“Then my companion, having seized the other wax candle, bent forward.  Next, he touched my arm without uttering a word.  I followed his glance, and saw on the ground, under the armchair by the side of the bed, standing out white on the dark carpet, and open as if to bite, Schopenhauer’s set of artificial teeth.

“The work of decomposition, loosening the jaws, had made it jump out of the mouth.

“I was really frightened that day, monsieur.”

And as the sun was sinking toward the glittering sea, the consumptive German rose from his seat, gave me a parting bow, and retired into the hotel.

Original short stories, Vol. 3.

Guy de maupassant
original short stories
Translated by
Albert M. C. McMASTER, B.A. 
A. E. Henderson, B.A. 
Mme. Quesada and Others

VOLUME III.

MISS HARRIET

There were seven of us on a drag, four women and three men; one of the latter sat on the box seat beside the coachman.  We were ascending, at a snail’s pace, the winding road up the steep cliff along the coast.

Setting out from Etretat at break of day in order to visit the ruins of Tancarville, we were still half asleep, benumbed by the fresh air of the morning.  The women especially, who were little accustomed to these early excursions, half opened and closed their eyes every moment, nodding their heads or yawning, quite insensible to the beauties of the dawn.

It was autumn.  On both sides of the road stretched the bare fields, yellowed by the stubble of wheat and oats which covered the soil like a beard that had been badly shaved.  The moist earth seemed to steam.  Larks were singing high up in the air, while other birds piped in the bushes.

The sun rose at length in front of us, bright red on the plane of the horizon, and in proportion as it ascended, growing clearer from minute to minute, the country seemed to awake, to smile, to shake itself like a young girl leaving her bed in her white robe of vapor.  The Comte d’Etraille, who was seated on the box, cried: 

“Look! look! a hare!” and he extended his arm toward the left, pointing to a patch of clover.  The animal scurried along, almost hidden by the clover, only its large ears showing.  Then it swerved across a furrow, stopped, started off again at full speed, changed its course, stopped anew, uneasy, spying out every danger, uncertain what route to take, when suddenly it began to run with great bounds, disappearing finally in a large patch of beet-root.  All the men had waked up to watch the course of the animal.

Rene Lamanoir exclaimed: 

“We are not at all gallant this morning,” and; regarding his neighbor, the little Baroness de Serennes, who struggled against sleep, he said to her in a low tone:  “You are thinking of your husband, baroness.  Reassure yourself; he will not return before Saturday, so you have still four days.”