d where we had sat at the foot of the haystack, near
the bee-hives. The hives and the haystack were still there; but there
was no glow of fire lighting the windows of the little inn, no smoke
ascending from the roof, no nets hung out to dry on the palisades of
the garden.

I knocked, no one answered; I shook the wooden latch, and the door
opened of itself. I entered the little hall with the smoky walls; the
hearth was swept clean, even to the very ashes, and the table and
furniture had been removed. The flagstones of the pavement were strewed
with straws and feathers that had fallen from five or six empty
swallows' nests which hung from the blackened beams of the ceiling. I
went up the wooden ladder which was fastened to the wall by an iron
hook, and served to ascend into the upper room where Julie had awaked
from her swoon, with her hand on my forehead. I entered as one enters a
sanctuary or a sepulchre, and looked around; the wooden beds, the
presses, the stools were all gone. The sound of my footsteps frightened
a nocturnal bird of prey, that heavily flapped its wings, and after
beating against the walls, flew out with a shrill cry through the open
window into the orchard. I could scarcely distinguish the place where I
had knelt during that terrible and yet enchanting night, at the bedside
of the sleeper or of the dead. I kissed the floor, and sat for a long
while on the edge of the window, trying to evoke again in my memory the
room, the furniture, the bed, the lamp, the hours, which had kept their
place within me though all had been changed during a single year of
absence. There was no one in the lonely neighborhood of the cottage who
could furnish any information as to the cause of its being thus
deserted. I conjectured from the heaps of fagots which remained in the
yard, from the hens and pigeons which returned of themselves to roost
in the room, or on the roof, and from the stacks of hay and straw which
stood untouched in the orchard, that the family had gone to gather in a
late harvest in the high chalets of the mountain, and had not yet come
down again.

The solitude of which I had thus taken possession was sad; not so sad,
however, as the presence of the indifferent in a spot that was sacred
in my eyes. I must have controlled before them my looks, my voice, my
gestures, and the impressions that assailed me. I resolved to pass the
night there, and brought up a bundle of fresh straw, which I spread on
the flo