ere is overcrowding under ground as there is above. "Keep off!
Keep off!" Therefore their ancestors' bones were in the way, and they had
cast them into this retreat to wait for the common grave. But the common
grave is again a place which must be taken, and the recent gluttonous dead
want everything. "Keep off! Keep off!" Let us not say anything ourselves,
perhaps they will dispute with us the corner of ground which should shelter
our bones!

Marcel went into the gloomy chapel; he lighted a dark lantern and began to
search among the pile.

Then he returned to the parsonage like a thief, afraid of being caught, and
shut himself up in his room.

He had a parcel under his arm; he opened it and, carefully placing its
contents on the table, he sat down in front of it and contemplated it for a
long time.

XXXIII.

FRENZY.

"Abstinence has its deadly exhaustions."

BALZAC (_Le Lys dans la Vallee_).

A few days before, the gravedigger, while digging up the whitened bones of
the ancient dead, had broken up with his pick-axe a mouldering coffin, and
a head rolled to his feet It was of later date, for the lower jaw was still
fastened to it and it had not the calcareous colour of bones buried long
ago. It was the more horrible.

The gravedigger threw it into his wheel-barrow with its neighbour's
shin-bones, and carried it to the common heap. It was this _thing_ that the
Cure of Althausen had coveted and stolen.

He had then placed it on his table and contemplated it in silence. The top
of the skull was polished and blunt, the front narrow, the bones small and
apparently not having attained their full development. It was therefore a
youthful head, the head of an adolescent cut down at the moment, when life
completely unfolds itself to hope; while the elliptical shape of the lower
maxillary, the small and similarly-shaped teeth, the slight separation of
the nasal bones, a few long hairs still adhering to the occiput, clearly
indicated its feminine origin.

"A young girl!" murmured Marcel, "a young girl! beautiful perhaps; loved
without doubt ... and there is what remains. Ah! if he who was pleased to
kiss your lips, could see your dreadful laugh."

And, after he had meditated a long while, he went to his bed, took the
plaster virgin from its pedestal, and taking in his two hands the skull, he
put it in its place between the serge curtains.

And when the fever seized him, when he was burning with all the fl