all night.
The next day about one o’clock in the afternoon, Marius Paumelle, a hired man in the employ of Maître Breton, husbandman at Ymauville, returned the pocketbook and its contents to Maître Houlbrèque of Manneville.
This man claimed to have found the object in the road; but not knowing how to read, he had carried it to the house and given it to his employer.
The news spread through the neighbourhood. Maître Hauchecorne was informed of it. He immediately went the circuit and began to recount his story completed by the happy climax. He triumphed.
“What grieved me so much was not the thing itself, as the lying. There is nothing so shameful as to be placed under a cloud on account of a lie.”
He talked of his adventure all day long, he told it on the highway to people who were passing by, in the inn to people who were drinking there, and to persons coming out of church the following Sunday. He stopped strangers to tell them about it. He was calm now, and yet something disturbed him without his knowing exactly what it was. People had the air of joking while they listened. They did not seem convinced. He seemed to feel that remarks were being made behind his back.
On Tuesday of the next week he went to the market at Goderville, urged solely by the necessity he felt of discussing the case.
Malandain, standing at his door, began to laugh on seeing him pass. Why?
He approached a farmer from Criquetot, who did not let him finish, and giving him a thump in the stomach said to his face:
“You clever rogue.”
Then he turned his back on him.
Maître Hauchecorne was confused, why was he called a clever rogue?
When he was seated at the table, in Jourdain’s tavern he commenced to explain “the affair.”
A horse dealer from Monvilliers called to him:
“Come, come, old sharper, that’s an old trick; I know all about your piece of string!”
Hauchecorne stammered:
“But since the pocketbook was found.”
But the other man replied:
“—Shut up, papa, there is one that finds, and there is one that brings back. No one is any the wiser, so you get out of it.”
The peasant stood choking. He understood. They accused him of having had the pocketbook returned by a confederate, by an accomplice.
He tried to protest. All the table began to laugh.
He could not finish his dinner and went away, in the midst of jeers.
He went home ashamed and indignant, choking with anger and confusion, the more dejected that he was capable with his Norman cunning of doing what they had accused him of, and even of boasting of it as of a good trick. His innocence to him, in a confused way, was impossible to prove, as his sharpness was known. And he was stricken to the heart by the injustice of the suspicion.
Then he began to recount the adventure again, enlarging his story every day, adding each time, new reasons, more energetic protestations, more solemn oaths which he imagined and prepared in his hours of solitude, his whole mind given up to the story of the string. He was believed so much the less as his defense was more complicated and his arguing more subtle.
“Those are lying excuses,” they said behind his back.
He felt it, consumed his heart over it, and wore himself out with useless efforts. He was visibly wasting away.
The wags now made him tell about the string to amuse them, as they make a soldier who has been on a campaign tell about his battles. His mind, seriously affected, began to weaken.
Towards the end of December he took to his bed.
He died in the first days of January, and in the delirium of his death struggles he kept claiming his innocence, reiterating.
“A piece of string, a piece of string—look—here it is, Mr. Mayor.”
A Wise Man
Blérot had been my friend since childhood; we had no secrets from each other, and were united heart and soul by a brotherly intimacy and a boundless confidence in each other. He used to tell me his most intimate thoughts, even the smallest pangs of conscience that are very often kept hidden from our own selves. I did the same for him. I had been the confident of all his love affairs, as he had been with mine.
When he told me that he was going to get married I was hurt, as though by an act of treason. I felt that it must interfere with that cordial and absolute affection which had united us. His wife would come between us. The intimacy of the marriage-bed establishes a kind of complicity, a mysterious alliance between two persons, even when they have ceased to love each other. Man and wife are like two discreet partners who will not let anyone else into their secrets. But that close bond which the conjugal kiss fastens is broken quickly on the day on which the woman takes a lover.
I remember Blérot’s wedding as if it were but yesterday. I would not be present at the signing of the marriage contract, as I have no particular liking for such ceremonies. I only went to the civil wedding and to the church.
His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a tall, slight girl, with pale hair, pale cheeks, pale hands, and eyes to match. She walked with a slightly undulating motion, as if she were on board a ship, and seemed to advance with a succession of long, graceful courtesies.
Blérot seemed very much in love with her. He looked at her constantly, and I felt a shiver of an immoderate desire for her pass through his frame. I went to see him a few days later, and he said to me:
“You do not know how happy I am; I am madly in love with her; but then she is—she is—” He did not finish his sentence, but he put the tips of his fingers to his lips with a gesture which signified “divine! delicious! perfect!” and
