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.
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:
