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 The Odd Number
 
 ( 
 
 H
 
 THE ODD NUMBER 
 
 Thirteen Tales 
 
 By 
 
 Guy de Maupassant 
 
 THE TRANSLATION 
 Bv JONATHAN STURGES 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 By HENRY JAMES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
 
 Copyright, 1889, by Harper & Brothers.
 
 T 
 
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Introduction vii 
 
 I. Happiness 3 
 
 II. A Coward 19 
 
 III. The Wolf 39 
 
 IV. The Necklace 53 
 
 V. The Piece of String 73 
 
 VI. La Mere Sauvage 91 
 
 VII. Moonlight 109 
 
 VIII. The Confession 123 
 
 IX. On the Journey 137 
 
 X. The Beggar 153 
 
 XI. A Ghost 167 
 
 XII. Little Soldier 185 
 
 XIII. The Wreck 203 
 
 3008388
 
 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
 
 Vlll 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 flirtatioi 
 — an expression which is really the onh 
 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 
 Drice is flung down to him. If he is a cap- 
 tal 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,
 
 xii 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 decadents: they have pro- 
 duced no talent that seems particularly alive
 
 INTRODUCTION. xiii 
 
 — 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
 
 XIV INTRODUCTION. 
 
 "Pierre et Jean"), devoted much time to 
 the moral that to prove that you have a first- 
 rate talent you must have a first-rate style. 
 He therefore learned to write, and acquired 
 an instrument which emits no uncertain 
 sound. He is wonderfully concise and di- 
 rect, yet at the same time it would be diffi- 
 cult to characterize more vividly. To have 
 color and be sober with it is an ideal, and 
 this ideal M. de Maupassant constantly 
 touches. The complete possession of his 
 instrument has enabled him to attack a great 
 variety of subjects — usually within rigid lim- 
 its of space. He has accepted the necessity 
 of being brief, and has made brevity very 
 full, through making it an energetic selec- 
 tion. He has published less than half a-doz- 
 en novels and more than a hundred tales, 
 and it is upon his tales that his reputation 
 will mainly rest. The short tale is infinitely 
 relished in France, which can show, in this 
 form, an array of masterpieces ; and no 
 small part of Maupassant's success, I think, 
 comes from his countrymen's pride in see- 
 ing him add to a collection which is already 
 a national glory. He has done so, as I say, 
 by putting selection really upon its mettle — 
 by going, in every picture, straight to the 
 strongest ingredients, and to them alone.
 
 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 nouvelle 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, 
 " Pierre et Jean " and " Fort comme la 
 Mort," 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, August 6, iJ
 
 I. 
 
 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. 5 
 
 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.
 
 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. 
 
 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 
 man, 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. I I 
 
 " ' 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- 
 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 NUMRKR. 
 
 icacyof 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.
 
 II. 
 
 A COWARD.
 
 A COWARD. 
 
 In 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 
 cafd 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
 
 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 :
 
 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."
 
 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 
 Chateauvillard'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
 
 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.
 
 4<D 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 inexorab'e. 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 Franc,ois 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 allee 
 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. Francois got up, 
 shivering, unable to remain there longer, 
 feeling himself almost growing faint. Noth- 
 ing was to be heard, neither the voice of the 
 doors 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. 
 
 Francois 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
 
 5° 
 
 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 and 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-fcu / 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 NUMP.ER. 
 
 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 
 clown there, of a Sunday. 
 
 Rut 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 Mine. 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. 
 
 Mine. Forestier went to a wardrobe with a 
 glass door, took out a large jewel-box, brought 
 it back, opened it, and said to Mine. Loisel: 
 
 "Choose, my dear." 
 
 She saw first of all some bracelets, then a 
 pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross, gold
 
 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. 6 1 
 
 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.
 
 62 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 
 clay, 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 ?" 
 
 " 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 see 
 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.
 
 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 chasrin 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, Mine. 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. 6j 
 
 what would she have said ? Would she not 
 have taken Mine. Loisel for a thief ? 
 
 Mine. 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. 
 
 Mine. 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 Mine. 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 ?"
 
 70 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 "Yes. Well?" 
 
 "Well, I lost it." 
 
 " 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 their wives 
 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 Breaute, 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
 
 76 THE 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 Angelas struck mid- 
 day those who lived at a distance poured 
 into the inns. 
 
 At Jourdain's the great room was rilled 
 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 Fortune 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."
 
 So 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. 8l 
 
 " 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, va/" 
 
 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 clay, 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, va/" 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. 
 He 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
 
 92 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 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 MERE 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 ?" 
 
 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 MKRE 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
 
 q6 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. 
 
 " Cesaire 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 suffer 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 1 
 
 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 MERE 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 NUMRER. 
 
 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. 103 
 
 The old " Sauvage " remained standing 
 before her ruined dwelling, armed with her 
 gun, her son's gun, for fear lest one cf 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 NUMBER. 
 
 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. 1 05 
 
 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.
 
 VII. 
 
 MOONLIGHT.
 
 MOONLIGHT. 
 
 The Abbe Marignan, as soldier of the 
 Church, bore his righting 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 clays 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 b_y 
 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. 1 1 1 
 
 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-
 
 112 THE 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 abbe 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. 1 1 3 
 
 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 
 8
 
 114 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 speak once more, he cried : " It is not true ; 
 you are lying, Melanie !" 
 
 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 advice. 
 
 After his dinner, he tried to read a lit-
 
 MOONLIGHT. I«5 
 
 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 honevsuckle climb-
 
 Il6 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 ing on the house wall, exhaled delicious, 
 sujrared 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
 
 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. 
 
 Why had God done this? Since the 
 night is destined for sleep, for unconscious- 
 ness, for repose, for forgetful ness 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
 
 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. I 25 
 
 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 Abbe Simon approached, took her
 
 THE CONFESSION. I 27 
 
 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
 
 I2» 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. 1 29 
 
 " 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 
 lon<r. Thou rememberest, is it not so ? It 
 was probably the first time . . . yes . . . Thou 
 wast so pale when thou earnest back to the 
 sala?t. 
 
 " 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 off 
 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. 133 
 
 " 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."
 
 IX. 
 
 ON THE JOURNEY.
 
 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 tete-a-tete with 
 a madman in an express, of hours passed
 
 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 
 choked 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 her 
 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. 14I 
 
 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. I43 
 
 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 !'
 
 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. 1 45 
 
 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 
 tete-a-tete, both silent. 
 
 " In the morning, when they stopped at a 
 German station, the unknown got clown ; 
 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 
 10
 
 146 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 hus- 
 band.' 
 
 " 1 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 reilected. 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
 
 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. 1 49 
 
 " ' 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
 
 154 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 several glasses of brandy to drink that he 
 had lamed his legs. And since then, a 
 laughing-stock and a vagabond, he knew of 
 nothing else to do but to hold out his hand 
 and beg. 
 
 Formerly the Baroness d'Avary had al- 
 lowed him to sleep in a kind of niche full 
 of straw beside the hen-house at the farm, 
 which was under the castle walls; and on 
 bad days he was sure of finding a piece of 
 bread and a glass of cider in her kitchen. 
 He also often got a few sous thrown him 
 by the old lady from the top of her steps 
 or from the windows of her chamber. Now 
 she was dead. 
 
 In the villages they hardly gave him any- 
 thing : they knew him too well ; this forty 
 years they were tired of seeing him carrying 
 about his ragged and deformed body from 
 hut to hut on his two wooden joints. And 
 yet he did not want to go away, because he 
 knew of nothing else on earth but this cor- 
 ner of a country, these three or four ham- 
 lets in which he had dragged about his 
 miserable life. He had set a boundary to 
 his beggarhood, and he would never have
 
 THE BEGGAR. I 55 
 
 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 BEGGAR. I 5 7 
 
 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't 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
 
 158 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 Maitre 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.
 
 l6o THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 He awaited, he knew not what, with that 
 vague sense of expectation which ever per- 
 sists within us. He waited in the corner of 
 that farm-yard under the icy wind, for the 
 mysterious help which we always hope from 
 the sky or from men, without asking our- 
 selves how or why, or through whom it is to 
 come. A flock of black chickens passed 
 by, searching their subsistence in the earth, 
 the nourisher of all. At every instant, with 
 one stroke of the beak, they picked up a 
 grain or an invisible insect, then continued 
 their slow and steady search. 
 
 " The Bell " regarded them without think- 
 ing of anything at all ; then, rather in his 
 stomach than in his brain, there came to 
 him a feeling rather than an idea that one 
 of these creatures broiled over a fire of dead 
 wood would be good to eat. 
 
 The suspicion that he was about to com- 
 mit a theft did not occur to him. He took 
 a stone which lay within reach of his hand, 
 and being adroit, he threw it and fairly kill- 
 ed the chicken which was nearest by. The 
 creature fell upon its side, moving its wings. 
 The others fled away, balanced upon their
 
 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 1
 
 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. 1 63 
 
 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 !
 
 XL 
 A GHOST.
 
 A GHOST. 
 
 We were talking of Processes of Seques- 
 tration, apropos of a recent law-case. It 
 was towards the end of a friendly evening, 
 in an ancient mansion in the Rue de Gre- 
 nelle, and each one had his story, his story 
 which he affirmed to be true. 
 
 Then the old Marquis de la Tour-Samuel, 
 who was eighty-two years old, rose, and went 
 and leaned upon the mantle-piece. He said, 
 with a voice which shook a little : 
 
 " I too, I know a strange story, so strange 
 that it has simply possessed my life. It is 
 fifty-six years since that adventure happen- 
 ed, yet not a month passes without my see- 
 ing it all again in dreams. That day has 
 left a mark, an imprint of fear, stamped
 
 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 
 
 happened, 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 chateau 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 chateau 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 ! 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. 1 
 
 " ' 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.
 
 A GHOST. 175 
 
 " I opened it without trouble, and en- 
 tered. 
 
 " The room was so dark that at first I 
 hardly made out anything. I paused, struck 
 by that mouldy and lifeless odor so peculiar 
 to apartments which are uninhabited and 
 condemned, and, as you might say, dead. 
 Then, little by little, my eyes became ac- 
 customed to the gloom, and I saw, clearly 
 enough, a great apartment all in disorder; 
 the bed without sheets, yet with its mattress 
 and its pillows, one of which bore the deep 
 impress of an elbow or a head, as if some 
 one had just lain on it. 
 
 " The chairs seemed all in confusion. I 
 noticed that a door (into a closet, no doubt) 
 had remained half open. 
 
 " I went first to the window to let in 
 some light, and I opened it ; but the iron 
 fastenings of the outside shutter were so 
 rusty that I could not make them yield. 
 
 " I even tried to break them with my sa- 
 bre, but without success. And as I was 
 growing angry at these useless efforts, and 
 as my eyes had at last perfectly accustomed 
 themselves to the darkness, I gave up the
 
 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
 
 l8o 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 clay. 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 
 inarch ; 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
 
 l86 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.
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. 1 87 
 
 As soon as they had crossed the Seine 
 they bought their provisions from the sau- 
 sage merchant, the baker, and the seller of 
 the wine of the country. A piece of blood- 
 pudding, four sous' worth of bread, and a 
 litre of "petit bleu" constituted the provi- 
 sions, which they carried off in their hand- 
 kerchiefs. But after they had left this vil- 
 lage they now went very slowly forward, and 
 they began to talk. 
 
 In front of them a barren plain strewn 
 with clumps of trees led to the wood, to the 
 little wood which had seemed to them to 
 resemble the one at Kermarivan. Grain- 
 fields and hay-fields bordered the narrow 
 path, which lost itself in this young green- 
 ness of the crops, and Jean Kerderen would 
 always say to Luc le Ganidec : 
 
 " It looks like it does near Plounivon." 
 
 " Yes , exactly." 
 
 They went onward, side by side, their 
 spirits suffused with vague memories of their 
 own country, filled with awakened images — 
 images as naive as the pictures on the col- 
 ored broadsheets which you buy for a pen- 
 ny. And they kept recognizing, as it were,
 
 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 bantieue fattens, but of the
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. 1 89 
 
 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 
 their 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
 
 190 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 mass, their red legs stretched out beside the 
 poppies of the field. And the leather of their 
 shakos and the brass of their buttons glit- 
 tered in the ardent sun, and made the larks, 
 which sang and hovered above their heads, 
 stop short. 
 
 About mid-day they began to turn their 
 eyes from time to time in the direction of 
 the village of Bezons, because the girl with 
 the cow was coming. 
 
 She passed by them every Sunday on her 
 way to milk and change the position of her 
 cow — the only cow of this district which 
 ever went out of the stable to grass. It 
 pastured in a narrow field along the edge of 
 wood -a little farther on. 
 
 They soon perceived the girl, the only 
 human being who came walking across the 
 land. And they felt themselves rejoiced by 
 the brilliant reflections thrown off by her tin 
 milk-pail under the flame of the sun. They 
 never talked about her. They were simply 
 glad to see her, without understanding why. 
 
 She was a great strong wench with red
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. IQI 
 
 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 
 iaughed 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. 1 93 
 
 "Oughtn't we to buy her something 
 good ?" 
 
 And they remained in great embarrass- 
 ment before the problem of the choice of a 
 delicacy for the girl with the cow. 
 
 Luc was of the opinion that a bit of tripe 
 would be the best, but Jean preferred some 
 berlingots, because he was fond of sweets. 
 His choice fairly made him enthusiastic, and 
 they bought at a grocer's two sous' worth of 
 candies white and red. 
 
 They ate their breakfast more rapidly 
 than usual, being nervous with expectation. 
 
 Jean saw her the first. " There she is !" 
 said he. Luc continued : " Yes, there she 
 is." 
 
 While yet some distance off she laughed 
 at seeing them. She cried : 
 
 " Is everything going as you like it ?" 
 
 They answered together : 
 
 " Are you getting on all right ?" 
 
 Then she conversed, talked to them of 
 simple things in which they felt an interest 
 — of the weather, of the crops, and of her 
 master. 
 
 They were afraid to offer her their can- 
 
 13
 
 194 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 dies, which were slowly melting away in 
 Jean's pocket. 
 
 At last Luc grew bold, and murmured : 
 "We have brought you something." 
 She demanded, " What is it ? Tell me I" 
 Then Jean, blushing up to his ears, man- 
 aged to get at the little paper cornucopia, 
 and held it out. 
 
 She began to eat the little pieces of sug- 
 ar, rolling them from one cheek to the oth- 
 er. And they made lumps beneath her 
 flesh. The two soldiers, seated before her, 
 regarded her with emotion and delight. 
 
 Then she went to milk her cow, and once 
 more gave them some milk on coming back. 
 They thought of her all the week ; several 
 times they even spoke of her. The next 
 Sunday she sat down with them for a little 
 longer talk ; and all three, seated side by 
 side, their eyes lost in the distance, clasp- 
 ing their knees with their hands, told the 
 small doings, the minute details of their life 
 in the villages where they had been born, 
 while over there the cow, seeing that the 
 milk-maid had stopped on her way, stretch- 
 ed out towards her its heavy head with the
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. I95 
 
 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-
 
 196 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 ed something without divining what it could 
 -be. 
 
 They did not say a word to one another 
 until they reached their usual stopping-place, 
 where, from their constant sitting in the 
 same spot, the grass was quite worn away. 
 And they ate their breakfast slowly. Nei- 
 ther of them felt hungry. 
 
 Before long the girl appeared. As on 
 every Sunday, they watched her coming. 
 When she was quite near, Luc rose and 
 made two steps forward. She put her milk- 
 pail on the ground, and kissed him. She 
 kissed him passionately, throwing her arms 
 about his neck, without noticing Jean, with- 
 out remembering that he was there, without 
 even seeing him. 
 
 And he sat there desperate, he the poor 
 Jean, so desperate that he did not under- 
 stand, his soul quite overwhelmed, his heart 
 bursting, not yet expressing it all to himself. 
 
 Then the girl seated herself beside Luc, 
 and they began to chatter. 
 
 Jean did not look at them : he now divined 
 why his comrade had gone out twice during 
 the week, and he felt within him a burning
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. I97 
 
 grief, a kind of wound, that sense of rending 
 which is caused by a treason. 
 
 Luc and the girl got up together to go 
 and change the position of the cow. 
 
 Jean followed them with his eyes. He 
 saw them departing side by side. The red 
 breeches of his comrade made a bright spot 
 on the road. It was Luc who picked up the 
 mallet and hammered down the stake to 
 which they tied the beast. 
 
 The girl stooped to milk her, while he 
 stroked the cow's sharp spine with a careless 
 hand. Then they left the milk-pail on the 
 grass, and they went deep into the wood. 
 
 Jean saw nothing more but the wall of 
 leaves where they had entered ; and he felt 
 himself so troubled that if he had tried to 
 rise he would certainly have fallen. 
 
 He sat motionless, stupefied by astonish- 
 ment and suffering, by a suffering which was 
 simple but which was deep. He wanted to 
 cry, to run away, to hide himself, never to 
 see anybody any more. 
 
 Suddenly he saw them issuing from the 
 thicket. They returned gently, holding each 
 other's hands, as in the villages do those who
 
 IDS 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-
 
 LITTLE SOLDIER. 199 
 
 balanced his body, his legs described a cir- 
 cle in the air, and the little blue and red 
 soldier fell in a lump, entered the water, and 
 disappeared. 
 
 Luc, his throat paralyzed with anguish, 
 tried in vain to shout. Farther down he 
 saw something stir ; then the head of his 
 comrade rose to the surface of the river and 
 re-entered it as soon. 
 
 Farther still he again perceived a hand, 
 a single hand which issued from the stream 
 and then plunged back. That was all. 
 
 The barge-men who ran up did not find 
 the body that clay. 
 
 Luc returned alone to the barracks, run- 
 ning, his head filled with madness ; and he 
 told of the accident, with tears in his eyes 
 and voice, blowing his nose again and again : 
 " He leaned over ... he ... he leaned over 
 ... so far ... so far that his head turned a 
 somersault ; and . . . and ... so he fell . . . 
 
 he fell " 
 
 He was strangled by emotion, he could say 
 no more. If he had only known !
 
 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
 
 204 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 told you about it, I think. And yet it was 
 a sentimental adventure, and it happened 
 to me. Aha ! That was a strange New- 
 year's Day indeed!' It must be twenty 
 years ago, since I was then thirty, and am 
 now fifty years old. 
 
 " I was then an inspector in the Maritime 
 Insurance Company, of which I nm now di- 
 rector. I had arranged to pass the fete of 
 New-year's in Paris — since it is a convention 
 to make that day a fete — when I received 
 a letter from the manager, directing me to 
 proceed at once to the island of Re, where a 
 three-masted vessel from Saint-Nazaire, in- 
 sured by us, had just gone ashore. It was 
 then eight o'clock in the morning. I arrived 
 at the office at ten, to get my instructions ■ 
 and the same evening I took the express, 
 which put me down in La Rochelle the next 
 day, December 31st. 
 
 " I had two hours to spare before going 
 aboard the boat for Re. So I made a tour 
 in the town. It is certainly a fantastic city, 
 La Rochelle, with a strong character of its 
 own — streets tangled like a labyrinth, side- 
 walks running under endless arcaded galler-
 
 THE WRECK. 205 
 
 ies like those of the Rue de Rivoli, but low, 
 mysterious, built as if to form a fit scene for 
 conspirators, and making an ancient and 
 striking background for those old-time wars, 
 the savage heroic wars of religion. It is in- 
 deed the typical old Huguenot city, grave, 
 discreet, with no fine art to show, with no 
 wonderful monuments, such as make Rouen 
 so grand ; but it is remarkable for its se- 
 vere, somewhat cunning look ; it is a city of 
 obstinate fighters, a city where fanaticisms 
 might well blossom, where the faith of the 
 Calvinists became exalted, and where the 
 plot of the ' Four Sergeants ' was born. 
 
 "After I had wandered for some time 
 about these curious streets, I went aboard 
 the black, fat-bellied little steamboat which 
 was to take me to the island of Re. It was 
 called the Jean Guiton. It started with an- 
 gry puffings, passed between the two old 
 towers which guard the harbor, crossed the 
 roadstead, and issued from the mole built 
 by Richelieu, the great stones of which are 
 visible at the water's edge, enclosing the 
 town like an immense necklace. Then the 
 steamboat turned off to the right.
 
 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 Jean Gttiton 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 Jean 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. 20Q 
 
 " ' 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. 
 14
 
 2IO THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 The island is very low, and little cultivated, 
 yet seems to be filled with people. How- 
 ever, I did not penetrate into the interior. 
 
 " After having breakfasted, I climbed 
 across a little promontory, and then, as the 
 tide was rapidly falling, I started out across 
 the sands towards a kind of black rock 
 which I could just perceive above the sur- 
 face of the water, far out, far down. 
 
 " I walked quickly over the yellow plain ; 
 it was elastic, like flesh, and seemed to sweat 
 beneath my foot. The sea had been there 
 very lately ; now I perceived it at a distance, 
 escaping out of sight, and I no longer dis- 
 tinguished the line which separated the 
 sands from ocean. I felt as though I were 
 assisting at a gigantic supernatural work of 
 enchantment. The Atlantic had just now 
 been before me, then it had disappeared 
 into the strand, just as does scenery through 
 a trap ; and I now walked in the midst of a 
 desert. Only the feeling, the breath of the 
 salt-water, remained in me. I perceived the 
 smell of the wrack, the smell of the wide 
 sea, the rough good smell of sea-coasts. I 
 walked fast; I was no longer cold; I looked
 
 THE WRECK. 211 
 
 at the stranded wreck, which grew in size as 
 I approached, and came now to resemble an 
 enormous shipwrecked whale. 
 
 " It seemed fairly to rise out of the ground, 
 and on that great, flat, yellow stretch of 
 sand assumed surprising proportions. After 
 an hour's walk I reached it at last. Bulg- 
 ing out and crushed, it lay upon its side, 
 which, like the flanks of an animal, dis- 
 played its broken bones, its bones of tarry 
 wood pierced with enormous bolts. The 
 sand had already invaded it, entered it by 
 all the crannies, and held it, possessed it, 
 refused to let it go. It seemed to have 
 taken root in it. The bow had entered deep 
 into this soft, treacherous beach j while the 
 stern, high in air, seemed to cast at heaven, 
 like a cry of despairing appeal, the two 
 white words on the black planking, Marie 
 jfoseph. 
 
 " I scaled this carcass of a ship by the low- 
 est side ; then, having reached the deck, I 
 went below. The daylight, which entered by 
 the stove-in hatches and the cracks in the 
 sides, showed sadly enough a species of 
 long sombre cellar full of demolished wood-
 
 2 12 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, mosieu, 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 TIIE ODD 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. 215 
 
 ning at once to make pencil sketches of this 
 melancholy and fantastic place. 
 
 " They had seated themselves side by side 
 on a projecting beam, and the four sketch- 
 books on the eight knees were being rapid- 
 ly covered with little black lines which were 
 intended to represent the half-opened stom- 
 ach of the Marie Joseph. 
 
 " I continued to inspect the skeleton of the 
 ship, and the oldest girl talked to me while 
 she worked. 
 
 " I learned that they were spending the 
 winter at Biarritz, and that they had come 
 to the island of Re expressly to see the 
 stranded three-master. They had none of the 
 usual English arrogance; they were simple 
 honest hearts of that class of constant wan- 
 derers with which England covers the globe. 
 The father was long and thin, with a red face 
 framed in white whiskers, and looking like 
 a living sandwich, a slice of ham cut in the 
 shape of a head, placed between two wedges 
 of hair. The daughters, like little wading- 
 birds in embryo, had long legs and were also 
 thin — except the oldest. All three were 
 pretty, especially the tallest.
 
 2l6 THE ODD NUMBER. 
 
 " She had such a droll way of speaking, 
 of talking, of laughing, of understanding and 
 of not understanding, of raising her eyes to 
 ask a question (eyes blue as deep water), 
 of stopping her drawing a moment to make 
 a guess at what you meant, of returning once 
 more to work, of saying ' yes ' or ' no ' — that 
 I could have listened and looked indefi- 
 nitely. 
 
 " Suddenly she murmured : 
 
 "'I hear a little movement on this boat.' 
 
 " I lent an ear ; and I immediately distin- 
 guished a low, steady, curious sound. What 
 was it ? I rose and looked out of the crack, 
 and I uttered a violent cry. The sea had 
 come back ; it was about to surround us ! 
 
 " We were on deck in an instant. It was 
 too late. The water circled us about, and 
 was running towards the coast with prodig- 
 ious swiftness. No, it did not run, it slip- 
 ped, it crawled, it grew longer, like a kind 
 of great limitless blot. The water on the 
 sands was barely a few centimetres deep; but 
 the rising flood had gone so far that we no 
 longer saw the flying line of its edge. 
 
 " The Englishman wanted to jump. I
 
 THE WRECK. 217 
 
 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 cowardly 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-
 
 THE WRECK. 219 
 
 creasing danger, I began to feel happy that 
 I was there, to be glad of the cold and the 
 peril, to rejoice in the long hours of dark- 
 ness and anguish which I must pass on this 
 plank so near this dainty and pretty little 
 girl. 
 
 " I asked myself, ' Why this strange sen- 
 sation of well-being and of joy ?' 
 
 " Why ! Does one know ? Because she 
 was there ? Who ? She, a little unknown 
 English girl ? I did not love her, I did not 
 even know her. And for all that I was 
 touched and conquered. I should have liked 
 to save her, to sacrifice myself for her, to 
 commit a thousand follies ! Strange thing ! 
 How does it happen that the presence of a 
 woman overwhelms us so ? Is it the power 
 of her grace, which infolds us ? Is it the se- 
 duction in her beauty and youth, which in- 
 toxicates us like wine ? 
 
 " Is it not rather, as it were, the touch of 
 Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks 
 constantly to unite two beings, who tries his 
 strength the instant he has put a man and a 
 woman face to face, and who suffuses them 
 with a confused, secret, profound emotion
 
 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
 
 THE WRECK. 22 1 
 
 raised myself ; a great gust blew in my face. 
 The wind was rising ! 
 
 " The Englishman perceived this at the 
 same time that I did, and said, simply: 
 
 " ' That is bad for us, this—' 
 
 " Of course it was bad, it was certain 
 death if any breakers, however feeble, should 
 attack and shake the wreck, which was al- 
 ready so loose and broken that the first big 
 sea would carry it off in a jelly. 
 
 " So our anguish increased from second 
 to second as the squalls grew stronger and 
 stronger. Now the sea broke a little, and 
 I saw in the darkness white lines appearing 
 and disappearing, which were lines of foam ; 
 while each wave struck the Marie Joseph, 
 and shook her with a short quiver which 
 rose to our hearts. 
 
 " The English girl was trembling ; I felt 
 her shiver against me. And I had a wild 
 desire to take her in my arms. 
 
 " Down there before and behind us, to left 
 and right, light -houses were shining along 
 the shore — light -houses white and yellow 
 and red, revolving like the enormous eyes 
 of giants who were staring at us, watching
 
 2 22 THE ODD NUMRER. 
 
 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 l Ave Ccesar tnorituri 
 tc salutamus.''
 
 THE WRECK. 223 
 
 "When they had finished I asked my 
 neighbor to sing a ballad alone, a legend, 
 anything she liked, to make ns 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 !'
 
 THE WRECK. 225 
 
 " We did sup. I was not gay. I regretted 
 the Marie Joseph. 
 
 " We had to separate, the next day, af- 
 ter much handshaking and many promises 
 to write. They departed for Biarritz. I 
 was not far from following them. 
 
 " I was hard hit ; I wanted to ask this little 
 girl in marriage. If we had passed eight 
 days together, I should have done so ! ' 
 How weak and incomprehensible a man 
 sometimes is ! 
 
 "Two years passed without my hearing 
 a word from them. Then I received a let- 
 ter from New York. She was married, 
 and wrote to tell me. And since then we 
 write to each other every year, on New- 
 year's Day. She tells me about her life, 
 talks of her children, her sisters, never of 
 her husband ! Why ? Ah ! why ? . . . And 
 as for me, I only talk of the Marie Joseph. 
 That was perhaps the only woman I have 
 ever loved. No — that I ever should have 
 loved. . . . Ah, well ! who can tell ? Facts 
 master you. . . . And then — and then — all 
 passes. . . . She must be old now ; I should 
 not know her. . . . Ah ! she of the by-gone 
 15
 
 2 26 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.
 
 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 
 
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