And all this soulless freshness smiled upon the poor old grandmother, who was quickly walking along to hear of the death of her last-born grandson.  She neared the awful moment when this event, which had taken place in the so distant Chinese seas, was to be told to her; she was taking that sinister walk that Sylvestre had divined at his death-hour—­the sight of that had torn his last agonized tears from him; his darling old granny summoned to Paimpol to be told that he was dead!  Clearly he had seen her pass along that road, running straight on, with her tiny brown shawl, her umbrella, and large head-dress.  And that apparition had made him toss and writhe in fearful anguish, while the huge, red sun of the Equator, disappearing in its glory, peered through the port-hole of the hospital to watch him die.  But he, in his last hallucination, had seen his old granny moving under a rain-laden sky, and on the contrary a joyous laughing spring-time mocked her on all sides.

Nearing Paimpol, she became more and more uneasy, and improved her speed.  Now she is in the gray town with its narrow granite streets, where the sun falls, bidding good-day to some other old women, her contemporaries, sitting at their windows.  Astonished to see her; they said:  “Wherever is she going so quickly, in her Sunday gown, on a week-day?”

“Monsieur le Commissaire” of the Naval Enlistment Office was not in just then.  One ugly little creature, about fifteen years old, who was his clerk, sat at his desk.  As he was too puny to be a fisher, he had received some education and passed his time in that same chair, in his black linen dust-sleeves, scratching away at paper.

With a look of importance, when she had said her name, he got up to get the official documents from off a shelf.

There were a great many papers—­what did it all mean?  Parchments, sealed papers, a sailor’s record-book, grown yellow on the sea, and over all floated an odour of death.  He spread them all out before the poor old woman, who began to tremble and feel dizzy.  She had just recognized two of the letters which Gaud used to write for her to her grandson, and which were now returned to her never unsealed.  The same thing had happened twenty years ago at the death of her son Pierre; the letters had been sent back from China to “Monsieur le Commissaire,” who had given them to her thus.

Now he was reading out in a consequential voice:  “Moan, Jean-Marie-Sylvestre, registered at Paimpol, folio 213, number 2091, died on board the Bien Hoa, on the 14th of ——.”

“What—­what has happened to him, my good sir?”

“Discharged—­dead,” he answered.

It wasn’t because this clerk was unkind, but if he spoke in that brutal way, it was through want of judgment, and from lack of intelligence in the little incomplete being.

As he saw that she did not understand that technical expression, he said in Breton: