Silvere stumbled.  He looked at his feet.  A fragment of a skull lay whitening in the grass.  He thought he heard a murmur of voices filling the pathway.  The dead were calling him, those long departed ones, whose warm breath had so strangely perturbed him and his sweetheart during the sultry July evenings.  He recognised their low whispers.  They were rejoicing, they were telling him to come, and promising to restore Miette to him beneath the earth, in some retreat which would prove still more sequestered than this old trysting-place.  The cemetery, whose oppressive odours and dark vegetation had breathed eager desire into the children’s hearts, while alluringly spreading out its couches of rank grass, without succeeding however in throwing them into one another’s arms, now longed to imbibe Silvere’s warm blood.  For two summers past it had been expecting the young lovers.

“Is it here?” asked the one-eyed man.

Silvere looked in front of him.  He had reached the end of the path.  His eyes fell on the tombstone, and he started.  Miette was right, that stone was for her. "Here lieth . . .  Marie . . . died . . . “ She was dead, that slab had fallen over her.  His strength failing him, he leant against the frozen stone.  How warm it had been when they sat in that nook, chatting for many a long evening!  She had always come that way, and the pressure of her foot, as she alighted from the wall, had worn away the stone’s surface in one corner.  The mark seemed instinct with something of her lissom figure.  And to Silvere it appeared as if some fatalism attached to all these objects—­as if the stone were there precisely in order that he might come to die beside it, there where he had loved.

The one-eyed man cocked his pistols.

Death! death! the thought fascinated Silvere.  It was to this spot, then, that they had led him, by the long white road which descends from Sainte-Roure to Plassans.  If he had known it, he would have hastened on yet more quickly in order to die on that stone, at the end of the narrow path, in the atmosphere where he could still detect the scent of Miette’s breath!  Never had he hoped for such consolation in his grief.  Heaven was merciful.  He waited, a vague smile playing on is face.

Mourgue, meantime, had caught sight of the pistols.  Hitherto he had allowed himself to be dragged along stupidly.  But fear now overcame him, and he repeated, in a tone of despair:  “I come from Poujols—­I come from Poujols!”

Then he threw himself on the ground, rolling at the gendarme’s feet, breaking out into prayers for mercy, and imagining that he was being mistaken for some one else.

“What does it matter to me that you come from Poujols?” Rengade muttered.

And as the wretched man, shivering and crying with terror, and quite unable to understand why he was going to die, held out his trembling hands—­his deformed, hard, labourer’s hands—­exclaiming in his patois that he had done nothing and ought to be pardoned, the one-eyed man grew quite exasperated at being unable to put the pistol to his temple, owing to his constant movements.