Turning their backs upon their work, the double military mass marched toward the encampment.  The ends of Justice had been served.  Trumpets and drums were lost on the horizon but their sounds were still magnified by the fresh echoes of the coming morn.  The corpse was despoiled of its jewels and then deposited in that poor coffin which looked so like a packing-box.  The two nuns took with timidity the gems which the dead woman had given them for their works of charity.  Then the lid was fastened down, shutting away forever the one who a few moments before was a woman of sumptuous charm upon whom men could not look unmoved.  The four planks now guarded merely bloody rags, mutilated flesh, broken bones.

The vehicle went to the cemetery of Vincennes, to the corner in which the executed were buried....  Not a flower, not an inscription, not a cross.  The lawyer himself could not be sure of finding her burial place if at any time it was necessary to seek it....  Such was the last scene in the career of this luxurious and pleasure-loving creature!...  Thus had that body gone to dissolution in an unknown hole in the ground like any abandoned beast of burden!...

“She was good,” said her defender, “and yet at the same time, she was a criminal.  Her education was to blame.  Poor woman!...  They had brought her up to live in riches, and riches had always fled before her.”

Then in his last lines the old maitre said with melancholy, “She died thinking of you and a little of me....  We have been the last men of her existence.”

This reading left Ulysses in a mournful state of stupefaction.  Freya was no longer living!...  He was no longer running the danger of seeing her appear on his ship at whatever port he might touch!...

The duality of his sentiments again surged up with violent contradiction.

“It was a good thing!” said the sailor, “how many men have died through her fault!...  Her execution was inevitable.  The sea must be cleared of such bandits.”

And at the same time the remembrance of the delights of Naples, of that long imprisonment in a harem pervaded with unlimited sensuousness was reborn in his mind.  He saw her in all the majesty of her marvelous body, just as when she was dancing or leaping from side to side of the old salon.  And now this form, molded by nature in a moment of enthusiasm, was no longer in existence....  It was nothing but a mass of liquid flesh and pestilent pulp!...

He recalled her kiss, that kiss that had so electrified him, making him sink down and down through an ocean of ecstasy, like a castaway, content with his fate....  And he would never know her more!...  And her mouth, with its perfume of cinnamon and incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue, was now ...!  Ah, misery!

Suddenly he saw the profile of the dead woman with one eye turned toward him, graciously and malignly, just as the “eye of the morning” must have looked at its mistress while uncoiling her mysterious dances in her Asiatic dwelling.