By-and-by I made it an irregular habit to accompany him on these shepherdings; to join him in his simple midday meal of sour brown bread and goat-milk cheese; to talk with him desultorily, and study him the while, inasmuch as he wakened an interest in me that was full of speculation.  For his was not an imbecility either hereditary or constitutional.  From the first there had appeared to me something abnormal in it—­a suspension of intelligence only, a frost-bite in the brain that presently some April breath of memory might thaw out.  This was not merely conjectural, of course.  I had the story of his mental collapse from his mother in the early days of my sojourn in Bel-Oiseau; for it came to pass that a fitful caprice induced me to prolong my stay in the swart little village far into the gracious Swiss summer.

The “story” I have called it; but it was none.  He was out on the hills one moonlight night, and came home in the early morning mad.  That was all.

This had happened some eight years before, when he was a lad of seventeen—­a strong, beautiful lad, his mother told me; and with a dreamy “poet’s corner” in his brain, she added, but in her own better way of putting it.  She had no shame that her shepherd should be an Endymion.  In Switzerland they still look upon Nature as a respectable pursuit for a young man.

Well, they had thought him possessed of a devil; and his father had at first sought to exorcise it with a chamois-hide thong, as Munchausen flogged the black fox out of his skin.  But the counter-irritant failed of its purpose.  The devil clung deep, and rent poor Camille with periodic convulsions of insanity.

It was noted that his derangement waxed and waned with the monthly moon; that it assumed a virulent character with the passing of the second quarter, and culminated, as the orb reached its fulness, in a species of delirium, during which it was necessary to carefully watch him; that it diminished with the lessening crescent until it fell away into a quiet abeyance of faculties that was but a step apart from the normal intelligence of his kind.  At his worst he was a stricken madman acutely sensitive to impressions; at his best an inoffensive peasant who said nothing foolish and nothing wise.

When he was twenty, his father died, and Camille and his mother had to make out existence in company.

Now, the veil, in my first knowledge of him, was never rent; yet occasionally it seemed to me to gape in a manner that let a little momentary finger of light through, in the flashing of which a soul kindled and shut in his eyes, like a hard-dying spark in ashes.  I wished to know what gave life to the spark, and I set to pondering the problem.

“He was not always thus?” I would say to Madame Barbiere.

“But no, Monsieur, truly.  This place—­bah! we are here imbeciles all to the great world, without doubt; but Camille!—­he was by nature of those who make the history of cities—­a rose in the wilderness.  Monsieur smiles?”