But by degrees the whole statue was becoming animated.  The loins swayed and the bosom swelled, as with a deep sigh, between the parted arms.  And suddenly the head drooped, the thighs bent, and the figure came forward like a living being, with all the wild anguish, the grief-inspired spring of a woman who is flinging herself down.

Claude at last understood things, when Mahoudeau uttered a terrible cry.  ‘By heavens, she’s breaking to pieces!—­she is coming down!’

The clay, in thawing, had snapped the weak wooden trusses.  There came a cracking noise, as if bones indeed were splitting; and Mahoudeau, with the same passionate gesture with which he had caressed the figure from afar, working himself into a fever, opened both arms, at the risk of being killed by the fall.  For a moment the bathing girl swayed to and fro, and then with one crash came down on her face, broken in twain at the ankles, and leaving her feet sticking to the boards.

Claude had jumped up to hold his friend back.

‘Dash it! you’ll be smashed!’ he cried.

But dreading to see her finish herself off on the floor, Mahoudeau remained with hands outstretched.  And the girl seemed to fling herself on his neck.  He caught her in his arms, winding them tightly around her.  Her bosom was flattened against his shoulder and her thighs beat against his own, while her decapitated head rolled upon the floor.  The shock was so violent that Mahoudeau was carried off his legs and thrown over, as far back as the wall; and there, without relaxing his hold on the girl’s trunk, he remained as if stunned lying beside her.

‘Ah! confound it!’ repeated Claude, furiously, believing that his friend was dead.

With great difficulty Mahoudeau rose to his knees, and burst into violent sobs.  He had only damaged his face in the fall.  Some blood dribbled down one of his cheeks, mingling with his tears.

‘Ah! curse poverty!’ he said.  ’It’s enough to make a fellow drown himself not to be able to buy a couple of rods!  And there she is, there she is!’

His sobs grew louder; they became an agonising wail; the painful shrieking of a lover before the mutilated corpse of his affections.  With unsteady hands he touched the limbs lying in confusion around him; the head, the torso, the arms that had snapped in twain; above aught else the bosom, now caved in.  That bosom, flattened, as if it had been operated upon for some terrible disease, suffocated him, and he unceasingly returned to it, probing the sore, trying to find the gash by which life had fled, while his tears, mingled with blood, flowed freely, and stained the statue’s gaping wounds with red.

‘Do help me!’ he gasped.  ‘One can’t leave her like this.’