The magistrate began to smile.

“Good!  I will have it taken at once to Roily for the legal examination.”  And, turning to his deputy, he said: 

“I can make use of your trap, can I not?”

“Yes, certainly.”

They all came back to the place where the corpse lay.  Mother La Roque, now seated beside her daughter, was holding her hand and was staring right before her with a wandering, listless eye.

The two doctors endeavored to lead her away, so that she might not witness the dead girl’s removal, but she understood at once what they wanted to do, and, flinging herself on the body, she threw both arms round it.  Lying on top of the corpse, she exclaimed: 

“You shall not have it—­it’s mine—­it’s mine now.  They have killed her for me, and I want to keep her—­you shall not have her——­”

All the men, affected and not knowing how to act, remained standing around her.  Renardet fell on his knees and said to her: 

“Listen, La Roque, it is necessary, in order to find out who killed her.  Without this, we could not find out.  We must make a search for the man in order to punish him.  When we have found him we’ll give her up to you.  I promise you this.”

This explanation bewildered the woman, and a feeling of hatred manifested itself in her distracted glance.

“So then they’ll arrest him?”

“Yes, I promise you that.”

She rose up, deciding to let them do as they liked, but when the captain remarked: 

“It is surprising that her clothes were not found,” a new idea, which she had not previously thought of, abruptly entered her mind, and she asked: 

“Where are her clothes?  They’re mine.  I want them.  Where have they been put?”

They explained to her that they had not been found.  Then she demanded them persistently, crying and moaning.

“They’re mine—­I want them.  Where are they?  I want them!”

The more they tried to calm her the more she sobbed and persisted in her demands.  She no longer wanted the body, she insisted on having the clothes, as much perhaps through the unconscious cupidity of a wretched being to whom a piece of silver represents a fortune as through maternal tenderness.

And when the little body, rolled up in blankets which had been brought out from Renardet’s house, had disappeared in the vehicle, the old woman standing under the trees, sustained by the mayor and the captain, exclaimed: 

“I have nothing, nothing, nothing in the world, not even her little cap —­her little cap.”

The cure, a young priest, had just arrived.  He took it on himself to accompany the mother, and they went away together toward the village.  The mother’s grief was modified by the sugary words of the clergyman, who promised her a thousand compensations.  But she kept repeating:  “If I had only her little cap.”  This idea now dominated every other.