good life they should have lived to-
gether! She saw him once again in that
vanished by-gone time, in that old past which
was put out forever. The beloved dead—
how they tear your hearts! Oh, that kiss,
his only kiss! She had hidden it in her
soul. And after it nothing, nothing more
her whole life long!
All of a sudden the priest stood straight,
and, with strong vibrant voice, he cried:


THE CONFESSION.
'33
"Mademoiselle Suzanne, your sister is
dying!"
Then Suzanne, opening her hands, show-
ed her face soaked with tears, and throwing
herself upon her sister, she kissed her with
all her might, stammering:
"I forgive thee, I forgive thee, Little
One."


A


IX.
ON THE JOURNEY.
V


i


ON THE JOURNEY.
Since leaving Cannes the carriage had
been full; and being all acquainted, we con-
versed together. As we passed Tarascon
some one said, "It is here the murders
happen." And we began to talk of that
mysterious assassin who has never been
caught, and who from time to time during
the last two years has offered up to himself
some traveller's life. Every one hazarded
suppositions, every one gave his opinion;
the women looked shiveringly at the sombre
night behind the panes, fearing to see the
head of a man show suddenly in the door-
way. And we began to tell dreadful stories
of terrible adventures, of some te"te-a-t£te with
a madman in an express, of hours passed
t


138 THE ODD NUMBER.
opposite suspicious-looking persons, quite
alone.
All the men had stories "on their hon-
or," all had intimidated, knocked down, and
chocked some malefactor in surprising cir-
cumstances, and with admirable boldness
and presence of mind. A physician, who
passed each winter in the South, wished in
his turn to tell a tale.
"I," said he, "have never had the chance
to try my courage in an affair of that sort;
but I knew a woman, one of my patients,
who is now dead, to whom there happened
the strangest thing in the world, and also
the most mysterious and the most affect-
ing.
"She was a Russian, the Countess Marie
Baranow, a very great lady of exquisite
beauty. You all know how beautiful the
Russian women are, or at least how beauti-
ful they seem to us, with their fine nostrils,
with their delicate mouths, with their eyes
of an indefinable color—a sort of blue-gray,
set close together—and with that grace of
.


ON THE JOURNEY. 139
theirs which is cold and a little hard. They
have about them something naughty and
seductive, something haughty and gentle,
something tender and severe, which is al-
together charming to a Frenchman. It is
perhaps, however, only the difference of
race and type which makes me see so
much.
"For several years her doctor had per-
ceived that she was threatened with a mal-
ady of the chest, and had been trying to
induce her to go to the South of France;
but she obstinately refused to leave St.
Petersburg. Finally, last autumn, the phy-
sician gave her up as lost, and so informed
her husband, who at once ordered his wife
to leave for Mentone.
"She took the train, alone in her carriage,
her servants occupying another compart-
ment. She leaned against the door-way, a
little sad, watching the country and the pass-
ing villages, feeling herself in life so lonely,
so abandoned, without children, almost with-
out relatives, with a husband whose love was
dead, and who, not coming with her, had
just thrown her off to the end of the world


140 THE ODD NUMBER.
as he would send to the hospital a valet who
was sick.
"At each station her body-servant Ivan
came to ask if anything was wanted by his
mistress. He was an old servant, blindly
devoted, ready to carry out any order which
she might give.
"The night fell, the train rolled onward
at full speed. She was much unstrung, she
could not sleep. Suddenly she took the idea
of counting the money which her husband
had given her at the last moment, in French
gold. She opened her little bag, and emp-
tied the shining flood of metal upon hei
knees.
But all of a sudden a breath of cold air
struck her in the face. She raised her
head in surprise. The door had just swung
open. The Countess Marie, in desperation,
brusquely threw a shawl over the money
which was spread upon her knees, and
waited. Some seconds passed, then a man
appeared, bareheaded, wounded in the hand,
panting, in evening dress. He shut the
door again, sat down, looked at his neighbor
with glittering eyes, then wrapped a hand-


ON THE JOURNEY. I4I
kerchief round his wrist, from which the
blood was flowing.
"The young countess felt herself grow
weak with fright. This man had certainly
seen her counting her gold, and he was come
to murder and to rob.
"He kept staring at her, breathless, his
face convulsed, ready, no doubt, to make
a spring.
"He said, suddenly:
"' Have no fear, madame!'
"She answered nothing, being unable to
open her mouth, hearing her heart beat and
her ears hum.
"He continued:
"' I am not a criminal, madame.'
"She still said nothing, but, in a brusque
movement which she made, her knees came
close together, and her gold began to flow
down upon the carpet as water flows from a
gutter.
"The man, surprised, looked at this rivulet
of metal, and suddenly he stooped to pick
up the money.
"She rose in a mad fright, casting all her
treasure to the ground, and she ran to the



142 THE ODD NUMBER.
door to throw herself out upon the track.
But he understood what she was about to
do, rushed forward, caught her in his arms,
made her sit down by force, and holding
her wrists: 'Listen, madame, I am not a
criminal, and the proof is that I am going
to pick up this money and give it back to
you. But I am a lost man, a dead man, un-
less you help me to cross the frontier. I
cannot tell you more. In one hour we shall
be at the last Russian station; in one hour
and twenty minutes we shall pass the boun-
dary of the empire. If you do not rescue
me I am lost. And yet, madame, I have
neither killed nor stolen, nor done anything
against my honor. I swear it to you. I can-
not tell you more.'
"And getting down on his knees, he pick-
ed up the gold, looking even for the last
pieces, which had rolled far under the seats.
Then, when the little leather bag was once
more full, he returned it to his neighbor
without adding a word, and again he went
and sat in the other corner of the car-
riage.
'They no longer stirred,either one or the


ON THE JOURNEY. 143
other. She remained motionless and dumb,
still fainting with terror, then little by little
growing more at ease. As for him, he did
not make a gesture, a movement; he sat
straight, his eyes fastened before him, very
pale, as though he had been dead. From
time to time she looked at him suddenly,
and as suddenly looked away. He was a
man about thirty, very handsome, with every
appearance of a gentleman.
"The train ran through the darkness, cast
rending cries across the night, sometimes
slackened its pace, then went off again at
full speed. But suddenly it slowed, whistled
several times, and stopped.
"Ivan appeared at the door to get his or-
ders.
"The Countess Marie, with a trembling
voice, considered her strange companion for
the last time, then said to her servant, with
a brusque voice:
"' Ivan, you are to return to the count; I
have no more need of you.'
"The man, speechless, opened his enor-
mous eyes. He stammered:
"' But—Barine!'
t


144 THE ODD NUMBER.
"She continued:
"' No, you are not to come; I have changed
my mind. I desire that you remain in Rus-
sia. Here is money to return. Give me
your cap and your cloak.'
"The old servant, quite bewildered, bared
his head and held out his cloak. He al-
ways obeyed without reply, being well ac-
customed to the sudden wishes and the ir-
resistible caprices of his masters. And he
withdrew, the tears in his eyes.
"The train went on, running towards the
frontier.
"Then the Countess Marie said to her
neighbor:
"' These things are for you, monsieur; you
are Ivan, my servant. I add only one con-
dition to what I do: it is that you shall
never speak to me, that you shall not ad-
dress me a single word, either to thank me
or for any purpose whatever.'
"The unknown bowed without uttering a
word.
"Very soon they came to a stop once more,
and officials in uniform visited the train.
The countess offered them her papers, and
'


ON THE JOURNEY. 145
pointing to the man seated at the back of
the carriage:
"' My servant, Ivan. Here is his pass-
port.'
"The train went on.
"During the whole night they remained in
tSte-a-tete, both silent.
"In the morning, when they stopped at a
German station, the unknown got down;
then, standing straight in the door-way:
"' Forgive my breaking my promise, ma-
dame; but I have deprived you of your serv-
ant, it is right that I should fill his place.
Have you need of anything?'
"She answered, coldly:
"' Go and find my maid.'
"He went to do so, then disappeared.
"When she got out of the carriage at some
restaurant or other, she perceived him from
a distance looking at her. They reached
Mentone."
The doctor was silent a second, then re-
sumed:
"One day, as I was receiving my patients
N
10


I46 THE ODD NUMBER.
in my office, I saw enter a tall young fellow,
who said to me:
"' Doctor, I come to ask news about the
Countess Marie Baranow. I am, although
she does not know me, a friend of her hua
band.'
"I replied:
"' She is doomed. She will never go back
to Russia.'
"And the man suddenly commenced to
sob, then he got up and went out, reeling
like a drunkard.
"The same night I told the countess that
a stranger had come to inquire from me
about her health. She seemed moved, and
told me all the story which I have just told
you. She added:
"' That man, whom I do not know at all,
now follows me like my shadow, I meet
him every time I go out; he looks at me
after a strange fashion, but he has never
spoken.'
"She reflected, then added:
"' See, I would wager he is under my win-
dows.'
"She left her easy-chair, went to pull back


ON THE JOURNEY. 147
the curtains, and, sure enough, she showed
me the man who had come to see me, now
seated there on a bench upon the prom-
enade, his eyes lifted towards the hotel.
He perceived us, rose, and went off with-
out once turning his head.
"And from that time forward I assisted
at a surprising and sorrowful thing—at the
silent love of these two beings, who did
not even know one another.
"He loved her with the affection of an
animal who has been saved, and who is
grateful and devoted unto death. He came
each day to say to me: 'How is she ?' un-
derstanding that I had divined the secret.
And he cried when he had seen her pass
each day feebler and paler.
"She said to me:
"'I have spoken but a single time to that
strange man, and it seems to me as if I had
known him for twenty years.'
"And when they met, she would return
his bow with a grave and charming smile. I
could see that she was happy — she, the
abandoned, the doomed—I could see that
she was happy to be loved like this, with such
t


148 THE ODD NUMBER.
respect and such constancy, with such exag<
gerated poetry, with this devotion which was.
ready for all things. And notwithstanding,
faithful to her mystical resolve, she wildly
refused to receive him, to know his name,
to speak with him. She said: 'No, no,
that would spoil for me this curious friend-
ship. We must remain strangers one to the
other.'
"As for him, he also was certainly a kind
of Don Quixote, because he made no at-
tempt to approach her. He meant to keep
to the end the absurd promise of never
speaking, which he had made her in the
railway carriage.
"Often, during her weary hours of weak-
ness, she rose from her long chair, and went
to open the curtains a little way to see if he
was there, beneath her window. And when
she had seen him, always motionless upon
his bench, she went back and lay down with
a smile upon her lips.
"She died one day about ten o'clock.
As I was leaving the hotel he came up to
me with a distracted face; he had already
heard the news.


ON THE JOURNEY. 149
'"I should like to see her, for one sec-
ond, in your presence,' said he.
"I took him by the arm and went back
into the house.
"When he was before the couch of the
dead he seized her hand and kissed it with
an endless kiss, then escaped like a mad-
man."
The doctor again was silent; then con-
tinued:
"This is certainly the strangest railway
adventure that I know. It must also be
said that men take sometimes the wildest
freaks."
A woman murmured, half aloud:
"Those two people were not so crazy as
you think. They were—they were—"
But she could not speak further, she was
crying so. As we changed the conversation
to calm her, we never knew what she had
wished to say.





X.
THE BEGGAR.





THE BEGGAR.
He had known better days, despite his
wretchedness and his infirmity.
At the age of fifteen he had had both
legs crushed by a carriage on the high-road
of Yarville. Since then he begged, drag-
ging himself along the roads, across the
farm-yards, balanced on his crutches, which
had made his shoulders mount as high as
his ears, so that his head seemed sunk be-
tween two mountains.
A child found in a ditch by the cure' of
Les Billettes, on All Souls' Eve, and bap-
tized, for that reason, Nicolas Toussaint, he
had been brought up on charity, and had
remained a stranger to all instruction. It
was after the village baker had given him


THE BEGGAR. 155
thought of passing the limits which he was
not accustomed to cross.
He did not know whether the world ex-
tended very much farther beyond the trees
which had always bounded his sight. He
never asked himself that. And when the
peasants, tired of always meeting him on
the borders of their fields or along their
ditches, cried at him, "Why don't you go
to the other villages instead of forever limp-
ing round here?" he made no reply, and
went off seized with a vague fear of the un-
known, with the fear of a poor wretch who
was confusedly afraid of a thousand things
—of strange faces, of insults, of the suspi-
cious looks of people who did not know him,
and of the gendarmes, who went two by
two along the roads, making him dive by in-
stinct into the thickets or behind the piles
of pounded stones.
When he saw their uniforms at a dis-
tance, glittering in the sun, he suddenly dis-
covered marvellous agility, the agility of a
monster who tries to gain some hiding-
place. He dropped from his crutches, let
himself fall as a rag falls, rolled himself into


156 THE ODD NUMBER.
a ball, and became quite small, invisible,
as close to the ground as a hare in her
form, confounding his brown tatters with
the earth.
He had, however, never had any trouble
with the gendarmes. And yet he carried
this in his blood, as though he had inherited
this terror and this trick from his parents,
whom he had never known.
He had no place of refuge, no roof of his
own, no covering, no shelter. He slept any-
where in summer, and in winter he slipped
under the barns or into the stables with
remarkable address. He always stole out
early in the morning before he should be
perceived. He knew all the holes by which
buildings could be entered. And the use
of his crutches having given his arms ex-
traordinary strength, he sometimes climbed
by sheer force of his wrists up into the hay-
lofts, where he would remain four or five
days without moving, provided in going his
round he had secured food enough to keep
him alive.
In the midst of men, he lived like the
beasts of the wood, knowing no one, loving


THE DEGGAR. 157
no one, exciting only among the peasants a
sort of indifferent disdain and resigned hos-
tility. They nicknamed him "The Bell,"
because indeed he did swing between his
two stakes of wood like a bell between its
supports.
For two days he had eaten nothing.
They no longer gave him anything at all.
They meant to be rid of him at last. The
peasant wives, on their door-steps, cried afar
off, on seeing him coming:
"Will you begone, you rascal! I gave
you a piece of bread only three days
ago!"
And he pivoted upon his props, and took
himself off to the next house, where they re-
ceived him after the same fashion.
From one door to the other the women
declared:
"All very well, but we can'c feed this
sluggard all the year round."
And yet every day the sluggard had need
to eat.
He had gone the round in Saint Hilaire,
Yarville, and Les Billettes without getting a
centime or an old crust. His last hope was


I58 THE ODD NUMBER.
at Tournolles; but he must go two leagues
on the high-road, and he felt himself too
exhausted to drag himself farther, having a
stomach as empty as his pocket.
Nevertheless, he set himself to walking.
It was in December. A cold wind ran
on the fields and whistled through the bare
branches. And the clouds galloped across
the low and sombre sky, hastening one
knows not whither. The cripple went slow-
ly, lifting his supports from their place one
after the other with a painful effort, wedging
himself up on his one remaining twisted leg,
which was terminated by a club-foot shod
with a clout.
From time to time he sat down on the
edge of the ditch and rested several min-
utes. Hunger threw a confused and heavy
distress into his soul. He had only one
thought: "to eat," but how he did not
know.
For three hours he toiled over the long
road; then, when he perceived the trees of
the village, he hastened his steps.
The first peasant whom he met, and of
whom he asked alms, replied to him:


THE BEGGAR. 159
"So here you are again, you old rogue!
Sha'n't we ever be rid of you?"
And "The Bell" went on. From door to
door they used him roughly, they sent him
away without giving him anything. He con-
tinued his round, notwithstanding, patient
and obstinate. He did not receive a sou.
Then he visited the farm-houses, reeling
over the ground soft with rain, so weak
that he could hardly lift his sticks. Every-
where they hunted him off. It was one of
those cold, sad days when hearts are shut,
when minds grow angry, when the soul is
sombre, when the hand does not open to
succor or to give.
When he had made the tour of all the
houses which he knew, he went and threw
himself down in the corner of a dry ditch
beside the farm-yard of Maitr.e Chiquet.
He "unhooked" himself, as people said, to
express the manner in which he let himself
fall from his high crutches, making them
slip from under his arms. And he remained
for a long time motionless, tortured by hun-
ger, but too much of an animal to really pen-
etrate the depths of his unfathomable misery.



THE BEGGAR. l6l
slender feet. And "The Bell," climbing
his crutches once more, set off to pick up
his game with movements like those of the
chickens.
Just as he arrived beside the little black
body stained with blood about its head, he
received a terrible blow in the back which
made him drop his sticks and sent him
rolling ten paces before them. And Maitre
Chiquet, in a rage, precipitating himself upon
the marauder, thrashed him soundly, pound-
ing with fist and knee all over the body of
the defenceless cripple, like a madman, or
like a peasant who has been robbed.
The farm servants arrived in their turn,
and, with their master, fell to beating the
beggar. Then, when they were tired, they
picked him up and carried him off, and shut
him up in the wood-house while they went to
fetch the gendarmes.
"The Bell," half-dead, bleeding, and torn
with hunger, remained lying on the ground.
Evening came, then night, then daybreak.
All this time he had eaten nothing.
Towards mid-day the gendarmes appeared
and opened the door with great precaution,
1
ii


162 THE ODD NUMBER.
expecting a resistance, since Maitre Chiquet
made out that he had been attacked by the
beggar, and had only defended himself with
the greatest difficulty.
The corporal cried:
"Come, get up!"
But "The Bell" could no longer move;
he tried, indeed, to hoist himself upon his
sticks, but he did not succeed. They thought
it was a feint, a trick, or the ugly temper
of a malefactor, and the two armed men,
seizing him roughly, planted him by force
upon his crutches.
Fear had taken hold of him, the fear which
the game has before the hunter, which the
mouse has in presence of the cat. By super-
human efforts he managed to remain upright.
"Forward !" said the corporal. He walk-
ed. All the people of the farm were there
to see him off. The women shook their
fists; the men jeered and insulted him: he
was caught at last! a good riddance.
He departed between his two guardians.
He found enough energy of desperation to
drag himself along till evening. He was
brutalized, not even knowing what was hap-


THE BEGGAR. 163
pening to him, too much frightened to un-
derstand.
The people whom they met stopped to
see him go by, and the peasants murmured:
"It is some robber!"
They arrived, towards night, at the cap-
ital of the district. He had never come as
far as that. He did not even figure to him-
self what was going on, nor what might be
about to happen. All these terrible and
unexpected things, these shapes of unknown
people, and these strange houses, struck him
with consternation.
He did not utter a word, having nothing
to say, for he no longer understood any-
thing. Moreover, since for so many years
he had conversed with no one, he had al-
most lost the use of his tongue; and his
thoughts also were too confused to formu-
late themselves in speech.
They shut him up in the town jail. The
gendarmes did not think of his needing
food, and they left him till the next day.
But when they came to examine him, ear-
ly in the morning, they found him dead,
upon the ground. What a surprise!








l68 THE ODD NUMBER.
on me, do you understand? Yes, for ten
minutes I suffered such horrible terror that
from that hour to this a sort of constant
dread has rested on my soul. Unexpected
noises make me tremble all over; objects
which in the shades of evening I do not
well distinguish cause me a mad desire to
escape. The fact is, I am afraid of the
night.
"No! I admit I should never have con-
fessed this before arriving at my present
age. But I can say what I like now. When
a man is eighty-two years old it is permitted
him to be afraid of imaginary dangers. And
in the face of real ones I have never drawn
back, mesdames.
"The affair so disturbed my spirit, and
produced in me so profound, so mysterious,
so dreadful a sense of trouble, that I have
never even told it. I have kept it in the
intimate recesses of my heart, in that corner
where we hide our bitter and our shameful
secrets, and all those unspeakable stories of
weaknesses which we have committed but
which we cannot confess.
"I shall tell you the tale exactly as it


A GHOST. 169
happenedj without trying to explain it. Cer-
tainly it can be explained — unless we as-
sume that for an hour I was mad. But no,
I was not mad, and I will give you the proof
of it. Imagine what you like. Here are the
plain facts:
"It was in the month of July, 1827. I
found myself in garrison at Rouen.
"One day, as I was taking a walk upon
the quay, I met a man whom I thought I
recognized, although I did not remember
exactly who he might be. I instinctively
made a motion to stop. The stranger no-
ticed the gesture, looked at me, and fell
into my arms.
"It was a friend of my youth whom I had
once loved dearly. The five years since I
had seen him seemed to have aged him fif-
ty. His hair was quite white; and when he
walked he stooped as if exhausted. He un-
derstood my surprise, and told me about his
life. He had been broken by a terrible sor-
row.
"He had fallen madly in love with a very
young girl, and he had married her with a
kind of joyful ecstasy. But after one sin>


170 THE ODD NUMBER.
gle year of superhuman happiness, she had
suddenly died of a trouble at the heart,
slain, no doubt, by love itself.
"He had left his cMteau the very day
of the funeral, and had come to reside in
his hotel at Rouen. He was now living
there, solitary and desperate, preyed on by
anguish, and so miserable that his only
thought was suicide.
"' Now that I've found you again,' said
he, 'I shall ask you to do me a great serv-
ice. It is to go out to the cMteau and
bring me some papers of which I stand in
urgent need. They are in the secretary in
my room, in our room. I cannot intrust
this commission to an inferior, or to a man
of business, because I desire impenetrable
discretion and absolute silence. And as to
myself, I would not go back to that house
for anything in the world.
"' I will give you the key of that cham-
ber, which I closed myself when I went
away. And I will give you the key of the
secretary. Besides that, you shall have a
line from me to my gardener, which will
make you free of the chateau. But come


A GHOST. 171
and breakfast with me to-morrow, and we
can talk about all that.'
"I promised to do him this service. It
was indeed a mere excursion for me, since
his estate lay only about five leagues from
Rouen, and I could get there on horseback
in an hour.
"I was with him at ten o'clock the next
morning. We breakfasted alone together;
yet he did not say twenty words. He begged
me to forgive him for his silence. The
thought of the visit which I was about to
make to that chamber where his happiness
lay dead, overwhelmed him completely, said
he to me. And for a fact, he did seem
strangely agitated and preoccupied, as if a
mysterious struggle were passing in his
soul.
"Finally, however, he explained to me
exactly what I must do. It was quite sim-
ple. I must secure two packages of letters
and a bundle of papers which were shut up
in the first drawer on the right of the desk
of which I had the key. He added:
"' I don't need to ask you not to look at
them.'


172 THE ODD NUMBER.
"I was almost wounded by this, and I
told him so a little hotly. He stammered:
"' Forgive me, I suffer so much.'
"And he fell to weeping.
"I left him about one o'clock, to accom-
plish my mission.
"It was brilliant weather, and I trotted
fast across the fields, listening to the songs
of the larks and the regular ring of my
sabre on my boot.
"Next I entered the forest and walked
my horse. Branches of trees caressed my
face; and sometimes I would catch a leaf in
my teeth, and chew it eagerly, in one of those
ecstasies at being alive which fill you, one
knows not why, with a tumultuous and al-
most elusive happiness, with a kind of in-
toxication of strength.
"On approaching the chateau, I looked
in my pocket for the note which I had for
\. the gardener, and I found to my astonish-
ment that it was sealed. I was so surprised
and irritated that I came near returning at
once, without acquitting myself of my er-
rand. But I reflected that I should in that
case display a susceptibility which would


A GHOST. 173
be in bad taste. And, moreover, in his trou-
ble, my friend might have sealed the note
unconsciously.
"The manor looked as though it had
been deserted these twenty years. How the
gate, which was open and rotten, held up,
was hard to tell. Grass covered the walks.
You no longer made out the borders of the
lawn.
"At the noise which I made by kicking a
shutter with my foot, an old man came out
of a side door and seemed stupefied at the
sight. I leaped to the ground and delivered
my letter. He read it, read it again, turn-
ed it round, looked at me askance, put the
paper in his pocket, and remarked:
"' Well! What do you want?'
"I answered, sharply:
"' You ought to know, since you have re-
ceived the orders of your master in that
letter. I want to enter the chateau.'
"He seemed overwhelmed. He said:
"' So, you are going into... into his room?'
"I began to grow impatient.
"' Parbleu I But do you mean to put me
through an examination, my good man?'


174 THE ODD NUMBER.
"He stammered:
"' No . . . monsieur . . . only ... it has
not been opened since . . . since the . . .
death. If you will wait five minutes, I will
go... go and see whether . . .'
"I interrupted him, angrily:
"' Come, come! Are you playing with
me? You know you can't get in. I have
the key.'
"He had nothing more to say.
"' Well, monsieur, I will show you the
way.'
"' Show me the staircase, and leave me
alone. I shall find the room well enough
without you.'
"' But... monsieur ... but.. .'
"This time I went fairly into a rage:
"' Be quiet! do you hear? Or you will
have to reckon with me.'
"I pushed him violently aside, and I pen-
etrated into the house.
"First I crossed the kitchen, then two lit-
tle rooms inhabited by the fellow and his
wife. I next passed into a great hall, I
climbed the stairs, and I recognized the
door as indicated by my friend.


176 THE ODD NUMBER.
hope of seeing more clearly, and I went to
the desk.
"I seated myself in an arm - chair, low-
ered the shelf, and opened the indicated
drawer. It was full to the top. I needed
only three packets, which I knew how to
tell. And I set myself to looking.
"I was straining my eyes to decipher the
inscriptions, when behind me I thought I
heard a slight rustle. I paid no heed to
it, thinking that a current of air had made
some of the hangings stir. But, in a min-
ute, another almost imperceptible movement
caused a singular, unpleasant little shiver to
pass over my skin. It was so stupid to be
even in the least degree nervous that I
would not turn round, being ashamed for
myself in my own presence. I had then
just discovered the second of the bundles
which I wanted. And now, just as I lit upon
the third, the breath of a great and painful
sigh against my shoulder caused me to give
one mad leap two yards away. In my start
I had turned quite round, with my hand upon
my sabre, and if I had not felt it by my side
I should certainly have run like a coward.


A GHOST. 177
"A tall woman dressed in white stood
looking at me from behind the arm-chair in
which, a second before, I had been sitting.
"Such a shudder ran through my limbs
that I almost fell backward! Oh, no one
who has not felt it can understand a dread-
ful yet foolish fear like that. The soul fair-
ly melts away; you are conscious of a heart
no longer; the whole body becomes as lax
as a sponge; and you would say that every-
thing within you was falling to pieces.
"I do not believe in ghosts at all.—Well,
I tell you that at that moment I grew faint
under the hideous fear of the dead. And
from the irresistible anguish caused by su-
pernatural terrors I suffered, oh, I suffered
in a few seconds more than I have done all
the rest of my life.
"If she had not spoken I should perhaps
have died! But she did speak; she spoke
in a sweet and dolorous voice which made
my nerves quiver. I should not venture to
say that I became master of myself and that
I recovered my reason. No. I was so fright-
ened that I no longer knew what I was do-
ing; but a kind of personal dignity which
12


178 THE ODD NUMBER.
I have in me, and also a little professional
pride, enabled me to keep up an honorable
countenance almost in spite of myself. I
posed for my own benefit, and for hers, no
doubt—for hers, woman or spectre, whatever
she might be. I analyzed all this later, be-
cause, I assure you, that at the instant of the
apparition I did not do much thinking. I
was afraid.
"She said:
"' Oh, monsieur, you can do me a great
service!'
"I tried to answer, but it was simply im-
possible for me to utter a word. A vague
sound issued from my throat.
"She continued:
"' Will you do it? You can save me,
cure me. I suffer dreadfully. I suffer, oh,
I suffer!'
"And she sat down gently in my arm-
chair. She looked at me:
"' Will you do it?'
"I made the sign 'yes' with my head,
for my voice was gone.
"Then she held out to me a tortoise-shell
comb and she murmured:


A GHOST. 179
"' Comb my hair; oh, comb my hair! That
will cure me. They must comb my hair.
Look at my head. How I suffer! And my
hair, how it hurts me!'
"Her hair, which was loose and long and
very black (as it seemed to me), hung down
over the arm-chair's back and touched the
ground.
"Why did I do that? Why, all shivering,
did I receive the comb? And why did I
take into my hands that long hair, which
gave my skin a feeling of atrocious cold,
as if I were touching serpents? I do not
know.
"That feeling still clings about my fin-
gers. And when I think of it I tremble.
"I combed her. I handled, I know not
how, that icy hair. I twisted it. I bound
it and unbound it. I plaited it as we plait
a horse's mane. She sighed, bent her head,
seemed happy.
"Suddenly she said to me,' I thank you!'
caught the comb out of my hands, and fled
through the half-open door which I had no-
ticed.
"For several seconds after I was left


180 THE ODD NUMBER.
\
alone, I experienced that wild trouble of the
soul which one feels after a nightmare from
which one has just awakened. Then at last
I recovered my senses; I ran to the window,
and I broke the shutters open with violent
blows.
"A flood of daylight entered. I rushed
upon the door by which she had disap-
peared. I found it shut and immovable.
"Then a fever of flight seized on me, a
panic, a real panic such as overcomes an
army. I caught up roughly the three pack-
ets of letters from the open desk; I crossed
the room at a run; I took the steps of the
staircase four at a time; I found myself
outside, I don't know how; and, perceiving
my horse ten paces off, I mounted him with
one leap and went off at full gallop.
"I did not pause till I was before the
door of my lodgings in Rouen. Throwing
the reins to my orderly, I escaped to my
room, where I locked myself in to think.
"And then for an hour I kept anxiously
asking whether I had not been the sport
of some hallucination. I had certainly
had one of those incomprehensible nervous


A GHOST. l8l
shocks, one of those affections of the brain
which dwarf the miracles to which the su-
pernatural owes its power.
"And I had almost come to believe it was
a delusion, an error of my senses, when I
drew near the window, and my eyes lit by
chance upon my breast. My dolman was
covered with long woman's hairs which had
rolled themselves around the buttons"!
"I took them one by one and I threw
them out of the window, with trembling in
my fingers.
"Then I called my orderly. I felt too
much moved, too much troubled, to go near
my friend that day. And I wished also to
ponder carefully what I should say to him
about all this.
"I had the letters taken to his house. He
gave the soldier a receipt. He asked many
questions about me, and my soldier told him
that I was unwell, that I had had a sun-
stroke—something. He seemed uneasy.
"I went to him the next day, early in the
morning, having resolved to tell him the
truth. He had gone out the evening before,
and had not come back.


182 THE ODD NUMBER.
"I returned in the course of the day. They
had seen nothing of him. I waited a week.
He did not reappear. Then I informed the
police. They searched for him everywhere
without discovering a trace of his passing
or of his final retreat.
"A minute inspection of the abandoned
chateau was instituted. Nothing suspicious
was discovered.
"No sign that a woman had been hidden
there revealed itself.
"The inquiry proving fruitless, the search
was interrupted.
"And for fifty - six years I have learned
nothing. I know nothing more."


XII.
LITTLE SOLDIER.





LITTLE SOLDIER.
Every Sunday, as soon as they were free,
the two little soldiers set off.
On leaving the barracks they turned to
the right; went through Courbevoie with
long quick steps, as though they were on a
march; then, having left the houses behind
them, they followed at a calmer gait the
bare and dusty high-road which leads to
Bezons.
Being little and thin, they looked quite
lost in their coats, which were too big and
too long. The sleeves hung down over their
hands, and they were much bothered by
their enormous red breeches, which compel-
led them to walk wide. Under their stiff,
high shakos their faces seemed like mere


186 THE ODD NUMBER.
nothings—two poor, hollow Breton faces,
simple in an almost animal simplicity, and
with blue eyes which were gentle and calm.
During the walk they never spoke. They
went straight on, each with the same idea
in his head as the other. It stood them in
place of conversation, for the fact is that
just inside the little wood near Les Cham-
pioux they had found a place which re-
minded them of their own country; and it
was only there that they felt happy.
When they came under the trees where
the roads from Colombes and from Chatou
cross, they would take off their heavy sha-
kos and wipe their foreheads.
They always stopped a little while on the
Bezons bridge to look at the Seine. They
would remain there two or three minutes,
bent double, leaning on the parapet. Or
sometimes they would gaze out over the
great basin of Argenteuil, where the skiffs
might be seen scudding, with their white,
slanted sails, recalling perhaps the look of
the Breton water, the harbor of Vannes, near
which they lived, and the fishing-boats stand-
ing out across the Morbihan to the open sea.


l88 THE ODD NUMBER.
now a corner of a field, a hedge, a bit of
moorland, now a cross-roads, now a granite
cross.
Then, too, they would always stop beside
a certain landmark, a great stone, because
it looked something like the cromlech at
Locneuven.
On arriving at the first clump of trees
Luc le Ganidec every Sunday cut a switch,
a hazel switch, and began gently to peel off
the bark, thinking meanwhile of the folk
there at home.
Jean Kerderen carried the provisions.
From time to time Luc mentioned a
name, or recalled some doing of their child-
hood in a few brief words, which caused
long thoughts. And their own country,
their dear distant country, repossessed them
little by little, seized upon them, and sent
to them from afar her shapes, her sounds,
her well-known prospects, her odors—odors
of the green lands where the salt sea-air was
blowing.
They were no longer conscious of the ex-
halations of the Parisian stables on which
the earth of the banlieue fattens, but of the


LITTLE SOLDIER. 189
perfume of the flowering broom, which the
salt breeze of the open sea plucks and bears
away. And the sails of the boats, appear-
ing above the river-banks, seemed to them
the sails of the coasting vessels perceived
beyond the great plain which extended from
their homes to the very margin of the waves.
They went with short steps, Luc le Gani-
dec and Jean Kerderen, content and sad,
haunted by a sweet melancholy, by the lin-
gering, penetrating sorrow of a caged animal
who remembers.
And by the time that Luc had stripped
the slender wand of its bark they arrived at
the corner of the wood where every Sunday
they took breakfast.
They found the two bricks which they
had hidden in the thicket, and they kindled
a little fire of branches, over which to roast
fcieir blood-pudding at the end of a bayonet.
And when they had breakfasted, eaten
their bread to the last crumb, and drunk
their wine to the last drop, they remained
seated side by side upon the grass, saying
nothing, their eyes on the distance, their
eyelids drooping, their fingers crossed as at


LITTLE SOLDIER. 191
hair, burned by the heat of sunny days, a
great sturdy wench of the environs of Paris.
Once, finding them again seated in the
same place, she said:
"Good-morning. You two are always here,
aren't you?"
Luc le Ganidec, the bolder, stammered:
"Yes; we come to rest."
That was all. But the next Sunday she
laughed on seeing them, laughed with a pro-
tecting benevolence and a feminine keen-
ness which knew well enough that they were
bashful. And she asked:
"What are you doing there? Are you
trying to see the grass grow?"
Luc was cheered up by this, and smiled
likewise: "Maybe we are."
She continued: "Hein! That's pretty
slow work."
He answered, still laughing: "Well, yes,
it is."
She went on. But coming back with a
milk-pail full of milk, she stopped again be-
fore them, and said:
"Would you like a drop? It will taste
like home."


I92 THE ODD NUMBER.
With her instinctive feeling that they were
of the same peasant race as she, being her-
self also far away from home perhaps, she
had divined and touched the spot.
They were both touched. Then, with some
difficulty, she managed to make a little milk
run into the neck of the glass bottle in which
they carried their wine. And Luc drank first,
with little swallows, stopping every minute to
see whether he had drunk more than his half.
Then he handed the bottle to Jean.
She stood upright before them, her hands
on her hips, her pail on the ground at her
feet, glad at the pleasure which she had
given.
Then she departed, shouting: "Allons!
Adieu! Till next Sunday!"
And as long as they could see her at all,
they followed with their eyes her tall silhou-
ette, which withdrew itself, growing smaller
and smaller, and seeming to sink into the
verdure of the fields.
When they were leaving the barracks the
week after, Jean said to Luc:


LITTLE SOLDIER. 195
dripping nostrils, and gave a long low to call
her back.
Soon the girl consented to eat a bit of
bread with them and drink a mouthful of
wine. She often brought them plums in her
pocket; for the season of plums had come.
Her presence sharpened the wits of the two
little Breton soldiers, and they chattered like
two birds.
But, one Tuesday, Luc le Ganidec asked
for leave—a thing which had never happen-
ed before—and he did not return until ten
o'clock at night.
Jean racked his brains uneasily for a
reason for his comrade's going out in this
way.
The next Thursday Luc, having borrow-
ed ten sous from his bed-fellow, again asked
and obtained permission to leave the bar-
racks for several hours.
And when he set off with Jean on their
Sunday walk his manner was very queer,
quite restless and quite changed. Kerderen
did not understand, but he vaguely suspect-


198 THE ODD NUMBER.
are promised. It was Luc who carried the
pail.
They kissed one another again before they
separated, and the girl went off after having
thrown Jean a friendly "good-evening" and
a smile which was full of meaning. To-day
she no longer thought of offering him any
milk.
The two little soldiers sat side by side,
motionless as usual, silent and calm, their
placid faces betraying nothing of all which
troubled their hearts. The sun fell on
them. Sometimes the cow lowed, looking
at them from afar.
At their usual hour they rose to go back.
Luc cut a switch. Jean carried the empty
bottle. He returned it to the wine-seller at
Bezons. Then they sallied out upon the
bridge, and, as they did every Sunday, they
stopped several minutes in the middle to
watch the water flowing.
Jean leaned, leaned more and more, over
the iron railing, as though he saw in the cur-
rent something which attracted him. Luc
said: "Are you trying to drink?" Just as
he uttered the last word Jean's head over.





XIII.
THE WRECK.





THE WRECK.
It was yesterday, the 31st of December.
I had just finished breakfast with my
old friend Georges Garin when the servant
brought him in a letter covered with seals
and foreign stamps.
Georges said:
"Will you excuse me?"
"Certainly."
And so he began to read eight pages in a
large English handwriting, crossed in every
direction. He read them slowly, with seri-
ous attention and the interest which we
only pay to things which touch our hearts.
Then he put the letter on a corner of the
mantle-piece, and he said:
"That was a curious story! I've never


206 THE ODD NUMBER.
"It was one of those sad days which op-
press and crush the thoughts, tighten the
heart, and extinguish in us all energy and
force—a gray, icy day, salted by a heavy
mist which was as wet as rain, as cold as
frost, as bad to breathe as the lye of a wash-
tub.
"Under this low ceiling of sinister fog,
the shallow, yellow, sandy sea of all gradu-
ally receding coasts lay without a wrinkle,
without a movement, without life, a sea of
turbid water, of greasy water, of stagnant
water. The yean Guiton passed over it, roll-
ing a little from habit, dividing the smooth,
opaque sheet, and leaving behind a few
waves, a little chopping sea, a few undula-
tions, which were soon calm.
"I began to talk to the captain, a little
man almost without feet, as round as his
boat and balancing himself like it. I want-
ed some details about the disaster on which
I was to deliver a report A great square-
rigged three-master, the Marie Joseph, of
Saint-Nazaire, had gone ashore one night
in a hurricane on the sands of the island
of Re".


THE WRECK. 207
"The owner wrote us that the storm had
thrown the ship so far ashore that it was
impossible to float her, and that they had
had to remove everything which could be
detached, with the utmost possible haste.
Nevertheless, I was to examine the situation
of the wreck, estimate what must have been
her condition before the disaster, and decide
whether all efforts had been used to get her
afloat. I came as an agent of the company
in order to bear contradictory testimony, if
necessary, at the trial.
"On receipt of my report, the manager
would take what measures he judged neces-
sary to protect our interests.
"The captain of the yean Guiton knew
all about the affair, having been summoned
with his boat to assist in the attempts at
salvage.
"He told me the story of the disaster, and
very simply too. The Marie Joseph, driven
by a furious gale, lost her bearings com-
pletely in the night, and steering by chance
over a heavy foaming sea—' a milk-soup sea,'
said the captain—had gone ashore on those
immense banks of sand which make the


208 THE ODD NUMBER.
coasts of this region seem like limitless
Saharas at hours when the tide is low.
"While talking I looked around and ahead.
Between the ocean and the lowering sky lay
a free space where the eye could see far.
We were following a coast. I asked:
"' Is that the island of Re?'
"' Yes, sir.'
"And suddenly the captain stretched his
right hand out before us, pointed to some-
thing almost invisible in the middle of the
sea, and said:
"' There's your ship!'
"' The Marie Joseph V
"' Yes.'
"I was stupefied. This black, almost im-
perceptible speck, which I should have taken
for a rock, seemed at least three miles from
land.
"I continued:
"' But, captain, there must be a hundred
fathoms of water in that place?'
"He began to laugh.
"' A hundred fathoms, my boy! Well, I
should say about two!'
"He was from Bordeaux. He continued:


THE WRECK. 209
"' It's now 9.40, just high tide. Go
down along the beach with your hands in
your pockets after you've had your lunch at
the Hotel du Dauphin, and I'll engage that
at ten minutes to three, or three o'clock,
you'll reach the wreck without wetting your
feet, and have from an hour and three-quar-
ters to two hours aboard of her; but not
more, or you'll be caught. The farther the
sea goes out the faster it comes back. This
coast is as flat as a bed-bug! But start
away at ten minutes to five, as I tell you,
and at half-past seven you will be aboard
of the Jean Guiton again, which will put you
down this same evening on the quay at La
Rochelle.'
"I thanked the captain, and I went and
sat down in the bow of the steamer to get
a good look at the little city of Saint-Martin,
which we were now rapidly approaching.
"It was just like all the miniature seaports
which serve as the capitals of the barren
islands scattered along the coast—a large
fishing village, one foot on sea and one on
shore, living on fish and wild-fowl, vegeta-
bles and shell-fish, radishes and mussels.


212 THE ODD NUMBER.
work. There was nothing here but the
sand, which served as foot-soil in this cavern
of planks.
"I began to take some notes about the
condition of the ship. I was seated on a
broken empty cask, writing by the light of
a great crack, through which I could per-
ceive the boundless stretch of the strand.
A strange shivering of cold and loneliness
ran over my skin from time to time; and I
would often stop writing for a moment to
listen to the vague mysterious noises in the
wreck: the noise of the crabs scratching
the planking with their hooked claws; the
noise of a thousand little creatures of the
sea already installed on this dead body;
the noise, so gentle and regular, of the
worms, who, with their gimlet-like, grinding
sound, gnaw ceaselessly at the old timber,
which they hollow out and devour.
"And, suddenly, very near me, I heard hu-
man voices; I started as though I had seen
a ghost. For a second I really thought I
was about to see two drowned men rise
from the sinister depths of the hold, who
would tell me about their death. At any


THE WRECK. 213
rate, it did not take me long to swing my-
self on deck with all the strength I had in
my wrists. There, below the bow, I found
standing a tall gentleman with three young
girls, or rather a tall Englishman with three
young misses. Certainly, they were a good
deal more frightened at seeing this sudden
apparition on the abandoned three-master
than I had been at seeing them. The
youngest girl turned round and ran; the
two others caught their father by the arms;
as for him, he opened his mouth—that was
sole sign of his emotion which he showed.
"Then, after several seconds, he spoke:
"'Aw, mbsieu, are you the owner of this
ship?'
"' I am.'
"' May I go over it?'
"' You may.'
"Then he uttered a long sentence in Eng-
lish, in which I only distinguished the word
'gracious,' repeated several times.
"As he was looking for a place to climb up,
I showed him the best, and lent him a hand.
He ascended. Then we helped up the three
little girls, who were now quite reassured.


214 THE 0DD NUMBER.
They were charming, especially the oldest,
a blonde of eighteen, fresh as a flower, and
so dainty, so pretty! Ah yes! the pretty
Englishwomen have indeed the look of ten-
der fruits of the sea. One would have said
of this one that she had just risen from the
sands and that her hair had kept their tint.
They all, with their exquisite freshness,
make you think of the delicate colors of
pink sea-shells, and of shining pearls rare
and mysterious, hidden in the unknown
deeps of ocean.
"She spoke French a little better than
her father, and she acted as interpreter. I
must tell all about the shipwreck, to the
very least details, and I romanced as though
I had been present at the catastrophe.
Then the whole family descended into the
interior of the wreck. As soon as they had
penetrated into this sombre, dim-lit gallery,
they uttered cries of astonishment and ad-
miration. And suddenly the father and his
three daughters were holding sketch-books
in their hands, which they had doubtless
carried hidden somewhere in their heavy
weather-proof clothes., and were all begin-


THE WRECK. 21^
held him back. Flight was impossible be-
cause of the deep places which we had been
obliged to go round on our way out, and
into which we should certainly fall on our
return.
"There was a minute of horrible anguish
in our hearts. Then the little English girl
began to smile, and murmured:
"' So we too are shipwrecked.'
"I tried to laugh; but fear caught me
tight, a fear which was cowa. dly and hor-
rid and base and mean, like the tide. All
the dangers which we ran appeared to me at
once. I wanted to shriek 'Help!' But to
whom?
"The two younger girls were cowering
against their father, who regarded, with a
look of consternation, the measureless sea
which hedged us round about.
"And the night fell as swiftly as the ocean
rose—a lowering, wet, icy night.
"I said:
"' There's nothing to do but to stay on
the ship.'
"The Englishman answered:
"'Oh yes!'


2l8 THE ODD NUMBER.
"And we waited there a quarter of an
hour, half an hour, indeed I don't know how
long, watching that yellow water which grew
deep about us, whirled round and round, and
seemed to bubble, and seemed to sport over
the reconquest of the vast sea-strand.
"One of the little girls was cold, and we
suddenly thought of going below to shelter
ourselves from the light but freezing wind
which blew upon us and pricked our skins.
"I leaned over the hatchway. The ship
was full of water. So we must cower against
the stern planking, which shielded us a little.
"The shades were now inwrapping us,
and we remained pressed close to one an-
other, surrounded by the darkness and by
the sea. I felt trembling against my shoul-
der the shoulder of the little English girl,
whose teeth chattered from time to time.
But I also felt the gentle warmth of her
body through her ulster, and that warmth
was as delicious to me as a kiss. We no
longer spoke; we sat motionless, mute, cow-
ering down like animals in a ditch when a
hurricane is raging. And, nevertheless, de-
spite the night, despite the terrible and in-


2 20 THE. ODD NUMBER.
just as you water the earth to make the flow-
ers spring?
"But the silence of the shades and of the
sky became dreadful, because we could thus
hear vaguely about us an infinite low roar,
the dull rumor of the rising sea, and the
monotonous dashing of the current against
the ship.
"Suddenly I heard the sound of sobs.
The youngest of the little girls was crying.
Then her father tried to console her, and
they began to talk in their own tongue,
which I did not understand. I guessed that
he was reassuring her, and that she was still
afraid.
"I asked my neighbor:
"' You are not too cold, are you, miss?'
"' Oh yes. I am very cold.'
"I wanted to give her my cloak; she re-
fused it. But I had taken it off, and I cov-
ered her with it against her will. In the
short struggle Her hand touched mine. It
made a charming shiver run over my body.
"For some minutes the air had been
growing brisker, the dashing of the water
stronger against the flanks of the ship. I
-■.


222 THE ODD NUMBER.
us, waiting eagerly for us to disappear. One
of them in especial irritated me. It went
out every thirty seconds and it lit up again
as soon. It was indeed an eye, that one,
with its lid ceaselessly lowered over its fiery
look.
"From time to time the Englishman struck
a match to see the hour; then he put his
watch back in his pocket. Suddenly he said
to me, over the heads of his daughters, with
a gravity which was supreme:
"' I wish you a Happy New Year, mbsieu)
"It was midnight. I held out my hand,
which he pressed. Then he said something
in English, and suddenly he and his daugh-
ters began to sing 'God save the Queen,'
which rose through the black and silent air
and vanished into space.
"At first I felt a desire to laugh; then I
was seized by a strong, fantastic emotion.
"It was something sinister and superb,
this chant of the shipwrecked, the condemn-
ed, something like a prayer, and also like
something grander, something comparable
to the ancient sublime 'Ave Casar morituri
te salutamus.'


THE WRECK. 223
"When they had finished I asked my
neighbor to sing a ballad alone, a legend,
anything she liked, to make us forget our
terrors. She consented, and immediately
her clear young voice flew off into the
night. She sang something which was
doubtless sad, because the notes were long
drawn out, issued slowly from her mouth,
and hovered, like wounded birds, above the
waves.
"The sea was rising now and beating upon
our wreck. As for me, I thought only of
that voice. And I thought also of the si-
rens. If a ship had passed near by us what
would the sailors have said? My troubled
spirit lost itself in the dream! A siren!
Was she not really a siren, this daughter of
the sea, who had kept me on this worm-eat-
en ship, and who was soon about to go down
with me deep into the waters?
"But suddenly we were all five rolling on
the deck, because the Marie Joseph had
sunk on her right side. The English girl
had fallen across me, and before I knew
what I was doing, thinking that my last mo-
ment was come, I had caught her in my


224 THE ODD NUMBER.
arms and kissed her cheek, her temple, and
her hair.
"The ship did not move again, and we, we
also, remained motionless.
"The father said,' Kate !' The one whom
I was holding answered,'Yes,' and made a
movement to free herself. And at that mo-
ment I should have wished the ship to split
in two and let me fall with her into the
sea.
"The Englishman continued:
"' A little rocking; it's nothing. I have
my three daughters safe.'
"Not having seen the oldest, he had
thought she was lost overboard!
"I rose slowly, and suddenly I made out a
light on the sea quite near us. I shouted;
they answered. It was a boat sent out in
search of us by the hotel-keeper, who had
guessed at our imprudence.
"We were saved. I was in despair. They
picked us up off our raft, and they brought
us back to Saint-Martin.
"The Englishman was now rubbing his
hands and murmuring:
"'A good supper! A good supper!'


226 THE ODD NUMBER.
time, she of the wreck! What a creature!
. . . Divine! She writes me her hair is
white. . . . That caused me terrible pain.
. . . Ah! her yellow hair. . . . No, my Eng-
lish girl exists no longer. . . . They are sad,
such things as that!
THE END.





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