My morbid imagination reveled in scenes of mourning.  I speculated as to who would be the first to depart, Marguerite or I. Either alternative caused me harrowing grief, and tears rose to my eyes at the thought of our shattered lives.  At the happiest periods of my existence I often became a prey to grim dejection such as nobody could understand but which was caused by the thought of impending nihility.  When I was most successful I was to general wonder most depressed.  The fatal question, “What avails it?” rang like a knell in my ears.  But the sharpest sting of this torment was that it came with a secret sense of shame, which rendered me unable to confide my thoughts to another.  Husband and wife lying side by side in the darkened room may quiver with the same shudder and yet remain mute, for people do not mention death any more than they pronounce certain obscene words.  Fear makes it nameless.

I was musing thus while my dear Marguerite knelt sobbing at my feet.  It grieved me sorely to be unable to comfort her by telling her that I suffered no pain.  If death were merely the annihilation of the flesh it had been foolish of me to harbor so much dread.  I experienced a selfish kind of restfulness in which all my cares were forgotten.  My memory had become extraordinarily vivid.  My whole life passed before me rapidly like a play in which I no longer acted a part; it was a curious and enjoyable sensation—­I seemed to hear a far-off voice relating my own history.

I saw in particular a certain spot in the country near Guerande, on the way to Piriac.  The road turns sharply, and some scattered pine trees carelessly dot a rocky slope.  When I was seven years old I used to pass through those pines with my father as far as a crumbling old house, where Marguerite’s parents gave me pancakes.  They were salt gatherers and earned a scanty livelihood by working the adjacent salt marshes.  Then I remembered the school at Nantes, where I had grown up, leading a monotonous life within its ancient walls and yearning for the broad horizon of Guerande and the salt marshes stretching to the limitless sea widening under the sky.

Next came a blank—­my father was dead.  I entered the hospital as clerk to the managing board and led a dreary life with one solitary diversion:  my Sunday visits to the old house on Piriac road.  The saltworks were doing badly; poverty reigned in the land, and Marguerite’s parents were nearly penniless.  Marguerite, when merely a child, had been fond of me because I trundled her about in a wheelbarrow, but on the morning when I asked her in marriage she shrank from me with a frightened gesture, and I realized that she thought me hideous.  Her parents, however, consented at once; they looked upon my offer as a godsend, and the daughter submissively acquiesced.  When she became accustomed to the idea of marrying me she did not seem to dislike it so much.  On our wedding day at Guerande the rain fell in torrents, and when we got home my bride had to take off her dress, which was soaked through, and sit in her petticoats.