Monsieur puts his hand in his pocket.  Madame hears the clink of coin and touches the enclosed fingers with her own delicately.  Monsieur withdraws his hand empty.

“Pardon, Madame.”

“Monsieur has the courage of a gentleman.  Come, Camille, little fool! a sweet good-night to Monsieur.”

“Stay, Madame.  I have walked far and am weary.  Is there an hotel in Bel-Oiseau?”

“Monsieur is jesting.  We are but a hundred of poor chalets.”

“An auberge, then—­a cabaret—­anything?”

“Les Trois Chevres.  It is not for such as you.”

“Is it, then, that I must toil onwards to Chatelard?”

“Monsieur does not know?  The Hotel Royal was burned to the walls six months since.”

“It follows that I must lie in the fields.”

Madame hesitates, ponders, and makes up her mind.

“I keep Monsieur talking, and the night wind is sharp from the snow.  It is ill for a heated skin, and one should be indoors.  I have a bedroom that is at Monsieur’s disposition, if Monsieur will condescend?”

Monsieur will condescend.  Monsieur would condescend to a loft and a truss of straw, in default of the neat little chilly chamber that is allotted him, so sick are his very limbs with long tramping, and so uninviting figures the further stretch in the moonlight to Chatelard, with its burnt-out carcase of an hotel.

This is how I came to quarter myself on Madame Barbiere and her idiot son, and how I ultimately learned from the lips of the latter the strange story of his own immediate fall from reason and the dear light of intellect.

* * * * *

By day Camille Barbiere proved to be a young man, some five and twenty years of age, of a handsome and impressive exterior.  His dark hair lay close about his well-shaped head; his features were regular and cut bold as an Etruscan cameo; his limbs were elastic and moulded into the supple finish of one whose life has not been set upon level roads.  At a speculative distance he appeared a straight specimen of a Burgundian youth—­sinewy, clean-formed, and graceful, though slender to gauntness; and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul die out of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself into some accident of twisted branches as one approaches the billowing tree that presented it.

The soul of Camille, the idiot, had warped long after its earthly tabernacle had grown firm and fair to look upon.  Cause and effect were not one from birth in him; and the result was a most wistful expression, as though the lost intellect were for ever struggling and failing to recall its ancient mastery.  Mostly he was a gentle young man, noteworthy for nothing but the uncomplaining patience with which he daily observed the monotonous routine of simple duties that were now all-sufficient for the poor life that had “crept so long on a broken wing.”  He milked the big, red, barrel-bodied cow, and churned industriously for butter; he kept the little vegetable garden in order and nursed the Savoys into fatness like plumping babies; he drove the goats to pasture on the mountain slopes, and all day sat among the rhododendrons, the forgotten soul behind his eyes conning the dead language of fate, as a foreigner vainly interrogates the abstruse complexity of an idiom.