“‘This is the way. After you!’
“She looked at him for a second with terrible,
wild, staring eyes. Then, taking a run as if
she were going to jump a hedge in the country, she
rushed past me and past him, jumped over the sill and
disappeared.
“I shall never forget the impression made on
me by that open window after I had seen that body
pass through it to fall to the ground. It appeared
to me in a second to be as large as the heavens and
as hollow as space. And I drew back instinctively,
not daring to look at it, as though I feared I might
fall out myself.
“Jean, dumfounded, stood motionless.
“They brought the poor girl in with both legs
broken. She will never walk again.
“Jean, wild with remorse and also possibly touched
with gratitude, made up his mind to marry her.
“There you have it, old man.”
It was growing dusk. The young woman felt chilly
and wanted to go home, and the servant wheeled the
invalid chair in the direction of the village.
The painter walked beside his wife, neither of them
having exchanged a word for an hour.
This story appeared in Le Gaulois, December 17, 1883.
He was a journeyman carpenter, a good workman and
a steady fellow, twenty-seven years old, but, although
the eldest son, Jacques Randel had been forced to
live on his family for two months, owing to the general
lack of work. He had walked about seeking work
for over a month and had left his native town, Ville-Avary,
in La Manche, because he could find nothing to do
and would no longer deprive his family of the bread
they needed themselves, when he was the strongest
of them all. His two sisters earned but little
as charwomen. He went and inquired at the town
hall, and the mayor’s secretary told him that
he would find work at the Labor Agency, and so he
started, well provided with papers and certificates,
and carrying another pair of shoes, a pair of trousers
and a shirt in a blue handkerchief at the end of his
stick.
And he had walked almost without stopping, day and
night, along interminable roads, in sun and rain,
without ever reaching that mysterious country where
workmen find work. At first he had the fixed
idea that he must only work as a carpenter, but at
every carpenter’s shop where he applied he was
told that they had just dismissed men on account of
work being so slack, and, finding himself at the end
of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake
any job that he might come across on the road.
And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stonecutter;
he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells,
mixed mortar, tied up fagots, tended goats on a mountain,
and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two
or three days’ work occasionally by offering
himself at a shamefully low price, in order to tempt
the avarice of employers and peasants.
