They reached the beach, and he chose a place where the water seemed deep.  Then he knotted the rope round the leather collar and tied a heavy stone to the other end.  He seized Cocotte in his arms and kissed her madly, as though he were taking leave of some human being.  He held her to his breast, rocked her and called her “my dear little Cocotte, my sweet little Cocotte,” and she grunted with pleasure.

Ten times he tried to throw her into the water and each time he lost courage.

But suddenly he made up his mind and threw her as far from him as he could.  At first she tried to swim, as she did when he gave her a bath, but her head, dragged down by the stone, kept going under, and she looked at her master with wild, human glances as she struggled like a drowning person.  Then the front part of her body sank, while her hind legs waved wildly out of the water.  Finally those also disappeared.

Then, for five minutes, bubbles rose to the surface as though the river were boiling, and Francois, haggard, his heart beating, thought that he saw Cocotte struggling in the mud, and, with the simplicity of a peasant, he kept saying to himself:  “What does the poor beast think of me now?”

He almost lost his mind.  He was ill for a month and every night he dreamed of his dog.  He could feel her licking his hands and hear her barking.  It was necessary to call in a physician.  At last he recovered, and toward the 2nd of June his employers took him to their estate at Biesard, near Rouen.

There again he was near the Seine.  He began to take baths.  Each morning he would go down with the groom and they would swim across the river.

One day, as they were disporting themselves in the water, Francois suddenly cried to his companion:  “Look what’s coming!  I’m going to give you a chop!”

It was an enormous, swollen corpse that was floating down with its feet sticking straight up in the air.

Francois swam up to it, still joking:  “Whew! it’s not fresh.  What a catch, old man!  It isn’t thin, either!” He kept swimming about at a distance from the animal that was in a state of decomposition.  Then, suddenly, he was silent and looked at it:  attentively.  This time he came near enough to touch, it.  He looked fixedly at the collar, then he stretched out his arm, seized the neck, swung the corpse round and drew it up close to him and read on the copper which had turned green and which still stuck to the discolored leather:  “Mademoiselle Cocotte, belonging to the coachman Francois.”

The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.

He let out a frightful shriek and began to swim for the beach with all his might, still howling; and as soon as he touched land he ran away wildly, stark naked, through the country.  He was insane!

THE CORSICAN BANDIT

The road ascended gently through the forest of Aitone.  The large pines formed a solemn dome above our heads, and that mysterious sound made by the wind in the trees sounded like the notes of an organ.