Suddenly Madame Caravan, consumed with rage, rushed at him, exclaiming:  “You are a thief, a footpad, a cur!  I would spit in your face!  I—­I —­would——­” She could find nothing further to say, suffocating as she was with rage, while he went on sipping his coffee with a smile.

His wife returning just then, Madame Caravan attacked her sister-in-law, and the two women—­the one with her enormous bulk, the other epileptic and spare, with changed voices and trembling hands flew at one another with words of abuse.

Chenet and Braux now interposed, and the latter, taking his better half by the shoulders, pushed her out of the door before him, shouting:  “Go on, you slut; you talk too much”; and the two were heard in the street quarrelling until they disappeared from sight.

M. Chenet also took his departure, leaving the Caravans alone, face to face.  The husband fell back on his chair, and with the cold sweat standing out in beads on his temples, murmured:  “What shall I say to my chief to-morrow?”

BESIDE SCHOPENHAUER’S CORPSE

He was slowly dying, as consumptives die.  I saw him each day, about two o’clock, sitting beneath the hotel windows on a bench in the promenade, looking out on the calm sea.  He remained for some time without moving, in the heat of the sun, gazing mournfully at the Mediterranean.  Every now and then, he cast a glance at the lofty mountains with beclouded summits that shut in Mentone; then, with a very slow movement, he would cross his long legs, so thin that they seemed like two bones, around which fluttered the cloth of his trousers, and he would open a book, always the same book.  And then he did not stir any more, but read on, read on with his eye and his mind; all his wasting body seemed to read, all his soul plunged, lost, disappeared, in this book, up to the hour when the cool air made him cough a little.  Then, he got up and reentered the hotel.

He was a tall German, with fair beard, who breakfasted and dined in his own room, and spoke to nobody.

A vague, curiosity attracted me to him.  One day, I sat down by his side, having taken up a book, too, to keep up appearances, a volume of Musset’s poems.

And I began to look through “Rolla.”

Suddenly, my neighbor said to me, in good French: 

“Do you know German, monsieur?”

“Not at all, monsieur.”

“I am sorry for that.  Since chance has thrown us side by side, I could have lent you, I could have shown you, an inestimable thing—­this book which I hold in my hand.”

“What is it, pray?”

“It is a copy of my master, Schopenhauer, annotated with his own hand.  All the margins, as you may see, are covered with his handwriting.”

I took the book from him reverently, and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.