Every night, the horrible scene enacted itself. It began with a sort of muttering in his ears, like the noise of a grinding-machine or the sound of a distant train crossing a bridge. Then his breath came in gasps; he stifled, and had to unbutton the collar of his shirt, and his belt. He walked about to stir the blood in his veins, he tried to read, he tried to sing; it was all in vain; willy-nilly, his mind went back to the day of the murder and forced him to live it over again in every secret detail, and to suffer again all its most violent emotions from the first minute of the day to the last.
When he rose that morning, the morning of that dreadful day, he had felt a slight dizziness and a headache which he attributed to the heat, and for that reason remained in his room until he was called for lunch. The meal over, he had taken a nap; then, towards the end of the afternoon, he had gone out to enjoy the fresh and cooling breeze under the trees of the copse.
But as soon as he was outside the house, the heavy burning air of the flat countryside oppressed him more than ever. The sun, still high in heaven, poured floods of blazing sunshine down on the burnt-up earth, dry and dying of thirst. No breath of wind stirred the leaves. Beasts, birds, even the grasshoppers were silent. Renardet reached the great trees and began to walk over the moss where a faint fresh odour rose from the Brindille under the vast roof of branches. But he felt ill at ease. It seemed to him that an unknown invisible hand was clutching his throat; and he hardly thought of anything, having at all times very few ideas in his head. Only, a vague thought had been obsessing him for three months, the thought of marrying again. He suffered from a solitary life, suffered in body and soul. Accustomed for ten years to feel a woman near him, accustomed to her constant presence, to her daily embrace, he felt the need, a confused and overmastering need, of her perpetual nearness and her habitual kiss. Since Madame Renardet’s death, he suffered all the time, hardly understanding why; he suffered because he missed her dress brushing past his leg every hour of the day, and especially because he could no longer find peace and ease of body in her arms. He had been a widower for barely six months and already he was looking round the neighbourhood for some young girl or some widow he might marry when his period of mourning was at an end.
His soul was chaste, but it was housed in the powerful body of a Hercules, and carnal visions began to trouble his sleep and the hours when he lay awake. He drove them from him; they returned; and now and then he murmured, smiling to himself: “I’m a Saint Anthony, I am.”
On this particular morning he had had several of these persistent visions, and a sudden desire seized him to bathe in the Brindille to refresh himself and cool the heat of his blood.
A little farther on, he knew a wide deep stretch of river where the country folk sometimes came to dip themselves in summer. He went there.
Thick-grown willows hid this clear pool, where the current paused and drowsed a little before rushing on again. As he drew near, Renardet thought he heard a slight sound, a faint lapping sound which was not the river lapping against its banks. He parted the leaves carefully and looked through. A very young girl, quite naked, showing white through the translucent water, was splashing the water with both hands, making little dancing movements in the water, turning and swaying with gracile gestures. She was no longer a child, and she was not yet a woman grown; she was plump and shapely, and had withal the air of a precocious child, developed beyond her years, almost mature. He did not stir, transfixed with amazement and a dreadful pain, the breath strangled in his throat by a strange and poignant emotion. He stood there, his heart beating as if one of his sensual dreams had just come to life, as if an evil faery had conjured up before him this disturbing and too youthful creature, this little peasant Venus, rising from the ripples of the stream as that other diviner Venus from the sea waves.
The child finished her bathe suddenly; she did not see him, and came towards him to get her clothes and dress herself. As she came nearer and nearer to him, taking little delicate steps to avoid the sharp stones, he felt himself driven towards her by an irresistible force, a mad animal lust that pricked his flesh, filled his mind with madness, and made him tremble from head to foot.
For a moment she stood still behind the willow where he was hiding. Then he lost all self-control, and, parting the branches, he flung himself on her and seized her in his arms. She fell down, too terrified to resist, too stunned to call out, and he possessed her without realising what he was doing.
He woke from his criminal madness like a man waking from a nightmare. The child began to cry.
“Hush,” he said, “hush then. I’ll give you some money.”
But she did not listen; she went on sobbing.
He began again: “Now hush then. Hush then. Hush then.”
She screamed and writhed in
