The tears started from her eyes, flowed over her nose, wet her cheeks, and trickled into her mouth.

She went on: 

“I thought you were dead, too?—­my poor Celestin.”

He said: 

“I would not have recognized you myself—­you were such a little thing then, and here you are so big!—­but how is it that you did not recognize me?”

She answered with a despairing movement of her hands: 

“I see so many men that they all seem to me alike.”

He kept his eyes still fixed on her intently, oppressed by an emotion that dazed him, and filled him with such pain as to make him long to cry like a little child that has been whipped.  He still held her in his arms, while she sat astride on his knees, with his open hands against the girl’s back; and now by sheer dint of looking continually at her, he at length recognized her, the little sister left behind in the country with all those whom she had seen die, while he had been tossing on the seas.  Then, suddenly taking between his big seaman’s paws this head found once more, he began to kiss her, as one kisses kindred flesh.  And after that, sobs, a man’s deep sobs, heaving like great billows, rose up in his throat, resembling the hiccoughs of drunkenness.

He stammered: 

“And this is you—­this is you, Francoise—­my little Francoise!”—­

Then, all at once, he sprang up, began swearing in an awful voice, and struck the table such a blow with his fists that the glasses were knocked down and smashed.  After that, he advanced three steps, staggered, stretched out his arms, and fell on his face.  And he rolled on the ground, crying out, beating the floor with his hands and feet, and uttering such groans that they seemed like a death-rattle.

All those comrades of his stared at him, and laughed.

“He’s not a bit drunk,” said one.

“He ought to be put to bed,” said another.  “If he goes out, we’ll all be run in together.”

Then, as he had money in his pockets, the landlady offered to let him have a bed, and his comrades, themselves so much intoxicated that they could not stand upright, hoisted him up the narrow stairs to the apartment of the woman who had just been in his company, and who remained sitting on a chair, at the foot of that bed of crime, weeping quite as freely as he had wept, until the morning dawned.

THE HERMIT

We had gone to see, with some friends, the old hermit installed on an antique mound covered with tall trees, in the midst of the vast plain which extends from Cannes to La Napoule.

On our return we spoke of those strange lay solitaries, numerous in former times, but now a vanished race.  We sought to find out the moral causes, and endeavored to determine the nature of the griefs which in bygone days had driven men into solitudes.

All of a sudden one of our companions said: