hs. It was only a carriage which had
passed.

The old wretch had been frightened.

She now returned to the room, and I heard the chest close. This strange
scene confounded all my ideas. What did this manikin signify? I became
more than ever attentive.

Fledermausse now left the house with her basket on her arm. I followed
her with my eyes till she turned the corner of the street. She had
reassumed the air of a trembling old woman, took short steps, and from
time to time turned her head partly around, to peer behind from the
corner of her eye.

Fledermausse was absent fully five hours. For myself, I went, I came, I
meditated. The time seemed insupportable. The sun heated the slate of
the roof, and scorched my brain.

Now I saw, at the window, the good man who occupied the fatal Green
Chamber; he was a brave peasant of Nassau, with a large three-cornered
hat, a scarlet vest, and a laughing face; he smoked his pipe of Ulm
tranquillity, and seemed to fear no evil.

I felt a strong desire to cry out to him: "Good man, be on your guard!
Do not allow yourself to be entrapped by the old wretch; distrust
yourself!" but he would not have comprehended me. Toward two o'clock
Fledermausse returned. The noise of her door resounded through the
vestibule. Then alone, all alone, she entered the yard, and seated
herself on the interior step of the stairway; she put down her basket
before her, and drew out first some packets of herbs, then vegetables,
then a red vest, then a three-cornered hat, a coat of brown velvet,
pants of plush, and coarse woolen hose--the complete costume of the
peasant from Nassau.

For a moment I felt stunned; then flames passed before my eyes.

I recollected those precipices which entice with an irresistible power;
those wells or pits, which the police have been compelled to close,
because men threw themselves into them; those trees which had been cut
down because they inspired men with the idea of hanging themselves;
that contagion of suicides, of robberies, of murders, at certain
epochs, by desperate means; that strange and subtile enticement of
example, which makes you yawn because another yawns, suffer because you
see another suffer, kill yourself because you see others kill
themselves--and my hair stood up with horror.

How could this Fledermausse, this base, sordid creature, have derived
so profound a law of human nature? how had she found the means to use
this law to the profit or indulgence of