“Can you see it all? Well, this year, at Epiphany, it had been snowing for a week. It was like the end of the world. When we went out on to the ramparts to look out over the plain, the cold of that vast white countryside struck through to our very bones; it was white everywhere, icy cold, and gleaming like varnish. It really looked as if the good God had wrapped up the earth to carry it away to the lumber room of old worlds. It was rare and melancholy, I can tell you.
“We had all our family at home then, and we were a large family, a very large family: my father, my mother, my uncle and my aunt; my two brothers and my four cousins; they were pretty girls; I married the youngest. Of all that company, there are only three left alive: my wife, myself, and my sister-in-law at Marseilles. God, how a family dwindles away: it makes me shiver to think of it. I was fifteen years old then, and now I’m fifty-six.
“Well, we were going to eat our Twelfth Night dinner and we were very gay, very gay. Everybody was in the drawing room waiting for dinner, when my eldest brother, Jacques, took it into his head to say: ‘A dog’s been howling out in the fields for the last ten minutes; it must be some poor beast that’s got lost.’
“The words were hardly out of his mouth when the garden bell rang. It had a heavy clang like a church bell and reminded you of funerals. A shiver ran through the assembled company. My father called a servant and told him to go and see who was there. We waited in complete silence, we thought of the snow that lay over the whole countryside. When the man came back, he declared he had seen nothing. The dog was still howling: the howls never stopped, and came always from the same direction.
“We went in to dinner, but we were a little uneasy, especially the young ones. All went well until the joint was on the table, and then the bell began to ring again; it rang three times, three loud long clangs that sent a thrill to our very fingertips and stopped the breath in our throats. We sat staring at each other, our forks in the air, straining our ears, seized by fear of some supernatural horror.
“At last my mother said: ‘It’s very queer that they’ve been so long coming back; don’t go alone, Baptiste; one of the gentlemen will go with you.’
“My uncle François got up. He was as strong as Hercules, very proud of his great strength and afraid of nothing on earth. ‘Take a gun,’ my father advised him. ‘You don’t know what it might be.’
“But my uncle took nothing but a walking-stick, and went out at once with the servant.
“The rest of us waited there, shaking with terror and fright, neither eating nor speaking. My father tried to comfort us. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘it’ll be some beggar or some passerby lost in the snow. He rang once, and when the door wasn’t opened immediately, he made another attempt to find his road: he didn’t succeed and he’s come back to our door.’
“My uncle’s absence seemed to us to last an hour. He came back at last, furiously angry, and cursing:
“ ‘Not a thing, by God, it’s someone playing a trick. Nothing but that cursed dog howling a hundred yards beyond the walls. If I’d taken a gun, I’d have killed him to keep him quiet.’
“We went on with our dinner, but we were still very anxious; we were quite sure that we hadn’t heard the last of it; something was going to happen, the bell would ring again in a minute.
“It did ring, at the very moment when we were cutting the Epiphany cake. The men leaped to their feet as one man. My uncle François, who had been drinking champagne, swore that he was going to murder it, in such a wild rage that my mother and my aunt flung themselves on him to hold him back. My father was quite calm about it; he was slightly lame too (he dragged one leg since he had broken it in a fall from his horse), but now he declared that he must know what it was, and that he was going out. My brothers, who were eighteen and twenty years old, ran in search of their guns, and as no one was paying any attention to me, I grabbed a rook rifle and got ready to accompany the expedition myself.
“It set off at once. My father and my uncle led off, with Baptiste, who was carrying a lantern. My brothers Jacques and Paul followed, and I brought up the rear, in spite of the entreaties of my mother, who stayed behind in the doorway, with her sister and my cousins.
“Snow had been falling again during the last hour and it lay thick on the trees. The pines bent under the heavy ghostly covering, like white pyramids or enormous sugar loaves; the slighter shrubs, palely glimmering in the shadows, were only dimly visible through the grey curtain of small hurrying flakes. The snow was falling so thickly that you couldn’t see more than ten paces ahead. But the lantern threw a wide beam of light in front of us. When we began to descend the twisting staircase hollowed out of the wall, I was afraid, I can tell you. I thought someone was walking behind me and I’d be grabbed by the shoulder and carried off; I wanted to run home again, but as I’d have had to go back the whole length of the garden, I didn’t dare.
“I heard them opening the door on to the fields; then my uncle began to swear: ‘Blast him, he’s gone. If I’d only
