“Toward evening all the female gossips of the locality came to view the remains of the defunct, but I would not allow a single person to enter.  I wanted to be alone, and I watched beside her all night.

“I looked at the corpse by the flickering light of the candles, at this unhappy woman, unknown to us all, who had died in such a lamentable manner and so far away from home.  Had she left no friends, no relations behind her?  What had her infancy been?  What had been her life?  Whence had she come thither alone, a wanderer, lost like a dog driven from home?  What secrets of sufferings and of despair were sealed up in that unprepossessing body, in that poor body whose outward appearance had driven from her all affection, all love?

“How many unhappy beings there are!  I felt that there weighed upon that human creature the eternal injustice of implacable nature!  It was all over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which sustains the greatest outcasts to wit, the hope of being loved once!  Otherwise why should she thus have concealed herself, fled from the face of others?  Why did she love everything so tenderly and so passionately, everything living that was not a man?

“I recognized the fact that she believed in a God, and that she hoped to receive compensation from the latter for all the miseries she had endured.  She would now disintegrate and become, in turn, a plant.  She would blossom in the sun, the cattle would browse on her leaves, the birds would bear away the seeds, and through these changes she would become again human flesh.  But that which is called the soul had been extinguished at the bottom of the dark well.  She suffered no longer.  She had given her life for that of others yet to come.

“Hours passed away in this silent and sinister communion with the dead.  A pale light at length announced the dawn of a new day; then a red ray streamed in on the bed, making a bar of light across the coverlet and across her hands.  This was the hour she had so much loved.  The awakened birds began to sing in the trees.

“I opened the window to its fullest extent and drew back the curtains that the whole heavens might look in upon us, and, bending over the icy corpse, I took in my hands the mutilated head and slowly, without terror or disgust, I imprinted a kiss, a long kiss, upon those lips which had never before been kissed.”

Leon Chenal remained silent.  The women wept.  We heard on the box seat the Count d’Atraille blowing his nose from time to time.  The coachman alone had gone to sleep.  The horses, who no longer felt the sting of the whip, had slackened their pace and moved along slowly.  The drag, hardly advancing at all, seemed suddenly torpid, as if it had been freighted with sorrow.