generations of the dead, for all the serried ranks of human beings, from the beginning to our day, suffices a very nothing, a field, almost nothing. The earth receives them, forgets them and effaces them. Goodbye!
At the end of the cultivated cemetery, I came all at once upon the deserted cemetery, the one where the dead of long ago came at their end to mingle their dust with the earth, where the very crosses were rotting away, where the latest comers will be placed at some future day. It is full of wild roses, sturdy black cypress-trees, a sad and marvellous garden, grown rich feeding on human flesh.
I was alone, quite alone. I effaced myself behind a green tree. I hid myself entirely among its thick sombre branches.
And I waited, clinging to its trunk like a shipwrecked man to a spar.
When the night was dark, very dark, I left my refuge and began to walk softly, with slow muted steps, over this ground full of the dead.
I wandered for a long time, a long, long time. I did not find her again. With outstretched arms, wide-open eyes, striking against tombstones with hands, and feet and knees and chest, with my very head, I went and did not find her. I touched, I felt about like a blind man seeking his way, I felt stones, crosses, iron bars, wreaths of glass, wreaths of faded flowers. I read the names with my fingers, tracing them over the letters. What a night! what a night! I did not find her.
No moon! What a night! I was seized with fear, terrible fear, in these narrow patches, between two rows of graves. Graves! graves! graves! Everywhere graves! To the left, to the right of me, before me, round me, everywhere, graves! I sat down on one of them, for my knees were shaking so much that I could not go on walking. I heard the beating of my heart! And I heard something else too! What was it? A confused nameless sound! Was the sound in my fear-stricken mind, in the impenetrable night, or under the mysterious earth, under the earth sown with human corpses? I looked round me.
How long did I stay there? I don’t know. I was paralysed with terror, I was drunk with fear, near screaming, near death.
And all at once I thought that the slab of marble on which I was seated moved. In very truth, it was moving, as if someone were pushing it up. With one bound I flung myself on the nearest grave, and saw, yes, I saw the stone which I had just left, raise itself bolt upright; and the dead appeared, a naked skeleton who was pushing off the stone with his bent back. I saw, I saw with perfect clearness, although the night was black as pitch. On the cross I could read:
“Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life aged fifty-one years. He was a good, honest man, who loved his family, and died in the peace of the Lord.”
Now the dead man himself was reading the words written on his tomb. Then he picked up a stone in the road, a small sharp stone, and began carefully to scratch out those words. Slowly, he entirely obliterated them, gazing with his empty eye-sockets at the place where until that moment they had been engraved; and with the end of the bone which was once his index finger he wrote in luminous letters, like the lines that are traced on walls with the end of a match:
“Here lies Jacques Olivant, who departed this life aged fifty-one years. By his harshness he hastened the death of his father, from whom he was anxious to inherit, he tortured his wife, tormented his child, cheated his neighbours, robbed when he could and died a wretched man.
The dead made an end of writing and, immobile, contemplated his work. And turning round, I saw that all the graves were open, that all the dead bodies had emerged, that all had effaced the lies written by their relation on the funeral stone, to reaffirm thereon the truth.
And I saw that all had been the executioners of their kith and kin, malignant, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, cheats, slanderers, envious, that they had robbed, deceived, perpetrated every sort of shameful and abominable deed, these good fathers, these faithful spouses, these devoted sons, these chaste maidens, these upright tradesmen, these men and women reputed beyond reproach.
With one accord they were writing, on the threshold of their eternal dwelling, the cruel, terrible, and sacred truth, of which everyone in the world is ignorant or pretends to be ignorant.
I thought that she too must be tracing it on her grave. And fearless now, running between the yawning graves, between the corpses, between the skeletons, I made my way towards her, sure that I should shortly find her.
I recognised her from afar off, although I could not see the face wrapped in its grave-clothes.
And on the marble cross where just now I had read: “She loved, was loved and died,” I saw:
“Going out one day to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain, and died.”
It appears that they picked me up at dawn, lying unconscious, near a grave.
Madame Husson’s May King
We had just passed through Gisors, where I had been awakened by hearing the name of the place shouted by the porters, and I was falling off to sleep again, when a frightful jerk threw me on top of the fat lady in the opposite seat.
A wheel had come off the engine, which was lying across the line. The tender and the luggage van, also derailed, lay beside this wreck which panted, shuddered, whistled, snorted and spat like horses that have fallen in the street; their flanks throb, their chests quiver, their nostrils smoke, they shudder through their whole bodies but do not seem able to make the slightest effort to get up and go on again.
No one was killed or
