“‘This is the way.  After you!’

“She looked at him for a second with terrible, wild, staring eyes.  Then, taking a run as if she were going to jump a hedge in the country, she rushed past me and past him, jumped over the sill and disappeared.

“I shall never forget the impression made on me by that open window after I had seen that body pass through it to fall to the ground.  It appeared to me in a second to be as large as the heavens and as hollow as space.  And I drew back instinctively, not daring to look at it, as though I feared I might fall out myself.

“Jean, dumfounded, stood motionless.

“They brought the poor girl in with both legs broken.  She will never walk again.

“Jean, wild with remorse and also possibly touched with gratitude, made up his mind to marry her.

“There you have it, old man.”

It was growing dusk.  The young woman felt chilly and wanted to go home, and the servant wheeled the invalid chair in the direction of the village.  The painter walked beside his wife, neither of them having exchanged a word for an hour.

This story appeared in Le Gaulois, December 17, 1883.

A VAGABOND

He was a journeyman carpenter, a good workman and a steady fellow, twenty-seven years old, but, although the eldest son, Jacques Randel had been forced to live on his family for two months, owing to the general lack of work.  He had walked about seeking work for over a month and had left his native town, Ville-Avary, in La Manche, because he could find nothing to do and would no longer deprive his family of the bread they needed themselves, when he was the strongest of them all.  His two sisters earned but little as charwomen.  He went and inquired at the town hall, and the mayor’s secretary told him that he would find work at the Labor Agency, and so he started, well provided with papers and certificates, and carrying another pair of shoes, a pair of trousers and a shirt in a blue handkerchief at the end of his stick.

And he had walked almost without stopping, day and night, along interminable roads, in sun and rain, without ever reaching that mysterious country where workmen find work.  At first he had the fixed idea that he must only work as a carpenter, but at every carpenter’s shop where he applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road.  And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up fagots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days’ work occasionally by offering himself at a shamefully low price, in order to tempt the avarice of employers and peasants.