“I wished also to look down the well, hoping to see better, and I leaned over the brink. I perceived, indistinctly, a white object. What could it be? I then conceived the idea of lowering a lantern at the end of a cord. The yellow flame danced on the stone walls, and gradually sank deeper. All four of us were leaning over the opening, Sapeur and Céleste having now joined us. The lantern rested on a black and white, indistinct mass, singular, incomprehensible. Sapeur exclaimed:
“ ‘It is a horse. I see the hoofs. It must have escaped from the meadow, during the night, and fallen in headlong.’
“But, suddenly, a cold shiver attacked my spine, I first recognized a foot, then a clothed limb; the body was entire, but the other limb had disappeared under the water.
“I groaned and trembled so violently that the light of the lamp danced hither and thither over the object, discovering a slipper.
“ ‘It is a woman! who—who—is down there. It is Miss Harriet.’
“Sapeur alone did not manifest horror. He had witnessed worse things in Africa.
“Mother Lecacheur and Céleste began to scream and to shriek, and ran away.
“But it was necessary to recover the corpse of the dead woman. I attached the boy securely by the loins, then I lowered him slowly, by means of the pulley, and watched him disappear in the darkness. In his hands he had a lantern, and another rope. Soon I recognized his voice, which seemed to come from the centre of the earth, crying:
“ ‘Stop.’
“I then saw him fish something out of the water. It was the other limb. He bound the two feet together, and shouted anew:
“ ‘Haul up.’
“I commenced to wind him up, but I felt as if my arms were broken, my muscles relaxed, and I was in terror lest I should let the boy fall to the bottom. When his head appeared over the brink, I asked:
“ ‘Well,’ as if I expected he had a message from the woman lying at the bottom.
“We both got on to the stone slab at the edge of the well, and, face to face, hoisted the body.
“Mother Lecacheur and Céleste watched us from a distance, concealed behind the wall of the house. When they saw, issuing from the well, the black slippers and white stockings of the drowned person, they disappeared.
“Sapeur seized the ankles, and we pulled up the poor chaste woman, in the most immodest posture. The head was in a shocking state, bruised and black; and the long, grey hair, hanging down, out of curl forever, was muddy and dripping with water.
“ ‘In the name of all that is holy, how thin she is!’ exclaimed Sapeur, in a contemptuous tone.
“We carried her into the room, and as the women did not put in an appearance, I, with the assistance of the lad, dressed the corpse for burial.
“I washed her disfigured face. By the touch of my hand an eye was slightly opened; it seemed to scan me with that pale stare, with that cold, that terrible look which corpses have, a look which seems to come from the beyond. I plaited up, as well as I could, her dishevelled hair, and I arranged on her forehead a novel and singular coiffure. Then I took off her dripping wet garments, baring, not without a feeling of shame, as though I had been guilty of some profanation, her shoulders and her chest, and her long arms, slim as the twigs of branches.
“I next went to fetch some flowers, poppies, cornflowers, marguerites, and fresh, sweet smelling grass, with which to strew her funeral couch.
“Being the only person near her, it was necessary for me to fulfil the usual formalities. In a letter found in her pocket, written at the last moment, she asked that her body be buried in the village in which she had passed the last days of her life. A frightful thought then oppressed my heart. Was it not on my account that she wished to be laid at rest in this place?
“Towards evening, all the female gossips of the locality came to view the remains of the deceased; but I would not allow a single person to enter; I wanted to be alone; and I watched by the corpse the whole night.
“By the light of the candles, I looked at the body of this miserable woman, wholly unknown, who had died so lamentably and so far away from home. Had she left no friends, no relatives behind her? What had her infancy been? What had been her life? Whence had she come, all alone, a wanderer, like a dog driven from home? What secrets of suffering and of despair were sealed up in that disagreeable body, like a shameful defect, concealed all her life beneath that ridiculous exterior, which had driven away from her all affection and all love?
“How many unhappy beings there are! I felt that upon that human creature weighed the eternal injustice of implacable nature! Life was over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which sustains the most miserable of us all—to wit, the hope of being once loved! Otherwise, why should she thus have concealed herself, have fled from others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so passionately, everything living that was not a man?
“I understood, also, why she believed in a God, and hoped for compensation from him for the miseries she had endured. She had now begun to decompose, and to become, in turn, a plant. She would blossom in the sun, and be eaten up by the cattle, carried away in seed by the birds, and as flesh by the beasts, again to become human flesh. But that which is called the soul had been extinguished at the bottom of the dark well. She suffered no longer. She had changed her life for that of others yet to
