Then, stricken through heart and brain with the curse of madness which had already sent her mistress red-handed to death, Virginie Giraud fled across the lawn—­through the parkgates—­out upon the bleak common beyond, and was gone.  The old priest laid aside the manuscript and took a fresh pinch of rappee from the silver snuff box.

“Monsieur,” said he, with a polite inclination of his grey head, “I have had the honor to read you the history you wished to hear.”

“And I thank you most heartily for your kindness,” returned I.  “But may I, without danger of seeming too inquisitive, ask you one question more?”

Seeing assent in his face, and a smile that anticipated my inquiry wrinkling the corners of his mouth, I continued boldly, “Will you tell me, then, M. Pierre, by what means you became possessed of this manuscript, and who wrote it?”

“It is a natural question, monsieur,” he answered after a short pause, “and I have no good reason for withholding the reply, since every one who was personally concerned in the tragedy has long been dead.  You must know, then, that in my younger days I was cure to a little parish of about two hundred souls in the province of Berry.  Many years ago there came to this village a strange old woman of whom nobody in the place had the least knowledge.  She took and rented a small hovel on the borders of a wood about two miles from our church, and, except on market days, when she came to the village for her weekly provisions, none of my parishioners ever held any intercourse with her.  She was evidently insane, and although she did harm to nobody, yet she often caused considerable alarm and wonderment by her eccentric behavior.  It is, as you must know, often the case in intermittent mania that its victims are insane upon some particular subject, some point upon which their frenzy always betrays itself,—­even when, with regard to other matters, they conduct themselves like ordinary people.  Now this old woman’s weakness manifested itself in a wild and continual desire to copy every written document she saw.  If, on her market-day visits to the village, any written notice upon the churchdoors chanced to catch her eye as she passed, she would immediately pause, draw out pencil and paper from her pocket, and stand muttering to herself until she had closely transcribed the whole of the placard, when she would quietly return the copy to her pocket and go on her way.

“Thinking it my duty, as pastor of the village, to make myself acquainted with this poor creature, who had thus become one of my flock, I went occasionally to visit her, in the hope that I might possibly discover the cause of her strange disorder (which I suspected had its origin in some calamity of her earlier days), and so qualify myself to afford her the advice and comfort she might need.  During the first two or three visits I paid her I could elicit nothing.