“I had acted, without wishing it, without being aware of it, in a worse fashion than these ignoble beings.  I had entered my own daughter’s bed!

“I was on the point of throwing myself into the water.  I was mad!  I wandered about till dawn, then I came back to my own house to think.

“I thereupon did what appeared to me the wisest thing.  I desired a notary to send for this little girl, and to ask her under what conditions her mother had given her the portrait of him whom she supposed to be her father, stating that he was intrusted with this duty by a friend.

“The notary executed my commands.  It was on her death-bed that this woman had designated the father of her daughter, and in the presence of a priest, whose name was given to me.

“Then, still in the name of this unknown friend, I got half of my fortune sent to this child, about one hundred and forty thousand francs, of which she could only get the income.  Then I resigned my employment—­and here I am.

“While wandering along this shore, I found this mountain, and I stopped there—­up to what time I am unable to say!

“What do you think of me, and of what I have done?”

I replied as I extended my hand towards him: 

“You have done what you ought to do.  Many others would have attached less importance to this odious fatality.”

He went on: 

“I know that, but I was nearly going mad on account of it.  It seems I had a sensitive soul without ever suspecting it.  And now I am afraid of Paris, as believers are bound to be afraid of Hell.  I have received a blow on the head—­that is all—­a blow resembling the fall of a tile when one is passing through the street.  I am getting better for some time past.”

I quitted my solitary.  I was much disturbed by his narrative.

I saw him again twice, then I went away, for I never remain in the South after the month of May.

When I came back in the following year the man was no longer on Snake
Mountain; and I have never since heard anything about him.

This is the history of my hermit.

THE ORDERLY

The cemetery, filled with officers, looked like a field covered with flowers.  The kepis and the red trousers, the stripes and the gold buttons, the shoulder-knots of the staff, the braid of the chasseurs and the hussars, passed through the midst of the tombs, whose crosses, white or black, opened their mournful arms—­their arms of iron, marble, or wood—­over the vanished race of the dead.

Colonel Limousin’s wife had just been buried.  She had been drowned, two days before, while taking a bath.  It was over.  The clergy had left; but the colonel, supported by two brother-officers, remained standing in front of the pit, at the bottom of which he saw still the oaken coffin, wherein lay, already decomposed, the body of his young wife.