Autumn came, the leaves were falling. Day and night they fell, curled and fluttering, twirling as they came down past the great trees. Sometimes, when a gust of wind swept over the tops of the trees, the slow ceaseless rain grew suddenly heavier and became a confused and rushing downpour covering the moss with a thick yellow carpet that crackled faintly under the feet. The almost inaudible murmuring, the fluttering ceaseless murmur of their falling, so sweet and so sad, seemed a lament, and these ever-dropping leaves seemed tears, great tears poured out by the great sad trees weeping day and night for the end of the year, for the end of warm dawns and quiet dusks, for the end of hot breezes and blazing suns, and perhaps too for the crime they had seen committed under their shadow, for the child violated and killed at their feet. They wept in the silence of the deserted empty wood, the shunned forsaken wood, where the soul, the little soul of the dead child surely wandered, lonely.
Tawny and angry-looking, swollen by the storms, the Brindille ran swifter between its dried-up banks, between two rows of slender bare willows.
Suddenly Renardet took to walking in the copse again. Every day at nightfall he left his house, slowly descended the steps of the terrace, and disappeared between the trees with a dreamy air, his hands in his pockets. He strode for a long time over the soft wet moss, while an army of crows who had gathered from the country round to nest in the lofty treetops, swept out across the sky like a vast mourning veil floating in the wind, with a monstrous sinister clamour.
Sometimes they settled, a horde of black spots clustered on the tangled branches against the red sky, the bloodred sky of an autumn twilight. Then all at once they flew off again, cawing frenziedly and spreading above the wood again the long sombre line of flying wings.
They sank at last in the highest tops and little by little ceased their crying while the advancing darkness merged their black feathers with the blackness of the hollow night.
Still Renardet wandered slowly under the trees; then, when the shadows drew so thickly down that he could no longer walk about, he returned home and fell heavily into his big chair before the glowing chimneypiece, stretching towards the hearth damp feet that steamed in front of the flames for hours.
Then, one morning, startling news ran through the countryside: the mayor had given orders to cut down his copse.
Twenty woodcutters were already at work. They had begun with the corner nearest the house, and under the master’s eye were progressing at a great rate.
First of all, the men who were to lop off the branches scrambled up the trunk.
Fastened to the tree by a rope round their bodies, they first take a grip of it with their arms, then raise one leg and drive the steel spike fixed to the soles of their boots firmly into the trunk. The point pierces the tree, and is wedged there, and as if he were walking the man raises himself and drives in the spike of the other foot: then he supports himself on this one and makes a fresh advance with the first foot.
And at each step he carries higher the rope that holds him to the tree; at his waist the steel hatchet dangles and glitters. He climbs gently and steadily like a parasite animal attacking a giant, he mounts clumsily up the vast column, twisting his arm round it and digging in his spurs to raise himself high enough to decapitate it.
As soon as he reaches the first branches, he stops, detaches the sharp ax from his thigh, and strikes. He strikes with slow regular blows, severing the limb close to the trunk; and all of a sudden the branch cracks, bends, hangs, tears apart, and rushes down, brushing past the surrounding trees in its fall. Then it is dashed on the earth with a crash of shattered wood, and for a long time all its smallest twigs quiver and shake.
The earth is covered with fallen branches that the rest of the men take and saw into smaller pieces, fastening them in bundles and piling them in heaps, while the trees still left standing look like monstrous pillars of wood, gigantic stakes amputated and shorn by the sharp steel of the axes.
And when the last branch has fallen, the woodman leaves the noose of rope he has carried up with him fastened to the peak of the straight slender pillar; then, digging in his spurs, he climbs down the pillaged trunk and the woodcutters proceed to attack it at the foot, striking heavy blows that echo all through the forest.
When the cut at the foot seems deep enough, a number of men haul on the rope fastened to the top, shouting all together with each heave, and the great mast suddenly cracks and falls to the earth with the hollow vibrating roar of a distant cannon-shot.
And day by day the wood grew less, losing its felled trees as an army loses its soldiers.
Renardet never left it; he stayed there from morning to evening, immobile, his hands clasped behind his back, contemplating the slow death of his forest. When a tree had fallen, he placed his foot on it as if it were a dead
