Suddenly an old peasant woman who had stayed beside the dying man, held there by a morbid fear of what would soon happen to herself, appeared at the window and cried in a shrill voice: 

“He’s dead! he’s dead!”

Everybody was silent.  The women arose quickly to go and see.  He was indeed dead.  The rattle had ceased.  The men looked at each other, looking down, ill at ease.  They hadn’t finished eating the dumplings.  Certainly the rascal had not chosen a propitious moment.  The Chicots were no longer weeping.  It was over; they were relieved.

They kept repeating: 

“I knew it couldn’t ’last.  If he could only have done it last night, it would have saved us all this trouble.”

Well, anyhow, it was over.  They would bury him on Monday, that was all, and they would eat some more dumplings for the occasion.

The guests went away, talking the matter over, pleased at having had the chance to see him and of getting something to eat.

And when the husband and wife were alone, face to face, she said, her face distorted with grief: 

“We’ll have to bake four dozen more dumplings!  Why couldn’t he have made up his mind last night?”

The husband, more resigned, answered: 

“Well, we’ll not have to do this every day.”

THE GAMEKEEPER

It was after dinner, and we were talking about adventures and accidents which happened while out shooting.

An old friend, known to all of us, M. Boniface, a great sportsman and a connoisseur of wine, a man of wonderful physique, witty and gay, and endowed with an ironical and resigned philosophy, which manifested itself in caustic humor, and never in melancholy, suddenly exclaimed: 

“I know a story, or rather a tragedy, which is somewhat peculiar.  It is not at all like those which one hears of usually, and I have never told it, thinking that it would interest no one.

“It is not at all sympathetic.  I mean by that, that it does not arouse the kind of interest which pleases or which moves one agreeably.

“Here is the story: 

“I was then about thirty-five years of age, and a most enthusiastic sportsman.

“In those days I owned a lonely bit of property in the neighborhood of Jumieges, surrounded by forests and abounding in hares and rabbits.  I was accustomed to spending four or five days alone there each year, there not being room enough to allow of my bringing a friend with me.

“I had placed there as gamekeeper, an old retired gendarme, a good man, hot-tempered, a severe disciplinarian, a terror to poachers and fearing nothing.  He lived all alone, far from the village, in a little house, or rather hut, consisting of two rooms downstairs, with kitchen and store-room, and two upstairs.  One of them, a kind of box just large enough to accommodate a bed, a cupboard and a chair, was reserved for my use.