word he would begin to eat again, with his right hand, while, with his outstretched left arm, he protected and defended his plate.
Sometimes they made him eat corks, wood, leaves, or even filth, which he could not distinguish.
Then they even wearied of their pleasantries; and the brother-in-law, growing angry at always having to feed him, struck him, and constantly boxed his ears, laughing at his victim’s futile efforts to ward off the blows or return them. This became a new game: the slap game. The ploughboys, the labourer, and the maids were constantly thrusting their hands at his face, and this produced a hurried twitching in his eyelids. He did not know where to hide, and kept his arms constantly extended to avoid their assaults.
At last they forced him to beg. They placed him on the roads on market days, and, as soon as he heard a sound of footsteps or the rattle of a carriage, he would hold out his hat, faltering: “Charity, if you please.”
But the peasant is not free with his money, and, during entire weeks, he did not bring home a halfpenny.
Then their real hatred was unchained, pitiless. And this is how he died:
One winter, the earth was covered with snow, and it froze appallingly hard. His brother-in-law, one morning, led him a long way off to a high road to make him beg for alms. He left him there all day, and when night was come, he told his household that he had not been able to find him. “But there!” he added, “we mustn’t bother, someone will have taken him off because he was cold. Of course he isn’t lost. He’ll come back tomorrow to eat his broth all right.”
The next day he did not come back.
After long hours of waiting, gripped by the cold, feeling that he was dying, the blind man had begun to walk. Unable to make out the road, which was buried under this froth of ice, he had wandered at random, falling into ditches and rising again, always silent, searching for a house.
But the numbness of the snows had gradually taken hold on him, and, his weak limbs unable to carry him farther, he had sat down in the middle of a field. He never got up again.
The white flakes fell steadily and buried him. His stiffened body disappeared under the ceaseless accumulation of the infinite multitude of them; and nothing indicated the spot where the corpse lay.
His relatives made a show of inquiring and searching for him for eight days. They even cried.
The winter was a hard one, and the thaw did not come soon. But one Sunday, on their way to Mass, the farmers noticed a great flock of crows hovering continually over the field, then swooping down like a black shower of rain, in troops, to the same spot, constantly rising from it again and returning to it.
The following week the dark birds were still there. The sky bore a cloud of them, as though they had assembled from every corner of the horizon; and they dropped down with a great clamour to the dazzling snow, making a strange-looking pattern of spots upon it, and obstinately searching in it.
A boy went to see what they were doing, and found the body of the blind man, already half-eaten, torn to shreds. His pale eyes had vanished, pricked out by the long, ravenous beaks.
And I can never feel the vivid gaiety of days of sunshine without a sad remembrance and a melancholy thought of the poor wretch, so robbed of all things in life that his horrible death was a relief to all who had known him.
Magnetism
The dinner was ended and the bachelors were sitting over their cigars and liqueurs, feeling comfortably quiescent as a result of good food and drink, when someone started a discussion of magnetism: Donato’s tricks and Charcot’s experiments. These sceptical, easygoing men who cared nothing about religion, unexpectedly began to tell stories of strange happenings, incredible things that nevertheless had really occurred, so they said; suddenly converted to the mysteries of magnetism which they supported in the name of science, they fell back into superstitious beliefs clinging like a burr to this last remnant of magic.
One of the party—a man full of vigour, a follower of young girls and hunter of women—smiled in his convinced incredulity: as he did not believe in anything, all discussion seemed to him to be futile.
He repeated with a sneer: “Humbug! humbug! humbug! We need not discuss Donato, who is simply a smart juggler. Monsieur Charcot, who is said to be a great scholar, seems to me like a storyteller of the Edgar Poe type who ends in a madhouse through concentrating on queer cases of insanity. He had proved the existence of unexplained and still inexplicable nervous phenomena, he deals with unknown forces that are now being investigated, and as he cannot always understand what he sees he probably remembers the ecclesiastical interpretation of these mysteries. I would like to hear what he himself has to say, quite a different thing to listening to your version of his conclusions.”
The rest of the party rather pitied the unbeliever; they felt as an assembly of monks would do towards a blasphemer. One of them exclaimed: “Still there were miracles in olden times!” to which he replied: “That I deny. Why are there none in our days?”
Then each one mentioned some fact, some weird presentiment, some instance of telegraphic communication from a distance or some case of one being’s secret influence over another. They asserted and maintained that these things had really happened, while the obstinate sceptic repeated: “Humbug! humbug! humbug!” At last he got up, threw away his cigar, and, with hands in his pockets, said: “Well, I will tell you two stories which I will explain afterwards. Here they are:
“In the little village of Étretat all the men, sailors every man of them, go off to the Newfoundland cod fisheries every year. Well,
