eft no friends, no relatives behind her? What
had her infancy been? What had been her life? Whence had she come
thither, all alone, a wanderer, like a dog driven from home? What
secrets of suffering and of despair were sealed up in that disagreeable
body, in that spent and withered body, that impenetrable hiding place
of a mystery which had driven her far away from affection and from love?

"How many unhappy beings there are! I felt that upon that human
creature weighed the eternal injustice of implacable nature! Life was
over with her, without her ever having experienced, perhaps, that which
sustains the most miserable of us all--to wit, the hope of being once
loved! Otherwise, why should she thus have concealed herself, have fled
from the face of others? Why did she love everything so tenderly and so
passionately, everything living that was not a man?

"I recognized, also, that she believed in a God, and that she hoped for
compensation from him for the miseries she had endured. She had now
begun to decompose, and to become, in turn, a plant. She who had
blossomed in the sun was now to be eaten up by the cattle, carried away
in herbs, and in the flesh of beasts, again to become human flesh. But
that which is called the soul had been extinguished at the bottom of
the dark well. She suffered no longer. She had changed her life for
that of others yet to be born.

"Hours passed away in this silent and sinister communion with the dead.
A pale light at length announced the dawn of a new day, and a bright
ray glistened on the bed, shedding a dash of fire on the bedclothes and
on her hands. This was the hour she had so much loved, when the waking
birds began to sing in the trees.

"I opened the window to its fullest extent, I drew back the curtains,
so that the whole heavens might look in upon us. Then bending toward
the glassy corpse, I took in my hands the mutilated head, and slowly,
without terror or disgust, imprinted a long, long kiss upon those lips
which had never before received the salute of love."

* * * * *

Leon Chenal remained silent. The women wept. We heard on the box seat
Count d'Etraille blow his nose, from time to time. The coachman alone
had gone to sleep. The horses, which felt no longer the sting of the
whip, had slackened their pace and dragged softly along. And the
four-in-hand, hardly moving at all, became suddenly torpid, as if laden
with sorrow.

THE HOLE

CUTS