“I stammered out in a loud voice, trembling so violently that the lantern danced hither and thither over the slipper: 

“‘It is a woman!  Who-who-can it be?  It is Miss Harriet!’

“Sapeur alone did not manifest horror.  He had witnessed many such scenes in Africa.

“Mother Lecacheur and Celeste began to utter piercing screams and ran away.

“But it was necessary to recover the corpse of the dead woman.  I attached the young man securely by the waist to the end of the pulley rope and lowered him very slowly, watching him disappear in the darkness.  In one hand he held the lantern and a rope in the other.  Soon I recognized his voice, which seemed to come from the centre of the earth, saying: 

“‘Stop!’

“I then saw him fish something out of the water.  It was the other leg.  He then bound the two feet together and shouted anew: 

“‘Haul up!’

“I began to wind up, but I felt my arms crack, my muscles twitch, and I was in terror lest I should let the man fall to the bottom.  When his head appeared at the brink I asked: 

“‘Well?’ as if I expected he had a message from the drowned woman.

“We both got on the stone slab at the edge of the well and from opposite sides we began to haul up the body.

“Mother Lecacheur and Celeste watched us from a distance, concealed from view behind the wall of the house.  When they saw issuing from the hole the black slippers and white stockings of the drowned person they disappeared.

“Sapeur seized the ankles, and we drew up the body of the poor woman.  The head was shocking to look at, being bruised and lacerated, and the long gray hair, out of curl forevermore, hanging down tangled and disordered.

“‘In the name of all that is holy! how lean she is,’ exclaimed Sapeur in a contemptuous tone.

“We carried her into the room, and as the women did not put in an appearance I, with the assistance of the stable lad, dressed the corpse for burial.

“I washed her disfigured face.  Under the touch of my finger an eye was slightly opened and regarded me with that pale, cold look, that terrible look of a corpse which seems to come from the beyond.  I braided as well as I could her dishevelled hair and with my clumsy hands arranged on her head a novel and singular coiffure.  Then I took off her dripping wet garments, baring, not without a feeling of shame, as though I had been guilty of some profanation, her shoulders and her chest and her long arms, as slim as the twigs of a tree.

“I next went to fetch some flowers, poppies, bluets, marguerites and fresh, sweet-smelling grass with which to strew her funeral couch.

“I then had to go through the usual formalities, as I was alone to attend to everything.  A letter found in her pocket, written at the last moment, requested that her body be buried in the village in which she had passed the last days of her life.  A sad suspicion weighed on my heart.  Was it not on my account that she wished to be laid to rest in this place?