They reached the beach, and he chose a place where
the water seemed deep. Then he knotted the rope
round the leather collar and tied a heavy stone to
the other end. He seized Cocotte in his arms and
kissed her madly, as though he were taking leave of
some human being. He held her to his breast,
rocked her and called her “my dear little Cocotte,
my sweet little Cocotte,” and she grunted with
pleasure.
Ten times he tried to throw her into the water and
each time he lost courage.
But suddenly he made up his mind and threw her as
far from him as he could. At first she tried
to swim, as she did when he gave her a bath, but her
head, dragged down by the stone, kept going under,
and she looked at her master with wild, human glances
as she struggled like a drowning person. Then
the front part of her body sank, while her hind legs
waved wildly out of the water. Finally those
also disappeared.
Then, for five minutes, bubbles rose to the surface
as though the river were boiling, and Francois, haggard,
his heart beating, thought that he saw Cocotte struggling
in the mud, and, with the simplicity of a peasant,
he kept saying to himself: “What does the
poor beast think of me now?”
He almost lost his mind. He was ill for a month
and every night he dreamed of his dog. He could
feel her licking his hands and hear her barking.
It was necessary to call in a physician. At last
he recovered, and toward the 2nd of June his employers
took him to their estate at Biesard, near Rouen.
There again he was near the Seine. He began to
take baths. Each morning he would go down with
the groom and they would swim across the river.
One day, as they were disporting themselves in the
water, Francois suddenly cried to his companion:
“Look what’s coming! I’m going
to give you a chop!”
It was an enormous, swollen corpse that was floating
down with its feet sticking straight up in the air.
Francois swam up to it, still joking: “Whew!
it’s not fresh. What a catch, old man!
It isn’t thin, either!” He kept swimming
about at a distance from the animal that was in a
state of decomposition. Then, suddenly, he was
silent and looked at it: attentively. This
time he came near enough to touch, it. He looked
fixedly at the collar, then he stretched out his arm,
seized the neck, swung the corpse round and drew it
up close to him and read on the copper which had turned
green and which still stuck to the discolored leather:
“Mademoiselle Cocotte, belonging to the coachman
Francois.”
The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to
find its master.
He let out a frightful shriek and began to swim for
the beach with all his might, still howling; and as
soon as he touched land he ran away wildly, stark
naked, through the country. He was insane!
The road ascended gently through the forest of Aitone.
The large pines formed a solemn dome above our heads,
and that mysterious sound made by the wind in the
trees sounded like the notes of an organ.
