an obsession, and always fancied a spectre was pursuing him. One day I was sent for in great haste, with a message that he was worse. He was dying when I reached him. He remained very calm for two hours, then all of a sudden, in spite of our efforts, he sat up in bed, and shouted, waving his arms as if in prey to mortal terror: “Take it! Take it! He is strangling me! Help! Help!” He ran twice around the room screaming, then he fell dead, with his face to the ground.
As he was an orphan, it was my duty to follow his remains to the little village of P⸺ in Normandy, where his parents were buried. It was from this village that he came on the evening when he found us drinking punch at Louis R.’s, where he had shown us the skinned hand. His body was enclosed in a leaden coffin, and four days later I was walking sadly, with the old priest who had first taught him to read and write, in the little cemetery where his grave was being dug. The weather was glorious; the blue sky was flooded with light; the birds were singing in the hedgerows, where we had gone so often as children to eat blackberries. I fancied I could see him again creeping along the hedge and slipping in through the little hole which I knew so well, down there at the end of the paupers’ plot. Then we used to return to the house, with our cheeks and lips black with the juice of the fruit we had eaten. I looked at the bramble-bushes; they were covered with berries. I mechanically plucked one and put it into my mouth. The priest had opened his breviary and was murmuring his oremus. At the end of the avenue I could hear the spades of the gravediggers, as they dug his tomb.
Suddenly they called to us, the priest closed his prayerbook, and we went to see what they wanted. They had turned up a coffin. With a stroke of their picks they knocked off the lid, and we saw an unusually tall skeleton, lying on its back, whose empty eyes seemed to be looking at us defiantly. I had a queer sensation, for some unknown reason, and was almost afraid. “Hello!” cried one of the men, “look, the ruffian’s hand is cut off. Here it is.” And he picked up a big, dried-up hand, which was lying beside the body, and handed it to us. “I say,” said the other man laughing, “you would think that he was watching you, and that he was going to spring at your throat and make you give him back his hand.”
“Come along,” said the priest, “leave the dead in peace, and close that coffin again. We will dig a grave somewhere else for poor Monsieur Pierre.”
Everything was finished the next day and I set out for Paris again, after having left fifty francs with the old priest for masses for the repose of the soul of the man whose grave we had disturbed.
Doctor Heraclius Gloss
I
The Mental Faculties of Doctor Heraclius Gloss
Doctor Heraclius Gloss was a very learned man. Although no book of any description written by him had ever appeared in the bookshops of the town, all the inhabitants of the erudite city of Balançon regarded Doctor Heraclius Gloss as a very learned man.
How and of what was he a doctor? No one could say. No more was known than that his father and his grandfather had been called “Doctor” by their fellow citizens. He had inherited their title at the same time as he had inherited their name and their possessions: in his family one became “Doctor” from father to son, just as, from son to father, one was called Heraclius Gloss.
But even though he possessed no diploma signed and countersigned by every member of some illustrious Faculty, Doctor Heraclius was, none the less, a very worthy and a very learned man. One had only to see the forty shelves loaded with books which covered the four panels of his vast study to be quite convinced that no more learned doctor had ever honoured the city of Balançon. And, moreover, each time there was any mention of his name in the presence of either the Dean or the Warden, these worthies were always seen to smile mysteriously. It was even rumoured that one day the Warden had delivered a long eulogy on him in Latin before the Archbishop; and the witness who told the story quoted besides, as undeniable proof, these few words which he had heard:
Parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus.
It was said, too, that the Dean and the Warden dined with him every Sunday; and thus no one would have dared to dispute that Doctor Heraclius Gloss was a very learned man.
II
The Physical Appearance of Doctor Heraclius Gloss
If it is true, as certain philosophers claim, that there is perfect harmony between the mental and the physical sides of a man and that one can read in the lines of the face the principal traits of a character, then Doctor Heraclius was not created to give the lie to such assertion. He was small, alert and wiry. He had in him something of the rat, the ant and the terrier: that is to say, he was the kind of being which investigates, gnaws, hunts and never tires. Looking at him one could not understand how all the doctrines which he had studied could ever have found their way into so small a head, but one could imagine, on the other hand, that he himself could have burrowed his way into science and lived there nibbling like a rat in a thick book.
What was most peculiar about him was the extraordinary thinness of his person; his friend the Dean pretended, perhaps not without reason, that
