Short Fiction

and violent thudding. He could not breathe without an effort, and clung to the banisters to keep himself from falling.

At the third floor he rang. A servant opened the door.

“Monsieur Flamel?” he inquired.

“Yes, sir. Will you come in?”

He entered a middle-class drawing room. He was alone, and he waited in agony like a man in the grip of disaster.

A door opened. A man appeared. He was tall, grave, and rather stout, and wore a black frock-coat. He pointed to a chair.

François Tessier sat down, then said in a breathless voice:

“Monsieur⁠ ⁠… Monsieur⁠ ⁠… I don’t know if you know my name⁠ ⁠… if you know⁠ ⁠…”

Monsieur Flamel cut him short.

“Do not trouble to explain, monsieur. I know. My wife has spoken of you.”

He had the forthright aspect of a kindly man trying to be severe; and the upstanding dignity of a sober, middle-class citizen.

“You see, monsieur, it’s like this,” continued François Tessier. “I am dying of grief, remorse, and shame. All that I long for is that I may once, just once, kiss⁠ ⁠… the child.”

Monsieur Flamel rose, went to the fireplace, and rang. The servant appeared.

“Fetch Louis,” he said.

She went out. They remained facing one another, silent, having nothing else to say, waiting.

Suddenly a little boy of ten dashed into the room and ran to kiss the man he thought to be his father. But he stopped in confusion when he saw the stranger.

Monsieur Flamel kissed him on the forehead, and then said:

“Now, kiss this gentleman, darling.”

The child advanced obediently, looking at the stranger.

François Tessier had risen; he let his hat fall and was himself ready to collapse.

Monsieur Flamel had tactfully turned his back and was looking out of the window at the street.

The child waited in great astonishment. He picked up the hat and restored it to the stranger. Then François, taking the little boy in his arms, began to cover his face with furious kisses, upon eyes, cheeks, mouth, and hair.

The child was frightened by the storm of kisses and tried to avoid them, turning away his head, and with his little hands thrust away the man’s greedy lips.

Abruptly François Tessier set him down again.

“Goodbye! Goodbye!” he cried.

And he fled like a thief.

The String

Along all the roads around Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming toward the little town, for it was market day. The men were proceeding with slow steps, the whole body bent forward at each movement of their long twisted legs, deformed by their hard work, by the weight on the plough which, at the same time, raised the left shoulder and distorted the figure, by the reaping of the wheat which made them spread their knees to get a firm stand, by all the slow and painful labours of the country. Their blouses, blue, starched, shining as if varnished, ornamented with a little design in white at the neck and wrists, puffed about their bony bodies, seemed like balloons ready to carry them off. From each of them a head, two arms, and two feet protruded.

Some led a cow or a calf at the end of a rope, and their wives, walking behind the animal, whipped its haunches with a leafy branch to hasten its progress. They carried large baskets on their arms from which, in some cases, chickens and, in others, ducks thrust out their heads. And they walked with a quicker, livelier step than their husbands. Their spare straight figures were wrapped in a scanty little shawl, pinned over their flat bosoms, and their heads were enveloped in a piece of white linen tightly pressed on the hair and surmounted by a cap.

Then a wagon passed at the jerky trot of a nag, shaking strangely, two men seated side by side and a woman in the bottom of the vehicle, the latter holding on to the sides to lessen the hard jolts.

In the square of Goderville there was a crowd, a throng of human beings and animals mixed together. The horns of the cattle, the tall hats with a long nap of the rich peasant, and the headgear of the peasant women rose above the surface of the crowd. And the clamorous, shrill, screaming voices made a continuous and savage din which sometimes was dominated by the robust lungs of some countryman’s laugh, or the long lowing of a cow tied to the wall of a house.

It all smacked of the stable, the dairy and the manure heap, of hay and sweat, giving forth that unpleasant odour, human and animal, peculiar to the people of the fields.

Maître Hauchecorne, of Bréauté, had just arrived at Goderville, and he was directing his steps toward the public square, when he perceived upon the ground a little piece of string. Maître Hauchecorne, economical like a true Norman, thought that everything useful ought to be picked up, and he stooped painfully, for he suffered from rheumatism. He took the bit of thin cord from the ground and was beginning to roll it carefully when he noticed Maître Malandain, the harness-maker, on the threshold of his door, looking at him. They had heretofore had business together on the subject of a halter, and they were on bad terms, being both good haters. Maître Hauchecorne was seized with a sort of shame to be seen thus by his enemy, picking a bit of string out of the dirt. He concealed his find quickly under his blouse, then in his trousers pocket; then he pretended to be still looking on the ground for something which he did not find, and he went towards the market, his head thrust forward, bent double by his pains.

He was soon lost in the noisy and slowly moving crowd, which was busy with interminable bargainings. The peasants looked at cows, went and came, perplexed, always in fear of being cheated, not daring to decide, watching the vender’s eye, ever trying to find the trick in the man and the flaw in the beast.

The women, having placed their great baskets at their feet, had