Ledantec was standing in front of me, his face convulsed with horror, his hair standing on end and his eyes staring out of his head, and he shouted to me:—­

“Let us escape!  Let us escape!” Whereupon I opened my eyes wide, and found myself lying on the ground, in a room into which daylight was shining.  I saw some rags hanging against the wall, two chairs, a broken jug lying on the floor by my side, and in a corner a wretched bed on which a woman was lying, who was no doubt dead, for her head was hanging over the side, and her long white hair reached almost to my feet.

With a bound I was up, like Ledantec.

“What!” I said to him, while my teeth chattered:  “Did you kill her?”

“No, no,” he replied.  “But that makes no difference; let us be off.”

I felt completely sober by that time, but I did think that he was still suffering somewhat from the effects of last night’s drunk; otherwise, why should he wish to escape? while the remains of pity for the unfortunate woman forced me to say:—­

“What is the matter with her?  If she is ill, we must look after her.”

And I went to the wretched bed, in order to put her head back on the pillow, but I discovered that she was neither dead nor ill, but only sound asleep, and I also noticed that she was quite young.  She still wore that idiotic smile, but her teeth were her own and those of a girl.  Her smooth skin and her firm bust showed that she was not more than sixteen; perhaps not so much.

“There!  You see it, you can see it!” Ledantec said.  “Let us be off.”

He tried to drag me out, and he was still drunk; I could see it by his feverish movements, his trembling hands and his nervous looks.  Then he implored me and said:—­

“I slept beside the old woman; but she is not old.  Look at her; look at her; yes, she is old after all!”

And he lifted up her long hair by handfuls; it was like handfuls of white silk, and then he added, evidently in a sort of delirium, which made me fear an attack of delirium tremens:  “To think that I have begotten children, three, four children.  Who knows how many children, all in one night!  And they were born immediately, and have grown up already!  Let us be off.”

Decidedly it was an attack of madness.  Poor Ledantec!  What could I do for him?  I took his arm and tried to calm him, but he thought that I was going to try and make him go to bed with her again, and he pushed me away and exclaimed with tears in his voice:  “If you do not believe me, look under the bed; the children are there; they are there, I tell you.  Look here, just look here.”

He threw himself down, flat on his stomach, and actually pulled out one, two, three, four children, who had hidden under the bed.  I do not exactly know whether they were boys or girls, but all, like the sleeping woman, had white hair, the hair of an octogenarian.

Was I still drunk, like Ledantec, or was I mad?  What was the meaning of this strange hallucination?  I hesitated for a moment, and shook myself to be sure that it was I.