Celeste had finished her work. She put her son
into his bed, arranged everything, and waited her
father-in-law’s return before lying down herself
beside Victor.
She remained sitting on a chair, without moving her
hands, and with her eyes fixed on vacancy.
As he did not come back she murmured in a tone of
impatience and annoyance:
“This good-for-nothing old man will burn four
sous’ worth of candle on us.”
Victor answered her from under the bed clothes.
“’Tis over an hour since he went out.
We’d want to see whether he fell asleep on the
bench before the door.”
She declared:
“I’m going there.”
She rose up, took the light, and went out, making
a shade of her hand in order to see through the darkness.
She saw nothing in front of the door, nothing on the
bench, nothing on the dung pit, where the old man
used sometimes to sit in hot weather.
But, just as she was on the point of going in again,
she chanced to raise her eyes towards the big apple
tree, which sheltered the entrance to the farm house,
and suddenly she saw two feet belonging to a man who
was hanging at the height of her face.
She uttered terrible cries:
“Victor! Victor! Victor!”
He ran out in his shirt. She could not utter
another word, and turning round her head, so as not
to see, she pointed towards the tree with her outstretched
arm.
Not understanding what she meant, he took the candle
in order to find out, and in the midst of the foliage
lit up from below, he saw old Amable hanged high up
by the neck with a stable-halter.
A ladder was fixed at the trunk of the apple tree.
Victor rushed to look for a bill-hook, climbed up
the tree, and cut the halter. But the old man
was already cold, and he put out his tongue horribly
with a frightful grimace.
It was at the close of a dinner-party of men, at the
hour of endless cigars and incessant sips of brandy,
amidst the smoke and the torpid warmth of digestion
and the slight confusion of heads generated by such
a quantity of eatables and by the absorption of so
many different liquors.
Those present were talking about magnetism, about
Donato’s tricks, and about Doctor Charcot’s
experiences. All of a sudden, those men, so skeptical,
so happy-go-lucky, so indifferent to religion of every
sort, began telling stories about strange occurrences,
incredible things which nevertheless had really happened,
they contended, falling back into superstitions, beliefs,
clinging to these last remnants of the marvelous,
becoming devotees of this mystery of magnetism, defending
it in the name of science. There was only one
person who smiled, a vigorous young fellow, a great
pursuer of girls in the town, and a hunter also of
frisky matrons, in whose mind there was so much incredulity
about everything that he would not even enter upon
a discussion of such matters.
